Londongrad

CHAPTER ONE

From behind the bar at his club in the West Village, Tolya Sverdloff looked up and saw me.

“Artie, good morning, how are you, have something to drink, or maybe a cup of good coffee, and we’ll talk, I need a little favor, maybe you can help me out?” All this came out of his mouth fast, in a single sentence, as if he couldn’t cram enough good things into it if he stopped for breath.

In the streaming shafts of morning sunlight coming in through a pair of big windows, he resembled a saint in stained glass, but a very secular saint, a glass of red wine in one hand, a Havana in the other and an expression of huge pleasure on his face. He stuck his nose in the glass, he swirled it and sniffed, and drank, and saw me watching.

“Oh, man, this is it,” he said. “This is everything, a reason to be alive. Come taste this,” added Tolya and poured some wine into a second glass. “A fantastic Ducru. I’ll give you a bottle,” he said. “As a reward.”

I sat on one of the padded leather stools at his bar. “What for?”

“For coming by at this hour when I call you,” said Tolya, who tasted the wine again and smiled, showing the dimples big enough for a child to stick its fist in. He brushed the thick black hair from his forehead, and rolled his eyes with pleasure at the wine, this big effusive generous guy, a voluptuary. Wine and food were his redemption, he always said.

“So what do you need that you got me here at the fucking crack of dawn on my first day of vacation?” I said. “I’ll take that coffee.”

He held up a hand. Some opera came in over the sound system. “Maria Callas,” said Tolya. “Traviata. My God, has there ever been a Violetta like that?”

While he listened, I looked at the framed Soviet posters on the wall, including an original Rodchenko for The Battleship Potemkin, and wondered how the hell he had got hold of it.

“Coffee?”

“Try the wine,” he said. “You should really come into business with me, you know, Artie. We could have so much fun, you could run this place, or we could open another one, you could make a little money. Anyhow, you’re too old to play cops and robbers.”

“I’m a New York City detective, it’s not a game,” I said. “You met somebody? You sound like you’re in love.”

“Don’t be so pompous,” said Tolya and we both burst out laughing.

“Yeah, I know.”

“You working anything, Artemy?” He used my Russian name.

Like me, Tolya Sverdloff grew up in Moscow. I got out when I was sixteen, got to New York, cut all my ties, dumped my past as fast as I could. He had a place over there, and one in England. Tolya was a nomad now, London, New York, Russia. He had opened clubs in all of them.

“I am on vacation as of yesterday,” I said. “Off the job for ten fantastic days, no homicides pending, no crazy Russians in need of my linguistic services.” I stretched and yawned, and drank some more of the wine. It wasn’t even nine in the morning. Who cares, I thought. The wine was delicious.

Tolya lifted his glass. “My birthday next week,” he said.

“Happy birthday.”

“So you’ll come to my party?”

“Sure. Where?”

“In London,” he said.

“You know I worked a case there once. It left a bad taste.”

“You’re wrong. Is fantastic city, Artemy.” I drank some more wine.

“Best city, most civilized.”

Whenever he talked about London these days, it was to tell me how wonderful it was. But he described it as a tourist might- the parks, the theaters, the pretty places. I knew that he had, along with his club there, other business. He didn’t tell me about it, I didn’t ask.

He put his glass down. “Oh, God, I love the smell of the Médoc in the morning, Artyom,” said Tolya, switching from English to Russian.

Tolya’s English depended on the occasion. As a result of an education at Moscow’s language schools, he spoke it beautifully, with a British accent. Drunk, or what he sometimes called “party mood”, his language was his own invention, a mix of Russian and English, low and high, the kind he figured un-educated people speak-the gangsters, the nouveau riche Russians. He taunted me constantly. He announced, once in a while, that he knew I thought all Russkis were thugs, or Neanderthals. “You think this, Artemy,” he said.

His Russian, when he bothered, though, was so pure, so soft, it made me feel my soul was being stroked. Like his father spoke when he was alive, Tolya told me once. His father had been trained as an actor. Singer, too. Paul Robeson complimented his father when his father was still a student. He had the voice, my pop did, said Tolya.

“You said you need a favor?”

“Just to take some books to an old lady in Brooklyn, okay?” Tolya put a shopping bag on the bar. “You don’t mind? Sure sure sure?”

He already knew I’d do what he wanted without asking. It was his definition of a friend. He believed only in the Russian version of friends, not like Americans, he says, who call everybody friends. “My best friend, they say,” he hooted mockingly.

“I would go myself,” said Tolya, “but I have two people who didn’t show up last night. Which a little bit annoys me because I am very nice with my staff. I pay salary also tips, unlike many clubs and restaurants.”

It was one of Sverdloff’s beefs that most staff at the city’s restaurants were paid minimum wage and made their money on tips. “I hate this system,” he said. “In Spain it is civilized, in Spain, waiters are properly paid,” he added and I could see he was starting on his usual riff.

“Right,” I said, feeling the wine in my veins like liquid pleasure. “Of course, Tolya. You are the nicest boss in town.”

“Do not laugh at me, Artyom,” he said. “I am very good socialist in capitalist drag.”

Tolya had called his club Pravda2, because there was already a bar named Pravda, which the owner, very nice English guy but stubborn, Tolya said, had refused to sell him. Club named Pravda must belong to Russian guy, Tolya said. English guy won’t sell me his, I open my own.

Pravda2, Artie, you get it?

You like the pun, Artie? You get it? Yeah, I get it, Tol, I’d say, Truth Too, In Vino Veritas, blah blah, you’re the fountainhead of all that is true, you, in the wine, I get it.

Originally, he’d planned on making P2, as he called it, a champagne bar he’d run for his friends, to entertain them, and where he would only sell Krug. He added a few dishes, and got himself a line to a supplier with very good caviar, and a food broker, a pretty girl, who could get excellent foie gras, he told me.

To his surprise, it was a success. He was thrilled. He gave in to his own lust for red wine, big reds, he calls them, and only French, the stuff that costs a bundle. And cognac. Some vodkas.

I wasn’t a wine drinker. People who loved it bored the shit out of me, but sometimes Sverdloff got me over in the afternoon when the wine salesmen come around and we spent hours tasting stuff. Some of them were truly great. Like the stuff I was having for breakfast that morning.

Tolya saw himself, he had told me the other evening, as an impresario of the night. I said he was a guy with a bar.

He liked to discuss the wines, not to mention the vodka he got made for him special in Siberia that he kept in a frozen silver decanter. He went to Mali last January to visit his Tuareg silversmith. He stayed for a month. Fell in love with the music.

Sverdloff liked the idea of the rare piece of silver, the expensive wine, liked to think of himself as a connoisseur. It’s just potatoes, I said. Potatoes. Vodka is a bunch of fermented spuds, I told him.

“So you’ll take the books for me?” Tolya said.

“Give me the address.” I finished the wine in my glass.

“They’re for Olga Dimitriovna, you remember, you took some books before, the older lady in Starrett City? She likes you, she always says, please say hello to your friend. I got them special from our mutual friend, Dubi, in Brighton Beach, very good editions, Russian novels, a whole set of Turgenev,” he added, and picked up his half-pound of solid gold Dunhill lighter with the cigar engraved, a ruby for the glowing tip. He flicked it and relit his Cohiba.

“Of course.”

“Thank you for this, Artie, honest. It is only these books, and some wine, but this lady depends, you know?” He put his hand into the pocket of his custom-made black jeans, and extracted a wad of bills held together with a jeweled money clip. “Look, put this inside one of the books. She won’t take money, but I know she needs.”

I took the dough.

“I would go myself if I could,” he said.

“Yeah, yeah, and how would you ever find Brooklyn anyhow?” I picked up the bottle and poured a little more wine in my glass.

“So you’ll go now, I mean, you’re waiting for what, MooDllo?” he said, his term of affectionate abuse, a word that doesn’t translate into English but comes from “modal” that once meant a castrated ram but moved on to mean a stupendously stupid person. An asshole was maybe the right word, but in Russian much more affectionate, much dirtier. He glanced at his watch.

“What’s the hurry?”

My elbows on the bar, I was slowly winding down into a vacation mode, thinking of things I’d do, sleep late, listen to music, some fishing off of Montauk, maybe ride my bike over the George Washington Bridge, see a few movies, take in a ball game, dinner out with some pals, maybe dinner with Valentina though I didn’t mention it to Tolya. He was crazy about his daughter, Val, and so was I. If Tolya knew how much, he’d rip my arms out. She was his kid, she was half my age.

“Pour me a little more of that wine, will you?” I said.

“Just go.”

“I hear you. I’m going.”

“You’ll come by tonight?” said Tolya.

“Sure.”

“Good.”

I was halfway out the door, when I heard Tolya behind me.

“Artemy?” He stood on the sidewalk in front of Pravda2, and held his face up to the hot sun. He waved at a delivery guy, he smiled at a couple of kids on skateboards. He was lord of this little domain, he owned it, it was his community. I envied him.

“What’s that?”

He hesitated.

“You used to know a guy named Roy Pettus?”

“Sure. Ex-Feeb. Worked the New York FBI office back when, I knew him some, worked a case, a dozen years, more maybe, around the time we met, you and me.”

“I don’t remember,” said Tolya. “Anyhow, he was in here, asking about you.”

“When?”

“Last night after you left.”

“Pettus? What did he want?”

Tolya shrugged. “Came in wearing a suit, said he wanted a glass of wine, didn’t drink it, didn’t look like a guy who knows his Pauillac from his Dr Pepper. Made a little conversation with me. Asked about you.”

“What about?”

“How you were, were you still working Russian jobs,” said Tolya, “How’s your facility with the lingo. Doesn’t ask straight out, but kind of hangs around. Tells me we met at your wedding, knows you got divorced. Pretends he is just making conversation, but what the fuck is a guy in a suit like that doing in my club? I got the feeling it was why he dropped by, wanting to ask about you.”

“Why didn’t he just call me?”

“What do I know? Maybe he’s just some old spook who likes playing the game, what do they call it, tradecraft?” said Tolya laughing and making spooky noises and laughing some more. “Well, as my daughter says, whatevs, right?’

“Yeah, right. Last I heard Roy Pettus retired home to Wyoming.”

I headed for my car at the curb. I had gotten it washed in time for vacation, and it looked beautiful, gleaming and red, the ancient Caddy convertible. I climbed in, put the Erroll Garner disc into the slot, and turned the key.

“Think about coming into the business with me, okay?” Tolya called out.

Already I was listening to the joyous music of Concert by the Sea, but I took in what Tolya said. Every month or so, when he asked me again, more and more I thought: why not go in with Sverdloff? Why not take him up on it, a trip to London, a chance for a new life, stop chasing fuckwits who murder people? Maybe it was time.

“Don’t get lost in Brooklyn,” Tolya called out, grinned and waved me away.

CHAPTER TWO

If I had gone straight to Brooklyn from Tolya’s, if I had not stopped at home to grab some swim shorts and call Valentina, maybe I could have avoided the whole damn thing, maybe I would have avoided the little kid, yelling and waving, mouth open in an O with a howl coming out.

By the time I saw her, as she darted into the street, I was a second away from running her down, from killing her. Sweat covered my face, ran down the back of my neck. The bag on the seat next to me fell on the floor, books tumbled out, the books I was taking to the old lady for Tolya.

I slammed on the brakes. I got out of my car in the middle of the street. There wasn’t much traffic out here in this dismal corner of the city, but a few cars were honking now, and I yelled at them and grabbed her up, the kid who was yelling, and sat her down on the curb. It was a warm dry day, gusts of wind coming off the water half a mile away. Balls of newspaper and dust rolled along the nearly empty street. It was a holiday. July 4.

On the broken sidewalk out here at the edge of Brooklyn, where it butts up against Queens, I put my arm around the kid in the dirty pink t-shirt and tried to get her to talk to me.

After a while, she calmed down some, and started talking in a tiny voice and I realized she was a Russian kid. I asked her name. Dina, she mumbled, and pulled at me, and I followed her across the street, which was lined with ramshackle houses, some of the windows broken and covered with plywood and plastic. In one of the yards weeds had grown up over the skeleton of an old Mercedes. There was garbage everywhere. A desolate place, fifteen miles from the middle of Manhattan.

Dina ducked under some rough bushes. In front of us was a gate to an old playground surrounded by chain-link fencing. There was a padlock on the gate. A piece of the fence was missing and Dina got on her belly and crawled under it. I followed her into a wasteland of overgrown weeds and grass, used needles, empty bottles. It was silent, a thick, dead silence, except for something creaking, a low raw sound I couldn’t identify.

The jungle gym was broken. The sandbox was empty, no sand to play in. Dina was silent now, too, she had stopped babbling, stopped talking. Then she lifted one skinny arm and pointed and I followed her gaze and saw it, a figure on a swing. It was the source of the noise, the raw creak, the metal chains grinding against the poles where the swing hung.

Wrapped in silver duct tape that glinted dully in the morning light, the figure – probably a woman – was sitting on the swing, arms tied to the chains with rope, a harsh wind moving her back and forth. Or maybe it was her own weight that propelled her as she went to and fro, back and forth, on the swing in the deserted playground in Brooklyn.

“When did you find this?” I said in Russian as softly as I could, though there was nobody else here.

“Is she dead? She is dead?” said Dina, and then suddenly broke away from me, and ran out of the playground, head down, too fast for me to catch her, a blur of skinny legs and arms and pink shirt.

I called it in, and went back to the swings.

I caught the body and held her still. She was heavy. She seemed to lean against me. I stumbled and tripped and fell on my knees. A broken bottle cut me and blood stained my ankle.

The feel of the greasy duct tape dank from humidity made me want to gag. I could feel this was flesh under the tape, that this had been a woman.

I’ve been a cop a long time, twenty years, more, but this was so surreal, for a second I thought I was hallucinating. I didn’t know what to do, not when the body against me seemed to breathe in and out of its own accord.

Was she still alive?

From above came the sound of a solitary plane; piercing the blue sky over the city, it came in low over the Jamaica Wetlands on its way into JFK.

I had to know what was under the tape.

Holding the body still with one arm, I lifted a small section of tape off the face. The tape rasped against the skin. It had been crudely done. The tape came away easily. I touched the skin near the nose lightly, and I saw one of her eyes and thought I felt it flutter, as if it might suddenly open.

She was dead. I never was an expert on physical death but she had been on the swing a long time, far as I could tell.

Wrapped up first? Dead first?

I wanted to beat it, get out, go back on vacation, but I had to wait for help. I didn’t want some other kid like Dina stumbling in here and seeing this.

Listening for sirens. Wishing I had a cigarette. Sweating in the hot sun, all I could do now was wait.

I didn’t know what else to do so I sat on the swing next to her. Together, the dead woman and me, we swung back and forth, to and fro, like kids early in the morning with nobody else to see them.

Behind me was the sound of sirens, of voices, of footsteps. I got up off the swing, turned and saw them coming, a small army trooping onto the playground.

Somebody had removed the gate so the ambulance people could get through. Uniforms, detectives, forensics people, all of them streamed in. It was like a tribal ceremony, the woman wrapped in silver tape on the ground now, everyone else moving around her in a ritual dance.

I spotted Bobo Leven, a young detective who was Russianborn. I went over and told him what I knew and then I started out of the playground. Bobo tried to follow me. I told him it wasn’t my case. I happened to be around, but I was leaving. He wanted my help, but I said I was sorry, I had to go, I was on vacation.

“Good luck with the case,” I said finally, shaking loose of Bobo Leven, hurrying away now as a couple of photographers from forensics brushed past me to take more pictures of the corpse like the paparazzi of the dead.

CHAPTER THREE

On the wall of Olga Dimitriovna’s place were three photographs, black and white pictures of children staring straight at the camera, and she saw me look at them as soon as I entered the apartment.

“Yes, you imagine these were taken by Valentina Sverdloff, isn’t that right?”

I nodded.

“Please, come in, Artemy Maximovich,” she said, a wiry woman about eighty, sharp as a bird, with a humorous face who was crazy about reading, especially novels. I placed the bag Tolya had given me on a table, and she took one out and admired it.

“So, tea? Coffee? A sandwich also? You are hungry, Artemy Maximovich?” She went into the tiny kitchen to prepare food.

I put my head through the kitchen door and said I’d have a sandwich with my coffee. I wasn’t hungry, but I knew she was a solitary old lady who wanted me to stay a while and talk. I didn’t remember the photographs.

“Valentina gave them to me, a month ago, I think.”

“You know Val?”

“Of course. For a time she comes to me for her Russian lessons. But not lately. The photographs are of children at her orphanage in Moscow.”

“What orphanage?”

“Where she gives money,” said Olga. “I think perhaps not an orphanage but a shelter for girls. Please say hello. Please, sit down,” she added.

The apartment was small, the furniture old. Olga still gave Russian lessons, she had told me, but the money wasn’t much. From a radio came a Beethoven sonata.

Out of the window here on the sixteenth floor, I could almost see the playground where I’d just been. In the other direction were the nineteen brick buildings of the Boulevard Public Housing project. I could see the vast Linden Houses, too, tens of thousands of people stacked up in scores of towers and below them the tangle of urban outlands and inner suburbia, bagel stores and storefront churches, squat low synagogues, C-Town supermarkets, Chinese restaurants with bulletproof windows, makeshift mosques, Indian takeouts. And the water, the Jamaica Wetlands, the network of wild islands where water-birds congregate and the dirty strip of beach where gulls pick over garbage for their breakfast.

I love the water. I used to go out on the party boats from Sheepshead Bay and fish for stripers and blues. A few miles away from where I stood is a secret place I go sometimes, a nice tavern at the edge of the wildlife sanctuary, where you meet other cops and fire guys, Irish mostly; you drink some beers or Guinness and there’s a breeze and it smells unbelievably sweet.

My phone was ringing, but I turned it off and sat with Olga Dimitriovna and ate my fried-egg sandwich and chatted in Russian. She told me there had been three muggings in her building. I told her to keep her door locked at night and the chain on, and I gave her my cell number.

“Anatoly Anatolyevich Sverdloff is a good man,” she said. “He gives to everybody. Please say thank you.” Olga pushed her wire-rim spectacles on top of her head, thanked me again, and offered me a glass of brandy. I refused.

“Please, come back, Artemy,” she said. “And tell Valentina to come.” She kissed my cheek, papery lips against my skin, and handed me a box of chocolates, which she had wrapped carefully with fancy gold paper and a red ribbon. “For Mr Sverdloff who sends me the books. You’ll give this to him?”

“Yes, of course,” I said.

“Tell Valentina I miss her, please.”

“Is there anything else I can do for you?”

She shook her head. “But maybe I will call you for help with some of my neighbors. They are afraid.”

“Of the muggings?”

“Of everything, crime, black people, of the new kind of Russians, of anything different, of a feeling that they may have to move again, or leave America. Most are legal, but they are afraid. They pull down their blinds and pray to God,” she added. “Except God isn’t listening. So some of us fight instead. We fight landlords. We remember how to fight. Goodbye, again, Artemy.”

As I walked along the corridor of Dimitriovna’s floor, I could hear classical music from behind the doors. Doors opened a crack, mostly old people looking out to see who it was, and if it was safe, and seeing other tenants looking out of their apartments, greeted each other in Russian, and fixed social arrangements for cards and tea. One elderly man held the door open long enough to take a good look at me.

“Who are you?” he said in English with a thick accent. “What do you want?” He was angry, I could see he felt I was some kind of interloper, somebody without any real business up here. Maybe he figured me for a developer.

Decades back, these high-rise towers had been built to house immigrants, forty bucks per room back then. They were almost trashed in the 1980s by gangs and guns, and people bolted their doors and rarely went out.

Now the crack dealer creeps had gone the place was threatened instead by Trump, or some other feral developer: take it over, raise the rents, blow it up, co-op it. Looked like by fall the deal would be done.

But Olga Dimitriovna and her friends weren’t going to budge easy, not without a fight, not after they’d made a life, a village up on the sixteenth floor, the old-timers helping the new ones, everybody in and out of each other’s apartments, sitting out on nice days on green and yellow plastic deckchairs, as if the sidewalk in front was a front porch; or making trips over to Brighton Beach to shop or eat on special occasions or maybe to the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan for music once a year.

They would resist. They would organize. If necessary, they would fight. They had survived everything else. Stalin, Hitler. Coming to America.

But even here, thousands of miles from Moscow, people were paranoid. Russia was hot as hell, in several senses, and now Putin was rattling his nukes, and people were secretly thinking: will America bend to these people? Will they cut off the stream of Russian immigrants? Will they listen to Lou Dobbs, the asshole on CNN who rants about immigrants every night? Even Russians with American passports, think: will I have to move again? Where will I go?

Near the elevator, I turned on my cellphone.

“Who is it?” I said, but the signal was dead.

I banged on the elevator door. Where was it?

Some of the tenants reappeared in the hall and watched until the elevator came and I went away. Ingrained in them was a deep suspicion, even hatred, of cops. Somehow they knew I was a cop, or suspected it. I realized I was still carrying the fancy box of chocolates and in the heat, I could smell them. I got into the elevator, feeling somebody was on my back. I opened the chocolates. I ate one. It had a nut in it.

CHAPTER FOUR

I was still holding the chocolates when I left the building, and as I got to my car, I thought I saw the kid, the Russian girl, Dina.

“Hey!”

I ran after her. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it was the hot sun in my eyes. I ran until my lungs burned. I caught her near a wire fence that divided the street from a water-plant facility, and a stretch of filthy beach.

When she saw me, she stopped. She hadn’t been running away from me.

“Why were you running?”

“I was looking for somebody,” she said in Russian.

“Who?”

“Nobody.”

We were outside a broken-down housing project. Some of the little yellow tiles had fallen off the façade, like scabs off a half-healed wound.

“You live here?”

She shrugged.

“You want to tell me something?”

“Yes.”

I looked at her. “You’re hungry?”

She nodded and I took her into a bodega on the other side of the street and bought her a ham sandwich and a Coke and a bag of Fritos and watched her eat all of it without stopping. I wondered when she had her last meal. All the time I was with her, she stared at the box of chocolate. I gave it to her. She shoved the candy into her mouth.

“Where do you live? Will you show me?”

“I have something,” said Dina, clutching her fist shut.

“Show me.”

When she opened her hand, she had a thin silver chain with a blue ceramic evil-eye charm in light blue and white.

“Where did you get this?”

“In the playground,” she said.

I waited.

“Will you give me money for it?” She looked up at me and her eyes were like a desperate little animal.

