“Are you? What sides?”
She knocked back her drink and got off the bar stool. I put out my hand to keep her from going.
“You met Val when?”
“About a year ago at Larry Sverdloff’s house in London, one of his daughters was playing piano, Val was sitting near her, I had never seen anyone so alive, so incredibly vivid. I’m so sorry. I know you and her father are great friends.”
“Was she alone?”
“Greg was there. I think he had a Russian name as well, which I didn’t catch, and frankly until the other day when this case came up, I didn’t think about him again. I told him I spoke the language and I loved the literature and he just opened up. Bit of a bloody nationalist, I thought, just a fraction too zealous, but he was a good-looking young man, charming, and deeply in love with Valentina. Greg told me how he and Valentina were working for the fatherland, explained to me how Putin was turning things around. Very persuasive, but he waited until Valentina was out of his hearing. ”
“What else?”
“They couldn’t keep their hands off each other. She was besotted. They were an astonishing couple, wonderful to look at, whispering to one another as if they had all the secrets to being alive.”
I didn’t answer.
“When Valentina was murdered, Larry Sverdloff called me,” she said. “He thinks whoever killed her did it to warn his cousin, Tolya. Is that what you think?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve been doing a little asking around privately,” she said.
“Can you find this Greg?”
“You really do think he’s a suspect?” Fiona said. “You’re going to need a lot more than thinking, Artie, you need a little bit of evidence,” and then we were interrupted by the long-faced woman I’d seen in the mirror.
“Elena Gagarin,” she said, and held out her hand to me, ignoring Fiona. “We met at the ball.” Sloshed, she had been crying, mascara streaked her face. “I was Valentina’s friend,” she added. “She showed me a photograph of you. She said, this is my Uncle Artie, my dad’s best friend. Also at her daddy’s house, there is a picture of you. So I see you, I try to say this at the party, I think, God, is this Valentina’s Artie?”
She had a mild Russian accent. “I know you loved her,” she went on in the naked way Russians sometimes do, especially women, as if they could peel back your skin, help themselves to your emotions. No embarrassment, nothing coy, she just said, again, “You loved her. Now she is dead. I am very drunk.”
“Let’s get you home,” said Fiona, but Gagarin shoved her away and went on bawling.
“As soon as I heard about Val,” she said, “I cried for one whole day without cease. Val was so good, she helps orphans.” Gagarin looked at the ceiling. “Perhaps she is in better place now?”
“You met these girls Val helped?”
“Some, yes, surely. A few she helped particularly to come from Russia to England.”
“Was one of them named Masha Panchuk? She worked as a maid.”
I saw the hesitation; I saw the eyes twirl like dark saucers, then dart inward. I was sure Gagarin had met Masha, but she wasn’t saying.
“I don’t know this person that worked as maid.”
“Think about it.”
“I am glad you are in London and living close to me, I feel more secure, I am living on same square with Tolya Sverdloff, this is how we all meet.”
And then without warning, Gagarin threw her glass at the wall of bottles behind the bar. The bartender Rolly took her by the arm.
“Go home,” he said.
“No.”
“You don’t feel safe in London?” I said to her.
“No, I think first this Masha is killed, then Valentina, and next, next is me.”
Somehow Rolly bundled Gagarin out into a taxi, came back.
“She comes here a lot?”
He shrugged.
“Some of the time,” he said. “She was friendly with the Sverdloffs. She’s done this before, she gets drunk and breaks things.”
“I must go,” said Fiona, looking at the tiny gold watch on her slim wrist.
“You left your car.”
“I’ll get a cab, I’ve had too much drink to drive. Shall I drop you, Artie?”
“No,” I said, and watched her go.
I liked Fiona Colquhoun, but I didn’t trust her. Her brief wasn’t dead girls in New York. For all her talk about 9/11, she wasn’t a cop anymore. She worked with Roy Pettus and she was some kind of spook, a security liaison between Scotland Yard and MI5, whatever that meant.
Most people in the spy business are so impressed with their own theatrics, the stuff they’ve read or seen, I never really believed them. I didn’t buy the act.
