Red Hook

by Reggie Nadelson

  I recognized one of them, a fat angry old man in a striped shirt like a sailor’s and I asked him if he had seen Tolya. He knew who I was; he turned away, suspicious; I was a cop; I was an outsider.

  On Brighton Beach Avenue, I checked a few of the nightclubs but they were jammed and I couldn’t spot Tolya in any of them. In one I sat at the bar and watched a girl with breasts big as footballs wrap herself around a pole on a platform above me. I drank a glass of wine. When the girl finished, I gestured to her, she leaned down, tits in my face, I put some money in her thong. She hadn’t seen Tolya, though she knew him.

  Eventually I drove the mile or so over to Sheepshead Bay and Farone’s. The place was full, the crowd loud and hungry. I saw Johnny.

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “It’s Thursday night, Artie. I’m overbooked.”

  I grabbed his sleeve. “I need to talk.”

  “Come upstairs to my office,” he said and I followed him up a flight of stairs. There was a private dining room on one side, the door open. Through it I saw a group of women. Genia was there, and she looked up and saw me, waved, then came out and kissed me.

  “Hello, Artemy. Please come and meet my friends,” she said formally in Russian.

  I peered into the private room where a dozen women, well dressed, sat at the table, heads low, talking softly like women in mourning. In spite of the designer clothes and hair, they looked like Russian women at a wake.

  Genia touched her own short hair self-consciously, and straightened her black cashmere sweater.

  “They’re abducting children, maybe killing them,” she said. “In Russia now, then where? In Beslan first. Here next? Here, Artyom? It will happen.”

  I kissed her.

  “We get news ahead of local TV. We are getting phone calls from Russia. We try to raise money for the families,” she said, gesturing to the group of women in the room. “We try.”

  People were scared, she said. They left Russia for America and the American empire cracked up, airplanes attacked buildings, and now in Russia people were dying in Moscow theaters, in schools. It was like a perpetual earthquake, like a tsunami.

  No place safe, Genia said to me and told me she heard people say, “If only we had Stalin. All the time I hear this, strong is good, Stalin was great, Putin is good. I’m frightened, Artemy,” she added and returned to her friends.

  I went into Johnny’s office with him and he opened a bottle of wine, sat behind his huge mahogany desk and gestured to a black leather chair.

  “You’re looking for Sverdloff, Art? That it?” he said.

  “How’d you know?”

  “He said you’d be by.”

  “When?”

  “He came in earlier, said he needed a fix of my soft shells, I fixed him some nice crabs, some nice pasta, I got him a good bottle of the Barolo he likes up from the cellar, you know, and he said, if Artie comes by, tell him I got his message. I’ll find him.”

  I got up to go.

  “I have to go down and see Billy next week, you want to send him something from you?” Johnny looked at me and I saw his eyes were wet. He was a weepy guy to begin with; since his boy killed a man, he cried all the time.

  “What time?”

  “What time what?”

  “Sverdloff was here, what time?”

  Farone looked at his watch. “Shit, man, I don’t know, earlier. I got so much fucking business, you believe that? I must be famous, right?”

  “Did he say where he was going?”

  Johnny shook his head. “I was busy. Listen, Art, did you tell me everything you found out about Billy? You never did, I know that. You kept it a secret from everyone. Tell me now.”

  “Don’t, Johnny. Please. I can’t do this now.” I felt trapped. I had to get out; Genia’s misery and Johnny’s sorrow drenched me; it was like napalm; I felt I couldn’t move.

  Johnny said, “It was that Sid McKay guy, wasn’t it? He fixed it with the press so people wouldn’t say my Billy was a killer. I met him. He was a sweet nice man.”

  I got up, and Johnny tried to hug me but he was too fat.

  “Sid McKay is dead. If you see Tolya Sverdloff you tell him I need him. Just do it,” I said and hurried out.

  Running out of the office and down the stairs, I heard Johnny behind me, panting, breathless, still talking even as I got to the door of the restaurant.

