“Things changed,” I said.
“I wanted to go to the West in a hot-air balloon, I wanted to sail over the Berlin Wall. Instead I went with a business-class ticket. Return.”
“Talk to me, Tolya. What’s going on here?” I pulled my chair close to where he sat, and he leaned down and I could feel his breath, could smell the sickness.
“A man in a nice jacket from Brooks Brothers brought me. Off the rack,” he said, trying to smile. “The jacket. Old for the job.”
“What is he?”
“He told you his name?”
“Yes.”
“Fyodor Bounine. Fyodor Samuelovich Bounine. You get the joke, right? FSB, maybe he has these initials embroidered on his underpants. It’s his real name, of course, but he thinks he’s a wit. Very good English. Very good Chinese. And Arabic. And very pleasant to me. Asks me a lot about you.”
“Nobody hurt you?”
“It’s not like that. They arrested me on money-laundering charges, they say.” He snorted, trying to laugh. “Then they add murder. It happens. They just take you away, nobody knows. You can’t call, nothing.”
“We can get you a lawyer.”
“It doesn’t work like that.”
“I saw Molly,” I said, not knowing if I should tell him.
He leaned forward. “Where? She’s okay?”
“I saw her at the dacha. She’s fine. She’s with her mother. I told her to go back to New York, or Boston.”
“I want her out of this fucking country. Get her out. Will you do this for me, Artyom? Please. Whatever it takes.”
“I already started on that,” I said. “I’ll do anything.”
“You don’t owe me.”
“You mean Billy,” said Tolya. “We never spoke of this.”
“Yes.”
“You want to speak about it,” said Tolya. “You want me to confess? You want to confess?” He laughed to diffuse it, and I didn’t answer. “I did for you what a friend does,” he says. “You couldn’t let them put your nephew, Billy, back into an institution. You told me that day on Staten Island, near Fresh Kills, the garbage dump. You knew he had killed and you couldn’t let him run away, or be free by himself. But you didn’t want him locked up again. There wasn’t any other way,” he said. “It was okay. You think I’m somehow immoral, don’t you Artemy?” he said softly without any anger. “You think because I am able to kill, I’m a killer.”
“No.”
“Sometimes you have to do what is right, even if it’s not moral. Sometimes it’s kinder. Revolutionaries never thought about that, they thought about their ideologies, they thought if only they had the right words, people would stop suffering. It’s ideology that kills people.”
It was this about Sverdloff I never came to terms with. I never understood how he operated in a world where he dealt with crooks and creeps and still remained himself. Remained a man full of life, happy with life, a guy who could eat and drink and laugh, who loved his kids and his friends.
Or had been. Had been that man before Valentina died. A guy who would do anything for me because we were friends. When he took Billy away a few years earlier, when he made a decision I couldn’t make, it was everything. I should have kept Val safe for him.
Say it, I thought to myself. Killed Billy. Tolya killed Billy to save him. He did it for you.
“I wish I could see Molly one more time,” said Tolya.
“What’s the ‘one more time’ thing?” I said, jaunty as I could.
“I’m dying, Artyom.”
The nurse came into the room, held out a little paper cup with some pills, Tolya took them and she offered him water. Tolya thanked her, and in a little while some color flowed back into his face.
“You’re in pain?”
“It’s not so bad.”
“Is this the polonium?”
“No,” he said.
“And Val?”
“There was never any polonium, Artie. The autopsy would have showed it. I let them believe this for a while because people paid attention. I had leverage with the press because of it, it was much more exciting for them. Everybody loves a story about crazy radioactive shit.”
“What do you need?” I said.
“Everything is finished.”
“Grisha Curtis killed Valentina.”
“Yes.”
“But not with polonium?”
“No,” said Tolya. “I made him talk to me when I found him in the woods, in the grounds of his uncle’s dacha. He made it look that way, he put the empty packages of Staticmaster around, so it would look as if somebody had poisoned her. But he just killed her, he stuffed a pillow over her face.”
“Did he mention a girl in London, Elena Gagarin?”
“Yes, he beat her up. He was afraid she was talking to you, that somehow she knew something. She was a sad girl, she didn’t know anything, but she liked to retail gossip.”
