Londongrad

CHAPTER TWELVE

A wall of sheer noise rose up at me when I went through the door of Pravda2. The rosy light made the faces beautiful. Among them I looked for Val, but she wasn’t there.

“You’ll ask him, you promise, you won’t let him go to London, right?” I remembered her words. I didn’t understand her obsession, her urgency, the fear I had seen in her face. I’d tell Tolya, but later.

Over the sound system came Sinatra on an album he recorded in Paris, maybe his best. “They Can’t Take That Away From Me”, sang Frank.

I made my way to the bar. At the far end, Tolya was talking intently to a chubby guy in black, the two of them sipping red wine.

For a while I sat and drank a Scotch and watched the crowd, looking for Valentina. I asked the bartender if he’d seen her.

“She was in earlier.”

“Is she coming back?”

“I don’t know.”

Waiters slipped through the spaces between tables with finesse, the usual ballet, hefting plates, depositing platters of oysters and langoustines. I got a steak sandwich, very rare, on fresh French bread.

For Tolya food was not just fuel or even simply a nice thing. I once had to track him to the Bronx where he was examining some baby lamb at the uptown meat market. Food was central to life, he said, you could not exist without it, and what he wanted, he had to have.

Fresh mozzarella had to come from Joe’s Dairy on Sullivan Street the same day he ate it. A tongue sandwich on rye bread, he wanted sliced very thin, and the bread had to be rye, so fresh it was almost moist, with those little seeds and the mustard German and brown. He once described this to me for about ten minutes and then he said he had to get to the Carnegie deli because talking about the tongue made him hungry for it.

Sinatra sang “Night And Day”.

I waited until the club began to empty out, until there was only a couple at a little table, touching each other’s faces, and a small group of men still talking wine with Tolya.

There were times now I got the feeling he was playing a part, that he spent more than he had on his clubs, that he flew to London and Moscow all the time for show, that he was surrounded by people who clamored for his attention, but why, why these people, rich, but pompous, a lot of them, people who dropped brands and names? These days, Tolya fell for the kind of flattery that he would have laughed at once. Among them were Russian names, and I’d say, oh, come on, Tol, these people are creeps, these oligarchs you love so much, your Olegs and Romans.

“Don’t be an ass, Artemy,” was all he ever said.

At four the last customer left, Tolya came out from behind the bar, and rubbed his face.

“I’m just going to lock up,” Tolya called up. “Then we can drink serious wine.”

“How come you tend bar yourself?”

“This is for fun,” said Tolya, locked the front door, came back, took a cigar out of a box on the bar, put it in his mouth and lit it, puffed at it for a few seconds.

“Everything’s okay?”

“Sure.”

“You’re going to London?”

“You decided to come. Fantastic.”

“Why don’t you stay in New York instead? The weather’s better,” I said because I couldn’t think of anything else.

“Valentina told you to say this?”

“Yes.”

He laughed. “You’re not exactly subtle, Artyom.”

“Is she coming tonight?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. She didn’t say.” He stared at me. “There’s something going on with you and her?”

“Don’t be stupid,” I said, and finished my drink.

“You talk to her behind my back?”

“Fuck off.”

“Let’s go upstairs and have a drink,” he said, and held up a bottle of red.

“Not that stuff,” I said, gesturing at the single malt he always poured for me. “Just regular Scotch, okay?”

The wine in one hand, he picked up a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue, his idea of regular Scotch, led me to the back room, then up four flights of narrow stairs and out onto the roof. He was pretty nimble for a big guy.

“Sit,” he said, gesturing to a pair of overstuffed armchairs arranged on a worn red and blue Persian rug.

On a table between the chairs was a bottle of vodka in an ice bucket. Tolya put the Scotch and the red wine next to it. There was a short-wave radio. A small CD player with speakers.

We sat, he poured, he puffed his cigar, we admired the city lights. The late-night buzz was fainter now, the city turning quiet. I didn’t mention the girl on the swing. I didn’t want Tolya involved. He got involved, he brought in his guys, as he called them. They poked around, they screwed up my case. It had happened before. I didn’t need Russian muscle on this thing. It wasn’t even my case.

“So you like my nice roof here?” he said, and told me he’d finally bought the whole brownstone.

“I thought no more real estate,” I said, drinking the Scotch, which was delicious.

“Artyom, is teeny tiny little building, not real estate,” said Tolya in his fake Russki accent. “Times are not so good, Wall Street goes down the toilet, economy is shit, so I like to buy real estate for my kids, you know? I buy them little bit in New York, what can ever happen with real estate, right? Also, they like America. They are Americans,” he said. He chuckled, a big man’s laugh. “America, all is money, all is shopping malls and consuming,” he said, and when I mentioned his eighteen pairs of bespoke Gucci loafers, some in rare skins, all with eighteen-carat gold buckles, he only shrugged. “Shoes are Italian,” he said, and broke up laughing.

