Disturbed Earth

by Reggie Nadelson

  I rewound the tape, then fast forwarded, looked at the date and time code until I got to Saturday morning. I hit play, and then as I slowed the tape, a figure emerged from the Farones' door. It was Billy. He was wearing the Yankees jacket, jeans, High Top sneakers. In his hand was his sports bag and his fishing rod.

  He disappeared from view briefly, then reappeared as he started across the street. When he was almost at the Gervasi front walk, he turned away suddenly and moved out of sight again. For a second I thought he was avoiding the camera. Then he was back. A banged up old Honda chugged into view.

  At first it seemed to follow Billy along the empty street, stalking him, going very slow to keep pace with the boy. I rewound the tape and watched a couple of days' worth of pictures from a street where nothing ever seemed to happen. The Farones went out, they came home, so did the Gervasis. Kids went to school. The school bus came by. So did the garbage truck.

  Then the Honda again. I checked the date. A week before Billy had disappeared, the car pulled into shot and parked in front of the Farone house. A tall, heavy young man got out of the driver's seat and seemed to look around, though the black and white pictures were blurry.

  The Farones' door opened and this time Billy appeared with an adult behind him. I assumed it was Genia until I wound the tape back again. It wasn't Gen; it was someone older. A woman but old. Sweat pouring down my neck now, I knew who it was. Johnny's mother whose skin smelled of vanilla. She kissed the kid, then, as if she'd heard a voice, turned and went back inside the house. The door behind her shut. Billy was alone on the street. Canvas bag in hand, as if he might be going to the school bus, he ran for the Honda and got in and the car pulled away.

  I thought: the creep was waiting for him.

  For half an hour, I rolled the tape backwards and forwards, and over the course of a week, the Honda appeared three times. Someone—the goofball—had staked out the place and was waiting for Billy. None of it was accidental. Long before he left home Saturday morning, Billy was a victim.

  About to turn the camera off, I noticed a different car just barely in frame. A woman got out. It looked like Genia. The car looked like a BMW. Elem Zeitsev had a BMW.

  I sat for a few minutes more, smoked, looked at the video. It occurred to me that if I could get the picture enlarged, I might get a read-out of the license plate on the Honda. I'd have to get to the city, but first I wanted to look at the place where Billy's clothes had been found.

  The snow was coming down heavy now, the sky was white, the water invisible. I couldn't see out of the window. I stopped the car, got out and scrubbed at the windshield of the car with my bare hands. I'd left my gloves at home.

  Frozen, I crawled inside again, put the heat on, switched the radio to a news station. The airports were closing down again; the city was socked in, the roads had turned, as the temperature fell, to ice. The heater made me sleepy. I had to see where Billy's clothes had been, had to see one more time. I had to get back to the city. Had to get to Maxine's, at least. Get a read-out on the license number. Get a read-out. I turned the radio up loud. I wanted to sleep.

  Along Neptune Avenue, everything was closed, even the auto repair shops. Thev called it the "odometer turn-back capital of the world." You wanted to sell your car secondhand, you could get thousands of miles off it and you paid by the thousand. A guy once offered me a freebie on a "turn back" as he called it.

  Trying to stay awake, I focused on the stores I passed. The pigeon feed shop was shut. Did the birds die of starvation in the winter or freeze to death or did people take them in? In New York, especially in Brooklyn, everyone kept pigeons since way back. Irish. Italians. They kept pigeons for sport and probably for company in wire cages on the roofs of the tenements.

  I was only ten, maybe twelve miles from home, but Brooklyn was like Siberia. There were almost no cars on the road, no snow plows. All I could see was the white piling up, the flakes caught in my headlights. Streaming tubes of lit-up snow and nothing else.

  One more time, I climbed out of my car. I had to know what Ivana had seen Saturday morning and how she'd really found Billy's bloody clothes.

  28

  A figure in a red fox coat emerged from the white landscape like a character in a set for a Russian play. It was the woman I'd seen on Saturday morning. I had seen the red coat, the wind tearing at it, the big black poodles at the end of the leash, the dogs pulling her, or seeming to. Then she disappeared behind the snow curtain and I was alone on the boardwalk.

