“Good. Cause these days they can snatch anyone they feel like, and they say it’s under the roof of Homeland Security which we all know is a pile of doggy do, man, right, to mix a couple metaphors, right?” Sonny laughed, but it was a bleak cackle.
Val?
From the yellow envelope I got at the house in Brighton Beach, the envelope I figured Tito Dravic had left me, I took the DVD. I put it in the machine.
On the screen a bunch of kids in their twenties were dancing at Dacha. People around the floor watched, yelling, singing.
The picture zoomed in on Masha Panchuk’s back, and she was wearing a silky pink dress. She danced like a pro. Her partner was older. A rough older man, stubble on his face, coarse black hair. After a second or two, she was gone, disappeared into the crowd.
Crouched on the floor, I put my face up against the screen, close as I could, played it again. Even from the back, Masha looked enough like Val for somebody to get it wrong. A thug for hire, who didn’t ask for ID, could have confused them.
Slung around Masha was a tiny purse, a small golden envelope on a long silk cord, best I could see. It looked expensive. So did her shoes. High-heeled sandals made of some skin, something silver.
I called Val again but there was no answer. I got in the shower, got out, sat in front of the TV, wrapped in a towel, waited for Val to call. I watched the news again without seeing it. Put on some music I didn’t hear. Pettus had left his cigarettes behind and I lit up.
If Pettus wanted me bad enough, he’d fix it. If he could make a case for me working the Russians out of London, it would happen. The department would agree. You said the words Homeland Security these days, and it trumped everything else. If you didn’t salute back and say, yessir, they could figure out a way. If you were a cop, like me, they could transfer you wherever they wanted.
Could they? Could Roy Pettus lean on them hard enough? I’d quit. I could hook up with Tolya Sverdloff, I could become a businessman, or a bartender. All I knew was New York City. It was all I ever cared about.
I got up and put on Ella Fitzgerald and listened to some Rodgers and Hart tracks, including “Manhattan”. For once, it didn’t divert me. Didn’t make me happy. I shut off my stereo.
I was feeling messed up, waiting for Val, worrying about the connection between her and the dead girl, Masha and Tito Dravic, and Masha and Val. What was Masha doing with a bag that looked like one of Val’s, and expensive shoes?
After a few minutes, I got dressed, put on a new linen shirt. I felt like a fool dressing up for dinner with Val as if it were a date, as if I were in love with her, and got the hell out, and as I was getting in my car, she called me back.
“Ten is what I said, Artie, I said I’d meet you at ten, at Beatrice’s, okay, at the wine bar, it’s only nine, right? I gave you the address? Look, I’ll be there, I promise.”
“You said nine or ten.”
“God, you’re so literal,” she said. “Between you and my dad I’m going nuts, you call, he calls, you leave messages, what’s going on? I’m fine. Daddy’s fine, he’s in Scotland or someplace playing golf, he stopped off, I mean, please, Artie, darling, go solve a crime or something, and I’ll see you in an hour. Honest to God, I’m fine!”
At nine-thirty, I was on East 2nd Street, sitting at the bar of Il Posto Acconto, drinking a glass of red, watching a game on the TV, and waiting for Valentina.
At ten she hadn’t arrived. Half an hour later I was on the street, leaning against the side of the building, watching a guy with tattoos tinker with a Harley. At the curb was Beatrice’s vintage yellow Caddy. I had parked my own car just behind it.
People were out, drinking wine, strolling, calling out, happy, and I tried not to let it get to me. Val was always late. Maybe she’d stayed in the office in Brooklyn. I was making myself crazy.
Beatrice, who owned the Caddy and wine bar, pushed back her streaky blonde hair, pinned it up with a pink plastic hair clip, adjusted her tomato-red skirt, poured me a shot of tequila which she considered a cure-all, and went and got me a bowl of spaghetti carbonara. She asked about Tolya. They had a special thing going and there were times they sat together and discussed the merits of a tomato or a white truffle or some herb from Puglia you couldn’t get anywhere else.
I wasn’t hungry. The kind of dread you get on a bad case had enveloped me. Across the street, an argument started, there was the sound of somebody falling on the sidewalk. I didn’t go over. I was glued to the seat where I sat.
By midnight, I knew Val wasn’t coming. She had forgotten. She had gone dancing. She was with somebody who called at the last minute.
