Londongrad

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

As soon as I’d put my bag in the overhead luggage rack and sat down on the airport bus into Moscow, a gang of teenagers in pink t-shirts crowded around me, like something out of Lord of the Flies, except that they were pretty girls, nice girls, who wanted only to recount the great time they’d had at camp near Sochi on the Black Sea.

The little girls swarmed me. Giggling, chattering, clutching their backpacks and books and fashion magazines, they flopped onto the remaining free seats near me in the back. The little ones, who looked about eight or nine, had sticky faces from the candy they were cramming into their mouths, and it was smeared on their dolls and stuffed animals, including an immense white plush bear. I helped its owner stash it in the overhead rack.

The older girls, thirteen, fourteen, kept track of the younger children; acting as chaperones they made sure the little ones were in their seats, then the teenagers sat and began to gossip to each other. At first a few complained about taking the regular airport bus. The plane had been late. The private bus intended for them had not appeared.

All of them wore the candy pink t-shirts that read I ♥ Putin, except for one whose logo read IF NOT HIM, WHO? Medvedev had been president for two months, one girl said, but everyone knew that Putin was the man who mattered.

The girl closest to me-she was about fourteen-looked at me with interest and asked me in Russian where I was from, In English, I said that I didn’t speak the language.

“You are from where, sir?” she said in English, and told me her name was Kim. I said New York City, and she grinned and looked excited and tapped her pal on the shoulder and told her that New York was wonderful and not at all like the rest of America, and the shopping downtown, Broadway, the things you can get, the designer bags, the shoes at Steve Madden, and the cute boys! She had been with her aunt twice, and, oh, New York, she said again, gabbling, running her words together, excited, practically jumping up and down.

Kim, the leader, the spokeswoman for the gang of girls, took charge. Camp had been fun, they said, with Kim as a translator. She explained that at camp they swam in the sea and camped under the stars, they had athletics, games, dramatics- she had been the star of an entire play they’d written and produced by themselves.

So many kids were going to camp these days, she noted, and the girls giggled when she described the Love Tents at a place on Lake Seliger. More for poor young people, of course, said Kim. At the Love Tents, she said again, older teenagers were encouraged to make babies for the fatherland.

The girls giggled some more.

I want four children, said one girl.

Suddenly, all the girls were talking at the same time. I pretended not to understand anything, waiting until Kim translated. The talk was of boys.

I would marry Vladimir Vladimirovich, said one of the girls, I would like this type of man we have for our leader. I would like one similar to him for a husband.

“You admire Mr Putin, sir?” said Kim, the English-speaker. “It is right word, admire?”

I didn’t answer right away, and another girl said in Russian, “He is American. He does not understand.” Nobody translated this. “Americans think they run the world, they think we are just a dumb old-fashioned country.”

I ignored her, pretending I couldn’t understand, and said I was a tourist and a travel writer. I was in Moscow to see the sights, the Kremlin, the museums, the churches.

I asked for their advice; they told me about Novodevichy, the convent and the cemetery, they mentioned Gorky Park, the museums, too, and the metro. The subway, said Kim, translating, was the most beautiful in the world. And the best ice cream, of course.

I listened. I thought about Grisha Curtis. I had come to Moscow to hunt him down. I knew Tolya would already be on his trail, and I had to get there first.

I didn’t want Tolya killing Grisha. I didn’t want Tolya in harm’s way. He hadn’t left me any messages, I didn’t know where he was, I figured he was here, someplace, in this vast sprawl of a city where I grew up and where once I knew my way around every back alley. I looked through the glass, the flat countryside, the suburbs, the endless billboards passed. We got closer to Moscow. The bus slowed. The traffic slowed up, roads clogged, then gridlock.

I was glad to be out of London. Mrs Curtis was dead, maybe because she had talked to me. Would her own son kill her for that? The rich cousin who lived on Eaton Square? I had left a trail of death spreading behind me like an infection.

“Tell him about St Saviour,” said another girl on the bus, and Kim told me about the beautiful cathedral, most beautiful in the world, she said, that had been a swimming pool, and which had been restored so beautifully, so much gold, she said.

I said, to make them talk more, fill me in on this new Moscow-it was seventeen years since I’d been back-and that I admired Russian culture very much. They asked me what I did exactly. I said I was doing research for my new book and also on vacation, and hoped my answer would be good enough, but they were observant kids.

“But you are doing what? In your real life?” asked Kim.

My real life?

Again, I said I was a travel writer, and I wrote books and an online blog about foreign places. They told me the best writers were in Russia, and then one of them offered me a candy bar, explaining Red October produced delicious chocolates, Russian chocolates.

She held out an Alionka bar. On the wrapper was the familiar picture of a rosy-cheeked little girl in a baby babushka, the tiny headscarf tied under her chin.

I unwrapped it slowly. The smell rose up. The same smell of the same chocolate my father had brought home for me every week in his leather briefcase, and now the girls on the bus said: taste it.

Breaking off a piece, I ate it, pretended it was a delightful new treat, something I’d never tasted, and the girls all said, eat some more, eat it all, we have enough, come on, as if it were a competition, a way to rate me, and I bit into the chocolate again, nodding and smiling for their benefit. When I looked out of the window, I saw my father.

I pushed my face against the window. Traffic bumper to bumper. Crowds on the street. Neon. Billboards. Shops. A city I hardly knew, and then I saw him just near Lubyanka Square, the KGB headquarters where he had his office when I was a kid.

The huge yellow stone building, where the statue of the founder of the Russian secret police was “hanged” when communism collapsed, hanged, hauled away. I always loved meeting my dad there because the KGB was next to Detsky Mir, Kids’ World, the greatest toy shop on earth, it had seemed then. I remembered. Lubyanka, with its terrifying jail, was sometimes joked about and in private called “Adults’ World”.

I saw my dad, walking along, perhaps heading to his office, swinging his good American leather briefcase in which he brought home my chocolates.

Alionka had been my favorite of all the sweets he brought home-cranberries in sugar, a chocolate rabbit for New Year’s, Stolichnaya with the same label as the vodka and vodka inside the candies.

Outside the window, the evening sun lit him up, as he dodged traffic, and jogged gracefully across the street, carrying the briefcase he had brought home from America, which he polished every night at the kitchen table.

You think it smells of America, my mother always said a little dismissively, but he was proud of it because other officers carried satchels made out of East German leather, or even cardboard. On my father’s fine leather case was a label that read Mark Cross.

In the 1950s and 1960s, when my father was a young hero of the KGB, times were good, he always said. Khrushchev times, when you could honorably defend your country, and people felt good about doing it, or some of them did. Things were changing. Sputnik went up in l957 and we were full of ourselves, we Soviets, and then Yuri Gagarin. They had believed, some of them, we would see the great days of real socialism, that we would rule the world in a just way.

When I was a baby, my father went to America, he was in New York during the Cuban Missile Crisis. My mother told me that during the crisis she had gone to bed some nights expecting not to wake up in the morning. My father was away from home. She was alone with me in the apartment in Moscow, and she kept me in her bed.

How I had adored him, my father who brought home chocolate candies wrapped in gold foil paper from a special store, and who took me fishing. He talked to me in English. We had a nice place to live, or that’s how it seemed to me back then, until things started going sour for us, my mother talking too loud, saying too much, telling people how pissed off she was at the failures of the USSR, especially after Brezhnev.

My father lost his job. We lost our apartment. We left Moscow for Israel.

My mother was still there, in a nursing home in Haifa. Alzheimer’s meant she didn’t know my name. But she still smoked secretly.

In our apartment in Moscow, I had once come into the living room to find the desk she used on fire. I poured water over it, and when she came home, my mother said, “What happened?” She admitted to me when she had a cigarette, she blew the smoke into the drawer. This last time, she had dropped the butt into the drawer, too. Some paper caught fire. After that we laughed and laughed about it. My mother’s “smoking drawer”, we called it.

Why did I think about it now? I thought about them both, her, my father. In Israel, he had been blown up on a bus by a bomb, a mistake, intended for another location.

Is it good? Do you like it? The girls twittered like high-pitched birds gathered at feeding time.

It’s good, I said. Very nice chocolate for sure, I said. Thank you. Yes, wonderful chocolate.

It is better than American? asked Kim who confided to me that her real name was Svetlana but everybody called her Kim after her grandmother whose name stood for Kommuni-stichesky International Molodezhny. It meant Communist Youth International, she explained and added that her great-grandmother had been called Vladlena, for Vladimir Ilych Lenin.

“First for the while we love Mars Bars, Snickers, my older sister who is now already thirty, she tells me everything is good if it comes from West. She loves this West. She wants everything West. But now we prefer our own candies,” said Kim. “It is much better. Higher percentage chocolate,” she explained, and mentioned that her grandmother had worked in the Red October factory, and had explained all of these things. Her grandmother, she added, had actually seen Comrade Stalin. The other girls sighed slightly.

Shut up! I wanted to shout at these hectic children: shut up. But I smiled and said, okay, you win, better than American candy bars. I like this chocolate very much, I said, speaking in the slow loud deliberate way Americans do when they’re in foreign countries, as if everybody around them is stupid or deaf. This seemed to make them happy and the girls smiled at each other knowingly. I was an okay kind of American.

Being in Moscow, looking out that window, seeing my father in the street, knowing it was a hallucination, it made me feel a little nuts. He was dead.

Maybe I had seen his ghost. In Moscow, you could believe in ghosts if you let go of your own present and let the past flood you.

Tall, tan, athletic, braces on her teeth, Kim, who was now chattering with the other girls, could have been European, American, Australian, except that she was in love with her president. And her expression, when she mentioned him, was a little bit crazy. Shining with devotion. She reminded me of a little girl I had been in the Komsomol with. I had been a young Pioneer, like everyone else, white shirt, red neckerchief.

My father had imposed it on me, and anyhow it was what everybody I knew did. In our group was one girl, very pale, blue eyes, hair the color and texture of corn-silk, braided and wound around her head, and when we sang patriotic songs, she was the one who always announced the concert by sounding out “Vladimir Ilych Lenin” in a piercing, shrill, high, zealous voice. She believed. She was a believer because she came from a working-class family, the father a drunk, the mother a factory cleaner, who had only their belief, and the bundles of dripping meat allocated to the mother at work.

A world long gone, replaced by one with easy access to food and chocolate, but admired by these girls, sentimentalized by them, and sometimes even their parents. In my time, at least when we went home, we took off our public faces. We made fun of the crappy culture and preferred the Beatles.

We hung out like young hoods in Pushkin Square, near the statue of the great Russian poet-hero, exchanging titbits of information about John, Paul, George and Ringo and wondering, as we examined forbidden pictures, which one was which. Tolya always said to me it was the Beatles who brought down communism.

“It caused us to defect internally from the system, Artyom,” he always said. “It made us flee from everything around us inside our souls.”

Where are you? I thought. Tolya, where are you for God’s sake?

“Say cheese!” Suddenly, Kim, picked up her phone and snapped my picture. The other girls followed. There was something about Kim of the little spy, taking pictures, hoarding them, as she chattered about the fatherland, the need to resettle internal immigrants back where they came from, especially if they came from the Caucasus.

