Bloody London Page 16

  “Sent by who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I said, “You have to help me here.”

  “I don’t know how to help you. I’m a messenger boy is all.” He looked ashen, shaky, a smear of blood on his upper lip. “I can’t even help myself. All I know is everything moves through London these days.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Russians.”

  “Spell it out.”

  “Pull around the other side of the diner. I don’t like to be near the road.”

  I turned the key and pulled the car into the shadows. Visibly, Tolya relaxed. He went on talking Russian. “One side America. The other side, the immense land mass, Europe, Russia, Asia. London is the axis for money. Body parts. The art market. Media. I do not mean individuals, Artyom, not just a few ladies who run this or that magazine, lovely English ladies that they are, of course,” he said, and because he was speaking Russian said something so dirty I laughed. From relief I laughed. For a minute, Sverdloff sounded like himself.

  “What else?”

  He took my cigarettes from the dashboard and unwrapped the cellophane. “Most of all, real estate. Property. Land. You know, in Europe we killed each other for land in the old days, now we have polite economic communities, but it’s all bullshit. The governments take down borders. Europe, Asia, one big party now.” He tried to laugh. “Look at Manhattan. London. For the right apartment, flat, house, mansion, dacha, villa, castle, factory site, skyscraper, landfill, even a burned-out jungle that will be a suburban sub-division next year, people will refrain from asking the hard question. People will fuck their neighbors, cheat their clients, kill. These are guys who buy and sell hotels, whole towns; look at the new cities of Asia. Look at Vegas. It’s Monopoly.” He exhaled, took one of the cigarettes and lit it with the car lighter. “It’s not just the money, it’s the size of your cock. You believe me? What time is it?”

  I looked at my watch. “There’s still time. You want some coffee?”

  He leaned back as if to retire into deeper shadow. “No. We did it in Hong Kong, we fucked with real estate over there, sold high, then we destroyed the market, the Asian economies went down on their knees. We’ll do it where we have to. Buy up the market, flood it, sell it low. Start again. Remember the fires in Malaysia? You think we were unaware? You think Russians did not have a hand in it? Before the banks went bust and the rouble fell apart, we knew real estate was the only game. But no more rules. All up for grabs. For the first time in my capitalist life, Artyom, I am scared to death.”

  “That guy Kievsky, he’s a player? Is it he who scared you?”

  He didn’t answer. Then he leaned towards me. “Look, Artyom, I don’t want you in trouble. You already got in the way. You were involved with Pascoe. You were my friend. They know your face. They came after me, and you were in the way, you started asking around.”

  I thought of Frankie. “It will end in London,” she had said. I said to Tolya, “I’m not going to London, man, you know. I’m finished with this thing.”

  “OK. Sure. But in case.” He shoved an envelope in my hand. A siren wailed behind me, got louder, then passed.

  “What is it?”

  “Keys. A place in London if you need it. It’s OK. It’s held through a respectable bank. No one connects me. I’ll try to meet you, but I have to go home now. Moscow. My kid’s in trouble.”

  He had been evasive before about the kid, and I said, “What kind?”

  “Not now.” He opened the car door.

  “I’ll drive you.”

  “No. From here I can walk. Better like that. No one sees us.”

  I knew it was for my sake. He got out on the side of the road. I could see the outline of the airport a few hundred yards away against the polluted sky. I got out too, and said, “Be careful.”

  “Yes.”

  I hugged him. “You said you were scared. Of who?”

  Tolya picked up his shoulder bag, stood silently for a few seconds, a huge lonely figure, then he said, “My own greed.”

  Leo Mishkin sat on the bathroom floor holding Frankie Pascoe’s hand. A medic, a thin blond guy in green hospital pants, bent over where she lay on the floor in the white robe she’d worn that morning. It was soaking wet.

  Mishkin had called emergency and Sonny heard the news and called me on my cellphone on my way back from Jersey. When I got to Frankie’s, Stan Getz was still on the stereo; “Falling in Love” was playing. Mishkin, whose face was raw and covered with stubble, wore a pair of jeans and a pajama top. He looked up; his face was wet. The medic stood up. Frankie Pascoe was dead.

