Londongrad

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

I watched as Valentina Sverdloff strolled to the gate of her grandparents’ house. Half in a trance, I followed her. I had seen her in New York on her own bed, had felt for her pulse.

That day, I had sat beside her, held her cold hand, absorbed, after a while-I never knew how long-that she was dead.

She was dead, and after they took her away, the ME had cut her up and stitched her back together on a metal slab. Bobo Leven had told me. Tolya had told me. I had read the report.

Russia, this fucking country, I thought. A country that makes you see things, makes you believe in shit that doesn’t exist, in ghosts. It was all I could think. I’d left it the first time when I was a kid, only sixteen. I’d come back once, got sucked in, gone away, swore I’d never come back. Never again. It did weird things to you, every part of you.

I knew that Val was dead. Again I pictured her on her bed, saw myself lean down and put my mouth in front of hers. No breath had come out. No breath, no pulse, nothing. In New York she had been dead.

But she was here in this strange evening light, in front of me, tall, lanky, hair ruffled by the breeze, wearing the white jeans, swinging her arms, back to me, smoking a cigarette and almost at the gates of the old Sverdloff dacha. I put down my bag and started to run.

“Val?” I shouted, stumbling on a tangle of uncut grass. Valentina?

Even saying it made gooseflesh run up my arms. I pulled on my jacket. I’d been carrying it, and I put it on and zipped it up and fumbled in the pocket for cigarettes. Val, darling?

“Artie, right?”

“Yes.”

She had turned around and was coming towards me, still smoking. Now she tossed her cigarette on the stone path and crushed it under her red sneaker.

“You don’t recognize me, do you? I met you a while back. I’m Valentina’s sister. Her twin. You remember? Maria. Everybody calls me Molly.”

They were identical twins, but only in looks. Different voices.

“You know he’s dead, don’t you?” she said.

Tolya was dead.

I wasn’t sure I could stand this. For a second, I was so dizzy I had to lean against the garden wall. What would I do without him?

“Ask me, I’m glad Grisha is dead, you know,” said Molly. “I never liked him. He was bad, every which way, he was a shit.”

“Grisha Curtis?”

“Who did you think I meant?”

“It doesn’t matter. How?”

“I don’t know. Somebody said he was drugged, somebody said a knife, other people thought he was strangled. This is Russia, Artie. Somebody will find out, I don’t care, I’m glad!”

“When did you hear?”

“Yesterday. They all gossip, like crazy,” Molly said. “I’m staying over at my mom’s dacha about a mile away. Over in Barvika. Grisha’s uncle has a place. Somebody found him in the woods, it’s all I know. And everybody was excited because there were police around, that kind of shit.”

“You’re sure?”

“Sure. You need a cigarette or something?”

“Yeah,” I said, taking the pack Molly offered. “Thank you.

Of course I remember you.”

“Val probably told you I was the good girl, the one who fit in, even in Florida, I dated boys who played football, I liked to shop, I was student president. You know my best friend in junior high was a little Russian tennis player from Almaty. When she lost some junior tournament, she killed herself. I decided I hated Russians right then.” Molly lit up, offered me her lighter.

Her hair was reddish brown, bangs over her forehead. A canvas bag was thrown over her shoulder. There was a wooden bench outside the dacha gates, and she sat on it. I sat next to her.

“He killed her, you know?” said Molly. “The bastard killed my lovely sister, he murdered her.”

“Grisha? You know that?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw him,” she said. “I saw him in Moscow a few days ago and he looked at me, and I could see he was terrified, as if he thought I was Val. I tried to find him again, but I couldn’t. He’s only met me a few times. I felt it. Twins feel things about each other. Did he?”

“I think so. Tell me what you know about him.”

“I met him a couple times.”

“What?”

“I met him in London last summer. He was very good-looking in a sort of spooky sci-fi way, you know? Very, very handsome, carved features, always smiling, great smile, good low voice, and funny, well, sort of funny,” said Molly. “I met Grisha’s mother at that sad little wedding in London. Val was all lit up. I think for the first time, just plain in love. Regular old-fashioned love and sex and somebody your own age, a nice good boy you were going to be with forever. She was a different kind of girl, but she had that in common with all of us.”

“Go on.”

“Val always liked older guys, rougher, smarter, remember Jack Santiago? She liked interesting people, which got her into trouble, she didn’t have real good pitch for emotional stuff. So at first I thought, wow, about fucking time Val met a regular guy, a nice guy, her age. But she was coy about Greg, or Grisha, or whatever the fuck he was called, I think she was shy, she told me to keep it to myself. My poor mom, Christ, she didn’t even know Val got married. I had to tell her after Val died.”

“What else?”

“Something went wrong between Grisha and Valentina the last few months, and then she was dead. My father went off his rocker. I went to her place and looked for all her diaries and stuff, but most of it was gone.”

“I was there.”

“Where?’

“In her apartment. Her stuff was all there, everything, her pictures, clothes, everything.”

“After she was murdered?” Molly said.

“Yes. So somebody was in there not long afterwards.”

“It was him.”

“Why did you come to Russia?”

“Like I said, our mom has a place not far away. She said she had to come here, she said she had to come to Russia, to her dacha, she’s half out of her skull because of Val, and because Dad went to New York to get her and bring her body back, apparently Val told him once she wanted to be with her grandparents in the cemetery, and I’m thinking, he’s out of his mind,” Molly added. “But I could imagine Val wanting it, for a while she became obsessed with Russia. We kind of stopped talking a lot, we were in different places,” she said. “Oh, shit, Artie, why did I make her feel bad?”

“No, she also loved New York. You didn’t make her feel bad.”

“I told her the Russian stuff was bullshit. Maybe it was because I always knew our dad preferred her. He never said or showed it, I just knew, they were connected in a different way.”

“I understand.”

“Thanks. Listen, I have to take my mom to New York. We don’t know if Daddy is ever coming. We’re leaving in the morning. But I wanted to see this place. I rode my bike over,” she said, pointing to the bicycle parked against the fence. “I don’t care about any of this Russian crap, you know, and the old house, our grandparents? It gives me the creeps. Daddy gave us the house, I told Val she could have my half. She said okay, but first we had to visit together, so we planned it for this summer.” She tossed her cigarette on the ground. “I miss her so bad, Artie.”

“Was she going to live here?”

“I think Val wanted to make it a country retreat for her kids.”

“Kids?”

“The girls she took care of. I don’t know what to do with it now.”

“Where’s your father?”

“I don’t know that either. We’ve only been here a few days. We were waiting for him. I think all that happens in this country is you get sucked in like quicksand and you can never get out. I hate it. It killed Val, and maybe it killed my dad. Fuck Russia, you know?” Her tone was defiant but her eyes were full of tears.

