“I just didn’t want her to take you away from me,” Billy said.
There was no place left for us to go. Billy fell asleep in the car. I drove away from the diner, back to the house because there was no other place I could think of. If we crossed Staten Island, one of the Russians might see us, someone connected to Vera or the beauty salon; I didn’t know if Sonny was still holding Stanley Shank. Sonny wouldn’t let me off the hook either, not this time.
Johnny and Genia were probably home or on their way, but Genia didn’t want her own kid. And Luda was still missing. I wasn’t sure now I could even get Billy to the airport. For all I knew Lippert might have put the word out to pick him up. But if I got him on a plane, and to Florida, then what?
At best, Billy would be locked up in the hospital ward. I couldn’t send him there. Anyway I knew he wouldn’t go to Florida. He had never meant to go back. I couldn’t keep him here for long, I couldn’t take him home.
Maxine was coming back the next day to our apartment over by the river, and I’d be there waiting. Somehow, I’d be there.
The onions we ate at the diner made me feel so sick, I was sweating and light-headed and I felt dehydrated, like there was no water in me at all, like I was dried out, dried up.
Around me, there was more traffic. People packed in cars and vans, some with boat stuff on the roof, kids inside giggling or hitting each other, all of them on their way to beaches or barbecues. In the street, a kid reeled around on a skateboard. The sun was high and hot. You could hear music from people’s backyards. My mouth was dry as dust.
I was on my own on this huge island, part domesticated, part wild, with its rows and rows and rows of bungalows and mobile homes, semi-detached houses, condos and mansions, the lawns mown, or scruffy, the strip malls baking in the summer heat, and the swamps and creeps, garbage dumps, bird sanctuaries, oceans, bays, ports, docks.
In the most isolated part of New York, there was plenty of wide-open space where you could lose yourself, but I felt trapped. Billy had wanted it that way. He fixed it up to get me here with him where we’d be alone.
I drove until I got back to the house, and thought about calling Hank Provone. I could talk to Hank. Hank would never refuse, but if I called him it meant putting him in deep.
In front of the mobile home and not thinking, I slammed on the brakes and it jolted Billy awake. He rubbed his eyes, yawned, got out of the car, and stumbled inside where, like a little kid, he fell onto the bed in the bedroom and went back to sleep.
I left the bedroom door open, and sat at the kitchen table. Billy wasn’t going to hurt me. Even if he could, he wouldn’t hurt me. He knew I wouldn’t leave him or turn him in.
In the little house near the water, we were alone and a while later he came out of the bedroom and sat with me at the kitchen table and told me straight out that it wasn’t him who beat up the kid in Brooklyn with a skateboard on Tuesday. I asked him about the homeless boy in Chinatown, but Billy told me no, that wasn’t him either.
I couldn’t ask about the baby in the freezer, not then, not yet, maybe not ever, because if he had done it, if he had killed the baby and put her in the freezer – if he had put her there before she was dead – what would I do?
I couldn’t just throw Billy away. I wouldn’t let them lock him up again. If you loved someone, you took care of them. Wasn’t that all that mattered?
I loved him, and I held onto that, taking a last deep drag on my cigarette. Billy was bent slightly forward, whistling to himself, tunelessly like he sometimes did. He looked up at me and grinned because he knew he couldn’t carry a tune and neither could I. We had agreed we were both shitty singers. We laughed about it again now. Then Billy yawned and said he was going to get some more sleep. Somehow he never got enough sleep. Growing fast, maybe, he said. He ruffled my hair as if he was the grown-up and then went to the bedroom.
I started making plans for where I could take Billy if I couldn’t get back to the city safe, and he wouldn’t go back to the school in Florida. Then I heard the sound of car tires on the gravel in front of the house.
33
“Where’s the boy? Where’s Billy?” said Hank Provone who got out of his car, followed by Tolya Sverdloff climbing down from his Hummer.
They were a crazy-looking posse. In a giant pair of red and green flowered swim trunks still wet from a dip in the ocean, his belly hanging over them, a pink towel around his neck, Hank wore thick white socks and big white sneakers. I wondered if he had an ankle holster with a weapon under the bulky socks.
Sverdloff looked like he hadn’t slept for a long time. Heavy bags hung under his eyes and his shoulders seemed to slump under his own weight.
“Billy’s inside asleep,” I said to Hank.
“I’m sorry, Artie. I had to bring Tolya because of the little Russian girl,” Hank said. “He told me and I had to bring him.”
“Sure,” I said.
I expected Sverdloff’s fury, but he just put his hand on my shoulder.
“Are you OK?”
“I don’t know.”
“We found Luda.”
“She’s dead.”
“No,” Hank said. “She’s not. She’s not dead. Sit down,” he said and I stumbled onto a plastic lawn chair then got up and sat on a redwood bench that put me between Tolya and the front door of the house.
“Tell me why you’re here,” I said to Tolya.
“I came to see Billy. To help you,” he said. “Do you want to go get him?”
“You can’t help me this way.”
Hank said, “I tried calling you on your cell and the landline out here, I couldn’t get any answer.”
“I thought you disconnected the phone.”
“No,” he said. “Lily Hanes called me, she said she knew we had seen each other recently. I told her I thought you could be here. Do you want me to stay, Artie?” Hank said. “I’ll do what you want me to, whatever you need.”
“One thing.”
“Yeah, anything.”
I dug in my pocket for a scrap of paper with Vera Gorbachev’s address on it and gave it to Hank.
“Try to find out how this woman is connected to a guy named Stan Shank or his family in Brooklyn, ex-cop.”
Hank looked at it. “Gorbachev?”
“No relation.”
He nodded. “You know how to get hold of me,” Hank said.
“Yeah. Of course. Thank you. Hey, Hank?”
“Yeah, Artie?”
“Yesterday, how come you left my place? You took Billy there and left before I got back.”
“Lily came over,” Hank said.
“I don’t mean that, I know you didn’t leave Billy alone, but what made you need to go?”
“Don’t ask me, Artie. Just say I wasn’t comfortable around the boy. So, you need me, just call.” He turned and got into his car and pulled away.
“What about Luda?” I said to Tolya, when Hank had gone.
“Valentina is with her,” Tolya said. “Lily also. Artyom, what made you come to my place last night? You knew, didn’t you? You knew something happened to Luda.”
It was a picture in Billy’s phone that had made me run to Tolya’s late the night before. The picture showed Luda posing at the toy store with one of the dolls that looked like her. On her face was a look of pure terror.
“Lily’s with Luda where?”
“St Vincent’s,” Tolya said.
“God, what happened?”
“It’s not completely clear, Luda doesn’t want to talk, but it seems she left the house last night because the kid – Billy – got on the phone with her and scared her about her being not exactly legal here, and said he would help her if she met him. He told her to take a taxi. Luda just left the house and tried to get a cab but she didn’t have any money. She’s ten, Artyom, and she’s lived most of her life in a fucking Russian orphanage and now she’s on the New York streets wearing shorts and flip-flops and it’s dark and she doesn’t have any money.”
/> “Let’s walk,” I said. “Just up to the water. I want to smoke.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s asleep, I told you. He’s not going anywhere,” I said, but I went and got the keys out of the car.
There was a rough plank bench near the water, and we sat on it.
“She cut someone, Artyom. This is almost worst part.”
“Who?”
“Luda.”
“Christ, tell me.”
“When she goes out, she takes only one thing, a knife from the kitchen. This is how Russian children are after a whole life in orphanage.”
“How did you know she took it?”
“I left it on the cutting board in kitchen, I was slicing a lemon, I left the room, when I came back, the knife was gone. I knew exactly what knife as soon as I heard what happened. Maybe I knew even before.”
“What made you think about it?”