Truth was, I didn’t give a fuck who was running Russia or if another revolution was coming, or for Larry Sverdloff’s feverish fantasies. All I wanted was the creep who had killed Valentina. I wanted something hard, sure, pure, evidence like diamonds that I could give to Tolya to make up for not saving his daughter. Then I wanted to go home.
“You asked me about Valentina Sverdloff?” said Rolly, wiping down the bar. “I didn’t tell you everything.”
“Yes.”
“Once or twice she asked me to post some packages for her. She always asked nicely, but there was this imperious quality, and also she seemed bloody obsessive about it.”
“What was in the packages?”
“I didn’t ask. Best not to. Always to Moscow.”
“You know where the boyfriend lived?”
“Valentina’s fellow?”
“Yeah. Somewhere in south London. He asked me if I knew anybody who wanted to rent a room. Fuck me, it was somewhere, Putney, I think, or maybe Wimbledon.”
“You have any more thoughts about him?”
“Maybe, but not anything I can swear to.”
“Go on.”
“Yeah. You know, no reason, when I heard somebody killed Valentina, it just came to me that it was him.”
“How come? You said he was charming.”
“Don’t know. When I heard, it came into my head. You want a last drink?”
I didn’t. I left. Into the dark empty London night where it was raining, rain dripping down my collar, I walked to Tolya’s house. Bloody London, I thought.
“What?”
It was four in the morning. It was raining. Water sluiced down the windows, and I was awake and still dressed, but in no mood for drunks at the door and I yelled at the intercom, fuck off. It buzzed again. Out of habit, I grabbed the gun Tolya gave me, went down, yanked open the front door. What? What!
Still in her party dress, Elena Gagarin stood on the steps. She looked scared. Her face was streaked from the rain, make-up smeared over it.
“I want to stay here tonight,” she said. “I am sorry for breaking glass at club.”
“No.”
“Please.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Come in if you want, I’ll make coffee, and I’ll walk you home.”
“I saw him.”
“Who?”
“Friend of Valentina.”
“Which friend?”
“This guy, he was at the party. Greg, he calls himself. I’m going in my house, he calls to me, and I say, go away, go away.”
“What else?”
I wasn’t sure if this woman, Gagarin, had picked up on what I’d been telling Fiona. Being with her felt like having napalm sprayed on you.
“Greg threatened me once. Said I shouldn’t listen to what Val tells me. I don’t understand. I could sleep in your bed, but we don’t do anything.”
“How do you know Greg?”
“I told you. I am friend of Valentina, of Tolya, best friend, BFF, you say.”
“I’ll walk you home,” I said. “Now.”
“I’ll go, I don’t beg,” she said suddenly, turned her back to me and marched to the door.
“Let me walk you,” I called.
She didn’t answer. Just went out into the rain, back hunched over, heading for her place. She told me it was just around the corner, and I went upstairs and and sat down in front of the TV, waiting for late calls from New York. I must have dozed, and I was still in the big leather chair, watching reruns of the Canadian women’s curling team, when sirens woke me. I looked at my watch.
It was five in the morning, and by the time I got to the window, only the faint screams of the sirens were left behind, like a bad, bad hangover.
“Is she dead?” I said to the medic at the hospital where they had taken Elena Gagarin.
“No,” he said. “Bad, though.”
“You got hold of me how?”
“In her pocket. Your name and number were in her pocket when the police found her. You’re a relation?”
I nodded. You got more out of hospitals if they thought you were blood.
“Come,” he said, and I followed him down the corridor to a room where Gagarin was attached to a tangle of IVs.
Most of her face was bandaged; one arm that lay outside the thin sheet was black and yellow. She had been beat up pretty good. A cop hovered close by.
“What happened?” I said.
“I found her,” said the cop.
“How come?”
“I was passing. I’d been round to a pub with some friends, and then to somebody’s flat for coffee and I was on my way back to the tube at Notting Hill Gate, and I cut around through an alleyway behind the shops, you wouldn’t know it, over by where the Marks food place is, and I found her. She could barely speak. They beat her up, one used a knife, left her on a building site. Nobody noticed.” He snorted. “Not even in an area where the bloody houses go for ten million quid. You’re related to her. I am sorry,” he said, and I thanked him and went back into the room.