  I climbed down the stairs and looked under the boardwalk as best I could because I was sure Ivana had found the clothes here. No one would have left the blood-soaked garments where she claimed she'd tripped over them. She must have moved the clothes. She had moved them. Maybe she knew where they'd be and it was intentional, her finding them.

  Did someone want the clothes found and the cops informed? Was Ivana the messenger? Did someone set her up? Was this what Samson Britz meant when he said: take another look.

  Under the boardwalk was where people went to drink and shoot up and fuck, to toss their garbage and maybe hide stuff. Once, whole families had lived here. In the forties and fifties, black families had lived whole lives under the boardwalk. They cooked on makeshift barbecues; they slept; they did their laundry.

  I jogged half a block, skidding on ice, and passed a small wood shack with a sign over the door: Iceberg Winter Bathers of C.I. Since the beginning of the twentieth century people had been swimming off Coney Island in the winter. Same time my grandfather started fighting the revolution. My father, who was in his forties when he had me—strange having a first child so late in those days, though I never asked—was born in Russia in 1913. He met them all: Lenin; Trotsky; later, Stalin. They shook his hand or patted his head; as a child he had been anointed. I looked at the ramshackle club house. The Polar Bears, they called the winter swimmers. Ivana Galitzine said she sometimes swam on cold days. She had been a swimmer all her life.

  I drove away from the boardwalk and the ocean, thinking at least I knew who had snatched Billy. The camera was next to me; on the tape I had the goofball who took Billy Farone from his house. I dialed Maxine. I hated doing it, but she could help me with the license number. She had friends who could run IDs fast. There was no answer and I drove faster, then I skidded.

  The car spun on the ice, banged the curb and stopped dead. I turned the key and stepped on the gas and nothing happened. I turned the key again, frantically. I climbed out and looked under the hood.

  All the time I was thinking: where was Billy? Where did the goofball take him? Was he freezing to death in Brooklyn? Was he dead? I knew he was dead. Nine times out often they were dead or so abused they were better off dead. I had to ID the retard in the video, we had to find out who he was and why he had staked out the Farone house.

  Gradually, the heat in the car died. I was frozen. I knew the bastard who allegedly fixed my car the day before had messed up the job. I looked out of the window; no one was out; no cars passed. For five minutes, huddled into my jacket, smoking, I sat and waited and tried not to panic.

  Billy's disappearance was not random, it wasn't accidental. Again I wondered about the big man who broke into Maxine's apartment. It wasn't Tolya, I told myself. It was crazy. All he had in common with the creep was his size. I was on the edge and grabbing at anything.

  I loved Tolya. I wanted to trust him. He had saved my ass and had rescued Lily; he was my friend. And Billy. I had to find him. Find him, find him, find him, it went around like a broken CD, like a digital movie where scenes break up in jagged patterns.

  I couldn't make a pattern. I couldn't assemble the pieces into a picture. All I could do was sit helplessly in my car, the radio dead, the heat off, my cell phone not working because of the blizzard. I needed help. I stuffed the video tape in my pocket, turned up my jacket collar, got out of the car, found an old blanket in the trunk and wrapped it around me. I locked the car. Hands in my pockets, I started walking. I felt like a bum. I p
ulled the blanket tight, and bent my head and stayed in the middle of the road.

  In my loafers, which were soaked, snow turning to water inside them, I stumbled forward. Suddenly like an oasis on the desert, I saw a light. A grocery store was in front of me, shuttered and silent but with a light in back. I banged on the metal gate hard. I rattled it.

  A small Korean woman peered through the window. I gesticulated. She looked at me fearfully; I showed her my badge. She retreated to the back of the shop. I shouted, but my words drifted away and snow filled my mouth. I was shaking.

  Suddenly, the woman reappeared with a set of keys, unlocked the door, unlocked the gate, and raised it far enough so, if I crouched low, I could get through.

