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.
“I’ll try,” I said. “What airline are you on?” I added, making stupid small talk to change the subject.
“You think I am flying commercial? Please.”
He smiled. He seemed okay. He said that Valentina was still asleep at home and he had checked on her, and in her sleep, she had smiled at him. I didn’t say she had been with me. Somehow, I would redeem myself with him, one day, some day.
“You have keys for my place? In case,” said Tolya.
“Yes.”
“And all my phone numbers?”
“Yeah.”
“You’ll think about coming with me in business, in restaurants? You promise?” He looked at his big gold Rolex. “What’s the date, Artyom?”
“July 6. You okay?”
“Please, I just want to set my watch, you think I’m getting senile?” He adjusted his watch. “We’ll have some fun before it’s too late, Artyom. Okay? Before we die. Thought we’d die before we got old, like they say back in the day, right, when I was rock and roll god, but now we have to hurry up.”
For a second it occurred to me that-I’d thought it before- Tolya’s clubs were some kind of cover, but cover for what? I didn’t know. I didn’t want to know.
“One other thing, Artyom,” he said.
“Sure.”
“This Roy Pettus, stay away from him.”
“Don’t worry. I’m seeing him later, I’m going to tell him to fuck off, you know?”
“Don’t see him at all. Just don’t. These guys, Artyom, these spook people they are the same, they work together, they exchange information, it’s capital for them, like cash,” said Tolya. “I have to go now.”
He climbed into the black Range Rover that was waiting for him at the curb. He shut the door. He pressed his face against the window, pushed his hair back from his forehead. It was already gray at the roots. In the face against the window, I could see how he would be as an old man.
Don’t go, I wanted to say.
“Take care of her,” he mouthed through the car window.
Tolya put his hand, big, like a pale pink ham, flat on the window, a sort of farewell gesture, and I remember thinking, not knowing why I thought it, that I’d never see him again. Then the car pulled away.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
It was quiet downtown when I went to meet Roy Pettus, the Sunday of a holiday weekend. No lawyers cluttered the monumental steps of the courthouses, or leaned against the columns of this imperial New York, no supplicants or secretaries or jurors fed up with endless waiting, nobody except a few tourists heading for Ground Zero, and homeless men stretched out on benches in the shade of the trees. And pigeons. And pigeon shit.
It was sultry. I tried not to think about Valentina and couldn’t think about anything else. A few minutes later, I saw Pettus.
He crossed the street near City Hall, stopped to light up a cigarette, and then he continued towards me. He put up his hand in greeting. Then he held it out.
“Artie, good to see you.”
“You too, Roy.” I kept it cool.
He looked around, maybe from habit and said, “Can we walk?”
“Sure.”
We set off towards the Brooklyn Bridge. Pettus looked a lot older than I recalled but it was more than a decade. The sandy hair was white, cut short. The sunburned face was lined, the pale eyes watery. He walked straight, though, and he was dressed square as any FBI man: pressed chinos, white button-down shirt tucked in, cellphone attached to his belt. Only a pair of worn cowboy boots marked him as off duty.
I asked Pettus how Chugwater was. He said okay. I’d known him when he was an agent at the New York FBI office, must be fifteen years, and we both worked the nukes case on Brighton Beach together. Afterwards, he retired to Chugwater, Wyoming where he was born.