“Why should I?”

“I got it from the playground. I got it near the swing.”

“You took it from her?”

“No. I picked it up.”

“How much?”

“One hundred.”

“No way,” I said in Russian. “No deal.”

“Fifty.” She was tiny and hungry and scared and an easy mark. The necklace wasn’t worth five bucks.

“I’ll give you twenty-five,” I said and she lit up like somebody had turned a switch.

I gave her some bills with one hand while I called a friend, a good female cop I know who would come and help me get the kid to a safe place.

“I want to go home,” she said.

I held on to her as best I could, but as soon as she felt me loosen my grip-I couldn’t handcuff her or anything-she broke away, same as earlier, just broke free and ran like hell and disappeared among the broken buildings.

“Artie?” It was Bobo Leven, the detective who had answered the call on the playground case. He was leaning against the jungle gym smoking. I looked at the swings. The body was gone.

“Yeah, hi, Bobo.”

“You got my message?”

“I got it. I’m in a hurry, so what do you need?”

“Thanks for coming.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said. Bobo looked anxious. “You’ll do the case fine, Bobo, you’ll make your name with it.”

His real name was Boris Borisovich Leven, but everyone called him Bobo. He was twenty-eight and smart as hell, having finished Brooklyn College in three years instead of four, followed by his MA at John Jay in criminology. He was still living at home these days, out on Brighton Beach with his parents.

And he knew the Russkis out there as well as anyone in the city, including me. Also, his mother, who ran a little export-import business from the house-Russian embroidery, varnished boxes, cheap porcelain, that kind of shit-went back and forth a lot, so he had a handle on what was doing over there. Bobo had cousins every place: LA, London, Miami, Los Angeles, Moscow, Tel Aviv.

At six four, with the kind of long springy muscles you get if you work out right, he played good basketball. He had an accent, but he was a handsome kid with nice manners, and when I needed a favor, he was always ready.

I had worked with Bobo Leven a few times. And once, I took him out drinking with a couple of the guys, and he loved the tribal aspect of it, the fact you could say things you couldn’t say to anyone else in language you could never divulge to civilians. He knew there were things that only other guys on the job understood. They liked him okay. But one of my oldest friends said to me, “He looks nice, he acts respectful, but I don’t trust him much.”

A couple of hazmat guys, white paper suits, yellow rubber boots, showed up and started working over the playground, taking samples of dirt, looking at their Geiger counters, whispering to each other through their masks, and Bobo, seeing them, looked nervous.

“What are they here for?”

One of the guys removed his mask and I recognized him from a job I did once. Couldn’t remember his name, and he was older and heavier, but the face was the same. I went over and talked to him out of Bobo’s hearing. I didn’t want him getting in the way. The wind puffed out the papery white hazmat suit.

“What’s going on?”

“Somebody thought the scene could be hot,” said Tom Alvin, name on his badge. “They always think a scene is hot, you know, man, I mean, it’s an obsession, they find a case, they send us in, and what the fuck difference does it make, you know? They’re consumed, man, with the idea of a dirty bomb. They read too much shit in the papers, you know, like that spy thing over in England, what was his name, the Russian dude that got poisoned? You heard about that? Some kind of radiation shit, but it was like a couple of years ago. Man, we better all pray McCain gets elected, he’s like a regular fucking war hero and if we get trouble, he’s the guy.” He paused. “You wanna know what they should do?”

“What’s that?”

“They should stop seeing movies that got nothing to do with what’s going on, all them big thrillers with nuclear shit in them, and worth nothing, nada, zero. They should spend some money inspecting container ships, and the baggage holds of all those aircraft from crazy places, how about hospital waste, how about them nuke plants that got no controls? But we don’t got no money for that, right, man? It’s coming, but not like this in some fucking playground, or in somebody’s sushi like the guy in London. One day, it’ll just come outta the sky, bang, like the Trade Center, bing bang boom!” He snorted, threw his smoke on the ground, crushed it with his foot and put his mask back on. “Artie, right?”

“Yeah.”

“You working this?”

“No, just passing by.”

“Didn’t you work a nuke case way back in the day, out by Brighton Beach? You tracked some nuke mule who carried stuff out of Russia in his suitcase? I remember that. With some of those fucking Russkis, right?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“So you think you got something here?” I gestured at the swing.

“I’m not sure. You want me to give you a call?”

I nodded in Bobo’s direction. “Call him, if you want.”

“What did the hazmat guy say?” Bobo asked.

“Give him your number, he’ll call you.”

“So would you work this with me, Artie?”

I told him I was seriously on vacation.

“I can call you for some advice?” He was polite, but I didn’t feel comfortable with this guy. Maybe all he wanted was to do the case right, but there was something I couldn’t explain. I wanted to get away.

“Or maybe we could have a beer together once in a while and I could talk through it with you?”

“Sure,” I said, and headed for the street, Bobo following me, scribbling in his notebook fast as he could write.

Outside the playground, I leaned against Bobo’s red Audi TT and wondered how he could afford it.

“Nice car,” I said.

“Thanks.”

“So what do you think?” said Bobo, dragging in smoke the way only a Russian guy can do it.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Me either. I mean, Artie, you been on the job all this time, and who the fuck tapes up some poor girl and leaves her to suffocate in this shitty place?”

“I don’t know, Bobo, I don’t know who likes making people feel pain.”

“You’re wondering if they taped her up before she was dead?” said Bobo.

“I have to go,” I said. “Keep in touch.”

“A guy once told me once you get close to a case, you can’t let go, isn’t that right? Artie?”

“He was probably drunk,” I said. “You don’t know anything about me.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Stacks of pink cold cuts lay on trays, little mountains of cubed cheese, orange, yellow, white, carrot sticks, candy bars, bagels, rolls, pastries that glistened, shiny under the lights, were arranged on platters, and NYPD guys in uniform were gobbling up food as fast as they could, as if they didn’t know where their next meal was coming from, shoving food into their mouths, piling it high on paper plates. The long tables were set up outside the sound stage.

“Craft Services, they call it,” said Sonny Lippert, my ex-boss, when I found him at the Steiner Movie Studios where the old Brooklyn Shipyards had been.

He picked up his plate and sauntered out into the courtyard, and I followed him. He sat on a canvas directors’ chair and gestured to another one. I sat next to him.

I wanted his advice before I saw Bobo Leven again. The dead girl wasn’t my case, it was Leven’s, but I couldn’t let it go. The image of the girl on the swing stayed with me like floaters that stick in your eye, float on the surface of your brain, clog your vision. Some guy had told Leven when I got close to a case I couldn’t let it go, but that was crap. I was happy to turn it over to Leven. I was curious was all. I had seen the girl on the swing first and I was curious.

Or was I fooling myself? Had I become some kind of obsessive, one of those cops who can’t get the smell of a homicide out of his nose?

It wasn’t that I planned to work the case, I only wanted advice. Any information I got I’d pass on. Anyhow, I owed Sonny Lippert a visit. I hadn’t seen much of him lately.

“So, Artie, good to see you, it’s been a while,” said Sonny, who was wearing a captain’s uniform, the kind of dress blues guys wore to funerals. I had never in my life seen Lippert dressed as a cop. Almost all the years I’d known him, it was after he left the police force to work as a US attorney.

“What’s with the outfit?” I said to Lippert who had been my boss on and off for years until he retired.

“Nifty, right,” said Sonny, smoothing his navy blue jacket. “Fits me nice, right? I sucked up to the wardrobe lady, man. These people are cool. Listen, man, you want to go hear Ahmad Jamal with me in the fall, one of the last of the greats, man?” he said.

Long ago Sonny and me had started listening to music together. He still calls everyone “man”, a leftover from his younger years when he hung out with jazz guys. He still listened to the music with real love.

When I was still a rookie and broke, he sometimes invited me to concerts at Carnegie Hall and sometimes to the Vanguard. It was with Sonny I first heard Miles Davis in person, and Stan Getz, and Ella.

“What the hell are you supposed to be?” I said, smiling because I suddenly felt affectionate towards Sonny.

“I’m a police captain, man,” he said, buttering a roll he had on the plate on his lap. “I’m an extra. The movie I’m working. I’m a consultant. I told you. Didn’t I?”

All around us real cops and fake movie cops, both, smoked and ate. One guy bit off half of an enormous sesame bagel stuffed with cream cheese and lox, tossed the other half in a garbage can and began kicking a soccer ball around the huge yard of Steiner Studios. Beyond the yard that was surrounded by a high chain-link fence, twelve, fourteen feet, was the old waterfront. With the staggering view of Manhattan and the river, once all this had been the Brooklyn Navy Yards where World War II ships were built.

“What do you know, you haven’t been a cop since Shaft was in action,” I kidded him, drinking my root beer.

“I sit around all day and actors come by and we shoot the shit about being a detective, and I tell them how to walk and talk, make it look real.”

“How the fuck do you know how cops walk and talk?”

“It’s not brain science, you know, Artie, man. One of the producers, so-called, said to me, you have that authority thing, Sonny. You got it. Teach them.” He laughed. “I tell them how it is, then they go and put the girls in low-cut tops and tight pants. I mean, what female detective is going to fucking dress like that in real life? Or maybe they do now. Maybe the real ones get how they dress from the TV cops,” said Sonny, heading into one of his riffs. “Truth is nobody knows what’s real anymore,” he added. “A lot of actual cops I know have stopped using the old lingo. Once civilians started picking up stuff from Law and Order, you know, bus for ambulance or on the job for being a cop, guys started dropping it. Hard to tell the difference, right, man? Reality and fiction, man, who can tell?”

“Jesus, Sonny.”

“So you came by to chew the fat, shoot the breeze, what, Artie?”

Sonny sat back on his canvas chair and looked me over.

Small and tightly wound as clockwork doll, his hair is still black and I have to figure he dyes it because Sonny must be pushing seventy. He seems a lot younger, doesn’t look much different from when he recruited me out of the academy back when. Over the years, I had worked for him on and off, usually on Russian cases. He likes to remind me how green I was when he first spotted me. I talent-spotted you, man, he’d say, like he invented me. Used to make me nuts.

Growing up in Moscow like I did, I thought I was pretty streetwise. Moscow kids, we figured ourselves at the center of the universe, the center of a vast country that was always centralized. Moscow was the place where everything happened, politics, literature, science, movies, music, everything.

We thought we were hot shit. In fact, we were so cut off from the world, we didn’t know how provincial we really were until word began to trickle through. Back then, all I had from outside, the only evidence there was better, something that reminded me of my dreams, was the music, Willie Conover’s Jazz Hour on Voice of America, and a few illegal Beatles tapes.

Anyhow, when I met Lippert, I was new in New York, young, willing. Lippert saw he could use me. I spoke languages, I knew which fork to use, more or less, and Lippert told me he could use me on certain special jobs. I was plenty available for flattery, which Lippert doled out in just the right doses.

For years I didn’t trust him. I knew he used me when it was convenient, but, retired or not, he was still the most connected guy I knew in the whole city.

The cop actors vied for Lippert’s attention, asking him if they looked okay, if they walked okay, if they resembled the real thing. For a while, he passed out advice, and they sucked it up gratefully.

