Red Hook (9 page)

He looked out of the window.

“If you want to talk, Sid, talk. Or I can call the guy who's already running this case, or you can use the phone number I gave you when you're ready, or I'll just
leave it alone, but make up your mind. I owe you. I know that. I don't want to drop you in any shit, but please, give me a break.”

“I'm sorry.” He picked up his own mug, and removed the teabag.

“Did you know who he was before he was murdered? The homeless guy, the guy you said asked you for money? You recognized him?”

“I suspected. You knew that.”

“Yes. Is this still a case of some Russian hood killing him in your place, or is that idea up for grabs, too. Does he have a name? Did he?”

Sid sipped his tea. “Could be.”

“Could be? You're telling me the facts are somehow relative, or that they change depending on the way you see them?”

“Often,” he said. “I saw you looking at my picture of Ricky Tae. You introduced us, you know.” He smiled. “You brought him along to a party all those years ago, it was you who introduced us.”

“I went to a lot of parties.”

“You don't remember,” Sid said.

“You have his picture because we were all at a party together once?” I put down the mug and got up.

“Something like that.”

It was like wading through a swamp, but I knew Sid would shut up if I pushed him too hard, shut up or trip in the tangle of his own memories and drown.

I said, gently as I could, “Do you want to tell me anything else about it, the dead guy, the reason you knew him, who he was?”

“I'll tell you about the dead man. I owe you that. I called you. Maybe I'm just getting old, thinking about my own death. Perhaps I made a mistake,” he said. “Maybe I should get some sleep.”

“I don't think you make mistakes like that, you know.” I got up. “I don't think you need sleep and I don't think you're senile. OK? Sid?”

“Give me a cigarette, would you?” he hesitated and the room was heavy with his indecision, and I tossed him the pack.

I saw his hand was trembling and he was watching me, making a judgment, sizing me up, waiting until he had the smoke lit and the nicotine in his system.

He sat down again, then leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, face in his hands. He was going to talk.

I'd seen it before. People hesitated. They waited. They called you and called you again. They filled up time with useless talk, trying to get a fix on you, trying to decide what to say, what they could say, processing information. Sometimes they waited so long, you thought you'd go crazy or fall asleep. I had worked cases where I kept asking for cups of coffee just to keep the witnesses moving, just to keep myself from nodding off, keep my eyes open.

I was tense. Sweating. It was hot. From the river came the mournful hoot of a tug. Voices somewhere close by. People out all night coming home. A woman laughed, raucous, shrill. Then it was silent.

I waited.

*

“OK.”

Five minutes had passed when neither of us spoke, and then: “OK.”

It was all he said at first but it broke the silence, and Sid's face, a strange dull ashy color, came to life a little. He got up, sat down, got up again, went into the kitchen, came back with a glass of beer, then sat again. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, a cigarette in one hand, the glass in the other.

“You're wondering if I slept with Ricky Tae, aren't you?”

I smoked.

“It doesn't matter any more,” he said. “That doesn't have anything to do with this. That's another story. There's always another story, Artie.” He reached over to his desk and picked up a Russian doll, elaborately painted with swirls of color and gold and silver paint; Sid started pulling it apart, removing the dolls inside, lining them up.

“Always more stories inside each other, like these Russian dollies,” Sid said. “Did you have matrioshka like this when you were a child? Or is it just a cliché notion of Russia, the dolls, the hidden stories? Perhaps it's just that,” he said, half to himself.

I crushed out my cigarette and lit another one. I had never had wooden dolls and this, being here, waiting for Sid, gave me the creeps; it was like being in Russia itself where people told you stories instead of the truth or even the facts because they had lost the habit or couldn't tell the difference or, most of all, because they liked stories better.

I kept my voice even. “Then tell me this story,” I said.

“The first McKay, Tobias, he was called, came to the US around the time of the Revolution. He was a free black man, he was a painter, he learned his trade in London in the 1770s and somehow he got here down through Halifax, I think, Nova Scotia, I mean, and worked in Boston and bought a newspaper in Massachusetts, then migrated down here to New York. We always worked in the newspaper business, on my father's side, but my father also made money. He liked money,” Sid said. “I mean he liked being wealthy and he liked the actual feel of coin, do you understand?” Sid picked up his glass, examined the beer in it, then set it down again. “He used to give me silver dollars for my birthday. He was a born businessman, and he knew that his being very light-skinned made it possible. He could pass, you see. He could do business where other black men could not.”

