Blood Count

CHAPTER 21

S o far as I could tell, nothing had been touched in Simonova’s apartment except the sofa where I’d first seen her body. It was rumpled now. The shawl that had covered her was on the floor; the funeral home guys who lifted her onto a gurney must have dropped it.

I made my way around the room while Lily waited near the door. I picked up bits of paper from the desk, I went into the bedroom, and looked briefly through Simonova’s clothes. It would take days to search the whole place.

In the living room, Lily was kneeling at the little table by the sofa, looking at the pills.

“Which ones do you think you screwed up?”

Lily picked up a plastic box, the days marked on it, and opened the lid.

“This one,” she said. “I think I forgot this one.” She poured the remaining capsules onto her palm. “I always counted. There’s one more than there should be.”

“Show me.”

I took the capsule, read what was marked on it.

“Why are you smiling?” Lily said.

“Because these are ACE inhibitors, blood pressure medication, Lily, honey. And it’s a low dosage. And you couldn’t kill a mouse if you forgot one, or probably ten or a hundred. Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?”

“I was scared. How do you know, anyway?”

“Tolya takes this stuff. He says it interferes with his eating grapefruit, and I tell him to eat caviar instead. I tell him he’s an ass. It’s fine, honey.” Putting my arm around her, “Is that why you went to the drugstore?”

She nodded. “I was trying to figure out if Marianna had another prescription, if there were meds I didn’t know about that I forgot to get, or she forgot. She sometimes got confused, especially when her breathing was very bad. It took all her will to concentrate.”

“Who would have prescribed something for her that you didn’t know about?”

“I don’t know. But there wasn’t anything. At the drugstore, anyway,” said Lily. “I’m sorry I’ve been so crazy. God, I’m so glad you’re here. I was sure I had done something awful.” She reached out for my hand. “Thank you.”

“It’s OK.”

“You know what?”

“What, honey?”

“I miss Tolya. Let’s call him and tell him to come over or something. Come on, I’ll make some coffee. I’ll get out some wine. Let’s go back to my place.” Lily made for the door. “You know, if I hadn’t seen you on election night, I might not have had the guts to call you this morning.”

“I’d always come,” I said. “You’re OK now? About the meds? You believe me now, that you didn’t have anything to do with her death?”

“I guess. Yes. I do. I’m going to believe you.”

I looked at the portrait of Paul Robeson on the wall.

“What is it?” Lily said.

“My mother got her gold earrings to see Robeson perform in Moscow. Whenever he came to Moscow to perform, everybody dressed up, some even in evening clothes, the kind that were normally forbidden in the ‘people’s paradise,’ ” I said. “My father got tickets once and my mother says, ‘What will I wear, Maxim? I haven’t got anything nice enough.’ So he takes her out and buys her a blue silk dress and gold earrings with little diamonds, the kind every Soviet woman wanted back then, and it costs him two months’ salary, but she’s so happy. Afterwards, they sit up all night in the kitchen discussing the concert and how heroic Robeson is. My mother told me.” I looked at Robeson’s portrait again. “It must have been like coming home for you in some ways,” I said to Lily. “And for Simonova, too.”

As if a dam had burst, Lily began to talk. About her childhood in Greenwich Village, her stiff-necked father who preferred his politics and his atheism to his kid-they never celebrated Christmas or anything else. Her mother had catered to him; he came first. Lily was an only child, left to fend for herself.

Still, when she grew up, after college, after her parents had died, she went back to the family apartment on Tenth Street. Maybe it was all she had in the way of a past that she could love.

Sitting in Simonova’s apartment now, she looked around her.

“I have all this culture in my bones. My father with his Robeson records,” she said. “His politics, the Civil Rights Movement, all that, it formed me, the good part; at least, I hope it’s only the good part,” she added. “God, my father loved the workers, he loved the whole world, but his own kid, that was something else.” Lily picked up Marianna’s shawl and wrapped it around her shoulders.

When she was little, Lily’s father had given her a copy of Das Kapital, but he had forbidden her the girls’ magazines she wanted; he had been horrified when he found her and her friends playing with their Barbies. On Sundays, he drove her around Harlem so she could see how poor people lived. Afterward, he would stop off at the Plaza Hotel.

