The doorman yanked my arm so hard, I winced and wanted to cry, but I kept it back. I hit back. I was in Moscow, I had punched out a tourist and a local, I was fucked.
“You look like shit.”
When I came to, my head felt like it was cracking, like it was inside a nutcracker, and somebody was talking at me.
I squinted through my bruised eyes and saw I was in a small apartment, lying on a couch, a mattress on the floor was made up neatly with a striped Indian bedspread, the shelves full of CDs and DVDs, a table, two chairs. I sat up. Sitting cross-legged on the mattress was a guy in gray sweatpants, a white shirt and socks. Hanging from a hook in a plastic dry-cleaning bag was a police uniform.
“Who the hell are you?” I said to the man. “Arkady Renko? Where am I?” I got up. “Fuck, my head hurts.”
“Drink your tea,” the man said, and I saw there was a mug of green tea on a little table next to the couch. “Drink,” he said in Russian. “You need the doctor.”
“Are you a policeman?”
“Sure. Sometimes,” he said. “I do many things.”
He crossed the room to the table, sat on a chair, opened his cellphone. He was short and big, chest like a weightlifter, waist whittled down, and he moved as if he understood his body and was aware other people would understand it.
His shirtsleeves were folded up high on his arms, which were sculpted, veins standing up on them, and while he talked, he flexed one, watching it as if it were alive. His face, though, was an intellectual’s, he had thoughtful eyes, and he was going bald. On a leather thong around his neck he wore a pendant the shape of a peace symbol.
“Artie Cohen?” he said to me as if to confirm, not to question. Without waiting for an answer, he said, “I am Leven, Viktor. The cousin of Boris, whom you call Bobo.”
“Bobo told you I was in Moscow?”
“He says to please keep my eye peeled out for you,” said Viktor, who was about forty. He handed me a glass of apple juice and some aspirin and told me his father and Bobo’s were brothers, his father the elder. “My cousin asks if you need help,” he said.
He produced a picture of the two cousins. “I am Viktor, and you are in very deep shit,” he added, in Russian now, “You understand?”
I nodded. “You have coffee?”
“I’ll make coffee,” he said, got up with one agile bounce and went into a tiny kitchen and came back with a mug of black coffee, instant, barely hot, in his hand. He’d made it under the tap.
“Drink it,” he said.
“What happened?”
“You went to the club Pravda222, twice at least, and using two different names, the name of Max Fielding and your own name of Artie Cohen, which is the name by which I know you.”
He spoke very precise English as if he had learned it from a language study tape or from a BBC radio program. He took pains to use the definite article which, of course, doesn’t exist in Russian and he used it so often it was stilted, comic even. I answered him in English so that he would not be insulted.
Viktor sat down on the mattress again, and crossed his legs in some crazy yoga position. He leaned back and switched on a CD player. George Harrison. “Here Comes The Sun” played.
“It calms me down,” said Viktor. “Never the fuck mind. Listen to me, it is not a good idea to try killing people here. You understand me?”
“I wasn’t trying to kill anyone.”
“So now everybody knows you’re here, everyone, they know you came in without a proper visa, and that you called yourself Max Fielding, and pretended to be some kind of travel fucking writer,” he said. “They know who you are.”
“I want them to know, and who the fuck are
they
anyhow?”
“I think you need a doctor,” said Viktor. “The cut on your mouth looks like shit.”
“How did you know where to find me?”
“Artemy, excuse me, but if you spend three years in the fucking Russian army it’s not so hard to find one American like you in Moscow. Anyhow, my cousin Boris told me to watch out for you. He says to me, watch out for this guy who can be one fucking asshole, but he’s a good cop, okay? He says he works this terrible case of Valentina Sverdloff, daughter of Anatoly, and he stays with it, and he knows you’ll come here, so I watch for you. I watch you, I see you go to Marina Fetushova, who I also know, and I think: he’s a crazy fucker. This is really dangerous. Naturally, I figure you will show at Pravda222, so I hang there, though it costs me a fucking arm and two legs. So I say to my cousin Boris, Borya, you owe me a lot. ”
My mouth hurt. Somebody had punched me plenty hard. I could taste dried blood.
“What happened to me?”
