Disturbed Earth

by Reggie Nadelson

  Snow was barreling up the east coast in the direction of New York. The air was cold and damp and mixed with the exhaust from cars and produced a thick dense fog that drifted across the windshield as I drove. New York, a night like this, they could have dumped the kid's body anywhere; there were a million places to dump a body—off City Island up in the Bronx or Gravesend in Brooklyn or the Gowanus Canal; a hundred different places. All around the city were the coastal swamps and wetlands where you could hide anything. The archipelago was laced with secret waterways.

  I thought about the girl's clothes dumped near Coney Island as if someone wanted them found. He, and you always figured it was a he in these cases, could have stashed her anyplace, out by the airports in the reedy water, or Queens or on Long Island. What did he want? There had been no ransom request, no calls, nothing. Had there? I still didn't know, wouldn't know until I saw the parents and the house. What did I expect to find? I was sure May Luca would be dead by now; they almost always were. I fiddled with the radio, got an oldies station, let the noise of the Supremes singing "Baby Love" drown out some of my worry and watched the red brake lights on the car ahead of me blink through the sticky fog.

  11

  The yellow ribbons and the lighted candles were what I saw first when I drove up the dark narrow street; there were always yellow ribbons these days at the site of a disaster. COME HOME, MAY, WE LOVE YOU.

  The ribbons were tied to trees and fences and outside the Luca house, a small bungalow with aluminum siding, was a shrine, the votives on the pavement shuddering in the wind.

  Standing a few yards away, a small crowd had gathered and they muttered and watched and whispered and a few, two elderly women, heads bent, prayed. The shades in the house were drawn, but the door was ajar; a uniformed cop stood outside it. The door was pushed open from inside and a woman with dark hair came out to talk to the cop. Behind her a tall man pulled her back in gently. She put her hands over her face. The door shut.

  Still in my car, I watched, then I pulled away. I wanted to see the house in my own time, my own way. The local guys would resent me. They didn't like outsiders. I had worked a couple of cases in Brighton Beach, which was next door to Sheepshead Bay, and they resented it. Resented it because I spoke the language better than they did. Because I had pulled rank through Sonny Lippert. Because I got in the way of them making collars. The Russians didn't like me much, either, sometimes for the same reasons.

  It was almost ten. I was late for Tolya's dinner. When I got to Johnny Farone's restaurant there was valet parking, and I climbed out of my car and gave the keys to a kid in a forest green jacket with FARONE'S embroidered in gold on his lapel.

  There was a doorman in an overcoat with epaulets and a top hat, also green, who opened the door to Johnny's restaurant.

  Coming in from the bleak night, I was knocked back by the sound of voices laughing and the rich, spicy, meaty smells. I gave my jacket to the coat check girl, and went to the bar, where the far end was jammed with people. On the bar itself was an immense copper vat with a mountain of shaved ice; in it oversized cocktail glasses were chilling upside down.

  Nearest to me a man shaped like a barrel with a mahogany tan sat alone with a cigar a foot long inserted into the O that was his mouth. He wore a pair of tinted aviator glasses, had a receding hairline and smelled of flowery cologne; around his neck was a large gold coin on a thick gold chain. I wondered if Johnny hired him as part of the scenery—a Tony Soprano stand-in.

  The guy was discussing the fine points of Armagnac; the bottles were lined up on the bar and the bartender uncorked one and poured a sample into a snifter the size of a cabbage and handed it to the man with the cigar.

  As I watched the bar scene, a headwaiter in a tux materialized and conducted me to Tolya's table, which was in the middle of the room. There was an empty chair for me and Tolya sat next to his mother. Johnny Farone hovered above her.

  Lara Sverdlova, Tolya's ma, had changed so much I wouldn't have recognized her. In Moscow she had been famous for her acting and her looks. The last time I had seen her was at the family dacha in Nikolina Gora the year I met Tolya's cousin, Svetlana. The party on the lawn in the fading summer light had been like a scene from Chekhov.

  Her skin was crumpled, the eyes thick with cataracts. Part of her face was stiff and I realized she'd had a stroke. A lot of old Russians, friends' parents, had had strokes after things fell apart. It was the post-Communist disease for the old people; paralyzed, those who had believed or learned to believe, could retreat.

  Sverdlova wore a two-piece pink tracksuit, black sneakers and thick white socks; at eighty she was skinny and stiff and her voice was shrill and very loud. Only Russians understood mushrooms she was telling Johnny. Only Russians could cook.

  Her English was fractured, but she insisted on speaking it.

  She liked speaking English, but she couldn't get the levels right and her voice rose. She was proud of the English and said she spoke with a British accent that she learned long ago when there were exchanges between the Royal Shakespeare Company in England and the Moscow Arts Theater.

  She glanced up at Farone, then back at Tolya; she criticized him for his Russian. He had been infected by slang, she said; he had forgotten his language.

  The restaurant was jammed. In the background The Marriage of Figaro played softly over the sound system; in the foreground, the voices collided with each other. Russians, Italians, civilians. Some of the women who had made it out of the neighborhood, and came back only to eat, showed off their sables, which they kept over their shoulders. Their men flashed diamond rings and flicked the lapels of their Armanis.

  You could pick out the women from Manhattan, the kind who studied Zagat and tried every new restaurant and considered a trip to the Brooklyn coast an anthropological expedition; they wore pale little cashmere sweater sets—it was their idea of casual—one sweater tossed over their shoulders. Their shoes had tiny heels. Prim is what they looked; prim and toned and sexy; you wouldn't mind ripping off those little cashmere sweaters and the rest of it and fooling around with them while they kept those little kittenish shoes on. The husbands wore sports jackets with sweaters underneath; they swirled the liquid in their glasses, muttered about "really big Tuscans" and sniffed knowingly as if they'd been to wine drinking school.

  Who was it who told me he'd dated one of the prim women and that she liked it up the ass? I couldn't remember. I knew I should feel embarrassed by my interest. I was a 45-year-old guy and I still wanted to try them all.

  I had slipped into the empty chair at Tolya's table, and when his mother finally stopped harassing Johnny Farone, she seemed to suddenly see me.

  "Artemy Maximovich!" she yelled. "You look older. You still look good, but older. You think you're still a sexy guy? You do? You think the women still fall down when you pass by? Yes? At least you look better than my Tolya who is fat. You know that," she said to Tolya. "You're a fat man, Anatoly Anatoly avich."

  Like a crowd at a tennis match, everyone in the room turned their heads in our direction, then away, then back, drawn by Sverdlova's commentary. Some of them giggled. Johnny scuttled away and returned with a magnum of wine and beckoned the wine waiter, who opened it with plenty of ritual.

  Waiters came and went with platters of food: tiny ravioli stuffed with sauteed foie gras; compact mounds of fettuccini with osetra caviar and creme fraiche; salmon wrapped in prosciutto, sea-bass on grilled fennel, scallops in their own foam. Duck with figs and risotto with crab and cilantro had been added to the menu, which still included braciola and osso bucco. Though he watched his mother uneasily, Tolya, unresisting in the face of the food, ate.

  "That man needs a haircut," Lara Sverdlova yelled in English, glancing at a Russian I vaguely recognized at the next table. "You put on a few pounds yourself Artemy, right?" she said as I passed her the bread.

  Some of the time between bites of food and the wine which she knocked back like Pepsi, Sverdlova switched to Russian. Whenever T
olya shifted his glance away from her, she yelled at him in English, then Russian as if to make sure no one in the room missed a word. The waiter put a discreet finger to his lips. She barely looked up. Someone changed the music on the sound system and turned it up loud so Lara Sverdlova seemed to be yelling in counterpoint to a blast of Verdi.

  She gestured at two couples at the table next to ours. "Look at them, those men could be their grandfathers. You think they look in the mirror? You think they figure the girls really want them? Ha!"

  By now the whole room was fixed on Lara Sverdlova's performance because that's what it was; she had her audience again. She was on stage and we waited for the curtain.

  I looked at Tolya and he looked, for the only time I could remember, embarrassed. I remembered once, when we were out eating somewhere, he told me about his childhood.

  "They were very famous, very establishment," he had said. "True believers and great stars, my father was a director, she was a star. She claimed she was only fifteen when she performed with Paul Robeson during a visit to Moscow. There were rumors they had a fling. Once I went in my pop's closet and found a suit of formal evening clothes, tails, the whole thing, which were never worn. No one ever even wore a tux or tails in Moscow, it was an imperialist idea, but for Robeson, they dressed. Even when we got a big apartment, it didn't help. They fought all the time until the day my father died, and then she couldn't manage without him or the system."

  In the candlelit room, everyone stared. No one knew what to do while Tolya's mother commented on everyone in the room; like a director with a tracking shot, she moved her camera slowly from one table to another. The Manhattan couples finished in a hurry; they sniffed trouble coming, like rain on a humid day.

  Tolya looked helplessly at me, but I had to get away and I got up and practically ran for the bar, where I ordered a glass of red wine, drank it down and asked for another one, then lit a cigarette. The bartender served me, looked away and kept his mouth shut. No smoking laws were for other bars, Johnny always said, laughing.

  From the main room I could hear Lara Sverdlova still shouting, and people scraping their chairs back—you could hear the embarrassment in the scrape of the chairs and the suppressed coughs—and shuffling to the door. I could see them through the archway from the bar. I could see them hurrying out of her line of fire.

  Rolling his eyes, Johnny Farone emerged from the dining room and climbed on the bar stool next to me. The bartender poured a Jack Daniel's for him.

  "Is she nuts or what?" Johnny said nodding in the general direction of Sverdlova. He tossed back his drink. "You like what I did here, the renovations, you like it, Artie?"

  Johnny's place was pretty lavish, the mahogany paneling on the walls, a huge painting of a hippo with birds flitting around it on the wall of the bar.

  "Walton Ford," he said proudly. "Very in," he said, "I bought two. I had this art guy help me. I didn't want them thinking I was just this Guido from Sheepshead Bay, you know? I even got the woman who does the flowrers for Balthazar," Johnny said and gestured at the enormous bouquets in old terracotta pots.

  FARONE'S was embossed in fancy gilt script on the heavy green leather menus, on the matchboxes, printed in gold on the cocktail napkins.

  He was a good guy; Johnny was OK. It was just he couldn't get used to his luck. Part of him always believed he belonged in a dingy shop selling secondhand auto parts. That he had hired a nineteen-year-old chef who turned into a celebrity, that he got Genia to marry him, still made him grin with disbelief.

  Johnny touched my sleeve. "You have anything for me, the stuff we talked about this morning?"

  "Look, Johnny, with the money thing, talk to the guys at the precinct out here, it's probably some local scam, you know?"

  "Gen would kill me if I talked to the cops. I can take the loss, but I'd like to know which bastard is soaking me, Art, and I can't go to the cops. You know what it's like."

  "I'll talk to her."

  "No!"

  I didn't have the heart to tell him what I suspected, so I just mumbled about getting something later in the week.

  "You didn't forget Billy's birthday next month? We're going to do it big. I'm going to turn the restaurant into a fishing pond or something, you know?"

  "I'll be there, sure, I'd like that."

  "You look upset, man. Is it about that little Luca girl? I heard. Everyone out here is praying for her."

  "You know her?"

  "I think I met the mother once." He shrugged. "You figure they'll find her or what?"

  "Where's Genia?"

  "She's on her way. You'll eat with us?"

  "I already ate with Sverdloff."

  "But you'll wait for her?"

  "I'll wait."

  I looked at my watch. There wasn't any point going back to the Luca house for a while; the place would be jammed up with people.

  "Oh Christ," I said, and Johnny looked at me and said, "What's wrong?"

  I had forgotten about dinner with Maxine. I just forgot. I called her and told her I was running late. She didn't sound happy. It was after eleven.

  Johnny glanced at the door. "About the missing money, Gen says if we stir things up, it's bad for business. Maybe I shouldn't have asked you, maybe I should just take the losses, you know, eat it up, it's what they do out here running a cash business. We're doing great, I mean maybe she's right but it's eating my liver, Artie, someone being greedy. I mean I treat them all really good, you know? I got a health care plan." He lowered his voice. "I love her, Artie," he said plaintively and I saw Johnny was a guy afraid of losing his wife.

