Disturbed Earth (5 page)

"Yeah?"

"Come on, Artemy. They got some smart people out here. Not all Russians on Brighton Beach are creeps and hookers and idiots. They think, they read, they travel. OK, a lot of the kids leave, they don't like it, they think it's old fashioned, but there's still smart people. They understand that the old empires are all gone, nothing holds together, it's all in pieces, nothing safe. Some of them think about going back home where they won't be immigrants. Some melting pot, they say; they just melt you down until you turn into American. No culture. No nothing. Just this crazy religion where they believe in the Bible as fact like it's the telephone book."

Dubi made me laugh.

I said, "I have to go. Good luck with the book. You writing in Russian?"

"Both," he said. "I do my own translation. But you're OK, Artie? You're doing OK?"

"I'm OK."

"You know what I can't get used to? I can't get used to the feeling war is coming. I remember this when I was a tiny boy in Leningrad, you know, and war was coming, and again in Israel later. I stare at the ceiling at night and think, not again. What the fuck are we going into Iraq for? So listen, come out one day and have a tea with me, OK, or some food. Come home one time."

"I will, Dube. Yeah I will. Thanks."

"You want to stay for lunch? I could order in?"

"That's OK," I said. "I have a date."

5

At Totonno's, I got a pizza, then I picked up Cropsey Avenue on my way to Shore Drive. Maxine's phone was busy, so I put my cell on redial.

It used to surprise me that even when a case loomed, even when there was the possibility of murder, you could think about pizza. Pizza, the dentist, calling my mother, buying a birthday present, music. Stuff. Stuff that made it a life. Stuff I never had growing up in Moscow when everything was makeshift and uncertain. There were memories even now I couldn't trap into consciousness; I had hated it that much. Even after more than twenty-five years in New York, I was thrilled by the routines of city life, my city, my neighborhood, my life—breakfast at Mike's coffee shop, a bike ride by the river, sitting at my desk in the sun coming through the old loft window, ribs at Tennessee Mountain with my neighbors, Lois and Louise. Pizza with Maxine.

I loved how New York was jammed with people who told in detail the stories their friends told them and the stories of their relatives; even distant acquaintances of casual friends became the stuff of your daily narrative. Everyone gossiped. Everyone relayed news about celebrities as if they were your best friends. Life was dense with people. Having a conversation in New York, the stories overlapping, everyone interrupting, you had to fight for air time. You were crazy, maybe; you got lonely; you were never alone.

So I got a large pie because it was one of the things I did with Maxine Crabbe on weekends and I didn't want to let go of it and anyhow there was nothing I could do about the case until I heard from Sonny Lippert. I called Maxie from the car again, got through and asked if the twins were around. She said they were away for the weekend with their dad's mother upstate, and she'd been doing laundry all morning and was hanging around, drinking coffee and wasn't even dressed. I said, don't bother.

An hour after I got to Maxine's, she left me in her bed and put the pizza I brought in the microwave.

"You want some?" she called from the kitchen, mouth full. "I really think Grimaldi's is better, you know, honey."

I got up and looked out of the window. The sun was high over the Hudson beyond Shore Drive where Maxie lived. She had grown up nearby in Bay Ridge. It was a peaceful neighborhood, Italian, some Jews, white; it had been Scandinavian once. She had moved back from Staten Island after her husband, Mark, died in the Trade Center.

From her half of the two family house, what they called a Mother and Daughter out in Brooklyn, she had a spectacular view of the water. I wasn't crazy about how easy the access was to her front door, but she loved it. She had always wanted a view of the Verrazano Bridge she said.

"The Golden Gate," Maxie would say, thickening up her Brooklyn accent. "That's not a bridge. This," she'd say, walking to the window and looking out, "this is a bridge!"

When Mark died on 9/11 she had gone back to her job in forensics, which was how I knew her. She was good at it and it filled up the hours and the girls were in junior high now anyway. She came back to the bedroom, where I was struggling with my jeans.

"You putting on a few pounds, sailor?" She giggled.

Maxine Crabbe was an old friend. We got together once in a while and argued over where you got the best pizza in Brooklyn—Grimaldi's, Totonno's, Di Fara's on Avenue J. Once in a while we had a pizza orgy and an overnight.

