sensed right away that there was something strange.
Mrs Curtis had said that Grisha kept an office close to Paddington station, and this place, on Moscow Road, was close enough. I had come on the kind of instinct that you need as a cop, something that went off in my head like a smoke alarm.
I left the lights off. Went to the window and looked out at the street where a couple gazed up at the church, then walked away, putting up an umbrella.
At the back of the office was a second door. In the desk drawer was a set of keys. I found the right one and went in.
It was nondescript, nothing on the walls, only a small conference table in the middle of the room, a pair of filing cabinets in a corner. On the table was a brand new desktop computer, and on a shelf was a row of books, Russian history mostly. I grabbed a couple at random to take with me. I’d look at them later.
I went to the computer. Somebody leaving in a hurry had failed to shut it down completely, there was no request for a password. I thought about the light in the top-floor window.
From upstairs, while I was bent over the computer, came the noise I’d been waiting for. There were footsteps. Somebody walking, then running.
And then whoever it was kept going, didn’t stop at the third floor, just kept going faster, down the stairs, out of the front door and into the street.
At the window again I watched. A dark figure emerged from the building, crossed the street and slid into an alleyway on the other side. He was waiting for me.
I grabbed envelopes out of the two filing cabinets, printed off what I could from the computer, and went out. He was out there, in the dark, playing chicken with me. It didn’t matter now. What I’d glimpsed in the files told me all I needed: I’d found Grisha Curtis’ office.
In the street, files under my jacket, I kept close to the buildings. All the time, ever since I arrived in London, he had been out there, watching, following, but always hidden from me.
Then, something, some sixth sense, made me swerve to the right, some clammy fear. It was late Sunday night, nothing open, no cafe, no pub, just the dark wet streets, and the cold, more like November than July. How did they stand it here?
And then a hotel, light still on in the lobby. I ducked in. Asked the guy at the front desk if the bar was open, could I get a beer, a sandwich. Everything shut, he said. I asked for a room. I put cash and my passport on the desk, and while he copied the information, I looked over my shoulder, pushed some extra dough in his direction, said if anybody came or called, he’d never seen me.
“Right?” I said.
He shrugged. Figured me for a drunk wanting to sober up before I went home. I let on I didn’t want my wife knowing where I was, exchanged some ugly jokes about women and booze to get his confidence, took the key, went up and unlocked the door.
My clothes were soaked. I took them off, dried my head with the stingy bathroom towel, wrapped myself in the bedspread because it was freezing. On a dusty shelf in a scratched wardrobe, I found a miniature bottle of Scotch and two cans of warm beer. The Scotch I drank in a single gulp.
There was a single bed, a TV on a table, a chair. I spread the papers I’d stolen on the table, so I could read and watch the street at the same time. It was surreal, but what else could I do? I used only a small desk light and kept it out of sight from the window.
I’ve been a cop long enough, done enough homicides and fraud cases, so I can work my way through paper evidence fast.
In the files were e-mails from Grigory Curtis, and faxes to him from Russia. There were notes and e-mails between him and Valentina. Records of phone calls, expense-account submissions, airline ticket stubs, the dreary detritus of a guy on the make.
Surprisingly, Curtis was a novice. He was a guy who didn’t know what the hell he was doing. He didn’t know how to conceal his dealings. Fragments, scribbles in Russian and English in a Moleskine diary, a few magazine articles on oligarchs in London; names underlined included Larry Sverdloff.
I took the envelopes onto the bed. One contained an address book, a diary, some Russian military medals. I drank one of the beers. I was thirsty. Fear made my mouth and throat dry.
From the material in front of me, I tracked Curtis’ movements over the last eighteen months from the time he had met Valentina. At first he fell for her. Afterwards it became clear she was a good opportunity, especially when she started writing to him about her efforts to save young girls in Russia. She was fierce in her descriptions of Russian bureaucrats who got in her way, and said she intended going to the press.
At some point he persuaded her to marry him.
Some of Curtis’ efforts at encoding messages to the FSB made me laugh. He didn’t know how to do it, even I could decipher the material, much of it on slick fax paper. Curtis said he thought Tolya Sverdloff was a clown but useful, that he could make introductions.
At some point Curtis told his contact, his control, whatever the fuck you call them, that Val was hard to control, she had a big mouth. About six months earlier, Val stopped answering his e-mails. He wrote. She didn’t answer. He said he had to see her, he was coming to New York.
It took hours to work out the dates until I found a receipt for some book. Curtis had bought books from Dubi Petrovsky. I looked at the stuff I’d taken off the shelf in his office. Russian history, mostly, nationalist crap. When I put in a call to Dubi, I was hoping he was in his shop, and I got lucky. As soon as he checked his records, he found Curtis’ name.
“You were right. This guy, Grisha Curtis was here, July 5.” Two days before Val was murdered. “He buys some Russian novels, you want the names?”
“Take me through it,” I said, and Dubi told me a young guy had come in, said he wanted books for a lady, a distant relative of his mother.
“I said, is she Russian? He said yes, and I asked her name because I sell to so many Russians.”
“What did he say?”
“It was for Olga Dimitriovna.”
When Dubi described him, I knew for sure it was Grisha Curtis.
“I said, I just sent novels to Olga, and he asked which ones and who bought them, and he was very nice and made like he knew Olga and her friends, so I told him. I said Tolya Sverdloff ordered them, or perhaps it was his daughter, and that a friend had delivered them, and he said, oh, Mr Sverdloff must be a nice man, and I said yes, and he asked for different books so he would not give to Olga the same books. He used his credit card.”
Grisha had used his own card. Like I thought, he was a novice, a zealot with an obsession, not a pro. But somebody else had been involved, somebody who did his dirty work on Masha, I was guessing, but I didn’t think it was Grisha, not that first killing. It was the work of a professional thug.
“Artie?”
“Yes?”
“He came back.”
“What?”
“He came back. He bought history books,” said Dubi, “the kind Olga never read, including Solzynitsin’s most recent essays, the attacks on the West, the Russian nationlist crap. Nobody reads this shit,” added Dubi succinctly.
“What dates?”
“He came back on July 7, end of the day, he buys this stuff and also some photographic materials, brushes to clean old-fashioned lenses, this sort of thing, I don’t ask why.”
“You’re sure of the date?”
“Yes.”
“Anything else?”
“I had one or two photographs by Valentina Sverdloff on the wall and he couldn’t stop staring at them.”
I tried not to fall asleep, I drank a warm beer, I called Bobo Leven and when I finally got through I told him about the books, and that through all Curtis’ notes written in English- which many were-there were references to somebody called T, and amounts of money next to the name. At first I thought it was for Tolya. I went and put my whole head under the cold-water tap. T. Who was T?
