“Hey, Artie.” She looked up, pointed at the phone, at a chair. “I won’t be long, okay? There’s coffee on in the kitchen, honey, and you could grab me a mug, too,” she added.
I remembered the place. When Tolya bought it for his mother, he had furnished it with a black leather couch and some easy chairs, which were still here but piled with files and folders and books. On the wall was a bulletin board with the names and addresses of orphanage facilities and shelters in Russian. Tacked to the cork board were also six of Val’s photographs of Russian children. Staring into the camera, the kids looked bruised, tired, hopeless.
Most of the bedroom furniture was gone-the old lady, Tolya’s mother, Lara Sverdlova-had had a taste for frilly covers and gilt mirrors. All that remained was a bed covered with a plain white linen spread. That, and a large movie poster with Lara as a young star in an old Soviet picture. In it, she was dressed as a farm girl riding a tractor, and it made me smile. Sverdlova had always been glamorous and even in a babushka, and on the tractor, she was perfectly made up, and her hands manicured. My dad had adored her.
In the small kitchen coffee was dripping into a glass. The smell was intense, and I poured it into a couple of mugs and went back to Val.
She beamed, got up, kissed me on the cheek. “You like my disguise?” she said indicating the blouse and skirt.
I gave her the coffee. “I like it,” I said.
“I deal with a lot of poor ex-Soviets now, some from the Stans, Uzbeks, Tajiks, those people, and the Bukharians, I always think it sounds romantic, the region is called the Silk Road, you know? Tashkent, Dushanbe, really, really isolated and strange, and suddenly they’re in America. People just hanging on. Some of them are religious, I don’t go around in shorts or tight stuff, it makes my job easier if I look okay to them. But the ones who don’t make it out are in real shit,” she added.
“How come?”
“They live in these backwaters. I went once, it’s incredible, like something out of prehistory, and there’s no money, and no work, so they go to Moscow and eventually some of the girls end up working the streets, or the train stations, or worse. The people here get the news, family members get in touch, I try to put my people in Moscow in contact. Sometimes it’s the girls themselves,” she said.
“How come I didn’t know about all this?”
“I only started not so long ago. You didn’t convince my dad to stay, I guess,” she added.
“I’m really sorry. I tried.”
She shrugged. “It’s okay. I saw him before he left. He said he’d make the London trip short. I hope he will.”
“What was in the envelope he gave you at his club?”
“You’re a nosey bastard,” she said, and grinned. “He gave me a big fat check for my little foundation.”
“I could give you a check.”
“You’re adorable, Artie, let’s not talk about depressing stuff, let’s go eat and maybe have a swim, or sit in the sun.”
“I want to hear more about your work,” I said. “I do.”
“I’ll tell you while we eat,”she said.
“I don’t know why you’re not fat, you eat all the time.”
“Maybe it’s genetic.” She picked up a copy of the Post from a chair. “You know about this, Artie?” Val showed me the picture of Masha Panchuk in the paper.
“Yeah, I heard.”
“When did you hear?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I knew her,” said Valentina. “Masha, right?”
When we were settled at a cafe on the boardwalk, and Val had ordered smoked fish, having changed her mind about the blintzes, and we were both drinking Bloody Marys, she asked me again what I knew about the dead girl.
“What do you mean you knew her?”
“That club out in Sheepshead Bay, the one I walked over to with you Friday night, Dacha, or maybe someplace in the city. It didn’t snap into place until I saw the paper. I recognized her from the picture, not the taped-up one, Jesus, Artie. Sometimes I wonder.”
I was surprised by Val’s cool, her composure. Most people, unless they’re on the job, pull back when the talk turns to dead people, to the cases filled with bare-knuckle ugliness.
“It doesn’t bother you, talking about it?”
“Of course it bothers me, but not the way people think,” said Val. “The stuff I see in Moscow is pretty shitty, so at least it makes me less of a pussy crybaby than most of my friends.”
“What kind of stuff?”
While I was asking, the food arrived, and Val dug into the huge platters of smoked salmon, whitefish, sable, sturgeon. She put butter on her bread, and piled it high with fish.
“What kind?” she said. “Little girls put out to work as prostitutes, parents who slash them, I mean on their faces, with rusty razor blades, if they refuse. This is big business in Moscow and no one does anything.”
“Tell me about Masha Panchuk. How well did you know her?”
“Was that her last name? I didn’t even know. I knew she was Masha, I got that, I remember, but I hardly knew her at all,” said Val. “Some of my friends told me she was illegal and I tried to figure out what to do for her, but I couldn’t, so I would give her little presents, stupid shit that girls like, a little purse, some make-up, I don’t know, some money or something, and I asked my dad about her, but he didn’t like me going out to the clubs, and anyhow, I’m always shoving my giant feet into things, so I just let it be this time.” She waved at the waitress, called her by name, asked Tanya how the kids were, and asked for more coffee. “Maybe I should have stayed with it, I mean helped Masha out, but I didn’t. Also, I pretty much stopped going to clubs last winter, you know, I mean I’m too old.”
“You’re twenty-four,” I said
“Yeah, but old for my years.” She laughed and ate more fish, and more bread, and thought about cheesecake. Val leaned back and looked at people on the boardwalk. “You want to swim?”
“I’d sink if I swam after all this food,” I said.
“What are you doing for dinner tonight? You could buy me an early birthday dinner if you want. Weird that my pop and I have the same birthday, isn’t it?”
I was flustered. I tried my usual line of joking with her.
“You’re supposed to think of me as your uncle or something,” I said. “Anyway, your father would not just kill me but do it slowly in little pieces, like the worst stuff he ever learned from his not-so-nice-nik friends. You know how they killed people in old Russia? You want me to tell you how they did it, Val? You’re thinking Pugachev, the bandit outlaw, from old times, right? I read the Pushkin story. They really did nasty stuff.” Val picked up her fork. The middle finger on her left hand was missing. She saw me looking at it.
“I know, my dad worries because he thinks this is his fault.”
When she was ten, Val was snatched from the Sverdloffs’ apartment in Moscow. It was the 1990s, the gangster years in Russia, and Tolya was in real-estate deals with bad people.
Tolya had been at home when they took Val, but he was dead drunk, fast asleep. He never got over it. It was his fault and he knew it, that they took his little girl, kept her for three days, cut off her finger and sent it to him. He left Moscow after that, and took his family to Florida to live in a gated community.
He offered Val plastic surgery. The best, he said. He urged it on her. You’ll be like new, he said. She refused. She wore her stump like a badge of honor, the way she wore everything- her beauty, her height.
She was a passionate, funny girl, but there were times when her eyes turned inward and she seemed far away. Maybe it was to do with the kids she helped in Moscow, the things she had learned that made her want to cut out, to stop the world. There were times I thought of her as a girl in a garden, dreaming, planning, a book on her lap, her eyes shut, listening to the crickets and the wind.