Maybe Paul Robeson had been idolized by the whole Soviet Union back when, but it didn’t stop the Russians from being the racist bastards they always were. Still are.
The asshole Commies had lured African students over, said they’d educate them, put them in dorms like Patrice Lumumba House in Moscow, told everyone, Look, we’re not racists, we’re not like the imperialist fucks in the west, we’re good to the peoples of the world whatever their color, our system is free from racism.
Ironic, how we were taught as little snot-nosed Soviet kids to love and honor black people; the Negro race, according to our teachers, was dignified and even under imperialism, noble. It didn’t stop anyone, kids, grown-ups, from being racists. Peoples of the world! It was horseshit.
It never ends. Never. Just goes on and on, and now there are a lot of poor Africans stranded in Russia, just flotsam left over from before, the detritus of a dead system, the way people see it, if they see it at all.
Those poor African bastards are the worst victims of the Soviet fallout. It was lousy then; it’s worse now: in Russia, if you’re black, you get the shit beat out of you. I was there.
I’m in Moscow, July of ’08, and I see it everywhere: people spitting at Africans, swearing at them, beating on them. One day I’m near the Pushkin Museum, some ugly acne-scarred Russian creeps, three of them, pin a skinny black guy up against the wall of a building. Start punching his face. They kick him, screaming insults. The poor guy covers his head, but they yank his arms away and hit him in the face some more.
And I lose it. I start yelling, and when they don’t stop, I push one of them on the ground, tell him I’m official, flash my badge. I manage to scare the bastards. When I walk the black guy back to his hostel, I ask if he wants me to call the cops. No point, he says, and thanks me.
There’ve always been two kinds of people in Russia. The first want to beat up all black people or just make them disappear. Then there are a few of us, like me, maybe my dad in his time, who have always sentimentalized black Americans, because of the music.
For me it was always the music. Jazz had transformed my miserable little pimply Soviet being, even when I was a good young pioneer singing the praises of Vladimir Ilyich.
I listened to Willis Conover’s Jazz Hour on the Voice of America under the covers. When every other kid was secretly listening to Beatles bootlegs, if they could get an illicit disc, I was listening to jazz. I listened with my father on our big Grundig in the dacha; it was safer in the countryside.
But race has everybody fucked up. When Obama was elected it had been as if, for a second, it was all over, all the ugly stuff. It didn’t last.
Now I was in Harlem, sitting in my car, an outsider.
What was Radcliff’s game? Did he have one? Was it only Lily he was worried about? He knew the building, he knew the people in it. He thought Simonova’s body had been posed, fixed up after she died, but he didn’t want me calling the ME.
It was Jimmy Wagner who had called Sonny looking for me. Wanting me to translate the piece of paper left on the dead guy, skewered into his heart. And it was Wagner who turned out to be Virgil Radcliff’s chief.
I’m not surprised, Radcliff had said when I told him I knew Wagner.
Is everything always about race? What the hell did I know? With this stuff there were no reliable witnesses, not anywhere. I stepped on the gas.
CHAPTER 12
Jingle bell, jingle bell, jingle bell rock…”
In the station house, the sergeant at the front desk was fielding calls. He waved at me to wait while he finished. On his tiny hand, little and strange like a dwarf’s, was a school ring with a huge blue glass stone. The man’s name tag said he was Edigio Russomano. He was small. After a minute, I realized he was sitting on a stack of phone books.
Near the front desk, his back to me, was a guy in a black jacket and gray hoodie, the hood up. Big guy. Meaty shoulders.
“What’s your name?” said Russomano to me after he hung up the phone.
I told him.
He asked again. “I’m getting deaf,” he said. “Doc told me my hearing’s shot. Yeah, right, Detective Artie Cohen, that’s it, glad a meetcha. Chief made me look for your number earlier. He had some Russian thing he wanted you to look at. You Russian or something? Cohen? That a Russian name? Why don’t you grab a pew over there, and I’ll get the chief.”
I got the feeling the guy in the black jacket had been listening all the time Russomano was talking to me. The little sergeant turned to him. “I thought you was on your way out. You need something or you just got nothing better to do than hang around here?”
Without saying a word, the guy stuffed his hands in his pockets and bolted from the station house, through the doors, into the street.
“Who was that?” I said to Russomano.
“What?”
“That guy who just left.”
“You have to ask the chief. I ain’t been around last couple days; I only just came on like a few minutes before you got here,” Russomano said.
I sat on a chair near the door. It was warm in the precinct. I unzipped my jacket, got out my cell, looking for calls from Lily.
I’d heard the stories about the Thirtieth. In the early nineties, this had been a station house that dealt big-time in narcotics, mostly cocaine. It had been so famous for the corruption, they’d made movies about it. Back in the day. Not anymore.
I was impatient. All I wanted from Jimmy Wagner was some input on the Armstrong-there was stuff going on there I didn’t understand. There was Virgil Radcliff-I didn’t like his insistence we work the case ourselves, if there was a case. He’d been holding back.
I looked around, hoping I wouldn’t find Radcliff still at the house so I could talk to Wagner about him. Was Radcliff still at the Armstrong where I’d left him in the parking lot? With Lily? Had she really gone out to do errands?
“ Dancing and prancing in Jingle Bell Square, in the frosty air…” The song played. I tried Lily on my cell. No answer.
I sat on an orange plastic chair opposite Russomano’s desk. A drunk who had wandered in and was yelling incoherently, inserting the word motherfucker between every syllable he uttered, was followed by a couple of kids, boys, maybe ten years old. Their jeans hung low on their skinny asses. They told Russomano somebody had stolen their sneakers. He told them to sit. They took the chairs next to mine.
“Hey, yo, what up, man?” the first boy said to the second.
“Jes chillin’.”
“You comin’ down J’s party? I tell you, It’s goin’ down right there, man. We gonna tear it up, I mean this gonna be stoopid tonight, you know what I’m saying?”
The boys kept it up, looking at the sergeant and me, making sure they had an audience, turning up the volume. They reminded me of those comic characters in Shakespeare who show up in the middle of the action. The little boys had high, childish voices. I tried not to laugh. I didn’t want to humiliate them.
The first little boy started talking trash again. He was a sweet-faced boy, he reminded me of my nephew Billy, when Billy was little and I used to take him fishing. Like the kid at the police station, he thought if he talked big, it would make him seem grown up, but it only made him seem younger. Billy was dead now, and I missed him.
“Shut up,” the sergeant called out to the kids.
I was laughing now, couldn’t help it.
“ Jingle bell…”
“Detective Cohen?”
A uniform-a black guy with Coke-bottle glasses-finally appeared and showed me to Wagner’s office. I passed dozens of cops bent over their desks, shooting the breeze, yakking into the phone, or worrying about money.
Mix of black, white, and Latino cops, a lot of joking around. It was almost Christmas, and in spite of all the shit in the city-money, crime, real estate-people could get it up a little for a holiday.