I looked at him. “You said they added murder charges to your arrest.”
“What do you think I did when I found this bastard who killed my Valentina?”
“I understand,” I said.
“That’s good.”
“What is it, if it’s not polonium?”
“My heart,” he said.
After he caught his breath—it was unbearable to watch him try to speak—he said, “I asked them to let me see you.”
“I’m happy.”
“They said what do you want, and I said, I want to see my friend. Fyodor Samuelovich said fine, where is he, and I said I didn’t know. But I knew you’d follow me to Moscow. And he said what is your friend’s name, but I could see he already knew, and when I said it, when I said your name, he smiled. But he already somehow knew it was you.”
“How?”
“Maybe they have people in New York, or London. I think maybe Fyodor Samuelovich, call me Sammy, no kidding, wants something from you. As soon as I said your name, I could see it. He’s an old guy, but he gets it, he learned from the best, he’s a hustler like the rest of us. He wants something from you,” said Tolya for the second time. “Whatever it is, don’t do it. Can you help me?” he added, trying to get out of bed and into the easy chair.
I put my arm under his. He leaned on me, and I could feel the weight and the fatigue and the sorrow. He sat down heavily.
“Tell me how to help you.” I looked at the ceiling as he had done.
“What difference does it really make? They know everything. I always wondered why people made such a fuss about bugs, when they knew it all. They didn’t hurt people to find out. They hurt them to make a point to other assholes, warn them, make sure they were afraid.”
“Go on.”
“You understand what I did? About this guy, this guy who killed Valentina? He was a monster. He killed her and he hired a thug who killed Masha Panchuk, but you knew that. The thug, this Terenti, saw Masha leave my club and thought it was Val, and he followed her to Brooklyn to the playground where you found her,” said Tolya, speaking his mix of English and Russian. “You have any cigarettes?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Asshole, if I am dying, I want to die smoking. I wish I had some cigars,” he said. “You know at first, I thought they arrested me because I told jokes.”
“What?”
“I did what I wanted in London, New York, I did bad deals, when I was mad at officials in Moscow, I made jokes, I talked too much, I said what I wanted. I laughed at them.”
“Of course.”
“I’m glad I told them what I think of all of them. I’m glad,” he said.
“You always tell great jokes,” I said, putting my hand on his. “There must be something you want. Tell me what to get you, tell me how I can help?”
“They take good care of me here, Artyom, but I think there’s a little catch.”
“What is it?”
“I think at some point, they will move me from this lovely hospital to someplace not quite so nice, you understand, to a different sort of hospital. The Russians are quite good at this, stashing people away in hospitals far from Moscow. I want to get out, but not if it costs you too much. I’d like to see Molly,” he said. “But I want you to remain this moral man I admire.”
“What else?” I pulled my chair close to him, and leaned over to touch his arm.
“You understand what I had to do? But they can call it murder. Cases last a long, long time here. They can last your whole life. Listen, don’t be so sad.”
“I’ll get you out,” I said, thinking suddenly of Roy Pettus, who had asked me to do favors for him. Pettus would come in handy. Maybe Fiona Colquhoun, too. Maybe they would help.
“What would it take?” I asked again.
“I can’t tell you, I don’t know,” said Tolya, closing his eyes. “They’ll tell you. Bounine, he’ll be waiting when we’re finished here. I mean for you, Artyom. Not if it costs you too much,” he said again. “Okay? Do not sell your soul to that devil, I’m not worth it anymore,” he said, and closed his eyes.
By the time I got up to leave, Tolya was back in the bed, asleep. I looked at him, lying on his back, his big feet sticking out of the blanket, and I realized I had seen him like this before, in a dream, in a terrible nightmare where I couldn’t save him.
I felt bereft. Here was the one person, the single human being I could always count on, who would show up when I needed him, who was a pain in the ass, but was there, big, solid as a mountain, on my side, available. My friend. It wasn’t in my plan for him to disappear, to die, to simply not be there. Somewhere deep down I had expected us to get old together. That wouldn’t happen. He needed a new heart. I couldn’t give it to him.
“Coffee?” said Bounine when we reached his office in Moscow.
We didn’t speak much on the short ride from the clinic, but now he chatted, made polite small talk while I sat down across from his desk. A secretary brought coffee and a tray of snacks.
