Read Online Londongrad by Reggie Nadelson - Free Book Online Page B

Soviet Union, Sverdloff’s parents had been stars among the Communist Party faithful, and well rewarded for it, his mother a movie star, his father a director. He grew up with access most kids like me had never dreamed of, and I didn’t have it bad as most.
    The parents idolized certain American writers like Arthur Miller and Clifford Odets, actors like John Garfield in his day, and Bogart and Brando and musicians like Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger, but they had the Russian intellectuals’ prejudice against American culture.
    To Tolya they said rock and roll was redneck music. He didn’t listen. Rock and roll was what got him through the Soviet years, he always told me, though it was the British stuff he loved most. The Beatles were his redemption and his rebellion as a teenager in the USSR, his line in the sand. “We didn’t rebel politically, there wasn’t any point, but we went into internal exile with the forbidden music,” he said. “It was different country then, this US of A,” he told me. “Music was incredible then.”
    We argued. He pulled my strings. We drank. I told him, when I had had plenty of Scotch, that he was a sell-out, a rock and roll hero who became a businessman. He beamed whenever I said it. Money was his art now, the richer he was, the greater an artist. He was my best friend and he had saved my ass more times than I could count.
    “You really love him, don’t you?” Val had said to me once, and she was right, of course, but we didn’t talk like that, we talked like guys.
    That night, sitting on the roof, we drank too much and suddenly, sometime very late, Tolya said, “I’m going to London on Sunday, Artemy.”
    “Already?” I thought about Valentina.
    “Like I told you, I will spend my birthday there in my lovely city, this beautiful green place,” he said, pushing the graying black hair back from his huge forehead. “London!” he said, as if it were a woman he was crazy for. “This is so beautiful a city, you should come. Come next week. My birthday is next week. We’ll have a party. I’ll take you to my place in the country also, which is eighteenth century, and so beautiful and was previously owned by very famous politician.”
    “What’s the big deal with London?”
    “It is sympathetic to good food and great wine, and also to Russians, and it is a civilized country, a civil society, a place of laws and culture.”
    “Enough about bloody London,” a voice said, as Val came through the door, walked across the roof, kissed me on the cheek, sat on the arm of Tolya’s chair and flung her arm around her father. “You’re obsessed,” she said.
    “Hello, darling,” said Tolya. “What would you like?”
    “I’d like for you not to go to London.”
    “I won’t stay too long. I promise.”
    “But we could have a nice summer here, we could go out to the house in East Hampton, we could go fishing together in Alaska, like we said, wherever you want. Please, Daddy?”
    “Afterwards. I promise you.” He looked up at her, surveyed the floaty green summer dress she wore, and smiled. “You look nice.”
    “Thank you.”
    He loved his daughter better than anything on earth. They were connected in the most elemental way, father and daughter. I was jealous, not because I wanted her—which I did—but because of the way they were together. I have no kids. It makes me sad.
    “Artie, the club, was it okay?” said Valentina. “You found what you needed?”
    “What club?” said Tolya.
    Again I held off telling him about the dead girl. It wasn’t just that he’d set up his own guys to investigate it. Maybe I didn’t want Val upset.
    “It’s nothing. I was helping out a guy on a case in Brooklyn.”
    “It’s Bobo Leven?” he said.
    “Yes, but it doesn’t matter.”
    “It doesn’t but whenever he comes in the club, I watch him, he’s like, what do you call it, grapevining all over you, listening to you, trying to pick your brains out,” said Tolya who was