Yes, I thought. I’ve been up there. I thought: What was Tolya doing up there alone at night? He was too fat to be up there. It was illegal. He had said to me, I go at night, like a thief, like a spy.
The cop said to me, “We used to do sweeps regular when a lot of homeless made camp up there. Not recently. I hate it. It’s slippery, like a jungle. You can kill yourself wandering around on the High Line.”
29
It was Jack, not Tolya. Jack had not gone to Russia. He had lied about it, or maybe he intended to go and someone stopped him, but he was dead. It was his body they had found early that morning, stuck in a fence, under the High Line.
A detective I knew slightly from the Sixth Precinct said, “You OK, Art?”
Leaning against the wall of a warehouse, I had my head down, trying to get some blood back. I looked up. “What happened?” I said.
“I saw him before they cut him down from the fence where he landed. You couldn’t tell if he was pushed or jumped. He must have snuck through one of the warehouses. That place is way off limits, I mean way. Trespassing, if you go up there it’s like private property and they’re very antsy about it, you get arrested. The people who own it are big time unhappy about that. You know who this guy was? He was a big deal or something?”
I nodded.
Officials were all over the place, cops in uniform, detectives, forensics, people from the Mayor’s office. Jack Santiago was a name. I counted three TV crews and six reporters with little notebooks. From around the corner, a young guy trotted over to one of the TV people, holding a stack of newspapers. An early edition of the Post was out. I grabbed one and tossed him some money.
On the front was a picture of the High Line, and a smudgy picture of a body—what looked like a body— hanging from a fence underneath it. The picture had been taken from a distance, but you could make out that it was probably Jack. It reminded me of a picture of a lynching in the South, a man hanging from a tree, the body like a sack of beans, just hanging down, lifeless.
A reporter who worked for the paper had been out until late, early this morning, drinking at one of the bars in the Meat District. Around five, he saw a cop arrive at the scene.
The article included an account of Jack’s life, a lot about his partying, hints about drugs, women, the usual stuff they printed in the Post. There was something about Jack’s stunts. I remembered Jack at my wedding, walking on the wall of Tolya’s terrace.
Tossing the paper in a garbage can I went across the street to Tolya’s building and went in, thinking how weird it was that a guy like Jack ended up dumped like a bag of trash. Jack, with a Pulitzer Prize, three ex-wives, a million other women, with all the access, the private numbers for every restaurant and club, whatever he wanted, could disappear overnight. He just fell through the cracks, someone on the street said. He wasn’t in Russia at all. He was dead.
I got to Tolya’s elevator at the same time as a family coming home from the beach. The man held the door open while the others—a woman and two girls—piled in the elevator with blankets, pillows, buckets, coolers. They took their time. I fiddled with a cigarette. The woman, who had an ugly skinny body and a face that had been worked on too many times, stared at me. “OK, we’re sorry,” she said in a peevish tone.
I wondered what the hell they were doing in Tolya’s building anyway. Maybe he was renting out residential space. Maybe the money was drying up.
I turned and slammed through a door and ran up six flights. Tolya knew his way around the High Line: he had shown it to me, had wanted me to see it, wanted me to know that he knew it, that he could get access to it. I banged on the door, and waited. I hammered on it, then rang the bell.
Wearing white slacks and a thin black shirt, Tolya embraced me formally, Russian style, and then without saying anything turned and went ahead of me into the living room, empty now of the tables and flowers and waiters and noise that had filled it at the party.
A couple of large white couches, some chairs, a huge expanse of glistening pale wood floor, a couple of immense abstracts on the walls, it was quiet. Light came through the wall of windows, but no noise.
Valentina was sitting on the couch. She had on one of Tolya’s shirts, a yellow shirt I’d seen before, which covered most of her shorts. Dry-eyed, she was very pale and held a liter bottle of water in one hand.
“Her sister is coming from Boston tonight to be with her here,” Tolya said. “Masha will be here soon.” He stood close to her, one hand on her shoulder.