  Frankie had put the music on, poured herself a pitcher of martinis, put it on the rim of the tub and run the water. She pushed the green button in her closet. The security system was activated. The steel walls snapped into place. She trapped herself in her own bathroom. Then she slipped into the tub, still in the robe – who could say why she wore it? – and began drinking.

  The maid found the room locked. Ryan Sweeney, the doorman, got hold of Mishkin because only Mishkin could get her out. He had the blueprints and knew the codes. He deactivated the system, got Frankie out, called 911.

  Mishkin didn’t move. I sat down next to him on Frankie’s bathroom floor and we waited for Sonny Lippert.

  I said, “You knew they’d pick you up if you came here.”

  “Yes.”

  “It would destroy your business, letting people know a safe room you built got screwed up.”

  Mishkin shrugged.

  “It was a lie, wasn’t it? It wasn’t the room. It was Frankie.”

  Mishkin didn’t care. He had protected Frankie for a long time. He stayed on the floor while they covered her up and took her away. I passed him some smokes, but he shook his head.

  He said, “Can we speak in Russian? It’s easier.”

  I nodded.

  “I don’t care if they pick me up. They’ll pick me up anyway,” he said.

  “You’ll take the blame for your son?”

  “Yes, I will say I was at the pool. They will check the DNA and see mine matches. Father and son.”

  I said, “Only half the markers are the same, Leo. Father and son, it’s only half.”

  He put his head in his hands.

  “Your son said he heard you say Thomas Pascoe was a problem. That you wanted him out of the way. Because of Frankie?”

  “No,” Leo said. “No, of course not. I loved Thomas Pascoe. He helped me. I was his friend. I tried to help him.”

  “But you loved his wife also?”

  “Also. Yes. It happens.”

  “Who wanted him out of the way?”

  “Thomas Pascoe made people nervous. He was a righteous man. He wanted it to stop.”

  “Wanted what to stop?”

  “I planned only to warn him. My God, I would not have killed Thomas. It was to be a warning.”

  “Your son took it a lot farther than a warning.”

  He didn’t answer. “You can’t prove it. There was no witness.”

  “You’d do anything for the boy?”

  “Yes. Anything.”

  “Who did Pascoe make nervous?”

  Leo Mishkin looked up. “In London, he said. People in London. They’re dividing the territory, Europe, you understand? They’re moving into London, west from Moscow, east from New York. Compared to New York, London is virgin territory for them. Thomas knew all this.”

  “What’s the scam?”

  “Like always,” he said. “Real estate. Property. Land.”

  “Is Tolya Sverdloff involved?”

  “Yes.”

  When they took Mishkin away, I looked around Frankie’s apartment. It was not exactly kosher, but I didn’t care and I found her passport. She had been to London half a dozen times that year. She had lied about even that.

  It wasn’t over. Ramirez whacked Pascoe, it was him that did the job. But it wasn’t what killed him, not the big picture. The big picture was London.


  “Promise me,” Frankie had said. “Promise me you’ll finish this.”

  In some way I owed Frankie, and anyway I had promised her, and in a way I had loved her. I went into the library. Out the window, it was daylight. Monday morning. I found the tape Stan Getz had made specially for Frankie and slipped it into my pocket.

  18

  That night I went to Lily’s. I found a bottle of Scotch, poured a couple inches in a glass, lit a cigarette and sprawled on her bed. I could smell her on her pillows. I’d slept some. I felt better.

  Lily asked me to pick up some stuff for Beth. I have her keys. She has mine. I’ve been in and out of her place a million times, but I never looked in her stuff. A cop like me, you’d think I’m a nosey son of a bitch. I learned as a kid in Moscow there’s stuff you’re better off avoiding. They put that in your milk in Moscow: don’t ask. Don’t tell.

  I stared at the ceiling. There was nothing I could do for Tolya Sverdloff. Later on I’d fill in Sonny Lippert, but I was still wasted from fatigue. I’d think about everything later. I thought I’d take a nap. It made me feel good, being here, in her place, on her bed. Normality seeped back in.

