“Of course not. Did anybody else see her like this? I mean before you found her?”
“Why does it matter?” she said.
“What about last night?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know why you’re interrogating me. She was sick. She just died. I’m sorry I called you out.” Lily seemed half out of her mind now. This dead woman on the sofa had obviously meant a lot to her in a way I didn’t understand.
“Come on, honey,” I reached for her hand. “Let’s get the doctor’s number.”
Lily didn’t move. Didn’t let me hold her hand.
“Come on.”
“Don’t nag me.”
I sat on the floor near Lily’s little chair. “Is there something else going on?”
“I’m just sad.”
She was sad, but she was scared, too, and I had to know why. Was Lily lying? My gut told me she was holding stuff back. I switched on a standing lamp with a fringed shade. The low-wattage bulb spilled a dim pool of yellow light on the body.
Marianna Simonova’s getup was like a costume. Her head was wrapped in a purple silk scarf, she wore a white shirt with a high neck, Cossack style, a long skirt, and over it all, a heavy brown velvet bathrobe with fancy embroidery. Around her neck was a gold cross with red stones.
Her hands were clasped across her body, one of them curled in a fist. I figured she was arthritic.
It was as if she had been arranged-or had arranged herself-for death. There was no sign anyone had hurt her, no actual sign of her dying, either, except that she was dead. She was as composed as one of the icons on her mantelpiece.
Kneeling by the sofa, I saw she wasn’t so old, no more than seventy. Her face was still smooth, and it was a long, imperious, oval face with a weirdly high forehead, thin, plucked eyebrows, a skinny nose.
The fingers of her left hand were cold but still pliant. Rigor hadn’t set in yet. I touched the other hand. It wasn’t arthritic after all, just curled in a fist. I pulled back the fingers. Something she had been holding fell out. It was a horn button from a man’s jacket. I put it in my pocket.
Simonova wasn’t a victim. Was she? This wasn’t some case I was working. But I took the button anyway, and then I touched her face. The skin was soft, almost alive, like one of those dolls they sell at fancy toy shops, the kind with the creepy feel of human flesh.
On the floor was a biography of Rasputin in Russian, and a paperback, an English mystery, the kind my mother used to love, which she read secretly in her kitchen back in Moscow. She hid them in a kitchen cupboard with the potatoes. I remembered them all.
A little table near the sofa, black and inlaid with mother-of-pearl, was piled with pill bottles, a half-empty liter of cheap American vodka, a pack of Sobranies, most of them already smoked, a glass ashtray full of the butts. A small glass with water still in it had red lipstick on the rim, and there was a bottle of perfume. I took out the stopper, smelled it. From the low chair where she was sitting, Lily watched me.
“Artie?”
“What?”
“Please cover Marianna up,” Lily said. “I feel like she can see me.”
I put the shawl back over the dead woman’s face, which is when I noticed something I hadn’t seen before: the tip of the woman’s left ring finger was missing, and the flesh where it had been cut was thick with scar tissue.
“Lily?” I wanted to ask her about the finger, but she suddenly got up and left the room.
CHAPTER 5
Along with the stench of cigarette smoke in the dead woman’s apartment was a heavy flower smell. It came from dried rose petals in a brass bowl on an old mahogany table. Candles, most of them almost burned out, gave off a cloying stink, too, clove and cinnamon. When I touched one, it was still warm, the wax soft. Something else in the room stank in a different way: age or death.
Lily, who said she had gone to the bathroom, had reclaimed her seat in the little chair. I knew she needed time. I’d let her sit for a few more minutes. I didn’t ask about the dead woman’s missing fingertip, not now. Instead, I walked around the enormous room. Only half consciously, I was looking for clues. There was something wrong about Lily’s shift in mood from flat to frantic, something wrong the way the dead woman was posed on the sofa, something wrong in the way the place stank.
Across the room from where Lily sat I saw that part of the ceiling and wall were wet. A plastic sheet on the floor caught the water that dripped from the roof through the ceiling. Chunks of crumbling plaster lay in wet pools on the plastic.
A rickety card table held a gold-colored bust of Pushkin. The cracked marble mantelpiece was jammed with pictures, some framed in leather, some in silver. I reached for one of them.
“Leave it,” Lily called out. “Just leave it all, OK?”
I crossed the room to where she sat. “What is it? Lily? Honey?” I had never seen her so out of control, tears creeping down her cheeks.
All the years I had known her, Lily had almost never cried, unless you counted election night, and that was for joy. Not even when she was out reporting on the sex trade in Bosnia and was beaten up so badly by thugs she almost died. People think Lily’s remote, even cold, obsessed with her work, unyielding in her opinions. And she is. Sometimes. She has a temper. I didn’t care; I never had.
Seeing her in the sweatpants, her hair a mess, her face pale and wet, I realized that nothing mattered to me as much as being with her. Nothing.
“Hey.”
“What?”
I touched her sleeve lightly. “I’ll help you. I’ll fix it. Whatever it is.” I put my arms around her. She didn’t pull away this time.
Just come home with me, I wanted to say. Just come downtown, we’ll go to my place, I’ll be with you, I’ll take care of you. But I didn’t. I couldn’t take the chance she’d say no.
“Marianna was so sick.” Lily’s voice was barely audible. “She was in such pain.”
“What happened?”
“I sublet the apartment across the hall when I decided I was going to work for Obama over on 133rd Street. I wanted a change anyway, so I rented the place from a friend who was going to Chicago for a year,” said Lily. “A few weeks after I got here, I met Marianna in the hall. We talked. She invited me for a cup of tea. I could see she needed help, so I got into the habit of stopping by. I put out her meds every night, and made sure the oxygen was working right, and then I’d come by most mornings to check in on her again.”
“I thought the doctor next door was her pal.”
“He helped. But his wife didn’t like Marianna.” Lily looked at me. “Also, I brought Marianna vodka. She used to say, ‘So I die sober, I die drunk, first way I die happy.’ ”
“What else?”
“In the beginning, I helped her out of, you know, my ridiculous sense of duty,” Lily said, almost smiling. “Then we became friends. Marianna told these really great stories, about her life in Russia, and about Harlem when she first got here. People she had known. She just needed somebody to talk to. I guess she was trying to make sense of her own history, and I listened.”
“Go on.”
“You know who that is?” Lily pointed to an oil painting of a handsome black man dressed in a military costume. The painter had emphasized the heroic features. A little brass-shaded light cast a glow that made the black skin look like satin.
“Yes.”
“My parents idolized Paul Robeson, his voice, his acting, his politics. That’s him in Othello in the picture. When I was a kid, Robeson was a god to the Old Left.”
“So your friend was a fan?”
“According to Marianna, Robeson was her lover.”
“What?”
“Yeah, she said he helped her get to the U.S. She met him in Moscow around 1960, when she was in her early twenties, and he was on one of his trips to the USSR. She said she seduced him. She had a lot of pictures of Robeson. She kept some in her storage room in the basement.”
“You believed her?”
“I was a sucker for the stories,” Lily said. “I never knew what to believe exactly. With Marianna it was always about the stories. She made the history so alive, I guess I was kind of enchanted; she’d play Robeson’s records on her turntable, him singing opera and spirituals and Slavic folk songs, in that deep dark incredible voice. You know it, right? She told me her grandfather fought in the Russian Revolution. Marianna made her ghosts come alive.” Lily put her hand on my arm. “Her ghosts. Maybe my own. She was like this wacked-out Scheherazade, suspended in her past. Once in a while I tried to pin her down-I’m a journalist, I’m supposed to care about the facts, but I didn’t. The Russian stuff was like a delicious trap for me.”