Red Hook (15 page)

I turned around. Lily was standing facing me.

“Why do you talk like that?” she said.

“Like what?”

She said, “Like not yourself. The way you say I love you, it's like there's someone listening, you're so solicitous and serious, and you sound, I don't know, brittle. Like a married man.”

“I am married.”

“Don't be so pompous, sweetheart,” she said.

“There was someone listening.”

“Yes. Me.”

“You mean I sound like I'm lying.”

“That, too,” she said.

I didn't answer.

Lily hoisted her bag on her shoulder. She said, “Take care of Tolya, will you? I don't know what he's doing but he's way out on a limb, so watch out for him, OK?”

“You knew that?”

“Some. He tells me some,” she said.

“OK.”

“So I'll be at the bar in Chinatown tomorrow night, OK, if you feel like it, I'll be there. I go by most nights. Unless you want me to come upstairs now? No, I guess not. I know I fucked up with us. With you. I've missed you a lot.”

Lily walked the few steps towards me, leaned over and kissed me very lightly on the mouth.

“I shouldn't have done that. So see you, sometime,” she said, and turned to walk away.

Upstairs in my loft, I stood near the window smoking and watched her walk slowly down the dark street. Lily looked thin and seemed to get smaller. I thought again what an idiot I'd always been about women. I knew men who said their best friends were women, but I usually wanted to sleep with them, Lily most of all; if I said we could be friends, and we saw each other, I would want
her. Thinking about her felt like a betrayal of Maxine, of Maxine and me.

I'd known Lily almost all the time I'd lived in this loft, the only place I had ever owned, a place where I'd scraped the floors myself and fixed the bookshelves, and sat out on the fire escape and watched ball games on TV. I had drunk with the neighbors and slept with plenty of women. Lily and Beth, the little girl I helped her adopt, had spent weekends with me here.

Then, out of nowhere, it came to me that I had met Sid McKay because of Lily.

It was a party she had taken me to. Ten years ago. About ten. It was on Crosby Street, when it was a dark alleyway off Broadway, a few blocks away from my place. Derelicts still bedded down at night there and you slipped in rotting vegetables that fell off produce trucks. I had worked a case around Crosby Street once.

The party was on the top floor in a huge loft with enormous red and yellow canvases on the wall. It was jammed with people. There was the excited buzz of a good New York party, talk, women, music, booze, drugs. Live music, a band, three, four musicians, I thought. Ricky Tae had been there. Of course, I thought. Rick had known Sid first. Or I had invited Ricky along. Couldn't remember. We had all known Sid somehow. Sid still kept Rick's photo. Had they been friends? Lovers? I started for the phone, and I remembered Rick was out of town, on business. Did he invite me to that party on Crosby Street? Did Lily? Was Tolya there, too?

It wasn't a party. It was a wedding. Somebody's
wedding celebration, somebody I knew, or Lily knew, or Rick. I remembered.

Late that night, a good-looking black guy at the party waves at Lily and then strolls across the room towards us, and she introduces him. It's Sid, handsome, courteous, asking her to dance.

They go out into the middle of the floor and people watch as Sid waltzes her around the room, very expert, very graceful. The band changes to “You're The Top”, and they keep dancing. Lily always said, “I can't dance, Artie. I have two left feet, you know. Or you think it's because I can never let the man lead?”

That night Sid leads her around the loft and they're good and I can't take my eyes off her.

I sat up for a while more. My reflection in the window showed me hunched, uncertain. I reached for the phone, put it down. Tolya said Sid had information that people wanted, and that people would kill for it. I didn't believe it much, but I figured Sid was in more trouble than I'd thought. I picked up the phone again, and then changed my mind for the second time. I went to bed. It could wait until morning.

There was the noise of a rat scurrying along the stone walls that were thick as a fortress, cool and humid under my hand, a smell like iodine embedded in them, as I made my way up to Sid's place the next morning. The outside door had been left unlocked and inside I heard the rat, heard water running, music playing. Somewhere someone dropped a shoe on an old wooden floor.

