Bloody London (14 page)

The dusky light took the edge off the hard blonde hair and brassy gold jewellery the women wore. The
whiff of charcoal and burnt meat was sweet. The air was clear and turning cold. On the beach, the piroshki men heated meat pies over their little stoves. I bought one, went back up on the boardwalk, hooked my foot around the railing and watched the ocean for a while. I ate the pie; it tasted great.

“What's so funny?” a good-looking woman called out in Russian, and I realized I was laughing out loud. At myself. I had spent twenty-five years, more than twenty-five, trying to dump the past; maybe I had become a Russian all over again. Three girls, arms linked, stopped and looked at me. I complimented them in Russian, then I went to see Johnny Farone, who once gave me a tip that helped me finally put a case together.

An Italian guy, Farone sold appliances for a while, then went into the security business, a smart move if you were dealing with Russians on Brighton Beach, where the motto was if you ain't paranoid you ain't paying attention.

For a while, Farone was practically the only non-Russian for a mile in either direction, and I first knew him when he worked out of Cosmos Auto Parts.

Cosmos was always a crummy shop, beige plastic crucifix on the wall that shook when the trains went by, espresso pot in the toilet, the window sills full of second-hand fanbelts and used air con parts. Johnny's place burned down. He took the insurance, got smart and learned Russian. He got into security. He figured even Russians like Italian food once in a while and he bought a run-down place with a view of the beach and
spruced it up; he hired a guy to make the pasta. He orders the mozzarella in fresh.

On the wall of his office, he'd hung the famous ad placed in
Novoye Russkoye
, the local rag. A request by the FBI for “All facts and gossip about organized crime rackets, murders, frauds, illegal incomes, narcotics, counterfeiting and all kind of criminal activities in the United States and abroad.” Farone saw me look at it and laughed. “I got it translated,” he said. “It's the ‘all facts and gossip' that slays me. Let me show you around, Artie.”

Johnny Farone, who had traded in his short-sleeve white nylon shirt for a nifty Donna Karan suit, escorted me from his office to the restaurant; it was a large room with dark-green walls, brass lamps and oil paintings of scenes from Italian operas. There were padded leather chairs, pink linen tablecloths, a long oak bar. He gestured to a barstool and we sat and ate baked clams and homemade caponata and drank vintage Barolo. Johnny folded his jacket carefully on the next stool over.

“Very nice.”

“It's a good combination out here, you know, Artie. Food and security, boy, the Russkis are they ever paranoid, you know? Make Italians look like they're in Kansas, so to say, Artie. They love detective stuff, you know? I got a half interest in a little store over on Beach 3rd, spy toys, you know? Phone bugs, cattle prods under the welcome mat. I'm gonna be a rich man, Artie. But I got a more important surprise for you.” He turned to look at the door, then blushed as a redhead in a miniskirt walked through the door.

I squinted in the low light of the bar. “Genia?”

My mousy cousin Genia had changed. For years she lived in a bungalow on a side street off the beach, a shabby house with broken masonry and a yard with a rusted garbage can. The atmosphere in her front room was sad and brown. Genia's father, a Red Army hero once, kept Genia and her little girl under his thumb and retailed his stories and gossip to other old men who walked on the boardwalk, ice in their beards, bitter eyes cloudy with age.

But Genia's old man was dead. And Genia, in her tight green cashmere sweater and a short black leather skirt, had emerged a Brighton Beach butterfly. Now she put her white mink jacket carefully over her arm, kissed me three times, and said politely in Russian, “Hello, Artemy Maximovich. It's nice to see you. How are you?”

I said I was fine, asked about her little girl. Genia sat on a barstool and crossed her ankles so the diamond ankle bracelet glittered. It turned out my cousin had sleek, sensational legs.

“She is well,” she said of her child. “Very good at music.” She spoke English now, carefully, as if she might break it.

“Still playing the flute?”

“Yes. She has scholarship. She will be big star, I think.” She sat on her barstool while Johnny poured her wine, fed her titbits from the hors d'oeuvre tray and gazed at her like he couldn't believe his luck.

Customers began arriving. The sun was gone; the ocean outside the window was black; the smell of fresh garlic bread wafted out from the kitchen.

