The Craigslist Murders (14 page)

Suddenly, his fist hit the wall and Charlotte shrank into her chair.

“It is a disaster, Charlotte. It nearly killed me. Getting the money, finding the workers, and now …”

“What? Nobody came?” Charlotte asked. “You have no guests?”

“Oh! I have guests,” Pavel retorted, licking his fist, as the cork flew across the room. “They steal everything. They steal the pillows, the sheets, the paintings on the walls.”

“We call it pilfering, Pavel. It’s a problem in hotels here, too.”

Pavel grinned. “You call it pilfering when guests check out, carrying off a six-foot gold mirror in my lobby? In front of my people at reception?”

Charlotte tried to imagine a similar scene taking place in the lobby of the Carlyle. “That’s unbelievable,” she said. “Why didn’t they call the police or try to stop them?”

“The police are criminals, too, Charlotte. So now my hotel is like a prison. I have bolted the beds and chairs to the floor. I have removed all the rugs and the decorations. It’s …”

“A catastrophe?” Charlotte offered, touching his sleeve.
Did this man ever sit down?
She wondered.

“No. It’s business as usual in Russia, Charlotte. This is what freedom means to us now. Permission to steal just a little bit more. But let’s drink,” he said, filling her glass.

Charlotte smiled as Pavel passed her the crystal flute of champagne and a toast point with so much caviar on it, she had to cup her hand under her chin to catch the eggs.

“You are still smiling, Charlotte. Is it the Tupperware?”

“No. I was thinking of you and the burning building,” she replied.

Pavel laughed. “The night I break my window and crawl out? When the firemen are all standing around smoking cigarettes?”

“Yes,” Charlotte said, as she crunched her toast and the first mouthful of pearl-like eggs slid down her throat. “You yelled at them. ‘Why for God’s sake don’t you come in and get me?’ ”

“We ring your bell and nobody answered,” Pavel said, finishing the story as he attempted to squeeze his 6′ 4″ frame into the confines of a velvet slipper chair. “I am choking on smoke and they wait for me to answer my doorbell.”

“Pavel, come over here,” Charlotte said, indicating a place for him on the sofa. “It’s making me uncomfortable, just watching you.”

“Here’s to your beauty,” he said, touching her glass and sitting down next to her.

“Would you like to hear some more Russian stories?” he asked, taking a slow sip of the Dom.

“You mean fairytales, Pavel?” she replied, pulling her knees up in front of the fire. “I would love to.”

“We Russians have always believed in fairytales, Charlotte,” Pavel said. “Because in our country, they come true.”

Was he being facetious? God knows, the news from Russia was like something straight out of Grimms: gassing theaters, killing schoolchildren, murders and mobsters. There were questions, however, that Charlotte simply didn’t ask Pavel. How he really made his money. Why it was safer for his family to live in New Jersey than Moscow.

“Let me give you one example of a Russian fairytale, OK?” he suggested, leaning over and stirring the champagne bubbles in her glass. “It is a true story.” Scooping up a spoonful of caviar, he swallowed and began to speak.

“One weekend last winter, I go cross-country skiing. It is perfect for this, the area around my dacha. I am gone for hours before I realize I am lost. And it is getting dark. Snow is falling, faster and faster. Then I hear these bells. The sound is, how you say, muffled by the snow? I follow the sound. And there in the middle of the forest is a village with a brand new church. This village is still full of old wooden houses,
izbahs
, we call them. Like gingerbread houses in old books. Except for the church, life is just as it was two centuries ago. There are women lined up at the well, helping each other put pails of water on wooden … on wooden …”

“Poles,” Charlotte whispered. “I think you mean poles.” She felt as if she’d been cast under a spell; touched in a way that made even her toes tingle. She wasn’t sure she liked it.

“Are you OK?” Pavel asked, brushing his fingers against her knees.

“Yes, I’m fine,” Charlotte replied. “Don’t stop.”

