Disturbed Earth

by Reggie Nadelson

  "What kind of someone?" I said again.

  "Someone I know who was maybe connected with the government. I had this visit."

  "Pull over, will you?" I said. "I want to talk before we get to your mother's place."

  "My place."

  "OK, your place, her place, just please pull over. Which government?" I said. "Mine? Yours?"

  "What's the difference? But yours, since you ask. American."

  29

  We were in Brighton Beach, parked alongside the curb, and Tolya said, "Anything out of order with you, Artyom? Anybody been snooping?"

  The heat was on high and the windows shut tight; I was shivering.

  "How come you're asking?"

  "Do you want to play games, or do you want to know what happened? I can play games, if you like, Artyom," he said.

  "OK."

  "You want to hear?"

  "Sure."

  "Then relax for a minute. You're making me nervous."

  I sucked down the cigarette smoke like a life-saving drug and waited until Tolya gulped another mouthful of Scotch. He took off his left shoe and rubbed his foot. Outside, a small boy wearing green earmuffs peered in the window of the vehicle. He widened his eyes, made them bulge, stuck out his tongue. Tolya grinned, shooed him away.

  "Did you do anything in 9/11, were you involved in the arrests, these detentions, were in contact with any Arab types?"

  "Why?" I said.

  "Just tell me."

  "I helped with the digging. I worked as a volunteer at the site. The rest of it, I worked inside the department. A lot of what we did was basic stuff, identification, escorting VIPs, attending funerals. I didn't have much to do with the arrests, it wasn't my area."

  "What about Sonny Lippert?"

  "I know you hate him, but so what?" I said.

  "Nothing."

  "Tell me who visited you. It was about me?"

  "Yes." Tolya hesitated.

  "Go on."

  "I'm at my hotel, in my suite, nice girl is with me, we are passing the time."

  "The architect?" I interrupted, but he shut me up.

  "I get a call on my phone. It is friend from the old days. Someone who moves around, does a little this a little that. Someone your father might have trained, you know, Artyom? The type, I mean, not literally, from the old days."

  "You said that, so he was KGB."

  "He's in business now."

  "Like you."

  "Like me." Tolya shifted his weight in the driver's seat, turning towards me, watching me.

  "And?"

  "He asks would I see a pal of his, an American he knew."

  "From where?"

  "He doesn't say at first. I guess FBI, CIA, free-lance, British. I don't really know, but I owe him, so I say sure he can send the friend. I say I'll meet him in the hotel bar, but he shows up and comes to my room."

  "Where's the girlfriend?"

  "I send her away shopping."

  "Go on," I said, reaching for the Scotch and seeing, on my right out the window, the little boy in green earmuffs, peering through my window this time, clown-like. I opened the window.

  "Get lost," I said.

  "The guy, the agent, whatever, he's interested in me, I think at first, business stuff, cementing international relations, as they used to say, someone after my ass. Then I see he wants to talk about you."

  Nausea rose up through my throat; I could taste bile.

  I said, "He knew we were connected?"

  "This is not hard to figure out," Tolya said. "You want another drink?"

  "Tell me about this guy."

  "It's alright, Artyom, you're not your father's son. You're just a cop, you're not a spook. They can't touch you. Take it easy.

  "I was willing," I said. "I was almost willing if they wanted me, after 9/11, I would have done anything, become a spook even, whatever the fuck they are, if anyone wanted me, even though I hate it, and also American spies so-called are cretins. But we were all so crazy in New York, I would have done anything. Jesus, I know people who joined the Marines. I would have joined the Marines." I shifted my weight and stared out the window again. "Except I'm too old."

  Tolya pressed the electric button on his left and his seat slid backward. He hauled one leg over the other and relaxed against the back of the leather seat. The cold sun that had come out caught in the stubble on his chin and made it glitter.

