Londongrad

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“Val? Val, darling? Are you there?” I unlocked the door to the Sverdloff place. “Val?” My voice echoed, cheerful, brittle, too loud as I went inside.

It was dawn, Monday morning, the sun coming up, the light coming in through fourteen windows, each ten feet high.

“Val?”

From the top floor-Tolya owned the building and lived on the top floor-you could see the city in every direction, the river, the Empire State, the downtown skyline.

I went through the living room to the door of Valentina’s apartment which Tolya had created for her. It had its own entrance to the hall where the elevator and stairs were, but I had come in through her father’s place.

Once, she had planned to get an apartment of her own in the East Village, but Tolya said, don’t, please, darling, I don’t like this area in East Village, I’ll make you an apartment here. Don’t go yet. She gave in.

Her door was locked. I went back into the hallway and tried the other door to her apartment. I banged on it and began yelling and when I heard heavy footsteps on the stairs, instinctively I put my hand on my gun. It was only Bobo.

We didn’t speak. Bobo had heard me on the phone earlier, trying to reach Val, had seen how frantic I was and he had come here without my asking.

I gestured for him to come up, and he followed me. I had to ask him to unlock Val’s door. I didn’t want Val thinking I had smashed into her place in case she suddenly appeared. I just hoped he was better at picking locks than me. I was half out of my mind. I didn’t want to go inside.

“I should go inside first,” said Bobo Leven who put his hand lightly on my arm. “It’s okay like that?” He reached for the antique brass doorknob Valentina had found in a thrift shop on Madison Avenue.

“Sure.”

“Probably it is nothing,” said Bobo. “Probably she is just maybe out to the beach or something.”

“Yes.”

He opened the door and went in. I waited. I could hear him walking over the hardboard floor, first in the living room, then the bedroom. I waited. Bobo reappeared.

“Nobody is home here,” he said. “Is okay.”

“Thanks.”

“Probably you don’t want people knowing about this or somebody will tell her father and he will go crazy?”

I nodded. He got out a pack of smokes. We both lit up.

“You want me to look at where she goes, who she knows, but quiet, right, Artemy?”

“That would be good. Yes. Tell people you’re on the Panchuk case, and nobody at your station house will ask you questions, right?”

“Exactly,” said Bobo. “I say just like that.”

“I want you to find Valentina Sverdloff. Nobody has to think she’s missing, maybe she’s just out with some guy, or someplace taking photographs, or like you said, at the beach. I don’t want her father going crazy and calling in the thugs he uses for bodyguards. I don’t want her going crazy at me because she thinks I’m pestering her. I need you to promise.”

“Yes, you said already, I understand.” He spoke Russian now, as if to convince me he was serious.

“I’m sure Val is just at the beach on the island,” I said again. “She forgot we were having dinner. She just forgot, right? Isn’t that how girls are? They forget? Girls, boys, the mood just kind of takes you, you stay out all night?” I could hear myself running on, desperate.

“Yes,” he said softly. “It is like that.”

“Daddy? You there? It’s me, Val, listen I’ll be home in the morning. Don’t go insane, I mean, I’m fine. I’m at a friend’s. A girlfriend’s place. See you.”

When I turned on Tolya’s answering machine for a second I thought the message was from the night before. Any time now, Val would come walking into the apartment.

But it was an old message, I realized.

I looked at my phone, then turned it off.

Tolya had been calling me. Sending me e-mails. It was nine in the morning, July 7. Tolya’s birthday coming up, what was it, two, three days? He had asked me again to come to London, big party, he had said. I’d have to take the calls soon. In the messages he asked about Valentina.

I went out on the terrace that was planted thick with flowers, pink and violet geraniums, low shrubs nearly trimmed. A glass still half full of orange juice was on the redwood table. Next to it was the Post. I picked it up. It was open to the story about Masha Panchuk. MUMMY GIRL, the headline read.

For a girl her age, twenty-four, her birthday the same day as her father’s, Val was neat as hell. I’d forgotten. Her laptop wasn’t there but she often took it with her, in a bag slung over her shoulder.

One wall was covered in books, paperbacks, textbooks, novels, cookbooks, and hundreds, maybe thousands of CDs and DVDs. There was a good Bose sound system, and I turned it on. Spring is Here, a Stan Getz album I’d given her, came on. The last thing she’d listened to before she went out.

It was a faintly anonymous room as if she alighted here from time to time, but was always on her way somewhere else.

In her darkroom on the work table was a single print, a picture of Tolya with a bottle of wine in his hand, head thrown back, laughing. He filled the frame.

A few negatives lay on the table, too, and a box of brushes for cleaning them. Staticmaster, the brushes were called. Something about the box caught my attention. I picked it up and looked at it, then put it back. I was wasting time on stupid details.

On the dresser in her bedroom were framed photos: her twin sister, her mother. A picture of me she had taken over by one of the Hudson piers.

Squinting into the sun, I was smiling at her, a dumb smile. I recognized the green shirt I was wearing in the picture. And one of Tolya and me, on his terrace, arms around each other, laughing. And a picture of a young guy I didn’t know, a handsome guy, maybe thirty, dark hair, blue eyes.

More pictures of the same man were in a drawer, some taken in London, some in Moscow. I didn’t know who the hell he was and I was jealous.

In the pictures, the way he looked at Val behind her camera, you knew he was in love with her. And she with him. Maybe she had another life. I was a fool.

Val?

In my head I saw Val like Masha Panchuk, suffocating inside the hot sticky tape, dying slowly somewhere on the fringes of the city, in a desolate park surrounded by dirty needles, or out by the water where gulls picked over garbage for their breakfast.

Did the killer who murdered Masha Panchuk take Val?

I was paralyzed. If I called her friends, there would be questions and Tolya would hear. By now I would have settled for almost anything, even a call from some creep to say she had been kidnapped. How much? Money was easy. If it was only money, it would be okay.

I called her and called her until I was hoarse.

Val?

“I saw her.”

It was later that morning when Bobo called. “It was Valentina,” he said. “It was her.”

“Where?”

“Artie, I saw her. I saw Valentina, I really see her, it’s okay, everything is okay.”

“Where?”

“I see her from my car window on 52nd Street, way over near Eleventh Avenue, Hell’s Kitchen, she goes around the corner on this red Vespa, she has a red scooter, right? Artie?”

My knees seemed to buckle. I didn’t care about anything else. I didn’t care about any of it, except that Val was okay. He had seen her. Bobo had seen her. I got out my phone and called Tolya.

“Jesus Christ, Artyom, what’s all the excitement?”

“Nothing. Nothing. I just saw Val on a red Vespa. You should make her wear a fucking helmet, or something. It’s dangerous.” I was out of my mind, I hardly knew what I was saying.

“Listen, I know this, asshole, but they wouldn’t leave off until I bought it, an early birthday present.”

I left the apartment, went out, and started to walk. I walked to the river. Had Bobo really seen Val? Was it her? I started to worry. I needed to see her myself, so I walked. How many hours did I walk around the city after that? I went up to Hell’s Kitchen, I went everywhere I knew Val went. As far as I knew. How much did I know about her? I didn’t know she had a red scooter.

Maybe it hadn’t been her at all? Bobo had only glimpsed her.

Why didn’t she answer my calls? It was after midnight now and I was feeling crazy.