“So the men take me into a home and feed me by candlelight,” Pavel said, quietly resuming his story. “We drink vodka and talk about the church. Then they introduce me to this ninety-five-year-old woman. She saw the church in a dream, Charlotte. The dream went on for weeks. And she understood this was a message. So for three years, she took the train into Moscow every day, all alone, and begged for money to build it. One old poor woman, Charlotte, a widow from the forest made a dream come true. And thanks to her dream, I am saved by the bell! I found my way home. This is ironic, no? And a good fairytale?”

Charlotte had been so entranced, she’d drunk three glasses of Dom. Her head was spinning.

“Charlotte?” Pavel said, touching her knee again.

She blinked.

“Aha!” laughed Pavel. “You have surrendered to what we Russians call
shamanstvo
. It is like an enchantment.”

“I guess so. I mean, yes!” she said, hardly daring to look him in the eye. “I’m not used to drinking so much.”

Pavel chuckled. “Charlotte, how lucky you are. For us, this Dom is like sipping teardrops.”

“You’re a poet, Pavel.”

“No, Charlotte,” Pavel said, with a grimace as he sat suddenly rigid in his chair. “I am most definitely not a poet. There is a dark side to our fairytales, too.”

“I know. I’ve read …” Charlotte said, gently placing her glass on the table and glancing over at him.

Pavel shook his head. “I am not speaking of those nightmares that make it onto your televisions here, Charlotte.”

“So tell me, Pavel.” Charlotte said, gazing intently at his face. “Please.”

“In the village where I have my dacha, I am like a god. The peasants—and yes, we still call them peasants—love me and fear me. This terror and love is just as it was with the czars and the priests and the communists. They see me arrive in my black Mercedes and hear about my indoor swimming pool and my eight bathrooms. It makes them angry.”

“Well, of course, it makes them angry,” said Charlotte.

“It makes them so angry, they kill for a handful of rubles. Perhaps, not in my village, not yet, but in Moscow where poor men know that the rich are also killing for billions of American dollars.”

“Oligarchs, you mean?” Charlotte said, thinking of the
Vanity Fair
article she’d read about the guy who owned a yacht with its own submarine.

“Oligarchs, yes,” Pavel confirmed, with a wave of his hand. “And many others, too. The point is, the poor man and the rich man in Russia today are the same, Charlotte. They share the same rage, the same dead eyes, the same hunger. The rich men shop like the starving eat. The shopping is new for us. The killing is not. But we do both with a vengeance, believe me.”

“It’s not so different here, Pavel,” Charlotte added, eagerly. “The rich and the poor, the hostility.”

“It is
not
the same, Charlotte. Can you imagine your government dumping radioactive waste in the middle of New York City? This happened in Moscow. Or going to the
market and buying a lovely fat watermelon for your family? Then finding out that it came from the Zone of Exclusion near Chernobyl? No, Charlotte. You know nothing of a Russian’s rage; of our monsters or the bloody, savage birth of hope at a time when even the earth itself is dying.”

Charlotte sat there, her mouth open. “I’m sorry. I had no idea,” she said, contritely.

“And now I must go. My wife and children are waiting.”

Charlotte usually preferred to be first at the door, to preempt other people’s departures. But tonight, she followed meekly after Pavel.

“We have to talk about work,” she said, pointing towards the sketches and swatches that she’d laid out near the fireplace. Pulling on his coat, Pavel grinned. “Of course. That is why I am here … to talk about furniture.”

“If you are here Monday during the day, I would like to take you up to meet Max,” Charlotte said, pulling out a leather book. “He has a shop I think you’ll love.”

“I am yours. But only if you promise to have dinner with me before I go back to Moscow? Will you do that, Charlotte?” Charlotte pretended to check her book.

“I think I’m free on Tuesday night.”

“Then Tuesday it is,” Pavel said, giving her a gentle peck on the cheek.

Charlotte accompanied him to the elevator and, as the doors began to close, leapt into the gap. “Wait!” She shouted, sliding up against the wall inside. “I’ll take you down.” The two shared an easy, companionable silence all the way to the lobby. It was only when Charlotte stood beneath the awning, gawking at the bodyguards that she spoke. “They’re
as big as armoires, those guys,” she said.