“No she’s not,” Val said. “I don’t want anyone. I’m OK. Masha has school starting. She doesn’t need to come, Daddy. She really really doesn’t. I called her. I’m fine.”
“She’s coming anyway,” he said, and sat down beside her and put his arms around her. For a minute, she was quiet. Then she looked up, her face scrubbed and shining, and said to me, “How are you, Artie?”
“I’m sorry,” I said to Val. “About Jack. I’m really sorry.”
“I know.” She turned to Tolya, whose eyes were closed, his face shut, expressionless. “Are you OK, Daddy?” she said gently. “Can I talk to Artie by myself, please? Would that be OK? I mean, I just need to talk to him a little bit. You don’t mind, do you? I mean he’s kind of like family, right?”
She was tentative with him, as if he were an old-fashioned patriarch. I had seen Tolya do business with men who looked up to him. I had seen him as a ringmaster, an impresario, at my wedding. I had seen him flirt with women. He had rescued me half a dozen times, efficient, fast on his feet. He knew how to make money. Then last week, I had seen him angry and defeated and sick. His daughter, in spite of their easy banter, saw him as requiring respect; with him, she deferred.
“Daddy, would that be OK?” she repeated.
Tolya nodded. He pulled himself to his feet and Val got up too, and he kissed her three times.
“I have to go out for a while. I have some business,” he said in Russian. “I trust Artyom,” he added, then walked away from her and went into his bedroom.
I sat down on the couch beside Val. “What is it?” I said, but I could see she didn’t want to talk until Tolya had gone. For a few minutes we sat, me and Val, silently, and waited for him.
Tolya reappeared in a dark summer suit, white shirt, plain black tie; even his shoes were black. Picking up keys and a wallet from a chair near the door, he left the apartment and closed the door behind him. A few seconds later he was back. He gestured to me, again formally, a man I barely recognized as the freewheeling guy I knew who had once been a rock and roll hero. I got up.
In Russian, he said to me quietly, “You’ll stay with her until I get back?”
“Sure,” I said. “Where are you going?”
“Something I have to do. Yes. For a few hours.” He looked at his watch. “You promise me, Artemy, you won’t leave her alone?”
“Business? On Labor Day? It’s a holiday. What about Santiago?” I said, still thinking I could get away to the shore before the holiday ended.
“He’s dead. We’ll talk about this later.” He went out again and I heard the grunt of the elevator.
Val picked up the water bottle she had set on a low green glass table in front of the couch, and pulled her legs up under her, then seemed to change her mind. “Artie?”
“Yes, honey.”
She looked towards the kitchen and said, “I need some caffeine. Will you stay and drink some coffee with me?”
“Sure. Let’s go ahead and make some coffee, and maybe you should eat something, too,” I said and we started for the kitchen, walking together, not saying anything.
In the vast stainless steel kitchen, Val made coffee in a red espresso machine. She moved slowly, and waited silently until the coffee was ready and then she poured it into green cups with gold rims and served me. She sat down at the table. I sat opposite her.
“I thought you’d be away already. I was even surprised to see you Saturday night,” Val said.
“I had some thing
s to do.”
“But, oh, it was your honeymoon.”
“I know. I’ll try to go tonight.”
“I liked Maxine so much. I thought she was wonderful. Is wonderful.”
“Me too. Are you OK?” I said. “About Jack?”
“Sure,” she said. “You think that’s cold? You didn’t like him anyhow, did you? I could see that the other night.”
A faint edge of anxiety inserted itself, I felt my pulse speed up and I was sweating. Val didn’t seem to care about Jack being dead. If she had anything to do with it, I didn’t want to know, but she was going to tell me. Don’t tell me, I thought. Keep it to yourself.
I said, “You feel how you feel, you don’t have to borrow your feelings from anyone, you know, you can feel something and not show it. It doesn’t matter what I felt about Jack,” I said and I thought she knew I was lying.
“It’s not that.”
“I don’t understand.” I drank down the coffee and got myself another cup.
