I could have been in Moscow. The damp stink of the long hall, green paint on the walls, the cooking smells coming from other apartments, the sound of people fighting, it was a long time since I’d been in a building like this. I wanted out.
Somewhere dogs were barking. They sounded like they were tied up, barking, whining, howling.
“I think they still fight dogs around here, you know? Cockfights, but also dogs. For money,” Rita said, stopped in front of a door, and unlocked it.
It was a small apartment. She said she shared it with a Mexican friend. In the living room was a couch, an armchair, and a table that was covered with a green and yellow flowered tablecloth. On the wall, on a shelf with a candle in a red glass jar, was a shrine to some Catholic saint. Next to it was a little Russian Orthodox icon and beside it a photograph of Stalin cut out of an old newspaper and framed behind glass. A bedroom was visible through an open door. A second door led to a kitchen where I followed Rita.
“Tamales,” she said, setting down her bag of groceries on a table that had one leg shorter than the others and was propped up with a few sticks of wood. “We cook for soccer games. Is big deal here, weekends, holidays, everyone playing football in park. Also, I make pelmeni.” Rita smiled, and put on some latex gloves and picked up the top of a large pot full of glass jars. She checked there was water in the pot then turned on the stove to boil the jars.
“Jars for borscht. I make real good borscht. One day I am queen of borscht.”
“What?”
She took off the gloves with a snap and put them on the counter near the stove, and leaned against the window.
“So over by old warehouses, little businesses all over Red Hook, you know, people doing this, that, blowing glass, making pies, designing stuff, kites, one lady makes so beautiful kites, so I start business, too, pelmeni, borscht, my friend Cecilia says, OK, you help me make tamales, I help with borscht, we gonna sell fancy restaurants, food stores. We gonna be big. Fancy.” She giggled. “We already give down payment on warehouse space by Snapple plant.”
I said, “There’s a lot of Russians around here now?”
“There’s Russians everywhere,” she said. “I’m born in Brighton Beach, I go back to Russia until I’m twenty years, then come back. I find place in Brighton, then I lose, move to Flatbush and I lose, and I have no place to go, story of poor Russians, we move, we get fucked, so I meet Cecilia and she says I can share. She is alone like me. So I make tamales,” she said in Russian now and glanced up at the shrine. “Where you from?”
“Manhattan,” I said.
“I mean in Russia.”
“Moscow.”
“You speak nice,” she said, “I speak shitty both languages, I lost both, English, Russian, moving around. You want something? Tea? Soup? Please.”
I said I’d eat some of her borscht—I was starving— and she heated some up, put it in a bowl and carried it into the living room where we sat at the table. I ate. I asked about the icon on the living room wall.
“Yours?” I said.
“My friend she makes shrine to some saints, so I make icon. Everyone praying a lot around here, Americans like praying, so I pray also.”
“To Stalin?”
“I get from my father,” she said. “So I keep. You think Stalin was so bad? Plenty Russians in Brooklyn loving Stalin.” She looked at my bowl. “Good?”
“Great,” I said.
“So you are surprised I invite you to my place? You think I just ask like that? You think I don’t remember that you are friends with fat Russian guy?” She smiled. “So is your friend, this fat Sverdloff bastard?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Which is why you are following me?”
“I wasn’t following you. I saw you on the street.”
She snorted.
I said, “Why did you attack him?”
“Are you cop?”
“Yes.”
“Is OK,” she said. “I am not scared of police like other Russians. I didn’t do nothing. You want to know why I attack him? If I tell you, maybe you keep him away from me, OK?”
“OK.”
Rita got up and went to a black wood cabinet with a glass front, squatted down in front of it, and extracted a bottle of vodka. She pulled off the foil around the neck and opened it, then produced a couple of glasses and held the bottle out towards me.
“Yes?”
“Sure.”
She poured the booze into the glasses, then sat on the couch. I went and sat next to her. Rita said, “I am very, very drunk that day, OK, so I feel bad after, but Sverdloff making trouble around here. Always here, always talking, always wanting to know, Red Hook this, Red Hook that, where can he buy property, what goes on. I meet him at soccer game, I see him at a bar, he makes nice, you know, also he buys my food, then he says I will invest in business. He promises but nothing happens.”
