Red Hook (13 page)

“Why now?” I said.

He shrugged his enormous shoulders and said, shifting between English and Russian as if he couldn't find a comfortable resting place even with his languages, “I tell about it one day. Now I need for you to take this key. I need for you to promise to be OK with the girls. And
ex-wife who is an idiot.” He laughed. “The ex-Mrs Sverdloff is very nice lady, but she is now retired to very relaxing life of South Florida in Boca Raton,” he said. “Can you think about this, my wife in Boca Raaaaton? Once, in Moscow, she was a professor of ancient Chinese poetry. She was rock and roll girlfriend also, chick who could recite Chinese poetry and lyrics of Beatles songs. Beautiful, sexy, very rebellious. Now she dates her plastic surgeon, he wears yachting caps, and blue blazers with gold buttons with little anchors on them. The sun has broiled her brain to a very small crisp. Little tiny potato chip of a brain, you know? I'm depressing myself,” he said. “I need for you to trust me.”

He leaned forward and peered out of the car window. “I like it here so much,” he said and looked up. “Look at seagulls, look. Come on. I'm thirsty,” he added. “It will be OK. I'll make my deals, and after I finish with Brooklyn, I swear to God, I will sell everything. Then I'll retire. Travel. Become humanitarian. OK?”

He started the car and drove slowly until he got to a narrow street where there was a bar. He pulled up in front of it.

You could imagine longshoremen drinking here, and girls looking to turn tricks who stood outside swinging their purses. You could imagine Mohawk tribesmen, who had a bar of their own nearby, Indian steel workers down from Canada to build the Verrazano Bridge. I had seen the pictures of the Mohawk up high on steel beams seemingly suspended from the sky.

On the cobbled backstreet the marine light from the water gave the buildings the colors of an old Dutch
picture. The bricks glowed. The light made the place lovely in spite of the broken pavement and seedy storefronts.

Tolya opened the car door. “Red Hook will be my last big buy, and then I retire,” he said, and looked at me. “I'm tired.”

Suddenly I thought: he is leaving. He's running. “Travel where?”

“Eventually Italy, France, Vietnam, Cuba. Maybe I settle in Havana. I will find a nice woman and go travel and eat,” he said.

“Is there someone?”

He smiled shyly. “Maybe.” He looked at me, and switched to his usual lingo, half English, half Russian. “Is not severe architect with ugly red mouth, and is not hooker with gigantic tits. Is real nice woman.”

“I thought you bought the building for the architect.”

“She doesn't love me. I buy buildings for her, it doesn't matter.”

“Do I know her? The nice woman?”

He shook his head.

“Russian?”

“Yes,” he said. “Like coming home.”

“You're really leaving.”

“Soon,” he said.

A decrepit air conditioner rattled in the window of the bar where pieces of metallic green tinsel left over from St Patrick's Day blew in the cold air. A few old guys, sipping their brews slowly to make them last, watched racing on some kind of cable channel on a TV hung out on an arm over the bar like a set in a hospital. A bartender leaned over the bar and stared at a copy of the
Post.

We climbed up on a couple of stools. The sweat dried on Tolya's face.

“What else?” I said. “You didn't bring me here to show me some real estate. You could have given me the key in the city.”

“No.”

“What?”

I ordered Scotch for both of us.

“Give me another one of those things you smoke.” I passed him the cigarettes and he simultaneously reached across the bar and plucked two bags of nuts off a cardboard stand with one hand, tore them open and swallowed the contents in one gulp.

The bartender set up some glasses and poured Scotch in them.

“Make them triples,” I said. “Why are we here, Tolya?”

He shifted uncomfortably on the barstool, too big for it, sitting uneasily while he knocked back his drink. He looked in his glass. “I need more.”

I got hold of the bartender and told him to give us a bottle and I dug some bills out of my pocket. I picked up the bottle and the glasses and made my way, Tolya following me, to the back where it smelled of stale beer and the air was fetid, but where we could sit alone at a table.

We made a silent toast, and drank. I waited for him to tell me what was bugging him, but he was restless. He said the bartender was eavesdropping, though the bartender barely looked at us. Tolya couldn't sit still.