  “That fucking hurricane is coming in like a bastard, you hear the news?” Johnny said. “Taking out everything in the Bahamas, right up the coast, they say it’s going to rain cats and fucking dogs, gonna kill Labor Day weekend. Gonna kill the party-boat business out here.” He pointed towards Sheepshead Bay beyond the glass windows of his restaurant. “Airports all shut down in Florida,” he said. “What a summer. You think this global warming shit means anything? Genia says we have to vote for Bush because he’s strong on terrorism, and he’s friends with Putin who is also strong. I don’t know anything anymore, Artie. Have a drink with me.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Wait. Please.”

  I didn’t wait. I pushed open the heavy front door of the restaurant, bumped into the doorman and ran for my car.

  Tolya had been at Farone’s, but not at the apartment. He didn’t answer my calls. I drove like a maniac across Brooklyn, heading back to Red Hook and Sid’s where I figured I’d talk my way in. I had a feeling I’d find Tolya there. I had a feeling there was still stuff in Sid’s place that mattered. It was late. I tried to reach Maxine and couldn’t get her cellphone.

  Crazy now because it was late, because it was two in the morning and I couldn’t reach Maxine, I was half a mile away from Sid’s when I stopped for a green light and a car rear-ended me. I heard the metal, the crackle of a broken tail-light. The prick who hit me drove away and left me under the Gowanus Parkway, my car all screwed up.

  16

  My car wouldn’t start. I called a tow truck and gave them the address and then I walked. It was desolate, deserted. My ribs hurt. Something in my neck didn’t feel right. The battery on my cellphone was down, but I kept it in my hands. I felt like I could hear the sound of my bones.

  I managed to get to the grassy patch near the pier, close to the place where I fell asleep and dreamed about Lily. I wanted to look at Sid’s building from the end of the pier. Sid could have seen Earl out here, and Earl could have seen Sid’s window. He could have watched Sid come and go.

  A light fog drifted in from the water, but I kept going out on the cement pier where people fished in good weather. The Statue of Liberty was just a faint shape, the city spread out over my shoulder, lights veiled through the mist. I could hear the sounds of boats, but I couldn’t tell where they were.

  Tolya’s phone was busy when I tried it again or else the circuit was jammed, and I walked out farther, but there was no signal at all. Out of breath, I sat down on the bench for a minute. Tolya had been my friend for almost ten years and I had to know if he killed Sid, had slammed him with a metal slab that destroyed his brain so it took him days to die.

  Out of the fog, the shapes emerged. Two men. It seemed that there were two of them, and I had them figured for junkies as I started back, but I was uneasy. Maybe they were the creeps who had crashed my car. I peered at them. I shifted my jacket so I could get to my gun, and began to walk faster, working out how to get around them. They filled up my sight line. They were big.

  A few feet further and I could hear them. They were speaking Russian, crude peasant Russian. I hoped they were just drunks. I couldn’t see their faces. Their backs were to me.

  Squat, heavy men, they were crouched down, their backs round, their arms huge and long, in the dark they seemed to move like something not really human. I was desperate to get away, but they blocked my exit. I waited for them to come for me. There was no way I could get around them and it would be easy for them to grab me, push me into the water where my head would hit the rocks and split open.

  The decision to shoot was something I had to
make fast, I had a second to do it as the two men came towards me, menacing, sinister, these lumps of humans, these animals crouched low like runners setting up for a sprint. My ribs hurt like hell, my shoulder burned, pain spit through my head.

  One of the men, his face visible but the features blurry, seemed to jump at me, huge, his arms out, a knife in one fist, the blade glinting. I could see it, and I held my gun steady. I heard it go off, but someone already had me from behind, grabbing me, clutching at me, holding me in a hammerlock so I couldn’t move, couldn’t turn either way. He was holding me around my chest; the pain in my ribs exploded.

  What the hell was I doing out here in Red Hook, in this fucking miserable place? I didn’t care how many yuppies moved in and called themselves fucking artists or about the water or the light or the real estate.