  There was a commotion in the dining room. Tolya and his mother appeared in the archway that led from the main room to the bar, arguing. Tolya got her coat and wrapped it around her and, glancing at me, half carried her out of the front door to the restaurant. I got off the stool where I sat and followed them into the parking lot.

  "It's OK," Tolya said to me, bundling his mother into the waiting limo. "Thanks for coming, Artyom. I'll call you." He disappeared into the back seat with his mother and slammed the door.

  I went back into the bar and sat next to Johnny and drank some of the wine the bartender set in front of me.

  "What are you two talking about?"

  Genia's voice came from behind me. It was soft but nervous. She kissed Johnny, then me, three times, Russian style.

  "How's Billy?" I said.

  "Fine," she said. "Great. He's wonderful. He's with his friend Stevie Gervasi for the weekend. Steve that comes from a nice family, good people, wealthy, educated. They went upstate."

  "So he left this morning? Early?" I said.

  "Yes, this morning."

  She smoothed back her hair and took off her mink jacket.

  "Don't you know when he left?"

  "I know about my boy, Artemy," she said very softly. "I spend all my time with my boy, I know everything."

  12

  Genia watched her reflection in the mirror behind the bar.

  My cousin's name was Evgenia Borisova Shimkin and she'd been a dowdy woman when I first met her, dowdy and depressed, her shoulders hunched forward, a shopping bag always in her hand; now she was vain. She was Gen Farone, Genny to her women friends.

  She looked in the mirror and preened, sleek as a cat as her tongue checked her beautiful white teeth for stray lipstick stains. She had them fixed after she married Johnny. Her hair was short, red and slicked back. She wore black leather pants and a yellow cashmere sweater and high-heeled boots and diamond earrings; like the teeth, Johnny had given her the earrings.

  When I was a kid, Russian women all yearned for diamond earrings, even my mother. They were a token of a life these women had not quite given up on even in the drabbest years of the Soviet empire.

  My mother's earrings were very small, very dull, with smudgy stones, but they were diamonds given to her by her husband, proof of attention and romance and she wore them even after I got her nicer stones. In the nursing home in Israel, she w
ore the earrings. She slept in them. She would be buried in them.

  Genia put one arm around Johnny's shoulders and whispered into his ear and smiled and glanced at herself again in the mirror behind him.

  "So how's Billy?" I said.

  "You asked already. Billy's fine," Johnny said. "He's a big boy. He's OK, right, hon? In English, please. Talk English, OK?"

  "Please, both of you, I say already, he goes to Stevie Gervasi, this kid in big house on the corner. You said to him, it's fine, you can walk over this morning yourself to Stevie's house. You said." In English Genia had never lost her accent.

  She was a lot edgier than her husband. She shied away from any involvement with the cops, even me. In her Russian mind, the police were the enemy; she felt if a case didn't involve her husband or her child or the business, she had no interest in it.

  I wasn't crazy about Genia; she was skittish and brittle; with me she was also wary. I was pretty sure she had come to America illegally and she knew I knew, and though she was married to Johnny and a citizen, it never left her. If it wasn't for Billy, I told myself, I wouldn't bother. I wouldn't see Genia. There was nothing that connected us. I couldn't remember my father mentioning her. My mother, even when she had some memory left, couldn't place her. Or maybe I lied to myself and I needed her, this last frail connection to another life.

  Out of nowhere I noticed something about her I'd never seen before. She took a cigarette out of the pack, closed it up, folding the foil over the top the way I did. She held the smoke like I did, her finger twisted oddly around it. For a second it seemed odd, both of us with the same eccentric gesture.

  I watched Genia greet a customer. She was effusive and charming. Underneath, she was a frightened woman, but who wouldn't be if you grew up the way we did? She'd had it a lot worse than me. Her old man had been a Red Army hero but her grandfather died in a gulag during the purges; for years the whole family were Enemies of the State. Genia's mother, she once told me, had whispered to her about it when she was little. Genia had escaped, first from Russia, then from the brown melancholy of the old house in Brighton Beach. She wasn't going back.