Londongrad

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

The return address on the envelope I had found in Gagarin’s suitcase was the same as the address I’d found in Val’s bathroom. Wimbledon.

It was Saturday. I was hungover from the party the night before. Worse, I felt messed up by Elena Gagarin’s death. I didn’t get any sleep, but the adrenalin shot through my body, it made me jumpy, on edge, the tension made me wired. I could smell him. I could smell this Greg.

If I could stay cool, if I kept the gun in my pocket, if I didn’t lose it the way I had when I saw him at the party on the dance floor, I’d get him.

It was raining when I got to Wimbledon. Tennis, I thought. They play tennis in Wimbledon. When did they play? I thought. June? July? I took the subway.

There was a loud, harsh wail of sirens that hit me as soon as I came up the subway stairs. Outside most of the street was blocked off. Rain came down hard. Next to the subway entrance, a small crowd had gathered against a three-storey building. On the ground floor was a fruit and vegetable store.

“Move them away,” said a uniform standing a few feet away. “Fucking sightseers,” he said to his partner.

I went over and asked what was going on, he looked at the gold watch on my wrist, a mixture of envy and contempt on his face. He didn’t answer, as if to say, what’s your bloody need to know, mate? He gestured to me to get back against the building.

It was as if I was on the other side, a civilian. Gun in my pocket, I kept my mouth shut and moved closer into the shadow of the fruit store.

Among the onlookers was the low rustle of fearful talk. Talk of bombs, guns, murder, knives. Talk of rising crime. Of terrorism. Islamists, they mumbled. Make bombs out of hair dye. They don’t fucking want to live by our rules then they should fuck off home. An old man said this. A woman nodded in agreement.

Nukes somebody said, radioactive poison. Like the Russian guy.

Polonium, right? Didn’t they say it jumps out of a box and climbs the walls?

Anger and fear ran through the little crowd for a few seconds, then fatigue set into their voices.

What can you do? What’s there to do?

Most sounded weary but a crude rough English voice suddenly shrieked louder than the others. “They’ll fucking get us!” the man said and the fear turned to hate, and I wanted out. The crowd was beginning to get ugly. I beat it, rain soaking through my clothes.

The address I was looking for was three blocks away. In the window was a handwritten card announcing a room for rent. I leaned on the bell, a woman appeared, I said I had found some mail, return address in Wimbledon, mistakenly sent to my place.

Brown skirt, beige blouse, sweater buttoned up the front, the woman at the door looked like one of my teachers at school. She had a weary, pretty face. She was about sixty, her hair was white, fine as tufts of cotton.

I repeated my story. She looked blank.

Rolly, the bartender at Pravda22, said Greg had told him there was a room for rent someplace in south London. I took the shot. “I am also a friend of Greg,” I said.

“He left this morning,” she said.

I asked again if she had a room to rent. I told her my name, and she nodded and said, “I am Deborah Curtis.”

I introduced myself.

Without letting me inside, Mrs Curtis told me she owned the house and lived on the ground floor that connected to a garden out back. Yes, she rented out a few rooms. The house was too big for her.

I smiled and was charming. All I wanted was to get inside. I had gambled, and this time I was right.

Sizing me up, she told me that in fact Greg’s room itself was available, and looked sorry that she had said it. “Can you come back later?” she asked.

“Could I just come in and dry off?” I said, smiling, pointing to my dripping hair.

She opened the door wider, showed me a bathroom, I toweled off best I could, and then she led me into a small apartment that had been built onto the back of the house. At the same time the doorbell rang.

Mrs Curtis went away to answer the door, came back to tell me a man had come to clean her carpets. “I’ll be fine,” I said, and she left, looking uneasy.

The apartment was empty, stripped bare of anything personal, except for a beautiful handmade patchwork quilt on the double bed. The only book on the shelf was a Bible. I began to feel London was a city of empty rooms for rent.

For a while I sat on the bed, thinking about Val and the gold cross she had started wearing a year earlier. Often, she had touched it as if touching it would bring luck. She told me once that she had started going to church.

“Don’t look at me as if I’ve turned into some kind of religious freak, Artie, darling,” she said once when we were eating tacos on a warm day in Washington Square Park. “I’m not going to join a convent or something. I’m just going to celebrate my name day, which will be February 23, for St Valentina the Martyr, and I’d like you to be there with me. Will you?”

“Do you like the room?” said Mrs Curtis, standing in the door. In her voice I heard the faintest hint of a Russian accent, the way you can make out the presence of a flavor you can’t quite identify in a certain dish. From behind the glasses with clear rims, her eyes darted from me to the room, as if she was worried she had left something that didn’t belong. She walked a few steps into the room.

In Russian, I said, “What’s the matter?”

She was rattled, but she answered in English.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” she said.

I reached for the door and closed it so she couldn’t leave.

“Tell me about Greg,” I said.

“You said he was your friend.”

“An acquaintance.”

“Actually, there’s nothing to tell,” she said. “He was a nice young man, he was here for a year or so.”

“And his girlfriend?”

“I didn’t meet his girlfriend,” she said, but her eyelids fluttered too fast. “Did he have a girlfriend? I was never certain, you see, it wasn’t my business after all. I really don’t actually know how I can help you.” Her hand shaking, she opened the door, looked over her shoulder at me as if daring me to stop her.

I followed her to the living room.

I could hear a clock ticking.

“Who else lives here?”

“I did say. I generally have a few students in the two spare rooms but it’s summer now and there’s nobody. I did mention it, didn’t I?”

“Well, say again.”

“No one, as I said. Tea?” She moved into the living room, a small crowded room, stuffed with mementos.

On the tables were laquered boxes. On shelves that were crammed with books, Russian dolls, the heavily painted matrioshka porcelain statues. No family pictures though. It was as if they had been banished. Plants in the windows kept the light out.

“When did Greg leave?”

“A few days ago, I think. I’m not sure I remember actually.”

“I’d like that tea, please.”

“Of course,” she said and went into the kitchen, then returned a few minutes later with a tray. On it were a teapot, cups, a plate with cookies. She set it on a low table, and gestured for me to sit down.

“You’ve lived here a long time?”

“Yes,” Mrs Curtis said. “A very long time, one way or another.”

“Things have changed around here?”

“Indeed,” she said.

“Lots of Russians moving in.”

“I suppose. Yes. Why not?”

“You have some connection with them?”

“I’m not sure what you mean. I meet the odd Russian in the shops. Some are quite charming. Very well read.”

“And was Greg Russian?”

“As I told you, he seemed very nice, though I rarely saw him, he worked in the City, he was quiet.”

“How old was he?”

“I really don’t know, Mr Cohen. I imagine he was about thirty.”

“But his business was legitimate?”

“What? Of course, Grisha would never do anything wrong.”

She was angry.

“Grisha?”

I had caught her off guard. My gut tightened up with anticipation. I had been right about this. I tried to keep my hands clasped politely. I tried not to fumble for some smokes. I leaned forward to pick up a teacup. My jacket fell open.

Did she see the gun?

“He sometimes called himself Grisha,” she said. “I believe it was his Russian nickname.”

“So he was Russian.”

“Yes.”

“You would want to know if something happened to this Grisha, I guess.”

She took off her glasses, rubbed her eyes. Her body almost imperceptibly tensed up.

“Has something happened to him?” she said.

“Has it?”

Her effort to stay calm didn’t work, her hands were in constant motion, clasping each other, unbuttoning and buttoning her sweater, prodding the table as if looking for something lost.

Putting on my jacket, I went to the window, looked out, saw the rain was letting up, got ready to leave. Behind me I could hear the rustle of paper, as Mrs Curtis knocked newspapers off a table.

“Please tell me if something has happened to him,” she said. “I have to know.”

“Why does it matter? If you don’t tell me, I can’t help you.”

“He’s my son.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know,” said Mrs Curtis who took a cigarette from a box on the table, but didn’t light it.

