Londongrad

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I stood in front of Tolya Sverdloff’s house in London, trying to figure out how to tell him his daughter, his Val, the only thing in the world he completely loved, was dead. Murdered. Suffocated with a pillow, lying on her own bed, as if she had just gone for a nap. And that it was my fault for not taking care of her. I felt like somebody had ripped my guts out.

It was early. Heavy green trees lined the long street. Overhead the sun was flushing out the early London mist, pearly light skimming the tall white houses. Milk bottles rattled as a delivery guy placed a couple of quarts on the stoop next door. A woman in tight red shorts jogged by, a tiny dog like a mouse on a leash behind her.

Notting Hill. London. July. This was Tolya’s Eden, his paradise, the shining city on a hill where he had believed no bad thing could ever happen.

I’d been up most of the night, crammed in a plane seat, my head hurt now, jaws, teeth, neck, too little sleep, too much Scotch. Most of the way across the Atlantic, I’d stared into the darkness, thinking about Tolya, thinking about Valentina. If I dozed off, I dreamed about her as she had been the other night at my place, alive, laughing, beautiful, curious, or at breakfast on the boardwalk, eating lox, cracking jokes, snapping pictures. Asleep it was much worse. I forced myself to stay awake.

From the other direction a second woman appeared, this one in sky blue, also jogging, and smoking, and the two woman, both young, not more than thirty, stopped a few feet from me and kissed three times, and greeted each other in Russian. I strained to hear them.

Was this what Roy Pettus wanted from me? Check out the Russians in London? Eavesdrop?

So far as I could find out, he had kept the media in New York at bay, Val’s death had not been reported and I knew he’d want something in return soon.

How long did I stand outside Tolya Sverdloff’s house? Time seemed to collapse. I stared at the doorbell. I put my bag down on the steps.

Mercedes, Audis, Range Rovers lined the street, punctuated by Smart cars and Minis and VWs in red and racing green and yellow and blue, little colored buttons of cars, shiny in the early light like M &Ms on this rich, gorgeous street.

From a door opposite where I stood, a man emerged with a little girl in a straw hat. I could hear them laughing softly as they climbed into a red Range Rover and the girl tossed her school books onto the back seat.

A man in a black linen jacket and pressed jeans, a guy talking softly into his collar, suddenly moved into the frame. He had been standing a few doors down. He was, I figured, somebody’s guy, some kind of muscle who kept a lookout on behalf of the inhabitants in one of the pretty houses.

Tolya never got up early. I would ring the doorbell and he’d come out, grumpy about the time, grinning because I was there.

“You came for my birthday,” Tolya Sverdloff would say, seeing me in front of his door. “You just arrived? You flew overnight? I’m so happy, my friend. Come in, Artemy,” he would say, and I would have to tell him the truth.

Past sleeping houses, doors gleaming with fresh paint, red, black, past pink, white, purple flowers tumbling from window boxes, I walked toward the church at the end of the street, light glistening on it, turning the stone gold.

A few blocks away near Portobello Road, I found a coffee joint. The smell of fresh coffee hit me. A young guy in back was grinding beans and packing them into silver bags. He made me some espresso to go and I asked him if I could leave my bag for a while. He just yawned, dumped more beans into the grinder and said sure.

I walked. I told myself Tolya was still asleep. Why wake him? I thought. I made excuses. I tried not to think about Valentina’s death, and who killed her.

Was it the same thug who murdered Masha first, by mistake, and left her on the swing? I couldn’t think about anything else. Somebody had killed her to get at her father, to warn him.

Tolya had been messing with bad people, maybe in New York or here in London, and he got out of line, made too much money, told too many jokes; Valentina’s murder was a warning. I would kill him.

This was the real consequence of murder. The horror was for the people left alive, unspeakable if they were the parents. It would go on and on for them. Their friends, not knowing how to respond, not wanting to know the ugly things, would look the other way. And it would never ever stop until they were dead themselves years later-of natural causes, the obits might say, though there would never be anything natural in their world again.

This knowledge, that he, Tolya, was a target, that Val’s murder was a threat, a warning, would make news of her death even worse for him.

Trucks delivering vegetables edged past me on the crowded road. The color of strawberries already on a stall was an intense, other-wordly red.

In the next street a guy unloaded flowers off a van for an outdoor flower store. Pink, green, red, yellow, purple all in tight bunches. Next door was a public toilet in a building made out of pale green tiles. The whole place had the quality of a fairy tale, or an article in a glossy travel magazine.

On the front page of a newspaper I bought was a picture of Litvinenko, late fall ’06. Scanning the story I saw that British officials had now confirmed it was the Russians who killed him. A two-year investigation had revealed that it was state terrorism. As of this morning, it was official. I bought a bunch of white tulips for Tolya.

At Tolya’s house, my suitcase on the polished stone step, I finally rang the bell. My pulse pounded in my neck, I tried to form up some words before he opened the door. Then, from inside, I heard the heavy steps, steps coming down a flight of stairs, coming towards the door, his cheerful voice calling out in mock irritation: “Okay, okay, I’m coming.”

“What time is it?” said Tolya.

Pulling a huge black silk bathrobe around him, feet bare, hair a mess, eyes clogged with sleep, he said, “Jesus, Artyom, Christ, you wake me at this crazy hour, but I forgive you. You came for my birthday. I’m happy. Come in.”

Taking my suitcase, he set it down inside, closed the door, hugged me and kissed me three times on both cheeks, Russian style, and let out a stream of insult and affection.

“You came for my birthday? You came for my party? You are a good friend, I knew you would come, I have surprise for you, in your room. Come,” he said, leading me to the staircase with the curving banister.

“And Val?” he said. “When’s she coming? She’s not going to forget my birthday, is she, I’m giving a big party, she says she is coming, she texts me, come upstairs,” he said, chattering at me in Russian, in English, joking around, telling me about the party, what he was serving, what vintages, which caviar.

I felt like a fraud.

I followed him up the staircase, its ancient stone steps salvaged from some palace, some chateau, smoothed thin by centuries of wear, polished to a high gloss. At the top, Tolya put down my bag. “Welcome!”

Double doors led into a large room with high ceilings and curly plaster moldings. The tall windows looked out onto a green square. On an antique wood table in front of the windows were boxes wrapped in fancy paper and tied with ribbons. Famous labels. Designer stuff. Next to the packages was a large photograph of Valentina in a silver frame. I tried not to look at it.

“Presents,” said Tolya, glancing at the packages and smiling. “I have very very nice friends, so many presents come. Don’t look like that, so gloomy,” he added, glancing at me. “It is not a big birthday, I will be forty-six in one day, and I am younger than you.” He laughed, and found a half-smoked Havana in his bathrobe pocket, put it in his mouth, and said, “What’s the matter, Artyom? You didn’t curse at me as usual on my birthday because you’re almost four years older? You didn’t bring a present? No, look you brought for me these wonderful flowers,” he said, and took them out of my hand and with them the newspaper still held.

Glancing at the front page, he made his way to the kitchen with me in his wake. “Come,” he said. “We’ll eat. You’ll feel better.”

Even while he made coffee in a red and chrome espresso machine, he talked, exuberant, fully awake now, glad to see me, full of news, and plans for my visit. And I listened and tried to find a space where I could tell him why I was in London. He put on the radio, listened briefly to the news about the Litvinenko case. Turned it off, talked some more about his birthday party.

He felt bad about Sasha Litvinenko, he said, the story had haunted him a long time, but he had worried enough, and he had tried to help find the killers. The thing was not to mourn but to celebrate life.

“I mean I offered what I knew about Sasha himself to someone I know who could use it. I didn’t do anything stupid, Artemy. I didn’t. Don’t worry. You always think I’m going to get in some kind of trouble.”

I couldn’t speak. I drank a glass of water, but my throat closed up. Tolya chattered on.

“But we don’t need to talk about serious stuff, you’re here on vacation, unless Roy Pettus persuaded you to become a spy.” He laughed his escalating laugh which, as it reached its peak, made him shake. “Listen, it’s okay, right?” said Tolya. “You don’t have to worry. Now let’s talk about where we will have lunch today, and then we’ll go buy presents for Valentina. Her birthday too, you knew that?”

I nodded.

“Also, I said to myself finally: Anatoly Anatolyevich, stop this crap with your kid. She’s a grown-up. Leave her some space. Give her some peace. She’s a young woman now. Let her find her way. This comes to me in the middle of the night recently when I wake up and I think, I have to let go of Valentina, I say to myself, Artemy is right, I can’t watch over her forever, and it is you who has always said this, and you approve, right?”

He pulled the espresso and handed me a dark green cup, then looked out of the window into the green communal garden. “I am so happy you’re here in London,” he said. “I’ve found my Zen place, my Brigadoon, you remember this disgusting musical they loved so much in Russia? I remember one production in Moscow where the fantasy Scottish never-never land becomes socialist paradise. You ever saw this?” He drank some espresso. “It was so awful people had to bite their lip to stop from laughing. My father directed it, it almost killed him. They put my mother in this plaid dress and she had to sing some schlock, which almost killed her, this was a woman who preferred Wagner.” Tolya turned from the espresso machine and belted out a song. “Go home, go home, go home with Bonnie Jean,” he sang. “I could have been musical star.” He laughed, and added, “So who the hell was this Bonnie Jean? And what’s with the glen?”

Tolya still laughing, I went to the glass doors and out onto a balcony. In the lush square below, four tiny girls with pale hair were hanging like pretty little monkeys from a jungle gym. Others chased each other, while their mothers and nannies watched and baked in the sun.

When I went back to the kitchen, Tolya was looking at some newspapers, drinking coffee, and chatting to somebody in his phone. He hung up.

“You can smoke in here if you want, Artyom, you don’t have to go onto the balcony. What’s with you? You haven’t said a word, not even when I sing. What’s wrong?”

I reached for the water glass.

“Artie? What’s going on? Maybe you should go take some sleep, and later I’ll take you for lunch,” he said, his voice sober, faintly concerned now, but for me.

It was me he was thinking about. He had no idea. “You don’t feel good? What’s the matter, Artyom?” he said again.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

When I told him Val was dead, Tolya stayed at the kitchen table where he was, not moving, his hands wrapped around a coffee cup, his cigar in an ashtray, the morning sun coming in from the window on the white tulips in a blue glass vase, the sounds of little children from the green gardens outside, the smell of coffee.

The ash on his cigar grew and tipped over into the ashtray. Fried eggs, untouched, on a yellow plate were on the table like a still life. The phone rang. In another room a TV played, or a radio. Tolya didn’t move. It was as if his soul had already left the room, leaving only his body. No motion, no expression, no sound at all.

Then, suddenly, he bent over, his head bowed, his arms wrapped around himself. Like an immense turtle, a creature from prehistoric times, he seemed to pull himself inside his shell, make a shield, protect himself from this body blow.

“I’m sorry.”

“How?”

“Somebody put a pillow over her face while she was asleep,” I said. I didn’t know this for sure, that she had been asleep, but I thought it would help him if he thought she had been sleeping.

“I wish they killed me instead.”

For a minute, he stayed where he was, head on his knees, breathing too hard, gasping for oxygen, his right hand on his left arm, as if he expected a heart attack. What he finally sat up, I thought he might hit me.

Instead, he simply said in Russian, very formally, “It is not your fault, Artemy.”

He picked up his phone, got up from the chair, went to the kitchen counter, found a second cellphone lying on the stretch of dark marble, began making calls on both of them and only turned back to me to say, “How is it I didn’t hear this on the news?” he asked.

Roy Pettus had kept his promise. Nobody had reported the story. If he could keep it quiet, Pettus had real clout.

“You fixed this?” Tolya said to me.

“Yes.”

“Good,” said Tolya. “Artemy, they tested her? They did tests?”

“For what?”

“Radiation, they have antidotes, I understand this, I know about this, my God, get her tested,” he said as if Val were still alive. He was going crazy while I watched, helpless.

From the kitchen I followed him to the living room, but he moved away to a window where he pressed his face against the glass, his back to me as if he couldn’t stand to hear anything else I had to say. And then, without knocking, the man I had seen in the street came in. He went quickly across the room to Tolya and seemed to make a little bow.

With a square head and brown crew-cut hair, he was about five ten and compact and ordinary. When he removed his black linen jacket, there was a gun in his waistband, and his white shirt was tight across the muscled chest. His face was expressionless. The only odd thing about him was that a piece of one ear was missing.

Without saying anything, the man watched Tolya attentively, like a soldier waiting for orders.

Tolya picked up a pack of cigarettes lying on the white marble mantelpiece and lit it with a match. I had never seen Tolya smoke anything except the big cigars or light up without the solid gold Dunhill as big as a brick. When he looked at me, his eyes dull, face sagging, there was nothing left of my old friend.

Suddenly exhausted, I went to the room next door, glimpsed my haggard face in a long gilt mirror, slumped on a chair, called Bobo Leven in New York and left a message. Wake up, I said. Test her, I said. Test the apartment. Test for anything, alpha gamma, cesium, red mercury, polonium-210.

It was what Tolya wanted. I didn’t believe Val had been poisoned, but he had asked me. At least he would know I had done something.

When Bobo called me back, he argued about the testing, and I started yelling, “Do it. Just do it.”

“I am going to New York now,” said Tolya, coming into the room, sitting on a chair next to mine. “Please tell me everything.”

“I’ll tell you on the way.”

“Tell me now.”

So I told him. I told him about the dead girl, Masha Panchuk. When I showed him her picture, he remembered she had worked at his club in New York a few times and wanted to tend bar, but she was too young and didn’t know anything about wine. I told him about Tito Dravic, the nightclub guy in Brooklyn who had disappeared.

“Talk about Valentina,” he said.

“We were going to have dinner. She never showed up. I looked for her, I went crazy, then somebody said they saw her on a red Vespa. It wasn’t her. By the time I got back to her place, she was there, on the bed, like I told you,” I said.

From somewhere deep inside him I heard a faint noise, as if of pain, an animal whimper.

I thought he might implode, that he might collapse inside himself like one of the Twin Towers.

I put out my hand.

