Londongrad Read online

  The door was locked from the inside. I called Dravic’s name. It was quiet. Too quiet. I was sweating in the heat, and unnerved. Dravic had said he’d be there, but when I knocked and then called out again, nobody answered.

  At the back of the house was a patch of yard with scabby dry grass, a plastic table and chairs. The back door was shut but not locked and I went into the kitchen where crates of booze and glasses were piled everywhere. On a table was a package wrapped in brown paper. On top was an invoice from a local printer. Inside were flyers for the club. I was in the right place. The office, Dravic had said.

  It was too quiet. No noise. Nothing. Somewhere outside, a car revved up, pulled away. I ran outside, but it had gone.

  In the house again, I went through the kitchen into a room where computers and phones sat on two large tables, there were three scratched filing cabinets, a big flatscreen TV, more crates of liquor, a yellow fake leather couch, a few chairs.

  I looked everywhere. There was something wrong, somebody had left in a hurry. Dravic maybe.

  The drawer of a filing cabinet was open, paper spilled out. There was paper on the white shag rug. The couch was rumpled, the pillows tossed around as if somebody had been digging around, looking for something. When I pushed aside the dirty drapes at the window, I saw an envelope half-hidden on the sill. It had my name on it.

  Did he leave in a hurry? Had he hidden the envelope on purpose? Did somebody come looking for it?

  I didn’t wait. I took it and left, same way I’d come, through the back door and the yard and around to the street where my car was parked.

  Somewhere I heard a door open. I looked down the row of houses. I didn’t see anyone. Then it banged shut and I got into my car, tossed the envelope on the seat next to me, and turned the key. As soon as I pulled away from the curb I stepped on the gas.

  I was a couple blocks away from the house when my phone rang and it was Bobo. He said he had an address for Masha, that he was headed for her apartment.

  “You want to come with me? I mean, could you come? I’m getting fucked up on this case, Artie, I’d appreciate it.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Give me the address. Where is it?”

  “Near Neptune Avenue,” he said. “Where the Paks live.” “Everybody here likes Masha,” said the guy at the video store who introduced himself as Mohammed Najib. “Nicest girl anywhere,” added Najib, a tall reedy guy with a little white cap on his gray hair and the stoop of a man who reads too much.

  Music from some Pakistani film came from one of the sets in the video store. Teenagers browsed the racks, giggling and making cracks.

  Najib, who said everybody called him Moe, said he would show me the apartment where Masha had lived above his store.

  “Of course, Officer Leven has already seen it,” added Moe. I couldn’t judge the tone. The guy-Moe-was polite, but I could see Bobo made him nervous. When he offered tea, Bobo barely thanked him, and I thought: what the hell is wrong with him? Just say thank you, Bobo, I mumbled to myself. Moe excused himself to wait on a customer.

  “You were here?” I said to Bobo out of Moe’s hearing. “You were already here?”

  “Yeah, so what? I figured I’d take a look, other guys on the case had already been, I didn’t want to bother you. Now I need your help.”

  “Never mind.” I was impatient. I wanted to look at the stuff in the envelope Dravic had left for me. Soon, I thought to myself, I’m going out to take my vacation days and go sit in the sun. I said it over and over, like a mantra. I hated the idea of myself as a guy who never took a break, who couldn’t let go. I said it, but I didn’t believe it.

  Little Pakistan is how it was known, this large chunk of Coney Island Avenue, not far from Brighton Beach. Ever since the 1980s when some Russians began moving up and out, Pakistanis-out here they called themselves Paks-moved in. Before 9/11 it was a bustling crowded community where people got along. Once the planes fell on the towers, once the back-lash began, some of them fled. A cop I knew had called me about the tension, he was worried, he had said. Told me there were FBI guys snooping around, Homeland Security assholes, police brass wanting to look good, look patriotic.

  In the end, maybe 15,000 residents had gone, some of them deported, others who just left temporarily out of fear. It was a shitty deal. But people came back. The community rebuilt. Some of the Pakistanis were doing well enough they could move on. Turks coming in now, take up the space.

