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  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.

  CHAPTER THREE

  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.

  “Please, come back, Artemy,” she said. “And tell Valentina to come.” She kissed my cheek, papery lips against my skin, and handed me a box of chocolates, which she had wrapped carefully with fancy gold paper and a red ribbon. “For Mr Sverdloff who sends me the books. You’ll give this to him?”

  “Yes, of course,” I said.

  “Tell Valentina I miss her, please.”

  “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  She shook her head. “But maybe I will call you for help with some of my neighbors. They are afraid.”

  “Of the muggings?”

  “Of everything, crime, black people, of the new kind of Russians, of anything different, of a feeling that they may have to move again, or leave America. Most are legal, but they are afraid. They pull down their blinds and pray to God,” she added. “Except God isn’t listening. So some of us fight instead. We fight landlords. We remember how to fight. Goodbye, again, Artemy.”

  As I walked alo
ng the corridor of Dimitriovna’s floor, I could hear classical music from behind the doors. Doors opened a crack, mostly old people looking out to see who it was, and if it was safe, and seeing other tenants looking out of their apartments, greeted each other in Russian, and fixed social arrangements for cards and tea. One elderly man held the door open long enough to take a good look at me.

  “Who are you?” he said in English with a thick accent. “What do you want?” He was angry, I could see he felt I was some kind of interloper, somebody without any real business up here. Maybe he figured me for a developer.

  Decades back, these high-rise towers had been built to house immigrants, forty bucks per room back then. They were almost trashed in the 1980s by gangs and guns, and people bolted their doors and rarely went out.

  Now the crack dealer creeps had gone the place was threatened instead by Trump, or some other feral developer: take it over, raise the rents, blow it up, co-op it. Looked like by fall the deal would be done.

  But Olga Dimitriovna and her friends weren’t going to budge easy, not without a fight, not after they’d made a life, a village up on the sixteenth floor, the old-timers helping the new ones, everybody in and out of each other’s apartments, sitting out on nice days on green and yellow plastic deckchairs, as if the sidewalk in front was a front porch; or making trips over to Brighton Beach to shop or eat on special occasions or maybe to the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan for music once a year.

  They would resist. They would organize. If necessary, they would fight. They had survived everything else. Stalin, Hitler. Coming to America.

  But even here, thousands of miles from Moscow, people were paranoid. Russia was hot as hell, in several senses, and now Putin was rattling his nukes, and people were secretly thinking: will America bend to these people? Will they cut off the stream of Russian immigrants? Will they listen to Lou Dobbs, the asshole on CNN who rants about immigrants every night? Even Russians with American passports, think: will I have to move again? Where will I go?

  Near the elevator, I turned on my cellphone.

  “Who is it?” I said, but the signal was dead.

  I banged on the elevator door. Where was it?

  Some of the tenants reappeared in the hall and watched until the elevator came and I went away. Ingrained in them was a deep suspicion, even hatred, of cops. Somehow they knew I was a cop, or suspected it. I realized I was still carrying the fancy box of chocolates and in the heat, I could smell them. I got into the elevator, feeling somebody was on my back. I opened the chocolates. I ate one. It had a nut in it.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I was still holding the chocolates when I left the building, and as I got to my car, I thought I saw the kid, the Russian girl, Dina.

  “Hey!”

  I ran after her. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it was the hot sun in my eyes. I ran until my lungs burned. I caught her near a wire fence that divided the street from a water-plant facility, and a stretch of filthy beach.

  When she saw me, she stopped. She hadn’t been running away from me.

  “Why were you running?”

  “I was looking for somebody,” she said in Russian.

  “Who?”

  “Nobody.”

  We were outside a broken-down housing project. Some of the little yellow tiles had fallen off the façade, like scabs off a half-healed wound.

  “You live here?”

  She shrugged.

  “You want to tell me something?”

  “Yes.”

  I looked at her. “You’re hungry?”

  She nodded and I took her into a bodega on the other side of the street and bought her a ham sandwich and a Coke and a bag of Fritos and watched her eat all of it without stopping. I wondered when she had her last meal. All the time I was with her, she stared at the box of chocolate. I gave it to her. She shoved the candy into her mouth.

  “Where do you live? Will you show me?”

  “I have something,” said Dina, clutching her fist shut.

  “Show me.”

  When she opened her hand, she had a thin silver chain with a blue ceramic evil-eye charm in light blue and white.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “In the playground,” she said.

  I waited.

  “Will you give me money for it?” She looked up at me and her eyes were like a desperate little animal.

