Red Hook (20 page)

“Artie, man, you there?”

I told him I'd call him later and hung up, then left Maxine a message that I was on my way. I didn't head right out for Jersey, though. I had another stop.

Behind the gate of Tolya Sverdloff's apartment building in Brighton Beach was a doorman wearing a Cossack-style get-up. His cranberry red shirt with puffy sleeves was buttoned on the shoulder and his pants were stuffed into knee-high boots. He was talking Russian into a cellphone.

Behind me along Brighton Beach Avenue under the elevated train tracks, the street was crowded with people shopping. The shops had Russian signs in the windows: books, underwear, minks, smoked fish, fancy imported china; everything was still Russian here. You could tell by the signs: the sign in one window read FISH in English and FRESH FISH in Russian. The old days, Soviet times, fish was almost always frozen, and the shopkeepers who ever got anything fresh always underlined the word. Fresh fish was real status.

Sid was dead and I couldn't get hold of Tolya, and I needed him to tell me that he wasn't involved.

Tell me, I thought. Tell me you didn't kill Sid because you needed information about some fucked-up real estate scheme. Tell me the girl Rita with the borscht business is just another crackpot Russian, and you didn't betray everything for more cash. Tell me you didn't send one of your guys to hurt Sid.

Tolya had guys for everything, drive him around, help out friends, and god knew what else. I had used his
guys plenty; I had taken the help. I never asked what else they did for him beside driving his cars around and doing errands for his friends. This time I had to ask.

In front of the building was the ocean and the long boardwalk that ran alongside it. Strings of colored lights were coming on at the cafés and restaurants that were clustered along the boardwalk. The sound of Russian pop music blasted out of speakers at every café. People drifted in for dinner.

Tolya's building itself had a fake Art Deco façade with shutters trimmed in mint green and cranberry. I banged on the gate a second time, and the Cossack with the cellphone looked at me. I held up a twenty-dollar bill. He opened the gate and I said I was Sverdloff's brother and implied I had keys for the apartment. He took the money, waited while I passed him twenty more, and then let me through.

In the elevator I got stuck at the back of a pack of Russian women, all babes, great figures, big hair, their arms piled full of shopping bags and boxes, one with a huge black plastic dress bag over her shoulder, something red and furry sticking out of the bottom. They were talking Russian loud. Peasant Russian, my mother would have said. She was a snob once. Now in the fog that Alzheimer's had wrapped around her, she didn't speak any language, not Russian or Hebrew or the French she had loved. I had to get to Israel to see her soon; it was over a year since I'd been and maybe I'd take Maxine, though for months after I saw my mother, I was always trapped by melancholy.

*

Outside Tolya's apartment, I listened for a minute. I rang the bell. Then I knocked. I rang again and listened again, and looked up and down the corridor which had dark red carpeting and flocked green and gold wallpaper.

Originally he had bought the place for his mother for her visits to America. During her last couple of years, she wanted to stay in Brighton Beach. “With my people,” she said over and over, but by then Lara Sverdlova was pretty much nuts.

After his mother died, Tolya kept the place. He told me he sometimes came out here to hide. Or to feel Russian. Or both.

“Who thinks I am ever living in this place in Brighton Beach, right, Artyom? Who ever imagines even that I have such a place in my possession? When I am hungry, I go for an overnight,” he had said once when we were sitting out on the boardwalk eating tongue and smoked sturgeon and roast lamb, him drinking the Kvass that he loved.

When I was sure the apartment was empty, I picked the lock.

All the time I was thinking: Was Tolya involved with Sid's death? Then I was thinking, maybe Tolya was dead, then thinking: don't be dead, man. For a second, I felt he was dead, then I rejected the idea and figured he was alive.

My skin crawled with anxiety. I wanted to call Maxine and tell her, wanted to ask her what I should do if Tolya was involved. She had a good moral compass, she didn't suffer from confusion about right and wrong;
she was a Catholic girl who knew; she just knew. I didn't call.

The living room had a couple of huge black leather couches and tons of computer stuff. A flatscreen TV covered most of one wall.

