Ranulf: Where was he from?
—The great-uncle, the badass dad, or your guy?
—All three.
—Big bear, the Ukraine. Daddy bear, a village near the Volga. Baby bear, Gorky, now called Nizhny Novgorod.
A chill runs down Andrew’s spine and he actually leans away from his computer, as if away from the memories the word Volga stirs in him.
Fu fu fu, I smell Russian bones.
He feels sweat moisten his palms. He rubs these on his pants.
—Where is little Dragomirov now?
—I should be asking you that. He disappeared from his summer cabin in Sterling. New York State. Like a few miles from you, right?
—Does it look mobbish? Old business coming back for him?
—Not likely. Everybody liked him. He was so good with numbers that three separate bosses used him to help cover their gasoline schemes, and so charming and funny the Luccheses didn’t whack him when they got Resnikoff. But he hung on until the early nineties when they opened that big, flashy nightclub, Rasputin’s. Meanwhile, new Russian mob was coming over in droves, lots of it with ex-Spetsnaz muscle. FBI got interested because these guys were as big as the Italians now, at least locally. Mikhail Dragomirov felt it getting hot, took off to St. Petersburg (Florida, not Russia), married a stewardess who also modeled at boat shows and bought a couple of condos. She died, he sold the condos, and now he just tools around with his dog gambling and frequenting on-line escorts. He looooves the shit out of Vegas. And Cirque du Soleil. I think he saw Ka seven times. And Avenue Q. If someone was going to make him sleep with the fishes, they would have done it back in the day.
Andrew blinks at the screen, rubs his chin. “Sleep with the fishes”? Was that intentional? Does she know about Nadia?
—Jesus, old man, you hang out with a rusalka? I didn’t know there were any of those in the west. WTF, he comes all the way to America to get drowned by a Russian mermaid?
—Are you actually reading my thoughts over the Internet? And is this conversation veiled?
—Facebook knows more about you than I do. And computers are my specialty. You’d be amazed ;)
So saying, Radha appears in a box on the screen (half Iranian on her father’s side but she says Persian—pale skin, dark hair, she is a honey), showing her hands. Text nonetheless continues to scroll.
—And I don’t have unveiled conversations, except on BS social media as a front. If I weren’t veiling this, I’d Skype you, because you type like a trained seal using his nose. I’m the go-to girl for like 40 of our sort… you think I’m going to let homeland security read this stuff? Try to print this conversation, I dare you.
Andrew likes dares. He prints. The printer slowly whines out not text, but a photograph. Him on the toilet, pants around ankles, long hair down, reading a copy of Timber Home Living, his favorite magazine. The picture is from this morning, from the angle of the polished brass mirror over the sink. A corner of his cell phone winks on the toilet’s tank, just behind him, indicating the electronic fingerhold she used to get in. Normally brass mirrors are safe, can’t be used as gates like glass ones, but Radha is so good with electricity and currents that she was able to press the conductive metal into her service.
—You scare me.
—Thanks. So, look, you should know I picked up some magic around him. Strong. Not coming from him, but someone near him, maybe family. Maybe the niece. Some Internet chatter about a niece coming over to help look for him, but nothing specific. I think someone’s veiling on that end.
—Someone stronger than you?
Radha crosses her arms and raises an eyebrow.
—I didn’t say that.
When she uncrosses her arms, she has six arms, Shiva-style, the hands of which she stacks on her hips defiantly, her six elbows fanned behind her, making a sort of Persian seraph of her.
—I dare you to get me info on the niece.
—Not fair.
—I double dog dare you.
—What do I get?
—What do you want?
—Madeline Kahn.
—Ok. I’ll open a trapdoor for five minutes. You know how it works, right?
—Yeah, you send me a DVD of a movie she’s in, and I get five minutes to get her to talk to me. Only she doesn’t have to. She could tell me to go fuck myself and leave her alone.
—Or she could freak out. No telling with the dead. Most likely she’ll use your time asking you about friends and family. You should probably Google the shit out of everybody she knew. And it’s going to be VHS. I haven’t figured out how to do it on DVD yet.
—Better catch up, old man. Even DVDs are old-school now. What are you going to do when it’s all computer streaming? Which it is.
—I guess you’ll take over.
—I can’t open trapdoors. I tried. Plenty.
—Then I guess you’ll have to go to a pawnshop and get a VCR.
—For Madeline? Ok. And send History of the World. I want to talk to her in that Roman get-up. “YES! No,no,no,no,no,no, YES!”
—Are you sure you don’t have a family member or friend you’d rather talk to?
—I’m young. All of my friends are alive. Only dead family were crabby old grayhairs. One nice Grandma on Brick Lane in London just died, but I’d rather talk to Madeline Kahn. “Ohhh, it’s twue, it’s twue!”
—As you wish.
—All right. I’ll keep poking. We’ll see if comrade witchiepoo Dragomirov has hackers or slackers in her kennel.
23
An apartment in Kiev.
Small and dirty, littered with decades-old Western kitsch.
An Eiffel tower perfume bottle, yellowed and empty, cat hair stuck to its sides, dominates a plastic white end table hash-marked at every edge with cigarette scars.
Next to the table, and taller, stands a Babel tower of books, at the top of which a dog-eared paperback presents a redhead with arched eyebrows, her conical, late-sixties breasts like small missiles all but poking through her bikini as she guns a motorcycle beneath the Czech title, Angels of Road and Beach.
Fake German steins made in Japan stand on the floor against a peeling once-avocado wall, like very small counterrevolutionaries awaiting their firing squad.
A curling old poster, its corners peppered with tack holes, features a leering and clearly unauthorized Mickey Mouse pointing a gloved finger back at the legend ORLANDO; oranges spill from the first O, a dolphin jumps through the second. Behind the huge mouse, men and women in early-eighties hairdos, all of them soft around the edges like someone Captain Kirk is about to inseminate, laugh in a sort of twinkling, painted-in, promlike heaven. Mickey’s waist is cut off by a neobiblical invitation, Come and See, Come and See! in Russian and Ukrainian. Under this is the Sunny Skye travel agency logo atop a long-dead phone number. The top and bottom of the poster are torn and taped in the middle where the apartment dweller’s father ripped it from its thumbtacks, ripped it off of the wall of his illegal Donetsk business in 1986, just ahead of the arrival of the police.
An orange cat with white paws licks itself, ignoring the man hunched over the computer in a sun-bleached pinkish-yellow Izod polo shirt. If it could stand up and look over his shoulder, it would see him typing in English: