Red Hook (29 page)

“Jack, too?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“Last week, you saw him there last week?”

“Last week when? It was a long week,” she said. “A lot of days. I saw him Tuesday for sure. I know I saw him then because I was out all night Monday, and I stopped for cigarettes on my way home real early. He was with another guy. Black guy. Elegant.”

“You knew the other guy.”

“I saw him around a few times, I saw him having dinner at 360, like that. He was some kind of writer. Sixty, sixty-five, I'm guessing. Why?”

I thought: the morning Sid went out and left his door
unlocked he was with Jack. He met Jack and never came back.

I said, “You like it here, you like living here?”

“It's OK,” she said. “Some homeless bastard got shoved off the pier last week, I could have done without that, but I mean we're just a couple of condos away from turning into SoHo, you got a lot of nice little businesses, artists, and now we got two good restaurants, and they're fixing the waterfront over by Beard Warehouses, parks and stuff for kids, and hey, we'll have a marina any minute and architects and design stores, and then Bloomingdales will come to Brooklyn, and what the fuck, we'll be made. Right?” She grinned. “I actually love it here,” she added. “It's still pretty wild.”

She asked if I wanted a cup of coffee, and I said I was in a hurry, so we talked a little more, standing in her doorway, and to be polite I asked what her business was because I could see a large loft space behind her. Kites, she said. I make silk kites. She reached up to her dark long hair and pulled at the glue that was stuck in it.

“Three, four, five hundred bucks a pop,” she said, giggling. “I once got a grand. For a kite,” she added.

I said what were you before? Before what, she said. I said before you made the kites.

“Married,” she said.

“What?”

“I was married. I lived in Westchester, in the suburbs. Now I make kites in Red Hook.”

SUITCASE NUKE WASHES UP OFF RED HOOK
read the headline. Suitcase nukes. Dirty bombs. Jack Santiago's big subject. Did you read my series? he had asked in the bar the night before.

Jack was gone. I didn't know how he traveled, the night before, this morning, but he was in Moscow and maybe already traveling south in Russia and the only way I could convince anyone to get him back was if I found out how he killed Sid, and why. Why, they'd say. What for? What made him kill Sid?

I was at Maxine's place in Brooklyn, out by Bay Ridge, reading through Sid's files, looking for evidence that Jack killed him. One at a time, I laid the folders out across the kitchen table and on some chairs. I picked over each piece of paper. Some pieces were stuck together from damp or age; I separated them and left them out to dry.

By the time I'd been at it for an hour, the kitchen table, dining-room table and living room floor were covered with paper. My instinct was to keep moving,
head for the airport, find out which plane Jack took, get someone to call someone, drive around. I had looked at the files before, but I knew I hadn't been careful enough. I had to know. So I kept going, stomach churning.

Hurry, I thought. Hurry up. Maybe he was still in Moscow. Sonny promised he'd get the word out. In Moscow, you could get your hands on him. Stop him at the airport. If he went south, it would be much harder.

Someone knocked on the door, and I reached for my gun. It was only Maxine's neighbor who thought we were all away. I said I was working, leaving later, I said, and smiled, grinning, pretending I was picking up stuff for the beach, I said. The woman probably thought I was crazy.

The living room of Maxine's apartment was small and neat, with two windows that looked out over the river. I'd spent hundreds of nights here, sitting on the couch that was covered with a red bedspread, eating pizza, kidding around. She had given me the keys and said, “This is ours, OK? Our place. Both of us.”

I felt like an interloper now. I had screwed up. Maxine didn't want me out at the beach. I didn't know if she even wanted me at all, and all I could do was focus on the piles of paper that Sid had left.

I picked out the file labeled “Suitcase Nukes”, the words written by hand on a green tab.

The piece with the headline was from a Russian rag I recognized, one of the papers that picked up stuff from the
New York Post,
some of the British tabs, and Russian news services. It was printed in Brooklyn.
People pored over it for gossip, news, and astrological forecasts. I'd seen it on the stands out in Brighton Beach.

