One hand in Molly’s, we went through the high gates, which were unlocked, then we stumbled through the weeds to the house.
The front door was locked. It had glass panes in the top half, and one was broken. I pushed it, and it fell in. I managed to push another one of the panes in too, and I heard it shatter lightly on wide planks inside the house.
It was very quiet. I listened to the house through the broken window. I couldn’t hear anything except a faint creaking noise, maybe a breeze, or a rat. Mice. Nobody was here. Sverdloff wasn’t here. Was he? It was a big house, two storeys. I listened some more.
“Let’s go,” said Molly. “Come on.”
I reached through the broken glass and found the doorknob, and turned it. The door opened and together we went inside the house.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Like a dog uncertain of what it was hearing, I stood in the doorway. Molly tried to go ahead. I tried to stop her, I put my arm out, but she went in anyway. She had a little flashlight in her purse. She turned it on and it made a narrow cone of light in the dark house. The old wide oak planks creaked under her feet.
“Molly?”
“Just wait, Artie,” she said, and I lost sight of her as she moved through the square hallway into the living room. “Wait,” she said, her voice echoing back at me. “Wait.”
I could hear her walking away after that, into the house. Her cell phone went off. She talked to it in a whisper and I couldn’t hear the words. I stood still and smelled the dust.
In the distance I saw a fluttering light, then I saw two. There are no ghosts, I told myself, except in the minds of Russians. But not in the real world.
I was beginning to hallucinate. Things swayed with the unreality of this candlelit world. Voices talked into my ear. My hand was ice cold on the metal of my gun. I held it in front of me. I watched the lights.
“You look like you saw something,” said Molly, reappearing. “Like you saw a spook,” she added, holding a couple of candles she had lit. “You okay?” In this light I saw how young she looked, much younger than Valentina had ever seemed.
“Come on,” I said, and we went through the house, one room at a time, looking for something. Anything. I thought I could smell Sverdloff’s aftershave, his cologne, the special scent he had made up for him in Florence in a medieval building on the Arno, he always said. It smelled of grapefruit. It arrived in New York in elaborate packages which contained the cologne in crystal bottles with carved gold stoppers. He had given me a bottle of it for a birthday.
“You smell him, don’t you?” said Molly.
“Yeah.”
“Me too. He always wore that stuff his friend Lorenzo made for him. He tried to get me to wear it. He was here, wasn’t he, Artie? He was in this house.” She spoke calmly, like a young doctor discussing the possibilities of a fatal disease.
“Yes.”
We moved through the rooms together, Molly with her candles.
Most of the furniture had been covered with dustsheets. One of the windows in the main room with its old beamed ceilings was broken, and a bird had left its nest in a corner of the room, high up, under the sloping roof.
In the kitchen, Molly put the candles on the long trestle table, a film of summer dust covering it, a huge tureen in the middle, the old copper samovar on a side table.
Everything the way I remembered it, but suspended in another time, unused now, empty, dusty. Except for the Grape Nuts. At one end of the table was a box of Grape Nuts, and an espresso pot, and a little empty blue tin that had contained caviar.
Molly picked up the pot, and made a face.
“There’s still coffee in here.”
The table looked as if somebody had left in the middle of breakfast. A cup was overturned, a napkin dropped on the floor.
“Only my dad eats Grape Nuts. He’s crazy for them. He always takes them with him. And caviar.” She picked up the little blue tin. “He’s so weird, he buys wine for a grand a bottle and drinks it like Coke, but he won’t travel without a box of Grape Nuts for breakfast, then he’ll have eggs with caviar, you know? Crazy asshole,” said Molly, smiling and then bursting into tears. “Where is he?”
“You okay here for a minute? I want to look around,” I said, after a while, and she nodded.
I left her one of the candles, took the other, and she looked at me and giggled.
“What?”
“You look like some kind of weird phantom, the gun in one hand, the candle in the other. God, Artie, where is he?” She lit a cigarette, and tossed the match in the empty cereal bowl.
“Don’t,” I said.
“Evidence?” she asked, taking it out of the bowl.
“I guess.”
“I was thinking of doing forensics anyhow,” she said. “Med school. I’m not going to be any good with people that are alive, you know,” said Molly.
“Yell if you need me,” I said, and went towards the study and music room that had been Tolya’s father’s domain.
All the time I could smell Tolya. He had been here. He had been here, but he was gone, unless there was something upstairs. I was hallucinating. From the kitchen I heard Molly singing an old Beatles tune.
“Hey Jude”, she sang to herself off key.
In the study, the walls were still jammed with books, books to the ceiling, new and old, in four languages. Records, old LPs were on other shelves.
There was a broken leather sofa under the windows. A big old-fashioned desk was on the other side of the room and above it was a portrait of Tolya’s mother.
I sat at the desk. There must be a caretaker or the house would have been stripped clean. Theft in the countryside had turned into big business. And Russians, like the Brits, once they had the dough, wanted a country life where they could pretend they were gentry. Or intellectuals. Or aristocrats. Or something they had never been and never would be. They could get the trappings. Books and furniture like Sverdloff’s could be cleaned up and sold for a bundle.
The leather-topped desk was scarred but there was no dust. Somebody had been cleaning up for sure. Somebody had been watching the house.
I left the study and climbed the stairs to the bedrooms. I checked all four.
The last room I went into had been Tolya’s when he was a boy. I sat on the lumpy bed with the sagging springs. I looked at the pictures on the wall, pictures of rock bands Tolya had played with and bands he had loved.
I went to the window and pulled up the shade, then pulled it down again. I looked in the closet. I could smell him here. I knew he had been here recently, but where was he? What had happened?
I lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling.
I got on my hands and knees, and looked under the bed.
I lay flat on the floor now, and stretched myself so I could reach all the way under the bed where I saw something yellow on the floor. I reached out and grabbed it, and sat up and leaned against the wall.
It was a huge yellow silk sock, dust balls hanging off it. It was one of Tolya’s socks. It was dusty, but it looked new. It smelled of some fancy talc Tolya used. There were still grains of the powder on the sock.
I knew now Tolya had left the house in a hurry, leaving the cereal and the socks. Nothing to tell me where he had gone, no clues. All I had was the sock, and, in the closet, a shoebox that had contained sneakers. I looked inside.
My God, I thought. He left without this. He left in a hurry, or maybe he left it for me.
“Molly?”
“Yes?”
“I found this stuff in Tolya’s old room.”
On the table I placed a couple of boxes of Staticmaster brushes, the kind I’d seen in Valentina’s darkroom. “Read this,” I said, pushing over the instructions I found in the box of brushes.