Disturbed Earth (8 page)

"You want me to say he drives a little pussy design car, right?"

"You read my mind."

"Yeah, he does. Don't be sad," he said in Russian. "I have some good news."

"Fine," I said.

"Come on."

"Where?"

"Surprise."

I glanced at the phone.

"Take your cell with you. We're not going far."

I picked up the phone, put on my jacket, waited until Tolya put his on, and both of us smoking the cigars he swore Castro had given him, we left my place, and walked north on Broadway.

On the way, Tolya, like a kid who couldn't wait to open his presents, told me the news. He was leaving Miami. He would keep an apartment in South Beach, but he was moving to the city. He'd bought a place in Soho. He cut west on Spring Street to West Broadway and stopped halfway up the block.

I was glad. Glad he was in New York, glad he'd be close by. I tossed the cigar into the gutter and turned to follow him into the building, clutching my cell phone.

"You get a decent signal in here?"

Tolya looked at me. "Sure. But what's with the obsession, you're hanging onto that phone like it was a lifeline."

"It's just a case I'm working."

*

The huge vaulted loft was on two floors, his office downstairs, the living space up. A terrace surrounded the top floor; you could see the city in every direction from it, the Soho rooftops and the Chrysler Building. Acres of some rare pale wood covered the floors. The kitchen, all stainless steel and glass, was in and Tolya, like a proud housewife, showed me the Sub-Zero fridge that was stocked with vintage champagne and hummed with power. In the middle of the main space, two architects, a contractor, a designer stood around a makeshift table fingering a sheaf of blueprints and arguing.

In the face of all of it Tolya seemed pretty fucking meek, if you asked me. He listened. He paid attention. He was caught up in the details of the work. He took the half pounder gold lighter out of his pocket and lit a cigarette and when one of the architects—a woman with a sour mouth—waved the smoke away, he put it out. With the toe of one of his green suede Gucci loafers—he got them made up in different colors, a dozen at a time, all with 18 karat gold buckles—he kicked at the newly laid wooden floor. His eyes, set deep in the head that was big as an Easter Island statue, followed the architects. I didn't get it, the way he paid so much heed to these people.

He hustled me into the bedroom, showed me the dressing room he'd had built. Everywhere boxes were piled, tissue paper spilling out, contents scattered around the room like a Christmas morning at Ali Baba's palace.

"I went shopping," he said. "I got carried away."

I glanced at the shoeboxes piled in shaky towers in one corner, and a makeshift coat rack where custom-made suits from Brioni hung in rows.

"I don't fit regular sizes," he said, a little sheepishly. "Come on." He led me back into the main room.

"Fuck off!"

Suddenly, out of nowhere, standing in the middle of the cavernous loft, the architects and designers arguing, bickering, whining like a gang of cats while they considered ways to spend his money, Tolya boiled over.

"Fuck off!" He leaned over the four of them and for a minute I thought he was going to crack their heads together like a quartet of walnuts, but instead he swore at them and ordered them out and there was a sudden hush. In a very chilly voice, in perfect English, Tolya told them, one more time: fuck off. The four picked up their coats and portfolios and scrambled for the door.

I leaned against a trestle table and lit up a cigarette.

"How come you put up with it?" I said.

"I liked the woman," he said. "I wanted her so I gave her the job."

Tolya looked sly. Women were his weakness. Normally he liked them young and gorgeous, strippers, hookers, models, so I didn't get it. The dour architect, dressed in black with a wedge of black hair over her eyes, was a departure for Tolya.

"You're surprised? You thought she was a dog, didn't you, Art?"

I laughed. "For sure not a hot chicken."

"I thought she had class," he said. "She went to Yale. And Oxford. The Sorbonne."

"You're impressed?"

"You think I should stick to hookers, Artyom?" He peered at me as if for the first time. "What's eating you?"

We sat on a pair of chairs in his loft and he poured vodka and we smoked and I told him about the blood-drenched clothes by the beach. Sonny Lippert had told me to keep my mouth shut on the subject but I didn't count Tolya. He kept quiet when it mattered. He had his own secrets and, more important, he was my friend.

