Bloody London Read online

  “I’ll make lunch.”

  I figured she was pissed off I was on the Pascoe case, scared maybe. I was still in the kitchen when the phone rang. Through the swing door, I heard her talking. Someone in London. Lily had worked in London; it still has a lot of allure for her, and she was animated now, gossiping about people I don’t know, laughing at jokes I didn’t hear. Even her inflection changed.

  Half listening, I fixed salad and sandwiches.

  “Hi.” Lily appeared in the door, a bottle of her best wine in her hand like an offering.

  We ate a late lunch with the TV on. Frances Pascoe appeared on the news in old pictures in an evening dress. Eventually I said, “Who was it? On the phone.”

  Lily said, “There’s some kind of job going in London.” She was a little shifty, fussing with her glass, smiling too hard. “A sort of charity thing, you know, Lily-does-good kind of thing.” She laughed.

  “You want to do it?”

  Suddenly the glass slipped from her hand and shattered on the hardwood floor. Lily crouched down, picked up the pieces of glass, cut herself. A bubble of blood appeared, and I pulled her on to the couch, took her hand, put her thumb in my mouth. I tasted the blood.

  I said, “It’s OK. Go to London if you want to.”

  She slumped against me, head on my shoulder, as if she was suddenly heavy with fatigue. She closed her eyes.

  “What is it, sweetheart? Tell me.” I held her. People think I’m a fool for putting up with her moods. I don’t listen to them. It’s not rational, this stuff, how I feel.

  She said, “I don’t want to go, I don’t, I’d rather stay here with you, it’s just maybe something I owe, something I ought to do. I don’t know.”

  I held on to her. She pushed her red hair away, looked at me, light gray-blue eyes transparent, troubled. “Bloody London,” she said. “It sucks you in.”

  I said, “Owe who?”, but Lily had closed her eyes. All she said was, “Turn off the TV.”

  6

  A picture of Thomas Pascoe came up on the TV screen. He had the right face for the job: long patrician forehead, aquiline nose, white hair, thin lips.

  The TV was over the bar and I stood drinking a beer, watching it, waiting for Lulu Fine in the pub off York Avenue. Fine was top of Mrs Pascoe’s list. Pictures of soccer stars lined the wall. I pulled some obits out of a file folder and put them on the bar.

  Thomas Pascoe was born in New York, 1920, he had English parents who took him home before he could talk. He looked good for going on eighty. He looked great. He came back to New York during the war, some kind of hot shot in the OSS. By the time he was twenty-five he was a hero. He stayed on, joined an investment bank. There was a brief first marriage, no kids. Then, later, Frances. They met on one of his trips to London, he brought her back to New York.

  She was a lot younger, but there were no birth dates. She’d covered her tracks that way. She’d been an athlete as a kid, played around as a journalist, decorator, hippie. The background bio was brief, but it read like she came from money. The money was hers, she said, when I asked her about it. “It was mine,” she said. “I earned it.” I didn’t know if marrying Pascoe was that job that earned her the dough or it was really hers. But even as a kid she looked rich.

  Later there were radical causes. In the file was a picture of her at a party for the Black Panthers in the late Sixties. In a fringed suede jacket, she looked very young.

  I’d checked with Sonny Lippert. Forty-four apartments in the Middlemarch, not counting the Pascoes’ and Ulanova’s. A dozen guys had been on it around the clock. Owners had been interviewed; no one knew anything. I called the board members. All of them talked up Thomas Pascoe like he was a dead saint. The house employees I got to were also quiet. I got an address for Pindar Aguirre; he lived in Astoria; it could wait. Two wannabes on Mrs Pascoe’s list were out of town, one permanently; a third was dead.

  The story was like the geoplastic phase of those volcanoes you see on National Geographic on TV, like molten earth, the lava that keeps on coming at you, getting bigger, moving faster, eating everything in its path. The Pascoe affair, it was mayhem with parameters, so people lapped it up. It was fun. Papers loved it, Post, News, Observer, the magazines, the TV. The Times packaged the gossip as financial news and retailed it big in the business section because Pascoe was director of a bunch of companies. A very rich guy was dead in a midnight-blue Art Deco swimming pool with a gold frieze around the tiles; it was the fanciest building in the most exclusive neighborhood in town. A building that didn’t take Jews, blacks, nobody from Jersey. They didn’t say so; everyone knew.

