Londongrad

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Doing ninety, I was in my car heading for Brooklyn to see Valentina. I had left Roy Pettus, broke away from him and his terrorist fables about the Russians. I wasn’t leaving New York for London. I wasn’t going into the spook business.

Alongside the Belt Parkway was the water, the harbor, the sunlight on the Statue of Liberty making it glisten. I had driven this road a thousand times, past Red Hook and the ancient warehouses, past the new cruise-ship port, the parks and garbage dumps. I knew every landmark, but I hardly saw them now, just drove as fast as I could and listened to Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Sevens, “Potato Head Blues” making me even happier than I already felt.

Hearing Val’s voice, I felt happy. And anxious. I wasn’t sure how to behave. For her it hadn’t been-I didn’t know what it had been for her. For me, something else, something like hearing Armstrong for the first time. I was forty-nine years old and I felt like a kid.

I went back over every word of the brief conversation we’d had half an hour earlier, when I was leaving Pettus.

“Come on out. I’ll buy you breakfast,” said Val. “And we can swim, if you want,” she said.

“Where are you?”

“Brooklyn.”

I was so relieved she was only in Brooklyn, I started laughing.

“What’s the matter?” said Val.

“Nothing. Where in Brooklyn?”

“You remember that apartment my dad bought for his mother, my grandma, Lara, when she came to America, before she died? Did you ever see it?”

I remembered.

“I’m on my way.”

“Good, I want to see you. Coffee’s on,” she said, and laughed, the throaty, dark laugh that was like an older woman. “If you’re good, I’ll buy you blintzes,” she added. “Strawberry.”

“I could meet you someplace, we could eat someplace,” I said, nervous now.

“Come to the apartment first.”

I had planned to go to Dacha, the club in Sheepshead Bay. Tito Dravic, the manager had promised me a video and some paperwork on Masha Panchuk, the dead girl on the swing. It was still early.

In Brighton Beach near the boardwalk overlooking the ocean was a condo built half a dozen years ago for Russians who had made some dough in America but didn’t want to leave the neighborhood. Old people, mostly. Others who had moved up and out, Long Island or New Jersey, kept an apartment for the ocean view, the shopping, sentiment, an investment.

Tolya Sverdloff had bought a condo for his mother the time she was in America. I didn’t know that after she died, he had kept it.

A doorman with gold braid on his shoulders was reading the News in the lobby and when he saw me, he faked a smile and buzzed the Sverdloff apartment, and I went up in the elevator with an elderly couple, their arms piled high with bags of food. I could smell the lox.

“Come on in,” her voice called. The door was open. I went into the apartment and saw her.

Behind a makeshift desk near the window, talking into the phone, reading some papers, doodling in a notebook, her face was scrubbed, no make-up, a pencil stuck behind her ear, she wore a red blouse with long sleeves and a white cotton skirt that fell below her knees. Her feet were stuck in a pair of yellow flip-flops. From somewhere-her iPod, maybe-came the sound of a lovely bossa nova track.

“Hey, Artie.” She looked up, pointed at the phone, at a chair. “I won’t be long, okay? There’s coffee on in the kitchen, honey, and you could grab me a mug, too,” she added.

I remembered the place. When Tolya bought it for his mother, he had furnished it with a black leather couch and some easy chairs, which were still here but piled with files and folders and books. On the wall was a bulletin board with the names and addresses of orphanage facilities and shelters in Russian. Tacked to the cork board were also six of Val’s photographs of Russian children. Staring into the camera, the kids looked bruised, tired, hopeless.

Most of the bedroom furniture was gone-the old lady, Tolya’s mother, Lara Sverdlova-had had a taste for frilly covers and gilt mirrors. All that remained was a bed covered with a plain white linen spread. That, and a large movie poster with Lara as a young star in an old Soviet picture. In it, she was dressed as a farm girl riding a tractor, and it made me smile. Sverdlova had always been glamorous and even in a babushka, and on the tractor, she was perfectly made up, and her hands manicured. My dad had adored her.

In the small kitchen coffee was dripping into a glass. The smell was intense, and I poured it into a couple of mugs and went back to Val.

She beamed, got up, kissed me on the cheek. “You like my disguise?” she said indicating the blouse and skirt.

I gave her the coffee. “I like it,” I said.

“I deal with a lot of poor ex-Soviets now, some from the Stans, Uzbeks, Tajiks, those people, and the Bukharians, I always think it sounds romantic, the region is called the Silk Road, you know? Tashkent, Dushanbe, really, really isolated and strange, and suddenly they’re in America. People just hanging on. Some of them are religious, I don’t go around in shorts or tight stuff, it makes my job easier if I look okay to them. But the ones who don’t make it out are in real shit,” she added.

“How come?”

“They live in these backwaters. I went once, it’s incredible, like something out of prehistory, and there’s no money, and no work, so they go to Moscow and eventually some of the girls end up working the streets, or the train stations, or worse. The people here get the news, family members get in touch, I try to put my people in Moscow in contact. Sometimes it’s the girls themselves,” she said.

“How come I didn’t know about all this?”

“I only started not so long ago. You didn’t convince my dad to stay, I guess,” she added.

“I’m really sorry. I tried.”

She shrugged. “It’s okay. I saw him before he left. He said he’d make the London trip short. I hope he will.”

“What was in the envelope he gave you at his club?”

“You’re a nosey bastard,” she said, and grinned. “He gave me a big fat check for my little foundation.”

“I could give you a check.”

“You’re adorable, Artie, let’s not talk about depressing stuff, let’s go eat and maybe have a swim, or sit in the sun.”

“I want to hear more about your work,” I said. “I do.”

“I’ll tell you while we eat,”she said.

“I don’t know why you’re not fat, you eat all the time.”

“Maybe it’s genetic.” She picked up a copy of the Post from a chair. “You know about this, Artie?” Val showed me the picture of Masha Panchuk in the paper.

“Yeah, I heard.”

“When did you hear?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I knew her,” said Valentina. “Masha, right?”

When we were settled at a cafe on the boardwalk, and Val had ordered smoked fish, having changed her mind about the blintzes, and we were both drinking Bloody Marys, she asked me again what I knew about the dead girl.

“What do you mean you knew her?”

“That club out in Sheepshead Bay, the one I walked over to with you Friday night, Dacha, or maybe someplace in the city. It didn’t snap into place until I saw the paper. I recognized her from the picture, not the taped-up one, Jesus, Artie. Sometimes I wonder.”

I was surprised by Val’s cool, her composure. Most people, unless they’re on the job, pull back when the talk turns to dead people, to the cases filled with bare-knuckle ugliness.

“It doesn’t bother you, talking about it?”

“Of course it bothers me, but not the way people think,” said Val. “The stuff I see in Moscow is pretty shitty, so at least it makes me less of a pussy crybaby than most of my friends.”

“What kind of stuff?”

While I was asking, the food arrived, and Val dug into the huge platters of smoked salmon, whitefish, sable, sturgeon. She put butter on her bread, and piled it high with fish.

“What kind?” she said. “Little girls put out to work as prostitutes, parents who slash them, I mean on their faces, with rusty razor blades, if they refuse. This is big business in Moscow and no one does anything.”

“Tell me about Masha Panchuk. How well did you know her?”

“Was that her last name? I didn’t even know. I knew she was Masha, I got that, I remember, but I hardly knew her at all,” said Val. “Some of my friends told me she was illegal and I tried to figure out what to do for her, but I couldn’t, so I would give her little presents, stupid shit that girls like, a little purse, some make-up, I don’t know, some money or something, and I asked my dad about her, but he didn’t like me going out to the clubs, and anyhow, I’m always shoving my giant feet into things, so I just let it be this time.” She waved at the waitress, called her by name, asked Tanya how the kids were, and asked for more coffee. “Maybe I should have stayed with it, I mean helped Masha out, but I didn’t. Also, I pretty much stopped going to clubs last winter, you know, I mean I’m too old.”

“You’re twenty-four,” I said

“Yeah, but old for my years.” She laughed and ate more fish, and more bread, and thought about cheesecake. Val leaned back and looked at people on the boardwalk. “You want to swim?”

“I’d sink if I swam after all this food,” I said.

“What are you doing for dinner tonight? You could buy me an early birthday dinner if you want. Weird that my pop and I have the same birthday, isn’t it?”

I was flustered. I tried my usual line of joking with her.