“You should get in on this consulting thing, man,” said Sonny. “It’s very competitive, I mean every ex-cop wants in, and some still on the job would love it, and I could help you get a gig if you want, you could be a movie cop, if you wanted, maybe even go on screen, like an extra or something, man. You’re still pretty good-looking. I could introduce you.” He glanced over at the fence that surrounded the studio, “Jesus, look at that,” he added.

Beyond the fence was a group of Hassidic men, with long black curls and big black hats, white shirts, black pants. They had been kicking a soccer ball around. Now they came to the fence, and stared, incredulous, hostile, at the fake cops. Maybe they figured them for the real thing.

A black actor was sitting on a canvas chair, reading, his back against the chain-link fence. He heard somebody rattle the fence and looked up. A Hassidic guy said something disdainful about blacks. The actor got up, body tense. Other actors crowded around him.

Insults were exchanged. You could feel the anger rise. Everyone started yelling. Only the fence kept them from fighting.

It was as if the Crown Heights riots were starting all over.

“Just fucking cut it out,” a crew member yelled. “Everybody, just back off,” he said, and then it stopped. On our side it was only make-believe, and there was the chain-link fence.

“Can we talk, please?” I said to Sonny again. “And not about make-believe, okay? Now?”

“Don’t get your hair in a braid, man,” he said and walked me across the cement courtyard, away from the crowd.

We sat on a cement block and he asked what was eating me, what I’d been up to.

I told him what I knew about the dead woman – or maybe she was a girl – on the swing, and about Dina, the kid who found her.

“You went there how? How come?”

“I was taking some books to an old lady in Brooklyn, that part doesn’t fucking matter, and I saw Dina running around in the street. I want you to tell me about duct tape, and about who does this kind of murder, does it ring any bells with you, anything you ever heard of? Sonny?”

“I heard about some, Albanian, maybe even Russkis, they get these girls, they prostitute them, the girls refuse, they try to run away, the creeps who own them do this kind of stuff. The duct tape, killing them this way, it’s a warning, keep still, don’t do anything, keep your mouth shut. It could be Mexicans, but I don’t think so, not around here.” He looked at his watch. “I can get out of here for an hour, if you want, I can take a look at the scene,” he said. “You have your car? I’ll follow you.”

I didn’t want Sonny at the scene, it wasn’t my case, it would complicate things, but he was already on his way to the parking lot. I saw he was eager, glad somebody had asked him about the real world.

“Murder Inc.,” were the first words out of Sonny Lippert’s mouth when he climbed out of his dark green Jag near Fountain Avenue.

I walked him over to the playground where I’d seen the body. It had been taken away, but forensic crews were still picking over the site. Lippert followed my gaze.

“She was there,” I said. “On the swing. Tied to it. Posed.”

“Go on.”

“Somebody was making a point,” I said. “Right?”

“Anybody look good for it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Weird, man, this is exactly where the mob used to dump the bodies times I was a kid,” said Sonny. “Murder Inc., Jesus Christ, it was famous, man, I mean we used to come over here and look for them. The bodies. You remember a song called ‘When My Bobby Gets Home’? We kids used to sing ‘When the Body Gets Cold’. All of us kids, all we wanted was to play ball for the Dodgers or join up with Murder Inc., maybe get to kill someone. Sometimes we did a cat, you know, strung it up from a light bulb, dumped the body out here. You don’t think it’s funny? Come on, Artie, man.”

“Listen to me, Sonny, try to think.”

“Yeah, yeah, okay, there were real Jewish gangsters then, big time. Jews and Italians got along, man, you know why?”

“Yeah, what’s that, Sonny?” I said.

“We were all short,” he laughed. “You know, we called this part of Brooklyn the Land of the Lost,” he added.

When Sonny Lippert set out on one of his riffs, when he rambled, you had to wait. Tangled in his past, he had to climb out of the web. It took him longer and longer these days. I sometimes felt he’d just disappear into his own past and never return.

“The Land of the Lost, used to be wild dogs, packs of them, around here because of the garbage dump close by.”

“Right.”

“I’ll make some calls, if you want,” Sonny said.

“Sure, Sonny, thank you. I should probably get going.” I knew there was no point keeping him here.

“You know you can call on me anytime, man, you know that.”

“Thanks.” I put my hand on his shoulder and he smiled slightly. “Thank you.”

“She was naked?”

“I don’t know.”

“Look for her clothes, man. I’m telling you, look for the clothes. You always find it in the clothes. They looked? Your girl on the swing, girl on a red velvet swing.”

“What?”

“Nothing, man. Just something out of a story,” said Sonny, then looked up as Bobo Leven appeared at the edge of the playground.

He greeted Sonny formally. He was polite, he showed deference. He asked him some questions about the case, what did Sonny think, did he have any insights? He was attentive.

“I have to go,” Sonny said.

“I’ll walk you,” I said, and went with Sonny back to his car.

“What is he?” said Lippert glancing towards the playground and Bobo Leven. “What is he, Artie, your Sundance?”

“He have anything interesting to say, Mr Lippert, I mean?” said Bobo when I got back to the playground.

“Anybody find the girl’s clothes?” I said.

“We didn’t find anything, not yet,” Bobo said.

“Put a few uniforms to work on it, Bobo, get some of the beat cops to look everywhere for the clothes,” I said and shoved the necklace with the blue charm on it in my pocket, and didn’t know why.

All the way to Brighton Beach the presence of the charm in my pocket, reminded me of the dead girl. I was going to meet Valentina Sverdloff. By the time I got there, I wished I’d unloaded the charm on Bobo Leven.

CHAPTER SIX

“Hello, darling Artie,” said Val as soon as I saw her at Dubi Petrovsky’s bookshop. She kissed me like a big sloppy puppy on the cheek, not having to reach up because she was as tall as me, just met me head on and kissed me. “Did you get my message?”

I’d come from the playground. By the time I got to Dubi’s, on Brighton Beach Avenue, people were out strolling in the late afternoon, a holiday afternoon, buying fruit, eating hot dogs, heading for the beach.

The bookshop was next to a juice bar. Dubi sold books in Russian, other Sov languages, English books on Russia, his own books on the Beatles in the former Soviet Union, other stuff too, CDs, DVDs, said you had to do it to stay afloat. He had added photographic equipment, old-style cameras, antique lenses, dusty packages of printing paper. From someplace in back “Penny Lane” was playing. I didn’t mention the girl in the playground to Dubi, or to Val; I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want it in my life.

“I got your message,” I said to Val. “Do you want to go swimming?”

“I need a favor,” she said.

“Anything.”

“Thank you.”

For a while Val had worn her hair chopped into a platinum crew cut, but she had started growing it and letting it go back to her natural red color. I liked it better. She wore a little white t-shirt and cut-off jeans.

“I was going to call you,” said Petrovsky, emerging from the back of the shop. “You thirsty?” he asked, then, without waiting, disappeared and returned, carrying a trio of cold Baltikas for us. “Good to see you, Artyom. You want this beer, young Valentina?”

She thanked him and asked about his own work, claiming his attention, his affection, like she always did. She was the most instinctively generous person I knew, curious about everyone. She rarely talked about herself, except to a few close friends, never dropped names; in spite of her height and beauty, she was a modest girl.

“What are you looking at?” She grinned at me, and went back to the books.

I drank some beer. “Go on, Dubi. You said you were going to call me?”

“This was a peculiar visit yesterday,” said Dubi, rubbing his hand over the high forehead, the large hawk-like nose. “This skinny guy in western boots comes by to look at books, he says, and makes conversation about you, tries to make it casual, like how good is your Russian, do you buy Russian books? I get this impression this is why he comes.”

“He gave you a name?”

“He used a credit card to pay for some stuff. R. Pettus,” Dubi said.

“Yeah, he’s nobody, Dube. Just a guy, an FBI agent I knew around 9/11, we worked some stuff together. He retired.”

“He buys a Russian-English dictionary, and says give Detective Artie Cohen my regards, if you see him.”

“Right.” I wondered, for the second time that day, what the hell Roy Pettus wanted. “It was probably nothing,” I said, but

I didn’t believe it. A cold hand seemed to brush my shoulder, like a ghost. Except I don’t believe in ghosts.

“I’m just going outside to make a call,” I said. “Val? You okay?”

She put her head up over the boxes. “Happy as a pig in shit,” she said. “Dubi has the most wonderful photographic books. I’ll be a little while longer.”

Nobody except a security guard at the desk in the FBI office answered when I called. It was a holiday. I called a number I had in Wyoming. All I got was a machine. I remembered Pettus had a daughter somewhere, New Jersey, maybe it was. There was a Cheryl Pettus listed in South Orange. A man who answered said she had moved. Finally I got her.

Cheryl told me sure, she was Roy Petttus’ daughter, and as it happened her dad was in town for her wedding. I told her who I was and she was okay with it, but said she had to go over to Seton Hall, the Catholic college where she was teaching a summer course. She said she’d get her dad to give me a call. Said she didn’t want to give out his cellphone. I said congratulations on the wedding, but it was urgent, and we hung up.

A few minutes later, Pettus phoned me back. Wanted to see me, he said, know how I was doing. I said fine, come on over, and he said I can’t tonight, rehearsal dinner, wedding tomorrow. What about Sunday, and I said, fine, what’s up, Roy, I thought you retired. He said, can you meet me Sunday morning?

There was nothing out of the ordinary in his voice, and I didn’t mention that I was pissed off the way he’d been going around asking my friends about me. That could wait until we met. Instead, I made a couple jokes. I said, so what’s with you, Roy, you back in the spook business?

CHAPTER SEVEN

“So what’s the favor?” I said to Val.

“Tell my dad not to go to London. Will you tell him? You will, right?”

“Why?”

“It’s not good for him, just trust me, okay?” She had come out of Dubi’s shop, her arms full of packages. “Artie? He’s going over to London. Soon.”

“Yeah, he told me he was going, but so what?”

“When did he tell you?”

“This morning. How come you’re so edgy?” I took her packages

“I worry about him, he’s such a big baby sometimes, he’s so like unbelievably ready to believe people.” She kissed my cheek. “You’ll talk to him tonight, okay? I’m sorry to keep nagging, but thank you, Uncle Artie,” she said, half mocking. “Well, you’re like an uncle. My dad and you, you’re like brothers, right? He always says. He’ll do what you tell him, he will.”

“You won’t go for his birthday?”

“No.”

“What’s up with London? You used to go a lot, you used to spend weeks and weeks there,” I was surprised by how urgent she sounded.

“I hate what London does to him, my dad, ever since he opened his club there. He behaves like one of those dumb-ass oligarchs, you know? He buys big-time art. You know the joke about the oligarch who says I just got a tie that cost four hundred bucks and the other oligarch says, I paid six hundred for the same thing. Daddy buys and buys and buys. It’s like he’s addicted, like he wants to be one of them.”

“He always bought a ton of stuff, he loves it.”

“Just listen to me, okay? I’m telling you, this is different. He hangs out with ugly people. Greedy, bad people. Russians. Crooks. They think they’re respectable, they put on this front, but they’re crooks. When it comes to money, they’ll do anything it takes.”

“So you’re telling me you don’t like London anymore.”

“It’s not a joke, okay?” she said, sounding bitter. “I don’t want to ever go back.”

“There’s something you’re not telling me.” We walked up onto the boardwalk.

“Just please trust me, okay, and don’t ask. You have to love me and my dad enough not to ask,” said Val. “Tell him I need him here. Lie if you have to. Promise me? If you love me, do this.”

