Free Disturbed Earth by Reggie Nadelson Page B

brain was half dead.
    "Thank God you're here," he said.
    "Why?"
    "My mother."
    "She's OK?"
    "She's here. I mean in America, in Brooklyn. Suddenly she doesn't want to stay in Manhattan, she won't stay at the Four Seasons either anymore, she wants to stay with her people. What fucking people? The Russians, she says. In Brighton Beach. I have to run around and find somewhere she can stay and I have to eat with her tonight, so you'll come, right?"
    "Yeah, sure."
    "Thank God. So you're hungry?" Tolya asked, eyes full of child-like anticipation.
    "I could eat."
    "I brought late lunch."
    He spread the bags on the kitchen counter. He tossed the ice packs into my freezer and sniffed the crab.
    "Still fresh," he said triumphantly.
    "They let you carry all this stuff on the plane?"
    "Please, Artyom, what's the matter with you, you think I fly commercial?"
    We settled at the kitchen counter. We sipped a little whiskey while the wine chilled and Tolya cracked the crab with a hammer and made some mayonnaise fresh and fixed a salad out of the mesclun he also had in his bag. I sliced up a loaf of sourdough and opened the bottle of white Burgundy, then poured it into my best glasses; we ate.
    "Nice, huh, Artemy?" he said holding his wine glass up to the light and admiring the lemony color. "Corton-Charlemagne is like drinking paradise."
    Anatoly Sverdloff was a civilized guy who could discuss semiotics in French and rock and roll in Chinese, Pushkin in Russian and Conrad in English. His languages, his brains, his charm would have made him a great spy except he had a big mouth, in every sense, and a lot of appetite, and he loved money. Lots of it. Anyhow, as he always said, who would you spy for these days?
    In the bad old days he was a DJ in Moscow who broadcast rock records to the fucking miserable Chinese when the poor bastards didn't have anything, no Internet, no music, no fashion. It was after I'd left Russia that he became famous for his sedition; brave and silly, for a while in the last days of the old Soviet Union, he became a cult hero.
    Even now he carried around the tattered paper copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four that he'd had as a boy, a book he bought, as if it was a drug, from another kid at his school. When the old world fell apart, while I was busy turning myself into an American, he translated himself into a capitalist and made tons of money. His father, Anatoly, Sr., was a famous actor at the Moscow Arts Theater, his mother Lara Sverdlova was an actress; the intellectual's cupcake, they used to called her.
    Tolya knew his way around high culture, but he played the part of an international hood: he flaunted it, he wore the silk shirts, the cashmere coats, smoked the Cohibas. "I am not corporate guy," he always said.
    "You mean you don't drink the Kool-Aid to get the deal."
    "What is this Kool-Aid?" he'd asked and I explained about Jonestown and how Jim Jones, the leader of a sinister cult, made his disciples commit suicide by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid; they did it all together, in unison, they took his orders. Jones just said: drink. They drank. Like good corporate underlings.
    Tolya loved it.
    When he met other guys in his trade, whatever it was, he hugged them and made as if he was some kind of godfather. I never knew for sure how deep he was involved with these people. When he drank, and he drank plenty, he sometimes spoke English with a low class Russian accent, dropping the articles, making himself sound like a gangster. It suited him, it was an escape from the old life where his parents were part of the intelligentsia and he was the smartest boy in town. He had become his own invention; it was his cover, his escape, the way being a New York cop was for me.
    Tolya pulled a CD out of his pocket and gave it to me.
    "You heard of these kids?" he said. "I am thinking of putting in money for American tour, you know? Cute," he said. "Dirty."
    I looked at the cover. A trio of Russian schoolgirls making out. I put it on, it