“When did he leave?”

“He left this morning, he came home from a party, he had been out all night, I said, Grisha, darling where are you going?”

“What time did you see him?”

“I slept in until eight this morning. He was just leaving. I don’t know when he came in, I don’t know anything, he was away for several days, then I saw him leaving this morning. He was out of his mind. A few days ago he told me that Valentina, a girl he knew, was dead.” Hands shaking, she lit her cigarette. “He said I would see it in the papers. He had to find her killer, he said. I thought he was going to America. He was in a terrible way. He was out of his mind,” she said. “With grief.”

“You knew Valentina?”

“Yes, of course.”

“And?”

“She was a beautiful girl.”

“You knew her father?”

“He’s the gangster. He’s one of these new Russians who come to London, I heard he put bad wine on the market that made people ill and then sold them his own.”

“Who told you?”

“Grisha said it. You didn’t come for the room, did you?”

“No.”

“What for?”

“I’m from New York. I’m a friend of Valentina Sverdloff,” I said. “Your English is very good.”

“My mother was English. She married my father and stayed in Moscow. She admired the Soviets,” she said with disgust. “She came as a student from London and she met him, and that was it.”

“What about Grisha?”

“He was a late child. I was already thirty-three, I wasn’t married, so I slept with someone I met as a tour guide. I thought if I made a child with an Englishman, even if nobody knew- I would have lost my job-he would have English genes. Where are you from originally?”

I didn’t answer.

“From your accent when you speak Russian, I would say Moscow. Is that true?”

I nodded.

“Then you understand. Many people here don’t understand how we managed things. We managed.”

“When did you come to London?”

“Almost twenty years now, I came with Grisha when it became possible, after Gorbachev came into power. I thought I’d be free. When I was a girl, I once told my father I was going to defect. He said he would denounce me to the KGB.” She smoked without inhaling, puffing at the cigarette. “London was my dream city. My mother told me about it, the parks, the red buses. It was her fairy tale when I was a child, and later, she taught me the language, and got me books, and showed me pictures.

“I wanted it the way other young women wanted to get married. Wanted sex. It was a physical thing,” she said, speaking in her educated Russian. “I saved everything, maps, books, I got a job at Intourist, and when I met English people, I asked them for stamps or even if they tipped me, to tip me in English money. I would sit at my little desk at home, and stack them up, you understand?”

“Yes.”

“And I come here and it is beautiful. I teach, I send Grisha to school, he goes to America, to Harvard University to take his business degree.”

“He was a banker in London?”

“Yes.”

“What else?”

“What else, he makes money, he has a nice car, he travels.”

“Where?”

“Often to Moscow.”

“Go on.”

“Two years ago he says to me he wants to go back to Russia, to study there, to work, to be part of his homeland. I said to him, darling, this is your home, but he says, no, I’m Russian. It’s like a nightmare. I had escaped once. His going back was my punishment. It was fine for a while, when he first met Valentina, and they talked about helping people. She was lovely. He became serious. Soon he says he feels patriotic. He loves the soul of his country.”

“Does he have a sister, or a cousin? Elena? Yelena? Lena?”

“No, of course not. What sister?”

I told her about Elena Gagarin. I showed her the picture.

“I see a bit of a resemblance,” she said. “I don’t know her,” added Mrs Curtis and gave a short mirthless snort. “Gagarin? Yuri? A peasant. Certainly, everybody was in love with him in the old days, but now we know he was a drunk from the provinces. Who is this girl? Did she claim a relationship with my Grisha?”

“She’s dead. She’s in some photographs of him and Valentina. Somebody beat her up so bad last night, she died. You said Grisha’s hand was bruised.” I gave her a picture of the three of them.

“It wasn’t him.” Mrs Curtis put out her cigarette. She peered at the picture.

“Valentina was so beautiful,” she said, beginning to weep.

“She became my daughter.”

“What?”

“You didn’t know?”

“Know what?”

“They were both modern children, but they became religious. They wanted to make things normal.”

My head was swimming in it. How much I hated Russia. How much I hated the religion, the obsession, the sentimentality. Valentina had been sucked in. Sucked in. By a blue-eyed Russian boy who kept a Bible in his room.

“I don’t understand.”

“They were married last year.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

And then Deborah Curtis was out of the door as if she’d heard a shot. As if, like a dog might, she’d heard something inaudible to anybody else. I followed her.

“I need air,” she said, and put an umbrella up, walking fast. I kept pace with her. The rain had turned to a thin drizzle.

We got to a shopping street, she turned into a cafe, I followed. She gestured at the empty chair next to hers.

“Please,” she said in English, and then ordered tea for herself in Russian from a dumpy waitress, who looked harassed, dyed red hair a mess, face weary. I asked for coffee.

On the table Mrs Curtis placed a picture. In it, Val was wearing a plain white dress with long sleeves, and a little wreath of white flowers on her hair. Grisha, tall, handsome, young, smiling, was in a dark blue suit with a white flower in the lapel, and a red silk tie, and his mother, no glasses, standing straight, looked ten years younger than she did now. Val married. Did Tolya know?

“The food here is nice,” said Mrs Curtis. “In case you’re hungry,” she added in formal English. “You carry a gun, Mr Cohen? You are a policeman?”

Around us in the half-full cafe, almost everyone was speaking Russian.

I drank coffee, she had her tea. Come on, I thought. Tell me what I need to know.

“Please tell me where Grisha is,” I said.

“Why?”

“I’d like to meet him,” I said. “He was Valentina’s husband. I have something for him from her. She put his name on it. From before she died,” I added, the lies pouring out of my mouth easily.

“What kind of things?” she said softly but reluctant now.

“Photographs. Souvenirs.”

“I can take these things for him,” she said. “I must do a few errands,” she added abruptly, fidgeting, unable to sit still.

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Call him. He has a cellphone?”

“A mobile? Yes, of course. He doesn’t always answer.”

There were things she couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me. I pushed my phone across the table. She dialed, and looked up. “He doesn’t answer. It says he’s out of range.”

“I think your Grisha is in trouble. I can help him. He will be an obvious suspect in Valentina’s murder. He was her husband, they’ll look at him first. He’s in Russia?”

She avoided the question. I waited. Suddenly she said, “They were distant cousins, you were right, Grisha and this Elena Gagarin. She claimed him as a cousin, and she came round once or twice, and I never knew what she wanted. They were always whispering and making plans on some business deal. I heard them mention Mr Sverdloff. Once my Grisha said Mr Sverdloff, Valentina’s father, got in the way of his business. He cared too much, my Grisha, about money, I would say, Grishinka, darling, this man is your father-in-law.”

“I want to help him,” I said. “Please continue.”

“Other young people came to the house, and afterwards he would talk garbage to me about his feelings of nationalist pride with Mr Putin in charge. He supported it all and I said, Grishinka, darling, you talk like a fascist. And he told me to stop. We never came to blows, of course, he was always respectful.”

“And Val?”

“The more he said these things, the less she came to the house. She went back to America more often and stayed longer.”

“Did he go to New York after that?”

“Yes. He went to convince her to come home with him. She wrote to me a few times to say she was sorry not to see me, and I had asked her to take some books to a distant relation of mine.”

“Olga Dimitriovna?”

Mrs Curtis looked at me. “Yes. You know her?”

I nodded. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because you were Valentina’s friend, and you will find my Grisha.”

“Is he missing?”

“I don’t know.”

“You haven’t heard from him?”

“Not for a few days. Except as I told you, for a minute this morning I saw him. He kissed me and left.”

“Can you tell me anything else?”

“I think he had a little office up in town where he did his own work. He mentioned this. I asked to see it. He said no. It struck me as odd.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“Think.”

“Paddington area, I know because he once took me to the train station and then said he’d walk to his office.”

“Was he here with you at the beginning of last week? On July 7?” I said, thinking of the night Val had died.

