Little Odessa

by Joseph Koenig

  Bucyk hung a right at Eighth and went back uptown. He switched on the dome and a high-intensity light came on over her end of the dashboard. “Thank you,” she said.

  “You don’t see many girls, I mean women in your racket reading books like that,” Bucyk said. “Reading.”

  Kate closed the slender volume over her index finger. “Do you have dealings with many of them?”

  “Not enough.”

  She turned back to Winesburg and didn’t look up again until they were on West Forty-eighth.

  Bucyk paraded her past the deskman and then they went upstairs. In a large room leaking clutter from a Bearcat police scanner overweight men were eating to stay awake. He sat her at a plain table scorched around the edges. He dumped an ashtray in a wastebasket and lit a True menthol, offered her one that she refused.

  Behind a glass partition a light-skinned Puerto Rican with a cast on his leg was talking to a uniformed officer. “The fuck you mean I fell off a fire escape?” he asked. “They found me, I was on the roof.”

  Bucyk crooked a finger at Infante, who was looking more himself in a blue quilted vest. He brushed long blond hair out of his eyes and came over with a thin sheaf of papers.

  “Say hello to Paul Infante,” Bucyk said. “He’s gonna help us with the paperwork.”

  Infante put a knee up on the chair beside her. “First we have to show you a UF61 form with the details of the complaint against you.”

  “Don’t I get to see my accuser?” she asked. “I thought that’s the way the law worked here.”

  “You do,” Bucyk told her, “but only if you go to trial. Till then, he’s calling the shots.”

  “Detective Bucyk, this is not going to be as quick and painless as you said it was, is it?”

  “Not really. Not for you.”

  “I’m going to have to spend the night in jail, aren’t I?”

  “A part.”

  “You mean what’s left of it.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Can I make a call?”

  “You don’t need a lawyer yet.”

  “My family,” Kate said. “They’ll worry.”

  “Soon,” Bucyk promised.

  Infante came up with the UF61 and read out the complaint. “That the way it happened?” Bucyk asked her.

  “You forgot the part where he burned me, where he mashed Washington’s face.”

  “We didn’t forget. He did. It’ll all come out eventually.”

  “Okay, now,” Infante said, “we need some personal info before we send you down to Central Booking. Can I have your name please?”

  “Kate Piro.”

  Infante put down his pen. “Just Kate? Kate’s not short for anything?”

  “It’s short for Ekaterina. My full name is Ekaterina Malutina Shapiro.”

  “DOB?”

  “I’m not familiar with that term.”

  “Don’t be cute on me.”

  “I never heard it before.”

  “Date of birth,” Bucyk explained.

  “January 12, 1965.”

  “Place?”

  “Odessa.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Texas,” Bucyk answered for her. “In the oilfields, right? I passed through once on my way to Fort Bliss.”

  “Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic,” she said without looking at either of them.

  “How’s that again?” Infante asked.

  “Russia.”

  “You’re a Russian?”

  “No.”

  “We won’t send you back,” he snickered.

  “I’m Jewish.”

  “Mazel tov. Can I see your green card?”

  “I don’t have one any more. We got out in 1974, with one of the first batches of Jews Brezhnev let go. I’m a naturalized citizen.”

  “Lucky break,” Infante said.

  “Luck had nothing to do with it. My father was a stevedore, not like those chess players, those Moscow intellectuals. The government saw a good deal and let us go for wheat.”

  “You sound sorry.”

  “You’ve stopped writing, Detective.”

  “Address?”

  “Forty-two thirty-seven Neptune Avenue. Apartment 4D.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Little Odessa.”

  “Huh?”

  “In Brighton Beach. Brooklyn.”

  “The rest you give when you’re booked,” Infante said. “Sign here and you’re on your way.”

  “Can I call now?” she asked.

  “Why don’t you wait a while?” Infante said. “See where you stand when you get downtown.”

  Bucyk fished in his pocket for a quarter. “There’s a pay phone out in the hall,” he told her. “You’re on your honor.”

