“Yeah.”
“Then go already,” she said. “Go do what you have to do. Go.”
“I already did that,” I said.
Maxine was caught up in her plans.
“I’m going over to Century 21 to try to squeeze my fat ass into a bathing suit,” she said.
“Don’t fish.” Maxine had a great figure, she was tall and thin and rangy.
She picked up her bag. “You need anything?”
“Like what?”
She said, “I don’t know. Socks. Underpants.”
“Is this how it works?”
“What?”
“Marriage.”
She kissed me. “Go away.”
“I’ll see you tonight.”
She hesitated.
“What is it?”
“Artie, honey, listen, the girls are restless, and it’s hot, would you mind if I just took them out to my mom’s today? We were going tomorrow anyhow, they’ll probably make you go up to Madison Square to see that the sniffer dogs are behaving right before the politicians get into town, and I’d like to get the kids settled at the shore. Is that OK? I know you can’t get away before Thursday night, like we agreed, and I’m OK with it, but I’d like to get them out of the city.”
“Go,” I got up and leaned down to kiss her.
“Artie?”
“What?”
“It’s OK, you know. I know you think about her sometimes. I don’t expect it to go away completely. You remember stuff. We all remember.”
“Who?”
“Lily Hanes,” she said. “I know that.” Max hesitated. “Did you see her? Do you see her?”
“When?”
“Ever. I know she’s back in the city.”
“How do you know?”
“I saw her on the street.”
“Where?”
“Chinatown. I was walking to your place, and I saw her. She didn’t see me. I met her with you years ago when we, you and me, we were just friends and you were together with her. Remember?”
“No.”
“I did. I saw her. Across the street. A month ago maybe.”
“Well I don’t see her and I didn’t see her and don’t be silly. OK?”
“OK.”
I kissed her again and started off, waving my hand. Looking over my shoulder, I saw her walk away.
I turned again to look for Maxie but she had disappeared around the corner. Later she told me she had called after me to ask how I felt about the apartment again, but that I didn’t hear her, or at least I didn’t turn around.
I was still thinking about Sid, and Earl, about Sid’s repetition of lies and half-truths so that every time I talked to him, it all seemed more and more impenetrable. I couldn’t shut it off, though, not Sid or Earl or their history.
I went to pick up my car. I’d left it a couple of blocks away, and when I got to the lot I felt someone watching me, someone behind me, making me sweat. I turned around. There was nobody, just the rows of cars and the deserted street.
8
You could smell the blood. It was hot, and you could smell it, fresh meat and blood as soon as you got to the Meat Packing District. I went looking for Tolya Sverdloff after I left Maxine because I’d left my jacket at his place the night before, and to thank him and pick up some gifts, and because of what the bartender in Red Hook had said. Sid McKay drank Martinis with a big Russian who drank Scotch and sounded a lot like Tolya Sverdloff. Give my regards to Tolya Sverdloff, Sid had said. But so what?
Sid knew a lot of people, but it was New York. You met people all the time, you met people who knew your friends, you ran into people you couldn’t remember who knew everything about you. People you hadn’t seen for years showed up after disasters. They heard you’d worked a bad case, they came back into your life to see if you were alive, or wanted to get drunk or keep each other company or get laid. So what if Sid and Tolya knew each other?
“Fucking watch out, asshole,” a guy in a truck yelled when I almost ran a light crossing Ninth Avenue, and I resisted saying “fuck you” back because I wanted to keep my good mood, and this stuff could escalate fast and you could explode and do something you would regret.
Tolya was talking to a guy in a bloodstained coat and a hairnet who was smoking and eating a meatball sandwich. The two of them were leaning against the wall of the warehouse opposite Tolya’s building off Gansevoort Street, watching a couple of kids move some beef carcasses off a truck on to the loading dock and then inside.
