Unfortunately, Dag beat him to it and Jay turned to watch the player’s retreating form pass through the workroom and out the door.
Nicole murmured, “I’m so sorry, Jay.”
He wheeled to face her and considered unleashing a stream of invective whose heat would bleach the equine-themed wallpaper behind the bed.
“Oh, god, I made a terrible decision,” his wife simpered. Her voice was a simulacrum of kindness and repentance braided with fear of what she had wrought. “Will you talk to me?”
The Nicole Era was over, but there was unfinished business with the man who had just left the room. The last words of D’Angelo Maxwell to Jay Gladstone when they parted in front of the Paladin Club: We’re good men, he said. We do what’s right.
Jay heard Nicole’s plangent voice calling his name like a ringing bell, once, twice, three times, as he slanted across the Turkish rug and out the door. Adrenaline kicked his system into dangerously high gear. Animated by an overwhelming desire to confront Dag and discuss how the athlete squared his professed morality with such dubious behavior, Jay squinted into the darkness searching for his quarry. In the distance, a tuxedoed silhouette could be seen making for the driveway. Jay called out, but Dag did not turn around. He just wanted to talk, about what he was not sure. Dag had already apologized. Did he require more deferential words? Or perhaps on some unfathomable level, he desired a physical confrontation that would both salvage his manhood and end in his annihilation.
The player was no longer in Jay’s field of vision. Intent on forcing the issue, and having, he believed, retrieved sufficient control of his faculties Jay staggered uphill struggling for traction on the slippery grass and nearly falling twice. He glanced toward the porch but saw no one. He did not suspect that, after what had happened, Dag would let himself in the house, yet somehow, he had dematerialized. Where was Dag’s car? Jay’s eyes went to the street and—there! Dag was jogging down the road.
Jay yanked the door of the Mercedes open and fell into the driver’s seat. For the briefest moment, he wondered whether he was clearheaded enough to drive. Boris always left the key under the seat and Jay was relieved to find that at least one person in his orbit could be relied upon not to betray him. He rammed the key into the ignition, shifted into reverse, and hit the gas sending the sedan shooting backward. He cut the wheel hard, crushed the brake, then shifted into drive and again stomped his foot on the gas pedal. The wheels screamed as the car shot forward.
He raced out of the driveway, nearly losing control, and swerved on to the country lane. There were no streetlights and Jay cursed as he peered through the darkness. The car gained speed, bumped over the uneven surface, and accelerated as Jay swiveled his head like a prison floodlight, one way then the other. Less than a hundred yards ahead Dag appeared on the side of the road looking incongruously dapper. His back was to the car as he loped unevenly along, the tiny light of his cell phone screen visible. Had he summoned his entourage?
The same interaction of painkillers and whiskey that led Jay to believe it was a good idea to leap into his car to confront the younger, more virile, and incomparably stronger man, steered him to the wild notion that he should accelerate toward Dag and stop just short of striking him. It would terrorize his adversary, and terror is what Jay needed to inflict in order to quash the feelings of impotence and shame which had temporarily deranged him. As the Mercedes continued to gather speed, Jay lifted his foot off the gas, intending to jam it down on the brake with great force. But the adverse chemical conditions caused the irrational driver to mistake the accelerator for the brake so when he thrust his foot down, instead of skidding to a dramatic halt, the car shot forward and caught the long-legged athlete just above the knees. The collision sent him sailing through the night sky higher than a basketball hoop before he crashed to the road taking most of the impact of the landing on his left shoulder and his head. The Mercedes smashed into a tree and the force that crushed the grille and collapsed the hood snapped Jay’s head back, then forward into the steering wheel. He blacked out.
When Jay emerged from the car, he wasn’t sure how long he had been there. His face and shirt were drenched in blood, knees banged up, chest bruised. What had happened? Moments earlier, he had been in his house and now he was standing unsteadily on the side of the road and the car was wrecked. What had he done?