“When did you talk to him, to Tolya?”

“Over a week? Sunday? Maybe Monday. He was in London. He promised to come. He said, I’ll meet you. Wait for me. I’m still waiting. I called somebody in New York. Val’s body is still there.”

“You knew about Val when?”

“From my mom.”

I thought of something, “Do you ride a red Vespa?” I asked.

“Yes, why?”

“Somebody saw you on it not long before Val was murdered.”

“I brought it to the city, to New York. I was intending to give it to Val for a present, because I needed a car in Boston. I didn’t go right over to her place, I just rode around and saw friends, and I went out that night. My God, she was still alive while I was riding that fucking scooter, and I was too late after that. Somebody thought I was Val, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“I could have saved her.”

“No. Grisha killed her.”

“I’m glad the bastard is dead. Over in Barvika, they’re all talking about it, boo hoo. I bet he fucked every one of those stupid girls. All they want is to marry an oligarch,” said Molly. “I’m glad he’s dead.” I’m really glad you’re here. My dad always talks about you, like all the time. Like you would know how to deal with this kind of shit. He said if I was ever in trouble, and he was away, I should call you.”

I took a cigarette from her and we lit up and smoked for a few seconds in silence.

“We need to go inside the house,” I said finally.

“You think he’s here?” She glanced at the house where the windows were dark. “Maybe he’s hiding from somebody,” she said. “I need him to be here now,” she said. “I’m scared to go in.”

“Why?”

“I think I’ll find him in there. You know, not alive.”

“Why would he be hiding, who from?”

“It’s the elephant in the room, isn’t it Artie?”

“Yeah.”

“If Daddy knew Grisha killed my sister, what would he do?” said Molly. “He’s not like other people’s dads, you know? This is what we’re not saying, that if he found Grisha, that would be it. And then they’d get my dad, too, they’d put him away for murder.”

The light was fading, Russia closing in on us. I moved towards the house.

“Molly, look, I should tell you, just in case, I have a gun. I just don’t want to freak you out. Okay?”

She smiled.

“Oh, Artie, honey, I grew up in Florida, I’m like from America, from real America, from Florida where they fuck with the elections and everybody has guns,” she said. “It’s the American religion, you know that. My mother has a gun, for Pete’s sake, honey.” Molly had a slight Southern accent, and the sweet look of somebody who had been happy most of her life. She was a nice girl.

One hand in Molly’s, we went through the high gates, which were unlocked, then we stumbled through the weeds to the house.

The front door was locked. It had glass panes in the top half, and one was broken. I pushed it, and it fell in. I managed to push another one of the panes in too, and I heard it shatter lightly on wide planks inside the house.

It was very quiet. I listened to the house through the broken window. I couldn’t hear anything except a faint creaking noise, maybe a breeze, or a rat. Mice. Nobody was here. Sverdloff wasn’t here. Was he? It was a big house, two storeys. I listened some more.

“Let’s go,” said Molly. “Come on.”

I reached through the broken glass and found the doorknob, and turned it. The door opened and together we went inside the house.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

Like a dog uncertain of what it was hearing, I stood in the doorway. Molly tried to go ahead. I tried to stop her, I put my arm out, but she went in anyway. She had a little flashlight in her purse. She turned it on and it made a narrow cone of light in the dark house. The old wide oak planks creaked under her feet.

“Molly?”

“Just wait, Artie,” she said, and I lost sight of her as she moved through the square hallway into the living room. “Wait,” she said, her voice echoing back at me. “Wait.”

I could hear her walking away after that, into the house. Her cell phone went off. She talked to it in a whisper and I couldn’t hear the words. I stood still and smelled the dust.

In the distance I saw a fluttering light, then I saw two. There are no ghosts, I told myself, except in the minds of Russians. But not in the real world.

I was beginning to hallucinate. Things swayed with the unreality of this candlelit world. Voices talked into my ear. My hand was ice cold on the metal of my gun. I held it in front of me. I watched the lights.

“You look like you saw something,” said Molly, reappearing. “Like you saw a spook,” she added, holding a couple of candles she had lit. “You okay?” In this light I saw how young she looked, much younger than Valentina had ever seemed.

“Come on,” I said, and we went through the house, one room at a time, looking for something. Anything. I thought I could smell Sverdloff’s aftershave, his cologne, the special scent he had made up for him in Florence in a medieval building on the Arno, he always said. It smelled of grapefruit. It arrived in New York in elaborate packages which contained the cologne in crystal bottles with carved gold stoppers. He had given me a bottle of it for a birthday.

“You smell him, don’t you?” said Molly.

“Yeah.”

“Me too. He always wore that stuff his friend Lorenzo made for him. He tried to get me to wear it. He was here, wasn’t he, Artie? He was in this house.” She spoke calmly, like a young doctor discussing the possibilities of a fatal disease.

“Yes.”

We moved through the rooms together, Molly with her candles.

Most of the furniture had been covered with dustsheets. One of the windows in the main room with its old beamed ceilings was broken, and a bird had left its nest in a corner of the room, high up, under the sloping roof.

In the kitchen, Molly put the candles on the long trestle table, a film of summer dust covering it, a huge tureen in the middle, the old copper samovar on a side table.

Everything the way I remembered it, but suspended in another time, unused now, empty, dusty. Except for the Grape Nuts. At one end of the table was a box of Grape Nuts, and an espresso pot, and a little empty blue tin that had contained caviar.

Molly picked up the pot, and made a face.

“There’s still coffee in here.”

The table looked as if somebody had left in the middle of breakfast. A cup was overturned, a napkin dropped on the floor.

“Only my dad eats Grape Nuts. He’s crazy for them. He always takes them with him. And caviar.” She picked up the little blue tin. “He’s so weird, he buys wine for a grand a bottle and drinks it like Coke, but he won’t travel without a box of Grape Nuts for breakfast, then he’ll have eggs with caviar, you know? Crazy asshole,” said Molly, smiling and then bursting into tears. “Where is he?”

“You okay here for a minute? I want to look around,” I said, after a while, and she nodded.

I left her one of the candles, took the other, and she looked at me and giggled.

“What?”

“You look like some kind of weird phantom, the gun in one hand, the candle in the other. God, Artie, where is he?” She lit a cigarette, and tossed the match in the empty cereal bowl.

“Don’t,” I said.

“Evidence?” she asked, taking it out of the bowl.

“I guess.”

“I was thinking of doing forensics anyhow,” she said. “Med school. I’m not going to be any good with people that are alive, you know,” said Molly.

“Yell if you need me,” I said, and went towards the study and music room that had been Tolya’s father’s domain.