  Later, I got up and went into Beth’s room. Beth’s clothes were neatly tucked in a dresser. It was a little dresser we bought in a junk sale on the island once. It was painted blue. I pulled out some winter things and packed them in a shopping bag. I couldn’t find one of the jackets Lily asked for.

  The pink loden coat – Beth’s obsessed with pink right now – was in her closet. On the top shelf were four small cartons I hadn’t noticed before. I pulled one of them down and put it on the floor, then I opened it.

  Inside there were pictures. I sat on the floor and looked at them. I lit a cigarette and kept looking. There were pictures of Lily as a child on Long Island in a smocked summer dress. Pictures of her at school with friends I never knew. College pictures. A picture of Lily in a fringed suede vest with her fist in the air surrounded by a group of Black Panthers. Lily in big shorts in the Peace Corps. Miniskirted in London. In bell bottoms. At friends’ weddings.

  I got up and took down a second carton and found more pictures, of her parents this time. The mother was tall, thin, unsmiling. The father had a stringy patrician look, a pursed, righteous mouth. In the same box was a copy of the Communist Manifesto, the mother’s name written in old-fashioned cursive on the flyleaf. Lily’s inheritance. I didn’t know if I should laugh or cry. We had that in common, anyhow: both of us had parents who were, once upon a time, true believers. A long time ago. Ten years since the Berlin Wall came down already. Time passed.

  Carefully I put the pictures back. At the bottom of the second carton was a flat blue gift box. I lifted the lid. Inside was a framed picture wrapped carefully in tissue paper. I lifted it out and unpeeled the paper. The eight by ten glossy was framed in glass and silver and it was signed. It read, “Tom to Lily, With Love.”

  At first I wasn’t sure what I was looking at, couldn’t focus, felt numb.

  Mechanically, I put the boxes back, then I took the picture and baby clothes, locked up the apartment, went out, got in my car and drove home. In the glove compartment I found the envelope Sverdloff had given me with cash and keys for an apartment in London. I shoved them in my pocket, then I looked at the picture on the seat beside me.

  The man in the picture had dark hair, but the patrician forehead, the aquiline nose, the bright eyes, were all the same as the day he died in the pool of his building on Sutton Place. Except the hair was white when he died. But the picture I had beside me now, the photograph I’d found in Lily’s drawer, was a carefully preserved portrait of Thomas Pascoe.

  Part Two

  London, November

  19

  A faint oystery light smudged the November sky outside the window. I swung my legs over the edge of the bed. I was in London, it was freezing cold and I couldn’t figure how the heat worked. I ran for the shower fast, the tiled floors bare, me hopping around like a fly on a cake of ice. It was early, before seven, and I’d slept lousy after I got into London the night before, restless, displaced, tainted sleep.

  At least the water was hot, and I stood under it and let it steam me back to life. Then I put on clean clothes. In my suitcase was the photograph of Thomas Pascoe. Why Pascoe died, the big picture, was here in London. I didn’t tell anyone I was coming, not even Lily. I had to get my head screwed on straight. I wanted to know how she was connected to the Pascoe case and why she kept his portrait in her kid’s closet. She left New York in a big hurry three days after the case broke. Maybe it really was because I was on the job. Maybe it was that simple and she was pissed off at me, or scared for me, but I didn’t call her, not yet. I put it off.

  If Lily was here in London – and she was here – Phillip Frye was back in her life. It was Frye who called her the day after Pascoe died. Frye who offered her a job. Frye who could sucker Lily with a call. It was only a job, she said. Said she’d finished with Frye years ago. Now, I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out.

  Jacket on, collar up, I went into the kitchen, made some instant because it’s all there was; standing in front of the glass door to the balcony, I drank the putrid brew out of a blue and white mug. There was a radio and I switched it on. A woman’s voice, poised but icy, talked politics.

  The apartment in the renovated warehouse was sleek as a ship’s cabin. Light wood floors, white walls, an open kitchen, a table and chairs, the bedroom with the bed, the white tiled bathroom. The balcony hung over a promenade along the river. I shoved open the balcony door.