  Sally, Montel, Jerry, all of them lined up experts for daytime trash talk, put on “Guys who try to behead their girlfriends”, and asked, would it float? Sink? What would it take to sever the head from a body? A carving knife? I ordered another beer and my cellphone rang.

  “Halloween, man,” Lippert said. He was on my phone relentlessly. “Got to do this Pascoe deal before the weekend, or it goes cold. Please, man,” he said, pushing me, driven by his own bosses. He didn’t mention Ulanova’s death; he didn’t cut the cord; I didn’t ask. I wanted on this case.

  “I heard you, Sonny,” I said into the phone for the fourth time, and looked back up at the TV set.

  “Artie Cohen?”

  I turned around. Lulu Fine held out her hand and said, “Nice to meet you. You’re the guy on the Middlemarch thing?”

  I thought of telling her I was a reporter on the story, but I hate a ruse and it didn’t matter. She was dying to unload. Lulu, who told me her real name was Larraine but she detested it, led me to a booth, ordered Campari and orange juice, put a bunch of quarters into the juke box on the wall, played some Beatles tunes. She was fortyish and small. She had a pelt of short, honey-blonde hair and wore creamy leather pants. Happy to talk.

  “New York sucks,” she said. “Who’d put up with this kind of housing crap anywhere else?” Her accent was part Brit, part New York. None of the pretensions of Mrs Pascoe’s Brit-Lite. Lulu Fine was a cute woman.

  “Do you want anything?” I said. The menu, which included fish and chips and shepherd’s pie, was scratched on a blackboard.

  She shook her head. “A drink’s perfect. I hope you don’t mind, I come here a lot. It’s where us down-market Brits like to hang out, you know? Feel at home, at least after I gave up wanting to be someone else. I was down at the Mercer already at lunch, I had enough of the horseshit high life for one day.”

  I said, “You’re from England.”

  She nodded. “Yeah, just outside London. Essex, that mean anything to you?”

  I shook my head. “Been here long?”

  “Christ, Artie – it’s Artie, right? – almost ten years. My dad moved his firm over here. Gary was already running it, we came on over. I married Gary, must be twenty-five years now. I was nineteen, can you believe it? I still get homesick.”

  Lulu Fine ordered another drink. “I was vain. And stupid. You want to know about the Middlemarch, right? I tried to get an apartment in the Middlemarch last year. I was married then. I thought it would please Gary, him so anxious about moving up. He said it. He actually said it. Moving up, babe. Christ, I can see how pathetic we were then. I stepped into it like a blind man strolls into dogshit, and I took poor Gary with me. Poor bastard.”

  She leaned across the table. “Should I tell you my story?” Lulu asked, and I said “Yeah, go on, tell me.”

  *

  Eight-thirty, a quiet winter night, snow melting, Lulu Fine remembered it very precise, she said. Every detail: the air heavy, wet, dark, dog-end of winter.

  They left their rental apartment on Third Avenue, and getting into Gary’s new Mercedes, racing green, tan leather interior, Lulu looked back at the building – the little beige bricks, the rows of sooty balconies, the predictable middle-class dullness. Finally they were leaving it behind.

  Gary wanted somewhere better more than anything in the world and Lulu was helping him ge
t it. They had the money now. She’d found it, the dream apartment.

  She put her arm around the back of Gary’s seat and gave him a little squeeze because he looked good; she made him get a haircut, he wore his plain dark-blue Armani suit and the black Gucci loafers.

  “What?”

  “You look really nice, Gar,” she said, and he said, “Thanks, love.” He was really anxious. “You think it will be OK?”

  Lulu said, “Sure it will. We have the money. We’re fine.”

  He’d done great too, even if it’s her father’s business; it was a bonanza couple years for the fur business and Gary on the cutting edge, excuse the pun. He saw fur would make a comeback and he was in there, meeting the fashion babes, talking up the product, organizing junkets to Norway so the young design kids could see how you worked fur.

