I picked up the phone and a man with a deep voice asked to speak to Miss Mardell. I handed her the receiver without a word and walked into the other room. I stood at the window and looked at the lights on the other side of the East River. After a couple of minutes she came and stood beside me. She didn't allude to the call, nor did I. Then ten minutes later the phone rang again and she answered it and it was for me. It was Walter, just using the phone a lot the way they encourage newcomers to do. I didn't stay on with him long, and when I got off I said, 'I'm sorry. It was a bad idea.'
'Well, you're here a lot. People ought to be able to reach you.' A few minutes later she said, 'Take it off the hook. Nobody has to reach either of us tonight.'
IN the morning I dropped in on Joe Durkin and wound up going out for lunch with him and two friends of his from the Major Crimes Squad. I went back to my hotel and stopped at the desk for my messages, but there weren't any. I went upstairs and picked up a book, and at twenty after three the phone rang.
Elaine said, 'You forgot to take off Call Forwarding.'
'Oh, for Christ's sake,' I said. 'No wonder there weren't any messages. I just got home, I was out all morning, it slipped my mind completely. I was going to come straight home and fix it and I forgot. It must have been driving you crazy all day.'
'No, but—'
'But how did you get through? Wouldn't it just bounce your call back and give you a busy signal if you called here?'
'It did the first time I tried. I called the desk downstairs and they patched the call through.'
'Oh.'
'Evidently it doesn't forward calls through the switchboard downstairs.'
'Evidently not.'
'TJ called earlier. But that's not important. Matt, Kenan Khoury just called. You have to call him right away. He said it's really urgent.'
'He did?'
'He said life or death, and probably death. I don't know what that means, but he sounded serious.'
I called right away, and Kenan said, 'Matt, thank God. Don't go nowhere, I got my brother on the other line. You're at home, right?
Okay, stay on the line, I'll be with you in a second.' There was a click, and then a minute or so later there was another click and he was back.
'He's on his way,' he said. 'He's coming over to your hotel, he'll be right out in front.'
'What's the matter with him?'
'With Petey? Nothing, he's fine. He's gonna bring you out to Brighton Beach. Nobody's got time to dick around with the subway today.'
'What's in Brighton Beach?'
'A whole lot of Russians,' he said. 'How do I put this? One of 'em just called to say he's going through business difficulties similar to what I went through.'
That could only mean one thing, but I wanted to make sure.
'His wife?'
'Worse. I gotta go, I'll meet you there.'
Chapter 18
Late in September Elaine and I had spent an idyllic afternoon in Brighton Beach. We rode the Q train to the end of the line and walked along Brighton Beach Avenue, browsing in the produce markets, window-shopping, then exploring the side streets with their modest frame houses and a network of back streets, little walks and alleys and paths and ways. The bulk of the population consisted of Russian Jews, many of them very recent arrivals, and the neighborhood had felt extremely foreign while remaining quintessentially New York. We ate at a Georgian restaurant, then walked on the boardwalk clear to Coney Island, watching people hardier than ourselves bobbing in the ocean.
Then we spent an hour at the Aquarium, and then we went home.
If we had passed Yuri Landau in the street that day I don't suppose we'd have looked at him twice. He would have looked at home there, as he must have once looked in the streets of Kiev or Odessa. He was a big man, broad in the chest, with a face that might have served as the model for an idealized worker in one of those murals from the days of Socialist Realism. A broad forehead, high cheekbones, sharply angled facial planes, and a prominent jaw. His hair was a medium brown, and lank; he was given to tossing his head to get his hair out of his face.
He was in his late forties, and he had been in America for ten years. He'd come over with his wife and his four-year-old daughter, Ludmilla. He'd done some sort of black-market trading in the Soviet Union, and in Brooklyn he gravitated easily into various marginal enterprises, and before long began trafficking in narcotics. He had done well, but then it is a business in which nobody breaks even. If you don't get killed or imprisoned, you generally do very well.
Four years ago his wife had been diagnosed with metastasized ovarian cancer. Chemotherapy had kept her alive for two and a half years. She had hoped to live to see her daughter graduate from intermediate school, but she died in the fall. Ludmilla, who now called herself Lucia, had graduated in the spring, and was now a member of the freshman class of Chichester Academy, a small private high school for girls located in Brooklyn Heights. The tuition was high, but so were the academic requirements, and Chichester had an excellent record at placing its graduates in Ivy League colleges, as well as women's colleges like Bryn Mawr and Smith.