“I’m a bad girl,” she always says, laughing at me.
“Honey, don’t drive like that,” said Beatrice, offering to take me home, drop me off. “You shouldn’t do that, okay?
Senti
, please, my little adorable Artie?”
I said I’d be fine. I got my car. I drove around for a while, my phone on redial. When it finally rang, it was a wrong number.
I was tired. The heaviness that crept up behind my teeth, the kind that seemed to infect my jaw, came over me. I went home, took a cold shower, changed my clothes, and made instant espresso.
If I called it in to the cops and Val was only out on a date, she’d kill me. She’d say I was a jealous old man.
I’d give it a couple more hours. I drove around. I went back to the playground in Brooklyn, I talked to a uniform watching the place. I was going nuts.
Outside was a sad little shrine, a few votive candles in glass jars, a bunch of roses from a bodega, already wilting, a photocopy of Masha, a little icon next to it.
“Dravic’s alibi checks out,” said Bobo out of breath as he arrived at the playground in Brooklyn. I had called him and he came as fast as he could, he said.
“Go on.”
“I called Dravic’s mother up in Kingston to check he was there when he said he was, when Masha died, and she confirmed, and she gave me the name of a couple of people who also saw him at a bar up there. I asked where he is now, and she said he’d left.”
“For where?”
“Relatives in Belgrade, the mother said. She said he had planned it, but I could tell she was scared, Artie. He didn’t kill Masha, but he got scared by someone. Maybe like you said, because he promised you Masha’s resume.”
“When did he leave?”
“This morning.”
“Belgrade, Jesus.”
“I’m working on it.”
“What about the clothes?” I said, looking around the playground where I found Masha on the swing. It was dark and empty except for a couple of patrolmen.
“What about the clothes, Bobo?”
“I’m on it. I got people picking over every leaf in a ten block area around here.”
“Good.”
My phone rang and I answered it. Wrong number. I tried Val and I knew Bobo was listening, but I didn’t care.
“I’m going to need you,” I said, and stared out over the playground.
“Of course. Anything. Should I come with you now?”
“Not now. I’m going back to the city, just keep your cell phone on, okay?”
“Yes, Artemy,” he said. I got out my car keys, dove into my car, and drove like crazy to my apartment, got the keys to Tolya’s place – I remembered he had given me spares – in the Meat Market district. You don’t smell blood anymore around the Meat Market. There are only fancy restaurants now.
On my way to the yellow brick building where Tolya had his loft and Val had her apartment, I went past loading docks where once, in the morning, huge carcasses had been rolled into storage facilities, cold dark spaces that smelled of meat and bone. All gone now.
“Val? Val, darling? Are you there?” I unlocked the door to the Sverdloff place. “Val?” My voice echoed, cheerful, brittle, too loud as I went inside.
It was dawn, Monday morning, the sun coming up, the light coming in through fourteen windows, each ten feet high.
“Val?”
From the top floor—Tolya owned the building and lived on the top floor—you could see the city in every direction, the river, the Empire State, the downtown skyline.
I went through the living room to the door of Valentina’s apartment which Tolya had created for her. It had its own entrance to the hall where the elevator and stairs were, but I had come in through her father’s place.
Once, she had planned to get an apartment of her own in the East Village, but Tolya said, don’t, please, darling, I don’t like this area in East Village, I’ll make you an apartment here. Don’t go yet. She gave in.
Her door was locked. I went back into the hallway and tried the other door to her apartment. I banged on it and began yelling and when I heard heavy footsteps on the stairs, instinctively I put my hand on my gun. It was only Bobo.
We didn’t speak. Bobo had heard me on the phone earlier, trying to reach Val, had seen how frantic I was and he had come here without my asking.
I gestured for him to come up, and he followed me. I had to ask him to unlock Val’s door. I didn’t want Val thinking I had smashed into her place in case she suddenly appeared. I just hoped he was better at picking locks than me. I was half out of my mind. I didn’t want to go inside.
“I should go inside first,” said Bobo Leven who put his hand lightly on my arm. “It’s okay like that?” He reached for the antique brass doorknob Valentina had found in a thrift shop on Madison Avenue.
“Sure.”
“Probably it is nothing,” said Bobo. “Probably she is just maybe out to the beach or something.”
