“Yes.”
“All the Russians have to do is play on the myth. It’s so terrifying, fear itself is radioactive. The Cold War nuts are back in business,” she added. “This is like Pandora out of the box. Irène Joliot-Curie, Mme Curie’s daughter, died of leukemia for her work with polonium. My grandmother who worked with her died of cancer. I suppose it’s become a kind of obsession with me. If the Russians feel it was worth the effort to export this sort of poison, they’ll do anything. And even where it’s nonexistent, just a rumor as provocation, or intel gossip, we spend time chasing it down. Great urban myths, Artie, are hard to beat.” She stopped to catch her breath.
I had worked a nuke case long ago. Red mercury, the legendary Soviet radioactive material, had turned out to be the biggest hoax of all.
“I know,” I said. “What else is it used for?”
“It used to be an element in the trigger for a nuclear weapon still employed in a few Russian weapons plants. Hard to get, hard to detect. And, Artie?”
“What?”
“We don’t know anything. All the cops and spooks and bureaucrats, nobody knows anything.” Fiona took a pad out of her bag and scribbled something on it, then handed it to me. “Go see these people, it’s a good clinic, private, just let them check you out, okay? You will, won’t you? Radiation isn’t a joke. I’ll drive you if you like.”
I said I’d make my own way there, knowing I wouldn’t bother, that there wasn’t time. I told Fiona I needed a favor. I said I was sure Greg Curtis had beat up Gagarin. From the house in Wimbledon I had managed to steal his Bible. I asked Colquhoun if she could get somebody to take prints off it and then match them up with Gagarin or the area where she had been mugged. I was a lousy spy, but I was still a good enough cop.
I asked Fiona to drop me at the subway. I had to do this by myself.
After I got to the station, I threw away the piece of paper with the clinic address. I wasn’t going to a clinic where they’d ask me questions I didn’t want to answer.
Valentina had married Grisha Curtis. She was married and she never told me. On the subway platform after I left Fiona, I was trapped by hordes of people.
I tried to avoid contact with other passengers because the gun was in my waistband and it was illegal as hell. If someone bumped me and felt it and made a stink—and there was plenty of rage in this city—I’d end up at some station house wasting time explaining things to a local cop.
Now people milled around and waited for a train, and some of them talked about the weather and what a washout the summer was, and others leaned against the wall and read their papers. I couldn’t see around the mob that pushed at me as I got on a train.
At the first stop, I tried to get off the train, but the crowds pushed me back. I kept my back close to the door.
Then the train stalled between stations. You could feel a ripple of tension. The memory of 7/7 was still fresh, the memory of people slaughtered on a subway train, a bus ripped open like a sardine can.
The grind and shunt of the train starting made people relax. A girl next to me smiled, a wry kind of smile, and returned to her copy of
Harry Potter
. A man next to her in a Lenin-style cap pulled down over his forehead was reading a Russian-language newspaper, while his tiny pale wife leaned against him and talked steadily. He never put his paper down.
I closed my eyes. I was betting Mrs Curtis was already on the phone to her son wherever he was and that he would come after me.
“Come on,” I thought. “Come and get me.”
All I wanted was Grisha Curtis, who had killed my Valentina.
Deborah Curtis, Grisha’s mother, was dead by the time I met Fiona Colquhoun the next morning at the Tate Gallery down near the river. It was early, mist hanging over the Thames, the lonely hoot coming from an invisible boat. When Colquhoun told me, at first I thought Mrs Curtis had somehow died from radiation poisoning in her house.
“No,” said Fiona. “No, Artie, and the radiation scare, this time anyway, was a false alarm,” she said, adding that Mrs Curtis had been found at her rich cousin’s house, sitting on the terrace, dead. The official line was she’d had a stroke, said Colquhoun.
“Did Grisha Curtis show up to see his mother? Did he kill her?”
“No”, said Fiona. “No evidence.”
I was sorry about Mrs Curtis. I wondered if my appearance at the Curtis house set off the events that had killed her. I had more questions for her, so I was sorry about that, too.
Fiona got it, didn’t think I was a bastard for saying it. She had been a real cop, even if now she was in some other game.