“You’re supposed to think of me as your uncle or something,” I said. “Anyway, your father would not just kill me but do it slowly in little pieces, like the worst stuff he ever learned from his not-so-nice-nik friends. You know how they killed people in old Russia? You want me to tell you how they did it, Val? You’re thinking Pugachev, the bandit outlaw, from old times, right? I read the Pushkin story. They really did nasty stuff.” Val picked up her fork. The middle finger on her left hand was missing. She saw me looking at it.

“I know, my dad worries because he thinks this is his fault.”

When she was ten, Val was snatched from the Sverdloffs’ apartment in Moscow. It was the 1990s, the gangster years in Russia, and Tolya was in real-estate deals with bad people.

Tolya had been at home when they took Val, but he was dead drunk, fast asleep. He never got over it. It was his fault and he knew it, that they took his little girl, kept her for three days, cut off her finger and sent it to him. He left Moscow after that, and took his family to Florida to live in a gated community.

He offered Val plastic surgery. The best, he said. He urged it on her. You’ll be like new, he said. She refused. She wore her stump like a badge of honor, the way she wore everything- her beauty, her height.

She was a passionate, funny girl, but there were times when her eyes turned inward and she seemed far away. Maybe it was to do with the kids she helped in Moscow, the things she had learned that made her want to cut out, to stop the world. There were times I thought of her as a girl in a garden, dreaming, planning, a book on her lap, her eyes shut, listening to the crickets and the wind.

“I’m a mutant, Artie, darling,” she said. “I’m too tall and too weird. I take pictures because I’m obsessed with looking at people. Sometimes I find myself staring at them in restaurants or on the train. I want to know everything. It’s just how I am. I once ate a little piece of film, a piece of the negative, to see what it was like, see if I could make it get inside of me-Jesus, Artie, why does my dad have to be in London?”

“He likes London.”

“I know, and I’m a grown woman and I should let him live his life.” She gulped her coffee and added, “I just like it better when he’s here.” She got up.

“Where are you going?”

“What, my dad put you on my tail? I have to go pick up some stuff so I can pack it up.”

“What stuff? Where are you going?”

“For the kids, clothes, meds, stuff. I send it ahead of me to Moscow. I’ll probably go over in a couple or three weeks, and then only for four, five days, it’s just I need to get things ready.” She sounded defensive.

“Tolya knows?”

“Maybe. Butt out, darling. Look, I’m just going to Moscow to do a few things and spend a few days with my mom who’s on vacation.”

“I thought she lived in Boca.”

“Yes, so what?” Val was exasperated by all my questions. “She does live in Florida, but she can afford to travel now, so she travels, my dad gives her whatever she wants, even though they’re divorced, he says, she is the mother of my children, you know? In that pompous voice he puts when he’s on a roll? My mom has a great big dacha near Barvika, outside Moscow, okay, everything she dreamed of when she was a girl and she married my dad, and they lived in a one-room apartment in Moscow, back in the day. But her tastes she developed in Boca, right?” Val smiled at the idea of her mother’s tastes. “So she has the condo in Boca, and a place in London, and a great big dacha in Barvika, I mean huge, with a fabulous pool with faux Impressionists painted on the bottom.

“She was just this provincial Russian girl when they got married, and he was like this big rock guru in Moscow, and he performs and she lies down on the stage one night and licks his boots. She was gorgeous. What a crazy time, I wish I was there, the 80s sound so fabulous in Moscow. Well, whatevs. Anyhow, my mom’s new dacha has marble and gold taps, and there’s a tennis court, and a pool, one indoors, one out.”

“What about her boyfriend?”

“He loves it. You remember him? The one who wears the yachting cap and the real gold buttons on his blazer? He has money, but now he feels he has class. I mean he’s global now. I think he comes from New Jersey. So, you see, I’ll be in safe hands. You should come visit. Moscow is wild. Daddy’s club is hot, he’s a star, he’ll be going on celebrity chef or something, or celebrity wine master, whatever.” She leaned over the table. “I love him a lot, Artie. I love my dad, you know, more than anyone? I won’t do anything to make him worry, I promise. Or you.”

“But you’re careful, right? I mean you don’t get crazy when you talk to officials over there, about the kids you help and stuff.”

“Of course not. But it’s fine, it’s all really official, we get help from NGOs, we get help from the US ambassador. You think I want to get involved with anything weird over there? Forget about it. I’m an American. I’m a perfect American girl, right?” She pursed her lips and made a rueful noise.

“You have a Russian passport?”

“Yes. Also.”

“You travel a lot, you, Tolya.”

“We like to travel,” she said, half sardonic. “Movement is everything. My mom remembers when she was my age, the only place she was ever allowed to go outside the Soviet Union was once to Bulgaria.” She put her hand up to her head. “God, my head hurts,” she said.

“You okay?”

“I’ve been feeling kind of weird lately, I don’t know, my stomach, my head. I’ve been using some new chemical in my darkroom, I think the smell makes me feel bad.”

“What kind of stuff?” Tell me, I wanted to say. Tell me and I’ll make you feel better whatever it is.

I wanted to put my arms around her, but I just drank my coffee.

“Oh, Artie, it’s nothing. Listen, did my dad ask you to work for him again?”

“Yeah, every other day. I think he feels sorry for me because I’m always broke.”

“Don’t go into business with my dad. You wouldn’t like it.”

“Why not?”

“That would mean the end of your love affair.”

For a moment I thought she meant us, her and me, and I was startled.

“What love affair?”

“You and my dad, of course,” said Val. “Not like that, you idiot, I mean, never mind. It’s about the best kind, about friendship. But if you went into business, you’d have to do things you wouldn’t like. It would offend your moral code,” said Valentina.

“I don’t have a moral code. You make me sound like some guy with a poker up his ass. What moral code?”

She sat down again, this time on the edge of a chair, put her elbows on the table and her face close to mine. “Well, not that kind,” she said and kissed me lightly on the lips. “For sure not that kind, Artie. We got past that last night, didn’t we? That kind of crap that says I’m too young for you, you hear me?”

I nodded.

“I’ll tell you everything tonight, I will, I promise.”

“Yes.”

“And you don’t remind me of my uncles one bit,” she added, leaned over the table again and put her hands on either side of my head, and I thought to myself: don’t do this. I thought to myself: don’t feel like this. Stop. I was besotted, but it was temporary, it was a fantasy, it was like falling for a girl in a movie. Wasn’t it?

The hours she had spent in my bed weren’t casual for her, I knew, but it wasn’t for the long term. I was too old. I was her father’s best friend. I wanted her so bad I could hardly look at her, but I had to, I had to pretend we were still just friends, just family, the way we always had been. I felt, in the far distance, a little door closing.

“Tonight?” I said.

“You’re going to take me to dinner,” she said. “Don’t look so serious,” she added.

“I’m fine.”

“You look gloomy as hell,” she said, then leaned over, kissed me three times on the cheek and the little gold cross she wore on a thin chain dangled against my forehead, as if she were a priest making the sign of the cross so I’d be safe. “I have to go,” she added. “I’ll meet you. Dinner. Around nine. Ten? And we could go to a late movie after? Or dancing?”

“Dinner,” I said. “Yes. Where?”

“My friend Beatrice’s, over in the East Village, you know the place? She cooks that fantastic spaghetti carbonara, my dad loves it, we go and he eats like everything on the menu.”

“On East 2nd Street, right? Ten.”

“Around ten,” she said.

I kissed the top of her head and said, casually as I could, “See you tonight.”

“Darling, I always show up for you, you know that, sooner or later. Sometimes later, I know, it’s my vice, bad time-keeping, but for you, I always show up.”

“Promise?”

“Artie, I do love you.”

All I could do was scramble in my jacket pocket for some money to pay the check. I couldn’t look at her, I couldn’t say what I wanted to.

“Artie?”

“What?”

“People worry about me, I say, listen, I was named for Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, and she came back, so I always come back, too. I’ll definitely be there.” She kissed me on the cheek once more, stuffed the last piece of cake into her mouth. “You are stuck with me, Artie, darling. So I’ll be there, or as we used to say when we were little kids, cross my heart and hope to die.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The club on Sheepshead Bay was shut up. Closed on Sunday, a sign said. Tito Dravic had told me there was a house on the next block that the club owners used as an office, and I walked around the corner. A row of small ramshackle houses was on the narrow side street. The trees cast shadows on the sidewalk. Nobody was around except a tiny kid riding a tricycle up and down the street.