All the time I could smell Tolya. He had been here. He had been here, but he was gone, unless there was something upstairs. I was hallucinating. From the kitchen I heard Molly singing an old Beatles tune.

“Hey Jude”, she sang to herself off key.

In the study, the walls were still jammed with books, books to the ceiling, new and old, in four languages. Records, old LPs were on other shelves.

There was a broken leather sofa under the windows. A big old-fashioned desk was on the other side of the room and above it was a portrait of Tolya’s mother.

I sat at the desk. There must be a caretaker or the house would have been stripped clean. Theft in the countryside had turned into big business. And Russians, like the Brits, once they had the dough, wanted a country life where they could pretend they were gentry. Or intellectuals. Or aristocrats. Or something they had never been and never would be. They could get the trappings. Books and furniture like Sverdloff’s could be cleaned up and sold for a bundle.

The leather-topped desk was scarred but there was no dust. Somebody had been cleaning up for sure. Somebody had been watching the house.

I left the study and climbed the stairs to the bedrooms. I checked all four.

The last room I went into had been Tolya’s when he was a boy. I sat on the lumpy bed with the sagging springs. I looked at the pictures on the wall, pictures of rock bands Tolya had played with and bands he had loved.

I went to the window and pulled up the shade, then pulled it down again. I looked in the closet. I could smell him here. I knew he had been here recently, but where was he? What had happened?

I lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling.

I got on my hands and knees, and looked under the bed.

I lay flat on the floor now, and stretched myself so I could reach all the way under the bed where I saw something yellow on the floor. I reached out and grabbed it, and sat up and leaned against the wall.

It was a huge yellow silk sock, dust balls hanging off it. It was one of Tolya’s socks. It was dusty, but it looked new. It smelled of some fancy talc Tolya used. There were still grains of the powder on the sock.

I knew now Tolya had left the house in a hurry, leaving the cereal and the socks. Nothing to tell me where he had gone, no clues. All I had was the sock, and, in the closet, a shoebox that had contained sneakers. I looked inside.

My God, I thought. He left without this. He left in a hurry, or maybe he left it for me.

“Molly?”

“Yes?”

“I found this stuff in Tolya’s old room.”

On the table I placed a couple of boxes of Staticmaster brushes, the kind I’d seen in Valentina’s darkroom. “Read this,” I said, pushing over the instructions I found in the box of brushes.

“What is it?”

“I think Tolya left this. I think he left it as a message, I think he was trying to tell us something. I saw these brushes in Val’s darkroom in New York. There were always a lot of them. I know that Grisha bought some from a guy in Brooklyn, too,” I said.

From outside came the distant sound of a car.

“What’s that?” said Molly.

“Read this thing with the brushes,” I said.

“Give me a minute,” said Molly, picking up the piece of paper, looking at the instructions, hands shaking. “I used to see these at Val’s place,” she said. “She used them for cleaning her negatives. She wouldn’t use a regular camera, only that fucking antique Leica that supposedly Bertolt Brecht gave our grandfather if you can believe it. I’m such a philistine I wasn’t sure who this Brecht guy was. Literature wasn’t my thing. Val was very finicky about her photos, I’d say, Jesus, Val, why don’t you just use like a make-up brush, I’ll get you some, and she’d throw me out. I don’t get what you’re saying, Artie.”

“How did she die?”

“Somebody smothered her. Put a pillow over her face.”

“Go on.”

“I thought about that. She was strong as an ox, right? So it was somebody she knew. She wasn’t letting just any creep into her place, right? But there was something else. My dad was rambling one time, when I saw him in New York, something about her being killed twice, something I figured for crazy because he was out of his brain. He was right. He kept talking about this guy, Livitsky, or someone that died in London. I thought he was paranoid.”

“Litvinenko. What if he was right?”

“The autopsy didn’t show anything,” she said. “It would have shown. Shit.”

“What?”

“It would only show if you knew what you were looking for.”

“I think that’s what Tolya said, or maybe the poison hadn’t started working.”

“I think my dad was just out of his mind about Val,” she said. “Even if they knew to look for Polonium, it’s very febrile stuff.” She crushed out her cigarette in an ashtray and put the butt in her cut-off jeans pocket.

“Molly?”

“What?”

“There were wrappers from Antistatic brushes on the floor of her bedroom when I found her there,” I said.

“Christ, she once told me Grisha was so nice about her photographs, always offering to help. My God, he did it Artie. He would have known how, or could have found out. You think that could be it? He did that to her, and then felt bad?”

“Tolya said something like that.”

Molly re-read the instructions on the box of brushes. “You would really need to know how to get them bulk,” she said. “You would need to grind this shit up and make sure she ingested it. You’d have to know where the Polonium was coming from to be sure it was still potent.”

“Grisha had connections,” I said. “Is your Dad sick?”

“I don’t know. He keeps that stuff to himself, why?”

“I saw him in London, he looked bad.”

“You think?” She gestured to the box of brushes. “Is that a car? Outside?”

“We need to go. Now.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

The car was coming closer. We were still sitting in the kitchen. I still had Tolya’s sock in my hand along with the box of lens brushes.

I got up and looked out the window. I could barely see the car, its lights out. Somebody was coming. Somebody who didn’t want to make a lot of noise, and I thought: it’s Tolya. It has to be. Who else could it be at this time of night, the weird purple sky heavy with rain, the humidity rising from the grass and coming down from the sky, so my skin was slick with sweat.

I blew out the candle.

“What’s happening, Artie?”

“Somebody just drove up to the gate.”

She rubbed her eyes. “You think it’s my dad?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t we go out of the back door, and through the back gate just in case it’s not him. How far is it to your mother’s place?”

“A mile, not far.”

“We can walk. I don’t want you riding your bike at night, there’s too many crazy drunk drivers out there. Stay on the side of the road.”

“Who do you think it is?” she said,taking the box of brushes from me and shoving them into the bag.

I thought about the man in the seersucker jacket. I thought about Grisha, or maybe it was just Ed, the Georgian taxi driver. Maybe Ed, the good Georgian, had come for me.

“It might be the taxi driver,” I said.

I had to take care of Molly. I had promised Tolya I’d look after Val, and I didn’t and he never blamed me. All that was left was her twin sister.

I pushed on the metal gate in back of the house, and it clattered with a rusty iron noise. We went through and stood together on the empty road that ran behind the Sverdloff dacha, and Molly pointed to the left. Her mother’s place was down the road. And then she stopped dead still.

“What?”

“I left my bike out front. They’ll see it.”

“Leave it,” I said. “We need to go.”

“What if it’s my dad?”

“We’ll walk a little, and then we’ll wait. Okay? You can go to your mother’s place, I’ll walk you most of the way and then and I’ll go back and see who it is.”

