Red Hook (23 page)

“Fuck you, Artyom, I want to buy some real estate, I want to make deals, I want names and phone numbers of people who own, of people in city who matter, you understand, and who owns them, OK? Sid says he has all
this. Or maybe you found other stuff you don't want to share?”

I sat down on a chair. My arm was bleeding, and I looked at it, and said, “I'll call you later.”

“Sure.” His voice was cold.

The idea formed in my head out of the blue: he wanted Red Hook like an object. Something about it obsessed him; he was willing to do anything to get it. It was what Sid had been trying to tell me one way or another: Tolya had come up against people who wouldn't give him what he wanted and it had made him crazy.

“I'm going home,” he said. “You can meet me later, if you want.” He took a gold pen that was fat as a cigar out of his pocket along with a little notebook, scribbled some phone numbers, tore out the page, and threw it on my desk.

“You need me, here are some addresses. I'll be around, Artie, you don't need to follow me like a dog, you don't need to hang on me like I'm a criminal.”

He walked out and left his cigar burning in the ashtray on my desk.

After I took some more aspirin, I got a fresh towel from the bathroom, put it around my arm and called Maxine.

“I waited for you,” she said. “We waited all night.”

“Shit. I'm so sorry. I really am. I did try. I called you.”

“My cell doesn't always work out here. You know that. You could have called my mother's phone.”

“I'll get out there as soon as I can, I just have a few
things, honey, I got into this thing, I think Tolya Sverdloff is in trouble.”

I didn't want to tell her I got beat up; I didn't want to use it as an excuse.

Quietly, she said, “I couldn't reach you. You said you'd be here last night after the convention, I knew you left early, so we waited for dinner. I tried to call, and your phone wasn't on, and the girls woke, got up and they were like, where's Artie? I lost it. I yelled at them. I meant it for you. Then it got really late and I got scared.”

“Max, I'm a jerk, tell me how the girls are. What did they do all week? Did you get up to Six Flags? Did they go swimming?”

“We didn't know anything. About you.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Right.”

In Maxine's slow responses I could hear that she didn't completely believe me. She had a slow temper; she almost never lost it; she kept stuff to herself.

“What's the weather like?”

“It's OK. The hurricane's coming,” she said.

“How bad? You think you should stay?”

“I don't want to talk about the weather.”

“One more day and I'll be with you. I promise.”

“So you're not coming today either?”

“I'm trying.”

There was a long pause. Ten, fifteen seconds, I couldn't tell how long, when she didn't say anything at all.

“You know what, Artie?” Maxine finally said.

“What?”

“Don't try. Don't come. I can't stand waiting to find out if you're coming, last night, this morning, now you're saying you have one more thing, one more day, so you know what? Just leave us be and we'll finish our vacation.”

“I'll be there. I swear to God.”

“Don't. I mean it, Artie, it's not fair to the girls, they just ask, when's he coming, and then we hang around. You have something to deal with in the city, do it. Please just don't come. We'll be home at the end of the week. We'll pick up again then. I mean it. Please don't come now.”

“I miss you.”

“We'll do something else sometime. We can go to Paris or whatever. We'll go back to our life, I hope, you and me. Right now, I need you not to be here,” she said.

I tried to say something but Maxine was gone, only the click and the dead line and I tried to get her back and couldn't.

For a while I tried to read some of the material in Sid's folders. The towel around my arm turned pink. I couldn't stop the bleeding for ten minutes, and I thought about going over to St Vincent's to the emergency room. I couldn't stand the idea of it, dragging myself over, sitting around for hours next to the banged-up junkies and the women with their babies and kids who had asthma and old men whose hearts were fucked up. I sat on the edge of the bathtub, a cigarette on the sink, and bandaged my arm as best I could. I called Maxine again. She was out, her mother said.

I found a couple of Percodan in a plastic bottle in the medicine cabinet, took them both and fell asleep. When I woke up it was already dark and my sheet was stained with blood.