“Did the creep who killed Masha kill Val?” he said.

“We can talk on the plane.”

Tolya got to his feet.

“I need you to stay here in London for me,” he said. “Somebody reached out to her from this side, I have to go to New York to collect her body, to make sure nobody touches her. I can’t be in both places. Will you stay here for me?”

“Tolya?” I reached out to touch his arm.

“Yes?”

“I’m coming with you. I know what went on in New York, I can show you, I have leads, I have people working this, please. I need to be there, with you, and for Valentina.”

There would be a funeral, I thought to myself. I had to be there. I had to say goodbye or it would never ever leave me, the feeling that she was still alive, that I could call her and hear her voice.

He glanced at me. “You loved her,” he said. “She was your family, too.”

“Of course.” I saw he didn’t know the rest of it, about Val and me. “Of course,” I said again. “Like you.”

“Ride with me to the airport,” he said. “I’ll try to explain.”

Tolya was half out of his mind. Voice calm, manner determined, but in his eyes I could see it. He started out of the room. I followed him.

“Please, stay here,” he said. “You don’t understand, do you?”

“I’m not sure.”

“For Russians, London is the bank, the offshore island, the money, and where is money is killing, where people are rich, criminals come, more and more and more,” said Tolya. “I did some bad deals, Artemy. I took too much.”

“You want to tell me?”

“I’ll try. Five minutes,” he said, and left me alone in the beautiful room with curly plaster ceilings, a fancy fireplace and on the mantel, red orchids in black and gold porcelain pots.

We left the house ten minutes later. Tolya was wearing a plain dark suit, no tie, and carrying a tan raincoat. In his hand was a small canvas suitcase and a plastic bag. No gold Rolex, no Guccis. On his feet were plain cheap black shoes with laces, the kind an accountant or a teacher might wear.

He climbed into a black Range Rover and gestured for me to follow him into the back. The guy in the linen jacket was in the driver’s seat. He turned his head, and looked at Tolya who nodded. For a surreal second or two, I thought the driver was going to kill me.

“I have arranged a plane,” said Tolya as we set off.

Biggin Hill, he said, private airport, a Gulf Five would be waiting. He had borrowed it, had called friends who could make a plane available.

London passed outside the window in a blur. We got on some motorway. At the edge of it nondescript houses, big box stores, anonymous malls passed. I barely looked out. I waited for Tolya to speak. I didn’t ask about the plane or its owner.

“Again,” he said. “Tell me.”

I took him through it all again, especially Val’s disappearance, her death, what I saw, heard, thought, knew. I told him who had been working the case, what kind of people were on the job, how high up I had taken it, everything. I recited the details as if I were officially on the job, reporting to a superior. It was what Tolya wanted. I described the playground, the silvery duct tape, the girl on the swing-Masha Panchuk-her blue eyes, her hair, her resemblance to Valentina.

He didn’t speak, just nodded, making me go on and on, stopping me only for the detail. I thought it would choke me, getting the words out to tell him how Val looked on the bed, the little gold cross, the green summer dress neatly arranged. There were pictures of her Bobo had taken for me with his phone but Tolya didn’t ask and I didn’t offer.

For most of the trip he spoke Russian to me. He talked fast. He was jumpy.

“Did you know I met Sasha Litvinenko?” said Tolya suddenly.

“I think you probably said.”

“Poor bastard, they killed him with polonium-210, fucking poured it in his tea and it ate him up from inside. He was a decent guy. And I went on believing I was safe, that anyone could be safe.”

Ivan, the driver, from the shift of his shoulders, his head, the way he positioned his body, it was as if he was trying to hear what Tolya was telling me. It was only a feeling I got, but it made me uneasy. If somebody killed Val to get at Tolya, who could he trust now? Who could I trust? Maybe Tolya was right. Maybe whoever killed Valentina, it was set up out of London.

Trees hung down over the road. The sky, low, dark, filled with scudding black clouds, seemed to lie across the countryside like a dirt blanket. We were someplace in the countryside now, winding roads, low-lying houses, an old pub with a thatched roof, planes overhead, rain.

“Let me go on,” said Tolya.

“Yes.”

“I tried to believe Litvinenko only had bad luck, bad karma. I wanted to believe in London, in British justice, in a civil society. I was happy here,” he said softly. “And the theater. I was raised with this idea of great theater by my parents, Artyom, and they loved this language, this English, as beautiful as Russian and bigger, a big language, flexible, opulent, dirty, poetic. What writers! What actors! I consider language reveals the soul of a place, that it is the soul. I was entranced. I even become big-time member of these great theaters, I become Olivier Circle Member of Royal National, imagine, and I go and I meet actors and I see everything,” he added as if in a daze. “What the fuck am I talking about?” Tolya sat up. He put his cigarette in the ashtray, rubbed his face. “I thought I’d stay here for good.” He raised his shoulders, a kind of shrug of despair.

“You know when it first hit me?” Tolya went on. “That there was no place safe, no place good for me?”

“When?”

“I discovered that the guy who killed Litvinenko was on British Airways flights between Moscow and London. That same month, he took many flights. He left a radioactive trail. People were tested, the planes were cleaned up, they said. They said it was clean. I didn’t believe it. Artemy?”

“Go on.”

“I was on two of those flights, and Valentina was with me.”

Did Tolya think he had been poisoned? That Val got a dose of polonium on those flights between Moscow and London? It was nearly two years back. And I thought that, knowing she was dead, he had lost his mind.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

For a few more minutes, we rode in silence.

“Talk to me,” I said, while Ivan manoeuvered over country lanes and I saw a sign for the airport. “If I’m staying in London, tell me who, who doesn’t like you, who did you do bad business with, who do you owe? If you think somebody killed Val to get at you, I have to know.” I put out the cigarette in the car’s ashtray and waited.

“So many,” said Tolya. “I was trying to tell you, there was the polonium on the planes, there were people who wanted me on those planes, and still I didn’t believe it. You think I’m crazy? So I’m crazy. But people said Sasha Litvinenko was crazy.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“Yes, but other things. Little things I ignore, I say, no big deal, and then you arrive and tell me they killed Valentina,” he said. “Now I believe it. All of it.” Tears filled his eyes and ran down his big cheeks. Tolya made no noise, but his face was wet. “Now, just like that, this morning, like I wake up from a dream, I see it. London is only like a Potemkin Village, a façade, the more beautiful it is, the more corrupt, the more great art inside mansions, the more brutal the people. It has a rotten heart of money.” He stopped, winded. I put out my hand to touch his sleeve. Gently, he pushed it away.

“You’re saying they hurt Val because of London?”

“They can reach out any place. Not hurt, Artemy, we do not need these euphemisms. They killed her. Murdered her. Slaughtered my girl. I never talk to you about business. You don’t question me. We’re like goluboy in the military, you and me: don’t ask, don’t tell.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“You can tell me anything.”

“I don’t like to upset this balance,” he said.

“What balance?”

“I know you keep a balance between friendship for me and not being involved with all my shit, so you can be proper policeman, and I honor this in you, Artemy, this moral code.” He pulled another fresh cigarette from the pack, lit up with a throwaway orange Bic.

“That’s what Val said.”

“What did she say?”

“Something about a moral code.”

“You and Valentina were close?”

I didn’t answer.

“I’m asking you a question,” he said.

“Sure, she said I was her Uncle Artie.” I looked straight ahead. I asked him for another cigarette. He passed me the pack and the Bic lighter. I lit up, I drew in the smoke, and blew it out hard, as if it would make a screen between us.

“Where’s your gold lighter?” I said.

“I left all my things, jewelry, everything in the apartment. You take what you need, what you want. You see? You understand?”

He didn’t want anything on him that would identify him, not his wallet or lighter or his fancy shoes. It didn’t make sense because people everywhere knew Tolya, but it made sense to him now. He figured if somebody killed him, he didn’t want them taking trophies.

“Artie?” He put his hand on my arm. Tolya almost never used my American name. I didn’t know why he used it now. “Tell me,” he said, and for a second I thought he meant Val, I thought he meant about Val and me, and I didn’t know what to say.

“This girl, Masha Panchuk, I saw her picture on TV,” said Tolya. “I should have said something. I recognized her only afterwards, the next night, I was already in bed, and I thought, should I call Artie, and then I fell asleep. So what, I said to myself. So she worked for me only two days last winter. I didn’t want trouble.”

“It wouldn’t have changed things.”

“Guys like me can always change things,” he said. “I could have helped her. I could have called you when she was dead and said I knew this girl. Maybe it would have made a difference for Valentina.” He closed his eyes. “I always worried about her. Not just for silly stuff, like she stays out late, but more deeply, you understand?”

“Can you tell me about it?” I said.

“For Val’s sister, I never worry. Her sister is in medical school, she will be a great doctor. Val is different. She wants to save the world, I want to help her, I build a nice legitimate business for her, I pay tax, I join community groups, I pay much more than minimum wage, I do not ever hire illegals in the kitchen, which is perhaps the only place serving food in New York City which has not one illegal, not because I approve of the American stupid obsession with foreigners, but because I want everything perfect for Val.” He leaned back. “For first time everything is nice and in order, I am in New York, I have one little club, my Pravda2, I try to be content, and then I see how much money I can make in London.”

“Money?”

He smiled bitterly. “Yes. Money. You’re so naïve, Artyom. British government makes this tax haven for people like me, for rich Russians. London is like an offshore island.”

“You said that. What shore?”

“European shore, American shore, shore of paradise, who cares? For Russians, like a, what do you say, day at the beach.”

“No rules.”

“No rules. And for Russians this is the godsend,” he said. “Maybe already five, ten years, some even more, so I come in very late, but there is always more. They can hide money, they can spend, they can invest in real estate, shares, anything, all this money they make from buying whole pieces of the earth. These are people who buy and sell oil, nickel, aluminum, sugar, oil, gas, diamonds, everything, the earth itself, people who use sugar and soy and turn it into money, who make fortunes on orange juice, who manipulate whole countries. Russians floating on oil, all the money in the world.” Tolya paused. “While it lasts.”

“Go on.”

“It’s not your fault. You think you failed me, you didn’t watch over Valentina, but it was me. I wanted too much. I got so greedy. My God, what did I do?”

“No, Tolya. It wasn’t you. It was some bastard who killed her, not you.”

“It was me,” said Tolya. “Such a simple beginning, you know? People say, why not brand your club, why not do this style of luxury in London, Moscow, Dubai, Tokyo? It seemed like a good game, so much fun.”

“People kill for this?”

“For anything. You want an example?” said Tolya. “Right. It’s very hard to get good caviar, Russians, we shat into the Caspian for years, we killed all the fish. The Iranian side is better, expensive, but first class. But of course there are Russian fishermen who do business with Iranian fishermen. With money nobody cares. I heard from somebody is always same, even in military, did you know Russian generals and Chechen rebels pump their gas at the same hole? Literally. Caviar is the same. Together these guys find a little place to fish sturgeon that make eggs so pure, so delicious. Deluxe, premium, melt-in-your-mouth big gray pearls. And I have a little connection. And sometimes I cheat.”

“You’re saying someone killed Val because of a caviar deal?”

“Also wine, wheat, you can buy Russian wheat fields now, anything. But even when I get my club in London and my club in Moscow, I don’t know how to play this game, and so I joke around like always. I joke about Putin. I joke about the money he stashes in Swiss banks. And some creep, the kind you can visualize FSB written on his forehead, tells me shut the fuck up, and I laugh at him. He’s in my club every night for a week. Just watching. I realize it’s like the Cold War, they’re still here, no matter what you call them, KGB, FSB, whatever you call them. They watch me, and still I don’t shut up, or stop, I think: I can do what I like, this is London, and so they kill Val.”

“Why New York?”

“Because she is there. These people go where they want, this is killing by the state, Artyom, like old days. They move very freely. And it comes from the top.”

“I can help you better in New York, I can do more if I’m with you.”

“Please. For me,” he said. “And for Valentina.”

“What about you?”

“I will be fine in New York. I have people,” said Tolya, and then I understood. He wanted me in London to work the case. He also wanted me out of New York so he could use his own people, he could do things I couldn’t do as a cop. Things he didn’t want me to know.

“Who knows you’re here?” Tolya asked. “What about this Roy Pettus? This FBI schmuck who came to my club in New York?”

“He helped me keep the media out of this.”

“Don’t go further with him, please, Artyom. We keep this in the family, unofficial, you tell one person, everyone knows. We do not trust officials, FBI, CIA, MI5, 6, KGB, FSB. All the same.”

“Pettus is on our side.”

“There is no side.”

“Tolya?”

“Yes, Artemy?”

“Who asked you to get the books to Olga, the old lady in Brooklyn?”

“I don’t know,” said Tolya. “It was through Val. A lady in London asks her to do this.” He looked at me as the car finally pulled into the airport and stopped.

We got out. As if he had a chill, Tolya held his tan raincoat close to his body.

I reached in my pocket and pulled out the photograph of Val and the good-looking boy.

“You know this guy?”

“Yes. I don’t like him,” he said.

“Why?”

“Val brings him over once and I don’t like him, no reason, just a feeling. Too eager, too slick, too polite with me, as if he wants something but never says. I think he was in love with her, though,” he added grudgingly. “I didn’t want to believe it. She says to me, Daddy, you are jealous of every boy since I’m twelve years old.”

“He has a name?”

“Greg. It’s all I know.”

We walked to the terminal building.

“If you go to New York, and you make noise, they’ll kill you,” I said.

“I have to take Valentina’s body before they cut her up,” said Tolya.

I didn’t tell him that the medical examiners were already at work. I didn’t have the guts to tell him. Deep down, he knew, of course.

“Will you stay, Artie? Please? Stay in London a few days. There will be no funeral without you. I promise this. I will not bury my Val without you.”

I nodded.

“I’ll call whenever I think of more things for you,” he said. “Please, do your work as a cop. You’re a good detective, Artie, sometimes great. You will know what to do,” he said and now he sounded calm. As soon as he saw I would stay in London, he seemed to calm down.

“Tolya?”

“Yes?”

