Bloody London (15 page)

The dance floor was full. The band pumped the Barbie song to a heavy disco beat, and the crowd moved to it laughing. Young guys, very smooth, danced, hands on their girls' asses. A quartet of women boogied with each other. Little kids got on the floor. A sweet-smelling girl with bright gold hair caught my arm and twirled me around, then I made my way through the rest of the couples who worked the dance floor like Fred and Ginger.

In the VIP area, beyond the big window, the ocean was black as pitch now, the yellow moon making a ladder of light on the water from the beach to the horizon. Tolya looked up from the table, caught my eye, warned me away with a gesture I ignored. I put the wine on his table, and Zeitsev shook my hand and smiled. He always figured I was bent, a dirty cop he could do business with.

The six private booths, their high backs to the room, were a few yards away. The band switched to a ballad. I reached over to shake Mrs Zeitsev's hand. Very clearly, in slo mo, I saw the huge yellow diamond on her hand. Then I saw Tolya half rise from his chair, mouth open, hand up as if to warn me or fend me off. Then a streak of blood. I was inches away from him when a shard of glass brushed my cheek. The band stopped. People screamed.

The window had imploded. The plate glass was sucked into the restaurant. Glass everywhere. I never heard it, no gunfire, no bomb, nothing. All I heard was the sound of glass and then panic, the crack and shatter, the smack of slabs of plate glass crashing, then the tinkle of the smaller pieces. I lay on the floor, tangled in a fur coat. There was blood on my cheek. I fumbled in my jacket.

Hand on my gun, I got on my feet.

I turned my head and saw I was a few feet from Leo Mishkin.

Blue suit torn by glass, he was on his hands and knees. He saw me look; there was blood on his forehead and neck, the dark curly hair seemed to sparkle with glass, but he was impervious to it all, absorbed only by the woman with him. He had thrown himself over her when the glass broke. Now he backed off carefully, and helped her up slowly, and from the way he touched her I saw he cared more about her than about himself.

Before the pandemonium in the restaurant subsided, I saw the gray slacks, the white silk shirt with the cuffs
folded back over those slim freckled wrists. The woman with Leo Mishkin was Frankie Pascoe.

An arm like a tree-trunk grabbed me, pushed me towards the back door, shoved me out on to the asphalt and around the side of the restaurant to the parking lot. The gravel tripped me, but Sverdloff held on to my shoulder. I pushed him away, saw his moon face in the street light: Tolya Sverdloff's face was covered in blood. “Get me out of here, Artyom,” he said. “Get me the hell out.”

I didn't wait. I pushed Sverdloff into my car, he kept his head down, we got the hell out of Brooklyn. I did ninety all the way through the Battery Tunnel.

The tunnel was completely empty. The emptiness echoed around me. I drove hard until I was in Manhattan. Sverdloff was silent. I said, “You'll stay at my place if there's a problem.”

He said, “I'm all right now, I can go home. Lend me your phone.”

I passed him the phone, he dialled, spoke briefly in Russian.

I said, “Farone called you?”

“Yes. He didn't like you nosing around by yourself.”

“You're a friend of Leo Mishkin, Tolya?”

He shrugged. “We do business.”

“He installed your safe room?”

“A favor.”

“You were in Brighton Beach tonight for what?” I kept driving, watching my rearview, the empty streets.

“Looking for you. Farone called me, like I said.”

“That's all?”

“I had business.”

“With Mishkin?”

“Some of it.”

I pulled up in front of Sverdloff's building. A Russian with a square head and a crew cut opened the door. I looked out. “The muscle is your guy?”

Sverdloff said, “Yes,” then leaned closer to me, one arm along the back of my seat. “Be careful, please.” He rubbed his face, smearing the blood. “Go home. I'll be in touch.”

He was messed up. Someone was on his tail and because of him, on mine. He got out of the car. I climbed out after him.

I said, “You think someone went for you tonight?”

He nodded. “And someone who knows we're friends. You got in the way, Artyom. I don't want that.”

“What do you need?”

“Keep it quiet that I'm in trouble, that I do business with Mishkin. Did business. Can you do that, Artyom?”

For the first time since I met him, Sverdloff seemed to shrink. He patted my shoulder, then turned to go into the building. He looked beat.