“Before the cops came to the club, you had a little fight with the doorman who is aided by some of his pals. They told you you should fuck off out of Russia.”
“Jesus.”
“You shouldn’t carry a gun in Moscow, you know, not a crappy illegal, how did they call them, six-shooter? Makes you look like a tourist,” said Viktor. “Carry a knife if you have to put something in your holster,” he added, laughing at his joke. “What do you need, Artemy Maximovich?” he said, finally. “How can I help you?”
I drank the sludge in the coffee mug. I didn’t know if I could trust him, either. No firm ground. Like Tolya had said, no traction anywhere. But he looked okay, and he was related to Bobo.
While I drank the coffee, he told me he had been a soldier, fought in Chechnya, which meant he got beat up plenty, being a Jew in the Russian army. Full of shrapnel, he had returned to Moscow. He could make decent money doing security, he said. One of his three daughters attended school in England, in Brighton by the sea. I knew there was more he didn’t tell me.
“What else?” I said.
“You’ve been all the fuck over Moscow,” said Viktor in Russian. “Cafes, restaurants, every place, and then you show up at Pravda222 last night and then you punch out a guy who, thank God, was only an Englishman, and currently we Russians formally fucking speaking, applaud people who mess up on the English, but we have to keep a fucking façade, man, and he’s an Englishman with connections, an Englishman who was invited by certain kinds of people including one tiny oligarch, not a big one, I grant you, but big enough, and is also rich and connected himself, if an asshole. You think London stops at the border? This British guy is a lawyer, he works for Russians.”
I liked him. For one thing, he could laugh, a deep belly laugh that rose up from his middle, and made him cry from laughing. Jokes, the only thing that saves us, said Viktor, and then we tossed around a few jokes, and laughed about the really bad Russian gangster films that were coming out. I wanted Viktor for a friend.
“I have to find Tolya Sverdloff,” I said.
“Mr Anatoly Sverdloff has made too much noise,” said Viktor. “I think the death of his daughter has made him crazy, which I understand. I would be the same,” he added.
“What kind of noise?”
“He will now do anything to get back at people who killed his daughter. He says she was poisoned with polonium-210. This makes people paranoid.”
“Who?”
“Everybody. The FSB says the British killed Litvinenko, others that it was Russian friends of Litvinenko in London. There is also talk of provocation, nothing has any reality anymore, just like Soviet times, you know? No firm ground. None,” said Viktor.
“Listen, man, I’m a New York cop, I just want the creep who killed my friend’s daughter, and I want to know where the fuck he is. No politics, okay? I’m grateful to you, but let’s just skip the political discussion.”
“Everything is politics,” said Viktor, who tossed the butt of his cigarette into a yellow cup where it sizzled in the dregs of the coffee. “Once upon a time, I would have saved the remains of this cigarette.”
“Do you know where Sverdloff is?”
“Nothing is sure.”
“There’s somebody else,” I said, and described Grisha Curtis and saw a flicker of fear scurry across Viktor’s round face, like a mouse looking for food where there wasn’t any.
“You’re in big trouble,” he said. “You’re playing with guys who are very, very connected. Get a little rest and I’ll make some calls.”
“No.”
“Listen to me, they got hold of you at the club, they beat you up, next time they’ll cut your tongue out, or kill you, okay? Or if it isn’t the creeps, you’ll disappear into the official pit where nobody climbs out, they know about you, they know the New York police have been looking at you for Valentina’s murder, that your prints were everywhere in her apartment, they know everything about you, that you came to Moscow before, you’re fully recorded in the files, you’re on the list.”
“What?”
“You grew up here, they know this, they know you came back to Moscow in the early 1990s.”
I put my hand in my pocket.
“The cash is here,” said Viktor, and handed me the pile of money. “You’re lucky as a girl with big tits that nobody took it off you,” he added. “But, then, we’re not all just about the money, hard as it may be for you to believe.”
“You sound like Bobo,” I said. “I have to get up.”
“Sleep,” said Viktor, and gestured to the mattress and brought a blanket and said he’d be back before it was light.
I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Before I crashed, I wondered if there had been anything in the coffee.
George Harrison seeped into my sleep. I opened my eyes.
