Londongrad

PART FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

The return address on the envelope I had found in Gagarin’s suitcase was the same as the address I’d found in Val’s bathroom. Wimbledon.

It was Saturday. I was hungover from the party the night before. Worse, I felt messed up by Elena Gagarin’s death. I didn’t get any sleep, but the adrenalin shot through my body, it made me jumpy, on edge, the tension made me wired. I could smell him. I could smell this Greg.

If I could stay cool, if I kept the gun in my pocket, if I didn’t lose it the way I had when I saw him at the party on the dance floor, I’d get him.

It was raining when I got to Wimbledon. Tennis, I thought. They play tennis in Wimbledon. When did they play? I thought. June? July? I took the subway.

There was a loud, harsh wail of sirens that hit me as soon as I came up the subway stairs. Outside most of the street was blocked off. Rain came down hard. Next to the subway entrance, a small crowd had gathered against a three-storey building. On the ground floor was a fruit and vegetable store.

“Move them away,” said a uniform standing a few feet away. “Fucking sightseers,” he said to his partner.

I went over and asked what was going on, he looked at the gold watch on my wrist, a mixture of envy and contempt on his face. He didn’t answer, as if to say, what’s your bloody need to know, mate? He gestured to me to get back against the building.

It was as if I was on the other side, a civilian. Gun in my pocket, I kept my mouth shut and moved closer into the shadow of the fruit store.

Among the onlookers was the low rustle of fearful talk. Talk of bombs, guns, murder, knives. Talk of rising crime. Of terrorism. Islamists, they mumbled. Make bombs out of hair dye. They don’t fucking want to live by our rules then they should fuck off home. An old man said this. A woman nodded in agreement.

Nukes somebody said, radioactive poison. Like the Russian guy.

Polonium, right? Didn’t they say it jumps out of a box and climbs the walls?

Anger and fear ran through the little crowd for a few seconds, then fatigue set into their voices.

What can you do? What’s there to do?

Most sounded weary but a crude rough English voice suddenly shrieked louder than the others. “They’ll fucking get us!” the man said and the fear turned to hate, and I wanted out. The crowd was beginning to get ugly. I beat it, rain soaking through my clothes.

The address I was looking for was three blocks away. In the window was a handwritten card announcing a room for rent. I leaned on the bell, a woman appeared, I said I had found some mail, return address in Wimbledon, mistakenly sent to my place.

Brown skirt, beige blouse, sweater buttoned up the front, the woman at the door looked like one of my teachers at school. She had a weary, pretty face. She was about sixty, her hair was white, fine as tufts of cotton.

I repeated my story. She looked blank.

Rolly, the bartender at Pravda22, said Greg had told him there was a room for rent someplace in south London. I took the shot. “I am also a friend of Greg,” I said.

“He left this morning,” she said.

I asked again if she had a room to rent. I told her my name, and she nodded and said, “I am Deborah Curtis.”

I introduced myself.

Without letting me inside, Mrs Curtis told me she owned the house and lived on the ground floor that connected to a garden out back. Yes, she rented out a few rooms. The house was too big for her.

I smiled and was charming. All I wanted was to get inside. I had gambled, and this time I was right.

Sizing me up, she told me that in fact Greg’s room itself was available, and looked sorry that she had said it. “Can you come back later?” she asked.

“Could I just come in and dry off?” I said, smiling, pointing to my dripping hair.

She opened the door wider, showed me a bathroom, I toweled off best I could, and then she led me into a small apartment that had been built onto the back of the house. At the same time the doorbell rang.

Mrs Curtis went away to answer the door, came back to tell me a man had come to clean her carpets. “I’ll be fine,” I said, and she left, looking uneasy.

The apartment was empty, stripped bare of anything personal, except for a beautiful handmade patchwork quilt on the double bed. The only book on the shelf was a Bible. I began to feel London was a city of empty rooms for rent.

For a while I sat on the bed, thinking about Val and the gold cross she had started wearing a year earlier. Often, she had touched it as if touching it would bring luck. She told me once that she had started going to church.

