Little Odessa Read online

  “Couldn’t care less.”

  “You fooled me. That good-looking guy, too. And he certainly knew his stuff.”

  “Did he? What makes you such an authority?”

  “Maybe I’m a sucker for a guy who knows how to wear a white suit,” Kate said.

  “So that’s the trick.”

  “Or maybe it’s just a guy who knows what he’s talking about.”

  They followed the stragglers into the elevator, Bucyk sucking up what was left of his paunch to allow the gate to shut. “That your type?”

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw him looking worried that she might say yes. His tough luck. “If I had a type.”

  “Pretty boys,” he snorted. “I’m surprised at you. I figured you for an intellectual, you always have your nose in a book.” They went out into a sunshower and Kate headed for the car. “Let’s walk,” he said. “I know a place …”

  “This is a very expensive neighborhood.”

  “… a place gives half off to cops …So I would’ve guessed you went for the brainy ones.”

  “He didn’t exactly come off as a dummy,” Kate said. “There wasn’t a lot he didn’t know about those icons.”

  They crossed Sixth Avenue and turned downtown toward Radio City. “Where is this restaurant? It’s really starting to come down.”

  “Smart,” Bucyk said as if he didn’t hear her. “Good-looking, a sharp dresser. A real piece of work, huh? You could go for a guy like that?”

  If he had to know. “Any woman would.”

  “Why don’t you, then?” He steered her inside a Mexican restaurant, shoved her a little harder than was necessary, and a short brown woman in a lace shawl showed them to a table under a piñata choking on its own insides. “His name’s Mike, Mike Nicholas.”

  “How do you—”

  “Let me finish … least that’s what he’s calling himself. If you want him, he’s yours, only you have to share him.”

  “You’re not making sense. Share him with who?”

  “The Bureau.”

  “Oh,” Kate said, picking up her menu and putting it down without opening it. “I’m starting to see.”

  Bucyk had stopped looking jealous. “You’re interested?”

  “No.”

  “You do a good imitation.”

  “You know perfectly well what I’m talking about. If I didn’t have a boyfriend, I might be interested in getting to know him, not in setting him up for the FBI.”

  Bucyk wasn’t so sure. “These general principles, or he rates special consideration for having a good tan?”

  It didn’t deserve an answer. She reached for the menu again.

  “Make you a wager. Take up with him … I’ll help with introductions. And you still think he’s such hot stuff, keep him with our blessings, he’s yours. You don’t, we take him off your hands. All we care about is you get him to hold off on going back to Russia. Fair enough? Your boyfriend never knows unless you tell him.”

  “And what if I don’t think it is fair?”

  “Then I gotta eat the paper with his phone number on it.”

  Kate said, “Bon appetit.”

  “That a yes or a no?”

  She searched the tables for their waiter. Bucyk waved him away. “You take this on, I’ll have your dog back inside of a week. Guaranteed.”

  “Do I get that in writing?” She laughed without smiling.

  Bucyk tore off a corner of the menu and scrawled a few words. Kate pushed the cardboard back at him without looking at it. He glanced again at what he had written and then put it in his pocket. “Okay, I’ll hold it for us,” he said.

  “I didn’t agree to anything.”

  “Didn’t you …?”

  8

  THE ZOO WENT UP early in the Depression, a Hooverville for animals. Forget the busloads of children and the orangutan she was convinced had come to know her and it was a joyless place, not enough sky and no grass, prison architecture—socialist realist lions with the breeze in their pitted manes poised heroically over a kill at the entrance to the Palace of the Felines. And inside, if you could stand the stench, the big cats pacing, going nuts by the mile as they measured their punishment cells.

