Disturbed Earth

by Reggie Nadelson

  "Yes."

  "I care about Billy. I care very much about the boy, more than you understand. That's as much as I feel like telling you now," he said. "You want to do business with me on this at all? Because I'll be staying with it one way or the other."

  I said, "Probably not."

  "Then it was a mistake to call you. I'm sorry." He stood up and walked to the door and opened it.

  Without knowing why, I said, "You grew up in Moscow, didn't you?"

  He nodded. "You can't hear it?"

  "No. I just wondered."

  "You neither," he said. "I took lessons to lose the accent I wanted so bad to get rid of all of it, you know, I wanted to dump the past. I couldn't until the old man died, but God how much I wanted that."

  I wanted to say: "Is he yours? Is Billy your son?" I didn't, though; I knew he'd clam up. Instead I just said, "What do you want?"

  "Give me until tomorrow," he said. "Please."

  "Is that what Genia asked you?"

  "Yes, but it's not the same reason. She's scared of the cops."

  "But you're not."

  Zeitsev said, "Not in the same way."

  "What way?"

  "Like I said, I'm scared of the way they fuck up. Look at how they let May Luca die. It was a simple case," he said. "I'm scared of the way they have a sense of entitlement, some of them, like a separate government, not accountable, at least out here." He gestured to the window and the coast beyond it. "This place is changing," Zeitsev added. "There are people who want to cash out before it becomes a complete little theme park, a tourist attraction, you know, see the old time Russkis, eat the pirogi and the borscht, see the hookers and criminals. The Russians move out, they move over to Mill Basin or Manhattan Beach and then there are people who don't like them, us, moving into their neighborhoods. To them, we're like blacks." He grinned. "You could call us black Russians."

  "Which people?"

  "I think you know."

  I thought of Belle Harbor and Gerritsen Beach and the small tight insular communities a few miles away where a lot of cops lived.

  Zeitsev said, "Have you seen the clothes from the beach?"

  I nodded.

  "I saw them, too. I know they were Billy's," he said. "I know it was the jacket you gave him."

  "You knew?"

  "He told me about the jacket. He was very proud of it. He loves you. He told me he wished you were his dad."

  I said, "When did you know?"

  "When Genia called me. She called earlier. She called again after she saw you."

  Genia had called him first, she called Zeitsev before I got to her. How did she know? What made her think Billy was missing?

  "How the hell did you see the clothes? They're in a forensics lab. No one gets in."

  Zeitsev shrugged. "I have friends."

  From my car I called Sonny Lippert to tell him what had happened; there was no answer. I tried his office, then his apartment. I tried his ex-wife. If the story broke, if it got out that the blood-soaked clothes did not belong to May Luca, all hell would break loose. There would be accusations of police incompetence. Worse, there would be the fear. It would spread. Mostly, though, I needed help finding Billy.

  I was ready to betray Genia; so what, I thought, trying to reassure myself. So what? The kid was missing. I had to find him. I didn't know what the Far ones' agenda was; Genia was terrified; Johnny was drunk; Zeitsev was unreliable. If I had to lie to Genia, tell her I was working the case myself, I'd lie. Where's Lippert, I thought. Where was he? I called again. Then, driving away from Brighton Beach, I thought: maybe someone close to Billy wants him dead.

  19

  Mrs. Farone opened the door before I rang the bell. She had been watching out of the window, or she knew I was coming. I followed her into the living room. I sat down on a chair without her inviting me.

  "Where's Billy?" I said.

  "You were already here. We already talked."

  "Yesterday I dropped off something Johnny sent you. Now I'm here to ask about Billy."

  "Another cop. It's always cops. Billy is OK," she said. "My Johnny said he went skiing with his friend."

  "What do you mean, another cop? Someone was here today already?"

  "I'm talking about my husband. Bastard," she said, spitting it out.

  I said, "Yeah, I heard."

  She was defensive. "Who from? Who did you hear from?"

  "What's the difference?"

  "I never knew nothing about him. You hear me? Just ask what you got to ask," she said. "Then go."

