Londongrad

CHAPTER FORTY

Taking the gun with me that night was a bad idea, but I didn’t care. I took it when I left Tolya’s around ten. It was three days since I had been to the agency on Moscow Road where Masha Panchuk got her job. When I had called during business hours, a machine picked up. Something about the place had been bugging me since I first saw it. And I was furious, crazy with anger.

The fury had built up over the time I’d been in London. And dread. I was scared of what I’d do if I was right about Grisha Curtis, if I found him and I was right. Dread of being wrong.

I ran along the sidewalk. A car splashed water on me. I yelled at the driver to go fuck himself.

On Moscow Road, the Greek grocery was shut, metal gates pulled down. Outside the church a homeless guy was stretched out, wet newspaper for a blanket.

In the building where the agency was, the windows were dark, except on the top floor. As I watched, the light there went off. The shade came down. Somebody had seen me looking.

What did I expect to find here late at night? The agency would be shut. I was operating on instinct and adrenalin and the fury.

I was surprised that the front door wasn’t locked. I pushed it, then went into the vestibule. The inner door was easy. I jimmied it with my pocketknife, and went up the first flight.

Shoulder tight against the wall, I edged my way up quiet as I could, feeling the peeling paint with one hand, the other on the gun. A stink of cigarettes was everywhere. Overhead bulbs were out. From inside a couple of the doors, I could hear voices, a TV.

The agency was on the third floor. I tapped very lightly on the frosted glass with the name on it. I waited. Listened for noise. The door was padlocked and I used the butt of my gun to break it.

The room was the same as it had been, desk, a couple of chairs, a framed poster, well-watered plants along the windowsill.

But Ilana was gone, her computer was covered with a plastic sheet, and I wondered if she had been covering for someone. Was it really an agency for maids and chauffeurs? Was it a front? Both? Impossible to tell, but I sensed right away that there was something strange.

Mrs Curtis had said that Grisha kept an office close to Paddington station, and this place, on Moscow Road, was close enough. I had come on the kind of instinct that you need as a cop, something that went off in my head like a smoke alarm.

I left the lights off. Went to the window and looked out at the street where a couple gazed up at the church, then walked away, putting up an umbrella.

At the back of the office was a second door. In the desk drawer was a set of keys. I found the right one and went in.

It was nondescript, nothing on the walls, only a small conference table in the middle of the room, a pair of filing cabinets in a corner. On the table was a brand new desktop computer, and on a shelf was a row of books, Russian history mostly. I grabbed a couple at random to take with me. I’d look at them later.

I went to the computer. Somebody leaving in a hurry had failed to shut it down completely, there was no request for a password. I thought about the light in the top-floor window.

From upstairs, while I was bent over the computer, came the noise I’d been waiting for. There were footsteps. Somebody walking, then running.

And then whoever it was kept going, didn’t stop at the third floor, just kept going faster, down the stairs, out of the front door and into the street.

At the window again I watched. A dark figure emerged from the building, crossed the street and slid into an alleyway on the other side. He was waiting for me.

I grabbed envelopes out of the two filing cabinets, printed off what I could from the computer, and went out. He was out there, in the dark, playing chicken with me. It didn’t matter now. What I’d glimpsed in the files told me all I needed: I’d found Grisha Curtis’ office.

In the street, files under my jacket, I kept close to the buildings. All the time, ever since I arrived in London, he had been out there, watching, following, but always hidden from me.

Then, something, some sixth sense, made me swerve to the right, some clammy fear. It was late Sunday night, nothing open, no cafe, no pub, just the dark wet streets, and the cold, more like November than July. How did they stand it here?

And then a hotel, light still on in the lobby. I ducked in. Asked the guy at the front desk if the bar was open, could I get a beer, a sandwich. Everything shut, he said. I asked for a room. I put cash and my passport on the desk, and while he copied the information, I looked over my shoulder, pushed some extra dough in his direction, said if anybody came or called, he’d never seen me.

“Right?” I said.

He shrugged. Figured me for a drunk wanting to sober up before I went home. I let on I didn’t want my wife knowing where I was, exchanged some ugly jokes about women and booze to get his confidence, took the key, went up and unlocked the door.

