Fresh Kills (9 page)

I pretended to like it. She didn't seem to notice – or maybe she didn't mind – the thin walls, the cheap burgundy carpet in the hallways, the noise of the couple upstairs screaming at each other. To her, it was the best place she'd ever lived, and just coming home at night to Battery Park City and our apartment in a brand new high rise lit her up. I loved her loving it and I wanted to feel the same way. I tried.

I went out onto the little balcony where, if I leaned over, I could see the river, the bike path along the Hudson, the young trees and grass that reminded me of the suburbs. Leaning against the railing, a boy and girl, maybe nineteen, twenty, were locked together munching on each other. I felt old. I went into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of wine. I went back into Billy's room. In the living room I changed the music, then switched it off. Maybe it was OK if I went out for an hour. I needed some company.

Downstairs in the lobby, I gave Jorge, the doorman, twenty bucks and asked him to check on Billy in half an hour. Jorge was a nice guy. Reliable. Billy was fourteen. What could happen? I went out, turned back, made sure Jorge had my cell number. He told me not to worry.

Zipping up my jacket, I headed east. Halfway there, I thought I should turn back, that I shouldn't have left Billy, but I kept walking. I should have done a lot of stuff, but I kept going, which was what I usually did. If you stopped moving, you started thinking, and for now things were OK, I told myself, so what was the point?

There was nothing small about Tolya Sverdloff, not his size, or his style, or the way he greeted you – happy, sad, pissed off, depending on his mood – and as soon as he saw me walk into the bar, he called out over the noise, “Artyom, darling, sweetheart, I'm so glad to see you, have some drinks. Come. Have something to drink. Many drinks. Champagne! Good stuff!”

The sleeves of his black silk shirt rolled up, a huge apron tied around his waist, Sverdloff, who towered over everyone, was behind the bar. Six-six, three hundred pounds, he was a big man with a face like an Easter Island statue and dimples the size of a baby's fist. His hair – it was turning gray, I suddenly saw – fell over the high forehead. He was leaning across the bar, talking to an English guy and he introduced us and we shook hands.

Turned out the guy, whose name I didn't catch, owned some restaurants in downtown Manhattan, including the place we were in and which Tolya wanted to buy. Good-looking guy, too, brush-cut hair, soft spoken, he was talking earnestly to Tolya about early Soviet film – Eisenstein or something,
though it was hard to hear – while Tolya tried to get a price out of him for the bar.

Tolya extracted a bottle of champagne from a wine fridge, picked up a couple of glasses, relinquished his job to the real bartender, and came around the other side where he poured the champagne out and offered me a glass.

“You want?” he said to me. “What the matter with you?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Yeah, I want a drink. With a Scotch for a chaser.”

“Don't be an idiot. It's Krug, Artyom, this is nectar from paradise. You can't drink Scotch with it. Some of the time, I think you are still provincial Russian boy,” he said. “You look lousy.”

“What provincial? I grew up in Moscow, I live in New York, so fuck you,” I tasted the champagne, which was delicious.

“You too,” Tolya laughed, and added something really filthy in Russian. With me he talked a mix of Russian and English, and his English was sometimes perfect, if he felt like it.

Tolya spoke five languages, he could quote poetry in all of them, he knew his way around art and wine and music, but when he was pissed off, or maybe when he wanted to get back at his parents – both had been famous Moscow actors and intellectuals – he hunched his huge shoulders, stuck the butt of a cohiba in his mouth, and put on a silk shirt that cost a grand, strutted around and dropped his articles so he sounded like a peasant or a hood. It made me nuts. I'd given up harassing him about it.

The champagne cheered me up. So did seeing Tolya, who considered good booze, food and great-looking women staples of a decent life.

“Just give me a minute, Artyom. I want him to sell to me,” said Tolya and gestured with one huge hand at both the guy he had been talking to and the bar. “I want bar of my own. Bar named Pravda should, truthfully, be possessed by Russian
fellow, right? Would be so nice. I fix up, I serve caviar, I serve Krug and caviar, and maybe I become modern-style DJ.” He aped a guy spinning platters with both his enormous hands. “Maybe not.”

While he returned to his negotiations with the English guy, I sipped the wine and leaned on the bar next to a pretty girl wearing a thin white T-shirt and no bra.

Tolya Sverdloff had once worked in Moscow as a DJ, broadcasting news of Russian rock to the Chinese in Chinese when it was all the poor bastards in China could get. It was after I had left Moscow, but I knew Tolya had done risky stuff, had gone to jail back when the Soviet assholes still called rock music “musical AIDS”. Another age.

I said, “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Pravda, good Russian name, I keep name. Excellent name, which is absolute truth.” Tolya laughed at his own joke. “I want to smoke. Let's go,” he said, shook hands with the English guy and made his way through the crowd and out towards the street where I followed him.

It was Tuesday night but it was summer and people were in the streets. Gangs of great-looking girls in tiny skirts and tight T-shirts, midriffs bare, paraded up and down the street in flip-flops and backless heels, making a sexy little noise against the pavement. Tolya leaned against the building and poured some more champagne into the glass I still held, then passed me the bottle.

From his gold cigar case with a cigar engraved on it, a huge ruby for the burning tip, he took a cohiba and stuck it in his mouth. From time to time, he smiled at girls in the street and occasionally one of them waved back and called out his name. Tolya knew a lot of people.

“I love the summer,” said Tolya, removing his cigar from his mouth. “I love this time when girls come out in little skirts and tiny tops and everything is showing. This can drive a man
crazy, of course, all of them bouncing around, so lovely and delicious.” We had been friends, him and me, for ten years, more even, back since he saved my ass from some hoods on the Brighton Beach boardwalk.

“You got the message I was back?” Tolya said. “I left this on your machine, also where I am regularly drinking at night.”

“How do you think I knew where you'd be?”

“Then what took you so long? I got back last week.”

“I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. How the hell are you?”

Almost a year earlier, in the middle of the night, I had driven Tolya to the airport. I wasn't sure where he was going. He left New York in a hurry and I didn't know if it was because of real estate deals that went bad or something worse.

Over the months, we'd talked a few times. I knew he was in Havana, then in Moscow, which scared the shit out of me. You did bad deals in real estate there they killed you. Also, if you survived, there was Putin to lock you up. Putin didn't like rich people he couldn't control. Far as I knew, Tolya didn't have oligarch dough, but he had plenty and he liked to play the part. Once, when he was on the phone, I'd heard him call Abramovich by his first name. Tolya was back in the New York, and I was glad as hell.

“I was away last week,” I said. “So I'm here now. You're OK?”

“I'm very fine.” Tolya switched to Russian. “I'm through with business. I sold everything; all my property I sold except I kept one nice little apartment in Moscow, one in New York, a little house at the beach, something in Havana. This is all. I give up all business because, Artemy Maximovich, business is crap. Commies were right. Mr Karl Marx was definitely the man. Maybe he didn't exactly lay down a great plan for the future, maybe he didn't want to live that way, especially since he liked his wife wearing nice clothes, maybe his plan wasn't so hot in all details – fucking workers are more
conservative than fucking bosses, you know – but he certainly knew how things would be, and what kind of shit capitalism would turn into, Artyom. I plan to see my kids, read books, learn about wine. Become wine master. Listen to important music.”

“Your rock days are over? You're moving into old age? What?”

“You, Artyom, have no taste in music at all. You listen to white-boy jazz, you think this is music?”

“This from a man who once considered Boris Gribenshikov a prince of rock. Hey, I saw Dubi Petrovsky today, he found a publisher for his book on the Beatles.”

“I like Dubi,” Tolya said. “Perhaps, Artyom, I will buy one small vineyard.” He was mildly drunk and in a very good mood. I admired his black linen jacket. Brioni, Tolya said.

Tolya, who could not resist one more suit, one more silk shirt, for whom the word Brioni was like a term of endearment, and who possessed at last count – his last count – forty-six pairs of custom made Gucci loafers with eighteen carat gold buckles – took the champagne bottle from me and held it up like a trophy.

“Nineteen-ninety, Krug,” he said. “My favorite year. Year everything happens, grapes grow good, Commie assholes losing grip. A very good year.” He hummed a little of the Sinatra tune and I told him to shut up, and we laughed and he said, “You want to eat something?”