One of the little girls-she was about nine-let off a stream of invective about the foreigners, as she called them, the Caucasians and the others who came to Moscow to work at the markets and clean the streets, and how dirty they were and how frightened her mother was of them.

Don’t talk to these dirty animals, her mother had told her. Don’t let them touch you.

I waited for the translation, but Kim told the girl she must not use nasty language, especially in front of foreigners, even if they didn’t understand, it wasn’t nice, and suddenly I got the feeling Kim knew I spoke Russian, that I understood. But she only smiled and we all smiled some more and I finished the chocolate bar to the amusement of all the little girls.

At the bus terminal, the girls said goodbye to me, and the tiny one with the big stuffed bear kissed my cheek. Kim handed me a second chocolate bar from her bag, and asked me to write down my name and my phone number and the hotel where I was staying. She planned on asking her mom if she could invite me to their house for tea. I said thanks and gave her a phony name-I became Max Fielding-and jotted down the National Hotel because it was all I could think of, and we all smiled some more, and then the girl who hated Caucasians turned around and snapped my photograph with her silver digital camera.

Snap snap. Suddenly all the girls got out their phones and little digital cameras and took more pictures of each other, and of me, each one posing with me, then posing in groups. Snap snap.

Come on, please, said Kim, one more, one more picture, so I can keep you. Okay, now with my mom, and she beckoned her mother, a good-looking woman with pale platinum hair who posed with me, and shook my hand and said I was welcome.

They tumbled into each other’s arms to say goodbye and waved at parents who were waiting and then they began to slip away; and I was alone, except for Kim who called out, “One more, please?” and held up her phone and with serious determination took a final picture as if to capture me for once and for all. I was now the official prisoner of little Russian girls in pink t-shirts. I ♥ Putin.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Moscow was hot and dusty. The National Hotel was full. I couldn’t remember any other hotels, only the National and the old Intourist, which had been replaced by a Ritz Carlton where they wanted twelve hundred bucks a night.

I didn’t have that kind of dough. I didn’t really want to stay in a hotel anyhow. It would make me too visible. I glanced around the lobby at the Ritz Carlton, and left.

I needed a place to stay.

As soon as I hit the streets, a fog of paranoia descended and clung to me like the humidity. I went towards Red Square. Everything in this place led to Red Square. I went on instinct, God knows why. I had to think of a place to stay, so I walked, trying to lose myself among the tourists.

There was a replica of Resurrection Gate that had gone up since I’d been here. I had heard about it as a kid. The sixteenth-century gate which had formed an entrance to Red Square was torn down by Stalin in l931 to make it easier for tanks to get through to the square. And just in front of the gate-it looked like cardboard-was a guy with some monkeys.

“Picture, picture, you want a picture?” shouted the monkey man.

He had two monkeys working the crowd for him, in fact. One of the monkeys looked like a little old man in a child’s outfit, little blue shorts, a jacket, a cap. The other was smaller, and had a skirt on.

“Fuck off,” I said.

Before I knew it, the man had tossed the monkeys at me, one into my arms, the big one on my back. He snapped my picture.

“Get them off of me,” I said, beginning to panic. “Get them fucking off me.”

The wall of noise from traffic was incredible, a million cars in gridlock. Hummers, Range Rovers, Mercs, Moscow money liked its cars big and loud. On the street a guy sidled up to me to offer me police kit for twenty grand, complete with flashing blue light, siren, special plates, which would get me out of traffic and into the VIP lane.

Was this Tolya’s alternative universe, this place where we had both grown up? Was this Tolya’s other planet, the place where he had disappeared? I barely recognized Moscow, the traffic, the stores, the signs, the neon, the crowds. I’d only been back once in the early 1990s. I looked around for a taxi.

Parched, I went into a grocery store to buy a bottle of water. It felt like a stage set, stocked like a fancy New York deli with salad, bread, meats, cheeses, imported canned goods, flowers, fresh fruit, cookies, wine, cake.

I walked some more. It was getting late now, sun going down, the Moscow night coming on. The whole city seemed about to explode, as if somebody had tossed a lighted match onto a sea of oil.

In the street, I held out my hand for a cab. A shabby beige Lada pulled up. The driver in jeans and a red t-shirt asked where I was going. I gave him the address of Tolya’s club. As he drove, he bent over the wheel in a weird contorted way. After a few minutes, I realized he was a hunchback.

The driver asked if I was a foreigner. He said did I need anything?

What was he offering? Girls? Drugs? I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything about this place.

When the driver finally pulled up at the curb and turned around, I saw he had a soft young face, and I gave him extra cash.

For a few seconds, standing on the street, I fantasized that I’d find Tolya at Pravda222, find him behind the bar, cradling some thousand-dollar bottle of wine the way I had that morning in New York. But I knew he would be lying low, looking for Grisha Curtis. I had already called his apartment, his ex-wife’s dacha. I didn’t want to try anybody else. I was afraid my calling would get him into bad trouble.

If Tolya was hiding, I’d try for anonymity here. Nobody else at the club would know me. As I went in, and dropped my bag at the coat-check, I became Max Fielding, a travel writer, always making notes in my little notebook.

Pravda222 was pretty much exactly like Tolya’s other clubs.

“Branding, Artyom,” I could hear Tolya say. “This is how it works. Rich people like security, they like a name they know, you must have a brand.”

How excited he had been when he opened his club in Moscow, his third club, and now he was on his way to a global brand. But Moscow, this is special, Artyom, he had said. This is like coming home.

Mahogany paneling, old chandeliers, long bar, de-silvered mirrors that Tolya told me he picked up at the flea market in Paris, and which caught the light. On the walls were the Soviet posters he had collected: Mayakovsky, the Stenberg Brothers, Rodchenko, a painting by Malevich that must have cost millions. Waiters in white bistro aprons checked the tables, the linen, glass.

People were filtering in quietly, the early part of the evening, most coming for dinner.

A handsome guy in a beautiful black suit, the cut so perfect I knew it was custom-made, approached me and asked if he could help.

I needed help. I told him I knew Sverdloff through a friend. It worked like a charm. The guy offered me a table, I said I’d sit at the bar. He offered me a drink, I said Scotch, please.

Konstantin was the suit’s name, and I told him I was Max Fielding and gave him the information I’d given the kids on the bus. I didn’t know if he believed me or not, but he welcomed me to Moscow and said did I need anything, and excused himself to greet somebody who had arrived and had perched on a barstool four down from where I sat.

While I drank I read an English-language paper I’d picked up at the airport. Fifty-four per cent of Russians, according to a poll, consider money the most important thing as compared to eleven per cent of Americans, the piece said. Things were going to fall into an abyss, another columnist had written. Give it two months, give it until October, he said, and the price of oil would plunge, and everybody would be left high and dry, stranded, screwed. Putin announced, meanwhile, that everything would be wonderful for a hundred years.

A couple of men who had planted themselves at the bar began telling jokes. They were well dressed, nice clothes, good accents. I made out that they were a pair of Moscow architects.

After a couple of drinks, they started talking about people from the former Sov republics. Then one cracked a joke about Obama. They laughed. What a joke, one said to the other in Russian.

“I say to myself, hope?” he said. “I say, change? I see a black guy, and I say, okay, how much?”

I was slipping between planets. I didn’t bother telling them Obama was probably the only candidate who could help us out, and we needed help. I didn’t bother. They wouldn’t get it.

I sat and drank for a while until the suit-Konstantin-came over, and asked if I needed anything else, and I mentioned I was looking for a place to stay. An apartment, maybe, instead of a hotel, I said. I wanted to get the real feel of being in Moscow.

I was pretty surprised-maybe it was too good to be true and I should have known it-Konstantin said he might have a solution. He asked if I wanted to eat, a waiter brought me some smoked fish and another drink, and about half an hour later, the American appeared.

Konstantin made the introductions and the guy got up on the stool next to me, asked for a beer, shook my hand. He had a Midwestern accent, and asked where I was from.

“New York,” I said.

“I love New York. I’m from Minnesota,” he said, and grinned. “Small town you’ve never heard of. You just got here? Max, right?”

I nodded.

“Willie Moffat,” he said. “Konstantin over there told me you were looking for a place to stay?”

In the background, Sinatra sang “Moonlight In Vermont”.

“I have to go back to the States, I fixed my flight,” said Moffat. “I was trying to set up to rent my apartment. My Russian sucks. So I asked Konstantin who knows everyone in Moscow, if he could help. I want to do it off the books, so I get it back, it’s for a few weeks.”

I ordered another drink and listened to Moffat, wondering who he really was, this tall balding American with square shoulders who had appeared suddenly with an apartment for rent. I looked in the mirror at the people behind me. Half expected to see Grisha Curtis shadowing me the way he had in London.

“How long for? The apartment?”

“Like I said, few weeks, a month tops. Listen, I’m sorry to make it kind of urgent, but I have to leave tonight, and it would be great if you wanted it,” said Moffat, fumbling for a pack of cigarettes. “Great thing about Moscow is you can still smoke,” he said. “The thing is, my mom is sick, and I don’t want to leave the apartment empty, you know? I just got it, and if you leave it empty, even after you pay off the realtors and do the bribes and shit, you can lose it. I don’t exactly have all the paperwork signed and sealed yet. But you’d be fine for a few weeks, honest.” His words spilled out in a rush, he was a guy in a hurry, but best I could tell he really was in a hurry to see his sick mother.

“Go on.”

Moffat looked reassured.

“I just started a new job here,” he said. “I’m on a private water project, and everybody is desperate about housing, it’s insane, you want to rent a decent place in a good area, it’s like the competition is completely nuts. I found this place. I mean, this girl found it for me, and it’s in a building that’s not really finished, look I could show you.” He was repeating himself. He was eager. Too eager?

“Yeah, I’ll take a look, why not,” I said casually as I could. If it worked out, I’d have a place to stay and nobody would know, I wouldn’t have to deal with a hotel, and the paperwork. As best I could, I was trying not to leave a trail, trying to keep to myself.

“My car’s outside,” he said. “If you want, I can leave you my car with the apartment,” added Moffat, who found Konstantin in the middle of the laughing drinking crowd, pressed some money into his hand, thanked him.

“I’ll tell Mr Sverdloff I saw you if he comes by. Mr Fielding, isn’t that right?” said Konstantin.

“Is he in Moscow? You didn’t say.”

“I heard so,” he said, his face bland and unrevealing. “But he has not been into the club yet.”

“Doesn’t he always come here?”

“I don’t ask these questions.”

“Sure, tell him Max said hi. And thanks,” I said, slipped a few large bills into his perfect suit jacket, and went to get my bag and look at Moffat’s apartment.

In Moffat’s new blue BMW, he asked me what I did. I told him I was planning to write a travel guide to the new Moscow.

“Who’s the girl?” I said, making conversation as he drove us to the building.

“You knew? You had to figure I didn’t care so much about the apartment just for myself, right?” He grinned and said his girl was really something, but he knew she wanted that apartment, and he had taken it on a six-month basis with an option to buy.

He was an engineer, he said, and told me about his life in Red Wing, Minnesota in so much detail, by the time we got to the apartment, I knew that his father was a doctor, an internist, and his brother liked golf, and more or less everything else about the Moffat family.

I made some conversation about the baseball season to prove I was a good American.

