Red Hook (17 page)

“I'll make you a deal, Artie, man,” Sonny said now. “I'll help you out here, if you tell me what you really know about the bum who got killed on Sunday, the one who scared Sid McKay.”

“OK. The dead guy was probably Sid McKay's half brother, maybe named Earl.”

“No shit.”

“Yeah. There was a connection that went way back in their past. I think Earl was following him around, hassling him. I think maybe Sid didn't want Earl to surface and fuck up his life. OK? Sonny? Like I said, he told me maybe it was Russian thugs who wanted information from him, from Sid, and whacked Earl by mistake. But he didn't believe it and I don't believe it.”

“Sid's never going to tell us now, is he?” Sonny was pouring another drink, tipping the bottle into his glass, losing himself. “Poor bastard. How did he look, this Earl?”

“I only got a glimpse of him in the water. He was dead is all.”

“You know who the first dead people I ever saw were?” Sonny said.

“Let's talk about Sid,” I said, feeling nuts.

“The Rosenbergs,” Sonny said. “Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, you know who that was, Artie, man? You're old enough? Yeah, you know, you're a Russki, they were probably idols over there, right? You probably knew all about them, even in your history books. Every kid in Brooklyn who had parents, what did they say, we were Progressive.” He laughed. “Progressive, shit, that was the polite term they cooked up in '48 when people were already scared of the House Un-American Activities, Progressive, fuck it, every fucking decent asshole had been in the Communist Party, and most of them still were, and now it's 1953, and now the kids figured, they're going to fry my mommy and daddy, right? Because they fried Ethel and Julius in the electric chair up at the Sing Sing New York, June 19, 1953, because they said they were spies. They brought them to the funeral home in Brooklyn, it was Brownsville.” Sonny reached for his bottle again and I thought about Sid and the ship in Red Hook that came aground in 1953, same year as the Rosenbergs.

Stalin dead in 1953. The Rosenbergs. Sid meeting the Russian sailors. In my pocket were the snapshots of Sid and the Russian sailor.

“Listen to me, Art, man, so they fry them, and every kid in Brooklyn with any balls wanted to look at Ethel and Julius. So my friend, Herman Pearlstein, we called him Pearly, his father is a typesetter and a member of the Communist Party, and he said, let's go look at them
martyrs for solidarity. Me, I wanted to see dead bodies. We snuck in. I'm practically shitting in my pants, I was so scared. I thought being electrocuted they'd look like fucking grilled meat. We got in this long line, it was like people weeping and wailing and some just thinking it was entertainment and some, probably some Irish Catholic fucking bastards, thinking good, more dead fucking Commie kikes, and a couple of Negroes who were on our side, very nicely dressed, the men were union guys, the ladies wore hats and carried handbags even though they did washing to make a few bucks, but they dressed nice, and we got in line and then we looked in the coffins. The cofffins were open, which we never saw, they didn't put Jews in open coffins, so it was like weird, and there they were two middle-aged people laid out on white satin, and they looked like my aunts and uncles, you know, just a couple of middle-aged Jewish people dressed up in good clothes like for Passover or something, they didn't look grilled or anything. Just dead. I thought: this is what dead looks like, big fucking deal, so we left, me and Pearly. Sit down, Art.”

I was feeling pretty desperate. Sonny could go on for a long time, and I said, “Help me out over Sid, Sonny. Who would want to hurt him? Is there anything going on around Red Hook? Something I'm missing?”

Sonny shrugged. “He was your friend. You gave him my number. I wasn't in on this. You could have called me yourself,” he said.

“What about Red Hook?” I said. “Sid was pretty obsessed with the place.”

“I heard you, I might be crazy but I'm not deaf.
Maybe it could be about Red Hook, man. Apparently, according to stuff I've been hearing, and take it with a pound of salt, they are fighting over that one square mile of New York City like it's the last piece of meat on the plate.” He sipped his drink and retreated, his eyes glazing over. “Or maybe not. Maybe it was racist shit with McKay. Maybe gay shit. I don't know.”

“What are they fighting for?”

