Dripping, cold as ice, shaking from fatigue, I went back into the room and called Sonny Lippert.
“Come home,” said Sonny Lippert. “You heard from Sverdloff?”
“He calls. He doesn’t say much.”
“You got anything over there, Art? On the Sverdloff girl?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Listen to me, Artie, forget this, just come home. Your friend Tolya is running his own private investigation into his daughter’s death, man. He’s got that kid, Leven, moonlighting for him. He’s everywhere, he’s on TV, in the papers, yelling and screaming about the Russkis, man, about how they got state terrorism all over again.”
“Go on.”
“Shit is what is hitting the fan,” said Sonny. “Shit is what he’s going to be up to his waist in. He’s making a lot of noise, he talks crazy stuff about radiation poisoning, about people at the top stealing money, he doesn’t give a flying fuck who he talks to, man. The TV talk shows are eating it up between election news. He makes a great show, man, but he’s crazy, the thing with his kid, talks about how she’s a martyr, he’s nuts and I don’t blame him, and I know he’s your friend, but you have to stop him.”
Somebody had used the word saint for Val. Mrs Curtis, her mother-in-law had said it: she was a saint, she’d said. Maybe it wasn’t just a turn of phrase for her, maybe it meant more. Who would have posed her like that, like a saint, or a martyr?
“Sonny?”
“Yeah?”
“Do me a favor, will you?”
“Sure, man.”
“Call me back in an hour, okay? Call me. If you don’t get an answer, call this number,” I said, and gave him Fiona’s cellphone.
“You’re not coming.”
“I’ll be there soon.”
“I’ll call you,” said Lippert. “You think somebody is enjoying our conversation? You think that funny little click is our other conversationalist?”
“I don’t know, Sonny. I don’t know how to do this. I’m a New York homicide cop. There’s nothing here I understand.”
“Maybe you should have listened to your father, he could have taught you the spy thing, right? Yeah, sorry about that, man, forget the fucking joke.”
I hung up.
I went to the window. It was getting light. Nobody outside. I waited. Nobody in the hall. I put my clothes back on, and waited, and went back to the paper trail.
Most of what Curtis fed his control, if that was what you called it, was titbits of information, gossip about the London scene. Only when Val began making a fuss about officials, when she began talking to Russian journalists, did the exchanges between Curtis and the guy in Russia heat up.
My face burned with fatigue. Legs buckled. No sleep. I washed my face. Fiona Colquhoun would be looking for me at Tolya’s by now. I had to get back. I put on my jacket, and stuffed the papers as best I could inside the pockets.
Had I been wrong to talk to Fiona?
Was I wrong to trust anybody? Even Larry? Or Tolya? Were they all Russian spies at heart, secrets buried so deep you could never separate the truth from the paranoia that made you distrust them and made them unreliable?
I went downstairs. The clerk was asleep behind the desk. I now knew that Tolya Sverdloff had not been the target. Valentina was not killed as a warning to him. She felt herself to be an American girl with the right to say whatever she wanted, to do whatever she wanted. And she was murdered for that, for what she said.
Footsteps rang out louder and louder on the hard sidewalk behind me. If I showed my gun in London, I’d be in trouble. I wanted to get the stuff I had on Grisha home, or at least to Fiona. She was my best gamble here.
But Grisha was behind me, like he had been, barely visible, almost never showing his face; and in the early morning rain, sidewalk slick as marble, I ran like a crazy person.
The footsteps came after me, and so fast I couldn’t think, a pair of arms like tree trunks locked around my shoulders and somebody dragged me up a short stretch of street and into a narrow mews, an alley, behind a row of cars.
It wasn’t Curtis. I got a glimpse of the face, it was only muscle, a thug. But Curtis had sent him, Curtis, who knew I had been in the building, and the hotel, who knew what I was doing. He had the means. He knew the right people. He would know who to call to summon the creep who was ripping at my eyelid with his fingernails.
There was a wound over my eye, and old wound that had healed badly, and it was as if he knew, as if he had studied a picture of me to see where I was vulnerable. He pulled at the skin. I was on the ground, wet, almost too tired to move. Again he peeled the skin from the wound, digging his nail in. The pain was unbearable.
In Russian, I swore at him, his mother, the country, everything I could think of, and he pulled back, looking for his gun, maybe. In that second, I managed to reach for my weapon, grabbed it, swung at him and hit hard with the butt. Again. I hit him until he let go and fell back on the sidewalk. Next to him was a pair of wire-rim glasses, the lenses shattered.
I didn’t wait to see if he was alive or not.
By the time I got back to Tolya’s, it was light. Upstairs I looked at my eye. The raw skin was bleeding and I patched it up with Band-Aids.
I took a hot shower. I got out and wrapped myself in a towel, and poured myself a drink, and knocked it all back, and then it came to me. I got it.
My God, I thought. The m on Masha, the letter carved in her flesh, wasn’t an m. It was a Russian t, the version of the lower case t. I got out of the shower and called Sonny Lippert.
“It wasn’t an m.”
“What?”
“The creep who carved an initial on Masha, the girl in the playground, it wasn’t an ‘m’ for ‘Masha’ like we thought: it was a Russian ‘t’. There was a T in Grisha’s notebook, ask around, Sonny, okay? Look for a guy with a T.”
“Jesus,” he said.
“Do it.”
He had already hung up.
“You were onto something, man,” said Sonny when he called back. “Earlier you said T, you said the letter T was in the notebook, look for a guy with a T? Turns out your Bobo Leven been looking very hard at a thug named Terry. Terenti is his Russian name. I got onto Leven to tell him what you said. Terenti looks very good for the girl in the playground, for Masha. They picked him up already. I’m betting he killed her. We’re checking evidence. You feeling okay?”
“Yeah, fine. Doesn’t matter. Leven’s doing his job?”
“I don’t like him, Artie, man, he’s a hustler for sure, he has a foul mouth and he’s a fucking racist little shit, but he’s smart, and he worked this case like a crazy person.”
“What else?”
“Terenti’s other jobs have all the same earmarks,” said Sonny. “The duct tape. The setting up the bodies like statues, like the girl, Masha, on the swing. He moves easy between New York, London, Moscow, Mexico, Havana, wherever he wants. He travels legal, we found entry dates into New York that would match up.”
“He wear glasses?”
“Jesus, man, how did you know? Yeah, he looks like a guy who reads books, little wire-rim glasses, maybe he thinks he’s Trotsky, or some other revolutionary fool.”
“Yeah, well, reading books doesn’t make you nice,” I said. “What kind of books?”
“I’ll ignore that,” said Sonny. “We think he killed Masha, but Valentina Sverdloff, it doesn’t look like the same guy. We’re checking everything, all the forensics, top priority.”
“Just call when you make the case,” I said.
“We won’t let this one go, Art,” he said. “You know what I hate about this global thing, Artie, man, I used to