Moffat was a diehard Twins fan, but he commiserated with me over the Yankees and over Torre leaving and I admitted only a dumb fan like me could stay loyal to such a fuck-up of a team.

We talked politics a little. It was all Americans talked about, that and the baseball season. He liked Obama, he said. Had shaken his hand at a rally. I fell in with the conversation.

“You sound homesick already,” Moffat said.

“Yeah. For sure.”

“I don’t know your last name,” he added amiably.

“Fielding,” I said.

At Moffat’s building, a caretaker was half asleep on a chair in the lobby. He looked at me suspiciously. Moffat stuffed some money in his hand.

“I call him Igor, he reminds me of Young Frankenstein,” said Moffat, chuckling. Igor also worked with the construction crews, said Moffat in English. Igor didn’t speak English. He didn’t speak much at all.

I followed Moffat up six flights of stairs-the new elevator wasn’t installed yet, and I was panting by the time we got there. He showed me around the two-room apartment with high ceilings and tall windows, peeling mint green paint in the bathrooms and olive green tiles, a big sofa and flatscreen TV in the living room, a brand-new king-size bed in the bedroom. In the kitchen a Soviet-era Elektra stove that was six feet tall, and emitted a strange smell I couldn’t pin down. Gas? Sewage?

Moffat apologized for the stove and said the new appliances would arrive any day. In the meantime, he had put in a microwave and a fancy silver espresso machine.

I didn’t plan on cooking.

I said I’d take it.

He gave me the keys. He gave me his phone numbers. I had picked up a local pay-as-you-go cellphone as soon as I got off the plane, and I gave Moffat the number. I used Fiona Colquhoun for a reference. Said she was my British book publisher. My own phone, I had turned off and put in my pocket. I didn’t want anybody using it to track me down.

Fiona already knew where I was; she’d made it happen, I had to trust her, she was all I had. There was nobody, nobody, I could trust anymore, except for Tolya Sverdloff and he had disappeared, slipped away, evaporated. I began to wonder if he had died. I remembered the gray pallor, the way he clutched his arm. Where was he?

Two weeks, Moffat said, until he was back. Three tops. I tried to give him some money for rent. He said he was fine with me just staying, water the plants, make sure the place is occupied, put on the lights when you go out. He didn’t want any break-ins, not by real-estate creeps or any other creeps. What kind of creeps?

Before I could ask, Moffat was gone, dragging a suitcase back down the stairs, and I sent Fiona Colquhoun a message to tell her a guy called Moffat might call for a reference on somebody name of Max Fielding, and that this Max-me-was writing a travel guide. If Moffat didn’t check my reference, I’d know it was a set-up.

If I hadn’t lived in America for almost thirty years, I would not have quite believed in Willie Moffat from Red Wing. But I’d met plenty like him, this good, nice American. And I’d spun him enough of a story about myself to keep him happy.

A picture of the Russian girlfriend-Moffat’s girlfriend- was on the table near his bed. In a bikini on a beach someplace, she had a fantastic body, the legs, a feral face with cheekbones sharp as glass.

Oh, Willie, man, I thought, this is a big mistake. But he was gone, and he was in love, so what could I do?

I was stashing my stuff in a couple of drawers in the bedroom when Igor knocked on the door to see if anything was leaking. He had heard water. He asked if I spoke Russian. I shook my head and put out my hands, palms up, and shrugged to indicate I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. I knew he just wanted a good look at me.

Later that night, early into the morning, unable to sleep, I went up on the roof of Moffat’s building to read through Grisha Curtis’ notes again, looking for clues about where he would go in Moscow. Find Grisha, I’d find Tolya, and the other way around. In my mind they were cuffed together.

I sat on a low plastic beach chair somebody had left out on the roof and I could see all of Moscow spread out: the blaze of neon, the river of red made by the tail lights on the endless stream of cars, the smear of gold and purple as the sun came up on another boiling humid Moscow day, when the smog hung in thick curtains of pearly gray until the sun burned some of it away.

Below me was the area of Patriarchy Prudi, Metro Mayakovskaya, late nineteenth, early twentieth century building, referred to in real-estate ads as “pre-revolutionary” the way somebody might list a Park Avenue apartment as “pre-war”. Some featured “Western renovation”. Some mentioned “Stalinera” buildings.

From my roof, I looked down over M. Kozikhinsky Lane. I had walked enough earlier to see the shops, the girls in their Manolos and Louboutin shoes, I had seen Nikitskaya Street.

For hours I gazed down from the roof at the area, where Bulgakov made his Master and Margarita do their business, and where as teenagers who read this forbidden book, the real thing, not the censored version-we were the children of privilege and there was always somebody who could get a copy- we had all come and loitered and smoked and discussed the novel in pretentious terms, unless we were at somebody’s flat examining the lyrics of “Sympathy For The Devil” which we knew had been inspired by the novel.

Once, in New York, I had dated a girl who thought The Master and Margarita was about cocktails. It didn’t last.

I replayed the conversation I’d had with Tolya at his cousin Larry’s place in England.

Tolya had been sick when I’d seen him in England. Had someone given him polonium to eat? Was it Grisha, who had already killed his daughter?

Tolya didn’t answer my calls. He must be dead. Tolya Sverdloff, who had saved my ass over and over, and I couldn’t do anything for him. I couldn’t even find him. If he was alive, he would have answered my calls.

Grisha was gone. They had disappeared, both of them, Tolya slipping like a man on a stellar banana peel. During his interplanetary trip had he missed the connection, the spaceship home? I was tired. In Moscow I knew if I let on what I was doing, I’d disappear, too.

So I was here, pretending to be an American, not my American self, not a New York cop, just a tourist who could speak a little bit of basic Russian and who understood less.

I would be an irritating travel writer I decided, the kind who thinks an interrogation is a conversation, who always wants the facts and figures and dates, the kind who keeps a little notebook in which he arduously inscribes all this, who discusses the hospitality industry with a kind of smug know-it-all attitude.

I went down the stairs from the roof onto the sixth floor and into the apartment. The air conditioner was broken. I took a tepid shower, changed, stuffed money into my pocket. I picked up the phone, tried dialing a local number, heard what I was listening for: somebody was on the line. Somebody was sharing my phone.

Or was I paranoid? Had the Russian disease, along with the booze and heat, made me crazy? It was time for me to get moving.

I headed out into the city. I wanted a gun.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

The bear at the entrance to Ismailova Park was chained up. People stood around waiting for the hourly performance, when, according to the sign, the bear would perform. WE WORK WITHOUT MUZZLES, said the sign.

This was a different city from the Moscow of fancy shops, it was a place where, on the outskirts of town, people went for cheap clothes, and, on weekends, to sell souvenirs to foreigners.

At dawn I had left the apartment. On the Moscow streets everywhere I looked, I saw Grisha Curtis, saw him walking in the opposite direction, turning a corner, waiting for me, leaning against a wall.

Even in the morning, the air was so thick and sticky, it coated my skin like grease. I studied the map in my hand. I was looking for a train station. I was a tourist in the city where I grew up. I was a ghost, the son of a ghost.

The area around Kazansky Station was jammed, people leaving, coming in, hanging out, sleeping on the ground. On a boom box, somebody was playing Metallica. Hordes of people with Asian faces milled around. The women were wrapped in shawls, and they came and want, dragging big bags of stuff to sell. A couple of girls, couldn’t have been more than fifteen, loitered on one corner, looking for men in cars.

I waited for the light to turn green before I crossed the street. People glanced at me, half amused. In Moscow, like New York, nobody waited for the lights. A girl with long skinny legs in high-heeled boots darted across the street like a large insect.

This station, crammed with people sleeping on the floor, with beggars, with children in filthy clothes screaming and running, with people selling fruit, caviar, vodka, wooden dolls, underpants, home-made brooms, sticky candy, was a good bet. I figured it for the kind of place a low-level hood might have something for sale. A.22, a little piece of shit, the kind of thing that would make me feel secure, nothing more. I didn’t want a high-end weapon.

In Moscow looking for a gun, I was a hick. It took me the best part of an hour to find out you could get one at Ismailova Park, the flea market at the edge of Moscow.

The stalls were jammed with matrioshka, the wooden Russian dolls, some of them the traditional girls with cheeks painted red, others political figures, sports figures. A row of the dolls depicted beaky-nosed men with ringlets, and I said, in Russian “What are those? Who are they supposed to be?”

“The Jews,” said the woman behind the stall.

Fur hats, hand-knitted scarves, more dolls, painted plates, table lines, the usual Russian stuff. I asked careful questions. I climbed some wooden steps, three women in peasant outfits were singing some old Russian songs, and I put change in the basket for them, and went on.

Up here were the antiques, the porcelain figures, the Soviet army gear, the bad oil paintings, the rugs, and a man selling posters.

I stopped for a minute. Piles of old posters were on his stall, posters depicting Soviet space, Soviet agriculture, politics, heroic figures. I moved on, I looked into the faces of guys sitting by their stalls playing chess. I searched for somebody who might sell me a gun.

Then I saw the postcards, and the period photographs; jumbled on one stall were pictures of men and women in high-collared blouses and turn-of-the-century suits-sepia photographs from the beginning of the twentieth century. Something drew me to one picture. I picked it up. It looked familiar, this family photograph, and I saw the resemblance. It was a picture of my father’s grandfather, who had fought in the revolution. Next to him was a young man with a baby, a little boy, my father. I would never get away from this place, this country. I bought the picture.

I went back down. I went to the edge of the market where there were people selling canned food and old shoes. A guy in rap pants saw me, and sidled up to me, and offered me meds, a handful of pills he probably swiped from a hospital. I told him in Russian to fuck off. Another had some weed, and I blew him off, and turned my back. But they had made me for a guy who wanted something and if it wasn’t drugs, it was probably weapons.

The gun I got was a.22, like a toy pistol. It wasn’t new. It looked like something for shooting rabbits. The guy sold me a box of ammo to go with it.

It was a piece of crap, and after I paid him cash, and put it in my pocket, I felt like a fool. What good was it except to give me some kind of solace, I thought as I left the market.

I got the subway. I looked at my notebook for the address I wanted. Changed trains. Got lost. I was looking for the shelter where Valentina had worked, the shelter she supported.

When I emerged from the subway someplace near the center of town, I realized I’d made a mistake again. I stopped to ask directions. A plump woman in a hot pink dress smiled and told me how to go. And then I saw him.

If I hadn’t screwed up, if I hadn’t lost my way, maybe I would never have seen him on that corner. But, of course, he would have found me, one way or the other, this guy in a Brooks Brothers jacket, blue and white seersucker, who stood on the opposite side of the street, staring at me. He removed his Ray-Bans and peered hard. He looked like an American tourist- the jacket, the khakis, the dark blue polo shirt, the Timberlands.

Head cocked, stare quizzical-it was like a performance, a man asking himself: do I recognize that guy in jeans?

Once more he looked, raised a hand as if in greeting, got his cellphone out.

Who was he? Was he somebody from home I didn’t remember? How else would he know me? The intensity of his interest bothered me. He didn’t call out. He didn’t approach me, and I backed off into the subway station.