A bolt of dread shot through Jay when he saw Dag lying on the ground, limbs arranged in an unnatural configuration. This was followed by another jolt when he realized Dag was unconscious. He kneeled down to take Dag’s pulse, and the large hand flopped out of the tuxedo sleeve. Jay thought he felt life, and then it was gone. He couldn’t tell what was real and what his short-circuiting brain madly imagined. Dag’s head was twisted at an odd angle, blood trickling from his mouth. Jay placed his fingers on one of Dag’s neck tattoos. Was he already dead? Had he been killed instantly?
Jay was lightheaded. Every cell in his body vibrated, his entire organism spinning out of control. He struggled to his feet. Blood spilled from his nose. Jay took his shirt off and held it to his face. Stripped to the waist, he shivered. The Mercedes headlight that had not shattered cast a ghostly light in the woods where the trunks of pine trees stood straight as jury members waiting for the judge to enter the courtroom. Whether D’Angelo Maxwell was dead or had suffered severe injuries but clung to life, or—and dear God, let it be this, anything else is unacceptable!—the damage was minor, and he would make a full recovery, the disastrous situation in which Jay Gladstone found himself was going to be exceedingly difficult to explain.
PART II
“In the struggle between you and the world,
bet on the world.”
—FRANZ KAFKA
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The year the Watergate Committee put the screws to Nixon, Jay sailed through his freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania. He spent the summer working in the family business, commuting from Scarsdale to Manhattan each day with Bingo in a Cadillac Eldorado. His father allowed Jay to listen to rock music on the radio for half the ride, but when they rolled past Yankee Stadium, he twirled the dial to the news station and the two of them savored the increasingly dire travails of the president, or, as Bingo referred to him: “That anti-Semitic sonofabitch.”
A Roosevelt Democrat, Bingo liked to discuss politics at the dinner table, and between bites of roast chicken or Salisbury steak he would quiz Jay and Bebe on their knowledge. Which president passed the Civil Rights Act? Who is Robert McNamara? What is the Jackson-Vanik Amendment? The last question held particular resonance for Bingo because he had a personal stake in it. The Jackson-Vanik Amendment was intended to force countries with nonmarket economies (Communist) to ease immigration of minority groups (Jews) in return for favorable trade status.
Although Bingo was a secular man, the fate of his coreligionists was never far from his mind. One night at dinner he told his family about the spring of 1937, his senior year in high school. He and his brother Jerry were walking along the Grand Concourse arguing about whether the Yankees would win the World Series that season, and if Joe DiMaggio could beat out Luke Appling of the Chicago White Sox for the batting title, when they noticed everyone around them craning their necks, staring at the sky. The two boys looked up to see the Hindenburg blimp looming imperially over their Bronx neighborhood. In those days, it was still rare to spot a plane, and the Nazi zeppelin was the most impressive aircraft they had ever seen. Immense and silvery with a giant swastika emblazoned on its tail, the Hindenburg seemed to have emerged directly from Hitler’s fevered psyche. To his family, Bingo said: I thought those Nazi bastards were coming to kill me.
The summer of Nixon’s agony was uneventful for Jay. He did errands for his father and Uncle Jerry, picked up lunch, delivered gifts to city officials. Occasionally he was allowed to attend meetings, but never when his father and uncle discussed anything important. The company offices were in the East F
ifties and during his lunch breaks he would sit on a bench in Central Park, eat a sandwich from home, and read a paperback. His cousin Franklin spent the summer working on a kibbutz in Israel and Jay often thought he should have joined him there. He considered transferring from Penn to Berkeley. California intrigued him, and in those burning years it looked like New York had no future.
When the following summer arrived, Bingo prevailed on Jay to give the real estate business another shot. I’m going to show you how it works, he said, the guts of it. Reluctantly, Jay agreed. The Jackson-Vanik Amendment had passed, and the result was to open the spigot and allow the flow of captive Jews out of the Soviet Union. Bingo was a member of several organizations dedicated to resettling the ones who landed in America and he gave a number of them jobs. In early June of 1975, he called his son into his office. Sitting in a chair was a floor safe named Marat Reznikov.
His father said, “Say hello to our cousin.”
