“It would be better to leave it before we go.”
“Where are we going?” I took the gun out of my pocket and placed it on the porch, then I picked it up, emptied it, and tossed it into the bushes. “Okay?”
He shrugged and I knew one of his guys-because he would have guys all around the house-would retrieve it.
“How did you find me?”
He smiled slightly. “It wasn’t that hard,” he said. “You stayed in a flat, I believe, where the caretaker was quite eager to make a little money. He said you disrespected the bones of the dead.”
“God.”
“I know. He called in at the local police station and was told the bones were from a butcher, and he then mentioned a foreigner staying in an empty flat.”
“I see.” I’d been an idiot to talk to Igor. I’d been stupid. Out of my head.
“Please get in the car with me? I’d be grateful,” he said. His cigarette was still held between his thumb and forefinger the way my father always held them.
I got in. He turned the key. Turned the car around. He put a CD into the slot, and “Fontessa”, the exquisite MJQ track, played.
“You like this music?” he said.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
“I’m so happy to see you, Artyom, my friend, I’m happy.” Tolya took my hand like it was a life raft.
In his pajamas and a bathrobe, he was propped up on a hospital bed. Oxygen tubes ran into his mouth. Machines around him monitored his vital signs. He breathed heavily, gasping a little.
It was the same clinic where I had been with Viktor Leven, the fancy medical facility. Viktor had heard right about it in the first place, but the staff had stonewalled us.
A light blanket lay across Tolya’s legs, but his feet were bare.
“Get me those slippers, can you?” he said softly, and I kneeled down and found some slippers and put them on his feet. “I wish I could smoke,” he said.
I sat on a straight chair close to the bed.
The room was large with two windows that looked out on to a courtyard. On the walls were prints, Monet’s flowers. A half-open door led to a bathroom.
On one side of the hospital bed was an easy chair. In the corner farthest from Tolya sat a middle-aged nurse, glasses on her nose, looking at a TV with the sound off. She rose, asked if I’d like to be alone with Tolya, told me she would sit outside the room in case he needed anything. I thanked her.
“How are you?” I said because I couldn’t think of anything else.
“Better because you’re here, Artyom.” He pushed himself up on the pillows.
What was it, a little more than a couple of weeks since he had asked me to take books to Olga Dimitriovna in Brooklyn? It felt like a lifetime.
“You have something to tell me, Artyom? You have that look.” He tried to smile.
“Yes. It wasn’t you. They didn’t kill Valentina because of something you did, it wasn’t you,” I said, and he began to weep. “They murdered her because of what she was doing at the shelter in Moscow, because she talked about it, because she got in their faces and accused them of stealing money and using little girls.”
“My God,” he said, and put his head in his hands.
“It wasn’t you.”
He looked up at me, an expression of terminal sadness on his face.
“What difference does it make?” he said. “She’s gone. And it was me, Artyom, it was me because I got close to evil, and it killed Val, and it killed poor Masha Panchuk, who also was somebody’s daughter.” He closed his eyes. I thought for a moment he was sleeping. Then he looked at me. “This is my prison, a very nice one, of course, but I can’t leave.”
“What?”
“They arrested me, asshole, tuft of mouse turd, my great dear friend.”
“What for?”
“They came to my parents’ house, in Nikolina Gora, and they brought me here. You realized I had been there? At the dacha?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I could smell you. Listen, I know what happened. To Val, I know.”
“You never liked the scent, you figured me for queer because I like the perfume Lorenzo made me. I’d like to see Florence again.”
“Shut up.”
“How can I, when it’s such a pleasure to have you here to torture this way?” said Tolya, joking around like he always did, though I could see it was an effort, the speaking was an effort, the simple act of it.
“What are they saying you did?”
“Sit closer to me, asshole,” said Tolya. “Move your chair over.” He looked at the ceiling.
“You think they’re sharing our conversation?”
“Just like the old days,” he said. “You remember? Were you ever arrested?”
“Only with my mother. In her refusenik period,” I said. “Only then. You?”
“Yes, spooky KGB guys in bad raincoats said I was of interest, as they say, in my rock and roll period, when I was on stage with my Fender Stratocaster, which nobody had seen, which I had arranged to get by not exactly kosher means. But I told you all this a million times, asshole, all about how much fun we had back in the day, Artyom. They let me go after they scared the shit out of me for twenty-four hours. Back in the day, Artie,” he said, switching to English. “It feels like a million years ago. How did I become like this?” he said. “How did I become an asshole of capitalism? I was a rock and roll hero. People wrote my name on walls, like Eric Clapton. ‘Sverdloff is God’, it said, or something like that, I don’t know if we had God back then. ‘Sverdloff is God’,” he said again wistfully.
“Things changed,” I said.
“I wanted to go to the West in a hot-air balloon, I wanted to sail over the Berlin Wall. Instead I went with a business-class ticket. Return.”
“Talk to me, Tolya. What’s going on here?” I pulled my chair close to where he sat, and he leaned down and I could feel his breath, could smell the sickness.
“A man in a nice jacket from Brooks Brothers brought me. Off the rack,” he said, trying to smile. “The jacket. Old for the job.”
“What is he?”
“He told you his name?”
“Yes.”
“Fyodor Bounine. Fyodor Samuelovich Bounine. You get the joke, right? FSB, maybe he has these initials embroidered on his underpants. It’s his real name, of course, but he thinks he’s a wit. Very good English. Very good Chinese. And Arabic. And very pleasant to me. Asks me a lot about you.”
“Nobody hurt you?”
“It’s not like that. They arrested me on money-laundering charges, they say.” He snorted, trying to laugh. “Then they add murder. It happens. They just take you away, nobody knows. You can’t call, nothing.”
“We can get you a lawyer.”
“It doesn’t work like that.”
“I saw Molly,” I said, not knowing if I should tell him.
He leaned forward. “Where? She’s okay?”
“I saw her at the dacha. She’s fine. She’s with her mother. I told her to go back to New York, or Boston.”
“I want her out of this fucking country. Get her out. Will you do this for me, Artyom? Please. Whatever it