I wasn’t officially on the job in Moscow. I wasn’t a cop here. As a Russian kid, I had never thought about being a policeman. All I ever wanted was to listen to jazz and find an easy life. If we’d stayed, I would have ended up teaching English. I would have been just another cog in the system, an unhappy guy who drank too much and secretly listened to music at home late at night.

Tolya Sverdloff thought I had a moral code, that I became a cop to help people. He didn’t understand. I’d become a cop because it seemed the best way to fit into New York, to belong.

It was for the sense of belonging that I loved being on the job, because of the other guys, the noises in the station house, the late-night drinking sessions, the weddings and funerals, people like my friend, Hank Provone over on Staten Island who had made me part of his family. No matter how brutal things got, no matter what shit I saw or stepped into-and this included the criminals and the cops-I wanted in.

The subway train shunted into the station I was looking for, I got out and found my way to Valentina’s shelter, her orphanage. When I saw it, saw the little cross that had been hung on the wall in the vestibule, something in my gut told me this was where it had all started.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

“She was like a saint,” said the tiny woman at the shelter when I asked about Valentina. “She gave us money, clothes, food, diapers for the babies. She found jobs for the young women we rescued from train stations, and the girls whose parents pimped them out for small change, girls of twelve and thirteen, would you like some coffee, please?” added the woman who introduced herself as Elisabetta Anton.

Her small smooth face was surrounded by fine white hair. Her age was hard to tell. Her English was exquisite. On her office desk was an iPod with small speakers. From it came the Beatles. “Norwegian Wood” was on, turned very low.

“A present from Valentina,” she said. “She knew when I was a girl, long ago, the Beatles meant everything to me and they were banned for so long. I’m sorry, I was thinking about her. I like to think about her. The news was so devastating it was hard to believe, but I was not surprised.”

Orphanage Number Six, as it had been in Soviet times, was a free-standing building with a ramshackle playground next to it. The concrete walls outside were stained with water. It still served children, Elisabetta told me, but some rooms had been converted to house older girls who needed shelter. In them, she showed me the desks, a pair of beds with blue spreads, posters of pop stars.

The building had been scrubbed endlessly, there were colorful pictures on the walls done by the kids, but there was a dank sour smell was there, as if it literally came out of the walls.

In Elisabetta’s office was a framed photograph of a little girl. It was Luda, the child Val had tried once to adopt.

Elisabetta offered coffee again and I refused, and sat down opposite her at her pine desk. She put a pack of Russian cigarettes on the desk followed by a small box of chocolates.

“Please,” she said.

“Not surprised, you said?”

“When I heard, I thought to myself, he did this to her. They did this.”

“Who?”

“One moment,” said Elisabetta. She closed the door and lowered her voice. “I know what happened,” she said. “I know. I said to her, my darling girl, please be careful, please go slowly. But Valentina was an innocent, you see. She didn’t understand about greed. Or money. She simply didn’t get it,” Elisabetta added. “We had begun taking in girls of ten, eleven, twelve, who were working in the train stations as prostitutes, there is a lot of money in Moscow now, and while the girls used to go to Western Europe and America, there is more money here. It had become big business and there are big, how would you say it? Big players. In business. In the government. I said to her, Valentina, you must not talk about certain people. But she didn’t hear me. She was, after all, an American girl. Is somebody there?” she called out, and half rose from her seat. Nobody answered.

“Who were you expecting?”

She turned up the volume. “Eleanor Rigby” played.

“I don’t know,” Elisabetta said. “Since Valentina’s death, there have been people dropping by for no reason in particular, you see. She took everyone on. She criticized everyone and everything she didn’t like, she picked up the phone and called government officials. Worst, she spoke to journalists. This can get you killed. She made friends with a woman who wrote about the abuse of children and girls, and the money and the connections with the government. Let me show you some of the girls, her girls,” said Elisabetta, taking a binder and opening it, turning the pages, showing me the pictures.

I stopped her. From my pocket, I took the picture of Masha Panchuk.

“Yes,” said Elisabetta, “she was one of ours. Her name was Maria. She was a Ukrainian girl who ran away from home and was found by her uncle who put her to work. Valentina got her out of the country and to London. I don’t think she was sixteen years old.” Turning pages in the binder, Elisabetta found the girl’s picture, a sad beautiful girl, photographed by Val.

“What did they call Maria?”

“We called her Masha.”

It had started here. In this shelter, on a crummy backstreet in Moscow.

“Masha’s last name, it was Panchuk?”

“Not then. Only after she married a fellow named Zim Panchuk. You knew her?”

I told Elisabetta about Masha’s death.

“My God,” she said.

“I think she was killed in Val’s place, she had a purse Val had given her with her name in it, and when they realized it was the wrong girl, they went after Valentina.”

Elisabetta put her small chin on one hand and smoked with the other.

“Who did it?”

“You knew her father?”

“Of course. Anatoly Anatolyevich, he gave us money. He came here a few times, he was so jolly with the little children, and he sang for them, and brought them presents, usually food so exotic they had never seen it. They thought he was Father Christmas,” she said. “He did whatever Valentina asked. In the last few months, I believe, she spent most of her time working on our behalf. I felt she had become obsessed.”

“You said she made friends with a journalist?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Please, tell me.”

“It’s dangerous,” she said. “They kill journalists.”

“They killed Valentina,” I said. “I need help.”

“I’ll see,” she said. “But now there are babies who need feeding. I must go.”

“I’m a policeman. In the United States. Valentina’s father is my best friend, she was my friend.” I leaned over the desk.

From a drawer, Elisabetta took a photograph and sat gazing at it. “She was such a special girl,” she said. “She was pure.”

“Valentina?”

“Yes, her soul was pure,” she said, and handed it to me. In the picture were Val and Grisha, his arm around her.

“You knew him?”

She nodded.

“What did you think?”

“I met him quite a while ago, not long after Val started helping us. She wanted everybody to love him, the way it always is when you first fall in love. Recently she had stopped talking about him. I didn’t pry. Once, she said just that he didn’t believe in the things she believed in anymore.”

“I see,” I said. I had heard it before. Valentina had fallen hard for Grisha at first. Later, she backed away, then broke it off. For this, I thought, most of all for this, he killed her.

Elisabetta got up to leave.

“Have you seen him?” I said.

She turned from the door.

“Yes.”

“When?”

“He came in a few days ago,” said Elisabetta. “He asked about Mr Sverdloff. My assistant talked to him, he wanted Valentina’s files, she said there were none, that she had taken them to America with her.”

“How was he?”

“Angry,” she said.

“Enough to kill?”

“My assistant was frightened, it’s all I know.”

Elisabetta went to the back of the building where I could hear the babble of babies, and returned with a short fat woman. “This is Marina,” she said, introducing the woman. “She is a journalist, but she helps us here at the shelter. I have to go.”

“Marina Fetushova,” said the woman, and lit up a stinky Russian cigarette.

I introduced myself to Fetushova. She didn’t move, just kept smoking.

“You help out here?” I said in Russian.

“None of your business.”

“I need information.”

“We can’t talk here,” she said, and without another word, she walked through the front door, blowing smoke into the open air. I followed her.

We were at the edge of a playground where a gang of eight-year-olds were climbing a jungle gym and skipping rope. Fetushova watched them.

Head set between beefy shoulders, she wore a sloppy green sweater and a gray skirt. In spite of the booming voice, and the fact that she swore like crazy, she had a cultivated accent.

“You’re a cop?” she said.

“Yes. From New York.”

“What is it you need?”

Her tone was brusque, almost hostile.

“I want to find somebody.”

“Who’s that?”

“Grigory Curtis.”

Fetushova swore, calling Curtis a prick and much worse, and then turned away.

I grabbed her arm.

“Don’t do that,” she said, shaking loose. “Don’t fucking touch me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I can’t talk to you here,” she said.

“What’s wrong with here?”

“Don’t be an ass.”

The sun beat down on the playground. The kids kept playing.

“So somebody knew about Val’s involvement here?”

“Yes.” She nodded.

“People watch this place?”

“My God, you’re naive. What do you think?”

Leaning forward, as close to her as I could without her slugging me, I said, without thinking about it, “I’m desperate.”

Her expression changed slightly, a mixture of sarcasm and sympathy.

“You don’t sound like a fucking pig cop,” she said.

“I’m a friend.”

“You’re from where?”

“Here.”

“Moscow?”

“Yes.”

“Where did you grow up?”

“You’re interested?”

“I’m only talking to you while I finish my smoke,” she said.

“Give me one.”

She offered me the pack, and her lighter. I told her the street where I grew up, the street where we moved after my father lost his job, the school I went to.

“Yeah, me too, same time,” she said.

There was a flash of recognition. Now she understood, it seemed to say, she knew all about me. But I looked at her and saw an old Russian woman, not somebody my age. Maybe that was what her work had done to her.

“You remember the music teacher?” I said. “At our school?”

“Okay, forget the fucking small talk,” said Fetushova, drawing back, throwing her cigarette on the sidewalk, crushing it with her foot, walking closer to the playground.

“What happened here?”

“Fuck you,” she said. “I don’t talk about it,” she added, but she didn’t leave, just stood and watched as women came and went, bringing packages to the shelter. The kids played. The older girls watched them. In this shabby district, everybody was poor, shabbily dressed. But you could hear the traffic, the rumble, the scream of it.

In the middle of town, you saw a Moscow afloat on Russia’s supplies of oil and natural gas, heard the world bellowing for fuel, prices skyrocketing. In the center of the city, you could feel it, as if the resources, oil and gas, aluminum, nickel, diamonds, gold, and the revenues poured down a chute into the city from the Far East and the former republics. Money, money, money.

It was the biggest city in Europe now, ten, twelve, sixteen million, depending if you counted the floating immigrant population and dozens of billionaires. I could feel it flexing its muscles, bragging rights claimed like a prizefighter who had taken the title. But at the shelter, there were only the kids and the stained building and old women in headscarves who looked like Russian women had looked for centuries. They brought home-made dumplings, and black bread, whatever they could afford for the children.

The little girls in tiny blue shorts and striped t-shirts ran around, laughing. They clambered up the jungle gym. I thought of the children in the green square in London, hanging upside down. An older girl sat on one of the swings, swinging higher and higher. I watched her. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

I saw it all over again. I saw the girl in the Brooklyn playground, I saw Masha Panchuk. Fetushova had picked up her bag, lit up another smoke, was getting ready to go.

“Was somebody hurt here?” I said. “In this playground?”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

I told her about Masha Panchuk, the way she died, I told her all the details.

She dropped her cigarette, hand trembling.

“My God,” she said.

“What?”

“Wait.” She hurried into the shelter where I tried to follow. “I said wait.”

“About a year ago, Valentina took this picture,” said Fetushova, returning with a print in a plastic sleeve.

Stomach turning, I looked at the picture. A girl on a bench, the jungle gym visible behind her.

“Here?”

“Yes,” Fetushova said.

The girl was wrapped like a mummy in duct tape. A doll was on her lap.

“Jesus Christ.”

“This playground,” she said. “The girl was thirteen. She belonged to a bastard very high up, close to the Kremlin.”

“Belonged?”

“He owned her. You can as good as buy these girls,” said Fetushova. “Somehow she got away. Somebody found her on the street and got her here. The son of a bitch thought the girl might talk. He hired a thug to do this. Shut her up. Tape her up. She was found like this.”

