Red Hook (26 page)

It was early Saturday evening, but already people were pushing their way into the restaurants and bars around Ninth Avenue, the tourists gaping, New Yorkers preening.

Until recently, the neighborhood had been owned at night by hookers, transvestites, assorted derelicts and a few artists. I'd never seen a neighborhood transformed so fast: a couple of blocks of warehouses, some of them pretty crummy, had become the hottest real estate in the
city. At night you could feel the area coming into full heat.

At the door of the restaurant where I found Jack, a crowd had formed. A guy from the suburbs all in suede was explaining to the maitre d' why he deserved a good table and who he knew.

The area around the bar was gridlocked with single people drinking and wading through the sexual anxiety. Next to me were a couple of women who looked like refugees from
Sex and the City.
They clung to their drinks. One had a blood-orange Mojito. The other was drinking Lillet with an orange slice.

“No sex in this city,” the Mojito who was standing beside Jack said to me woefully. “I had a date. I got him on J Date, on line, and he brought me here and just got up and left, and fucking left me with the check.”

I bought her a drink.

“So what about the suitcase nukes, Artie?” Jack said.

“Boom,” I said.

“People like you, you'll be making jokes when the city blows up and there's a hundred thousand dead. You'll still be joking. You read my series about portable nukes, you read it? The stuff is everywhere.”

Jack talked into my ear and drank bourbon. I let him talk because I knew he was drunk enough and probably vain enough to let something slip. I wanted to hear how he felt about Sid but I didn't want it tainted by questions from me he thought he had to answer.

So for a few minutes I listened to Jack talk about suitcase nukes. I got bored. He changed the subject. He
was leaving town, headed for Beslan, he said. He was going to cover the massacre in southern Russia, kids murdered at the school, children slaughtered on a basketball court. He lit up. Big Story. Right?

“Yeah, Jack, right. Where is she?”

“Big table in the back with her friends. So. Beslan. My kind of story,” he said. “I like to get to the real places. Off road, I always called it that, people thought I was an asshole.” He ordered another drink. “I am an asshole,” he added. “You think I don't know that? Have another drink, Artie.”

As soon as you figured Jack for a man whose self-regard was as impenetrable as cement, the minute you got pissed off at that soul patch he wore on his chin, he said something that won you back.

He regaled everyone at the bar in hearing distance with stories of terrible places he'd covered and crappy hotels he had stayed in—Communist guest houses with holes in the wall, and rusty stains on the floor, or hotels where hookers appeared in your room uninvited along with the cockroaches. People at the bar laughed. All reporters liked to brag about the lousy conditions they had endured, but Jack was funny.

One thing about Jack, people always said, was that he laughed at himself. He never took anything, either. Not like the other journalists, the big timers, the ones who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning books and showed up at international conferences in Davos and Aspen and pretended they were there to observe and enjoyed the goodies, the hotels, champagne, adulation; he never took, not that way. Wars, massacres, terrorism, he had
been there, and he knew the flip side, too, he knew the New York scene because he had once been married to an editor at
Vogue,
or maybe another fashion magazine. I couldn't remember all of it, but he reminded me, tossing back bourbon, talking about himself like he was plenty wired.

“So you moved, Jack, right? You used to live downtown some place but you told me you moved.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I had a place in SoHo, but it's so over, and I got out and made some dough and went to Williamsburg, but now I got a sweet little deal in Red Hook, very cool, a piece of an 1880s warehouse, nice views. Not right on the water, but close by. Red Hook is where you want to be, you know? Val doesn't like it but she's only been once, and I'm OK staying in the city with her. Nice.”

Come on, I thought, tell me about Sid. I didn't want to ask, not yet. I wanted him to tell me.

“Anyone you want me to say hello to in Russia, Art, any good contacts for me?” Jack said, then looked past me and suddenly stopped talking.

Tolya Sverdloff had arrived. Jack addressed him in Russian, using his patronymic, which sounded ridiculous in the middle of this mob in the Meat District in New York.

“Where's Valentina?” Tolya said in English.

“Eating dinner. With her friends,” Jack said.

“I want to see her.”

