Bloody London (34 page)

In the second club, a casino with mauve silk walls, he listened to a woman in a green dress. Even while he put the make on her, he listened sympathetically. Then we got back in the car and sped down the embankment towards Docklands, Canary Wharf, Isle of Dogs. I knew my way better here. I could follow the routes.

Tolya talked. He had a piece of apartment buildings along the Thames down to Teddington and up to the Barrier, he crowed. He talked about property like it was sex. Manhattan on the Thames, he said. London's Hong Kong. But I knew him. He was nervous. We stayed north of the river most of the time, the other side from the apartment on Butler's Wharf. Over here, this side, the north side of the river, Sverdloff said, was a boom town in a boom town, Tolya said.

East from Tower Bridge all the way to the estuary, he added. Plenty of room left. Isle of Dogs. Surrey Docks. Silvertown. Millennium Mills.

We drove, he talked. There were thousands of acres of eerie landscape, a few decayed remnants of the massive Royal Docks, the waterways, canals where the big ships once unloaded. Once, there were chemical plants and rubber processing and no one cared how toxic any of it was, not then, when the chemical manufacturers came in the 1870s. There were railheads next door and a ton of money to be made. For a hundred years, even more, there had been a seething, belching, filthy, noisy life to this place; now it was creepily quiet. You wondered how much toxic crap remained in the soil, the riverbed, the air.

A few skyscrapers loomed. There was some open
space, but the landscape was half finished, the parks rough, the buildings covered with scaffolding. The apartment houses looked like Lego. Sverdloff showed me the Tate and Lyle plant at the edge of the river. “Sugar,” he said. “My great grandfather traded sugar in Petersburg.”

Through the wet car window, he watched closely. He pointed out the Millennium Dome, a huge erector set of a monument, a flying saucer set upside down, legs in the air.

Foreigners liked it here, he said. They felt happiest here. They could fly in and out fast. Short-haul airports. Private strips. Heliports. Marinas. Here was a whole new city dedicated to skyscrapers, money and tax breaks. Here, in the slick apartments and anonymous office buildings and the brass and glass hotels and restaurants, among the babble of foreign voices, England seemed to disappear.

The façade of the massive hotel was copper colored. The doorman, rigged out in a Tsarist uniform, looked like an extra from a Mosfilm epic. He spun the door for us, and tipped his fur hat to Sverdloff.

In the lobby, nightclub, casino, all of them jammed, there were Russian voices. Rich Russians. Russians circling the tables, tossing down chips for bets like they were candy. Sverdloff reached casually in his pocket, found a couple of hundred pounds, picked up a few chips, then tossed them on the roulette table.

“I thought you were broke.”

“Don't be so bourgeois, Artyom.”

Then he hit. He picked up the money and stuffed it in his pocket and moved on.

Tolya glanced around and said, “At night, people take off their faces. No illusion. Everything is on table.”

He took a corner table and ordered wine. A band played elevator muzak.

I said, “So we learned something from the night? We learned the birch trees are weeping, or what? Can you fucking return from Planet Russian Fantasy and talk to me? Why don't you tell me about your so-called bank and the foreclosures, Tolya? It's Eddie Kievsky's bank. Isn't it? You can drop the bullshit act.”

“I bought too much, Artyom,” he said in English. “All over Docklands I buy in Eighties, early Nineties, when was dying here. Good stuff. Bad stuff. Doesn't matter, I buy cheap. Ninety-eight, Russia on its knees, rouble falls apart, I am laughing. My money is in property. Now the market is swollen, fat, bloated.” His voice fell.

I kept quiet.

“Say someone pulls plug. Say real-estate market tumbles. Rumors here. Rumors there. Market goes belly up, everything goes down like dominoes. It was plan. Listen to me.”

“Is that what the foreclosure notices were about?”

“Maybe. I'm trying to fix something, OK?”

“Something here?”

“Here, yes. Mob chiefs – all of them, Russian, Jap, Chinese, Mafia – two, three years ago, they met in Beaune to divide Europe, no one even noticed, the locals were at a goddamn wine auction.” He laughed
mirthlessly. “The Russians asked for Britain. Russians always like London, I was already in. I already buy Docklands, land, building, apartment, office.”