Sid got up and went to the table and ran his hand down the line of photographs and picked them up, one at a time, inspecting the pictures of his family, then turned back to me.

“In my family color was everything. It was what mattered, you understand,” Sid said. “There's a point to this, Artie. There is. I promise you. I loved coming out here to the docks when I was a kid. It was out of bounds. We lived in a big brownstone in Bed Stuy Gardens where there were whole streets of rich Negro families, and all this, the waterfront, was forbidden. My dad who owned newspapers also owned warehouses here near the docks. He passed. He did business here as a white man.
You'd be surprised how many people got on by passing,” Sid said and paused.

“Go on.”

“He did business with Italian mobsters and Jewish gangsters and the Democratic machine, and the city of New York, which were the same thing, and then he went home to our house and was a proud Negro man. He said that of himself. His own language. Once, when I was little, he brought me to the waterfront, but people looked at him funny, what was he doing with a little black kid and after that it was forbidden. I wasn't allowed. But when I could I took my bike and came here alone. I need some water,” he said. “You?”

“Sid?”

The beer finished, Sid went to the kitchen, got a glass of water, returned, sat down and drank it thirstily.

“Artie, there was a Soviet freighter that ran aground not far from here and it changed everything for me. It must have been late February 1953, just before Stalin died, a few weeks, not more, it came into the channel, the Ambrose Light wasn't working right, or the pilot who went on board and was supposed to guide the ship into the harbor was dead drunk, or the buoys, they were called Red Nuns, got screwed up and it was foggy as hell, but the ship ran aground.

“Do you remember? No, of course not, you weren't born, but then Stalin died, and there must have been terrible confusion, nobody knew what to do or who was in charge. It was quite a famous story.
Red Dawn,
the ship was called. Stuck on the coast of America. Stranded in an alien world while the Soviet Union rocked on its
axis. It reminds me of Sergei Krikalyov. Do you remember? The Soviet cosmonaut who was up in space in 1991 when the USSR collapsed. He left his country and while he was away it disappeared and he went on stranded in space. It was like that in 1953.

There wasn't any money to send the ship back, the USSR was in chaos. It was the height of the Red Scare. McCarthy times. People petrified of Communists. I knew kids who thought they had horns, Artie. There was a TV show on Friday nights.
I Led Three Lives,
it was called. The story of Richard Carlson, a brave American agent who went among the Commies, and I said to my dad, but they were smiling, Daddy, could they be Commies if they smiled? Wouldn't they have slanted eyes? I knew Catholic children who were made to pray for the souls of the little Commie children. People were terrified. Terrorized. And then this ship.” Sid got up restlessly, then sat down, crossed and uncrossed his legs.

“I remember people came out to stare at it,” he said. “Normally they would have sent the ship back, but the papers weren't in order; this was the depth of the Cold War: the ship was quarantined. We could see sailors on deck staring back at us. I was mesmerized. I was fifteen years old. It went on for weeks. I heard someone took a boat out and sent up some food. Sometimes you could hear them singing on the ship. There were all kinds of rumors. Rumors about sailors jumping ship.

It was only three or four hundred yards, easy to swim. Hard to remember, but there were no computers, of course, no cellphones, nothing. Eventually, the ship was sent home, but people said some of the Russian sailors
were hiding around Red Hook. No one knew how many, rumors went wild, two, eight, ten of them. People wanted to help them; maybe they thought they could save a few guys from the Communist terror.

“I remember a kind of luncheonette where I would hang out and listen. I must have been a strange little Negro boy, tall, skinny and curious, and then someone pointed out two guys sitting in a booth in the back. Russians. They really had escaped. They loved the food, BLTs, grilled cheese sandwiches and fries.”

“Come on, Sid,” I said. “Who was he? The dead guy?”

“Let me finish. I made friends with one sailor, he was only sixteen, and not much older than I was, and he said his name was Meler. Strange names they had. He said it stood for Marx Engels Lenin Electrification Revolution, poor old Meler, we laughed at his name. Everyone brought him food, he was a runty guy, almost stunted. He would have been very young during the War, probably never had enough to eat as a kid, he was so small. Everyone fed him, I remembered that. The ship was gone. Meler and the other guy disappeared, went to ground in Brooklyn. I spent years looking for him, or Meler. I was obsessed. I had to know what happened.”