She was thirty-eight and looked younger, a stringbean of a girl, tall, skinny, loose limbed. She wore her hair short and she had freckles. We had known each other before I met Lily. I met Max when she showed up, a kid of twenty-two, at a station house where I was working. She was very sharp.

We had dated on and off, she was practical, funny, smart and uncomplicated, but I was a pain in the ass and couldn't commit and she gave up and married Mark, a handsome fire captain from Staten Island. They had twins, Millie and Maria, identical as babies but different as they grew up; Millie was smooth and blonde, a real little nymphet, and Maria, who hated her sister's obsessions with boys and clothes, wore glasses she didn't need and kept her face in a book even at dinner when Max tried to stop her. But they were both good kids.

Once in a while, in the old days, I went over when they lived on Staten Island. I'd fish with Mark; Maxie would barbecue.

For months after Mark died, Maxine worked long nights at the "Dead House," the makeshift morgue at the Marriott Hotel downtown where they tried to match what remains they could find to DNA samples. It was horrible for her; not because she wasn't used to it, she dealt with dead bodies all the time. She pulled those hours, I knew, because she was waiting for Mark to show up. Something, she thought. Please, God, let them find a piece of him so I can get some rest. They never did.

Like everyone downtown, we got close those months. Lily left New York, Max and me, we went out a few times. Nothing was ever said. We fell into a kind of routine, pizza, a movie, music, a trip to the park with the girls. No big deal. We were friends who fell into bed together once in a while. It filled up the time, but I missed Lily.

"You want a slice?"

"I'm not hungry," I said. "I'll skip it. Is there coffee?" I got dressed, followed her into the kitchen, where she was sampling the pie.

"Grimaldi's is much better," she said. "Artie?"

"Yeah?"

"You believe in God?"

"No."

"I wish I could get rid of believing."

"It's different if you're Catholic, I think."

"But Jews believe."

"I'm not that kind of Jew," I said.

"What kind are you?"

"The kind who doesn't believe in God. Anyway, my father wasn't Jewish at all, but that's not really it. I'm a New York Jew, you know? I'm a Woody Allen Jew, a George Gershwin Jew, a Stan Getz Jew, a Mel Brooks Jew, and Billy Wilder and books by Philip Roth and all the rest, I believe in them, you know? That's all I have. The rest, for me, OK, I don't mean to insult your religion, but for me, it's all bullshit. You want to do dinner, tonight?"

"If you get lucky." She kissed me and looked at her watch. "Christ, it's late. So make it a late dinner, OK? Come back around nine. No pizza, either. I'm cooking. I bought steak for the kids to take up to their grandmother and they left it. New York strip. Salad. Red wine."

"This could go great with steak," I said, and gave her the bottle Johnny gave me.

She looked at it. "Jeez, that's some helluva wine. You forgot to tell me what you were doing in Brooklyn so early in the morning."

"Can we talk about it later?"

"Sure," she said. Maxie was a pro; she knew if I had a case, I'd talk when I was ready. "So you have the keys I gave you, right? If I'm late, just let yourself in."

"Thanks."

"Listen, you can keep those keys, I mean in case you're ever working a case here and you need to crash and you don't want to go all the way back to the city, whatever." She stuttered some when she said it. "I mean no big deal, OK. Just if you want."

I put my arms around her. There was a lot I wanted to say, but I wasn't brave enough. I could work cases in bad places. I could chase bad guys with guns if I had to. I'd seen lousy stuff on the job. This was different. Harder.

"Thanks," was all I said. "That's really nice. Thank you."

6

"Where are you?" It was Sonny Lippert on my cell phone.

"On my way home."

"Stay there," he said. "I might need you later."

"What's going on?" I said but the line went dead.

The bridge was like spun silver behind me. On the hill above was the old fort which had been there since men in wigs and three-cornered hats made a revolution. The traffic was light and the sun blinding. I pulled my sunglasses out of my jacket pocket. It was cold and beautiful. The river was bright with sunlight, navy blue and silver, the way it gets in the winter, and there were chunks of ice jamming it up. The short trip, water always on my left, I felt I was in a boat. I drove without feeling the road under the tires, as if I was driving on water.

