I went back over every word of the brief conversation we’d had half an hour earlier, when I was leaving Pettus.
“Come on out. I’ll buy you breakfast,” said Val. “And we can swim, if you want,” she said.
“Where are you?”
“Brooklyn.”
I was so relieved she was only in Brooklyn, I started laughing.
“What’s the matter?” said Val.
“Nothing. Where in Brooklyn?”
“You remember that apartment my dad bought for his mother, my grandma, Lara, when she came to America, before she died? Did you ever see it?”
I remembered.
“I’m on my way.”
“Good, I want to see you. Coffee’s on,” she said, and laughed, the throaty, dark laugh that was like an older woman. “If you’re good, I’ll buy you blintzes,” she added. “Strawberry.”
“I could meet you someplace, we could eat someplace,” I said, nervous now.
“Come to the apartment first.”
I had planned to go to Dacha, the club in Sheepshead Bay. Tito Dravic, the manager had promised me a video and some paperwork on Masha Panchuk, the dead girl on the swing. It was still early.
In Brighton Beach near the boardwalk overlooking the ocean was a condo built half a dozen years ago for Russians who had made some dough in America but didn’t want to leave the neighborhood. Old people, mostly. Others who had moved up and out, Long Island or New Jersey, kept an apartment for the ocean view, the shopping, sentiment, an investment.
Tolya Sverdloff had bought a condo for his mother the time she was in America. I didn’t know that after she died, he had kept it.
A doorman with gold braid on his shoulders was reading the
“Come on in,” her voice called. The door was open. I went into the apartment and saw her.
Behind a makeshift desk near the window, talking into the phone, reading some papers, doodling in a notebook, her face was scrubbed, no make-up, a pencil stuck behind her ear, she wore a red blouse with long sleeves and a white cotton skirt that fell below her knees. Her feet were stuck in a pair of yellow flip-flops. From somewhere-her iPod, maybe-came the sound of a lovely bossa nova track.
“Hey, Artie.” She looked up, pointed at the phone, at a chair. “I won’t be long, okay? There’s coffee on in the kitchen, honey, and you could grab me a mug, too,” she added.
I remembered the place. When Tolya bought it for his mother, he had furnished it with a black leather couch and some easy chairs, which were still here but piled with files and folders and books. On the wall was a bulletin board with the names and addresses of orphanage facilities and shelters in Russian. Tacked to the cork board were also six of Val’s photographs of Russian children. Staring into the camera, the kids looked bruised, tired, hopeless.
Most of the bedroom furniture was gone-the old lady, Tolya’s mother, Lara Sverdlova-had had a taste for frilly covers and gilt mirrors. All that remained was a bed covered with a plain white linen spread. That, and a large movie poster with Lara as a young star in an old Soviet picture. In it, she was dressed as a farm girl riding a tractor, and it made me smile. Sverdlova had always been glamorous and even in a babushka, and on the tractor, she was perfectly made up, and her hands manicured. My dad had adored her.
In the small kitchen coffee was dripping into a glass. The smell was intense, and I poured it into a couple of mugs and went back to Val.
She beamed, got up, kissed me on the cheek. “You like my disguise?” she said indicating the blouse and skirt.
I gave her the coffee. “I like it,” I said.
“I deal with a lot of poor ex-Soviets now, some from the Stans, Uzbeks, Tajiks, those people, and the Bukharians, I always think it sounds romantic, the region is called the Silk Road, you know? Tashkent, Dushanbe, really, really isolated and strange, and suddenly they’re in America. People just hanging on. Some of them are religious, I don’t go around in shorts or tight stuff, it makes my job easier if I look okay to them. But the ones who don’t make it out are in real shit,” she added.
“How come?”
“They live in these backwaters. I went once, it’s incredible, like something out of prehistory, and there’s no money, and no work, so they go to Moscow and eventually some of the girls end up working the streets, or the train stations, or worse. The people here get the news, family members get in touch, I try to put my people in Moscow in contact. Sometimes it’s the girls themselves,” she said.
“How come I didn’t know about all this?”
“I only started not so long ago. You didn’t convince my dad to stay, I guess,” she added.
“I’m really sorry. I tried.”
She shrugged. “It’s okay. I saw him before he left. He said he’d make the London trip short. I hope he will.”
“What was in the envelope he gave you at his club?”
“You’re a nosey bastard,” she said, and grinned. “He gave me a big fat check for my little foundation.”
“I could give you a check.”
“You’re adorable, Artie, let’s not talk about depressing stuff, let’s go eat and maybe have a swim, or sit in the sun.”
“I want to hear more about your work,” I said. “I do.”
“I’ll tell you while we eat,”she said.
“I don’t know why you’re not fat, you eat all the time.”
“Maybe it’s genetic.” She picked up a copy of the
“Yeah, I heard.”
“When did you hear?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I knew her,” said Valentina. “Masha, right?”
When we were settled at a cafe on the boardwalk, and Val had ordered smoked fish, having changed her mind about the blintzes, and we were both drinking Bloody Marys, she asked me again what I knew about the dead girl.
“What do you mean you knew her?”
“That club out in Sheepshead Bay, the one I walked over to with you Friday night, Dacha, or maybe someplace in the city. It didn’t snap into place until I saw the paper. I recognized her from the picture, not the taped-up one, Jesus, Artie. Sometimes I wonder.”
I was surprised by Val’s cool, her composure. Most people, unless they’re on the job, pull back when the talk turns to dead people, to the cases filled with bare-knuckle ugliness.
“It doesn’t bother you, talking about it?”
“Of course it bothers me, but not the way people think,” said Val. “The stuff I see in Moscow is pretty shitty, so at least it makes me less of a pussy crybaby than most of my friends.”
“What kind of stuff?”
While I was asking, the food arrived, and Val dug into the huge platters of smoked salmon, whitefish, sable, sturgeon. She put butter on her bread, and piled it high with fish.
“What kind?” she said. “Little girls put out to work as prostitutes, parents who slash them, I mean on their faces, with rusty razor blades, if they refuse. This is big business in Moscow and no one does anything.”
“Tell me about Masha Panchuk. How well did you know her?”