“You won’t do anything stupid in New York? You won’t employ your guys in any stupid way? You won’t run some kind of war by yourself?”

He didn’t answer, but reaching into his canvas carry-on, Tolya pulled out a plastic bag wrapped around something. On the bag it said Mr Christian’s Delicatessen. Inside was a gun.

“Here,” said Tolya. “Take this, be careful. There’s no license for you to carry it. Be careful. In the house in Notting Hill there is money if you need it. My guy will be there for you.”

He called out softly and Ivan hurried over. He made a little bow. “Ivan will drive you back.” said Tolya.

“What’s his other name?”

“Danilov.”

From a few feet away, I looked sideways at Ivan Danilov and saw that he was staring straight ahead. I didn’t like him, but I had never liked Tolya’s “guys”.

“Everybody loved Valentina,” I said.

For a split second Tolya opened his mouth as if to howl, but no sound came out.

“I got my wings burned off, Artemy,” he said finally, face swamped with tears now. “I got greedy and I got burned, and I fell down, it’s my fault, I fell and crushed my little girl.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

That night, after Tolya left for New York, I was on the roof of Pravda22, his London club. For each club, he had announced, he would add a 2. The buzz of excitement mixed with the whoosh of girls’ silky skirts in the breeze of an early summer evening, the sounds of voices, the buzz of traffic.

Below were the streets, low houses, deep gardens. People were sitting out on balconies, on the street, spilling onto the sidewalk from pubs and cafes. A kid whizzed by on a skateboard. From nearby, a motorbike roared.

I felt somebody watching, as if from the houses, behind the lights, up in the trees, as if there were people looking at me from all around, the way you might in a forest, the birds, the monkeys staring at you. Or ghosts. Ghosts in the green summer trees. The air was heavy on my skin, humid, and somewhere a streak of thunder rumbled.

Downstairs inside the club I wondered if he was in New York yet. I looked at my phone. Nothing.

It was jammed, the air full of Russian voices. The waiters glided among the tables, with huge buckets of champagne on ice and platters of sushi. I introduced myself to the bartender.

“Yeah, mate, good to meet you,” said the bartender when I introduced myself. “Mr Sverdloff said you’d be in, said to give you whatever, you know?”

Roland was his name, he said, and I remembered Tolya saying I could trust this guy if I needed somebody. Trust him, more or less, Tolya had said.

Roland was his name, he said again, and I nodded, “Yeah, thanks,” I said, and he said, “They call me Rolly. Australian. Read Russian at uni. Everyone calls me Rolly. Anything you need, mate.” He was a skinny guy, striped shirt, long humorous face. Mate. Matey. Like a sailor doing a jig.

At the far end of the bar was a guy in his fifties, long hair, straggly beard, sloping shoulders, paunch, cheap gray shoes. A second-hand book was propped on the bar. Crime and Punishment the guy was reading in Russian.

“Mr Sverdloff’s poet, like his Pindar, mate,” said Rolly. I looked again.

What kind of poet? I wondered did he write odes to Tolya? Was he some kind of praise singer in Tolya’s pay? Before I could get away, he detained me, and started talking at me in Russian, about Russians in London, about the true believers, the communists, the democrats, the nationalists, on and on and on, Putin, the anti-Putinistas, the Kasparovites, who believed Gary Kasparov wasn’t a chess player but a god. Decried money, pissed on capitalism. I tossed some money on the bar. Finally he left.

From behind the bar, Rolly held up a glass to make sure it was clean. He beckoned me back to his end, and said, “Mr Sverdloff tells me to serve him, give him drinks and food, don’t charge him. Says he can be our conscience. I think he’s our pain in the royal, you know?” He put the glass down and reached for a bottle of vodka. “He comes in early, I keep him at the end of the bar so he doesn’t bother the others with his bullshit, but he leaves early, knows a good thing, mate, so he doesn’t make a fuss much,” said Rolly. “He’s been in London a while. Teaches, I think.” He was making a martini while we talked.

“You ever meet Valentina Sverdloff, Sverdloff’s daughter?”

He hesitated.

“What is it?”

“You’re Mr Sverdloff’s friend, right?”

“Yes.”

“It’s tough to say exactly.”

“Try.”

“She was a knockout,” he said.

“That’s not what you were thinking.”

“You mean because I’m gay? I can see what a girl looks like can’t I?”

“You were thinking something you didn’t want to tell me. You want to walk outside for a minute? Grab a smoke?”

“Sure,” said Rolly, talked to another bartender, and went out onto the street with me where he lit up a smoke and sighed.

“Valentina,” I said. “You knew her. How well? Listen, level with me. Tell me what you thought about her, don’t fucking hold back, okay?”

Drinking his beer, he looked surprised.

“You sure, mate? I mean, you’re her dad’s pal, right?”

“Just fucking please tell me.”

“Men were crazy for her, and she was drop-dead gorgeous when she bothered, I’m saying sometimes she came by, no makeup, old pair of jeans, she was okay, but when she was done up, it was like Jesus H. fucking Christ. She was fantastic, I might be gay but I know sex on a stick.” He glanced at me. “I’m sorry.”

“She had friends?”

“Sure. Girlfriends. Men. Men came round like bees to honey, though she was bloody demanding.”

“One guy in particular?”

“Oh, yeah, baby,” said Rolly with emphasis, while he took big sucks on his smoke. “Now he was very cool.”

“Did he pay for the drinks?”

“Of course not. It was her daddy’s club, they didn’t pay though I got the impression he wasn’t absolutely rolling in it, the boy I mean.”

“Was he after her father’s money?”

“Who can tell? You want to know the actual truth about her, Valentina, the way I saw it?”

I nodded.

“She was a scary girl. Intense, you know?” said Rolly. “She’d talk about orphanages in Russia, the bloody politics of the place, I could see some of the customers look at her as if she was mad.”

“Anything else you can think of about the boyfriend?”

“Just he looked amazing, crazy about her, a lot of fucking charm, mate. Perfect manners. Never said a thing when she started in on one of her rants, but I could see it made him uncomfortable when she talked about how corrupt officials in Moscow are, I mean it’s not fucking brilliant in a club like this to say Putin has billions stashed in a Swiss bank, is it?”

“And she liked him?”

“Crazy about him. I think she was one of those girls who everybody wants, but she had never really fallen for anybody, and this time, it was very big, very hot.”

“He was Russian, wasn’t he?”

“I didn’t notice. Yes, I think so. He only spoke English to me. Said his name was Greg.”

“Nothing else?”

“Not with me,” said Rolly. “But I was just the help. I better go back in. You coming?”

There wasn’t much more I could get at the club so I went back to the house which was a few blocks away and sat in a canvas chair on Tolya’s patio. It was back of the house and joined up with the communal gardens just beyond. Fireflies spat their glitter onto the thick dark summer night, and I sat, drank some Scotch and watched people go in and out of their houses.

They carried trays and bottles, they sat around outdoor tables and yakked and laughed. Kids ran on the grass.

For a while I tried to figure how to look for a man who had killed Sverdloff’s daughter as a warning.

From my cell I called Bobo Leven in New York, told him to get me anything he had on Tito Dravic, the Brooklyn club manager. Told him to keep working everything, including the initial m carved on Masha. I wasn’t convinced it was her own initial, I was guessing the killer left it because he liked to sign his work. Then I went into Tolya’s house through the garden door.

Sleepless, I wandered through the house. On the marble mantel in the living room was a stack of invitations, heavy white cards. I picked them up. Balls. Parties. Picnics. Races. One was for Saving Girls, a charity ball. Host: Anatoly Sverdloff. It was Val’s charity. I looked at the date. The night after the next. I’d be there. I wanted to know what these people had heard, how much they knew. Russians.

From the room where I crawled into bed finally, but still restless, I leaned on one arm and looked out the side street window. Tolya’s SUV was there, and his guy, Ivan, was leaning against it, smoking. I could see the burning red tip of his smoke.

A minute or two later, another car drove slowly up the street, slowly maybe just to avoid the speed bumps, maybe because the driver was looking for something.

I changed rooms. I went to bed in a room away from the street. I put the gun Tolya had given me on the bedside table. The clock, an alarm clock in a blue leather case, was next to it. The illuminated green dial read 3.04.

Couldn’t sleep. Got up one more time, smoked a while, standing at the window, saw black shapes outside, something in the gardens, maybe just teenagers, maybe something else. I felt trapped between the two sides of the house.

Exhausted, jet-lagged, so heavy I felt like I was carrying somebody else, another whole body, on my back, I dozed. Except for a few miserable hours sucking in stale air on the plane, I hadn’t slept for a couple of nights.

Only now, in my half-sleep, then in my dreams, did I finally grasp that Valentina was really gone. I pushed my face into the pillow.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Bray was the name of the little town where Tito Dravic had worked. Bobo Leven got me the information same as he got me the information that Dravic had turned up in Belgrade and refused to talk to anyone. I was guessing he was scared by Masha’s murder, by offering to help me. Scared him so bad he’d left New York.

The town was an hour out of London, and the River Inn where Dravic had been a waiter sat in a plush green grove of trees on the banks of the river Thames. Yellow-green willows brushed their feathery branches against the water.

A lovely sweet smell came up as I got out of the cab from the train station, green, fresh, light years from the crappy playground where Masha had been tied up to the swing.

Another part of Tolya’s make-believe paradise was the English countryside. I knew Tolya had a country mansion someplace. His Eden.

“Ten pounds,” said the irritable cab driver when I gave him dollars by mistake.

Even before I got to the front door of the hotel, it hit me that Dravic had known Masha Panchuk better than he said, and that he knew her long before she got to New York.

How bad did it hurt when he found out she had a husband, that she was probably going out with other guys, maybe working as a hooker? Did he watch her with men at the club in Brooklyn and want to kill her?

As I left the parking lot at the inn I noticed the same Mercedes SUV I had seen from the window the night before, the SUV that rolled slowly over the speed bumps on Tolya’s street; or maybe I was just going nuts.

“Can I help you?”

The hotel smelled of polish and fresh flowers. In the bar off the lobby, a young guy was setting up for lunch. Chilling bottles of white wine in a tub of ice as delicately as if they were tiny missiles, he clocked my presence and asked for the second time if he could help.

“Can I help you, sir?” I wasn’t sure why I did it at first, but I twisted my wrist to glance at the gold Rolex I had taken from Tolya’s place because I’d left my watch in New York. I made my accent slightly foreign, faintly Russian. I realized he had seen the watch, had taken note of my accent.

The Rolex sat on my wrist, big as a quarter pounder, gold, diamonds surrounding the dial.

“I’d like some coffee, please,” I said.

“Of course,” said the waiter attentively. “Would you like some breakfast, sir?”

I said I’d be out on the terrace where tables were set for lunch. As I sat down, I asked for some cigarettes, took Tolya’s lighter out of my pocket, flicked it in the sun, examined the familiar design-a cigar engraved on the surface with a large ruby for the burning tip. Tolya always carried it. The waiter who had seated me rushed away to get my coffee and a newspaper. He obviously figured me for somebody with dough, maybe a rich Russian.

From where I sat I could watch boats drift along the water, the beautiful houses on the other side, a few kids scrambling down the bank, and then, without me really noticing at first, a man emerged from the hotel and sat at the table farthest from mine, next to a large terracotta pot of red geraniums.

He wore jeans and a white t-shirt. He spoke Russian softly into his phone. He saw me look. Nodded politely like well-bred strangers in some period movie, then closed his phone and opened his copy of the Financial Times.

When the waiter brought my coffee, I peeled a ten off the wad of Tolya’s notes I had in my pocket and said, “You have a minute?”

He nodded. I asked him about Tito Dravic. He said he knew Dravic before he left for the States. I showed him the picture of Masha Panchuk.

“Oh, sure, Masha worked as a maid here for a few weeks,” he said. “She was a sad girl. Pretty, but so sad she wore it like a coat.”

“She was close with Dravic?”

“I don’t know. I heard something,” he said. “Hang on a minute.” He disappeared into the hotel, and a few minutes later a stocky woman in a white skirt and dark blue blouse came out and hovered. She introduced herself as the assistant manager. I didn’t identify myself as a cop, but I implied this was some kind of official visit. The woman looked tense. Easy to intimidate.

“Sit down, please.” I said. “You knew Masha Panchuk, and Tito Dravic?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Miss Panchuk worked for a friend of mine,” I said. “In New York. I said I’d ask about her when I got here. They were close?”

“Yes,” said the woman who didn’t tell me her name, just her title. Yes, she said again and told me that Tito was upset when Masha went away. That Masha took up with a fellow, name of Zim something. “She told me she was going to Alaska with him. I told her she was mad, she had a good job here, but she didn’t take any notice.”

“Did Dravic know?”

“I imagine he knew, and not long after Masha left, he said he was going home to New York.”

“When was this?”

She shrugged. “Last winter perhaps?”

“You knew she was dead?”

“We heard. I am so sorry.”

“Is there anything else you can tell me?”

She got up. “Do you speak Russian?”

“Yes.”

“Come with me, if you would.”

I took a gulp of my coffee, glanced again at the middle-aged man in jeans-good-looking, expensive haircut, unlined face- and I followed her into the hotel and upstairs to a small office. She picked up the phone. A minute later, a young woman appeared. She wore a maid’s uniform, she was very young and pale and serious.

The manager spoke to her in bad Russian and gave her permission to answer my questions.

“You knew Masha Panchuk?” I said.

She nodded.

“And Dravic?”

“Yes.”

“They were close?”

“Yes,” she said, not volunteering more than she was asked for.

“Masha went away without him?”

“She gets married with Zim. Tito is unhappy. After a while he returns to the United States.”

“How unhappy?”

“Very unhappy and angry. I didn’t like to be near him,” the girl said. “One time I found him punching the wall with his fist until it is covered in blood.”

“And Masha?”

“I never saw her again.”

Masha was dead. Dravic was in Belgrade, refusing to talk to anyone, which was as good as dead.

Had Masha first gone to the Brooklyn club to get help from him? To tell him it was over with Zim? That she only used Zim to get to America?