“It was me,” she said. “It was my fault. I’m twenty years old, I’ll be twenty next week, Artie, and I don’t know, it must be genetic, you see.” She put out her hand towards me and I took it. Her skin was soft, unwrinkled, perfect. “I feel like an ordinary American kid,” Val said. “I’m the Echo generation, the team player, the desired child, I’m the kid who grew up in a suburb, in Florida, in Miami, with all the stuff, I had music lessons and ballet lessons and soccer and I wanted to be a soccer superstar, you know, like Mia Hamm, and I was editor of the school newspaper and I started a Spanish lit club, not Russian, of course, just to be cool, and I started a garage band, and I was a fucking cheerleader, can you believe it? I was going to be an American. Shit, Artie, I even tried out for some junior Miss America thing, but that was too much even for me. I was only eleven when we came from Moscow.” She held up her hand. “You know about this.” She nodded at the missing finger. “You know about it? My dad told you? The kidnapping thing? He blames himself. He thinks he did it.”
“Yes.”
“I went to shrinks. Russian shrinks, you can imagine, American shrinks who had no idea what I was talking about. Dad wanted me to have plastic surgery, but I said no. My sister doesn’t get it because she’s so guilty that it happened to me and not her. My mother has turned into an American so completely that she supports Jeb Bush, can you imagine? She likes him. She likes the Bush family.” She laughed. “I’m so sorry to unload on you Artie.”
“It’s alright, honey.” She held on to my hand like a lifeline.
“He needs you, Artie.”
“Who?”
“My dad.”
I said, “Tell me what you mean, genetic.”
“I think that somewhere deep down, no matter how much I pretend to be American, no matter how good I am at it, I’m kind of Russian, kind of complicated in that way, I mean I made myself over. I was still really young so it was easy but it was conscious. I really worked on it, I made sure I didn’t have a trace of an accent, not a single trace or a phrase, nothing, I wouldn’t even play tennis, you know, once those little tennis girls started coming over, all those sad little girls from the Russian provinces turning up in Florida, seven, eight, nine years old, with their parents, or even alone, trying to make it, trying to be the next Anna Kournikova. But I couldn’t get rid of some of the ways I thought. When I came up here to New York and I started hanging out with people who were Russian, who were closer to it than me, it was, I don’t know.”
I knew. “It gets to you,” I said.
“Yes. I think I’m more devious than a real American. I think I’m able to like betray people in a way. I don’t know. I’d like a cigarette, is that OK?” She pulled her hand out of mine.
I got a pack out of my pocket and opened the kitchen door that led on to the terrace. Outside there was noise from the river, the cop cars below, the crowds. I started to shut the door.
“It’s OK,” she said, got up, went out and leaned her long arms on the railing and her head on her hands. I stood next to her. She smoked awkwardly. “What about you and Lily?” she said. “Was that hard, I mean, losing her?”
“You knew about us?”
“My dad always talked about it,” she said. “He talked to me about stuff. My mom is an idiot. I mean she’s a nice lady but she’s heavily into her plastic surgeon and her TV reality shows and stuff and my sister is a complete geek, which is fine, she’s a huge success at Harvard and Daddy will love that, but he can sort of talk to me. I’m the grown up, he says. I’m the old one. He was like, not jealous or envious or anything, not like he wanted Lily at all. He just thought you had something with her he could never have with anyone.”
“What was that?”
Val leaned her head on my shoulder. “Friendship,” she said. “That you were friends. He’d like that, but he doesn’t know how.”
“I thought he had a new girlfriend, a Russian woman?”
She turned to me, a knowing smile on her mouth, and said, “He dreams about it, but it’s make-believe. He meets someone, he meets a Russian writer, very elegant, very warm and cultured, and she likes him, you can see, I saw that with this woman, and then he starts buying things. She thinks, who is this asshole who buys me stuff I would never wear? He’s like a child.”
For a few minutes we smoked and she talked. I tried to look at my watch without her noticing.