These days most of the meat business had moved up to Hunt’s Point in the Bronx. Real estate and art and hair salons where a cut cost six hundred bucks had replaced them. The meat that still came in here on the west side mostly came butchered and shrink-wrapped and boxed before it was shipped out across the city, but a couple of places still got the meat in whole and you could smell it for days. It stayed in your nostrils. Even at night around the Meat Packing District I could smell it as if it was in the walls, mixed in with the cement.
Wearing a yellow linen shirt like a tent hanging over his blue pants, Tolya saw me getting out of my car. He shook hands with the meat guy, and started in my direction. I thought about the party and the watch and suddenly I was glad as hell to see him. I kissed him three times Russian style, and said, “I left my jacket at your place.”
“I was calling you,” he said, waving his phone in my direction.
Tolya walked over to a canary-yellow Cadillac Escalade and leaned against it.
“You like it?” he said.
“What happened to the Hummer?”
“Vulgar,” he said. “I wait for my Maybach to be delivered now. Best car made.”
“You mean she doesn’t like the Hummer? Your lady. The severe one. She thinks the Hummer is vulgar?”
“We compromise,” he said. “She prefers small environmentally fine little design car for small people, I tell her this is impossible, I can’t fit in this kind of car, she says I won’t go in that thing. So I put my beautiful Hummer in a garage.” He looked at his Escalade. “OK, so I am still polluting environment, so kill me.” Tolya smiled but his huge face was tight and the eyes flickered away from mine as if he was looking for something or someone over my shoulder.
Tolya was anxious. I didn’t want to ask him about Sid, not yet.
“Artyom, do you have a little time for me?” Tolya said in Russian. “You have some time?” He was hesitant, unsure, unlike himself.
“Sure. Yeah, of course. I’m on call, but I don’t have to go any place unless they call me. What the hell is it?” I said. “What’s the matter?”
He shrugged.
“Tell me.”
“Come on,” he said, and he took hold of my arm in his ham-sized hand and we walked towards the river.
“Look up, Artemy,” he said. “Look above you.”
“What is it?”
“The High Line,” Tolya said, exuberant now as if he’d suddenly seen a gorgeous woman. “I want this. Is very beautiful up there. I want to show you.” He flashed his old smile, and began walking.
We went, Tolya first, under the elevated tracks, moving in the faint broken glare from the light that filtered through the overhead tracks and the shifting patterns from cars on the Westside Highway.
The underside of the derelict train tracks was littered with condoms, beer cans, used needles, smashed-up signs from anti-Bush protests, a pink high-heeled shoe, a straw hat with a red, white and blue band that proclaimed “I Love Bush”.
Tolya was possessed, insistent, and I followed him. We walked a few blocks, and then he stopped abruptly and fumbled for a key in his pocket.
“What?” I said and my voice boomed out in the deserted space under the tracks.
“Come,” he said and found the entrance to an abandoned warehouse.
We went in. The place was stacked with empty boxes, and the high windows were encrusted with dirt.
I followed Tolya up a couple of flights of stairs to a back door that he unlock
ed. He walked out on to a loading dock that led straight on to the elevated railway line.
“Is illegal,” he said when we were both outside. “Is trespassing to come here, but I come anyway.”
Tolya seemed to move lightly across the tracks, though the place was overgrown with weeds and grass, knitted together so it caught at your ankles. I stumbled, got my balance. I stood up. I looked out west.
We were only a couple of blocks from the river, but the buildings and the old shipping terminals separated us from the water.
“What the fuck is this place?” I said.