“Dead?”

“Of course.”

“They murdered the kid?”

“Yes.”

“Why all the duct tape?”

“It’s an old gangster punishment. You make it look like the old mob, the officials can deny it. They distance themselves. The fuckers look clean as a whistle, they give the shelter money, they go on TV, official TV, we only have official TV now, of course, and say how dreadful this is.”

“Valentina?”

“She had started working with us when it happened. We asked her to take pictures. The girl in Brooklyn, she looked like this one, the duct tape?”

“Yes. I think they were after Valentina and got the wrong girl.”

“Fuck,” said Fetushova. “Somebody hired a creep who knew about this?”

“I think it was Grigory Curtis.”

“Piece of shit, piece of mother-fucking donkey turd,” she said. “You know him?”

“I want him,” I said. “He’s here. Elisabetta told me he had been here to the shelter.”

“He wouldn’t have the stomach to do this kind of job, if it was him, he hired somebody who fucked it up, right?”

“Yes.”

“And when it came to Val, all he could manage was a pillow over her face. Fucking bastard. I have to go.” She looked around.

A couple of guys lounged at the edge of the playground. They looked like low-level hoods, or street creeps from the FSB.

“Who are they?”

“Garbage men,” she said, laughing. “We call them garbage men, I just don’t know what kind of garbage.”

“Where can we talk?”

“I can’t talk.”

“I’ll be at your office. I’ll wait for you,” I said.

“Just don’t get me killed,” said Fetushova.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

I left the shelter. I had already checked every place that was mentioned in Grisha Curtis’ files; in the stuff I had stolen from the office on Moscow Road. I had checked, quietly as I could: an apartment where he’d lived; a bank he had worked at; a gym where he did weights.

I couldn’t exactly call up the FSB and ask for his contact. I couldn’t say, who ran him, if somebody did. Maybe a real spy would know how.

So I worked the obvious places. Nothing. He wasn’t good at keeping secret files, but he was good at hiding.

I felt him on my back all the time. At every corner, I looked over my shoulder, and put my hand on the little gun in my pocket.

Paranoia took over in Moscow. I walked as fast as I could, heading for the subway, always feeling somebody behind me, turning sharply, thinking I’d see Curtis, when there was nobody at all.

I stopped near an old Moscow housing project, twelve tall buildings, most in an even worse state than when I’d been here in the 1990s. I put my head into the hallway of one of the buildings; it stank of piss, like it always had, the elevator was still broken.

A few elderly women sat on rickety chairs on a patch of grass outside, and I scanned the faces, thinking I might recognize somebody, but they stared back, blank, and went on fanning themselves against the heat with newspapers. Living on meager pensions, they seemed completely unconnected with the new Moscow.

I asked the oldest of the women if she had known Birdie Golden. My mother’s best friend who had taught me English lived and died in the building with the broken elevator.

“Yes,” she said in Russian. “You are?”

I told her who I was. She beckoned me to lean down so she could kiss my cheek.

“Birdie loved you very much,” she said. “She talked about you all the time, you were like her own son,” said the woman, who invited me to take an empty chair and offered me a bottle of water from her bag.

I wanted to stay. I wanted to sit in the sun like the old women and talk. I realized Olga Dimitriovna had reminded me of Birdie a little.

“There is a man looking in this direction,” said Birdie’s friend, and I glanced over my shoulder and saw one of the garbage men from the playground.

“I should go,” I said.

“Please come back,” said the woman, and I said I’d try, even while sweat was running down my back and my hands were cold. I had to get Marina Fetushova to tell me what she knew. Whatever it took. Now, I thought.

I found her at the radio station where she worked.

“Fetushova, Marina,” she said, sticking out a hand as if she had never met me before, and I saw this was for show, for the other people at the small radio station where I found her.

The radio station was in a couple of rooms in a concrete building near the Arbat, a dingy place with stale air thick with the rank smell of old cigarettes, no air conditioning.

Fetushova half pushed me out of the room where four people pored over scripts and fiddled with equipment. From another room, door shut, came the sound of American Blues. Buddy Guy, Mick Jagger covering a raucous Muddy Waters number about champagne and reefers.

A guy stood on the landing, leaning against the wall. Security for Fetushova and the others, I guessed. I started for the office.

“Not in there. I don’t like to compromise anyone else,” she said, pushing me back out into the hallway.

“Let’s go outside,” I said. “A cafe.”

“I told you what I know. You’re a cop, you’re Sverdloff’s friend, you were Valentina’s friend. She mentioned you to me once,” she said, and sat on the bottom stair, elbows on knees.

“What did she say?”

“Said you were okay. I have to get back to work soon.”

I leaned against the railing near her. “I want to know why Valentina Sverdloff was killed.”

She gave a short tough laugh. “You know what I was before?” she said.

Russians always told you what they were before, before, before the Soviet Union crumbled, before everything changed. Physicists who now sold fur coats. Linguists who drove cabs. Guys who once ran market stalls were billionaires. You went up the scale or you went down, but everything had changed. It was as if they had all migrated to a different planet. Except for old people, like my Aunt Birdie’s friends. Old people stayed where they had always been; so did the poor in the countryside.

“What were you?”

She grunted a laugh.

“For a while, I was a scientist, I was educated as a scientist, and I was in forensics, and then I thought, fuck it, I’ll be a cop. It doesn’t matter, nothing changes, we’re master and slave, the elite and the mass, the hierarchy remains,” said Fetushova, “You know what it is, it’s fucking Orthodox Christianity whose aim is to enslave people, Maybe my grandchildren’s grandchildren will see some kind of civil society. I have three of them. You’re surprised?” She reached in her brown leather bag and took out a folder, opened it, showed me her children. Two girls and a boy, good-looking young people. In the boy’s arms was a baby.

“What are their names? Are they here in Moscow with you?”

No, thank God,” she said, and then seemed sorry she had revealed this and stuffed the pictures back in her bag.

“You said you were a cop.”

“You don’t believe me? I’m not fucking kidding you, Mr Cohen. I was. So I saw everything. I see everything. It’s all façade, the FSB is about money, the gangsters of the 1990s have moved sideways into it.” She sucked at her cigarette. “Literally. I mean literally. I saw how the corruption worked, small, bigger, I see it now and I can’t keep my mouth shut. My friends say I’m like a woman with Tourette’s syndrome, you know?” She blew a harsh puff of smoke in my face. “I still have friends in the police, I have friends in the FSB, retired KGB officers. You think the spook world was a place of endlessly reflecting mirrors and no moral spine, everybody and everything up for grabs during the Cold War? Now there is only money. Everything is money.”

“I believe you.”

“Most of all, as a cop, I saw how they treated women. Whatever the crime, the women were culpable. Rape was a joke at the police station most of the time. I imagine it still is. It was my beat. When I got here,” she gestured at the radio station, “I was still ranting, people thought I was nuts, and I was nuts, I am nuts. Valentina came to me, and I said, go the fuck away, it will get us all killed, and I’m a dead dog anyhow.” From inside the studio I could hear voices, and music.

“What about this radio station?”

“They keep us on the air to show what a free society we are, we say what we want, and they let us alone partly because it’s the only way the Kremlin assholes can get real information. They have a need to know, especially the big shots at the FSB. Funny, right? They need our little station because they need a source of fact, they need us because we report things as they are. On the other hand, we could go off the air any minute, poof, but for now, we’re all there is.” She sucked in more smoke.

“Money? You were talking money.”

“I told Valentina, she had to be careful, but it made her crazy when she discovered how many girls were being prostituted and how many officials were pocketing the cash, and the one thing you don’t talk about here is their money, especially where our leader is concerned.” She sneered as she said it. “I told her, but she didn’t listen. She talked and talked, she thought she was impregnable, an American girl with rights. Free speech, Marina, she says, I can say what I want. We don’t have free speech. Putin said so. He said Russians never had free speech.”

“What happened?”

“Finally, Valentina got me to go on the air with it, to tell about deputies who keep girls at home, who offer them to foreign diplomats, one had a book of pictures, so friends could choose the beauties they liked, some of them were little, twelve, thirteen. I told only facts.”

I felt bands tightened around my head.

“Valentina felt she should put herself on the line if I did. She called in to the show, gave her real name and supported me with more cases.”

“My God.”

“Also, Valentina had a video.”

“Fuck. What did she do with it?”

“I made her give it to me, but I don’t know if she made copies or put it on the Internet or sent it to somebody. A couple of top FSB guys are in it, a little girl.”

“Fuck.”

“Yup. Fuck is right.” She smiled. Her teeth were discolored. “So you want me to give you Grisha Curtis? You plan to kill him, you want to avenge your friend, like in the novels?” She cracked another smile. “I’ll put out some calls. But don’t tell me what you plan to do.”

I agreed.

“You don’t care anymore about what happens to you, as long as you get him, isn’t that right? Artie? That’s what Valentina always called you.”

“Yes.” I took hold of her dry hand, the skin peeling. “Get me the video. Please,” I said.

“You were in love with Valentina, weren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“She was a good girl. If I can get the bastards, it would be fine, we have nothing, no laws, no courts, no free speech. Whoever thought it would have been Yeltsin, that old fatso sot, who left the press alone? He had something. But this one.” Her eyes glistened. “What the fuck, the economy is probably going down the tubes in a few months and we can all wallow in the shit together.”

I started for the door.

“Take it easy,” she said, her voice down a few decibels. “Your pal Sverdloff might still be alive.” She shook her head. “But do this quietly. Find Curtis. You don’t want somebody killing Sverdloff before you get there, if he is alive.”

“Be careful,” I said. “You be careful.”

She snorted, rolling her eyes, pulling at her shabby green sweater that barely covered her fat belly. “Careful? You want me to find this tape for you, you want me to find this Curtis for you, and you say be careful?”

“I’ll give you my numbers,” I said.

“I have your number,” she said, and hoisted herself off the step, went back into the radio station and closed the door.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

“Artemy Maximovich Ostalsky? Artie Cohen?”

That night, I saw the man in the blue and white jacket again. Near Pushkinskaya, he suddenly appeared. He said my name, I turned.

Compact man, medium build, with short elegantly cut white hair and light brown eyes like milk chocolate, he wore a pair of pressed khakis, a white Oxford shirt, the sleeves neatly rolled to his forearms, which were tan.

Only the loose skin around his neck and the deep lines in his face made me think he could be seventy or even more. On his feet were the Timberlands, he had the blue and white seersucker jacket over one arm-it was a hot, heavy night-and he could have passed for a well-heeled tourist strolling Moscow’s main street in the early evening.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t know him, or want to, and before I ran into the subway, the man smiled lightly, shrugged and then walked away as if he’d made a mistake about knowing me. But he knew my Russian name.

He saw that I had heard him, that he was right, that it was my name, and then he ducked into a car waiting at the curb. I felt I was going crazy, but it’s what happens to you in Russia, and after that, I saw a horse.

“It really was a horse,” said a hooker standing in the doorway of McDonald’s. “You aren’t crazy,” she added, munching her Big Mac. “Every night, they bring horses in from the country. People come out of bars and clubs late and they ride across the city. The gypsies bring them, and people ride, and sometimes girls wait until their men are drunk enough to buy them diamonds at all-night shopping malls, and then they put the boyfriends on the horses and watch them ride away.” She looked at me and burst out laughing. “You think I’m telling you the truth?” she said. “You want to come someplace with me?”