“No. Yes.” she said. “I don’t remember.”

“If you want to see him, you might want to tell me the truth,” I said. “Last week, was he here in London?”

“He wasn’t here.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

By the time we got back to the Curtis house, a couple of patrolman and some guys who I made for detectives were on the other side of the street. So was Fiona Colquhoun. I had sent her a text from the cafe.

“What’s going on?” I said to her.

“I got your text. I had somebody at my office type in the address you gave me, and a red flag went up.”

“What red flag?”

“I’ll explain. Just wait,” said Fiona, turning to take Mrs Curtis’ arm and escort her to a police car, make sure she got inside.

“What is it?” I asked, and Fiona told me Mrs Curtis’ house was one of the addresses where there had been traces of radiation. You put an address into the computer, at least the computer at Fiona’s office, if it was one of the houses that had been listed, the flag went up.

“Fuck,” I said.

“This house has been looked at before,” said Fiona.

“Christ.”

“You know it was never reported, the amount of polonium that came into London. It left a long trail, hotels, houses, restaurants, and we didn’t have protective suits and escape hoods enough for our own investigators,” she said. “There have been people too ill to report. Bloody Litvinenko,” she added, and I was surprised. “You thought he was heroic? Did you know one of his friends called a photographer when he was dying? But I don’t blame him either. There was no firm ground, poor bastard.”

I looked at the car where Mrs Curtis sat, the door partially open, a patrolman next to it.

“What’s she doing there?” I said.

“She can’t go back in.”

“What?”

“There are still traces of radiation in the house. They’ll have to check her as well. Were you inside the house?”

“Where are they taking her?”

“They’ll give her a medical check. After that, she says, she can stay with her rich cousin in Eaton Square,” said Fiona.

Before she could stop me, I broke away. There was something on my mind. I pushed past the cop, I crouched beside the open car door.

“Mrs Curtis?”

“Yes?”

“Will you be okay?”

She nodded. “I’ll be with my cousin.”

“Will you keep in touch with me?” I gave her my number on a scrap of paper.

“Yes. Thank you. Will you call me if you find my Grisha? Whatever should happen, I would want to know. Please? Promise this?”

“Yes,” I said. “Tell me one other thing.”

“Of course.”

“What did your Grisha think about Litvinenko’s murder, about his death?”

“He said he got what he deserved because he was a traitor.”

“It’s Grisha Curtis,” I said to Fiona, who was sitting beside me on a low stone wall opposite the Curtis house.

Mrs Curtis had been driven away. It was raining again and Fiona held a large black umbrella over us. “Grisha killed Gagarin and I’m betting he killed Valentina. You can pick him up, if you can find him. I’m betting he’s gone to Moscow. Get your people on it.”

“I want you checked out, Artie. I’ll take you myself. Come on, get in my car. Please?”

There was nothing else I could do in Wimbledon, so I followed Fiona into her car. We sat there, her hand on the key.

“The radiation leaves traces,” she said. “You were in the house. Did you eat or drink?”

“Tea.”

“Hold on,” she said. “I want to read you something,” added Fiona, and pulled a notebook out of her bag.

For a moment, imagining it was another life, I enjoyed sitting in the car with her, the light rain coming down, the two of us smoking. In another life, I thought again.

“Litvinenko was as good as the first victim of nuclear terrorism, did you know that?”

“Go on.”

“Do you know about polonium-210, Artie? It’s both completely passive and astonishingly active. It can’t move through even the thinnest piece of paper, not even skin. But once it’s been ingested, it moves through one’s body like the proverbial knife through butter. A trace on a table or a teapot and it crackles into life, it moves about, I’ve read it described as devious, sneaky, elusive… I wrote it down,” she looked at her notebook. “I try to remind myself not to be sloppy. Listen to this article from the New York Times: ‘Its sheer energy punched out atoms that could attach to a mote of dust-spreading, settling on surfaces, absorbed in lungs, on lips, invisible.’ The writer calls it ‘a braggart, a substance whose whereabouts were blindingly evident to those who knew where and how to look. It leaped free from any attempt to contain it, spreading, and smearing traces of its presence everywhere I had been, on tabletops, door handles, clothes, light switches, faucets.’ They say it crawls the walls.”

“What else?”

“We see those red flags all over London. But are they for real? A trail left by Litvinenko? Caused by rumor? The myth of fingerprints? You understand the power of these legends, these myths?”

“Yes.”

“All the Russians have to do is play on the myth. It’s so terrifying, fear itself is radioactive. The Cold War nuts are back in business,” she added. “This is like Pandora out of the box. Irène Joliot-Curie, Mme Curie’s daughter, died of leukemia for her work with polonium. My grandmother who worked with her died of cancer. I suppose it’s become a kind of obsession with me. If the Russians feel it was worth the effort to export this sort of poison, they’ll do anything. And even where it’s nonexistent, just a rumor as provocation, or intel gossip, we spend time chasing it down. Great urban myths, Artie, are hard to beat.” She stopped to catch her breath.

I had worked a nuke case long ago. Red mercury, the legendary Soviet radioactive material, had turned out to be the biggest hoax of all.

“I know,” I said. “What else is it used for?”

“It used to be an element in the trigger for a nuclear weapon still employed in a few Russian weapons plants. Hard to get, hard to detect. And, Artie?”

“What?”

“We don’t know anything. All the cops and spooks and bureaucrats, nobody knows anything.” Fiona took a pad out of her bag and scribbled something on it, then handed it to me. “Go see these people, it’s a good clinic, private, just let them check you out, okay? You will, won’t you? Radiation isn’t a joke. I’ll drive you if you like.”

I said I’d make my own way there, knowing I wouldn’t bother, that there wasn’t time. I told Fiona I needed a favor. I said I was sure Greg Curtis had beat up Gagarin. From the house in Wimbledon I had managed to steal his Bible. I asked Colquhoun if she could get somebody to take prints off it and then match them up with Gagarin or the area where she had been mugged. I was a lousy spy, but I was still a good enough cop.

I asked Fiona to drop me at the subway. I had to do this by myself.

After I got to the station, I threw away the piece of paper with the clinic address. I wasn’t going to a clinic where they’d ask me questions I didn’t want to answer.

Valentina had married Grisha Curtis. She was married and she never told me. On the subway platform after I left Fiona, I was trapped by hordes of people.

I tried to avoid contact with other passengers because the gun was in my waistband and it was illegal as hell. If someone bumped me and felt it and made a stink-and there was plenty of rage in this city-I’d end up at some station house wasting time explaining things to a local cop.

Now people milled around and waited for a train, and some of them talked about the weather and what a washout the summer was, and others leaned against the wall and read their papers. I couldn’t see around the mob that pushed at me as I got on a train.

At the first stop, I tried to get off the train, but the crowds pushed me back. I kept my back close to the door.

Then the train stalled between stations. You could feel a ripple of tension. The memory of 7/7 was still fresh, the memory of people slaughtered on a subway train, a bus ripped open like a sardine can.

The grind and shunt of the train starting made people relax. A girl next to me smiled, a wry kind of smile, and returned to her copy of Harry Potter. A man next to her in a Lenin-style cap pulled down over his forehead was reading a Russian-language newspaper, while his tiny pale wife leaned against him and talked steadily. He never put his paper down.

I closed my eyes. I was betting Mrs Curtis was already on the phone to her son wherever he was and that he would come after me.

“Come on,” I thought. “Come and get me.”

All I wanted was Grisha Curtis, who had killed my Valentina.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Deborah Curtis, Grisha’s mother, was dead by the time I met Fiona Colquhoun the next morning at the Tate Gallery down near the river. It was early, mist hanging over the Thames, the lonely hoot coming from an invisible boat. When Colquhoun told me, at first I thought Mrs Curtis had somehow died from radiation poisoning in her house.