“The High Line,” he said in Russian. “It was built in the late 1920s, used to run to the tip of Manhattan when Manhattan was still a big port. Carried the goods down to the water. At the other end it connected with the trains, the old Empire Line. In 1980, it was abandoned, just like that. Look, look at the Deco detail on these railings, look, Artyom.” Tolya was ecstatic. He put his arms out wide. “After a while, after the ships stopped coming to Manhattan, the warehouses die, the High Line dies, nobody does anything,” he said. “Now everyone wants. Like Red Hook,” he added. “Like every piece of the city. People are fighting over industrial bones of New York, Artyom. Rotting docks and grain docks and container ports and rusty warehouses and cast-iron buildings and meat packing plants and places that made car parts, and printing presses. Brooklyn, Manhattan, Bronx. Up here on the High Line some people want to put galleries for art, others want to tear it down to use the land. Everyone thought the city was dead three years ago and now they grab at it, people betray each other for tiny little pieces. I came to New York, I thought it was the modern city, but it is old and beautiful.” Tolya closed his eyes, then opened them. “Old, beautiful, crazy. Who knows. I want this so much, but it is owned by the railroads, it is private property, but I want it. Look at how seeds blow in and take hold and all this green grows, like a jungle in the sky. To have a piece of this would make you a king of New York, right, Artemy?” he asked, and then burst out laughing. “I don’t get, of course, but I can dream.”
Something about Tolya made me feel he wanted me to know he was connected to this place. I didn’t understand why, but I knew he needed me to know. Maybe it made him feel he already owned it.
“Let’s go,” I said and looked down. The grass grew thick under my feet, and the old tracks were supported by iron struts that were spaced far apart. There was jagged wire and broken glass.
We started back. Tolya tripped and I caught him. He was breathing hard. He had always been big, but he seemed tired, out of breath, sick.
“Sometimes, Artyom, I come up here at night, like a thief, like a spy,” Tolya said.
It was something Sid McKay had said of himself as a child. A child spy, he had called himself.
When we were back on the street Tolya said, “So will you take a ride with me, Artyom? You’re not working? You have time for me?”
I looked at my beeper. There was nothing. “Sure.”
“Thank you.”
“What is all this ‘thank you’ bullshit, Tol?”
For the second time that day, he was strangely tentative as we walked back to his car. Again I had the sense that something wasn’t right.
“Your Valentina is lovely,” I said. “She’s a terrific girl.”
“Yes, but is self-conscious,” he said. “I offer her plastic surgery for the finger, but she says no, this belongs to her past, this horrible thing they do to her, cut off her finger, bastards who kidnap her when she was a little girl in Moscow. Who does this shit, Artyom? But she says it is part of my story, Daddy. Part of my own narrative. What does this mean?” He turned to look at me, face drowning in sadness. “This is American, that you must have a story?”
“Yeah. Beginning, middle, end. Like a sitcom.”
We got to his car and he added, “Suddenly Valentina is grown up, and we are in Miami where she is living with her mother, and she says, Dad I want to join up with you, work in your business in New York, I want to leave Miami, other girls are doing this, and I say, I don’t care what are other girls doing, I say, go to college, but she wants experience, she wants more, more experience, more life, she says, what kind of life? She is nineteen. This is life, to be model and work in real estate?”
“Give her a chance,” I said. “Some kids grow up fast.”
“So you’ll take a ride with me? You’re OK for that?”
“They’ll beep me if they want me. I’m OK. Where do you want to ride, Tolya?”
“To Brooklyn,” he said.
“Big place Brooklyn,” I said, figuring he wanted to go out to Brighton Beach where he kept an apartment, maybe get some food, maybe buy the Russian papers. I figured it for a trip out to Brighton Beach.
“Yes,” he said, and I didn’t know if he was avoiding the question but all he said was, “I’ll go upstairs and get your jacket,” then walked a couple of steps to his building and lumbered through the door.
*
I didn’t know if I was surprised when Tolya pulled off the BQE, cut under the Gowanus, parked near a chain-link fence on the Red Hook waterfront, got out and gestured for me to follow him.
Silently we crossed some tufts of dry scabby grass and I almost tripped over a Snapple bottle. There was a Snapple factory nearby. Made from the best stuff on earth, the logo on the bottles said. Best stuff, I thought. Sure.
A security guard who was smoking and leaning against the fence put up his hand, but Tolya went over and talked to him, the guy shrugged, straightened up, threw away his butt and looked respectful. Then he held open the gate and we went through. More weeds covered an expanse of ground where there were cars rusting, and we went out to the edge of a decayed dock.