I shook my head, and she was gone. All that was left of her was the wrapper from the burger tossed into the gutter.

I looked at my watch. It was pushing eleven. I found a cab. Heading back to the apartment, I realized where I had seen the man in the blue and white jacket who called out my name. I had seen him at the bus station when I arrrived from the airport. He had been waiting for one of the children on the airport bus. I didn’t understand. I didn’t have time for it, either.

At the apartment, I climbed the stairs, changed my sweat-soaked clothes, and took the rest of Larry Sverdloff’s cash out of my bag. Then I packed. I put Grisha Curtis’ files and my clothes in the suitcase. While I was checking my phones, messages, texts, e-mails, I heard somebody pounding at the door.

When I opened the door, I saw Igor, the caretaker, with a package in his arms.

“Yes?”

He hesitated as if working out what to say to me.

“Look.”

I took the package and peeled back some of the newspaper. It was a tangle of old bones.

Taking my arm, Igor made me follow him down the stairs into the ground-floor apartment. Half of the walls were covered with marble slabs, the rest was empty and unfinished. Empty cups stained with tea littered the floor.

In the bathroom floor was a hole. It had been covered up with linoleum, and worn, turd-colored Soviet carpet, both now pushed aside in a heap. Igor pointed to the hole in the ground.

“Somebody died here,” he said. “This is interesting for a historian like yourself?”

“Travel writer,” I said, and turned to go back up to the apartment. But Igor wasn’t finished and he followed me doggedly. He pointed to the bones.

Maybe it was the tension that made me start to laugh. I couldn’t stop. Sitting on a toilet floor in Moscow beside a Russian named Igor who had produced some old bones like an offering. What else could I do except laugh? He looked at me like I was crazy.

“You think this is funny, the bones of the dead?” and crossed himself three or four times, and I pretended not to understand.

“No, not funny, never mind. What do you want?” I knew this Igor had an agenda.

Did he want some money? Did he think the bones valuable? Did he plan to call the cops and accuse me of – what? Tell somebody a weird American was occupying the top floor flat? He told me he was afraid of the bones; he said that old bones could bring terrible curses on people who did not bury them properly and asked if I would wrap them up again and find suitable burial ground.

I pushed some bills into his hand because I wanted to get rid of him. He smiled a lot now and offered me a smoke. He didn’t leave though.

“Right, what else?” I said, and gave him more money.

“Somebody comes to see you!” he said. “Young guy, black hair, you know this guy?”

“What was his name?”

Igor was silent, but I knew it was Grisha Curtis. I told Igor to get lost, and he went back down the stairs. The bones, which I saw were from a butcher shop, I put in a closet. It didn’t mean anything. It was just Igor wanting money, wanting to stall and bargain before he told me about Grisha coming by.

Grisha Curtis had been here. He knew the apartment where I was staying. I started figuring how to bait Grisha Curtis, how to get him to visit me again.

He knew I was in Moscow. He knew where I was living.

Had it been a set-up? Was it the manager at Tolya’s club? Willie Moffat?

I didn’t care. I wanted Grisha here. I wanted him at the door. I wanted him to hunt me down in Moscow, in a bar, a restaurant, on the street. No more disguises, I thought. I’d show myself everywhere, I wanted him to see me, find me, get in my face.

When I saw Curtis, when I looked at him, I’d know if he had killed Valentina.

I couldn’t wait. I figured the best way was to show myself around, try to flush him out, draw attention, get him to come for me. Come on, I thought. Come get me!

I put on my best clean shirt and the expensive shoes from London. Gun in my pocket, I went over again to Pravda222, this time as Artie Cohen.

Come on, I thought again. I’m waiting.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

At the front door of Pravda222, I asked if Konstantin was on. He wasn’t. I asked if Sverdloff was in, and made sure the girl at the front desk knew he was my pal. Over the sound system, Frank Sinatra was singing “Come Fly With Me”, in that voice that crackled with so much sexual vanity.

I knew that nearby, in the shadows of the fancy apartment buildings, there would be plenty of security. Moscow was full of big men with weapons under their jackets, who knew how to make themselves invisible, at least to tourists.

The girl at the desk, long legs, polished skin, pearly teeth, picked up the phone, smiled at me, considered the condition of her long fingernails and rings, and then smiled again, more fulsomely this time, and led me inside.

Late at night, Pravda222 was a different scene. The girls and boys who served drinks were dressed up in skinny suits by some local designer, tight jackets, narrow pants. The new Russians understood style, they had been told this endlessly by Western fashion writers. It made them preen.

“What’s your name?” said a girl at the bar in perfect New York English. “Where are you from?”

“Can I buy you a drink?” I said.

“Sure.”

We exchanged bullshit conversation about stuff, movies, food. The girl next to me showed me her red crocodile Hermès bag, a Birkin, she said, stroking it lightly.

“These are the little gods of Moscow,” she said, and told me she had waited five years for it. She made me look at it as if it were a rare work of art. Together we inspected the skin.

She was a talkative girl. I thought she might have more to say, something I could use. I bought her a drink, I asked if I could buy her another drink and let her know I knew Tolya Sverdloff.

“Do you know this place well?” I said.

“Of course,” she said.

“Do you know the owner?”

“Tolya Sverdloff? I wish,” she said.

She stroked her bag like a pet. The club filled up. The girl with the bag spotted a good-looking man in a good-looking suit and lost interest in me and tripped away in his direction.

Rich Russians read all the magazines-I’d seen them in the bookstores-and they knew what to do. They looked good, even if they seemed to be in costume. The men wore linen shirts, sleeves rolled up casually, jeans, pale leather Prada loafers, no socks.

I moved to a table in the corner, back to the wall, ordered ginger ale and a salad. The couple next to me on the dark soft leather banquette were Brits and they wanted attention, they wanted to get in on things, they had heard me speak Russian to the waiter, they had seen the girl with the pearly fingernails treat me like a big shot, they wanted a piece.

“That looks rather good, actually,” said the woman, peering at my salad.

“Smoked eel,” I said politely.

“Yum,” she said, and went on chattering, telling me an oligarch, a friend, a Russian friend, very dear, such a lovely man, not at all just about money, always helping people, had rung ahead to say they would be made welcome at the club, at Pravda222, which was the only place worth going in Moscow he had said, their own private oligarch. Just really philanthropic, they had seen him at the White Nights Ball the other week. They had seen him in St Tropez.

Nice, I said, and continued eating.

“You are?” said the woman, who was wearing tight white jeans and a strapless top.

I told them my name was Art.

“From the States?” she said.

“New York.”

“Oh, great, brilliant,” she said. “We absolutely adore New York, don’t we, darling? I’m Dee, everyone calls me Dee, of course, and this grumpy old man is Martin, my husband.” She put out her hand and touched his shirt.

The husband, Martin, who was not interested, nodded. He was drinking cognac steadily, glancing at me, looking pissed off while I talked to Dee.

The noise rose. The music played. The crowds swirled around as if it were a party at somebody’s house, nobody staying in one seat at one table, but moving around, greeting, kissing, joking.

“Let’s order some fizz, darling, shall we?” said Dee and the husband snapped his fingers for a waiter, and one of the girls in a tight pants suit, striped, like a clown’s, appeared. He ordered a bottle of Cristal.

“Oh, darling, nobody drinks Cristal anymore. Let’s have a nice Pol Roger Rosé, make it a magnum, shall we? A nice year. What’s a nice year, darling? So there’s enough for Art, here. We love New York,” she said. “We always stay at the Mercer. We just adore it. Last month we ordered two chairs by the Campana Brothers from Moss, for the children’s room, of course, it’s the most divine shop, you must must know it, and Murray-he owns it, of course, you know that-is the most extraordinary man with such brilliant taste. We see him every year at Art Basel in Miami,” she said, then turned to the husband. “Can we have some caviar, darling, the lovely stuff I like so much, darling?”

The husband grunted. The woman said to me, “Our friend Tolya who owns this club is the only one who can still get the great Beluga, you know.”

She rattled on. Her braying English voice penetrated even the noise of the bar. She was very tall and very blonde and looked like a horse. I was startled when she said “Our friend Tolya”.

“Tolya?” I said.

“Oh, yes, you know, that marvelous Russian chap who owns this place, and the others, New York, London, such a genius, the food and wine, the people.”

“You know him well?” I said.

“Enough,” she said. “Yes, of course, we’ve been to his wonderful house in Notting Hill, a book launch, wasn’t it? Yes, for someone we know a bit. ”

“You’ve been to his club in London?”

“She couldn’t get in,” said the husband. “That’s how connected she is, that’s how much she knows. She was like a little puppy at the entrance, oh, we know everybody, please can I come in,” he added in a mocking voice.

“Fuck you,” she said. “I got us in here, didn’t I? It was only because darling Tolya wasn’t there. He’d be so incredibly upset to know we hadn’t got in. I mean, here we are. I wonder if Tolya will be here tonight? I think he’s actually rather a late-night person.”

My head hurt. Too many bars, too much to drink, here, New York, London.

The champagne arrived, and the husband refused it and continued drinking cognac, so I shared it with the wife. We drank. Dee moved closer to me. Wiggled around in her jeans and the little strapless top.

I tried not to laugh, but it didn’t matter. She didn’t notice. The husband looked furious and gloomy and he was drinking more seriously. Sinatra sang. Dee sang along. I watched the crowd, looking for Grisha Curtis, looking for Tolya.

Suddenly, a stream of invective came out of Martin’s mouth and I looked over and saw he’d spilled his drink down the front of his white linen shirt. He got up, leaned down and grabbed his wife’s arm.

“We’re going,” he said. “We’re fucking getting out of here, that is if you’re finished with your American.” He said the word American as if it were a curse.

She pulled away.

He held tight on to her wrist. Her long horsey face pinched up in pain.

“Let go,” I said.

“Fuck off,” he said.

All around I could hear people talking about us in Russian. Americans, Brits, they said, terrible manners, didn’t know how to behave. Through a fog, I could hear them speaking Russian, I could hear somebody talk about calling the cops. I was pretty drunk myself, but then I saw Dee’s face.

She was in pain. Her bastard of a husband was holding her wrist so tight, I thought he might break it. So I socked him. Hard.

I had held in too much, I didn’t know if I wanted to draw attention to myself, maybe flush out Grisha, or if it was pent-up rage, but I punched him again. He teetered backwards, grabbed hold of a small table, pulled it down and crashed to the floor. He didn’t move.

“Thanks,” said Dee. “I was sick to bloody death of his carryon. He thinks he owns the planet because he’s in business with a few bloody Russians, and he can behave like the pig he is.” She went over and crouched beside him, and shook him.

I didn’t wait to find out how he was, I made for the door, but I was shaking, and before I got outside, somebody had grabbed me.

“We’ve called the police,” said the doorman. He held on to my arm. “Sit,” he said. Already I could hear the sirens in the distance. I tried to get away and the doorman punched me, and that was it. It was over. The cops were coming for me, and I’d given my real name, I had wanted to attract attention, to get Grisha Curtis to come after me. I got it.