“Yes.”
He opened the door and went in. I waited. I could hear him walking over the hardboard floor, first in the living room, then the bedroom. I waited. Bobo reappeared.
“Nobody is home here,” he said. “Is okay.”
“Thanks.”
“Probably you don’t want people knowing about this or somebody will tell her father and he will go crazy?”
I nodded. He got out a pack of smokes. We both lit up.
“You want me to look at where she goes, who she knows, but quiet, right, Artemy?”
“That would be good. Yes. Tell people you’re on the Panchuk case, and nobody at your station house will ask you questions, right?”
“Exactly,” said Bobo. “I say just like that.”
“I want you to find Valentina Sverdloff. Nobody has to think she’s missing, maybe she’s just out with some guy, or someplace taking photographs, or like you said, at the beach. I don’t want her father going crazy and calling in the thugs he uses for bodyguards. I don’t want her going crazy at me because she thinks I’m pestering her. I need you to promise.”
“Yes, you said already, I understand.” He spoke Russian now, as if to convince me he was serious.
“I’m sure Val is just at the beach on the island,” I said again. “She forgot we were having dinner. She just forgot, right? Isn’t that how girls are? They forget? Girls, boys, the mood just kind of takes you, you stay out all night?” I could hear myself running on, desperate.
“Yes,” he said softly. “It is like that.”
“Daddy? You there? It’s me, Val, listen I’ll be home in the morning. Don’t go insane, I mean, I’m fine. I’m at a friend’s. A girlfriend’s place. See you.”
When I turned on Tolya’s answering machine for a second I thought the message was from the night before. Any time now, Val would come walking into the apartment.
But it was an old message, I realized.
I looked at my phone, then turned it off.
Tolya had been calling me. Sending me e-mails. It was nine in the morning, July 7. Tolya’s birthday coming up, what was it, two, three days? He had asked me again to come to London, big party, he had said. I’d have to take the calls soon. In the messages he asked about Valentina.
I went out on the terrace that was planted thick with flowers, pink and violet geraniums, low shrubs nearly trimmed. A glass still half full of orange juice was on the redwood table. Next to it was the
Post
. I picked it up. It was open to the story about Masha Panchuk. MUMMY GIRL, the headline read.
For a girl her age, twenty-four, her birthday the same day as her father’s, Val was neat as hell. I’d forgotten. Her laptop wasn’t there but she often took it with her, in a bag slung over her shoulder.
One wall was covered in books, paperbacks, textbooks, novels, cookbooks, and hundreds, maybe thousands of CDs and DVDs. There was a good Bose sound system, and I turned it on.
Spring
is Here
, a Stan Getz album I’d given her, came on. The last thing she’d listened to before she went out.
It was a faintly anonymous room as if she alighted here from time to time, but was always on her way somewhere else.
In her darkroom on the work table was a single print, a picture of Tolya with a bottle of wine in his hand, head thrown back, laughing. He filled the frame.
A few negatives lay on the table, too, and a box of brushes for cleaning them. Staticmaster, the brushes were called. Something about the box caught my attention. I picked it up and looked at it, then put it back. I was wasting time on stupid details.
On the dresser in her bedroom were framed photos: her twin sister, her mother. A picture of me she had taken over by one of the Hudson piers.
Squinting into the sun, I was smiling at her, a dumb smile. I recognized the green shirt I was wearing in the picture. And one of Tolya and me, on his terrace, arms around each other, laughing. And a picture of a young guy I didn’t know, a handsome guy, maybe thirty, dark hair, blue eyes.
More pictures of the same man were in a drawer, some taken in London, some in Moscow. I didn’t know who the hell he was and I was jealous.
In the pictures, the way he looked at Val behind her camera, you knew he was in love with her. And she with him. Maybe she had another life. I was a fool.
Val?
In my head I saw Val like Masha Panchuk, suffocating inside the hot sticky tape, dying slowly somewhere on the fringes of the city, in a desolate park surrounded by dirty needles, or out by the water where gulls picked over garbage for their breakfast.
Did the killer who murdered Masha Panchuk take Val?
I was paralyzed. If I called her friends, there would be questions and Tolya would hear. By now I would have settled for almost anything, even a call from some creep to say she had been kidnapped. How much? Money was easy. If it was only money, it would be okay.