“You found him?”

“Excuse me,” Sid said and got up and, limping more heavily now, went towards the bathroom.

“I first came to Red Hook because of it,” Sid said. “Because of Meler. I thought he might have settled around here. I was going to write a book, will write it,
it connects me with everything in my life. It became the whole point of my life, the language, the Russian thing, the romance of it. It was the reason I became a reporter, the reason I went to live in the former USSR for a while. All of it. I suppose it was the reason I was interested in you,” he said, and half smiled at me.

I said, “Who was the man?”

“The sailor?”

“The dead man.”

“I saw the sailor a few times. Meler. You couldn't miss him. He was still a runt. Filled out, though. Stocky. Those dark blue eyes that were too big for the face and popped out at you, you couldn't miss them. Once I thought I saw him in one of the bars around here, and someone said they thought he had moved out to Brighton Beach. I thought I spotted him in the 1970s, I think, out in Brighton Beach. In a Russian video store.”

“You're sure?”

“No.”

“You looked for him after that?”

“For a while, but time passed, and I was in a different place, and I stopped looking. I suppose I let him down. Maybe I let him down, but I stopped looking.”

“Let's talk about the dead man. The man in the inlet. The man whose death you called in after you found the body. Isn't that it? You found the body? You knew his name?”

“Earl,” Sid said. “He was my cousin, or my half brother. I was never sure, not at first.”

*

Sid made more coffee, but he kept talking now, you couldn't stop him. I smoked and listened.

“When I was a child I was never sure who he was; he might have been the illegitimate child of an uncle, I thought. He found me somehow at school one day and said we were related, and I could see it, of course, even then. He lived out near Coney Island. ‘Nigger Town', they called it. Under the boardwalk. People set up shacks and lived there, they lived there full time, I mean, they slept, washed, they cooked, they hung out laundry on lines, whole communities of poor black people,” Sid said. “No one mentioned it, of course, not in my house. People kept secrets in that generation. Children were never told. No one discussed it if there was anything that seemed shameful, cancer, anything unconventional. C, they said, if someone had cancer. They whispered it like a curse. Shh, C. We had three suicides in one generation and no one mentioned it. Maybe I became a reporter because it was supposed to be a job that was about the facts, maybe even the truth, you know? In the beginning that's what I thought. These days people just make it up, they manipulate it, you know? It's why I quit, why I left.” He was rambling again.

“So your cousin?”

“No.”

“What was he?”

“He was my half brother,” Sid said. “I only found out many years later than when she was a girl, my mother had an affair with one of my dad's workers, a poor boy who delivered groceries. She was only sixteen. They wouldn't let her marry him. The child was put up for
adoption, and no one ever said anything. Somehow Earl did find out and he found me, but he didn't speak about it. He made friends with me. It was with Earl that I spent my time hanging around Red Hook and the docks with the Russians who ate grilled cheese sandwiches.” Sid smiled.

“Earl was my idol. He was tough and funny and he wasn't afraid of anything, but he didn't have anything to lose, I guess. He would pick me up after school, and I gave him my bike and told my parents I lost it. I got a new one, a blue Schwinn, and we'd ride over to Red Hook, Earl and I, and sit and watch the ships and the longshoremen and the way they unloaded the huge freighters with cargo in the huge nets. We made friends with the Russian sailors, especially Meler. Then he disappeared and after that, Earl stopped showing up and I lost track of him. Maybe my parents found out. I don't know. I never asked. I couldn't tell my parents I'd been riding my bike to Red Hook, that I'd given my bike to Earl, they'd have killed me. I was frightened that somehow they'd punish him. You have no idea how rigid this society was where I grew up, there were rules for everything. There were pictures of Earl in our house, and once when I asked a cousin who was my age, she played dumb. Or was dumb. Mary Eleanor, she was a tiny girl with a freckled face and bobbed hair and patent leather pumps. She knew. I could see it on her mean face that she'd heard all about Earl, but she wouldn't tell. Our house was full of secrets. Secrets were only good for one thing, you know?” Sid hoisted himself out of his chair.