  It was dusk. The avenue was lit up bright, video stores, restaurants, insurance brokers, car parts. There were a couple twenty-four-hour joints where cabbies ate. Last few years when I was working around Brighton Beach, I sometimes went by for a meal.

  Outside the video store, Bobo lit up a cigarette, and listened to music from the video store.

  “Man, sounds like somebody stepped on the cat,” he said. “I can’t believe Masha lived upstairs. How could she live in a dump like this?”

  A couple of women, their heads covered with scarves, strolled by, chatting and laughing. Bobo stared at them.

  “What’s with you?” I said.

  “Okay, I don’t like them. Okay? Say I have prejudice, I mean after 9/11, Artie, come on.”

  “Stop fucking staring, Bobo.”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t like it, okay? I just don’t, so I’m not PC, you should think about it, Artie, you’re also Jewish.”

  “What difference does that make?” I had never been in a synagogue in my life except for a bar mitzvah once when a friend’s kid turned thirteen.

  Moe reappeared.

  “Can I help you?” he said, and I realized he had a British accent. On his t-shirt was an Obama For President button.

  “Masha Panchuk’s apartment?” I said.

  “Yes, of course, I’m sorry. I was distracted. Come up, please.”

  “You from England?” asked Bobo.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact,” said Moe. “I was born and grew up in a place called Bradford. Man, I would never go back. Too wet and cold, rains all the time. I’m so sorry about Masha.”

  “You knew about her? That she was murdered?”

  “You told me,” he said. “You called the store and asked if she had lived here.”

  “Right,” said Bobo. “You didn’t think to call when you knew she was missing?”

  “I didn’t know until I heard from you,” Moe said. “She came and went. Often I didn’t see her for several days. In fact, I saw her Saturday, she was going out to shop.”

  “Who else had extra keys, besides you?”

  “I don’t know, maybe she made extras. I can’t say,” said Moe. “I keep spares because I own the building,” he added.

  We followed him into the doorway next to his store and up three flights of stairs. “I’ll be downstairs if you need me,” he said, not looking at Bobo.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” I said to Bobo. “You think you get anything by talking to people who help you like that?”

  “I don’t like them, okay?” We stood on the landing. The apartment was sealed. Bobo carefully removed the tape and opened the door.

  “Who got it sealed?”

  “I did,” he said. “Soon as I found out where it was. I didn’t want anyone except guys working the case going in.”

  “It’s not okay,” I said. “How come it took you so long to tell me where she lived?”

  “You didn’t seem interested.”

  Inside the tiny studio apartment was a bed, a dresser, a table, a tiny kitchen behind a curtain, a bathroom. It was a furnished room, and all Masha had added were a couple of posters of boy groups she must have liked.

  In the closet were her clothes, jumbled together, some on the floor, some stuffed into shelves or on cheap wire hangers. Hard to tell if she’d been messy like a kid or somebody had come here to look through her things.

  “Look for her clothes,” Sonny Lippert had said.

  “You still didn’t find her clothes, right? The stuff she had on when they killed her
?”

  “I have four guys working on it,” said Bobo Leven. “I told them to leave the stuff here until we looked at everything.”

  I pulled out some shoes, a bag, a jacket. There were expensive things in the girl’s closet. The kind of things I expected Val to wear, or her friends. There was no pink dress, no pink party dress with sparkles on it.

  “What was she wearing when she was murdered?”

  “Nothing,” said Bobo. “At least nothing when the tape was removed.”

  “You think they killed her in the playground, taped her up there?”

  “Probably not. Too risky.”

  “So what happened to her clothes?”

  “We’re looking, like I said. You have some thoughts?” he said.

  “Yeah, look for a pink party dress. Let me know.”

  Between us we worked over every inch of the place, her clothes, the make-up in the bathroom, a few paperback books, her iPod, a tiny pink address book. I scanned it, there were names of a few friends, city agencies, bars. Bobo said he had seen it, had it copied, put it back. Send me a copy, I said. Nothing in it, he said.

