Londongrad

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

The bear at the entrance to Ismailova Park was chained up. People stood around waiting for the hourly performance, when, according to the sign, the bear would perform. WE WORK WITHOUT MUZZLES, said the sign.

This was a different city from the Moscow of fancy shops, it was a place where, on the outskirts of town, people went for cheap clothes, and, on weekends, to sell souvenirs to foreigners.

At dawn I had left the apartment. On the Moscow streets everywhere I looked, I saw Grisha Curtis, saw him walking in the opposite direction, turning a corner, waiting for me, leaning against a wall.

Even in the morning, the air was so thick and sticky, it coated my skin like grease. I studied the map in my hand. I was looking for a train station. I was a tourist in the city where I grew up. I was a ghost, the son of a ghost.

The area around Kazansky Station was jammed, people leaving, coming in, hanging out, sleeping on the ground. On a boom box, somebody was playing Metallica. Hordes of people with Asian faces milled around. The women were wrapped in shawls, and they came and want, dragging big bags of stuff to sell. A couple of girls, couldn’t have been more than fifteen, loitered on one corner, looking for men in cars.

I waited for the light to turn green before I crossed the street. People glanced at me, half amused. In Moscow, like New York, nobody waited for the lights. A girl with long skinny legs in high-heeled boots darted across the street like a large insect.

This station, crammed with people sleeping on the floor, with beggars, with children in filthy clothes screaming and running, with people selling fruit, caviar, vodka, wooden dolls, underpants, home-made brooms, sticky candy, was a good bet. I figured it for the kind of place a low-level hood might have something for sale. A. 22, a little piece of shit, the kind of thing that would make me feel secure, nothing more. I didn’t want a high-end weapon.

In Moscow looking for a gun, I was a hick. It took me the best part of an hour to find out you could get one at Ismailova Park, the flea market at the edge of Moscow.

The stalls were jammed with matrioshka, the wooden Russian dolls, some of them the traditional girls with cheeks painted red, others political figures, sports figures. A row of the dolls depicted beaky-nosed men with ringlets, and I said, in Russian “What are those? Who are they supposed to be?”

“The Jews,” said the woman behind the stall.

Fur hats, hand-knitted scarves, more dolls, painted plates, table lines, the usual Russian stuff. I asked careful questions. I climbed some wooden steps, three women in peasant outfits were singing some old Russian songs, and I put change in the basket for them, and went on.

Up here were the antiques, the porcelain figures, the Soviet army gear, the bad oil paintings, the rugs, and a man selling posters.

I stopped for a minute. Piles of old posters were on his stall, posters depicting Soviet space, Soviet agriculture, politics, heroic figures. I moved on, I looked into the faces of guys sitting by their stalls playing chess. I searched for somebody who might sell me a gun.

Then I saw the postcards, and the period photographs; jumbled on one stall were pictures of men and women in high-collared blouses and turn-of-the-century suits-sepia photographs from the beginning of the twentieth century. Something drew me to one picture. I picked it up. It looked familiar, this family photograph, and I saw the resemblance. It was a picture of my father’s grandfather, who had fought in the revolution. Next to him was a young man with a baby, a little boy, my father. I would never get away from this place, this country. I bought the picture.

I went back down. I went to the edge of the market where there were people selling canned food and old shoes. A guy in rap pants saw me, and sidled up to me, and offered me meds, a handful of pills he probably swiped from a hospital. I told him in Russian to fuck off. Another had some weed, and I blew him off, and turned my back. But they had made me for a guy who wanted something and if it wasn’t drugs, it was probably weapons.

The gun I got was a. 22, like a toy pistol. It wasn’t new. It looked like something for shooting rabbits. The guy sold me a box of ammo to go with it.

It was a piece of crap, and after I paid him cash, and put it in my pocket, I felt like a fool. What good was it except to give me some kind of solace, I thought as I left the market.

I got the subway. I looked at my notebook for the address I wanted. Changed trains. Got lost. I was looking for the shelter where Valentina had worked, the shelter she supported.

When I emerged from the subway someplace near the center of town, I realized I’d made a mistake again. I stopped to ask directions. A plump woman in a hot pink dress smiled and told me how to go. And then I saw him.

If I hadn’t screwed up, if I hadn’t lost my way, maybe I would never have seen him on that corner. But, of course, he would have found me, one way or the other, this guy in a Brooks Brothers jacket, blue and white seersucker, who stood on the opposite side of the street, staring at me. He removed his Ray-Bans and peered hard. He looked like an American tourist- the jacket, the khakis, the dark blue polo shirt, the Timberlands.

Head cocked, stare quizzical-it was like a performance, a man asking himself: do I recognize that guy in jeans?

Once more he looked, raised a hand as if in greeting, got his cellphone out.

Who was he? Was he somebody from home I didn’t remember? How else would he know me? The intensity of his interest bothered me. He didn’t call out. He didn’t approach me, and I backed off into the subway station.

I wasn’t officially on the job in Moscow. I wasn’t a cop here. As a Russian kid, I had never thought about being a policeman. All I ever wanted was to listen to jazz and find an easy life. If we’d stayed, I would have ended up teaching English. I would have been just another cog in the system, an unhappy guy who drank too much and secretly listened to music at home late at night.

Tolya Sverdloff thought I had a moral code, that I became a cop to help people. He didn’t understand. I’d become a cop because it seemed the best way to fit into New York, to belong.

It was for the sense of belonging that I loved being on the job, because of the other guys, the noises in the station house, the late-night drinking sessions, the weddings and funerals, people like my friend, Hank Provone over on Staten Island who had made me part of his family. No matter how brutal things got, no matter what shit I saw or stepped into-and this included the criminals and the cops-I wanted in.

The subway train shunted into the station I was looking for, I got out and found my way to Valentina’s shelter, her orphanage. When I saw it, saw the little cross that had been hung on the wall in the vestibule, something in my gut told me this was where it had all started.