“Who the fuck knows? Land. Ego. Waterfront. A safe haven for creeps. It always was. Bring in illegal cargo, booze, drugs, whatever. Or just real estate. Nowhere left to live in New York, everybody wanting. Why don't you ask your friend, Sverdloff? I hear he's been buying buildings like monopoly pieces. I hear he's not dish of the day back home in Moscow either where they're seriously killing each other at the intersection of mafia and real estate. Name of the game this year, real estate. A lot of dead people in Russia involved.”

It was what Tolya had said. Sonny had never liked Tolya.

“You knew that about Sid, that he was gay?”

“Everyone knew,” he said. “He was pretty famous for a while. The
Times.
CBS. PBS. Who can remember? Everyone was famous for a while. I broke a case with him, did you know, I gave it to him when he was at the
Times,
he kept calling me up to do cases with him, he thought I was fucking God.” Sonny snorted. “He was good. He did me some favors. He helped me dig up some shit on nukes coming into the city through Brooklyn, you remember, around the time you broke the Red Mercury story and before the TV people came
after us wanting to make a movie out of it, you remember?” He laughed. “We thought we were going to be rolling in it, you and me. Movie deals. Movie stars. Who was going to play me, man? Pacino, I think we said Pacino could play me, and who was going to play you? Some good-looking bastard, right, I can't remember who.”

“You're thinking nukes in Red Hook?”

“Sure I could like Red Hook for illegal nukes, put the stuff in some canisters, bring it in on some Lebanese freighter. But how the fuck do I know anything, Artie? Maybe it was random, maybe it was sex or drugs or race. I make one call, they hate me in Brooklyn now. They don't know shit there anymore, I tried too many cases, and after I worked the child abuse stuff year before last, they didn't want to know. But I got a few favors left, maybe.”

“Thanks.”

Suddenly as if emerging from some kind of fog, Sonny seemed to sharpen up. He put his drink on the little plastic table beside him. He got up and rubbed his eyes, and picked up his phone off the floor and went inside where I heard him talking.

I looked across the river. It was hot out and I was sweating and Sonny, in the living room, talked into the phone softly so I couldn't hear him.

When Sonny came back, I said, “So?”

“So I'll do what I can do.” He reached down for a book that lay on the stained concrete on the little balcony and picked it up and held it out. “You ever read
this?” he asked, and showed me his copy of
Moby Dick.
“Everything's here,” he said.

“I have to go, Sonny. If you can help me on the McKay thing, or his half brother, give me a call, OK, just call me. I have to go uptown. Then I'll go to the hospital. Just do this for me. OK? Do it. Sid was a good guy and he's as good as dead, so fucking do something, or else I'm going to give everyone on the case your home number.” I let off steam in his direction for no real reason and for once, he took it. He just absorbed it, or maybe he was already too drunk to care.

“Sure,” he said, picked up the bottle, went inside and switched on the television where politicians were screaming at each other.

I went to the hospital in Brooklyn first. No visitors, they said. No one. I couldn't get near Sid. I was late for work, I left my car at home, took the subway and came up near Madison Square Garden. Slabs of cement like the Berlin Wall had been lowered into place. There were gates in the cement walls. Metal detectors stood every few feet.

Along the sidewalks city cops stood holding machine guns. Squads of traffic cops leaned on bikes and mopeds, there were FBI agents on foot, some in blue jackets with logos on the back, others in the bad suits they always wore; secret service guys, big men like movie extras with short hair, milled around and talked into their lapels as limos pulled up and disgorged delegates.

From a few blocks away, where the protestors were penned up, I could hear the chanting, or thought I could, and I wondered if Lily was there. I thought about going over but she was probably busy with people who hated cops. The orders were out: get them locked up, as many as possible. I tried to stop myself thinking about her.

“Hard to tell if it's to keep the Republicans in or everyone else out,” I heard someone say. “Fuck politics,” said someone else.

News crews in pairs and trios wandered around looking for people to interview, and banks of broadcast trucks lined the streets. I got out my phone and called the guy who'd called me, looking for someone who could speak Russian. A minute later he pulled up in an unmarked car, a maroon Crown Vic; he got out, shook my hand.

“Thanks for coming,” he said, and walked me half a block, where a Russian woman about fifty was sweating into her Bush T-shirt, and leaning against an NYPD car. She was fat and her belly hung out from her T-shirt. In the back seat was a kid, maybe eleven; he looked scared. A cop sat next to him.

