The Other Joseph (11 page)

So this is the battlefield?

—Red Dawn
(1984)

B
EYOND THE SOFT, BUTTERY SUNLIGHT OF POSTCARD
San Francisco is a low-slung and oftentimes foggy neighborhood locals refer to as the Outer Richmond. My sublet was on Forty-Sixth Avenue, in the bottom floor of a guacamole-green building between Fulton and Cabrillo Streets. About a quarter mile from the ice-cold Pacific, and a half block north of Golden Gate Park. Many of my neighbors were Chinese or Russian, and our stretch of Forty-Sixth Avenue was nothing but salt-mellowed two- and three-stories crammed together like the worn toy cubes of a child. I'd hate to see what a fire might do there. A thrifty lady buys a used toaster, then everyone dies.

Viktor Fedorov's house was just eight blocks away from my tiny apartment, and during our Kansas phone call we had arranged to meet in the park the morning after I got into town. “I will see you at nine thirty,” he'd said on the phone. “By the windmill at the end of JFK Drive.”

And though Joni wasn't for Viktor to know about, the apartment was also a mile and a half from Marvel Court. Thursday, my date of arrival, wouldn't count toward my five working days of amnesty, but starting tomorrow I'd be on the clock. I only had a week to both find Joni and charm her, so after my check-for-key exchange with the serene, apple-cheeked Karen Yang, I left Sam
in the apartment and trudged up Cabrillo, then Thirty-Second Avenue, alone.

The Hammons house was a yellow, entrance-beside-garage stucco, flat across the front save for ten feet of balcony built into the second floor. It sat wedged between a pair of similar two-story stuccos on Marvel Court, not far from where that short, dead-end lane hit up against a steep and bushy hillside belonging to a park called Lincoln Park. A trail through the trees and scrub along the eastern portion of Lincoln Park brought me to the hill above Marvel Court. I could see the house from there, and I reckoned if I returned tomorrow and waited long enough I'd spot Joni coming home from school. That tomorrow I would know what she looked like.

FRIDAY MORNING,
and an overcast sky. Golden Gate Park. A thousand-acre rectangle of land running from the middle of the city to the ocean. Way west by the quiet Outer Richmond the park felt unfinished. Wild, almost. There were sad cases who dwelled within its thickets: addicts in blanket tents, loner combat vets, small homeless confederations. So, condoms and needles, trash and misery, but also things I never expected to find in a big American city. Peace and beauty. Raccoon, possum, and skunk tracks. Various songbirds, raptors, and waterfowl. Ravens and crows. There was a restaurant that looked over the Great Highway and the Pacific, two dormant windmills and an archery range, some soccer fields, and even a nine-hole golf course—but pretty much everything else was forest.

The windmill on JFK Drive was only a ten-minute walk from the apartment, and I found it without any trouble. A Brothers Grimm windmill, about seven stories high with brown shingles and four still sails. We were early, so I figured I had let Sam nose the green hedges of the tulip garden there. And I had just taken
him off leash when I saw a silver-haired man coming up the sidewalk with a dog of his own. A Saluki—like a greyhound, but with a feathered and fawn-colored coat. The man saw Sam roaming loose and stopped. His Saluki was leashed, so I was the one in the wrong, no argument there. I hollered for Sam, but it was too late. He'd seen the sight hound and was bounding over to say hello. I kept yelling, but Sam wasn't listening.

A dog will sometimes become nervous if it's on a leash and gets approached by a rowdy Fido that isn't, and once the man saw Sam wasn't going to peel off he dropped his Saluki's lead so she wouldn't fluster. At first the two dogs were only sniffing each other, and I'd almost reached them when the Saluki bit Sam on the ear. Sam made a sound like tires squealing. Now
he
was pissed. The Saluki hauled ass, and Sam tore after her—but she was the fastest dog ever. The man was shouting in Russian and I was shouting in English, until finally we got our dogs in check.

Sam was pawing at his ear and whimpering. I knelt beside him, then looked to the Russian. He was pushing sixty, moonfaced and bull-necked, about my height but way broader and with short, Caesar-cut hair, a downturned mouth, and half-lidded eyes. He was wearing a black leather jacket and black pants, and had the Saluki sitting between his splayed feet.

