Blood Count

CHAPTER 56

My name is Marianna Simonova, I am born in USSR, and now I live here at Armstrong Building, Harlem, New York. Is that good, Lily, darling, is this where you want I start?”

Lily had shown me a tape of Simonova singing when I first got to the building on Friday. There had been another tape on top of the video player. I’d put it in and now the Russian stared at me out of the TV again, as she had that first morning.

I figured that Lily had shot it. Again I saw the jaunty Russian, her face made up, the eyes glittering. Only now I knew she was a killer. I knew she had killed Lionel Hutchison, but why? What was her motive? They had been friends.

The whole apartment was filled with the woman’s books, letters, tapes, photographs. I was working against time. Virgil had called to say the ME had confirmed there was cyanide in Lionel Hutchison, enough to kill him. The fact that Lucille had produced bottles with Hutchison’s name on one and Simonova’s on another meant somebody was going to ask questions about the dead woman. And soon.

“How much time do I have?” I’d asked Virgil.

“It’s the end of the day,” he said. “There’s plenty going on, everybody is busy as hell right now. I figure you’ve got a little window, Artie, but not a lot. You have to get out of there before morning, you hear me? I know Wagner is going to want me on this, and Dawes is asking questions. I think you should hurry up. I think you should get out of Simonova’s apartment as fast as you can, and for God’s sake, try not to leave anything. You don’t want people to know you were looking around. I have to go.” He hung up in a hurry, as if somebody had entered a room, heard him talking to me, and told him to kill the call.

The place and everything in it now belonged to Marie Louise. I had no business in here. Even by midnight, I still had work to do. Hurry, I thought.

I knew I should get out, but I couldn’t. There was something holding me. And Lily had been involved with Simonova, more than she’d told me. I couldn’t let go, not yet.

I pushed play again, and Simonova began talking about her life, looking up from time to time to see if Lily was happy with the tape. Her voice was harsh from cigarettes and disease, her English broken. She switched to Russian, answering Lily’s questions, or just rambling. But she was lively, laughing.

From inside the old TV, from the tape, the dead woman talked at me. She painted an epic life.

Marianna Simonova was born in a provincial village near Perm in 1938. She was an orphan, no family. Only the Party gave her a life, she explained, but she explained it in terms of a glorious revolutionary spirit. Communism was her religion; the Party was her family.

“I was fantastic little Young Pioneer, I am so cute in my outfit,” she says, looking out from the screen and singing a snatch of a song I knew from my own childhood.

No parents. I wondered if she had made them disappear, like some Soviet kids. If their parents had spoiled histories, if they had been enemies of the state, or had done time in Gulags, some children simply denied their own history, their own blood. Otherwise, you were doomed: no access to the best education, no access to decent housing, no access to a life that was worth anything at all. Some children made their parents disappear; others informed on them.

I wondered about Simonova. For a woman who had accumulated so much stuff, there was nothing about her own family, no pictures, no souvenirs, nothing at all.

I sat in the near dark, watching the tape, not wanting to put on the lights. Then I heard footsteps in the hall. I looked through the peephole in Simonova’s door, but it was only Regina McGee, trudging home with her shopping bags.

I sat on the floor again and looked at the TV.

Simonova went on with her history. She grew up in a Soviet orphanage and somehow got herself to school in Moscow. She loved music. She heard Paul Robeson. She developed a passion for him and became determined to meet him. They had an affair, she claimed. I heard Lily’s voice asking for dates; Simonova refused to answer, then she became defensive. Lily eased up. She just wanted the story.

On and on Simonova went, Lily rarely interrupting, as she spun her tales about the Soviet Union: of Yuri Gagarin in space, of the trans-Siberian railway, of her feats as a young gymnast, and the occasion when she presented Stalin with a bouquet of roses in Red Square. No detail was left out, not what she had worn or who she met. She had been looking for somebody who would take an interest in her tales, and in Lily she’d found a taker.

Marianna Simonova had touched something deep in Lily’s past-the politics, the community of the left, her father. Simonova had exploited it.

On the tape she sang patriotic songs for Lily’s benefit. In the background, I could hear Lily singing along.

Again, I stopped the tape. I had to get to the journals, the letters. I got up and glanced at the shelves of books, looking for anything that might give me a clue, but most were political tomes or Russian novels.