Tolya Sverdloff didn’t like America much. He didn’t like the politics, he didn’t like what he figured was the land of George W. Bush. He kept a place in the city, he did business here, bought and sold real estate-the huge penthouse near Sutton Place, the SoHo loft, another one in the Meat Market district. He claimed most of it was for the kids, for Val who loved the city and considered herself an American, and her sister at med school in Boston.

In the Soviet Union, Sverdloff’s parents had been stars among the Communist Party faithful, and well rewarded for it, his mother a movie star, his father a director. He grew up with access most kids like me had never dreamed of, and I didn’t have it bad as most.

The parents idolized certain American writers like Arthur Miller and Clifford Odets, actors like John Garfield in his day, and Bogart and Brando and musicians like Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger, but they had the Russian intellectuals’ prejudice against American culture.

To Tolya they said rock and roll was redneck music. He didn’t listen. Rock and roll was what got him through the Soviet years, he always told me, though it was the British stuff he loved most. The Beatles were his redemption and his rebellion as a teenager in the USSR, his line in the sand. “We didn’t rebel politically, there wasn’t any point, but we went into internal exile with the forbidden music,” he said. “It was different country then, this US of A,” he told me. “Music was incredible then.”

We argued. He pulled my strings. We drank. I told him, when I had had plenty of Scotch, that he was a sell-out, a rock and roll hero who became a businessman. He beamed whenever I said it. Money was his art now, the richer he was, the greater an artist. He was my best friend and he had saved my ass more times than I could count.

“You really love him, don’t you?” Val had said to me once, and she was right, of course, but we didn’t talk like that, we talked like guys.

That night, sitting on the roof, we drank too much and suddenly, sometime very late, Tolya said, “I’m going to London on Sunday, Artemy.”

“Already?” I thought about Valentina.

“Like I told you, I will spend my birthday there in my lovely city, this beautiful green place,” he said, pushing the graying black hair back from his huge forehead. “London!” he said, as if it were a woman he was crazy for. “This is so beautiful a city, you should come. Come next week. My birthday is next week. We’ll have a party. I’ll take you to my place in the country also, which is eighteenth century, and so beautiful and was previously owned by very famous politician.”

“What’s the big deal with London?”

“It is sympathetic to good food and great wine, and also to Russians, and it is a civilized country, a civil society, a place of laws and culture.”

“Enough about bloody London,” a voice said, as Val came through the door, walked across the roof, kissed me on the cheek, sat on the arm of Tolya’s chair and flung her arm around her father. “You’re obsessed,” she said.

“Hello, darling,” said Tolya. “What would you like?”

“I’d like for you not to go to London.”

“I won’t stay too long. I promise.”

“But we could have a nice summer here, we could go out to the house in East Hampton, we could go fishing together in Alaska, like we said, wherever you want. Please, Daddy?”

“Afterwards. I promise you.” He looked up at her, surveyed the floaty green summer dress she wore, and smiled. “You look nice.”

“Thank you.”

He loved his daughter better than anything on earth. They were connected in the most elemental way, father and daughter. I was jealous, not because I wanted her-which I did-but because of the way they were together. I have no kids. It makes me sad.

“Artie, the club, was it okay?” said Valentina. “You found what you needed?”

“What club?” said Tolya.

Again I held off telling him about the dead girl. It wasn’t just that he’d set up his own guys to investigate it. Maybe I didn’t want Val upset.

“It’s nothing. I was helping out a guy on a case in Brooklyn.”

“It’s Bobo Leven?” he said.

“Yes, but it doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t but whenever he comes in the club, I watch him, he’s like, what do you call it, grapevining all over you, listening to you, trying to pick your brains out,” said Tolya who was pretty drunk now.

“You’ll go swimming with me tomorrow?” said Valentina.

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll call you in the morning.”

“Not too early. I’m going to a party.”

“Now?” Tolya said, glancing at his watch.

“I’m a big girl, Daddy,” she said. “Daddy?” She got up and then squatted near her father, and took his hands. “Don’t go. Please.”

“What’s bothering you?”

“I don’t know. I just have this bad feeling, like I ate something off. They do bad stuff to Russians in London.”

“But I’m very small potatoes, my darling, nobody is going to bother me,” said Tolya. “I’m not Boris Berezovsky, after all.”

“Please?”

“I’ll think,” he said. “Don’t nag.”

She kissed him and got up to go. Tolya called after her.

“What is it?”