I told him about the blood-soaked clothes, told him Lippert said the girl was dead and I wasn't convinced. I unloaded on him and while I talked, he listened, his huge body folding down onto itself as he lit one cigarette after another and knocked back half a bottle of Stoli. I'd never seen so much anguish in him and I didn't understand.

"Tolya?"

He waved me away and turned his back to me and walked across the floor. He faced the wall and leaned against it and I saw him sob; his back heaved with crying. When he turned around, he walked slowly back, sat down, picked up the bottle and drank steadily from it until it was empty.

Watching him I remembered Lippert's warning. Keep it zipped, he'd said. Now I wondered if I should have told Tolya.

I leaned my elbows on my knees and put a hand on his arm.

"What is it, Tol? You know something? You think she's dead?"

"They did this to my daughter once," he said. "I don't mean they killed her, but they kidnapped her, just took her, they stole her from me, and they marked her. I never told you. I never told anyone. I couldn't talk about it. I promised her I would never talk because she was ashamed.

"They took her and held her for one week, Artyom. A whole week they kept her in a closet, she was ten. I sent the money. I offered myself in exchange, but they kept her and when they sent her back, they had cut marks in her face and cut off her finger. They told her they ate little girls and this was why they took the finger, and she believes them and for two years she doesn't eat.

"They marked her. They took my daughter. They took her away in the middle of the night and I was there. You understand? I wake up and I know something is wrong." Tolya's voice cracked. "We have a big apartment, high ceilings, large furniture, something left over from a high apparatchik who had lived in it and lost favor or some shit, you see this, Artyom? Imagine, I'm asleep. I have come in late, so I should be guilty because I have been out with some rock and roll asshole from the West, we still think of it as West, and it's late, and I've been drinking plenty, and my wife is asleep and I think, she'll smell it on me, that I have been places I should not be, vodka, cigars, women, you know the smell of women you cannot wash off?" He got up and sat down again.

"So I go to sleep on the sofa. I remember. Red leather sofa from Poltrona Frau in Germany, you know I'm so into my things, Artyom, first time I have real money, I just shop. Later that night, I get up, the apartment is very large and the kids have their rooms at the other end, so I hear myself walk around like a hippopotamus, and I trample over the floor, and feel it, marble, cold under my feet. I open her door and the bed is empty. She has gone. Just gone. No one there, just the empty room."

"Valentina?"

"Yes," he said.

I knew that the girls, his twins, lived in Florida now with Tolya's second ex-wife. All he ever told me was the good news, their achievements, their successes in high school. He showed their pictures to me once in a while; the pair of them, teenagers with fiery red hair and Tolya's dimples imprinted on their cheeks to remind you they were his.

I said, "What about Masha?"

He said, "She was at a friend's. But Valentina, they kept her. For one week. For one week while I try to make deals with everyone, even God, which is something I hate and despise, the Russian God. But I promise. They send her back, but it's not her."

1 m sorry.

"She was not the same kid afterwards," Tolya said.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"I promised her I would never tell anyone. She's in high school now. She's an American kid in high school in Florida. She got early admission for Harvard. It's better now, but she was never the same. She became an imitation of her old self, she looks fine, she does well in school, but she was never the same, the pleasure was all gone. I don't know who are the monsters who do this and for what? You want to walk a while?"

He got up slowly, then turned to look at me. "You know why they do this to children?"

"Why?"

"Sometimes because they are weak and enraged. Sometimes because it's the best way to get to the parents, for revenge on the parents, to destroy you. Everywhere they do this to children. Also," he said and looked at me hard.

"Also?"

"You believe in evil?"

"I don't know."

"I know. Let's walk."

He turned out the lights and we left the loft. Tolya locked the door. It was dark now and the wind whipped in from the river so bitterly cold it hurt my face.

I said, "Listen, even if anyone's missing, we don't know if there's a dead girl, do we?"

"What else would it be?" he said. "Don't fool yourself."

"How do they know it's a girl?"

He didn't answer.

"You want to stay at my place while they finish your loft?" I said.

He shook his head. "I have the penthouse suite at 60 Mercer," Tolya said. "Let me help you with this case you're on."

"Not yet," I said.