“No,” said Fiona. “No, Artie, and the radiation scare, this time anyway, was a false alarm,” she said, adding that Mrs Curtis had been found at her rich cousin’s house, sitting on the terrace, dead. The official line was she’d had a stroke, said Colquhoun.

“Did Grisha Curtis show up to see his mother? Did he kill her?”

“No”, said Fiona. “No evidence.”

I was sorry about Mrs Curtis. I wondered if my appearance at the Curtis house set off the events that had killed her. I had more questions for her, so I was sorry about that, too.

Fiona got it, didn’t think I was a bastard for saying it. She had been a real cop, even if now she was in some other game.

We walked along the river and she pointed out the spy palace across the river, an ugly modern building, letting me know she knew her way around, I thought. I had called her early that morning hoping I could play her, knowing there was plenty she hadn’t told me. But she was too sharp.

Drinking out of a coffee container, she told me she had run Grisha Curtis through her computers, and, unless he was using a different name, he was still in Britain. There was no record of him leaving the country.

“We matched fingerprints on the Bible you took from the Curtis house with some on Elena Gagarin’s handbag,” Fiona said. “They were a perfect match. The bank where he worked confirmed he was an employee and they had prints on him from a file. He taught school in Boston while he did his MBA, and the school system printed him,” she added. “He had a UK passport, and a Russian passport,” she said. “I had looked at Curtis before, but it was only when Valentina died, and when you came here, Artie, that I really focused on him. This Russian stuff really is like one of those mythical many-headed monsters, you look at something, it disappears, then shows up again. For a time, on the surface, he was pretty much what he claimed. I don’t know where the marriage license was filed, but I couldn’t find it. Perhaps someone made it disappear.”

“Yeah, what doesn’t show up is that he’s a murderous bastard. Thanks about the prints,” I added.

We sat on the steps of the museum. I knew Fiona was killing time while she thought about something.

“I met Grigory Curtis a second time, after I saw him at Larry Sverdloff’s, quite a bit later,” she said.

“Where?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Recently?”

“Quite.”

“You’re not comfortable with telling me?”

“I’m telling you what matters. I’m sorry it took this long. I’m telling you now, if you want the truth, because I think you can help me. Before I tell you, I’d like to know that you will share whatever you find with me, and that isn’t only about your friend’s daughter.”

“Go on.”

“Is that a yes?” The chilly formality, the way Fiona’s expression changed, the adjustment of her posture reminded me this was her real business with me.

“Sure.”

“I think Curtis did errands for the KGB,” said Fiona. “The FSB as it’s now called.”

“I know what the FSB is, for chrissake.”

“Curtis told me, and yes, quite recently, that he thought that it was not Putin’s people who killed Litvinenko, that it was the British, that we did it as a provocation, and that in any case Litvinenko was a traitor,” said Fiona, who went on to tell me that she understood from what he had said that Curtis worked for the Kremlin or the FSB-the same things, she said-and they had seen in him an opportunity. “A young man taken up with a zealous Russian patriotism, and who had two passports? Quite a coup, don’t you think?”

“And an American wife. You knew they were married?”

“Only when I met the mother yesterday,” said Fiona. “It’s when I realized I was right about him. It gave Curtis, and anyone he serviced, access to the US. I think that was the real ambition.”

“He used Val?”

“Hard to say. They were certainly in love when I saw them, I can’t know if he used her from the beginning or if he saw an opportunity he could retail, or if his masters exploited it. I haven’t got the whole answer.”

“And Val turned on him when she discovered what he was up to.”

“Or when she simply discovered he was a zealot who was in love with the whole ‘Russia first’, thing. Bloody fascists.”

“What about Larry Sverdloff?”

“I think he’s on our side. I think he understands all of it, and that we can trust him. Up to a point. He wants to change Russia, but he wants the money, like all of them. He’s scared. He should be scared. There have been plenty of death threats. I told him to leave England for a few days. I think you should go, too.”

“He went?”

“I don’t know.” Fiona got up. “It’s clear Curtis beat up Elena Gagarin. I can have him picked up if we can find him.”

What I didn’t say, though I was sure Fiona knew, was I wasn’t going anywhere until I had Curtis in my sights, until I had a way to get him for Valentina’s death.

“Your bosses want to know all about me?”

“They think you’re here working for Roy Pettus,” Fiona said.

“And you let them think it?”

“I told you, I like you. And I really want these people, I’ve worked nearly two years on this. I want them, I want to put a lid on Russian terrorism before it explodes here, and I think Curtis might lead me to them, because for now there’s just a wall of Russians in London, and nobody is quite what he seems, and it’s very hard to break through it. I want them, Artie, I want the people who bring their poison into my country. Or spread its myth and make people terrified, the fear of fear is something your country suffers from, and we’ve caught it. I want all this badly enough to accommodate anyone, including you. Please be careful. I’ll pick you up tonight, if you like, I’ll take you to meet someone who will help you. Say, it’s my boss. Just wait for me.”

“A real spy?”

She smiled. “Ah, but there are no real spies anymore,” she said. “Only people like me.”

“How come you’re doing all this?”

“I don’t know. Because it’s the right thing to do. And I like you,” she said and blushed. “I’ll find you later.”

“Where?”

“I’ll find you. Artie?”

“Yes?”

“It’s Sunday. I was wondering if you’d like to come round for lunch.”

“When it’s all over, I’d like that. Lunch. Even dinner.”

“Thanks.”

“Wait for me.”

“Of course,” I said. “Thank you.”

Fiona put out her hand and I shook it, and then she walked away, along the river, shrouded in the strange mist that had settled on everything.

CHAPTER FORTY

Taking the gun with me that night was a bad idea, but I didn’t care. I took it when I left Tolya’s around ten. It was three days since I had been to the agency on Moscow Road where Masha Panchuk got her job. When I had called during business hours, a machine picked up. Something about the place had been bugging me since I first saw it. And I was furious, crazy with anger.

The fury had built up over the time I’d been in London. And dread. I was scared of what I’d do if I was right about Grisha Curtis, if I found him and I was right. Dread of being wrong.

I ran along the sidewalk. A car splashed water on me. I yelled at the driver to go fuck himself.

On Moscow Road, the Greek grocery was shut, metal gates pulled down. Outside the church a homeless guy was stretched out, wet newspaper for a blanket.

In the building where the agency was, the windows were dark, except on the top floor. As I watched, the light there went off. The shade came down. Somebody had seen me looking.

What did I expect to find here late at night? The agency would be shut. I was operating on instinct and adrenalin and the fury.

I was surprised that the front door wasn’t locked. I pushed it, then went into the vestibule. The inner door was easy. I jimmied it with my pocketknife, and went up the first flight.

Shoulder tight against the wall, I edged my way up quiet as I could, feeling the peeling paint with one hand, the other on the gun. A stink of cigarettes was everywhere. Overhead bulbs were out. From inside a couple of the doors, I could hear voices, a TV.

The agency was on the third floor. I tapped very lightly on the frosted glass with the name on it. I waited. Listened for noise. The door was padlocked and I used the butt of my gun to break it.

The room was the same as it had been, desk, a couple of chairs, a framed poster, well-watered plants along the windowsill.

But Ilana was gone, her computer was covered with a plastic sheet, and I wondered if she had been covering for someone. Was it really an agency for maids and chauffeurs? Was it a front? Both? Impossible to tell, but I sensed right away that there was something strange.

Mrs Curtis had said that Grisha kept an office close to Paddington station, and this place, on Moscow Road, was close enough. I had come on the kind of instinct that you need as a cop, something that went off in my head like a smoke alarm.

I left the lights off. Went to the window and looked out at the street where a couple gazed up at the church, then walked away, putting up an umbrella.

At the back of the office was a second door. In the desk drawer was a set of keys. I found the right one and went in.

It was nondescript, nothing on the walls, only a small conference table in the middle of the room, a pair of filing cabinets in a corner. On the table was a brand new desktop computer, and on a shelf was a row of books, Russian history mostly. I grabbed a couple at random to take with me. I’d look at them later.

