It was the biggest city in Europe now, ten, twelve, sixteen million, depending if you counted the floating immigrant population and dozens of billionaires. I could feel it flexing its muscles, bragging rights claimed like a prizefighter who had taken the title. But at the shelter, there were only the kids and the stained building and old women in headscarves who looked like Russian women had looked for centuries. They brought home-made dumplings, and black bread, whatever they could afford for the children.
The little girls in tiny blue shorts and striped t-shirts ran around, laughing. They clambered up the jungle gym. I thought of the children in the green square in London, hanging upside down. An older girl sat on one of the swings, swinging higher and higher. I watched her. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
I saw it all over again. I saw the girl in the Brooklyn playground, I saw Masha Panchuk. Fetushova had picked up her bag, lit up another smoke, was getting ready to go.
“Was somebody hurt here?” I said. “In this playground?”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
I told her about Masha Panchuk, the way she died, I told her all the details.
She dropped her cigarette, hand trembling.
“My God,” she said.
“What?”
“Wait.” She hurried into the shelter where I tried to follow. “I said wait.”
“About a year ago, Valentina took this picture,” said Fetushova, returning with a print in a plastic sleeve.
Stomach turning, I looked at the picture. A girl on a bench, the jungle gym visible behind her.
“Here?”
“Yes,” Fetushova said.
The girl was wrapped like a mummy in duct tape. A doll was on her lap.
“Jesus Christ.”
“This playground,” she said. “The girl was thirteen. She belonged to a bastard very high up, close to the Kremlin.”
“Belonged?”
“He owned her. You can as good as buy these girls,” said Fetushova. “Somehow she got away. Somebody found her on the street and got her here. The son of a bitch thought the girl might talk. He hired a thug to do this. Shut her up. Tape her up. She was found like this.”
“Dead?”
“Of course.”
“They murdered the kid?”
“Yes.”
“Why all the duct tape?”
“It’s an old gangster punishment. You make it look like the old mob, the officials can deny it. They distance themselves. The fuckers look clean as a whistle, they give the shelter money, they go on TV, official TV, we only have official TV now, of course, and say how dreadful this is.”
“Valentina?”
“She had started working with us when it happened. We asked her to take pictures. The girl in Brooklyn, she looked like this one, the duct tape?”
“Yes. I think they were after Valentina and got the wrong girl.”
“Fuck,” said Fetushova. “Somebody hired a creep who knew about this?”
“I think it was Grigory Curtis.”
“Piece of shit, piece of mother-fucking donkey turd,” she said. “You know him?”
“I want him,” I said. “He’s here. Elisabetta told me he had been here to the shelter.”
“He wouldn’t have the stomach to do this kind of job, if it was him, he hired somebody who fucked it up, right?”
“Yes.”
“And when it came to Val, all he could manage was a pillow over her face. Fucking bastard. I have to go.” She looked around.
A couple of guys lounged at the edge of the playground. They looked like low-level hoods, or street creeps from the FSB.
“Who are they?”
“Garbage men,” she said, laughing. “We call them garbage men, I just don’t know what kind of garbage.”
“Where can we talk?”
“I can’t talk.”
“I’ll be at your office. I’ll wait for you,” I said.
“Just don’t get me killed,” said Fetushova.
I left the shelter. I had already checked every place that was mentioned in Grisha Curtis’ files; in the stuff I had stolen from the office on Moscow Road. I had checked, quietly as I could: an apartment where he’d lived; a bank he had worked at; a gym where he did weights.
I couldn’t exactly call up the FSB and ask for his contact. I couldn’t say, who ran him, if somebody did. Maybe a real spy would know how.
So I worked the obvious places. Nothing. He wasn’t good at keeping secret files, but he was good at hiding.
I felt him on my back all the time. At every corner, I looked over my shoulder, and put my hand on the little gun in my pocket.
Paranoia took over in Moscow. I walked as fast as I could, heading for the subway, always feeling somebody behind me, turning sharply, thinking I’d see Curtis, when there was nobody at all.
