Londongrad Page 4

  A few minutes later, Pettus phoned me back. Wanted to see me, he said, know how I was doing. I said fine, come on over, and he said I can’t tonight, rehearsal dinner, wedding tomorrow. What about Sunday, and I said, fine, what’s up, Roy, I thought you retired. He said, can you meet me Sunday morning?

  There was nothing out of the ordinary in his voice, and I didn’t mention that I was pissed off the way he’d been going around asking my friends about me. That could wait until we met. Instead, I made a couple jokes. I said, so what’s with you, Roy, you back in the spook business?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “So what’s the favor?” I said to Val.

  “Tell my dad not to go to London. Will you tell him? You will, right?”

  “Why?”

  “It’s not good for him, just trust me, okay?” She had come out of Dubi’s shop, her arms full of packages. “Artie? He’s going over to London. Soon.”

  “Yeah, he told me he was going, but so what?”

  “When did he tell you?”

  “This morning. How come you’re so edgy?” I took her packages

  “I worry about him, he’s such a big baby sometimes, he’s so like unbelievably ready to believe people.” She kissed my cheek. “You’ll talk to him tonight, okay? I’m sorry to keep nagging, but thank you, Uncle Artie,” she said, half mocking. “Well, you’re like an uncle. My dad and you, you’re like brothers, right? He always says. He’ll do what you tell him, he will.”

  “You won’t go for his birthday?”

  “No.”

  “What’s up with London? You used to go a lot, you used to spend weeks and weeks there,” I was surprised by how urgent she sounded.

  “I hate what London does to him, my dad, ever since he opened his club there. He behaves like one of those dumb-ass oligarchs, you know? He buys big-time art. You know the joke about the oligarch who says I just got a tie that cost four hundred bucks and the other oligarch says, I paid six hundred for the same thing. Daddy buys and buys and buys. It’s like he’s addicted, like he wants to be one of them.”

  “He always bought a ton of stuff, he loves it.”

  “Just listen to me, okay? I’m telling you, this is different. He hangs out with ugly people. Greedy, bad people. Russians. Crooks. They think they’re respectable, they put on this front, but they’re crooks. When it comes to money, they’ll do anything it takes.”

  “So you’re telling me you don’t like London anymore.”

  “It’s not a joke, okay?” she said, sounding bitter. “I don’t want to ever go back.”

  “There’s something you’re not telling me.” We walked up onto the boardwalk.

  “Just please trust me, okay, and don’t ask. You have to love me and my dad enough not to ask,” said Val. “Tell him I need him here. Lie if you have to. Promise me? If you love me, do this.”

  I promised her. I would have promised her anything, much more than she knew.

  “You still want to swim?” I said to Val a few minutes later when we were on the beach, sand warm underfoot. I put her packages on the ground.

  She shook her head. “Too many rip tides this summer, Artie, too many people going under. I’ll wait for you. Go on. I’ll watch,” she said, and held up her camera. She watched while I took off my shirt and jeans. I felt shy.

  “You look cute in those swim shorts,” said Val, and held up her camera. “Smile for me, Artie, darling. I’ll take your picture.”

  The water off Brighton Beach was cold as hell, and I swam hard as I could, and it ran over me, waking me up, the sun deliciously hot on my head even late in the day.

  I dove back in, tasted salt, spat out the icy water. I turned over on my back and felt the water slide over me, and buoy me up; I squinted into the sun and blue sky.

  For a while I floated on my way back, then swam towards the toy-size ships on the horizon as far as I could. When I turned around, I saw Val on the beach, watching me, waving. As I ran towards her, she pulled a towel from my bag.

  Around us families were picking up babies and plastic buckets, shaking out their towels, getting ready to go home. A pretty girl in a little yellow halter-neck top and a bikini bottom was sunbathing on the beach near me and she glanced over and smiled. I smiled back. I’m not dead yet, I thought.