“You were in on it?”

“Sure. I'm real-estate guy, I'm in. We borrow from banks we also own.”

“Russian banks? Eddie Kievsky's banks?”

“Yes. Now market is volatile, up, down, up.”

“You're telling me the banks foreclose on purpose?”

“We sell a little. Markets get nervous. We sell some more. We take financial reporter to nice lunch at Pont de la Tour. Discuss overbuilding on river. Discuss overheated market. Article appears, maybe
FT, Herald Tribune
.”

“Christ, so you fuck with the market and start all over again?”

He looked nervous, twisting his head constantly.

I said, “Eddie Kievsky makes you nervous.”

“Yes.”

“You knew all along he was Leo Mishkin's brother in law?”

“Sure.”

“When I got to London, to your apartment, there was a dummy with my face on it. It was a message to stay away from you? A message for me. Who from?”

He turned away. “Kievsky's creeps. I'm sorry.”

“You're in bed with these guys, Tolya? You do business with them?”

“I did.” Tolya switched back to Russian. “I am trying to fix it now, but it's hard to put the genie back in her bottle. Listen to me. Tomorrow I've got to go back to
Moscow. See the kid, OK. I got a problem. They came for me, they beat him up again. Knocked his teeth out. How's he going to work as an actor without his teeth? I'm bad luck right now. Stay away. Go home to New York.” He leaned in my face. “Go home.”

“What about Phillip Frye? Is he also in bed with Kievsky?”

“Kievsky gave him money for his charity.”

“What's he been giving Kievsky?”

“I'm working on it.”

We finished the night in the hotel strip joint. It was called the Sugar Reef. One wall was made of glass. On the other side was a huge pool. There was a wave machine and colored lights, neon fish and make-believe coral reef and strands of seagrass that waved seductively to the lights and music.

Tolya took a front-row seat, put his face up against the glass, was transfixed. The girls in the pool were got up like mermaid or fish. They stripped in the pool, then bobbed up above the water line for tips.

Customers threw the girls bills and they caught them in their hands or fins or sometimes their teeth. More guys, eyes moist, put money at the end of toy fishing reels like bait. I laughed. Tolya shoved an elbow in my ribs. He takes his strippers serious, as he informed me a long time back when we were in a Brighton Beach club in Brooklyn and I made the mistake of laughing at the girls. I asked for Scotch; he ordered the bottle.

A girl with enormous melons hung on her chest smooched him through the glass. He raised his eyebrow,
grinned at a naked woman with a tail who swam up alongside the other babe and kissed the glass. Tolya leaned forward, his face dimpling, and kissed her back.

I put my hand on the glass. A lobster swam up to me and winked. Tolya leaned over and kissed her, then turned to me and stuffed the thick wad of cash he won earlier in my hand. He said softly, “Will this buy you the information you want?”

I thought about Gilchrist. “Yes,” I said. “So tell me, these guys, Mishkin, Kievsky, tell me yes or no because I'm getting nervous here, man, did they kill people we both know about? Are you in business with them, in or out?”

He got up to go. “This is problem for me, Artyom. I must go now. I will call you.”

“In or out?”

“Half in, half out.”

My passport lay on Jack Cotton's bare metal desk at his station house next to a crude poster. I had slept badly after I left Sverdloff at the strip club and went back to the apartment. I dreamed too much and couldn't remember what I dreamed. A polite young guy in uniform showed up the next morning and said Jack couldn't come himself, but he had something for me.

I picked my passport up. “Thank you.”

He said, “You'll need a new one. This one's fucked.” It was stained with water. I leaned against the desk.

“Sit down, Artie, OK. We have to talk.”

“I don't want to talk, Jack. I'm on vacation. Remember? I'm a tourist.”

“You're an American. All Americans want to talk.” He pushed the red and gold Dunhills towards me.

“Fuck you.”

He grabbed my wrist. “Sit down. Please. And listen to me.”

I sat down. “I'm listening.”