“What time is it?”
Viktor, sitting on one of the chairs, was watching me while I tried to wake up. He looked at his watch.
“Five past eleven.”
“In the morning?”
“Yes.”
“The guy’s dead? The British dick?”
“No, sadly, the fool is fine. His wife liked you, he took a poke at you, and you socked him. Nobody is bringing charges, but nobody wants you hanging around Moscow either, so tell me what you need and let’s get it done and let’s get you out of here.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“For Bobo, for our family, or as you say, whatever.”
“You knew about Valentina?”
“This poor girl found out too late she had a boyfriend who was a little bit of a fascist.”
“Grisha Curtis?”
“You met him?”
“Only at a party in London. For a minute. You know where he is?”
“I’ve heard rumors.”
“I need your help,” I said finally. “I think if we can find Sverdloff, we can find Curtis. Or the other way around.”
“Sverdloff is most important, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Take a shower. I made soup. There’s a clinic we could try, I made some phone calls while you were sleeping. We have to go fast, people are asking about you,” he said, and sent me into what passed for his bathroom where I took a shower under a tepid drizzle of water, and borrowed a clean t-shirt from him.
He made me eat the whole bowl of borscht and some bread and cheese, and then he drove us in his second-hand blue VW to a fancy clinic near the river.
All the way, he played Indian music. It drove me out of my skull, but I kept quiet. Viktor knew what he was doing.
The clinic was all glass and steel. Gorgeous women in starched white dresses and little caps on their hair were the nurses, though they looked more like Playboy models. In a sunroom with a huge flatscreen TV on the wall, patients looked well fed. The doctor, wearing Zegna from head to toe, was impatient.
“Look again,” said Viktor, showing him Tolya’s picture.
“Yes,” he said.
“Yes, what?”
“I think he was here. I’m not sure,” said the doctor, who was eager to get away.
“What did he have?”
The doctor called out to one of the costumed nurses and handed her the picture, told her to look up the records, made a gesture that indicated she was not to tell us too much. Said he was busy, gave us an engraved business card, mentioned we could make an appointment. He shook our hands, looked at his Rolex, and disappeared with that self-important stride only doctors and lawyers have, the kind that lets you know they are busier than you can imagine, and important and have great big balls.
After the nurse pretended to look through some files on her new Mac, she took Tolya’s picture in her hand.
“I don’t have anything on him,” she said. “I remember him. He told jokes, but he was very ill. I have a feeling it was his heart. He didn’t stay long enough.” She inspected a calendar. “Monday night. The 14th. I told him he must stay in the hospital, but he just wanted pills. He said he would come back. He never came.”
“You gave him the pills?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “Perhaps you’ll wait until the doctor is free again?”
“Sverdloff didn’t leave an address, a contact?”
“Nothing.”
“Ravi Shankar. A genius,” said Viktor, nodding at his iPod that was plugged into the car. “I love the sitar.”
“I have to find Sverdloff.”
“Listen to me, you have to pay attention, you have to be careful, you think like an American, but this place is not normal anymore, this is a police state, this is only one guy who is running things, and you have to pay attention.” Viktor said it so quietly I could hardly hear him.
“Why do you tell me all this?”
“My cousin Bobo tells me I should say these things to you. I should help you. You help him, you help the family.”
“I want the boy,” I said. “I want Grisha. I think Tolya Sverdloff came here to look for him. I think maybe Tolya already found him. He followed me to the place I was staying, maybe to the club, on the street, and then he went away.”
“You think Mr Grisha has gone to be with Marx as we used to say? You don’t think he’s already dead?”
“Who do you really work for?”
“This one, that one. I was a soldier, I told you. For a while I was a detective also, like Bobo. I’m freelance. Some of the time I help with joint terrorist things, even your friend from Wyoming. Bodyguard, too, for money. This and that. I keep telling you. You have some idea, yes?”
“Roy Pettus?”
“He’s okay,” said Viktor.
“Yeah.”
“What’s your idea?”
“I need to go somewhere by myself. One hour. Look, there are some bodies I heard about, dumped out by a place you don’t need to see. One might be Grisha Curtis. I have a friend who’s a homicide cop.”
“One hour.”