Red Hook

by Reggie Nadelson

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I feel like shit. I don’t mean anything.”

  He knew I was lying. Flipping through the pile of mail on his desk, Tolya looked up regularly at the window, and seemed to be listening for the sound of sirens. He ignored me, then he took a crumpled pack of Lucky Strikes out of his desk and passed them to me. I tried to light one. My hands shook.

  “Just ask me,” he said. “Just ask me whatever it is.”

  “You knew Sid McKay was dead?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “When did you know?”

  “Earlier.”

  “You didn’t want to talk to me about this, or call me? Nothing?”

  “What for?” he said. “He’s dead. Is very sad.”

  “Tuesday morning very early Sid walked out of his place and left the door open for someone or he forgot to close it because he suddenly went to meet someone.”

  Tolya’s face closed up. “Yes? And?”

  “Nothing. Forget it. I’m sorry.” I tried smiling.

  “No,” he said. “Don’t do that. You want to know where I was when Sid was attacked, is that right?”

  “You want to tell me?”

  “I don’t want,” he said. “I don’t want because you should trust me.” The antagonism in his voice rose. “Maybe you also want to know what I was doing near Sid’s last night. Maybe you want to go there with me so you can play policeman and watch me to see if I look guilty.”

  “Don’t,” I said. “Stop.”

  He picked up his drink and tossed it back, then took a cigar from his case.

  “OK, I know you got hurt, so we stop this stupid talk. So, you saw Lily,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Do you remember how we all went to the same party? On Crosby Street?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “Since you’re so interested in my friendship with Sid McKay, that’s where I met him the first time. I liked him so much,” Tolya said.

  The anger had gone, but Tolya’s face stayed weirdly immobile. Gripping a coffee mug, his knuckles were white through the skin. For a big man, he had large but slender, beautiful hands; maybe he got them from his father who had been not only a famous actor but a jazz pianist who played in private houses when jazz was more or less outlawed in Russia. Another time. Another story.

  Tolya said, “I’m not your enemy.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Did you find it?” he said.

  “Find what?”

  “What you were looking for at Sid’s? Weren’t you on your way to Sid’s tonight?”

  “There was nothing to find out. I’m not working Sid’s case. I tried to help him, I fucked up. End of story.”

  “So you were out on the pier for what reason? I had to pull the creeps off you there because you like the view?”

  “Who were they?” I said.

  “They were trying to get to me through you.”

  I reached for the Scotch. He pulled it away.

  “It will make you sick if you drink more.”

  Getting up, Tolya went into the bathroom and came back with a blanket and put it around me.

  “I’ll take you home,” he said.

  I nodded, got up, and then sat down again, hard this time.

  “Give me a few minutes,” I said.

  “I liked Sid,” Tolya said. “I told you, we spoke Russian, we ate once in a while, we talked about news, it was his obsession, the death of the news, the truth, the way he understood it. He tells people he quit his job, but they threw him out. Threw him away. He made a fuss. He looked for people who faked stories, and he tried to see they got punished for it and people got sick of him. Who needs this? Sid knows I understand this. Americans are so easy to propagandize because they don’t expect it, they think of themselves as free. I understand. Propaganda, Artyom, Putin cracks down. Same here now. TV people fall in line, yes, sir, Premier Bush. So we talk. We talk, and Sid tells me he has files he wants me to have. You found this stuff?”

  “Go on.”

  “I was helping him,” Tolya said. “He was writing a book about a Russian ship that ran aground off Red Hook, a long time ago, in the 1950s. I got him some information. I could get material for him. He was looking for a Russian who came over on that boat, some sailor he got to know. He thought the man was still alive. He said he’d heard he was alive. I would like to have someone finish this book for him. I would like to do this for Sid. So I want his files.”

  “I hear you.”

  “You don’t believe me.”

  “I have Sid’s files,” I said.

  Tolya sat up. “Yes?”

  I said, “So the file you want is about a Russian ship from the 50s, that’s the one you want, right? Nothing else?”