I promised her. I would have promised her anything, much more than she knew.

“You still want to swim?” I said to Val a few minutes later when we were on the beach, sand warm underfoot. I put her packages on the ground.

She shook her head. “Too many rip tides this summer, Artie, too many people going under. I’ll wait for you. Go on. I’ll watch,” she said, and held up her camera. She watched while I took off my shirt and jeans. I felt shy.

“You look cute in those swim shorts,” said Val, and held up her camera. “Smile for me, Artie, darling. I’ll take your picture.”

The water off Brighton Beach was cold as hell, and I swam hard as I could, and it ran over me, waking me up, the sun deliciously hot on my head even late in the day.

I dove back in, tasted salt, spat out the icy water. I turned over on my back and felt the water slide over me, and buoy me up; I squinted into the sun and blue sky.

For a while I floated on my way back, then swam towards the toy-size ships on the horizon as far as I could. When I turned around, I saw Val on the beach, watching me, waving. As I ran towards her, she pulled a towel from my bag.

Around us families were picking up babies and plastic buckets, shaking out their towels, getting ready to go home. A pretty girl in a little yellow halter-neck top and a bikini bottom was sunbathing on the beach near me and she glanced over and smiled. I smiled back. I’m not dead yet, I thought.

We walked up to a restaurant on the boardwalk where the owner let me change my clothes in the bathroom. When I came out, Val was sitting at a table and we sat and drank and the day seemed to have spilled golden light over Brighton Beach, turning it into an Impressionist painting. Two elderly women, arms linked, held green and lavender nylon umbrellas over their heads, like parasols; a red-headed girl in pink sweats pushed an old lady in a wheelchair, while a dachshund, tied to the chair, trotted behind them; two old Russians sat on a bench in checkered caps playing chess.

People were settling into the cafes along the boardwalk. “Castles In The Sand”, an old Stevie Wonder number from an album called Stevie at the Beach, was playing somewhere, and then came the Temptations’ “Under The Boardwalk”, as if somebody had compiled summer music to go with the glorious weather.

I watched Val. So intent was she on what she was doing, she didn’t see me. She took a picture of three old men in wheelchairs playing cards. She snapped them just as one guy won the game with a triumphant slap of the cards on the fold-up table where they played.

“Why don’t you get a new camera?” I said, gesturing at the camera that was always around her neck.

“It may look like a junk-store relic to you, but it’s a Stradivarius to me, my darling,” she said. “I love my Leica M3-it puts me in the frame with all the greats, the guys from Magnum who invented photojournalism. Cartier-Bresson always said it opened his eyes and allowed him to grab those, you know what he called them, Artie? The decisive moments. I read he thought the silky noise of the shutter was like a Rolls-Royce door closing. Silky noise, wow. And it let him get close to things, this funny camera. Robert Capa took it to war, Eve Arnold took it around the world and into Marilyn Monroe’s secret life,” she added. “Okay, so I’m a fool for it, so I read too much about these people, but they’re my heroes. I love the feel of it-it’s like, I don’t know, like a part of me.” She picked up the camera again, and took my picture. “Anyway, it belonged to my grandfather in Russia. Am I boring the shit out of you? I bore all my friends with this camera shit.”

“You never bore me,” I said. “You want me to take you back to the city?”

“You have any gum?” said Val.

I put my hand in my pocket, digging for some chewing gum, and found the chain with the charm.

“Val?”

“Yes, Artie, darling?”

I took the necklace with the little blue and white charm out of my pocket.

“You ever see something like this?”

“Sure.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere that there’s crazy, superstitious people. Or fashionista babes, same thing. Rich Russian girlies like them with diamonds. Some believe this shit, remember the Kabbala stuff, Madonna’s red strings she was pushing? They buy into anything, even Landmark.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s the East Coast version of Scientology. No matter how many get degrees at NYU, the Russkis still believe hair grows on billiard boards. My best friend’s grandmother-she’s Ukrainian-is so superstitious, she thinks if you touch a Jew, you’re going to die from some Christ-killer disease. I once saw her staring at another friend of mine’s hair. I asked how come, she said she was wondering if this girl, who’s Jewish, had horns. She was serious.”

“What about this charm?”

“It’s just fashion. Artie. Where did you get it?”

I told Val and as soon as I told her I was sorry.

She turned it over. “Look, see, there’s this D on the back, it’s a party favor from a club named Dacha. Over in Sheepshead Bay.”

“You go there?”

“Once in a while,” she said. “People think Heaven is a cooler club, but Dacha has more action and also people eat pickles with their vodka like the old country and everyone dances like crazy. You want me to walk you over?”

“Yes,” I said, and suddenly there was a crack in the sky, a noise that split my ears. Boom. I started. Val jumped. She grabbed my hand and we ran up on the boardwalk as another rumble, like thunder, like war, and then we all looked up.

Fireworks exploded over Coney Island, red, white, blue, gold, Roman fountains, pinwheels, flowers, flags, somewhere the sound of a band, live, from loudspeakers, and everybody along the boardwalk, a solid wall of people almost a mile long, yelled and cheered.

“Happy July 4, Artie, darling,” Val said, kissing me on the mouth where the smell of her perfume and lipstick and suntan lotion stayed for hours.

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 résumé, 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?”

CHAPTER NINE

After I let Tito Dravic go back to work, I called Gloria and told her the dead girl’s name, I told her about the tattoo, and then I started for the street. I’d had enough of the club, the drunks, the heated-up flesh, the bad music. I was going back into the city, but there was something I had to do first.

As I passed the girls who had greeted Valentina on the street, one of them followed me. Her name was Janna, she said, she had carrot hair and a clinging little blue silk dress that was tight on her ripe burnished body. She was maybe twenty.

“Can we go out for a smoke?” she said. “Would you mind, Mr Cohen?” She was polite, and we went out to the street and over to the canal where the fishing boats were. Crowds of people sauntered up and down, cars honked, people waved American flags. The fourth of July.

Janna offered me her pack of cigarettes, and I took one. I figured if we smoked together she’d relax. She was tense, coiled up.

“You were in because of the girl that died, right?” she said.

“You knew that?”

“Oh, in these clubs talk goes around faster than the ecstasy goes down,” she said. “And Tito has a big mouth. He retails gossip as a way to hang out with us.”

“You don’t like him?”

“He’s okay. He’s just kind of low-class, you know?”

I showed her the picture.

“Masha Panchuk,” she said. “We liked her. We tried to help her.”

“Help how?” I said, and I saw this girl, this Janna, wanted in on the case, that she was curious, nosey maybe. Maybe like Dravic, she wanted to retail the story.

“We knew she needed a job. She didn’t have any family, only a grandma someplace in, I don’t know, Kiev, or somewhere,” said Janna. “There was a guy, a husband? She wanted out. She was just a good kid.”

“You Russian?”

Janna said she had grown up in London, and her parents were both Russian. Her friends in the club had Russian parents, but had been born in Brooklyn. They were at NYU, studying business.

“I don’t want the others to know about this, they’re American girls, they don’t know how anything works, and I don’t want to scare them. You know, I said to one of them, Don’t you long to travel, and she said, well, yes, but I couldn’t go anywhere I don’t feel safe. They’re frightened.”

“Listen, you want to help?”

“Yes.”

“You need to go back in the club?”

She couldn’t tell what I was after. I could see it in her unformed pretty little face.

“I don’t know. Why?”

“Where did Masha buy her clothes, where do girls out here get stuff? Show me.”

“There’s shops around Brighton Beach. Masha liked a lot of glitz.”

“Okay, you want to help, show me. My car’s around the corner.”

She hesitated, and then, rising to the challenge, to what she saw as a dare, she put her smokes in the little purse that dangled from a sparkly chain on her shoulder.

“Sure,” she said and she followed me to my car and got in, and jabbered while I drove back to Brighton Beach, jabbered half frightened, half excited. I could smell the excitement, especially when I hit the gas hard. She lit up another cigarette.

“I knew something was wrong,” said Janna. “She tried so hard to get it right, to dress right, she told me she had lived outside London, as if it gave her some kind of qualification, some kind of status is the word I want. Maybe because my accent is sort of English.” Janna looked up at me. “Everybody loved this girl, boys, girls, everybody, I don’t just mean in a friends way, I mean loved as in wanted, but also liked. She slept with a lot of people.”

“Was she hooking?”

“Probably. But there was this air about her that drew you in,” said Janna. “She said she was twenty-two, I think she was a lot younger, I mean like seventeen, and I’m pretty sure she was illegal. I saw her in the city at some club. You could talk to my dad.”

“You said your dad’s Russian?”

“Yes. Should I call you Detective? I’m sorry, I don’t know what to call you.” She pointed at a side street in Brighton Beach and I pulled into it, and she got out and I followed her to a shop. Even at this hour it was open, but it was a holiday and people shopped late.

“Here,” said Janna. “I know Masha had a dress that she got here.” She pointed at the rack of shiny clothes. The woman who ran the place glared at us. She figured me for Janna’s sugar daddy. Janna pushed the clothes along the rack. When she came to a short dress, pink with some kind of glitter on it, she stopped.

“It’s what I saw her in the last time. One, maybe two nights ago,” she said. “You want me to put it on?”

“It’s okay,” I said, but she had already disappeared into a dressing room.

She reappeared in the dress, plucked a platinum blonde wig off a rack of cheap wigs, the kind you get for Halloween. Imitating girls on a catwalk, in her high-heeled sandals and the wig and the pink dress, Janna strode up and down the room, admiring herself in a mirror.

“So she looked like this,” she said, as if she had cracked a big case. I realized now she was pretty wasted. I should have seen it earlier.

“It’s enough,” I said. “I have to go.”

“I could go with you.”

“Just get your clothes back on, and I’ll take you to the club,” I said and while she changed again, I saw the owner stare at me some more before she picked up her cellphone, dialed and began talking about me to someone at the other end. She was talking Russian. She probably figured me for a guy who came out to the Beach from the city to pick up little girls.

CHAPTER TEN

All the way back to the club, I felt somebody on my tail, somebody watching, following. I didn’t know who the owner of the clothing shop had called, didn’t know if she called local cops, or security people, to say there’s a creep from the city hanging around.

“Why can’t I stay with you?” said Janna. “It’s fun playing detective.”

I thanked her and told her to go back to her friends, realizing that I’d created a loose cannon. I didn’t know the girl. I didn’t know what she’d tell her friends, her parents.

I pulled up near the club, and got out with Janna and walked her back to Dacha where there was a long line at the velvet rope, the guy dressed as a Cossack standing at it.

“Thanks,” I said, and watched her go into the club, then come out again.

“Listen,” she said. “There’s this young guy, a cop, he’s here tonight, he comes a lot. He knew Masha, he could maybe help you.”

Dressed up, black linen shirt, cuffs turned back, white jeans, expensive loafers, hair freshly cut, a gold watch, bright against his tanned arm, Bobo Leven was greeting people everywhere in the club. He shook hands. He thumped them on the back, he gave guys hugs, he kissed girls. Then he saw me.

I cornered him, made him go into the bar.

“I thought you were working the case,” I said.

“I am working it, Artie, it’s okay, I know what I’m doing.” He greeted the bartender who brought him a Coke.

“So you’re a regular here, you must have known the dead girl.”

“I saw her a few times.”

“You already knew her name?”