“I'd rather drink.”

“Over there.” Tolya gestured at a bench where we went and sat. The unlit cigar was still in his mouth and he got out his heavy gold lighter and lit it slowly.

“So, like two old guys we're sitting on a bench and I'm wondering what's going on with Artyom. Why doesn't he call? Why doesn't he say anything now, except for small talk about the Beatles. What's going on?”

I didn't want to talk to Tolya about Billy. I had seen the look on Sonny Lippert's face on the beach, and I didn't want any grief from Tolya about it. I looked at my watch. I felt restless again. I got up.

“I should go home.”

“Artyom, please, sit down. I see in your face there's shit in your life.” Tolya was no longer switching back and forth between languages, but speaking Russian; for him Russian was for serious talk, the literate purring Russian that made me feel my soul was being fingered. It made me think of my father and Uncle Joe, the giant, who spoke the most beautiful Russian of them all. When Joe came to visit us in Moscow from his miserable job in the south, my mother, who had a crush on him because of the way he spoke, made him read aloud from Pushkin.

Tolya poured more champagne into our glasses and set the bottle on the sidewalk near our bench.

“What's with you?” he said. “Talk to me.”

“I'm fine.”

“You don't want to talk?”

“I don't know.”

“You want to eat?”

“You asked already. I said no. How's Valentina?”

“Good.”

“The girlfriend?”

“What?”

“Your girlfriend, the nice one, the Russian, the one you felt you could be with permanent?”

“I don't know.” Tolya was lousy at choosing women – normally, he liked strippers and hookers, except for the time he wound up with a dour little architect who made him miserable. He avoided my question about the nice Russian and drank some more.

“This is lovely wine.” Tolya gazed at the liquid in his glass
like he would a gorgeous woman. “But did you ever taste Clos de Menil? Better than money, or women.” He smiled. “Maybe not women.”

“We're going to discuss wine? Tolya? I don't give a shit, I don't know dick, it comes in red or white.”

“I love you when you pretend to be a philistine,” he said, still talking Russian. “You think it makes you more American, this posing as dumb and dumber. So talk about other stuff. You're the one who doesn't answer questions, you're the one hiding some shit or other.”

“I need to smoke.

He offered me the cigar case, put it away, found a crumpled box of cigarettes in his pocket.

“I make club for smoking,” Tolya said in English now. “I call this place ‘Yes Smoking'. Maxine is OK?” he said. “She's pregnant, maybe?”

“She's in California with her girls.”

The cigarette tasted great.

Tolya leaned his elbows on his knees and contemplated his cigar. “It's the Farone boy, isn't it? Something's wrong with Billy Farone.”

The skin on my arms felt cold.

“How the fuck did you know that?”

“I'm a genius.”

“I don't believe you. Tell me how you knew?”

“Calm down. I just know you. What's wrong with him? He's sick? What?”

“No.”

“You saw him?”

I nodded.

“In the place in Florida where they sent him, the one Sid McKay helped you fix?”

“So maybe I saw Billy,” I said.

“How is he?”

“He's fine.”

We sat in silence. I needed to talk. I needed to tell him.

“So, the way you felt about your girls when they were young, you'd do anything to protect them, right?”

“I kill for them,” he said in English without melodrama, the way he might say he'd get them a glass of water. “When they were little, also now.”

“I feel like that about Billy. I love Maxine's twins, and your Valentina, but this boy, he's like mine. I can't explain.”

“He's your blood.”

“I don't believe in all that crap. I don't believe all that sentimental Russian garbage.”

“Believe, don't believe,” said Tolya with a dismissive gesture. “It doesn't make any difference what you believe, or what you think, Artemy, it is what it is. You cannot change this. Billy is your family.”

“I saw him.” I threw away my cigarette. “He's OK, I mean he's better, I think he's cured, or maybe he just outgrew the bad stuff. His doctor told me it could happen. Billy is smart and handsome and funny and he talks a lot and he notices stuff, and he can be really focused on whatever interests him, baseball or books or fishing, Christ, you don't think I've become like some weird pedophile?” I could only say it to Tolya, and when he burst out laughing, I felt better.