Chapter 30

It was very late in the evening but Lee called anyway and Lila Hoth agreed to meet with us at the Four Seasons, right away, no hesitation. We drove over in Lee’s unmarked car and parked in the hotel’s curbside loading zone. The lobby was magnificent. All pale sandstone and brass and tan paint and golden marble, suspended halfway between dim intimacy and bright modernism. Lee showed her badge at the desk and the clerk called upstairs and then pointed us toward the elevators. We were headed for another high floor and the way the clerk had spoken made me feel that Lila Hoth’s room wasn’t going to be the smallest or the cheapest in the place.

In fact Lila Hoth’s room was another suite. It had a double door, like Sansom’s in North Carolina, but no cop outside. Just a quiet empty corridor. There were used room service trays here and there, and some of the doorknobs had Do Not Disturb signs or breakfast orders on them. Theresa Lee paused and double-checked the number and knocked. Nothing happened for a minute. Then the right-hand panel opened and we saw a woman standing inside the doorway, with soft yellow light directly behind her. She was easily sixty, maybe more, short and thick and heavy, with steel-gray hair cut plain and blunt. Dark eyes, lined and hooded. A white slab of a face, meaty, immobile, and bleak. A guarded, unreadable expression. She was wearing an ugly brown housedress made of thick man-made material.

Lee asked, “Ms. Hoth?”

The woman ducked her head and blinked and moved her hands and made a kind of all-purpose apologetic sound. The universal dumb show for not understanding. I said, “She doesn’t speak English.” Lee said, “She spoke English fifteen minutes ago.” The light behind the woman was coming from a table lamp set deep inside the room. Its glow dimmed briefly as a second figure stepped in front of it and headed our way. Another woman. But much younger. Maybe twenty-five or twenty-six. Very elegant. And very, very beautiful. Rare, and exotic. Like a model. She smiled a little shyly and said, “It was me speaking English fifteen minutes ago. I’m Lila Hoth. This is my mother.”

She bent and spoke fast in a foreign language, Eastern European, quietly, more or less straight into the older woman’s ear. Explanation, context, inclusion. The older woman brightened and smiled. We introduced ourselves by name. Lila Hoth spoke for her mother. She said her name was Svetlana Hoth. We all shook hands, back and forth, quite formally, crossing wrists, two people on our side and two on theirs. Lila Hoth was stunning. And very natural. She made the girl I had seen on the train look contrived in comparison. She was tall but not too tall, and she was slender but not too slender. She had dark skin, like a perfect beach tan. She had long dark hair. No makeup. Huge, hypnotic eyes, the brightest blue I had ever seen. As if they were lit from within. She moved with a kind of lithe economy. Half the time she looked young and leggy and gamine, and half the time she looked all grown up and self-possessed. Half the time she seemed unaware of how good she looked, and half the time she seemed a little bashful about it. She was wearing a simple black cocktail dress that probably came from Paris and cost more than a car. But she didn’t need it. She could have been in something stitched together from old potato sacks without diminishing the effect.

We followed her inside and her mother followed us. The suite was made up of three rooms. A living room in the center, and bedrooms either side. The living room had a full set of furniture, including a dining table. There were the remnants of a room service supper on it. There were shopping bags in the corners of the room. Two from Bergdorf Goodman, and two from Tiffany. Theresa Lee pulled her badge and Lila Hoth stepped away to a credenza under a mirror and came back with two slim booklets which she handed to her. Their passports. She thought official visitors in New York needed to see papers. The passports were maroon and each had an eagle graphic printed in gold in the center of the cover and words in Cyrillic above and below it that looked like NACHOPT YKPAIHA in English. Lee flipped through them and stepped away and put them back on the credenza.

Then we all sat down. Svetlana Hoth stared straight ahead, blank, excluded by language. Lila Hoth looked at the two of us, carefully, establishing our identities in her mind. A cop from the precinct, and the witness from the train. She ended up looking straight at me, maybe because she thought I had been the more seriously affected by events. I wasn’t complaining. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

She said, “I am so very sorry about what happened to Susan Mark.”

Her voice was low. Her diction was precise. She spoke English very well. A little accented, a little formal. As if she had learned the language from black and white movies, both American and British.

Theresa Lee didn’t speak. I said, “We don’t know what happened to Susan Mark. Not really. Beyond the obvious facts, I mean.”

Lila Hoth nodded, courteously, delicately, and a little contritely. She said, “You want to understand my involvement.”

“Yes, we do.”

“It’s a long story. But let me say at the very beginning that nothing in it could possibly explain the events on the subway train.”

Theresa Lee said, “So let’s hear the story.”

And so we heard it. The first part of it was background information. Purely biographical. Lila Hoth was twenty-six years old. She was Ukrainian. She had been married at the age of eighteen to a Russian. The Russian had been knee-deep in nineties-style Moscow entrepreneurship. He had grabbed oil leases and coal and uranium rights from the crumbling state. He had become a single-figure billionaire. Next step was to become a double-figure billionaire. He didn’t make it. It was a tight bottleneck. Everyone wanted to squeeze through, and there wasn’t room for everyone to succeed. A rival had shot the Russian in the head, one year ago, outside a nightclub. The body had lain in the snow on the sidewalk all the next day. A message, Moscow style. The newly-widowed Lila Hoth had taken the hint and cashed out and moved to London with her mother. She liked London and planned on living there forever, awash with money but with nothing much to do.