I made excuses. I didn't want him with me. He would attract attention. Later, I would need him but not now, so I lied and told him I was only going home, I was tired, I had paperwork to do, and he just said, OK, he'd be at the hotel. I didn't believe him. I knew he was already figuring who he knew, who could help, who would make a deal to give him information about a little girl whose blood-soaked clothes had been found near the boardwalk. She was like a ghost who had shed her skins. Tolya, carrying his own obsessions, his own hurt, the memories of his daughter, he would scratch at the case until he fixed things.

He said, "You won't forget."

"What?"

"My mother. Dinner, OK? Later? Nine, ten?"

"As soon as I can," I said. "Where?"

"She wants to eat in Brooklyn. What about Farone's place? You'll come?"

"Yes," I said and left him on the corner of Spring Street, a huge figure heading west, head bowed.

Part Two

10

"We know who she is," Sonny said, very flat.

I found him at the gym he used close to his apartment in Battery Park City. He was on the treadmill in worn blue sweatpants, reading, the book propped on the handlebars. He heard me come in and looked up. It was Saturday night. The gym was empty.

"Who? Who is she? Sonny, tell me." I was yelling now, up close to him, as close as I could get to the treadmill.

Sonny said, "I've been going through Dostoyevsky again, you know, man, I'm reading
Notes from the Underground,
and I think, OK, this is it, this is where it begins. I'm sorry, man, I'm rambling. I wish I could sleep."

"Tell me who the girl is."

Most nights if I needed him, I could find Sonny in the gym, tense, coiled, head down, walking the treadmill, reading Dickens or Dostoevsky, Melville, Tolstoy, Conrad. Sonny liked big books. Big in both senses, he told me once; he liked books with big themes, he liked fat books. Weighed them in his hands when he brought a new one into the office. He would take the book out of the bag and balance it on both hands, I saw him do it a few times, palms turned up, the book on them as if his hands were scales.

These books kept him going nights when he couldn't sleep. He had been like this since the Chinatown fire six or seven years back when he had to identify thirty-seven bodies.

"You found her?"

"The parents called her in missing. Her name is May Luca. She went to her grandmother's yesterday morning early, like she was supposed to, there was some miscommunication and they thought she went and only when she didn't come home they figured something was wrong. The grandmother never called because she figured the kid changed her mind. The kid was wearing a blue baseball jacket and green sneaks."

"You weren't going to tell me?" I said. "You weren't planning to let me know you found out who the kid was?"

"Yeah, yeah," Sonny said, distracted.

"So what are you doing here?"

He climbed off the treadmill, picked up a towel from a bench and wiped his face.

"What else am I going to do? Run around Brooklyn? I got a dozen guys on this. Stay home and watch reality TV? I got plenty of reality. What?" he said. "Look, what I said this morning still goes, I want you by the phone, we know who she is, we don't know where she is, OK? We're still nowhere."

"You said you wanted me in clean space. What did you mean?"

"Instinctive."

"You think everyone's corrupt, don't you? You think there's no more good guys."

"Pretty much, yeah, that's right."

"You want to tell me anything about this Luca girl?"

"Come on," he said, disappeared into the locker room, came back ten minutes later, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and his overcoat. Lippert's hair was wet, plastered to his head like a helmet.

We walked to his apartment, not saying much as we passed the hole in the ground where the Trade Center had been. People said the city had moved on. Outsiders got bored with New York's obsession. People said we were over the worst. It wasn't true.

At night the pit was still floodlit, eerie, secret now with the high fence concealing most of it from traffic. The tourists were gone. The work went on, orderly, professional. The heroics were over; even the thieves who stole from the site were gone, workers plundering the underbelly of the site as if it were a pharaoh's tomb: piles of jeans in the cab of a fire truck; Rolex watches from a shop that had remained almost intact; scrap metal. Now, nothing except barricades and cement blocks were left and cops to keep you from getting close.

There were barricades everywhere in the city. Cops, state troopers, national guardsmen in big camouflage jackets, knitted face masks to keep them warm, AK-47s cradled in their arms, were everywhere. On TV pasty-faced bureaucrats urged us to stock up on water and duct tape. Got your duck tape? everyone asked sarcastically. We were encouraged to root for war in Iraq. We were bombarded with patriotic shit. It made me nuts; like Tolya said, the propaganda was like Moscow in the old days.