I went to the computer. Somebody leaving in a hurry had failed to shut it down completely, there was no request for a password. I thought about the light in the top-floor window.

From upstairs, while I was bent over the computer, came the noise I’d been waiting for. There were footsteps. Somebody walking, then running.

And then whoever it was kept going, didn’t stop at the third floor, just kept going faster, down the stairs, out of the front door and into the street.

At the window again I watched. A dark figure emerged from the building, crossed the street and slid into an alleyway on the other side. He was waiting for me.

I grabbed envelopes out of the two filing cabinets, printed off what I could from the computer, and went out. He was out there, in the dark, playing chicken with me. It didn’t matter now. What I’d glimpsed in the files told me all I needed: I’d found Grisha Curtis’ office.

In the street, files under my jacket, I kept close to the buildings. All the time, ever since I arrived in London, he had been out there, watching, following, but always hidden from me.

Then, something, some sixth sense, made me swerve to the right, some clammy fear. It was late Sunday night, nothing open, no cafe, no pub, just the dark wet streets, and the cold, more like November than July. How did they stand it here?

And then a hotel, light still on in the lobby. I ducked in. Asked the guy at the front desk if the bar was open, could I get a beer, a sandwich. Everything shut, he said. I asked for a room. I put cash and my passport on the desk, and while he copied the information, I looked over my shoulder, pushed some extra dough in his direction, said if anybody came or called, he’d never seen me.

“Right?” I said.

He shrugged. Figured me for a drunk wanting to sober up before I went home. I let on I didn’t want my wife knowing where I was, exchanged some ugly jokes about women and booze to get his confidence, took the key, went up and unlocked the door.

My clothes were soaked. I took them off, dried my head with the stingy bathroom towel, wrapped myself in the bedspread because it was freezing. On a dusty shelf in a scratched wardrobe, I found a miniature bottle of Scotch and two cans of warm beer. The Scotch I drank in a single gulp.

There was a single bed, a TV on a table, a chair. I spread the papers I’d stolen on the table, so I could read and watch the street at the same time. It was surreal, but what else could I do? I used only a small desk light and kept it out of sight from the window.

I’ve been a cop long enough, done enough homicides and fraud cases, so I can work my way through paper evidence fast.

In the files were e-mails from Grigory Curtis, and faxes to him from Russia. There were notes and e-mails between him and Valentina. Records of phone calls, expense-account submissions, airline ticket stubs, the dreary detritus of a guy on the make.

Surprisingly, Curtis was a novice. He was a guy who didn’t know what the hell he was doing. He didn’t know how to conceal his dealings. Fragments, scribbles in Russian and English in a Moleskine diary, a few magazine articles on oligarchs in London; names underlined included Larry Sverdloff.

I took the envelopes onto the bed. One contained an address book, a diary, some Russian military medals. I drank one of the beers. I was thirsty. Fear made my mouth and throat dry.

From the material in front of me, I tracked Curtis’ movements over the last eighteen months from the time he had met Valentina. At first he fell for her. Afterwards it became clear she was a good opportunity, especially when she started writing to him about her efforts to save young girls in Russia. She was fierce in her descriptions of Russian bureaucrats who got in her way, and said she intended going to the press.

At some point he persuaded her to marry him.

Some of Curtis’ efforts at encoding messages to the FSB made me laugh. He didn’t know how to do it, even I could decipher the material, much of it on slick fax paper. Curtis said he thought Tolya Sverdloff was a clown but useful, that he could make introductions.

At some point Curtis told his contact, his control, whatever the fuck you call them, that Val was hard to control, she had a big mouth. About six months earlier, Val stopped answering his e-mails. He wrote. She didn’t answer. He said he had to see her, he was coming to New York.

It took hours to work out the dates until I found a receipt for some book. Curtis had bought books from Dubi Petrovsky. I looked at the stuff I’d taken off the shelf in his office. Russian history, mostly, nationalist crap. When I put in a call to Dubi, I was hoping he was in his shop, and I got lucky. As soon as he checked his records, he found Curtis’ name.

“You were right. This guy, Grisha Curtis was here, July 5.” Two days before Val was murdered. “He buys some Russian novels, you want the names?”

“Take me through it,” I said, and Dubi told me a young guy had come in, said he wanted books for a lady, a distant relative of his mother.

“I said, is she Russian? He said yes, and I asked her name because I sell to so many Russians.”

“What did he say?”

“It was for Olga Dimitriovna.”

When Dubi described him, I knew for sure it was Grisha Curtis.

“I said, I just sent novels to Olga, and he asked which ones and who bought them, and he was very nice and made like he knew Olga and her friends, so I told him. I said Tolya Sverdloff ordered them, or perhaps it was his daughter, and that a friend had delivered them, and he said, oh, Mr Sverdloff must be a nice man, and I said yes, and he asked for different books so he would not give to Olga the same books. He used his credit card.”

Grisha had used his own card. Like I thought, he was a novice, a zealot with an obsession, not a pro. But somebody else had been involved, somebody who did his dirty work on Masha, I was guessing, but I didn’t think it was Grisha, not that first killing. It was the work of a professional thug.

“Artie?”

“Yes?”

“He came back.”

“What?”

“He came back. He bought history books,” said Dubi, “the kind Olga never read, including Solzynitsin’s most recent essays, the attacks on the West, the Russian nationlist crap. Nobody reads this shit,” added Dubi succinctly.

“What dates?”

“He came back on July 7, end of the day, he buys this stuff and also some photographic materials, brushes to clean old-fashioned lenses, this sort of thing, I don’t ask why.”

“You’re sure of the date?”

“Yes.”

“Anything else?”

“I had one or two photographs by Valentina Sverdloff on the wall and he couldn’t stop staring at them.”

I tried not to fall asleep, I drank a warm beer, I called Bobo Leven and when I finally got through I told him about the books, and that through all Curtis’ notes written in English- which many were-there were references to somebody called T, and amounts of money next to the name. At first I thought it was for Tolya. I went and put my whole head under the cold-water tap. T. Who was T?

Dripping, cold as ice, shaking from fatigue, I went back into the room and called Sonny Lippert.

“Come home,” said Sonny Lippert. “You heard from Sverdloff?”

“He calls. He doesn’t say much.”

“You got anything over there, Art? On the Sverdloff girl?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Listen to me, Artie, forget this, just come home. Your friend Tolya is running his own private investigation into his daughter’s death, man. He’s got that kid, Leven, moonlighting for him. He’s everywhere, he’s on TV, in the papers, yelling and screaming about the Russkis, man, about how they got state terrorism all over again.”

“Go on.”

“Shit is what is hitting the fan,” said Sonny. “Shit is what he’s going to be up to his waist in. He’s making a lot of noise, he talks crazy stuff about radiation poisoning, about people at the top stealing money, he doesn’t give a flying fuck who he talks to, man. The TV talk shows are eating it up between election news. He makes a great show, man, but he’s crazy, the thing with his kid, talks about how she’s a martyr, he’s nuts and I don’t blame him, and I know he’s your friend, but you have to stop him.”

Somebody had used the word saint for Val. Mrs Curtis, her mother-in-law had said it: she was a saint, she’d said. Maybe it wasn’t just a turn of phrase for her, maybe it meant more. Who would have posed her like that, like a saint, or a martyr?

“Sonny?”

“Yeah?”

“Do me a favor, will you?”

“Sure, man.”

“Call me back in an hour, okay? Call me. If you don’t get an answer, call this number,” I said, and gave him Fiona’s cellphone.

“You’re not coming.”

“I’ll be there soon.”

“I’ll call you,” said Lippert. “You think somebody is enjoying our conversation? You think that funny little click is our other conversationalist?”

“I don’t know, Sonny. I don’t know how to do this. I’m a New York homicide cop. There’s nothing here I understand.”

