After the nurse pretended to look through some files on her new Mac, she took Tolya’s picture in her hand.
“I don’t have anything on him,” she said. “I remember him. He told jokes, but he was very ill. I have a feeling it was his heart. He didn’t stay long enough.” She inspected a calendar. “Monday night. The 14th. I told him he must stay in the hospital, but he just wanted pills. He said he would come back. He never came.”
“You gave him the pills?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “Perhaps you’ll wait until the doctor is free again?”
“Sverdloff didn’t leave an address, a contact?”
“Nothing.”
“Ravi Shankar. A genius,” said Viktor, nodding at his iPod that was plugged into the car. “I love the sitar.”
“I have to find Sverdloff.”
“Listen to me, you have to pay attention, you have to be careful, you think like an American, but this place is not normal anymore, this is a police state, this is only one guy who is running things, and you have to pay attention.” Viktor said it so quietly I could hardly hear him.
“Why do you tell me all this?”
“My cousin Bobo tells me I should say these things to you. I should help you. You help him, you help the family.”
“I want the boy,” I said. “I want Grisha. I think Tolya Sverdloff came here to look for him. I think maybe Tolya already found him. He followed me to the place I was staying, maybe to the club, on the street, and then he went away.”
“You think Mr Grisha has gone to be with Marx as we used to say? You don’t think he’s already dead?”
“Who do you really work for?”
“This one, that one. I was a soldier, I told you. For a while I was a detective also, like Bobo. I’m freelance. Some of the time I help with joint terrorist things, even your friend from Wyoming. Bodyguard, too, for money. This and that. I keep telling you. You have some idea, yes?”
“Roy Pettus?”
“He’s okay,” said Viktor.
“Yeah.”
“What’s your idea?”
“I need to go somewhere by myself. One hour. Look, there are some bodies I heard about, dumped out by a place you don’t need to see. One might be Grisha Curtis. I have a friend who’s a homicide cop.”
“One hour.”
“I’ll take you to my place. You can wait there. Don’t go back to your apartment. Don’t go out. Please, this is serious, you’ll get in trouble, you’ll get me in trouble, you’ll get people killed if you don’t listen. I’ll get your stuff from the apartment, if you want.”
“You know where I’m staying?”
“Sure.”
“You knew as soon as I got here?”
“Stay here,” he said as he pulled up in front of his building. “Pray one of our bodies is Curtis. You have contacts with anyone here?”
“Who would I have contacts with?”
“Cops? Journalists other than Fetushova? Friends? Old friends?”
“Not anymore,” I said.
“Family?”
“Dead.”
“Friends of family?”
“Also dead. What the fuck are you asking for?”
“Children of friends of family, parents?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Okay, so think.”
“Just fucking tell me what you want to know.”
“FSB,” he said in a low voice.
“I don’t know these bastards.”
“KGB.”
I said I knew what the fucking FSB was, and that it used to be the KGB, and how the fuck would I know anybody in it?
“Your father.”
“He’s been dead a long time.”
“They like the families, the children, you have heritage, they’ll talk to you. Sooner or later somebody will remember your father and say, what about him, what about the son, he’s one of us.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“In this country, even according to my pious Christian friends, Christ is dead,” said Viktor, picking up his car keys.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
I didn’t wait for Viktor Leven. I had an idea I had to get going. Maybe I was already too late.
At Moffat’s place, I looked for Igor the caretaker. He was out. I went into his hutch and then into the half-built apartment. Upstairs I looked for the bones. They were gone. So were Willie Moffat’s golf clubs. Maybe Igor had gone to sell them both.
I had come back to the apartment to get a few of my things, and lock the place up so Moffat didn’t come home and find everything gone. As soon as I got inside I knew somebody had been there, looking for me, searching through my stuff, papers, a notebook, but nothing else. Everything else was in place: TV, desktop computer, espresso machine. It wasn’t a thief. It wasn’t Igor.
I locked up, left a note for Moffat, pushed the keys under the door, went out to look for a taxi. I could have taken Moffat’s car, but it was too risky. Traffic cops were on the make all over Moscow. They stopped you. They asked for money. I was guessing it was the reason nothing had been done about the traffic. Maybe the traffic cops’ union put up a fight. Maybe it was the only way they could feed their kids. I didn’t want to drive another guy’s car, not now.
My phone rang. A familiar voice was on the other end, but the line was blurry. I couldn’t make out who it was, and then the line went dead. I had my clothes and papers in my carry-on, I didn’t know where the hell I was going, but I wasn’t coming back here. I had cash, and I had the gun. Viktor Leven never took it off me.
I flagged down a cab. I made a deal with the driver for the trip out to the country, twenty kilometers, give or take, and he was willing, glad of the work, a chubby little cheerful Georgian with two teeth missing, who told me he loved Americans and for me he would make a deal. We did it in sign language, and the couple of words of Russian I admitted I knew.
I kept up the idea that I didn’t speak Russian much and that I was just a tourist, at least for a while, and then I gave it up.
From the rear-view mirror hung a little Georgian flag. I felt okay in his car. Georgians disliked the Russians plenty. There was going to be trouble, he said. South Ossieta, Russian army, the whole thing was going to blow up, and soon.
“What were you?”
“I was a history teacher,” he said. “I need the money,” he added, half turning to look at me.
I asked him to take me to Nikolina Gora, a village out in the Moscow countryside. He asked where exactly. I said I was looking for someone, I’d let him know.
His name was Eduard, and he was a shrewd guy. He said, if I was looking for information around Barvika, the town you came to before you got to Nikolina Gora, he would call his sister who cleaned houses nearby and heard all the gossip. It was all a Georgian girl with a dark complexion could get around Moscow. She cleans their fucking toilets, he said. I said, call her. He put his foot on the gas.
He got on his cell, he called his sister and they gabbled away for twenty minutes while we sat in traffic. I understood the sister had agreed to meet us. Eduard turned the radio up.
It was a hot windy day, sky sludge-colored, dust swirling across the windows of the crummy taxi, no air conditioning. From behind I could see the sweat streaming down my Georgian’s neck. He wiped it with a paper towel.
You think of Moscow as a winter city, its ugliness and sprawl disguised. In summer, you see it as it is. I remembered the summers now, dusty, everyone jamming into cars or on a train or a bus to get out of town.
I rolled down the window as we headed out of town on the highway, and Eduard chattered away, mostly in Russian, trying out his English and sign language, half turned towards me and grinning like a fool. I figured we were going to crash.
It was a long time since I’d come out here, the last time to Sverdloff’s parents’ dacha in Nikolina Gora.
The Rublevo-Uspenskoye highway was always the best road in the entire country, all eleven time zones of it. Big-time creeps had their official country houses out this way, right back to Stalin. Even now, where once the ZiL sirens blared, there were big Mercs and Range Rovers.