War was coming. Terror. Chaos. Some nights it hardly seemed like New York anymore; it seemed like a foreign country, some place in the Balkans, silent, cold, the hole in the ground lit up by the huge sulphurous spotlights, the masked men with automatic weapons.

The government stoked the fear; in New York we laughed about how stupid the FBI was, how idiotic the Homeland Security. They told us to buy duct tape; we went out and got drunk. I knew a girl in the East Village, an artist who turned her tape into an art object and sold it to some dumb tourists for thousands. Someone else made a ball gown from it.

We laughed; we were tense. The whole city was like an armed camp and it got to you eventually. A few days earlier I'd been in the subway on the 6 train, going uptown to the dentist. My car was in the shop. Suddenly, at Union Square, the train emptied out. I was alone. The car I was in shunted forward and back, then stopped. Within a few seconds, there was an announcement: the train ahead of us was late into the station. Nothing to worry about. It got to me. At 23rd Street, I got out and ran up the steps and jogged home in the dark. I was scared.

Lippert's apartment was a one bedroom with a view of the river. It was furnished with a sofa and chair covered in gray tweed and it was as bland as an office except for his books. Sonny had moved in after his divorce. He glanced out at the river and the skyline, then went into the kitchen and found a bottle of Scotch and some glasses.

I sat on a tweed chair. Sonny crouched on the sofa.

"Can we just go over everything, I mean, look, the jogger runs over something this morning, right? What time did you get the call?"

He drank the Scotch. "Around ten," he said.

"The jogger, this Ivana Galitzine, goes out for a run and trips over something that scares her. She looks; it's a kid's clothes drenched in blood. She runs to find a cop, weird, right, I mean she's running down from the beach and she finds these clothes out in plain sight which is already odd, and she's Russian and her first impulse is to call a cop in a neighborhood where everyone's scared of cops?" Sonny drank some more.

"Anyhow, now it turns out the kid who maybe was wearing those clothes lives near Sheepshead Bay. Ivana lives off Brighton 8th Street, a mile away. And what kind of people don't notice their kid's been missing all day? What kind of people don't notice their kid is gone?"

I drank the rest of my Scotch and reached for cigarettes; before I lit up I asked Sonny's permission; these days, you had to ask.

"Poor people," Sonny said. "People who are trying to hold a lot of shit together maybe don't notice their kid is out of the house. They're glad the kid's doing something. People who have three, four kids and two jobs each and not enough money to make it through the week. Those kind of people."

"Have another drink," he said and I could see he was lonely.

I looked at my watch. I had promised Tolya I'd be in Brooklyn by nine.

"I have some stuff to do," I said, but I stayed where I was and held out my glass. "Make it a short one."

Lippert picked up a Lucite cube he kept on his glass coffee table. In it was a baseball. He looked at it. "Jackie Robinson hit this homer, you know that, Art? You know who Jackie Robinson even was?"

"I know who Jackie Robinson was." I was restless. I wanted to get going. I wanted to see where the dead girl had lived.

"I was born in Brooklyn," he said suddenly. "Crown Heights," he said. "Did you know that? Did I tell you? My grandfather came from Poland. He was a rabbi. He thought I was an infidel."

"What happened to us, Art? What the fuck happened?" Sonny looked at me. "When I was a kid, we were on the street until dark. We fought each other, we had gangs, we were crazy, but no one worried about us. No creeps kidnapped us. The parents worried about polio. They worried you'd get fucking polio in the summer, but no one worried some freak would snatch you out of your house. Jesus, I wish we had the machine back. It was easy then. It was a lot easier. It was a political machine and it worked. There was this guy called Mead Esposito, you ever hear of him, man?"

I shook my head and said, "There was a guy named Meat? Meat?"

He laughed briefly. "Mead, man. He was called Mead Esposito and he ran Brooklyn and I wish to God we had him now. Nobody, I mean nobody, did anything in that borough unless he said OK, you know. I mean presidential candidates paid court to him, he could carry Brooklyn for a Democrat. He had a table at a restaurant named Foffe, accent over the e, of course. You went and ate with him and he fixed things."

