Red Hook (38 page)

For what was maybe the twentieth time in a week, I made the trip back to the city, listened to my car bang around, knew I needed to turn it in, didn't care, and cut across Canal Street. A Chinese woman was setting out piles of brown lychees on her stall in spite of the rain.

The light turned red as I got to my block. I saw Lily before she saw me.

She was in front of my building, holding an umbrella, looking up. Her bag was slung over her shoulder. She had called that morning and asked when I'd be around. She asked if she could stop by and I didn't say no, so it wasn't as if she was intruding. It was me.

I looked at her. I was far enough away so she couldn't see me, and I just sat like that for a while, didn't know how long. I looked like an idiot. I had a kid's beach towel wrapped around my neck. My head throbbed. My throat was sore as hell from all the salt. I was bleeding some, superficially, but bleeding, and I couldn't stop thinking about the poor bastard who went over the edge of the boat, who let go of my hand. I had yelled, but
there was nobody to hear. I couldn't save him. He disappeared with his history.

I wanted so bad to talk to Lily about it all and she was there, a few yards away. I could almost touch her. I didn't know how long I sat there looking at her.

I thought about all the betrayals, Sid and his half brother, and the short Russian who had swum off a freighter fifty years before. I thought about how close I'd come with Tolya. Everybody afraid. I looked at Lily one more time.

I turned the key, started the car, put on some music, leaned back over my shoulder, backed the car up, cut across town west to the Holland Tunnel, the New Jersey shore and Maxine, and hoped like hell that she'd come home with me.

Read on for an exclusive extract
from Reggie Nadelson's new
Artie Cohen mystery,
Fresh Kills.

The steady noise of the engine above me changed, I sat up, opened my eyes, squinted into the sun. The small sightseeing plane flying low over Coney Island stuttered across the sky and I held my breath, waiting for the crash. Next to me on the beach, my nephew Billy was stretched out. One hand holding a radio tuned to a Yankees game, his big adolescent feet in black sneakers, laces trailing, propped up on an empty pizza box from Totonno's.

The plane disappeared behind backlit clouds, probably heading for some airstrip nearby where tourists caught sightseeing flights.

It was Tuesday, a mild July day when only a few people, maybe a couple dozen, were stretched out on the sand near me catching some sun. Two old guys sat on low green plastic beach chairs and played gin rummy. A couple of women, their wives probably, who wore pull-on velour pants and matching windbreakers in pink and blue, sat near the men, reading Russian newspapers that rattled dryly in the breeze. Beyond them a Pakistani
family ate lunch from metal containers, the compartments stacked up on each other, chatting in Urdu, probably Urdu, maybe imagining they were back home taking the afternoon off on some beach in Karachi. In Midwood, in the interior of Brooklyn around three miles from Coney Island, there was a big Pakistani community. Now, I could smell the spiciness of the food. It made me hungry.

At the edge of the water, a chubby teenage girl with carrot-colored hair jogged heavily, her feet pulled down by damp sand. Two boys ran gracefully past her. An electric blue mermaid, also near the water, picked up her sequined blue tail, and scuttled up towards the boardwalk. The plane appeared again. Everyone on the beach looked up. No one moved now. Sun glinted off the mermaid's blue tail.

All this seemingly in slow motion, while music came from a boom box somewhere – Wilson Pickett's “(Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay”, which I'd always loved. I realized that the mermaid was one of the girls who dressed up every summer to march, if you could call it that, in the annual Coney Island Mermaid Parade.

The plane, out of control, zigzagged across the blue sky over the ocean, flew away from the beach, dipped down, one of its wings hanging loose, like a wounded insect. I got up, stumbled on the sand, found my phone in my jeans, called 911. It was too late. In a slow spiral, the plane lost altitude and then, suddenly, snagged by gravity, fell.

In the windows I saw two faces looking down from the tumbling plane. Maybe they could see blue water
coming up at them, Russians reading newspapers, a man running from Nathan's clutching a hot dog with a wiggly line of yellow mustard on the dog. I wondered if the people in the plane could see the mustard, and what they were thinking, or if there was time. Then the plane hit the sand and broke. People on the beach backed away, expecting an explosion, smoke, fire.