In the bedroom the bed was still covered with the pink silk spread that Tolya's mother had used; the dresser held her perfume bottles; a Russian book on astrology was on the nightstand next to pictures of her husband, and of Tolya and his children. A votive candle, unlit, stood in a glass holder. I picked it up. It was cold.

Furry brown slippers with bears' heads that had belonged to Lara Sverdlova were on the floor. In a small bookcase were old Soviet magazines she liked to read, magazines with pictures of herself as the young, beautiful actress she had been, so unlike the crazy old woman I remembered who had terrorized people around Brighton Beach. She yelled at people. She told them they were fat or ugly. She just let fly whenever she wanted. Tolya had been sweet, though, and patient.

I remembered how he had carried her out of Farone's restaurant one night when she went berserk; she made his life hell, but he picked her up and carried her gently to the car.

When Sverdlova had died earlier in the summer in her dacha outside Moscow, Tolya went to bury her in the cemetery in Peredelkino near her husband and within sight of Boris Pasternak's grave. She had always claimed that she had been up for the part of Ophelia in a production of Pasternak's translation of
Hamlet
and that
she had had an affair with the writer. I never knew how many stories she made up. I thought of Sid and his wooden dolls.

In the living room, I looked at the answering machine, but there were no messages. I hoped like hell that Tolya would show up. I had left him messages to meet me. I leaned on the window sill and looked out at the beach and the dark ocean, with tiny lights from a ship on the horizon.

For an hour I waited, but no one came. It was getting late. It was a long drive to New Jersey. I had to get to Tolya first, but it was getting late. Where was he?

On the boardwalk, I went into some of the cafés where Tolya ate, but no one had seen him. Tourists strolled by, inspecting the menus posted outside the restaurants.

“It's so Russian here,” I heard a woman giggle.

“Brighton Beach is theme park now, little Russian theme park, like you could have practically Mickey Mouski, you know,” Tolya had said to me.

Old men sat on all the benches along the boardwalk and watched the ocean. Some wore overcoats even in the summer. All of them smoked, and talked about Russia. They came every night, even in the winter, even when there was snow on the ground and ice in their beards, and they spoke only Russian. In their minds they were here on a temporary basis, even after twenty, thirty, forty years. They yearned for a place where they believed there was some kind of order, a way of life they understood. There wasn't any. The best it got was the strict arrangement of seating on the boardwalk benches,
a kind of acknowledged ritual. They looked at the water and thought about going home. But where would they go? The country they had known had disappeared. The Soviet Union was long gone. On those benches, they always seemed shipwrecked.

I recognized one of them, a fat angry old man in a striped shirt like a sailor's and I asked him if he had seen Tolya. He knew who I was; he turned away, suspicious; I was a cop; I was an outsider.

On Brighton Beach Avenue, I checked a few of the nightclubs but they were jammed and I couldn't spot Tolya in any of them. In one I sat at the bar and watched a girl with breasts big as footballs wrap herself around a pole on a platform above me. I drank a glass of wine. When the girl finished, I gestured to her, she leaned down, tits in my face, I put some money in her thong. She hadn't seen Tolya, though she knew him.

Eventually I drove the mile or so over to Sheepshead Bay and Farone's. The place was full, the crowd loud and hungry. I saw Johnny.

“I need to talk to you.”

“It's Thursday night, Artie. I'm overbooked.”

I grabbed his sleeve. “I need to talk.”

“Come upstairs to my office,” he said and I followed him up a flight of stairs. There was a private dining room on one side, the door open. Through it I saw a group of women. Genia was there, and she looked up and saw me, waved, then came out and kissed me.

“Hello, Artemy. Please come and meet my friends,” she said formally in Russian.

I peered into the private room where a dozen
women, well dressed, sat at the table, heads low, talking softly like women in mourning. In spite of the designer clothes and hair, they looked like Russian women at a wake.

Genia touched her own short hair self-consciously, and straightened her black cashmere sweater.

“They're abducting children, maybe killing them,” she said. “In Russia now, then where? In Beslan first. Here next? Here, Artyom? It will happen.”

I kissed her.