  When she stepped from the booth he was waiting for her, looking like a schoolboy with her bag over his shoulder. “Let me tell you what’s gonna happen now,” he said, walking her downstairs. “First you’re going to Manhattan Central Booking. They’ll take your prints and send them on to Albany by computer and they’ll mug you front and side. That’s color mugshots I’m talking about. They’ll put you in a cell while a DA draws up a formal complaint and then you’ll go up to the Criminal Courthouse at 100 Centre Street. You’ll be interviewed there by someone from the Vera Institute of Justice, a background check to help determine what kind of bail they’ll ask. If I wasn’t working for the other side, I’d advise you not to tell them how you dress for work. You’ll pose for more pictures there, black-and-white Polaroids they’ll clip to your bench warrant.

  “Are you still with me? All this is gonna take a good ten, twelve hours, and that’s if there’s no glitches. This is New York, so count on glitches. Tomorrow you’ll go before a judge and he’ll set bail, probably let you out on your own recognizance, you don’t have a record … and then they’ll drop the charges,” he said. “Piddlyshit thing like this, you don’t do time. The process, that’s the punishment right there. You see how it works?”

  She shook her head. “Where will you be, Detective Bucyk,” she asked bitterly, “home in bed, watching TV, out for drinks with your friends? Why didn’t you just say you couldn’t find me?”

  Bucyk avoided her face. “Tell me about Russia,” he said.

  She came out of jail shielding her eyes against the sunset, put on her glasses and headed across Foley Square to the IRT. A blue Ford station wagon with a mismatched fender skirt cut her off crossing Pearl Street. She started to say something but changed her mind, swung the bag over the other shoulder and went around behind it. The driver backed up, blocking the way, and she turned to look for a cop. Bucyk cranked down the window on the passenger’s side. “Need a lift?” he asked.

  “No, I—” A cab bleated past, nearly clipping her heels. Bucyk opened the door and she jumped in.

  “How bad was it?” he asked.

  Her nose reddened, but there were no tears. She hid her face in a crumpled tissue and when she took it away her color was as even as when he saw her at the Starlight.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “I moonlight for one of these, you know, car services,” he said. “Business wasn’t so hot, so I thought I’d see if I’d catch you, case you needed a ride home or anything.”

  “How long were you waiting?”

  “Not long,” he told her. “A couple hours, could’ve been.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Was it terrible?” he tried again.

  She didn’t answer right away. “Worse than that,” she finally said. “Much worse.”

  “Did they try to … do anything, those characters—?”

  “The other women? Four or five of them, maybe four or five didn’t. We found each other in that big cell and stayed together and after a while the others sort of gave up. I didn’t sleep.”

  “Anyone you wanna press charges against? I’m good at that.”

  “No,” she said. “I just want to go home and take a hot bath.”

&nbs
p; They went around City Hall Park onto the Brooklyn Bridge. He looked down through the cabled grid at the sliver of a not very large island that marked the boundaries of his world. Two years in Texas after high school and a week each November getting loaded at a deer lodge in the Poconos, spring and summer visits with his brother in Atlantic City, that was his experience with the rest of it—the mainland, he liked to call it. Brooklyn, shrouded in its stolid nineteenth-century waterfront, was almost as great a mystery as the woman beside him.

  Kate couldn’t keep her eyes open. Her jaw sagged and her lips parted and he heard her heavy breathing. He pulled into the right lane and slowed to forty to study her face at rest. Without makeup her skin was still flawless, unlined even around the eyes, not a hint of the smacked-out hardness that went with Times Square. She showed little of what she had been through other than arms holding herself tight. Inside the heavy coat cloaking her voluptuousness she looked about sixteen, which Bucyk was surprised to discover did not excite him all that much.

  He followed the BQE around the corroding Brooklyn shore. Poking through the haze was the Erector-set skeleton of the parachute jump, a relic of the 1939 World’s Fair, of the ritualized silliness of Steeplechase Park, “the funny place,” and of Coney Island in its heyday, of the boardwalk, of Brooklyn. A grave marker two hundred fifty feet high.