  What you want, she yelled at me, her face contorted with anger or fear, I couldn't tell, couldn't read her. But she offered me a cup of the tea she was drinking and I figured maybe the fear was cultural. I was a big white cop, she was a squashed Asian woman. All I really wanted was her phone.

  She led me into the dark cluttered back room where there were boxes of groceries, and a hot plate and a table and chair.

  I figured she was stuck, like me, in the storm. I found a ten-dollar bill and put it on the table, and gestured at the chipped black phone and started calling. The woman listened intently, though I wasn't sure how much she understood, but her eyes never left me. I called everyone I could think of: Lippert, Maxie, Tolya. I needed help bad. No one answered. Only answering machines or dead cell phones.

  For ten minutes I sat in silence with the Korean woman and drank tea, both of us like stranded hikers in some alpine hut. She broke out a package of Oreos and ate one, licking the white cream off first. I took one and ate it the same way, and then ate another one. Her face relaxed and I saw she wasn't old at all. Not more than forty. Tiny and wrinkled but pretty.

  Once she had been a very pretty girl. She drank more tea, nibbled a second Oreo and then ate a Milky Way. I grinned and took a candy bar and ate it. I went back to the phone. I think she figured I really was a guy in trouble, and not just a son of a bitch cop who was going to break her ass for some minor infringement.

  "Where the hell are you?" Lippert mumbled when I finally got hold of him.

  I told him. He said there was no one he could send, nothing he could do, everybody was up to their asses in snow. I slammed down the phone, and dialed Tolya again. I left a message with the address of the grocery store and told him to get himself over because I didn't know who else to call and I couldn't walk back to Manhattan. An hour later, Tolya rolled up to the door in his yellow tank.

  I pulled some money out of my pocket and offered it to the Korean woman and she bowed her head delicately and refused, but I left it anyway on the candy counter at the front of the store. She unlocked the door and the gates, and I handed her my card. Said if she ever needed anything, she could call me and didn't know if she understood, but she bowed again and waited until we left, then pulled the gates shut and closed the door. By the time we pulled away, she was locked back into the store, all the lights off except the dim bulb in the back.

  "Thank Christ you got my message," I said to Tolya who was bundled up in his black mink coat. He wore a towering Russian hat, curly gray fur that looked like a sheep stuck on his head.

  The Hummer, Tolya's tank, was warm and smelled of the rich soft leather, and the CD player poured Tchaikovsky into the enclosed space.

  "I'm homesick when it's like this, the snow, the cold, I'm a Russian," he said, chuckling. "I have some extra shoes in the back. There's a bottle of Scotch, too, and I brought some sandwiches," he added as he pulled away from the store and roared through the streets. "Where's your car?"

  I told him the location and he got out his phone and called a tow truck.

  "OK?" he said.

  "Yeah," I said and it wasn't until the truck drove away, my car in tow, I forgot the camera was still in it. It would cost me, but I had the tape, which was all that mattered.

  I reached into the back of Tolya's vehicle and found a pair of his shoes; grass green suede Guccis with gold buckles, they were three sizes too big. I put them on and looked at my feet. I looked like a kid in his father's shoes, but they were dry. I found the Scotch and drank from the bottle. The sandwiches were made out of black bread, sweet butter and caviar the color of very dark gray metal.

  When I bit into one of the sandwiches, the caviar was rich on my tongue, the big eggs burst, the flavor was almost sweet. I ate a couple more bites, then stuffed another sandwich in my mouth.

  "I've been looking for you and you've been avoiding me," Tolya said.

  "Looking for me before I left you a message?"

  "Since yesterday, but you screen my calls and you don't answer the messages, Artyom. Isn't that so?"

  "I'm sorry," I said. "What's the deal?"

  "Some creep comes to talk to me about you, and I get worried that this case with Evgenia's boy is a signal for you. Someone wants you out here in Brooklyn, someone wants to keep an eye on you, someone wants to hurt you. And."

  "And?"

  "Someone uses Billy as bait for you," he said.

  I lit up and smoked without saying anything.

  "Artyom?"

  "What kind of creep?" I said.