I helped myself to another glass of wine. “Listen, Johnny, you know a guy name of Anatoly Sverdloff ?”

He picked a cracker from a tray on the bar and spread it delicately with some carponata, then popped it in Genia's mouth. She blushed again and dabbed her mouth with a napkin.

Farone said to me, “Sure. Everyone knows Sverdloff here. Didn't I meet him with you back when?”

“If a guy like Sverdloff has a safe room in his fancy apartment in Manhattan, you know what I'm talking about, who installed it?”

“You gotta gimme some details, Artie.”

I told him and he said, interested but wary now, “Has to be Leo Mishkin. He's the biggest in the business. I met him once. He's number one in security. He's not Brighton Beach, Artie, not anymore, not for a long time. This guy Mishkin, he's second generation, I mean I knew him once, he came first, then he brought his old man over. The old man was a rough bastard, lives in a home now. I bet he still does business. But Leo's second generation, like I said. Mishkin has ambitions.”

“Is he legit?”

Farone shrugged. “What's that mean? There's always stories.”

“What kind of stories?”

“It's just gossip. Russians get kind of jealous one of their own does real good, you know, but I heard Mishkin keeps his own copies of safe-room blueprints.”

“Meaning he would have access.”

Johnny pushed his hair back. “Mishkin's not my
business. Out here, you mind your own business. He's Manhattan.”

Genia piped up, “We're buying a house, Artyom. Sheepshead Bay. You'll come?” Her face lit up. “A house with a garden. A swimming pool. A piano. A room just for TV.”

I said, “I'll come,” but even while we talked, I was aware of people in the bar, the sullen glances, the hostile faces that shut down tight when I looked their way. There were people in Brighton Beach who probably wished I was dead. Cops, even ex-cops, were not welcome.

“Get me some stuff on Mishkin, will you, Johnny?” I spoke softly to Genia in Russian. “Ask him to help me.” I said, “Tell him it's a family thing.”

Johnny lowered his voice. “I'm an outsider here, I gotta be careful, OK? You want to check out Leo Mishkin, sometimes he hangs out at the Imperial Thursday nights.”

“How come Thursday?”

“Thursday, the big guys that maybe moved to Manhattan, Montclair, whatever, they like coming home. Fridays, Saturdays, it's for manicurists and tourists, you know.”

“You know anyone who can encourage that Mishkin shows up tonight, this being Thursday, anyone who can provide a come-on?”

“I'll see what I can do.”

“I'll be over at the Imperial.”

“So take it easy, right? I mean you're not that popular around here, OK? It ain't Manhattan out here.”

*

The Imperial was a free-standing building that had valet parking and a phalanx of muscle in heavy leathers to guard the cars. The first thing I saw when I went inside the main room was a big blonde, black mink over her shoulders, eating off a lobster tree. It was a Brighton Beach special, a three-foot plastic tree stacked with lobsters. Hands oily with butter, vulpine eyes glittering, she sat at the table with her boyfriend, pulled the plump meat out of the red shell, dipped it in melted butter, and pinky finger held high, a massive diamond aloft on it, sucked the meat into her wet, smiling, red mouth. Then she fed some to the guy opposite her. The lively fur stayed over her bare shoulders while she ate. Another diamond sparkled in her cleavage. On the table was a magnum of Cristal Rosé.

I shifted my gun; I had taken it out of the car and it was under my jacket. People still hate you here, Farone had said. I looked around.

On the street side, you entered a lobby where there were glass Art Deco panels engraved with eagles – I figured this for an imperial motif – and pink leather banquettes where the limo drivers sat, bellies on their knees, muttering in coarse Russian and watching the babes. Through the lobby was a long bar, the main room, a huge dance floor and beyond it, set apart by an archway draped in red satin, an area that faced the ocean.

The ocean-front area had a big expanse of plate glass, eight round linen-covered tables and six high-back booths shaped like giant shells and made of cream-color
naugahyde. I wondered if the glass was bulletproof. Next to the booths was a VIP entrance.

After I took a look around, I sat at the bar. The blonde eating lobster winked at me. What had changed since my last visit to a Brighton Beach nightclub, a couple years back, was the money. There was more of it. More suits that cost five grand. More women in sable, even a few Ultra-Natashas, the kind I'd seen at Mr Chow's, although you had to figure they only came to the Beach because some guy got sentimental. This was not their desired destination. No almond-eyed Natasha ever crawled out of some shithole in Russia and made her way to New York City to end up in Brighton Beach.