It was a dead end. What I wanted was the son of a bitch who killed Valentina.

The manager told the Russian girl to go back to her work, then said to me, “Is your friend looking for someone to replace Masha Panchuk?”

“It’s for me,” I said. “I’m going to be living in London for a while and I need someone good.”

“You’d like a Russian girl?”

“Yes.”

She didn’t ask why, just made a phone call, wrote on a piece of paper and handed it to me.

“This is the agency we used for Masha. They have good workers. They supply many of the important Russian families living here.”

“But you’re not Russian?”

“No, just plain English,” she said.

“A lot of Russians come to the hotel?”

“Yes,” she said. “We have a marvelous chef, two stars in Lyons before he came to us, absolute genius, and a very fine wine cellar and the Russians want only the best. Many come here to stay which is why we hire quite a few Russians as maids and waiters. Many of the wealthiest Russians have country estates quite close by. We cater parties for them, and the houses are marvelous, and the best art.”

“So it’s okay? You’re happy about it?”

“Of course we’re happy,” she said. “The Russians come and they are wonderful tippers. As long as it lasts,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“One of these days the whole thing will come crashing down.” She shifted her glance from me to the wall and back, and I realized she was not just uneasy, but on edge and maybe a little bit nuts.

Was she afraid of her world crashing? Of the Russians fleeing? Of the wave of money receding and leaving her stranded on some imaginary beach?

“How do you know?”

She looked up at the ceiling.

“I hear things,” she said, and I didn’t know if the woman meant God talked to her or she got messages through the fillings in her teeth or she eavesdropped on the Russians in the hotel.

“Can I trouble you for a light?” said the man in jeans when I got back to the terrace.

“Sure.” I handed him the gold lighter I had borrowed from Tolya. He shook a cigarette out of a pack and lit up, then handed the lighter back.

“Nice,” he said. “I noticed it earlier.”

“Right.”

“I was just wondering where you got it.”

“Why?”

“I’ve only seen one other lighter just like it. It belongs to Tolya Sverdloff.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

“I’m Laurence Sverdloff,” he said, “Tolya’s cousin. It’s his lighter, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said, and told him my name.

“You have another name, Mr Cohen?”

“Artie,” I said.

“In Russian you are Artemy Maximovich?”

“I’m not Russian,” I said. “But, yeah, once it was my name.”

“Good, yes, like Tolya told me,” he said. “Then it really is you. I’m sorry to make a fuss, but this horrible thing with Valentina. It makes you look in the rear-view mirror twice, you know?” His accent was neutral, stranded somewhere between America and England.

He was in his mid-forties, tall, wiry, and comfortable in his jeans and t-shirt, though I was guessing he was the kind of business guy who went everywhere first class as if he owned it. When he smiled, I saw the resemblance with Tolya.

“My real name is Laurence Sverdloff Antonovich” he said. “In America, they called me Larry,” he said. “Somebody picked this ridiculous name when I went to grad school at Stanford. God, I loved California. Name stuck. Whatever, but then Artie’s not much better,” he said, smiling, making his charm work hard for him. “Have you heard from my cousin?”

I didn’t answer. I wanted this Larry to fill the silence, tell me something.

“I bloody worry about what he’ll do to find out who killed Valentina. Nothing matters to him anymore except that. I wish you were with him.”

“He wanted me here.”

“He thinks it’s all about London,” said Larry.

“Is it? You could go to New York,” I said.

“It would make things worse. People watch where I go.”

“What people?”

He didn’t answer the question, just said, “Tolya and me, we grew up together, his father and mine were brothers. Both dead now,” said Larry, picking up his own lighter from the table as he reached for a cigarette. I’m afraid I only use my old Zippo.” He lit up. “I’m scared for him, when we were kids all I wanted was to be like him, my cousin Tolya, my idol, this daring guy. He had every illicit book under his bed, he was very rock and roll and for real. I wanted to call myself Ringo, but my father threatened to send me to the military academy, he said, we named you for the great British actor, and you want to call yourself for a what? A Beatle? So I gave in. I didn’t have Tolya’s balls.”

“I asked who’s watching you.”

“People who I offend,” he said, and went on to recount how his father had been a director, like Tolya’s.

“How’d you make the money?”

“You assume I have money?”

“Come on.”

“I went to Stanford, my English was already pretty good, made some money in Silicon Valley,” he said. “I played the game in Moscow. Made more. Back to California. So I go all the way to America, which I love, to marry an English girl who’s a doctor and wants to come home to work in the National Health Service here.”

I tapped my fingers. I wanted the meat and this guy was giving me the empty bun.

“I married a socialist.” He laughed. “What comes around, eh? You know my grandfather went to high school with Trotsky,” he added. “Seems like they were always fighting because grandpa’s pop was in the fur biz. Sable.”

“You’re not here by accident, are you?” I said to Larry.

“No,” he said. “I knew you were coming to London, Tolya told me, and before he left, he called and said I should keep an eye on you. I’m sorry for all the cloak and dagger stuff, but my driver saw you leave Tolya’s and head this way and he called me. Apologies, Artie.”

“How come you’re telling me all this?”

“So you’ll trust me,” he said. “What are you looking at?”

Just behind Larry, a guy with the square jaw and sloping shoulders of a piece of Russian muscle was hovering. Wanting to get into Larry’s eye line, to signal him, tell him it was time to get out of here, I figured. I mentioned it. Larry turned around, then got up from his chair and put some money on the table.

He held up the newspaper. “You saw the story?” He gestured to a piece on Litvinenko. “The Brits are saying what everybody already knows, that this was an act of state terrorism. Now it’s official. I should go. Why don’t you ride with me, come have some lunch, if you want, or else my guy will take you back to London. His name is Pavel. He’s a good man, by the way.”

Half an hour later, we arrived at Larry Sverdloff’s house. There was a high black wrought-iron gate which opened as if somebody had been watching for us. Larry’s driver, Pavel, went through it, up a circular drive and parked in front of a long low-slung stone mansion. The sun had come out and it gave the stones a golden color.

We had come in the Merc-the Brits loved their cars, and gave them nicknames-with a Range Rover behind and in front. Through the narrow country lanes we had come like a military convoy. These Russians, Tolya, his cousin, others, used their drivers, their guys, like little armies. They used them as advance parties to protect them, spies to watch out for them, servants to do their bidding. Other things, too. Under his jacket, Pavel carried a gun.

I had a vision of them constantly in motion, driving around the countryside, through the London streets, the drivers reporting back to headquarters. England was a crowded little country, too many cars, too many drivers, too many cameras hanging from buildings and trees, like strange fruit.

From the front door of the house, a woman appeared. Larry greeted her in Russian, introduced me, we shook hands. Basha was her name, she said, and smiled. I saw in the way Larry Sverdloff talked to her, the way she used his first name, he played at being a benign laid-back guy. He was still in charge. The people who worked for him were modern-day serfs. Most were Russian. I was betting plenty of them were illegal. If they left him, where would they go?

Around the huge house were gardens planted thick with flowers, neon blue hydrangeas, purple iris, creamy roses. Ancient trees spread green shade over lawns. Beyond them I could see huge vistas of green, more trees, a lake glittering in the distance. I could see how jealous Tolya would have been. His cousin was a player with a castle and the courtiers to go with it.

“Shall we swim?” said Larry.

He lent me a suit, I changed in a pool house, and for a while we swam silently.

A powerful swimmer, Larry was clearly a guy who worked out, wiry, compact, big shoulders, no fat at all. Without agreeing, we raced the length of the pool and back, and I knew he expected to win. I let him win. A happy opponent was useful, though there was no reason to figure Larry Sverdloff for the opposition.

Afterwards, he tossed me a thick blue towel, and used another one to dry his hair. Basha, the housekeeper appeared with a tray of sandwiches and drinks. Larry took a can of Diet Coke, popped the top and drank it. Somewhere a bird tweeted in a tree.

“You think this is all nuts, somebody like me riding around in that tank of an SUV? Living in this place?” said Larry.

“Is it?”

“Fuck knows,” said Larry, smiling suddenly like a regular guy who found himself in an unexpected, almost ridiculous situation.

“You’ve seen a lot of Tolya the last few years?”

“Yes,” he said. “He never mentions me?”

“No.”

“He probably doesn’t want to involve you,” said Larry.

“What in?”

“His business. My business.”

“He told you that?” I took a beer.

“He doesn’t have to. He talks about you a lot, I know how he feels.”

“What’s his business?”

“Whatever he can get.”

I drank from the bottle. “What’s that mean?” I said.

“Look, when we were kids in Moscow, he could always get books, or jeans, or go up to Tallinn to a flea market and come back with Pierre Cardin sunglasses. He would wear those sunglasses and imagine he was somewhere else. The glasses invested him with his own kind of power. They were magic glasses, he always told me. I believed him. ”

“And now?”

“He thinks he’s still a rock and roll hero except now his music is the money.”

“So?”

“He shoots his mouth off,” Larry said. “People think he’s a wild man.”

“Do you?”

“What?”

“Think he’s a loose cannon?”

Larry looked up. Clouds, ominous fat purple clouds scrambled across the sky and thunder rumbled through the humid afternoon. I followed his gaze, and saw him glance in the direction of the house.

“Ten years ago I was living in a nice little suburban place outside Palo Alto,” he said.

“Yeah, so what made you give it up, I mean other than your wife wanted to live in England?”

“Greed,” he said. “At first.”

“And second?”

“You probably want to know about Valentina. I loved Val,” he said, “I was her uncle and her godfather.”

“What about the boyfriend? Greg.”

“I met him at a party. He seemed fine. Val was crazy about him.”

“I want to talk to him.”

“I’ll try to help.”

Larry’s phone rang. He picked it up, listened, got up, a towel still around his neck.

“I want to get back to London,” I said.

“What’s the hurry?”

“I don’t like the country.”

“Right,” he said. “I’ll try to get hold of Greg for you. Meanwhile I’ll give you a phone number. You might need help, right?” He said it straight, it wasn’t ironic, not sarcastic, just a statement of fact. “Come up to the house,” Larry added. “You can shower and change. I have an office out here, I do a lot of my business instead of my main office in London,” he said. “It’s easier, safer, and I’ve discovered most people are willing to make the trip.”

“I bet.”

He shrugged. “If they want something, they come. I might be able to give you something that will help. My driver can take you back to London later,” said Larry, who didn’t wait for my answer.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Larry Sverdloff’s office was in a free-standing building in back of the house, out of view of the gardens, or the beautiful rooms I had glimpsed on my way to shower and change.

In a room next to the office were two sofas and an armchair and in them sat five men, leaning forward, waiting, a little anxious.

A couple of them were Russians in open-necked shirts. The three Brits sat straight, they were tense, they looked like supplicants, like people who wanted something, needed something from Larry Sverdloff.

When I came in, they looked up expectantly, then went back to staring at their hands. A woman who said she was Larry’s assistant came out of his office, greeted me and asked me to wait.

“He’ll only be a minute,” she said.

Through the window I could see cars in a parking area, could see one leave, another arrive. I got the sense Larry wanted me to see all this, wanted me to understand his power, his authority.

After a few minutes, Larry came out and said, “Hi, Art, God, I’m sorry I was late. Come in.”

We started for his office, the men who were waiting got up and greeted him. He shook their hands. There was no trace of irony on his face, no glimpse at all of the guy I had been swimming with an hour earlier.

He was comfortable with the power he had over the men in his outer office.

On the wall in Larry’s own office was a huge Matisse, a thing so beautiful, I couldn’t stop looking. Larry followed my gaze, but he didn’t speak, and then from his pocket he got a scrap of paper with a number. “This is somebody you could call if you want help, use my name, okay? It’s a good contact, and safe,” he said.

I was impatient with all of it suddenly. I stayed on my feet.

“Don’t you want to sit, Artie?”

“I’m fine. What’s so fucking hush-hush?”

“Yeah, okay, I was holding back, but I realized if you’re going to find who killed Val and who wants Tolya dead, there are things you should know. Please sit down, it will take a while,” said Larry, glancing out of the window.

“Sure,” I said, sitting on a worn leather chair. “You keep looking around, you ride in an armored car, I don’t get it.”

“You don’t believe it’s necessary?”

“This is England. They don’t even carry guns here. It feels like a lot’s going on for show.”

“You mean you think it’s posturing, that I do all this stuff to show people I have power?”

“You want an answer?”

“Sure.”

“Yes. I mean, what’s it for? You think you’re in so much danger? Come on,” I said.

“They killed Valentina.”

“In New York.”

“They killed Litvinenko. There have been others. I’ve had threats. Even my kids. I try to keep it normal for them, I don’t want them going to school with guys carrying loaded AKs, like some people.”

“Jesus.”

“No matter where I go, I can’t get away, here, California, vacation, it doesn’t matter.”

“Because you owe somebody?”

He smiled just slightly. “Because of who I am.”

“I don’t get it.”

“I’m a Russian. Like Tolya, like you.”

“No fucking chance,” I said under my breath.

Larry got up and looked out of the window, turned back to me but didn’t sit down.

“You can’t escape from it,” he said. “The religion, the politics, the KGB, FSB, the Kremlin, the power, the paranoia, the fear, the fact that until a century ago most of us were serfs, slaves, really, we didn’t even have last names, all surreal, the fact that thirty-seven per cent of the population can’t see the need for indoor plumbing, that men are dying younger and younger, that we’ve produced the most sophisticated music and literature and graphics in the past, and we’re living in the Middle Ages, and we shoot journalists who tell the truth. It’s getting worse.” In Larry’s face was something I hadn’t seen before, a kind of passion, or was it obsession?

“I thought you were a businessman, I thought you were in it for the dough.”

“There will be a lot of shit coming,” Larry said. “Soon. Soon, Artie, they want Georgia, they want Ukraine, I’m betting before the end of the summer, there will be tanks in Tblisi, Art, and nobody will know if it’s a response to the Georgians or if the Georgians wanted it, provoked it. People will take sides, they’ll rattle nukes. There’s only one power and it takes in the whole damn place, the whole former USSR, you get it? You want me to spell it out, you want me to write the name?”

