were more homeless out on the streets than I had seen for years.
Already one or two TV pundits were predicting recession, depression, the end of the world. George Bush said everything would be just fine and dandy, but nobody believed him about anything anymore.
A money guy I sometimes ran into at Tolya’s bar had told me the end was coming, that there really was something rotten in the financial world, something bad, that we were all going down, even the big banks, the brokerage houses, all of it. The end is coming, man, he’d say, and everybody would laugh. You’re like one of those preachers in the street, they’d say, and laugh at him, and then order another bottle of wine that cost a thousand bucks.
In a month or two or three, this guy insisted late one night, it will tumble, collapse, fall into a depression unlike anything since l929 and there would be bodies falling from skyscrapers on Wall Street, they way they had fallen from the Twin Towers.
I only half listened. I didn’t have any money anyway.
The West Village had changed since I first got to New York when, for a while, I lived in a crummy walk-up on Horatio Street and hung around the Village Vanguard to hear the music. Bums pissed on my front steps, but writers still went to the White Horse Tavern, and gay men haunted the Hudson piers where you could take some sun and smell the stink of pollution in the river.
All gone.
Brownstones on tree-lined streets housed movie stars, limos idled at the curb outside pubs where painters used to go back in the day, and nobody, not the writers or artists or jazz guys, gave a rat’s ass for money. Manhattan’s Old Bohemia had disappeared.
My head felt thick. I couldn’t stop thinking about Masha, the duct tape, the way she died. I parked in front of Pravda2, and went in, and then I knew what had been bothering me, making my head thick, making me edgy, unnerved by the noise and the night.
CHAPTER TWELVE
A wall of sheer noise rose up at me when I went through the door of Pravda2. The rosy light made the faces beautiful. Among them I looked for Val, but she wasn’t there.
“You’ll ask him, you promise, you won’t let him go to London, right?” I remembered her words. I didn’t understand her obsession, her urgency, the fear I had seen in her face. I’d tell Tolya, but later.
Over the sound system came Sinatra on an album he recorded in Paris, maybe his best. “They Can’t Take That Away From Me”, sang Frank.
I made my way to the bar. At the far end, Tolya was talking intently to a chubby guy in black, the two of them sipping red wine.
For a while I sat and drank a Scotch and watched the crowd, looking for Valentina. I asked the bartender if he’d seen her.
“She was in earlier.”
“Is she coming back?”
“I don’t know.”
Waiters slipped through the spaces between tables with finesse, the usual ballet, hefting plates, depositing platters of oysters and langoustines. I got a steak sandwich, very rare, on fresh French bread.
For Tolya food was not just fuel or even simply a nice thing. I once had to track him to the Bronx where he was examining some baby lamb at the uptown meat market. Food was central to life, he said, you could not exist without it, and what he wanted, he had to have.
Fresh mozzarella had to come from Joe’s Dairy on Sullivan Street the same day he ate it. A tongue sandwich on rye bread, he wanted sliced very thin, and the bread had to be rye, so fresh it was almost moist, with those little seeds and the mustard German and brown. He once described this to me for about ten minutes and then he said he had to get to the Carnegie deli because talking about the tongue made him hungry for it.
Sinatra sang “Night And Day”.
I waited until the club began to empty out, until there was only a couple at a little table, touching each other’s faces, and a small group of men still talking wine with Tolya.
There were times now I got the feeling he was playing a part, that he
Already one or two TV pundits were predicting recession, depression, the end of the world. George Bush said everything would be just fine and dandy, but nobody believed him about anything anymore.
A money guy I sometimes ran into at Tolya’s bar had told me the end was coming, that there really was something rotten in the financial world, something bad, that we were all going down, even the big banks, the brokerage houses, all of it. The end is coming, man, he’d say, and everybody would laugh. You’re like one of those preachers in the street, they’d say, and laugh at him, and then order another bottle of wine that cost a thousand bucks.
In a month or two or three, this guy insisted late one night, it will tumble, collapse, fall into a depression unlike anything since l929 and there would be bodies falling from skyscrapers on Wall Street, they way they had fallen from the Twin Towers.
I only half listened. I didn’t have any money anyway.
The West Village had changed since I first got to New York when, for a while, I lived in a crummy walk-up on Horatio Street and hung around the Village Vanguard to hear the music. Bums pissed on my front steps, but writers still went to the White Horse Tavern, and gay men haunted the Hudson piers where you could take some sun and smell the stink of pollution in the river.
All gone.
Brownstones on tree-lined streets housed movie stars, limos idled at the curb outside pubs where painters used to go back in the day, and nobody, not the writers or artists or jazz guys, gave a rat’s ass for money. Manhattan’s Old Bohemia had disappeared.
My head felt thick. I couldn’t stop thinking about Masha, the duct tape, the way she died. I parked in front of Pravda2, and went in, and then I knew what had been bothering me, making my head thick, making me edgy, unnerved by the noise and the night.
CHAPTER TWELVE
A wall of sheer noise rose up at me when I went through the door of Pravda2. The rosy light made the faces beautiful. Among them I looked for Val, but she wasn’t there.
“You’ll ask him, you promise, you won’t let him go to London, right?” I remembered her words. I didn’t understand her obsession, her urgency, the fear I had seen in her face. I’d tell Tolya, but later.
Over the sound system came Sinatra on an album he recorded in Paris, maybe his best. “They Can’t Take That Away From Me”, sang Frank.
I made my way to the bar. At the far end, Tolya was talking intently to a chubby guy in black, the two of them sipping red wine.
For a while I sat and drank a Scotch and watched the crowd, looking for Valentina. I asked the bartender if he’d seen her.
“She was in earlier.”
“Is she coming back?”
“I don’t know.”
Waiters slipped through the spaces between tables with finesse, the usual ballet, hefting plates, depositing platters of oysters and langoustines. I got a steak sandwich, very rare, on fresh French bread.
For Tolya food was not just fuel or even simply a nice thing. I once had to track him to the Bronx where he was examining some baby lamb at the uptown meat market. Food was central to life, he said, you could not exist without it, and what he wanted, he had to have.
Fresh mozzarella had to come from Joe’s Dairy on Sullivan Street the same day he ate it. A tongue sandwich on rye bread, he wanted sliced very thin, and the bread had to be rye, so fresh it was almost moist, with those little seeds and the mustard German and brown. He once described this to me for about ten minutes and then he said he had to get to the Carnegie deli because talking about the tongue made him hungry for it.
Sinatra sang “Night And Day”.
I waited until the club began to empty out, until there was only a couple at a little table, touching each other’s faces, and a small group of men still talking wine with Tolya.
There were times now I got the feeling he was playing a part, that he
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