Blood Count

CHAPTER 11

Christmas.” Virgil Radcliff looked at a party supply truck with a pink elephant on it parked out back of the Armstrong. “I wish it was over already,” he said.

“Why’s that?”

“Doesn’t matter. Listen, you can park out here.” He gestured to an area surrounded by eight-foot metal fencing topped with barbed wire, where half a dozen cars were parked. It was cold as hell, snow falling hard.

“Where’s your car, Artie?”

“By the front door.”

“Come on, I’ll go with you, help you with the wrath of Diaz. He probably already called the precinct to give you a ticket. He’s a creep. He has another guy he hangs with, sometimes helps him out.”

“This guy he calls the Goof?”

“No, that’s just some poor kid who hangs around. The other guy is his pal from Cuba. Name of Fidel Castro, named for El Jefe. They spend most of their time nosing around the tenants, or playing cards in the basement and planning how they’ll go back when things change in Cuba, and how the Mets are gonna win next year.”

“Fat chance.” I wondered why Radcliff was being so accommodating. Maybe he was trying to make up for his having Lily instead of me.

We headed for the street, went past a gas station and around toward the front of the building.

“I’ve been thinking, Artie, we’re both a little uneasy about Simonova, right? So why don’t you take another look, if you feel like. You have the time?”

“Sure. But how come? You suddenly don’t buy she just died?”

“You want to look around, I’m with you, I’ll back you up,” was all he said. “I won’t get in your face if you want to do that.”

“What about you?”

“I’m up to my eyeballs. We got one homicide, dead white guy, somebody dumped him over at the Church of the Intercession, right there on West 155th. It’s got the look of some kind of mob hit, but which mob?” Radcliff groaned. “It’s too fucking much, especially when we already have another possible homicide. On Convent Avenue, in a brownstone, guy knifed bad, left in a closet to bleed out. About a month ago.” Radcliff walked fast. I kept up. “They don’t like this kind of thing around here. We’ve got a record to live up to, you know, murder down, crime down. My boss wants to keep up his image these days.”

“I’ll check out the Simonova thing.”

“That’d be good. Thank you. I know you’ll keep it between us, if possible,” said Radcliff. “Yeah, I’d be grateful. I’m trying to get out of town by Wednesday. Visit my grandfather.”

“Where does he live?”

“California,” he said. “Berkeley.”

I was suddenly angry. He was playing games with me. “Is that why you didn’t want me to just call the ME in? You’re too busy, and you figured you might catch this case and fuck up your holiday plans?”

“That’s not why,” Radcliff said.

Radcliff looked at my car when we got to the front of the building. “Nice,” he said as I opened the door and got in. “Nice paint job.” He got in next to me.

“You’re interested in paint?”

“Just paying a compliment.”

“Whatever.” I looked straight ahead, stepped on the gas.

“Is this about Lily?” Radcliff’s voice was quiet and he chose his words carefully. “You need to talk to her about it, Artie. I mean, you’re gone a year, you show up, and you’re pissed off at me big-time, even when you’re not saying it right out, so talk to her. We’ve been having a nice time together, since you were asking.” It was a verbal tic with him, that phrase. It was driving me nuts. “OK? We’re all grown-ups, and I like her a lot, and I think she likes me,” said Radcliff. “I’m not planning on voluntarily giving her up just because you showed up, unless that’s what she wants, and I’m not under the impression she does. So there it is.”

I didn’t answer. I knew he was waiting for me to say something. He was Lily’s boyfriend, and he was smart, good looking, young, and hard to hate. I drove around to the back of the building. Radcliff whistled softly “Spring is Here,” a favorite song of mine, and I wondered if Lily had played it for him.

“You want to make that right turn, by the gas station,” he said.

“How come you know this building so well?”

“I’ve been coming here since I was a kid. My parents always had friends here. I had an uncle who lived here for a while. I knew some of the kids. We sometimes played up on the roof in the summer. We called it Tar Beach.”

“So you all know each other?”

“What ‘we all,’ Artie?” he said, but without attitude, and looked at his watch, an old Omega on a soft pigskin strap he might have inherited from a grandfather. “You mean us black people? We African Americans? You can pull in over there, next to mine,” he added as we reached the lot. He pointed at a burgundy Crown Vic. It surprised me. I’d had figured him for something more stylish than the standard-issue cop car.

I parked. Radcliff made to get out, then handed me a card with his phone number. “So you’ll keep in touch, Artie? We’re on the same page about Simonova, right?” His tone was cool.

“What do they usually call you? Radcliff? Virgil?” I said, by way of minor apology.

He hesitated, one hand on the car door.

