“I’ll take you to my place. You can wait there. Don’t go back to your apartment. Don’t go out. Please, this is serious, you’ll get in trouble, you’ll get me in trouble, you’ll get people killed if you don’t listen. I’ll get your stuff from the apartment, if you want.”
“You know where I’m staying?”
“Sure.”
“You knew as soon as I got here?”
“Stay here,” he said as he pulled up in front of his building. “Pray one of our bodies is Curtis. You have contacts with anyone here?”
“Who would I have contacts with?”
“Cops? Journalists other than Fetushova? Friends? Old friends?”
“Not anymore,” I said.
“Family?”
“Dead.”
“Friends of family?”
“Also dead. What the fuck are you asking for?”
“Children of friends of family, parents?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Okay, so think.”
“Just fucking tell me what you want to know.”
“FSB,” he said in a low voice.
“I don’t know these bastards.”
“KGB.”
I said I knew what the fucking FSB was, and that it used to be the KGB, and how the fuck would I know anybody in it?
“Your father.”
“He’s been dead a long time.”
“They like the families, the children, you have heritage, they’ll talk to you. Sooner or later somebody will remember your father and say, what about him, what about the son, he’s one of us.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“In this country, even according to my pious Christian friends, Christ is dead,” said Viktor, picking up his car keys.
I didn’t wait for Viktor Leven. I had an idea I had to get going. Maybe I was already too late.
At Moffat’s place, I looked for Igor the caretaker. He was out. I went into his hutch and then into the half-built apartment. Upstairs I looked for the bones. They were gone. So were Willie Moffat’s golf clubs. Maybe Igor had gone to sell them both.
I had come back to the apartment to get a few of my things, and lock the place up so Moffat didn’t come home and find everything gone. As soon as I got inside I knew somebody had been there, looking for me, searching through my stuff, papers, a notebook, but nothing else. Everything else was in place: TV, desktop computer, espresso machine. It wasn’t a thief. It wasn’t Igor.
I locked up, left a note for Moffat, pushed the keys under the door, went out to look for a taxi. I could have taken Moffat’s car, but it was too risky. Traffic cops were on the make all over Moscow. They stopped you. They asked for money. I was guessing it was the reason nothing had been done about the traffic. Maybe the traffic cops’ union put up a fight. Maybe it was the only way they could feed their kids. I didn’t want to drive another guy’s car, not now.
My phone rang. A familiar voice was on the other end, but the line was blurry. I couldn’t make out who it was, and then the line went dead. I had my clothes and papers in my carry-on, I didn’t know where the hell I was going, but I wasn’t coming back here. I had cash, and I had the gun. Viktor Leven never took it off me.
I flagged down a cab. I made a deal with the driver for the trip out to the country, twenty kilometers, give or take, and he was willing, glad of the work, a chubby little cheerful Georgian with two teeth missing, who told me he loved Americans and for me he would make a deal. We did it in sign language, and the couple of words of Russian I admitted I knew.
I kept up the idea that I didn’t speak Russian much and that I was just a tourist, at least for a while, and then I gave it up.
From the rear-view mirror hung a little Georgian flag. I felt okay in his car. Georgians disliked the Russians plenty. There was going to be trouble, he said. South Ossieta, Russian army, the whole thing was going to blow up, and soon.
“What were you?”
“I was a history teacher,” he said. “I need the money,” he added, half turning to look at me.
I asked him to take me to Nikolina Gora, a village out in the Moscow countryside. He asked where exactly. I said I was looking for someone, I’d let him know.
His name was Eduard, and he was a shrewd guy. He said, if I was looking for information around Barvika, the town you came to before you got to Nikolina Gora, he would call his sister who cleaned houses nearby and heard all the gossip. It was all a Georgian girl with a dark complexion could get around Moscow. She cleans their fucking toilets, he said. I said, call her. He put his foot on the gas.
He got on his cell, he called his sister and they gabbled away for twenty minutes while we sat in traffic. I understood the sister had agreed to meet us. Eduard turned the radio up.
It was a hot windy day, sky sludge-colored, dust swirling across the windows of the crummy taxi, no air conditioning. From behind I could see the sweat streaming down my Georgian’s neck. He wiped it with a paper towel.