“Don’t look at me as if I’ve turned into some kind of religious freak, Artie, darling,” she said once when we were eating tacos on a warm day in Washington Square Park. “I’m not going to join a convent or something. I’m just going to celebrate my name day, which will be February 23, for St Valentina the Martyr, and I’d like you to be there with me. Will you?”

“Do you like the room?” said Mrs Curtis, standing in the door. In her voice I heard the faintest hint of a Russian accent, the way you can make out the presence of a flavor you can’t quite identify in a certain dish. From behind the glasses with clear rims, her eyes darted from me to the room, as if she was worried she had left something that didn’t belong. She walked a few steps into the room.

In Russian, I said, “What’s the matter?”

She was rattled, but she answered in English.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” she said.

I reached for the door and closed it so she couldn’t leave.

“Tell me about Greg,” I said.

“You said he was your friend.”

“An acquaintance.”

“Actually, there’s nothing to tell,” she said. “He was a nice young man, he was here for a year or so.”

“And his girlfriend?”

“I didn’t meet his girlfriend,” she said, but her eyelids fluttered too fast. “Did he have a girlfriend? I was never certain, you see, it wasn’t my business after all. I really don’t actually know how I can help you.” Her hand shaking, she opened the door, looked over her shoulder at me as if daring me to stop her.

I followed her to the living room.

I could hear a clock ticking.

“Who else lives here?”

“I did say. I generally have a few students in the two spare rooms but it’s summer now and there’s nobody. I did mention it, didn’t I?”

“Well, say again.”

“No one, as I said. Tea?” She moved into the living room, a small crowded room, stuffed with mementos.

On the tables were laquered boxes. On shelves that were crammed with books, Russian dolls, the heavily painted matrioshka porcelain statues. No family pictures though. It was as if they had been banished. Plants in the windows kept the light out.

“When did Greg leave?”

“A few days ago, I think. I’m not sure I remember actually.”

“I’d like that tea, please.”

“Of course,” she said and went into the kitchen, then returned a few minutes later with a tray. On it were a teapot, cups, a plate with cookies. She set it on a low table, and gestured for me to sit down.

“You’ve lived here a long time?”

“Yes,” Mrs Curtis said. “A very long time, one way or another.”

“Things have changed around here?”

“Indeed,” she said.

“Lots of Russians moving in.”

“I suppose. Yes. Why not?”

“You have some connection with them?”

“I’m not sure what you mean. I meet the odd Russian in the shops. Some are quite charming. Very well read.”

“And was Greg Russian?”

“As I told you, he seemed very nice, though I rarely saw him, he worked in the City, he was quiet.”

“How old was he?”

“I really don’t know, Mr Cohen. I imagine he was about thirty.”

“But his business was legitimate?”

“What? Of course, Grisha would never do anything wrong.”

She was angry.

“Grisha?”

I had caught her off guard. My gut tightened up with anticipation. I had been right about this. I tried to keep my hands clasped politely. I tried not to fumble for some smokes. I leaned forward to pick up a teacup. My jacket fell open.

Did she see the gun?

“He sometimes called himself Grisha,” she said. “I believe it was his Russian nickname.”

“So he was Russian.”

“Yes.”

“You would want to know if something happened to this Grisha, I guess.”

She took off her glasses, rubbed her eyes. Her body almost imperceptibly tensed up.

“Has something happened to him?” she said.

“Has it?”

Her effort to stay calm didn’t work, her hands were in constant motion, clasping each other, unbuttoning and buttoning her sweater, prodding the table as if looking for something lost.

Putting on my jacket, I went to the window, looked out, saw the rain was letting up, got ready to leave. Behind me I could hear the rustle of paper, as Mrs Curtis knocked newspapers off a table.

“Please tell me if something has happened to him,” she said. “I have to know.”

“Why does it matter? If you don’t tell me, I can’t help you.”

“He’s my son.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know,” said Mrs Curtis who took a cigarette from a box on the table, but didn’t light it.

“When did he leave?”

“He left this morning, he came home from a party, he had been out all night, I said, Grisha, darling where are you going?”

“What time did you see him?”