The man got up from his seat and smiled at Jay, revealing a gold incisor. He wore a tight suit with a black shirt and no tie. His face was pockmarked. He had thick lips and a one-inch vertical scar on his left cheek. His eyes were dark caves. He was five foot nine but looked like he could stop the F train with his elbow. When they shook hands, Jay noticed Cyrillic letters tattooed on his fingers. Jay knew no one with tattoos. To see them on someone’s fingers was unimaginable. Bingo informed his son that Marat had been a successful businessman in Odessa, a port city on the Black Sea, and would be employed by the Gladstones as a rent collector.
“Hello, cousin.” Marat’s voice had the texture of a bear’s paw.
Jay nodded mutely.
“You’re going to work together,” Bingo said.
“Your father’s grandfather and mine—brothers,” Marat said to Jay, who knew how important the idea of family was to his father. Marat grabbed Jay’s bicep and pointed at Bingo. “Your father khoroshiy chelovek, good man.” The consonants of his accent banged and clicked.
“You’ll get to use a company car,” Bingo told his son by way of inducement.
Jay did not have to be sold. He liked the idea of getting out of the office and into the field. This cousin seemed to be what his father referred to as “a character,” someone who willfully differed from the prevailing norms. At thirty-two, Marat was twelve years older than Jay. He had served in the Soviet Army, earned a degree in mathematics, and used his expertise to immerse himself in the black market where he supplied the apparatchiks with whatever sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll they required. Bingo knew about the mathematics degree and the military service but was not privy to the spicier corners of his cousin’s resume. For Bingo, the man’s identity as a Jew was the only salient fact. As for Marat, a Jew in name only who did not keep kosher, did not daven, and did not know the Ten Commandments except to violate them, his religious status was just another hustle he was happy to use to escape the bleak Ukraine for the crumbling disco inferno of 1970s New York.
In those years, the Gladstones owned over a thousand rental units in the Bronx stretched over the largely black and Latino neighborhoods of Mott Haven, Hunts Point, and East Tremont. Most of the tenants paid their rent on time, and the Gladstone brothers did not look to cause problems. If the rent was two weeks late, a letter was sent requesting payment. A month in arrears and another letter would arrive reminding the renter of his obligation. Six weeks of nonpayment resulted in a visit from a representative of the landlords, and it was this function that Marat Reznikov was hired to perform.
The Bronx that summer was no longer the borough of Bingo Gladstone. Burned husks of buildings, abandoned cars stripped to their axles, streets furrowed with potholes, medians overgrown and littered with trash, junkies on the nod, and the whole rotting body festooned with explosions of graffiti, bursts of life shouting that the venerable borough would not die gently. From the subway platform on the Jerome Avenue line, say, or the Concourse line, or the Pelham line, you watched trains surge in, every car decorated with spray-painted designs, the mobile oeuvre of taggers with names like TAKI183, Batz 4, Mitch 77. And the dogs! Heinz 57s, Rottweilers, and Dobermans, beasts on thick chains that could barely control their hellish aggression, all barking in maniacal communication. And the pop pop pop of gunfire that would occur without warning. All of this was news to Jay, whose personal experience of the city’s northern borough was confined to Yankee Stadium and the Bronx Zoo.
The company car that Bingo provided turned out to be a 1972 brown Ford Pinto with a balky transmission that Jay nicknamed Lucille, after B.B. King’s guitar. Because Marat did not have a driver’s license, Jay piloted the Pinto around the potholes and down the battered streets with his cousin in the passenger seat chain-smoking Lucky Strikes, whose packaging, appropriately, featured a target. Although Marat lived in the Kingsbridge neighborhood, he had only resided in the borough for two months and was unfamiliar with the geography, so the two of them relied on a grubby map provided by a clerk in the office. Jay picked up Marat in front of his apartment every morning at eight, and the two of them made their humid rounds. The air conditioning in the dinged-up car was a rumor, and Jay’s clothes stuck to his skin. In the urban swelter, they toiled until four with a break for lunch. They tried to finish their rounds before people returned from work, because that reduced the chance of confrontations. The Bronx stank of uncollected garbage, but it was the scent of imminent violence that had Jay on edge all day—he wore Adidas to make running easier—while his cousin, cigarette glued to his lip and a blasé expression on his scarred face, was unconcerned.