You think of Moscow as a winter city, its ugliness and sprawl disguised. In summer, you see it as it is. I remembered the summers now, dusty, everyone jamming into cars or on a train or a bus to get out of town.
I rolled down the window as we headed out of town on the highway, and Eduard chattered away, mostly in Russian, trying out his English and sign language, half turned towards me and grinning like a fool. I figured we were going to crash.
It was a long time since I’d come out here, the last time to Sverdloff’s parents’ dacha in Nikolina Gora.
The Rublevo-Uspenskoye highway was always the best road in the entire country, all eleven time zones of it. Big-time creeps had their official country houses out this way, right back to Stalin. Even now, where once the ZiL sirens blared, there were big Mercs and Range Rovers.
At the end of the turnoff to Putin’s place were two cop cars.
The driver mentioned Putin as if spitting and showed me his rough hand, thumb down.
He talked on and on, pointing out the building sites at the side of the road. He pulled over and invited me to join him in the front seat.
Under the seat, he had a bottle of Georgian wine, which was illegal in Moscow, more or less, the bastards have put a levy on it, he said. No love lost. Hates the fucking Russkis. Ed, he said I should call him, Ed, you say in West.
He passed me the bottle. I drank some of the thick heavy red. He drank. We toasted Georgia.
Out here, ten, fifteen miles from the center of Moscow where I remembered only countryside, huge stands of trees had been replaced by billboards and gated communities and shopping malls and ugly McMansions. You could hear the birds twitter and smell the exhaust as big cars slammed down the country road.
“Pricks,” said Ed. “Bastards. All. All same.”
We passed the billboards: German dental centers, Meissen china, Princess cruises, real estate, spas, all the billboards pushing capitalist pleasures.
Ed, who had worked as a tour guide for Georgians up to see Moscow, was in full flow, holding forth on the origins of the dacha, knocking back gulps of red wine.
Everybody has a dacha, said Ed, even workers and poor slobs, everybody has a little patch of land. The dacha meant escape.
My own parents had had a dacha for a while when my father was in the KGB, a cottage a few miles further out in the countryside. My father took me fishing, I swam in the river, friends came to eat.
Best of all, there was a huge Grundig radio my father had somehow managed to acquire. In those days there were only official radios and radio stations, nothing you wanted to listen to.
A foreign radio on which you could listen to foreign stations was an immense prize, only available to the privileged. Antennae sprouted from cottages all over the countryside.
My mother listened for news from Europe, my father, and his best friend, Gennadi—the man I called Uncle Gennadi—to jazz. Teenagers fiddled with the knobs on their parents’ radios, trying to get the BBC and the Beatles.
I knew all about the life in dachas outside Moscow, and it came back to me so powerfully I had to shake myself out of the memories.
“Luxury mall,” said Ed, and points out the window, then pulls up. “Come with me. Look, see what the new world has brought to us, here we are, a capitalist country with a peasant’s soul.” He looked around. “It’s to keep the wives busy shopping and away from Moscow, so men can be with their mistresses.”
The mall was exquisite, all sleek wood and glass, more Milan than Moscow. Every label in this label-mad country was here: Gucci, Bulgari, Graf, Bentley, Prada, Zegna, Armani, Ralph Lauren. But it was like Alphaville, empty, devoid of life, dystopic. Ed understood this.
“Everything is façade now,” he said, leading me to the far end of the mall where, in a Lada, a woman was waiting.
Ed’s sister was a small pretty women, about fifty, who got out of the battered car, embraced her brother, and said to me, “How can I help you?”
I asked her if she knew the way to a certain dacha in Nikolina Gora, and she got on her cellphone, made a few calls, and told me her husband’s cousin had worked nearby and would call Eduard with directions. She climbed in her car, and, waving, drove away.
Then, without warning, Eddie hustled me back in the car, and pulled back on the road, going at the legal speed. The police car he said he had seen didn’t stop us. I never noticed it. I was losing my focus.
“Russian cops,” Ed said, and spat.
When Ed got the call from his brother-in-law’s cousin, he found the right road to the dacha I was looking for. He gave me his cell number. I offered him extra money. He refused.