  The whole ride over to the building by river, they pumped themselves up. He said, “I heard they’re trying more of an open door policy, you know, take in some new blood,” and she said to him, “That’s right, and I mean, how many other people can get references from a top fashion editor and a designer like Isaac?” She straightened her demure, dark brown, well-cut mink that she put over a plain black Jil Sander suit. Plain dark tights from Fogal, the alligator Manolo pumps from Barneys.

  “We look great,” he said. “Why shouldn’t they want us?”

  Anyhow, the minute they got there, Lulu knew. Knew it was all wrong, the accents, the clothes, them. Too dressed up. She thought: I should have worn those stupid Belgian flats.

  There were four of them on the board: Pascoe, a woman with red eye-glasses who repeated everything Pascoe said, a balding lawyer and an old queen. Also Pascoe’s wife. She sat away from the others, poured tea and whiskey like it was a social occasion.

  They shook hands all around, hello, how do you do? It was, of course, all cash the lawyer whispered, and Pascoe gave him a dirty look like you didn’t talk about the money. But the lawyer ignored him, said to Gary – he talked to the man as if Lulu was a log – said they didn’t permit financing ever, never, not in five, ten years. Gary went dead white. Him and Lulu’s dad had worked it out; the old man had stuffed their accounts so they could ante up the cash, then finance later. Pascoe gave the lawyer another stern look and Lulu understood the lawyer was Pascoe’s stalking dog. Did the dirty work.

  Gary saw it all go up in smoke in front of his eyes. He ran to the can, didn’t get the door closed all the way. They all heard him puke.

  Lulu paused and I thought of Mrs Pascoe’s words. “Poor sod,” she’d said, “but he shouldn’t have lied to us.”

  “You want me to go on?” Lulu said and I nodded.

  “It was pretty awful. Before we got to the elevator, I heard Pascoe say, ‘Well, we were never serious about them, cash or not, were we?’ And the wife said, ‘Of course not, darling,’ and they all tittered.” Lulu took a breath.

  “I didn’t get to the good part yet. While Gary’s in the bathroom, Pascoe gets me to one side, offers me a drink, takes my hand, you know, that creepy way where it’s like your hand’s your tit and they’re touching you up? Then he tells me I’m too good for Gary, and why didn’t we meet up for a few drinkies. He said that, I swear to God.” She laughed, then raked her hand through her hair. “That’s how it is in New York fucking City, OK? It tore us apart, me and Gar. We split up a few months after.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I got a much better place. You want to see?”

  We stopped in a shop off East End Avenue that smelled of glue and cloth. The two old men who ran it worked late, coughing, listening to a radio while one of them wrote up bills and the other cut upholstery fabric by hand with a razor blade. Lulu gave the cutter some fabric samples and he looked up, his mouth full of pins, and nodded.

  She led me out to the street, then glanced back at the tenement where the shop occupied the basement. “Poor bastards. They’re pulling these buildings down next year. That’s them for the rubbish bin.”

  The streets were jammed, people strolling towards the river. Every corner, the Koreans sold pumpkins alongside the other produce, shiny orange mountains of them. In the store windows, skeletons, witches, ghosts, politicians bared their fangs in rubbery masks. Our new national holiday, Halloween. Trick or Treat.

  We went east on 57th Street, crossed Second Avenue and Lulu waved to the guy who stood in the door of the liquor store, eyes shut, enjoying a smoke. We crossed First Avenue, and on Sutton, she turned right and stopped in front of the huge building where I’d met Sal Castle. Now I got a better look.

  The doorman, this time in evening gear that included a wing collar and even more gold braid, greeted Lulu effusively. The lobby itself included six kinds of marble: green marble, chocolate marble, white marble, pink, gray, black. The walls, floors, tables, and urns were marble and there were bouquets of pastel-colored silk flowers everywhere. A sweeping staircase had marble steps that were lighted from underneath by tiny bulbs and lit from above by the chandeliers that dripped crystal like a waterfall.

  “Don’t you love it?” Lulu said. “The staircase ends in a closet. I love the fucker, it’s so bloody vulgar. It drives the assholes at the Middlemarch bonkers. We call it the Staircase to Nowhere Building.”

