I wasn’t a wine drinker. People who loved it bored the shit out of me, but sometimes Sverdloff got me over in the afternoon when the wine salesmen come around and we spent hours tasting stuff. Some of them were truly great. Like the stuff I was having for breakfast that morning.
Tolya saw himself, he had told me the other evening, as an impresario of the night. I said he was a guy with a bar.
He liked to discuss the wines, not to mention the vodka he got made for him special in Siberia that he kept in a frozen silver decanter. He went to Mali last January to visit his Tuareg silversmith. He stayed for a month. Fell in love with the music.
Sverdloff liked the idea of the rare piece of silver, the expensive wine, liked to think of himself as a connoisseur. It’s just potatoes, I said. Potatoes. Vodka is a bunch of fermented spuds, I told him.
“So you’ll take the books for me?” Tolya said.
“Give me the address.” I finished the wine in my glass.
“They’re for Olga Dimitriovna, you remember, you took some books before, the older lady in Starrett City? She likes you, she always says, please say hello to your friend. I got them special from our mutual friend, Dubi, in Brighton Beach, very good editions, Russian novels, a whole set of Turgenev,” he added, and picked up his half-pound of solid gold Dunhill lighter with the cigar engraved, a ruby for the glowing tip. He flicked it and relit his Cohiba.
“Of course.”
“Thank you for this, Artie, honest. It is only these books, and some wine, but this lady depends, you know?” He put his hand into the pocket of his custom-made black jeans, and extracted a wad of bills held together with a jeweled money clip. “Look, put this inside one of the books. She won’t take money, but I know she needs.”
I took the dough.
“I would go myself if I could,” he said.
“Yeah, yeah, and how would you ever find Brooklyn anyhow?” I picked up the bottle and poured a little more wine in my glass.
“So you’ll go now, I mean, you’re waiting for what,
MooDllo
?” he said, his term of affectionate abuse, a word that doesn’t translate into English but comes from “modal” that once meant a castrated ram but moved on to mean a stupendously stupid person. An asshole was maybe the right word, but in Russian much more affectionate, much dirtier. He glanced at his watch.
“What’s the hurry?”
My elbows on the bar, I was slowly winding down into a vacation mode, thinking of things I’d do, sleep late, listen to music, some fishing off of Montauk, maybe ride my bike over the George Washington Bridge, see a few movies, take in a ball game, dinner out with some pals, maybe dinner with Valentina though I didn’t mention it to Tolya. He was crazy about his daughter, Val, and so was I. If Tolya knew how much, he’d rip my arms out. She was his kid, she was half my age.
“Pour me a little more of that wine, will you?” I said.
“Just go.”
“I hear you. I’m going.”
“You’ll come by tonight?” said Tolya.
“Sure.”
“Good.”
I was halfway out the door, when I heard Tolya behind me.
“Artemy?” He stood on the sidewalk in front of Pravda2, and held his face up to the hot sun. He waved at a delivery guy, he smiled at a couple of kids on skateboards. He was lord of this little domain, he owned it, it was his community. I envied him.
“What’s that?”
He hesitated.
“You used to know a guy named Roy Pettus?”
“Sure. Ex-Feeb. Worked the New York FBI office back when, I knew him some, worked a case, a dozen years, more maybe, around the time we met, you and me.”
“I don’t remember,” said Tolya. “Anyhow, he was in here, asking about you.”
“When?”
“Last night after you left.”
“Pettus? What did he want?”
Tolya shrugged. “Came in wearing a suit, said he wanted a glass of wine, didn’t drink it, didn’t look like a guy who knows his Pauillac from his Dr Pepper. Made a little conversation with me. Asked about you.”
“What about?”
“How you were, were you still working Russian jobs,” said Tolya, “How’s your facility with the lingo. Doesn’t ask straight out, but kind of hangs around. Tells me we met at your wedding, knows you got divorced. Pretends he is just making conversation, but what the fuck is a guy in a suit like that doing in my club? I got the feeling it was why he dropped by, wanting to ask about you.”
“Why didn’t he just call me?”
“What do I know? Maybe he’s just some old spook who likes playing the game, what do they call it, tradecraft?” said Tolya laughing and making spooky noises and laughing some more. “Well, as my daughter says, whatevs, right?’