“Maybe you should have listened to your father, he could have taught you the spy thing, right? Yeah, sorry about that, man, forget the fucking joke.”

I hung up.

I went to the window. It was getting light. Nobody outside. I waited. Nobody in the hall. I put my clothes back on, and waited, and went back to the paper trail.

Most of what Curtis fed his control, if that was what you called it, was titbits of information, gossip about the London scene. Only when Val began making a fuss about officials, when she began talking to Russian journalists, did the exchanges between Curtis and the guy in Russia heat up.

My face burned with fatigue. Legs buckled. No sleep. I washed my face. Fiona Colquhoun would be looking for me at Tolya’s by now. I had to get back. I put on my jacket, and stuffed the papers as best I could inside the pockets.

Had I been wrong to talk to Fiona?

Was I wrong to trust anybody? Even Larry? Or Tolya? Were they all Russian spies at heart, secrets buried so deep you could never separate the truth from the paranoia that made you distrust them and made them unreliable?

I went downstairs. The clerk was asleep behind the desk. I now knew that Tolya Sverdloff had not been the target. Valentina was not killed as a warning to him. She felt herself to be an American girl with the right to say whatever she wanted, to do whatever she wanted. And she was murdered for that, for what she said.

Footsteps rang out louder and louder on the hard sidewalk behind me. If I showed my gun in London, I’d be in trouble. I wanted to get the stuff I had on Grisha home, or at least to Fiona. She was my best gamble here.

But Grisha was behind me, like he had been, barely visible, almost never showing his face; and in the early morning rain, sidewalk slick as marble, I ran like a crazy person.

The footsteps came after me, and so fast I couldn’t think, a pair of arms like tree trunks locked around my shoulders and somebody dragged me up a short stretch of street and into a narrow mews, an alley, behind a row of cars.

It wasn’t Curtis. I got a glimpse of the face, it was only muscle, a thug. But Curtis had sent him, Curtis, who knew I had been in the building, and the hotel, who knew what I was doing. He had the means. He knew the right people. He would know who to call to summon the creep who was ripping at my eyelid with his fingernails.

There was a wound over my eye, and old wound that had healed badly, and it was as if he knew, as if he had studied a picture of me to see where I was vulnerable. He pulled at the skin. I was on the ground, wet, almost too tired to move. Again he peeled the skin from the wound, digging his nail in. The pain was unbearable.

In Russian, I swore at him, his mother, the country, everything I could think of, and he pulled back, looking for his gun, maybe. In that second, I managed to reach for my weapon, grabbed it, swung at him and hit hard with the butt. Again. I hit him until he let go and fell back on the sidewalk. Next to him was a pair of wire-rim glasses, the lenses shattered.

I didn’t wait to see if he was alive or not.

By the time I got back to Tolya’s, it was light. Upstairs I looked at my eye. The raw skin was bleeding and I patched it up with Band-Aids.

I took a hot shower. I got out and wrapped myself in a towel, and poured myself a drink, and knocked it all back, and then it came to me. I got it.

My God, I thought. The m on Masha, the letter carved in her flesh, wasn’t an m. It was a Russian t, the version of the lower case t. I got out of the shower and called Sonny Lippert.

“It wasn’t an m.”

“What?”

“The creep who carved an initial on Masha, the girl in the playground, it wasn’t an ‘m’ for ‘Masha’ like we thought: it was a Russian ‘t’. There was a T in Grisha’s notebook, ask around, Sonny, okay? Look for a guy with a T.”

“Jesus,” he said.

“Do it.”

He had already hung up.

“You were onto something, man,” said Sonny when he called back. “Earlier you said T, you said the letter T was in the notebook, look for a guy with a T? Turns out your Bobo Leven been looking very hard at a thug named Terry. Terenti is his Russian name. I got onto Leven to tell him what you said. Terenti looks very good for the girl in the playground, for Masha. They picked him up already. I’m betting he killed her. We’re checking evidence. You feeling okay?”

“Yeah, fine. Doesn’t matter. Leven’s doing his job?”

“I don’t like him, Artie, man, he’s a hustler for sure, he has a foul mouth and he’s a fucking racist little shit, but he’s smart, and he worked this case like a crazy person.”

“What else?”

“Terenti’s other jobs have all the same earmarks,” said Sonny. “The duct tape. The setting up the bodies like statues, like the girl, Masha, on the swing. He moves easy between New York, London, Moscow, Mexico, Havana, wherever he wants. He travels legal, we found entry dates into New York that would match up.”

“He wear glasses?”

“Jesus, man, how did you know? Yeah, he looks like a guy who reads books, little wire-rim glasses, maybe he thinks he’s Trotsky, or some other revolutionary fool.”

“Yeah, well, reading books doesn’t make you nice,” I said. “What kind of books?”

“I’ll ignore that,” said Sonny. “We think he killed Masha, but Valentina Sverdloff, it doesn’t look like the same guy. We’re checking everything, all the forensics, top priority.”

“Just call when you make the case,” I said.

“We won’t let this one go, Art,” he said. “You know what I hate about this global thing, Artie, man, I used to run my investigations in New York for New York, and now everybody is running around the planet, and nobody knows who works for anybody. It’s porous like it’s never been and we whore ourselves to anyone with a buck, so the intel is just out there, all of it,” he said. “The more we do business with asshole countries like Russia and China, the more loopholes there are. Also, the creeps that got the money can just disappear. Plus you got a jackass running Homeland Security who forgets to put air marshals on planes. We’re in a whole new place, man, we’re in a lateral thing, which means no place.”

“Listen, you said this Terenti reads books, you mean literally?” It popped into my head like a jack out of a box.

“Yeah, man. They picked him up, he had a pile of them in the motel room.”

“In Brighton Beach? The motel?”

“Yeah.”

“The books were in Russian?”

“I heard yes.”

“Who’s keeping you in the loop on all this?” I said.

“Listen, you know Dubi Petrovsky?”

“Yeah, the guy where you got me that first edition Conrad, right? Big guy, shop out near the beach?”

“Right. Find out if he sold the books they found with this Terenti creep, okay?”

“Sure, man. You think this could turn on books?”

“With Russians, yeah, sure, they love to think of themselves as intellectuals, right?”

“One more thing.”

“Yeah, Sonny?”

“Terenti, turns out he’s done it before, he signed his work on another girl. The letter m in Masha’s flesh, his signature, like he was the author of the job.”

“My God.”

“Come home soon as you can, man.”

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

“Please come,” he said. “My car is waiting,” he added, calling me MooDllo, the name no one except Tolya ever uses. “Asshole, I need you to meet me.”

“Where?”

“My car is waiting downstairs. Ivan is there,” he said.

I went to the window of Tolya’s Notting Hill house and looked out and saw the car, the driver.

“I have to go,” I said to Fiona, who had been waiting for me when I stumbled in. The guy who’d beaten me up had left me looking bad, but she didn’t ask, just washed off the blood, using some antibiotics she found in Tolya’s bathroom.

“I have to go,” I said to her again, and gave her most of the papers I’d found in Grisha’s office on Moscow Road. Not all. Not the notebook.

“Don’t ask me where, okay?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Just come,” said Tolya into the phone. “I need you Artyom,” he said. His voice was low and hesitant, like a sick man’s.

“What’s wrong with you?” I said when I found Tolya waiting for me in Larry Sverdloff’s house. From the outside, the house resembled a fortress. A dozen guys were planted in the garden, sitting in deckchairs, speaking into their earpieces, and sipping water. More stood outside the front gate.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Tolya from the chair where he sat in Larry’s study. His skin was gray. He worked hard to catch his breath. I got a chair and pulled it up beside him.

“Where’s your cousin?”

“Upstairs.”

“Let me get him.”

“No,” said Tolya. “He’s fixing things. Let him do it.” He reached for a plastic tube of pills on the table next to him, swallowed a few capsules and washed them down with a glass of vodka he poured himself.