Now I was a sitting duck. Sitting bird, Tolya always said, one of his rare goofs in English, and I had never known if it was on purpose or not. Somewhere I heard Tony Bennett singing “The Best Is Yet To Come”, and I was hurting enough I couldn’t even get it up for some irony.

The doorman yanked my arm so hard, I winced and wanted to cry, but I kept it back. I hit back. I was in Moscow, I had punched out a tourist and a local, I was fucked.

CHAPTER FIFTY

“You look like shit.”

When I came to, my head felt like it was cracking, like it was inside a nutcracker, and somebody was talking at me.

I squinted through my bruised eyes and saw I was in a small apartment, lying on a couch, a mattress on the floor was made up neatly with a striped Indian bedspread, the shelves full of CDs and DVDs, a table, two chairs. I sat up. Sitting cross-legged on the mattress was a guy in gray sweatpants, a white shirt and socks. Hanging from a hook in a plastic dry-cleaning bag was a police uniform.

“Who the hell are you?” I said to the man. “Arkady Renko? Where am I?” I got up. “Fuck, my head hurts.”

“Drink your tea,” the man said, and I saw there was a mug of green tea on a little table next to the couch. “Drink,” he said in Russian. “You need the doctor.”

“Are you a policeman?”

“Sure. Sometimes,” he said. “I do many things.”

He crossed the room to the table, sat on a chair, opened his cellphone. He was short and big, chest like a weightlifter, waist whittled down, and he moved as if he understood his body and was aware other people would understand it.

His shirtsleeves were folded up high on his arms, which were sculpted, veins standing up on them, and while he talked, he flexed one, watching it as if it were alive. His face, though, was an intellectual’s, he had thoughtful eyes, and he was going bald. On a leather thong around his neck he wore a pendant the shape of a peace symbol.

“Artie Cohen?” he said to me as if to confirm, not to question. Without waiting for an answer, he said, “I am Leven, Viktor. The cousin of Boris, whom you call Bobo.”

“Bobo told you I was in Moscow?”

“He says to please keep my eye peeled out for you,” said Viktor, who was about forty. He handed me a glass of apple juice and some aspirin and told me his father and Bobo’s were brothers, his father the elder. “My cousin asks if you need help,” he said.

He produced a picture of the two cousins. “I am Viktor, and you are in very deep shit,” he added, in Russian now, “You understand?”

I nodded. “You have coffee?”

“I’ll make coffee,” he said, got up with one agile bounce and went into a tiny kitchen and came back with a mug of black coffee, instant, barely hot, in his hand. He’d made it under the tap.

“Drink it,” he said.

“What happened?”

“You went to the club Pravda222, twice at least, and using two different names, the name of Max Fielding and your own name of Artie Cohen, which is the name by which I know you.”

He spoke very precise English as if he had learned it from a language study tape or from a BBC radio program. He took pains to use the definite article which, of course, doesn’t exist in Russian and he used it so often it was stilted, comic even. I answered him in English so that he would not be insulted.

Viktor sat down on the mattress again, and crossed his legs in some crazy yoga position. He leaned back and switched on a CD player. George Harrison. “Here Comes The Sun” played.

“It calms me down,” said Viktor. “Never the fuck mind. Listen to me, it is not a good idea to try killing people here. You understand me?”

“I wasn’t trying to kill anyone.”

“So now everybody knows you’re here, everyone, they know you came in without a proper visa, and that you called yourself Max Fielding, and pretended to be some kind of travel fucking writer,” he said. “They know who you are.”

“I want them to know, and who the fuck are they anyhow?”

“I think you need a doctor,” said Viktor. “The cut on your mouth looks like shit.”

“How did you know where to find me?”

“Artemy, excuse me, but if you spend three years in the fucking Russian army it’s not so hard to find one American like you in Moscow. Anyhow, my cousin Boris told me to watch out for you. He says to me, watch out for this guy who can be one fucking asshole, but he’s a good cop, okay? He says he works this terrible case of Valentina Sverdloff, daughter of Anatoly, and he stays with it, and he knows you’ll come here, so I watch for you. I watch you, I see you go to Marina Fetushova, who I also know, and I think: he’s a crazy fucker. This is really dangerous. Naturally, I figure you will show at Pravda222, so I hang there, though it costs me a fucking arm and two legs. So I say to my cousin Boris, Borya, you owe me a lot. ”

My mouth hurt. Somebody had punched me plenty hard. I could taste dried blood.

“What happened to me?”

“Before the cops came to the club, you had a little fight with the doorman who is aided by some of his pals. They told you you should fuck off out of Russia.”

“Jesus.”

“You shouldn’t carry a gun in Moscow, you know, not a crappy illegal, how did they call them, six-shooter? Makes you look like a tourist,” said Viktor. “Carry a knife if you have to put something in your holster,” he added, laughing at his joke. “What do you need, Artemy Maximovich?” he said, finally. “How can I help you?”

I drank the sludge in the coffee mug. I didn’t know if I could trust him, either. No firm ground. Like Tolya had said, no traction anywhere. But he looked okay, and he was related to Bobo.

While I drank the coffee, he told me he had been a soldier, fought in Chechnya, which meant he got beat up plenty, being a Jew in the Russian army. Full of shrapnel, he had returned to Moscow. He could make decent money doing security, he said. One of his three daughters attended school in England, in Brighton by the sea. I knew there was more he didn’t tell me.

“What else?” I said.

“You’ve been all the fuck over Moscow,” said Viktor in Russian. “Cafes, restaurants, every place, and then you show up at Pravda222 last night and then you punch out a guy who, thank God, was only an Englishman, and currently we Russians formally fucking speaking, applaud people who mess up on the English, but we have to keep a fucking façade, man, and he’s an Englishman with connections, an Englishman who was invited by certain kinds of people including one tiny oligarch, not a big one, I grant you, but big enough, and is also rich and connected himself, if an asshole. You think London stops at the border? This British guy is a lawyer, he works for Russians.”

I liked him. For one thing, he could laugh, a deep belly laugh that rose up from his middle, and made him cry from laughing. Jokes, the only thing that saves us, said Viktor, and then we tossed around a few jokes, and laughed about the really bad Russian gangster films that were coming out. I wanted Viktor for a friend.

“I have to find Tolya Sverdloff,” I said.

“Mr Anatoly Sverdloff has made too much noise,” said Viktor. “I think the death of his daughter has made him crazy, which I understand. I would be the same,” he added.

“What kind of noise?”

“He will now do anything to get back at people who killed his daughter. He says she was poisoned with polonium-210. This makes people paranoid.”

“Who?”

“Everybody. The FSB says the British killed Litvinenko, others that it was Russian friends of Litvinenko in London. There is also talk of provocation, nothing has any reality anymore, just like Soviet times, you know? No firm ground. None,” said Viktor.

“Listen, man, I’m a New York cop, I just want the creep who killed my friend’s daughter, and I want to know where the fuck he is. No politics, okay? I’m grateful to you, but let’s just skip the political discussion.”

“Everything is politics,” said Viktor, who tossed the butt of his cigarette into a yellow cup where it sizzled in the dregs of the coffee. “Once upon a time, I would have saved the remains of this cigarette.”

“Do you know where Sverdloff is?”

“Nothing is sure.”

“There’s somebody else,” I said, and described Grisha Curtis and saw a flicker of fear scurry across Viktor’s round face, like a mouse looking for food where there wasn’t any.

“You’re in big trouble,” he said. “You’re playing with guys who are very, very connected. Get a little rest and I’ll make some calls.”

“No.”

“Listen to me, they got hold of you at the club, they beat you up, next time they’ll cut your tongue out, or kill you, okay? Or if it isn’t the creeps, you’ll disappear into the official pit where nobody climbs out, they know about you, they know the New York police have been looking at you for Valentina’s murder, that your prints were everywhere in her apartment, they know everything about you, that you came to Moscow before, you’re fully recorded in the files, you’re on the list.”

“What?”

“You grew up here, they know this, they know you came back to Moscow in the early 1990s.”

I put my hand in my pocket.

“The cash is here,” said Viktor, and handed me the pile of money. “You’re lucky as a girl with big tits that nobody took it off you,” he added. “But, then, we’re not all just about the money, hard as it may be for you to believe.”

“You sound like Bobo,” I said. “I have to get up.”

“Sleep,” said Viktor, and gestured to the mattress and brought a blanket and said he’d be back before it was light.

I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Before I crashed, I wondered if there had been anything in the coffee.

George Harrison seeped into my sleep. I opened my eyes.

“What time is it?”

Viktor, sitting on one of the chairs, was watching me while I tried to wake up. He looked at his watch.

“Five past eleven.”

“In the morning?”

“Yes.”

“The guy’s dead? The British dick?”

“No, sadly, the fool is fine. His wife liked you, he took a poke at you, and you socked him. Nobody is bringing charges, but nobody wants you hanging around Moscow either, so tell me what you need and let’s get it done and let’s get you out of here.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“For Bobo, for our family, or as you say, whatever.”

“You knew about Valentina?”

“This poor girl found out too late she had a boyfriend who was a little bit of a fascist.”

“Grisha Curtis?”

“You met him?”

“Only at a party in London. For a minute. You know where he is?”

“I’ve heard rumors.”

“I need your help,” I said finally. “I think if we can find Sverdloff, we can find Curtis. Or the other way around.”

“Sverdloff is most important, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Take a shower. I made soup. There’s a clinic we could try, I made some phone calls while you were sleeping. We have to go fast, people are asking about you,” he said, and sent me into what passed for his bathroom where I took a shower under a tepid drizzle of water, and borrowed a clean t-shirt from him.

He made me eat the whole bowl of borscht and some bread and cheese, and then he drove us in his second-hand blue VW to a fancy clinic near the river.

All the way, he played Indian music. It drove me out of my skull, but I kept quiet. Viktor knew what he was doing.

The clinic was all glass and steel. Gorgeous women in starched white dresses and little caps on their hair were the nurses, though they looked more like Playboy models. In a sunroom with a huge flatscreen TV on the wall, patients looked well fed. The doctor, wearing Zegna from head to toe, was impatient.

“Look again,” said Viktor, showing him Tolya’s picture.

“Yes,” he said.

“Yes, what?”

“I think he was here. I’m not sure,” said the doctor, who was eager to get away.

“What did he have?”

The doctor called out to one of the costumed nurses and handed her the picture, told her to look up the records, made a gesture that indicated she was not to tell us too much. Said he was busy, gave us an engraved business card, mentioned we could make an appointment. He shook our hands, looked at his Rolex, and disappeared with that self-important stride only doctors and lawyers have, the kind that lets you know they are busier than you can imagine, and important and have great big balls.

After the nurse pretended to look through some files on her new Mac, she took Tolya’s picture in her hand.

“I don’t have anything on him,” she said. “I remember him. He told jokes, but he was very ill. I have a feeling it was his heart. He didn’t stay long enough.” She inspected a calendar. “Monday night. The 14th. I told him he must stay in the hospital, but he just wanted pills. He said he would come back. He never came.”

“You gave him the pills?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “Perhaps you’ll wait until the doctor is free again?”