  I wanted to get to the envelope Tito Dravic had left me, wanted the résumé he had promised me, and the tape, Masha Panchuk dancing.

  “What about this?” Bobo held up a small roll of duct tape he’d found in the bathroom.

  “Probably somebody used it for sealing the window when it was cold. Anyhow, it’s black.”

  “Yeah, right, this is a fucking waste of time,” he said.

  “Get somebody from your station house to go over the place again, okay? In detail.”

  “Yes, Artie, of course.”

  On the street, Bobo on his phone, I went in to thank Moe and give him my number in case anything came up.

  The weather had turned sultry. Humidity clung to my skin. It had been a long day, and now I felt I was fighting the air that was like syrup on my skin, heavy, thick, cloying. Music played out of car windows as guys rolled along Coney Island Avenue. Rap. Rappers call it music. I call it shit.

  “I have to go,” I said.

  “You don’t get it, do you? You don’t know anything.” He snapped his phone shut.

  “What about?”

  “These people, Artie.” Bobo was looking to pick a fight with me. I let him talk. “My cousin Viktor was fighting in Chechnya against these assholes. You have any idea what that was like for a Jewish boy from Moscow? If all young soldiers get beat up, all new Jewish soldiers get double beating, one for being Jewish, one for being from Moscow.”

  “What’s it got to do with the Chechens?”

  “You don’t know shit some of the time, pardon me, Artemy. Over there in the former USSR, they would like to kill all the Jews, except maybe one for each province. You remember that old saying about how every Russian governor always had one Jew for show. A Show Jew, Artie. But you don’t remember,” said Bobo. “You think the guys at my station house feel different?”

  “Well, then, fuck them, too. Get over it. I’m not having you alienate half of Brooklyn because you hate Muslims, okay? You zip it up, Bobo.”

  “I’m Russian. I’m also Jew. You have a lot of towel-head friends, Artie?” His tone was mild but the words were aggressive.

  At the center of this string bean of a kid with his shambling walk, his punk haircut, was a determined, ambitious cop. And angry. He was learning fast. Before long he’d stop taking shit from anybody, including me.

  “So, Artie. Here,” he said handing me a card. “I also found this in the apartment. In the medicine cabinet.”

  Natasha Club, it said. The best in Russian Women.

  “What is it?”

  “Mail-order brides, you say, I think. Or whores.”

  “There’s something else?” I said to Bobo.

  “Yeah, something else. I want to tell you what it was like at home, okay? Caucasians from down there from the Caucasus, they come to Moscow, they take over most of the market stalls, they’re dirty people, and they blow up stuff in Moscow. Apartment buildings. Subway stations. What the fuck are they in Moscow for? And here, now they’re here, in Brooklyn, and how come they make their women wear those bags over their heads?”

  I ignored him. He was baiting me and I had no intention of fueling his rage. He could get over it or he could fuck off for all I cared.

  “How well did you know the dead girl?” I said.

  “I knew Masha a little. She was great dancer. Always twelve guys hanging around for her.”

  “Fine. I’m not going to ask how come you didn’t tell me you knew her in the first place or what shit you know about Dacha, the club, just find out who they were, the twelve guys, also the girls she knew. Get me some hard information.”

  “Not twelve exactly.”

  “I get it. I get it’s not exactly twelve, but however many.” I was impatient. “What else?”

  “Once we eat on the boardwalk on Saturday night, a group, seven, eight friends, we just sit out and watch the ocean and talk. Masha was there.”

  “Write it down. Send me an e-mail.”

  “Artie?”

  “Yes?”

  “You ever wonder about the m on Masha, the one somebody made with a knife?”

  “The lab’s been looking at it all along.”

  “You wonder what it stands for? You think it stands for Masha?”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “What about Mohammed, what about this guy Moe?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, but he’d planted the seed of doubt into my head where it could take root.

  Bobo’s car was at the curb. He unlocked the door.

  “I’m on it,” he said, his voice turning chilly. “You don’t have to bust my balls.”

