Londongrad

CHAPTER EIGHT

Val, Val, Val, the girls cried out when they saw her, all those young girls, eighteen, nineteen, long legs, long hair, faces already flushed with anticipation and now with recognition, as if a celebrity had suddenly appeared. She smiled and hugged them, and exchanged kisses, a big sister to these girls waiting outside the club. Wound around Val’s wrist was the chain with the blue ceramic bead.

Overlooking the water in Sheepshead Bay, a mile along the Brooklyn coast from Brighton Beach, was Dacha. A free-standing building painted to resemble a Russian country house, it was dark green, with silver birch trees stenciled on the side. Dressed up in a puffy shirt, his pants stuffed into high black boots, a large guy with a shaved head the size of a basketball barred the outside door, and manned the velvet rope.

“You’re coming,” I said to Val, and she shook her head.

“Oh, Val, come have just one drink,” a girl with carrot hair said, and Val said, “Take care of my friend Artie, okay, girls? Whatever he needs,” she said and gave me back the chain with the bead. “Artie?” She took her packages-the books from Dibi’s shop-from me.

“What, honey?”

“You’ll talk to him tonight? My dad? okay? See you later.”

“Disco night,” said a kid, a Russian boy, not more than twenty, with contempt as I went into the club where the Bee Gees were wailing their stuff. He had a thick accent, slicked-down hair, sharp suit, no tie. He fondled a wad of bills.

The multi-level club was filling up, as more and more people poured in, talking English, Russian, the boys on the make eyeing the spectacular girls with long legs, cheekbones to cut glass, perfect tits, tiny skirts, glittering jewels, stilettos. The air was thick, heavy with perfume and hormones, and the music, the Bee Gees, Village People, Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor.

I looked at my watch. It was still early, just after nine, and there were people eating dinner, families, some of them getting up to dance, kids, older people. And could they dance! The middle-aged dancers knew all the songs and they could cut it, singing along, Marvin Gaye, James Brown, Abba.

I went looking for the manager, up a spiral staircase that led to a bar and a roof garden. At a corner table, Val’s girls had gathered, and they waved at me, and smiled, and beckoned me to their table. I waved back and went out on the roof so I could use my phone.

People were sitting around tables up here smoking, drinking cocktails, watching the last fireworks over the ocean. I walked to the edge of the roof and looked out over the canals, the fishing boats, the low-lying houses that ran right up to the beach and the ocean. I called my old pal Gloria Lopez and I got lucky. She was working the night shift.

Gloria had been on the job, a young detective in Red Hook when I met her, but after she had her baby and dumped the creep she married, she did some forensic courses and went to work in a lab. Mainly she worked on fibers. But could network better than anyone I ever met, not counting Sonny Lippert, and she was a great girl with a low humorous voice.

We went out to dinner once in a while, we caught a movie, a couple times I stayed over at her place. If I wasn’t hung up on Valentina, I could have gone for Gloria but I’d already screwed up enough lives, and we kept it light.

I told her about the dead girl in the playground. She had already heard. Had seen it on TV, had heard from colleagues asking for forensic help on duct tape. She asked what I wanted and I said could she get a picture. A couple of minutes later Gloria called back. She was sending a picture of the girl to my phone.

“Thanks. You have anything on the time of death?”

“They’re saying maybe around one, two in the morning, something like that, I could get some more on it, if you want,” said Gloria.

“Thanks again.”

“That Russian cop, Bobo Leven, you know him, right, Artie? He’s been sniffing around me.”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t get him. Somehow he got one of the guys here to send him a picture of the dead woman, he said he needed it right away, said he was on the job, the primary. He’s very ambitious, yeah, he hangs here whenever, he’s always looking into microscopes and asking about fibers and shit, he was here today, so I did what I do, I humored him, but I didn’t tell him nada. That right?”

“You always do it right,” I said, and she gave a dirty sexy laugh into the phone and we agreed to go for Dominican food later that week in uptown Manhattan where Gloria lived with her kid and her mother.