“So, since you ask, Artie, yeah. At Harvard, I got some of the guys to call me Rad. It didn’t stick. It never fucking stuck,” he said. “I was back to being Virgil. Jesus. When it comes to names, I’m fucked. Everybody in my family is trapped in the past. My father teaches classics. My mother writes scholarly books about nineteenth-century literature. I had to lie to my grandmother about being a cop. She thinks I’m a lawyer.”

“You have a middle name?”

“Worse,” he said. “Darcy. My mom’s idea. Never mind.”

“You think because I’m a cop I never heard of Jane Austen?”

“Sorry about that. But just since you are interested, there’s been occasions when some of the time, in certain places, especially with some of my fellow officers, they call me nigger.”

That word coming from him startled me. I hear the word plenty. There’s white cops who use it plenty. There’s black detectives on the squad down at One PP where I normally work who use it between themselves. Rappers, too, of course; teenagers on the street. But coming from Radcliff-and I was guessing he didn’t use it often and not in front of Lily-it had a different kind of power.

“You think I’m a soft, naive guy, don’t you, Artie?” said Virgil Radcliff, who didn’t wait for an answer. He looked at his watch again. “I have to get back to work, you want to look into this unofficially, fine, but do it fast. Easier for Lily. Easier for everybody.”

“What’s your house?”

“The Three-O. Captain’s name is Wagner. Why, you want to check up on me?” He smiled. His tone was cool. I didn’t see anything else on his face.

“Jimmy Wagner?”

“You know him?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Virgil, and got out of my car.

I’m not surprised, Virgil Radcliff had said. Was it race? Did he think about me the same way he thought about Jimmy Wagner, a white Irish guy from Staten Island?

I’ve been in New York thirty years now, and I’ve worked with plenty of cops who are brutal racists; it goes with the territory. Same with the rest of the population. Nothing like the fucking Russians, though. I wondered if Radcliff knew from Lily I was one of them. A Russian.

Maybe Paul Robeson had been idolized by the whole Soviet Union back when, but it didn’t stop the Russians from being the racist bastards they always were. Still are.

The asshole Commies had lured African students over, said they’d educate them, put them in dorms like Patrice Lumumba House in Moscow, told everyone, Look, we’re not racists, we’re not like the imperialist fucks in the west, we’re good to the peoples of the world whatever their color, our system is free from racism.

Ironic, how we were taught as little snot-nosed Soviet kids to love and honor black people; the Negro race, according to our teachers, was dignified and even under imperialism, noble. It didn’t stop anyone, kids, grown-ups, from being racists. Peoples of the world! It was horseshit.

It never ends. Never. Just goes on and on, and now there are a lot of poor Africans stranded in Russia, just flotsam left over from before, the detritus of a dead system, the way people see it, if they see it at all.

Those poor African bastards are the worst victims of the Soviet fallout. It was lousy then; it’s worse now: in Russia, if you’re black, you get the shit beat out of you. I was there.

I’m in Moscow, July of ’08, and I see it everywhere: people spitting at Africans, swearing at them, beating on them. One day I’m near the Pushkin Museum, some ugly acne-scarred Russian creeps, three of them, pin a skinny black guy up against the wall of a building. Start punching his face. They kick him, screaming insults. The poor guy covers his head, but they yank his arms away and hit him in the face some more.

And I lose it. I start yelling, and when they don’t stop, I push one of them on the ground, tell him I’m official, flash my badge. I manage to scare the bastards. When I walk the black guy back to his hostel, I ask if he wants me to call the cops. No point, he says, and thanks me.

There’ve always been two kinds of people in Russia. The first want to beat up all black people or just make them disappear. Then there are a few of us, like me, maybe my dad in his time, who have always sentimentalized black Americans, because of the music.

For me it was always the music. Jazz had transformed my miserable little pimply Soviet being, even when I was a good young pioneer singing the praises of Vladimir Ilyich.

I listened to Willis Conover’s Jazz Hour on the Voice of America under the covers. When every other kid was secretly listening to Beatles bootlegs, if they could get an illicit disc, I was listening to jazz. I listened with my father on our big Grundig in the dacha; it was safer in the countryside.

But race has everybody fucked up. When Obama was elected it had been as if, for a second, it was all over, all the ugly stuff. It didn’t last.

Now I was in Harlem, sitting in my car, an outsider.

What was Radcliff’s game? Did he have one? Was it only Lily he was worried about? He knew the building, he knew the people in it. He thought Simonova’s body had been posed, fixed up after she died, but he didn’t want me calling the ME.

It was Jimmy Wagner who had called Sonny looking for me. Wanting me to translate the piece of paper left on the dead guy, skewered into his heart. And it was Wagner who turned out to be Virgil Radcliff’s chief.

I’m not surprised, Radcliff had said when I told him I knew Wagner.

Is everything always about race? What the hell did I know? With this stuff there were no reliable witnesses, not anywhere. I stepped on the gas.