  We walked up to a restaurant on the boardwalk where the owner let me change my clothes in the bathroom. When I came out, Val was sitting at a table and we sat and drank and the day seemed to have spilled golden light over Brighton Beach, turning it into an Impressionist painting. Two elderly women, arms linked, held green and lavender nylon umbrellas over their heads, like parasols; a red-headed girl in pink sweats pushed an old lady in a wheelchair, while a dachshund, tied to the chair, trotted behind them; two old Russians sat on a bench in checkered caps playing chess.

  People were settling into the cafes along the boardwalk. “Castles In The Sand”, an old Stevie Wonder number from an album called Stevie at the Beach, was playing somewhere, and then came the Temptations’ “Under The Boardwalk”, as if somebody had compiled summer music to go with the glorious weather.

  I watched Val. So intent was she on what she was doing, she didn’t see me. She took a picture of three old men in wheelchairs playing cards. She snapped them just as one guy won the game with a triumphant slap of the cards on the fold-up table where they played.

  “Why don’t you get a new camera?” I said, gesturing at the camera that was always around her neck.

  “It may look like a junk-store relic to you, but it’s a Stradivarius to me, my darling,” she said. “I love my Leica M3-it puts me in the frame with all the greats, the guys from Magnum who invented photojournalism. Cartier-Bresson always said it opened his eyes and allowed him to grab those, you know what he called them, Artie? The decisive moments. I read he thought the silky noise of the shutter was like a Rolls-Royce door closing. Silky noise, wow. And it let him get close to things, this funny camera. Robert Capa took it to war, Eve Arnold took it around the world and into Marilyn Monroe’s secret life,” she added. “Okay, so I’m a fool for it, so I read too much about these people, but they’re my heroes. I love the feel of it-it’s like, I don’t know, like a part of me.” She picked up the camera again, and took my picture. “Anyway, it belonged to my grandfather in Russia. Am I boring the shit out of you? I bore all my friends with this camera shit.”

  “You never bore me,” I said. “You want me to take you back to the city?”

  “You have any gum?” said Val.

  I put my hand in my pocket, digging for some chewing gum, and found the chain with the charm.

  “Val?”

  “Yes, Artie, darling?”

  I took the necklace with the little blue and white charm out of my pocket.

  “You ever see something like this?”

  “Sure.”

  “Where?”

  “Anywhere that there’s crazy, superstitious people. Or fashionista babes, same thing. Rich Russian girlies like them with diamonds. Some believe this shit, remember the Kabbala stuff, Madonna’s red strings she was pushing? They buy into anything, even Landmark.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s the East Coast version of Scientology. No matter how many get degrees at NYU, the Russkis still believe hair grows on billiard boards. My best friend’s grandmother-she’s Ukrainian-is so superstitious, she thinks if you touch a Jew, you’re going to die from some Christ-killer disease. I once saw her staring at another friend of mine’s hair. I asked how come, she said she was wondering if this girl, who’s Jewish, had horns. She was serious.”

  “What about this charm?”

  “It’s just fashion. Artie. Where did you get it?”

  I told Val and as soon as I told her I was sorry.

  She turned it over. “Look, see, there’s this D on the back, it’s a party favor from a club named Dacha. Over in Sheepshead Bay.”

  “You go there?”

  “Once in a while,” she said. “People think Heaven is
a cooler club, but Dacha has more action and also people eat pickles with their vodka like the old country and everyone dances like crazy. You want me to walk you over?”

  “Yes,” I said, and suddenly there was a crack in the sky, a noise that split my ears. Boom. I started. Val jumped. She grabbed my hand and we ran up on the boardwalk as another rumble, like thunder, like war, and then we all looked up.

  Fireworks exploded over Coney Island, red, white, blue, gold, Roman fountains, pinwheels, flowers, flags, somewhere the sound of a band, live, from loudspeakers, and everybody along the boardwalk, a solid wall of people almost a mile long, yelled and cheered.