“I slept in until eight this morning. He was just leaving. I don’t know when he came in, I don’t know anything, he was away for several days, then I saw him leaving this morning. He was out of his mind. A few days ago he told me that Valentina, a girl he knew, was dead.” Hands shaking, she lit her cigarette. “He said I would see it in the papers. He had to find her killer, he said. I thought he was going to America. He was in a terrible way. He was out of his mind,” she said. “With grief.”

“You knew Valentina?”

“Yes, of course.”

“And?”

“She was a beautiful girl.”

“You knew her father?”

“He’s the gangster. He’s one of these new Russians who come to London, I heard he put bad wine on the market that made people ill and then sold them his own.”

“Who told you?”

“Grisha said it. You didn’t come for the room, did you?”

“No.”

“What for?”

“I’m from New York. I’m a friend of Valentina Sverdloff,” I said. “Your English is very good.”

“My mother was English. She married my father and stayed in Moscow. She admired the Soviets,” she said with disgust. “She came as a student from London and she met him, and that was it.”

“What about Grisha?”

“He was a late child. I was already thirty-three, I wasn’t married, so I slept with someone I met as a tour guide. I thought if I made a child with an Englishman, even if nobody knew- I would have lost my job-he would have English genes. Where are you from originally?”

I didn’t answer.

“From your accent when you speak Russian, I would say Moscow. Is that true?”

I nodded.

“Then you understand. Many people here don’t understand how we managed things. We managed.”

“When did you come to London?”

“Almost twenty years now, I came with Grisha when it became possible, after Gorbachev came into power. I thought I’d be free. When I was a girl, I once told my father I was going to defect. He said he would denounce me to the KGB.” She smoked without inhaling, puffing at the cigarette. “London was my dream city. My mother told me about it, the parks, the red buses. It was her fairy tale when I was a child, and later, she taught me the language, and got me books, and showed me pictures.

“I wanted it the way other young women wanted to get married. Wanted sex. It was a physical thing,” she said, speaking in her educated Russian. “I saved everything, maps, books, I got a job at Intourist, and when I met English people, I asked them for stamps or even if they tipped me, to tip me in English money. I would sit at my little desk at home, and stack them up, you understand?”

“Yes.”

“And I come here and it is beautiful. I teach, I send Grisha to school, he goes to America, to Harvard University to take his business degree.”

“He was a banker in London?”

“Yes.”

“What else?”

“What else, he makes money, he has a nice car, he travels.”

“Where?”

“Often to Moscow.”

“Go on.”

“Two years ago he says to me he wants to go back to Russia, to study there, to work, to be part of his homeland. I said to him, darling, this is your home, but he says, no, I’m Russian. It’s like a nightmare. I had escaped once. His going back was my punishment. It was fine for a while, when he first met Valentina, and they talked about helping people. She was lovely. He became serious. Soon he says he feels patriotic. He loves the soul of his country.”

“Does he have a sister, or a cousin? Elena? Yelena? Lena?”

“No, of course not. What sister?”

I told her about Elena Gagarin. I showed her the picture.

“I see a bit of a resemblance,” she said. “I don’t know her,” added Mrs Curtis and gave a short mirthless snort. “Gagarin? Yuri? A peasant. Certainly, everybody was in love with him in the old days, but now we know he was a drunk from the provinces. Who is this girl? Did she claim a relationship with my Grisha?”

“She’s dead. She’s in some photographs of him and Valentina. Somebody beat her up so bad last night, she died. You said Grisha’s hand was bruised.” I gave her a picture of the three of them.

“It wasn’t him.” Mrs Curtis put out her cigarette. She peered at the picture.

“Valentina was so beautiful,” she said, beginning to weep.

“She became my daughter.”

“What?”

“You didn’t know?”

“Know what?”

“They were both modern children, but they became religious. They wanted to make things normal.”

My head was swimming in it. How much I hated Russia. How much I hated the religion, the obsession, the sentimentality. Valentina had been sucked in. Sucked in. By a blue-eyed Russian boy who kept a Bible in his room.

“I don’t understand.”

“They were married last year.”