“Are you Viktor?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “You are Roy? Is she all right?” A statement of concern, but in the same bored monotone I'd heard on the phone. Like he was flipping each word over for a tedious inspection. “I am very sorry. I have never seen Dina bite.”

“It's not your fault.” And it wasn't, of course. Still, it made me sick to see Sam hurting. I examined a small cut on the inside of his left ear. “It's
he,
” I said. “Sam.”

Viktor nodded. “I believe your Sam will be fine.”

In my sweatshirt I found a wad of napkins I'd pocketed at some point, and I was wiping the blood from Sam's ear when
he slipped away, tail wagging, and went back over to the Saluki. Soon they were rolling around together near the tulip garden, all forgiven. Viktor laughed, and I stood.

“Dina and Sam,” he said. “You see? They are falling in love now.” He took my wrist in his hand, avoiding the blood-smeared napkins. “How was your trip?”

“It went okay. No problems till yesterday.”

“Something is a problem?”

Last night I had planned to go searching for a diner, but the LeBaron wouldn't crank. “My car,” I said. “I need to replace the battery, I think.”

“I just saw a Louisiana car. The red BMW on Cabrillo?”

“The Chrysler on Fulton.”

“A 300?”

“An old LeBaron.”

He frowned. “You are missing a finger.”

“I am.” My left hand was in the pouch of my sweatshirt, but he must have noticed the clipped knuckle while I was seeing to Sam's ear.

“This happened on an oil rig?”

“Yep.”

“You did not tell me this.”

“Does it matter?”

“Probably no.”

“But possibly yes?”

He stuck his own meaty thumb in my face like a hitchhiker, an artist measuring proportion. “I had an uncle in Leningrad who lost his thumb. Do you forget sometimes it is gone?”

“What?”

“My uncle, his missing thumb, it would tingle.”

“Oh. No. Not really.”

“Maybe it is not gone long enough?”

“Could be.”

His arm fell. “How is our friend Terry? He is still with Larissa?” But without waiting for my answer he glanced at his watch. It was as shiny as a gold disco ball. “Let us walk,” he said.

There were only a few roads on this end of Golden Gate Park. Paved, gray arteries and veins in a choke of green. We leashed the dogs and headed in the direction I'd come from the apartment. Past the archery range, on Forty-Seventh Avenue, was an exit from the park onto Fulton. On the corner to our right was a grass acre field. Viktor brought me halfway across it and stopped.

“Yesterday they found a body here,” he said. “But today you cannot even tell this.”

“I'm sorry?”

“Right here. In the early, early morning after Halloween. A homeless woman. She had overdosed herself.”

I'd been asleep in a Battle Mountain trailer, but as Viktor moved on I was picturing a scabby, rotten-toothed woman collapsing in the wet grass of that little field. She's vomiting. She's seizing. There is the faint roar of the nearby ocean, a cold night breeze. She lies dead for hours before anyone even knows.

From the killing acre we took a dirt trail that led through a forest. Eucalyptus trees with leaves like narrow lance tips, the bark shedding from their creamy trunks in long, spiraling strips. Cypress. Pine. An understory of rhododendron and azalea and ivy, dark topsoil and thicket. From somewhere in the brush a radio was playing.

Viktor was doing all the talking, rambling on about a guy he'd seen in that same forest over the weekend. A falconer hunting squirrels. The morning was misty and chilled, but he seemed to be warming to me, his monotone lifting on occasion as he spun his tale, and I followed along, half listening, smelling the dank of the moist woods and the salt of the Pacific, sporadic whiffs of urine and shit. I was wondering what I'd gotten myself into.
Probably no,
he'd said regarding my finger being a deal breaker.
Kiss my ass. No doubt I could come up with a less depraved and creepy cover story to explain my presence in San Francisco than bride shopping.

“What a thing,” said Viktor. “To see a
sokolnik
and his bird in this park.”

“Terry said you have a car service? Limos?” I've learned asking questions helps keep the focus off me.

Viktor nodded. “I have four limousines and a Mercedes.”

“How long have you been in America?”

“I got out in 1973 with nothing but my wife. I was just twenty-four. But a smart man can make his living here, raise a family.”

“So y'all have kids, then?”

“We have a daughter in St. Louis and a son in Seattle.”

