On the floor next to Shank was a newspaper, partly soaked in blood, dated three days earlier.
Had Shank been trapped here for three days? Had he wrestled with the thick rope that made up the nets? Did he bleed to death? Did anyone know or hear him call? I got out my cell and started to dial Lippert's number, then shut the phone, got to my feet and walked softly into the other room then out to the corridor and called out, "Billy?"
I turned off the flashlight and said again, softly at first, then louder, "Billy?"
My voice echoed into the darkness, down the row of cabanas, and I thought, out of the blue because I was half crazed, that cabana was the wrong word for this, it was a word that called up sunlight and Latino music and girls in bikinis and drinks with fruit in them and paper parasols on top.
"Billy?"
Pushing myself forward, my feet heavy, I wanted to lie down on the old salt soaked boards of the beach club and drift off. I kept going, down the row, one, two, three doors from the place where Shank lay dead.
There was no noise, no cars, no planes, nothing, just my footsteps and then, suddenly, a tiny noise, creaking, scuttling, near me, next to me, behind the door in front of me.
I yelled out, "Hey, Billy, it's me, it's Artie."
"I'm in here," a voice said. "The door is open."
His voice was normal. The invitation was spoken like an adult would speak it, domesticated, pleasant. The door is open, come on in.
What I felt, first, was hysterical relief: Billy was alive. It was over. The days of looking for him and not finding him, the feeling I'd failed, that one more time I'd used people—Maxine most of all—to get what I needed and then screwed up, that I had looked at the wrong picture or looked at it the wrong way and that I'd find Billy dead at the end of it, it was all over. The tension went; for a second I thought I'd have to sit down. I wasn't much of a crybaby—you'd be surprised how many guys are weepers—but my eyes stung from tears in them. I put my gun away and leaned against the doorjamb with relief. Billy was OK; or, at least, he was alive.
Come on in, Artie, he called again, and I opened the door.
His back was to me. A faint smudge of morning light was coming up outside the window and I set the flashlight, still on, on a table and I could see Billy's fine blond hair was matted and his blue sweater was smeared with blood. On a red plastic chair he sat staring at the TV which was on a shelf that also held a vase of plastic flowers. The electricity was off; the screen was blank. Billy didn't turn around when I came through the door, just sat looking at the set.
"Do you know who hurt Heshey Shank?" I said to the back of Billy's head. "Billy, look at me."
He turned halfway in his chair. I moved towards him and held out my arms and he got up and hugged me. I tried to hold onto him, but he slumped back onto the chair.
"I did it," he said. "I had to." Billy saw me reach for my phone. "Please don't call anyone yet, Artie, please. I just want 55 you.
I put the phone away.
"Did he hurt you?" I sat on the chair next to his. "Did Heshey make you get in his car? Are you hurt anywhere?"
"You mean like the priests, you mean like that, like they put on TV all the time, the priests that stick their hands down the kids' pants? Like that?"
"Like that. Or anything else."
"I would have killed him if he did that," he said. "Right away."
Abruptly he shifted his weight again and looked straight at me; his face seemed formed now, like a little adult. Already you could see how he'd look as a man. The blue eyes were set wide apart in the pale face, like my father's.
It was true: Billy was my nephew; my father had been his grandfather. I noticed the blood on his faded jeans. He wore black sneakers; no socks.
"I'll take you home," I said.
"No."
"Then let me take you somewhere else. It's freezing here. You could come back with me to the city, if you want."
In a dented metal locker, I found some cotton blankets. I wrapped one around Billy and put another over my own shoulders. My cigarettes were in my pocket and I got them out and lit one.
"Can I have one?" Billy said.
"You're too young."
He smiled wide and said, "Come on, Artie, please please please please, give me one. I'll love you forever, I won't tell. Come on, I smoke my mom's when she's out all the time."
I gave him a cigarette and lit it for him and he sat huddled under the blanket, a twelve-year-old man, self-possessed, smoking the cigarette, talking in bursts.