I drank my vodka.
“Not so many people speak Russian around here,” Rita said. “So first I help him. He pays me something, and I help him, I tell him what I hear, what I know, who has bids on spaces, how much, then I find out he wants to buy everything. He don’t give no shit about people here, he wants to buy and make houses for rich people.”
“He does this stuff himself?”
“No. He has people. He has people, you know? He don’t do small shit. Is like movie business, you know? He is Mr Nice Guy, helps everyone, gives money for everything, kids, schools, charity, artistic stuff. Not him. He does not get hands dirty. I moved enough,” Rita said. “You understand? I don’t want to move no more. I keep this apartment.”
“Yeah, but I’m not sure he’s interested in this apartment.”
She finished her drink and poured some more. “So is your friend?” she said. “Friend from long time?”
“What else?” I said. “I could give you some money for your business. If you want. I could make an investment.”
I took out my wallet and looked inside. I’d been to the bank. I had vacation money. I took a fifty and put it under the empty borscht bowl.
“I mean I like borscht.”
“Your mom made?”
“Sure,” I said and thought of my mother who never cooked if she didn’t have to, who hated Russian food and dreamed only of a life in Paris that she would never have, who cut out pictures of France from magazines she bought on the black market when she had a little extra money.
From her stash of photographs, she pieced together a life of Parisian pleasure, of museums, and bookshops, and cafés and delicious food and wine. She never made it to France, but after we were kicked out of Moscow, when we went to Israel, a few times, on birthdays, my father took her to a French restaurant. She ate pâté and French bread and they drank wine. She saved the menus.
For a few seconds, I wasn’t sure if Rita would take the money or throw me out, but she was a smart cookie. She did her primitive shtick, and I listened and smiled and we drank more vodka and cracked jokes in Russian and I complimented her on her soup again.
She pulled her legs up under her and sat cross-legged next to me, leaning forward. She gave off heat. I was wearing a T-shirt, it was warm in the apartment, no air con, and Rita reached over and touched the bare skin on my arm.
“OK,” she said. “If you want, you can invest in my company, so I tell you this friend of you is big creep and sometimes I see him with black man, they walk and talk a lot by docks and sometimes they are arguing.”
“Which black man?”
“Mr Sid McKay.”
“You know him?”
“Everyone here knows,” she said. “Small place.”
“You liked him?”
“Sure,” she said.
“What else?” I said, but the front door flew open, and a tall skinny Hispanic woman burst in, followed by a pair of teenage girls, arms laden with shopping bags that sprouted ears of corn.
The two girls spread a plastic garbage bag on the floor, and began husking the corn; the corn silk p
iled up like shorn hair.
Rita got up. I suddenly wondered if she had spotted me first on the street, if she just wanted some money. She wrote down her phone number on a piece of paper and gave it to me.
At the door I said, “Did you know that Sid McKay was attacked?”
“Yes,” she said. “Everybody knows. He is dead?”
“Not yet.”
Not yet. Not yet, it went through my head, it kept time with the sound of my steps in the hallway outside Rita’s door. I ran, the sound echoed in my head. I left the building; it was dark. Teenage boys loitered close by. Somewhere there was the sound of gunfire, or maybe just a car backfiring.
Hurry, I thought to myself, but where to? I should have been on the road to Maxine hours ago, but I had to know about Tolya. When I got through to someone at his condo in Florida, the woman said she had no idea where the hell he was, no idea, and it sounded like a lie. Everything sounded like a lie. I ran for my car.
15
“He’s dead,” Sonny said on the phone when I answered it from my car. “He’s dead, man. They unplugged Sid, you knew that, and finally he went. He’s dead. Someone beat him with the metal plank, and left him, and it took him days to die. You figure he didn’t know? You figure he didn’t feel anything once he went in the coma? Who the fuck knows? Maybe he was lying there and he knew it all. So here’s a wackola thing, man, he had metal in his brain and he had wood splinters deep in his hands, go figure.” Sonny sounded sober. “Go have your honeymoon. I’m with this now.”
