Red Hook (6 page)

“Then can we look at some apartments tomorrow?”

“Sure. You think you found something?”

She lit up like a bulb, girlish and thrilled, and nodded. “I think maybe,” she said. “I think I did.”

We were still commuting. Max had stayed in Brooklyn at her place near Bay Ridge so the girls could finish middle school there. I was in my loft trying to
figure out how to renovate it for the four of us. It worked OK. We had been together a pretty long time and we were used to it.

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for everything.”

“I'm the one,” I said and kissed her but before she could start off towards her mother, Tolya appeared at her side, carrying an enormous bunch of pink roses two feet long, wrapped in crackling cellophane, dripping with white silk ribbons. He presented them to Maxine, a ritual offering, and then kissed her cheeks three times, Russian style. I could see Maxine, swamped by the flowers, loving it. I just grinned. It was such a Russian gesture.

Tolya threw his arms around me, and handed me a fat manila envelope. I thought I heard him hum “If I Was A Rich Man”. He had started drinking early.

“A small party, you said. You promised. You lied to me.” I was laughing now, looking at the people still streaming in.

“Your wedding party, right? You cannot have wedding without party, or what is point?” asked Tolya, half in English, half in Russian, as he pulled a magnum of Krug from a passing waiter and poured some into my glass. I drank. He poured. Maxine looked at the champagne and Tolya took the flowers from her and set them on a chair and offered her a glass.

Anatoly Sverdloff had grown up, in Moscow, like me, but we met in New York, what was it, ten years ago? In his white linen suit and green silk shirt, Tolya was six-six, three hundred pounds, big as a mountain, and as solid. His white Gucci loafers had been made of alligator
or some other dead animal, eighteen-carat-gold buckles on them.

He saw Maxine gaze at the shoes, and a grin spread across the face that, square and dimpled, resembled an Easter Island statue. He pushed the shock of dark hair off his forehead. From his pocket he extracted a gold cigar case engraved with a cigar, a big ruby for the burning tip glittering; he snapped it open and took out a Cohiba and put it in his mouth, then lit it with a quarter pound of solid gold lighter. The smell was delicious.

In his element, Tolya talked to us, keeping an eye on the waiters and caterers, waving at guests, ringmaster, impresario, godfather. Half of me expected him to offer favors to his friends on the occasion of my wedding, but then I'd seen
The Godfather
too many times, usually over a lot of booze with Tolya.

“Tolya?”

“Yes, Artyom?” Tolya said, using my Russian nickname, practically the only person I still knew who did. I'd been in New York so long I wasn't sure how many people, friends, people I worked with on the job, even knew I was born in Russia. It was another life. It had faded. I was a New Yorker, an American.

“Who are all these people?” I said. “I mean the ones I don't know?”

“Your friends, my friends, friends of people, people we should be friends with. I plan to be King of New York,” he said and burst out laughing. “Maxine, darling, are you OK? Is there anything at all that you want? Tell me, just ask.” He suddenly slipped into perfect English.

Tolya Sverdloff had been a language student in Moscow in the late '70s; he spoke five languages, six if you counted Ukrainian. With me he switched between English and Russian without thinking. Sometimes, when he was drunk or pissed off, he talked the English of an immigrant Russian, dropping articles, mixing them up so he sounded like an uneducated hood. He also did it to mock me, too, because, as he had said more than once, “You are so American, Artyom, nothing Russian left in you, not one thing, nothing at all.”

He kissed me on both cheeks now. He was drunk. I was catching up.

I said to Tolya, “Where's your girlfriend?”

He shrugged.

“You think I don't know why you bought this building?” I added and followed his gaze towards the small woman with a wedge of black hair over her forehead, a red mouth and a sullen expression. She was wearing dark Japanese clothes that looked wrinkled, and flat shoes that looked like they were made out of rubber. I couldn't remember her name.

In Russian, Tolya swore at me, but he watched the woman as she wandered through the crowd running her hands along the walls as if testing the structural value. She was an architect Tolya had fallen for a couple of years earlier; I didn't get it; normally, he liked models, he liked strippers, he liked babes, and he liked them young and gorgeous.

“She makes me smart,” he said and added that while he pursued her, the building was good for parties, and convenient to the river which he loved, and where,
downtown near the Financial Center, he kept a large boat.

“Come,” he said. “Come. Both of you.” He held out his hand to Maxine.

Near the window, Tolya gestured with both arms at the city. From up here, he said, he could keep an eye on the real estate, the new buildings going up, the glass towers in the West Village, the famous new structures by famous old architects that would change the city skyline. He pointed out buildings that he said he already owned, including a squat warehouse across the street, the letters on its side proclaiming it to be the purveyor of the finest meats in America.

“I am in love with old buildings,” Tolya added. “I like to buy everything. You should buy something,” he said to me now.

“What with?”

“I help,” he said.

I said leave the money to me in your will. He laughed.

“You're older than me, you bastard,” he said. “You'll die before me. You'll be fifty before me.”

“Yeah, by three measly years.”

“Four,” he said. “And coming soon.”

Maxine watched Tolya. She had kissed him eagerly when he gave her the flowers, then drawn back, wary, worried she had been too effusive; like a little girl she was uncertain. Odd, because she was more of a grown-up then I ever was. She looked a lot younger, but she was thirty-eight, a single mother with two children who were almost teenagers; she was good at
her job; she didn't take a lot of crap from people.