She was there. Lily was sitting at the bar, her hand around a drink. She'd told me she was there most nights and I went because I could talk to her about Tolya. Lily had known Sid McKay, too.

Maybe I was just looking for excuses to see her, but I made them to myself and late, when it was almost midnight, I found myself in the bar. I was a little fucked up from the painkillers.

As soon as I saw her, I started to back out. I stood in the doorway of the bar, paralyzed. Her back was to me. She had on a thin white cotton shirt, damp from sweat that had only partly dried in the cold air in the bar.

As if she knew I was looking at her, she turned around and said, “What's the matter?”

“Nothing.” I walked towards her.

“You look lousy,” she said. “You have a bump on your head.”

“Some jerk in Brooklyn hit my car,” I said.

“But you're OK?”

“I should probably go.”

“You just got here. Come on, let's sit for a minute.” Lily got off the barstool and went to the table by the window. I sat down opposite her.

The place was empty except for two guys at the far end of the bar and a couple who emerged from the gloomy back room and hurried out into the street.

“You were looking for me,” Lily said. It wasn't a question.

I didn't answer.

“My car's somewhere out in Brooklyn,” I said. “I have to go get it. I got smacked into by some jerk. Some end it would have been.”

She laughed.

“Did they arrest you?” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Assholes. They locked up whatever protestors they could get hold of and dumped us over by the river in some horrible place for like two days with practically nothing to drink or eat. It was a shitty experience, to tell you the truth,” she added. “But now I can talk about it for months. Bore people to death. Sometimes I bore myself to death. I'm sick of fucking politics, Artie.”

“You?”

“Yeah.”

“You want wine?”

She nodded.

At the bar, I ordered us some drinks. The Chinese kid who was on duty poured white wine into two glasses, took my money and went back to his book. Picking it up off the bar, he jiggled his head to the music on the sound system, some techno thing. Fine with me, I
thought. I didn't want to listen to music I had loved listening to with Lily, the stuff the regular bartender had always played. I went back to the table.

Lily said, “This is nice.”

“I don't think I can be here with you,” I said.

“We could talk about the election,” she said. “That would cool us down.”

Fumbling for cigarettes, I said, without thinking, “Don't let me sleep with you. Promise me.”

She laughed. “That's the nicest proposition I've ever had. I'll try,” she said.

“Lily, I'm scared.”

“What of?”

“Everything.”

“Is that why you came looking for me?”

I said, “Yeah. I'm worried about Tolya.”

“Tell me what you're scared of.”

“You knew Sid McKay, right?”

“Sure. Once. A little. Not for years, though. Why? He was a nice man. I liked him. He was good to young reporters. He was a good guy.”

“How well did you know him?”

“I told you, a bit, I knew him a bit. With you, remember? We met him together, and we saw him once in a while.”

“Where?”

“Around. I don't know. Maybe Raoul's, other restaurants, maybe with Ricky. We knew everyone, didn't we, I mean, we were good that way, you and me. “Why are you asking me about Sid McKay, Artie? This is me. You came here to talk to me. You can't just ask me
things out of the blue and expect me not to want to know why.”

“No.”

“So what is it?”

“He's dead.”

“My God. I'm sorry. What of? What did he die of? He wasn't that old.”

“He was murdered. Someone beat him over the head with a piece of metal and shoved him into the river, I don't know for sure.”

“I'm really sorry. I liked him,” she said.

“Everybody liked Sid, as far as I can make out.”

“You think that's weird? Why can't people just have liked him? Maybe he was just a nice guy.”

“What else?”

“Obsessive about work. He thought if you didn't have three perfect sources you could confirm, you shouldn't report a story at all, he was living in cloud cuckoo land and it made people angry,” she said. “I remember he was brave, though. I met him once in the Soviet Union in the old days, and he would do anything it took to get the story right. But people don't kill you for that stuff.” She looked at me. “How the hell did Sid McKay end up murdered?” She finished her wine. “I almost forgot that you live in a world where people get murdered.”