  "Billy didn't go upstate. He's gone. He's disappeared." I watched carefully when I said it. Her face remained expressionless.

  I moved closer to her and looked in her eyes and they were dead and flat and cold as fish.

  "You're not interested?"

  She said, "Sure I'm interested. Sure. I know this boy, he likes to go for a walk or on his bike by himself. I'm his grandmother, I know him. I know he's OK. He just went for a bike ride. OK? You hear me?" Her voice rose, shrill, panicky, irritated.

  "Where does Billy play? Who are his friends?"

  She hesitated. She turned to look out of the window as if there was something that required her attention.

  "Listen to me, lady, Billy is missing. Tell me whatever you know or a lot more cops will be stopping by."

  "I don't know nothing."

  I leaned so close I could smell the sweet stink of the vanilla perfume.

  "How is he with you?" I said. "Is he ever violent or passive, shy? He likes burgers, he plays ball, he visits friends, what? Just tell me something that could help me find him," I was enraged now. "Or don't you want me to find him? You know he's gone but you like it better this way, it's less trouble, is that it?"

  She swore under her breath. I knew that as soon as I left, she'd call Johnny. I wanted her to call. He'd go crazy when he heard about Billy from her and she'd get under his skin and maybe Johnny would blow up and I'd learn something. I planted the land-mine in her and I'd wait for him to step on it.

  Mrs. Farone was silent. Then suddenly, out of the blue, she looked at me hard.

  "Billy is a very handsome little boy. You understand? Sexy almost. He don't know what it means, but he knows enough. People turn around to look at him in the street. He don't see it. Men. Women. Or maybe he knows and keeps it secret. He has secrets. Most of the time, he can't tell what other people are feeling or thinking, or anything. Most kids, they got instinctive information on people, you know? But Billy, he can't see, he don't pay no attention to other people. He likes playing alone, so he don't understand what's in their minds."

  "No friends?"

  She hesitated.

  I leaned forward. "You want to be an accessory? You want to stand up and say, I didn't tell the truth and Billy died?"

  "OK, there's one girl. Sometimes she comes to play with him. Sometimes he goes there. They're in Catholic school together, then my son's wife takes Billy out of Catholic school."

  "What girl?"

  "Because of her I have to throw out my husband. Because he touches this girl. I find them and I tell him to go."

  "What girl? What was her name?" I said.

  "You don't harass me, you hear, or you can get out."

  "Then tell me."

  Suddenly she looked frightened. She glanced at the front door as if someone might appear.

  "If you don't tell me, I can arrange for you to come with me and someone else can talk to you," I said. "Someone who's not family," I said.

  "He was a nice man, my husband." She tossed her head in the direction of a photograph on her mantel. "He was OK until this girl comes. Old days, he took Billy fishing. All the time. There's a shack near Breezy Point, out by the water, you know where I mean. I think he took Billy once or twice," she said. "Yeah, he did."

  "Write it down for me." I shoved a piece of paper under her nose. "Just do it."

  "Why should I?"

  "Where's your husband?"

  "Yeah, Florida,
" she said. "With Johnny's sister."

  "What was he?" I said. "What was his work?"

  "He was a cop," she said. "Whole fucking lousy family is cops. Here, Russia. Poland. Italy. The army. All cops."

  "Write down the address," I said. "The place near Breezy Point."

  She grabbed the piece of paper and a pen. She scribbled it hurriedly. She wanted me out. She got up and held the door open.

  "Thanks for your time," I said, and she barely nodded. "Now you can tell me the name of the little girl Billy played with."

  "I think you already knew, right? Her name was May Luca, and now she's dead."

  It was May's red T-shirt near the beach after all; it was May's but it was Billy who had left home wearing it that morning. Had she given it to him? Was her death connected to Billy's disappearance? Billy's sacred shirt, something that obsessed him, belonged to May Luca.

  20

  A state trooper pulled me over as soon as I got to the Marine Bay Bridge. In the rear view mirror, I could see Manhattan behind me, the skyline pale gray, like a ghost disappearing as it turned dark.