  But Nicholas was “a sucker for bears,” his brand of nationalism, Bucyk had said, and Kate found him at the crumbly dens where the polar bears lumbered down a concrete bluff for a vegetarian lunch slopped out of a keeper’s bucket. She inched along the rail groping for something to say. Bucyk’s suggestions were as leaden as the ones he’d tried out on her and so she’d insisted on a free hand. Now that it was time, she was fresh out of ideas and she wondered if dropping a hankie might do the trick. She had no hankie. What she said was, “I didn’t know they eat lettuce. I mean, where do they get a taste for salad at the North Pole?”

  Just terrible, and Nicholas didn’t even seem to hear. Then he tossed a peanut through the bars and looking straight ahead said, “Seal meat is their favorite food. But that’s not to say they’re strict carnivores. They’ll fill their bellies with seaweed, or grass when they’re hunting on land.”

  Very romantic. Well, you can’t judge a book by—

  “Then it’s not one bit fair.”

  He emptied the bag and dry-washed his hands. He turned to look at her and for an instant she thought he recognized her from the gallery. No problem, till she realized she’d forgotten what she planned to say if he did. “What isn’t?” he asked.

  “Keeping them penned up like that, like they’ve been bad.”

  “It could be worse,” he said. The voice was silky, a light tenor with no more accent than hers, which was none at all. “I’ve been to zoos where they make them earn their keep—dancing, balancing on rubber balls, wrestling their keepers. They may seem bored, but take my word for it, doing nothing can be paradise.”

  “Oh, have you had much experience?”

  “I was talking about the bears,” he said sharply, and Kate tried not to hold her breath as she waited for him to walk off. He pushed his sunglasses back over the polished hair. His eyes were brown, heavily lidded and lashed, and held their own with the rest of his darkly appealing features. “But yes,” he conceded, “I’ve had some, though not nearly enough as I’d have liked.”

  “I was sure I’d seen you here before.” Beating him to the punch. Just in case.

  He looked surprised. “I don’t think so. This is not a place where I spend much free time.” He backed away from the rail and crumpled the bag into a trash can. He lowered his shades and she was sure he was saying good-bye. Then she realized this was his way of signaling that act one was over. The shades came up again and they walked together to the monkey house.

  They went in past a family of Arabian baboons done in white marble, and along one wall a cage full of the real thing. A large old male with broken teeth was rocking on his haunches, yawning, and Kate came near clucking her tongue. “Poor thing, he can hardly keep his eyes open.”

  “I hope you’re not thinking of tucking him in bed,” Nicholas said. “What he’s doing is called ‘rage yawning,’ showing his fangs.”

  “You didn’t learn that from the plaque on the cage. How do you know so much about animals?”

  “I’m an expert,” he said. “A free-lance expert, on any and all things.”

  “Does it pay?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “I’m not after your job,” she laughed. “It seems like pleasant work, being an expert. There are things I’m expert on, too.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I see that.”

  It was a clumsy line, she thought, too obvious—almost crude. In spite of herself, this spy business was getting to be fun. Every word sounded on so many levels that the most innocuous remark seemed to thunder between them. She wanted to blush, to trump him at his own game. She tried conjuring up the first time she’d gone bottomless at the Starlight, putting a hand to her chest to feel for warmth. She felt nothing. “What would you say was my field of expertise?” she a
sked.

  With his head cocked to the side he reminded her of a Coney Island storefront gypsy trying to guess her weight and age. “Whatever, I’m sure it’s something that’s fun.”

  “It depends on how you look at it. I have a restaurant on Seventy-second Street, a Mideastern place.” They left the monkey house, dragging across a plaza where two harbor seals slapped gritty breakers from the lip of a blackish pool. “I still don’t know what you do,” she said. “Why are you being so mysterious?”

  “I am, aren’t I?” Offering nothing. “Does it make you uncomfortable?”

  As if it was the most natural thing to do, she took his arm. “On the contrary, I love a good mystery.”

  Bucyk was waiting when she came out onto the stoop, grinning like he had her in his pocket. Gone was the station wagon, and in its place a midnight-blue van with running boards and picture windows along the side panels, a Monument Valley sunset splashed across the rear doors. He fiddled with the air conditioning and gave her a hint of the big Blaupunkt speakers, then took her for a spin to Riverside Park. “How’d it go?” he asked.