From outside there was only silence, and the cold that seeped in through the broken window and the faint smell of salt, and garbage. There was something else. It was spicy salsa. The blanket had been used for a picnic; in the folds I could feel the crumbs. Chips, I thought; tortilla chips.
"I wanted to fish," Billy said. "I liked it when you took me, but you didn't come all the time. My father didn't take me a lot. I had to see the sheepshead. You remember? They said the sheepshead fish came back to Brooklyn and I never saw one and I had to."
"The fishing really mattered, didn't it?"
He said, "It took my mind off things."
"You met Heshey at the pizza place?"
Billy took a drag on his cigarette and made a face and said, "Yeah. He was always there and he would buy me as many slices as I want and then he would talk blah blah blah about how he's scared, and how he knew the Trade Center was like going to fall before it happened and no one believed him, and he's scared things are coming down from the sky. Creep," Billy said. "He liked me. He just wanted company because he was this retard and I'm like, this is boring, but he has a car. Heshey says his brother knows my grandpa and his brother says it's OK for us to hang out. I didn't believe him first, but he has the car."
"What about friends your own age?"
"They're boring. I try to make friends, I say, let's go on an adventure, a journey, and they say, let's look up some girl's skirt."
"You liked May Luca."
"Fuck you." He tossed the cigarette butt on the floor and crushed it under his heel. "She's dead, OK?"
"You're sorry?"
He looked up. "Sure I'm sorry. Course I am. Jesus fucking Christ, Artie, course I'm sorry. I loved May. I know, OK, we're like little kids, but I loved her and she was nice to me. She gave me her shirt for a present. May didn't buy into this thing I supposedly got, some disease, I hear my mom on the phone talking about it. I know she steals money from my dad for the doctors and she gives it to me, too, to buy me things."
He dug into his jeans and pulled out some matches and a fishing fly; with them, a wad of cash spilled from the pocket.
"Genia gave you the money?"
"She stole it from my father and she gave me some and I took the rest from her purse."
"You were short of cash?"
He laughed. "Always, yeah. Aren't you? I'm not crazy. I'm not sick. They like it better if they think I have something with a name."
"Can I ask you something, Billy?"
"You can ask me anything."
In Russian I said, "Do you speak other languages?"
"Of course," he replied in Russian. "Russian, Italian, even some shitty Spanish I picked up at school."
Like me, he was a mynah bird, a mimic. It ran in the family. He was a little spy, a secret boy. He could join the family business; he had all the talents, the looks, the charm, the softness of speech, the persuasive blue eyes.
"Anyone know about the languages?"
"You must be kidding. Course not. It's my weapon. You know why I learned?"
"Why?"
"I wanted to be like you." He held out his hand and took mine and talked for about an hour, sometimes fluently, sometimes in disjoined sentences.
It started when Heshey Shank invited him to go out fishing and Billy told his grandpa in Florida; they talked almost every day, Billy loved the old man and he was miserable when they sent him away. For what? Billy said. Because he liked little girls? Billy didn't believe it.
&n
bsp; "All I wanted was an adventure," Billy said suddenly. "Like in books. My own adventure, a trip, you know?" With his stubby boy's fingers he extracted another cigarette from my pack and lit it.
The trip was set for Saturday. Billy worked it fine. He got Stevie Gervasi across from his own house to invite him for an overnight to the country. He told his mom he was old enough to cross the street alone and she had to let him, he told her, don't baby me, he said. She promised to stay in her room even if she was awake that morning he left.
Early, he called Stevie on his cell—all the kids had their own phones—and said it was off, he wasn't coming, and he watched from the window as Stevie and his dad drove away. Then Billy picked up his bag, jogged down the stairs and left the house. He had to go or he'd miss the timing. He couldn't find his nets, but he had his fishing knife, so it was OK. When Heshey came by in the crappy Honda, Billy was ready.
There was a bonus, he said. A block away he saw Stevie's horrible cat, and he told Heshey to pull over, then raced out of the car, grabbed the cat and slung it in the back seat.