“I want to go, too.”

“No,” I said, “I can’t do that. I can’t let you. Just go back to New York, tell Bobo Leven. Take the brushes back to New York. First you go see my friend, Sonny Lippert. Right away, give him the brushes. Put them in something safe, wrap them up good, okay?”

She nodded.

“If you get stuck in Moscow, go see this guy, Viktor,” I said.

She held out her arm. “Write it here, so I don’t forget,” said Molly, and I scribbled the numbers with her red pen.

“Come on, we have to go,” I said, but she hesitated.

“Listen, I have to tell you something. In case I don’t get another chance, or whatever.”

“Of course.”

“Val told me she liked you for real. She told me that if you weren’t our dad’s best friend, she would have… never mind.”

“Thank you.”

“She called me the day before she died, said she had spent the night with you. She sounded really happy.

“I’m glad you told me.” I took her hand and we started down the road together, listening for the noise of a car, or footsteps.

I walked with Molly until we were within sight of her mother’s dacha, and she kissed me on the cheek, and I watched her run up the path until she got to the front gate.

I watched her go, swinging her arms, looking like Valentina from behind, only turning to give a jaunty wave, before she disappeared behind the gate and the stands of white birch trees.

I turned around and walked back to Sverdloff’s dacha. It took me fifteen minutes, maybe more. From the road, I could see a small light on the porch that might be somebody lighting a match.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

“Hello, Artie.”

I saw him as soon as I got through the gate. He was sitting on the steps, smoking. I didn’t turn away, there wasn’t any point, I just kept going until I had climbed the same steps to the porch, and was sitting next to him. It wasn’t a cigar in his mouth. It was a cigarette and he offered me one.

The man I’d seen all week in the seersucker jacket held his Zippo lighter up for me.

In the flame I could see his face a little better, a pleasant round face, short white hair, a snappy haircut, calm milk chocolate brown eyes, big ears which, if he’d grown up in the West, somebody would have fixed.

In that strange purple light, I could see he was older than I’d thought, maybe seventy-five. He wore a black polo shirt and khaki pants and loafers instead of the Timberlands I’d seen him in before.

“Where is he?” I said.

“Sverdloff, you mean? Your friend, Tolya?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to take you to him.”

“You have a name?” I said, wondering if I could get my gun out of my pocket, and if I did what I would do with it.

“Bounine,” he said. “Fyodor Samuelovich.” His English was perfect. I figured him for some kind of creep, somebody who was in business with Sverdloff. Or maybe he was a cop. In this fucking country, they were the same thing.

He didn’t talk after that, and he didn’t threaten me, he just got up off the steps and brushed his pants.

“Are you coming with me?” he said, though I knew there wasn’t any choice.

“I have to do something first,” I said, thinking about Molly down the road with her grieving mother.

“Not right now,” he said. “Have you got a weapon with you?”

“Why?”

“It would be better to leave it before we go.”

“Where are we going?” I took the gun out of my pocket and placed it on the porch, then I picked it up, emptied it, and tossed it into the bushes. “Okay?”

He shrugged and I knew one of his guys-because he would have guys all around the house-would retrieve it.

“How did you find me?”

He smiled slightly. “It wasn’t that hard,” he said. “You stayed in a flat, I believe, where the caretaker was quite eager to make a little money. He said you disrespected the bones of the dead.”

“God.”

“I know. He called in at the local police station and was told the bones were from a butcher, and he then mentioned a foreigner staying in an empty flat.”

“I see.” I’d been an idiot to talk to Igor. I’d been stupid. Out of my head.

“Please get in the car with me? I’d be grateful,” he said. His cigarette was still held between his thumb and forefinger the way my father always held them.

I got in. He turned the key. Turned the car around. He put a CD into the slot, and “Fontessa”, the exquisite MJQ track, played.

“You like this music?” he said.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

“I’m so happy to see you, Artyom, my friend, I’m happy.” Tolya took my hand like it was a life raft.

In his pajamas and a bathrobe, he was propped up on a hospital bed. Oxygen tubes ran into his mouth. Machines around him monitored his vital signs. He breathed heavily, gasping a little.

It was the same clinic where I had been with Viktor Leven, the fancy medical facility. Viktor had heard right about it in the first place, but the staff had stonewalled us.

A light blanket lay across Tolya’s legs, but his feet were bare.

“Get me those slippers, can you?” he said softly, and I kneeled down and found some slippers and put them on his feet. “I wish I could smoke,” he said.

I sat on a straight chair close to the bed.

The room was large with two windows that looked out on to a courtyard. On the walls were prints, Monet’s flowers. A half-open door led to a bathroom.

On one side of the hospital bed was an easy chair. In the corner farthest from Tolya sat a middle-aged nurse, glasses on her nose, looking at a TV with the sound off. She rose, asked if I’d like to be alone with Tolya, told me she would sit outside the room in case he needed anything. I thanked her.

“How are you?” I said because I couldn’t think of anything else.

“Better because you’re here, Artyom.” He pushed himself up on the pillows.

What was it, a little more than a couple of weeks since he had asked me to take books to Olga Dimitriovna in Brooklyn? It felt like a lifetime.

“You have something to tell me, Artyom? You have that look.” He tried to smile.

“Yes. It wasn’t you. They didn’t kill Valentina because of something you did, it wasn’t you,” I said, and he began to weep. “They murdered her because of what she was doing at the shelter in Moscow, because she talked about it, because she got in their faces and accused them of stealing money and using little girls.”

“My God,” he said, and put his head in his hands.

“It wasn’t you.”

He looked up at me, an expression of terminal sadness on his face.

“What difference does it make?” he said. “She’s gone. And it was me, Artyom, it was me because I got close to evil, and it killed Val, and it killed poor Masha Panchuk, who also was somebody’s daughter.” He closed his eyes. I thought for a moment he was sleeping. Then he looked at me. “This is my prison, a very nice one, of course, but I can’t leave.”

“What?”

“They arrested me, asshole, tuft of mouse turd, my great dear friend.”

“What for?”

“They came to my parents’ house, in Nikolina Gora, and they brought me here. You realized I had been there? At the dacha?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I could smell you. Listen, I know what happened. To Val, I know.”

“You never liked the scent, you figured me for queer because I like the perfume Lorenzo made me. I’d like to see Florence again.”

“Shut up.”

“How can I, when it’s such a pleasure to have you here to torture this way?” said Tolya, joking around like he always did, though I could see it was an effort, the speaking was an effort, the simple act of it.

“What are they saying you did?”

“Sit closer to me, asshole,” said Tolya. “Move your chair over.” He looked at the ceiling.

“You think they’re sharing our conversation?”