“Sure. I’m only a New York cop, help me out.”

He lowered his voice to a whisper, and said, “Everything comes from the Kremlin,” he said. “Everything goes back to Putin.”

“What does it have to do with Val?”

“Tolya,” he said. “Maybe me. A warning.”

“You have people on it?”

“I have official friends. The number I gave you is one of them, somebody who can help you with Valentina. Use it.”

“Official?”

“I don’t operate like my cousin, I do this stuff inside the system. It works better. And we’ll find them, whoever killed her, the way we found out who killed Sasha Litvinenko.”

“Who?”

“Name is Lugovoi. Maybe you read about it. He’s in Russia, no extradition. They’ll protect him, but nothing is forever.”

“Who’s we? I don’t believe the bullshit about it all being official. There’s other people.”

“You don’t need them,” he said.

“Can you fix for me to meet this guy, Greg?”

“There’s a party tomorrow night. Maybe he’ll be there. Charity thing Tolya cooked up. It would have been for Val, now it will be in her honor,” he said, and his eyes filled up. I couldn’t tell if he was acting or not. “Call me anytime. But be careful.”

“What of?”

“There are people like me here who want things to change in Russia, you know their names, these are people who are in much worse danger, they go on TV, they give interviews, they never travel without whole armies of security.” Larry sat close to me now, and leaned forward. “This is where we put our money, this is what we work for, to make it better in Russia, to stop all this. This is why it’s dangerous.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” I said, impatient now.

Larry got up. “The next revolution, Art. I have to go now. See you at the party tomorrow night.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

“Watch it, mate,” said a fat man who pushed past me on the street in London.

Fuck off, mate, I wanted to say, but I kept my mouth shut. By the time I got back to London from Larry Sverdloff’s place, it was a dripping day, wet, warm. I looked at the number on the door of a Greek grocery store on Moscow Road. I was looking for the agency where Masha Panchuk had been hired to work at the country hotel.

People looked pissed off, they snapped if you bumped into the them, in the stores they were surly. London had become a mean place since I’d been here a dozen years ago. Maybe it always was.

“Bloody London,” I said half aloud. It was what I had felt even then. It was a city that got to me, made me half fall in love with it, then shoved me away, snarling.

In a row of little stores, electrical appliances, laundromat, coffee place, I found the building and rang the bell. Somebody buzzed me in, and I climbed three flights.

“Maids, Butlers, Chauffeurs” the printed sign read in English. Under it, on a piece of cardboard, the same sign was written out by hand in Russian. The door was open.

A middle-aged woman with a kindly face and a hairy wart on her cheek was singing a Russian lullaby to the plants she was watering on the windowsill. Turned when I entered, said her name was Ilana. On the other side of the room was a second door. I figured it led to a bathroom.

“Please, sit down,” said Ilana, taking the chair behind a desk that held only a calendar and an old desktop computer.

I repeated what I’d said at the hotel in the countryside that I was looking for somebody to take care of me in London. I didn’t mention Masha Panchuk, not at first, and I didn’t know if the hotel had called Ilana. She pulled her computer screen towards me so we could both see it and then scrolled through pictures.

I made conversation. On a hunch, I switched to Russian. She smiled. I reflected on the humor in the street where the agency was being called Moscow Road. There was some history here, she added. Aristocrats had lived here; just around the corner in St Petersburg Mews, too. Russian businesses had opened over the years, she said, because it was close to Paddington Station where the train from the airport came in, and close to the Russian Embassy if you needed visas for your workers; and so people clustered around it, and after a while it had become a little joke.

Where do you go when you get to London? Moscow Road, they would say to each other.

Flashing my gold watch, I looked at the pictures she showed me on the computer, photographs of the girls who could clean. All good girls, she said. Hard workers. Nice-looking.

Did she think I wanted something else? I had implied I was a rich Russian and she believed it, the way the woman at the hotel had believed it. I felt I was in disguise.

More girls were displayed on the screen. Was this a front? Were they offering hookers? I pointed to a girl who looked about fifteen.

“I like this one. How old is she?”

“Twenty-one,” said Ilana. “Very nice girl.”

“She looks younger,” I said.

I offered Ilana a cigarette and we both lit up, and I let her know what my tastes were. I said, of course, I really did want somebody to clean. It was just I liked attractive people in my house, I liked girls with good manners who could double as waitresses and knew how to greet people at the door, and wear a nice uniform.

“Of course,” she said, “what else?”

We looked at more pictures, then I returned to the little girl I had chosen first.

From my pocket, I took some money out, and slid it under the calendar on the desk. She didn’t look, but she smiled faintly.

“Can I confide in you?” she said.

“Of course,” I said, adding we were both Russians and people of the world and we understood each other.

“This little one, she is young, but we try to help everybody. It’s tough for these girls. Very young, which means very good at taking instructions, like schoolgirl, yes? Very fresh, very hardworking. Shall I send her to you? We want to give our girls a chance for some kind of life.”

I hesitated.

“You would like somebody older?”

“What about younger?”

“I don’t know,” she said nervously, peeking at the money I’d put on the desk. “I shall ask.” She handed me her card.

“Expensive?”

“Yes, but these girls are good,” she said, and then picked up the money I’d given her and returned it. “Thank you,” she said. “But we only accept a fee once you’ve hired the girl.”

I was surprised. She wasn’t on the take after all, or did she want something else, something bigger?

Thanking her, I got up. I suggested that she put the girl she had in mind on standby and that I would call as soon as I was settled in my new house.

“Where is it?” she asked.

I told her it was in the countryside, an old mansion I had recently purchased. Near Bray in the county of Berkshire, I said, and she seemed satisfied. I said again that I would call, she said she would send the girl as soon as I needed her. I started for the door.

“For a sleep-in maid, yes?” said Ilana, but I was halfway out the door. I waited in the hall.

I heard Ilana get up, heard the scrape of her chair, heard her move around the office. When I went back in, she was coming out of the door I thought was a bathroom. A scrabbling noise.

“Is somebody here?” I said.

“No, certainly not,” said Ilana, looking at me confused, unsure what I wanted, eager to supply it.

I asked about Masha Panchuk again, and there was too much hesitation before she told me she had never met the girl. She said she had an appointment and looked nervously at her watch.

From Moscow Road, I walked a few blocks to Queensway, a wide street packed with Russians, Arabs, Chinese. The air was thick with languages. Some guys were trading whatever they had in their pants pockets. Drugs? Nickel bags? Gold watches?

People like this were always out for crumbs. You could read it in their faces and their clothes. They inhabited the fringes of crime. They hung around waiting for something to happen. They bought and sold drugs or information or little girls or boys, anything they could.

I listened in. I got the Russian, the exchanges and promises and threats. Some of the Arabic I also got.

This was a shabby world of people who live off the books. You found them in every big city. One guy turned suddenly. He had a pale face and pallid sweaty skin and a missing front tooth and he stared at me. He knew I had been listening. He offered me girls. Cheap, he said. I told him to fuck off. In a back alley a hundred yards away, I found stalls selling wooden dolls, Soviet army watches, the usual garbage that had begun to appear almost twenty years ago now, the fallout from the old Soviet Empire.

As soon as I turned myself into a Russian-I talked the language even in my head-I tuned in to people around me. I caught what they said, I asked questions, I got plenty of offers: currency, girls, drugs, whatever I wanted I could get here.

A place like this, I knew, you could find out who did certain kinds of jobs and how much they cost. This was where I could find out how it worked in London now, maybe the kind of people paid to deal with Tolya, deal with his daughter. Maybe I could get a fix on Greg, the boy in Val’s pictures. Maybe I was jealous, and I couldn’t get it out of my head that she’d had somebody.

Here too, you could find out who would run errands. If you hung around enough, if you let on you had enough cash, you could probably find out who would kill.

Maybe this was what Roy Pettus had wanted me for. Maybe without meaning to, I was doing his business.

I bought the newspapers, British, Russian, I stopped for coffee and read some of them. I began to see that London wasn’t only the banker for Russians, but a marketplace for money, for people, for information, a crazy quilt of greed, ambition, fear. There were listings for real estate, for country houses, for apartments in Russia, for furniture and gold and diamonds. In the want-ads were listings for people to service the rich: maids, escorts, butlers, chauffeurs, interpreters, wives. You read between the lines carefully enough, you spotted girls for sale.

At the other end of the street, near Hyde Park, was an ice-skating rink, and I leaned against the wall and watched for a while. Kids went in and came out, some with skates over their shoulders, others idled in the doorway.

This was a London of foreigners. Languages I couldn’t even make out ate up the air space around me so that my head hurt.

So Masha had used a seedy employment agency that might or might not be a front for hookers? What difference did it make? She had been killed in Valentina’s place because of a resemblance, because she had Val’s gold purse. Somebody realized the mistake and went for Val.

Nothing here, I thought. Not today.

I gave one guy a few bucks, though. He was a small Russian with a sweaty face and a taste for Middle Eastern sweet things. He talked and fed his mouth with Turkish delight that left powdered sugar on his face.

I’d found him selling Russian tablecloths at a tiny stall, and he was eager and smart. Of the people I saw on the street, in stores, restaurant, stalls, this one was alert and up for business. He held out the box of candy.

“Try pistachio,” he said. “Or rose water.” He had a peasant accent, his Russian was crude, but on a hunch, I showed him Greg’s pictures, and told him it was worth quite a bit to me to find him. By the time I left, the little man was already on his phone.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

“You let them cut her up,” said Tolya over the phone late that night. I was sitting in Tolya’s library, the TV tuned to some Euro sports channel, the sound muted, when he called.

“They sliced her open, Artemy.”

“I couldn’t stop that.”

He didn’t speak, but I could hear him breathing hard.

“Tolya? You there? I’m coming home,” I said.

“No. I want you to go to my party tomorrow night, I want you to see who comes, who doesn’t come, who cries real tears for Valentina. Many people will not know you, which is good.”

“Of course.”

“But my cousin Larry will know you. He’ll know who you are. You’ll meet him at the party.”

“I met him.”

“I see. He sent his guy to follow you around?”

“Yes. What’s with him?”

“He thinks he’s going to change the world, Artemy, he thinks he’s going to fix things in Russia, him and a bunch of other guys. He’s okay, but anything you want to tell him, anything he asks, call me first.”

“Sure.”

“I left something for you in the closet. In the guest room,” he said, his voice dry and affectless, his language formal, no swearing, no affectionate barbs, nothing at all that reminded me of my friend.

Valentina’s room was on the top floor, I climbed the stairs and stood outside the door. I didn’t want to go in. The house was silent. There was only the noise of a party out in the garden, but in here it was silent.

I opened the door gently. The room smelled of Val, it smelled of her perfume, her shampoo. It was an empty space. The bed and the rest of the furniture remained. The drawers and closets were empty, as if she had barely used them, as if she had left this room long ago.

I hate what London does to him, my dad, ever since he opened his club there. Valentina had said this to me at Dubi’s bookshop. I don’t want to ever go back.

What did I expect to find?

I looked through the desk drawers, in the bathroom. Nothing. I got down on the floor and felt I wanted to stay there, wanted to just lie down on the soft rug and sleep for a while.

Under the bed was a long flat box, probably something that had been forgotten by Val, by Tolya, by the people who cleaned. I pulled it out, sat up and opened it.

Inside were freshly laundered sheets wrapped in tissue paper that smelled of sandalwood, nothing else as far as I could see at first.

Again, I searched the room. I tried to look with the eye of a cop, of a guy who had come in fresh, not knowing anything, not the place or the people who had inhabited it. Eventually I found the box on a shelf in the bathroom.

Inside were a few pieces of jewelry Val had obviously forgotten. There was a thin gold chain with a Victorian locket on it, a pair of small diamond earrings, and an antique bracelet made out of amber. There was also an envelope where somebody-Val, somebody else-had placed some stray beads, a single earring that had no mate, a gold charm resembling a Russian Easter egg. Nothing else.

I took out the envelope. Val’s name was on the front. On the back was a return address. Wimbledon, it said. Wimbledon, I thought. They play tennis there.

It didn’t mean anything, but I put the envelope in my pocket.

What else did Val say about London?

I sat on the edge of her bed now, and tried to remember. We had talked a little about it the night she stayed with me. I had tried not to think about her. It was all I wanted to think about.

It was about one in the morning, and we were in my bed and Val leaned on her elbow and said, “I’m starving,” and giggled, though she almost never giggled. Her laugh, the low husky rising chuckle that exploded at the end, belonged to a grown-up. But now she giggled, and said, I’m hungry, and I said I’d make her a sandwich, and we both got out of bed, and she saw me looking at her.

“Stop staring,” she said.

“Why stop?”

“I don’t know, I just feel suddenly shy,” she said, and loped into the kitchen, me in some pajama bottoms I found; her wearing a ratty old bathrobe I had hanging on the bathroom door.

In the kitchen, I put bread and some cheese and a spicy sopressata on the counter. I got a bottle of red wine out of the cupboard, and poured it out. Val sliced up the sausage and ate a piece, and I made sandwiches.

“Are you happy, Artie, darling?”

“Yes.”

“Do we need to talk about anything?”

“Only if you want to,” I said.

“I don’t want to, I want you to put on some music and I want to eat and then I want to go back to bed,” she said.

I put Ella on the stereo. Ella singing Gershwin, and Val put her elbows on the kitchen counter, drank the wine and listened.

“I love this stuff,” she said. “I love this music. It makes me think of New York, even when I’m here, you know?”

“I know.”

“I don’t want to leave, Artie.”

“New York, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Me either.”

“I can feel good here,” said Val, pouring more wine in her glass while Ella sang “Someone To Watch Over Me”. “That’s you, isn’t it, you’ll watch out for me?”

“Yes.” I held her hand.

I didn’t know how the hell I’d tell Tolya but I wasn’t giving her up, not unless she wanted me to give her up. Most of me knew it wouldn’t go on, couldn’t, I was too old, she was Tolya’s kid, but a little part believed.

“Let’s go back to bed,” she said, and smiled a smile both wicked and sweet. And we did.

