Red Hook (11 page)

I lit a cigarette, and leaned on the railing and looked at the building opposite me. On one of the balconies was a woman in a bikini. She was standing up, and she slowly removed her top, picked up a plastic bottle of suntan oil and began rubbing it into her bare breasts. She was looking down now at her small round breasts, working on the oil. She didn't see me watching at first; it felt like a peepshow; I couldn't look away.

Then, suddenly, she looked straight at me, grinned, and rubbed in more oil, climbed on to a green and white plastic lounger and lay back, her hands reaching down beside her for a glass with something in it—apple juice, iced tea—that she drank in slow motion. She put it back, put on her sunglasses and picked up a paperback.

I walked to the other end of the balcony. We were a couple of blocks from Ground Zero and high enough up you could see the pit. The sky was clear blue the way it had been that day. Three years. Coming up for three
years next week. We had moved people out by water that day; from every side of the city, we moved them on boats.

I had helped move people to Jersey from the marina a couple of blocks from where I stood now. I went on some of the boats. Debris fell on us, even as we moved out into the water.

I remembered one trip, people huddled together, me trying to stay calm when a leg fell on the deck of the boat. The leg just missed a couple who were huddled together crying and covered thick with dust, the dust caked on them because they'd poured water over themselves. The leg hit the deck and a man who had lost his shoes and was standing in dusty socks by the boat's railing started laughing. He laughed and laughed and couldn't stop and I had to get him to a hospital in Jersey.

Maybe Sid McKay went a little crazy like the rest of us. Maybe he went crazy and never came back.

“What do you think?” Maxine came out behind me and put her arms around my waist.

I nodded towards the pit. We had talked about it plenty. It didn't bother her the idea of us living here even though Mark, her first husband, had died in the Trade Center; if anything, she said, she felt closer to him.

“I love it here,” she said. “I love it that it's in the city and I can walk to work and there are great schools and grass and good security. I think it's beautiful, to tell you the truth, Artie, honey. I loved it on September 10, I think it's important to keep on loving it, or else what's the point of anything if we just change how we feel
because of the fucking bastards who did that to us? I could live here for the rest of my life,” she said and we went inside and down the elevator to the lobby along with the realtor in beige.

Maxine took the woman's card, and then the two of us, Max and me, walked silently along the river, past the Irish potato famine museum with grass and potatoes growing on its roof, and then the Jewish museum. We came out near Clinton Castle, the old gray stone fort at the bottom of the island. We looked at the war memorials in Battery Park.

I bought us both some coffee from a wagon and a raisin bagel with butter for Max. We sat on a bench facing the boats that went to the Statue of Liberty.

Acrobats worked the crowd. Four black guys, all of them made out of pure muscle, flipped over each other, made human pyramids, did headstands; music blasted from a boom-box; tourists gaped at them. Maxine got up and put a dollar in the hat.

Sitting down again, she said, “Sonny Lippert lives around here, doesn't he?”

I nodded.

Max added, “That was incredible, Sonny giving you the Jackie Robinson baseball.”

“It was for both of us.”

She shook her head. “It was for you. It was his way of making peace between you. You're like an old married couple, you two.”

“What?”

“It's your conspiracy, yours and Lippert's. You carp, you're suspicious, you hate each other, you think he's a
piece of shit, but you love him, and he's the same way. Artie, honey, what's eating you? You're distracted as hell.”

I put my arm around her and kissed her. No one had ever paid so much attention to me.

“You're a very smart cookie, aren't you, and I love you,” I said.

“Still? You think that even now we're married? You think I should call myself Maxine Crabbe-Cohen, you think it has like some kind of ring?”

“Do you love the apartment?”

“The last one, yeah I do. It was too expensive, but I loved it, and I was thinking if it was OK with you, I could use some of the 9/11 money I got, which was for Mark, and this would be for the kids, partly, which would be for Mark. I loved it so much.” She got her cigarettes out of her purse and lit up.

“We could manage,” I said, though my stomach turned over.