Next to me, Billy was already on his feet, rubbing his eyes. Around us, people were scrambling to their feet, grabbing their bags and towels, toys and cards, newspapers, chairs, radios, coolers, looking up, running towards the boardwalk, then stopping, unsure which way to go.

Is it terrorists, I heard a woman say to her husband. An attack? The boom box kept playing; on it, the music changed, the Drifters singing “Up On The Roof”.

The silvery plane lay near the edge of the water a couple of hundred yards away, crushed like a Coke can. The surf bubbled onto the beach and washed the pieces of the plane. I could just make out the bodies that were half in, half out of it, including a little girl who was maybe three years old. She didn't move.

“Is anyone dead? Is the little girl dead?” Billy was staring at the plane, rigid with attention.

“Let's go,” I said to Billy. “Come on.”

We had come out to Coney Island because Billy said the first thing he wanted when he got home to Brooklyn was to eat a pie from Totonno's. That and to sit in the sun and look at the ocean, and catch a few rays, he'd said, posing, his face up to the sky, hands on hips, like some guy in a TV commercial for suntan stuff.

“Now,” I said.

Cars and trucks were screaming in the direction of the beach, driving onto the sand, parking, emergency crews emerging. They were all over the wreck, pulling out bodies, loading them into an ambulance. I thought I recognized a detective in a red jacket I'd met someplace. Smoke trailed upwards from the wreck. I grabbed for Billy's hand, he tossed his knapsack over his shoulder and we ran.

“Artie?”

“Are you OK?” I said to Billy. We were on the boardwalk, leaning against the rail, looking at the plane wreck, brushing sand off our clothes.

“This is really weird,” he said. “I'm glad you're here.”

“Let's get out of here.”

“You think everyone's OK?” said Billy.

A girl of about ten was standing near us with her mother, crying. Billy turned to her.

“It'll be OK,” he said. “Hey – It's OK. It's over now. You all right?”

Billy Farone, who was my half sister's kid, was fourteen, lanky, broad shouldered, and nearly six feet tall already, as tall as me, almost. Last couple of days since we'd been together, mostly he seemed to take things as they came. For an adolescent, he was pretty easy-going. People liked him, and he was interested in what they said and how they felt, and it was disarming. He was a charming kid.

Thick black hair fell over Billy's forehead, the blue eyes lit up the face which, with the faint Slavic cast,
cheekbones, chin, that kind of thing, reminded my of my father. Once in a while, hands shoved in his pockets, the big sneakers, the shoelaces trailing on the ground, swaying a little side to side as if he was growing too fast to keep it all together, Billy still seemed awkward, adolescent. Now, making sure the girl who'd been crying was OK, he seemed almost grown up. Black jeans, red T-shirt, a dark blue Yankees jacket, he leaned comfortably against the railing. He looked out at the water and the plane.

“You think they're alive?” he said. “The people in the plane?”

“I don't know.”

To change the subject, I told Billy how Charles Lindbergh opened Floyd Bennett Field a few miles away, one of the first airports in the country. 1923. Over by Dead Horse Bay, which was what they called it back then when the city's dead horses were boiled down for fat there and the stink was unbearable.

“Who's Lindbergh?” Billy said, and I explained about the guy who first flew the Atlantic solo, took off from Roosevelt Field on Long Island by himself and how after that they called him Lucky Lindy. Billy was pretty interested in the story – he was a kid who mopped up information and paid attention to the answers when he asked you questions – but he made me stop when I him told how Lindbergh's baby was kidnapped. Case of the century, they had called it.

After a while, we went and sat on the boardwalk steps. Billy told me that he could tell right away from the arc of the plane that it hadn't been coming anyplace near us,
and that he felt pretty crappy because he found himself waiting for the crash. He had wondered if it would spin, or just plunge nose down. He didn't want it to fall, but if it was going to, he wanted to see.

“It's the way people feel about car racing, right? Isn't it?” he asked me. “If it's going to happen, you want to see. Right Artie? I mean it was just crazy. You want some of my cucumbers?”