Billy used his fishing knife on the cat and the blood got on his clothes and in the car he changed. He made Heshey drive to Coney Island so he could stuff the blood-soaked clothes under the boardwalk. Later he would string up the cat at the beach club. He also carried extra blood in a jar in his bag. He got it from a butcher store near the pizza joint.
"You put them there so someone would find them?"
Billy shrugged. "Maybe, maybe not. I once heard this girl that babysat—I didn't need a babysitter, but my mom said you can't stay alone, blah blah blah—I heard her on the phone saying you could find treasure there, and I thought if someone found the clothes it would be more fun."
"And you put cuts in May's T-shirt, that right? There was a lot of blood for one cat. You cut yourself to confuse everyone, that right? It was a game? Billy?"
Billy didn't answer.
After he hid the clothes, he told Heshey to drive to Breezy Point, where his grandpa Farone had a shack. Then they would go fishing. It started to snow. There was a TV in the shack and after a while, Billy realized people were searching for him. It was fun, he said. It was fun watching, like being at your own funeral and listening to what people said about you.
I said, "I was there. I was at the shack."
"I know. I saw your car. But we were in a different shack by then. I told Heshey he had to do what I wanted or people would say he kidnapped me."
"I would have fixed things," I said.
"I know. But I had to go on this trip. See the sheepshead, stuff like that."
Billy got bored, he said. In the shack in Breezy Point, he found some Tylenol PM in the medicine cabinet, and he knew what it was; he had seen it on TV. He crushed it with a spoon and put it in Heshey's chilli.
"I put tons of it. Heshey was a fat guy."
"And the clock, the drawing? You did it?"
"You liked it?"
"How did you get to the beach club if Heshey was drugged?"
Billy smiled. "I drove. Pretty cool, right? Like you taught me," he said.
"Billy?"
"Yeah, Artie?"
"You think your grandma knew about you going to the shack, you think she knew?"
"Maybe. She knew a lot of stuff. She's a witch, you know? I mean a real one?"
"There aren't any witches, honey."
"I don't know, OK?" He smiled sleepily. "Artie, I'm tired. I want to sleep a while."
I didn't let him sleep. I made him talk. I made Billy tell me how he got Shank to the beach club and half dragged him into the cabana. He told me how Heshey fell asleep and how he got the nets and covered him, and left him. Billy talked and I didn't know how much was true, if he had gone home to the Farones or to the pizza place, but I knew he had cut Heshey Shank.
"Did you?"
Billy looked up at me with those see-through blue eyes and said, "I wanted to see how it felt."
"How did it feel?"
"Like cutting a fish," he said. "I got scared, so I locked him in and came in here and went to sleep for a while."
"He was bleeding? He suffocated in the nets?"
"Whatever," Billy said. "But everything is shit, isn't it? I listen to grown-ups and the TV, and they say how bad everything is and no one answers my questions and I wanted to have an adventure before I died. You ever feel like that?"
But there was something else. I thought about the way Heshey's flesh looked, the small chunks carved out of it. I sat on the floor with Billy and we talked for what seemed like hours until the sky outside was light and most of the fog was gone.
"You remember my ma's pop?" Billy asked and for a moment I thought he meant my father. He couldn't know, of course. He couldn't.
I said, "You mean the general?"
Billy nodded. He had liked the general. He had liked his stories. When Billy was little, he told me, they went fishing. The old man was the first guy who took Billy fishing and they sat by the water and the general told him stories about the war in Leningrad, where he lived.
"He told me they ate wallpaper paste," Billy said, suddenly. "Other stuff."
"What other stuff?" I said.
Billy didn't answer, and I didn't ask. I didn't want to know what I already knew. The general told stories about Leningrad and the siege and how people foraged for food among the dead. Ate the dead. I knew why Billy had taken chunks out of Heshey Shank.
Out of the blue, Billy got up off the floor and went to the window. I watched him and knew that he left Shank trapped in the nets and bleeding, left him there for days until he bled to death.
Billy said, "The fog is going away, I can see the ocean. Artie?"