If she wanted it, if it was what Maxie wanted, maybe I could rent out my loft. Maybe I didn't have to sell. I could rent to some rich assholes. I could get someone in and then in a few years maybe I could take my place back somehow.

I glanced towards Battery Park City with the neat green spaces, the gardens, and the security guards. There was something ghostly about it. It existed apart from the city. It sat on landfill. Maybe the landfill had come from a suburb somewhere and the place itself had taken on the character of the borrowed earth, suburban, sterile, unmessy.

I kept my mouth shut and listened to Maxine talk and I thought about living by the river.

On a piece of paper, Maxine was doing figures, the down payment, mortgages, loans, and in her imagination, I knew, we were already moving in. I wanted so bad to want it; instead I felt trapped.

My phone rang. It was a message from Sid, one of the messages from the day before that I had forgotten to erase. But I was done with it. I had done what I could for Sid. I tried to get rid of the image of him at the loft in Red Hook. I tried to forget how scared he had seemed, scared and old and somehow facing the end of his life. I had called the local detectives. I had left a message for Clara Fuentes, the cop in the red jacket. I held Maxie's hand and tried to think about us, and moving, and going away on Thursday. It was Monday. Thursday I'd be out of town with Max at the beach.

“What is it?” Maxine said.

“Nothing.”

“It was who you went to see this morning, right? And yesterday. Honey?”

I nodded. “A guy I know named Sid McKay.”

“Who helped you out on a case in a big way, something like that? I remember you mentioning him. I remember. You liked him. I wanted to meet him but it never happened. You owed him, Artie, didn't you? You care about this guy?”

“Yeah.”

“Then go already,” she said. “Go do what you have to do. Go.”

“I already did that,” I said.

Maxine was caught up in her plans.

“I'm going over to Century 21 to try to squeeze my fat ass into a bathing suit,” she said.

“Don't fish.” Maxine had a great figure, she was tall and thin and rangy.

She picked up her bag. “You need anything?”

“Like what?”

She said, “I don't know. Socks. Underpants.”

“Is this how it works?”

“What?”

“Marriage.”

She kissed me. “Go away.”

“I'll see you tonight.”

She hesitated.

“What is it?”

“Artie, honey, listen, the girls are restless, and it's hot, would you mind if I just took them out to my mom's today? We were going tomorrow anyhow, they'll probably make you go up to Madison Square to see that the sniffer dogs are behaving right before the politicians get into town, and I'd like to get the kids settled at the shore. Is that OK? I know you can't get away before Thursday night, like we agreed, and I'm OK with it, but I'd like to get them out of the city.”

“Go,” I got up and leaned down to kiss her.

“Artie?”

“What?”

“It's OK, you know. I know you think about her sometimes. I don't expect it to go away completely. You remember stuff. We all remember.”

“Who?”

“Lily Hanes,” she said. “I know that.” Max hesitated. “Did you see her? Do you see her?”

“When?”

“Ever. I know she's back in the city.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw her on the street.”

“Where?”

“Chinatown. I was walking to your place, and I saw her. She didn't see me. I met her with you years ago when we, you and me, we were just friends and you were together with her. Remember?”

“No.”

“I did. I saw her. Across the street. A month ago maybe.”

“Well I don't see her and I didn't see her and don't be silly. OK?”

“OK.”

I kissed her again and started off, waving my hand. Looking over my shoulder, I saw her walk away.

I turned again to look for Maxie but she had disappeared around the corner. Later she told me she had called after me to ask how I felt about the apartment again, but that I didn't hear her, or at least I didn't turn around.

I was still thinking about Sid, and Earl, about Sid's repetition of lies and half-truths so that every time I talked to him, it all seemed more and more impenetrable. I couldn't shut it off, though, not Sid or Earl or their history.

I went to pick up my car. I'd left it a couple of blocks away, and when I got to the lot I felt someone watching
me, someone behind me, making me sweat. I turned around. There was nobody, just the rows of cars and the deserted street.