  “Why should I?”

  “I got it from the playground. I got it near the swing.”

  “You took it from her?”

  “No. I picked it up.”

  “How much?”

  “One hundred.”

  “No way,” I said in Russian. “No deal.”

  “Fifty.” She was tiny and hungry and scared and an easy mark. The necklace wasn’t worth five bucks.

  “I’ll give you twenty-five,” I said and she lit up like somebody had turned a switch.

  I gave her some bills with one hand while I called a friend, a good female cop I know who would come and help me get the kid to a safe place.

  “I want to go home,” she said.

  I held on to her as best I could, but as soon as she felt me loosen my grip-I couldn’t handcuff her or anything-she broke away, same as earlier, just broke free and ran like hell and disappeared among the broken buildings.

  *

  “Artie?” It was Bobo Leven, the detective who had answered the call on the playground case. He was leaning against the jungle gym smoking. I looked at the swings. The body was gone.

  “Yeah, hi, Bobo.”

  “You got my message?”

  “I got it. I’m in a hurry, so what do you need?”

  “Thanks for coming.”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said. Bobo looked anxious. “You’ll do the case fine, Bobo, you’ll make your name with it.”

  His real name was Boris Borisovich Leven, but everyone called him Bobo. He was twenty-eight and smart as hell, having finished Brooklyn College in three years instead of four, followed by his MA at John Jay in criminology. He was still living at home these days, out on Brighton Beach with his parents.

  And he knew the Russkis out there as well as anyone in the city, including me. Also, his mother, who ran a little export-import business from the house-Russian embroidery, varnished boxes, cheap porcelain, that kind of shit-went back and forth a lot, so he had a handle on what was doing over there. Bobo had cousins every place: LA, London, Miami, Los Angeles, Moscow, Tel Aviv.

  At six four, with the kind of long springy muscles you get if you work out right, he played good basketball. He had an accent, but he was a handsome kid with nice manners, and when I needed a favor, he was always ready.

  I had worked with Bobo Leven a few times. And once, I took him out drinking with a couple of the guys, and he loved the tribal aspect of it, the fact you could say things you couldn’t say to anyone else in language you could never divulge to civilians. He knew there were things that only other guys on the job understood. They liked him okay. But one of my oldest friends said to me, “He looks nice, he acts respectful, but I don’t trust him much.”

  *

  A couple of hazmat guys, white paper suits, yellow rubber boots, showed up and started working over the playground, taking samples of dirt, looking at their Geiger counters, whispering to each other through their masks, and Bobo, seeing them, looked nervous.

  “What are they here for?”

  One of the guys removed his mask and I recognized him from a job I did once. Couldn’t remember his name, and he was older and heavier, but the face was the same. I went over and talked to him out of Bobo’s hearing. I didn’t want him getting in the way. The wind puffed out the papery white hazmat suit.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Somebody thought the scene could be hot,” said Tom Alvin, name on his badge. “They always think a scene is hot, you know, man, I mean, it’s an obsession, they find a case, they send us in, and what the fuck difference does it make, you know? They’re consumed, man, with the idea of a
dirty bomb. They read too much shit in the papers, you know, like that spy thing over in England, what was his name, the Russian dude that got poisoned? You heard about that? Some kind of radiation shit, but it was like a couple of years ago. Man, we better all pray McCain gets elected, he’s like a regular fucking war hero and if we get trouble, he’s the guy.” He paused. “You wanna know what they should do?”

  “What’s that?”

  “They should stop seeing movies that got nothing to do with what’s going on, all them big thrillers with nuclear shit in them, and worth nothing, nada, zero. They should spend some money inspecting container ships, and the baggage holds of all those aircraft from crazy places, how about hospital waste, how about them nuke plants that got no controls? But we don’t got no money for that, right, man? It’s coming, but not like this in some fucking playground, or in somebody’s sushi like the guy in London. One day, it’ll just come outta the sky, bang, like the Trade Center, bing bang boom!” He snorted, threw his smoke on the ground, crushed it with his foot and put his mask back on. “Artie, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You working this?”

  “No, just passing by.”

  “Didn’t you work a nuke case way back in the day, out by Brighton Beach? You tracked some nuke mule who carried stuff out of Russia in his suitcase? I remember that. With some of those fucking Russkis, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “So you think you got something here?” I gestured at the swing.

  “I’m not sure. You want me to give you a call?”

  I nodded in Bobo’s direction. “Call him, if you want.”