Londongrad

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

“I’m so happy to see you, Artyom, my friend, I’m happy.” Tolya took my hand like it was a life raft.

In his pajamas and a bathrobe, he was propped up on a hospital bed. Oxygen tubes ran into his mouth. Machines around him monitored his vital signs. He breathed heavily, gasping a little.

It was the same clinic where I had been with Viktor Leven, the fancy medical facility. Viktor had heard right about it in the first place, but the staff had stonewalled us.

A light blanket lay across Tolya’s legs, but his feet were bare.

“Get me those slippers, can you?” he said softly, and I kneeled down and found some slippers and put them on his feet. “I wish I could smoke,” he said.

I sat on a straight chair close to the bed.

The room was large with two windows that looked out on to a courtyard. On the walls were prints, Monet’s flowers. A half-open door led to a bathroom.

On one side of the hospital bed was an easy chair. In the corner farthest from Tolya sat a middle-aged nurse, glasses on her nose, looking at a TV with the sound off. She rose, asked if I’d like to be alone with Tolya, told me she would sit outside the room in case he needed anything. I thanked her.

“How are you?” I said because I couldn’t think of anything else.

“Better because you’re here, Artyom.” He pushed himself up on the pillows.

What was it, a little more than a couple of weeks since he had asked me to take books to Olga Dimitriovna in Brooklyn? It felt like a lifetime.

“You have something to tell me, Artyom? You have that look.” He tried to smile.

“Yes. It wasn’t you. They didn’t kill Valentina because of something you did, it wasn’t you,” I said, and he began to weep. “They murdered her because of what she was doing at the shelter in Moscow, because she talked about it, because she got in their faces and accused them of stealing money and using little girls.”

“My God,” he said, and put his head in his hands.

“It wasn’t you.”

He looked up at me, an expression of terminal sadness on his face.

“What difference does it make?” he said. “She’s gone. And it was me, Artyom, it was me because I got close to evil, and it killed Val, and it killed poor Masha Panchuk, who also was somebody’s daughter.” He closed his eyes. I thought for a moment he was sleeping. Then he looked at me. “This is my prison, a very nice one, of course, but I can’t leave.”

“What?”

“They arrested me, asshole, tuft of mouse turd, my great dear friend.”

“What for?”

“They came to my parents’ house, in Nikolina Gora, and they brought me here. You realized I had been there? At the dacha?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I could smell you. Listen, I know what happened. To Val, I know.”

“You never liked the scent, you figured me for queer because I like the perfume Lorenzo made me. I’d like to see Florence again.”

“Shut up.”

“How can I, when it’s such a pleasure to have you here to torture this way?” said Tolya, joking around like he always did, though I could see it was an effort, the speaking was an effort, the simple act of it.

“What are they saying you did?”

“Sit closer to me, asshole,” said Tolya. “Move your chair over.” He looked at the ceiling.

“You think they’re sharing our conversation?”

“Just like the old days,” he said. “You remember? Were you ever arrested?”

“Only with my mother. In her refusenik period,” I said. “Only then. You?”

“Yes, spooky KGB guys in bad raincoats said I was of interest, as they say, in my rock and roll period, when I was on stage with my Fender Stratocaster, which nobody had seen, which I had arranged to get by not exactly kosher means. But I told you all this a million times, asshole, all about how much fun we had back in the day, Artyom. They let me go after they scared the shit out of me for twenty-four hours. Back in the day, Artie,” he said, switching to English. “It feels like a million years ago. How did I become like this?” he said. “How did I become an asshole of capitalism? I was a rock and roll hero. People wrote my name on walls, like Eric Clapton. ‘Sverdloff is God’, it said, or something like that, I don’t know if we had God back then. ‘Sverdloff is God’,” he said again wistfully.

“Things changed,” I said.

“I wanted to go to the West in a hot-air balloon, I wanted to sail over the Berlin Wall. Instead I went with a business-class ticket. Return.”

“Talk to me, Tolya. What’s going on here?” I pulled my chair close to where he sat, and he leaned down and I could feel his breath, could smell the sickness.