In Val’s room in London now nothing was left of her except her smell.

In the kitchen I found a bottle of Scotch and did something I almost never did anymore: I drank too much of the stuff, I carried the glass through the house, I drank three, four, five shots, and I kept on drinking.

In the guest room, I opened the closet. On a wooden hanger was a garment bag and inside a tux. My size. A box on the shelf contained shirts and ties. Beside it were fancy shoes.

I tried on the clothes, and they fit beautifully. Tolya must have swiped one of my jackets to get the measurements. He had planned it all, he must have planned it before I got to London, long ago, hoping I’d come for his birthday party. Before Val was murdered, he had planned it.

In the tux and the shoes, with Tolya’s watch, I looked in the mirror. Looking back was a well-heeled guy, a rich Russian, maybe, with an expensive glass of whisky in his hand, a big gold watch and plenty of dough. Nobody except Larry Sverdloff would make me for a New York cop at the party, for sure not Greg, the boyfriend.

Was I obsessed because he had been with Val? If he didn’t kill her, why didn’t he show up or get in touch with Tolya? He was Valentina’s guy, what was stopping him? The part of me that was functioning like a cop knew the other part was jealous as hell and it was clouding my judgement and making me stupid.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Even from the entrance to Kensington Gardens, just as I entered the park, in the near distance, I could see the palace all lit up like Christmas, aglitter on the near horizon, and I could hear the Stones. A cover band was playing ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’.

As I got closer, the palace turned into a blaze of lights, lights in windows, lights in trees, little gold lights, silk lanterns with lights inside, chandeliers with candles set on tables you could see through the tall windows, real torches lining the drive. Tolya’s party, Valentina’s party, a party in honour of Val’s charity, a party where they both should have been. In my hand was the invitation I had taken from Tolya’s mantelpiece.

The band shifted to ‘Wild Horses’. Security was everywhere, guys in uniform, others in plain clothes, Russian muscle speaking into the collar of their evening clothes that were too tight, others in costume.

Near the entrance where people were streaming in, was a bunch of gorgeous girls in period ball-gowns, diamonds on every part, wrists, ears, necks, greeted me. Slavic cheekbones, legs up to their armpits, the Russian babes were working the door.

All suited up in the tux and new shoes, I passed in without much trouble.

“Devil?”

“What?”

“A mask?” One of the babes was holding up a red devil mask with sequins on it.

“I don’t think so.”

“Cat?”

“What?”

“I think there’s others,” she said worriedly, sorting through the basket.

“I’ll take the devil.”

Kensington Palace, where Lady Diana had lived – somebody dropped this into conversation as soon as I got in the door – was close to the Russian Embassy. Maybe in the next Revolution, the new Russians could set up shop here.

London had always been a good place to operate out of. My mother used to tell me about it, late at night when Moscow was asleep. She told me how Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin had been in London: Lenin and his wife had stayed in a nice place in Kensington; Stalin, who was broke, in a flea pit. She liked spinning stories about the so-called Soviet heroes. It made her feel better. It was her form of sedition, these late-night sessions.

From the look of the guests streaming into the palace, many courtiers, Tsars, more than one King Louis, a couple of Rasputins, and the others in regular clothes, jewels glittering, they already knew the next Revolution would not take place during Marxism-Leninism class, or folk-dancing.

“Jumpin’ Jack Flash is a gas gas” went the lyrics you could never get out of your head. This band was almost as good as the original, the beat, the strut, the bluesy heart.

I had always secretly preferred the Stones to the Beatles, even as a kid in Moscow, when the Beatles were like God, and everyone prayed at their altar; and though I Ioved them for a long time, after a while I couldn’t stand the reverence. And now, at the entrance to Kensington Palace, the noise was like a drug. It picked me up and carried me into the place, where I saw, in what felt like a druggy hallucination, Marie Antoinette, or maybe it was Catherine the Great, wobbling towards me, the heels of her large blue silk pumps going tippy-tap on the marble floor.

This Marie had very big feet, she was six feet tall plus a yard of powdered wig on her head, thick corkscrew curls hanging down her neck. Shoulders of an Olympic swimmer, big boobs pushed up most of the way so that when she bent over you could see her nipples. Until I saw them, and even then, I thought it was a guy in drag.

Her blue dress, weighed down with lace and sequins, was so wide that people scuttled away to avoid getting hit as if by a bumper car in an arcade. Unlike the ladies of the eighteenth century, she had a deep hard tan, and a voice that, when she shouted out to friends who passed, could crack Coke bottles. Overhead chandeliers hanging with crystals, and lit up with real candles, made her diamonds glitter hard as the tan.

I pushed the devil mask up on top of my head. Maybe I should have come as Lenin, I thought, and it was then, near the door, me adjusting my red mask, that the Marie Antoinette or whoever she was held out her hand as if she expected me to kiss it. I gave it a shake.

“Alexandra Arkadina Romanov,” said Marie through puffy lips thick with implants and gloss. “And you are?”

The band moved on to “Mother’s Little Helper”.

I said hi to Marie. She said this was her party, or at least she was on the committee, and that she had been Valentina Sverdloff’s best friend. In mourning for her, she said, we are all in mourning, but one must carry on.

I’m looking for a guy named Greg, I said to her, but she wasn’t interested. She asked where I was from and I said New York, and she said, no, originally, and I said I was original, and it went on like that for a minute or so, until she spotted better prey, a fat guy in a red frock coat with lace dribbling down his front.

“Artie.” It was Larry Sverdloff. He was not the kind of guy to put on a costume, and he was wearing tails and white tie and he looked good, the stuff was custom-made. He shook my hand. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“Yeah, sorry I’m late.”

“It’s fine.”

“How come Tolya got this place for a party?”

“They rent it out,” he said. “You can rent pretty much any place you want. Can I get you a drink?” He signaled a waiter who swerved in and out between people, carrying aloft trays of champagne and other booze as the crowd grew, and you could feel the heat. There must have been five hundred people. I scanned the room, looking for Greg.

“You’ve heard from Tolya?”

“Only a message to deliver when I make the speech. I’m playing host for him. You okay? You have everything you want?”

“What about Greg?”

“I put out lines. I’m sure you’ll meet him. Excuse me,” said Larry. “I’m going to make a speech soon, then we can talk. There’s somebody I want you to meet here. ”

“Yeah, who’s that?” I was getting sick of Larry’s games, if they were games.

“Somebody else. She’ll be somewhere, probably out on the terrace smoking.”

“Who?”

“I’ll explain.”

“Fine, so what’s her name?”

“Fiona,” he said. “Excuse me.”

The band was on “Brown Sugar”. I looked around for the musicians, I went through one gilded room after the other, all of them packed, five hundred rich people giving off heat and ambition, and a band playing Stones numbers. I realized the music was coming from outside, from a big white tent out on the lawn.

Everywhere I went, people swarmed around me, shook my hand and bowed, and asked who I was, but didn’t care.

I met a guy who had made a fortune installing bulletproof glass, I met art dealers who could get you a Francis Bacon or a Monet, depending on your taste, and people who would protect your art collection because there had already been killings on that front, they said, and I didn’t know if they meant in the financial sense or the other kind that made you literally dead.

Actors, famous actors I’d seen in the movies, were around, dotted across the room like decorative objects. Brits with braying nasal voices in white tie and tails bragged about their agencies where you could hire butlers with pedigree, realtors who told me Russians liked living in houses near famous people, Belgravia was good, any place near Sean Connery a top choice. Or people with titles, God how the Russkis loved it, they’d say, oh, do meet the Earl of Fuckwit or whatever, and you could see them creaming their pants.

And there were Russians I recognized from news magazines, the big ones, the ones with the fleets of yachts. These were men who had swiped chunks of the old USSR, oil, gas, airlines, aluminum, the works. Faces as famous now as Lenin and Stalin and the other ghouls.

I went into a room with painted ceilings, looking for a drink. The bar was massive, twenty feet long, covered in bouquets of white flowers, white roses, white peonies, and along the rest of the surface, gold-colored tubs filled with ice and champagne bottles. Magnums of champagne, Krug, the really good stuff I knew about from Tolya’s club, and ranks of glittering crystal. Tons of caviar was heaped on ice in gold and silver bowls, glistening black and gray and pearly and golden. I thought about Tolya’s caviar deals, and wondered if this was part of it.

Waiters, dressed in black knee pants and tailcoats and those stupid white wigs, served it up on gold plates, and I was betting they were real.

As a child, I’d seen a news item on TV about a dinner at Buckingham Palace attended by the Soviet ambassador where all the plates were made of gold. It was intended to show us how decadent the West was, but my mother and her pals turned down the sound of propaganda and peered at the pictures to work out if there really were gold plates in London.

Drink in hand, mask on my face, I went out to the terrace, scanning the crowd for Greg. I had his picture in my pocket.

The night was warm and damp. The band was playing “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” with what seemed to me an epic sense of irony. Somewhere close by I could hear a helicopter. On the walls of the tent, I could see the outlines of people dancing, like a puppet show.

“Are you Artie Cohen?” a warm low voice said.

She was tall, slim, brown hair, cut so it fell to her chin, bangs to her eyebrows. She lit a cigarette without any fuss, her hands long, thin, her gestures small and efficient. With her other hand, she pushed the cat mask that covered her eyes and nose onto the top of her head. Her eyes were gray.

“I’m Fiona Colquhoun,” she said.

In spite of a serious expression and not much make-up, or maybe because of it, she was pretty sexy. Plain long black dress, three strands of pearls around her long neck. No wedding ring.

“Le tout Londongrad, eh? I shouldn’t smoke.” She tossed the cigarette into an urn on the terrace and said, “Let’s walk a bit, shall we?” She led me towards a separate building out on the lawns, a huge barn of a place, but beautiful and mostly made of glass.

“What do they call this?”

“The Orangery,” she said.

“You know about this stuff?”

“I was always a history nut, old houses, my grandmother used to take me. This one was a greenhouse.”

“Some greenhouse.”

“Yup, you want to go in? There’s carvings by a guy called Grinling Gibbons, it was so beautiful they probably used it for supper in the summer, and entertaining their pals. Or shall we sit out here?” Gracefully she sat on a marble bench and I sat next to her.

“I needed some air,” she said. “Russian sentimentality makes me gag.”

“You knew my name?”

“I took a flyer on it being you.”

She didn’t offer any other information, so I played along.

From a little silver purse she took a fresh pack and lit up again.

“You smoke a lot.”

“Indeed.”

“It will kill you.”

“Give me a bloody break. My God, look at that,” she added, starting to laugh.

The guy passing, probably an old Russian thug from the 90s, had been recycled for respectability, and was stuffed into his tails and white tie.

Like a penguin looking for his mate, he waddled across the terrace. I was drinking too much. I thought I saw Gorbachev. The real one. Not a guy in costume. Fiona followed my glance.

“You know who all these people are?”

“Some,” she said.

Fiona sat quietly beside me, and when I asked, she pointed them out, relaying names, the football players, fashion designers, wives, mistresses belonging to oligarchs, the businessmen and members of various factions and feuds, British politicians in hock to Russian money. Politics inside politics, she said, like Russian wooden dolls, people who had been allies in Russia, were enemies in London.

“Feuds?”

“Of course. Some of them are creatures of the Kremlin and owe it like they were vassals, others want to overturn it. You’ve heard of Berezovsky, Abramovich, Deripaska. I think your country just refused Mr Deripaska a visa.”

The band moved onto “Ruby Tuesday”.

“You’re wondering how I knew your name?” said Fiona Colquhoun.

“I guessed.” I looked around for Larry Sverdloff.

“Right,” she said, as if she understood. “Good. Then we know what we’re about.”

“These people, at this party, you know them?”

“It’s my job. You’re looking for somebody?”

“Could be,” I said. Suddenly the band stopped. People poured out of the tent towards the house.

“What’s going on?”

“A speech, I imagine,” said Fiona.

“You knew Valentina Sverdloff?”

“I met her once or twice. Let’s go inside.”

In a long room lined with windows, hung with chandeliers, lit with candles, over it all was an immense screen, widescreen, like a movie theater with images of Valentina projected on it. I didn’t want to look. There wasn’t any choice, it hung there over everything, lit up by thousands of candles and dozens of chandeliers. A thousand people looked up.

Then the slide show stopped. A picture of Val was frozen on the screen. In a silver gown, diamonds in her ears, face made up, hair done, she barely looked like herself.

But she knew how to pose. She had earned some money modeling when she was in high school, she had hated it. In that picture, ten feet high, behind the eyes, I could see the self-mockery. The whole crowd was looking at her like she was an icon. And then she spoke. I thought my heart would crack.

“Hello, everybody,” said Valentina. “I’m sorry I can’t be with you. But I want to say hi and thank you for coming and for giving to my foundation.”

From the screen she talked about the girls she tried to rescue in Russia, the little ones, the older ones, girls who worked train stations as prostitutes, some as young as ten or eleven. She asked her friends to give what they could, she smiled and smiled, and then she thanked everyone in that husky voice. She thanked her father and her uncle and blew them kisses. For a few minutes she talked, and when she stopped all that remained was her image on the screen.

She had made the video because even before she was murdered, she knew she wasn’t coming for the party, though Tolya had gone on believing she’d show up. There was something in London that Val hated more, or that scared her more than she had said.

Next to me stood Fiona Colquhoun, not watching the screen, watching me instead. Around us, people began to weep. One woman with a long face cried uncontrollably.

There followed more speeches, by Larry Sverdloff, by friends of Valentina, people sobbing, talking English, Russian. A choir in Russian peasant outfits got up and sang some old folk songs and it was corny but haunting, and I felt I had to get away but I couldn’t. And I remembered something.

One night, when was it? Last year? On a cold fall night we had been walking by the river, me and Val. She was wearing a heavy green sweater and jeans, and she started singing in Russian. She had been learning, she said. She wanted to surprise Tolya. And she sang the old Russian songs, revolutionary anthems, other stuff, and we walked and I had been glad it was dark and she couldn’t see me crying.

“I think you wanted to meet Greg,” said Fiona whispering into my ear while the speeches finished and people began to leave the room.