  Just routine, the trooper said. Routine. The country on Orange Alert, he said. Going up to Red. New York already on Red all the time. He was a garrulous fat man and when I showed him my badge, he made a joke about Osama. We didn't believe anything, so we told jokes.

  On the other side of the bridge was a spit of land, the Rockaways at one end, Breezy Point at the other, a thin finger of land between Jamaica Bay and the Atlantic. Normally dozens of planes circled and swooped in the mysterious patterns of arrival and departure, but the weather was closing in and only a single plane circled, looking for a gap in the low ceiling of cloud that hung down almost to the water.

  Nearby were New York's salt marshes and wetlands and swamplands; in Pumpkin Channel a body would sink without trace. There were deep woods, too; a terrorist with a shoulder-to-air missile could reach a plane as it took off. The woods were easy to get to and in the winter, when it was deserted and snow fell, no one would see you.

  It was over Rockaway Beach that a plane went down in October 2001, a month after 9/11. Officials said the American Airlines jet broke up because of a mechanical defect. A lot of cops and firemen I knew believed it was terrorists. Officials hid the truth and called it accidental because the city couldn't stand another attack. People had no reserves left. I can't do this again, Maxine said to me. I don't have anything left.

  Glancing at the scrap of paper where Mrs. Farone had written an address, I turned right and drove slowly. I was looking for the fishing shack. Her husband had brought Billy fishing out here. Maybe he had taken May Luca, too. I tried to use my phone, call Lippert, call Maxine; there was no signal.

  Along the road were rows of small ramshackle bungalows, a bar, a church. I didn't know how this place was connected to the kidnapper, or if the old man was involved, but it was something. It was better than driving around Brooklyn blind; it was better than waiting; I tried to reach Lippert again, got through to his machine, left a message, or thought I did; the machine cut me off suddenly and again the signal died.

  On my left was nothing except marshlands. On the right were more fishing shacks, most shuttered for the winter, dark and unheated. No one came here in the winter, and the gas station at the corner was closed.

  The fog moved in, heavy now, seeming to carry sheets of snow in its folds. I switched stations on the radio to get a clear signal. LaGuardia was closed, so was Newark and only a few flights were coming in at JFK. In the headlights, I could see the shafts of snow.

  Along the narrow roads where I drove up and back again were more bungalows, windows boarded up, hibernating, eyeless. At the end of one street was a small house with a green fence. The number was rubbed off the door, but the house matched Mrs. Farone's description. The windows were dark. The geraniums in a plastic pot were dead. I parked and went up the front walk.

  The snow coming down hard froze the skin on my face. I banged on the front door, stopped, and banged some more. I yelled out. I peered in windows.

  I went around to the back, where a couple of metal garbage cans rolled on their sides. The wind tossed them together and the discordant banging seemed so loud I half expected to hear someone coming to find out what the noise was, a car, a siren, a gun. A third can was still upright, its lid weighted down with small rocks. I yanked off the lid. Inside was a black plastic bag with some trash in it.

  A noise distracted me and I went to the back door of the shack. It was padlocked and bolted. I got hold of my gun and wrapped my hand around the butt, thinking I'd break a window.

  I didn't have a warrant. I wasn't a local detective. If I got it wrong and screwed up, the guys out here would come down hard on me. There would be resentment. They'd make finding Billy harder. They'd want me off the case.

  I was still waiting for Lippert's call back. Maybe it was irrelevant now. Maybe he was punishing me. My eyelids sank over my eyes. I was exhausted. I was edgy. Genia would be furious that I had called Lippert.

  Except for the pale heavy sky and the slanty sheets of snow coming down, I could barely see anything. I crashed into one of the garbage cans and tripped and fell against a pile of fishing gear half shrouded in garbage bags. I stumbled to my feet.

  Take it easy, I thought, and wanted a cigarette. If I made too much noise and they were nearby, the creep who took Billy would kill him. It would be my fault.

  I grabbed at the padlock on the door and tried to force it open. It wouldn't give and I went back towards the car to get some tools. Better to break the lock than a window.

  From the car, I looked back at the house that, in the storm, was only a smudge. Suddenly I saw a light flash on and off in the house next door. There was the blue glow of a TV set for a second, then it went off. I wasn't sure what I saw. The snow got in my eyes. The wind coming off the water whined.