“I could see this fury in her, I saw it, and I heard it,” said Tolya. “I could read in her the things she never talked about, the orphanage, the kids who died from radiation poisoning after Chernobyl, the kids held hostage and killed by terrorists at the Moscow theater and in Beslan. Her own twin sister. All they have left is rage, and they feed on it, and they will grow up only to think about revenge.”
“It’s what Billy said.”
“He knew. He understood her.” Tolya lifted himself heavily off the bench. “We have to take Billy.”
“Linda took the knife for protection?”
Tolya pulled the cigar case out of his shirt pocket and lit up a skinny little cigar. “I don’t know if it was for protection or to somehow hurt Billy, or just because she was so afraid.”
“I see.”
“Luda was alone on the streets most of the night, and there was a boy, and she cut him,” said Tolya.
A cop had found Luda curled up on the sidewalk in the doorway of a shop in the Village that sold Russian antiques and books. She said she read the sign on the awning and felt comforted by the Cyrillic letters and was waiting for someone to come. She didn’t speak much, not to the cop who couldn’t understand her.
She still had the knife. The cop saw there was blood on it and on her hand. He didn’t know what to do with her because she was so small – he thought she was seven or eight – so he picked her up and put her in the patrol car and took her to St Vincent’s, which was a couple of blocks away.
He called into his station house and found out that a woman who lived on Thirteenth Street reported a crazy little girl had attacked her son with a knife, a girl who didn’t speak English. Her son had gone out very early, before it was light, carrying a basketball on his way to practice before a game. He came home bleeding and his mother took him to St Vincent’s, where they sewed him up and let him go. The police were notified.
In another part of the hospital Luda lay on a bed, not speaking. There was no one who spoke Russian. She had on pink shorts and shirt and the red flip-flops. Her legs were bruised and no one could tell if it was from fighting with the boy with the basketball or from stumbling up the curbs.
Eventually a Russian nurse from Washington Heights arrived, and before she put her bag down – it was a huge fake Vuitton bag that she used to carry her lunch in, she said, hastily – she was taken to Luda.
The nurse – her American name was Michelle, she said – stayed with Luda until she sat up, drank some milk and started talking. She was a good listener. She sat on the edge of Luda’s bed, and Luda talked to her. Luda told her Valentina’s name but Val wasn’t listed and neither was Tolya. It took hours to find them, but then Val arrived at the hospital with Lily.
Somehow, Luda had met up with Billy. After she left Tolya’s place, wearing her shorts, carrying a shopping bag from the toy store where she kept the knife, she started walking. Somewhere, she didn’t remember where, she heard people on the street talking Russian. She asked for directions. They asked her if she wanted a ride and she said yes. It was raining.
Luda knew you weren’t supposed to go in strangers’ cars, but the people looked OK, a nice young man and woman, and Luda had her knife, so she went. They took her to Billy, who was waiting for her on the corner of Broadway near my loft. The nice man and woman waited until Luda got out of the car, and when they saw Billy put his arms around her, drove off.
Billy complimented Luda on the way she had come by herself and said he had something to show her. He took her hand. She yanked it away. She was scared of him, but he promised to help her and she thought this meant she wouldn’t have to go back to Russia.
“I just have to show you something,” he said in Russian. “I have to show you what happens in America to people who break the law.”
It was Friday evening just before I got back from Sonny’s. People were in a hurry. The film crew was milling around. Everyone was preoccupied, and if anyone saw the two kids, they barely paid attention to a boy and his little sister.
Clutching her shopping bag, Luda followed Billy into the alley where he opened the humpback freezer. He showed it to her. He showed her the dead baby girl. He told her it was what happened to bad kids. It was how it was, he said, and she looked and then she ran. She ran as fast as she could, not turning around, not knowing where she was going, just ran.
For hours she sat in the doorway of the Russian antique shop. Maybe she fell asleep. Much later, early in the morning, in fact, a boy with a basketball stopped to see if she was OK, and when she saw him, she thought it was Billy and she ran at him and cut his hand with her knife.