  "Where are we going?" Tolya asked. "Where do you need to go?"

  Without thinking, I said, "Where were you Sunday night?"

  "What?"

  "I'm curious, you were with the blonde, the brunette, the architect, you were with your mother, where?"

  He glanced in my direction, his face expressionless. An effusive man, Tolya: he laughed, he got angry, his enormous face was a kaleidoscope of his emotional state, and the changes played out over the features. Now his face was chilly and immobile.

  He said, "This is a policeman that's asking me, or is friend? This is interrogation? Third degree. What it is, detective?"

  If I told him about the guy who broke into Maxine's, if I said I was suspicious, if I spelled it out, it would be the end of the friendship. Instead, I put out my cigarette in the ashtray and fumbled for the bottle of Scotch.

  "You think I'm connected out here, is that it?" Tolya's voice was very cold. "You think I work with these putrid thugs out here near the beach, this is what you think? You imply this with me, right? You think all Russians are criminal assholes? You're a fucking racist, you know that?" He lapsed into Russian. "You tell me why you ask, I tell you where I've been."

  So, finally, I told him. I told him about Maxine's apartment and the shadowy figure I thought looked like him. He looked back at me, pitying but disdainful. Tolya was silent.

  I apologized. He didn't tell me where he'd been Sunday night, though, but I didn't ask again. I told him about the tape. I told him I needed a video camera because mine was in the abandoned car and a computer and a fax machine and that I had to get to the city. I had to get to the lab where there was a guy Maxine knew who could read the license off the video tape and ID the car's owner from it.

  "I'll go by subway, if you don't want to drive with me," I said. "You can drop me at the train."

  "I have what we need," Tolya said. "I have editing stuff, I have video equipment. I have everything. One of my girls, my younger daughter, she wants to be in films so she says, Pa, get me this stuff. She never uses it, but I keep anyway. We can send pictures with my stuff."

  I gestured at the vehicle. "You think we can make it back to the city? The roads are solid ice."

  "We're not going to the city," he said.

  "Please, Tolya, I have to get there. Please."

  "I put the stuff in an apartment out here. I told you my mother was crazy, she wants to stay with Russians, with what she calls family, you remember?"

  "Yeah, sure."

  "I bought her an apartment in Brighton Beach. I couldn't stand the relatives, I couldn't stand the cousins' house, which stank of borscht and nail polish remover."

  "You bought an apartment?"

  "I bought it. It was cheap, Artyom, it was fine.
I can always sell. It was cheaper than putting her in the Four Seasons, which she didn't like anyway."

  "She's there, at this apartment?"

  "Yes. She said she wanted to go home. There aren't any flights. She won't bother us."

  I thought of Lara Sverdlova in her pink sweatsuit.

  I said, "You have a fax machine, a computer?"

  He looked at me with comic disdain. "You think I'm some poor Russian schmuck that communicates by homing pigeon?"

  He stepped on the gas and the vehicle shoved through the snow like a giant dust-buster. We moved about a mile an hour.

  "You're in trouble," he said.

  "I know. Just watch the road."

  "You don't like my driving? I don't mean trouble with the missing boy."

  He took the Scotch and drank and passed it back. I swallowed a mouthful.

  Tolya said, "Sunday night I was with the architect, the woman with short hair you met."

  "You like her."

  "Crazy for her, I'm nuts about her, I don't even get it," he said. "She's harsh, she's skinny, she has no tits, she has no ass, she wears only this black, she criticizes my taste."

  "So what's she for?"

  "She's funny. You know what, Artyom? The hookers, my usual type woman, is never ever funny. Also not usually smart. This one is smart. She makes me laugh. She reads books. She knows philosophy. We discuss mathematics."

  I glanced at him. For a split second his face was flushed with excitement.

  "That's nice, Tolya. I'm happy. What did you mean, trouble? Someone came to see you about me. Right? What kind of someone?"

  Sometimes, once in a while, nerve endings seemed alive like electric wires had singed my skin. Waiting for Tolya's answer, I felt my whole system was sending signals.