“Just like the old days,” he said. “You remember? Were you ever arrested?”

“Only with my mother. In her refusenik period,” I said. “Only then. You?”

“Yes, spooky KGB guys in bad raincoats said I was of interest, as they say, in my rock and roll period, when I was on stage with my Fender Stratocaster, which nobody had seen, which I had arranged to get by not exactly kosher means. But I told you all this a million times, asshole, all about how much fun we had back in the day, Artyom. They let me go after they scared the shit out of me for twenty-four hours. Back in the day, Artie,” he said, switching to English. “It feels like a million years ago. How did I become like this?” he said. “How did I become an asshole of capitalism? I was a rock and roll hero. People wrote my name on walls, like Eric Clapton. ‘Sverdloff is God’, it said, or something like that, I don’t know if we had God back then. ‘Sverdloff is God’,” he said again wistfully.

“Things changed,” I said.

“I wanted to go to the West in a hot-air balloon, I wanted to sail over the Berlin Wall. Instead I went with a business-class ticket. Return.”

“Talk to me, Tolya. What’s going on here?” I pulled my chair close to where he sat, and he leaned down and I could feel his breath, could smell the sickness.

“A man in a nice jacket from Brooks Brothers brought me. Off the rack,” he said, trying to smile. “The jacket. Old for the job.”

“What is he?”

“He told you his name?”

“Yes.”

“Fyodor Bounine. Fyodor Samuelovich Bounine. You get the joke, right? FSB, maybe he has these initials embroidered on his underpants. It’s his real name, of course, but he thinks he’s a wit. Very good English. Very good Chinese. And Arabic. And very pleasant to me. Asks me a lot about you.”

“Nobody hurt you?”

“It’s not like that. They arrested me on money-laundering charges, they say.” He snorted, trying to laugh. “Then they add murder. It happens. They just take you away, nobody knows. You can’t call, nothing.”

“We can get you a lawyer.”

“It doesn’t work like that.”

“I saw Molly,” I said, not knowing if I should tell him.

He leaned forward. “Where? She’s okay?”

“I saw her at the dacha. She’s fine. She’s with her mother. I told her to go back to New York, or Boston.”

“I want her out of this fucking country. Get her out. Will you do this for me, Artyom? Please. Whatever it takes.”

“I already started on that,” I said. “I’ll do anything.”

“You don’t owe me.”

“You mean Billy,” said Tolya. “We never spoke of this.”

“Yes.”

“You want to speak about it,” said Tolya. “You want me to confess? You want to confess?” He laughed to diffuse it, and I didn’t answer. “I did for you what a friend does,” he says. “You couldn’t let them put your nephew, Billy, back into an institution. You told me that day on Staten Island, near Fresh Kills, the garbage dump. You knew he had killed and you couldn’t let him run away, or be free by himself. But you didn’t want him locked up again. There wasn’t any other way,” he said. “It was okay. You think I’m somehow immoral, don’t you Artemy?” he said softly without any anger. “You think because I am able to kill, I’m a killer.”

“No.”

“Sometimes you have to do what is right, even if it’s not moral. Sometimes it’s kinder. Revolutionaries never thought about that, they thought about their ideologies, they thought if only they had the right words, people would stop suffering. It’s ideology that kills people.”

It was this about Sverdloff I never came to terms with. I never understood how he operated in a world where he dealt with crooks and creeps and still remained himself. Remained a man full of life, happy with life, a guy who could eat and drink and laugh, who loved his kids and his friends.

Or had been. Had been that man before Valentina died. A guy who would do anything for me because we were friends. When he took Billy away a few years earlier, when he made a decision I couldn’t make, it was everything. I should have kept Val safe for him.

Say it, I thought to myself. Killed Billy. Tolya killed Billy to save him. He did it for you.

“I wish I could see Molly one more time,” said Tolya.

“What’s the ‘one more time’ thing?” I said, jaunty as I could.

“I’m dying, Artyom.”

The nurse came into the room, held out a little paper cup with some pills, Tolya took them and she offered him water. Tolya thanked her, and in a little while some color flowed back into his face.

“You’re in pain?”

“It’s not so bad.”

“Is this the polonium?”

“No,” he said.

“And Val?”

“There was never any polonium, Artie. The autopsy would have showed it. I let them believe this for a while because people paid attention. I had leverage with the press because of it, it was much more exciting for them. Everybody loves a story about crazy radioactive shit.”

“What do you need?” I said.

“Everything is finished.”

“Grisha Curtis killed Valentina.”

“Yes.”

“But not with polonium?”

“No,” said Tolya. “I made him talk to me when I found him in the woods, in the grounds of his uncle’s dacha. He made it look that way, he put the empty packages of Staticmaster around, so it would look as if somebody had poisoned her. But he just killed her, he stuffed a pillow over her face.”

“Did he mention a girl in London, Elena Gagarin?”

“Yes, he beat her up. He was afraid she was talking to you, that somehow she knew something. She was a sad girl, she didn’t know anything, but she liked to retail gossip.”

I looked at him. “You said they added murder charges to your arrest.”

“What do you think I did when I found this bastard who killed my Valentina?”

“I understand,” I said.

“That’s good.”

“What is it, if it’s not polonium?”

“My heart,” he said.

After he caught his breath-it was unbearable to watch him try to speak-he said, “I asked them to let me see you.”

“I’m happy.”

“They said what do you want, and I said, I want to see my friend. Fyodor Samuelovich said fine, where is he, and I said I didn’t know. But I knew you’d follow me to Moscow. And he said what is your friend’s name, but I could see he already knew, and when I said it, when I said your name, he smiled. But he already somehow knew it was you.”

“How?”

“Maybe they have people in New York, or London. I think maybe Fyodor Samuelovich, call me Sammy, no kidding, wants something from you. As soon as I said your name, I could see it. He’s an old guy, but he gets it, he learned from the best, he’s a hustler like the rest of us. He wants something from you,” said Tolya for the second time. “Whatever it is, don’t do it. Can you help me?” he added, trying to get out of bed and into the easy chair.

I put my arm under his. He leaned on me, and I could feel the weight and the fatigue and the sorrow. He sat down heavily.

“Tell me how to help you.” I looked at the ceiling as he had done.

“What difference does it really make? They know everything. I always wondered why people made such a fuss about bugs, when they knew it all. They didn’t hurt people to find out. They hurt them to make a point to other assholes, warn them, make sure they were afraid.”

“Go on.”

“You understand what I did? About this guy, this guy who killed Valentina? He was a monster. He killed her and he hired a thug who killed Masha Panchuk, but you knew that. The thug, this Terenti, saw Masha leave my club and thought it was Val, and he followed her to Brooklyn to the playground where you found her,” said Tolya, speaking his mix of English and Russian. “You have any cigarettes?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Asshole, if I am dying, I want to die smoking. I wish I had some cigars,” he said. “You know at first, I thought they arrested me because I told jokes.”