I wasn't sure why Sonny Lippert was so agitated, but it was Lippert who helped me get back on the job. Even before 9/11, I had wanted it. I hated the time when I worked as a private investigator. I tried it on my own; I had tried working for Keyes, one of the big security companies. I made more money, I had a fine health plan and an office and regular hours, but there was none of the stuff about being a New York cop that I'd always loved, even when I knew how much bullshit went down.

Keyes was mostly paperwork, bank accounts, corporate stuff; I learned my way around a paper trail, but I was bored. Anyway I could never get rid of the idea that being a private eye was something out of a B movie. Chandler, Ross MacDonald, Ellroy, those writers who did it brilliantly in books, but it wasn't like that for me. It was dull and lonely. I never got over missing the guys at work, the station house, the noise and smells, even if the pay was lousy.

"We had fun, didn't we?" a detective I know—I was at the academy with her—said after we both retired. We were sitting over a beer at Fanelli's and regretting it, that we'd left, and remembering the good times, except she had a husband and kids, so it was OK for her. Someone, probably Sonny Lippert whispering in his ear, bent the rules for me so I could go back even though I missed the one-year rule—you could go back on the job up to a year after you quit. I was twice as old as some of the new guys; it was OK.

Lippert took a risk on me. "You'll have to cool it," he'd said. "You'll have to play by the rules. My rules. You'll have to go where I need you, OK? You get it?"

I promised to be good and he got me my job. Nominally, I worked out of headquarters in Manhattan, but in reality I went wherever Sonny went. Ever since I had first worked for him at the Federal Prosecutor's Office at Cadman Plaza over in downtown Brooklyn, I'd been his boy. Most of '01, '02, we worked out of Police Plaza in the city, we worked on terrorism. Things moved on, Lippert formed his unit on crimes against children.

Working on cases connected with children was what made Sonny Lippert nuts. It put him out on a fragile emotional limb, it caused his divorce, it made him febrile. Again I wondered why the bloody clothes had been left where they'd be so easily found? Was that the point? Was it planned? Was it the result of some crack-addled brain, another case of child abuse, another case where someone used a kid as a punching bag, a way to express a hideous rage? It didn't feel Russian; the Russians rarely did anything except for profit; even revenge had pretty much disappeared as a motive. The new age of Russian crime was entirely invested in money, and though you occasionally ran into someone who still cared about the myth, it was mostly the dough. Where was the profit in killing a little girl then burying her bloody clothes? I was still half convinced Lippert had over-reacted. No body. No report. No nothing except the clothes.

I hit the gas harder and slipped my Getz/Gilberto album into the CD slot. People put it down, the album; they said Stan Getz sold out when he got together with Joao Gilberto and the record sold millions. Snobs those people who loved jazz only if it was Ornette Coleman making weird noises. I listened to the warm music; it was sublime is all.

The music was sweet. Once I would have fantasized about Brazil, going there, hanging out, eating the food, going to Bahia and Rio, meeting the girl from Ipanema. All those years I wanted to travel, to be able to just go. I didn't care anymore. I didn't want to leave New York. I had been, Moscow, London, Paris, Hong Kong, Vienna, Bosnia, you know? Made up for lost time. No more.

I ran my hand along the cream leather seat of the red Caddy I'd bought with a windfall I got a while back. It was in the shop more than out, but I loved it. I had a good sound system put in. Lily had been embarrassed by it, but Maxie loved it; to her it was great, luxurious, easy riding. The kids could fool around in the big back seat.

It was almost new, big and smooth as silk. It was the kind of car—a Cadillac—I had wanted from the time I was a kid in Moscow and I saw one in a picture in an illicit copy of
Life
magazine someone sold me in my school's toilet. The toilet was the center of commerce for Moscow kids in those days.

It was Saturday, but I called Sonny's office and got Rhonda Fisher, his assistant, and she said there was nothing yet, Lippert wasn't back from Coney Island, there were no formal reports in, and I asked if she'd let me have whatever had come, fax, e-mail. I lied and told her Sonny said it was OK. Rhonda said if she could find anything she'd drop it off at my place because she was meeting her sister at a play in the city. I said could she drop it with Mike Rizzi at the coffee shop, and we stayed on the phone exchanging banalities about logistics until I hung up and called Mike and asked him to give Rhonda key lime pie on me. Lemon meringue, if he was out of key lime.

And then there was Ivana Galitzine with the gray eyes and the lithe body. I couldn't shake her image.

"Will you invite me for coffee again?"