“Tea.”
“Hold on,” she said. “I want to read you something,” added Fiona, and pulled a notebook out of her bag.
For a moment, imagining it was another life, I enjoyed sitting in the car with her, the light rain coming down, the two of us smoking. In another life, I thought again.
“Litvinenko was as good as the first victim of nuclear terrorism, did you know that?”
“Go on.”
“Do you know about polonium-210, Artie? It’s both completely passive and astonishingly active. It can’t move through even the thinnest piece of paper, not even skin. But once it’s been ingested, it moves through one’s body like the proverbial knife through butter. A trace on a table or a teapot and it crackles into life, it moves about, I’ve read it described as devious, sneaky, elusive… I wrote it down,” she looked at her notebook. “I try to remind myself not to be sloppy. Listen to this article from the New York Times: ‘Its sheer energy punched out atoms that could attach to a mote of dust-spreading, settling on surfaces, absorbed in lungs, on lips, invisible.’ The writer calls it ‘a braggart, a substance whose whereabouts were blindingly evident to those who knew where and how to look. It leaped free from any attempt to contain it, spreading, and smearing traces of its presence everywhere I had been, on tabletops, door handles, clothes, light switches, faucets.’ They say it crawls the walls.”
“What else?”
“We see those red flags all over London. But are they for real? A trail left by Litvinenko? Caused by rumor? The myth of fingerprints? You understand the power of these legends, these myths?”
“Yes.”
“All the Russians have to do is play on the myth. It’s so terrifying, fear itself is radioactive. The Cold War nuts are back in business,” she added. “This is like Pandora out of the box. Irène Joliot-Curie, Mme Curie’s daughter, died of leukemia for her work with polonium. My grandmother who worked with her died of cancer. I suppose it’s become a kind of obsession with me. If the Russians feel it was worth the effort to export this sort of poison, they’ll do anything. And even where it’s nonexistent, just a rumor as provocation, or intel gossip, we spend time chasing it down. Great urban myths, Artie, are hard to beat.” She stopped to catch her breath.
I had worked a nuke case long ago. Red mercury, the legendary Soviet radioactive material, had turned out to be the biggest hoax of all.
“I know,” I said. “What else is it used for?”
“It used to be an element in the trigger for a nuclear weapon still employed in a few Russian weapons plants. Hard to get, hard to detect. And, Artie?”
“What?”
“We don’t know anything. All the cops and spooks and bureaucrats, nobody knows anything.” Fiona took a pad out of her bag and scribbled something on it, then handed it to me. “Go see these people, it’s a good clinic, private, just let them check you out, okay? You will, won’t you? Radiation isn’t a joke. I’ll drive you if you like.”
I said I’d make my own way there, knowing I wouldn’t bother, that there wasn’t time. I told Fiona I needed a favor. I said I was sure Greg Curtis had beat up Gagarin. From the house in Wimbledon I had managed to steal his Bible. I asked Colquhoun if she could get somebody to take prints off it and then match them up with Gagarin or the area where she had been mugged. I was a lousy spy, but I was still a good enough cop.
I asked Fiona to drop me at the subway. I had to do this by myself.
After I got to the station, I threw away the piece of paper with the clinic address. I wasn’t going to a clinic where they’d ask me questions I didn’t want to answer.
Valentina had married Grisha Curtis. She was married and she never told me. On the subway platform after I left Fiona, I was trapped by hordes of people.
I tried to avoid contact with other passengers because the gun was in my waistband and it was illegal as hell. If someone bumped me and felt it and made a stink-and there was plenty of rage in this city-I’d end up at some station house wasting time explaining things to a local cop.
Now people milled around and waited for a train, and some of them talked about the weather and what a washout the summer was, and others leaned against the wall and read their papers. I couldn’t see around the mob that pushed at me as I got on a train.
At the first stop, I tried to get off the train, but the crowds pushed me back. I kept my back close to the door.
Then the train stalled between stations. You could feel a ripple of tension. The memory of 7/7 was still fresh, the memory of people slaughtered on a subway train, a bus ripped open like a sardine can.
The grind and shunt of the train starting made people relax. A girl next to me smiled, a wry kind of smile, and returned to her copy of Harry Potter. A man next to her in a Lenin-style cap pulled down over his forehead was reading a Russian-language newspaper, while his tiny pale wife leaned against him and talked steadily. He never put his paper down.
I closed my eyes. I was betting Mrs Curtis was already on the phone to her son wherever he was and that he would come after me.
“Come on,” I thought. “Come and get me.”
All I wanted was Grisha Curtis, who had killed my Valentina.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Deborah Curtis, Grisha’s mother, was dead by the time I met Fiona Colquhoun the next morning at the Tate Gallery down near the river. It was early, mist hanging over the Thames, the lonely hoot coming from an invisible boat. When Colquhoun told me, at first I thought Mrs Curtis had somehow died from radiation poisoning in her house.
“No,” said Fiona. “No, Artie, and the radiation scare, this time anyway, was a false alarm,” she said, adding that Mrs Curtis had been found at her rich cousin’s house, sitting on the terrace, dead. The official line was she’d had a stroke, said Colquhoun.
“Did Grisha Curtis show up to see his mother? Did he kill her?”
“No”, said Fiona. “No evidence.”
I was sorry about Mrs Curtis. I wondered if my appearance at the Curtis house set off the events that had killed her. I had more questions for her, so I was sorry about that, too.
Fiona got it, didn’t think I was a bastard for saying it. She had been a real cop, even if now she was in some other game.
We walked along the river and she pointed out the spy palace across the river, an ugly modern building, letting me know she knew her way around, I thought. I had called her early that morning hoping I could play her, knowing there was plenty she hadn’t told me. But she was too sharp.
Drinking out of a coffee container, she told me she had run Grisha Curtis through her computers, and, unless he was using a different name, he was still in Britain. There was no record of him leaving the country.
“We matched fingerprints on the Bible you took from the Curtis house with some on Elena Gagarin’s handbag,” Fiona said. “They were a perfect match. The bank where he worked confirmed he was an employee and they had prints on him from a file. He taught school in Boston while he did his MBA, and the school system printed him,” she added. “He had a UK passport, and a Russian passport,” she said. “I had looked at Curtis before, but it was only when Valentina died, and when you came here, Artie, that I really focused on him. This Russian stuff really is like one of those mythical many-headed monsters, you look at something, it disappears, then shows up again. For a time, on the surface, he was pretty much what he claimed. I don’t know where the marriage license was filed, but I couldn’t find it. Perhaps someone made it disappear.”
“Yeah, what doesn’t show up is that he’s a murderous bastard. Thanks about the prints,” I added.
We sat on the steps of the museum. I knew Fiona was killing time while she thought about something.
“I met Grigory Curtis a second time, after I saw him at Larry Sverdloff’s, quite a bit later,” she said.