I stopped near an old Moscow housing project, twelve tall buildings, most in an even worse state than when I’d been here in the 1990s. I put my head into the hallway of one of the buildings; it stank of piss, like it always had, the elevator was still broken.
A few elderly women sat on rickety chairs on a patch of grass outside, and I scanned the faces, thinking I might recognize somebody, but they stared back, blank, and went on fanning themselves against the heat with newspapers. Living on meager pensions, they seemed completely unconnected with the new Moscow.
I asked the oldest of the women if she had known Birdie Golden. My mother’s best friend who had taught me English lived and died in the building with the broken elevator.
“Yes,” she said in Russian. “You are?”
I told her who I was. She beckoned me to lean down so she could kiss my cheek.
“Birdie loved you very much,” she said. “She talked about you all the time, you were like her own son,” said the woman, who invited me to take an empty chair and offered me a bottle of water from her bag.
I wanted to stay. I wanted to sit in the sun like the old women and talk. I realized Olga Dimitriovna had reminded me of Birdie a little.
“There is a man looking in this direction,” said Birdie’s friend, and I glanced over my shoulder and saw one of the garbage men from the playground.
“I should go,” I said.
“Please come back,” said the woman, and I said I’d try, even while sweat was running down my back and my hands were cold. I had to get Marina Fetushova to tell me what she knew. Whatever it took. Now, I thought.
I found her at the radio station where she worked.
“Fetushova, Marina,” she said, sticking out a hand as if she had never met me before, and I saw this was for show, for the other people at the small radio station where I found her.
The radio station was in a couple of rooms in a concrete building near the Arbat, a dingy place with stale air thick with the rank smell of old cigarettes, no air conditioning.
Fetushova half pushed me out of the room where four people pored over scripts and fiddled with equipment. From another room, door shut, came the sound of American Blues. Buddy Guy, Mick Jagger covering a raucous Muddy Waters number about champagne and reefers.
A guy stood on the landing, leaning against the wall. Security for Fetushova and the others, I guessed. I started for the office.
“Not in there. I don’t like to compromise anyone else,” she said, pushing me back out into the hallway.
“Let’s go outside,” I said. “A cafe.”
“I told you what I know. You’re a cop, you’re Sverdloff’s friend, you were Valentina’s friend. She mentioned you to me once,” she said, and sat on the bottom stair, elbows on knees.
“What did she say?”
“Said you were okay. I have to get back to work soon.”
I leaned against the railing near her. “I want to know why Valentina Sverdloff was killed.”
She gave a short tough laugh. “You know what I was before?” she said.
Russians always told you what they were before, before, before the Soviet Union crumbled, before everything changed. Physicists who now sold fur coats. Linguists who drove cabs. Guys who once ran market stalls were billionaires. You went up the scale or you went down, but everything had changed. It was as if they had all migrated to a different planet. Except for old people, like my Aunt Birdie’s friends. Old people stayed where they had always been; so did the poor in the countryside.
“What were you?”
She grunted a laugh.
“For a while, I was a scientist, I was educated as a scientist, and I was in forensics, and then I thought, fuck it, I’ll be a cop. It doesn’t matter, nothing changes, we’re master and slave, the elite and the mass, the hierarchy remains,” said Fetushova, “You know what it is, it’s fucking Orthodox Christianity whose aim is to enslave people, Maybe my grandchildren’s grandchildren will see some kind of civil society. I have three of them. You’re surprised?” She reached in her brown leather bag and took out a folder, opened it, showed me her children. Two girls and a boy, good-looking young people. In the boy’s arms was a baby.
“What are their names? Are they here in Moscow with you?”
No, thank God,” she said, and then seemed sorry she had revealed this and stuffed the pictures back in her bag.
“You said you were a cop.”
“You don’t believe me? I’m not fucking kidding you, Mr Cohen. I was. So I saw everything. I see everything. It’s all façade, the FSB is about money, the gangsters of the 1990s have moved sideways into it.” She sucked at her cigarette. “Literally. I mean literally. I saw how the corruption worked, small, bigger, I see it now and I can’t keep my mouth shut. My friends say I’m like a woman with Tourette’s syndrome, you know?” She blew a harsh puff of smoke in my face. “I still have friends in the police, I have friends in the FSB, retired KGB officers. You think the spook world was a place of endlessly reflecting mirrors and no moral spine, everybody and everything up for grabs during the Cold War? Now there is only money. Everything is money.”