On the porch of one of the houses was a stack of beer cases, a crate of wine, another of vodka. I figured it was the right place. Next to the door was a piece of paper taped on the wall, a message scribbled on it: ‘Deliveries for Dacha’, and below it a cell number. I called the number. Nobody answered.

The door was locked from the inside. I called Dravic’s name. It was quiet. Too quiet. I was sweating in the heat, and unnerved. Dravic had said he’d be there, but when I knocked and then called out again, nobody answered.

At the back of the house was a patch of yard with scabby dry grass, a plastic table and chairs. The back door was shut but not locked and I went into the kitchen where crates of booze and glasses were piled everywhere. On a table was a package wrapped in brown paper. On top was an invoice from a local printer. Inside were flyers for the club. I was in the right place. The office, Dravic had said.

It was too quiet. No noise. Nothing. Somewhere outside, a car revved up, pulled away. I ran outside, but it had gone.

In the house again, I went through the kitchen into a room where computers and phones sat on two large tables, there were three scratched filing cabinets, a big flatscreen TV, more crates of liquor, a yellow fake leather couch, a few chairs.

I looked everywhere. There was something wrong, somebody had left in a hurry. Dravic maybe.

The drawer of a filing cabinet was open, paper spilled out. There was paper on the white shag rug. The couch was rumpled, the pillows tossed around as if somebody had been digging around, looking for something. When I pushed aside the dirty drapes at the window, I saw an envelope half-hidden on the sill. It had my name on it.

Did he leave in a hurry? Had he hidden the envelope on purpose? Did somebody come looking for it?

I didn’t wait. I took it and left, same way I’d come, through the back door and the yard and around to the street where my car was parked.

Somewhere I heard a door open. I looked down the row of houses. I didn’t see anyone. Then it banged shut and I got into my car, tossed the envelope on the seat next to me, and turned the key. As soon as I pulled away from the curb I stepped on the gas.

I was a couple blocks away from the house when my phone rang and it was Bobo. He said he had an address for Masha, that he was headed for her apartment.

“You want to come with me? I mean, could you come? I’m getting fucked up on this case, Artie, I’d appreciate it.”

“Sure,” I said. “Give me the address. Where is it?”

“Near Neptune Avenue,” he said. “Where the Paks live.” “Everybody here likes Masha,” said the guy at the video store who introduced himself as Mohammed Najib. “Nicest girl anywhere,” added Najib, a tall reedy guy with a little white cap on his gray hair and the stoop of a man who reads too much.

Music from some Pakistani film came from one of the sets in the video store. Teenagers browsed the racks, giggling and making cracks.

Najib, who said everybody called him Moe, said he would show me the apartment where Masha had lived above his store.

“Of course, Officer Leven has already seen it,” added Moe. I couldn’t judge the tone. The guy-Moe-was polite, but I could see Bobo made him nervous. When he offered tea, Bobo barely thanked him, and I thought: what the hell is wrong with him? Just say thank you, Bobo, I mumbled to myself. Moe excused himself to wait on a customer.

“You were here?” I said to Bobo out of Moe’s hearing. “You were already here?”

“Yeah, so what? I figured I’d take a look, other guys on the case had already been, I didn’t want to bother you. Now I need your help.”

“Never mind.” I was impatient. I wanted to look at the stuff in the envelope Dravic had left for me. Soon, I thought to myself, I’m going out to take my vacation days and go sit in the sun. I said it over and over, like a mantra. I hated the idea of myself as a guy who never took a break, who couldn’t let go. I said it, but I didn’t believe it.

Little Pakistan is how it was known, this large chunk of Coney Island Avenue, not far from Brighton Beach. Ever since the 1980s when some Russians began moving up and out, Pakistanis-out here they called themselves Paks-moved in. Before 9/11 it was a bustling crowded community where people got along. Once the planes fell on the towers, once the back-lash began, some of them fled. A cop I knew had called me about the tension, he was worried, he had said. Told me there were FBI guys snooping around, Homeland Security assholes, police brass wanting to look good, look patriotic.

In the end, maybe 15,000 residents had gone, some of them deported, others who just left temporarily out of fear. It was a shitty deal. But people came back. The community rebuilt. Some of the Pakistanis were doing well enough they could move on. Turks coming in now, take up the space.

It was dusk. The avenue was lit up bright, video stores, restaurants, insurance brokers, car parts. There were a couple twenty-four-hour joints where cabbies ate. Last few years when I was working around Brighton Beach, I sometimes went by for a meal.

Outside the video store, Bobo lit up a cigarette, and listened to music from the video store.

“Man, sounds like somebody stepped on the cat,” he said. “I can’t believe Masha lived upstairs. How could she live in a dump like this?”

A couple of women, their heads covered with scarves, strolled by, chatting and laughing. Bobo stared at them.

“What’s with you?” I said.

“Okay, I don’t like them. Okay? Say I have prejudice, I mean after 9/11, Artie, come on.”

“Stop fucking staring, Bobo.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t like it, okay? I just don’t, so I’m not PC, you should think about it, Artie, you’re also Jewish.”

“What difference does that make?” I had never been in a synagogue in my life except for a bar mitzvah once when a friend’s kid turned thirteen.

Moe reappeared.

“Can I help you?” he said, and I realized he had a British accent. On his t-shirt was an Obama For President button.

“Masha Panchuk’s apartment?” I said.

“Yes, of course, I’m sorry. I was distracted. Come up, please.”

“You from England?” asked Bobo.

“Yes, as a matter of fact,” said Moe. “I was born and grew up in a place called Bradford. Man, I would never go back. Too wet and cold, rains all the time. I’m so sorry about Masha.”

“You knew about her? That she was murdered?”

“You told me,” he said. “You called the store and asked if she had lived here.”

“Right,” said Bobo. “You didn’t think to call when you knew she was missing?”

“I didn’t know until I heard from you,” Moe said. “She came and went. Often I didn’t see her for several days. In fact, I saw her Saturday, she was going out to shop.”

“Who else had extra keys, besides you?”

“I don’t know, maybe she made extras. I can’t say,” said Moe. “I keep spares because I own the building,” he added.

We followed him into the doorway next to his store and up three flights of stairs. “I’ll be downstairs if you need me,” he said, not looking at Bobo.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” I said to Bobo. “You think you get anything by talking to people who help you like that?”

“I don’t like them, okay?” We stood on the landing. The apartment was sealed. Bobo carefully removed the tape and opened the door.

“Who got it sealed?”

“I did,” he said. “Soon as I found out where it was. I didn’t want anyone except guys working the case going in.”

“It’s not okay,” I said. “How come it took you so long to tell me where she lived?”

“You didn’t seem interested.”

Inside the tiny studio apartment was a bed, a dresser, a table, a tiny kitchen behind a curtain, a bathroom. It was a furnished room, and all Masha had added were a couple of posters of boy groups she must have liked.

In the closet were her clothes, jumbled together, some on the floor, some stuffed into shelves or on cheap wire hangers. Hard to tell if she’d been messy like a kid or somebody had come here to look through her things.

“Look for her clothes,” Sonny Lippert had said.

“You still didn’t find her clothes, right? The stuff she had on when they killed her?”

“I have four guys working on it,” said Bobo Leven. “I told them to leave the stuff here until we looked at everything.”

I pulled out some shoes, a bag, a jacket. There were expensive things in the girl’s closet. The kind of things I expected Val to wear, or her friends. There was no pink dress, no pink party dress with sparkles on it.

“What was she wearing when she was murdered?”

“Nothing,” said Bobo. “At least nothing when the tape was removed.”

“You think they killed her in the playground, taped her up there?”

“Probably not. Too risky.”

“So what happened to her clothes?”

“We’re looking, like I said. You have some thoughts?” he said.

“Yeah, look for a pink party dress. Let me know.”

Between us we worked over every inch of the place, her clothes, the make-up in the bathroom, a few paperback books, her iPod, a tiny pink address book. I scanned it, there were names of a few friends, city agencies, bars. Bobo said he had seen it, had it copied, put it back. Send me a copy, I said. Nothing in it, he said.

I wanted to get to the envelope Tito Dravic had left me, wanted the résumé he had promised me, and the tape, Masha Panchuk dancing.

“What about this?” Bobo held up a small roll of duct tape he’d found in the bathroom.