“What?”

“I did what I wanted in London, New York, I did bad deals, when I was mad at officials in Moscow, I made jokes, I talked too much, I said what I wanted. I laughed at them.”

“Of course.”

“I’m glad I told them what I think of all of them. I’m glad,” he said.

“You always tell great jokes,” I said, putting my hand on his. “There must be something you want. Tell me what to get you, tell me how I can help?”

“They take good care of me here, Artyom, but I think there’s a little catch.”

“What is it?”

“I think at some point, they will move me from this lovely hospital to someplace not quite so nice, you understand, to a different sort of hospital. The Russians are quite good at this, stashing people away in hospitals far from Moscow. I want to get out, but not if it costs you too much. I’d like to see Molly,” he said. “But I want you to remain this moral man I admire.”

“What else?” I pulled my chair close to him, and leaned over to touch his arm.

“You understand what I had to do? But they can call it murder. Cases last a long, long time here. They can last your whole life. Listen, don’t be so sad.”

“I’ll get you out,” I said, thinking suddenly of Roy Pettus, who had asked me to do favors for him. Pettus would come in handy. Maybe Fiona Colquhoun, too. Maybe they would help.

“What would it take?” I asked again.

“I can’t tell you, I don’t know,” said Tolya, closing his eyes. “They’ll tell you. Bounine, he’ll be waiting when we’re finished here. I mean for you, Artyom. Not if it costs you too much,” he said again. “Okay? Do not sell your soul to that devil, I’m not worth it anymore,” he said, and closed his eyes.

By the time I got up to leave, Tolya was back in the bed, asleep. I looked at him, lying on his back, his big feet sticking out of the blanket, and I realized I had seen him like this before, in a dream, in a terrible nightmare where I couldn’t save him.

I felt bereft. Here was the one person, the single human being I could always count on, who would show up when I needed him, who was a pain in the ass, but was there, big, solid as a mountain, on my side, available. My friend. It wasn’t in my plan for him to disappear, to die, to simply not be there. Somewhere deep down I had expected us to get old together. That wouldn’t happen. He needed a new heart. I couldn’t give it to him.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

“Coffee?” said Bounine when we reached his office in Moscow.

We didn’t speak much on the short ride from the clinic, but now he chatted, made polite small talk while I sat down across from his desk. A secretary brought coffee and a tray of snacks.

Bounine told me he had spent time at the UN in New York, and he had also lived in London. He sipped some coffee and, as if it were a casual thing, assured me that Sverdloff would be well treated.

“When are you letting Tolya out?”

“Please,” he said, gesturing at the snacks on the table, cake, and cheese and cold meats.

“I’m not hungry,” I said, wanting to punch him. I tried to stay cool. I tried not to think about Tolya in the hospital bed.

“I’m sorry we had to pick you up at the Sverdloff dacha like that. I really should have phoned you instead.” He handed me an envelope. Inside was a video.

“What is it?”

“Marina Fetushova said she would send this to you.”

“You know her?”

“Everybody knows everybody here,” he said.

“You’ve looked at it?”

“Yes. It’s just a few low-level officers, all retired now, and some girls, not very nice to watch, but the girls are all over eighteen, we’ve checked. It’s not important, not anymore.”

“And Grisha Curtis? He’s in it?”

“Sadly, yes. But he’s dead, so it doesn’t matter either. You can keep it if you’d like.”

I took the package.

“But you were following me, weren’t you, you followed me all over Moscow, right? How did you spot me?”

“We like to know where our visitors are,” he said.

“You knew I was here almost as soon as I arrived.”

“Yes.”

“How?”

He laughed. “It was accidental. It was my granddaughter.”

“What?”

“Would you like a drink?”

“Sure.”

He got up and went to a table on the other side of his office. He picked up a bottle of Black Label, held it up and I nodded. He poured some in two glasses.

“There’s no ice, I’m sorry.”

“You already knew I drink Scotch?”

“You’re a New York cop. I assumed you might like Scotch. How I miss it.”

“The Scotch?”

“The city.”

“Yeah, well, let’s move on to the subject, I’m not here for nostalgia, am I?”

“My granddaughter’s friend met you on a bus from the airport. I took the girls to the ballet the next night, and young Kim was excited about her trip and the nice American she had met on the bus, and she showed me your picture, the one she took with her cellphone. It was just chance. I saw you, I recognized you.”

“Christ. You breed them young.”

He laughed. “It wasn’t like that. You were from New York. I had told my granddaughter and her best friend so many stories about New York.”

“You have stuff on me? Why? Because I left this miserable country when I was sixteen? Because my mother didn’t like losing her job because she was a Jew? It was in another century.”

“We don’t have stuff on you, Mr Cohen,” he said, using my American name. “All we knew was that you didn’t register at a hotel, but it was your picture on Kim’s phone. After that, I had a few colleagues ask around. And there was the crazy caretaker, Igor, of course. Otherwise, you’d be hard to find in this huge city.”

I drank the Scotch in two gulps, he offered more, I refused. “What are you going to do with Sverdloff?” I looked at the door, an old padded green leather door, the kind the apparatchiks used to have. On the desk was a red plastic phone. My father had a red phone.

“You’re looking at my old phone,” he said, smiling. “I keep it as a souvenir.”

“I see you keep Putin’s picture on the wall, is it a souvenir?”

Putin’s chilly face looked down from over the table with the Scotch. Beside it was a picture of Medvedev, the new president who was only Putin’s puppet. Also very short. You saw him on TV, he looked like a dwarf.

“Yes, but Mr Putin does more good than not,” Bounine said. “People feel safe and they have food to eat.”

“I want my friend out of that place,” I said. “I want him out, and I’ll do what it takes. State department. Anything. He’s a US citizen.”

“He isn’t, in fact,” said Bounine. “He has a Russian passport. He has a UK passport. Nothing from the US. Maybe the Brits will help you. Or maybe there is somebody in the US.”

“Thanks.”

“I think you’re friendly with Agent Roy Pettus, isn’t that right? I met him a couple of times when there was quite a lot of Russian-American friendship after 9/11, when we did some work together. Look, Artie, I could help you, if you like,” he said. He leaned back and stretched out his legs to look at his dark brown loafers.

“I’ve been wearing these for almost forty years,” he said. “I got my first pair of Bass Weejun penny loafers at B. Altmans on 34th Street. I thought it was so stylish, this putting of a shining penny in your shoes. So American.”