“I believe you.”
“Most of all, as a cop, I saw how they treated women. Whatever the crime, the women were culpable. Rape was a joke at the police station most of the time. I imagine it still is. It was my beat. When I got here,” she gestured at the radio station, “I was still ranting, people thought I was nuts, and I was nuts, I am nuts. Valentina came to me, and I said, go the fuck away, it will get us all killed, and I’m a dead dog anyhow.” From inside the studio I could hear voices, and music.
“What about this radio station?”
“They keep us on the air to show what a free society we are, we say what we want, and they let us alone partly because it’s the only way the Kremlin assholes can get real information. They have a need to know, especially the big shots at the FSB. Funny, right? They need our little station because they need a source of fact, they need us because we report things as they are. On the other hand, we could go off the air any minute, poof, but for now, we’re all there is.” She sucked in more smoke.
“Money? You were talking money.”
“I told Valentina, she had to be careful, but it made her crazy when she discovered how many girls were being prostituted and how many officials were pocketing the cash, and the one thing you don’t talk about here is their money, especially where our leader is concerned.” She sneered as she said it. “I told her, but she didn’t listen. She talked and talked, she thought she was impregnable, an American girl with rights. Free speech, Marina, she says, I can say what I want. We don’t have free speech. Putin said so. He said Russians never had free speech.”
“What happened?”
“Finally, Valentina got me to go on the air with it, to tell about deputies who keep girls at home, who offer them to foreign diplomats, one had a book of pictures, so friends could choose the beauties they liked, some of them were little, twelve, thirteen. I told only facts.”
I felt bands tightened around my head.
“Valentina felt she should put herself on the line if I did. She called in to the show, gave her real name and supported me with more cases.”
“My God.”
“Also, Valentina had a video.”
“Fuck. What did she do with it?”
“I made her give it to me, but I don’t know if she made copies or put it on the Internet or sent it to somebody. A couple of top FSB guys are in it, a little girl.”
“Fuck.”
“Yup. Fuck is right.” She smiled. Her teeth were discolored. “So you want me to give you Grisha Curtis? You plan to kill him, you want to avenge your friend, like in the novels?” She cracked another smile. “I’ll put out some calls. But don’t tell me what you plan to do.”
I agreed.
“You don’t care anymore about what happens to you, as long as you get him, isn’t that right? Artie? That’s what Valentina always called you.”
“Yes.” I took hold of her dry hand, the skin peeling. “Get me the video. Please,” I said.
“You were in love with Valentina, weren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“She was a good girl. If I can get the bastards, it would be fine, we have nothing, no laws, no courts, no free speech. Whoever thought it would have been Yeltsin, that old fatso sot, who left the press alone? He had something. But this one.” Her eyes glistened. “What the fuck, the economy is probably going down the tubes in a few months and we can all wallow in the shit together.”
I started for the door.
“Take it easy,” she said, her voice down a few decibels. “Your pal Sverdloff might still be alive.” She shook her head. “But do this quietly. Find Curtis. You don’t want somebody killing Sverdloff before you get there, if he is alive.”
“Be careful,” I said. “You be careful.”
She snorted, rolling her eyes, pulling at her shabby green sweater that barely covered her fat belly. “Careful? You want me to find this tape for you, you want me to find this Curtis for you, and you say be careful?”
“I’ll give you my numbers,” I said.
“I have your number,” she said, and hoisted herself off the step, went back into the radio station and closed the door.
“Artemy Maximovich Ostalsky? Artie Cohen?”
That night, I saw the man in the blue and white jacket again. Near Pushkinskaya, he suddenly appeared. He said my name, I turned.
Compact man, medium build, with short elegantly cut white hair and light brown eyes like milk chocolate, he wore a pair of pressed khakis, a white Oxford shirt, the sleeves neatly rolled to his forearms, which were tan.