“I wasn’t sure if it was Masha, not at first,” he said.

“You didn’t tell me?”

“You said you didn’t want to be bothered with this, so I didn’t bother you. You said you were on vacation.”

“That’s bullshit, Bobo.”

“You want to hear what I have?”

“Sure.”

“Masha had a husband named Zim Panchuk. From Lvov. Ukraine.”

“I know where it is.”

“They maybe met in London where they were both working, him as a truck driver, her as a maid. He took her to Alaska. He was legal. He had a job on the pipeline. Soon as they got there, and she was in America, she dumped him and probably came to New York right away.”

“Yeah, and the husband?”

“I called. He left his job two days ago. He went back to Russia.”

“You got a lot of stuff pretty fast.”

“I called around.”

“You didn’t think to call me?”

“I’m sorry, Artie. If you want I’ll keep you in the loop, I just thought you didn’t want in. But from now on, you’ll be my first call, man.”

“Yeah, well, I have to get back to the city. One more thing, Bobo.”

“What’s that?” he said.

“Where were you last night?”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A girl I knew slightly was coming out of the building with her dog, a dachshund, and we exchanged views on the noise in the street the night before and cracked some jokes about the tourists. She was going up on the roof one night and shoot at them with a beebee gun, she said, and I laughed. We agreed to get coffee some day and I felt better. Coming home here to my place off Broadway where I’d lived for fifteen years made everything okay. I was home.

Upstairs in my loft, I switched on the news and got scores from the game last night-the Yankees were so lousy this summer only a faithful dog of a fan like me would care. I was thinking of switching to the Dodgers. At least they had Joe Torre.

Already there was a report on the girl on the swing. Speculation had begun on Masha Panchuk. It was a holiday weekend and the news cycle was hungry and everybody had an opinion: it was drug-related; the work of some nutjob seeking attention; a crazed terrorist. There was even an item about a Brooklyn artist who made human forms out of duct tape he had purchased after 9/11 when the city bought the stuff in bulk so we could all tape up our windows against some future nuke attack. I turned the TV off.

With Clifford Brown on my stereo, and listening to the incredible “Joy Spring” solo, I got into the shower, let it pour hot and hard over me, then switched to ice cold. When I got out I looked in the mirror.

I was looking okay. I’d been sleeping, I had quit smoking for the most part, I lost a few pounds.

Clean clothes on, I fixed some espresso. My place was looking good. I’d bought it cheap years earlier when nobody wanted a place down here, and I had scraped down the old wood floors myself until they shone. Got some nice mid-50s furniture. Put up shelves.

On the walls were framed photographs of the musicians I love-Stan Getz, Ella, Duke, Lester Young, Dizzy, Miles. Maybe I’d retire and take lessons. My father had loved the music. Even in Moscow, he had loved it.

I checked my messages. Tolya had called twice, reminding me I was due at his club to sample new wines. Another friend wanted to know if I’d go fishing the following day. It was okay. Everything was fine. I was okay.

On that night when I drove over to Tolya’s place, Manhattan felt like a cruise ship, an overcrowded pleasure boat, getting ready to sink, but full of people having a ball as it sailed through the lit-up streets. Any minute, though, it would hit bedrock and start to go down, too loaded up with ambition, real estate, money, talent, sex, drugs booze, work, and always money. It was ready. It was ripe. Something had to explode.

In the summer, New York lived in the streets. Restaurants and bars spilled their customers out onto the streets, along the big avenues, on the grid of streets running river to river, and in the winding alleys downtown.

The streets were jammed with tourists gorging on the city, the dollar cheap. Everywhere you heard foreign voices, Japanese, French, Brit, all of them frenzied, rushing the bars, restaurants, even stores that were open late to service them, to sell them stuff, any stuff, sneakers, computers, sheets, like they were expecting disaster, their last best chance, as if they, too, somehow knew a crash was coming. The streets seemed to shudder from so many pounding feet, I felt I could feel them move, judder, throb, under my own feet.

Every transaction took place over food, booze, coffee, drugs as people hurried, hurry, hurry, to get some whatever it was while the stock market went up four hundred points, then down four hundred points. Oil skyrocketed, money was made out of smoke and mirrors and fraud, and there were more homeless out on the streets than I had seen for years.

Already one or two TV pundits were predicting recession, depression, the end of the world. George Bush said everything would be just fine and dandy, but nobody believed him about anything anymore.

A money guy I sometimes ran into at Tolya’s bar had told me the end was coming, that there really was something rotten in the financial world, something bad, that we were all going down, even the big banks, the brokerage houses, all of it. The end is coming, man, he’d say, and everybody would laugh. You’re like one of those preachers in the street, they’d say, and laugh at him, and then order another bottle of wine that cost a thousand bucks.

In a month or two or three, this guy insisted late one night, it will tumble, collapse, fall into a depression unlike anything since l929 and there would be bodies falling from skyscrapers on Wall Street, they way they had fallen from the Twin Towers.

I only half listened. I didn’t have any money anyway.

The West Village had changed since I first got to New York when, for a while, I lived in a crummy walk-up on Horatio Street and hung around the Village Vanguard to hear the music. Bums pissed on my front steps, but writers still went to the White Horse Tavern, and gay men haunted the Hudson piers where you could take some sun and smell the stink of pollution in the river.

All gone.

Brownstones on tree-lined streets housed movie stars, limos idled at the curb outside pubs where painters used to go back in the day, and nobody, not the writers or artists or jazz guys, gave a rat’s ass for money. Manhattan’s Old Bohemia had disappeared.

My head felt thick. I couldn’t stop thinking about Masha, the duct tape, the way she died. I parked in front of Pravda2, and went in, and then I knew what had been bothering me, making my head thick, making me edgy, unnerved by the noise and the night.

CHAPTER TWELVE

A wall of sheer noise rose up at me when I went through the door of Pravda2. The rosy light made the faces beautiful. Among them I looked for Val, but she wasn’t there.

“You’ll ask him, you promise, you won’t let him go to London, right?” I remembered her words. I didn’t understand her obsession, her urgency, the fear I had seen in her face. I’d tell Tolya, but later.

Over the sound system came Sinatra on an album he recorded in Paris, maybe his best. “They Can’t Take That Away From Me”, sang Frank.

I made my way to the bar. At the far end, Tolya was talking intently to a chubby guy in black, the two of them sipping red wine.

For a while I sat and drank a Scotch and watched the crowd, looking for Valentina. I asked the bartender if he’d seen her.

“She was in earlier.”

“Is she coming back?”

“I don’t know.”

Waiters slipped through the spaces between tables with finesse, the usual ballet, hefting plates, depositing platters of oysters and langoustines. I got a steak sandwich, very rare, on fresh French bread.

For Tolya food was not just fuel or even simply a nice thing. I once had to track him to the Bronx where he was examining some baby lamb at the uptown meat market. Food was central to life, he said, you could not exist without it, and what he wanted, he had to have.

Fresh mozzarella had to come from Joe’s Dairy on Sullivan Street the same day he ate it. A tongue sandwich on rye bread, he wanted sliced very thin, and the bread had to be rye, so fresh it was almost moist, with those little seeds and the mustard German and brown. He once described this to me for about ten minutes and then he said he had to get to the Carnegie deli because talking about the tongue made him hungry for it.

Sinatra sang “Night And Day”.

I waited until the club began to empty out, until there was only a couple at a little table, touching each other’s faces, and a small group of men still talking wine with Tolya.

There were times now I got the feeling he was playing a part, that he spent more than he had on his clubs, that he flew to London and Moscow all the time for show, that he was surrounded by people who clamored for his attention, but why, why these people, rich, but pompous, a lot of them, people who dropped brands and names? These days, Tolya fell for the kind of flattery that he would have laughed at once. Among them were Russian names, and I’d say, oh, come on, Tol, these people are creeps, these oligarchs you love so much, your Olegs and Romans.

“Don’t be an ass, Artemy,” was all he ever said.

At four the last customer left, Tolya came out from behind the bar, and rubbed his face.

“I’m just going to lock up,” Tolya called up. “Then we can drink serious wine.”

“How come you tend bar yourself?”

“This is for fun,” said Tolya, locked the front door, came back, took a cigar out of a box on the bar, put it in his mouth and lit it, puffed at it for a few seconds.

“Everything’s okay?”

“Sure.”

“You’re going to London?”

“You decided to come. Fantastic.”

“Why don’t you stay in New York instead? The weather’s better,” I said because I couldn’t think of anything else.

“Valentina told you to say this?”

“Yes.”

He laughed. “You’re not exactly subtle, Artyom.”

“Is she coming tonight?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. She didn’t say.” He stared at me. “There’s something going on with you and her?”

“Don’t be stupid,” I said, and finished my drink.

“You talk to her behind my back?”

“Fuck off.”

“Let’s go upstairs and have a drink,” he said, and held up a bottle of red.

“Not that stuff,” I said, gesturing at the single malt he always poured for me. “Just regular Scotch, okay?”

The wine in one hand, he picked up a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue, his idea of regular Scotch, led me to the back room, then up four flights of narrow stairs and out onto the roof. He was pretty nimble for a big guy.

“Sit,” he said, gesturing to a pair of overstuffed armchairs arranged on a worn red and blue Persian rug.

On a table between the chairs was a bottle of vodka in an ice bucket. Tolya put the Scotch and the red wine next to it. There was a short-wave radio. A small CD player with speakers.

We sat, he poured, he puffed his cigar, we admired the city lights. The late-night buzz was fainter now, the city turning quiet. I didn’t mention the girl on the swing. I didn’t want Tolya involved. He got involved, he brought in his guys, as he called them. They poked around, they screwed up my case. It had happened before. I didn’t need Russian muscle on this thing. It wasn’t even my case.

“So you like my nice roof here?” he said, and told me he’d finally bought the whole brownstone.

“I thought no more real estate,” I said, drinking the Scotch, which was delicious.

“Artyom, is teeny tiny little building, not real estate,” said Tolya in his fake Russki accent. “Times are not so good, Wall Street goes down the toilet, economy is shit, so I like to buy real estate for my kids, you know? I buy them little bit in New York, what can ever happen with real estate, right? Also, they like America. They are Americans,” he said. He chuckled, a big man’s laugh. “America, all is money, all is shopping malls and consuming,” he said, and when I mentioned his eighteen pairs of bespoke Gucci loafers, some in rare skins, all with eighteen-carat gold buckles, he only shrugged. “Shoes are Italian,” he said, and broke up laughing.

Tolya Sverdloff didn’t like America much. He didn’t like the politics, he didn’t like what he figured was the land of George W. Bush. He kept a place in the city, he did business here, bought and sold real estate-the huge penthouse near Sutton Place, the SoHo loft, another one in the Meat Market district. He claimed most of it was for the kids, for Val who loved the city and considered herself an American, and her sister at med school in Boston.

In the Soviet Union, Sverdloff’s parents had been stars among the Communist Party faithful, and well rewarded for it, his mother a movie star, his father a director. He grew up with access most kids like me had never dreamed of, and I didn’t have it bad as most.

The parents idolized certain American writers like Arthur Miller and Clifford Odets, actors like John Garfield in his day, and Bogart and Brando and musicians like Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger, but they had the Russian intellectuals’ prejudice against American culture.