“Sverdloff didn’t leave an address, a contact?”

“Nothing.”

“Ravi Shankar. A genius,” said Viktor, nodding at his iPod that was plugged into the car. “I love the sitar.”

“I have to find Sverdloff.”

“Listen to me, you have to pay attention, you have to be careful, you think like an American, but this place is not normal anymore, this is a police state, this is only one guy who is running things, and you have to pay attention.” Viktor said it so quietly I could hardly hear him.

“Why do you tell me all this?”

“My cousin Bobo tells me I should say these things to you. I should help you. You help him, you help the family.”

“I want the boy,” I said. “I want Grisha. I think Tolya Sverdloff came here to look for him. I think maybe Tolya already found him. He followed me to the place I was staying, maybe to the club, on the street, and then he went away.”

“You think Mr Grisha has gone to be with Marx as we used to say? You don’t think he’s already dead?”

“Who do you really work for?”

“This one, that one. I was a soldier, I told you. For a while I was a detective also, like Bobo. I’m freelance. Some of the time I help with joint terrorist things, even your friend from Wyoming. Bodyguard, too, for money. This and that. I keep telling you. You have some idea, yes?”

“Roy Pettus?”

“He’s okay,” said Viktor.

“Yeah.”

“What’s your idea?”

“I need to go somewhere by myself. One hour. Look, there are some bodies I heard about, dumped out by a place you don’t need to see. One might be Grisha Curtis. I have a friend who’s a homicide cop.”

“One hour.”

“I’ll take you to my place. You can wait there. Don’t go back to your apartment. Don’t go out. Please, this is serious, you’ll get in trouble, you’ll get me in trouble, you’ll get people killed if you don’t listen. I’ll get your stuff from the apartment, if you want.”

“You know where I’m staying?”

“Sure.”

“You knew as soon as I got here?”

“Stay here,” he said as he pulled up in front of his building. “Pray one of our bodies is Curtis. You have contacts with anyone here?”

“Who would I have contacts with?”

“Cops? Journalists other than Fetushova? Friends? Old friends?”

“Not anymore,” I said.

“Family?”

“Dead.”

“Friends of family?”

“Also dead. What the fuck are you asking for?”

“Children of friends of family, parents?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Okay, so think.”

“Just fucking tell me what you want to know.”

“FSB,” he said in a low voice.

“I don’t know these bastards.”

“KGB.”

I said I knew what the fucking FSB was, and that it used to be the KGB, and how the fuck would I know anybody in it?

“Your father.”

“He’s been dead a long time.”

“They like the families, the children, you have heritage, they’ll talk to you. Sooner or later somebody will remember your father and say, what about him, what about the son, he’s one of us.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“In this country, even according to my pious Christian friends, Christ is dead,” said Viktor, picking up his car keys.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

I didn’t wait for Viktor Leven. I had an idea I had to get going. Maybe I was already too late.

At Moffat’s place, I looked for Igor the caretaker. He was out. I went into his hutch and then into the half-built apartment. Upstairs I looked for the bones. They were gone. So were Willie Moffat’s golf clubs. Maybe Igor had gone to sell them both.

I had come back to the apartment to get a few of my things, and lock the place up so Moffat didn’t come home and find everything gone. As soon as I got inside I knew somebody had been there, looking for me, searching through my stuff, papers, a notebook, but nothing else. Everything else was in place: TV, desktop computer, espresso machine. It wasn’t a thief. It wasn’t Igor.

I locked up, left a note for Moffat, pushed the keys under the door, went out to look for a taxi. I could have taken Moffat’s car, but it was too risky. Traffic cops were on the make all over Moscow. They stopped you. They asked for money. I was guessing it was the reason nothing had been done about the traffic. Maybe the traffic cops’ union put up a fight. Maybe it was the only way they could feed their kids. I didn’t want to drive another guy’s car, not now.

My phone rang. A familiar voice was on the other end, but the line was blurry. I couldn’t make out who it was, and then the line went dead. I had my clothes and papers in my carry-on, I didn’t know where the hell I was going, but I wasn’t coming back here. I had cash, and I had the gun. Viktor Leven never took it off me.

I flagged down a cab. I made a deal with the driver for the trip out to the country, twenty kilometers, give or take, and he was willing, glad of the work, a chubby little cheerful Georgian with two teeth missing, who told me he loved Americans and for me he would make a deal. We did it in sign language, and the couple of words of Russian I admitted I knew.

I kept up the idea that I didn’t speak Russian much and that I was just a tourist, at least for a while, and then I gave it up.

From the rear-view mirror hung a little Georgian flag. I felt okay in his car. Georgians disliked the Russians plenty. There was going to be trouble, he said. South Ossieta, Russian army, the whole thing was going to blow up, and soon.

“What were you?”

“I was a history teacher,” he said. “I need the money,” he added, half turning to look at me.

I asked him to take me to Nikolina Gora, a village out in the Moscow countryside. He asked where exactly. I said I was looking for someone, I’d let him know.

His name was Eduard, and he was a shrewd guy. He said, if I was looking for information around Barvika, the town you came to before you got to Nikolina Gora, he would call his sister who cleaned houses nearby and heard all the gossip. It was all a Georgian girl with a dark complexion could get around Moscow. She cleans their fucking toilets, he said. I said, call her. He put his foot on the gas.

He got on his cell, he called his sister and they gabbled away for twenty minutes while we sat in traffic. I understood the sister had agreed to meet us. Eduard turned the radio up.

It was a hot windy day, sky sludge-colored, dust swirling across the windows of the crummy taxi, no air conditioning. From behind I could see the sweat streaming down my Georgian’s neck. He wiped it with a paper towel.

You think of Moscow as a winter city, its ugliness and sprawl disguised. In summer, you see it as it is. I remembered the summers now, dusty, everyone jamming into cars or on a train or a bus to get out of town.

I rolled down the window as we headed out of town on the highway, and Eduard chattered away, mostly in Russian, trying out his English and sign language, half turned towards me and grinning like a fool. I figured we were going to crash.

It was a long time since I’d come out here, the last time to Sverdloff’s parents’ dacha in Nikolina Gora.

The Rublevo-Uspenskoye highway was always the best road in the entire country, all eleven time zones of it. Big-time creeps had their official country houses out this way, right back to Stalin. Even now, where once the ZiL sirens blared, there were big Mercs and Range Rovers.

At the end of the turnoff to Putin’s place were two cop cars.

The driver mentioned Putin as if spitting and showed me his rough hand, thumb down.

He talked on and on, pointing out the building sites at the side of the road. He pulled over and invited me to join him in the front seat.

Under the seat, he had a bottle of Georgian wine, which was illegal in Moscow, more or less, the bastards have put a levy on it, he said. No love lost. Hates the fucking Russkis. Ed, he said I should call him, Ed, you say in West.

He passed me the bottle. I drank some of the thick heavy red. He drank. We toasted Georgia.

Out here, ten, fifteen miles from the center of Moscow where I remembered only countryside, huge stands of trees had been replaced by billboards and gated communities and shopping malls and ugly McMansions. You could hear the birds twitter and smell the exhaust as big cars slammed down the country road.

“Pricks,” said Ed. “Bastards. All. All same.”

We passed the billboards: German dental centers, Meissen china, Princess cruises, real estate, spas, all the billboards pushing capitalist pleasures.

Ed, who had worked as a tour guide for Georgians up to see Moscow, was in full flow, holding forth on the origins of the dacha, knocking back gulps of red wine.

Everybody has a dacha, said Ed, even workers and poor slobs, everybody has a little patch of land. The dacha meant escape.

My own parents had had a dacha for a while when my father was in the KGB, a cottage a few miles further out in the countryside. My father took me fishing, I swam in the river, friends came to eat.

Best of all, there was a huge Grundig radio my father had somehow managed to acquire. In those days there were only official radios and radio stations, nothing you wanted to listen to.

A foreign radio on which you could listen to foreign stations was an immense prize, only available to the privileged. Antennae sprouted from cottages all over the countryside.

My mother listened for news from Europe, my father, and his best friend, Gennadi-the man I called Uncle Gennadi-to jazz. Teenagers fiddled with the knobs on their parents’ radios, trying to get the BBC and the Beatles.

I knew all about the life in dachas outside Moscow, and it came back to me so powerfully I had to shake myself out of the memories.

“Luxury mall,” said Ed, and points out the window, then pulls up. “Come with me. Look, see what the new world has brought to us, here we are, a capitalist country with a peasant’s soul.” He looked around. “It’s to keep the wives busy shopping and away from Moscow, so men can be with their mistresses.”

The mall was exquisite, all sleek wood and glass, more Milan than Moscow. Every label in this label-mad country was here: Gucci, Bulgari, Graf, Bentley, Prada, Zegna, Armani, Ralph Lauren. But it was like Alphaville, empty, devoid of life, dystopic. Ed understood this.

“Everything is façade now,” he said, leading me to the far end of the mall where, in a Lada, a woman was waiting.

Ed’s sister was a small pretty women, about fifty, who got out of the battered car, embraced her brother, and said to me, “How can I help you?”

I asked her if she knew the way to a certain dacha in Nikolina Gora, and she got on her cellphone, made a few calls, and told me her husband’s cousin had worked nearby and would call Eduard with directions. She climbed in her car, and, waving, drove away.

Then, without warning, Eddie hustled me back in the car, and pulled back on the road, going at the legal speed. The police car he said he had seen didn’t stop us. I never noticed it. I was losing my focus.

“Russian cops,” Ed said, and spat.

When Ed got the call from his brother-in-law’s cousin, he found the right road to the dacha I was looking for. He gave me his cell number. I offered him extra money. He refused.

Georgians loved America, he told me sincerely, and he hoped we would remain eternal friends. We shook hands, and then he left me at the junction where the main road joined a dirt path to the Sverdloff place.

It was getting dark now, the sky purple with rain clouds. I started up the path. I could see the house clearly.

The garden sloped down to a stream that fed the river, but it was overgrown, weeds had pushed up through the grass. The hydrangea bushes, neon blue in the evening light, were in bloom. Fireflies glittered everywhere.

I had been here once before in the summer, a long time ago. Under an immense tree in the garden was an old trestle table where we had eaten dinner, me, Tolya, his parents, his cousin, Svetlana.

The dinner table had been surrounded by friends of the Sverdloffs, writers, artists.

Tolya’s father, almost as big as his son, sang songs from Oklahoma! I remembered the physicist who told me the truth about red mercury. Most of all, I remembered Svetlana in her white skirt and blouse and a bright red shawl. I loved her. The next day, because of me, she was dead. A car bomb went off in her car. Meant for me.

Svetlana had been the beginning, it was Svetlana I saw in Valentina, at least a little. I realized that now.

From the woods behind the house I could hear cicadas. Could hear the stream. At first I didn’t hear anything else. Then I heard the flick of a lighter, the sound of somebody lighting a cigarette. Soft footsteps fell on the path. I walked a few more yards, and I saw her.

Near the front gate was a silver bike, a girl leaning against it, looking at the house. It was all I could do to keep from crying. Valentina? Valentina! My God!

She was there, wearing her skinny white jeans and a little black top, her hair was short, dark red, and she was walking slowly, smoking a cigarette on her way to her grandparents’ house.