  For a minute or two I sat in the car. Did the light go on again? Was it a signal? Had I drifted off to sleep? I thought: I'm lost. I was lost and there was a child somewhere out there and someone going to kill him. Or already had. Not just any kid. It was Billy and I saw him as a small helpless figure wandering through a vast open expanse of snow and fog.

  Bolt cutters in my hand, I went back to the house. Something bugged me now, some half remembered story I couldn't pull into shape enough to make sense of it. In spite of the cold, I began to sweat. In my pocket I found Ivana's crumpled pack of cigarettes and put one in my mouth. I was afraid to light a match but the tobacco smelled good.

  I edged my way towards the house. I believed that Billy was inside because I had to. Or he was inside one of the other shacks. I didn't know how I knew; I believed it. I thought about Mrs. Farone, her telling me about the shack in Breezy Point and about her husband who liked little girls. Maybe he liked boys. Maybe he liked Billy. It happened. Most of the creeps who abused children were inside a family; they had been abused, and they did it to their kids and their grandchildren and it never ended.

  Then another light, this one from across the street. I hurried over. Something had stopped me from breaking the padlock on the house with the green fence. I had to check this other house, maybe other shacks and cottages, squat and ghostly in the storm. My feet slipping out from under me, I moved forward slowly. The fog in front of me was substantial, hard to penetrate, everything seemed to slump under its weight. Then the light I had seen disappeared.

  In the distance I heard a fire engine. Snow fell in my collar and down my neck. It settled, wet and creepy, a ring of damp, a noose.

  I went house to house. I peered through windows. I went around into backyards that were covered in snow. The shacks were empty. No one came here in the dead of winter. There were no footsteps in the snow, no tracks.

  Back at the house behind the low green fence, my hand wrapped around the bolt cutters, ready to break the lock.

  The bolt cutters raised, I stopped. There was something, a noise, a scuttling, like mice running for cover. It came from insid
e. Again, I scanned the yard. I noticed the upright garbage can and leaned over to pull up the plastic bag that contained trash, boxes, newspaper, empty cans. Maybe there was something in the garbage can. My head was inside it when I heard a noise behind me. I wasn't fast enough.

  I heard him at the same time I felt the cold damp steel of the knife against my neck.

  A fleshy arm big as a log tightened around my shoulders. I could smell him. I could smell his sweat and his boozy breath and I could feel the scratchy wool of his sleeve.

  "What the fuck do you want?" I said.

  There was no answer.

  The arm that held me was big as a ham and the knife was sharp and I felt a thin trickle of warm blood running down my face. I felt for my gun and somehow got hold of the grip.

  "Who are you?" I said and gagged on his sleeve, but there was no answer and when I half-turned around I saw his face was covered with a balaclava, slits for the eyes, a hole for the mouth and the stinking breath coming out. My head hurt.

  Somehow, I got him onto the ground. There was more blood, his, mine, and I was punching his face as hard as I could, I could feel my knuckles break and bleed. Somewhere in the near distance I heard something thump along the pavement, along the ice, his head, I thought it was the sound of a head but my ears were stuffed. The noise was like a ghetto-blaster, like a plane when your ears are stuffed and all you hear is your heart. Like a sonic boom over Howard Beach. Boom. My head. A plane. Concorde. Blood in my mouth. Hot. Salty. Viscous.

  His eyes, slits through the hood, peered up at me. I showed him the gun. The eyes widened. He was scared.

  "Who the fuck are you?" I said in Russian and put the gun next to his head.

  He mumbled something. I caught the accent. He was a redneck. He was a Russian peasant, probably an illegal, and he was scared.

  "Who?"

  "Zeitsev," he said.

  I didn't believe him. Everyone knew Zeitsev's name. It was too easy. I hit him again.

  A noise from the house distracted me for a split second, the creep stumbled to his feet and began to run. I fired off a round and missed. He ran like an athlete; he was faster than me. He disappeared. I stumbled towards my car. I couldn't see anything except the snow. I had lost him.