“Probably somebody used it for sealing the window when it was cold. Anyhow, it’s black.”

“Yeah, right, this is a fucking waste of time,” he said.

“Get somebody from your station house to go over the place again, okay? In detail.”

“Yes, Artie, of course.”

On the street, Bobo on his phone, I went in to thank Moe and give him my number in case anything came up.

The weather had turned sultry. Humidity clung to my skin. It had been a long day, and now I felt I was fighting the air that was like syrup on my skin, heavy, thick, cloying. Music played out of car windows as guys rolled along Coney Island Avenue. Rap. Rappers call it music. I call it shit.

“I have to go,” I said.

“You don’t get it, do you? You don’t know anything.” He snapped his phone shut.

“What about?”

“These people, Artie.” Bobo was looking to pick a fight with me. I let him talk. “My cousin Viktor was fighting in Chechnya against these assholes. You have any idea what that was like for a Jewish boy from Moscow? If all young soldiers get beat up, all new Jewish soldiers get double beating, one for being Jewish, one for being from Moscow.”

“What’s it got to do with the Chechens?”

“You don’t know shit some of the time, pardon me, Artemy. Over there in the former USSR, they would like to kill all the Jews, except maybe one for each province. You remember that old saying about how every Russian governor always had one Jew for show. A Show Jew, Artie. But you don’t remember,” said Bobo. “You think the guys at my station house feel different?”

“Well, then, fuck them, too. Get over it. I’m not having you alienate half of Brooklyn because you hate Muslims, okay? You zip it up, Bobo.”

“I’m Russian. I’m also Jew. You have a lot of towel-head friends, Artie?” His tone was mild but the words were aggressive.

At the center of this string bean of a kid with his shambling walk, his punk haircut, was a determined, ambitious cop. And angry. He was learning fast. Before long he’d stop taking shit from anybody, including me.

“So, Artie. Here,” he said handing me a card. “I also found this in the apartment. In the medicine cabinet.”

Natasha Club, it said. The best in Russian Women.

“What is it?”

“Mail-order brides, you say, I think. Or whores.”

“There’s something else?” I said to Bobo.

“Yeah, something else. I want to tell you what it was like at home, okay? Caucasians from down there from the Caucasus, they come to Moscow, they take over most of the market stalls, they’re dirty people, and they blow up stuff in Moscow. Apartment buildings. Subway stations. What the fuck are they in Moscow for? And here, now they’re here, in Brooklyn, and how come they make their women wear those bags over their heads?”

I ignored him. He was baiting me and I had no intention of fueling his rage. He could get over it or he could fuck off for all I cared.

“How well did you know the dead girl?” I said.

“I knew Masha a little. She was great dancer. Always twelve guys hanging around for her.”

“Fine. I’m not going to ask how come you didn’t tell me you knew her in the first place or what shit you know about Dacha, the club, just find out who they were, the twelve guys, also the girls she knew. Get me some hard information.”

“Not twelve exactly.”

“I get it. I get it’s not exactly twelve, but however many.” I was impatient. “What else?”

“Once we eat on the boardwalk on Saturday night, a group, seven, eight friends, we just sit out and watch the ocean and talk. Masha was there.”

“Write it down. Send me an e-mail.”

“Artie?”

“Yes?”

“You ever wonder about the m on Masha, the one somebody made with a knife?”

“The lab’s been looking at it all along.”

“You wonder what it stands for? You think it stands for Masha?”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“What about Mohammed, what about this guy Moe?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, but he’d planted the seed of doubt into my head where it could take root.

Bobo’s car was at the curb. He unlocked the door.

“I’m on it,” he said, his voice turning chilly. “You don’t have to bust my balls.”

“Very nice car,” I said. “You got it where?”

“My parents.”

“Your parents are doing so well?”

“Fuck you.”

“Give it a break, Bobo. Relax.”

“No, I don’t want to fucking give it a break. My pop opened another dry-cleaning place. Why? You think because my parents are living in Brighton Beach, they’re crooked? Because I’m living at home I’m in on some game, too? I stay there to help out with my mom who has arthritis bad, right? The car was a present, right? It was my birthday present.”

“Forget it.”

“No. Let’s discuss. I take a lot of shit from you, okay, so I learn this way. But some stuff it’s not okay. Not okay that you think I take money in some way unclean, you know? Not all Russians are corrupted bastards,” he said in English and then switched to Russian, his voice very cold and very low. “You think that all of us are just creeps, I know that, Artemy, I know how you think, you always show it to me, one way or the other. You’ve turned into an American, so for you Russians are gangsters or religious nuts, you’ve forgotten your country, and I don’t care about that, but get off my fucking back. I’m not your kid.”

“Calm down,” I said.

“Sure.”

“One more thing, Bobo.”

“Yeah?”

“You slept with her? You slept with Masha? You had something going on?”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Standing near my car, I opened the package I had taken from the house in Brighton Beach and found a videotape, and a few sheets of paper. I scanned them, and then yelled for Bobo Leven who was climbing into his car. He shut the door and jogged over to me. I held out a piece of paper. He took it, read it, grunted.

“Jesus, Art.”

“Yeah.” I felt sick.

“Masha Panchuk waited tables for your pal, Anatoly Sverdloff,” he said.

“Give me a cigarette.”

Bobo handed me the pack along with his lighter.

“Fuck it, Artie, didn’t Sverdloff mention this?” said Bobo. “He didn’t tell you one of his girls was missing?”

“Why would he? Maybe he didn’t know. Maybe she was a temp.”

“Don’t be so defensive, but you have to figure by now someone maybe called him about it, Sverdloff, I mean. Right? Or you want to do that?”

“He’s on his way to London. He didn’t have anything to do with Masha Panchuk’s murder.”

“You want to hang onto that raft, like they say, Artemy?”

“Fine. I’ll call him,” I said.

“You trust him, right?”

I lit the cigarette and handed him back his smokes and the lighter.

I worked my phone, I made some calls, nothing. I turned to Bobo.

“Find Dravic, if you can,” I said. “He was supposed to meet me at the house the club uses as an office, he wasn’t there, I just tried him on the phone, there’s no answer. I called the club, nothing. Now I’m thinking he was scared, but of what? Scared because he promised to give me some stuff on Masha Panchuk? Did someone overhear us talking at the club?”

“Sure,” said Bobo. “I will work everything,” he said formally, his English sounding as if he had learned it in school, his Russian accent more pronounced now. “I will be taking everything into consideration, of course, Artemy.”

I knew that Bobo Leven would get into everything, he was tenacious, relentless, one of those cops, even at his age, who never let go. At two in the morning, he’d still be at his desk doing the paperwork. Before the other guys got into his station house, he’d be combing his computer, and then when they arrived, he’d bug them for scraps of information. The phone would be permanently attached to his ear, he would be calling, asking, bribing if he had to. I had known a few cops like Bobo. It wasn’t just that he wanted to make a name for himself, it was who he was, what he lived for. Everything would come under scrutiny, he would talk to everybody, Albanians, Jamaicans, Mexies, Serbs, Russians, and he would go through every detective report on crazy people, on thugs who sliced people up, on the kinds of knives they used, and if they also used guns, and he would read medical reports, and reports on duct tape, fibers and feathers, anything he could get his hands on.

Every single homicide pattern that was anything like the case would be worked by Bobo; so would cold cases he kept in a bottom drawer.

Moving around, he would get to Starrett City, Brighton Beach, looking at how people had been mugged, sliced, killed. He wanted this case, and he would go without sleep, night after night, until fatigue made him crazy.

“I’m going back to the city,” I said, but Bobo didn’t answer; he was already on the phone, already tracking Tito Dravic.

In my car, I studied the picture of Masha I had with me, I stared at it hard as if it would give up some secret, and without warning a faint finger of panic crawled up my neck. The thing I hadn’t seen, the thing I didn’t want to see.

But I had to look. And I looked, and the face stared back at me.

If some creep had snatched Masha Panchuk, and Masha had worked at Tolya’s bar, was it Masha the creep really wanted? Was it a mistake? Were they looking for someone else? Somebody connected to me? Somebody who scared Tito Dravic bad?

Masha Panchuk, in the picture I held, was tall with short platinum hair. It had been taken the month before.

The face looked back at me, and in it, there was the resemblance. To Val. She looked like Val. Val’s hair had been short and blonde, too. Only recently had she let it grow out; only recently had she let it go back to her dark red.