I looked at the date. It was a couple of months old. I turned it over, saw it was attached by a paper clip to a more recent piece printed off the Internet with Jack's byline. He had his own website.

In the girls' bedroom, I switched on their computer. I was lousy at this stuff, but I could at least get as far as Jack's web page where I read up some more. Same stuff as on paper. A suitcase nuke at one of the derelict docks in Red Hook. Nobody hurt. I knew it had happened more than once in the city. Mostly city officials kept this stuff quiet, if they could.

I kept reading, smoking, scanning the stuff about radiologicals, most of it gossip from Internet sites that recycled what passed for news, and some blogs that didn't tell me anything I didn't know. Denials, assertions, fear mongering, the kind of stuff TV sometimes picked up to fill the space between news cycles.

I switched off the computer, went back into the living room and put on
People Time,
the somber album Stan Getz made when he was only months from dying and could barely play. But he did play, exquisite music. It was one of the albums I'd given Maxine that she didn't really like but that she listened to attentively, trying to get it. If she worked hard enough, listened carefully enough, she felt she would understand. I could see her, on the couch, her legs under her, nibbling a piece of pizza, like a schoolkid, listening as if for an exam, trying to work out what it meant. I had wanted to say, just let
it happen. But that wasn't the point. It was enough that she tried.

Restless, I read more newspaper pieces, more about nuclear smuggling, some pseudo-science, government reports, statistics, conjecture and endless articles by Jack. He was bluffing half the time.

I wandered into Maxine's bedroom, opening drawers I shouldn't have opened. In the top drawer of her bureau was a tape for learning Russian and a notebook covered with her attempts at making Cyrillic letters. I felt like getting the hell out, getting to her. She was trying to learn Russian; she never told me. Her big loopy handwriting, the effort to make the Russian letters, touched me more than anything she had ever done.

What else didn't I know? We had been living together for a year and a half, more or less, and I had known her for much longer. I found a photograph of her father, an unsmiling man in a fireman's uniform, then put it away. There were no pictures of her mother.

I went back to the files and looked at a diagram for a suitcase nuke. Crap, most of it.

I knew what people thought, though. Max and me, we'd discussed it because they talked about it at her job. We had laughed about the suitcase nukes. People imagined a miniature silver nuclear missile like a toy with a little warhead at the top, secreted in an old-fashioned brown leather suitcase that had latches and locks and leather handles, a suitcase out of a Hitchcock movie with brightly-colored stickers that read: Ritz Hotel, Paris, or the Orient Express, Istanbul, or National Hotel, Moscow. They imagined that you opened the
suitcase, and presto, the little missile popped out of the suitcase and a miniature fire ball rose over 34th Street or Times Square or Wall Street; a baby mushroom cloud fell over Manhattan like something in a
Terminator
movie, and there was a terrible wind that swept everything with it. I knew it was what people thought; it's pretty much what I thought until I did a couple of cases.

Suitcase nukes. The radioactive stuff, the enriched uranium, plutonium, cesium, beryllium, usually came from some poor slob who hadn't been paid for months and carried it out of a nuke plant in Russia in a saucepan. People were hungry in the Russian hinterlands; old people didn't have heat; scientists didn't get paid so they did what they had to. The big players took it from there.

American ports were as leaky as it got and you could get anything in. Usually the radioactive shit got through tucked in with antiques from Indonesia or tablecloths from Ukraine. I'd seen one of the canisters; it had held cesium. It was lead and painted yellow, the paint chipped. It looked like a cheap coffee thermos, but it was heavy. The hardware, labeled as tool and die machines, could be shipped through Germany, and then south, Iraq, Iran, Syria.

You didn't need a fancy nuclear bomb, either; everyone knew. You got enough of the radiologicals, and added some crappy parts—a detonator, a piece of an alarm clock—put it with conventional explosives and took it on a ship or on board a plane or even a subway. Hit the Trade Center with that, you had a nuclear missile
almost as terrifying as anything buried in the ground out in Wyoming. Fucking boom, as a friend of mine once said.

A hundred thousand people would be streaming up Broadway, the unlucky ones, their faces falling off, their skin peeling off, dying as they walked, and then thousands more, and no one at St Vincent's with any idea what to do.