  My lungs seemed to shut down. I struggled for air the way I did once when I went 13,000 feet up a mountain out west and couldn’t get any oxygen in me. People said you thought about things that mattered, you thought about your life, your death, about people you loved; it was bullshit; all I thought about was trying to breathe, get some oxygen.

  Gasping, I only saw one of the bears, and he looked up and then collapsed, blood streaming on to the ground. Blood covered my hands and arms. Warm blood all over me.

  “Let the fuck go,” I tried to say, but the man behind me held on and I was helpless.

  The only image I could hold on to while I was trying to breathe, the only thing that shimmered in front of my eyes and I didn’t know if I was dead or asleep or unconscious, was my father’s face, the handsome smooth face with the blue eyes. Then his face changed into mine. The next face I saw was Lily’s.

  It was surreal. The pain was bad, there was more blood on my arm; I thought about letting go.

  17

  I had killed him.

  It was getting light. I could see better. I saw him. Face down, the man on the pier was bleeding bad. The blood soaked into the concrete walkway.

  Somewhere in the distance I could hear the wail of a siren but I couldn’t tell if it was coming closer or going away. Head down, I breathed as deep as I could, and then I tried to lift the bear of a man off the ground. He was huge and heavy and I couldn’t lift him. I stuck my hand into his neck. I couldn’t find a pulse. He wasn’t breathing. He was dead. I fumbled in my pocket for my phone. It was gone. So was my gun.

  “Stop it. He’s not dead,” a voice said and then someone pulled me off the man.

  I was shaking and I could hardly stand up. Tolya, who had pulled me off the man, held on to me and kept his arm around my shoulder.

  “Come on,” he said softly in Russian.

  “I lost my phone.”

  “I have your phone. I have your gun. He’s not dead, Artyom,” he said. “It’s a leg wound. I called 911. The ambulance will come. I think we should go.”

  “There were two of them.”

  “The other one got away,” Tolya said.

  “Who the hell were they?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I looked at him. He was wearing a light blue jacket that he took off and put around me, then he looked up as if he was listening for something. The sound of a siren came closer.

  Again he said, “Let’s go.”

  “We have to wait until someone comes. I can’t leave like this.”

  “We’ll wait in the car. We’ll wait until we see them come. The cops, OK? We’ll do it right,” Tolya said.

  “I have to wait here. I have to wait here and then I have to get my car back to the city.”

  “You can’t drive like this.”

  “I’m OK.”

  He was half dragging me towards his SUV. My arm was bleeding.

  “Where were you? I called you.”

  Tolya kept moving, kept me moving. “I’m going to take you to a doctor,” he said, and reached in the back of the car and pulled out a beach towel. “Here.”

  I wrapped my arm up in the towel. “I’ll be OK.”

  “I was in East Hampton with Valentina,” Tolya said. “Why?”

  I said, “I shot him.”

  “You didn’t shoot him,” Tolya said. “I did.”

  “What?”

  “He was coming after you, both of them, two creeps, and one got scared when he saw me, and he ran, but the other one keeps coming, like he’s on something, like he’s some kind of robot, and he has a knife.”

  “You walk around with a weapon?”

  “When I think I have to,” he said. “I keep it in the car, OK? I have license, if you want. You want to discuss this, or you want to just get out of here? Please come with me. I don’t want a conversation with cops, OK? He’ll be OK. He was a hood, a creep, a nothing. I recognized him from Brighton, OK? He was a guy people hire for shit work. Nobody. He’ll be sorry he’s alive when they find out who he is.”

  “You knew this guy?”

  “I told you, I saw him a few times around Brighton Beach. He’s nothing,” said Tolya. “Come on.”

  I hung on to him.

  He opened the door of the SUV, and helped me into the passenger seat. He got in, slammed the door, turned on the ignition and drove slowly away from the pier and the water until we got to a quiet side street where he stopped, kept the engine running, waited. An ambulance appeared, lights flashing. It turned off towards the river and the pier.