I felt lousy when I heard. I already knew Sid was finished, but you could hope. This was final. I felt lousy. I should have paid attention when Sid told me someone was looking for him and killed his half brother Earl by mistake, but who would mistake Earl, a homeless drunk in rags, for Sid? It still didn’t compute.
I said to Sonny, “Where are you?”
“I’m at the hospital, where do you think? You said fucking help the guy, so I’m helping.”
“I’m on my way.”
“Don’t. There’s nothing you can do.”
“What kind of wood?”
It was the thing that had been lodged in the back of my mind, and now I had to yank it out and look at it. Did Sid kill Earl? It occurred to me now that this was how Sid knew about the wood plank, about Earl maybe being hit over the head before he went into the water. It was Sid who had called in the case. Would he do it if he really was the killer? Because he suddenly felt guilty? Because no one would suspect him anyhow? Because I wouldn’t? Did Sid read me so well?
“Artie, you there, man?” Sonny was still on the phone.
“What kind of wood, Sonny?”
“What?”
“The splinters in Sid’s fingers.”
“Fuck knows,” he said. “You having some thoughts about this?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
If it was Sid who killed Earl, what the hell difference did it make now? Earl was dead. Sid was dead. If I kept my mouth shut, the waters would close over it all. If it got out, it was all anyone would remember about Sid McKay, that he killed a homeless guy who was probably his half brother. I’d make sure Earl got a decent burial, like I had promised, and let it go. I’d let it go. Sonny was waiting on the other end of the phone.
“Artie, man, you there?”
I told him I’d call him later and hung up, then left Maxine a message that I was on my way. I didn’t head right out for Jersey, though. I had another stop.
Behind the gate of Tolya Sverdloff’s apartment building in Brighton Beach was a doorman wearing a Cossack-style get-up. His cranberry red shirt with puffy sleeves was buttoned on the shoulder and his pants were stuffed into knee-high boots. He was talking Russian into a cellphone.
Behind me along Brighton Beach Avenue under the elevated train tracks, the street was crowded with people shopping. The shops had Russian signs in the windows: books, underwear, minks, smoked fish, fancy imported china; everything was still Russian here. You could tell by the signs: the sign in one window read FISH in English and FRESH FISH in Russian. The old days, Soviet times, fish was almost always frozen, and the shopkeepers who ever got anything fresh always underlined the word. Fresh fish was real status.
Sid was dead and I couldn’t get hold of Tolya, and I needed him to tell me that he wasn’t involved.
Tell me, I thought. Tell me you didn’t kill Sid because you needed information about some fucked-up real estate scheme. Tell me the girl Rita with the borscht business is just another crackpot Russian, and you didn’t betray everything for more cash. Tell me you didn’t send one of your guys to hurt Sid.
Tolya had guys for everything, drive him around, help out friends, and god knew what else. I had used his guys plenty; I had taken the help. I never asked what else they did for him beside driving his cars around and doing errands for his friends. This time I had to ask.
In front of the building was the ocean and the long boardwalk that ran alongside it. Strings of colored lights were coming on at the cafés and restaurants that were clustered along the boardwalk. The sound of Russian pop music blasted out of speakers at every café. People drifted in for dinner.
Tolya’s building itself had a fake Art Deco façade with shutters trimmed in mint green and cranberry. I banged on the gate a second time, and the Cossack with the cellphone looked at me. I held up a twenty-dollar bill. He opened the gate and I said I was Sverdloff’s brother and implied I had keys for the apartment. He took the money, waited while I passed him twenty more, and then let me through.
In the elevator I got stuck at the back of a pack of Russian women, all babes, great figures, big hair, their arms piled full of shopping bags and boxes, one with a huge black plastic dress bag over her shoulder, something red and furry sticking out of the bottom. They were talking Russian loud. Peasant Russian, my mother would have said. She was a snob once. Now in the fog that Alzheimer’s had wrapped around her, she didn’t speak any language, not Russian or Hebrew or the French she had loved. I had to get to Israel to see her soon; it was over a year since I’d been and maybe I’d take Maxine, though for months after I saw my mother, I was always trapped by melancholy.
