“Thank you.”
He loved his daughter better than anything on earth. They were connected in the most elemental way, father and daughter. I was jealous, not because I wanted her-which I did-but because of the way they were together. I have no kids. It makes me sad.
“Artie, the club, was it okay?” said Valentina. “You found what you needed?”
“What club?” said Tolya.
Again I held off telling him about the dead girl. It wasn’t just that he’d set up his own guys to investigate it. Maybe I didn’t want Val upset.
“It’s nothing. I was helping out a guy on a case in Brooklyn.”
“It’s Bobo Leven?” he said.
“Yes, but it doesn’t matter.”
“It doesn’t but whenever he comes in the club, I watch him, he’s like, what do you call it, grapevining all over you, listening to you, trying to pick your brains out,” said Tolya who was pretty drunk now.
“You’ll go swimming with me tomorrow?” said Valentina.
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll call you in the morning.”
“Not too early. I’m going to a party.”
“Now?” Tolya said, glancing at his watch.
“I’m a big girl, Daddy,” she said. “Daddy?” She got up and then squatted near her father, and took his hands. “Don’t go. Please.”
“What’s bothering you?”
“I don’t know. I just have this bad feeling, like I ate something off. They do bad stuff to Russians in London.”
“But I’m very small potatoes, my darling, nobody is going to bother me,” said Tolya. “I’m not Boris Berezovsky, after all.”
“Please?”
“I’ll think,” he said. “Don’t nag.”
She kissed him and got up to go. Tolya called after her.
“What is it?”
He took an envelope out of his pocket, and handed it to her. She looked inside and smiled. “Thanks, Daddy. That’s nice.” She kissed the top of his head. “You’re turning gray. You’ll have to start dyeing your hair,” she giggled. “See you both tomorrow, okay? Love you.”
When Val had gone, Tolya asked me again if I wanted to come to London with him. I said I couldn’t. What I didn’t tell him was that I wanted to stay in New York where Val was, that I wanted to go swimming with her and take her to dinner.
“How come Val’s so worried?” I said.
“She thinks they’re killing Russians, some silly shit, Artyom, in London.” For a split second he looked uncomfortable, then he said, “But this is just small, little part of things, and who except English would give asylum to so many people, and protect against bad guys? Also, me I am not in that league of oligarchs. I’m little guy, Artyom,” he said, dropping his articles everywhere, making himself sound like a peasant, as if he didn’t know better.
“But you’d like to be, wouldn’t you? A big guy,” I said, and saw that it bothered him, that his eyes shifted inwards. He wanted it. He wanted the whole thing. It gave me the creeps. It turned him into a man I didn’t really recognize. Then it passed. He laughed, and we had some more to drink, then he stretched out his legs, inspected his cigar, looked out at the Hudson River, then back at me and said, “It’s just business.”
“What kind of business? In London?”
“Restaurants. Wine. All my life I know that without good food, life is nothing, so now I am in the good-food business. In Europe they understand this. In Russia they understand. You have no idea, Artemy, these Russians, these guys, Dellos, Navikov, they get big respect, they are considered true food guys and they are Russians, not French or Italian, and they understand restaurants, they are changing Moscow, they spend money, they buy great chefs, and now they open up in London, London has become wonderful Russian province along with food center of the universe now.” He reached over and turned on the CD player, and put his head back and closed his eyes. “Tito Gobbi,” he said. “ Don Carlos. Gorgeous, yes?”
For a while we listened, then Tolya suddenly said to me, “You know what is my favorite book, Artyom?”
“ Nineteen Eighty-four,” I said, recalling how he had for years carried a tattered Penguin copy. He put it in his pocket and took it out once in a while to read a passage to me. I always told him Brave New World was much closer to the way things had been in the USSR, but Tolya loved Orwell very much.
“But also Slaughterhouse 5. Recently I reread this. I am also a pilgrim, like Billy Pilgrim, also unstuck in time, also tumbling in the ridiculous. This writer, Kurt Vonnegut, I love this man. I feel like that, London, Moscow, New York, planes in between, other places, nothing fixed, nothing regular, like many people these days, just falling free here to there. Even as a boy, I always feel I am in contact with creatures from another planet.” He smiled. “Not like UFOs, asshole, you know what I mean,” he said.
Glass in hand, Tolya got up and leaned on the parapet, looking out at the city. Suddenly, as he turned to look at me, I saw a look of pain cross his face, of sudden sharp physical pain held in. He put his hand to his left arm.
“What’s the matter with you?” I said. “Tolya?”
“Nothing.”
“Tell me.”
“I drank too much,” he said.
“What? Talk to me. Sit down, for chrissake.”
Sitting in the chair, he pulled up his pink silk socks.
“Come with me. You can be part of it, you know what is happening in London, how much money, how this lovely adorable government takes just teeny little taxes, and how they are civil and have good courts. Money, you can scoop off trees. This is stupid, still being a cop, Artemy, what for? Big stupid people are cops. You know what they call them in London? Detective Plod.”
“Pick,” I said.
“Pick what?”
“Pick money off the trees. Not scoop.”
“Ha ha. So your English is better than mine, I am younger than you. You’ll be fifty before me. You won’t come, will you? So you’ll watch out for Val, yes?”
“She’s not going to turn into a pumpkin, she’s twenty-four.”
“You’ll take care of her, won’t you? Artie? This is not some joke.”
“Yes.”
We drank and watched the sun come up.
“Good.” He got up. He held the bottle of Scotch out. I took a glass and poured a shot for myself. “Mr Pettus will ask you to watch me. This is why he came to my club, Artemy.”
“Why would he want me to watch you? Tolya?”
But he didn’t answer, just watched the sun coming up over Manhattan, and then fell asleep.
At six, Sverdloff dozing in his chair on the roof, I went home through the glorious New York dawn. I’d been up all night. I was exhausted, but edgy, the girl on the swing, Tolya going to London, Val trying to keep him here.
At home, I thought about the case, I made notes, I went out for a walk to clear my head. I wasn’t sure at all how long I walked along the East River, trying to get a fix on things. That evening when I got home, I got into bed and fell dead asleep.
Some time after dark-I leaned on one elbow trying to see a clock-the buzzer rang. It was Valentina. I let her in. Without a word, she took off her jeans and shirt, and slipped into my bed, and it was early in the morning before she left.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Sunday morning, Tolya left New York. He called early. He was waiting for me outside the yellow brick loft building where he lived in the old Meat Market. His black hair still wet from the shower, he looked sober.
“Why do I feel you have a case, that you’re working on something and you don’t tell me, Artemy? In Brooklyn? Val asked you about it at my club. You ignored her.”
“It’s a homicide Bobo Leven is working. I gave him the benefit of my wisdom,” I said.
“You don’t want to tell me?”
“It’s fucking grim, a young girl murdered. Just enjoy your trip, okay?”
“Take care of Valentina. I trust you with her only in public places.”
We laughed, but I felt sad and I couldn’t say why. Maybe it was the early morning, the soft balmy summer dawn, the kind when we had so often staggered home from parties together.