Had I missed this? How? Did I fail to see it because I didn’t want to see it?

I started the car, I drove like crazy back to Brighton Beach, to Val’s office, and when I got there she was gone. I called her. Val? Val? Answer the phone!

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Val?

All the way home, I called, I put my phone on redial, and when I got to my block I barely noticed that Roy Pettus was leaning against the wall of the Korean grocery on the corner. Holding a bottle of Coke, he saw me pull up. I put my phone away.

“Hello, Art.”

“Roy. You following me?”

He looked at his watch.

“Nope, just hoping you might be coming home before I have to go back to New Jersey,” Roy said who was wearing a suit, the jacket too big, the collar of his shirt too tight. “You give my offer some thought?” he said. “You okay, Artie? You look shook up.”

“What offer?”

“Coming in with us.”

“No thanks. I’m helping out on a homicide. I’m busy.”

“The Russian girl, right? I could give you some stuff on this, help you finish it up.”

“What kind?”

Leaning forward, his head jutting out of his tight shirt collar, he reacted fast, and said, voice low, “This personal with you at all, Artie? You have a stake in this case?” He stuck his finger into his collar like he was suffocating. “God, I feel like a horse’s ass, suit and tie, haven’t been in a get-up like this for years since I left the city.” He adjusted the jacket. “It’s too damn hot for this.”

“You want to come up to my place?” All the time we were talking, I strained to hear my cellphone. Call, I thought. Val?

“Thanks. That would be fine,” Pettus said. “I won’t stay long. Just need to cool off.”

Upstairs at my place, Pettus removed his jacket carefully, folded it neatly on a kitchen stool, sat down on another one and asked if he could smoke. I said sure and got him a cold Coke, which he asked for, confessing he was addicted to the stuff.

I put a glass and an ashtray in front of him, then checked my messages and my e-mails, while he watched me, guessing how frantic I was, that I was waiting to hear from somebody.

He concentrated on his drink, but I knew he was looking around, watching me, taking a good look, appraising my place, me, how I lived. It was what he had wanted, maybe even why he had been waiting for me on the street in front of my building.

“Nice place,” he said.

I got a beer from the fridge, sat opposite him and said, “Thank you.” And waited.

“Tough living in the city these days. Expensive.”

“Roy, let’s skip the small talk.”

“Just wanting to help.”

“Spit it out, Roy, you’re still wanting me to go to London, spy on the Russians there, get involved, is that it? If so, please don’t follow me around and bug my friends, it doesn’t make me feel comfortable at all.”

“Like I said, I’m sorry about that,” said Roy. “We’re in trouble,” he said, as the phone rang, and I bolted from the kitchen to answer it. It wasn’t Val.

“Not the call you’ve been waiting for?” Pettus added mildly.

I didn’t answer, just said, “What makes you so sure I’d be good at this stuff, this whatever you call it? Intelligence. Isn’t that the polite term, Roy? Isn’t that what Bush calls it every time he wants some more money to bug our phones? It’s all just bluster, it’s just the fucking Russians rattling their missiles and stamping their feet.”

Pettus crushed out his smoke, got up, loped across my loft, admired some photographs on the wall, looked at my books, picked one out and examined it. I couldn’t see the title. From one of the big industrial windows that faced the street, he looked at the building opposite mine. He turned to me.

“I am really sorry for not coming to you straight,” he said. “I don’t know what got hold of me. I need your help. We need you bad. It’s that simple. I can’t think of anyone else I can ask, or trust.”

Climbing back on the stool, he put his elbows on the counter, asked if he could have another Coke and smiled, as if at his own pathetic addiction to the soda.

“You’d be attached to Scotland Yard along with a few other NYPD detectives.”

“For real? Or as a cover?”

“You’d be working normal terrorism stuff, of course, but it’s obvious you’d hang out with some of the new Russians, being a Russian yourself.”

“You’re figuring if I’m in London I’m spending time at Tolya Sverdloff’s London club. With Russians.”

“It’s where they go.”

“I can’t do that. I’d be lousy at it.”

“You’ve been undercover from time to time in New York, right? Even doing your homicide cases, you specialize in getting people to tell you things. Right? This isn’t any different.” Roy turned the pale brown eyes on me. “You have the gift,” he added.

“What makes you think that?”

“Your dad, wasn’t he an agent? Didn’t he work for the KGB back when? I read he was the best, subtle, he could charm anything out of anybody.”

“How the hell do you know?”

“When the Soviet Union collapsed, for a time we were on good terms with their people, they let us read a lot of their stuff.”

“A long time ago, Roy. It’s not genetic.”

“People tell us it’s like a family, KGB, FSB as it’s become. They only trust their own. Your family was in the business, you’re part of it, it’s dynastic.”

I saw now what Pettus wanted. He wanted somebody ex-KGB guys would trust, maybe even current FSB guys.

I didn’t answer.

“Your job here, I could clear you on that. There’s plenty of detectives could take your place for a while.”

“You already checked?”

“Yes.”

“Look, there’s a whole lot of Russians in New York, cops, too, I’m sure you can buy a couple. People who speak the lingo better than me.”

“We want somebody who looks and sounds American.”

“Well, you could always pay somebody.”

“We don’t want people we can buy. We need people who do it for America. Don’t you owe this country?” said Pettus softly. He didn’t harangue, he didn’t yell, just asked. “Isn’t that what your father did in his day, for his country?”

Putting his jacket on, Pettus fished in the pocket, put a card on the counter.

“I’ve put all my numbers on this,” said Pettus. “I’ll be in the New York area for three more days. Please call me, Artie.”

Rattled by Pettus. I drank a shot of Scotch. Then I called Sonny Lippert.

“Go on, man.”

“He told me we owe our friends in London, Pettus said they need to watch out for the Russkis?”

“He’s right, man, about that, at least. I’m guessing he wants you to move into some kind of intel work, and why not? You got the brains, man. I mean, like you could be a spy man, James Bond, George Smiley, whatever,” said Sonny. “Joseph Conrad.”

“But why the snooping around?”

“Fuck knows, man. Obviously he wanted you to know he was at it, maybe put you off guard, maybe let you know he knows where your friends are, what do I know, maybe Roy Pettus has turned into J. Edgar Hoover in his old age, or maybe he just likes spying on people.”

“You know him at all?”

“Some. Years ago. Always seemed like a straight arrow, far as it goes. You want me to ask around?”

“Yeah. Could you, Sonny?”

“You told him to work it up his ass, man?”

“I was polite.”

“Good. Cause these days they can snatch anyone they feel like, and they say it’s under the roof of Homeland Security which we all know is a pile of doggy do, man, right, to mix a couple metaphors, right?” Sonny laughed, but it was a bleak cackle.

Val?

From the yellow envelope I got at the house in Brighton Beach, the envelope I figured Tito Dravic had left me, I took the DVD. I put it in the machine.

On the screen a bunch of kids in their twenties were dancing at Dacha. People around the floor watched, yelling, singing.

The picture zoomed in on Masha Panchuk’s back, and she was wearing a silky pink dress. She danced like a pro. Her partner was older. A rough older man, stubble on his face, coarse black hair. After a second or two, she was gone, disappeared into the crowd.

Crouched on the floor, I put my face up against the screen, close as I could, played it again. Even from the back, Masha looked enough like Val for somebody to get it wrong. A thug for hire, who didn’t ask for ID, could have confused them.

Slung around Masha was a tiny purse, a small golden envelope on a long silk cord, best I could see. It looked expensive. So did her shoes. High-heeled sandals made of some skin, something silver.

I called Val again but there was no answer. I got in the shower, got out, sat in front of the TV, wrapped in a towel, waited for Val to call. I watched the news again without seeing it. Put on some music I didn’t hear. Pettus had left his cigarettes behind and I lit up.

If Pettus wanted me bad enough, he’d fix it. If he could make a case for me working the Russians out of London, it would happen. The department would agree. You said the words Homeland Security these days, and it trumped everything else. If you didn’t salute back and say, yessir, they could figure out a way. If you were a cop, like me, they could transfer you wherever they wanted.

Could they? Could Roy Pettus lean on them hard enough? I’d quit. I could hook up with Tolya Sverdloff, I could become a businessman, or a bartender. All I knew was New York City. It was all I ever cared about.

I got up and put on Ella Fitzgerald and listened to some Rodgers and Hart tracks, including “Manhattan”. For once, it didn’t divert me. Didn’t make me happy. I shut off my stereo.