Tolya had had plenty to drink by the time he arrived. He had eaten at Pastis down the block, where he normally ate, he said, as if Santiago didn't know how to
choose the right restaurant. He shook my hand. He was friendly enough, but cool.

As he started for Valentina's table, the restaurant's two owners appeared from a back room, and embraced Tolya who towered over everyone. He introduced me to them.

Jack, left out, was restless now.

“Let's go find Val,” he said.

“I'll follow you,” Tolya said. “Tell her I'm here.” He put his hand on my arm. “Stay with me, please.”

I was impatient. I wanted to talk to Jack. Jack had a place in Red Hook because it was cool, he said, but I didn't believe him.

He picked his way through the crowd to a table where I could just see Valentina.

“You think she's in love with him?” I said.

I already knew that Tolya wanted to rip the guy's head off.

“Is a prick,” he said in English.

“You only think he's a prick because he's dating Val.”

Tolya leaned over me, talking Russian now, very low, very intense, sober.

“He is forty, twice her age, and he is a fantasist,” Tolya said. “I've met his kind before, he wants information from me, he likes stories about nuclear smuggling, he likes mob stories, he likes to talk about hoods, he believes in conspiracy theories, he asks about my background. Tell me about your past, he says, and tries talking Russian. He uses my patronymic to show respect. What the fuck business is it of his, my past? He claims he's half Russian, and I think, who gives a shit.
He sucks up to me, you understand? He considers himself a great journalist, he talks about this, he says to me there are nuclear materials coming into the US, he is obsessed with this, with nukes coming into all the ports, people bringing them in suitcases, it is a big story, he says, and it starts in Russia, and I think: so fucking what? I'm a real estate guy. I don't like him and I don't want him near my Valushka.”

“So he's Russian,” I said. “So he's paranoid. So what else is new?”

“He's not a real Russian. Cuban father. Russian mother. Maybe she was Russian, partly Russian. Who invited him to the wedding party?”

“Not me,” I said. “I hardly know the guy. Maybe Valentina invited him.”

“Santiago has some kind of agenda, like I said. He cooks it all up, he makes stories out of smoke and mirrors, then he asks you questions and if you don't answer, he refers to this story he made as if it was real. He likes putting people on the spot,” Tolya said. “He's one of those guys who would kill you for a story. You see the way he swaggers, you say this, swagger?”

“Yeah.”

“Your English is still better than mine.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Val likes him a lot?”

“She's nuts for him, and I hear him telling stories, very funny, very entertaining, how he knows people, how he gets her into the movies, he knows Tom Cruise, he knows everyone. Bullshit.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “Val is a nice girl, right?”

“She's wonderful,” I said. “Let's go find her.”

*

In the restaurant, waitresses in some kind of Asian outfit clattered around on backless slippers, explaining the food to people who sat on low chairs, squealing over the noodles and spring rolls.

Val was at a big table surrounded by her friends. As soon as she saw us, she jumped up and threw her arms around Tolya, and then kissed me on both cheeks.

“Daddy! Artie! Come meet everyone.”

“Where's Jack?” I said.

“He ran into an old friend.” She gestured to another table where I saw him sitting with a guy in a black T-shirt. At the same table, I thought I saw my dentist, Dr Pelton Crane, and I couldn't believe it. Drinking up my money.

Val added, “He'll be back. Sit down with us.” She made me sit next to her. Tolya took the chair beside me.

Music boomed, voices rose, ice clinked on glasses, china clattered; I looked around. The four guys at our table were in their late twenties, older than the girls, and they owned restaurants and clubs and Ferraris from what I could make out. Two of them were Russian. One of the others was an actor whose name I recognized faintly and when he got up to shake my hand, I thought he was still sitting down. He was handsome, blond and very short.

All of them Russian and rich, the girls were dressed up to the teeth in fancy outfits that probably cost thousands. One wore a neon blue strapless dress; the others were in miniskirts up to their crotches, and tiny glittery tops that showed off their sleek bellies and perfect tits. They were
nineteen, twenty, Val's age; they had perfect skin, hair, legs, arms.