Near the sofa on the little table were the same two books I’d seen before: a copy of Chekhov’s stories; and a book about Rasputin. Rasputin was poisoned with cyanide.

At the desk I looked through a pile of letters. Then I went into Simonova’s bedroom, the bathroom, the study. My phone rang and I jumped. Lily said she was at Tolya’s new brownstone now. Might sleep over. I was glad. She was safer with Tolya.

It was cold. I glanced at the bottle of vodka still on the table, and I took a swig. It burned my throat. Everything in the apartment felt cold to the touch, the boxes, the leather journals, the cassettes. Against one wall was a small chest of drawers. It was stuffed with photographs.

There were photographs everywhere: on the mantel, in little Russian boxes, on every surface. Newspaper clippings with more pictures were piled in a cardboard box.

When you first start, you think the hard part about being a cop will be the streets, the creeps and crooks and killers. You think about the victims, the bodies, the blood, the morgue. If you’re any kind of human being, the stuff, especially when it involves kids, makes you feel sick, makes you puke, gives you ulcers. You stop feeling sick, it’s time to quit.

As bad for me is the history-the victim’s, the killer’s. You turn back page after page, interrogations, transcripts, confessions, diaries, letters, heart racing, stomach turning, cold sweat on your neck, knowing it will reveal something terrible, the grim hidden secrets.

I knew the only way to find out what had happened to Simonova was here. The lump on my head ached. I was hungry. In Simonova’s kitchen I found Russian Christmas cookies. I ate some. Drank more of her vodka.

By ten that night, one lamp on, I had clippings and letters and photographs laid out on the worn purple Turkish rug. I laid them out like a hand of solitaire.

I’d finished with the video tapes, but in a drawer in the bedroom, I’d found audio cassettes and an old-fashioned player. Some of the tapes were marked with Lily’s name. Most of what I heard, when I began to listen, was in Russian.

Were the tapes for a book Lily wanted to write? Did Simonova figure she’d get them translated? Did she want to leave a record? She knew she was sick, maybe dying. The dead woman had recorded her life.

While I listened, and a lot of it was propaganda, Simonova’s philosophy, I went through more of her journals. I looked at newspaper clippings.

In Moscow she had worked in some obscure bureau. She clipped foreign magazines and sent the information to the KGB, to a low-level KGB apparatchik. She’d been a small-time librarian who could only afford to live in a communal apartment, but she had access to foreign magazines.

In her spare time, she had churned out papers she hoped to publish, papers written by a faithful Communist Party hack, which is what she had been. All she ever was.

Most of her clippings, most of the magazine articles she had saved for herself, were about black people in America. It had been her specialty. Her obsession. She had fallen for these exotics, as she saw them, the oppressed, the victims of American imperialism, of the racism she believed to be rife in the United States.

Paul Robeson featured in many of the articles, and there were copies of letters she had written to him. She had never met him.

I changed the audio tape. On this one, Simonova described how she had come to America.

“Lily, yes, this is working OK? Sure, so I continue,” said Simonova. “I leave Moscow in l972 after this Nixon-Brezhnev detente, when Jews are permitted to go to Israel, so I tell everybody I am Jewish, though I am not sure what I am. Still, I must go, so I make my way to New York with other so-called Jews. First time in history, many Russians pretend to be Jew. But not because I love America. I remain true socialist. I leave because I am pregnant. I meet American musician in Moscow, we spend one night, and so. Can I have water, please?”

She paused, to drink the water, I assumed, and then continued. “I live first in Brighton Beach, then in Washington Heights, I teach, I do translation, I even work as waitress.”

In the first part of the tape, Simonova spoke in English. Then she switched to Russian. She told Lily to get the rest translated, but these were things she could say only in Russian.

She began.

I listened carefully, stopping and starting the tape. It wasn’t completely clear if the KGB had contacted Simonova before she left Russia or after she had arrived in New York, but she became a very small time sleeper.

She wasn’t activated until 1982, just before Brezhnev died and the Soviet Union was running out of steam-out of oil. There followed Andropov and Chernenko, then Gorbachev came in, the system collapsed, and Marianna Simonova was left stranded in the United States, without the KGB money or the contacts. She was on her own. Nobody was interested in a two-bit sleeper who had only done minor errands. She went freelance.