Before I put my phone away, I looked at the dead woman in the picture Gloria had sent me. She was on a metal table in the morgue. Marks on her face where the duct tape had been peeled away. She was very young. She was pretty.

The bar was solid with human flesh now, and I leaned on the bar itself, a slick blue glass surface, ordered a beer, showed the bartender my badge and asked if the manager was around.

A squat guy, square shoulders, bad skin, came alongside me and I could smell his heavy cologne. Said he was the manager, name was Tito. Tito Dravic, he added, then gestured to the bartender with some kind of authority. My beer arrived pronto, a fat short bottle of Duvel, great Belgian stuff with a big head.

“Anything wrong?” Tito Dravic was nervous. Plenty of people under twenty-one were drinking, and there were kids trading E, too.

I pushed the silver necklace with the blue bead along the slick glass surface of the bar. Wary but not hostile, Tito had an accent I couldn’t figure. He picked up the silver chain. “Yeah, we gave these away as favors, sure.”

“When?”

“You want exactly when?”

“Yeah.”

I held back on the picture Gloria had sent to my phone. It felt obscene, as if the dead girl was trapped in it the way she had been trapped inside the duct-tape shroud.

If I was getting squeamish, I was getting too old for the job. Death needed respecting, but if you were on the job, you did whatever it took. Otherwise, you got out.

What I wanted right now was out of here. The music, the heat, the crowd were driving me a little nuts, maybe because I was sober. You can’t do clubs sober. You need the high from booze or pills. I was thinking of beating it, but I followed Dravic into a little office behind the bar, where the walls were covered with framed clippings.

One of the clippings caught my eye, a picture of three girls in a local newspaper, including one with short blonde hair, big smile, long legs, tiny skirt. Jesus, I thought. The girl in the picture on the wall was the same girl in the picture in my phone. The dead girl from the playground.

I pointed to the picture. “You know this girl?”

“Sure, why?”

“What’s her name?”

“Masha,” Dravic said.

I showed him the photograph in my phone.

Instinctively he put his hand over his mouth as if to keep from crying out. “How?”

“You knew her well?”

“I knew her. How did it happen?”

“You have a name besides Masha?”

“He real name was Maria, everybody called her Masha.” He sat down on the edge of the desk, color draining from his face, the skin suddenly gray, drab.

“Masha what?” I said.

“Panchuk. Her husband’s name, I think. I never knew her own.”

“There was a husband?”

“Yeah, for a while. I don’t think she liked him much. I’m not even sure if he was still around the last few months.”

“What else did you know about her?”

“I thought you wanted to know about the blue charm. They’re connected, the charm, Masha?”

“Go on.”

“We give out favors when business is slow, during the week, usually. The girls like these things, evil eyes, they call them.”

“Okay, so tell me some more about Masha.”

“Tall. Blonde. Pretty. Short hair. Crew cut almost. You want the picture?” He reached up to the wall and took the framed clipping down.

“You have one of her alone?”

From a folder on the desk, he got a picture, a color snap, a bad photograph but it was her, and she was tall and skinny, long-legged, wearing a skirt slit to her thighs, big earrings, smiling and posing. She looked very young.

“Can I keep it?”

“Sure.”

“So you knew her pretty well, but you didn’t fucking know she was dead, even though the story’s been on TV already?” I kept my tone even, but I was feeling pissed off with this guy.

“I was upstate at my mother’s in Kingston for a couple days, I did three shifts straight here and then I went up to her place to sleep.”

“Your mother doesn’t have a TV?”

“It was broken,” he said. “Yeah, it’s true. I only got here an hour ago, so I didn’t know anything.”

“Nobody here mentioned it?”

“You’re telling me you people already made her identity public?” asked Dravic. “So how come you asked me for her name? If I knew earlier, I would have called somebody. How did it happen?” His eyes welled up.

I told him.

“My God,” he said, then grabbed his phone, made a call, talked fast, hung up.

“The guy that was on duty before, he said another cop was nosing around earlier.”

