“They murdered the kid?”
“Yes.”
“Why all the duct tape?”
“It’s an old gangster punishment. You make it look like the old mob, the officials can deny it. They distance themselves. The fuckers look clean as a whistle, they give the shelter money, they go on TV, official TV, we only have official TV now, of course, and say how dreadful this is.”
“Valentina?”
“She had started working with us when it happened. We asked her to take pictures. The girl in Brooklyn, she looked like this one, the duct tape?”
“Yes. I think they were after Valentina and got the wrong girl.”
“Fuck,” said Fetushova. “Somebody hired a creep who knew about this?”
“I think it was Grigory Curtis.”
“Piece of shit, piece of mother-fucking donkey turd,” she said. “You know him?”
“I want him,” I said. “He’s here. Elisabetta told me he had been here to the shelter.”
“He wouldn’t have the stomach to do this kind of job, if it was him, he hired somebody who fucked it up, right?”
“Yes.”
“And when it came to Val, all he could manage was a pillow over her face. Fucking bastard. I have to go.” She looked around.
A couple of guys lounged at the edge of the playground. They looked like low-level hoods, or street creeps from the FSB.
“Who are they?”
“Garbage men,” she said, laughing. “We call them garbage men, I just don’t know what kind of garbage.”
“Where can we talk?”
“I can’t talk.”
“I’ll be at your office. I’ll wait for you,” I said.
“Just don’t get me killed,” said Fetushova.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
I left the shelter. I had already checked every place that was mentioned in Grisha Curtis’ files; in the stuff I had stolen from the office on Moscow Road. I had checked, quietly as I could: an apartment where he’d lived; a bank he had worked at; a gym where he did weights.
I couldn’t exactly call up the FSB and ask for his contact. I couldn’t say, who ran him, if somebody did. Maybe a real spy would know how.
So I worked the obvious places. Nothing. He wasn’t good at keeping secret files, but he was good at hiding.
I felt him on my back all the time. At every corner, I looked over my shoulder, and put my hand on the little gun in my pocket.
Paranoia took over in Moscow. I walked as fast as I could, heading for the subway, always feeling somebody behind me, turning sharply, thinking I’d see Curtis, when there was nobody at all.
I stopped near an old Moscow housing project, twelve tall buildings, most in an even worse state than when I’d been here in the 1990s. I put my head into the hallway of one of the buildings; it stank of piss, like it always had, the elevator was still broken.
A few elderly women sat on rickety chairs on a patch of grass outside, and I scanned the faces, thinking I might recognize somebody, but they stared back, blank, and went on fanning themselves against the heat with newspapers. Living on meager pensions, they seemed completely unconnected with the new Moscow.
I asked the oldest of the women if she had known Birdie Golden. My mother’s best friend who had taught me English lived and died in the building with the broken elevator.
“Yes,” she said in Russian. “You are?”
I told her who I was. She beckoned me to lean down so she could kiss my cheek.
“Birdie loved you very much,” she said. “She talked about you all the time, you were like her own son,” said the woman, who invited me to take an empty chair and offered me a bottle of water from her bag.
I wanted to stay. I wanted to sit in the sun like the old women and talk. I realized Olga Dimitriovna had reminded me of Birdie a little.
“There is a man looking in this direction,” said Birdie’s friend, and I glanced over my shoulder and saw one of the garbage men from the playground.
“I should go,” I said.
“Please come back,” said the woman, and I said I’d try, even while sweat was running down my back and my hands were cold. I had to get Marina Fetushova to tell me what she knew. Whatever it took. Now, I thought.
I found her at the radio station where she worked.
“Fetushova, Marina,” she said, sticking out a hand as if she had never met me before, and I saw this was for show, for the other people at the small radio station where I found her.
The radio station was in a couple of rooms in a concrete building near the Arbat, a dingy place with stale air thick with the rank smell of old cigarettes, no air conditioning.
Fetushova half pushed me out of the room where four people pored over scripts and fiddled with equipment. From another room, door shut, came the sound of American Blues. Buddy Guy, Mick Jagger covering a raucous Muddy Waters number about champagne and reefers.
A guy stood on the landing, leaning against the wall. Security for Fetushova and the others, I guessed. I started for the office.
“Not in there. I don’t like to compromise anyone else,” she said, pushing me back out into the hallway.
“Let’s go outside,” I said. “A cafe.”
“I told you what I know. You’re a cop, you’re Sverdloff’s friend, you were Valentina’s friend. She mentioned you to me once,” she said, and sat on the bottom stair, elbows on knees.
“What did she say?”
“Said you were okay. I have to get back to work soon.”
I leaned against the railing near her. “I want to know why Valentina Sverdloff was killed.”
She gave a short tough laugh. “You know what I was before?” she said.
Russians always told you what they were before, before, before the Soviet Union crumbled, before everything changed. Physicists who now sold fur coats. Linguists who drove cabs. Guys who once ran market stalls were billionaires. You went up the scale or you went down, but everything had changed. It was as if they had all migrated to a different planet. Except for old people, like my Aunt Birdie’s friends. Old people stayed where they had always been; so did the poor in the countryside.
“What were you?”
She grunted a laugh.
“For a while, I was a scientist, I was educated as a scientist, and I was in forensics, and then I thought, fuck it, I’ll be a cop. It doesn’t matter, nothing changes, we’re master and slave, the elite and the mass, the hierarchy remains,” said Fetushova, “You know what it is, it’s fucking Orthodox Christianity whose aim is to enslave people, Maybe my grandchildren’s grandchildren will see some kind of civil society. I have three of them. You’re surprised?” She reached in her brown leather bag and took out a folder, opened it, showed me her children. Two girls and a boy, good-looking young people. In the boy’s arms was a baby.
“What are their names? Are they here in Moscow with you?”
No, thank God,” she said, and then seemed sorry she had revealed this and stuffed the pictures back in her bag.
“You said you were a cop.”
“You don’t believe me? I’m not fucking kidding you, Mr Cohen. I was. So I saw everything. I see everything. It’s all facade, the FSB is about money, the gangsters of the 1990s have moved sideways into it.” She sucked at her