I wanted this over. I was going up to confront Sid; I didn't call, I just went. He had said he was leaving town. He had said he was heading out to Long Island, but when I'd called his place in Sag Harbor, a woman answered and said Sid had not arrived. She had come in to clean, she said, and there was no sign of him at all. Sid didn't answer his home phone; he didn't answer any of his phones.

Maxine was waiting for me at the shore, and I wanted to get down to Avalon, hang out with her and the kids, lie in the sun on the beach, swim, forget Lily, forget the city for a while. It was Tuesday morning. I had a few days more on call, and then I would be gone. Thursday
night I'd be on the road. I didn't have much time. I had to be there.

I didn't like it that Sid had not showed up on Long Island. Where was he?

If Sid was involved in any way, if he had covered something up, maybe I could help fix things the way he had helped me when I needed him so bad. I thought about Sid and how he reached out to you without talking about it.

Sweating now, climbing the stairs in the old warehouse, I focused on this. I made myself concentrate. Do this, confront Sid, I thought, and get the hell out of the city.

I banged on Sid's door and when no one answered, I pushed at it hard; it was unlocked, and I lost my balance and stumbled forwards. I stuck my head inside, called out. “Sid?”

There was no answer.

Dread pushed down on me. For a split second I felt as if a heavy wooden press was coming down on me and I couldn't stop it.

From the floor below came music; from outside, the water lapped around the edges of the brick building, and the rotting wooden docks. I reached inside the door and switched on a light, then, feeling for my gun, went in.

“Sid?”

I was pretty sure the place was empty but I went in slowly. Out of the high windows at the end of the loft, pale sun lit up the water.

I took out a cigarette then put it away. I didn't want
to mess with any smell Sid might have left, anything that would tell me if he had been here or when he'd left, if he was alone, or with someone else.

On the desk was an ashtray but it was empty and had been wiped clean. A blanket was folded neatly on the couch where he sometimes spent the night. I picked it up, a rough Hudson Bay blanket, cream with a wide red and black stripe, and sniffed it. It smelled of new wool, but nothing else, nothing human, no smell of smoke or sweat or sex, only wool and a faint reek of cleaning fluid as if it had been bagged in plastic; it was a different blanket from the one I'd seen the day before. I thought it was different, but I wasn't sure.

Did it mean anything? I didn't know. Maybe Sid never slept on the couch. Maybe he sat up all night like he said. The loft was his office, his publishing company. Maybe he went to his apartment in Brooklyn Heights but I had stopped by on my way, and it was shut up tight and an old lady in the basement apartment said she hadn't seen him in weeks.

Suddenly, my beeper vibrated. I grabbed it, called the number. There was a message to go up to Madison Square Garden and the Republican Convention that day; somebody needed a cop who could talk Russian. I scribbled down the name of the contact on the back of a piece of paper I had in my jeans and shoved it back in a pocket and went to look around Sid's place.

Above the bookshelves that ran the length of the brick wall were the old prints of Brooklyn, some from the nineteenth century, some newer, some hung neatly, others propped on the top shelf. There was a framed
faded photograph of a Russian ship and I took it down and went over to the window where the light was good. I probably needed glasses, but I didn't want to admit it.

I held the picture up to the light. I could just make out the name of the freighter in Russian:
Red Dawn.
The ship that had run aground off Red Hook.

Stuck in the corner of the frame was a small black and white snapshot, the edges already turning brownish yellow from age, the paper brittle. In the picture was a boy with a Russian sailor's cap, looking straight at the camera, wary, worried. He was probably fifteen or sixteen, but so small he looked like a kid; after the war, everyone in Russia was small; a whole generation of children had grown up, starving.

I turned the picture over. June '53; they must have put the dates on snapshots in those days, I thought. 1953. The year my parents got married. Stalin dead. My own father, only a little older than the boy in the pictures, had been in the navy before he was in the KGB. He had loved the sea and he had taken me fishing, though mostly to a river outside of Moscow. We went on weekends and fished together standing in the river, or sitting on the bank we ate sandwiches and ice cream and talked and he tried to show me how to read the water. I was lousy at it.