Where?”

“I saw him go out towards the band,” she said, and took my hand and led me to a white tent where inside the band started up again and people took to the floor.

Scores of people started to dance, then more, all moving to the music. Russians, Brits.

Fiona gestured with her head, and I saw him, Greg, a tall guy in a tux and a mask with a girl in a milkmaid outfit, blonde hair to her waist. She wore a cat mask. Greg had Pushkin’s face on his own mask.

Anybody who grew up in Russia would know it, Pushkin, our national hero, the most admired man in Russia even though he died in 1837. We kids all knew Pushkin, the face, the poems, by heart. Maybe this guy, this Greg, figured himself for a hero.

I was sure he knew I was watching him. He knew who I was. Maybe Val had told him about me, her dad’s friend, her “Uncle Artie”. And then, for a split second I was distracted by the band which was going crazy on “Satisfaction”.

On the stage, Mick Jagger did his stuff, strutting, twirling, smirking. I’d figured it for a tribute band, a good one. It wasn’t. It was the Stones. It was the real thing.

“Jesus,” I said under my breath. I had lost sight of Greg.

“The big Russians hire bands privately,” said Fiona. “A perk of my job, Artie. My kid goes to a party, the parents fly in Britney Spears. I’ve seen McCartney, they pay anything, millions, sometimes two, three bands, once I saw the whole bloody Royal Ballet.” She followed my gaze, I was staring at the Pushkin mask. “You want to talk to him. You want me to insist?”

“What makes you so sure you can force him?”

“I’m pretty persuasive,” she said.

I didn’t wait for Fiona, I got myself close to Greg, close enough so he could hear me, close enough he could see me. In the seconds between numbers, as the band stopped playing, I called his name out.

He turned his face, the Pushkin mask, towards me. The hair was cut short, almost black, the mouth smiling-all I could see of his face was part of his mouth and the blue eyes through the eye holes in the mask.

For a second he was so close I could feel his breath, this pretend Pushkin, I could feel it, and I leaned into him, my mouth next to his ear. “You killed her, didn’t you?” I said. “You did it, isn’t that right? You killed Valentina and I’m coming for you,” I said. I was pretty drunk.

He didn’t say anything at all, just smiled slightly and then moved away and slipped into the crowd.

On the ground, over the lawns, pathways, skirting the Orangery, the gardens, the huge trees, the torches, I was running, looking for him, swerving between people watching the sky. My lungs hurt from running, my head was full of booze, but I ran, looking for him.

The Stones had finished. An orchestra was playing the l812, and now fireworks threw up huge gold flowers into the sky, red white and blue waterfalls, Russian flags, Union Jack, more flowers, and in the light of it, I thought I saw him again. He saw me. He raised the mask and showed his face. The handsome face stared at me, the intense blue eyes seemed to be smiling or laughing, and then I realized what the message was-it was a threat. He wasn’t scared of me. He was coming after me.

He replaced the mask, and again I lost him. He was too good at it; had he been trained? This was a guy who could have slipped in and out of New York and killed her.

“What’s the matter with you?” said Larry Sverdloff. It was ten, fifteen minutes after I’d seen Greg, and I was still looking, in the parking lot now, among the big cars, among the waiting drivers, and the drunken partygoers.

“I saw him.”

“I know,” said Larry Sverdloff, looking pissed off. “He told me.”

“Fucking told you what?”

“That you accused him of being involved in Val’s murder.”

“I said I wanted you to find him for me,” I said. “You didn’t make much effort.”

“I was going to get you together later, I thought you wanted to talk to him, not accuse him.”

“Yeah, well, it’s what I think. Unless you know different.”

“That’s crazy,” said Larry. “I loved her and I loved him, too, for chrissake.”

“What are you talking about?”

“He was a good kid, they were the real thing,” said Larry. “My crazy cousin Tolya didn’t approve of him. Val told me she loved him. I thought you wanted his help. Jesus, Artie, what the fuck are you doing?” said Larry. “I’m going to take you to my place, and tomorrow I’m putting you on a plane. Let’s go.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Val stopped seeing him?”

“Yes.”

“What else?”

“They broke up, so what? She wouldn’t talk about it. Let’s go, I want you out of here and out of London,” said Larry. “You tell people you think they killed somebody, they don’t like it.” He looked at the crowds, some climbing into cars, others going back for more to eat and drink. “I hate it. I hate this. I hate what it did to my cousin and to Val.”

“Who? What the fuck are you talking about?”

“All of them, Russians,” he said. “Bastards.”

Fiona was standing close by. Unruffled, smoking, listening, she had been close by me most of the evening and she still was and I wondered what her business was, and how come Larry Sverdloff had told her about me. Was she his official contact, one of the officials he said he worked with? Something else?

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

I didn’t go with Larry Sverdloff, I left the party, and walked out of the park, along the avenue next to it, turned right, looking for a place I’d spotted earlier, figuring that on Queensway, a bar would still be open. Found myself near an all-night cafe, no booze, kept moving.

From behind me there were steps on the sidewalk again, the scuffle of feet, the raucous hoot of young men, a low mean whistle. The crummy street where I found myself was lined with shuttered shops. The sidewalk was crumbling. A few teenagers drinking out of paper bags wandered into a late-night game arcade. A shitty chicken takeout was empty except for the counter man asleep on a table. Some Arab-looking boys glared at me from the doorway of a kebab place.

I kept walking. I heard a car coming slowly along the dark road. It slowed to keep pace with me, and then I heard her voice.

“Artie, please, get in the car,” called Fiona. “I’ll give you a lift.”

“I want to walk,” I said.

“Then at least buy me a drink,” she said, and parked her Mini and got out. “Sverdloff’s club will still be open,” she added.

I need a drink, I thought.

“I’ll walk with you,” said Fiona.

“If you want.”

“You’ll come to Sverdloff’s club?”

“Maybe.”

Overhead, clouds scudded away, revealing a piece of white moon that cast a strange light over the empty streets where we walked.

Fiona had a big stride like an athlete and she talked very softly, had a way of projecting her voice just far enough so I could hear clearly but keeping it low. Nice voice. English, husky.

For a while we walked silently, Fiona smoking, and then I realized we were in Moscow Road.

“Something about this road strikes a chord?” she said.

“I don’t know.”

Then the shabby streets of cheap hotels and small shops gave way to tree-lined roads, pretty houses, foreign cars parked in front, trees thick and green.

Finally, I said, “What are you?”

“I’m sorry?”

“What are you? What’s your job? How come you know all the Russians? How come you knew my name? Spell it out for me.”

“You didn’t know?”

“How the fuck would I know? I figured you were something official,” I said. “But what?”

“Didn’t Agent Pettus tell you?”

“Roy Pettus?”

“Yes. I’ve been waiting for you to ring for several days, Pettus told me you were coming across.”

“Jesus.”

“What did you think?”

“Tell me what you are.”

Lighting one smoke from another, she told me she was a special liaison, coordinated projects between Scotland Yard and MI5.

“Your FBI,” she said.

“Right.”

She went on talking, told me she had studied Russian at university along with Polish and Swedish, and had done graduate work in Warsaw. Her grandmother was Polish and a scientist, and Fiona had a background in physics and chemistry because of it.

“My grandmother raised me,” she said. “She thought girls should learn.” Colquhoun’s looks suggested an ice queen but she was open, warm, surprising. “She left me the house in Highgate where I live,” she added. “A lot of Russians there, the new, the last wave, we’ve got them all, white, red, dead, rich, oligarchs, we’ve even got Karl Marx. Did you know he’s buried in the cemetery at Highgate?”

“Yes.”

“Unusual for an American to know, but you aren’t entirely American, are you, Artie?”

“Yeah.”

How much did Fiona know about me? Why was she making small talk? I wondered, and then she said, “Will you let me help?”

I didn’t answer, not then. Maybe she was connected to both Pettus and to Larry Sverdloff, and it didn’t make me happy, but I needed Colquhoun’s help. In the street light her face was pale, the expression on her lips wry.

“I’m also a cop, Artie, if that makes you feel better,” she said.

Pravda22 was almost empty, but the bartender, Rolly, saw me and beckoned us in. A few people sat at tables in the back. He knew Fiona’s name.

“I’ve been here before,” she said by way of explanation. I asked for Scotch, Fiona for a small brandy. We sat at the bar.

“You’re a cop?”

“Yes, as I said. I moved in and out of the police, I went to higher education and back, took a graduate degree, worked for a while designing gender-related studies for the police college. I was a homicide detective, British style, you know, like Morse?” She smiled. “Then I shifted to one of the joint forces.”

She had done the business, I realized, though she looked younger, she was probably my age, even a couple years older.

“You speak Russian?”

She nodded.

“You work with Roy Pettus?”

“I work with a good number of people,” she said. “We’ve had to gear up quite quickly.”

“On the Russians?”

“Yes, and not long ago we had good relations with them. Just after the attacks on New York, and then on London, we had marvelous relationships, your people, even the bloody Russians.”

“But not now?”

“I wouldn’t say we’re exactly friends. The Litvinenko thing has triggered a little Cold War, we accuse them of killing him, they retaliate by persecuting Brits in Russia, the ambassador, anyone they can. Did you know there are as many Russian agents here as during the real Cold War?”

“So you work with them?”

“Not if I can help it. I prefer you Americans,” she said.

Perched beside me at the bar, Fiona had great legs, a witty curious face, beautiful when she smiled. Another time, place, I would have been interested, but not now. Now there was only Val.

“I believe you worked quite a big case here in London once,” said Fiona. It wasn’t a question.

“How did you know?”

“It’s a small country. I worked once with a detective who knew you.”

“Who’s that?”

“Chap called Jack Cotton.”

“Christ.”

“That’s pretty much how Jack thinks of himself now. He’s one of our top cops. He’s Sir Jack now.”

“No shit, so he’s a top dog?”

“One of the biggest, and when Sir Jack barks, all the little puppies sit up and beg,” said Fiona. “Shall I send your regards? He’ll give us some help on this if I ask, if I say you asked.”

“Not now.” I wanted to operate on my own for now, I didn’t want red tape.

“He said you were very good and rather unreliable,” said Fiona Colquhoun. “That you did what you liked, and people put up with it because you get results. Good taste in music, Artie had, he said. He says you had mixed feelings about this place, always called it bloody London.”

“You asked him if you could trust me?”

“Yes.”

“Because he’s one of yours?”

“Of course. And Sir Jack said you liked carrying a gun even in London. Is that right, Artie?”

“If I have to.”

“Please don’t do that,” she said. “I can’t help you if you do.”

“Listen, I’m here because of Valentina Sverdloff’s murder,” I said. “I’m guessing you knew that. I’ll do what I have to do,” I said, and tossed back the Scotch.

In the gilded mirror over the bar, I saw a familiar figure moving in behind me, coming at me, the woman who had cried like crazy at the party, long sad face, pointed nose. I ordered another drink.

“I understand, Artie, I’m still a cop in my bones, and I know how good your people, how good they were to me, when I worked in New York,” said Fiona, tapping me lightly on the arm.

“When?”

“Nine-eleven. There were Brits who died in the Towers, and a few of us volunteered to go over, our tragedy, too. Your people, police, firemen, were extraordinary. When I got back, I asked to move over to an anti-terrorism squad,” she said softly. “I would like to have stayed.”

“But?”

“I have a daughter, Gracie, she’s twelve.”

I was moved and pissed off. She meant what she said but she knew, like a great detective, if only instinctively, how to seduce. Telling me about her part after 9/11, how she had taken part in the now holy events, got to me.

“I met Valentina Sverdloff once,” said Fiona.

“Where?”

“At her uncle’s house. My daughter is friends with one of Larry’s girls.”

“Larry Sverdloff?”

Yes.”

“You get around.”

“He’s the father of my daughter’s friend, or do you think I use my daughter to spy on Russian oligarchs?”

“You tell me.”

“You think because I know Agent Roy Pettus and Larry Sverdloff, I’m working both sides? Did Larry give you my name, too, is that it?” She looked at me. “I see.”

“Are you? What sides?”

She knocked back her drink and got off the bar stool. I put out my hand to keep her from going.

“You met Val when?”

“About a year ago at Larry Sverdloff’s house in London, one of his daughters was playing piano, Val was sitting near her, I had never seen anyone so alive, so incredibly vivid. I’m so sorry. I know you and her father are great friends.”

“Was she alone?”

“Greg was there. I think he had a Russian name as well, which I didn’t catch, and frankly until the other day when this case came up, I didn’t think about him again. I told him I spoke the language and I loved the literature and he just opened up. Bit of a bloody nationalist, I thought, just a fraction too zealous, but he was a good-looking young man, charming, and deeply in love with Valentina. Greg told me how he and Valentina were working for the fatherland, explained to me how Putin was turning things around. Very persuasive, but he waited until Valentina was out of his hearing. ”

“What else?”

“They couldn’t keep their hands off each other. She was besotted. They were an astonishing couple, wonderful to look at, whispering to one another as if they had all the secrets to being alive.”

I didn’t answer.

“When Valentina was murdered, Larry Sverdloff called me,” she said. “He thinks whoever killed her did it to warn his cousin, Tolya. Is that what you think?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve been doing a little asking around privately,” she said.

“Can you find this Greg?”

“You really do think he’s a suspect?” Fiona said. “You’re going to need a lot more than thinking, Artie, you need a little bit of evidence,” and then we were interrupted by the long-faced woman I’d seen in the mirror.

“Elena Gagarin,” she said, and held out her hand to me, ignoring Fiona. “We met at the ball.” Sloshed, she had been crying, mascara streaked her face. “I was Valentina’s friend,” she added. “She showed me a photograph of you. She said, this is my Uncle Artie, my dad’s best friend. Also at her daddy’s house, there is a picture of you. So I see you, I try to say this at the party, I think, God, is this Valentina’s Artie?”

She had a mild Russian accent. “I know you loved her,” she went on in the naked way Russians sometimes do, especially women, as if they could peel back your skin, help themselves to your emotions. No embarrassment, nothing coy, she just said, again, “You loved her. Now she is dead. I am very drunk.”