“Listen, please, man, I’m sorry I came on so heavy.” I said. “Just please tell me whatever you can.” I had almost lost him by sounding aggressive, and now I changed my tone. You get a lot more that way, and now Dravic offered me the chair, and switched on a fan. It was a tight fit, me, him, the little office piled with crates of booze.

“Masha was here a lot,” he said. “A few weeks ago, she starts pestering me for a job, says she has some fucking bartending certificate, I tell her, it’s not for a kid serving hundreds of crazy people at midnight when they’re already soused and high, you have to scrape teenagers off the floor when they OD on Midori shots and E.”

“She stopped bugging you?”

“I told her I’d give her a tryout. I tried her out, a couple of weeks ago, Tuesday night, easy crowd. She wasn’t bad, but I didn’t like it, I wasn’t sure she was even twenty-one, I wasn’t sure she was eighteen, tell you the truth, she dressed up older and wore a lot of make-up and she had a real grown-up body, but I thought she was a kid, something about her, so I told her, you have to get some real ID if I’m gonna keep you. She was using fake stuff, driver’s license, social security card, but crap, the kind you can buy for sixty bucks. She left. I didn’t hear back.”

“Any rough stuff in the club?”

“We get mostly Russians, but the kind with money, they come to party, show off their moves. No fights. Some tension once in a while, especially when there’s a Ukrainian bunch.”

“Masha got involved?”

“She could work both crowds, she was very good-looking, and sweet. She was a great dancer. I probably have a video someplace from a dance contest.”

“Where?”

“The main office is on the next block over, there’s a house where they keep most of the stuff. I put it there. I might have something else for you.”

“What’s that?”

“She had this little resume, you know, not much but a couple places she had worked, a few bars, I put it in a file, that any use to you?”

“Plenty.”

“Can you stop back Sunday? It’s quiet Sunday. I could go over to the office and get you the stuff.”

“What’s wrong now?” I said.

“I have to do this when nobody else is around.”

“I need it.”

“Look, please, man, if I try to get anything out of there now, it’ll be a problem, trust me, okay, please?”

He looked frightened. Dravic glanced at the door of the little office. I figured if I pushed him too hard, he’d balk, or somebody else would get in the way, so I pulled back.

“Right,” I said. So, you were pretty nice to her, you gave her a tryout as a bartender, even if she was underage-you had something with her?”

“No,” he said, hesitating just a split second. “She was just a nice girl.”

“And the husband?”

“I didn’t get the feeling he would be happy if she was even talking to other guys, it was like he owned her, she had a tat with his name on it.”

“You saw it?”

“She told me. It was not, you know, visible exactly.”

“You’re Russian?”

“Serbian dad, Russian grandma on his side. My Mom’s a hippie from upstate New York.”

“You speak Russian?”

“My grandmother taught me some.”

“Right. So what else?”

“The Russian girls, they look great, but they can be really chilly, peevish, you know, petulant, like they’d rather be doing some other thing really important, you know, like smoking cigarettes, you know that look? It’s the same everywhere, I met some of them in England when I worked there, just the same fucking thing. Masha was different. She was nice to everyone.”

“How nice? You think Masha was hooking?”

“I don’t know.”

“She wore expensive clothes?”

“Yeah, so what?”

His face tightened up. I wondered if he had been in love with Masha.

I started to go. He put a hand on my sleeve, put it there too hard, clutched the fabric too tight. He was furious, pissed off at me for asking if the girl was a hooker. He kept hold of my arm, and he was solid, muscled, built like a bull.

“Let go of me, man,” I said. “Fucking let go.”

“Yeah, sorry,” said Dravic. “There’s guys, I don’t know, Rumanians, Albanians, whatever, they come in with these girls who are really frightened and you can see the bastard owns them.”

“Serbs?” I wanted to get him riled up, I wanted him to hit me if he had to. It would tell me something about him and the dead girl. He didn’t. He lowered his voice. He understood that I was now a threat to him.

“What else?” I said.

“I mean they keep the girls’ passports. The girls are like slaves. Man, if I have kids and they’re girls, I’m sending them someplace else.”

“Where’s that?”

“Yeah, where?” said Dravic. “Where on earth?”