My clothes were soaked. I took them off, dried my head with the stingy bathroom towel, wrapped myself in the bedspread because it was freezing. On a dusty shelf in a scratched wardrobe, I found a miniature bottle of Scotch and two cans of warm beer. The Scotch I drank in a single gulp.

There was a single bed, a TV on a table, a chair. I spread the papers I’d stolen on the table, so I could read and watch the street at the same time. It was surreal, but what else could I do? I used only a small desk light and kept it out of sight from the window.

I’ve been a cop long enough, done enough homicides and fraud cases, so I can work my way through paper evidence fast.

In the files were e-mails from Grigory Curtis, and faxes to him from Russia. There were notes and e-mails between him and Valentina. Records of phone calls, expense-account submissions, airline ticket stubs, the dreary detritus of a guy on the make.

Surprisingly, Curtis was a novice. He was a guy who didn’t know what the hell he was doing. He didn’t know how to conceal his dealings. Fragments, scribbles in Russian and English in a Moleskine diary, a few magazine articles on oligarchs in London; names underlined included Larry Sverdloff.

I took the envelopes onto the bed. One contained an address book, a diary, some Russian military medals. I drank one of the beers. I was thirsty. Fear made my mouth and throat dry.

From the material in front of me, I tracked Curtis’ movements over the last eighteen months from the time he had met Valentina. At first he fell for her. Afterwards it became clear she was a good opportunity, especially when she started writing to him about her efforts to save young girls in Russia. She was fierce in her descriptions of Russian bureaucrats who got in her way, and said she intended going to the press.

At some point he persuaded her to marry him.

Some of Curtis’ efforts at encoding messages to the FSB made me laugh. He didn’t know how to do it, even I could decipher the material, much of it on slick fax paper. Curtis said he thought Tolya Sverdloff was a clown but useful, that he could make introductions.

At some point Curtis told his contact, his control, whatever the fuck you call them, that Val was hard to control, she had a big mouth. About six months earlier, Val stopped answering his e-mails. He wrote. She didn’t answer. He said he had to see her, he was coming to New York.

It took hours to work out the dates until I found a receipt for some book. Curtis had bought books from Dubi Petrovsky. I looked at the stuff I’d taken off the shelf in his office. Russian history, mostly, nationalist crap. When I put in a call to Dubi, I was hoping he was in his shop, and I got lucky. As soon as he checked his records, he found Curtis’ name.

“You were right. This guy, Grisha Curtis was here, July 5.” Two days before Val was murdered. “He buys some Russian novels, you want the names?”

“Take me through it,” I said, and Dubi told me a young guy had come in, said he wanted books for a lady, a distant relative of his mother.

“I said, is she Russian? He said yes, and I asked her name because I sell to so many Russians.”

“What did he say?”

“It was for Olga Dimitriovna.”

When Dubi described him, I knew for sure it was Grisha Curtis.

“I said, I just sent novels to Olga, and he asked which ones and who bought them, and he was very nice and made like he knew Olga and her friends, so I told him. I said Tolya Sverdloff ordered them, or perhaps it was his daughter, and that a friend had delivered them, and he said, oh, Mr Sverdloff must be a nice man, and I said yes, and he asked for different books so he would not give to Olga the same books. He used his credit card.”

Grisha had used his own card. Like I thought, he was a novice, a zealot with an obsession, not a pro. But somebody else had been involved, somebody who did his dirty work on Masha, I was guessing, but I didn’t think it was Grisha, not that first killing. It was the work of a professional thug.

“Artie?”

“Yes?”

“He came back.”

“What?”

“He came back. He bought history books,” said Dubi, “the kind Olga never read, including Solzynitsin’s most recent essays, the attacks on the West, the Russian nationlist crap. Nobody reads this shit,” added Dubi succinctly.

“What dates?”

“He came back on July 7, end of the day, he buys this stuff and also some photographic materials, brushes to clean old-fashioned lenses, this sort of thing, I don’t ask why.”

“You’re sure of the date?”

“Yes.”

“Anything else?”

“I had one or two photographs by Valentina Sverdloff on the wall and he couldn’t stop staring at them.”

I tried not to fall asleep, I drank a warm beer, I called Bobo Leven and when I finally got through I told him about the books, and that through all Curtis’ notes written in English- which many were-there were references to somebody called T, and amounts of money next to the name. At first I thought it was for Tolya. I went and put my whole head under the cold-water tap. T. Who was T?

