Authors: Reggie Nadelson
"You were expecting maybe someone hot, some hot chicken?"
Tolya Sverdloff bellowed with laughter over the phone. I told him to knock it off and anyway you couldn't say hot chicken. Chick, maybe, though no one said chick anymore, but not chicken, and I could hear his voice turn sulky at the implication that his English wasn't perfect. I was pretty happy to hear his voice, though. As usual, the phone call was followed by the buzzer and a voice that announced he was downstairs with groceries. When Tolya showed up that day, I was glad as hell, tell the truth, to see him.
"Artyom!" he exploded when I opened the door. Tolya was the only person in my life who still called me Artyom, my old Russian nickname. He was the only person I'd told about it. It wasn't a common name and a guy I knew in Moscow said once I stole it from him and never forgave me. Like me, Tolya was born in Moscow but he was a few years younger and we had never met there. He spoke five languages, six if you included Ukrainian.
Tolya's showing up took my mind off everything, especially when he arrived, right off the plane from Miami, with an eighteen-year-old single malt and a bag of food that included fresh crab packed in dry ice. Tolya never simply arrived; he made an appearance. The phone would ring and he'd be there, a rabbit out of a hat, arms full of presents and booze and food. A big rabbit.
I was six one, but I was a shrimp next to Tolya. He was six six, three hundred pounds, give or take. His size and his passion for food were a certainty in a world that had pretty much gone to hell. Terrorism, murder, the break-up of empires, a lousy economy, Tolya loved to eat.
Food was his religion; he believed that good food and booze were essential to a happy life; he believed it like an ethical system, a moral code. Without decent food, he explained to me once in Paris, you couldn't function, your brain was half dead.
"Thank God you're here," he said.
"Why?"
"My mother."
"She's OK?"
"She's here. I mean in America, in Brooklyn. Suddenly she doesn't want to stay in Manhattan, she won't stay at the Four Seasons either anymore, she wants to stay with her people. What fucking people? The Russians, she says. In Brighton Beach. I have to run around and find somewhere she can stay and I have to eat with her tonight, so you'll come, right?"
"Yeah, sure."
"Thank God. So you're hungry?" Tolya asked, eyes full of child-like anticipation.
"I could eat."
"I brought late lunch."
He spread the bags on the kitchen counter. He tossed the ice packs into my freezer and sniffed the crab.
"Still fresh," he said triumphantly.
"They let you carry all this stuff on the plane?"
"Please, Artyom, what's the matter with you, you think I fly commercial?"
We settled at the kitchen counter. We sipped a little whiskey while the wine chilled and Tolya cracked the crab with a hammer and made some mayonnaise fresh and fixed a salad out of the mesclun he also had in his bag. I sliced up a loaf of sourdough and opened the bottle of white Burgundy, then poured it into my best glasses; we ate.
"Nice, huh, Artemy?" he said holding his wine glass up to the light and admiring the lemony color. "Corton-Charlemagne is like drinking paradise."
Anatoly Sverdloff was a civilized guy who could discuss semiotics in French and rock and roll in Chinese, Pushkin in Russian and Conrad in English. His languages, his brains, his charm would have made him a great spy except he had a big mouth, in every sense, and a lot of appetite, and he loved money. Lots of it. Anyhow, as he always said, who would you spy for these days?
In the bad old days he was a DJ in Moscow who broadcast rock records to the fucking miserable Chinese when the poor bastards didn't have anything, no Internet, no music, no fashion. It was after I'd left Russia that he became famous for his sedition; brave and silly, for a while in the last days of the old Soviet Union, he became a cult hero.
Even now he carried around the tattered paper copy of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
that he'd had as a boy, a book he bought, as if it was a drug, from another kid at his school. When the old world fell apart, while I was busy turning myself into an American, he translated himself into a capitalist and made tons of money. His father, Anatoly, Sr., was a famous actor at the Moscow Arts Theater, his mother Lara Sverdlova was an actress; the intellectual's cupcake, they used to called her.
Tolya knew his way around high culture, but he played the part of an international hood: he flaunted it, he wore the silk shirts, the cashmere coats, smoked the Cohibas. "I am not corporate guy," he always said.
"You mean you don't drink the Kool-Aid to get the deal."
"What is this Kool-Aid?" he'd asked and I explained about Jonestown and how Jim Jones, the leader of a sinister cult, made his disciples commit suicide by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid; they did it all together, in unison, they took his orders. Jones just said: drink. They drank. Like good corporate underlings.
Tolya loved it.
When he met other guys in his trade, whatever it was, he hugged them and made as if he was some kind of godfather. I never knew for sure how deep he was involved with these people. When he drank, and he drank plenty, he sometimes spoke English with a low class Russian accent, dropping the articles, making himself sound like a gangster. It suited him, it was an escape from the old life where his parents were part of the intelligentsia and he was the smartest boy in town. He had become his own invention; it was his cover, his escape, the way being a New York cop was for me.
Tolya pulled a CD out of his pocket and gave it to me.
"You heard of these kids?" he said. "I am thinking of putting in money for American tour, you know? Cute," he said. "Dirty."
I looked at the cover. A trio of Russian schoolgirls making out. I put it on, it wasn't bad, and we finished the crab and talked about stuff, his family, Lily, people we knew. All the time I was aware of the cell phone on the counter, "You expecting a call, Artyom?" he said. "A woman? Someone new?"
I didn't say anything. He finished the wine and poured some of the whiskey into fresh glasses and extracted two big Havanas from a heavy gold case he always carried in his jacket pocket. On it was engraved the outline of a cigar with a big ruby set at one end for the burning tip.
"No, thanks," I said.
"Just for once," he said. "I got them from Fidel. I go see him to talk business, he opens his own humidor and gives them to me. You believe me?"