Jack had described it all; I could read his lust for the subject. It wasn't that no one else had reported it. It was that Jack was obsessed. He sketched out fictional scenarios that would scare the socks off your fucking feet. There were clippings of his pieces from Long Island newspapers and local Brooklyn giveaway sheets, stuff reprinted in foreign papers and magazines.

He had covered the territory for years, he had consulted with medics, engineers and weapons specialists, he had even calculated the numbers of deaths; behind the cool calculations and figures and language, you could see that he was hot for the subject and he had been everywhere, traveling on any story he could get that took him to Russia, Iran, China, anywhere he thought he could detail sources of radioactive material; he described the mules who humped the stuff out of the Middle East and through Central Europe, some of them girls who worked as prostitutes and did it unknowingly, just carried canisters of the stuff in their bags. Some got cancer. A few had died of radioactive poisoning.

Probably it came down to that: Jack sat in front of his computer in the building in Red Hook that looked like crumbling bread and outlined the end of the world.

Weapons of Mass Destruction. Jack was in with it before it had a name. He got himself into conferences and spoke at universities.

For hours I read through the stuff that Sid had hoarded in his folders, moving through it, trying to make sense, restless, panicky that I'd never get to the end.

I spread the files around again, and picked my way over them, and kept looking for something that would show me what Sid knew about Jack that made Jack kill him.

By now, a sea of paper was scattered on Maxine's floor. A snowstorm. I was getting nuts from it. A blizzard. Shut up, I thought. Read. Hurry.

I tried to picture Sid carefully cutting out pieces from newspapers, printing out stuff from the Internet, filing it, attaching paper clips, writing labels. There had not been a TV in his loft. Didn't like the noise, he said. Sid liked his news recycled on his own time.

After about my fourth cup of coffee, my head cleared up and I realized I felt like I was reading a bad novel. Something didn't click, didn't fit, didn't hang together, the jigsaw puzzle was missing a piece of the sky.

At the window, I looked out at the green lawn that sloped down to Shore Drive and the Belt Parkway. Cars buzzed past, and beyond them there were a few boats on the water. The Verrazano Bridge stretched elegant, a thin whip of metal across the Narrows to Staten Island, and I thought of how Maxine loved to stand at the window when the sun went down over it.

The “Guinea Gangplank”, she told me her uncle used
to call the bridge, when
guinea
was a common slur for Italians, and people thought the mafia pushed their victims off the bridge.

The water was smooth, but the hurricane that had flattened Florida was coming up the East Coast; it was the worst hurricane season in a hundred years. I began worrying about Maxine down on that little Jersey peninsula, the scraps of beach that a storm could flood. She'd only laugh at me.

“It's New Jersey, Artie, honey. Nothing ever happens here.”

Anyhow, she didn't want me there.

“I don't want you to, Artie. I just don't, not right now,” she had said when I called the night before. Maxine sounded sad and I knew we had lost something.

What was I looking for those hours locked up in Maxine's apartment?

I kept reading. I always resisted paperwork. I didn't like the smell of old paper from the time I was a kid in Moscow and my mother leaned on me to use libraries. Love libraries, Artyom, she would say; there will always be something worth reading, and she would give me some money to bribe the librarian who would slip you forbidden books for a price. I once got caught. I was thirteen, fourteen, can't remember, but I remembered that I was working on some subject I didn't like, some Marxist–Leninist crap—hard to believe there was such a time—and I was looking through a copy of a Philip Roth novel and I got caught. My father had to come and get me from school.

It was getting late and I was already jumpy but I made more coffee, waited until it boiled, turned off the music, drank the coffee and found some stale Entenmann's donuts in the fridge. I ate two and got powdered sugar on my shirt.

In the kitchen, I sat on a stool, upright near the window where it was bright so the light would keep me awake.

The last three folders were on the Formica counter in front of me. I opened one. The pages from a yellow legal pad were covered in Sid's tiny handwriting, beautiful writing done with a fountain pen, as if he had studied calligraphy.