Blood Count

CHAPTER 4

Red hair held back with a rubber band, face white, Lily looked frightened. Green sweatpants, an Obama shirt. She was waiting for me as I came out of the elevator on the fourteenth floor.

“God, I’m so glad you’re here,” she said, taking hold of my sleeve. “Thank you for coming.” Her voice was flat, but she was shaking. With cold? With fear? She led me down the long corridor, stopped in front of a door marked 14B and hesitated.

“This is your place?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s go inside. It’s cold.”

“No. Across the hall.” Lily gestured to the door opposite hers.

“What is it?”

“Come with me.” She unlocked the door. We went into the apartment.

“Whose place is this?” I said.

The woman lay on a worn brown velvet sofa. Lily, who had locked the apartment’s front door behind us, pulled back a purple shawl to reveal her face.

“She’s dead, isn’t she?” said Lily.

I felt the woman’s neck for a pulse. “Yes.”

“I didn’t know what to do. I never saw a dead body, not somebody I knew. Wars and stuff, but when you’re a reporter, it’s different. I thought I should cover her face.”

“You did the right thing.”

“She was my friend.” Lily shivered. The room was freezing. “Who left the terrace door open?” Lily asked nervously.

I went to shut the terrace door, where heavy silk curtains the color of cranberries-that Russian color somewhere between wine and blood-billowed in the bitter wind. When I turned around, Lily was staring at the dead woman.

“She always said she could only sleep in a cold room because she was Russian,” said Lily.

“Who is she? ”

“Marianna Simonova. She was my friend.” Lily put her hand on the oxygen machine that stood near the sofa. I had seen one like it before. The oxygen tank was enclosed in a cube of light-blue plastic. It stood on wheels. A coil of transparent tubing ran from the tank to the woman’s nose. The oxygen was still on; it sounded like somebody breathing.

“I left it like that,” said Lily. “I didn’t want to touch her.” She started to cry silently.

“She was sick,” I said.

“Yes.” Lily stumbled a little, moving back from the sofa. I got hold of her hand to keep her from falling.

Her hand was ice cold. I rubbed it to make it warm. I could feel the electricity between us even now. It had always been like that with Lily and me, and I knew she felt it too. Abruptly, she pulled her hand away.

“I shouldn’t have asked you to come,” she said. “It’s not fair.”

“I’m glad you called. Talk to me.”

“Marianna was so sick, and I couldn’t help her.”

“What with?”

“Her lungs were shot. I think her heart couldn’t take it. She drank. She smoked like crazy. You can smell it everywhere.”

I looked around the room with its high ceilings and fancy plaster moldings. The building must have gone up around 1920. The apartment needed a paint job. The yellow walls were grubby. The stink of cigarette smoke was everywhere; it came off the furniture, shabby rugs, the red silk drapes, off the dead woman.

“What should I do?” said Lily.

“Tell me what’s going on. You said she was your friend.”

“Help me.” Lily sat down suddenly in a small chair with carved wooden arms; she sat down hard, as if her legs wouldn’t support her.

I asked if Lily knew who the woman’s doctor was.

“What for?”

I told her somebody had to sign the death certificate. She said there was a guy in the next-door apartment who was a doctor. Maybe he could sign it. “They were friends,” Lily said. “Him and Marianna.”

“Didn’t she have her own doctor?”

“Of course. Sure.”

“You have a name?”

“Why?”

“It’s better if somebody who was taking care of her signs the certificate,” I said, and wondered why Lily was suddenly wary.

“Lucille Bernard,” she said finally. “Saint Bernard, Marianna called her. She could be pretty funny. She was funny.”

“You met her? The doctor?”

“Yes.”

“You have a number?”

“I took Marianna to an appointment once or twice,” Lily said. “At Presbyterian. Bernard’s office is in the hospital. I might have the number.”

“Let’s call her.”

“Why can’t we just get Lionel? I’ll go next door and get him.” Lily’s eyes welled up. She wiped her face with the back of her sleeve.

“Lily? Honey? It was you who found her?”

“Yes.

“How come you didn’t call 911?”

“Marianna was sick. I didn’t think it was an emergency, not if you die from being sick. Was that wrong?”

“Of course not. Did anybody else see her like this? I mean before you found her?”

“Why does it matter?” she said.

“What about last night?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know why you’re interrogating me. She was sick. She just died. I’m sorry I called you out.” Lily seemed half out of her mind now. This dead woman on the sofa had obviously meant a lot to her in a way I didn’t understand.

“Come on, honey,” I reached for her hand. “Let’s get the doctor’s number.”

Lily didn’t move. Didn’t let me hold her hand.

“Come on.”

“Don’t nag me.”

I sat on the floor near Lily’s little chair. “Is there something else going on?”

“I’m just sad.”

She was sad, but she was scared, too, and I had to know why. Was Lily lying? My gut told me she was holding stuff back. I switched on a standing lamp with a fringed shade. The low-wattage bulb spilled a dim pool of yellow light on the body.

Marianna Simonova’s getup was like a costume. Her head was wrapped in a purple silk scarf, she wore a white shirt with a high neck, Cossack style, a long skirt, and over it all, a heavy brown velvet bathrobe with fancy embroidery. Around her neck was a gold cross with red stones.

Her hands were clasped across her body, one of them curled in a fist. I figured she was arthritic.

It was as if she had been arranged-or had arranged herself-for death. There was no sign anyone had hurt her, no actual sign of her dying, either, except that she was dead. She was as composed as one of the icons on her mantelpiece.

Kneeling by the sofa, I saw she wasn’t so old, no more than seventy. Her face was still smooth, and it was a long, imperious, oval face with a weirdly high forehead, thin, plucked eyebrows, a skinny nose.

The fingers of her left hand were cold but still pliant. Rigor hadn’t set in yet. I touched the other hand. It wasn’t arthritic after all, just curled in a fist. I pulled back the fingers. Something she had been holding fell out. It was a horn button from a man’s jacket. I put it in my pocket.

Simonova wasn’t a victim. Was she? This wasn’t some case I was working. But I took the button anyway, and then I touched her face. The skin was soft, almost alive, like one of those dolls they sell at fancy toy shops, the kind with the creepy feel of human flesh.

On the floor was a biography of Rasputin in Russian, and a paperback, an English mystery, the kind my mother used to love, which she read secretly in her kitchen back in Moscow. She hid them in a kitchen cupboard with the potatoes. I remembered them all.

A little table near the sofa, black and inlaid with mother-of-pearl, was piled with pill bottles, a half-empty liter of cheap American vodka, a pack of Sobranies, most of them already smoked, a glass ashtray full of the butts. A small glass with water still in it had red lipstick on the rim, and there was a bottle of perfume. I took out the stopper, smelled it. From the low chair where she was sitting, Lily watched me.

“Artie?”

“What?”

“Please cover Marianna up,” Lily said. “I feel like she can see me.”

I put the shawl back over the dead woman’s face, which is when I noticed something I hadn’t seen before: the tip of the woman’s left ring finger was missing, and the flesh where it had been cut was thick with scar tissue.

“Lily?” I wanted to ask her about the finger, but she suddenly got up and left the room.