  “Happy July 4, Artie, darling,” Val said, kissing me on the mouth where the smell of her perfume and lipstick and suntan lotion stayed for hours.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Val, Val, Val, the girls cried out when they saw her, all those young girls, eighteen, nineteen, long legs, long hair, faces already flushed with anticipation and now with recognition, as if a celebrity had suddenly appeared. She smiled and hugged them, and exchanged kisses, a big sister to these girls waiting outside the club. Wound around Val’s wrist was the chain with the blue ceramic bead.

  Overlooking the water in Sheepshead Bay, a mile along the Brooklyn coast from Brighton Beach, was Dacha. A free-standing building painted to resemble a Russian country house, it was dark green, with silver birch trees stenciled on the side. Dressed up in a puffy shirt, his pants stuffed into high black boots, a large guy with a shaved head the size of a basketball barred the outside door, and manned the velvet rope.

  “You’re coming,” I said to Val, and she shook her head.

  “Oh, Val, come have just one drink,” a girl with carrot hair said, and Val said, “Take care of my friend Artie, okay, girls? Whatever he needs,” she said and gave me back the chain with the bead. “Artie?” She took her packages-the books from Dibi’s shop-from me.

  “What, honey?”

  “You’ll talk to him tonight? My dad? okay? See you later.”

  “Disco night,” said a kid, a Russian boy, not more than twenty, with contempt as I went into the club where the Bee Gees were wailing their stuff. He had a thick accent, slicked-down hair, sharp suit, no tie. He fondled a wad of bills.

  The multi-level club was filling up, as more and more people poured in, talking English, Russian, the boys on the make eyeing the spectacular girls with long legs, cheekbones to cut glass, perfect tits, tiny skirts, glittering jewels, stilettos. The air was thick, heavy with perfume and hormones, and the music, the Bee Gees, Village People, Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor.

  I looked at my watch. It was still early, just after nine, and there were people eating dinner, families, some of them getting up to dance, kids, older people. And could they dance! The middle-aged dancers knew all the songs and they could cut it, singing along, Marvin Gaye, James Brown, Abba.

  I went looking for the manager, up a spiral staircase that led to a bar and a roof garden. At a corner table, Val’s girls had gathered, and they waved at me, and smiled, and beckoned me to their table. I waved back and went out on the roof so I could use my phone.

  People were sitting around tables up here smoking, drinking cocktails, watching the last fireworks over the ocean. I walked to the edge of the roof and looked out over the canals, the fishing boats, the low-lying houses that ran right up to the beach and the ocean. I called my old pal Gloria Lopez and I got lucky. She was working the night shift.

  Gloria had been on the job, a young detective in Red Hook when I met her, but after she had her baby and dumped the creep she married, she did some forensic courses and went to work in a lab. Mainly she worked on fibers. But could network better than anyone I ever met, not counting Sonny Lippert, and she was a great girl with a low humorous voice.

  We went out to dinner once in a while, we caught a movie, a couple times I stayed over at her place. If I wasn’t hung up on Valentina, I could have gone for Gloria but I’d already screwed up enough lives, and we kept it light.

  I told her about the dead girl in the playground. She had already heard. Had seen it on TV, had heard from colleagues asking for forensic help on duct tape. She asked what I wanted and I said could she get a picture. A couple of minutes later Gloria called back. She was sending a picture of the girl to my phone.

  “Thanks. You have anything on the time of death?”

  “They’re saying maybe around one, two in the morning, something like that, I could get some more on it, if you want,” said Gloria.

  “Thanks again.”

  “That Russian cop, Bobo Leven, you know him, right, Artie? He’s been sniffing around me.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t get him. Somehow he got one of the guys here to send him a picture of the dead woman, he said he needed it right away, said he was on the job, the primary. He’s very ambitious, yeah, he hangs here whenever, he’s always looking into microscopes and asking about fibers and shit, he was here today, so I did what I do, I humored him, but I didn’t tell him nada. That right?”

  “You always do it right,” I said, and she gave a dirty sexy laugh into the phone and we agreed to go for Dominican food later that week in uptown Manhattan where Gloria lived with her kid and her mother.