“I know,” she said. “You have to go. I just have one other thing I have to tell you, had to, without Daddy around, OK?”
Don’t!
Don’t tell me!
“Let’s go back inside,” I said, and we went into the kitchen and I shut the door.
We sat at the table again. The motor in the huge refrigerator vibrated. Val picked up her coffee cup and drained it.
“I like cold coffee,” she said. “Weird that I got together with Jack at your wedding. Didn’t you know that?” She looked at me. “Yeah. Anyhow. So. Me and Jack. We met at your wedding.”
All I remembered was the electricity between them, a kind of comic book electricity, as if you could see the jagged line of sparks.
“I thought you invited him,” I said. “I thought you came with him. You looked like the two of you were already pretty much an item. I didn’t know Jack well enough to invite him.”
“It was a big party,” she said. “Maybe he just showed up. Maybe someone else brought him. I don’t remember.”
“You’d never met him?”
“Yeah, I’d seen him around. Clubs, that kind of stuff. I thought he was kind of old for me. He was always hitting on me. It was a game. I liked him, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to do anything. He knew a lot of the Russian girls, he said he was half Russian, yeah, like which half, Jack? You couldn’t tell what he made up, you know?” she said. “He was obsessed with being cool and young, which was why he moved to horrible old Red Hook, stuff like that. It doesn’t matter, does it? Not anymore. So, like, yeah, so there he was and it was kind of fun in a stupid way having this famous forty-year-old guy who everyone knew was hitting on me, I don’t know, maybe I was a little bit drunk, and he was very sexy. I mean, like you would do it right there with him.” She looked at me, and bit her lip and said, “Oh, God, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be saying this to you.”
“Don’t worry.”
“He was in love with me, he said. We went out that night after your wedding and the next couple of nights, and my friends were impressed and I was an idiot, and all of a sudden, he says, let’s get married, and I’m like Jack, I’m nineteen, and he says, you’re an old soul. He was always going, you’re the one. He’d look in your eyes, you know how he had those hot little coal eyes, and he could talk about everything, he’d been everywhere.” Val paused. “Daddy thought Jack was using me to get to him, get stuff on his, Daddy’s, background or the Russian mob, something. It made him a little crazy. Anyway, I tried to blow Jack off, but he wouldn’t go away.”
I thought back to the night in the Meat District when I had seen them t
ogether. I thought about the tender way Val put her arms around Jack when I told him Sid was dead.
I said, “You seemed pretty intense with him Saturday night.”
“I get like that, you know. I’m a kid, after all. I want something really bad at first, and then they come on too strong, and I’m out of it. For like five minutes. It didn’t last. Call me superficial. I liked him. I just didn’t want so much.”
“Why don’t we go out and take a walk or something?”
“There’s more.”
“I don’t need to hear it.”
“I need to tell you.”
“What about?”
“My dad. I think he’s way out on a limb,” she said. “I need you to know because I’m going home, Artie.”
“To Florida?”
“To Russia, I mean. I can’t do all this stuff. I mean the Russian princess thing, the nightclubs, the restaurants, the money, the hanging out with girls who live in ten-million-dollar apartments, it was fun, and I tried, and I don’t despise it, I just don’t want it. I think being with Jack that week taught me that. I didn’t like myself. I didn’t want to be in one more club or drink one more cocktail or wear one more stupid outfit. So I’m going.” Her voice was calm.
“Where in Russia?”
“We have an apartment in Moscow. I’ll go there first. Then, I don’t know exactly but I have friends who can help, you won’t think this is stupid?”
“No.”
Unbuttoning the top button of her yellow shirt, Val pulled a little gold chain from between her tan breasts. A small cross hung from it. She held it out. “I think I want to work with kids. The school thing in Beslan. I don’t know. Or AIDS kids. Something. Better than this. I don’t want to come on all Mother Theresa, but I have to do it. I told you it was genetic. You think I’m going to come on all religious, you think I’m going to end up some kind of Russian religious nutbag?”
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