Londongrad
LONDONGRAD
REGGIE NADELSON
Walker & Company
New York
If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
E. M. Forster,
Two Cheers for Democracy
“I’m dead,” says Anatoly Sverdloff, gasping for air, lungs shot.
He whispers this in Russian, in English, the crazy mixture he
speaks, but stumbling, gulping to get air in, trawling for oxygen,
voice so small, you can hardly hear him. He can’t breathe. His
heart is killing him, he says, pushing the words out in short
helpless bursts.
Medics, nurses, other people crowd around the bed, a whole
mob of them, shaking their heads to indicate there’s no hope.
Hooked up to machines, thick transparent corrugated tubes,
blue, white, pushing air into him, expelling the bad stuff. IVs
stuck in his arms trail up to clear plastic sacks of medicine on
a metal stand. He wears a sleeveless hospital gown that’s too
short.
On his back, this huge man, six foot six, normally three
hundred pounds, but seeming suddenly shrunken, like the carcass
of a beached whale. Only the dimples in the large square face
that resembles an Easter Island statue make him recognizable.
Somewhere, on a CD, schlocky music is playing, music will
help, somebody says, and a voice cries out, no, not that, put
on Sinatra, he loves Sinatra. Or opera. Italian. Verdi. Whose
voice is crying out? Tolya’s? No one is listening.
More doctors and nurses bundled up in white paper suits like
spacemen come and go. But there’s no reason for it, no radioactive
poison in him, why are you dressed like that? the voice
says. Everybody has a white mask on, and white paper hats.
Party hats. Somebody is blowing a red party whistle. People
wander in and out of the room, some lost, others looking for
the festivities. The guy is dead, somebody says, there’s no party.
A single shoe, yellow alligator, big gold buckle dull from dust,
is near the bed, just lying there. Somebody picks it up. His
massive feet sticking out from a blanket are the gray of some
prehistoric mammal, as if Tolya is returning to a primitive
form, the disease eating him from the inside out.
And then he’s dead.
He’s in a coffin, for viewing, and he turns into Stalin, the
enormous head, the hair, the mustache, the large nostrils, why
Stalin? Why? Or is it Yeltsin? Big men. Big Russian men.
My best friend is dying, and I can’t stop it, and he says, Artie,
help me, and then he’s dead, and I start to cry. Stop the music,
I yell. Turn it off! Suddenly I have to sit down on a chair in
the hospital room because I can’t breathe anymore. Somebody
tries to stick a tube in my nose but I fight back. The tubes trip
me, I’m tangled in clear plastic tubes, falling.
He rips off the tubes, pulls out the lifelines, the IVs, and all
he says is, “I knew Sasha Litvinenko. I met him, and they killed
him and nobody remembers the poor bastard anymore.”
Contents
From behind the bar at his club in the West Village, Tolya Sverdloff looked up and saw me.
“Artie, good morning, how are you, have something to drink, or maybe a cup of good coffee, and we’ll talk, I need a little favor, maybe you can help me out?” All this came out of his mouth fast, in a single sentence, as if he couldn’t cram enough good things into it if he stopped for breath.
In the streaming shafts of morning sunlight coming in through a pair of big windows, he resembled a saint in stained glass, but a very secular saint, a glass of red wine in one hand, a Havana in the other and an expression of huge pleasure on his face. He stuck his nose in the glass, he swirled it and sniffed, and drank, and saw me watching.
“Oh, man, this is it,” he said. “This is everything, a reason to be alive. Come taste this,” added Tolya and poured some wine into a second glass. “A fantastic Ducru. I’ll give you a bottle,” he said. “As a reward.”
I sat on one of the padded leather stools at his bar. “What for?”
“For coming by at this hour when I call you,” said Tolya, who tasted the wine again and smiled, showing the dimples big enough for a child to stick its fist in. He brushed the thick black hair from his forehead, and rolled his eyes with pleasure at the wine, this big effusive generous guy, a voluptuary. Wine and food were his redemption, he always said.
“So what do you need that you got me here at the fucking crack of dawn on my first day of vacation?” I said. “I’ll take that coffee.”
He held up a hand. Some opera came in over the sound system. “Maria Callas,” said Tolya. “
Traviata
. My God, has there ever been a Violetta like that?”
While he listened, I looked at the framed Soviet posters on the wall, including an original Rodchenko for
The Battleship
Potemkin
, and wondered how the hell he had got hold of it.
