“Did you meet them? Russians?”
“Some. Some just in passing. A few when I took her to Washington Heights shopping. A few once I went with her to Brighton Beach. She had an address book where she wrote everything. She always took it with her, in a big, old-fashioned leather purse,” Lily said, pouring more Scotch. “Take off that jacket, Artie, it makes you look like a cop.”
I took it off. From my jeans I got Simonova’s address book and put it on the counter.
“I took it from her apartment earlier,” I said.
“Why?”
“Habit.”
“Is this Ivan in it?”
“Yes.” I opened the book. I showed her. Lily examined the names.
“I remember once Marianna wanted to call the grocery store, and I picked up that address book, and she got furious when I touched it. Artie, you want to lie down? You look terrible.”
“I’m OK. But is there anything else I should know?” I held up the address book. “What about all these marks and stars and stuff beside the names? Was it some kind of code?”
“I guess she had some kind of system. Can you read it?”
I flipped through the pages. Some of the names had New York numbers and addresses. Some were in Moscow. Some both. Some had moved from Moscow to New York, the Moscow numbers crossed out. A few were in Florida and Los Angeles.
“Anything?” said Lily.
“Tell me what else you know about her.”
“Artie?”
“What’s that, honey?”
“Do you believe Marianna killed Lionel?”
“I’m sorry.”
Lily got up and went into the other room. She came back with a cardboard box.
“What is it?”
“Some of the notes I made about Marianna. Some of the journals she gave me. There are a couple of video tapes. She didn’t have a DVD player. I only looked at some of it. A lot’s in Russian. I don’t know, maybe I was trying to protect her, or let her keep her privacy or some fucking thing. Maybe I should have given this to you earlier, Artie.”
“There wasn’t time,” I said. “Everything has happened so fast the past couple days.”
“There’s more in her apartment,” Lily said. “In the study.”
“I have to go back.”
“I can’t go in there.”
“That’s fine.” I didn’t want her with me. What I was going to do wasn’t legal. I had to work fast. Lucille knew about the cyanide. I was gambling she figured I’d report it. I couldn’t be sure. She might call Jimmy Wagner herself. As soon as it was out, there’d be cops crawling all over Simonova’s apartment.
Lily gave me the keys. I put my arms around her. She didn’t push me away.
It was so quiet in the building, I felt we were alone.
“Will you be OK?”
“Yes.”
“Wait for me here.”
“Hurry, Artie. Please. I just want all of this to end.” Lily kissed me. “Just hurry.”
“I love you,” I said.
CHAPTER 56
My name is Marianna Simonova, I am born in USSR, and now I live here at Armstrong Building, Harlem, New York. Is that good, Lily, darling, is this where you want I start?”
Lily had shown me a tape of Simonova singing when I first got to the building on Friday. There had been another tape on top of the video player. I’d put it in and now the Russian stared at me out of the TV again, as she had that first morning.
I figured that Lily had shot it. Again I saw the jaunty Russian, her face made up, the eyes glittering. Only now I knew she was a killer. I knew she had killed Lionel Hutchison, but why? What was her motive? They had been friends.
The whole apartment was filled with the woman’s books, letters, tapes, photographs. I was working against time. Virgil had called to say the ME had confirmed there was cyanide in Lionel Hutchison, enough to kill him. The fact that Lucille had produced bottles with Hutchison’s name on one and Simonova’s on another meant somebody was going to ask questions about the dead woman. And soon.
“How much time do I have?” I’d asked Virgil.
“It’s the end of the day,” he said. “There’s plenty going on, everybody is busy as hell right now. I figure you’ve got a little window, Artie, but not a lot. You have to get out of there before morning, you hear me? I know Wagner is going to want me on this, and Dawes is asking questions. I think you should hurry up. I think you should get out of Simonova’s apartment as fast as you can, and for God’s sake, try not to leave anything. You don’t want people to know you were looking around. I have to go.” He hung up in a hurry, as if somebody had entered a room, heard him talking to me, and told him to kill the call.
The place and everything in it now belonged to Marie Louise. I had no business in here. Even by midnight, I still had work to do. Hurry, I thought.
I knew I should get out, but I couldn’t. There was something holding me. And Lily had been involved with Simonova, more than she’d told me. I couldn’t let go, not yet.
I pushed play again, and Simonova began talking about her life, looking up from time to time to see if Lily was happy with the tape. Her voice was harsh from cigarettes and disease, her English broken. She switched to Russian, answering Lily’s questions, or just rambling. But she was lively, laughing.
From inside the old TV, from the tape, the dead woman talked at me. She painted an epic life.
Marianna Simonova was born in a provincial village near Perm in 1938. She was an orphan, no family. Only the Party gave her a life, she explained, but she explained it in terms of a glorious revolutionary spirit. Communism was her religion; the Party was her family.
“I was fantastic little Young Pioneer, I am so cute in my outfit,” she says, looking out from the screen and singing a snatch of a song I knew from my own childhood.
No parents. I wondered if she had made them disappear, like some Soviet kids. If their parents had spoiled histories, if they had been enemies of the state, or had done time in Gulags, some children simply denied their own history, their own blood. Otherwise, you were doomed: no access to the best education, no access to decent housing, no access to a life that was worth anything at all. Some children made their parents disappear; others informed on them.
I wondered about Simonova. For a woman who had accumulated so much stuff, there was nothing about her own family, no pictures, no souvenirs, nothing at all.
I sat in the near dark, watching the tape, not wanting to put on the lights. Then I heard footsteps in the hall. I looked through the peephole in Simonova’s door, but it was only Regina McGee, trudging home with her shopping bags.
I sat on the floor again and looked at the TV.
Simonova went on with her history. She grew up in a Soviet orphanage and somehow got herself to school in Moscow. She loved music. She heard Paul Robeson. She developed a passion for him and became determined to meet him. They had an affair, she claimed. I heard Lily’s voice asking for dates; Simonova refused to answer, then she became defensive. Lily eased up. She just wanted the story.
On and on Simonova went, Lily rarely interrupting, as she spun her tales about the Soviet Union: of Yuri Gagarin in space, of the trans-Siberian railway, of her feats as a young gymnast, and the occasion when she
