I was pretty surprised—maybe it was too good to be true and I should have known it—Konstantin said he might have a solution. He asked if I wanted to eat, a waiter brought me some smoked fish and another drink, and about half an hour later, the American appeared.
Konstantin made the introductions and the guy got up on the stool next to me, asked for a beer, shook my hand. He had a Midwestern accent, and asked where I was from.
“New York,” I said.
“I love New York. I’m from Minnesota,” he said, and grinned. “Small town you’ve never heard of. You just got here? Max, right?”
I nodded.
“Willie Moffat,” he said. “Konstantin over there told me you were looking for a place to stay?”
In the background, Sinatra sang “Moonlight In Vermont”.
“I have to go back to the States, I fixed my flight,” said Moffat. “I was trying to set up to rent my apartment. My Russian sucks. So I asked Konstantin who knows everyone in Moscow, if he could help. I want to do it off the books, so I get it back, it’s for a few weeks.”
I ordered another drink and listened to Moffat, wondering who he really was, this tall balding American with square shoulders who had appeared suddenly with an apartment for rent. I looked in the mirror at the people behind me. Half expected to see Grisha Curtis shadowing me the way he had in London.
“How long for? The apartment?”
“Like I said, few weeks, a month tops. Listen, I’m sorry to make it kind of urgent, but I have to leave tonight, and it would be great if you wanted it,” said Moffat, fumbling for a pack of cigarettes. “Great thing about Moscow is you can still smoke,” he said. “The thing is, my mom is sick, and I don’t want to leave the apartment empty, you know? I just got it, and if you leave it empty, even after you pay off the realtors and do the bribes and shit, you can lose it. I don’t exactly have all the paperwork signed and sealed yet. But you’d be fine for a few weeks, honest.” His words spilled out in a rush, he was a guy in a hurry, but best I could tell he really was in a hurry to see his sick mother.
“Go on.”
Moffat looked reassured.
“I just started a new job here,” he said. “I’m on a private water project, and everybody is desperate about housing, it’s insane, you want to rent a decent place in a good area, it’s like the competition is completely nuts. I found this place. I mean, this girl found it for me, and it’s in a building that’s not really finished, look I could show you.” He was repeating himself. He was eager. Too eager?
“Yeah, I’ll take a look, why not,” I said casually as I could. If it worked out, I’d have a place to stay and nobody would know, I wouldn’t have to deal with a hotel, and the paperwork. As best I could, I was trying not to leave a trail, trying to keep to myself.
“My car’s outside,” he said. “If you want, I can leave you my car with the apartment,” added Moffat, who found Konstantin in the middle of the laughing drinking crowd, pressed some money into his hand, thanked him.
“I’ll tell Mr Sverdloff I saw you if he comes by. Mr Fielding, isn’t that right?” said Konstantin.
“Is he in Moscow? You didn’t say.”
“I heard so,” he said, his face bland and unrevealing. “But he has not been into the club yet.”
“Doesn’t he always come here?”
“I don’t ask these questions.”
“Sure, tell him Max said hi. And thanks,” I said, slipped a few large bills into his perfect suit jacket, and went to get my bag and look at Moffat’s apartment.
In Moffat’s new blue BMW, he asked me what I did. I told him I was planning to write a travel guide to the new Moscow.
“Who’s the girl?” I said, making conversation as he drove us to the building.
“You knew? You had to figure I didn’t care so much about the apartment just for myself, right?” He grinned and said his girl was really something, but he knew she wanted that apartment, and he had taken it on a six-month basis with an option to buy.
He was an engineer, he said, and told me about his life in Red Wing, Minnesota in so much detail, by the time we got to the apartment, I knew that his father was a doctor, an internist, and his brother liked golf, and more or less everything else about the Moffat family.
I made some conversation about the baseball season to prove I was a good American.
Moffat was a diehard Twins fan, but he commiserated with me over the Yankees and over Torre leaving and I admitted only a dumb fan like me could stay loyal to such a fuck-up of a team.
We talked politics a little. It was all Americans talked about, that and the baseball season. He liked Obama, he said. Had shaken his hand at a rally. I fell in with the conversation.
“You sound homesick already,” Moffat said.
“Yeah. For sure.”