You could smell the blood. It was hot, and you could smell it, fresh meat and blood as soon as you got to the Meat Packing District. I went looking for Tolya Sverdloff after I left Maxine because I'd left my jacket at his place the night before, and to thank him and pick up some gifts, and because of what the bartender in Red Hook had said. Sid McKay drank Martinis with a big Russian who drank Scotch and sounded a lot like Tolya Sverdloff. Give my regards to Tolya Sverdloff, Sid had said. But so what?

Sid knew a lot of people, but it was New York. You met people all the time, you met people who knew your friends, you ran into people you couldn't remember who knew everything about you. People you hadn't seen for years showed up after disasters. They heard you'd worked a bad case, they came back into your life to see if you were alive, or wanted to get drunk or keep each other company or get laid. So what if Sid and Tolya knew each other?

“Fucking watch out, asshole,” a guy in a truck yelled
when I almost ran a light crossing Ninth Avenue, and I resisted saying “fuck you” back because I wanted to keep my good mood, and this stuff could escalate fast and you could explode and do something you would regret.

Tolya was talking to a guy in a bloodstained coat and a hairnet who was smoking and eating a meatball sandwich. The two of them were leaning against the wall of the warehouse opposite Tolya's building off Gansevoort Street, watching a couple of kids move some beef carcasses off a truck on to the loading dock and then inside.

These days most of the meat business had moved up to Hunt's Point in the Bronx. Real estate and art and hair salons where a cut cost six hundred bucks had replaced them. The meat that still came in here on the west side mostly came butchered and shrink-wrapped and boxed before it was shipped out across the city, but a couple of places still got the meat in whole and you could smell it for days. It stayed in your nostrils. Even at night around the Meat Packing District I could smell it as if it was in the walls, mixed in with the cement.

Wearing a yellow linen shirt like a tent hanging over his blue pants, Tolya saw me getting out of my car. He shook hands with the meat guy, and started in my direction. I thought about the party and the watch and suddenly I was glad as hell to see him. I kissed him three times Russian style, and said, “I left my jacket at your place.”

“I was calling you,” he said, waving his phone in my direction.

Tolya walked over to a canary-yellow Cadillac Escalade and leaned against it.

“You like it?” he said.

“What happened to the Hummer?”

“Vulgar,” he said. “I wait for my Maybach to be delivered now. Best car made.”

“You mean she doesn't like the Hummer? Your lady. The severe one. She thinks the Hummer is vulgar?”

“We compromise,” he said. “She prefers small environmentally fine little design car for small people, I tell her this is impossible, I can't fit in this kind of car, she says I won't go in that thing. So I put my beautiful Hummer in a garage.” He looked at his Escalade. “OK, so I am still polluting environment, so kill me.” Tolya smiled but his huge face was tight and the eyes flickered away from mine as if he was looking for something or someone over my shoulder.

Tolya was anxious. I didn't want to ask him about Sid, not yet.

“Artyom, do you have a little time for me?” Tolya said in Russian. “You have some time?” He was hesitant, unsure, unlike himself.

“Sure. Yeah, of course. I'm on call, but I don't have to go any place unless they call me. What the hell is it?” I said. “What's the matter?”

He shrugged.

“Tell me.”

“Come on,” he said, and he took hold of my arm in his ham-sized hand and we walked towards the river.

“Look up, Artemy,” he said. “Look above you.”

“What is it?”

“The High Line,” Tolya said, exuberant now as if he'd suddenly seen a gorgeous woman. “I want this. Is very beautiful up there. I want to show you.” He flashed his old smile, and began walking.

We went, Tolya first, under the elevated tracks, moving in the faint broken glare from the light that filtered through the overhead tracks and the shifting patterns from cars on the Westside Highway.

The underside of the derelict train tracks was littered with condoms, beer cans, used needles, smashed-up signs from anti-Bush protests, a pink high-heeled shoe, a straw hat with a red, white and blue band that proclaimed “I Love Bush”.

Tolya was possessed, insistent, and I followed him. We walked a few blocks, and then he stopped abruptly and fumbled for a key in his pocket.