"Don't go sentimental on me, Sonny, please."

"Yeah, I'm sorry, man." He poured himself more Scotch. "But there was respect. Even kids had respect. Sort of." He laughed.

"What's so funny?"

"When I was a kid in Brooklyn we all wanted to be Jackie Robinson or a member of Murder Inc., you know about that? The crime gangs?"

"Jesus, Sonny."

"Yeah, I was a cut-up. I wish it was like that now. Everything's fucked, you know, nobody cares. People killing kids, taking them, it's like some mirror fucking image of the whole country, of the whole fucking world. We got a nut job for a president who thinks God told him to go to war to avenge his daddy.

My father fought political battles in his sleep. They slept in this little alcove off the living room with yellow wallpaper that peeled when it was damp so I could have the bedroom. My mother snored so loud the whole place shook. When I was little and I had a nightmare, they would bring me into their bed. They had these two single beds and they somehow hooked together. They'd put me in between. He would fight politics all night in his sleep, he would be defending Trotsky or shouting about Sacco and Vanzetti or the Rosenbergs, and I'd be scared shitless, because I thought they would be taken away and fried like Ethel and Julius, you know, the electric chair was a big subject with kids like me, and my mother would be snoring and then I'd fall through a crack between the beds."

I tried not to laugh.

"Laugh," he said. "It's funny. The beds would separate. So I fell through and slept under the beds. In the morning, they'd wake up, and say, 'Leo? What happened to Leo, where's the boy?'"

"They named you for Tolstoy?"

"Leo," he said. "Leo N. Lippert. They compromised between Leon Trotsky and Leo Tolstoy. Everyone called me Sonny. I fucking hated it. I got over it. You get over things. You get over everything. One day you wake up dead and nothing hurts you. Forget it. I'm drunk."

"On a couple of shots?"

"I had a few after work." He reached for the bottle of Johnny Walker and poured himself a fresh glass, picked it up and wandered around the living room, talking.

He had a theory, he said. Told me he felt that somehow the rise in child abuse, in kidnapping, was connected to the fear that was rampant everywhere; you couldn't see it, people went about their business, but the fear expressed itself in outbreaks of violence against children.

We felt helpless so we preyed on the innocent, we did it to them, he said, even our own kids, we made them pawns in divorce cases, we used them, we manipulated them. He looked at me, and for the first time since I'd known him, Sonny looked old. The skin of his neck was slack, his face was sallow. I wondered if he dyed his hair.

"We just do what we feel like, you know?" he said. "We meet someone, we leave, we tell the kids, it will be the same, Mom and Dad will be there for you, we love you like always, but they know it's not true because if it was true, how come we just fucked off?" He sat down and picked up the bottle. Sonny had started drinking hard after he split up with Jennifer, his wife, and he lost his own kids.

I waited.

"I need this case, man, you hear me? It was my fault we never solved the last one, the girl that got her feet cut off. And then 9/11 happened. I let it go. I said to myself, we got 9/11 to deal with. Fucking 9/11, it was an excuse for everything."

"What's her address, the girl, May Luca?"

"I'll get it for you," Sonny said. "Sheepshead Bay, a few blocks from the boats."

"How old?"

"Ten," Sonny said.

Sonny tried to get up and tumbled backwards onto the sofa, his short legs in the air.

"You OK?"

"I've been out there, Art. I've been to the house. There's nothing we can do tonight. I have six guys on this. We took the girl's stuff to the lab," Sonny said.

"Stuff?" I said. "What for?"

"DNA. Get a match. The skin in the sneakers. There's not a lot. Just a little skin, like the girl had a blister or something and someone tore off her sneaks and some skin was left in the bottom. Blood, too. Jesus."

They would have taken her hairbrush, her toothbrush, would have asked the mother for them. Make a match, match the skin inside the sneakers.

The clothes were a tease, someone taunting us. In my bones, I could feel it. I had to see the girl's house. Cases with children, abuse, rape, even murder, it was often inside the family. A look at the house could tell you things about it.

"Who's on this?" I said again.

"Plenty," he said. "I have plenty of people on it. I'm going to wait a day and then I'll make an announcement. I'll go on TV. There's a cell phone. The kid had a cell phone."