Tolya sat on an overturned crate and motioned for me to sit beside him on a second box. Beyond us, spread out, spectacular against the hot sky, was the river and the city. The sun lit up the water so it glittered.
I kept my mouth shut about Sid, but I wondered if it was accidental, Tolya bringing me here the day after Sid called, the day after the guy died in the inlet. I figured I’d wait and see if he mentioned it. Maybe it was coincidence, maybe that was all. I didn’t like myself much for not telling him. Tolya stretched out his arms again as he had on the High Line earlier.
“Pot of gold,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Imagine, Artyom, imagine to be here on edge of the world, Statue of Liberty in front, New York City there, ten minutes, and all this,” he said. “Imagine new buildings, imagine marinas and boats, imagine a brand new city.” Tolya’s eyes were half shut as he squinted into the hard light. Again came the sound of his breathing hard, trying to catch a breath.
“You sound like shit,” I said.
He didn’t answer.
“Are you listening to me?
He said, “One day I am coming from Brighton Beach to the city and I stop and I think this is beautiful, and I buy a few little buildings here,” he said. “Most already sold. There is guy, big guy, same like me, and I ask him, can I buy some from you, but he says, what fun is it if you sell your buildings, and I understand, so I buy what I can and I look for more. Land. Like always. Every century.”
“Sure,” I said. “Fine. So what’s stopping you?”
He shifted his weight on the box. “Information,” he said. “Who has rights, who owns what, who in city makes promises.”
Sometimes I wondered how the hell he made all the money, tons of money, money mountains, that he used to buy the buildings, more and more every year. He bought buildings like I ate pie. He said it was just good business and tried to get me in on stuff. I couldn’t. I didn’t have the dough and I never would. I didn’t want to think about what kind of deals he did, either. I didn’t ask about money. It was part of the deal. We were friends. We had shared more than a pood of salt as the Russkis said, and that was it. I had pushed him on his business stuff once and it almost killed our friendship. He did what he did, I thought; as far as I knew, what he did was legal, more
or less. Anyway it was only financial stuff. Not insider trading, either. It was only real estate, stuff everyone did, one way or another.
“Something else is eating you. Tolya? Are we talking some fucking Russian thing?”
He hoisted himself to his feet. “Artyom, sweetheart, everything is a fucking Russian thing for us, you and me,” he said. “Everything. You want that we deny this, but it never goes away. Never. I wish it would go.”
It was the first time I’d heard him talk that way. Usually it was me. I put my hand on his arm, and said, “What?”
“I have become American citizen. US. Wave the fucking flag,” he said.
“When?” I didn’t smile, I swear to God, I just listened and didn’t say anything.
“Last month. I applied over a year ago, it takes fucking four hundred days until I finally got the passport.”
“I would have made a party for you.”
“Yeah, and to eat? Red, white and blue American cheese sandwiches?”
“You passed your citizenship test?”
“I can tell you names of all presidents of US, OK?”
“Congratulations,” I said. “But I mean, so how come? You always told me you don’t like America that much.”
He shrugged. “I do it for my girls, OK? I do, but I am not happy. It makes me feel unreal. I do not feel American. New York’s different. It’s OK. Also, I have my little apartment out by Brighton Beach. I can hide out. Feel Russian.” He snorted ironically.
“The girls are citizens already,” I said.
“Listen, I did this, I like having passports. One is good. Two is better. Three excellent.”
Tolya put his hand on my shoulder to steady himself.
“Let’s go drink something,” he said. “Let’s drink.”
He walked back towards the street and the SUV and I went with him. He looked tired.
“There are guys I used to know who are looking over my shoulder, Artyom,” he said. “Every time I put money down on a piece of real estate, I discover these guys are trying to steal it from me. Russian guys. Guys with guns. In Moscow, you want to be in trouble, get in the way of guys buying real estate. You understand? And they buy everywhere, not just Russia, everywhere.”
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