Pavel flinched. “A necessary evil,” he replied, as one of the men opened the door to the limo and Pavel lowered his head to get in.

“See you Monday,” he said, disappearing into the darkness.

Riding up in the elevator, Charlotte wondered if Pavel had been referring to himself in his story. Was he one of the rich men who killed for billions of dollars? Had she found a kindred soul? A man who would understand the extraordinary thing that made her so different from others? Money hadn’t yet thinned Pavel’s blood. There was something that felt so fresh about his struggle. So raw.

Sipping a final glass of Dom and making room for the Tupperware bowl in her fridge, Charlotte thought about the old lady and her dream of the church. It reminded her of her own recurrent dream. Was the dream about being chased by her mother a premonition, a message? Scrubbing her hands in soapy water, she touched the old marble sink, as if to reassure herself. And as she had done so many times before, Charlotte wondered what it might have been like to have had a sister in her life.

After giving her hair its usual one hundred slow luxurious strokes, she slipped into Vicky’s old cashmere and touched the silver framed photo next to her bed. Sometimes, she’d find herself speaking to Aunt Dottie, hoping that she was alive somewhere, listening.
Was it worth the price that
her mother had paid, losing an entire family?
she wondered. For what? For party invitations? For an apartment on Fifth Avenue and a membership at the Cosmo Club?

Charlotte closed her eyes and slept like the dead.

Charlotte was admiring the work her French painters had done in Rita’s foyer (twelve coats of a lovely two-tone gray lacquer) when her client stormed in the front door. She was wearing a brace on her right wrist.

“My God!” Charlotte said. “What happened?”

“Don’t ask. Don’t even ask!” Rita said, making a clumsy effort to remove a black kid glove from her left hand.

“I’m asking anyway,” Charlotte said, leaning down to help remove the glove.

“You won’t believe it,” Rita added. “But yesterday I went to the orthopedist. I’ve had these horrible pains in my wrist, Charlotte, for weeks.”

“It sounds like carpal tunnel,” Charlotte said, feigning sympathy.

“So the doctor says to me: ‘Mrs. Brickman, you’re the third woman in here this month with the same complaint.’ I’m kneading my arm, anything to get rid of the pain, Charlotte. And then he says: ‘Do you, by any chance, own a Birkin bag?’ ‘Of course, I own a Birkin bag,’ I said to him. ‘It was a present from my husband.’ So, he says to me, ‘Well, it’s BBS, Mrs. Brickman, Birkin Bag Syndrome. Carrying all that the weight in the crook of your arm has damaged your nerves.
You’ll have to put the bag away and wear a brace.’ ”

“Do you have any idea how long I waited for that Birkin?” Rita fumed. “I’m going to sue Hermes!”

Hers, of course, was
no ordinary
Birkin. Charlotte recalled the gloating phone call from Rita, a year earlier. Abe had somehow gotten his hands on one of six $78,000 anniversary Birkins with diamonds in the locket. He’d flown an assistant all the way to Honolulu to pick it up. Watching silently while Rita handed her new sable coat over to one of the maids, Charlotte noticed that a few stray hairs had managed to work themselves loose from her tight little updo. And there was a button missing from her cashmere cardigan. Neither was a good sign.

Wasting no time on further niceties, Rita launched herself into the next scathing tirade.

“And as if my life isn’t complicated enough, Charlotte … my daughter, my adorable ten-year-old daughter, has lice!”

Charlotte simply raised an eyebrow in response. Rita hated being interrupted during her tirades.

“We are paying $35,000 a year plus thousands more in donations to the fanciest private girls’ school in New York, and she has lice. I mean, what kind of children are they taking in over there?”

“I have no idea, Rita,” Charlotte said, picking at her cuticles.

“So I get myself over to the Whiting School, Charlotte, after forcing that feckless headmaster, Robinson, to talk to me. And do you know what he says to me? To me, one of the biggest contributors to their annual fund?”

More rhetorical questions
, thought Charlotte.

“He says, ‘Rita, you should hire a professional nitpicker.’ ”