Heavy with fatigue, he moved slowly across the few feet between us. I was still sitting on the floor and Billy kneeled down next to me and put his arms around me. I could feel his weight and the soft skin.
Against my chest, Billy nodded his head. Then he said, "I love you."
After a while, curled up against me, Billy fell asleep. A faintly puzzled look was on his face as if he slept perplexed by the fact that what he had done was wrong. He didn't really understand what he did or why; it occurred to me that in that way he was like America.
Carefully, I laid him on the floor, still in his blanket, got up and went outside. I could barely breathe. I managed to get out my cell phone and call Sonny Lippert, and then I went back and sat beside Billy again and waited until Lippert and some of his guys arrived.
"Don't use any sirens," I'd said to Lippert and he put out the word.
When I heard Lippert's footsteps on the wooden walkway outside the cabana, I got up and opened the door and showed Lippert where Heshey Shank lay, dead, on the bare floor of the cabana.
"Go home" was all Lippert said to me.
We looked at each other briefly and didn't speak because we both knew this was something you couldn't say, not yet, we both knew it, and I felt his hand on my arm for a moment.
After some of Lippert's guys showed up, I went to the Farones' and told them Billy was in custody. And I left them. I'd had it for now. There was nothing else I could do. Zeitsev would fix up a lawyer and maybe Billy would get help if he needed help.
Maybe he was just a rotten kid; you could be a kid and be evil. Maybe he was a shattered little boy, crushed by all the grown-ups who surrounded him. I couldn't tell, and if he was sick, it didn't have a name. I couldn't shake the memory of the warm body against me and him saying, "I love you."
No one gave a rat's ass about Heshey Shank; he was just a retard, a pervert who got what he deserved. A cop found Heshey's tape recorder shoved in his pants pocket. He had recorded what happened while he could; it took him three days, like I figured, to die. The tape disappeared somewhere into Brooklyn.
Billy became a kind of hero. Billy, the kid, they called him. BILLY THE KID. That was how the media played it. Zeitsev had all the right lawyers, and within a day or two people were saying what a smart, brave kid he was, a child soldier. His photogr
aph appeared in the papers; every time I saw his face, I saw my own father.
There was much more. There were things that went back thirty-five years, connections I still had to untangle: Genia was my half sister and my father was Billy's grandpa. Heshey Shank had been set up by his brother to get rid of Billy Farone. Was it because old Mrs. Farone asked him? Because she was jealous of the husband she had kicked out but whom Billy adored? Because she knew the kid was Zeitsev's and not her son's? Was it a way to draw me into a trap? In the end, the two crazy innocents, Heshey and Ivana, died from it.
I went back to the city and returned Mike's van and got something to eat. All I wanted was food and sleep. I had been so obsessed with the danger Billy was in, I never figured it for him as the killer. He had made everyone afraid in a city that was already scared to death, it was an easy place to raise the terror. Now he was a hero. At Mike's, I glanced up at the TV on the shelf over the cake-stand and saw Billy's face.
Afterwards
Afterwards, I went home and slept. For the next couple of weeks all I did was sleep and spend time, in between sleeping, with Tolya. He was at St Vincent's where I got him transferred because I knew people there, and they were good and I trusted them.
Maxine and I saw each other and, knowing we were almost a married couple, made plans. We behaved like a couple. We held hands. We inspected furniture we couldn't afford in fancy Soho stores; we lay on an Italian leather bed in Flou and giggled. We looked at converting my loft to make rooms for her girls. I liked it. I liked the sense of security. It was almost spring.
On the first warm glorious day, hot sun, blue sky, my bike propped up just outside, I was at the counter of Mike's coffee shop. Someone came in the door and I looked up from the BLT I had in one hand.
Tolya didn't say anything. He climbed on the stool next to me, ordered bacon and eggs and ate silently while I finished my sandwich.
"How are you?" I said.
"I lost twenty pounds," he said. "I must buy new clothes. We'll shop."
"I'd love to shop with you. I need a new suit. You'll be my best man?"
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