We walked along the river and she pointed out the spy palace across the river, an ugly modern building, letting me know she knew her way around, I thought. I had called her early that morning hoping I could play her, knowing there was plenty she hadn’t told me. But she was too sharp.
Drinking out of a coffee container, she told me she had run Grisha Curtis through her computers, and, unless he was using a different name, he was still in Britain. There was no record of him leaving the country.
“We matched fingerprints on the Bible you took from the Curtis house with some on Elena Gagarin’s handbag,” Fiona said. “They were a perfect match. The bank where he worked confirmed he was an employee and they had prints on him from a file. He taught school in Boston while he did his MBA, and the school system printed him,” she added. “He had a UK passport, and a Russian passport,” she said. “I had looked at Curtis before, but it was only when Valentina died, and when you came here, Artie, that I really focused on him. This Russian stuff really is like one of those mythical many-headed monsters, you look at something, it disappears, then shows up again. For a time, on the surface, he was pretty much what he claimed. I don’t know where the marriage license was filed, but I couldn’t find it. Perhaps someone made it disappear.”
“Yeah, what doesn’t show up is that he’s a murderous bastard. Thanks about the prints,” I added.
We sat on the steps of the museum. I knew Fiona was killing time while she thought about something.
“I met Grigory Curtis a second time, after I saw him at Larry Sverdloff’s, quite a bit later,” she said.
“Where?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Recently?”
“Quite.”
“You’re not comfortable with telling me?”
“I’m telling you what matters. I’m sorry it took this long. I’m telling you now, if you want the truth, because I think you can help me. Before I tell you, I’d like to know that you will share whatever you find with me, and that isn’t only about your friend’s daughter.”
“Go on.”
“Is that a yes?” The chilly formality, the way Fiona’s expression changed, the adjustment of her posture reminded me this was her real business with me.
“Sure.”
“I think Curtis did errands for the KGB,” said Fiona. “The FSB as it’s now called.”
“I know what the FSB is, for chrissake.”
“Curtis told me, and yes, quite recently, that he thought that it was not Putin’s people who killed Litvinenko, that it was the British, that we did it as a provocation, and that in any case Litvinenko was a traitor,” said Fiona, who went on to tell me that she understood from what he had said that Curtis worked for the Kremlin or the FSB—the same things, she said—and they had seen in him an opportunity. “A young man taken up with a zealous Russian patriotism, and who had two passports? Quite a coup, don’t you think?”
“And an American wife. You knew they were married?”
“Only when I met the mother yesterday,” said Fiona. “It’s when I realized I was right about him. It gave Curtis, and anyone he serviced, access to the US. I think that was the real ambition.”
“He used Val?”
“Hard to say. They were certainly in love when I saw them, I can’t know if he used her from the beginning or if he saw an opportunity he could retail, or if his masters exploited it. I haven’t got the whole answer.”
“And Val turned on him when she discovered what he was up to.”
“Or when she simply discovered he was a zealot who was in love with the whole ‘Russia first’, thing. Bloody fascists.”
“What about Larry Sverdloff?”
“I think he’s on our side. I think he understands all of it, and that we can trust him. Up to a point. He wants to change Russia, but he wants the money, like all of them. He’s scared. He should be scared. There have been plenty of death threats. I told him to leave England for a few days. I think you should go, too.”
“He went?”
“I don’t know.” Fiona got up. “It’s clear Curtis beat up Elena Gagarin. I can have him picked up if we can find him.”
What I didn’t say, though I was sure Fiona knew, was I wasn’t going anywhere until I had Curtis in my sights, until I had a way to get him for Valentina’s death.
“Your bosses want to know all about me?”
“They think you’re here working for Roy Pettus,” Fiona said.
“And you let them think it?”
“I told you, I like you. And I really want these people, I’ve worked nearly two years on this. I want them, I want to put a lid on Russian terrorism before it explodes here, and I think Curtis might lead me to them, because for now there’s just a wall of Russians in London, and nobody is quite what he seems, and it’s very hard to break through it. I want them, Artie, I want the people who bring their poison into my country. Or spread its myth and make people terrified, the fear of fear is something your country suffers from, and we’ve caught it. I want all this badly enough to accommodate anyone, including you. Please be careful. I’ll pick you up tonight, if you like, I’ll take you to meet someone who will help you. Say, it’s my boss. Just wait for me.”