“You could never stand that about me, could you?”

“You bet.” Her tone turned acid. “I want another drink.” She got up and went to the bar where the bartender filled her glass; she paid for her drink herself.

“I guess in your world it's different, all the dead
people are someplace else,” I said when Lily sat down. “You can worry about them long distance, in front of the TV. You could never just say you hated my job. You hated what I did.”

“How come you're baiting me?”

“You started.”

“Don't be a jerk, Artie, I didn't hate what you did.”

“You fucking wanted me to go to law school.”

“I thought you were smart. You think that's patronizing? OK, I didn't like the guns. OK?”

“How's Beth?”

“She misses you.”

“Don't do that to me.”

“You asked, didn't you? Grow up,” she said, “Just get over it. I left you. I'm sorry. You're telling me you never fucked around when we were together, you were Simon-pure? I did something I had to do, I left, you want to talk about it, talk. But don't be such a baby. Don't be so fucking suburban, Artie.”

She was suddenly in a rage and I remembered how it could happen. She never lied; she never said anything she didn't mean; there were no smuggled messages with her, and for me, coming from a country where everything was smuggled, it had been astonishing.

I said, “Well, why don't you tell me how you really feel?”

“I just did.”

At the end of the bar, the two guys looked in our direction, then back at their drinks. The kid behind the bar was asleep on his math book.

Lily was still mad and I could feel the heat, and I
wanted to touch her so bad, I had to literally sit on my hands, and she knew it. She was angry and her eyes were bright, her hair a strange red in the dull light.

Pale, shirt smudged with dirt, her skirt wrinkled, Lily looked wrecked. She looked older and thinner and vulnerable, and I had never seen her like that, never thought of her as vulnerable. Reaching up to fix her hair, she stretched and then scraped her hair back. She leaned over the table and reached for my cigarettes. I didn't know if she did it on purpose but her breasts were visible.

“You know the problem with you, Artie, you wanted it all ways, you always did, you wanted to be the good guy at work, and you wanted the moral high ground when possible, and when you couldn't quite have it, you'd settle for at least being nice to people, and charming, charm was always your thing. People liked you. Sonny Lippert used to say it was why he hired you, you could charm suspects into telling you things, isn't that right? You know what? I'm pretty drunk, I've been here for hours, thinking about you, and what I'd really like now is to get down under the table here, and, never mind, you're married, you don't do dirty things anymore, isn't that right? Artie?”

The shifting traffic just outside the window made shadows on Lily's face. She spoke too fast, was too angry. It didn't matter; I couldn't get enough of her. I thought: I have to get away.

We sat like that and I didn't know how much time passed, and then Lily said, “I just missed you,” and all the heat went out of it. She put out her hand to touch mine.

“Come on, we'll try to get a cab and I'll drop you at your place, if that's what you want,” she said.

“What about you?”

“I just wanted to sleep with you,” she said, and turned her head to look out the window.

“Do you see Tolya much?”

“When I can,” she said. “I see him because Beth is crazy about him, and because if I'm honest, I can talk about you with him.” She picked up her bag and rummaged in it, and when she looked up she was blushing. “I like talking about you. I'm like a teenage girl that way. Also, he takes me out to eat at great places. Politics at my level doesn't pay so hot, you know?”

“I thought you married money. But I'm guessing you wouldn't take anything when you left him, right?”

“Yeah, well, I had my old apartment here, I sublet, I got it back and Tolya gives Beth whatever she wants, so what do I need?”

“Tolya scares me, Lily. He has this vision of himself as a Russian oligarch, he wants to buy more and bigger, no matter what. You think he'd do anything to get what he wanted?”

“Tolya? It's mostly an act. You're talking like a cop.”

“I am a cop,” I said. “Do you remember a party we went to where you danced with Sid somewhere in SoHo? Crosby Street?”