“I don’t know your last name,” he added amiably.
“Fielding,” I said.
At Moffat’s building, a caretaker was half asleep on a chair in the lobby. He looked at me suspiciously. Moffat stuffed some money in his hand.
“I call him Igor, he reminds me of
Young Frankenstein
,” said Moffat, chuckling. Igor also worked with the construction crews, said Moffat in English. Igor didn’t speak English. He didn’t speak much at all.
I followed Moffat up six flights of stairs—the new elevator wasn’t installed yet, and I was panting by the time we got there. He showed me around the two-room apartment with high ceilings and tall windows, peeling mint green paint in the bathrooms and olive green tiles, a big sofa and flatscreen TV in the living room, a brand-new king-size bed in the bedroom. In the kitchen a Soviet-era Elektra stove that was six feet tall, and emitted a strange smell I couldn’t pin down. Gas? Sewage?
Moffat apologized for the stove and said the new appliances would arrive any day. In the meantime, he had put in a microwave and a fancy silver espresso machine.
I didn’t plan on cooking.
I said I’d take it.
He gave me the keys. He gave me his phone numbers. I had picked up a local pay-as-you-go cellphone as soon as I got off the plane, and I gave Moffat the number. I used Fiona Colquhoun for a reference. Said she was my British book publisher. My own phone, I had turned off and put in my pocket. I didn’t want anybody using it to track me down.
Fiona already knew where I was; she’d made it happen, I had to trust her, she was all I had. There was nobody, nobody, I could trust anymore, except for Tolya Sverdloff and he had disappeared, slipped away, evaporated. I began to wonder if he had died. I remembered the gray pallor, the way he clutched his arm. Where was he?
Two weeks, Moffat said, until he was back. Three tops. I tried to give him some money for rent. He said he was fine with me just staying, water the plants, make sure the place is occupied, put on the lights when you go out. He didn’t want any break-ins, not by real-estate creeps or any other creeps. What kind of creeps?
Before I could ask, Moffat was gone, dragging a suitcase back down the stairs, and I sent Fiona Colquhoun a message to tell her a guy called Moffat might call for a reference on somebody name of Max Fielding, and that this Max—me—was writing a travel guide. If Moffat didn’t check my reference, I’d know it was a set-up.
If I hadn’t lived in America for almost thirty years, I would not have quite believed in Willie Moffat from Red Wing. But I’d met plenty like him, this good, nice American. And I’d spun him enough of a story about myself to keep him happy.
A picture of the Russian girlfriend—Moffat’s girlfriend— was on the table near his bed. In a bikini on a beach someplace, she had a fantastic body, the legs, a feral face with cheekbones sharp as glass.
Oh, Willie, man, I thought, this is a big mistake. But he was gone, and he was in love, so what could I do?
I was stashing my stuff in a couple of drawers in the bedroom when Igor knocked on the door to see if anything was leaking. He had heard water. He asked if I spoke Russian. I shook my head and put out my hands, palms up, and shrugged to indicate I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. I knew he just wanted a good look at me.
Later that night, early into the morning, unable to sleep, I went up on the roof of Moffat’s building to read through Grisha Curtis’ notes again, looking for clues about where he would go in Moscow. Find Grisha, I’d find Tolya, and the other way around. In my mind they were cuffed together.
I sat on a low plastic beach chair somebody had left out on the roof and I could see all of Moscow spread out: the blaze of neon, the river of red made by the tail lights on the endless stream of cars, the smear of gold and purple as the sun came up on another boiling humid Moscow day, when the smog hung in thick curtains of pearly gray until the sun burned some of it away.
Below me was the area of Patriarchy Prudi, Metro Mayakovskaya, late nineteenth, early twentieth century building, referred to in real-estate ads as “pre-revolutionary” the way somebody might list a Park Avenue apartment as “pre-war”. Some featured “Western renovation”. Some mentioned “Stalinera” buildings.
From my roof, I looked down over M. Kozikhinsky Lane. I had walked enough earlier to see the shops, the girls in their Manolos and Louboutin shoes, I had seen Nikitskaya Street.