That seemed crazy to me—the Americans created by this Russian. A family transforming and morphing into something completely different than it had once been. The new family becomes the real family; the old family becomes trivia. If Nancy Hammons was to be believed, Tommy had spent one night with her in San Diego, and now the only other descendant of the Dry Springs Josephs left in the world was here in California. We walked on in silence.

Eventually the forest opened, and we came to a long, tapering pond hemmed by willows, water grasses, blackberry bushes. Along a blacktop path was a bench hidden within all that jungle between us and the pond, and we stopped there to sit. Sam sprawled out at my feet. Dina came over and lay by Viktor. There were mallards and wigeon and pouldeau in the pond. Red-winged blackbirds were bouncing on willow limbs.

I lit a Winston; Viktor was working on a cigar. “We watch now,” he said. “The Russian nannies. They come here and they gossip.”

“Nannies?”

After a few minutes they began to file in—five youngish women
pushing baby strollers the size of shopping carts. The nannies collected on a small gravel-and-sand beach on the other side of the pond, their strollers parked like circled wagons as they smoked cigarettes and talked.

“There she is,” said Viktor.

“Who?”

“In the white sweater. The blue jeans. Do you see her?”

She was far away, but I did. Her chin-length hair was a coppery color, and she was apart from the group, scraping sand off her black boots with a long stick. Once she finished she went to join the others. Her body was full, compact but curved, and the way her chest pushed against the front of her wool sweater made me think of those Fox News anchors the guys on the rigs liked to leer at. Free porn, we'd call Fox News.

“Yeah,” I said. “I see her.”

“Marina Katanova.” Viktor tapped the ashes from his cigar. “From Moscow. One of the three women I have spoken to for you. The best one, probably. And they are like wives and mothers already, these nannies.”

I felt something inside me shifting. This was the difference between hearing Lionel Purcell speak of unlikely creatures and seeing them appear on a mountainside myself. The difference between having an address and seeing a house. My father happened to be born just across the Cane River from the girl he was meant to be with, and if that isn't fate I don't know what is. But, hell, perhaps this was fate too. That the search for a lost niece in San Francisco and the long-ago blatherings of a crew boat captain would bring Viktor, then this woman, into my life.

“You will be meeting her tonight,” said Viktor. “That is the soonest she can get away from her work.”

“Does she live there too? At the place she works?”

“Exactly.”

“That's near here?”

“No. But she comes on the bus with the baby. She is lonesome.”

“And she knows about me?”

“She does—though we should go before she sees us.”

“About that stuff I wrote to you in my e-mail, I mean.”

“Ah. Yes. Some of it. The good things, those I told her.”

“But not everything.”

He shook his head. “Let her learn for herself that you are nice, that you have means. If there is a later, then yes, we will tell her everything. But for now that can wait, okay?”

I was still watching Marina Katanova as he stood. I would have traded another finger for binoculars right then.

Viktor looked down at me. “You are not happy? We could begin with one of the other two. Do you want that instead?”

Marina was no less Russian than the rest of those across-the-pond nannies, far as I knew, but even at that range, and even though she was among baby strollers, a single dopey thought would not leave my brain. Maybe she's like a Cane River girl for
me,
I was thinking.

“No,” I said. “I'd rather get to know that one first. Marina.”

WITH THE LEBARON'S
battery dead I was left riding the bus to travel any fair distance, lurching from stop to stop on those rattletrap barges. Marco Polo in jeans and a gray sweatshirt, adrift in the washed-out and faded pastels of a new world. And after my walk with Viktor I set out for the bayfront shipyards. I'd seen them from the bridge as I had crossed into the city, and though I'm not sure why, I thought going there today might somehow inspire me, help me lay out my plans.

So I was eastbound on a bus called the 5 Fulton. At five-thirty I would be meeting Marina Katanova, and before that, when school let out, I'd try to steal my first glimpse of Joni. With that
accomplished I was confident the rest of my plan would form in my mind. Somehow I'd have to introduce myself to Joni, but that clearly couldn't happen at Marvel Court, the home turf of Nancy Hammons. I had to find a way that wouldn't spook her. A way that wouldn't end with me being driven to a police station. The best way for Joni, but also the best way for me.