"Why wouldn't I believe you?"
"Because you have that look, but is true," he said.
"I believe you. So how is Fidel these days? Cracking down on dissidents? Tossing people in the slammer?"
"Old," he said. "He's a crazy old man."
"I used to have a soft spot for him, you know, Tol? My father, when he was in the KGB went to Cuba in the early days of the Revolution, he was a fan, he loved Fidel, Cienfuegos. He idolized Che, he kept pictures of them in his office, him and Che joking around. Che gave him a beret. One of his own. I should have kept it. I could have made a fortune on eBay, right?"
"Commie kitsch is very big, sure, I go to Berlin, the kids are pining for East, they buy old Trabant cars. Shit is what this is," he said then smiled. "I made a killing when I went to auction, my Soviet train set, tablecloth from Kremlin with hammer and sickle embroidered, everything gets big bucks." He started to laugh.
"My mother would take them down, the photographs of Che, and tear them up, but my father kept copies. Long time." I puffed at the cigar. "What a bunch of assholes," I added. "Fucking communism, fucking nothing."
Tolya said, "We'll go on vacation, you and me, I'll show you Cuba. You'll love it, the Malecon at sunset, the music, the women. Oh, Artyom, the women are so beautiful, so sweet, like a dream."
"I' ll pass.
"Why, you're worried they'll think we're a couple of queers and lock us up? You worry too much, but it's why I love you, Artyom," he said switching easily from English to the beautiful purring Russian he speaks that makes me feel my soul is being fingered.
I said, "So, any deals? You're still doing business with those creeps in Moscow?"
"Moscow, Kiev, Shanghai, Baku, Havana, Hanoi, Alaska, I don't give a shit where they come from if they have the money, I feel it's my destiny to do the deals, you know?"
"So you said."
I didn't ask about his deals or how he made his money; he was my friend; we had shared the salt, as the Russians say; it was enough.
"I'm not like you, Artyom. You got rid of the accent, the memories, the past, you came to New York to be an American, and you unloaded it all. I don't want to be an American," he said.
I taunted him. "How come? They won't let you?"
"You want to know?'
Go on.
"New York, I love, yeah, maybe New Orleans for food and music, Los Angeles for art, OK, fishing in Montana. I love East Hampton for the parties, OK? But the rest? I don't get it," he said and puffed on his cigar. "I don't like the way they make a fetish out of the flag, I don't like the religious bullshit. I look at the TV news, and I think this is the kind of shit I watched at home. This is news by old Pravda. Also, they're not subtle. Americans. They're not subtle, they don't read, they don't go anywhere."
"My father thought like that about America," I said. "The KGB loved him for it."
Tolya laughed. "How's your mother?"
"Lousy," I said. "The same. Nothing ever changes for her."
I was sixteen when we left Moscow for Israel. Two years later, my father was dead. A bomb blew up the bus he was on. My mother stayed, she had a job, friends. Now she was in the last stages of Alzheimer's at the nursing home in Haifa; she didn't know who the hell I was. I'd had a letter from my friend Hamid the day before. He was a doctor who looked in on her once in a while. There was nothing they could do.
"How come you're not bitter?" I'd polished off a couple of shots of the whiskey and I'd always meant to ask him. "How come?
"You mean because of those fartofskis in Moscow who locked me once up for a few days when I played rock and roll in public, and humped the bass? Who gives a shit?" he said. "It's old history. So what's going on, you need me to save your ass again, Artyom, what's happening?" He peered over the cigar smoke, then noticed the book about fish on the kitchen counter. He picked it up.
"You're into pictures offish now?"
"It's for Billy."
"Your cousin's kid? How is he?"
"He's good."
"You like that boy, don't you?"
"Yeah," I said, distracted. I was thinking about the Far ones. The first time Tolya had bailed me out was on the case in Brighton Beach when I met Johnny Farone.
I wanted to ask Tolya about Lily because I knew they were in touch, but I felt shy about it. He took care of her when she was attacked and almost died and I loved him for it. They had something between them that I wasn't part of; he took care of her in a way I couldn't because he had access to the best doctors and private planes and because he loved her like a friend, no complications.
"What do you think?" he held out the jacket he wore and stroked the fabric with one hand. "Loro Piano," he said. "I get them made up custom."
"Nice."
"Nice? This is beyond nice. You want me to get you one?"
"OK, beyond nice," I said and touched the fabric. "It's perfection, it's fabulous, it's as if woven by the tiny hands of a thousand virgins. It's terrific."
"I'll get you one."
"Thank you."
"What color?"
"You decide."
"I'll get you two," he said. "I'll get you black and they have a very nice blue. Match your eyes. Women like that. You want gold buttons? Sterling? How come you didn't call me for three weeks, Artie?"
"I've been busy. But I got you something." I went to my desk and picked up the book I'd bought in Brighton Beach.
Tolya's face lit up. "For me?"
"Yeah, I owe you one."
He unwrapped the book, a first edition of a Turgenev novel I knew he loved. He kissed me Russian style, three times on the cheek.
"OK, I accept this apology, for not being in touch," he said. "How come you're so jumpy? What's with the phone? You keep looking at it. This is a woman you're waiting for? Finally you have someone new?"
"No."
He put his hand on my arm.
"Lily's not coming back," he said softly.
"Yeah. You saw her?" I pretended not to care.
"You want me to lie to you?"
I shook my head.
"She's happy," Tolya said. "The husband has no sense of humor. What can I say? He makes a lot of money, he takes care of her like she's a piece of precious glass, he supports her causes."
"Beth?"
"He's very nice with Beth. He has a daughter from his other marriage, a little older, but the girls are friends. I think this is working for all of them."
"And he's not a cop." I poured some more whiskey into my glass and took a puff on the cigar. "Right? So what does he drive?"