The doctor told me Gagarin had been in a coma since they admitted her, and we stood by the bed, and watched her for a while, keeping watch, I thought, somebody to bear witness for this pathetic woman. A few hours before she had stood in my doorway, drenched by the rain, asking for help.
We watched her, the cop, the doctor, technician and me, watched the lines on the machines go flat. She was dead.
Thinking I was her relative, they gave me her bag to see if I could make an ID. There was a little book, and the address of a building around the corner from Tolya’s where she had told me she lived.
The bag was made of fancy white and gray snakeskin with a silver buckle which when I looked closely I saw was a fake, a knock-off, a cheap version of the real thing, jammed with make-up, underwear, sweater, a few photographs, a wallet with a couple of pounds in it.
I put the photographs in my pocket and gave the bag back to the policeman, handed over my cell number, and left Gagarin to the cops and medics, and other people who tended the dead and dying.
Dead, with no ID, and only a fake bag, Gagarin seemed to have ceased to exist.
Around eight in the morning, I left the hospital, found a Starbucks—they had spread like a stain all over London—got some coffee, and went over to Gagarin’s place.
A slim pretty woman, half asleep from the look of it, opened the door. She wore jeans, a shirt tied at the waist, and yellow flip-flops.
“Yes?”
I apologized for banging on the front door. I said I was looking for Elena Gagarin’s flat, pretending I expected to find her in the house.
“I’m sorry,” said the woman. “The police have already been. They said she was attacked not far from here. They’ve seen what there is, and it isn’t much. They told me Elena was taken to hospital very early this morning.”
I said I was her cousin and I’d come to get some things for her, to take to the hospital.
“I’ll help if I can,” said the woman. “But she hasn’t lived here for some months. Is she all right?”
I explained what had happened. I dug a scrap of paper out of my pocket. “Is this the right address?”
“Yes, number twelve, that’s right, but it belongs to us, my husband and me.”
“You don’t know her?”
“Look, come in,” she said. “Can I make you a cup of coffee? Tea? I’m Janet Milo, by the way.”
I went into the hallway. Inside what had once been a private house and was now divided into apartments was a beautiful winding staircase. I followed the woman in yellow flip-flops to the top floor where there were two doors. One was ajar.
“This is ours,” she said, gesturing at the apartment with the open door where I could hear a radio playing news. She unlocked the other door. “Up top here, there’s a minute little room, I suppose it was once for a servant,” she said. “Elena did rent it from us for a time, oh, six months back, she said she adored the area and she was looking for a place of her own, but she could never quite pay the rent and eventually we asked her to go. We’ve redecorated and there’s a new girl coming to live here.”
“You haven’t seen her, yesterday, recently?”
“No, but she did stop by, asked if we had changed the locks,” she said. “The police asked to see the room where she had lived.” She was pretty cool about it, but maybe it was her style. “I assume that’s why you’re here?”
“Yes, and she’s dead,” I said.
I realized now that I had never seen Gagarin go into the house. She had lied about the apartment.
“I’d like to take a look.”
“I don’t see why not. Coffee?”
“Do you know where she worked? You must have asked.”
“I got the impression Elena was always looking for a job. She said she had prospects at one of the big banks, but I think she survived doing translations. Working at a bookshop. Possibly a club that catered to Russians, a bit of, forgive me, sponging off her friends. Quite a few of them have settled around here, sadly. She left early and came home late, and she was quiet. You’re American?”
“Yes.”
“It was so nice when we had Americans. I adore Americans. Not too many now,” she said. “The dollar, I suppose. For that matter, there aren’t too many English people, either, not round here, anyway,” she added, a wry expression on her handsome English face. “Do go in. Let me know if you need anything.” I thanked Mrs Milo and she said please call me Janet.
The little studio at the top of the house was the kind a student might use. It was freshly painted. Striped curtains hung at the windows, which were open and through one I could see Tolya’s house on the other side of the green square.
A bed, desk, old-fashioned dresser, some lamps, a chair and a little TV completed the furnishings. The bathroom was pristine, and there was no sign anyone had been here.
Where did she live? Where did she keep her clothes?