run my investigations in New York for New York, and now everybody is running around the planet, and nobody knows who works for anybody. It’s porous like it’s never been and we whore ourselves to anyone with a buck, so the intel is just out there, all of it,” he said. “The more we do business with asshole countries like Russia and China, the more loopholes there are. Also, the creeps that got the money can just disappear. Plus you got a jackass running Homeland Security who forgets to put air marshals on planes. We’re in a whole new place, man, we’re in a lateral thing, which means no place.”
“Listen, you said this Terenti reads books, you mean literally?” It popped into my head like a jack out of a box.
“Yeah, man. They picked him up, he had a pile of them in the motel room.”
“In Brighton Beach? The motel?”
“Yeah.”
“The books were in Russian?”
“I heard yes.”
“Who’s keeping you in the loop on all this?” I said.
“Listen, you know Dubi Petrovsky?”
“Yeah, the guy where you got me that first edition Conrad, right? Big guy, shop out near the beach?”
“Right. Find out if he sold the books they found with this Terenti creep, okay?”
“Sure, man. You think this could turn on books?”
“With Russians, yeah, sure, they love to think of themselves as intellectuals, right?”
“One more thing.”
“Yeah, Sonny?”
“Terenti, turns out he’s done it before, he signed his work on another girl. The letter m in Masha’s flesh, his signature, like he was the author of the job.”
“My God.”
“Come home soon as you can, man.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
“Please come,” he said. “My car is waiting,” he added, calling me
“Where?”
“My car is waiting downstairs. Ivan is there,” he said.
I went to the window of Tolya’s Notting Hill house and looked out and saw the car, the driver.
“I have to go,” I said to Fiona, who had been waiting for me when I stumbled in. The guy who’d beaten me up had left me looking bad, but she didn’t ask, just washed off the blood, using some antibiotics she found in Tolya’s bathroom.
“I have to go,” I said to her again, and gave her most of the papers I’d found in Grisha’s office on Moscow Road. Not all. Not the notebook.
“Don’t ask me where, okay?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Just come,” said Tolya into the phone. “I need you Artyom,” he said. His voice was low and hesitant, like a sick man’s.
“What’s wrong with you?” I said when I found Tolya waiting for me in Larry Sverdloff’s house. From the outside, the house resembled a fortress. A dozen guys were planted in the garden, sitting in deckchairs, speaking into their earpieces, and sipping water. More stood outside the front gate.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Tolya from the chair where he sat in Larry’s study. His skin was gray. He worked hard to catch his breath. I got a chair and pulled it up beside him.
“Where’s your cousin?”
“Upstairs.”
“Let me get him.”
“No,” said Tolya. “He’s fixing things. Let him do it.” He reached for a plastic tube of pills on the table next to him, swallowed a few capsules and washed them down with a glass of vodka he poured himself.
“What is it?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I can’t find my shoes.”
“They’re next to the couch,” I said.
“Can you get them for me, Artyom? Please?”
“Sure.”
I got a pair of his Gucci loafers, bright yellow skins, gold buckles, and brought them to him.
“Sorry to ask, man,” he said, slipping his feet into the shoes. “I’m just a little tired,” added Tolya speaking half in English, half in Russian. “I need to get going.”
In all the years we’d been friends, I had never known Tolya like this. He looked lousy. There was a moment when he clutched his left arm as if in pain, and I reached out, but he gently pushed me away. He spoke to me like a supplicant, like a guy who needed help even with his shoes. I tried not to show what I was feeling, but I think he knew.
“When did you get here?”
“An hour ago,” he said, glancing at his watch. The band was loose on his wrist.
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. He wore a rumpled black suit.
“Listen to me, I came to see you, and Styopa, too,” he said, referring to his cousin Larry’s patronymic. “Only you two, okay, nothing else, nobody else, no one. Is anyone with you?”
“No. Tell me.”
“I came, you see, because I can’t tell you anything on the phone, not anymore, and because I have to go soon.”
“When?”
“An hour. Two.”
“Where?” I said.
“It doesn’t matter.”
I reached in my pocket for cigarettes.
“You’re smoking? Give me one, please?” Tolya said, trying to conceal a rasping cough. “No lecture.”
I lit my cigarette and tossed him the lighter.
“So, Artyom. So. You use my nice lighter?” He tried to joke.
I waited.
“Put on some music, please, Artyom,” said Tolya. “ Something nice.”
There was a CD player in the bookshelf and I went over and found a CD I knew he liked. I held it up.
“Sinatra okay?”
“Always,” said Tolya. “Sure. But classical now, Verdi,” he said. “Larry has this recording,
“You should listen sometime, Artyom.” He smiled. “It’s about a poisoned drink and reconciliation. Turn it louder, please.”
“You don’t want your cousin to hear?”
“He already knows most of it.”
“Most?”
“I left out certain things.”
“You don’t trust him?”
“Of course I trust him, it’s for his sake,” said Tolya. “My cousin thinks he is leading the loyal opposition, he thinks he and his people and their money can bring down Putin and the Kremlin. He has made tremendous fortune,