Jack Cotton said, “Prudence Vane is dead. It turns
out you were out with her the night before. People saw you, man. Warren Pascoe is murdered. Your passport turns up at his studio. We find a pair of Russians near by, one also dead, the other as good as. I get a message from a casualty unit, they've got an American. Now, I never mentioned your name when we heard about the Vane woman. Or Warren Pascoe's death. Or the Russians. None of this is my territory, but I covered for you. You're in London, what, five, six days, Artie, and people die.”

I looked at the cup Cotton's assistant brought me and said, “What is this shit?”

“Tea.”

“Please.”

“You want coffee instead?”

“I don't want anything.”

Quietly, Cotton said, “I'm not saying anything about anything, but help me out here, Artie, man, OK?” He reached over and shut his door with his foot. Jack Cotton wore black suede shoes with rubber soles. He took the thick mug and drank the tea himself. “We're on the same side, Art.”

“Are we? Can I go?”

“No. You asked me to help you out on Phillip Frye. We know he stinks. I want us to work on this. We will get him if you work with me.”

“Especially if he's faking the theft of his own address book so he can extort his own contributors.”

Jack looked up. “Christ, Artie, is that what it is?”

“That's what Pru thought.”

He said, “She told you?”

“Yes.”

“You'd testify?”

I didn't answer. I said, “You got a pal at the morgue?”

“If I need one.”

“A guy with a cleft palate that lived in one of Frye's shelters, brain tumor, liver disease, they must have paper on him, ask when he died, and if any of Warren's models came via Frye's shelters.”

“My God. Frye's supplying bodies?”

“Yeah.”

“You think Warren was in the middle of this?”

“A sideshow.”

“But Frye's contributors ain't gonna be happy if he was supplying homeless dead guys for Warren's art. Least we can hope for is getting Frye some lousy publicity.”

“I'll call you tomorrow, Jack. I'll have some stuff for you. Probably we can do business.”

“You want a lift?”

“I'm all right.”

“Do you think, Artie, I should put someone on Phillip Frye straight away?”

“It's your call. Me, I wouldn't. I'd give him another couple days, see if he jumps overboard all by himself.”

“Anything else?”

“I hear Philly's having a big party tonight, and I got myself an invite, I figured they might cancel because of Pru's death, but I checked. So you want to be my date?”

Jack smiled. “A lot of excellent women will attend.”

I grinned. “How old before we outgrow this shit?”

Jack said, “When our dicks drop off.”

“So what's the poster?”

Jack leaned back in his chair. “I'm thinking of quitting this.” He gestured at the room. “I've been putting the word out quietly.”

“You want to tell me about the poster?”

He reached over to the desk and unrolled it. It was a rough drawing in crayon that showed a black cop with Asian features. It was addressed to the “Eleven Black and Asian Cops” and said they should have their heads cut off.

Jack tore it in half. “Forget it,” he said. “I'm way past this kind of shit, you know? Hey, I had a boss who told me straight out – I mean, we're having breakfast – he says most black men are uneducated and uneducable and because there's no overt violence in Britain like there is in America, there's only a simmering rage. He said, you give me any seven-year-old black male, I can write his future for you right now because he doesn't have one.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah, well, fuck them all, Art, you know. I'm busy with other stuff. So one more thing.” He picked up a thick brown envelope and opened it, then pulled out a gun.

“What's that?”

“You don't have to say anything, OK, just take it as from a friend, which I am, but they picked up this weapon near Warren Pascoe's studio. A Gluck. Brand new. Never been used. No serial number. Sadly for us, the prints got wiped off.”

“Thanks, Jack. Thank you.”

“I didn't hear that, so if you know anything about it, don't tell me, just think about it. OK?”

“OK.”

Gilchrist's club was in a building on a grand scale, high ceilings, pillars, beautiful woodwork, a library, men in leather armchairs. Soft voices. Old books. Gilchrist sat in front of a fire. The flames were bright, warm. He held out his hands.

I said, “So the KGB kept it all going for you. All this.”

He laughed merrily. “Absolutely. Fees paid, post collected, friends memorialized even. If I asked for flowers to be sent to a funeral, it was done. They understood. It was all much more banal and much more surreal than people imagined, but I suspect you know that. It's in your blood.”