  “Sure,” he said but I could see it wasn’t what he expected. “You want to sit here some more?”

  While Tolya talked, he looked at a picture on the wall and I followed his gaze. It was a photograph of himself aged about twenty. He was skinny. He wore black leather pants and a ponytail and he held a Fender Stratocaster in his arms like a love object.

  “Back in the USSR,” he said, but not smiling. “The 1980s. They said rock and roll was musical AIDS and they banned me from playing, and I spent a little time in not such a nice place.”

  I knew he had been in jail briefly; his parents’ connections got him out. I let him talk.

  “Sometimes you ask me how I make money. You asked once. You don’t ask now, but you want to know.”

  “Sure.”

  “I told you but you think it was a joke,” he said. “I stole it.”

  18

  “Who did you steal from?” I said to Tolya, who had poured himself another half glass of Scotch and was sitting behind the desk in his office, legs stretched out in front of him, his red snakeskin loafers kicked aside.

  He snorted, half laughing, half bitter. “I’ll tell you, if you want.”

  “Go on.”

  “You remember the dacha? My parent’s house in the country? You remember it?”

  I nodded. I remembered the house with a big porch, the wild garden that led to a river, the pack of dogs running around, Tolya’s father singing American show tunes, his mother hurrying in and out of the house with trays of food. I remembered the trestle table under the trees laid with platters of food: tongue and horseradish, rice pilaf and pork roast, caviar. Candles flickered everywhere in glass jars, and there were fireflies, and a view of the woods, the silver beech trees, the sound of people picking mushrooms. It was the first time I went back to Russia, the fall I almost married his cousin. That night she had worn a red shawl.

  “Stop remembering,” Tolya said. “It was not like that. What you saw was façade, was stage set, was just theater.”

  It strikes Tolya one day at his parents’ dacha that nothing means shit except money. Out of the blue sky it comes to him. Gorbachev is out, Yeltsin is in, kids in Moscow say they desire most to be hookers or croupiers because this is how you get a few rubles in your jeans. In the new glassy modern hotels in Moscow he has seen them, he has seen eager wannabe businessmen lick salt off their fingers as they eat bowls of free peanuts at the Aerostar Hotel bar, and wait for foreigners to buy them drinks. He’s been to the food markets with stalls overflowing with fruit, flowers, meat, butter, everything available now, for money. If you have money, you can have every delicacy. Other people wait in line at the back door of the National Hotel kitchen, trying to buy a two-day-old cake.

  The gangs are dividing up the businesses: Azeris, the drugs, Georgians, the casinos. The rumor mills turn out stories of godfathers and crime bosses, and money-making schemes. You go out with some foreign capitalists for burgers at Trenmos, and you talk and you make a deal. American TV shows are on everywhere, and everyone sees what money buys in the real world.

  So he’s leaning over the railing of the porch of the country house, smoking a stinky Indian cigarette, which is all he can afford, listeni
ng to his father playing the piano and drinking whatever brandy he has left. His parents’ state pension will probably last them about a week. They gave most of their money to some crook who promised a thousand percent return and left the country.

  Tolya has never thought about money in his life. There was always enough of what you needed, his mother a famous actress, his father an actor and musician, his friends hip and knowing Moscow kids who could get around rules. There was always money to buy an illicit rock and roll record, Records on Ribs, something scratched out on a piece of plastic, an old x-ray plate; he had heard all the good music, one way or another.

  He and his friends used to watch with real pity and maybe a little contempt the redneck guys who went to Afghanistan to fight. They stayed home and went to university and played music in somebody’s bedroom and hoarded pictures of the Beatles someone got from a western newspaper and tried to figure out which one was John.

  Tolya eventually got a job as a DJ on a radio station out of Moscow broadcasting in Chinese to the Chinese about Russian rock. No one knows what the hell he’s saying so he says what he likes. He gets a reputation for smuggling out news, jokes, rock and roll information, a few seditious jokes.