I was feeling messed up, waiting for Val, worrying about the connection between her and the dead girl, Masha and Tito Dravic, and Masha and Val. What was Masha doing with a bag that looked like one of Val’s, and expensive shoes?

After a few minutes, I got dressed, put on a new linen shirt. I felt like a fool dressing up for dinner with Val as if it were a date, as if I were in love with her, and got the hell out, and as I was getting in my car, she called me back.

“Ten is what I said, Artie, I said I’d meet you at ten, at Beatrice’s, okay, at the wine bar, it’s only nine, right? I gave you the address? Look, I’ll be there, I promise.”

“You said nine or ten.”

“God, you’re so literal,” she said. “Between you and my dad I’m going nuts, you call, he calls, you leave messages, what’s going on? I’m fine. Daddy’s fine, he’s in Scotland or someplace playing golf, he stopped off, I mean, please, Artie, darling, go solve a crime or something, and I’ll see you in an hour. Honest to God, I’m fine!”

At nine-thirty, I was on East 2nd Street, sitting at the bar of Il Posto Acconto, drinking a glass of red, watching a game on the TV, and waiting for Valentina.

At ten she hadn’t arrived. Half an hour later I was on the street, leaning against the side of the building, watching a guy with tattoos tinker with a Harley. At the curb was Beatrice’s vintage yellow Caddy. I had parked my own car just behind it.

People were out, drinking wine, strolling, calling out, happy, and I tried not to let it get to me. Val was always late. Maybe she’d stayed in the office in Brooklyn. I was making myself crazy.

Beatrice, who owned the Caddy and wine bar, pushed back her streaky blonde hair, pinned it up with a pink plastic hair clip, adjusted her tomato-red skirt, poured me a shot of tequila which she considered a cure-all, and went and got me a bowl of spaghetti carbonara. She asked about Tolya. They had a special thing going and there were times they sat together and discussed the merits of a tomato or a white truffle or some herb from Puglia you couldn’t get anywhere else.

I wasn’t hungry. The kind of dread you get on a bad case had enveloped me. Across the street, an argument started, there was the sound of somebody falling on the sidewalk. I didn’t go over. I was glued to the seat where I sat.

By midnight, I knew Val wasn’t coming. She had forgotten. She had gone dancing. She was with somebody who called at the last minute.

“I’m a bad girl,” she always says, laughing at me.

“Honey, don’t drive like that,” said Beatrice, offering to take me home, drop me off. “You shouldn’t do that, okay? Senti, please, my little adorable Artie?”

I said I’d be fine. I got my car. I drove around for a while, my phone on redial. When it finally rang, it was a wrong number.

I was tired. The heaviness that crept up behind my teeth, the kind that seemed to infect my jaw, came over me. I went home, took a cold shower, changed my clothes, and made instant espresso.

If I called it in to the cops and Val was only out on a date, she’d kill me. She’d say I was a jealous old man.

I’d give it a couple more hours. I drove around. I went back to the playground in Brooklyn, I talked to a uniform watching the place. I was going nuts.

Outside was a sad little shrine, a few votive candles in glass jars, a bunch of roses from a bodega, already wilting, a photocopy of Masha, a little icon next to it.

“Dravic’s alibi checks out,” said Bobo out of breath as he arrived at the playground in Brooklyn. I had called him and he came as fast as he could, he said.

“Go on.”

“I called Dravic’s mother up in Kingston to check he was there when he said he was, when Masha died, and she confirmed, and she gave me the name of a couple of people who also saw him at a bar up there. I asked where he is now, and she said he’d left.”

“For where?”

“Relatives in Belgrade, the mother said. She said he had planned it, but I could tell she was scared, Artie. He didn’t kill Masha, but he got scared by someone. Maybe like you said, because he promised you Masha’s resume.”

“When did he leave?”

“This morning.”

“Belgrade, Jesus.”

“I’m working on it.”

“What about the clothes?” I said, looking around the playground where I found Masha on the swing. It was dark and empty except for a couple of patrolmen.

“What about the clothes, Bobo?”

“I’m on it. I got people picking over every leaf in a ten block area around here.”

“Good.”

My phone rang and I answered it. Wrong number. I tried Val and I knew Bobo was listening, but I didn’t care.

“I’m going to need you,” I said, and stared out over the playground.

“Of course. Anything. Should I come with you now?”

“Not now. I’m going back to the city, just keep your cell phone on, okay?”

“Yes, Artemy,” he said. I got out my car keys, dove into my car, and drove like crazy to my apartment, got the keys to Tolya’s place – I remembered he had given me spares – in the Meat Market district. You don’t smell blood anymore around the Meat Market. There are only fancy restaurants now.

On my way to the yellow brick building where Tolya had his loft and Val had her apartment, I went past loading docks where once, in the morning, huge carcasses had been rolled into storage facilities, cold dark spaces that smelled of meat and bone. All gone now.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“Val? Val, darling? Are you there?” I unlocked the door to the Sverdloff place. “Val?” My voice echoed, cheerful, brittle, too loud as I went inside.

It was dawn, Monday morning, the sun coming up, the light coming in through fourteen windows, each ten feet high.

“Val?”

From the top floor-Tolya owned the building and lived on the top floor-you could see the city in every direction, the river, the Empire State, the downtown skyline.

I went through the living room to the door of Valentina’s apartment which Tolya had created for her. It had its own entrance to the hall where the elevator and stairs were, but I had come in through her father’s place.

Once, she had planned to get an apartment of her own in the East Village, but Tolya said, don’t, please, darling, I don’t like this area in East Village, I’ll make you an apartment here. Don’t go yet. She gave in.

Her door was locked. I went back into the hallway and tried the other door to her apartment. I banged on it and began yelling and when I heard heavy footsteps on the stairs, instinctively I put my hand on my gun. It was only Bobo.

We didn’t speak. Bobo had heard me on the phone earlier, trying to reach Val, had seen how frantic I was and he had come here without my asking.

I gestured for him to come up, and he followed me. I had to ask him to unlock Val’s door. I didn’t want Val thinking I had smashed into her place in case she suddenly appeared. I just hoped he was better at picking locks than me. I was half out of my mind. I didn’t want to go inside.

“I should go inside first,” said Bobo Leven who put his hand lightly on my arm. “It’s okay like that?” He reached for the antique brass doorknob Valentina had found in a thrift shop on Madison Avenue.

“Sure.”

“Probably it is nothing,” said Bobo. “Probably she is just maybe out to the beach or something.”

“Yes.”

He opened the door and went in. I waited. I could hear him walking over the hardboard floor, first in the living room, then the bedroom. I waited. Bobo reappeared.

“Nobody is home here,” he said. “Is okay.”

“Thanks.”

“Probably you don’t want people knowing about this or somebody will tell her father and he will go crazy?”

I nodded. He got out a pack of smokes. We both lit up.

“You want me to look at where she goes, who she knows, but quiet, right, Artemy?”

“That would be good. Yes. Tell people you’re on the Panchuk case, and nobody at your station house will ask you questions, right?”

“Exactly,” said Bobo. “I say just like that.”

“I want you to find Valentina Sverdloff. Nobody has to think she’s missing, maybe she’s just out with some guy, or someplace taking photographs, or like you said, at the beach. I don’t want her father going crazy and calling in the thugs he uses for bodyguards. I don’t want her going crazy at me because she thinks I’m pestering her. I need you to promise.”

“Yes, you said already, I understand.” He spoke Russian now, as if to convince me he was serious.

“I’m sure Val is just at the beach on the island,” I said again. “She forgot we were having dinner. She just forgot, right? Isn’t that how girls are? They forget? Girls, boys, the mood just kind of takes you, you stay out all night?” I could hear myself running on, desperate.

“Yes,” he said softly. “It is like that.”

“Daddy? You there? It’s me, Val, listen I’ll be home in the morning. Don’t go insane, I mean, I’m fine. I’m at a friend’s. A girlfriend’s place. See you.”

When I turned on Tolya’s answering machine for a second I thought the message was from the night before. Any time now, Val would come walking into the apartment.

But it was an old message, I realized.

I looked at my phone, then turned it off.

Tolya had been calling me. Sending me e-mails. It was nine in the morning, July 7. Tolya’s birthday coming up, what was it, two, three days? He had asked me again to come to London, big party, he had said. I’d have to take the calls soon. In the messages he asked about Valentina.

