Reggie Nadelson: Londongrad

The eighth book in the Artie Cohen series, 2008

“I’m dead,” says Anatoly Sverdloff, gasping for air, lungs shot. He whispers this in Russian, in English, the crazy mixture he speaks, but stumbling, gulping to get air in, trawling for oxygen, voice so small, you can hardly hear him. He can’t breathe. His heart is killing him, he says, pushing the words out in short helpless bursts.

Medics, nurses, other people crowd around the bed, a whole mob of them, shaking their heads to indicate there’s no hope. Hooked up to machines, thick transparent corrugated tubes, blue, white, pushing air into him, expelling the bad stuff. IVs stuck in his arms trail up to clear plastic sacks of medicine on a metal stand. He wears a sleeveless hospital gown that’s too short.

On his back, this huge man, six foot six, normally three hundred pounds, but seeming suddenly shrunken, like the carcass of a beached whale. Only the dimples in the large square face that resembles an Easter Island statue make him recognizable.

Somewhere, on a CD, schlocky music is playing, music will help, somebody says, and a voice cries out, no, not that, put on Sinatra, he loves Sinatra. Or opera. Italian. Verdi. Whose voice is crying out? Tolya’s? No one is listening.

More doctors and nurses bundled up in white paper suits like spacemen come and go. But there’s no reason for it, no radioactive poison in him, why are you dressed like that? the voice says. Everybody has a white mask on, and white paper hats. Party hats. Somebody is blowing a red party whistle. People wander in and out of the room, some lost, others looking for the festivities. The guy is dead, somebody says, there’s no party.

A single shoe, yellow alligator, big gold buckle dull from dust, is near the bed, just lying there. Somebody picks it up. His massive feet sticking out from a blanket are the gray of some prehistoric mammal, as if Tolya is returning to a primitive form, the disease eating him from the inside out.

And then he’s dead.

He’s in a coffin, for viewing, and he turns into Stalin, the enormous head, the hair, the mustache, the large nostrils, why Stalin? Why? Or is it Yeltsin? Big men. Big Russian men.

My best friend is dying, and I can’t stop it, and he says, Artie, help me, and then he’s dead, and I start to cry. Stop the music, I yell. Turn it off! Suddenly I have to sit down on a chair in the hospital room because I can’t breathe anymore. Somebody tries to stick a tube in my nose but I fight back. The tubes trip me, I’m tangled in clear plastic tubes, falling.

He rips off the tubes, pulls out the lifelines, the IVs, and all he says is, “I knew Sasha Litvinenko. I met him, and they killed him and nobody remembers the poor bastard anymore.”

From behind the bar at his club in the West Village, Tolya Sverdloff looked up and saw me.

“Artie, good morning, how are you, have something to drink, or maybe a cup of good coffee, and we’ll talk, I need a little favor, maybe you can help me out?” All this came out of his mouth fast, in a single sentence, as if he couldn’t cram enough good things into it if he stopped for breath.

In the streaming shafts of morning sunlight coming in through a pair of big windows, he resembled a saint in stained glass, but a very secular saint, a glass of red wine in one hand, a Havana in the other and an expression of huge pleasure on his face. He stuck his nose in the glass, he swirled it and sniffed, and drank, and saw me watching.

“Oh, man, this is it,” he said. “This is everything, a reason to be alive. Come taste this,” added Tolya and poured some wine into a second glass. “A fantastic Ducru. I’ll give you a bottle,” he said. “As a reward.”

I sat on one of the padded leather stools at his bar. “What for?”

“For coming by at this hour when I call you,” said Tolya, who tasted the wine again and smiled, showing the dimples big enough for a child to stick its fist in. He brushed the thick black hair from his forehead, and rolled his eyes with pleasure at the wine, this big effusive generous guy, a voluptuary. Wine and food were his redemption, he always said.

“So what do you need that you got me here at the fucking crack of dawn on my first day of vacation?” I said. “I’ll take that coffee.”

He held up a hand. Some opera came in over the sound system. “Maria Callas,” said Tolya. “ Traviata . My God, has there ever been a Violetta like that?”

While he listened, I looked at the framed Soviet posters on the wall, including an original Rodchenko for The Battleship Potemkin , and wondered how the hell he had got hold of it.

“Coffee?”

“Try the wine,” he said. “You should really come into business with me, you know, Artie. We could have so much fun, you could run this place, or we could open another one, you could make a little money. Anyhow, you’re too old to play cops and robbers.”

“I’m a New York City detective, it’s not a game,” I said. “You met somebody? You sound like you’re in love.”

“Don’t be so pompous,” said Tolya and we both burst out laughing.

“Yeah, I know.”

“You working anything, Artemy?” He used my Russian name.

Like me, Tolya Sverdloff grew up in Moscow. I got out when I was sixteen, got to New York, cut all my ties, dumped my past as fast as I could. He had a place over there, and one in England. Tolya was a nomad now, London, New York, Russia. He had opened clubs in all of them.

“I am on vacation as of yesterday,” I said. “Off the job for ten fantastic days, no homicides pending, no crazy Russians in need of my linguistic services.” I stretched and yawned, and drank some more of the wine. It wasn’t even nine in the morning. Who cares, I thought. The wine was delicious.

Tolya lifted his glass. “My birthday next week,” he said.

“Happy birthday.”

“So you’ll come to my party?”

“Sure. Where?”

“In London,” he said.

“You know I worked a case there once. It left a bad taste.”

“You’re wrong. Is fantastic city, Artemy.” I drank some more wine.

“Best city, most civilized.”

Whenever he talked about London these days, it was to tell me how wonderful it was. But he described it as a tourist might- the parks, the theaters, the pretty places. I knew that he had, along with his club there, other business. He didn’t tell me about it, I didn’t ask.

He put his glass down. “Oh, God, I love the smell of the Médoc in the morning, Artyom,” said Tolya, switching from English to Russian.

Tolya’s English depended on the occasion. As a result of an education at Moscow’s language schools, he spoke it beautifully, with a British accent. Drunk, or what he sometimes called “party mood”, his language was his own invention, a mix of Russian and English, low and high, the kind he figured un-educated people speak-the gangsters, the nouveau riche Russians. He taunted me constantly. He announced, once in a while, that he knew I thought all Russkis were thugs, or Neanderthals. “You think this, Artemy,” he said.