“What happened?” I said to the woman in Russian and she looked up and told me she had seen the kid on the street acting suspicious. The kid had a backpack that looked funny. It had a bulge, she said, so she started yelling out that he had a bomb, he had a bomb. A cop was in the crowd. He hauled the kid in. Turned out the kid was carrying a soccer ball.

I calmed the woman down and she told me she was in town for the convention from Moscow. She was part of a group of Russian politicians. They were here to observe democracy in action, she said.

It had happened before. It was June when I was crossing Times Square real early in the morning, hardly anyone on the streets. Just by the Marriot Marquis Hotel, I see him, a kid, thirteen maybe. Hot day, and the kid
bundled up big in a puffy silver winter jacket. For a split second, I think he's crazy, a crazy young kid who wears winter clothes in the summer. I'm almost passing him when I see a wire hanging out of his pants, the way you sometimes see a fringe hanging out on those Hassidic boys on 47th Street.

A cop in uniform is coming across the street and somehow we stop the kid and we get hold of Bomb Disposal. And he is wired up good; the kid is all wrapped up with a vest loaded with explosives that would have gone off, would have gone boom right in Times Square.

Stuff happened. We didn't talk about it. We didn't talk about the suicide bombers, the one that almost made it on to a plane, the one that almost got into a Yankees game at the Stadium, or the 6 train at the 59th Street stop, underneath Bloomingdales. We didn't talk about it. I knew because once in a while I got calls from people in the department desperate for information. They figured that, having lived in Israel, I knew about this kind of thing. I hadn't lived in Israel for twenty-five years. I went every year for a week to see my mother if I could, but that was it. But they called me like I knew about suicide bombers and the kind of detonators you could hide under your clothes. That's how desperate they were: they were asking me.

The rest of Tuesday and Tuesday night and then all “Wednesday into Thursday, I worked the convention. All the time, I was calling Sonny and the hospital in Brooklyn, trying to get a fix on Sid who was still in a
coma. No news. I tried to get away, but everyone in law enforcement in the city was in midtown, everyone doing double, triple shifts. I got a couple hours' sleep and then I went back. I was exhausted.

I couldn't leave and it made me nuts because I was doing dumb stuff, checking delegates' badges, making sure news people stayed in their pens. I did a couple of hours at one of the checkpoints, watching people come and go in limos, and I thought I saw Dick Cheney, his face pasty and angry, a white cold face like a KGB man, but he probably came by helicopter, and I only imagined it. Helicopters buzzed the hot sky; there were snipers on rooftops. New York midtown looked like a war zone.

Most surreal of all was that I was assigned to a delegation of politicians from Moscow, including the fat woman who saw the kid she thought had a bomb in his backpack. They were special guests of the Republicans. Bush always referred to Putin as his friend “Vladimir.”

I escorted four of them, three guys and the fat woman, all wearing cheesy cowboy hats with Bush–Cheney bands on them, to Virgil's on West 44th Street. They ate ribs and fried chicken and told me how great it was now there were strong leaders like Putin and Bush. They invited me to go to Rasputin out near Brighton Beach to party later on. I looked at them, barbecue sauce smeared on their faces, guzzling beer. I listened to their crude accents. Small potatoes, I thought; they would never be players in a country ruled by Putin who didn't drink.

Then, early Thursday, the story of the school siege in Russia began filtering through: rumors about kids held
hostage; rumors about children murdered, of parents forced to choose which kid to take out of the school with them; rumors of slaughter. I saw my Russians on a street corner that day, huddled together, weeping.

I caught some of the convention on monitors outside the main hall and I thought how much the politicians sounded like men I grew up watching on TV, same rhetoric, same bullshit: strong government was what mattered; anyone who didn't think so was an enemy of the state. “Enemy of the state.” I heard some asshole use the expression, and it made me feel physically sick. Stalin's favorite label.

I was never political. I voted some of the time; sometimes I didn't vote. Depended who was up. I liked Clinton OK, but, and I never told anyone, I mostly liked him because I felt a lot in common with a guy who like me, if he was honest, if I was honest, wanted to sleep with practically every good-looking woman he saw.