I was missing something, and I said, “So you see this picture in your granddaughter’s friend’s phone, how come you were so interested in it, how come you recognized me, how the fuck did you know who I was?”

“I knew your father,” he said. “He was my boss.”

Usually I figured life was mostly random. Unless you were religious and believed in some kind of cosmic pixies, it was random. On the job, you sometimes got lucky, you tripped over something useful, there was an accident; mostly you solved a case this way.

Bounine’s story about the little girl’s phone was the kind of thing that happened. It happened. When he mentioned my father, though, something in me resisted. I tried not to believe him. Not at first.

“It’s true,” he said softly. “I worked for Maksim Stepanovich for several years in New York City. I was a kid. I was just out of language school, my first year in the KGB,” he said. “I was twenty-four and I got lucky. I had good connections. It’s true. Later, in Moscow, we continued to work together, though he was promoted faster then me. He was a brilliant agent, Artemy. I remember your mother, too. She wasn’t in New York. But I met her here in Moscow. She loved France. Isn’t that right?”

I fumbled in my pocket for some cigarettes. Bounine threw me a pack, and I lit one, and sucked in the smoke like a drug.

“And you saw me on the street.”

“Yes. I saw you in the phone, and I thought, my God it’s Max, my old friend, but he’s been dead so long. I ran a few things through the system and I discovered you were calling yourself Max Fielding. It seemed to connect. Max, you see, you used your father’s name.”

I had never thought about it when I picked the name out of the blue, never once thought about the fact that it had been my father’s name. He had been Maksim. Max to his friends. To me he was my father. My dad. The only good thing about this miserable country where I grew up, my father, and my mother, of course. But most of all, him.

“What system?” I said.

“Ours. Yours, too. Why not? We throw bombast at one another, but we’re allies, more or less, your Mr Bush was just here with Mr Putin in Sochi, and from the time he invited his good friend Vladimir at the Texas ranch, we began setting up systems to share certain things.”

“So you shared me? Pettus shared me with you?”

“It’s never that simple.”

“I want Sverdloff out.”

“I understand.”

For a few minutes, Bounine sat, silent, sipping his whisky, as if weighing his thoughts.

The photograph showed my father and Bounine, both very young, both in hipster suits and narrow ties. My father’s arm was around Bounine’s shoulder and they were standing near the arch in Washington Square Park. In the corner of the photograph, my father had written his name and a fond message to his friend, Sam. July, l962.

“Jesus.”

“Yup. We were Max and Sam in New York,” he said. “And when I discovered that you were Sverdloff’s friend, I thought to myself, Artemy will want to help his friend. And I will help him because his father helped me. I have something else for you,” he said, and removed a large envelope from his desk. “Will you have dinner with me? I don’t want to talk about any of this here.”

I nodded.

“Good. We’ll make a plan, you and me. We’ll make a plan to get your friend out.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

GUM, the great department store on Red Square, was outlined in little white lights. It glittered like Christmas on the soft summer night.

The manager of the small Italian restaurant just to the left of the entrance to GUM appeared as soon as we arrived. He smiled and shook Bounine’s hand, and mine, and showed us to a table on the terrace just outside. All Red Square was spread out in front of us, St Basil’s, the Kremlin, GUM, with its lights. Bounine ordered a bottle of red wine. I asked for Scotch.

“It’s fine, nobody will bother us here,” said Bounine. “It’s mostly tourists. You seem edgy. I’m not going to arrest you or put some idiotic muscle on you, you don’t believe these myths about us anymore. Do you? The FSB is different. We don’t do those things. We did, once, of course, the KGB had idiots just like the CIA. Well, slightly better educated idiots, but we’re a different country.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s true.” He sipped the wine. “Let’s order. The rabbit lasagna is delicious.”

I ordered steak. He ordered the pasta. I wasn’t hungry.

“What do you care about in this new kind of country, as you call it?” I said.

“We care about our own. We value our people. We encourage people to keep in touch, to act like a family. In our business we often go on vacations together, quite a lot of us have married into each other’s families. We respect the children of the great agents who taught us. Like you.”

I kept my mouth shut. I was too wrecked to eat much. I lit a cigarette. I didn’t want him to see my hands shake. I had been up against killers and creeps, jerks who beat me up, people who murdered children. This was worse. I wanted Tolya out of the rathole he was in. I’d do anything. Just ask, I thought. Just tell me what it is.

“It’s okay, Artie, I like that name, I remember your dad saying he was going to call your Artemy and would make your Western name Artie because he adored the way Artie Shaw played clarinet.”

“So?” I tried for nonchalance.

“Is your dish okay?” he said, as if it were a social occasion.

“I’m not hungry.”

“Would you like another drink?”

“Sure.”

Bounine ordered it for me.

“We didn’t poison Valentina Sverdloff. Nobody poisoned her, but I think you already know that,” said Bounine. “We don’t do that kind of thing anymore. Not for decades,” he chortled slightly. “Did you know your dad and I were young guys together in New York City, in the early l960s? Yes, I told you, I’m sorry, I repeat myself a bit. We loved it, but he loved it most because of the music. Did you know?”

“And Sverdloff? The polonium?”

“My dear boy, of course not,” he said, sounding surprised. “Oh, no, it’s become an explosive urban myth, ever since poor Litvinenko died, but that was a single terrible event. Some idiot had the idea of using polonium-210 on the assumption nobody would trace it. It was, thank God, a one-time blunder.” He smiled and when he smiled it lit up his face and made it charming, like a TV anchor, all sincere intelligence and warmth, and all invented for the moment.

“So you understand, we had nothing to do with Miss Sverdloff. I promise you,” Bounine added.

I drank.

“Unfortunately the young man she married turned out to be a bad egg, as we used to say. He found out he had married a passionate young woman, who spoke her mind, perhaps too much, and he didn’t agree with her, and I think, personally, he went off the rails.”

“Or one of your creeps told Grisha Curtis to kill her. Or he was yours, this Curtis creep.”

“You could be right. Grigory Curtis was eager to help us, perhaps too eager. I don’t like zealots. There are, in any system, always one or two loose cannons,” said Bounine, who had a taste in English for clichés.

“But not you.”

“No.”

“What about Larry Sverdloff?”

“He’s one of those Russians who live in London and think they can make another revolution, it’s almost touching, that they think they can overthrow Putin, using their money to back various dissident groups. It reminds me of the days when Lenin and Trotsky and the rest of them sat around Europe plotting. It won’t come to anything.”

“What’s wrong with Tolya Sverdloff?”

“Didn’t he tell you?”

“Yes, but I want you to tell me.”

“Sverdloff, of course, has heart disease. He had it when this all began. Didn’t you know that in New York? Our doctors say he’s been ill for quite some time.”

