Londongrad

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

By the time we got back to the Curtis house, a couple of patrolman and some guys who I made for detectives were on the other side of the street. So was Fiona Colquhoun. I had sent her a text from the cafe.

“What’s going on?” I said to her.

“I got your text. I had somebody at my office type in the address you gave me, and a red flag went up.”

“What red flag?”

“I’ll explain. Just wait,” said Fiona, turning to take Mrs Curtis’ arm and escort her to a police car, make sure she got inside.

“What is it?” I asked, and Fiona told me Mrs Curtis’ house was one of the addresses where there had been traces of radiation. You put an address into the computer, at least the computer at Fiona’s office, if it was one of the houses that had been listed, the flag went up.

“Fuck,” I said.

“This house has been looked at before,” said Fiona.

“Christ.”

“You know it was never reported, the amount of polonium that came into London. It left a long trail, hotels, houses, restaurants, and we didn’t have protective suits and escape hoods enough for our own investigators,” she said. “There have been people too ill to report. Bloody Litvinenko,” she added, and I was surprised. “You thought he was heroic? Did you know one of his friends called a photographer when he was dying? But I don’t blame him either. There was no firm ground, poor bastard.”

I looked at the car where Mrs Curtis sat, the door partially open, a patrolman next to it.

“What’s she doing there?” I said.

“She can’t go back in.”

“What?”

“There are still traces of radiation in the house. They’ll have to check her as well. Were you inside the house?”

“Where are they taking her?”

“They’ll give her a medical check. After that, she says, she can stay with her rich cousin in Eaton Square,” said Fiona.

Before she could stop me, I broke away. There was something on my mind. I pushed past the cop, I crouched beside the open car door.

“Mrs Curtis?”

“Yes?”

“Will you be okay?”

She nodded. “I’ll be with my cousin.”

“Will you keep in touch with me?” I gave her my number on a scrap of paper.

“Yes. Thank you. Will you call me if you find my Grisha? Whatever should happen, I would want to know. Please? Promise this?”

“Yes,” I said. “Tell me one other thing.”

“Of course.”

“What did your Grisha think about Litvinenko’s murder, about his death?”

“He said he got what he deserved because he was a traitor.”

“It’s Grisha Curtis,” I said to Fiona, who was sitting beside me on a low stone wall opposite the Curtis house.

Mrs Curtis had been driven away. It was raining again and Fiona held a large black umbrella over us. “Grisha killed Gagarin and I’m betting he killed Valentina. You can pick him up, if you can find him. I’m betting he’s gone to Moscow. Get your people on it.”

“I want you checked out, Artie. I’ll take you myself. Come on, get in my car. Please?”

There was nothing else I could do in Wimbledon, so I followed Fiona into her car. We sat there, her hand on the key.

“The radiation leaves traces,” she said. “You were in the house. Did you eat or drink?”

“Tea.”

“Hold on,” she said. “I want to read you something,” added Fiona, and pulled a notebook out of her bag.

For a moment, imagining it was another life, I enjoyed sitting in the car with her, the light rain coming down, the two of us smoking. In another life, I thought again.

“Litvinenko was as good as the first victim of nuclear terrorism, did you know that?”

“Go on.”

“Do you know about polonium-210, Artie? It’s both completely passive and astonishingly active. It can’t move through even the thinnest piece of paper, not even skin. But once it’s been ingested, it moves through one’s body like the proverbial knife through butter. A trace on a table or a teapot and it crackles into life, it moves about, I’ve read it described as devious, sneaky, elusive… I wrote it down,” she looked at her notebook. “I try to remind myself not to be sloppy. Listen to this article from the New York Times: ‘Its sheer energy punched out atoms that could attach to a mote of dust-spreading, settling on surfaces, absorbed in lungs, on lips, invisible.’ The writer calls it ‘a braggart, a substance whose whereabouts were blindingly evident to those who knew where and how to look. It leaped free from any attempt to contain it, spreading, and smearing traces of its presence everywhere I had been, on tabletops, door handles, clothes, light switches, faucets.’ They say it crawls the walls.”

“What else?”

“We see those red flags all over London. But are they for real? A trail left by Litvinenko? Caused by rumor? The myth of fingerprints? You understand the power of these legends, these myths?”

“Yes.”

“All the Russians have to do is play on the myth. It’s so terrifying, fear itself is radioactive. The Cold War nuts are back in business,” she added. “This is like Pandora out of the box. Irene Joliot-Curie, Mme Curie’s daughter, died of leukemia for her work with polonium. My grandmother who worked with her died of cancer. I suppose it’s become a kind of obsession with me. If the Russians feel it was worth the effort to export this sort of poison, they’ll do anything. And even where it’s nonexistent, just a rumor as provocation, or intel gossip, we spend time chasing it down. Great urban myths, Artie, are hard to beat.” She stopped to catch her breath.

I had worked a nuke case long ago. Red mercury, the legendary Soviet radioactive material, had turned out to be the biggest hoax of all.

“I know,” I said. “What else is it used for?”

“It used to be an element in the trigger for a nuclear weapon still employed in a few Russian weapons plants. Hard to get, hard to detect. And, Artie?”

“What?”

“We don’t know anything. All the cops and spooks and bureaucrats, nobody knows anything.” Fiona took a pad out of her bag and scribbled something on it, then handed it to me. “Go see these people, it’s a good clinic, private, just let them check you out, okay? You will, won’t you? Radiation isn’t a joke. I’ll drive you if you like.”

I said I’d make my own way there, knowing I wouldn’t bother, that there wasn’t time. I told Fiona I needed a favor. I said I was sure Greg Curtis had beat up Gagarin. From the house in Wimbledon I had managed to steal his Bible. I asked Colquhoun if she could get somebody to take prints off it and then match them up with Gagarin or the area where she had been mugged. I was a lousy spy, but I was still a good enough cop.

I asked Fiona to drop me at the subway. I had to do this by myself.

After I got to the station, I threw away the piece of paper with the clinic address. I wasn’t going to a clinic where they’d ask me questions I didn’t want to answer.

Valentina had married Grisha Curtis. She was married and she never told me. On the subway platform after I left Fiona, I was trapped by hordes of people.

I tried to avoid contact with other passengers because the gun was in my waistband and it was illegal as hell. If someone bumped me and felt it and made a stink-and there was plenty of rage in this city-I’d end up at some station house wasting time explaining things to a local cop.

Now people milled around and waited for a train, and some of them talked about the weather and what a washout the summer was, and others leaned against the wall and read their papers. I couldn’t see around the mob that pushed at me as I got on a train.

At the first stop, I tried to get off the train, but the crowds pushed me back. I kept my back close to the door.

Then the train stalled between stations. You could feel a ripple of tension. The memory of 7/7 was still fresh, the memory of people slaughtered on a subway train, a bus ripped open like a sardine can.

The grind and shunt of the train starting made people relax. A girl next to me smiled, a wry kind of smile, and returned to her copy of Harry Potter. A man next to her in a Lenin-style cap pulled down over his forehead was reading a Russian-language newspaper, while his tiny pale wife leaned against him and talked steadily. He never put his paper down.

I closed my eyes. I was betting Mrs Curtis was already on the phone to her son wherever he was and that he would come after me.

“Come on,” I thought. “Come and get me.”

All I wanted was Grisha Curtis, who had killed my Valentina.