  “They’ll take care of it,” Tolya said. “We can go.”

  I was still trying to get my breath.

  “You almost fucking strangled me.”

  “You passed out,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “The guy had you by the neck and you couldn’t breathe. I had to grab you away from him, I had to.”

  I glanced at him sideways. His face was large and very white in the flat light. I didn’t know what to believe.

  “You think it was me? Why would I try to strangle you, Artyom?” He looked puzzled, and he drove slowly. “You’re pretty out of it, yes? You passed out.”

  Before I said anything, I stopped myself. When I finally spoke, I made my tone of voice soft. I didn’t want to confront him. It wouldn’t get me anything and I didn’t feel so hot anyhow.

  “You have anything to smoke?” I said.

  He held out his gold cigar case, and I opened it and took one. Tolya lit it for me.

  “You got my messages?” I said. “You just happened to be in Red Hook to rescue me,” I said and smiled. “I mean, like always, right?”

  “Like always. Sure I was looking for you,” he said. “Artyom, come on, please, you can do interrogation later. You left me messages and as soon as I could leave Valentina and I figured out you were in the city, not with Maxine at the seashore, I went to find you. Remember? I went back to my place in Brighton Beach, and the doorman, the idiot in the Cossack shirt who would let Osama into my building if he gave him twenty bucks, told me you were there, and then I met someone at a strip joint who saw you, a girl, you remember, one of the girls who used to be in that Anna Karenina routine, remember?”

  “Who?”

  “A girl who knew who you were from the old days. I tried every place I could think of in Brooklyn. I asked around. Johnny Farone said you’d been in talking about Red Hook. You’re not that hard to find. You drive that fucked up old red Cadillac. I’ll get one of my guys to get it fixed and haul it back to the city for you.”

  Behind the building where he had his office, Tolya parked in an empty lot, then hustled me through the back door. A small sign read: Orwell Properties.

  The dim space had two windows on the street with bars across them, and a door with the gate pulled down. Two desks held computers, and one wall was lined with filing cabinets, most of them padlocked.

  I went into the bathroom, threw the remains of Tolya’s cigar into the toilet, took my shirt off and washed off my arm, found some Band-Aids and stuck them on. The cut didn’t look bad. I put my shirt back on.

  A large closet was inside the bathroom. The door was half open and
inside were shelves that were filled with bags and boxes from Bergdorf Goodman, Armani, Prada, sets of luggage and a bag of golf clubs. From a rail hung a trio of fur coats.

  “It’s like Aladdin’s fucking cave back there, you think you need Shoppers Anonymous or something?” I said to Tolya when I got back to the office. I was trying for a joke. He didn’t smile.

  He said in Russian, “I buy Valentina and her sister a few things, you know, make them smile, so what? Sit down.”

  Tolya made coffee in an electric pot that stood on a shelf behind his desk. From the same shelf, he took a bottle of Scotch and a couple of glasses, poured some and handed it to me. He asked me again if I wanted a doctor. I said I was fine. I wanted to get back to the city, and then out to New Jersey. He told me to stay still for half an hour, make sure I didn’t have a concussion, some bullshit. He found a bottle of aspirin in a drawer, and a plastic tube of pills.

  “Take,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “Antibiotic,” he said. “Take two.”

  I took the pills. The Scotch and coffee helped. Tolya didn’t speak. Again I looked around the office, taking in the locked cabinets.

  “Listen, Artemy, you want to look around? You want to come back when I’m not here? Something is on your mind. Here, take the keys if you want.” He took a platinum ring from his pants and threw it across to me. I tried to separate the key from the key ring which had a big diamond in it.

  “Keep it,” he said. “You can always pawn it when I’m dead,” he added, and laughed, but it was bitter. “You’re so interested in my business all of a sudden? All these years, I say, come into business, come and I make you some money and you don’t want, so you don’t want. Now you’re interested.”