She said, “There’s a presumption that young people who get rich will do things for their parents. You see it all the time with pop stars and movie stars and athletes. And such a thing is a very Ukrainian sentiment. My father died before I was born. My mother is all I have left. So, of course, I offered her anything she wanted. Houses, cars, holidays, cruises. She refused them all. All she wanted was a favor. She wanted me to help her track down a man from her past. It was like the dust had settled after a long and turbulent life, and at last she was free to concentrate on what meant most to her.”

I asked, “Who was the man?”

“An American soldier named John. That was all we knew. At first my mother claimed him only as an acquaintance. But then it emerged that he had been very kind to her, at a particular time and place.”

“Where and when?”

“In Berlin, for a short period in the early eighties.”

“That’s vague.”

“It was before I was born. It was in 1983. Privately I thought trying to find the man was a hopeless task. I thought my mother was becoming a silly old woman. But I was happy to go through the motions. And, don’t worry, she doesn’t understand what we’re saying.”

Svetlana Hoth smiled and nodded at nothing in particular.

I asked, “Why was your mother in Berlin?”

“She was with the Red Army,” her daughter said.

“Doing what?”

“She was with an infantry regiment.”

“As what?”

“She was a political commissar. All regiments had one. In fact, all regiments had several.”

I asked, “So what did you do about tracing the American?”

“My mother was clear that her friend John had been in the army, not the Marines. That was my starting point. So I telephoned from London to your Department of Defense and asked what I should do. After many explanations I was transferred to the Human Resources Command. They have a press office. The man I spoke to was quite touched. He thought it was a sweet story. Possibly he saw a public relations aspect, I don’t know. Some good news at last, perhaps, instead of all the bad. He said he would make inquiries. Personally I thought he was wasting his time. John is a very common name. And as I understand it, most American soldiers rotate through Germany, and most visit Berlin. So I thought the pool of possibilities would grow enormous. Which apparently it did. The next thing I knew was weeks later when a clerk called Susan Mark telephoned me. I wasn’t home. She left a message. She said she had been assigned the task. She told me that some names that sound like John are actually contractions of Jonathan, spelled without the letter h. She wanted to know if my mother had ever seen the name written down, perhaps on a note. I asked my mother and called Susan Mark back and told her we were sure it was John with the letter h. The conversation with Susan turned out to be very pleasant, and we had many more. We almost became friends, I think, the way you sometimes can on the phone. Like pen-pals, but talking instead of writing. She told me a lot about herself. She was a very lonely woman, and I think our conversations brightened her days.”

Lee asked, “And then what?”

“Eventually I received news from Susan. She said she had arrived at some preliminary conclusions. I suggested we meet here in New York, almost as a way to consummate our friendship. You know, dinner and maybe a show. As a way of saying thank you for her efforts, certainly. But she never arrived.”

I asked, “What time were you expecting her?”

“About ten o’clock. She said she would leave after work.”

“Too late for dinner and a show.”

“She planned to stay over. I booked a room for her.”

“When did you get here?”

“Three days ago.”

“How?”

“British Airways from London.”

I said, “You hired a local crew.”

Lila Hoth nodded.

I asked, “When?”

“Just before we got here.”

“Why?”

“It’s expected,” she said. “And sometimes useful.”

“Where did you find them?”

“They advertise. In the Moscow papers, and in the expatriate papers in London. It’s good business for them, and it’s a kind of status check for us. If you go overseas unassisted, you look weak. And it’s better not to do that.”

“They told me you brought a crew of your own.”

She looked surprised.

“I don’t have a crew of my own,” she said. “Why on earth would they say that? I don’t understand it.”

“They said you brought a bunch of scary types.”

For a second she looked mystified and a little annoyed. Then some kind of comprehension dawned in her face. She seemed to be a fast analyst. She said, “Perhaps they were inventive, strategically. When Susan didn’t arrive, I sent them out looking. I thought, I’m paying them, they might as well do some work. And my mother has a lot of hope invested in this business. So I didn’t want to come all this way, and then fail at the last minute. So I offered them a bonus. We grow up believing that money talks loudest, in America. So perhaps those men were making up a story for you. Perhaps they were inventing a scary alternative. To make sure they got their extra money. So that you would be tempted to talk to them.”

I said nothing.

Then something else dawned in her face. Some new realization. She said, “I have no crew, as you call it. Just one man. Leonid, one of my husband’s old team. He couldn’t get a new job. He’s a bit of a lame duck, I’m afraid. So I kept him on. Right now he’s at Penn Station. He’s waiting for you. The police told me that the witness had gone to Washington. I assumed you would take the train, and come back the same way. Did you not?”

I said, “Yes, I came back on the train.”

“Then Leonid must have missed you. He had your picture. He was supposed to ask you to telephone me. Poor man, he must still be there.”

She stood up and headed for the credenza. For the room phone. Which gave me a temporary tactical problem. Because Leonid’s cell was in my pocket.