“Lily?” I wanted to ask her about the finger, but she suddenly got up and left the room.
CHAPTER 5
Along with the stench of cigarette smoke in the dead woman’s apartment was a heavy flower smell. It came from dried rose petals in a brass bowl on an old mahogany table. Candles, most of them almost burned out, gave off a cloying stink, too, clove and cinnamon. When I touched one, it was still warm, the wax soft. Something else in the room stank in a different way: age or death.
Lily, who said she had gone to the bathroom, had reclaimed her seat in the little chair. I knew she needed time. I’d let her sit for a few more minutes. I didn’t ask about the dead woman’s missing fingertip, not now. Instead, I walked around the enormous room. Only half consciously, I was looking for clues. There was something wrong about Lily’s shift in mood from flat to frantic, something wrong the way the dead woman was posed on the sofa, something wrong in the way the place stank.
Across the room from where Lily sat I saw that part of the ceiling and wall were wet. A plastic sheet on the floor caught the water that dripped from the roof through the ceiling. Chunks of crumbling plaster lay in wet pools on the plastic.
A rickety card table held a gold-colored bust of Pushkin. The cracked marble mantelpiece was jammed with pictures, some framed in leather, some in silver. I reached for one of them.
“Leave it,” Lily called out. “Just leave it all, OK?”
I crossed the room to where she sat. “What is it? Lily? Honey?” I had never seen her so out of control, tears creeping down her cheeks.
All the years I had known her, Lily had almost never cried, unless you counted election night, and that was for joy. Not even when she was out reporting on the sex trade in Bosnia and was beaten up so badly by thugs she almost died. People think Lily’s remote, even cold, obsessed with her work, unyielding in her opinions. And she is. Sometimes. She has a temper. I didn’t care; I never had.
Seeing her in the sweatpants, her hair a mess, her face pale and wet, I realized that nothing mattered to me as much as being with her. Nothing.
“Hey.”
“What?”
I touched her sleeve lightly. “I’ll help you. I’ll fix it. Whatever it is.” I put my arms around her. She didn’t pull away this time.
Just come home with me, I wanted to say. Just come downtown, we’ll go to my place, I’ll be with you, I’ll take care of you. But I didn’t. I couldn’t take the chance she’d say no.
“Marianna was so sick.” Lily’s voice was barely audible. “She was in such pain.”
“What happened?”
“I sublet the apartment across the hall when I decided I was going to work for Obama over on 133rd Street. I wanted a change anyway, so I rented the place from a friend who was going to Chicago for a year,” said Lily. “A few weeks after I got here, I met Marianna in the hall. We talked. She invited me for a cup of tea. I could see she needed help, so I got into the habit of stopping by. I put out her meds every night, and made sure the oxygen was working right, and then I’d come by most mornings to check in on her again.”
“I thought the doctor next door was her pal.”
“He helped. But his wife didn’t like Marianna.” Lily looked at me. “Also, I brought Marianna vodka. She used to say, ‘So I die sober, I die drunk, first way I die happy.’ ”
“What else?”
“In the beginning, I helped her out of, you know, my ridiculous sense of duty,” Lily said, almost smiling. “Then we became friends. Marianna told these really great stories, about her life in Russia, and about Harlem when she first got here. People she had known. She just needed somebody to talk to. I guess she was trying to make sense of her own history, and I listened.”
“Go on.”
“You know who that is?” Lily pointed to an oil painting of a handsome black man dressed in a military costume. The painter had emphasized the heroic features. A little brass-shaded light cast a glow that made the black skin look like satin.
“Yes.”
“My parents idolized Paul Robeson, his voice, his acting, his politics. That’s him in Othello in the picture. When I was a kid, Robeson was a god to the Old Left.”
“So your friend was a fan?”
“According to Marianna, Robeson was her lover.”
“What?”
“Yeah, she said he helped her get to the U.S. She met him in Moscow around 1960, when she was in her early twenties, and he was on one of his trips to the USSR. She said she seduced him. She had a lot of pictures of Robeson. She kept some in her storage room in the basement.”
“You believed her?”
“I was a sucker for the stories,” Lily said. “I never knew what to believe exactly. With Marianna it was always about the stories. She made the history so alive, I guess I was kind of enchanted; she’d play Robeson’s records on her turntable, him singing opera and spirituals and Slavic folk songs, in that deep dark incredible voice. You know it, right? She told me her grandfather fought in the Russian Revolution. Marianna made her ghosts come alive.” Lily put her hand on my arm. “Her ghosts. Maybe my own. She was like this wacked-out Scheherazade, suspended in her past. Once in a while I tried to pin her down-I’m a journalist, I’m supposed to care about the facts, but I didn’t. The Russian stuff was like a delicious trap for me.”
A trap for me, too, I thought. Without the honey. Somewhere deep down I knew the Russian thing would never let me go. I had almost made my peace with the whole fucking enterprise, until last summer, when Tolya’s daughter died and I had to go to Moscow.
For now, because this was about Lily, if I had to, I’d deal with it one more time. I could do that. Suddenly, I knew what the dead woman’s perfume reminded me of. It was a scent my grandmother used to wear: heavy, sweet, too ripe.
“You said she had a storage room. There’s a key?”
“I have it,” said Lily. “She asked me to get some things for her.”
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
“Did you?”
“I meant to but I was busy. I didn’t even do that for her, I couldn’t be bothered, and now she’s dead.”
“What things?”
“Russian Christmas decorations. She told me there was a special box she wanted me to have. She was big on presents, little surprises. She was always giving me those damn Russian dolls.”
“I’ll get the box for you if you want.”
“Will you? Thank you.” Lily burst into tears again. “Oh, God, I used her.”
“How?”
“I made her tell me stories, even when she was sick, even when she didn’t have much breath left. Then she died. She was only seventy. Artie?”
“What?”
“I taped her stories. Some of the time I didn’t even tell her I had my voice recorder on. I figured she’d feel freer. Jesus, you become a journalist, a writer, you sell your soul for other people’s stories. It’s like a fucking addiction. The bigger the story, the more horrible the history, the more you crave it.”
“It’s what you do. It’s who you are, and I don’t think you used her. She probably loved it that you were interested,” I said. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“She was OK last night, right? She was alive?”
