It was a huge yellow silk sock, dust balls hanging off it. It was one of Tolya’s socks. It was dusty, but it looked new. It smelled of some fancy talc Tolya used. There were still grains of the powder on the sock.
I knew now Tolya had left the house in a hurry, leaving the cereal and the socks. Nothing to tell me where he had gone, no clues. All I had was the sock, and, in the closet, a shoebox that had contained sneakers. I looked inside.
My God, I thought. He left without this. He left in a hurry, or maybe he left it for me.
“Molly?”
“Yes?”
“I found this stuff in Tolya’s old room.”
On the table I placed a couple of boxes of Staticmaster brushes, the kind I’d seen in Valentina’s darkroom. “Read this,” I said, pushing over the instructions I found in the box of brushes.
“What is it?”
“I think Tolya left this. I think he left it as a message, I think he was trying to tell us something. I saw these brushes in Val’s darkroom in New York. There were always a lot of them. I know that Grisha bought some from a guy in Brooklyn, too,” I said.
From outside came the distant sound of a car.
“What’s that?” said Molly.
“Read this thing with the brushes,” I said.
“Give me a minute,” said Molly, picking up the piece of paper, looking at the instructions, hands shaking. “I used to see these at Val’s place,” she said. “She used them for cleaning her negatives. She wouldn’t use a regular camera, only that fucking antique Leica that supposedly Bertolt Brecht gave our grandfather if you can believe it. I’m such a philistine I wasn’t sure who this Brecht guy was. Literature wasn’t my thing. Val was very finicky about her photos, I’d say, Jesus, Val, why don’t you just use like a make-up brush, I’ll get you some, and she’d throw me out. I don’t get what you’re saying, Artie.”
“How did she die?”
“Somebody smothered her. Put a pillow over her face.”
“Go on.”
“I thought about that. She was strong as an ox, right? So it was somebody she knew. She wasn’t letting just any creep into her place, right? But there was something else. My dad was rambling one time, when I saw him in New York, something about her being killed twice, something I figured for crazy because he was out of his brain. He was right. He kept talking about this guy, Livitsky, or someone that died in London. I thought he was paranoid.”
“Litvinenko. What if he was right?”
“The autopsy didn’t show anything,” she said. “It would have shown. Shit.”
“What?”
“It would only show if you knew what you were looking for.”
“I think that’s what Tolya said, or maybe the poison hadn’t started working.”
“I think my dad was just out of his mind about Val,” she said. “Even if they knew to look for Polonium, it’s very febrile stuff.” She crushed out her cigarette in an ashtray and put the butt in her cut-off jeans pocket.
“Molly?”
“What?”
“There were wrappers from Antistatic brushes on the floor of her bedroom when I found her there,” I said.
“Christ, she once told me Grisha was so nice about her photographs, always offering to help. My God, he did it Artie. He would have known how, or could have found out. You think that could be it? He did that to her, and then felt bad?”
“Tolya said something like that.”
Molly re-read the instructions on the box of brushes. “You would really need to know how to get them bulk,” she said. “You would need to grind this shit up and make sure she ingested it. You’d have to know where the Polonium was coming from to be sure it was still potent.”
“Grisha had connections,” I said. “Is your Dad sick?”
“I don’t know. He keeps that stuff to himself, why?”
“I saw him in London, he looked bad.”
“You think?” She gestured to the box of brushes. “Is that a car? Outside?”
“We need to go. Now.”
The car was coming closer. We were still sitting in the kitchen. I still had Tolya’s sock in my hand along with the box of lens brushes.
I got up and looked out the window. I could barely see the car, its lights out. Somebody was coming. Somebody who didn’t want to make a lot of noise, and I thought: it’s Tolya. It has to be. Who else could it be at this time of night, the weird purple sky heavy with rain, the humidity rising from the grass and coming down from the sky, so my skin was slick with sweat.
I blew out the candle.
“What’s happening, Artie?”
“Somebody just drove up to the gate.”
She rubbed her eyes. “You think it’s my dad?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t we go out of the back door, and through the back gate just in case it’s not him. How far is it to your mother’s place?”
“A mile, not far.”
“We can walk. I don’t want you riding your bike at night, there’s too many crazy drunk drivers out there. Stay on the side of the road.”