  He put a hand on her shoulder and after a while he shook it. “Where do we get off?” he asked. “I’ve never driven this way before.”

  “Huh …? I don’t know,” she said. “I always take the train.”

  “The D? Not exactly your Moscow subway. I’ve seen pictures. It’s a regular museum.”

  She yawned. “I’ve never been to Moscow. Wait … we’re on the Belt. You’d better turn here.”

  He exited at Ocean Parkway and took it toward the beach. Almost immediately she said, “You just went past it.”

  “What?”

  “Neptune Avenue. My block.”

  At Brighton Beach Avenue she pointed him in the shadow of the el. The dark streets were crowded with middle-aged men and women, uniformly thickset, in shabby clothes or flashy. Discount store closeouts—the women in cloth coats and peasant scarves, burgundy pants and patterned jackets for the men, lots of patent leather. And everyone dragging a net shopping bag as if the shelves might be bare tomorrow, forgetting where they were.

  They wore put-upon expressions that made him wonder how they had looked before. More put-upon, he decided. An express train gathering speed overhead showered the street with sparks, but no one ducked for cover, no one took an extra step. Whatever they once had been put through, they would spend the rest of their lives taking it easy now that it was over. Nothing would ever get them moving again.

  “There’s no young people here,” he said.

  “The Russians are desperate for workers and soldiers so they keep everyone but the sick and old. The few young ones who got out, most went to Israel. But things are bad there now with the economy and military service till you’re fifty-five, so they’re starting to show up here … I see you don’t take cabs.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “The drivers, they’re all greenhorns.”

  Though he prided himself on a beat cop’s eye, he could see nothing especially Jewish about these people. Nor did they seem Russian, lacking the sloping cheekbones and oriental cast, the furious eyebrows that he associated with comatose old men in greatcoats at Red Square funerals. There was some resemblance to the Czechs around Yorkville, but not enough so you’d confuse them. What they looked like most were the generic poor.

  “I bet there aren’t many like you at NYU,” he said.

  She turned to him with a puzzled frown. “I don’t know what you mean.” The frown met his and followed it to the school insignia on her chest. “Oh this,” she laughed. “I don’t go to NYU …It costs three hundred dollars a credit and what would I take up besides space? But it’s a nice color, don’t you think? And sometimes, when I’m in the Village, it gets me in their library.”

  “You don’t go to college?”

  “Starlight U.”

  “You can’t be president, you weren’t born here,” he said. “So what are you going to do with your life? You don’t want to be M. Anita Supreme all the time.”

  “I’m not,” she told him. “In the afternoon I’m Hellen Bedd. And Sundays,” rattling her bracelets, “I’m a belly dancer at an Egyptian restaurant on Seventy-second Street.”

  “Kind of skinny for that, aren’t you?” He’d wanted to make a joke of it, but it came out wrong. “What do you call yourself there? … C. Anita Camel? Harem Scarem?”

  “Little Odessa.”

  “You like to dance? You’re good? I missed you at the Starlight.”

  “Thank God,” she said. “No, I’m not making a career of it, if that’s what you want to know. I’ve got real plans.”

  “Like what?” he asked.

  “I’m going to start modeling school, when I scrape up a few extra dollars.”

  “Those places are a rip,” he said. “They tell fat girls they look like what’s-her-name, Twiggy.”

  “I have to work on my diction,” she said. “I want to lose this accent.”

  “You don’t sound like a Russkie.”

  “Not Russian. Brooklyn. I want to do TV. Every once in a while I find a modeling job on my own, showroom stuff. If things work out, pretty soon I’ll have to give up dancing before my face … before I get too well known. At least I hope so.”

  He went up Brighton Fifth Street, banked with the decaying brick and stucco bungalows of recently arrived Jamaicans, the old summer colony of the Brooklyn elite now in the throes of third-world liberation. He turned again on Neptune and she pointed out a five-story elevator building indistinguishable from hundreds of others, save for LEVANTINE HALL in script over the entrance. He put the wagon in park, killed the engine. “Well—”

  “Straight ahead will put you on the Belt,” she said. “Maybe you can find a fare going back.”