“A man in a nice jacket from Brooks Brothers brought me. Off the rack,” he said, trying to smile. “The jacket. Old for the job.”

“What is he?”

“He told you his name?”

“Yes.”

“Fyodor Bounine. Fyodor Samuelovich Bounine. You get the joke, right? FSB, maybe he has these initials embroidered on his underpants. It’s his real name, of course, but he thinks he’s a wit. Very good English. Very good Chinese. And Arabic. And very pleasant to me. Asks me a lot about you.”

“Nobody hurt you?”

“It’s not like that. They arrested me on money-laundering charges, they say.” He snorted, trying to laugh. “Then they add murder. It happens. They just take you away, nobody knows. You can’t call, nothing.”

“We can get you a lawyer.”

“It doesn’t work like that.”

“I saw Molly,” I said, not knowing if I should tell him.

He leaned forward. “Where? She’s okay?”

“I saw her at the dacha. She’s fine. She’s with her mother. I told her to go back to New York, or Boston.”

“I want her out of this fucking country. Get her out. Will you do this for me, Artyom? Please. Whatever it takes.”

“I already started on that,” I said. “I’ll do anything.”

“You don’t owe me.”

“You mean Billy,” said Tolya. “We never spoke of this.”

“Yes.”

“You want to speak about it,” said Tolya. “You want me to confess? You want to confess?” He laughed to diffuse it, and I didn’t answer. “I did for you what a friend does,” he says. “You couldn’t let them put your nephew, Billy, back into an institution. You told me that day on Staten Island, near Fresh Kills, the garbage dump. You knew he had killed and you couldn’t let him run away, or be free by himself. But you didn’t want him locked up again. There wasn’t any other way,” he said. “It was okay. You think I’m somehow immoral, don’t you Artemy?” he said softly without any anger. “You think because I am able to kill, I’m a killer.”

“No.”

“Sometimes you have to do what is right, even if it’s not moral. Sometimes it’s kinder. Revolutionaries never thought about that, they thought about their ideologies, they thought if only they had the right words, people would stop suffering. It’s ideology that kills people.”

It was this about Sverdloff I never came to terms with. I never understood how he operated in a world where he dealt with crooks and creeps and still remained himself. Remained a man full of life, happy with life, a guy who could eat and drink and laugh, who loved his kids and his friends.

Or had been. Had been that man before Valentina died. A guy who would do anything for me because we were friends. When he took Billy away a few years earlier, when he made a decision I couldn’t make, it was everything. I should have kept Val safe for him.

Say it, I thought to myself. Killed Billy. Tolya killed Billy to save him. He did it for you.

“I wish I could see Molly one more time,” said Tolya.

“What’s the ‘one more time’ thing?” I said, jaunty as I could.

“I’m dying, Artyom.”

The nurse came into the room, held out a little paper cup with some pills, Tolya took them and she offered him water. Tolya thanked her, and in a little while some color flowed back into his face.

“You’re in pain?”

“It’s not so bad.”

“Is this the polonium?”

“No,” he said.

“And Val?”

“There was never any polonium, Artie. The autopsy would have showed it. I let them believe this for a while because people paid attention. I had leverage with the press because of it, it was much more exciting for them. Everybody loves a story about crazy radioactive shit.”

“What do you need?” I said.

“Everything is finished.”

“Grisha Curtis killed Valentina.”

“Yes.”

“But not with polonium?”

“No,” said Tolya. “I made him talk to me when I found him in the woods, in the grounds of his uncle’s dacha. He made it look that way, he put the empty packages of Staticmaster around, so it would look as if somebody had poisoned her. But he just killed her, he stuffed a pillow over her face.”

“Did he mention a girl in London, Elena Gagarin?”

“Yes, he beat her up. He was afraid she was talking to you, that somehow she knew something. She was a sad girl, she didn’t know anything, but she liked to retail gossip.”

I looked at him. “You said they added murder charges to your arrest.”