“Yeah, right. Last I heard Roy Pettus retired home to Wyoming.”
I headed for my car at the curb. I had gotten it washed in time for vacation, and it looked beautiful, gleaming and red, the ancient Caddy convertible. I climbed in, put the Erroll Garner disc into the slot, and turned the key.
“Think about coming into the business with me, okay?” Tolya called out.
Already I was listening to the joyous music of
Concert by
the Sea
, but I took in what Tolya said. Every month or so, when he asked me again, more and more I thought: why not go in with Sverdloff? Why not take him up on it, a trip to London, a chance for a new life, stop chasing fuckwits who murder people? Maybe it was time.
“Don’t get lost in Brooklyn,” Tolya called out, grinned and waved me away.
If I had gone straight to Brooklyn from Tolya’s, if I had not stopped at home to grab some swim shorts and call Valentina, maybe I could have avoided the whole damn thing, maybe I would have avoided the little kid, yelling and waving, mouth open in an O with a howl coming out.
By the time I saw her, as she darted into the street, I was a second away from running her down, from killing her. Sweat covered my face, ran down the back of my neck. The bag on the seat next to me fell on the floor, books tumbled out, the books I was taking to the old lady for Tolya.
I slammed on the brakes. I got out of my car in the middle of the street. There wasn’t much traffic out here in this dismal corner of the city, but a few cars were honking now, and I yelled at them and grabbed her up, the kid who was yelling, and sat her down on the curb. It was a warm dry day, gusts of wind coming off the water half a mile away. Balls of newspaper and dust rolled along the nearly empty street. It was a holiday. July 4.
On the broken sidewalk out here at the edge of Brooklyn, where it butts up against Queens, I put my arm around the kid in the dirty pink t-shirt and tried to get her to talk to me.
After a while, she calmed down some, and started talking in a tiny voice and I realized she was a Russian kid. I asked her name. Dina, she mumbled, and pulled at me, and I followed her across the street, which was lined with ramshackle houses, some of the windows broken and covered with plywood and plastic. In one of the yards weeds had grown up over the skeleton of an old Mercedes. There was garbage everywhere. A desolate place, fifteen miles from the middle of Manhattan.
Dina ducked under some rough bushes. In front of us was a gate to an old playground surrounded by chain-link fencing. There was a padlock on the gate. A piece of the fence was missing and Dina got on her belly and crawled under it. I followed her into a wasteland of overgrown weeds and grass, used needles, empty bottles. It was silent, a thick, dead silence, except for something creaking, a low raw sound I couldn’t identify.
The jungle gym was broken. The sandbox was empty, no sand to play in. Dina was silent now, too, she had stopped babbling, stopped talking. Then she lifted one skinny arm and pointed and I followed her gaze and saw it, a figure on a swing. It was the source of the noise, the raw creak, the metal chains grinding against the poles where the swing hung.
Wrapped in silver duct tape that glinted dully in the morning light, the figure – probably a woman – was sitting on the swing, arms tied to the chains with rope, a harsh wind moving her back and forth. Or maybe it was her own weight that propelled her as she went to and fro, back and forth, on the swing in the deserted playground in Brooklyn.
“When did you find this?” I said in Russian as softly as I could, though there was nobody else here.
“Is she dead? She is dead?” said Dina, and then suddenly broke away from me, and ran out of the playground, head down, too fast for me to catch her, a blur of skinny legs and arms and pink shirt.
I called it in, and went back to the swings.
I caught the body and held her still. She was heavy. She seemed to lean against me. I stumbled and tripped and fell on my knees. A broken bottle cut me and blood stained my ankle.
The feel of the greasy duct tape dank from humidity made me want to gag. I could feel this was flesh under the tape, that this had been a woman.
I’ve been a cop a long time, twenty years, more, but this was so surreal, for a second I thought I was hallucinating. I didn’t know what to do, not when the body against me seemed to breathe in and out of its own accord.
Was she still alive?
From above came the sound of a solitary plane; piercing the blue sky over the city, it came in low over the Jamaica Wetlands on its way into JFK.
I had to know what was under the tape.