In the street, the woman exploded at Tolya, screaming in English and Russian, hanging on to him, trying to claw at his head and his eyes. She was small, about five-one and she wore a sleeveless cotton blouse and blue shorts and red sneakers, and she hung on him like a cat. She had seemed to come out of nowhere, appearing as we left the bar, running at him, trying to gouge his eyes out.

Like a huge animal disturbed, Tolya shook himself but the woman had her fingers in his eyes. I grabbed at her. He was talking Russian to her softly, seductive, beautiful Russian, words that sounded like trapped smoke, trying to calm her down. She went on howling,
shrieking, yelling; I couldn't make out what she was saying at first; she sounded drunk.

Finally, I pulled her away from him. She was heavy, deadweight. I held her, but she kept talking, accusing Tolya of evicting her from her building in Brighton Beach. She lost her house, she said; you took my house, you bulldozed my house, you try to kill me, she screamed. She had recognized him on the street because he was her enemy. I held her wrists tight and yanked her off him.

“Let her go,” Tolya said.

“What?”

“Just let her go.”

I let go of her hands. The woman ran down the street and turned the corner. Tolya rubbed his eyes. His big head seemed to sag into his neck.

“She was drunk,” he said.

“You knew her?”

“I don't want to talk about it,” he said. “Do you understand me?”

“Sure.”

“I want to eat.”

“Where?”

“Farone's,” he said.

I checked my beeper. Maxine was on her way to the shore with the girls. Everything was quiet in the city. “Fine,” I said to Tolya. “Let's go.”

“So, Artemy, you want to talk about Sid McKay now? You want to talk about this with me at all?”

I was silent.

“You knew that I knew Sid McKay, didn't you?

You think I didn't know about his trouble, that I didn't hear about the dead guy out by his place in Red Hook?”

Al Sharpton was at Farone's. As soon as one of Johnny Farone's captains showed us into the main room of the restaurant, I spotted the Reverend Al at the big table in the center of the room where he was surrounded by a large group, three other black men, two black women and one white. Sharpton was clearly the center of attention.

Sharpton saw us at the same time and he started in our direction, reaching his hand out for Tolya. They met halfway.

Other diners looked up as the two big men greeted each other, hugging, grinning. Tolya introduced me; Sharpton had a mellifluous voice, soft and seductive. He had been a street singer before he became a preacher and a politician.

In a three-piece pinstriped suit, his sleek hair to his collar, Sharpton shook my hand with the politicians' two-handed shake; his hand were soft and manicured. Then he turned back to Tolya and I noticed it was Sharpton who paid equal court. All the time I was thinking about Sid, that Tolya knew Sid, that he knew I knew, and I had kept that knowledge from him.

“I didn't know you were pals with Sharpton,” I said to Tolya when we were seated at a table near the window.

“I make friends with these politicians,” he said. “So you asked me why I wanted America passport? I met
Comrade Putin. Did I tell you, Artyom? I met him at a reception in Moscow.”

I was interested. “Go on,” I said.

“He was the coldest son of a bitch I ever met, ever, including several killers I know,” Tolya said in Russian. “I mean ice cold. You see Putin, he wears a nice suit, he makes nice joke, he eats barbecue with Bush in Texas, but all you can think about is how he was as a KGB guy, on the opposite side of the interrogation table, a big white light on you. He doesn't drink. He does karate. He's clamping down on the press, a TV station here, a newspaper there, he's replacing some elections with his own appointed apparatchiks. He talks War on Terror. People trust him for this. It's the good old days back in the USSR, Artyom, and they love him and now America loves him, too. You know what law they're proposing in Russia, in Parliament? Law barring foreigners who do not respect Russia.”

Around us in the room was the buzz of people eating, talking, drinking.

“What else?” I said.

“Putin puts rich guys he doesn't like in jail, you're with him, or against him, he says. Twenty years since Gorbachev arrived, next March it is twenty years, and now we have Putin. Back to old ways,” he said, then stopped short.

Johnny Farone was at our table, proffering a bottle of vintage wine like it was the baby Jesus, and recommending spaghetti with caviar.

“Like they make it at the Four Seasons in Manhattan,” Johnny said. “I did a lot of new stuff here, new
dishes, décor.” He nodded his head at the room. “You could have my lobster after. I do it a little spicy.”