“What is it?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I can’t find my shoes.”

“They’re next to the couch,” I said.

“Can you get them for me, Artyom? Please?”

“Sure.”

I got a pair of his Gucci loafers, bright yellow skins, gold buckles, and brought them to him.

“Sorry to ask, man,” he said, slipping his feet into the shoes. “I’m just a little tired,” added Tolya speaking half in English, half in Russian. “I need to get going.”

In all the years we’d been friends, I had never known Tolya like this. He looked lousy. There was a moment when he clutched his left arm as if in pain, and I reached out, but he gently pushed me away. He spoke to me like a supplicant, like a guy who needed help even with his shoes. I tried not to show what I was feeling, but I think he knew.

“When did you get here?”

“An hour ago,” he said, glancing at his watch. The band was loose on his wrist.

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. He wore a rumpled black suit.

“Listen to me, I came to see you, and Styopa, too,” he said, referring to his cousin Larry’s patronymic. “Only you two, okay, nothing else, nobody else, no one. Is anyone with you?”

“No. Tell me.”

“I came, you see, because I can’t tell you anything on the phone, not anymore, and because I have to go soon.”

“When?”

“An hour. Two.”

“Where?” I said.

“It doesn’t matter.”

I reached in my pocket for cigarettes.

“You’re smoking? Give me one, please?” Tolya said, trying to conceal a rasping cough. “No lecture.”

I lit my cigarette and tossed him the lighter.

“So, Artyom. So. You use my nice lighter?” He tried to joke.

I waited.

“Put on some music, please, Artyom,” said Tolya. “ Something nice.”

There was a CD player in the bookshelf and I went over and found a CD I knew he liked. I held it up.

“Sinatra okay?”

“Always,” said Tolya. “Sure. But classical now, Verdi,” he said. “Larry has this recording, Simon Boccanegra, the Covent Garden version, Tito Gobbi, Victoria de los Angeles, Boris Christoff, please Artyom, it’s on the table,” he added, as if choosing his last record. When I put it on the turntable, Tolya closed his eyes and listened for a few seconds.

“You should listen sometime, Artyom.” He smiled. “It’s about a poisoned drink and reconciliation. Turn it louder, please.”

“You don’t want your cousin to hear?”

“He already knows most of it.”

“Most?”

“I left out certain things.”

“You don’t trust him?”

“Of course I trust him, it’s for his sake,” said Tolya. “My cousin thinks he is leading the loyal opposition, he thinks he and his people and their money can bring down Putin and the Kremlin. He has made tremendous fortune, billions, so now he hears there is trouble in Ukraine, he supports Orange Revolution, he hears there will be trouble in Georgia this summer, he sends money to what he calls the democratic forces. It makes him a target.” Tolya sat up. “It’s not about him, it’s about you. This is why I came to see you, Artyom. Your fingerprints were all over Val’s place. Excuse me.” He said, hauled himself to his feet like an old man, and slowly made his way out of the room to the bathroom.

“Why did they look for your fingerprints, Artie?” said Tolya when he returned. “Was there a reason?”

“They probably run everything through the computer.”

“Yes, perhaps,” he said, “but people ask questions.”

“Which people?”

“It doesn’t matter. I just wanted to warn you.”

I was pretty stunned. I kept my mouth shut.

“By the time I got to New York, they had taken Valentina away,” said Tolya.

“I’m sorry.”

“You tried. Your Mr Roy Pettus is asking about you.”

“I needed his help.”

“You’re naive,” said Tolya softly.

“Just tell me.”

He picked up his glass and sipped the vodka.

“I got to the loft and my Val was gone. Leven, you call him Bobo? He was waiting as if he knew I was coming. It took balls. He sees me, he gets up and doesn’t know what to say, just stands there, this skinny tall boy, long arms hanging down, showing respect, and I think to myself, I should offer my hand. So I put out my hand, and I think he is going to kiss it. ‘I’m sorry, Anatoly Anatolyevich. Please forgive me,’ Leven says in Russian.”

She wasn’t there, of course. They had taken her away. Together they went to the morgue but he couldn’t look at her body.

“I love all my kids, Artie. Val’s sister, of course, and my boy who I almost never see, but she is special. Valentina is like me. She never took shit from anybody. She wanted to do things how she wanted. Even as a little girl when I bring them to Florida from Moscow to be safe, she is a rebel.”

I didn’t say anything, just waited for him to catch his breath and take another slug of the vodka.

It was the hot dog that got to Tolya, he said. Before he and Bobo got to the morgue, he saw the lunchtime crowd, and in it, a man eating a hot dog with yellow mustard and listening to his iPod. He saw the mustard, the white strings of the iPod, the man’s red shirt very clearly. Then they went inside.

“I can’t look,” said Tolya. “I just went back outside. You love her, Artie? I know that. I know you loved her also not just as my daughter. I know that you did and that you never touched her. You said to yourself, this is not right, and you left it.”

“What else?”

“In the official world, it’s hard to get information.”

“You bought some?”

“Yes.”

“What was it?”

“They tried to poison her, Artyom.” he said. “Turn off the music, please.”

“With what?”

“Polonium-210.”

“The autopsy?”

“They said they were still testing. They didn’t know how to look. You have to know how to look for the symptoms. In another week, or perhaps two, she would have lost her hair, her skin, everything. She would have died very fast, very ugly. But Leven gave me the pictures he took of her at home, after she was dead, she looked very pretty in her summer dress Artyom, everything was in place. How was that possible I asked myself? I asked myself over and over, and I don’t know. Maybe I was wrong about the poison, maybe I went crazy, or maybe the poison had not yet started its work on her body.”

“But you came here to see me.”

“I think, I must tell Artie about the fingerprints. I must tell him before anything happens to him.”

“You think it was me?”

“I only know your fingerprints were everywhere in her apartment, even on the desk, the pictures, the bed, everywhere, even things in the wastepaper basket, old boxes of film, on brushes she uses to clean her negatives. I tell everybody, Artie Cohen had nothing at all to do with this. He was often here, he is our friend, of course his fingerprints are in the apartment. And I don’t ask you anything at all,” he said. “This second killing was not murder. Whoever did this, it was a blessing,” he said. “It kept her from dying like Sasha Litvinenko. It kept her from being eaten from inside. It was from mercy, I understand,” said Tolya who got up, kissed me on the cheek and went to his room.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

“It wasn’t me.”

“Then who?”

“Do you believe me?” I said.

“If you tell me, of course,” said Tolya, but I could see he didn’t believe me, not completely.

“Will they believe me at home?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who, Artyom?”

“Grisha Curtis. You were right, it began in London, you can get anything here, buy anyone.”

The housekeeper came in with a tray of drinks, but Tolya shook his head.

“I must go,” said Tolya, barely reacting to the information about Grisha. “We all travel too much now,” he said. “Russians feel they have to keep moving or somebody might take this right away again,” he added. “Don’t worry, I’m okay,” he added, but it was hard for him to talk and he caught his breath constantly the way you might catch your clothing on a thorn.

“You should eat.”

“It’s all right. I’ve had everything,” said Tolya. “I’ve had my share,” he added. “I’ve had all the good things.” He left the room again, and I listened to the music until he came back, carrying a black raincoat and a small bag.

I asked him again where he was going.

“Where is Curtis? Is he in Moscow?”

“I don’t know. You’re going after him?”

“What do you think, Artyom? To Moscow?”

“Probably, yes,” I said, and regretted it as soon as I did. In that instant I knew Tolya would go after, him and in Moscow Tolya would be in bad trouble.

“What else?”

“Curtis knows I have stuff on him, he knows I got it from his office, that I can make the connection that he hired this Terenti creep to kill Val, and Terenti got it wrong and killed Masha by mistake, and then Grisha took over. He knows I can make the connection to Valentina. I think he was furious when this Terenti shit got the wrong girl and killed Val himself. If he went to Moscow it’s because the Russians won’t let the Brits extradite, he probably thinks he’s safe there.”