Bounine told me he had spent time at the UN in New York, and he had also lived in London. He sipped some coffee and, as if it were a casual thing, assured me that Sverdloff would be well treated.
“When are you letting Tolya out?”
“Please,” he said, gesturing at the snacks on the table, cake, and cheese and cold meats.
“I’m not hungry,” I said, wanting to punch him. I tried to stay cool. I tried not to think about Tolya in the hospital bed.
“I’m sorry we had to pick you up at the Sverdloff dacha like that. I really should have phoned you instead.” He handed me an envelope. Inside was a video.
“What is it?”
“Marina Fetushova said she would send this to you.”
“You know her?”
“Everybody knows everybody here,” he said.
“You’ve looked at it?”
“Yes. It’s just a few low-level officers, all retired now, and some girls, not very nice to watch, but the girls are all over eighteen, we’ve checked. It’s not important, not anymore.”
“And Grisha Curtis? He’s in it?”
“Sadly, yes. But he’s dead, so it doesn’t matter either. You can keep it if you’d like.”
I took the package.
“But you were following me, weren’t you, you followed me all over Moscow, right? How did you spot me?”
“We like to know where our visitors are,” he said.
“You knew I was here almost as soon as I arrived.”
“Yes.”
“How?”
He laughed. “It was accidental. It was my granddaughter.”
“What?”
“Would you like a drink?”
“Sure.”
He got up and went to a table on the other side of his office. He picked up a bottle of Black Label, held it up and I nodded. He poured some in two glasses.
“There’s no ice, I’m sorry.”
“You already knew I drink Scotch?”
“You’re a New York cop. I assumed you might like Scotch. How I miss it.”
“The Scotch?”
“The city.”
“Yeah, well, let’s move on to the subject, I’m not here for nostalgia, am I?”
“My granddaughter’s friend met you on a bus from the airport. I took the girls to the ballet the next night, and young Kim was excited about her trip and the nice American she had met on the bus, and she showed me your picture, the one she took with her cellphone. It was just chance. I saw you, I recognized you.”
“Christ. You breed them young.”
He laughed. “It wasn’t like that. You were from New York. I had told my granddaughter and her best friend so many stories about New York.”
“You have stuff on me? Why? Because I left this miserable country when I was sixteen? Because my mother didn’t like losing her job because she was a Jew? It was in another century.”
“We don’t have stuff on you, Mr Cohen,” he said, using my American name. “All we knew was that you didn’t register at a hotel, but it was your picture on Kim’s phone. After that, I had a few colleagues ask around. And there was the crazy caretaker, Igor, of course. Otherwise, you’d be hard to find in this huge city.”
I drank the Scotch in two gulps, he offered more, I refused. “What are you going to do with Sverdloff?” I looked at the door, an old padded green leather door, the kind the apparatchiks used to have. On the desk was a red plastic phone. My father had a red phone.
“You’re looking at my old phone,” he said, smiling. “I keep it as a souvenir.”
“I see you keep Putin’s picture on the wall, is it a souvenir?”
Putin’s chilly face looked down from over the table with the Scotch. Beside it was a picture of Medvedev, the new president who was only Putin’s puppet. Also very short. You saw him on TV, he looked like a dwarf.
“Yes, but Mr Putin does more good than not,” Bounine said. “People feel safe and they have food to eat.”
“I want my friend out of that place,” I said. “I want him out, and I’ll do what it takes. State department. Anything. He’s a US citizen.”
“He isn’t, in fact,” said Bounine. “He has a Russian passport. He has a UK passport. Nothing from the US. Maybe the Brits will help you. Or maybe there is somebody in the US.”
“Thanks.”
“I think you’re friendly with Agent Roy Pettus, isn’t that right? I met him a couple of times when there was quite a lot of Russian-American friendship after 9/11, when we did some work together. Look, Artie, I could help you, if you like,” he said. He leaned back and stretched out his legs to look at his dark brown loafers.
“I’ve been wearing these for almost forty years,” he said. “I got my first pair of Bass Weejun penny loafers at B. Altmans on 34th Street. I thought it was so stylish, this putting of a shining penny in your shoes. So American.”