Holding the body still with one arm, I lifted a small section of tape off the face. The tape rasped against the skin. It had been crudely done. The tape came away easily. I touched the skin near the nose lightly, and I saw one of her eyes and thought I felt it flutter, as if it might suddenly open.
She was dead. I never was an expert on physical death but she had been on the swing a long time, far as I could tell.
Wrapped up first? Dead first?
I wanted to beat it, get out, go back on vacation, but I had to wait for help. I didn’t want some other kid like Dina stumbling in here and seeing this.
Listening for sirens. Wishing I had a cigarette. Sweating in the hot sun, all I could do now was wait.
I didn’t know what else to do so I sat on the swing next to her. Together, the dead woman and me, we swung back and forth, to and fro, like kids early in the morning with nobody else to see them.
Behind me was the sound of sirens, of voices, of footsteps. I got up off the swing, turned and saw them coming, a small army trooping onto the playground.
Somebody had removed the gate so the ambulance people could get through. Uniforms, detectives, forensics people, all of them streamed in. It was like a tribal ceremony, the woman wrapped in silver tape on the ground now, everyone else moving around her in a ritual dance.
I spotted Bobo Leven, a young detective who was Russianborn. I went over and told him what I knew and then I started out of the playground. Bobo tried to follow me. I told him it wasn’t my case. I happened to be around, but I was leaving. He wanted my help, but I said I was sorry, I had to go, I was on vacation.
“Good luck with the case,” I said finally, shaking loose of Bobo Leven, hurrying away now as a couple of photographers from forensics brushed past me to take more pictures of the corpse like the paparazzi of the dead.
On the wall of Olga Dimitriovna’s place were three photographs, black and white pictures of children staring straight at the camera, and she saw me look at them as soon as I entered the apartment.
“Yes, you imagine these were taken by Valentina Sverdloff, isn’t that right?”
I nodded.
“Please, come in, Artemy Maximovich,” she said, a wiry woman about eighty, sharp as a bird, with a humorous face who was crazy about reading, especially novels. I placed the bag Tolya had given me on a table, and she took one out and admired it.
“So, tea? Coffee? A sandwich also? You are hungry, Artemy Maximovich?” She went into the tiny kitchen to prepare food.
I put my head through the kitchen door and said I’d have a sandwich with my coffee. I wasn’t hungry, but I knew she was a solitary old lady who wanted me to stay a while and talk. I didn’t remember the photographs.
“Valentina gave them to me, a month ago, I think.”
“You know Val?”
“Of course. For a time she comes to me for her Russian lessons. But not lately. The photographs are of children at her orphanage in Moscow.”
“What orphanage?”
“Where she gives money,” said Olga. “I think perhaps not an orphanage but a shelter for girls. Please say hello. Please, sit down,” she added.
The apartment was small, the furniture old. Olga still gave Russian lessons, she had told me, but the money wasn’t much. From a radio came a Beethoven sonata.
Out of the window here on the sixteenth floor, I could almost see the playground where I’d just been. In the other direction were the nineteen brick buildings of the Boulevard Public Housing project. I could see the vast Linden Houses, too, tens of thousands of people stacked up in scores of towers and below them the tangle of urban outlands and inner suburbia, bagel stores and storefront churches, squat low synagogues, C-Town supermarkets, Chinese restaurants with bulletproof windows, makeshift mosques, Indian takeouts. And the water, the Jamaica Wetlands, the network of wild islands where water-birds congregate and the dirty strip of beach where gulls pick over garbage for their breakfast.
I love the water. I used to go out on the party boats from Sheepshead Bay and fish for stripers and blues. A few miles away from where I stood is a secret place I go sometimes, a nice tavern at the edge of the wildlife sanctuary, where you meet other cops and fire guys, Irish mostly; you drink some beers or Guinness and there’s a breeze and it smells unbelievably sweet.
My phone was ringing, but I turned it off and sat with Olga Dimitriovna and ate my fried-egg sandwich and chatted in Russian. She told me there had been three muggings in her building. I told her to keep her door locked at night and the chain on, and I gave her my cell number.
“Anatoly Anatolyevich Sverdloff is a good man,” she said. “He gives to everybody. Please say thank you.” Olga pushed her wire-rim spectacles on top of her head, thanked me again, and offered me a glass of brandy. I refused.