He took a plastic bag full of cucumber strips from the knapsack he carried over one shoulder. “God, I love cucumbers,” said Billy and told me he liked the way the pale green flesh looked, the coolness and the crunch. In Florida, he added, cold cucumbers were great on a hot day. What did they say, cool as a cuke? I had heard the expression, or read it somewhere. Also, Billy said, he loved slicing them up, peeling the dark green skin with the red Swiss Army knife I had given him when he was younger.

People were all over the wreck of the plane. I stayed where I was; I figured no one needed an off-duty Manhattan detective like me messing up the scene.

“What?” Billy said, looking at me.

“Nothing.”

“Come on, Artie, what?” He smiled. “What? Tell me. Please, please, please, please. I want to know what you're thinking.”

I didn't answer him because I didn't want to lie. I was thinking how I couldn't believe that Billy was the same kid who had killed a man – been accused of killing a man – a couple of years back.

“Artie?”

“What?”

“You think we could go fishing tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

“Awesome.”

“You have any place in mind?”

“I was thinking out on the island, like Montauk? Any place, so long as it's you and me and we could fish, like before, the way we used to, you know?”

Before. Before Billy had been locked up in the place – they called it a therapeutic facility – in Florida. Before.

I nodded.

“I could make sandwiches for us,” said Billy eagerly. “I'm really good at it. I can do those giant heroes with salami and cheese and ham and pepperoni and roasted peppers, and we can take sodas, and just hang together. I heard they got stripers running already. Blues. Guess what?”

“What?”

“Guess.”

“Tell me.”

“I even heard you can fly-fish in Central Park now,” Billy said, throwing his arm up and out in an arc as if he was fishing. “It sounds goofy, though, right?”

“We'll go to the island,” I said. “You feel good and all?”

“Great.” Billy put his hand on my sleeve, tentatively, wanting to hold on like a little kid, but too big for that now. His hand was as big as mine, the skin was rough and I knew he played ball without a glove.

“You know what?” he said.

“What's that?”

“You won't believe this. You'll laugh.”

“Try me.”

“I'm sort of hungry.”

“You can't be hungry,” I said. “We ate a whole pizza, and some calzones, you ate cucumbers, we had waffles for breakfast, and bacon and about a quart of OJ.”

“I'm a growing boy, right?” Deepening his voice, he mimicked some pompous pundit he'd heard on TV. He had the family knack for languages, for mimicry.

Again I thought how OK he was now. He was cured. Everything had finally fallen into place and he seemed like a normal New York kid who could talk a blue streak, fluent and funny, and sometimes pretty wry, and very observant. The sickness was gone. It was over.

“Artie?”

“Let's eat,” I said. “Whatever you feel like.”

“Something else.” He was shy. “I need to ask you something.”

“Whatever you want,” I said, but my phone rang before he could answer.

“Where are you?” Sonny Lippert said on the phone when I answered it.

“On the beach,” I said. “I'm busy.”

“I have something I want you to do for me,” said Lippert, my sometime boss. “A favor. I'm tied up in a shitty case and there's something I don't have time for, man, and I want you to do it.”

“I'll call you tomorrow.”

“Which beach?” Lippert said.

“What does it matter, I'm on the beach, I came to eat
a hot dog, whatever. I'll call you later. Hello?” I pretended the signal had gone.

Billy said, “Who was that on the phone?”

“It doesn't matter. Where do you want to eat? You want some hot dogs at Nathan's?”

“Let's go look at the plane,” said Billy.

“What about the hot dogs?” I said, but he had already started walking towards the wreck on the beach.

I said, “What?”

“What?”

“You were talking to yourself.”

“No kidding? That's crazy.” Billy was halfway down the beach, loping towards the wrecked plane. “Jeez, Art, I'm going to be like some young old guy, talking to myself. You never know, I could be drooling soon.” He laughed as he imitated an old man stumbling along. Then he straightened up, and walked next to me.

“I'm almost as tall as you now,” said Billy. “How old do I look? For real.”

“Seventeen,” I said.

There had been big tall men in my family in Russia when I was growing up there. My own father was tall, but my uncle, Joe, was a giant. He was almost seven feet tall with huge shoulders and a neck thick as a tree. He played basketball in school. Later on, because he thought he was a freak, he killed himself. I was fifteen when it happened but no one told me.