“What do you think I did when I found this bastard who killed my Valentina?”

“I understand,” I said.

“That’s good.”

“What is it, if it’s not polonium?”

“My heart,” he said.

After he caught his breath-it was unbearable to watch him try to speak-he said, “I asked them to let me see you.”

“I’m happy.”

“They said what do you want, and I said, I want to see my friend. Fyodor Samuelovich said fine, where is he, and I said I didn’t know. But I knew you’d follow me to Moscow. And he said what is your friend’s name, but I could see he already knew, and when I said it, when I said your name, he smiled. But he already somehow knew it was you.”

“How?”

“Maybe they have people in New York, or London. I think maybe Fyodor Samuelovich, call me Sammy, no kidding, wants something from you. As soon as I said your name, I could see it. He’s an old guy, but he gets it, he learned from the best, he’s a hustler like the rest of us. He wants something from you,” said Tolya for the second time. “Whatever it is, don’t do it. Can you help me?” he added, trying to get out of bed and into the easy chair.

I put my arm under his. He leaned on me, and I could feel the weight and the fatigue and the sorrow. He sat down heavily.

“Tell me how to help you.” I looked at the ceiling as he had done.

“What difference does it really make? They know everything. I always wondered why people made such a fuss about bugs, when they knew it all. They didn’t hurt people to find out. They hurt them to make a point to other assholes, warn them, make sure they were afraid.”

“Go on.”

“You understand what I did? About this guy, this guy who killed Valentina? He was a monster. He killed her and he hired a thug who killed Masha Panchuk, but you knew that. The thug, this Terenti, saw Masha leave my club and thought it was Val, and he followed her to Brooklyn to the playground where you found her,” said Tolya, speaking his mix of English and Russian. “You have any cigarettes?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Asshole, if I am dying, I want to die smoking. I wish I had some cigars,” he said. “You know at first, I thought they arrested me because I told jokes.”

“What?”

“I did what I wanted in London, New York, I did bad deals, when I was mad at officials in Moscow, I made jokes, I talked too much, I said what I wanted. I laughed at them.”

“Of course.”

“I’m glad I told them what I think of all of them. I’m glad,” he said.

“You always tell great jokes,” I said, putting my hand on his. “There must be something you want. Tell me what to get you, tell me how I can help?”

“They take good care of me here, Artyom, but I think there’s a little catch.”

“What is it?”

“I think at some point, they will move me from this lovely hospital to someplace not quite so nice, you understand, to a different sort of hospital. The Russians are quite good at this, stashing people away in hospitals far from Moscow. I want to get out, but not if it costs you too much. I’d like to see Molly,” he said. “But I want you to remain this moral man I admire.”

“What else?” I pulled my chair close to him, and leaned over to touch his arm.

“You understand what I had to do? But they can call it murder. Cases last a long, long time here. They can last your whole life. Listen, don’t be so sad.”

“I’ll get you out,” I said, thinking suddenly of Roy Pettus, who had asked me to do favors for him. Pettus would come in handy. Maybe Fiona Colquhoun, too. Maybe they would help.

“What would it take?” I asked again.

“I can’t tell you, I don’t know,” said Tolya, closing his eyes. “They’ll tell you. Bounine, he’ll be waiting when we’re finished here. I mean for you, Artyom. Not if it costs you too much,” he said again. “Okay? Do not sell your soul to that devil, I’m not worth it anymore,” he said, and closed his eyes.

By the time I got up to leave, Tolya was back in the bed, asleep. I looked at him, lying on his back, his big feet sticking out of the blanket, and I realized I had seen him like this before, in a dream, in a terrible nightmare where I couldn’t save him.

I felt bereft. Here was the one person, the single human being I could always count on, who would show up when I needed him, who was a pain in the ass, but was there, big, solid as a mountain, on my side, available. My friend. It wasn’t in my plan for him to disappear, to die, to simply not be there. Somewhere deep down I had expected us to get old together. That wouldn’t happen. He needed a new heart. I couldn’t give it to him.