“A real spy?”
She smiled. “Ah, but there are no real spies anymore,” she said. “Only people like me.”
“How come you’re doing all this?”
“I don’t know. Because it’s the right thing to do. And I like you,” she said and blushed. “I’ll find you later.”
“Where?”
“I’ll find you. Artie?”
“Yes?”
“It’s Sunday. I was wondering if you’d like to come round for lunch.”
“When it’s all over, I’d like that. Lunch. Even dinner.”
“Thanks.”
“Wait for me.”
“Of course,” I said. “Thank you.”
Fiona put out her hand and I shook it, and then she walked away, along the river, shrouded in the strange mist that had settled on everything.
Taking the gun with me that night was a bad idea, but I didn’t care. I took it when I left Tolya’s around ten. It was three days since I had been to the agency on Moscow Road where Masha Panchuk got her job. When I had called during business hours, a machine picked up. Something about the place had been bugging me since I first saw it. And I was furious, crazy with anger.
The fury had built up over the time I’d been in London. And dread. I was scared of what I’d do if I was right about Grisha Curtis, if I found him and I was right. Dread of being wrong.
I ran along the sidewalk. A car splashed water on me. I yelled at the driver to go fuck himself.
On Moscow Road, the Greek grocery was shut, metal gates pulled down. Outside the church a homeless guy was stretched out, wet newspaper for a blanket.
In the building where the agency was, the windows were dark, except on the top floor. As I watched, the light there went off. The shade came down. Somebody had seen me looking.
What did I expect to find here late at night? The agency would be shut. I was operating on instinct and adrenalin and the fury.
I was surprised that the front door wasn’t locked. I pushed it, then went into the vestibule. The inner door was easy. I jimmied it with my pocketknife, and went up the first flight.
Shoulder tight against the wall, I edged my way up quiet as I could, feeling the peeling paint with one hand, the other on the gun. A stink of cigarettes was everywhere. Overhead bulbs were out. From inside a couple of the doors, I could hear voices, a TV.
The agency was on the third floor. I tapped very lightly on the frosted glass with the name on it. I waited. Listened for noise. The door was padlocked and I used the butt of my gun to break it.
The room was the same as it had been, desk, a couple of chairs, a framed poster, well-watered plants along the windowsill.
But Ilana was gone, her computer was covered with a plastic sheet, and I wondered if she had been covering for someone. Was it really an agency for maids and chauffeurs? Was it a front? Both? Impossible to tell, but I sensed right away that there was something strange.
Mrs Curtis had said that Grisha kept an office close to Paddington station, and this place, on Moscow Road, was close enough. I had come on the kind of instinct that you need as a cop, something that went off in my head like a smoke alarm.
I left the lights off. Went to the window and looked out at the street where a couple gazed up at the church, then walked away, putting up an umbrella.
At the back of the office was a second door. In the desk drawer was a set of keys. I found the right one and went in.
It was nondescript, nothing on the walls, only a small conference table in the middle of the room, a pair of filing cabinets in a corner. On the table was a brand new desktop computer, and on a shelf was a row of books, Russian history mostly. I grabbed a couple at random to take with me. I’d look at them later.
I went to the computer. Somebody leaving in a hurry had failed to shut it down completely, there was no request for a password. I thought about the light in the top-floor window.
From upstairs, while I was bent over the computer, came the noise I’d been waiting for. There were footsteps. Somebody walking, then running.
And then whoever it was kept going, didn’t stop at the third floor, just kept going faster, down the stairs, out of the front door and into the street.
At the window again I watched. A dark figure emerged from the building, crossed the street and slid into an alleyway on the other side. He was waiting for me.
I grabbed envelopes out of the two filing cabinets, printed off what I could from the computer, and went out. He was out there, in the dark, playing chicken with me. It didn’t matter now. What I’d glimpsed in the files told me all I needed: I’d found Grisha Curtis’ office.