I went out on the terrace that was planted thick with flowers, pink and violet geraniums, low shrubs nearly trimmed. A glass still half full of orange juice was on the redwood table. Next to it was the Post. I picked it up. It was open to the story about Masha Panchuk. MUMMY GIRL, the headline read.

For a girl her age, twenty-four, her birthday the same day as her father’s, Val was neat as hell. I’d forgotten. Her laptop wasn’t there but she often took it with her, in a bag slung over her shoulder.

One wall was covered in books, paperbacks, textbooks, novels, cookbooks, and hundreds, maybe thousands of CDs and DVDs. There was a good Bose sound system, and I turned it on. Spring is Here, a Stan Getz album I’d given her, came on. The last thing she’d listened to before she went out.

It was a faintly anonymous room as if she alighted here from time to time, but was always on her way somewhere else.

In her darkroom on the work table was a single print, a picture of Tolya with a bottle of wine in his hand, head thrown back, laughing. He filled the frame.

A few negatives lay on the table, too, and a box of brushes for cleaning them. Staticmaster, the brushes were called. Something about the box caught my attention. I picked it up and looked at it, then put it back. I was wasting time on stupid details.

On the dresser in her bedroom were framed photos: her twin sister, her mother. A picture of me she had taken over by one of the Hudson piers.

Squinting into the sun, I was smiling at her, a dumb smile. I recognized the green shirt I was wearing in the picture. And one of Tolya and me, on his terrace, arms around each other, laughing. And a picture of a young guy I didn’t know, a handsome guy, maybe thirty, dark hair, blue eyes.

More pictures of the same man were in a drawer, some taken in London, some in Moscow. I didn’t know who the hell he was and I was jealous.

In the pictures, the way he looked at Val behind her camera, you knew he was in love with her. And she with him. Maybe she had another life. I was a fool.

Val?

In my head I saw Val like Masha Panchuk, suffocating inside the hot sticky tape, dying slowly somewhere on the fringes of the city, in a desolate park surrounded by dirty needles, or out by the water where gulls picked over garbage for their breakfast.

Did the killer who murdered Masha Panchuk take Val?

I was paralyzed. If I called her friends, there would be questions and Tolya would hear. By now I would have settled for almost anything, even a call from some creep to say she had been kidnapped. How much? Money was easy. If it was only money, it would be okay.

I called her and called her until I was hoarse.

Val?

“I saw her.”

It was later that morning when Bobo called. “It was Valentina,” he said. “It was her.”

“Where?”

“Artie, I saw her. I saw Valentina, I really see her, it’s okay, everything is okay.”

“Where?”

“I see her from my car window on 52nd Street, way over near Eleventh Avenue, Hell’s Kitchen, she goes around the corner on this red Vespa, she has a red scooter, right? Artie?”

My knees seemed to buckle. I didn’t care about anything else. I didn’t care about any of it, except that Val was okay. He had seen her. Bobo had seen her. I got out my phone and called Tolya.

“Jesus Christ, Artyom, what’s all the excitement?”

“Nothing. Nothing. I just saw Val on a red Vespa. You should make her wear a fucking helmet, or something. It’s dangerous.” I was out of my mind, I hardly knew what I was saying.

“Listen, I know this, asshole, but they wouldn’t leave off until I bought it, an early birthday present.”

I left the apartment, went out, and started to walk. I walked to the river. Had Bobo really seen Val? Was it her? I started to worry. I needed to see her myself, so I walked. How many hours did I walk around the city after that? I went up to Hell’s Kitchen, I went everywhere I knew Val went. As far as I knew. How much did I know about her? I didn’t know she had a red scooter.

Maybe it hadn’t been her at all? Bobo had only glimpsed her.

Why didn’t she answer my calls? It was after midnight now and I was feeling crazy.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Tuesday 2 a.m.

Even at two in the morning, Sonny Lippert was awake. Maybe Lippert could help. I could trust him.

He had opened the door to his apartment in Battery Park City. Rhonda Fisher, his wife, was asleep, but as always, Lippert was awake reading, listening to music. Out of his sound system, the real thing, turntable, tubes, came “Somethin’ Else”, a great Miles track with Cannonball Adderley and Art Blakey. Sonny was in sweatpants and a t-shirt. In his hand was a glass of single malt.

“Can I get you one?” he said. I shook my head. “But you didn’t come here for a drink.”

“Valentina Sverdloff disappeared, no calls, no nothing. I was supposed to meet her on Sunday night. I can’t reach her.”

Lippert turned off the music. He put his drink down. He was brisk.

“Who else knows? Please, sit down.” Sonny sat on the edge of the leather sofa, and I sat on a chair.

“Bobo Leven.”

He shrugged.

“You didn’t bother to tell me this before now?”

“I didn’t want the media.”

“You think that’s all I do, I call the fucking media, man?”

“You like the publicity, Sonny.” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Any connection with the dead girl, what was her name, on the swing? Panchuk?” Suddenly Lippert was sharp as ever.

“The dead girl, Maria Panchuk worked at Sverdloff’s club, Pravda2, over on Horatio.”

“I know where it is.”

“Panchuk looked like Val. Somewhat like,” I said.

“You think they did Panchuk by mistake?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they wanted both. Maybe Panchuk was an early warning.”

“Because of Valentina’s father?”

“I think she was into stuff she shouldn’t have been.”

“What kind?”

“Kids.”

“You’re crazy, man,” said Lippert.

“Christ, Sonny, no, but Val helped out at women’s shelters in Russia, and with little kids, orphans, abused girls, she sends stuff over, she goes there, she gets in their face, the officials. I’ve seen the letters,” I said, thinking of the files in Val’s closet.

“A big mouth like her father.”

“Sonny, listen, I’ve never said this to you before, I’m desperate. This girl is like my own family. I know you don’t like Sverdloff, but that doesn’t matter. I have to find her before Tolya Sverdloff finds out and sends in his guys who will fuck it up worse and get her killed. I’ve been everywhere, and I have not one fucking idea what I’m doing. I’m running on empty here, and you have to help me.”

“Calm down, man,” he said, and put his hand on my arm.

I grabbed hold of his shirtsleeve. “Please, Sonny,” I said.

“I’ll help you.”

“Thank you. I need a smoke.”

Lippert fished a pack out of his jacket pocket, and passed them over. “I was supposed to quit. I can’t.”

“I’ve never been so lost before, Sonny. I keep turning up stuff that has nothing to do with Valentina, or even with Panchuk, the dead girl. I got a Serb club manager scared off bad enough after I talked to him that he left for his mother upstate and maybe to Belgrade. This guy knew Masha, better than he let on, I think, but his alibi checks out.”

“Where’s Sverdloff?”

“In Scotland.”

“Jesus! What for?”

“Golf. I don’t know. He left for London Sunday morning, and now he’s playing fucking golf.”

“Let’s just focus on the Sverdloff girl, okay? Let’s just work that, Artie, man, you with me? Forget the rest for now, leave the rest to the others. Take me through everything,” Sonny said, and I told him everything.

“I was in London a couple times,” he said.

“What?”

“Yeah, London, you said Sverdloff was in a hurry to get back to London.”

“Sonny, Jesus, man, a girl is missing and you’re going to give me a travelogue.”

“It’s related. I’m thinking Sverdloff goes to London where his daughter doesn’t want him going, and Roy Pettus wants you in bloody London. To keep an eye on Sverdloff, maybe? Maybe that’s the part he didn’t mention.

“It’s a weird country, man, really weird,” said Sonny. “They major in spy shit. Your pal Sverdloff is not the most fucking transparent guy I ever met. I gotta think this thing with his kid is all about what he’s been doing, making money in London, stealing money, doing stuff with people he shouldn’t be doing it with.”

“And this is a way of getting to him, through Val? But why here? And who the fuck is they?”

“I’m just trying to think about the Russkis all living over there in London, all the secret stuff, state killings. Man, Lenin would be jumping up out of his grave and clapping his blood-soaked hands. I know, man, I remember. My parents were devoted. They believed.”

I grabbed his arm. I was panicky.

“I’m telling you something here,” said Lippert. “I’m thinking this out. If they got to Valentina, they’re after her father. She’s an American. She lives in New York. They’re not coming this far for a girl who likes helping out with orphans. I think she’s alive,” said Lippert. “Listen to me. I don’t think she’s dead. I think they want something out of her. You need something to drink?”