Johnny beamed as if his fat face would split, too much flesh for the skin that looked too tight and shiny to contain it. His dark brown linen suit pulled even around the shoulders, and he looked uncomfortable, but he hugged me and patted my back like American men did, and said congratulations and what a great wedding party it had been.

“On me,” Johnny handed the bottle to the wine guy. “The wine's on me.”

It was Monday night but Farone's was packed. A large round table was crowded with Republicans out sightseeing, I guessed. They had American flags in their lapels; all of them wore Bush buttons; one had a cowboy hat on his head.

Johnny Farone had started out catering to rich Russians. Then he got a reputation, and a 26 in Zagat, as he liked telling you. Right now I wished he'd hurry up and beat it so I could talk to Tolya. But Johnny lingered, flattered that Tolya was sniffing the wine appreciatively.

Johnny, when I first met him, had a crappy auto parks shop in Brighton Beach. He was one of the few Italians who got close to the Russians—he even learned a few words—and eventually he opened a restaurant. It overlooked the water in Sheepshead Bay, which was next door to Brighton Beach on the Brooklyn Coast. He married my half sister, Genia, and I saw her across the room, chatting to people at a table nearby. She looked up and lifted her hand and then came over to greet us.

She wore a salmon-colored sheath, Prada, she told
me, and gold snakeskin sandals by Gucci, and her red hair had been styled, she said, by Sally Hershberger. Genia pointed out all of her possessions and the provenance of each, as if each one provided ballast, as if they held her together. After her son Billy committed murder and was sent away, it was all she had left.

Johnny stayed beside her, clinging to Genia like a heavy anchor, weighing her down. They had stayed together, maybe because Gen was so grateful to Johnny for marrying her and making her an American, or because of Billy. They had both adored Billy, their only child who, when he killed a man, had also destroyed them. He had killed out of curiosity, nothing more, but they pretended it was self-defense; they bought into the self-defense line that made the papers call Billy a boy-hero.

Once in a while, Genia called me and talked, speaking Russian, weeping. I had been to Florida twice to see Billy. He seemed like a normal kid; the façade was perfect; they even talked about letting him out. It terrified me, the day when Billy would get out. He said, I want to live with you, Artie. When I get out, I want to be with you. I want to be like you, he had said. “I'll be a detective,” he said.

It was Sid who had fixed it, who fed the press the stuff so that Billy was let off easy and sent to a special school instead of jail—they charged them that young as adults now in murder cases—which would have killed him. Because of Sid, no one labeled Billy the monster that he was. Sid had never asked for anything back until now.

Johnny waddled off towards the front door and Genia kissed me and retreated to her friends.

I said to Tolya, “I'm sorry.”

“What about?”

“I should have mentioned about Sid.”

“I want to eat first,” he said.

Tolya believed in food as a way of coping with trouble, a restorative, a form of medication, redemption. Without decent food, you couldn't think, he said.

The sound of voices rose around us; the sound of opera that Johnny played over the sound system soared. The politicians ate; the couples celebrating anniversaries drank Cristal; a trio of women giggled, seated on a green leather banquette under an oil painting; Johnny liked pictures of flowers and dead game birds.

The three women were in their thirties, all in sleeveless satin summer dresses, black, blue, pink, with low necks. They sat together in a row so a waiter could snap their picture. They had big hair, brown, copper, platinum, and pink lips. The middle one with the big copper hair was celebrating her birthday and a waiter brought a cake and then more waiters appeared and sang to her. The women clinked champagne glasses. Johnny brought a ball of pink cotton candy the size of a basketball, studded with candied violets. The trio laughed, high forced tinny giggles. It reminded me of the Diane Arbus photographs Lily had loved. Arbus gave me the creeps.

“I stole the idea from the Four Seasons, too,” Johnny said, passing our table. “The cotton candy thing.”

“Artyom?”

Tolya reclaimed my attention. The spaghetti had arrived. A waiter in a dark green jacket, with “Farones” embroidered on it in gold letters, hovered over our plates holding a large blue can of caviar. He scooped up the golden oscietra with a soup spoon and piled it on top of the pasta.