I watched until Tolya, shadowed by his guy, disappeared. Then I walked across to the Middlemarch. It wasn't far from Tolya's building on the other side of Sutton Place and I thought how much Pascoe must have hated it, the new money, the Russians who encroached on his fiefdom. The street was dreamy and private in the mild night, shut away from the rest of the city. But if the Middlemarch was Pascoe's castle, who in God's name were the courtiers?

The light slid slowly up the cast-iron building opposite mine; it seemed to paint the façade. I'd cleaned my place up, and I was standing looking out the window like I do, early mornings, smoking, thinking about the explosion the night before: it turned out to be a low-level explosive but, being Brighton Beach, no one was talking. Outside, Mike Rizzi pulled up in his station wagon, like he does every morning of his life, coming in from Brooklyn, hard-working bastard that he is, killing himself to pay for his three kids. And his wife's ambitions.

Callie Rizzi, Mike's youngest, practically fell out of the car, backpack in one hand, school blazer under her arm, pink sweatshirt tied around her neck, like the ruff on some long-legged Caribbean bird. She waited until Mike unlocked the shop, followed him in.

A few minutes later she came out again, a jelly donut in her hand, then looked up at my window – I've known Cal since she was a little kid, used to babysit her for Mike. She had her yellow blazer on now, and she
saw me at the window, put her hand in front of her eyes to shade it from the sun, and slowly, donut still in her hand, waved to me. Then she turned and ran for the subway.

I shuffled the mental snapshots. Two boys in the park near the Middlemarch, their yellow jackets, one boy raising his hand in a salute. The boy who turned out to be Mishkin's son. Callie's jacket was yellow like his. It was the day Frankie Pascoe gave me the list, the day she watched me watching the boys in the park. Frankie Pascoe and Leo Mishkin in Brighton Beach together. I figured Mishkin killed Thomas Pascoe. He had the connections, motive, the muscle.

I jammed my feet into sneakers, I raced downstairs and on to the pavement. She'd turned the corner. I banged full frontal into a pair of kids trying out their Halloween gear; a six-year-old Teletubby hit me up for a buck. I caught Callie at the subway.

“Hey, Artie.” She gave me a sloppy kiss.

“You have a minute?”

“For you, always.” She grinned big – she has that infectious smile – and walked alongside me. She spotted a coffee shop and said, “Come on, I need a hit. You can treat me.”

We sat at a table. She licked the foam off her coffee. “Double cappuccino with skim.” She drank steadily. “I really need my hit, you know.” She laughed. “Caffeine's drug of choice at all the best schools. So what's up?”

Callie leaned back and yawned. Her high round breasts pushed against the school shirt. She's just
fourteen, but my friend Steve says with girls like Callie, you want to look right over their heads. I see her, I think: jailbait, but I always say, “You look very cool,” and keep the rest shut up in a real dark place. I don't look inside that place except when I'm drunk, and I'm not drinking much these days.

“How's the others? Justine? Sophie?” Callie blows hot and cold about her two older sisters. She grinned. “The good girls, you mean? The brainiacs? They're cool. So what kind of case are you on, Artie?” She smoothed out her skirt.

“I'm working that thing at the Middlemarch, building by the river?”

“Cool,” she said. “Guy gets his head chopped in a swimming pool – omigod, I should be like more reverent, but it's so totally weird.”

“I noticed some kids from your school hanging around the scene.”

“Warthog Park, you mean. You're interested because it's near the scene, right? Is that right?”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“Sure. We all go there a lot.”

“So, Cal, you know a kid named Mishkin?”

She polished off her coffee and blushed. “Everybody knows Jared Mishkin. He's a junior at my school. He's pretty cool. Class President, that kind of stuff,” she said. “I could get to know him better, if you want,” she added, then flushed again, red, like a little tomato.

I said, “You like him?”

“Everyone likes him,” she said. “How come you're asking?”

“Anything special about him? You ever met his family?”

“No. He doesn't ask people over. I think he's embarrassed, you know, I mean, he has like foreign parents, you know. Russians. So what?” She was defensive, then she kissed me on the cheek. “I could get to know Jared Mishkin a lot better if you want,” she giggled. “I'll do some undercover work today, so meet me tonight if you want. Look. Meet me tonight at the park. I'll show you.”