“I see.”

“Do you?”

“Then he killed her twice, once with the Polonium, the second time because he suddenly thought about her suffering horribly, and so he suffocated her and laid her nicely on the bed. And I believed it was you. Oh God,” said Tolya. “I want you to stay here for a little while, please. To be safe. I’ll call you as soon as it’s safe.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’ll call you.”

I ran out of the house and caught him near the car. He was bent over, trying to catch some air, to get a breath. I took his hand.

“What’s the matter with you, what’s wrong?” I put my hand on his shoulder.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “I’m just tired.”

“Where’s he going?”

“He didn’t tell me,” Larry said. “He asked me to go to New York to look after things there for him.”

“I thought Fiona said you were in danger, that you should have already left England, wasn’t that it, what happened?”

“I didn’t go,” said Larry. “I had to be where Tolya could find me if he needed me. I’m not such a coward as you might think, Artie. But now I’ll go to New York for him. And you must stay here. He said if you went to New York now, there would be questions about Val’s death.”

“Is he going to Moscow? He shouldn’t go to Moscow, it will be bad for him. He’ll act crazy.”

“I can’t stop him. Look, I’m going to have to leave myself,” said Larry. “Do you need any money?”

“I don’t know. Yes.”

“Then just take it.” He held out a wad of cash. “Anything else I should know? I might be able to help.”

I told him I beat up a creep near Moscow Road with a gun.

“God, Artie. That means your prints are in Valentina’s room in New York, and also on some creep in London. Did you kill him?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll make some calls. Chances are it was just a hood nobody will give a fuck about. Was he black?”

“No.”

“Islamic?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“If he was Islamic, you’d be in better shape. The cops here personally feel one less is a better thing. It doesn’t matter. But they’re not crazy about guns here, at least not officially, and there’s only so much I can do, so just stay put, right? Just a few days. Don’t make calls. Don’t take any.”

“What about Fiona Colquhoun?”

“What about her?”

“She’ll wonder where I am.”

“I’ll let her know as much as I can.”

“How well do you know her?” I asked Larry.

“We’re friends,” he said.

“How good?”

“Good enough. It’s fine. You don’t need to know anything else about it, just stay here, Artie, okay? Just stay until we know it’s okay for you to go home to New York.”

“Until when?”

“Until I call you. I’m on your side, you know.”

I stayed overnight at Larry’s. I swam in his pool. I tried to sleep. I knew that Tolya had followed Grisha Curtis to Moscow. But I had seen the look on his face when I told him I thought Curtis had killed Valentina and had then gone to Moscow. Tolya had nothing else to lose, I knew if he found Grisha, he would hurt him, or kill him.

In spite of what Larry said, I had to know. I tried Tolya on half a dozen numbers. For two days, I worked the phone. But he had vanished.

It was true, I was in bad fucking trouble, my prints on a gun I had used in London. My prints all over Valentina’s room. My pictures were in her room, or had been.

I thought about calling Fiona. I knew I was on the edge, dancing at the very edge of an open manhole cover and I could fall into the sewer. Fiona Colquhoun had access and I trusted her, more or less. I gave it one more day. For one day, I’d go quiet. Maybe two.

I stopped answering e-mails. I turned off my cellphone. I bought a pay-as-you-go phone and gave Fiona the number but nobody else.

Stay out of London, she said. I felt crazy from waiting. I swam in Larry’s pool, I swam so much, my skin wrinkled. In a shop in the little village near Larry Sverdloff’s house, I picked up a couple of books, one or two spy novels, and sat in the pub reading, drinking a little beer, keeping to myself.

In spy novels, in the Bourne movies, that kind of stuff, guys always leave false traces; they use different names; they have extra passports and money in Swiss banks.

I thought about moving into some remote hotel, but they’d ask for my passport. At night I went through the papers I had taken from Grisha’s office, following the dates, the e-mails, working out when he had been in America.

By Wednesday, two days after I’d seen Tolya, I was going nuts. The weather had turned hot and outside the pub, a couple of boys kicked a football around. I walked back to Larry’s, and on the way I called Fiona Colquhoun from a public payphone. From inside the red box I watched an old lady bicycle past.

Fiona told me to wait for her near the village post office, and half an hour later, her green Mini pulled up.

“Grisha Curtis is gone, we think he’s in Russia, as you probably guessed” she said. “The last we have on him is his buying a ticket. We don’t know if he boarded the plane, but we have to assume it. We have our people in Moscow on it. You always believed he killed Valentina Sverdloff?”

“Yes.”

“But now you’re sure.”

“Yes. He hired a thug to do it who messed up and killed another girl, Masha, and when Grisha saw how he butchered her, he had to kill Valentina himself. He couldn’t stand the idea of Val ending up like Masha, wrapped in duct tape, left in a playground.”

“I got you a visa.”

“Thank you.”

“I assumed you’d want to go.”

“Thanks. I know that Tolya Sverdloff thinks he was poisoned, like Litvinenko, he thinks his daughter was also poisoned. Something is wrong with him, but not this. I need to convince him. This is your subject,” I said. “Help me.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Thank you,” I said, and I told her about the thug Terenti they’d picked up in New York for Masha Panchuk’s murder. “I’m guessing he beat me up the other night, too.”

“We can’t find him,” she said. “It’s a bloody can of worms.”

“Yes.”

Handing me an envelope, she said, “Your visa. This should get you out of here and into Moscow.”

“You knew?”

“I knew you’d try to go, and if you have to go to Moscow, and I know you will, do at least pretend you’re an American tourist with an interest in Russian culture. When you get there, use a different name, at least for a bit, try to stay safe,” said Fiona, putting her hand on my shoulder. “These days I can’t help you over there, Artie. We Brits are not in good odor. If there’s trouble in Georgia, which is what I’m hearing from the chatter, they won’t be in love with Americans, either,” she said. “I wish to God you wouldn’t go at all, but you will, and this is the best I can do for you this end.”

“You’ll let me know what you find out?”

“If I can.”

“In that case, lunch when I get back,” I said. “I’ll bring the wine. I like your hat.”

“I got it in Israel,” she said. “Did you know there are an awful lot of Russians there now, Tel Aviv’s a bit like a Russian colony by the sea. No matter, I’m glad you like my hat. And, Artie?”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t for God’s sake take the bloody gun with you. And don’t try buying one in Moscow.”

“You have me pegged as some kind of gunslinger, or what? You think I’m Dirty Harry?”

“I don’t know. Are you?”

I thought about it. I had never liked guns, but all the years I’d been a cop, they had become a kind of body part.

“I hear you,” I said. “And I don’t love guns.”

Her mouth turned up in a smile.

“I wouldn’t blame you, considering the scum we’re dealing with, but it’s about your safety. If you’re caught with a weapon in Moscow, they won’t be nearly as nice as I am,” said Fiona. “You were wondering, I imagine, what my relationship is with Larry Sverdloff?”

“It’s none of my business.”

“Good,” she said. “Don’t think about it. He’s helped me, leave it at that,” she said, and suddenly I felt just a flicker of jealousy.

“What else?” I said, getting up from the bench. As Fiona got up, too, I realized she was as tall as me.

“Don’t pick your toes in Pushkin Square,” she added, and we both laughed and exchanged banter about our favorite old movies, especially comedies.

“God, don’t you wish life was like that?”

“Yeah, of course,” I said. “More comedy would be great.”

For a few more minutes we chatted about movies, and the weather, and her daughter, unwilling to part, sensing it could be our last conversation.

Fiona adjusted her straw hat so it shaded the gray eyes, pushed her thick dark hair away from her face, and said, “I can get you to Russia, but please try to make yourself invisible, they’ll be watching you.”

“Who?”

“In Moscow? Everyone.”