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.
“What is it?”
“I think Tolya left this. I think he left it as a message, I think he was trying to tell us something. I saw these brushes in Val’s darkroom in New York. There were always a lot of them. I know that Grisha bought some from a guy in Brooklyn, too,” I said.
From outside came the distant sound of a car.
“What’s that?” said Molly.
“Read this thing with the brushes,” I said.
“Give me a minute,” said Molly, picking up the piece of paper, looking at the instructions, hands shaking. “I used to see these at Val’s place,” she said. “She used them for cleaning her negatives. She wouldn’t use a regular camera, only that fucking antique Leica that supposedly Bertolt Brecht gave our grandfather if you can believe it. I’m such a philistine I wasn’t sure who this Brecht guy was. Literature wasn’t my thing. Val was very finicky about her photos, I’d say, Jesus, Val, why don’t you just use like a make-up brush, I’ll get you some, and she’d throw me out. I don’t get what you’re saying, Artie.”
“How did she die?”
“Somebody smothered her. Put a pillow over her face.”
“Go on.”
“I thought about that. She was strong as an ox, right? So it was somebody she knew. She wasn’t letting just any creep into her place, right? But there was something else. My dad was rambling one time, when I saw him in New York, something about her being killed twice, something I figured for crazy because he was out of his brain. He was right. He kept talking about this guy, Livitsky, or someone that died in London. I thought he was paranoid.”
“Litvinenko. What if he was right?”
“The autopsy didn’t show anything,” she said. “It would have shown. Shit.”
“What?”
“It would only show if you knew what you were looking for.”
“I think that’s what Tolya said, or maybe the poison hadn’t started working.”
“I think my dad was just out of his mind about Val,” she said. “Even if they knew to look for Polonium, it’s very febrile stuff.” She crushed out her cigarette in an ashtray and put the butt in her cut-off jeans pocket.
“Molly?”
“What?”
“There were wrappers from Antistatic brushes on the floor of her bedroom when I found her there,” I said.
“Christ, she once told me Grisha was so nice about her photographs, always offering to help. My God, he did it Artie. He would have known how, or could have found out. You think that could be it? He did that to her, and then felt bad?”
“Tolya said something like that.”
Molly re-read the instructions on the box of brushes. “You would really need to know how to get them bulk,” she said. “You would need to grind this shit up and make sure she ingested it. You’d have to know where the Polonium was coming from to be sure it was still potent.”
“Grisha had connections,” I said. “Is your Dad sick?”
“I don’t know. He keeps that stuff to himself, why?”
“I saw him in London, he looked bad.”
“You think?” She gestured to the box of brushes. “Is that a car? Outside?”
“We need to go. Now.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
The car was coming closer. We were still sitting in the kitchen. I still had Tolya’s sock in my hand along with the box of lens brushes.
I got up and looked out the window. I could barely see the car, its lights out. Somebody was coming. Somebody who didn’t want to make a lot of noise, and I thought: it’s Tolya. It has to be. Who else could it be at this time of night, the weird purple sky heavy with rain, the humidity rising from the grass and coming down from the sky, so my skin was slick with sweat.
I blew out the candle.
“What’s happening, Artie?”
“Somebody just drove up to the gate.”
She rubbed her eyes. “You think it’s my dad?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t we go out of the back door, and through the back gate just in case it’s not him. How far is it to your mother’s place?”
“A mile, not far.”
“We can walk. I don’t want you riding your bike at night, there’s too many crazy drunk drivers out there. Stay on the side of the road.”
“Who do you think it is?” she said,taking the box of brushes from me and shoving them into the bag.
I thought about the man in the seersucker jacket. I thought about Grisha, or maybe it was just Ed, the Georgian taxi driver. Maybe Ed, the good Georgian, had come for me.
“It might be the taxi driver,” I said.
I had to take care of Molly. I had promised Tolya I’d look after Val, and I didn’t and he never blamed me. All that was left was her twin sister.
I pushed on the metal gate in back of the house, and it clattered with a rusty iron noise. We went through and stood together on the empty road that ran behind the Sverdloff dacha, and Molly pointed to the left. Her mother’s place was down the road. And then she stopped dead still.
“What?”
“I left my bike out front. They’ll see it.”
“Leave it,” I said. “We need to go.”
“What if it’s my dad?”
“We’ll walk a little, and then we’ll wait. Okay? You can go to your mother’s place, I’ll walk you most of the way and then and I’ll go back and see who it is.”
“I want to go, too.”
“No,” I said, “I can’t do that. I can’t let you. Just go back to New York, tell Bobo Leven. Take the brushes back to New York. First you go see my friend, Sonny Lippert. Right away, give him the brushes. Put them in something safe, wrap them up good, okay?”
She nodded.
“If you get stuck in Moscow, go see this guy, Viktor,” I said.
She held out her arm. “Write it here, so I don’t forget,” said Molly, and I scribbled the numbers with her red pen.
“Come on, we have to go,” I said, but she hesitated.
“Listen, I have to tell you something. In case I don’t get another chance, or whatever.”
“Of course.”
“Val told me she liked you for real. She told me that if you weren’t our dad’s best friend, she would have… never mind.”
“Thank you.”
“She called me the day before she died, said she had spent the night with you. She sounded really happy.
“I’m glad you told me.” I took her hand and we started down the road together, listening for the noise of a car, or footsteps.