“No.”

“Artie, man, I’m going to make some very discreet phone calls to guys who retired and don’t have an ax, and who owe me. Okay? You listening?”

I nodded.

“You’ve been to her apartment.”

“Yes.”

“So you have keys, right? She lives with her old man, doesn’t she? Go wait for her. Wait for a call. I’ll work this, I swear to you, I know how it is with you and Sverdloff.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“What’s the thank you bullshit?” said Sonny. “I’m on it. It will be okay.” For Lippert this passed as extreme optimism.

“Art, man?”

“What?”

“If Roy Pettus wants something from you, make a trade for information about Valentina. He has connections even I can’t touch. Tell him you’ll do whatever, if he gets Valentina Sverdloff back. Call him and go wait for her. She’ll turn up there, or the creeps who took her will call looking for her old man, I know it. Give me a couple hours,” he said. “You want me to go with you?”

I shook my head.

“Then go.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

When I got to Sverdloff’s building, there was light in the sky, and already people were coming out of the elevator with their dogs, two little rat dogs, a big Lab, somebody with a suitcase holding the door open, and I couldn’t wait, I just bolted up the stairs, the endless-seeming flights of stairs, running faster and faster, until my legs burned and I couldn’t breathe, and all I could think about was Valentina and Tolya and how I had failed, I could see them in my mind’s eye, could see the girl Masha Panchuk too, the blue eyes staring up out of her duct-tape shroud, and when I slammed into the apartment, Bobo Leven had just arrived, had just got to the place, and was waiting there in the living room, to tell me that Valentina Sverdloff was dead.

“Where is she?”

Bobo nodded towards her room.

I was already moving towards Val’s apartment, towards her room, but Bobo put out a hand to stop me. Wait, he said. Wait for me.

“Tell me.”

“One of my guys found some of Masha Panchuk’s stuff, it had been buried near the playground, behind a derelict gas station. I was looking for you when Lippert called and said you were on your way here.”

“And?”

“There was a part of a pink dress, a high-heeled sandal, and a little gold purse with Masha’s clothes, there was a card inside.” He gave it to me. It was Valentina’s card. “I think they killed Masha because she had this card, and she looked like Valentina. They killed the wrong girl the first time. Somebody figured it out,” Bobo said.

“I came here, and the door was unlocked, Artie, and inside is Valentina Anatolyevich Sverdloff, this lovely girl, she is there.” He lapsed into bad English, and switched to Russian. “I am so sorry.”

“When did you get here?”

“Few minutes,” he said.

I started for her room.

“Please, do not go in that room alone. Please.”

I told Bobo to wait. I looked at the card he had given me, and then I went into Val’s place, through her living room into her bedroom.

On her bed, Val looked asleep. Unharmed. Her feet were bare. There were no marks on her face or legs or arms so far as I could see. She was pale, composed, expressionless.

On the floor near the bed were wrappers from the Antistatic brushes I’d seen earlier in her darkroom, but I couldn’t deal with anything now, all I could do was look at her. I sat down beside her on the bed.

Her hands were crossed on her chest. Her eyes were shut. The thin gold chain with the cross was around her neck. I tried her pulse. I put my fingers on her neck. I leaned close to her mouth. There was no breath.

I picked up one of the hands, and it was still soft, still pliant and soft and smooth, a young girl’s hand except for the missing finger. She hadn’t been dead long, as far as I could tell. Maybe I got to the apartment an hour too late. I had left my watch at home. I was going crazy.

How long did I sit in there? Eventually Bobo came into the bedroom and leaned over and took her hand out of mine. I rubbed my hand across my face.

“What should I do, Artie? Tell me how I can help,” he said.

“What time is it?”

“Four minutes after nine in the morning,” said Bobo, and I asked him to check flights to London.

I couldn’t tell Tolya about Valentina by phone. I had to go. I had to be there. It would kill him, but if it didn’t, at least he could hit me. He could blame me for failing, for not taking care of her, he could at least take it out on me, if he wanted.

“Artie?”

“Just stay here, okay? I want you to stay here until I leave.”

He looked up from his BlackBerry.

“You can get a non-stop, JFK, get you into London around six tomorrow morning.”

“Do it.” I tossed him a credit card. I figured there was enough for a cheap ticket on it.

“If Sverdloff calls?”

“By the time I get on the plane, it will be night-time in London. I hope to God he’s still playing golf in Scotland, or at some fucking party. Try to fend him off. Tell him I’ll be in touch. Tell him I’m calling any minute. Just give me a little time, can you do that? Try to stay here with her, don’t call anyone.”

“Of course.”

“After I go, just do what you have to, Bobo. It’s your case now. This is yours. You work this like you were hanging onto a twenty-storey building by one fingernail, you get me? Find him.”

“I don’t know how to work this without you.”

“You know plenty. You’ll solve the thing, you’ll find out who killed Panchuk, and you’ll find out who killed Val. I have to go. The same creep killed them both. He killed Masha thinking she was Valentina, then he killed her.”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll call you? I have to get my passport, some other stuff.” I felt very calm and cold. “Lippert will help you, he’ll do it for me.”

Before I left, I looked at Valentina again, and I understood.

Somebody who had loved her had killed her. The killer had suffocated her and then put her on her bed, hands crossed to make it look as if she was only asleep.

Standing next to me, Bobo put out his hand to shake mine, and this formal unlikely gesture moved me, and I choked up before I ran down the stairs and out to my car.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

On the way to the airport, I made one stop.

Roy Pettus was at a hotel on Lex, a Radisson so new you could smell the carpets. A girl at the desk gave me his room number after I badgered her and I went up to the ninth floor and banged on his door.

“It’s open,” Pettus called out, and I went in.

It was a nondescript room. The furniture was new and ugly. There was no sign Roy Pettus had been here except for the leather suitcase he was packing and the smell of Camels.

He snapped shut his bag, sat in one of a pair of small armchairs and gestured to the other one.

Pettus crossed one leg over the other. He wore pressed jeans, a white shirt and the cowboy boots.

I couldn’t sit. I started for the door, then turned around. I hated the idea of being in hock to Pettus.

“I can trust you?”

“Yes,” he said.

“You have to keep your mouth shut. I need you to help me keep the media off this. I need time. I need ten hours of time. I don’t know who else can call in that kind of favor.”

“Go on.”

“Valentina Sverdloff is dead.”

“Tolya Sverdloff’s daughter?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Somebody left her in her own bed. Last few hours. I was there earlier, she wasn’t there, I went back, she was there.” I stared at him.

“How?”

“She was probably suffocated. Somebody put a pillow over her face.”

“While she was asleep? Somebody who had access to her place?”

“I think so.”

“I am sorry,” he said. “I offer you my condolences, and also to Mr Sverdloff,” he added in that peculiar old-fashioned way.

“Tolya doesn’t know.”

“Where is he?”

“London,” I said.

“What else can I do for you?”

He got up, went to the bathroom, returned with a glass of water and handed it to me. He looked at the bag I had put on the floor.

“You’re going to London to tell her father?”

“Just the media, please. Just make sure it’s kept quiet until I tell Tolya. That’s all. If that’s possible. Is it possible? Roy?”

“I can try.”

“Thank you.”

“You think somebody went after her to get at her father?”

“Yes. Maybe. If they did, then he’s in trouble. I have to go over. I have to tell him first, I have to do it in person. You understand that?”

“Of course.” He put out his hand. “I’ll see what I can do, Artie. I’ll try to help you. How old was she?”

“Twenty-four this week.”

“Same as my girl,” he said. “When are you leaving?”

“Soon.”

“I’ll be in touch,” said Roy Pettus.

“Thank you,” I said.

He shook my hand, walked me to the door, watched me go down the hall towards the elevator.

After I left, I realized Pettus had not asked me for anything in exchange. He didn’t ask me for favors, he didn’t propose I go to work on some Joint Force or attach myself to the Brits, get him intelligence, or spy on Sverdloff, he didn’t ask anything at all, just patted me on the shoulder and shook my hand.

But in Pettus’ mind, I was now his, I was in his play, maybe only with a walk-on part. He had wanted me in London, and he was getting what he wanted, I thought as I boarded the plane that evening. He never asked, never said a word, it was enough for Roy Pettus that I needed him. In some way, he’d ask for a payback, in some way, some time, and by the time the plane took off it felt like a threat.