  “Before we start, let’s get one thing straight,” she said. “I’m not taking money for this.”

  It didn’t seem to surprise him. “You might change your mind. How about we keep your payments in an escrow account? You decide you want at it, it’s waiting for you. How about that?”

  “If you do,” she said, “get yourself another girl.”

  “Your choice,” he told her. “We can always find something else to keep the money busy. Now let’s take it from the top again. How’d it go?”

  She shrugged him off. “You promised me more information. Let me out now if you’re not giving everything you have.”

  He pulled off the Henry Hudson into a cobbled turnout below the Cloisters. There was a totaled Volkswagen upside down in the weeds and a couple of Puerto Ricans stripping it. They were about fifty, in cutoffs and tank tops, drinking malt liquor out of the can through straws. Their women were huddled in the shade of a linden tree, fanning themselves with movie magazines. No one paid attention to the van.

  Bucyk killed the engine and reached back for a manila folder on a narrow bed covered in crushed velvet. “His real name’s Mikhail Nikolaevich Kunavin,” he said, not reading. “Thirty-six years old.”

  “He said thirty-two.”

  “He would. His hometown’s Stalingrad, or whatever they call it now. He turned down a cushy job as a government interpreter to do a few years as a political officer with a Red Army tank unit on the Czech-German frontier. Came back home and married a niece of the Leningrad party chief. Had two kids, two little girls.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Did he?”

  She had no answer for that.

  “What the hell, it’s a cinch they’re not living together.” He looked inside the folder and shuffled some papers. “He’s here as a rep for a state-owned trading company, SOVTORG, distributing vodka, Caspian Sea caviar. At least that’s what he’s supposed to be doing. Where those icons are coming from, we haven’t got a clue. We want you to find out if he’s moving them with the knowledge of the government, or if he’s freebooting.”

  “He’s very cautious. He’ll talk all afternoon, but he won’t say a word about himself.”

  Bucyk switched on the radio and the power antenna telescoped above the roof. A ball game came on so low Kate could hardly hear it. “Give it a while,” he said. “It’ll come.”

  “He’s extremely defensive. Whenever I ask anything about him, he turns the conversation around so we’re talking about me.”

  “Like I say, it takes time. You didn’t think this was a one-day job?”

  “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  Bucyk tossed the folder on the bed. “When you seeing him again?”

  “This evening. He’s taking me to Lincoln Center.”

  “You work fast.”

  “He does. He wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

  “You’re not supposed to say no.” He scowled.

  She looked away, focusing on a tugboat nudging a couple of barges into the harbor under a swarm of gulls.

  “You worried your boyfriend’s gonna know? Screw him, the way he runs around.”

  “I told Nathan I need some time off and want him to keep an eye on the club tonight. I don’t think the responsibility will kill him and I’m paying him out of my own pocket.” She sighed. “So why do I feel guilty?”

  “Probably a habit.” He turned up the radio. “This is working out better than I thought. You’re something to Nicholas already. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t be going to Lincoln Center. He’d be taking you to the Soviet-American Friendship Committee Anti-Zionist Cotillion, like that.”

  “That would be fun,” Kate said. “All I’d have to do is open my mouth and—”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I think I see what you mean.”

  The sleek Lincoln cabriolet looked about ninety feet long, so impossibly luxurious that she’d never get used to it. There was a boomerang antenna over the rear and a VCR and phone inside, a refrigerator and a bar. The silver shag felt ankle-deep. She kicked off her shoes as the chauffeur put them on course for Queens.

  Nicholas couldn’t have been more at home. He fixed two highballs and wound down the smoked-glass window, letting some street light inside. He saw it sparkling in both glasses and rolled up quickly, as if he had all he could use. He handed her a drink. “Did you ever hear anything like them?” he asked.