  Now he looks across the lawn that’s ragged and uncut, at the last survivor of his father’s dogs, a hairy mutt lying in the wintry sun. What he also sees is that the house is falling apart. Two of the wooden shutters have come loose; they hang down from the window ledge. The house needs a paint job; the surface is scarred and patched. His mother now makes cherry jam all day. Tolya is thirty years old, he has a wife, two daughters and nothing to show for himself except he can speak five languages, at least one of them useless if you count his Ukrainian. He still lives with his parents in the Moscow apartment. And he is dying of talk.

  Everyone talks. Tolya’s parents, their friends, his friends, all day, all night long, they talk, socialism, democracy, theater; they talk in the kitchen over dinner, they talk in bars, they sit up all night talking and getting drunk at the Writers’ House and the Film House. For seventy years no one was allowed to talk; now everyone talks, yak yak yak, talk the country to death. That afternoon in the country listening to the cicadas like little men in the bushes winding their watches—this is something he read by an English writer—he thinks he might die from the talking.

  “I quit,” he says half to himself, half out loud, and throws away the butt of his shitty cigarette. He does it. He quits his job as a DJ. He looks for how to make money. He goes out into Moscow and undertakes to educate himself in capitalism.

  People are grabbing what they can. One family rents its dacha to foreigners. “We put in lavender color bidet,” they say. “This is big selling point with foreigners.” Another guy sets up a cooperative toilet in Red Square where you can take a comfy shit for fifty kopeks. Someone sells vintage propaganda posters to a Swede who is a collector. People play rock gigs and charge. This is not for Tolya; he is not interested in hustling hard currency or fur hats or pimping or smuggling fake caviar.

  “What the hell do I know about business?” he thinks.

  In Moscow, he starts going to the coffee shop at the Radisson Hotel. He listens in to conversations. His English is good, and he makes friends with some guys, usually Canadian at first, and later Germans, and he listens and he thinks: this is easy. The thing he realizes is that nobody really knows who owns anything; gas, oil, electricity, land, real estate, who the hell knows? The State owned everything, but the State has disappeared up its own ass.

  A friend whose family is leaving for Australia calls him. They live in a nice apartment, very central, a couple of blocks from Gorki Street. Tverskaya. It’s now the main drag that goes right from the airport to Red Square. It is a good location. People say to him good locations are important. Good, he thinks. This is good, and he says, OK, I’ll buy it.

  Tolya borrows from friends. He promises big returns. He puts together a little deal. Most of his friends don’t exactly know what the hell he’s talking about but he’s the smartest guy anyone knows, so they lend him money. He buys. He sells. He trades up. He returns money with interest.

  “I am a capitalist,” he thinks suddenly one afternoon, strolling around the Arbat, heading for the Irish Pub that has opened where you can drink Guinness. “I love capitalism. I love business.”

  It is, he thinks secretly because he can’t tell any of his friends yet, as much fun as rock and roll. It is new rock and roll. It makes people hot. Business. Money.

  To him, money is for pleasure, for buying things, for giving his parents presents of books and brandy and getting their house fixed, for having fun. It’s a game, a prank, a send-up of the whole system he grew up with where he couldn’t read the books he liked or play the music he loved, except in secret. Tolya’s revenge.

  He’s made for it, but he needs bigger lenders, and now he’s meeting plenty of westerners, journalists who introduce him to businessmen. He plays the part, Russian but efficient, Russian but understanding the West, Russian who loves and plays rock and roll. He starts going out to good restaurants where he tells his stories about his life as a rebel rock star. He moves into a nice apartment. He buys nice furniture. He invites new Western friends over and they drink vodka and eat caviar and he plays them old Soviet rock records, and his wife talks to them about Chinese poetry; his girls, his twins, Valentina and Masha, appear in matching pajamas and say hello.

