Artie? We’re on the same page about Simonova, right?” His tone was cool.
“What do they usually call you? Radcliff? Virgil?” I said, by way of minor apology.
He hesitated, one hand on the car door.
“So, since you ask, Artie, yeah. At Harvard, I got some of the guys to call me Rad. It didn’t stick. It never fucking stuck,” he said. “I was back to being Virgil. Jesus. When it comes to names, I’m fucked. Everybody in my family is trapped in the past. My father teaches classics. My mother writes scholarly books about nineteenth-century literature. I had to lie to my grandmother about being a cop. She thinks I’m a lawyer.”
“You have a middle name?”
“Worse,” he said. “Darcy. My mom’s idea. Never mind.”
“You think because I’m a cop I never heard of Jane Austen?”
“Sorry about that. But just since you are interested, there’s been occasions when some of the time, in certain places, especially with some of my fellow officers, they call me nigger.”
That word coming from him startled me. I hear the word plenty. There’s white cops who use it plenty. There’s black detectives on the squad down at One PP where I normally work who use it between themselves. Rappers, too, of course; teenagers on the street. But coming from Radcliff-and I was guessing he didn’t use it often and not in front of Lily-it had a different kind of power.
“You think I’m a soft, naive guy, don’t you, Artie?” said Virgil Radcliff, who didn’t wait for an answer. He looked at his watch again. “I have to get back to work, you want to look into this unofficially, fine, but do it fast. Easier for Lily. Easier for everybody.”
“What’s your house?”
“The Three-O. Captain’s name is Wagner. Why, you want to check up on me?” He smiled. His tone was cool. I didn’t see anything else on his face.
“Jimmy Wagner?”
“You know him?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“I’m not surprised,” said Virgil, and got out of my car.
I’m not surprised, Virgil Radcliff had said. Was it race? Did he think about me the same way he thought about Jimmy Wagner, a white Irish guy from Staten Island?
I’ve been in New York thirty years now, and I’ve worked with plenty of cops who are brutal racists; it goes with the territory. Same with the rest of the population. Nothing like the fucking Russians, though. I wondered if Radcliff knew from Lily I was one of them. A Russian.
Maybe Paul Robeson had been idolized by the whole Soviet Union back when, but it didn’t stop the Russians from being the racist bastards they always were. Still are.
The asshole Commies had lured African students over, said they’d educate them, put them in dorms like Patrice Lumumba House in Moscow, told everyone, Look, we’re not racists, we’re not like the imperialist fucks in the west, we’re good to the peoples of the world whatever their color, our system is free from racism.
Ironic, how we were taught as little snot-nosed Soviet kids to love and honor black people; the Negro race, according to our teachers, was dignified and even under imperialism, noble. It didn’t stop anyone, kids, grown-ups, from being racists. Peoples of the world! It was horseshit.
It never ends. Never. Just goes on and on, and now there are a lot of poor Africans stranded in Russia, just flotsam left over from before, the detritus of a dead system, the way people see it, if they see it at all.
Those poor African bastards are the worst victims of the Soviet fallout. It was lousy then; it’s worse now: in Russia, if you’re black, you get the shit beat out of you. I was there.
I’m in Moscow, July of ’08, and I see it everywhere: people spitting at Africans, swearing at them, beating on them. One day I’m near the Pushkin Museum, some ugly acne-scarred Russian creeps, three of them, pin a skinny black guy up against the wall of a building. Start punching his face. They kick him, screaming insults. The poor guy covers his head, but they yank his arms away and hit him in the face some more.
And I lose it. I start yelling, and when they don’t stop, I push one of them on the ground, tell him I’m official, flash my badge. I manage to scare the bastards. When I walk the black guy back to his hostel, I ask if he wants me to call the cops. No point, he says, and thanks me.
There’ve always been two kinds of people in Russia. The first want to beat up all black people or just make them disappear. Then there are a few of us, like me, maybe my dad in his time, who have always sentimentalized black Americans, because of the music.
For me it was always the music. Jazz had transformed my miserable little pimply Soviet being, even when I was a good young pioneer singing the praises of Vladimir Ilyich.
I listened to Willis Conover’s Jazz Hour on the Voice of America under the covers. When every other kid was secretly listening to Beatles bootlegs, if they could get an illicit disc, I was listening to jazz. I listened with my father on our big Grundig in the dacha; it was safer in the countryside.
But race has everybody fucked up. When Obama was elected it had been as if, for a second, it was all over, all the ugly stuff. It didn’t last.
Now I was in Harlem, sitting in my car, an outsider.
What was Radcliff’s game? Did he have one? Was it only Lily he was worried about? He knew the building, he knew the people in it. He thought Simonova’s body had been posed, fixed up after she died, but he didn’t want me calling the ME.
It was Jimmy Wagner who had called Sonny looking for me. Wanting me to translate the piece of paper left on the dead guy, skewered into his heart. And it was Wagner who turned out to be Virgil Radcliff’s chief.
I’m not surprised, Radcliff had said when I told him I knew Wagner.
Is everything always about race? What the hell did I know? With this stuff there were no reliable witnesses, not anywhere. I stepped on the gas.
CHAPTER 12
Jingle bell, jingle bell, jingle bell rock…”
In the station house, the sergeant at the front desk was fielding calls. He waved at me to wait while he finished. On his tiny hand, little and strange like a dwarf’s, was a school ring with a huge blue glass stone. The man’s name tag said he was Edigio Russomano. He was small. After a minute, I realized he was sitting on a stack of phone books.
Near the front desk, his back to me, was a guy in a black jacket and gray hoodie, the hood up. Big guy. Meaty shoulders.
“What’s your name?” said Russomano to me after he hung up the phone.
I told him.
He asked again. “I’m getting deaf,” he said. “Doc told me my hearing’s shot. Yeah, right, Detective Artie Cohen, that’s it, glad a meetcha. Chief made me look for your number earlier. He had some Russian thing he wanted you to look at. You Russian or something? Cohen? That a Russian name? Why don’t you grab a pew over there, and I’ll get the chief.”
I got the feeling the guy in the black jacket had been listening all the time Russomano was talking to me. The little sergeant turned to him. “I thought you was on your way out. You need something or you just got nothing better to do than hang around here?”
Without saying a word, the guy stuffed his hands in his pockets and bolted from the station house, through the doors, into the street.
“Who was that?” I said to Russomano.
“What?”
“That guy who just left.”
“You have to ask the chief. I ain’t been around last couple days; I only just came on like a few minutes before you got here,” Russomano said.
I sat on a chair near the door. It was warm in the precinct. I unzipped my jacket, got out my cell, looking for calls from Lily.