  “Hack commission catches me, I’m dead,” he told her. “I don’t have a license to cruise.”

  “Anyway, I appreciate the ride.”

  “Don’t mention it,” he said, and laughed uneasily. “It was the least I could do after running you in.”

  She grabbed her bag and opened the door. He stopped her with a hand on her wrist. “You don’t really live with your folks?”

  “Why?”

  “I thought I could come upstairs, we could have a cup of coffee together.”

  “That would be nice,” she said, “but I’m asleep on my feet. How would you feel if I dozed off while we were talking?”

  “I wouldn’t mind.”

  “Yes you would.” She smiled too sweetly. “Besides, my mother would hit the roof if I brought home a shaygets.”

  “A what?”

  “Good night,” she said. “And thanks again.”

  Fuck you, too, lady. “Well then, s’long.”

  2

  NATHAN METREVELLI, JIGGLING A sifter full of seeds and broken twigs over a Formica tabletop, said he hated sleeping alone. “If I wanted to be by myself all the time, I wouldn’t have moved in with you. There are plenty of rich women I could be just as lonely with.”

  Kate dropped her bag at the door and went inside the tiny kitchen. “You know, there’s more to life than sex and money,” she said, “but they’re acquired tastes.”

  “Well, yes,” Nathan admitted without turning his head. “That’s why every day I try to set aside a few hours to eat, go to the schvitz, watch TV, work—”

  “Hah,” Kate said, “what do you know about that one?”

  “About eating? Just wait and see. When are you starting supper?”

  She threw her arms around his neck, nuzzled him. “Nathan, Nathan, why do I put up with you?”

  “Because,” he said, “I’m not like other men, who never get past your obvious charms. What I love you for …”

  “Yes, Nathan?”r />
  “Is your body.”

  She slapped his face.

  “Ow,” he said, spilling some of the grass from a yellow square of gummed paper. “Those rings feel like brass knuckles.”

  “They’re supposed to.”

  He crooked an arm around her neck and bulldogged her cheek to his, quickly let her go. She stood over him and cupped his chin in her hand, guided his mouth to her lips. “Your body,” he said again.

  She studied the upside-down face. The cleft jaw made a fine, worried pinhead above the red-rimmed cyclops’ eye of his mouth. The curly dark brown hair, a beard from a Chagall painting of a shtetl rabbi. She wondered if she seemed as ridiculous to him, and then realized he wasn’t looking. Inside out was the only perspective that interested him.

  “Do you know why?” she asked.

  He waggled his chin, shaking the stubbly pinhead. “Why what?”

  “Why I put up with you?”

  The arm snaked around her waist and pulled her onto his lap. His eyes widened in mock apprehension. “No, Kate, I don’t. Why?”

  “Because you’re so damn useful,” she said. “When all the other girls at Lincoln were rebelling against their parents, when they were doing reds and drinking that awful peppermint schnapps, sniffing glue and getting knocked up, the real dumb ones, I didn’t have to. I had Nathan Metrevelli, the Bad News Boor. Just being with you was worse for my reputation than anything the others tried.”

  No, that wasn’t smart. Never be too candid with Nathan, especially when you’re going heart to heart with him. Nathan could dish it out with the best of them, but he caught everything coming back with a glass ego.

  “So you had time for homework and made good marks,” he said. “What did that ever get you?”

  “Nathan Metrevelli all over again.”

  He moistened his lips and put the joint in his mouth and drew it out again. He leaned over the stove and Kate caught a whiff of singed hair before the sweet mustiness of the Maui Wowie. He filled his lungs and puffed out his cheeks, croaked, “Wanna hit?”

  “Nathan,” she said, “I’m twenty-two years old and I dance bottomless on Times Square. I don’t need you to be bad for me any more.”