“He always drank exactly two Gibsons, never more, that was it, and he smoked two cigarettes, and that was our so-called quality time together. I was ten. He loved books, too, good books, and movies. He did that for me. We went to the movies together,” said Lily. “Sometimes he’d let me pick a movie, and even if it was something stupid with Doris Day, he would secretly enjoy it. He adored the movies, and I guess there was a little softness in him those times, a feel for just pure pleasure.” Lily smiled. “Not like my Uncle Lenny, my mother’s brother, my dad’s best friend; he was obsessed. He gave up his law practice to organize the Mohawk Indians who built the Verrazano bridge. Joe McCarthy’s ghouls hunted Lenny down-he really was a Communist-but he wouldn’t talk and he went to jail. My cousin Nancy was in love with a Russian boy for a while. They were really happy, but it didn’t last. She was a lot older than me. She was a real Red Diaper baby.”

“What happened to her?”

“I don’t know. She disappeared. I haven’t heard from Nancy for twenty years.”

“Maybe that’s why Simonova trusted you, because you understood.”

“Maybe. God, the stories. She told me she had slept with Che when he visited the Soviet Union, stuff like that,” said Lily. “Was it true? I don’t know. I didn’t care. The stories, the folk music, the endless talk about politics.” Lily got up. “You remember that time I got drunk and got up on the table and sang old Union songs?”

“Do I ever. Something about, what was it, ‘ the vaults are made of marble with a guard at every door,’ and then I forget.”

“ ‘ And the mines are stuffed with silver that the miners sweated for. ’ ” Lily laughed. “You want me to sing some more?”

“No, thanks.”

“Did you know my dad’s last wife was black? Fourth wife. Long after I left home. It validated him, and Virginia, that was her name, was very good to him, self-obsessed bastard that he was. We were raised to love and admire and understand what black people did and had endured. It was important. It was a cause, something to fight, to win.”

“Obama gave you that back?”

“In a way. Those days. Long time.” She looked at me. “Artie, I know you want to look around, so go ahead. I’ll wait here. I’ll sit on Marianna’s sofa one last time.”

A few things were slightly out of place in the apartment, things I hadn’t noticed before. I had a sense that papers on the desk were not where they had been this morning. A drinking glass that had been on the table near the sofa was gone. Even the smell in the room was somehow different.

“I noticed you left a present for her,” I said to Lily, gesturing to the Christmas tree I’d seen earlier. Alongside the gifts for Simonova, was a pile of stuff still unwrapped. “What’s all this?”

“She bought stuff for everyone,” Lily crossed to the tree. “She was planning to wrap them today. She had already written the cards.”

There were liqueur chocolates in a Russian lacquered box for Regina McGee; for Lionel Hutchison there were Russian cigarettes and a fancy lighter. A Russian box had a muscle man on the label and the words “Elixir of Life.” On the card, Simonova had written “To Lionel, who is the elixir of life.”

For Carver Lennox there was a fancy silver samovar. Draped over a chair were green velour Christmas stockings full of Alenka chocolates, addressed to Allison and Thomas Lennox. In the stockings were also crisp hundred-dollar bills, one each.

“Who are these people?”

“Carver Lennox’s kids,” said Lily.

“Simonova knew them? They were important enough to her to give them money?”

“I don’t know,” Lily said.

I picked up one of the chocolate bars.

I’d grown up on Alenka chocolate, from the Red October factory; it never failed to take me back to my childhood, the chocolate bars with the picture of a little girl in a headscarf, a baby babushka, that too-sweet chocolate we thought the best thing on earth.

“Where did she get all this Russian stuff? Brighton Beach?”

“Shop in Washington Heights,” said Lily. “I went with her once.”

“What about you?” I said to Lily. “What did she give you.”

“A necklace her mother gave her,” she said. “And a biography of Robeson, and a nicely bound copy of Das Kapital, a really good edition.”

I looked through the presents again. “There’s something else for you here.” I picked up a small red-foil envelope.

“You open it, Artie. Or let’s take it with us. I want to get out of here.”

“Sure.”

“I want to go get dressed for the party,” Lily said. “I’ve had enough of the past. They’re all dead, my parents, their friends, their ideals. Marianna was my last connection to all that.” Lily pushed her hair back. “She remembered, she knew some of them, she had even heard of my Uncle Lenny. Another world. God. Now she’s dead. They’re all dead.” Lily looked around Simonova’s apartment. “I won’t come back here. I don’t want to be here again.”

I knew I would come back. I knew there was something here that I had missed. I couldn’t stay away.