*
Outside Tolya’s apartment, I listened for a minute. I rang the bell. Then I knocked. I rang again and listened again, and looked up and down the corridor which had dark red carpeting and flocked green and gold wallpaper.
Originally he had bought the place for his mother for her visits to America. During her last couple of years, she wanted to stay in Brighton Beach. “With my people,” she said over and over, but by then Lara Sverdlova was pretty much nuts.
After his mother died, Tolya kept the place. He told me he sometimes came out here to hide. Or to feel Russian. Or both.
“Who thinks I am ever living in this place in Brighton Beach, right, Artyom? Who ever imagines even that I have such a place in my possession? When I am hungry, I go for an overnight,” he had said once when we were sitting out on the boardwalk eating tongue and smoked sturgeon and roast lamb, him drinking the Kvass that he loved.
When I was sure the apartment was empty, I picked the lock.
All the time I was thinking: Was Tolya involved with Sid’s death? Then I was thinking, maybe Tolya was dead, then thinking: don’t be dead, man. For a second, I felt he was dead, then I rejected the idea and figured he was alive.
My skin crawled with anxiety. I wanted to call Maxine and tell her, wanted to ask her what I should do if Tolya was involved. She had a good moral compass, she didn’t suffer from confusion about right and wrong; she was a Catholic girl who knew; she just knew. I didn’t call.
The living room had a couple of huge black leather couches and tons of computer stuff. A flatscreen TV covered most of one wall.
In the bedroom the bed was still covered with the pink silk spread that Tolya’s mother had used; the dresser held her perfume bottles; a Russian book on astrology was on the nightstand next to pictures of her husband, and of Tolya and his childr
en. A votive candle, unlit, stood in a glass holder. I picked it up. It was cold.
Furry brown slippers with bears’ heads that had belonged to Lara Sverdlova were on the floor. In a small bookcase were old Soviet magazines she liked to read, magazines with pictures of herself as the young, beautiful actress she had been, so unlike the crazy old woman I remembered who had terrorized people around Brighton Beach. She yelled at people. She told them they were fat or ugly. She just let fly whenever she wanted. Tolya had been sweet, though, and patient.
I remembered how he had carried her out of Farone’s restaurant one night when she went berserk; she made his life hell, but he picked her up and carried her gently to the car.
When Sverdlova had died earlier in the summer in her dacha outside Moscow, Tolya went to bury her in the cemetery in Peredelkino near her husband and within sight of Boris Pasternak’s grave. She had always claimed that she had been up for the part of Ophelia in a production of Pasternak’s translation of Hamlet and that she had had an affair with the writer. I never knew how many stories she made up. I thought of Sid and his wooden dolls.
In the living room, I looked at the answering machine, but there were no messages. I hoped like hell that Tolya would show up. I had left him messages to meet me. I leaned on the window sill and looked out at the beach and the dark ocean, with tiny lights from a ship on the horizon.
For an hour I waited, but no one came. It was getting late. It was a long drive to New Jersey. I had to get to Tolya first, but it was getting late. Where was he?
On the boardwalk, I went into some of the cafés where Tolya ate, but no one had seen him. Tourists strolled by, inspecting the menus posted outside the restaurants.
“It’s so Russian here,” I heard a woman giggle.
“Brighton Beach is theme park now, little Russian theme park, like you could have practically Mickey Mouski, you know,” Tolya had said to me.
Old men sat on all the benches along the boardwalk and watched the ocean. Some wore overcoats even in the summer. All of them smoked, and talked about Russia. They came every night, even in the winter, even when there was snow on the ground and ice in their beards, and they spoke only Russian. In their minds they were here on a temporary basis, even after twenty, thirty, forty years. They yearned for a place where they believed there was some kind of order, a way of life they understood. There wasn’t any. The best it got was the strict arrangement of seating on the boardwalk benches, a kind of acknowledged ritual. They looked at the water and thought about going home. But where would they go? The country they had known had disappeared. The Soviet Union was long gone. On those benches, they always seemed shipwrecked.
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