presented Stalin with a bouquet of roses in Red Square. No detail was left out, not what she had worn or who she met. She had been looking for somebody who would take an interest in her tales, and in Lily she’d found a taker.
Marianna Simonova had touched something deep in Lily’s past-the politics, the community of the left, her father. Simonova had exploited it.
On the tape she sang patriotic songs for Lily’s benefit. In the background, I could hear Lily singing along.
Again, I stopped the tape. I had to get to the journals, the letters. I got up and glanced at the shelves of books, looking for anything that might give me a clue, but most were political tomes or Russian novels.
Near the sofa on the little table were the same two books I’d seen before: a copy of Chekhov’s stories; and a book about Rasputin. Rasputin was poisoned with cyanide.
At the desk I looked through a pile of letters. Then I went into Simonova’s bedroom, the bathroom, the study. My phone rang and I jumped. Lily said she was at Tolya’s new brownstone now. Might sleep over. I was glad. She was safer with Tolya.
It was cold. I glanced at the bottle of vodka still on the table, and I took a swig. It burned my throat. Everything in the apartment felt cold to the touch, the boxes, the leather journals, the cassettes. Against one wall was a small chest of drawers. It was stuffed with photographs.
There were photographs everywhere: on the mantel, in little Russian boxes, on every surface. Newspaper clippings with more pictures were piled in a cardboard box.
When you first start, you think the hard part about being a cop will be the streets, the creeps and crooks and killers. You think about the victims, the bodies, the blood, the morgue. If you’re any kind of human being, the stuff, especially when it involves kids, makes you feel sick, makes you puke, gives you ulcers. You stop feeling sick, it’s time to quit.
As bad for me is the history-the victim’s, the killer’s. You turn back page after page, interrogations, transcripts, confessions, diaries, letters, heart racing, stomach turning, cold sweat on your neck, knowing it will reveal something terrible, the grim hidden secrets.
I knew the only way to find out what had happened to Simonova was here. The lump on my head ached. I was hungry. In Simonova’s kitchen I found Russian Christmas cookies. I ate some. Drank more of her vodka.
By ten that night, one lamp on, I had clippings and letters and photographs laid out on the worn purple Turkish rug. I laid them out like a hand of solitaire.
I’d finished with the video tapes, but in a drawer in the bedroom, I’d found audio cassettes and an old- fashioned player. Some of the tapes were marked with Lily’s name. Most of what I heard, when I began to listen, was in Russian.
Were the tapes for a book Lily wanted to write? Did Simonova figure she’d get them translated? Did she want to leave a record? She knew she was sick, maybe dying. The dead woman had recorded her life.
While I listened, and a lot of it was propaganda, Simonova’s philosophy, I went through more of her journals. I looked at newspaper clippings.
In Moscow she had worked in some obscure bureau. She clipped foreign magazines and sent the information to the KGB, to a low-level KGB apparatchik. She’d been a small-time librarian who could only afford to live in a communal apartment, but she had access to foreign magazines.
In her spare time, she had churned out papers she hoped to publish, papers written by a faithful Communist Party hack, which is what she had been. All she ever was.
Most of her clippings, most of the magazine articles she had saved for herself, were about black people in America. It had been her specialty. Her obsession. She had fallen for these exotics, as she saw them, the oppressed, the victims of American imperialism, of the racism she believed to be rife in the United States.
Paul Robeson featured in many of the articles, and there were copies of letters she had written to him. She had never met him.
I changed the audio tape. On this one, Simonova described how she had come to America.
“Lily, yes, this is working OK? Sure, so I continue,” said Simonova. “I leave Moscow in l972 after this Nixon- Brezhnev detente, when Jews are permitted to go to Israel, so I tell everybody I am Jewish, though I am not sure what I am. Still, I must go, so I make my way to New York with other so-called Jews. First time in history, many Russians pretend to be Jew. But not because I love America. I remain true socialist. I leave because I am pregnant. I meet American musician in Moscow, we spend one night, and so. Can I have water, please?”
She paused, to drink the water, I assumed, and then continued. “I live first in Brighton Beach, then in Washington Heights, I teach, I do translation, I even work as waitress.”
In the first part of the tape, Simonova spoke in English. Then she switched to Russian. She told Lily to get the rest translated, but these were things she could say only in Russian.
She began.
I listened carefully, stopping and starting the tape. It wasn’t completely clear if the KGB had contacted Simonova before she left Russia or after she had arrived in New York, but she became a very small time sleeper.
She wasn’t activated until 1982, just before Brezhnev died and the Soviet Union was running out of steam-out of oil. There followed Andropov and Chernenko, then Gorbachev came in, the system collapsed, and Marianna Simonova was left stranded in the United States, without the KGB money or the contacts. She was on her own. Nobody was interested in a two-bit sleeper who had only done minor errands. She went freelance.
English again: “So, dear Lily, I come to Harlem, first to 131st Street, then Armstrong, where I make nice life. I tell people how I knew Comrade Robeson. I talk to them about people I know.” Listening, I understood how she had made her myth, the kind that would enchant people like Lily.
What kind of work had she done in New York after the Soviet Union collapsed? I wasn’t sure. She’d done translations, but she had lived well. Too well.
I burrowed in her papers, and I kept thinking: Where did she get the money?
I found receipts, scraps of paper with names, notes, lists. She had kept everything, the last shreds of reality, as if without all of it, she would cease to exist.
Then I found more tapes that had come from an old answering machine; somebody had set it up to record telephone calls. I found the machine in a closet and I sat and listened to her phone calls, most in Russian, and shuddered as I made notes. She had taped all her calls, perhaps by mistake, maybe on purpose. I couldn’t know.
Her conversations in English, some with other people in the Armstrong, ran to arrangements for bridge or doctor’s appointments. There was nothing much interesting.
The calls in Russian were also about social arrangements; many of the voices belonged to other women.
But there were two men who seemed to call Simonova frequently. She addressed them as Comrade. The same men, same voices, one with a crude accent, the other educated. Over and Over, they had called her.
The conversations cropped up at random times on a dozen different answering-machine tapes. I could date them by the events they discussed: Iraq, Putin, Obama. Both men professed a longing for the return of a regime like Stalin’s. Both considered Putin an important man, a strong man, a truly Russian man. With Simonova, in Russian, they discussed the revival of the real men, who would fix things.
I thought of the tats on Ivan’s arm: WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE, and of the Communist Manifesto skewered into the dead guy’s heart. They were low-level thugs, but they still believed. Or maybe the new order had left them out in the cold, and they worked as thugs for hire as a kind of revenge.
The harder I listened to the men on the phone, the more I was convinced one of them was Ivan.
The specifics of the jobs they did and who they did them for were never mentioned. Simonova, the low-level KGB creep, had turned to the agency’s successor, the FSB. She did anything she could get. It didn’t seem to matter if it was political or just plain criminal. She wanted the money.
Like Nixon, she had been obsessed with taping things, making notes, scratching entries in one of her diaries every night-people she’d seen, talked to, played cards with, people she liked or had a beef with. Like Nixon, too, in the way she resented everybody, she was obsessed with her so-called enemies.
I was lost in her world now. Lost among her tapes and phone calls and address books, even a transcript from a CNN program. But I kept going back to the photographs.
I made coffee. I looked at the cluttered living room, the icons, the statues and books and paper, the sofa, the