To Tolya they said rock and roll was redneck music. He didn’t listen. Rock and roll was what got him through the Soviet years, he always told me, though it was the British stuff he loved most. The Beatles were his redemption and his rebellion as a teenager in the USSR, his line in the sand. “We didn’t rebel politically, there wasn’t any point, but we went into internal exile with the forbidden music,” he said. “It was different country then, this US of A,” he told me. “Music was incredible then.”

We argued. He pulled my strings. We drank. I told him, when I had had plenty of Scotch, that he was a sell-out, a rock and roll hero who became a businessman. He beamed whenever I said it. Money was his art now, the richer he was, the greater an artist. He was my best friend and he had saved my ass more times than I could count.

“You really love him, don’t you?” Val had said to me once, and she was right, of course, but we didn’t talk like that, we talked like guys.

That night, sitting on the roof, we drank too much and suddenly, sometime very late, Tolya said, “I’m going to London on Sunday, Artemy.”

“Already?” I thought about Valentina.

“Like I told you, I will spend my birthday there in my lovely city, this beautiful green place,” he said, pushing the graying black hair back from his huge forehead. “London!” he said, as if it were a woman he was crazy for. “This is so beautiful a city, you should come. Come next week. My birthday is next week. We’ll have a party. I’ll take you to my place in the country also, which is eighteenth century, and so beautiful and was previously owned by very famous politician.”

“What’s the big deal with London?”

“It is sympathetic to good food and great wine, and also to Russians, and it is a civilized country, a civil society, a place of laws and culture.”

“Enough about bloody London,” a voice said, as Val came through the door, walked across the roof, kissed me on the cheek, sat on the arm of Tolya’s chair and flung her arm around her father. “You’re obsessed,” she said.

“Hello, darling,” said Tolya. “What would you like?”

“I’d like for you not to go to London.”

“I won’t stay too long. I promise.”

“But we could have a nice summer here, we could go out to the house in East Hampton, we could go fishing together in Alaska, like we said, wherever you want. Please, Daddy?”

“Afterwards. I promise you.” He looked up at her, surveyed the floaty green summer dress she wore, and smiled. “You look nice.”

“Thank you.”

He loved his daughter better than anything on earth. They were connected in the most elemental way, father and daughter. I was jealous, not because I wanted her-which I did-but because of the way they were together. I have no kids. It makes me sad.

“Artie, the club, was it okay?” said Valentina. “You found what you needed?”

“What club?” said Tolya.

Again I held off telling him about the dead girl. It wasn’t just that he’d set up his own guys to investigate it. Maybe I didn’t want Val upset.

“It’s nothing. I was helping out a guy on a case in Brooklyn.”

“It’s Bobo Leven?” he said.

“Yes, but it doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t but whenever he comes in the club, I watch him, he’s like, what do you call it, grapevining all over you, listening to you, trying to pick your brains out,” said Tolya who was pretty drunk now.

“You’ll go swimming with me tomorrow?” said Valentina.

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll call you in the morning.”

“Not too early. I’m going to a party.”

“Now?” Tolya said, glancing at his watch.

“I’m a big girl, Daddy,” she said. “Daddy?” She got up and then squatted near her father, and took his hands. “Don’t go. Please.”

“What’s bothering you?”

“I don’t know. I just have this bad feeling, like I ate something off. They do bad stuff to Russians in London.”

“But I’m very small potatoes, my darling, nobody is going to bother me,” said Tolya. “I’m not Boris Berezovsky, after all.”

“Please?”

“I’ll think,” he said. “Don’t nag.”

She kissed him and got up to go. Tolya called after her.

“What is it?”

He took an envelope out of his pocket, and handed it to her. She looked inside and smiled. “Thanks, Daddy. That’s nice.” She kissed the top of his head. “You’re turning gray. You’ll have to start dyeing your hair,” she giggled. “See you both tomorrow, okay? Love you.”

When Val had gone, Tolya asked me again if I wanted to come to London with him. I said I couldn’t. What I didn’t tell him was that I wanted to stay in New York where Val was, that I wanted to go swimming with her and take her to dinner.

“How come Val’s so worried?” I said.

“She thinks they’re killing Russians, some silly shit, Artyom, in London.” For a split second he looked uncomfortable, then he said, “But this is just small, little part of things, and who except English would give asylum to so many people, and protect against bad guys? Also, me I am not in that league of oligarchs. I’m little guy, Artyom,” he said, dropping his articles everywhere, making himself sound like a peasant, as if he didn’t know better.

“But you’d like to be, wouldn’t you? A big guy,” I said, and saw that it bothered him, that his eyes shifted inwards. He wanted it. He wanted the whole thing. It gave me the creeps. It turned him into a man I didn’t really recognize. Then it passed. He laughed, and we had some more to drink, then he stretched out his legs, inspected his cigar, looked out at the Hudson River, then back at me and said, “It’s just business.”

“What kind of business? In London?”

“Restaurants. Wine. All my life I know that without good food, life is nothing, so now I am in the good-food business. In Europe they understand this. In Russia they understand. You have no idea, Artemy, these Russians, these guys, Dellos, Navikov, they get big respect, they are considered true food guys and they are Russians, not French or Italian, and they understand restaurants, they are changing Moscow, they spend money, they buy great chefs, and now they open up in London, London has become wonderful Russian province along with food center of the universe now.” He reached over and turned on the CD player, and put his head back and closed his eyes. “Tito Gobbi,” he said. “Don Carlos. Gorgeous, yes?”

For a while we listened, then Tolya suddenly said to me, “You know what is my favorite book, Artyom?”

“Nineteen Eighty-four,” I said, recalling how he had for years carried a tattered Penguin copy. He put it in his pocket and took it out once in a while to read a passage to me. I always told him Brave New World was much closer to the way things had been in the USSR, but Tolya loved Orwell very much.

“But also Slaughterhouse 5. Recently I reread this. I am also a pilgrim, like Billy Pilgrim, also unstuck in time, also tumbling in the ridiculous. This writer, Kurt Vonnegut, I love this man. I feel like that, London, Moscow, New York, planes in between, other places, nothing fixed, nothing regular, like many people these days, just falling free here to there. Even as a boy, I always feel I am in contact with creatures from another planet.” He smiled. “Not like UFOs, asshole, you know what I mean,” he said.

Glass in hand, Tolya got up and leaned on the parapet, looking out at the city. Suddenly, as he turned to look at me, I saw a look of pain cross his face, of sudden sharp physical pain held in. He put his hand to his left arm.

“What’s the matter with you?” I said. “Tolya?”

“Nothing.”

“Tell me.”

“I drank too much,” he said.

“What? Talk to me. Sit down, for chrissake.”

Sitting in the chair, he pulled up his pink silk socks.

“Come with me. You can be part of it, you know what is happening in London, how much money, how this lovely adorable government takes just teeny little taxes, and how they are civil and have good courts. Money, you can scoop off trees. This is stupid, still being a cop, Artemy, what for? Big stupid people are cops. You know what they call them in London? Detective Plod.”

“Pick,” I said.

“Pick what?”

“Pick money off the trees. Not scoop.”

“Ha ha. So your English is better than mine, I am younger than you. You’ll be fifty before me. You won’t come, will you? So you’ll watch out for Val, yes?”

“She’s not going to turn into a pumpkin, she’s twenty-four.”

“You’ll take care of her, won’t you? Artie? This is not some joke.”

“Yes.”

We drank and watched the sun come up.

“Good.” He got up. He held the bottle of Scotch out. I took a glass and poured a shot for myself. “Mr Pettus will ask you to watch me. This is why he came to my club, Artemy.”

“Why would he want me to watch you? Tolya?”

But he didn’t answer, just watched the sun coming up over Manhattan, and then fell asleep.

At six, Sverdloff dozing in his chair on the roof, I went home through the glorious New York dawn. I’d been up all night. I was exhausted, but edgy, the girl on the swing, Tolya going to London, Val trying to keep him here.

At home, I thought about the case, I made notes, I went out for a walk to clear my head. I wasn’t sure at all how long I walked along the East River, trying to get a fix on things. That evening when I got home, I got into bed and fell dead asleep.

Some time after dark-I leaned on one elbow trying to see a clock-the buzzer rang. It was Valentina. I let her in. Without a word, she took off her jeans and shirt, and slipped into my bed, and it was early in the morning before she left.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Sunday morning, Tolya left New York. He called early. He was waiting for me outside the yellow brick loft building where he lived in the old Meat Market. His black hair still wet from the shower, he looked sober.

“Why do I feel you have a case, that you’re working on something and you don’t tell me, Artemy? In Brooklyn? Val asked you about it at my club. You ignored her.”

“It’s a homicide Bobo Leven is working. I gave him the benefit of my wisdom,” I said.

“You don’t want to tell me?”

“It’s fucking grim, a young girl murdered. Just enjoy your trip, okay?”

“Take care of Valentina. I trust you with her only in public places.”

We laughed, but I felt sad and I couldn’t say why. Maybe it was the early morning, the soft balmy summer dawn, the kind when we had so often staggered home from parties together.

“I’ll try,” I said. “What airline are you on?” I added, making stupid small talk to change the subject.

“You think I am flying commercial? Please.”

He smiled. He seemed okay. He said that Valentina was still asleep at home and he had checked on her, and in her sleep, she had smiled at him. I didn’t say she had been with me. Somehow, I would redeem myself with him, one day, some day.

“You have keys for my place? In case,” said Tolya.

“Yes.”

“And all my phone numbers?”

“Yeah.”

“You’ll think about coming with me in business, in restaurants? You promise?” He looked at his big gold Rolex. “What’s the date, Artyom?”

“July 6. You okay?”

“Please, I just want to set my watch, you think I’m getting senile?” He adjusted his watch. “We’ll have some fun before it’s too late, Artyom. Okay? Before we die. Thought we’d die before we got old, like they say back in the day, right, when I was rock and roll god, but now we have to hurry up.”

For a second it occurred to me that-I’d thought it before- Tolya’s clubs were some kind of cover, but cover for what? I didn’t know. I didn’t want to know.

“One other thing, Artyom,” he said.

“Sure.”

“This Roy Pettus, stay away from him.”

“Don’t worry. I’m seeing him later, I’m going to tell him to fuck off, you know?”

“Don’t see him at all. Just don’t. These guys, Artyom, these spook people they are the same, they work together, they exchange information, it’s capital for them, like cash,” said Tolya. “I have to go now.”

He climbed into the black Range Rover that was waiting for him at the curb. He shut the door. He pressed his face against the window, pushed his hair back from his forehead. It was already gray at the roots. In the face against the window, I could see how he would be as an old man.

Don’t go, I wanted to say.

“Take care of her,” he mouthed through the car window.

Tolya put his hand, big, like a pale pink ham, flat on the window, a sort of farewell gesture, and I remember thinking, not knowing why I thought it, that I’d never see him again. Then the car pulled away.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

It was quiet downtown when I went to meet Roy Pettus, the Sunday of a holiday weekend. No lawyers cluttered the monumental steps of the courthouses, or leaned against the columns of this imperial New York, no supplicants or secretaries or jurors fed up with endless waiting, nobody except a few tourists heading for Ground Zero, and homeless men stretched out on benches in the shade of the trees. And pigeons. And pigeon shit.

It was sultry. I tried not to think about Valentina and couldn’t think about anything else. A few minutes later, I saw Pettus.

He crossed the street near City Hall, stopped to light up a cigarette, and then he continued towards me. He put up his hand in greeting. Then he held it out.