Did I know? Had I seen something in Sverdloff’s face that night in New York on the roof at his club?

“I’ll give you the number of his doctors in New York, or in London,” Bounine added. “He may need a transplant. We can help. Perhaps it would be good for him to have a strong Russian heart?”

“Why would I believe you?”

“Why would you? For Sverdloff’s sake.” He put down his knife and fork and picked up his wine glass and glanced at the crowd in the square. “Things are much better now. People live well, they travel, they read books they like to read, listen to rock music, of course. I saw Paul McCartney play Red Square. Can you imagine? Of course, things are better.”

“I want him out now. Tolya Sverdloff. I want him to come home with me, to New York.”

“I understand. And we take care of our family, Artie. We like doing business with people we know. So many of our recruits can trace their lineage all the way back. You’re our family.”

“You think the FSB or the fucking KGB is some kind of aristocracy? You think the pricks who do your work have lineage?” I was sorry I said it. I was sorry in case in made it worse for Tolya. I bit my lip. I drank the Scotch.

“You are more like your mother,” he said. “Dessert?”

“Tell me how I can get Sverdloff out of here?”

“I have an idea,” said Bounine. “How lovely it is tonight,” he added.

It was a soft beautiful summer night. The red star on the Kremlin glittered. All around Red Square, ice-cream sellers fixed cones for tourists. A soldier leaned casually against the red granite of Lenin’s tomb and shared a joke with some tourists while a little boy had his picture taken against the mausoleum.

Bounine followed my gaze.

“You see things do change for the better,” he said. “I’m going to have an armagnac, perhaps a really nice one. Will you join me?” He gave a little shrug. “I hope all this lasts,” he added.

“All what?”

“All the good things we have now. Who knows? In a year, two years from now it might all disappear, the whole enterprise might just go bust,” he said. “Maybe capitalism wasn’t such a good idea, after all,” he added, chuckling. “If the economy goes belly up, well, let’s hope for the best, shall we?”

Did he order the armagnac at the cafe overlooking Red Square because it was Sverdloff’s drink? Bounine reached into his briefcase, and said, “I nearly forgot.”

He pulled out the envelope he had taken fom his office and opened it. Inside was an old-fashioned black and white school notebook. Bounine opened it at random. It was covered with my father’s elegant handwriting. Bounine offered it to me.

“Your father’s diary from his years in America,” he said. “When you left Moscow, he was asked to leave his notes behind, of course, but I kept it. ‘One day’ I said to myself, ‘I’ll give this to Max’s son.’ To you. I saved it for you.” He handed it to me.

“What do you want from me in return for the notebook? What’s the price?”

He shook his head.

“It’s for you. I’ve kept it too many years. It’s yours, Artemy, it belongs to you. I was so sorry when I heard your father had died in Israel. I wanted to write, I wanted to send you the diary. I couldn’t, but I mourned for him.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“He was a brilliant agent, he could listen all day and all night. He could get people to tell him anything, usually in the easiest way. But he was also a patriot. He did what he had to do,” said Bounine. “I envied him. I could see that, even when I was a young man. He could have gone all the way. To the top, I mean.”

“Except for my mother.”

“Except that.”

I got up and walked a few yards into the square and away from Bounine. All my life I had kept my father as I had remembered him. I kept the handsome blue-eyed young man who brought me candy and took me fishing and introduced me to jazz and told me, secretly, quietly, about New York City as if it were a paradise just over the horizon.

In those days, we imagined the KGB was a force for good, part of the future of the wonderful socialist state that had sent a man into space first. And even after that, even after I knew it was all lies, I kept my father as I remembered him, the one good thing about this miserable country where I grew up.

In some way I’d built everything on the notion that he was a good man. But Bounine had made me listen to the other truth. “He was a brilliant agent, he could get people to tell him anything. He did what he had to do.” I knew what it meant. Under my feet as I walked back to the table, I felt the cracks between the bricks. The ground seemed uneven.

“What do you want from me?” I said to Bounine. “For Tolya Sverdloff. What do you want?”

“I just thought it would be nice to keep the family contact with you, and I could drop in on you when I’m in New York,” said Bounine. “Nothing much. Sometimes we just need someone who can talk to people in their own language. I don’t mean English, of course, I mean their own lingo, idiom, on their own terms.”

Don’t sell your soul to that devil, Tolya had said. Don’t do that.

“And for that you’ll let Tolya out? You’ll let me take him home?”

He nodded.

“And these things you want help with?”

“There are always people we like knowing about, here and there, in New York, possibly next week or next year,” Bounine said, drinking his armagnac slowly.

I knew what Bounine wanted. He wanted me for an errand boy when he needed one. He wanted a line to me when he needed it. He wanted me to join the family business.

“You want to know how ill Sverdloff is?”

“I can see.”

“He’s tough, you know. He could be treated. I talked to the doctors. He could have some time left.”

“What about his businesses?”

“I don’t know about business, Artie, I never became a good capitalist.”

“Bullshit.”

“He could have time left. He might get well. His businesses are, well, how shall I say it? His own business.” He smiled at the small joke.

“You’re all bastards,” I said, and finished my Scotch, watching him light up a cigar. It was one of Sverdloff’s Cuban brands. The smoke swirled up around us.

“You really look like your dad,” he said. “So what do you think? Do we have a deal?”

I didn’t want to think. I wanted to go home to my other life. But my other life included Tolya who had done something nobody else would have done for me. I owed him.

From the restaurant’s sound system, a lilting Brazilian tune played, something by Joao Gilberto. I looked across Red Square, the last streak of light in the sky above the red star, above St Basil’s and the Kremlin.

And then I saw the horse. A girl rode the animal bareback, pressing her heels against its side, leaning forward to cling to its neck, stroking its mane, galloping across the square, laughing, hair streaming out behind her, skirt billowing in the evening breeze, as she headed for Resurrection Gate. And people looking began to laugh and cheer and blow her kisses. Somebody started an old Russian song and the others joined in. Even a couple of cops laughed before they chased her away.

Smiling, Bounine tossed his American Express card on the table, to pay for dinner, and the drinks. It was a Platinum card. And it was as if the gesture, the tossing it on the table, included me as if he could charge me on his Amex card.

It occurred to me in the pleasant cafe, surrounded by civilized people, savoring good wine, enjoying dinner, laughing merrily at the girl on the horse, that maybe this was how they did it now, maybe now everything was only about money, even spooks charged their thugs and hands-for-hire to American Express.

Bounine followed my gaze. “You’re not imagining it,” he said kindly. “It really is a horse. You see that at night in Moscow.”

I put my coffee cup down.

He took a little sip of the armagnac, held it to the light with satisfaction and said softly, “You’ll help us, then, won’t you, Artie?”