I left Callie at the subway. I was at my door when I heard Angie Rizzi call my name. She was across the street, leaning against the coffee shop. I went over. Angie's beautiful face was papery, ravaged, the huge dark eyes full of panic.

“Where's Mike?” I said.

“At the bank. Sneaking a smoke. You saw her.”

“Sure.”

“She won't talk to me.”

“You want me to try?”

“She says she hates being set up for conversation.”

“It's normal, Ange.”

Angie's voice rose. “Normal? Jesus, Artie, I'm at my wits' end. Such a wasted life.”

“Callie's only fourteen.”

“They invent things. They lie all the time. You've met some of the kids she goes with, they're polite and all, but they're fourteen going on forty. I used to think anything was worth it, but with kids, from the minute they pop out you're on the rack until you die. I'm sorry,
Artie, it's an unhappy atmosphere at the minute, but it's her lying. I lie in bed rigid as a board waiting for her to come home. She says she's just going out by the river. To talk. What kid goes to the river at night to talk? I smell her breath. I find a forty-ounce empty in her room.

“Everyone does it, Mom, she says, you wanted me to go to St Pete's. Then she slams her door. She'll be thrown out of school, she'll have a rap sheet that will follow her. It's not like with rich kids that got fathers who are big-time lawyers or movie producers, who can fix it for their kid. It will follow her.”

“Christ, what's she done?”

Angie whispers, “Dope. They're smoking dope. Someone caught them in the girls' locker room. Pot.”

I smiled. I was relieved as hell. “That's it? That's all it is?”

She was irritated. “You and Mike, you're hopeless,” she said. “I have to go.”

I spent all day chasing my tail. I was worried about Sverdloff. Frankie Pascoe didn't take my calls. Leo Mishkin's company, when I read the files, was big and it appeared clean. He had branches in London and Moscow. He seemed clean as a fucking whistle. Everyone at the Middlemarch had been interviewed now, residents, janitors, supers, doormen. Nothing. Nobody talked. I went to Queens to see Pindar Aguirre, the Middlemarch janitor.

Aguirre lived on a narrow street in Astoria, in a four-story house with aluminum siding. Old men sat on the
stoop and smoked in the sun. When I buzzed, Pindar came out and we walked a while. He led me to the sculpture garden on the river near the old Steinway piano plant. We stared at the Noguchi sculptures for a while. On the other side of the East River you could see the Middlemarch, a tiny limestone castle. All the time we were there I had the sense someone was watching. There was no one at all in the garden. I figured the paranoia was getting me.

“You all right?” I said. “I heard you quit.”

He snorted. “I was fired.”

“How's that?”

I was on my way out already, you know, they didn't like it I wouldn't play ball.”

“How play ball?” I offered him cigarettes. He shook his head, took a small black cheroot out of his pocket and lit it.

“Something not right in that building. You ever see down there? You saw how lousy it looks in the basement, except the pool?”

I thought of the empty storage rooms, cafeterias, the fallout shelter.

He said, “There was never no money for fixing stuff up. I complained.”

“The monthly maintenance must be huge.”

“Yeah, but so was the needs of certain people.”

“Board members?”

He looked nervous. “Maybe. Maybe so.”

Aguirre tossed his cheroot down and rubbed it out with his foot. A car seemed to backfire. Nothing else. I thought it was a car until I saw a red stain on his
shoulder, spreading through the material of his white T-shirt. He saw me looking and glanced down and seemed surprised. Then he grabbed his arm and held it, his fingers spread over the surface of the wound.

I spun around. Nobody. Nobody in the sculpture garden or near the river. Somebody had been there, though. Someone took a pot shot at Aguirre, I thought, as I hustled him into my car and over to a local hospital. He wasn't hurt bad. The shot grazed the fleshy part of his shoulder, but it was shocking, coming out of nowhere.

I sat with him while they dressed the wound and he said softly, “Somebody didn't want I talk to you.”

I nodded. “I'm sorry.” After they released him, I drove Aguirre home, gave him some cash. Apologized some more. But it stayed with me, the bullet out of nowhere on a sunny afternoon, the sudden red spot on his shirt, the fact it was probably some thug trying to threaten him because he talked to me. I couldn't stop thinking about the poor son-of-a-bitch all that day and for the day after either. I couldn't shake it.