I shook the framed picture and a second snapshot fell out from between the picture and the glass. I picked it up from the floor. The same Russian sailor was in it, and next to him was a skinny black teenager holding on to an old-fashioned Schwinn bike. Behind them was the faint outline of the Statue of Liberty. In the black kid's face
you could just see the ghost of Sid McKay. Not the ghost, I thought, the precursor, the boy who would become Sid. There was no one else, no sign of Earl, Sid's half brother. Maybe Earl had taken the picture. I put the two snapshots in my pocket. I needed a cigarette.

For a minute, I sat on the edge of the desk chair, rocking back and forth, listening to the wheels squeak, looking at the boats on the water, barges, sailboats. Over by Jersey cranes picked at the sky like giraffes. It was addictive, the view, the sense of space, the way you were surrounded by water. It lulled you.

A police boat cruised up to the edge of the basin and sputtered away, maybe routine, maybe checking for problems. The port was vulnerable; the word had come down early in the summer that the ports were easy targets for attack.

Then I saw that the red light was flashing on the answering machine on the desk. I hit the play button. A petal with brown edges fell off a rose that was in a glass jar and dropped on to a pile of about thirty manila folders stacked on the desk, and while I listened to the messages, I opened the top folder. It contained newspaper clippings.

Sid's phone messages included a reminder of an appointment with his orthopedic surgeon because of his ankle, someone from the
New York Times
about lunch, a real estate guy who wanted to buy Sid's apartment in Brooklyn Heights, a woman asking him to a dinner party on St Luke's Place. Nothing. I kept looking at the folders.

Information, Tolya had said. Sid had information, but
all I saw were news clippings and some scribbled notes about Red Hook's history.

“Call me back,” said a voice on the answering machine that I recognized. “Call me back, man. Call me!” No name, just a number.

I knew the voice. My stomach turned over. I listened to it again, and called the number, and it was busy. I picked up the files on the desk and put them in a plastic bag I found in a desk drawer.

Again I looked around. Nothing seemed out of place. It looked as if Sid had simply walked out, leaving the door unlocked. Maybe he had gone out to get cigarettes. Or someone had called and he had gone to meet them and forgotten to lock up. There were keys hanging on a hook by the door, and I took them. I wasn't sure why, but I took them.

I stole Sid's keys, his files, closed the door and left it unlocked in case he came back.

I needed nicotine. I lit up as soon as I got outside Sid's, then went downstairs and tried to find the loft where the music had come from. I banged on the door, it opened, a young guy, maybe twenty-five, looked out. Behind him was a huge mass of metal. There was some New Age music on a stereo; it sounded like dripping forests.

“Hi,” he said.

“Yeah, hi. Listen, sorry to bother you.”

“It's OK, man.”

“You know Sid McKay?”

“Sure. Yeah, sure I love Sid. He's the only other guy around here who's up early like me, sometimes in the
winter it's pitch-black and I'm still awake trying to like make fucking sense of this sculpture shit I do, and there's Sid, going out for a walk on the pier, or to get coffee. He always bangs on my window and asks if I want something and sometimes I go out and walk with him.”

“You saw him this morning?”

“Every morning. Sure.”

“What time?”

He laughed. “Don't know. But early. Maybe five. Six. I saw him out of the window. I knocked on the glass, he tapped back like always. Sure. Something wrong?”

“You saw him come back?”

“No. I waited, too, he said he'd bring coffee, and I wanted to talk, but I didn't see him, so I went to bed. Maybe I should have called. You think he's OK? You a friend of his?”

“Thanks,” I said, my phone still in my hand, redialing the number on Sid's machine, already heading for my car when I noticed a pair of guys in a kayak floating towards me.

I stuck the bag with Sid's files in the trunk of my car and walked out on the pier towards the little boat.

The two men, middle-aged, both in T-shirts and shorts, worked hard keeping upright. They paddled seriously, intense, benign expressions on their faces, heading towards the inlet where the homeless guy, Earl, had been found. One of them turned his face towards the sun.

Suddenly, from around the corner of the warehouse, a three-wheeled vehicle appeared and stopped short. A
security guard, a fat nimble guy with an angry red face the color of pastrami, leaped out and ran to the edge of the water where he leaned over and put his meaty face as close as he could to the guys in the kayak.