For hours I gazed down from the roof at the area, where Bulgakov made his Master and Margarita do their business, and where as teenagers who read this forbidden book, the real thing, not the censored version—we were the children of privilege and there was always somebody who could get a copy— we had all come and loitered and smoked and discussed the novel in pretentious terms, unless we were at somebody’s flat examining the lyrics of “Sympathy For The Devil” which we knew had been inspired by the novel.
Once, in New York, I had dated a girl who thought
The
Master and Margarita
was about cocktails. It didn’t last.
I replayed the conversation I’d had with Tolya at his cousin Larry’s place in England.
Tolya had been sick when I’d seen him in England. Had someone given him polonium to eat? Was it Grisha, who had already killed his daughter?
Tolya didn’t answer my calls. He must be dead. Tolya Sverdloff, who had saved my ass over and over, and I couldn’t do anything for him. I couldn’t even find him. If he was alive, he would have answered my calls.
Grisha was gone. They had disappeared, both of them, Tolya slipping like a man on a stellar banana peel. During his interplanetary trip had he missed the connection, the spaceship home? I was tired. In Moscow I knew if I let on what I was doing, I’d disappear, too.
So I was here, pretending to be an American, not my American self, not a New York cop, just a tourist who could speak a little bit of basic Russian and who understood less.
I would be an irritating travel writer I decided, the kind who thinks an interrogation is a conversation, who always wants the facts and figures and dates, the kind who keeps a little notebook in which he arduously inscribes all this, who discusses the hospitality industry with a kind of smug know-it-all attitude.
I went down the stairs from the roof onto the sixth floor and into the apartment. The air conditioner was broken. I took a tepid shower, changed, stuffed money into my pocket. I picked up the phone, tried dialing a local number, heard what I was listening for: somebody was on the line. Somebody was sharing my phone.
Or was I paranoid? Had the Russian disease, along with the booze and heat, made me crazy? It was time for me to get moving.
I headed out into the city. I wanted a gun.
The bear at the entrance to Ismailova Park was chained up. People stood around waiting for the hourly performance, when, according to the sign, the bear would perform. WE WORK WITHOUT MUZZLES, said the sign.
This was a different city from the Moscow of fancy shops, it was a place where, on the outskirts of town, people went for cheap clothes, and, on weekends, to sell souvenirs to foreigners.
At dawn I had left the apartment. On the Moscow streets everywhere I looked, I saw Grisha Curtis, saw him walking in the opposite direction, turning a corner, waiting for me, leaning against a wall.
Even in the morning, the air was so thick and sticky, it coated my skin like grease. I studied the map in my hand. I was looking for a train station. I was a tourist in the city where I grew up. I was a ghost, the son of a ghost.
The area around Kazansky Station was jammed, people leaving, coming in, hanging out, sleeping on the ground. On a boom box, somebody was playing Metallica. Hordes of people with Asian faces milled around. The women were wrapped in shawls, and they came and want, dragging big bags of stuff to sell. A couple of girls, couldn’t have been more than fifteen, loitered on one corner, looking for men in cars.
I waited for the light to turn green before I crossed the street. People glanced at me, half amused. In Moscow, like New York, nobody waited for the lights. A girl with long skinny legs in high-heeled boots darted across the street like a large insect.
This station, crammed with people sleeping on the floor, with beggars, with children in filthy clothes screaming and running, with people selling fruit, caviar, vodka, wooden dolls, underpants, home-made brooms, sticky candy, was a good bet. I figured it for the kind of place a low-level hood might have something for sale. A .22, a little piece of shit, the kind of thing that would make me feel secure, nothing more. I didn’t want a high-end weapon.
In Moscow looking for a gun, I was a hick. It took me the best part of an hour to find out you could get one at Ismailova Park, the flea market at the edge of Moscow.
The stalls were jammed with matrioshka, the wooden Russian dolls, some of them the traditional girls with cheeks painted red, others political figures, sports figures. A row of the dolls depicted beaky-nosed men with ringlets, and I said, in Russian “What are those? Who are they supposed to be?”
“The Jews,” said the woman behind the stall.
Fur hats, hand-knitted scarves, more dolls, painted plates, table lines, the usual Russian stuff. I asked careful questions. I climbed some wooden steps, three women in peasant outfits were singing some old Russian songs, and I put change in the basket for them, and went on.