Dripping, cold as ice, shaking from fatigue, I went back into the room and called Sonny Lippert.

“Come home,” said Sonny Lippert. “You heard from Sverdloff?”

“He calls. He doesn’t say much.”

“You got anything over there, Art? On the Sverdloff girl?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Listen to me, Artie, forget this, just come home. Your friend Tolya is running his own private investigation into his daughter’s death, man. He’s got that kid, Leven, moonlighting for him. He’s everywhere, he’s on TV, in the papers, yelling and screaming about the Russkis, man, about how they got state terrorism all over again.”

“Go on.”

“Shit is what is hitting the fan,” said Sonny. “Shit is what he’s going to be up to his waist in. He’s making a lot of noise, he talks crazy stuff about radiation poisoning, about people at the top stealing money, he doesn’t give a flying fuck who he talks to, man. The TV talk shows are eating it up between election news. He makes a great show, man, but he’s crazy, the thing with his kid, talks about how she’s a martyr, he’s nuts and I don’t blame him, and I know he’s your friend, but you have to stop him.”

Somebody had used the word saint for Val. Mrs Curtis, her mother-in-law had said it: she was a saint, she’d said. Maybe it wasn’t just a turn of phrase for her, maybe it meant more. Who would have posed her like that, like a saint, or a martyr?

“Sonny?”

“Yeah?”

“Do me a favor, will you?”

“Sure, man.”

“Call me back in an hour, okay? Call me. If you don’t get an answer, call this number,” I said, and gave him Fiona’s cellphone.

“You’re not coming.”

“I’ll be there soon.”

“I’ll call you,” said Lippert. “You think somebody is enjoying our conversation? You think that funny little click is our other conversationalist?”

“I don’t know, Sonny. I don’t know how to do this. I’m a New York homicide cop. There’s nothing here I understand.”

“Maybe you should have listened to your father, he could have taught you the spy thing, right? Yeah, sorry about that, man, forget the fucking joke.”

I hung up.

I went to the window. It was getting light. Nobody outside. I waited. Nobody in the hall. I put my clothes back on, and waited, and went back to the paper trail.

Most of what Curtis fed his control, if that was what you called it, was titbits of information, gossip about the London scene. Only when Val began making a fuss about officials, when she began talking to Russian journalists, did the exchanges between Curtis and the guy in Russia heat up.

My face burned with fatigue. Legs buckled. No sleep. I washed my face. Fiona Colquhoun would be looking for me at Tolya’s by now. I had to get back. I put on my jacket, and stuffed the papers as best I could inside the pockets.

Had I been wrong to talk to Fiona?

Was I wrong to trust anybody? Even Larry? Or Tolya? Were they all Russian spies at heart, secrets buried so deep you could never separate the truth from the paranoia that made you distrust them and made them unreliable?

I went downstairs. The clerk was asleep behind the desk. I now knew that Tolya Sverdloff had not been the target. Valentina was not killed as a warning to him. She felt herself to be an American girl with the right to say whatever she wanted, to do whatever she wanted. And she was murdered for that, for what she said.

Footsteps rang out louder and louder on the hard sidewalk behind me. If I showed my gun in London, I’d be in trouble. I wanted to get the stuff I had on Grisha home, or at least to Fiona. She was my best gamble here.

But Grisha was behind me, like he had been, barely visible, almost never showing his face; and in the early morning rain, sidewalk slick as marble, I ran like a crazy person.

The footsteps came after me, and so fast I couldn’t think, a pair of arms like tree trunks locked around my shoulders and somebody dragged me up a short stretch of street and into a narrow mews, an alley, behind a row of cars.

It wasn’t Curtis. I got a glimpse of the face, it was only muscle, a thug. But Curtis had sent him, Curtis, who knew I had been in the building, and the hotel, who knew what I was doing. He had the means. He knew the right people. He would know who to call to summon the creep who was ripping at my eyelid with his fingernails.

There was a wound over my eye, and old wound that had healed badly, and it was as if he knew, as if he had studied a picture of me to see where I was vulnerable. He pulled at the skin. I was on the ground, wet, almost too tired to move. Again he peeled the skin from the wound, digging his nail in. The pain was unbearable.