  The fog seemed to lie over the town like old soft rags; it draped itself on my hands and face and left them wet. London wrapped in its traditional weather. What else could a tourist want? I laughed and finished the coffee. Then I looked up at the roof.

  The security was good: discreet video cameras, an alarm system. Anyone who got in – whoever left the dummy for me to find the night before – knew his way around. I slammed the door. What was it the cabbie said when I landed, with London lit up by bonfires like a war zone? Guy Fawkes Night.

  The dummy, the Guy they call it, lay inside on a white canvas chair. It was limp and harmless now. I picked up the picture I’d ripped off the dummy’s face. A Daily News photograph of me on a recent case. A snapshot snatched out of an Internet file, I guessed, and printed on cheap paper. I’d seen a copy before, in New York, the night the bastards wrecked my loft. Bastards!

  I stuffed my Knicks cap on the dummy, made more coffee. I didn’t tell anyone I was coming to London, but somebody knew. I should have gone to a hotel, but I didn’t have the dough, and anyhow, if somebody was interested in me being here, I wanted to know. I wanted a gun. I didn’t care if it was illegal here, and I grabbed the picture and the damp dummy, locked up the apartment, then took the elevator down.

  “Yes?” He had on a Hawaiian shirt with green pineapples. He stood behind a desk in the lobby and sorted out mail.

  “Who are you?”

  “Porter,” he said, not looking up. Youngish guy, thirty-five tops. Going bald in the middle.

  I held out the dummy and the picture. “I found this on the balcony. It mean anything to you?”

  He looked shifty, and rearranged his shirt. “Kids. A prank. You know, man. You staying here?” He had a whiney British accent, American slang.

  I put the picture in my pocket. I dumped the dummy on the porter’s desk and gave him a ten-pound bill. “See what you can find out about it, will you? Anyone been in that apartment the last couple days?”

  “Only the cleaner.”

  “Man? Woman?”

  “A woman.”

  “You talked to her?”

  “She didn’t speak English.”

  “What did she speak?”

  “Some sort of wog, I don’t know, Polish, Russian.”

  I gave him another ten. “She comes regular?”

  “The bank sends her in. Bank that holds the lease.”

  “B
ank holds a lot of leases here?”

  He shrugged. “You joking? Round here? After the crash, late Eighties, early Nineties, you could buy property here for peanuts.”

  “Find her for me.”

  “How much?”

  “Fifty.”

  “A hundred.” He moved out from behind the desk. I looked at his feet. He wore old Guccis but they were polished to a dull shine.

  “Been here long?” I offered him some smokes.

  “I’m the porter, like I said.” He picked up a can of Carlsberg from behind the desk where the mail lay. Swigged it.

  “What else?”

  “I was an estate agent. I was like heavy into Docklands property, then the market crashed, I went broke.” He shrugged, leaned back, crossed his feet, whistled tunelessly.

  “You do other errands?”

  “For cash.”

  It was raining outside. The building was part of a complex of converted warehouses, and on the cold, humid morning, the narrow street felt ancient, shut-in, sad. It was still dark and danker than any place I could remember except Poland. I jammed my hands in my pockets and left Butler’s Wharf. The passageway behind the building was empty, the restaurants and fancy food shop shut up, a few bottles of olive oil set in the windows.

  A man with an umbrella hurried towards the river and I followed him up a set of narrow stairs. I looked at the map I had. Tower Bridge.

  The river was so dense with fog, I couldn’t see the water. Along with the keys to the apartment, Tolya Sverdloff had given me a piece of paper with an address when I took him to Newark before he disappeared through the polluted night to the airport. I fumbled in my pocket for the address, then looked up. A taxi light floated through the fog and I ran for it.

  “High Ground” was the name of the house. It was written in gold leaf on the freshly painted black iron gates.

  On my way up, the fog had lifted a little and I could see London soaked in the rain. Everything dripped: trees, cars, gutters that ran with water. I must have dozed. When I opened my eyes, I felt lost. We were climbing a hill. I could see a little pond, some kids, maybe on their way to school, young kids in gray shorts, older kids in big sneakers, then an immense park.