  "He was a small man," Tolya said. "Small and messy and thin, you know, and he comes into my suite at the hotel and he looks around and sees the shopping bag and it's as if I'm some kind of queen or something." Tolya clasped his foot. "You know, Artyom, I am looking at this guy and the bad suit and I think, he can be FBI only, but he doesn't show me his badge at first, it's like cat and mouse, and I don't ask, so I think maybe CIA. I can't tell. One or the other. Then I think: this suit definitely is from FBI, gray, cheap, you can get this suit for two hundred dollars. White shirt. Crummy tie. Suit is rumpled like he sleeps in it, and the coat is not regular coat but kind of ski jacket. A student's coat. He sits down when I say please sit down, but he keeps on the blue jacket."

  "Tolya, please, enough with the fashion."

  "It's important."

  "Why?"

  "Let me finish, OK?"

  "He sits and I understand he keeps on the jacket because he's carrying a gun and doesn't want me to know, though this seems quite idiotic, don't you think, he could have worn in the waist of his pants, but he is skinny and his pants kept slipping down, I notice this, he has to haul them up all the time. So I ask him do you want a drink and he looks at me like I ask if he wants to shoot up. The type you would see around US Embassy in Moscow in old days.

  When he hauls up his pants, his ankles show, the pants are too short, the socks are white and are too short and the shoes are cheap, light brown and scuffed, maybe he is forty or fifty, but always old; from birth this guy is old. You know these people that never have an age? Anyway, finally he says, 'You are friends with Detective Arthur Cohen?'"

  It struck us both as funny at the same time, the agent calling me Arthur, and we both, Tolya and me, laughed.

  I suddenly wondered if Sonny Lippert knew about the man in the too-short pants from the FBI. Would I be unwelcome on the job when he found out?

  "Artyom?"

  "What?"

  "Then the guy takes off his coat. I say, what's your name please, and he says Agent John Smith. I think he is telling truth, no one makes up John Smith, so he shows me some identification, and he takes off the blue ski jacket and accepts a cup of coffee, which he stirs very slowly," he said. "Americans stir coffee slowly, also they put so many things in it, first coffee, then cream and sugar and stirring for minutes very very slowly. He is sizing me up while he stirs the coffee. The white shirt is clean, but wrinkled, and he loosens his tie, one of those striped ties, some cheesy synthetic."

  "I don't care about his tie." I was feeling restless.

  "He plays with it, and suddenly, when he finishes his coffee, John Smith puts the cup down on the coffee table, and looks up and I realize it is all an act, the suit, the tie, the coffee. He is giving the impression he is this stupid FBI dummy, this cliche agent, because then I will tell him anything. He is good."

  Mr. Sverdloff, he says. I gather you've bought a loft style apartment on West Broadway?

  Yes.

  The building has some code violations, there have been some problems in the building, John Smith says.

  Are you threatening me? replies Tolya, sipping the Bloody Mary he's ordered from room service. Are you, in fact leaning on me about this?

  Smith shakes his head. We just want to help you get past this. We're not sure if Detective Cohen should be working on certain cases when we're uncertain about his background, you see, and I just mentioned the possible violations in the building that you've bought in case we can help in any way.

  I said to Tolya, "You bought the whole fucking building?"

  "It was a bargain."

 
To Smith, sitting in his hotel room, he says: And you think this will pressure me? For what?

  We'd like to know whatever you know about Detective Cohen.

  I know he's a good cop, Tolya says. I know he loves this country, I don't know what you want to know, so how can I help you know it?

  Yes, we know about his service record, we can access that, I mean anything else, about his background, for instance.

  He left the fucking Soviet Union when he was sixteen.

  But after, said Smith. After that.

  He spent a couple of years in Israel. He went to university there, he went in the army, he came here. I don't know what the fuck you want because there's nothing. He's the cleanest son of a bitch I know.

  Does he know any people of the Arab race?

  What?

  Arabs. Does he have friends who are Arabian?

  How the fuck would I know, Tolya says, angry now. I don't keep tabs on his friends. What's this about?

  Smith is completely calm and casual and only mentions the Patriot Act once, hinting that he has the power to pick up anyone. Anyone he says again, if there's a suspicion. 9/11 changed things, he says.

  Tolya tells him to get out: GET OUT!