Waitresses brought trays of Asian food on little plates and a stream of cocktails in fancy colors and Val and her friends ate and drank, like a herd of hungry, thirsty, beautiful young animals at the trough.

The girls spoke unaccented English. They had been born in America, though a couple said they still had grandparents in Moscow.

Half focused on Jack at the next table, I only caught snatches of conversation. Val's friends were in college, but business was what they loved; one worked for her parents. Big money was involved. She mentioned to Val that her summer rental in East Hampton cost a hundred grand, but she was planning to buy the house anyhow.

At the end of the table next to me in a low armchair with a leather seat, Tolya looked uncomfortable. He was drinking hard, straight Scotch, keeping up a running commentary in my ear: the girl in blue was the daughter of Krushkov; the one next to her was a Lepinsky and next to her was Klimov's niece. Look, Tolya said, the blond boy's daddy is in oil in the Far East, or was it oil pipelines? I had trouble hearing him. I had trouble concentrating as Tolya recited the roll call of oligarchs and real estate barons, of men who stole and put the gold they stole in Swiss banks, and those who simply helped themselves to aluminum, diamonds and nukes as the Soviet Union fell apart.

The children, the sons and daughters who were Valentina's friends, had been born in America and were growing up here in Manhattan or Miami. The girls went
into business or to law school and some did modeling and one pined for an acting career.

“Look,” Tolya whispered. “The girl in the pink skirt with the ten-carat heart-shaped pink diamonds in her ears, her father can buy Real Madrid, the soccer team, and owns most of Vladivostok, and sixteen Picassos, sixteen, Artyom, big ones, and the little one there, you see, with the glorious tits hanging out of the white T-shirt that cost five hundred bucks, you see her, her pop has oil flowing in his veins and a chain of hotels in Dubai, uranium, diamonds, rain forests in South America that he cuts down secretly so nobody ever knows. Her uncle has real estate in China. These people are players, Artyom,” Tolya said. “These people own real things. Entire cities. Land.”

In Tolya's voice I heard the kind of desire I'd never heard from him, not even when he was talking about women. He wanted it all. He believed. He was as devoted to money as any Party hack to his ideology. Maybe I hadn't really listened to him before. I looked for a waiter; I needed a fresh drink.

Around the table, Val and her friends were unaware of Tolya or me. Laughing, drinking, gurgling into their cocktails like babies with fancy bottles, they ate and drank. Maybe they were popping pills, too, or snorting coke. Maybe they were just high on themselves.

Two of the girls were discussing with a boy—he couldn't have been more than twenty-five or -six, but he apparently owned a string of bars—if they should buy a bus to go campaigning door to door for John Kerry in Ohio; everyone was doing it, there were rumors that
Britney and Beyoncé were going. All those poor Republicans in swing states only needed a little encouragement to switch, it was agreed.

I thought about these girls in outfits that cost ten grand going out to the boondocks, going from one split level to another, houses with a basketball hoop out front, asking people to vote for John Kerry, a man who paid two hundred bucks for a tie and bought two hundred ties at a time and went windsurfing for fun.

“Let's give a party,” one of the boys said. “Let's invite some Republicans downtown for a party. Let's show them New York,” he added and everyone laughed. I hated their contempt.

“Too too late,” the girl in pink said. “The convention is over over over. I went to some of their parties, they were dull dull dull.”

Val turned to me, reaching for my hand. I couldn't help looking at the missing finger. She smiled, and I saw that her eyes were the blue of marbles but that one was flecked with gold or brown depending how she moved or how the light fell on her.

You couldn't stop looking at her. Val wore a plain white T-shirt, very tight, and a thin white cotton mini and white sneakers without laces on her tan feet. She was really something. A dirty thought flickered through my head, and I exiled it, and kissed her on the cheek.

“Uncle Artie,” she said sardonically.

“What do you want to eat, darling?” Tolya said to Val in Russian, and she replied in her bland Florida English.

“I ate already, daddy,” she said. “I ate tons and tons
and tons of food, I ate spareribs and spring rolls and satay, honest.” She smiled. “He feeds me like I'm in training for the ladies' heavyweight class for the next Olympics.”