“Artie, good to see you.”

“You too, Roy.” I kept it cool.

He looked around, maybe from habit and said, “Can we walk?”

“Sure.”

We set off towards the Brooklyn Bridge. Pettus looked a lot older than I recalled but it was more than a decade. The sandy hair was white, cut short. The sunburned face was lined, the pale eyes watery. He walked straight, though, and he was dressed square as any FBI man: pressed chinos, white button-down shirt tucked in, cellphone attached to his belt. Only a pair of worn cowboy boots marked him as off duty.

I asked Pettus how Chugwater was. He said okay. I’d known him when he was an agent at the New York FBI office, must be fifteen years, and we both worked the nukes case on Brighton Beach together. Afterwards, he retired to Chugwater, Wyoming where he was born.

I drove through it once on a trip out west, but I didn’t know Roy’s address and I didn’t look him up. Wasn’t much there, just an old railroad siding, a grain silo, a couple shops and a place that made chili. And the endless empty spaces of prairie in all directions. I had wondered what it would be like, living in all that emptiness.

“Congratulations on your daughter,” I said. “The marriage. Cheryl, right?”

“Thanks,” he said.

I waited for him to give something away, tell me why he’d been bugging my friends. We walked. He smoked. In front of us the great gothic arches of the bridge rose in the early sky. The sun through clouds that had moved in turned the river to a stream of hot tin.

“So how come you’ve been talking to my friends, Roy?” I said finally. “You could have just called me up.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m sorry for that.” He didn’t explain.

“Tell me what you need,” I said pleasantly, and I could see he was confused. He had wanted me off my guard, angry maybe, pissed off at least. Figured he’d get more out of me, make me say something I didn’t want to say.

My father, when he was with the KGB all those years back, knew how to get information out of people better than anyone I ever met. In the 1960s and early 1970s, he was a star, enough of a star that they let him travel. He had been to New York.

Always be quiet, my dad had said. Always wait. Getting information is a sort of seduction. Be cool was his message, though he would not have used the word.

The blowhards, the guys quick on the draw with clever retorts, the furious, the overly confident, never learned anything worth knowing.

“So you’re here to celebrate?” I said. “You want a soda, a coffee Roy?” I spotted a guy with a cart a few feet away.

“Thanks,” he said, and I got a couple of Cokes and gave him a can. “You want to walk across the bridge?”

“Sure. You like the guy she’s marrying?”

“What?”

“Your kid.”

“Yeah, yeah, he’s fine. Nice boy, nice enough.” He was distracted.

“I’m sorry you didn’t call earlier, we could have grabbed some lunch,” I said. “I could have taken you by my pal Sverdloff’s new club, he serves nice wine.”

He nodded.

“You’re back on the job?” I said.

“You knew?”

“I was guessing. Lot of guys went back, you were pretty much always a patriot,” I said.

“Since after 9/11,” he said. “Had to do it.” Pettus added, leaning against the brick structure at the center of the Brooklyn Bridge and looking out at the river. “Mostly I work out west, out of Denver, closest place to where I live where there’s a big office.”

“I’m guessing you get here to the city, though, some of the time, that so, Roy?”

“Yeah, sometimes I do some stuff here.”

“Who with?”

“Liaison stuff. Your guys. Ours. Joint Force on Terrorism. This city is the only place they do it right. You didn’t just wait on Washington.”

“Right,” I said.

“Critical,” he said. “Without them, we’d be screwed.”

Pettus put the Coke can to his lips and swallowed the rest of his Coke. He walked to a trash basket and deposited the Coke can, walked back, lit a cigarette and offered me one. I didn’t want it.

“You’re good with languages, aren’t you?” said Pettus. “You’ve lived different places. You have friends.”

“I’m just a homicide detective, Roy, that’s it, and I’m on vacation.”

“You’re better than that.”

“There is nothing better,” I said, and he smiled.

“Your old boss, Mr Lippert, I mean, he used to say you were sharp and smart and you knew your way around. Worldly, was the word I think he used,” Roy said.

In silence, we walked down the slope of the bridge towards the Brooklyn end, and I turned and started back again. Pettus had trouble keeping up and I stopped for a minute and let him catch his breath.

“Artie, there’s no vacation from the terrorists. No vacation. And it’s coming again, Artie, we just don’t see it, it’s coming in a nuke in a container on a ship into Jersey, it’s coming over the Mexican border, it’s coming in some kind of financial meltdown.”

“We’ll be okay,” I said, as we walked to the Manhattan side of the bridge. “In New York we got really good guys, we get good intel on terrorists now, we even send our people to Tel Aviv, London, Pakistan, as soon as there’s an incident, we get our own people on it.”

“That’s what I mean,” said Roy.

“What do you mean?” I said. It was hard keeping cool. I was angry at Pettus for going to Dubi, and to Tolya. “What’s on your mind, Roy?”

For a while he talked some more about terrorism and patriotism, and then he said, “We need you. We need your skills. We need you in places where you can learn what’s going on.

And then I understood.

“You’re saying you want me to be a spook, a spy, a curtain-twitcher, as my mother called them? You want me as a creature- for what, for who? Your people? The CIA? Listen, Roy, man it’s not me, I’m sorry, but I don’t do that stuff. I do cases here in New York. We fight our own kind of terror, homicides, rapes, like always. Maybe Sonny Lippert’s been reading too many spy novels.”

“There are no local cases anymore, Artie. Everybody’s caught up in a spider web of shit, it encircles the globe like the ozone, you follow up something, it takes you somewhere else, borders are fluid, easy to get across, nothing is local.” It was the longest speech I could remember him making.

“This was your idea? Talking to me?”

He nodded.

“Your idea to go to my friends, too, to ask around about me?”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“You knew they’d tell me.”

“I’m sorry about that. People say you still speak good Russian, no accent.”

“You went to see Dubi Petrovsky for this? This is why you saw him?”

“Yes.”

“You asked him how good my Russian is?”

At first I had thought it was my Arabic Roy was interested in, and I didn’t get it because the Arabic I learned in Israel was pretty basic stuff. Now it was clear, the reason for him asking how good my Russian was, I put it all together. I’d been stupid not to see exactly what he was after. But I made him spell it out even while I watched the river, the skyline, the city. My city. Mine. I wasn’t going anywhere else.

“I’m not leaving the city or my job, so you can forget about it,” I said.

“This is another Cold War we’re in, Artie. Things are moving fast. The FSB-what they’re calling the KGB now-run the whole show. They run Russia.”

“I know what the FSB is.”

“Everyone thinks they just got some kind of Russian-style capitalism, maybe a little light authoritarian stuff till they get the economy fixed, but that somehow they’re okay, and they’re our pals. Bush says he looked in Vladimir Putin’s eyes and saw his soul. What’s he think, it’s some kind of prayer meeting? And John McCain he looks at him and sees KGB on his forehead, and he says so, and he thinks this is the way you deal with them?” This was a blaspheming kind of thing for somebody like Pettus who had always been a good Catholic, not pious, but devout, and also a staunch Republican who thought Ronald Reagan was a dead god, and who would walk over broken glass for a guy like McCain. Pettus had been in the Marines in Vietnam.

“I work homicides, it’s all I do, okay? I’m speaking loud enough?” I said. “So I speak Russian, so what? What the hell do you want with me being a, whatever it is, some kind of spy bullshit? I mean they have all that lingo, they talk about trade-craft and curtain-twitchers, and moles and shit. I guess I could study up, read the books.” I kept my tone light. “Why didn’t you just call me for fuck’s sake, Roy?” “I’m sorry. It was stupid. I don’t know. I get used to doing things a certain way. If it will help, I apologize. I’ll apologize again.”

“Right.”

“This Russian thing’s serious. We get calls for help from the Brits, especially, who are in bad shape. They didn’t see it coming, they were obsessed with the Islamic stuff. Ever since Litvinenko, that Russian that died from polonium in London, everyone’s going nuts. Artie, the Russians poisoned one of their own, he got out of line, they killed him on British soil.”

“I heard nobody was exactly sure what happened.”

“I’m telling you the truth. The Brits, they’re paying big time for their government that opened the door, they got greedy, they let rich Russians into London, tax free, and the money came and the crime followed. It’s coming here.”

I’d had no plans to leave New York before last night, and after, after Val stayed with me, I was never going away. We didn’t say anything. We hardly spoke. After I left Pettus, I’d call her. I wouldn’t push her. I’d buy her breakfast was all. Or lunch.

“I have to go,” I said, and we walked to the Manhattan side, and off the bridge. “You think I live in some bizarro alternative spook universe? Honest to god, Roy, how in the fuck would I ever know anything about being a spy in a foreign place? What do I know about London?”

“You worked a case there once.”

I smiled. “You’ve been in my files.”

“I’m just talking, right? You can relax,” said Pettus, tossing his cigarette on the sidewalk and putting it out with the worn toe of his brown cowboy boot. “I’m just here to shoot the breeze with you, just passing through. Get your view of things is all. I always got an interesting angle off of you, Artie. Always valued it. Like running things through a different prism.”

I accepted what Pettus said but deep down I felt it was bullshit. He had a job in mind for me, and I wasn’t going anywhere, I wasn’t leaving New York.

“Right,” I said. “You’re pretty interested in helping the Brits.”

“We owe them. My dad was Canadian. He was in the Air Force. He went over in l940 and flew in the Battle of Britain. The Brits did it for us then and they’re doing it for us now.”

“It’s a long time ago.” I put out my hand. “Roy, keep in touch.”

“You know these people, Artie. You come from there. You speak the language. You understand the territory. You got it in the blood.”

“What the hell is that? I was sixteen when we left Moscow.”

“You got a feel for it, though.”

“Who says?”

“I’m not going to talk patriotism to you. Like I said, I just wanted to chat, honest to God.”

“There’s a load of Russians, very patriotic, very devoted to the USA and right here in New York. You probably got a few in Wyoming.”

“What about your friend, Sverdloff? He devoted? I heard he doesn’t love America.”

“What about him?”

“He spends time over in London. Got himself a club here, a club there, another one in Moscow, he has houses everywhere, hangs out with the real money. Isn’t that the truth, Artie? You’re pals with him, with his kid, too?”

“How the fuck do you know that?”

“Why? It’s a secret?”

“Is that what this is about, about Sverdloff? You want me to spy on my friend? Go fuck yourself.”

“Come on, Artie, man, you know Sverdloff is one of theirs.”

“What the hell do you mean?”

“I mean Russian.”

“Sverdloff isn’t a spy.”

“Don’t be a horse’s ass, Artie. Sverdloff will do whatever he has to do.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“We’re in trouble, Artie. The whole damn free world.”

“I haven’t heard that line for a long time.”

Pettus got out his smokes again, lit one and offered me the pack.

“Can we talk again?”

“It won’t make any difference.”

The phone rang while we were talking. I looked at the number. It was Valentina. I didn’t want Petttus watching me when I talked to her.

Have breakfast with me, she had said earlier before she left my place. Let’s have breakfast.

“You’re in a hurry?” said Pettus.

“I’m in a hurry,” I said. “I have to go,” I added, left him in front of City Hall and called Val back.

“I’m looking at the ocean,” she said. “It’s such a gorgeous day.”

For a moment I thought she had gone away. I felt panicky.

“Where are you?” I said. “Val?”