  “When you said we were going to a jazz concert, to a New Orleans jazz concert, I almost backed out. I thought it would be like Dixieland, but those old men can play.”

  “There’s nothing old about their music,” he said. “I’ve been in love with it since I was a child. Because I wasn’t allowed to listen to it, I suspect.”

  “Why was that?”

  “My parents wouldn’t let me waste my time on anything as … as decadent as jazz.”

  “Why?” she tried again. Wondering how hard she could press him, what invention he’d fall back on.

  “They were spending their hard-earned money on violin lessons for me. They said I’d become a jazz musician all right, over their dead bodies.”

  “Do you still have your violin?”

  “Under glass,” he said. “I gave it up when I was thirteen and never went near it again.”

  “You’ll have to play for me sometime.”

  “Over my dead body,” he said.

  They left the Midtown Tunnel, arcing over SRO cemeteries whose blunt skyline mimicked the one at their back, past hazy flatlands of deserted factories and twenty-four-hour chop shops. Then Queens Boulevard funneled them into sturdy, residential Forest Hills. Through the stone proscenium of a railroad trestle Kate saw a gothic tower. The streets were paved in red brick. “Where are we?” she asked.

  “Forest Gardens.”

  “It looks like England.”

  “It’s supposed to,” he said, “to people who know England from picture postcards. It was put up before the First World War by a visionary architect trying to create the ideal urban environment.” He pointed into the shadow of a concrete grandstand varicose with naked vines. “There’s the West Side Tennis Club, which used to host all the major tourneys.”

  “It’s hard to believe we’re still in the city.”

  “That’s what attracted me to the area. It combines the best of two worlds.”

  “Which two?” She felt light-headed, a drink away from trouble.

  “The world of the rich,” he said. “That’s one.”

  “And the other?”

  He seemed to be making up his mind. “Of the very rich,” he decided after a while.

  They turned onto an avenue curling around prim flower gardens leaching color in the moonlight. Two lefts brought them inside a flawed cathedral of elms, the stout trunks pushing up sprays of barren limbs. Nicholas guided the chauffeur between Tudor mansions set o
n postage-stamp lawns. At a home hidden behind a stone wall shimmering with broken glass Kate noticed a black Porsche 944 in the drive. The vanity plate spelled NICK.

  “Park at the curb,” Nicholas said.

  Kate squeezed into her shoes and tested one on the sidewalk, then the other. Her legs felt like jelly. Leaning on Nicholas’s shoulder, she asked, “What were we drinking?”

  He mumbled something she didn’t hear. He dismissed the driver and helped her up the walk to the big house. She squirmed from under his arm and dashed off the flagstones, kicked off her heels again, sinking her toes into the cool grass.

  “You don’t live here,” she said. “You’re just trying to make an impression on me.”

  “Do you want to hear something funny? That’s the same thing I tell myself every morning.”

  He pushed open the door into an ambush of blinding light. Kate twisted away. She heard a siren.

  “Damn,” Nicholas stepped back outside and punched a four-digit number into a metal box on the doorframe.

  “What was that all about?” Kate asked. “I thought someone was about to open fire.”

  “For another five thousand dollars someone would. It’s a burglar alarm, and it set me back more than I’ll ever lose in a robbery.”

  The floor came level and some of the cobwebs cleared. She tried not to show it. “What’s so valuable you need to protect it like that?”

  He switched on a lamp and a room glutted on antique furniture took form. She wobbled down stone stairs to the closest seat and plopped down hard. “I’m starting to see,” she said.

  “Do you?” he asked in a tone it took some time to recognize wasn’t condescending. “Most people on their first visit tell me how beautiful all this is, but what they experience is a museum. To recognize that it’s not just for looking, that the priceless Victorian slipper chair you’re sitting in is meant just for that, requires rare intuition.”

  Or guts, Kate wanted to say, or to be awfully dumb or crocked. She sat a little straighter. “Are you a dealer?”

  “Would you believe this is a furnished room?”