Used to be you saw a lot of home-made outfits and plenty of glitter. Now a lot of the women were in drop-dead black, Prada, that kind of thing. I heard more English too; a second generation had grown up here. Grandpa had been maybe a two-bit hoodlum with a tattoo on his hand who did time in the Gulag; the grandkids went to Harvard. Old story, but where it once took fifty years for a crook to shape up his American dream, now if you were a Russki with a brain, you could do it in five. I read somewhere the Russians have the highest median income of any ethnic group. Fifty grand per year for starters and that's the manicurists.

In the middle of the main room was a dance floor and a stage. In the mirror over the bar I could see a reflection of the whole room. I ordered a beer. The smell of Chanel and fur, the sound of a band playing the
theme from
Titanic
, the noise of Russians talking and eating enveloped me. There were two weddings and a birthday party at long tables where maybe twenty people sat around half an acre of food and flowers and forests of booze, vodka, whiskey, also Coke and wine.

The stage show began. Twelve girls, all over six feet, in bright red jackets and fishnet tights strutted down a spiral staircase singing “New York, New York”. The band was perched on a balcony overhead.

The noise, the smell and the raw lust and aspiration were ankle deep. A hostess in a long satin skirt, a silk T-shirt so tight you could see the nipples rise and fall, stopped by to ask if I needed anything. I gave her some money to let me know if Leo Mishkin showed up.

A waiter set down dishes of snacks on the bar – herring and pickled walnuts, Russian salads and cold meats, hard-boiled eggs, delicate slices of oily sturgeon. I had ordered vodka and the bartender put a bottle of Absolut in front of me.

Then I saw Tolya Sverdloff arrive. He didn't see me.

He was surrounded by a cordon of men. He made his way towards the private area that faced the ocean and I followed cautiously, keeping out of view. He stopped at a round table where Elem Zeitsev was drinking martinis with his wife.

Zeitsev was a quiet, vain guy who took over the big money scams when his uncle Pavel finally croaked. I'd heard Zeitsev had kept the family house in Sheepshead Bay for business, but he'd bought a big place for his wife and her show dogs in East Hampton, south of the highway.

When Sverdloff approached, Zeitsev stood up and kissed him the old-fashioned way, big smackeroo on the mouth like Brezhnev always did, and gestured to a chair. Tolya sat down and I retreated to the bar. I sipped my drink slowly. Sampled the smoked fish. And watched the hoods in Loro Piano cashmere, and wondered if any of them messed with my loft or banged me up in the Middlemarch stairwell. Looking for a particular hood out here was like looking for a grain of sand on the beach.

The show finished, the band played Barry Manilow covers now and people started to dance. Johnny Farone arrived with Genia. In her silver slip dress, she showed off her brand-new boobs: the size of grapefruits, they stayed aloft all by themselves.

Johnny and Genia were happy as clams together, him grinning, her purring, at a table not far from me. He sent me over a bottle of Haut Brion 1953. Cost a bundle. I got a waiter to open it, picked up the bottle and went over to thank Johnny, sat down uninvited, poured some wine for him and Genia. Farone's head swivelled nervously.

I sipped wine and said, “Very very nice wine, Johnny, thanks.”

Genia touched my hand and nodded to the entrance. I looked up. The hostess and a maître d', followed by the owner, were at attention. With them was a big man in a beautiful dark-blue suit. He arrived quietly, but there was an electric field around him that made people stop eating and stare.

Genia whispered, “Leo Mishkin.”

Mishkin walked quickly through the crowds towards the private room and disappeared into one of the high-backed booths, but I saw the face when he passed. It was the same man I'd seen at Lulu Fine's building uptown. The man talking Russian to his beautiful son. The boy in the yellow St Pete's jacket who waved to me from the park below the Middlemarch. I wanted to talk to Mishkin.

I tossed my napkin on to the table. Johnny put his hand out to stop me, but Genia took him on to the dance floor. I picked up the wine bottle and threaded my way through the dancers to Tolya Sverdloff. From the table where he sat I could get a better look at Mishkin.