“How do you know she was telling the truth?” I said to Tolya. “Maybe she was screwed up about what was happening, maybe she saw the story about the dead baby on TV and constructed her story.”
“She was gone out of the apartment before it was on TV,” Tolya said. “Her English isn’t good enough for TV, but she was already gone.”
“Maybe Billy just heard about it and told her to scare her. Does anyone know who the baby in the freezer was? Is there anything on it? You talked to Lippert?”
“Yes. There was a report of a baby taken from a carriage outside some Korean deli downtown. Canal Street area. Woman went in to get cigarettes and left her in the baby carriage for a second. A lot of people were around. A second, she said. She left her baby for a second and then she was gone,” Tolya said. “Artyom, it was Billy. He showed Luda the infant in that freezer before anyone knew the baby was in there. You have to know that.”
“How do you know Luda wasn’t just scared? She could say anything.”
“Billy didn’t want her getting between you and him, I saw that the first day. You were the only thing he had, and she was there, and he saw that you paid attention to her.” Tolya hesitated. “He has no conscience, Artie. He doesn’t have some disease, or fucked-up genes, he has no conscience. I told you once I thought he was like this country, beautiful and brilliant but unaware of anyone else.”
“You’re wrong,” I said. “You’re wrong.”
“I don’t know how this happens in someone,” said Tolya. “But I can see this in him.”
I thought about my nephew, the good-looking boy with the hair falling in his face, and the way he laughed and how the laces of his sneakers trailed all over the ground.
“Where’s the proof? Except for Luda’s story, where’s the evidence?” I was desperate. I didn’t want to know. Go away, I thought, but I didn’t say anything, just waited for Tolya to finish.
“Luda had a picture of it,” Tolya said. “Luda had a little cell phone she got at the toy store Wednesday night, we set it up so she could call us, or take pictures or just have fun with it. She was there. Luda was there in the alleyway, looking in the freezer and Billy was there, and she took a picture. The time is marked on it. I have a copy if you need to see.”
34
Billy was gone when we went back inside the house. He had slipped out while Tolya and I were sitting on the bench, talking. I’d pretty much known if I turned my back, he’d go, and Tolya knew, too. I
let Billy go because I didn’t want to believe what he had done, and I didn’t know what to do.
My car was still in the driveway. I knew he couldn’t have gone far. I glanced out of the window of the house at the water. For a second it crossed my mind that maybe Billy just walked in, let the water into his mouth and nose, sucked it up, drifted down slowly. But it would have been tough for him to get to the water without me seeing him. Billy’s stuff was still in the bedroom.
I went out into the yard.
“He’s not here,” I said to Tolya.
“Do you know where he is?”
“I’ll look,” I said.
“I’ll go with you.”
“I think I have to do this myself. It will be OK, Tolya, I promise. I’ll do what I have to. I can manage, I swear. Trust me, OK? Go home to Luda and Val.”
“And to Lily, who is so nice to all of us,” Tolya said. “She helps my Valentina, she helps Luda. Val loves her. She is so good for us.”
“And me,” I said.
“All of us. I think if she didn’t belong to you, I would try to marry her,” said Tolya.
“Yes.” I started for my car, and then I said to him, “Tolya, you keep a weapon with you? You told me once you had one.”
“You really want to know?” He tried to smile.
“I want you to give it to me, please.”
He went to his car, opened the passenger door, leaned in got out a gun and gave it to me. I took it, put it in my waistband, put my jacket on so the gun didn’t show.
“You’ll be OK?” Tolya said.
“Yeah, I’m fine. I just feel naked without a gun, you know, I’m a cop, right?”
“Sure,” he said.
I patted him on the arm because I didn’t know what else to do, and then I got into my car, and backed out of the drive, watching Tolya who just stood there, hunched over a little, a cigar in his hand, looking at me.
About half a mile from the house, in the woods near the water, I found Billy sitting on the ground, hidden from the road. He told me that he had tripped and caught his foot in some weeds.
“I knew you’d come, Artie,” he said. “I waited for you.”
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