In Russian, I swore at him, his mother, the country, everything I could think of, and he pulled back, looking for his gun, maybe. In that second, I managed to reach for my weapon, grabbed it, swung at him and hit hard with the butt. Again. I hit him until he let go and fell back on the sidewalk. Next to him was a pair of wire-rim glasses, the lenses shattered.

I didn’t wait to see if he was alive or not.

By the time I got back to Tolya’s, it was light. Upstairs I looked at my eye. The raw skin was bleeding and I patched it up with Band-Aids.

I took a hot shower. I got out and wrapped myself in a towel, and poured myself a drink, and knocked it all back, and then it came to me. I got it.

My God, I thought. The m on Masha, the letter carved in her flesh, wasn’t an m. It was a Russian t, the version of the lower case t. I got out of the shower and called Sonny Lippert.

“It wasn’t an m.”

“What?”

“The creep who carved an initial on Masha, the girl in the playground, it wasn’t an ‘m’ for ‘Masha’ like we thought: it was a Russian ‘t’. There was a T in Grisha’s notebook, ask around, Sonny, okay? Look for a guy with a T.”

“Jesus,” he said.

“Do it.”

He had already hung up.

“You were onto something, man,” said Sonny when he called back. “Earlier you said T, you said the letter T was in the notebook, look for a guy with a T? Turns out your Bobo Leven been looking very hard at a thug named Terry. Terenti is his Russian name. I got onto Leven to tell him what you said. Terenti looks very good for the girl in the playground, for Masha. They picked him up already. I’m betting he killed her. We’re checking evidence. You feeling okay?”

“Yeah, fine. Doesn’t matter. Leven’s doing his job?”

“I don’t like him, Artie, man, he’s a hustler for sure, he has a foul mouth and he’s a fucking racist little shit, but he’s smart, and he worked this case like a crazy person.”

“What else?”

“Terenti’s other jobs have all the same earmarks,” said Sonny. “The duct tape. The setting up the bodies like statues, like the girl, Masha, on the swing. He moves easy between New York, London, Moscow, Mexico, Havana, wherever he wants. He travels legal, we found entry dates into New York that would match up.”

“He wear glasses?”

“Jesus, man, how did you know? Yeah, he looks like a guy who reads books, little wire-rim glasses, maybe he thinks he’s Trotsky, or some other revolutionary fool.”

“Yeah, well, reading books doesn’t make you nice,” I said. “What kind of books?”

“I’ll ignore that,” said Sonny. “We think he killed Masha, but Valentina Sverdloff, it doesn’t look like the same guy. We’re checking everything, all the forensics, top priority.”

“Just call when you make the case,” I said.

“We won’t let this one go, Art,” he said. “You know what I hate about this global thing, Artie, man, I used to run my investigations in New York for New York, and now everybody is running around the planet, and nobody knows who works for anybody. It’s porous like it’s never been and we whore ourselves to anyone with a buck, so the intel is just out there, all of it,” he said. “The more we do business with asshole countries like Russia and China, the more loopholes there are. Also, the creeps that got the money can just disappear. Plus you got a jackass running Homeland Security who forgets to put air marshals on planes. We’re in a whole new place, man, we’re in a lateral thing, which means no place.”

“Listen, you said this Terenti reads books, you mean literally?” It popped into my head like a jack out of a box.

“Yeah, man. They picked him up, he had a pile of them in the motel room.”

“In Brighton Beach? The motel?”

“Yeah.”

“The books were in Russian?”

“I heard yes.”

“Who’s keeping you in the loop on all this?” I said.

“Listen, you know Dubi Petrovsky?”

“Yeah, the guy where you got me that first edition Conrad, right? Big guy, shop out near the beach?”

“Right. Find out if he sold the books they found with this Terenti creep, okay?”

“Sure, man. You think this could turn on books?”

“With Russians, yeah, sure, they love to think of themselves as intellectuals, right?”

“One more thing.”

“Yeah, Sonny?”

“Terenti, turns out he’s done it before, he signed his work on another girl. The letter m in Masha’s flesh, his signature, like he was the author of the job.”

“My God.”

“Come home soon as you can, man.”