  I thought about John Smith, if that was his name, the agent who had visited Tolya. Who had broken into my place. I wished it had been gangsters with guns, thieves, killers.

  I thought about my old friend, Roy Pettus, the only FBI guy I ever liked or trusted, but he had a heart attack and retired to Chugwater, Wyoming, years ago where he came from and where he was now bored and sad. I called him once in a while; he hated the way things went after 9/11, the random stop and search, the arrests, the detentions. It didn't work, Pettus said; it made things worse.

  "Did he threaten you? This John Smith?"

  Tolya laughed. "You think I feel threatened? I have green card, right, I am legal. You are citizen, Artyom. Fuck them."

  But the fury I felt made me hot. I understood about the dictionaries, the letters from Hamid. Whoever had been in my place wasn't connected to the kidnappings. They were looking for me, for my past, for evidence I was a bad American. It was because I was foreign. I sat in the vehicle, half listening to Tolya, and was terrified. I had done jobs in countries where I didn't speak the language. I'd been threatened with knives. Lily had been attacked. I had never been scared the way I was now. I felt foreign.

  Inside the apartment Tolya had bought for his mother, we shed our coats. Lara Sverdlova was in the bedroom asleep and snoring and you could hear her through the bedroom door.

  "Can we do this?" I said holding out the tape. "I want to take some stills off this and send them to someone, can you do it?"

  He nodded. "To send the whole tape or just the pictures we make?"

  "The whole tape if you can, but also some stills. I want to make some stills off it. I'll show you. I want the people in it, anyone who's in it. OK? Can you do it? You know how? You know I'm lousy with technology," I said.

  "What is it?" he asked.

  I was silent.

  "You either trust me or fuck off, Artyom, because I'm really tired of your suspicions. You know who I am, you know what I do."

  "I don't know."

  "I do business," he said. "I make deals. I buy and sell, property, money, gold, whatever, I make money. I buy my mother an apartment in Brooklyn, OK? Is that OK with you? If there's real estate to buy I buy it if I can. I deal like everyone else in business."

  "Who do you make deals with out here?"

  "What do you care? I'm your friend."

  I said, "Are you? Is that why you let a creep from the FBI into the room?"

  "This is insulting," Tolya said. "I hate this. We already went through this before, in London. You remember London? You know I'm your friend. You can't get over it because I'm still Russian, can you, you despise me when I speak English and drop articles. You don't want to be connected with foreigners, Russkis especially, you're afraid it will drag you back."

  "So why do you do it?"

  "What?"

  "Talk like a gangster?"

  "Sometimes because I forget," he said. "My English is not like yours exactly. Sometimes because it makes me laugh inside, I hear myself talking like hood, like bizinesssman, from this I keep myself going."

  He was already at the far end of the living room where he had assembled a mountain of machines: two big screens, editing equipment, computers, a DVD player.

  Tolya shoved the tape into a video camera he picked up off the pile of equipment and plugged the camera into his computer. The images rolled up onto the screen. Again from the other room came the sound of Lara Sverdlova snoring. Tolya shut the door.

  "You have money, you have houses, now you've found a woman you like, something who's for real, why not stop all the dealing?" I said.

  "I can't stop. You don't mean stop, anyway, you mean why don't I go corporate. Like your friend, Zeitsev, right? I am what I am, that's why Zeitsev gives me a pain in the ass, with his fake American facade, it's like a cheap veneer, like the hair, like the poses. Did he ever say to you people tell him he resembles JFK?"

  I nodded.

  "He's just the son of a Russian monster who decided life was more fun legit, but what kind of legit is that?" Tolya snorted. "He deals with insurance companies, he gives money to political parties, he supports people who sell cigarettes to children in the Third World, he probably parties with assholes who give Dick Cheney money for his campaigns when Cheney goes way back with companies like Enron that sucks the lifeblood out of regular people, you think this is better? You think this is legit life? Fuck that, man. Zeitsev fucks with stuff just like everyone else."

  "Zeitsev is a Democrat."

  "For God's sake, Artyom, what's the bloody difference?"

  "I'm not Zeitsev's publicist, OK? You sound like an old Commie."