“We get news ahead of local TV. We are getting phone calls from Russia. We try to raise money for the families,” she said, gesturing to the group of women in the room. “We try.”

People were scared, she said. They left Russia for America and the American empire cracked up, airplanes attacked buildings, and now in Russia people were dying in Moscow theaters, in schools. It was like a perpetual earthquake, like a tsunami.

No place safe, Genia said to me and told me she heard people say, “If only we had Stalin. All the time I hear this, strong is good, Stalin was great, Putin is good. I'm frightened, Artemy,” she added and returned to her friends.

I went into Johnny's office with him and he opened a bottle of wine, sat behind his huge mahogany desk and gestured to a black leather chair.

“You're looking for Sverdloff, Art? That it?” he said.

“How'd you know?”

“He said you'd be by.”

“When?”

“He came in earlier, said he needed a fix of my soft shells, I fixed him some nice crabs, some nice pasta, I got him a good bottle of the Barolo he likes up from the cellar, you know, and he said, if Artie comes by, tell him I got his message. I'll find him.”

I got up to go.

“I have to go down and see Billy next week, you want to send him something from you?” Johnny looked at me and I saw his eyes were wet. He was a weepy guy to begin with; since his boy killed a man, he cried all the time.

“What time?”

“What time what?”

“Sverdloff was here, what time?”

Farone looked at his watch. “Shit, man, I don't know, earlier. I got so much fucking business, you believe that? I must be famous, right?”

“Did he say where he was going?”

Johnny shook his head. “I was busy. Listen, Art, did you tell me everything you found out about Billy? You never did, I know that. You kept it a secret from everyone. Tell me now.”

“Don't, Johnny. Please. I can't do this now.” I felt trapped. I had to get out; Genia's misery and Johnny's sorrow drenched me; it was like napalm; I felt I couldn't move.

Johnny said, “It was that Sid McKay guy, wasn't it? He fixed it with the press so people wouldn't say my Billy was a killer. I met him. He was a sweet nice man.”

I got up, and Johnny tried to hug me but he was too fat.

“Sid McKay is dead. If you see Tolya Sverdloff you tell him I need him. Just do it,” I said and hurried out.

Running out of the office and down the stairs, I heard Johnny behind me, panting, breathless, still talking even as I got to the door of the restaurant.

“That fucking hurricane is coming in like a bastard, you hear the news?” Johnny said. “Taking out everything in the Bahamas, right up the coast, they say it's going to rain cats and fucking dogs, gonna kill Labor Day weekend. Gonna kill the party-boat business out here.” He pointed towards Sheepshead Bay beyond the glass windows of his restaurant. “Airports all shut down in Florida,” he said. “What a summer. You think this global warming shit means anything? Genia says we have to vote for Bush because he's strong on terrorism, and he's friends with Putin who is also strong. I don't know anything anymore, Artie. Have a drink with me.”

“I can't.”

“Wait. Please.”

I didn't wait. I pushed open the heavy front door of the restaurant, bumped into the doorman and ran for my car.

Tolya had been at Farone's, but not at the apartment. He didn't answer my calls. I drove like a maniac across Brooklyn, heading back to Red Hook and Sid's where I figured I'd talk my way in. I had a feeling I'd find Tolya there. I had a feeling there was still stuff in Sid's place that mattered. It was late. I tried to reach Maxine and couldn't get her cellphone.

Crazy now because it was late, because it was two in
the morning and I couldn't reach Maxine, I was half a mile away from Sid's when I stopped for a green light and a car rear-ended me. I heard the metal, the crackle of a broken tail-light. The prick who hit me drove away and left me under the Gowanus Parkway, my car all screwed up.

My car wouldn't start. I called a tow truck and gave them the address and then I walked. It was desolate, deserted. My ribs hurt. Something in my neck didn't feel right. The battery on my cellphone was down, but I kept it in my hands. I felt like I could hear the sound of my bones.

I managed to get to the grassy patch near the pier, close to the place where I fell asleep and dreamed about Lily. I wanted to look at Sid's building from the end of the pier. Sid could have seen Earl out here, and Earl could have seen Sid's window. He could have watched Sid come and go.