“Who do you think it is?” she said,taking the box of brushes from me and shoving them into the bag.
I thought about the man in the seersucker jacket. I thought about Grisha, or maybe it was just Ed, the Georgian taxi driver. Maybe Ed, the good Georgian, had come for me.
“It might be the taxi driver,” I said.
I had to take care of Molly. I had promised Tolya I’d look after Val, and I didn’t and he never blamed me. All that was left was her twin sister.
I pushed on the metal gate in back of the house, and it clattered with a rusty iron noise. We went through and stood together on the empty road that ran behind the Sverdloff dacha, and Molly pointed to the left. Her mother’s place was down the road. And then she stopped dead still.
“What?”
“I left my bike out front. They’ll see it.”
“Leave it,” I said. “We need to go.”
“What if it’s my dad?”
“We’ll walk a little, and then we’ll wait. Okay? You can go to your mother’s place, I’ll walk you most of the way and then and I’ll go back and see who it is.”
“I want to go, too.”
“No,” I said, “I can’t do that. I can’t let you. Just go back to New York, tell Bobo Leven. Take the brushes back to New York. First you go see my friend, Sonny Lippert. Right away, give him the brushes. Put them in something safe, wrap them up good, okay?”
She nodded.
“If you get stuck in Moscow, go see this guy, Viktor,” I said.
She held out her arm. “Write it here, so I don’t forget,” said Molly, and I scribbled the numbers with her red pen.
“Come on, we have to go,” I said, but she hesitated.
“Listen, I have to tell you something. In case I don’t get another chance, or whatever.”
“Of course.”
“Val told me she liked you for real. She told me that if you weren’t our dad’s best friend, she would have . . . never mind.”
“Thank you.”
“She called me the day before she died, said she had spent the night with you. She sounded really happy.
“I’m glad you told me.” I took her hand and we started down the road together, listening for the noise of a car, or footsteps.
I walked with Molly until we were within sight of her mother’s dacha, and she kissed me on the cheek, and I watched her run up the path until she got to the front gate.
I watched her go, swinging her arms, looking like Valentina from behind, only turning to give a jaunty wave, before she disappeared behind the gate and the stands of white birch trees.
I turned around and walked back to Sverdloff’s dacha. It took me fifteen minutes, maybe more. From the road, I could see a small light on the porch that might be somebody lighting a match.
“Hello, Artie.”
I saw him as soon as I got through the gate. He was sitting on the steps, smoking. I didn’t turn away, there wasn’t any point, I just kept going until I had climbed the same steps to the porch, and was sitting next to him. It wasn’t a cigar in his mouth. It was a cigarette and he offered me one.
The man I’d seen all week in the seersucker jacket held his Zippo lighter up for me.
In the flame I could see his face a little better, a pleasant round face, short white hair, a snappy haircut, calm milk chocolate brown eyes, big ears which, if he’d grown up in the West, somebody would have fixed.
In that strange purple light, I could see he was older than I’d thought, maybe seventy-five. He wore a black polo shirt and khaki pants and loafers instead of the Timberlands I’d seen him in before.
“Where is he?” I said.
“Sverdloff, you mean? Your friend, Tolya?”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to take you to him.”
“You have a name?” I said, wondering if I could get my gun out of my pocket, and if I did what I would do with it.
“Bounine,” he said. “Fyodor Samuelovich.” His English was perfect. I figured him for some kind of creep, somebody who was in business with Sverdloff. Or maybe he was a cop. In this fucking country, they were the same thing.
He didn’t talk after that, and he didn’t threaten me, he just got up off the steps and brushed his pants.
“Are you coming with me?” he said, though I knew there wasn’t any choice.
“I have to do something first,” I said, thinking about Molly down the road with her grieving mother.
“Not right now,” he said. “Have you got a weapon with you?”
“Why?”
“It would be better to leave it before we go.”
“Where are we going?” I took the gun out of my pocket and placed it on the porch, then I picked it up, emptied it, and tossed it into the bushes. “Okay?”
He shrugged and I knew one of his guys—because he would have guys all around the house—would retrieve it.
“How did you find me?”
He smiled slightly. “It wasn’t that hard,” he said. “You stayed in a flat, I believe, where the caretaker was quite eager to make a little money. He said you disrespected the bones of the dead.”