  “Very nice car,” I said. “You got it where?”

  “My parents.”

  “Your parents are doing so well?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Give it a break, Bobo. Relax.”

  “No, I don’t want to fucking give it a break. My pop opened another dry-cleaning place. Why? You think because my parents are living in Brighton Beach, they’re crooked? Because I’m living at home I’m in on some game, too? I stay there to help out with my mom who has arthritis bad, right? The car was a present, right? It was my birthday present.”

  “Forget it.”

  “No. Let’s discuss. I take a lot of shit from you, okay, so I learn this way. But some stuff it’s not okay. Not okay that you think I take money in some way unclean, you know? Not all Russians are corrupted bastards,” he said in English and then switched to Russian, his voice very cold and very low. “You think that all of us are just creeps, I know that, Artemy, I know how you think, you always show it to me, one way or the other. You’ve turned into an American, so for you Russians are gangsters or religious nuts, you’ve forgotten your country, and I don’t care about that, but get off my fucking back. I’m not your kid.”

  “Calm down,” I said.

  “Sure.”

  “One more thing, Bobo.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You slept with her? You slept with Masha? You had something going on?”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Standing near my car, I opened the package I had taken from the house in Brighton Beach and found a videotape, and a few sheets of paper. I scanned them, and then yelled for Bobo Leven who was climbing into his car. He shut the door and jogged over to me. I held out a piece of paper. He took it, read it, grunted.

  “Jesus, Art.”

  “Yeah.” I felt sick.

  “Masha Panchuk waited tables for your pal, Anatoly Sverdloff,” he said.

  “Give me a cigarette.”

  Bobo handed me the pack along with his lighter.

  “Fuck it, Artie, didn’t Sverdloff mention this?” said Bobo. “He didn’t tell you one of his girls was missing?”

  “Why would he? Maybe he didn’t know. Maybe she was a temp.”

  “Don’t be so defensive, but you have to figure by now s
omeone maybe called him about it, Sverdloff, I mean. Right? Or you want to do that?”

  “He’s on his way to London. He didn’t have anything to do with Masha Panchuk’s murder.”

  “You want to hang onto that raft, like they say, Artemy?”

  “Fine. I’ll call him,” I said.

  “You trust him, right?”

  I lit the cigarette and handed him back his smokes and the lighter.

  I worked my phone, I made some calls, nothing. I turned to Bobo.

  “Find Dravic, if you can,” I said. “He was supposed to meet me at the house the club uses as an office, he wasn’t there, I just tried him on the phone, there’s no answer. I called the club, nothing. Now I’m thinking he was scared, but of what? Scared because he promised to give me some stuff on Masha Panchuk? Did someone overhear us talking at the club?”

  “Sure,” said Bobo. “I will work everything,” he said formally, his English sounding as if he had learned it in school, his Russian accent more pronounced now. “I will be taking everything into consideration, of course, Artemy.”

  I knew that Bobo Leven would get into everything, he was tenacious, relentless, one of those cops, even at his age, who never let go. At two in the morning, he’d still be at his desk doing the paperwork. Before the other guys got into his station house, he’d be combing his computer, and then when they arrived, he’d bug them for scraps of information. The phone would be permanently attached to his ear, he would be calling, asking, bribing if he had to. I had known a few cops like Bobo. It wasn’t just that he wanted to make a name for himself, it was who he was, what he lived for. Everything would come under scrutiny, he would talk to everybody, Albanians, Jamaicans, Mexies, Serbs, Russians, and he would go through every detective report on crazy people, on thugs who sliced people up, on the kinds of knives they used, and if they also used guns, and he would read medical reports, and reports on duct tape, fibers and feathers, anything he could get his hands on.

  Every single homicide pattern that was anything like the case would be worked by Bobo; so would cold cases he kept in a bottom drawer.

  Moving around, he would get to Starrett City, Brighton Beach, looking at how people had been mugged, sliced, killed. He wanted this case, and he would go without sleep, night after night, until fatigue made him crazy.