“Let’s get you home,” said Fiona, but Gagarin shoved her away and went on bawling.

“As soon as I heard about Val,” she said, “I cried for one whole day without cease. Val was so good, she helps orphans.” Gagarin looked at the ceiling. “Perhaps she is in better place now?”

“You met these girls Val helped?”

“Some, yes, surely. A few she helped particularly to come from Russia to England.”

“Was one of them named Masha Panchuk? She worked as a maid.”

I saw the hesitation; I saw the eyes twirl like dark saucers, then dart inward. I was sure Gagarin had met Masha, but she wasn’t saying.

“I don’t know this person that worked as maid.”

“Think about it.”

“I am glad you are in London and living close to me, I feel more secure, I am living on same square with Tolya Sverdloff, this is how we all meet.”

And then without warning, Gagarin threw her glass at the wall of bottles behind the bar. The bartender Rolly took her by the arm.

“Go home,” he said.

“No.”

“You don’t feel safe in London?” I said to her.

“No, I think first this Masha is killed, then Valentina, and next, next is me.”

Somehow Rolly bundled Gagarin out into a taxi, came back.

“She comes here a lot?”

He shrugged.

“Some of the time,” he said. “She was friendly with the Sverdloffs. She’s done this before, she gets drunk and breaks things.”

“I must go,” said Fiona, looking at the tiny gold watch on her slim wrist.

“You left your car.”

“I’ll get a cab, I’ve had too much drink to drive. Shall I drop you, Artie?”

“No,” I said, and watched her go.

I liked Fiona Colquhoun, but I didn’t trust her. Her brief wasn’t dead girls in New York. For all her talk about 9/11, she wasn’t a cop anymore. She worked with Roy Pettus and she was some kind of spook, a security liaison between Scotland Yard and MI5, whatever that meant.

Most people in the spy business are so impressed with their own theatrics, the stuff they’ve read or seen, I never really believed them. I didn’t buy the act.

Truth was, I didn’t give a fuck who was running Russia or if another revolution was coming, or for Larry Sverdloff’s feverish fantasies. All I wanted was the creep who had killed Valentina. I wanted something hard, sure, pure, evidence like diamonds that I could give to Tolya to make up for not saving his daughter. Then I wanted to go home.

“You asked me about Valentina Sverdloff?” said Rolly, wiping down the bar. “I didn’t tell you everything.”

“Yes.”

“Once or twice she asked me to post some packages for her. She always asked nicely, but there was this imperious quality, and also she seemed bloody obsessive about it.”

“What was in the packages?”

“I didn’t ask. Best not to. Always to Moscow.”

“You know where the boyfriend lived?”

“Valentina’s fellow?”

“Yeah. Somewhere in south London. He asked me if I knew anybody who wanted to rent a room. Fuck me, it was somewhere, Putney, I think, or maybe Wimbledon.”

“You have any more thoughts about him?”

“Maybe, but not anything I can swear to.”

“Go on.”

“Yeah. You know, no reason, when I heard somebody killed Valentina, it just came to me that it was him.”

“How come? You said he was charming.”

“Don’t know. When I heard, it came into my head. You want a last drink?”

I didn’t. I left. Into the dark empty London night where it was raining, rain dripping down my collar, I walked to Tolya’s house. Bloody London, I thought.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

“What?”

It was four in the morning. It was raining. Water sluiced down the windows, and I was awake and still dressed, but in no mood for drunks at the door and I yelled at the intercom, fuck off. It buzzed again. Out of habit, I grabbed the gun Tolya gave me, went down, yanked open the front door. What? What!

Still in her party dress, Elena Gagarin stood on the steps. She looked scared. Her face was streaked from the rain, make-up smeared over it.

“I want to stay here tonight,” she said. “I am sorry for breaking glass at club.”

“No.”

“Please.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Come in if you want, I’ll make coffee, and I’ll walk you home.”

“I saw him.”

“Who?”

“Friend of Valentina.”

“Which friend?”

“This guy, he was at the party. Greg, he calls himself. I’m going in my house, he calls to me, and I say, go away, go away.”

“What else?”

I wasn’t sure if this woman, Gagarin, had picked up on what I’d been telling Fiona. Being with her felt like having napalm sprayed on you.

“Greg threatened me once. Said I shouldn’t listen to what Val tells me. I don’t understand. I could sleep in your bed, but we don’t do anything.”

“How do you know Greg?”

“I told you. I am friend of Valentina, of Tolya, best friend, BFF, you say.”

“I’ll walk you home,” I said. “Now.”

“I’ll go, I don’t beg,” she said suddenly, turned her back to me and marched to the door.

“Let me walk you,” I called.

She didn’t answer. Just went out into the rain, back hunched over, heading for her place. She told me it was just around the corner, and I went upstairs and and sat down in front of the TV, waiting for late calls from New York. I must have dozed, and I was still in the big leather chair, watching reruns of the Canadian women’s curling team, when sirens woke me. I looked at my watch.

It was five in the morning, and by the time I got to the window, only the faint screams of the sirens were left behind, like a bad, bad hangover.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

“Is she dead?” I said to the medic at the hospital where they had taken Elena Gagarin.

“No,” he said. “Bad, though.”

“You got hold of me how?”

“In her pocket. Your name and number were in her pocket when the police found her. You’re a relation?”

I nodded. You got more out of hospitals if they thought you were blood.

“Come,” he said, and I followed him down the corridor to a room where Gagarin was attached to a tangle of IVs.

Most of her face was bandaged; one arm that lay outside the thin sheet was black and yellow. She had been beat up pretty good. A cop hovered close by.

“What happened?” I said.

“I found her,” said the cop.

“How come?”

“I was passing. I’d been round to a pub with some friends, and then to somebody’s flat for coffee and I was on my way back to the tube at Notting Hill Gate, and I cut around through an alleyway behind the shops, you wouldn’t know it, over by where the Marks food place is, and I found her. She could barely speak. They beat her up, one used a knife, left her on a building site. Nobody noticed.” He snorted. “Not even in an area where the bloody houses go for ten million quid. You’re related to her. I am sorry,” he said, and I thanked him and went back into the room.

The doctor told me Gagarin had been in a coma since they admitted her, and we stood by the bed, and watched her for a while, keeping watch, I thought, somebody to bear witness for this pathetic woman. A few hours before she had stood in my doorway, drenched by the rain, asking for help.

We watched her, the cop, the doctor, technician and me, watched the lines on the machines go flat. She was dead.

Thinking I was her relative, they gave me her bag to see if I could make an ID. There was a little book, and the address of a building around the corner from Tolya’s where she had told me she lived.

The bag was made of fancy white and gray snakeskin with a silver buckle which when I looked closely I saw was a fake, a knock-off, a cheap version of the real thing, jammed with make-up, underwear, sweater, a few photographs, a wallet with a couple of pounds in it.

I put the photographs in my pocket and gave the bag back to the policeman, handed over my cell number, and left Gagarin to the cops and medics, and other people who tended the dead and dying.

Dead, with no ID, and only a fake bag, Gagarin seemed to have ceased to exist.

Around eight in the morning, I left the hospital, found a Starbucks-they had spread like a stain all over London-got some coffee, and went over to Gagarin’s place.

A slim pretty woman, half asleep from the look of it, opened the door. She wore jeans, a shirt tied at the waist, and yellow flip-flops.

“Yes?”

I apologized for banging on the front door. I said I was looking for Elena Gagarin’s flat, pretending I expected to find her in the house.

“I’m sorry,” said the woman. “The police have already been. They said she was attacked not far from here. They’ve seen what there is, and it isn’t much. They told me Elena was taken to hospital very early this morning.”

I said I was her cousin and I’d come to get some things for her, to take to the hospital.

“I’ll help if I can,” said the woman. “But she hasn’t lived here for some months. Is she all right?”

I explained what had happened. I dug a scrap of paper out of my pocket. “Is this the right address?”

“Yes, number twelve, that’s right, but it belongs to us, my husband and me.”

“You don’t know her?”

“Look, come in,” she said. “Can I make you a cup of coffee? Tea? I’m Janet Milo, by the way.”

I went into the hallway. Inside what had once been a private house and was now divided into apartments was a beautiful winding staircase. I followed the woman in yellow flip-flops to the top floor where there were two doors. One was ajar.

“This is ours,” she said, gesturing at the apartment with the open door where I could hear a radio playing news. She unlocked the other door. “Up top here, there’s a minute little room, I suppose it was once for a servant,” she said. “Elena did rent it from us for a time, oh, six months back, she said she adored the area and she was looking for a place of her own, but she could never quite pay the rent and eventually we asked her to go. We’ve redecorated and there’s a new girl coming to live here.”

“You haven’t seen her, yesterday, recently?”

“No, but she did stop by, asked if we had changed the locks,” she said. “The police asked to see the room where she had lived.” She was pretty cool about it, but maybe it was her style. “I assume that’s why you’re here?”

“Yes, and she’s dead,” I said.

I realized now that I had never seen Gagarin go into the house. She had lied about the apartment.

“I’d like to take a look.”

“I don’t see why not. Coffee?”

“Do you know where she worked? You must have asked.”

“I got the impression Elena was always looking for a job. She said she had prospects at one of the big banks, but I think she survived doing translations. Working at a bookshop. Possibly a club that catered to Russians, a bit of, forgive me, sponging off her friends. Quite a few of them have settled around here, sadly. She left early and came home late, and she was quiet. You’re American?”

“Yes.”

“It was so nice when we had Americans. I adore Americans. Not too many now,” she said. “The dollar, I suppose. For that matter, there aren’t too many English people, either, not round here, anyway,” she added, a wry expression on her handsome English face. “Do go in. Let me know if you need anything.” I thanked Mrs Milo and she said please call me Janet.

The little studio at the top of the house was the kind a student might use. It was freshly painted. Striped curtains hung at the windows, which were open and through one I could see Tolya’s house on the other side of the green square.

A bed, desk, old-fashioned dresser, some lamps, a chair and a little TV completed the furnishings. The bathroom was pristine, and there was no sign anyone had been here.

Where did she live? Where did she keep her clothes?

I went and asked Mrs Milo for the coffee, and followed her into her apartment.

“Elena wasn’t here last night at all?” I said casually.

“No, and we changed the locks when we redecorated. We’ve got a new tenant coming in this week, as I said.”

“So you haven’t seen her.”

“I told the police that she was round several times asking if she could have the room back, that she had some money. But I told her it was already let.”

“Please try to think, did Elena mention anything, did she maybe leave something?”

Janet Milo paused, and something seemed to click, and then she said, “Oh my God, I’m so sorry. You’re right of course.”

“Go on.”

“It was a while back, and she asked if she could store an old suitcase in our storage room in the basement. I completely forgot.”

“You showed it to the cops?”

“I only just remembered. I’ll phone them straight away.”

“Could you show it to me first?” I smiled reassuringly.

In the underground storage room, I crouched down and opened the huge battered green suitcase that had belonged to Elena Gagarin.

Clothes, shoes, underwear were stuffed into the suitcase. There were also envelopes filled with clippings, letters, snapshots. I shuffled through them, including one of Elena herself posed alongside a car that had belonged to Yuri Gagarin, the cosmonaut. Another of a middle-aged couple, weary-looking people, working-class Russians I figured for her parents. Pictures of Valentina. A picture of Greg.

I began to sweat. I’d been an idiot not to see it before: Elena and “Greg” were related. You looked at them together in the pictures and you could see it. Brother and sister? Cousins? I had been insane not to see it.

Rooting around in the suitcase, I found applications for British citizenship, credit card slips, a small notebook with telephone numbers. I tried ringing a few, including the bank where Gagarin claimed to have worked. Nobody had heard of her. There was an ID card. Her name really was Yelena Gagarin, but it was a common enough name.

This had made it easy for her to imply the connection with the famous cosmonaut, the Soviet hero, Yuri, whose daughter was known as Lena, the diminutive form of Yelena, or Elena of course. This Gagarin had a different middle name, different patronymic, which she had changed to make her game work.

It was a smart move. Elena knew the current generation of young Russians at home and abroad idolized Yuri Gagarin, that he had become a hero to them as he had to their parents and grandparents: the first big modern hero in Russia, even if he did die flying a plane drunk.

It didn’t matter. He got to space first, he beat the Americans, he was young and handsome and a true Russian hero. Elena had borrowed a little piece of him, just the reputation, which was easy since she already had the name. It made her very popular. It made it easy for her to make her way, first in Moscow, then in London. In a small notebook, she had scribbled notes about her childhood obsession with Yuri Gagarin, and how she had visited the town of Gagarin where she posed with his car. In Moscow she went to his statue every year. This stainless steel cosmonaut was said to fly annually and grant you your wish.

From the suitcase diary and notebook and scraps, the postcards and letters in the box-what I could put together-she had arrived in London a couple of years earlier from Moscow, though she had grown up in St Petersburg. She already spoke good English and had worked as a cleaner for a while in a hotel near Heathrow Airport.

She got to know a few people, guests at the hotel, and then she made her move. She set herself up as a banker. She made friends with Val. Even after she left the apartment in this building on Tolya’s square, she went on pretending she lived here.

A couple of letters from her mother revealed that Gagarin came from a working-class family still living in one of the crappy housing projects on the fringe of St Petersburg, near the cemeteries, where the mud made your feet sink on a damp day.

Elena wasn’t related to Yuri Gagarin, she didn’t work in a fancy bank or hedge fund, she didn’t live on Stanley Gardens in Notting Hill, she couldn’t even afford the attic room.

Who the hell was she? A girl on the make in London? A girl who had come over looking for a life, or a husband? She had managed to fake it with Tolya, Val, even me. Her lying about almost everything was her way of surviving.

I pocketed an address book I found in the suitcase. Now I was sure Greg had been involved in Elena’s death. And Valentina’s. The three were connected.

Heart pounding, sweating, in a small wooden box in the suitcase pocket, I found a portrait of Val in a green sweater I recognized.

But Val was dead. And even Yuri Gagarin couldn’t grant me my wish.