  Tolya starts to travel. It’s like a door to Wonderland opening. It’s thrilling, it’s like sex all the time, but better. He goes everywhere, Hong Kong, Cuba, America, France, Italy, South Africa. He eats. He drinks. He feels free. One day he realizes that Tolya, the businessman, has grown into himself.

  Behind his desk at the office in Red Hook, Tolya stopped talking abruptly, reached up for the picture of himself as a young man in leather pants with a guitar and threw it hard in the garbage can; the glass frame shattered.

  “I don’t remember this young guy anymore,” he said.

  “What happened in Moscow?” I said.

  “I did something stupid,” he said. “I made a deal with people who were not so nice, and I cheated them, not even from greed but because I didn’t like them, so for a kind of fun. I laundered some money; I did a lot of fast talking. I sold real estate for more than I said. I kept the extra. I bragged to friends in Moscow. Some creeps kidnapped Valentina and cut off her finger, and no one ever found them because everyone was taking bribes. I thought: I’ll stop now.”

  “You didn’t stop.”

  “No. I think to myself: I’ll make a little more money. A few more deals. A few more,” he said. “I kept going. I start buying in New York. After 9/11, when the market goes down, I buy I think, first I make money out of wreckage of Communism, now I buy what nobody wants in New York. Out of wreckage, something new, I tell myself. I lie to myself. I give away money to victims to make myself feel good, I give a lot, but I feel like shit. Sometimes I don’t know who I buy from, I do it by third-party deals.”

  The hair stood up on my neck.

  “You found out that some of the deals were with the same people who hurt Val in Moscow?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I did that. I can’t stop. This is what I know. Who I am.” He turned his back to me, and for a minute I thought he was crying, but he turned around, and said, calmly, “You don’t look so good, Artyom. I’ll take you home.”

  I wasn’t feeling so hot, the bruise on my forehead was swelling up, the cut on my arm was bleeding, but I said, “What do you need more money for?”

  “To feel safe,” he said.

  Back in the city at my place, I got the files I’d stolen from Sid out of my desk drawer, gave them to Tolya and went to take a shower. I only gave him the stuff I’d already looked at.

  In the shower, I turned the water up as hot as I could stand it. I was shaking. I figured I had some kind of fever. The cut on my arm was bleeding, and I watched the red trickle into the water and down on to the shower floor.

  T
urning off the water, I got out, wrapped myself in a towel, got some jeans from the bedroom, put them on and went into the living room.

  Tolya was at my desk, back to me, hunched over, a cigar in his hand, looking down at the files. Turning to me, his face was blank with disbelief.

  “It’s bullshit,” he said. “All paranoid crazy bullshit. McKay just lied to me. Nothing is new in here, all stuff about how news business is fucked up, old history, and stories from his childhood. Bullshit,” he said and tossed the files away from him hard so the papers scattered across the desk and on to the floor.

  “I thought that’s what you wanted?”

  “Fuck you, Artyom, I want to buy some real estate, I want to make deals, I want names and phone numbers of people who own, of people in city who matter, you understand, and who owns them, OK? Sid says he has all this. Or maybe you found other stuff you don’t want to share?”

  I sat down on a chair. My arm was bleeding, and I looked at it, and said, “I’ll call you later.”

  “Sure.” His voice was cold.

  The idea formed in my head out of the blue: he wanted Red Hook like an object. Something about it obsessed him; he was willing to do anything to get it. It was what Sid had been trying to tell me one way or another: Tolya had come up against people who wouldn’t give him what he wanted and it had made him crazy.

  “I’m going home,” he said. “You can meet me later, if you want.” He took a gold pen that was fat as a cigar out of his pocket along with a little notebook, scribbled some phone numbers, tore out the page, and threw it on my desk.

  “You need me, here are some addresses. I’ll be around, Artie, you don’t need to follow me like a dog, you don’t need to hang on me like I’m a criminal.”

  He walked out and left his cigar burning in the ashtray on my desk.

  After I took some more aspirin, I got a fresh towel from the bathroom, put it around my arm and called Maxine.