“God.”
“I know. He called in at the local police station and was told the bones were from a butcher, and he then mentioned a foreigner staying in an empty flat.”
“I see.” I’d been an idiot to talk to Igor. I’d been stupid. Out of my head.
“Please get in the car with me? I’d be grateful,” he said. His cigarette was still held between his thumb and forefinger the way my father always held them.
I got in. He turned the key. Turned the car around. He put a CD into the slot, and “Fontessa”, the exquisite MJQ track, played.
“You like this music?” he said.
“I’m so happy to see you, Artyom, my friend, I’m happy.” Tolya took my hand like it was a life raft.
In his pajamas and a bathrobe, he was propped up on a hospital bed. Oxygen tubes ran into his mouth. Machines around him monitored his vital signs. He breathed heavily, gasping a little.
It was the same clinic where I had been with Viktor Leven, the fancy medical facility. Viktor had heard right about it in the first place, but the staff had stonewalled us.
A light blanket lay across Tolya’s legs, but his feet were bare.
“Get me those slippers, can you?” he said softly, and I kneeled down and found some slippers and put them on his feet. “I wish I could smoke,” he said.
I sat on a straight chair close to the bed.
The room was large with two windows that looked out on to a courtyard. On the walls were prints, Monet’s flowers. A half-open door led to a bathroom.
On one side of the hospital bed was an easy chair. In the corner farthest from Tolya sat a middle-aged nurse, glasses on her nose, looking at a TV with the sound off. She rose, asked if I’d like to be alone with Tolya, told me she would sit outside the room in case he needed anything. I thanked her.
“How are you?” I said because I couldn’t think of anything else.
“Better because you’re here, Artyom.” He pushed himself up on the pillows.
What was it, a little more than a couple of weeks since he had asked me to take books to Olga Dimitriovna in Brooklyn? It felt like a lifetime.
“You have something to tell me, Artyom? You have that look.” He tried to smile.
“Yes. It wasn’t you. They didn’t kill Valentina because of something you did, it wasn’t you,” I said, and he began to weep. “They murdered her because of what she was doing at the shelter in Moscow, because she talked about it, because she got in their faces and accused them of stealing money and using little girls.”
“My God,” he said, and put his head in his hands.
“It wasn’t you.”
He looked up at me, an expression of terminal sadness on his face.
“What difference does it make?” he said. “She’s gone. And it was me, Artyom, it was me because I got close to evil, and it killed Val, and it killed poor Masha Panchuk, who also was somebody’s daughter.” He closed his eyes. I thought for a moment he was sleeping. Then he looked at me. “This is my prison, a very nice one, of course, but I can’t leave.”
“What?”
“They arrested me, asshole, tuft of mouse turd, my great dear friend.”
“What for?”
“They came to my parents’ house, in Nikolina Gora, and they brought me here. You realized I had been there? At the dacha?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I could smell you. Listen, I know what happened. To Val, I know.”
“You never liked the scent, you figured me for queer because I like the perfume Lorenzo made me. I’d like to see Florence again.”
“Shut up.”
“How can I, when it’s such a pleasure to have you here to torture this way?” said Tolya, joking around like he always did, though I could see it was an effort, the speaking was an effort, the simple act of it.
“What are they saying you did?”
“Sit closer to me, asshole,” said Tolya. “Move your chair over.” He looked at the ceiling.
“You think they’re sharing our conversation?”
“Just like the old days,” he said. “You remember? Were you ever arrested?”
“Only with my mother. In her refusenik period,” I said. “Only then. You?”
“Yes, spooky KGB guys in bad raincoats said I was of interest, as they say, in my rock and roll period, when I was on stage with my Fender Stratocaster, which nobody had seen, which I had arranged to get by not exactly kosher means. But I told you all this a million times, asshole, all about how much fun we had back in the day, Artyom. They let me go after they scared the shit out of me for twenty-four hours. Back in the day, Artie,” he said, switching to English. “It feels like a million years ago. How did I become like this?” he said. “How did I become an asshole of capitalism? I was a rock and roll hero. People wrote my name on walls, like Eric Clapton. ‘Sverdloff is God’, it said, or something like that, I don’t know if we had God back then. ‘Sverdloff is God’,” he said again wistfully.