Marat Reznikov was like no Jew Jay had ever met. His English was sparse, but he wanted to learn so he consistently engaged Jay in conversation. He talked about his years in the Soviet Army and the scams he ran after he was discharged. In Odessa, gangs controlled the rackets and Marat survived by a combination of guile and intimidation. Once, he beat a man who owed him money, then put a leash around his victim’s neck and made him walk down the street naked on all fours, like a dog. To Jay it seemed depraved, but Marat told the story like it was funny.
They parked Lucille in front of whatever Gladstone building they entered. It didn’t matter if the parking space was illegal, in those years Bronx cops didn’t write a lot of parking tickets. Then, they opened the front door with a master key and headed for the deadbeat apartments, starting on the highest floor and working their way down. The halls were dark and uninviting, and often smelled of urine. The glass of shattered lightbulbs crunched beneath their feet. Marat would pound on a door, Jay standing behind him. Less than half the time someone answered. Every apartment had more locks than Rikers Island, and the tenants would unbolt them—click click click click click, slide the chain—and open the door. Whatever the size, shape, and age of their bodies, their eyes were a blend of anger and defeat. Marat used his limited English to explain the situation, and the tenant would either pay up or Jay would hand over a legal notice informing them of the grim fate that lay ahead should they fail to honor the terms of their lease. The first few times they did this, Jay had to take deep breaths to still his rampaging heart. But Marat, despite his imperfect command of the language, seemed to frighten most of the people they encountered. When Jay realized this, he became less tense.
The first week passed without incident.
That weekend Jay played tennis with a high school friend at his parents’ country club. Afterwards, they had drinks in the bar overlooking a golf course that resembled an English landscape painting. The friend was about to leave for a summer program at the Sorbonne and planned to travel on a Eurail pass for August. Sipping his second Heineken, the sense of distance between the foundation of his family’s income and the life it provided came into sharper focus. He wanted to discuss it with his friend but lacked the vocabulary. Instead, he talked about this wild Ukrainian his father was making him work with and when he repeated the story about the naked man on the leash the two of them hooted with laughter, altho
ugh Jay was still not entirely sure why it was amusing.
The following Monday, in a building with a broken elevator in East Tremont, a Puerto Rican tenant—a dissipated man in his forties gripping a quart bottle of Colt malt liquor, Guzman, three months back rent owed—shoved Marat and slammed the door in his face. Already out of sorts from climbing five flights, Marat was livid. He pounded his fist on the door and shouted curses in Russian. Thumped it with his foot. A Latina woman in curlers cuddling a crying baby stuck her head out of another apartment and told him to shut the fuck up. Marat cursed her. He thrashed the door for five minutes, but Guzman remained inside. Jay taped an eviction notice to the door and with great difficulty convinced his fulminating cousin to leave.
An hour later they were on foot in Mott Haven. It was late morning, and the temperature was already in the nineties. They had just purchased sodas at a bodega and were crossing East 139th Street, headed back to the Pinto. Marat was asking Jay if he knew anything about how bond trading worked when a gypsy cab bumped him. Marat yelled something at the driver, who blasted his horn and screamed Get your ass outta the street. Marat whipped his can of soda against the windshield of the cab, and the driver threw the door open. A pasty-faced white man in a Mets hat, waving a crowbar. His eyes were cracks as he lumbered toward Marat. Jay had never been this close to real violence, and the sight pinned him like a butterfly to where he stood. The man raised the crowbar to swing at Marat, but before he could bring it down on the Russian’s head, he froze. A smiling Marat was pointing a gun in his face. In the sunshine of the Bronx morning, his gold incisor glinted. The passenger in the cab, a black woman wearing a summer dress and a wide-brimmed straw hat, climbed out of the door and scuttled in the opposite direction.
The Hazards of Good Fortune Page 27