die.
Minutes went by.
Animals scampered past.
Footsteps passed overhead.
Somebody playing Ella, improbable, my hallucination. Ella singing “Manhattan.”
My finger bleeding through the scrap of white cloth.
Me, gagging on my past.
CHAPTER 17
What happened?”
I sat in Tolya Sverdloff’s SUV, trying not to cry from the pain. My head hurt so bad I had to close my eyes. Leaned back. Tried not to whimper. Floaters cruised the air in front of my face, bubbles of light and the pain that I couldn’t stop. Again, I tried to open my eyes. It was really Tolya sitting beside me. We were parked on Edgecombe Avenue opposite the Armstrong. He handed me a bottle of water. My hand was neatly bandaged.
“You did this?” I said to him.
“Sure,” he said. “You recall I have been medic in Russian army. So we are going to see my doctor, Artyom. I made this appointment already. I pay. No emergency room, no quacks, nobody on police health insurance plan.”
Somebody tapped on the car window. Still squinting through a fog of pain, I saw Carver Lennox. I opened the window. Lennox leaned in.
“How you doing, Artie?” He looked worried.
“I’m OK,” I said.
“Carver is who finds you, Artie,” said Tolya.
“What?”
“Lily calls you on cell, says you told her you’d be at her place in ten minutes, that you’re in the basement of the building, but she can’t reach you, can’t reach this guy, Virgil. She calls me. I call Carver.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Yeah, thank you.” I didn’t like it that I owed him now.
“I was worried as hell,” said Lennox. “You must have been in that storage room an hour. More.”
“You have any idea who did it? You think it was somebody who works in the building?” I said to Lennox.
“I can’t see why,” he said. “They didn’t take anything off you, did they?”
I checked my pockets. My wallet was intact, my phone, too.
“Nothing.”
“You been hassling any of the guys that work here?” said Lennox. “They get pissed off. Not that a few of them couldn’t do with a wake-up call.”
“Why would I?”
“You’re a cop, aren’t you? But listen, I’m sorry. I’m getting in some real security. I don’t want this kind of shit going down in my building,” he said, referring to the building as his own. I thanked him again and otherwise kept my mouth shut.
“Don’t mention it,” he said. “I have to go now, but call if you need anything. Artie. Tolya.” With a nod, he left and went into the building, the black coat flapping behind him in the cold wind.
“How the hell did you know to call Lennox?” I said to Tolya.
“Everybody in Harlem knows him. If you want real estate you must know him. So I know him. Drink some more.” He gave me a second bottle of water.
Wearing a black suit and red shoes, the Gucci loafers he has made for him out of the skins of weird reptiles, six six, three hundred pounds, Tolya was looking good. The heart surgery he had during the summer had worked out. He was happy running his club, Pravda2, in the West Village. He bought good wines for it; he traveled to France regularly.
Tolya has been my best friend for a long time. I met him fifteen years back, more even, and, as they say in Russian, we’ve shared more than one sack of salt.
Last summer, when some creeps snatched Tolya off a Moscow street, they asked me for the promise of a favor. I told them I’d do whatever they wanted if they let Tolya go. Anything. It had been my fault that his daughter Valentina was murdered. He had never blamed me.
We got the creep who did it, but I’d never figured out who had fingered Valentina in the first place. I never knew who had discovered where she lived in New York, where she went, who she went with. I knew if I ever did, I would kill him. I loved Val a lot.
The promise I had made in exchange for Tolya was to the FSB, the new version of the KGB. These guys were tough, and they were corrupt. So far they hadn’t asked me for anything, but it would come.
“Artyom?” Tolya was watching me, looking worried.
“I have to go,” I said. “I have to get to Lily. Tolya, listen to me, I think whoever beat me up spoke Russian. What are you doing here, anyway?”
“I told you, Lily calls me, she’s worried, I don’t know if she’s crazy or this is for real, so I call Lennox, like I tell you. I was not far away.”
“I mean what were you doing uptown?
“I have business.”
“What business?”
“You recall from election night? I said I love this Harlem, and so I will buy a house, I said this to you, and I have bought.”
“You bought a house?”
“Sure. Maybe I buy nice little club, you can run, you can employ jazz musicians instead of getting beat up, Artyom. Maybe I buy Minton’s Playhouse for you if you want. Is enough already, being a cop.”
“Where? The house?”
“Strivers’ Row, you tell me I am striver, so I buy lovely, lovely brownstone. I am striver, no?”
“I thought you were done with business, with deals, all that shit.”
“Oh, but Artyom, one lovely brownstone is not deals. You will come. Tonight, you can stay with me.”
“You’re living there already?”
“Sure. Cash deal. No problem.”
“You’re fucking crazy.”
“Yes.”
I put up my hand as if to catch one of the floaters in front of my eyes, a long gold and purple flash, like an exotic insect.
Tolya handed me some pills. “Take this,” said Tolya, in Russian now, the beautiful, elegant Russian he had learned from his parents, who had been actors. They had taken him with them to France and England when they performed. They were pretty upset when Tolya became a rocker. He had been arrested back in the day, when rock was illegal in the USSR.
He speaks four, five languages, if you include Ukrainian, and his English is great, except when he’s drunk, or when he’s putting me on, dropping articles, speaking his make-believe Brighton Beach English.
“I have to go,” I said again.
“Not yet.”
“Listen to me, I need to finish this case, I really do. Give me some more of those pills, OK?” I climbed out of the SUV and held onto the door handle. Tolya followed me.
“I’ll come with you, in that case.”
“What for?” Shivering, I realized my jacket had disappeared in the storage room.
“In case you pass out,” he said. “You look like crap. Put this on.” He reached in the back of the SUV and handed me a black sweater. Cashmere. Triple X. I pulled it over my head.
As we went into the lobby of the Armstrong, I spoke softly to him in Russian. “There’ve been a couple of murders not far from here.” I described the guy with the tats killed in the cemetery, the paper skewered to his