“Coffee?”
“Try the wine,” he said. “You should really come into business with me, you know, Artie. We could have so much fun, you could run this place, or we could open another one, you could make a little money. Anyhow, you’re too old to play cops and robbers.”
“I’m a New York City detective, it’s not a game,” I said. “You met somebody? You sound like you’re in love.”
“Don’t be so pompous,” said Tolya and we both burst out laughing.
“Yeah, I know.”
“You working anything, Artemy?” He used my Russian name.
Like me, Tolya Sverdloff grew up in Moscow. I got out when I was sixteen, got to New York, cut all my ties, dumped my past as fast as I could. He had a place over there, and one in England. Tolya was a nomad now, London, New York, Russia. He had opened clubs in all of them.
“I am on vacation as of yesterday,” I said. “Off the job for ten fantastic days, no homicides pending, no crazy Russians in need of my linguistic services.” I stretched and yawned, and drank some more of the wine. It wasn’t even nine in the morning. Who cares, I thought. The wine was delicious.
Tolya lifted his glass. “My birthday next week,” he said.
“Happy birthday.”
“So you’ll come to my party?”
“Sure. Where?”
“In London,” he said.
“You know I worked a case there once. It left a bad taste.”
“You’re wrong. Is fantastic city, Artemy.” I drank some more wine.
“Best city, most civilized.”
Whenever he talked about London these days, it was to tell me how wonderful it was. But he described it as a tourist might— the parks, the theaters, the pretty places. I knew that he had, along with his club there, other business. He didn’t tell me about it, I didn’t ask.
He put his glass down. “Oh, God, I love the smell of the Médoc in the morning, Artyom,” said Tolya, switching from English to Russian.
Tolya’s English depended on the occasion. As a result of an education at Moscow’s language schools, he spoke it beautifully, with a British accent. Drunk, or what he sometimes called “party mood”, his language was his own invention, a mix of Russian and English, low and high, the kind he figured un-educated people speak—the gangsters, the nouveau riche Russians. He taunted me constantly. He announced, once in a while, that he knew I thought all Russkis were thugs, or Neanderthals. “You think this, Artemy,” he said.
His Russian, when he bothered, though, was so pure, so soft, it made me feel my soul was being stroked. Like his father spoke when he was alive, Tolya told me once. His father had been trained as an actor. Singer, too. Paul Robeson complimented his father when his father was still a student. He had the voice, my pop did, said Tolya.
“You said you need a favor?”
“Just to take some books to an old lady in Brooklyn, okay?” Tolya put a shopping bag on the bar. “You don’t mind? Sure sure sure?”
He already knew I’d do what he wanted without asking. It was his definition of a friend. He believed only in the Russian version of friends, not like Americans, he says, who call everybody friends. “My best friend, they say,” he hooted mockingly.
“I would go myself,” said Tolya, “but I have two people who didn’t show up last night. Which a little bit annoys me because I am very nice with my staff. I pay salary also tips, unlike many clubs and restaurants.”
It was one of Sverdloff’s beefs that most staff at the city’s restaurants were paid minimum wage and made their money on tips. “I hate this system,” he said. “In Spain it is civilized, in Spain, waiters are properly paid,” he added and I could see he was starting on his usual riff.
“Right,” I said, feeling the wine in my veins like liquid pleasure. “Of course, Tolya. You are the nicest boss in town.”
“Do not laugh at me, Artyom,” he said. “I am very good socialist in capitalist drag.”
Tolya had called his club Pravda2, because there was already a bar named Pravda, which the owner, very nice English guy but stubborn, Tolya said, had refused to sell him. Club named Pravda must belong to Russian guy, Tolya said. English guy won’t sell me his, I open my own.
Pravda2, Artie, you get it?
You like the pun, Artie? You get it? Yeah, I get it, Tol, I’d say, Truth Too,
In Vino Veritas
, blah blah, you’re the fountainhead of all that is true, you, in the wine, I get it.
Originally, he’d planned on making P2, as he called it, a champagne bar he’d run for his friends, to entertain them, and where he would only sell Krug. He added a few dishes, and got himself a line to a supplier with very good caviar, and a food broker, a pretty girl, who could get excellent foie gras, he told me.
To his surprise, it was a success. He was thrilled. He gave in to his own lust for red wine, big reds, he calls them, and only French, the stuff that costs a bundle. And cognac. Some vodkas.