  "Yeah, well maybe I'm a new Commie. I'm a realist." He fumbled in his pocket for the cigar case and lit a Cohiba.

  The aromatic smoke filled the room that was furnished with only a leather sofa and two chairs, a coffee table and the computer gear. On the balcony outside, a small mountain of snow trembled until it seemed it would topple.

  Tolya was messing with the machinery and talking at the same time.

  "You know something, Artyom," he said in Russian. "I consider you like a brother. You almost married my cousin Svetlana, who loved you very much. I took care of your Lily, and Beth, and I still take care of her, too, when Lily lets me."

  "She's not my Lily anymore."

  Tolya ignored me and said in English now, "You know what, I rescue your ass many times. But you don't trust me. I don't know if you like me. Maybe because I'm not American, maybe because I don't love your country so much, or I make you feel less American. I don't know." He sounded mournful. He gestured to the screen. "Is this what you want?"

  On the screen were the pictures I had already seen, the goofball, the Honda, Billy getting into it.

  "I want you to send them to this e-mail address I'm going to get you," I said, and picked up the phone.

  I called Maxine's friend, Mel, a geek she knew who worked weekends and nights and could pull up license plate idents. He was brilliant with drivers' licenses; he could match numbers and pictures.

  Mel said he could do it but he needed an OK from Maxine, needed to know that it was fine with her; so I called her. I didn't want to call her but I didn't have much choice. It was after working hours and I needed the information fast.

  I could hear from her voice that she was happy to hear from me. I could hear she thought I was calling because I'd made a decision about us.

  "I need help," I said. "I'm sorry."

  I told her I had to get Mel to put some images through the system for an ID, and her voice was disappointed. She said she'd call him and hung up and I felt lousy about it.

  I turned to Tolya, who was crouched over the computer. I watched him while I called Mel back; he said Maxine had called; he said I could put through the pictures,
the picture of the guy, the picture of the license plate. I passed the phone to Tolya and Mel told him how to send the material.

  I sneezed.

  "Jesus, I've never heard anyone sneeze so loud," Tolya said. "Go make coffee while I finish sending this stuff."

  My throat was raw. I sneezed again. I went into Tolya's kitchen and made coffee and poured brandy out of a two-liter bottle and knocked it back, as much as I could without puking it up. I hated brandy, but it warmed me up. I took Tolya a mug of coffee, black and bitter, and I drank one down myself.

  In the living room, while Tolya drank his coffee, I looked over his shoulder at the printer which spat out the pictures: first Billy Farone, then the goofball. In another I could see Genia very clearly. For black and white surveillance pictures, they were pretty good. I stared at the goofball's face and waited for Mel to call.

  Goofy was twenty-five, twenty-six, and big, but not fat or heavily muscled; just big and loose and large. He wore a puffy down-filled jacket and fat boy jeans that hung below his crotch and flapped around his ankles. He had dark hair and there was something vacant about his face. I remembered what Fred Capestro, the guy in the pizza store, said: he was a mongoose. He was a retard. The face was benign, almost sweet, but vacant.

  Without any warning, the bedroom door burst open and Lara Sverdlova exploded into the living room, still in the pink sweatsuit, her gray hair springing up from her head as if she'd been electrocuted. Ignoring us, she went into the kitchen, where I heard the refrigerator bang open and shut, pots and pans rattled and, without a word, she emerged holding a plate of food and went back into the bedroom.

  The rackety noise of the fax started up, the sound that was like cicadas in the bush at night in the countryside. Tolya reached for the pages as they fell off the fax into a basket. One at a time, he handed them to me.

  The way things sometimes did, it floated into my head while I held the faxes that the only person who for sure knew I spoke Arabic was Sonny Lippert; he had known from the beginning.

  "What's the matter?" It was Tolya and he was staring at me. "You look like you saw demons."

  The fax in my hand distracted me. In it, Mel had scribbled the identification of the guy, the mongoose, the creep, in the video surveillance picture. He had matched him to the license plate and a driver's license. I knew for sure it was his Honda, the car Billy got into, the car that took him away.