Georgians loved America, he told me sincerely, and he hoped we would remain eternal friends. We shook hands, and then he left me at the junction where the main road joined a dirt path to the Sverdloff place.
It was getting dark now, the sky purple with rain clouds. I started up the path. I could see the house clearly.
The garden sloped down to a stream that fed the river, but it was overgrown, weeds had pushed up through the grass. The hydrangea bushes, neon blue in the evening light, were in bloom. Fireflies glittered everywhere.
I had been here once before in the summer, a long time ago. Under an immense tree in the garden was an old trestle table where we had eaten dinner, me, Tolya, his parents, his cousin, Svetlana.
The dinner table had been surrounded by friends of the Sverdloffs, writers, artists.
Tolya’s father, almost as big as his son, sang songs from
Oklahoma!
I remembered the physicist who told me the truth about red mercury. Most of all, I remembered Svetlana in her white skirt and blouse and a bright red shawl. I loved her. The next day, because of me, she was dead. A car bomb went off in her car. Meant for me.
Svetlana had been the beginning, it was Svetlana I saw in Valentina, at least a little. I realized that now.
From the woods behind the house I could hear cicadas. Could hear the stream. At first I didn’t hear anything else. Then I heard the flick of a lighter, the sound of somebody lighting a cigarette. Soft footsteps fell on the path. I walked a few more yards, and I saw her.
Near the front gate was a silver bike, a girl leaning against it, looking at the house. It was all I could do to keep from crying. Valentina? Valentina! My God!
She was there, wearing her skinny white jeans and a little black top, her hair was short, dark red, and she was walking slowly, smoking a cigarette on her way to her grandparents’ house.
I watched as Valentina Sverdloff strolled to the gate of her grandparents’ house. Half in a trance, I followed her. I had seen her in New York on her own bed, had felt for her pulse.
That day, I had sat beside her, held her cold hand, absorbed, after a while—I never knew how long—that she was dead.
She was dead, and after they took her away, the ME had cut her up and stitched her back together on a metal slab. Bobo Leven had told me. Tolya had told me. I had read the report.
Russia, this fucking country, I thought. A country that makes you see things, makes you believe in shit that doesn’t exist, in ghosts. It was all I could think. I’d left it the first time when I was a kid, only sixteen. I’d come back once, got sucked in, gone away, swore I’d never come back. Never again. It did weird things to you, every part of you.
I knew that Val was dead. Again I pictured her on her bed, saw myself lean down and put my mouth in front of hers. No breath had come out. No breath, no pulse, nothing. In New York she had been dead.
But she was here in this strange evening light, in front of me, tall, lanky, hair ruffled by the breeze, wearing the white jeans, swinging her arms, back to me, smoking a cigarette and almost at the gates of the old Sverdloff dacha. I put down my bag and started to run.
“Val?” I shouted, stumbling on a tangle of uncut grass. Valentina?
Even saying it made gooseflesh run up my arms. I pulled on my jacket. I’d been carrying it, and I put it on and zipped it up and fumbled in the pocket for cigarettes. Val, darling?
“Artie, right?”
“Yes.”
She had turned around and was coming towards me, still smoking. Now she tossed her cigarette on the stone path and crushed it under her red sneaker.
“You don’t recognize me, do you? I met you a while back. I’m Valentina’s sister. Her twin. You remember? Maria. Everybody calls me Molly.”
They were identical twins, but only in looks. Different voices.
“You know he’s dead, don’t you?” she said.
Tolya was dead.
I wasn’t sure I could stand this. For a second, I was so dizzy I had to lean against the garden wall. What would I do without him?
“Ask me, I’m glad Grisha is dead, you know,” said Molly. “I never liked him. He was bad, every which way, he was a shit.”
“Grisha Curtis?”
“Who did you think I meant?”
“It doesn’t matter. How?”
“I don’t know. Somebody said he was drugged, somebody said a knife, other people thought he was strangled. This is Russia, Artie. Somebody will find out, I don’t care, I’m glad!”
“When did you hear?”
“Yesterday. They all gossip, like crazy,” Molly said. “I’m staying over at my mom’s dacha about a mile away. Over in Barvika. Grisha’s uncle has a place. Somebody found him in the woods, it’s all I know. And everybody was excited because there were police around, that kind of shit.”