  The elevator opened. A burly, handsome man in a dark-blue suit, hand made, double vents, got out; his son followed. You could see the man’s rough good looks, the dark hair, blue eyes, the surprisingly sweet smile, transformed into real beauty on the boy, who was about sixteen. Black hair like his father. No smile. I couldn’t see the eyes: the kid wore a pair of designer shades. He had a yellow blazer over his shoulder.

  The man whispered to him in Russian and the boy said, irritably, “Talk English, will you?”

  The doorman saluted them and went to hail a cab. Lulu got her mail from a concierge and we went upstairs. I had seen the boy earlier, hanging out in the pocket park, glittering in the sun. He had waved to me.

  On the twentieth floor, Lulu unlocked her door and I followed her into a vast living room about forty feet square. At one end were some leather sofas and chairs, a glass coffee table stacked with magazines and books and a stray coffee cup. At the other were crates stacked neatly, shopping bags, objects covered with padded moving blankets, plastic sheets. Lulu picked one up and showed me German furniture in red leather and white suede, showed me French chandeliers with a million crystal drops tucked inside bubble wrap. There were bags of linens and blankets (“Frette,” Lulu whispered), china and silver, flowers made out of glass beads, oil paintings in gold-leaf frames so heavy they could crash the precious metals markets. Some bronze sculpture. Modern art.

  Lulu looked at her watch, replaced the plastic, said, “I’ll let you in on my secret,” she said.

  I said, “What’s your secret?”

  “Russians.”

  “Yeah?”

  Lulu jumped up on to one of the packing crates and perched there, legs crossed, grinning. “Well, you see, hon, it’s rather brilliant. The market doesn’t worry those girls, they got cash stashed place you would not believe. They got lotsa money, I mean up at the top of the heap, it’s mega, and just starting out. There’s quite a few in this building. Sometimes it’s the babes, you know, they call ’em Natashas, though that’s not always fair since it’s the bloody Turks who gave them that name, the Russian hookers who work Turkey. Anyhow, mine are called ‘Ultra Natashas’, gorgeous girls, but they come over from nowhere, from some provincial dump, they find a guy, and the guy isn’t into shopping. Now someone has to purchase the Cristal, the Prada, the Hermès, the furniture, so I’m there to help. Sometimes I help them find the guy, nice banker, maybe. I get a nice deal on suites at the Four Seasons when they fly in. I get them a table at the bar. You’re shocked?”

  I shook my head.

  “I can do decorating, auction houses. You ever pass Sotheby’s? It’s all Russians with mobile phones hanging outside on the steps. They like oil paintings. Big ones. You want to drink somethin
g?” she said, I nodded, and she disappeared then returned with a bottle of white wine. “OK?”

  She grabbed my arm. Gestured to the window. “Superb, don’t you think? Look.”

  I looked. We were facing east toward the river. The Pepsi-Cola sign winked in the distance. Below us was the Middlemarch.

  Lulu smiled. “I can look down on them any time I like. Living well, as they say. And they bloody detest us, which makes it that much sweeter. You know the problem with the English here in New York, Artie sweetheart? At home we all know the game. You wanna break the rules, you know your cues. Here it’s more like free floating. It took me a long time to figure that out. Here, some of them reckon they got a piece of the action, and they do, for half an hour in certain neighborhoods, but mostly, in the real world, nobody gives a shit. They don’t get that.”

  “And easier to get into.”

  “What is?”

  “A building like this.”

  “Much much easier. We’re a condominium so no one here has life and death power over the occupants. You pays your money, you gets your apartment. But even here they got to show, fuck me, everything, financials, credit ratings, even on a sublet. I’m on the board. I know.”

  “You have preferences?”

  “Friends, naturally. This is a very high-class condo, but we’ve got three hundred apartments. I have to say we’re partial to artists, gallery owners, musicians, top models.” She reeled off some familiar names.

  “Russians?”

  She giggled. “Like I said, we got a few.”

  “They straight? Crooked?”

  “Hon, this is New York – who can tell the difference? For all I know, we have indeed got a few high-tone gangsters. They make excellent tenants. They like spending. They want a piece of American pie. Don’t we all?” Lulu added quietly, “I give preference to people rejected by the Middlemarch. You know how the developers here got the land to build?”

  “Go on.”