English again: “So, dear Lily, I come to Harlem, first to 131st Street, then Armstrong, where I make nice life. I tell people how I knew Comrade Robeson. I talk to them about people I know.” Listening, I understood how she had made her myth, the kind that would enchant people like Lily.

What kind of work had she done in New York after the Soviet Union collapsed? I wasn’t sure. She’d done translations, but she had lived well. Too well.

I burrowed in her papers, and I kept thinking: Where did she get the money?

I found receipts, scraps of paper with names, notes, lists. She had kept everything, the last shreds of reality, as if without all of it, she would cease to exist.

Then I found more tapes that had come from an old answering machine; somebody had set it up to record telephone calls. I found the machine in a closet and I sat and listened to her phone calls, most in Russian, and shuddered as I made notes. She had taped all her calls, perhaps by mistake, maybe on purpose. I couldn’t know.

Her conversations in English, some with other people in the Armstrong, ran to arrangements for bridge or doctor’s appointments. There was nothing much interesting.

The calls in Russian were also about social arrangements; many of the voices belonged to other women.

But there were two men who seemed to call Simonova frequently. She addressed them as Comrade. The same men, same voices, one with a crude accent, the other educated. Over and Over, they had called her.

The conversations cropped up at random times on a dozen different answering-machine tapes. I could date them by the events they discussed: Iraq, Putin, Obama. Both men professed a longing for the return of a regime like Stalin’s. Both considered Putin an important man, a strong man, a truly Russian man. With Simonova, in Russian, they discussed the revival of the real men, who would fix things.

I thought of the tats on Ivan’s arm: WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE, and of the Communist Manifesto skewered into the dead guy’s heart. They were low-level thugs, but they still believed. Or maybe the new order had left them out in the cold, and they worked as thugs for hire as a kind of revenge.

The harder I listened to the men on the phone, the more I was convinced one of them was Ivan.

The specifics of the jobs they did and who they did them for were never mentioned. Simonova, the low-level KGB creep, had turned to the agency’s successor, the FSB. She did anything she could get. It didn’t seem to matter if it was political or just plain criminal. She wanted the money.

Like Nixon, she had been obsessed with taping things, making notes, scratching entries in one of her diaries every night-people she’d seen, talked to, played cards with, people she liked or had a beef with. Like Nixon, too, in the way she resented everybody, she was obsessed with her so-called enemies.

I was lost in her world now. Lost among her tapes and phone calls and address books, even a transcript from a CNN program. But I kept going back to the photographs.

I made coffee. I looked at the cluttered living room, the icons, the statues and books and paper, the sofa, the fancy chairs. I went through the pictures all over again, and then, finally, I found it, the thing I had been looking for, the thing that had been rattling around in my head.

On the table near the sofa was a small mirror, about six by eight. It was on the same table where she had kept things that seemed important-pills, vodka, cigarettes, the book about Rasputin. I picked it up on a hunch, and in it I saw my own reflection, tired, at the end of my rope. My hand on the back, I felt something loose.

I pried the glass from the frame. In the back were half a dozen more photographs. I sat back on my heels, staring down at them. I knew. My God, I thought. Now I understood.

I heard of a noise.

“Who’s there?”

But it was only the wind blowing at the terrace door. Fucking wind, all weekend it had been rattling glass, sending me out of doors, prowling the terraces. Some of the time I’d felt I could hear the Armstrong itself moaning, the whole building wailing, its history, now the deaths.

I went out and looked around. I looked in the pail where Lionel Hutchison had tossed his cigarette butts the morning I’d seen him, Saturday morning. How many did he light up? Two, I remembered. There were four in the pail, and there was a piece of toast. It had stopped snowing Saturday night. Anything left out here before, would have been covered, but the two butts, the toast were visible, no snow covering them. Footprints too in snow that was now half a foot deep. There’d been no snow when I first met Hutchison. I leaned over to the Hutchison terrace. Prints there, too.

Did Lionel climb onto his friend’s terrace? Did he bring his coffee and his meds out? Did he take the pill, get dizzy and fall off? I stared at the prints. Then I heard somebody.

Somebody was at Simonova’s door.