He took an envelope out of his pocket, and handed it to her. She looked inside and smiled. “Thanks, Daddy. That’s nice.” She kissed the top of his head. “You’re turning gray. You’ll have to start dyeing your hair,” she giggled. “See you both tomorrow, okay? Love you.”

When Val had gone, Tolya asked me again if I wanted to come to London with him. I said I couldn’t. What I didn’t tell him was that I wanted to stay in New York where Val was, that I wanted to go swimming with her and take her to dinner.

“How come Val’s so worried?” I said.

“She thinks they’re killing Russians, some silly shit, Artyom, in London.” For a split second he looked uncomfortable, then he said, “But this is just small, little part of things, and who except English would give asylum to so many people, and protect against bad guys? Also, me I am not in that league of oligarchs. I’m little guy, Artyom,” he said, dropping his articles everywhere, making himself sound like a peasant, as if he didn’t know better.

“But you’d like to be, wouldn’t you? A big guy,” I said, and saw that it bothered him, that his eyes shifted inwards. He wanted it. He wanted the whole thing. It gave me the creeps. It turned him into a man I didn’t really recognize. Then it passed. He laughed, and we had some more to drink, then he stretched out his legs, inspected his cigar, looked out at the Hudson River, then back at me and said, “It’s just business.”

“What kind of business? In London?”

“Restaurants. Wine. All my life I know that without good food, life is nothing, so now I am in the good-food business. In Europe they understand this. In Russia they understand. You have no idea, Artemy, these Russians, these guys, Dellos, Navikov, they get big respect, they are considered true food guys and they are Russians, not French or Italian, and they understand restaurants, they are changing Moscow, they spend money, they buy great chefs, and now they open up in London, London has become wonderful Russian province along with food center of the universe now.” He reached over and turned on the CD player, and put his head back and closed his eyes. “Tito Gobbi,” he said. “ Don Carlos. Gorgeous, yes?”

For a while we listened, then Tolya suddenly said to me, “You know what is my favorite book, Artyom?”

“ Nineteen Eighty-four,” I said, recalling how he had for years carried a tattered Penguin copy. He put it in his pocket and took it out once in a while to read a passage to me. I always told him Brave New World was much closer to the way things had been in the USSR, but Tolya loved Orwell very much.

“But also Slaughterhouse 5. Recently I reread this. I am also a pilgrim, like Billy Pilgrim, also unstuck in time, also tumbling in the ridiculous. This writer, Kurt Vonnegut, I love this man. I feel like that, London, Moscow, New York, planes in between, other places, nothing fixed, nothing regular, like many people these days, just falling free here to there. Even as a boy, I always feel I am in contact with creatures from another planet.” He smiled. “Not like UFOs, asshole, you know what I mean,” he said.

Glass in hand, Tolya got up and leaned on the parapet, looking out at the city. Suddenly, as he turned to look at me, I saw a look of pain cross his face, of sudden sharp physical pain held in. He put his hand to his left arm.

“What’s the matter with you?” I said. “Tolya?”

“Nothing.”

“Tell me.”

“I drank too much,” he said.

“What? Talk to me. Sit down, for chrissake.”

Sitting in the chair, he pulled up his pink silk socks.

“Come with me. You can be part of it, you know what is happening in London, how much money, how this lovely adorable government takes just teeny little taxes, and how they are civil and have good courts. Money, you can scoop off trees. This is stupid, still being a cop, Artemy, what for? Big stupid people are cops. You know what they call them in London? Detective Plod.”

“Pick,” I said.

“Pick what?”

“Pick money off the trees. Not scoop.”

“Ha ha. So your English is better than mine, I am younger than you. You’ll be fifty before me. You won’t come, will you? So you’ll watch out for Val, yes?”

“She’s not going to turn into a pumpkin, she’s twenty-four.”

“You’ll take care of her, won’t you? Artie? This is not some joke.”

“Yes.”

We drank and watched the sun come up.

“Good.” He got up. He held the bottle of Scotch out. I took a glass and poured a shot for myself. “Mr Pettus will ask you to watch me. This is why he came to my club, Artemy.”

“Why would he want me to watch you? Tolya?”

But he didn’t answer, just watched the sun coming up over Manhattan, and then fell asleep.

At six, Sverdloff dozing in his chair on the roof, I went home through the glorious New York dawn. I’d been up all night. I was exhausted, but edgy, the girl on the swing, Tolya going to London, Val trying to keep him here.

At home, I thought about the case, I made notes, I went out for a walk to clear my head. I wasn’t sure at all how long I walked along the East River, trying to get a fix on things. That evening when I got home, I got into bed and fell dead asleep.

Some time after dark-I leaned on one elbow trying to see a clock-the buzzer rang. It was Valentina. I let her in. Without a word, she took off her jeans and shirt, and slipped into my bed, and it was early in the morning before she left.