  Before I put my phone away, I looked at the dead woman in the picture Gloria had sent me. She was on a metal table in the morgue. Marks on her face where the duct tape had been peeled away. She was very young. She was pretty.

  The bar was solid with human flesh now, and I leaned on the bar itself, a slick blue glass surface, ordered a beer, showed the bartender my badge and asked if the manager was around.

  A squat guy, square shoulders, bad skin, came alongside me and I could smell his heavy cologne. Said he was the manager, name was Tito. Tito Dravic, he added, then gestured to the bartender with some kind of authority. My beer arrived pronto, a fat short bottle of Duvel, great Belgian stuff with a big head.

  “Anything wrong?” Tito Dravic was nervous. Plenty of people under twenty-one were drinking, and there were kids trading E, too.

  I pushed the silver necklace with the blue bead along the slick glass surface of the bar. Wary but not hostile, Tito had an accent I couldn’t figure. He picked up the silver chain. “Yeah, we gave these away as favors, sure.”

  “When?”

  “You want exactly when?”

  “Yeah.”

  I held back on the picture Gloria had sent to my phone. It felt obscene, as if the dead girl was trapped in it the way she had been trapped inside the duct-tape shroud.

  If I was getting squeamish, I was getting too old for the job. Death needed respecting, but if you were on the job, you did whatever it took. Otherwise, you got out.

  What I wanted right now was out of here. The music, the heat, the crowd were driving me a little nuts, maybe because I was sober. You can’t do clubs sober. You need the high from booze or pills. I was thinking of beating it, but I followed Dravic into a little office behind the bar, where the walls were covered with framed clippings.

  One of the clippings caught my eye, a picture of three girls in a local newspaper, including one with short blonde hair, big smile, long legs, tiny skirt. Jesus, I thought. The girl in the picture on the wall was the same girl in the picture in my phone. The dead girl from the playground.

  I pointed to the picture. “You know this girl?”

  “Sure, why?”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Masha,” Dravic said.

  I showed him the photograph in my phone.

  Instinctively he put his hand over his mouth as if to keep from crying out. “How?”

  “You knew her well?”

  “I knew her. How did it happen?”

  “You have a name besides Masha?”

  “He real name was Maria, everybody called her Masha.” He sat down on the edge of the desk, color draining from his face, the skin suddenly gray, drab.

  “Masha what?” I said.

  “Panchuk. Her husband’s
name, I think. I never knew her own.”

  “There was a husband?”

  “Yeah, for a while. I don’t think she liked him much. I’m not even sure if he was still around the last few months.”

  “What else did you know about her?”

  “I thought you wanted to know about the blue charm. They’re connected, the charm, Masha?”

  “Go on.”

  “We give out favors when business is slow, during the week, usually. The girls like these things, evil eyes, they call them.”

  “Okay, so tell me some more about Masha.”

  “Tall. Blonde. Pretty. Short hair. Crew cut almost. You want the picture?” He reached up to the wall and took the framed clipping down.

  “You have one of her alone?”

  From a folder on the desk, he got a picture, a color snap, a bad photograph but it was her, and she was tall and skinny, long-legged, wearing a skirt slit to her thighs, big earrings, smiling and posing. She looked very young.

  “Can I keep it?”

  “Sure.”

  “So you knew her pretty well, but you didn’t fucking know she was dead, even though the story’s been on TV already?” I kept my tone even, but I was feeling pissed off with this guy.

  “I was upstate at my mother’s in Kingston for a couple days, I did three shifts straight here and then I went up to her place to sleep.”

  “Your mother doesn’t have a TV?”

  “It was broken,” he said. “Yeah, it’s true. I only got here an hour ago, so I didn’t know anything.”

  “Nobody here mentioned it?”

  “You’re telling me you people already made her identity public?” asked Dravic. “So how come you asked me for her name? If I knew earlier, I would have called somebody. How did it happen?” His eyes welled up.