At her job in the forensics lab where she worked, she had seen more than anyone should ever have to on and after 9/11. She saw the bodies, but also the body parts. She had waited for pieces of her own husband, but nothing ever turned up.

Still, now, in front of Tolya she was shy, girlish, almost timid.

Max had always been unsure about him because she thought he felt that she didn't measure up to Lily Hanes. She felt Tolya had wanted me to marry Lily.

Lily was gone, though. Not part of my life anymore. Tolya leaned down and kissed Maxine again, and grinned, and moved back into the crowd.

“What did Tolya give you?” she said.

I looked at the envelope still in my hand. “God knows,” I said.

“Open it.”

“Here?”

“Sure,” Maxine said. “Don't you want to look?”

I said, “I'm scared maybe he gave us money, I mean like those mafia weddings where they give money for the little silk purse, and I wouldn't know what to do, keep it, give it back?”

Maxie said, “You've had a lot of champagne, honey. Anyway they give the girl the money for the purse, she holds the silk purse. Also you've seen way too many movies. Open it.”

I opened it. There were two tickets to Paris, first class, a note from Tolya and keys to an apartment he had and a picture of it. I looked at the dates on the tickets, but
they were open and good any time. Maxine took them from me and stared at them.

“My God,” she said. “Is it OK to take it?”

“Do you want to?”

“Sure I do.” She sounded hesitant.

“What is it? Come on, tell me.”

“I've never been out of the country.”

“What do you mean?”

“I didn't tell you because it didn't come up and I didn't want you to think I was some kind of hick, and me and Mark, we talked about maybe going to Canada, or even Ireland some time, but it never happened.” Shyly, she added, “I finally got a passport last spring, though.”

“Yeah? How come?”

“I got it when I thought maybe we, me and you, we'd go someplace together.”

“Where did you have in mind?” I said. “Where would you like to go?”

“I don't know. Russia. Israel. Some place connected with you, or some place you lived, or something. Shit. Never mind.” She blushed.

“But Paris will be OK?”

“Shut up.” She kissed me. “We could go if you can get the time,” she said. “We could do it. Couldn't we, Artie? Our next vacation. The girls could stay with my mom or something.”

“We'll go for sure,” I said, and added, “I can see your mother is waving at you so crazy she looks like she missed her bus. On the other side of the room near the bar.”

Max said, “Am I OK? I'm not wrinkled or anything?”

“I think you look gorgeous. I can't figure out why the hell you married me, but I'm not asking, and you look really great.”

“But not wrinkled.”

“Not wrinkled. I love the dress. The orchid didn't wilt, your hair is perfect, your mascara isn't running, even though you cried in front of the judge, and I love you.”

“I did not cry,” she said.

“OK, allergies.”

“So I better go inside and deal with my mom, and my nana who looks like she's going to fall down, I mean she's eighty-five and she's pretty good, but she likes a few drinks, you know. Honey?”

“What?”

“My mom's fine about us coming down to the shore, there's plenty of space. I'll take the kids tomorrow or the day after, OK, and then you can come and meet us Thursday, right? You'll come though, right, like we planned? I mean you'll come to Jersey, won't you? They want that, the girls. So do I. Artie?”

She went on making plans, arranging domestic details. I realized I had stopped listening.

“Look, I better get over to my family, before my mom and my nan and my ex-mother-in-law kill each other with kindness, like they say,” she said, and glanced out of the window. “You know, my grandpa sold eggs down around here some place. He was an egg man, you know? I don't remember him real well at all, but I remember the eggs, so many of them in one place.”

I watched her go and realized I was still holding the envelope Tolya had given me. There was a box in it that contained a watch, thin as a dime, on a black strap, one like Tolya wore that I'd admired. I put it on.

I thought how lucky I was, lucky to make it to New York, lucky to get Maxine, lucky to have friends, as lucky as the guy with the winning lottery ticket. I could have been a cop in Moscow taking petty bribes to put food on the table, but I was here, in New York City. I went to thank Tolya for the watch.

“To you, Artyom,” he said and drank some of the champagne in his glass.

“I love the watch. Thank you. It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.”

“More beautiful than me?”

“Yes.”

He held out his arm. “Same like mine. This makes us brothers.”

“We already are,” I said, and thought if you lived long enough, and like me you had no kids of your own, your parents dead or dying, like my mother who had Alzheimer's, what you had were friends.

“You're thinking of your mother?” Tolya asked and I nodded. He knew. His own mother had died a few months earlier.

“I am planning to drink much much more,” he added. “Please help me.”

“Yes,” I said and raised my glass.

We drank.

“I see you looking distracted at your own wedding, I know you're on a case. What? You need help?”

I thought about Sid McKay. It wasn't a case.

“I'm good,” I said.

Tolya went to greet some guy who had just arrived. I felt someone hovering. When I turned around, Sonny Lippert was standing near me, holding a square box.

I wanted to ask him about Sid. Sonny knew everyone in New York, but the box was an offering and I kept my mouth shut about Sid, at least for now.

I said, “Thanks, Sonny, that's really nice. You want me to get Maxine so we can open it together?”

He shook his head. “No, man, it's for you. OK?”

Sonny Lippert, who I worked for a lot of the time, was small and tightly wound, his hair still dark like a tight cap over his head; I figured he probably dyed it. Sonny was around sixty now. He'd been a cop, had risen up through the ranks, gone to law school, moved over to the federal prosecutor's office, worked as a US attorney. He was driven. He was ambitious. I never knew exactly what he would do to win, to get what he wanted.

A while back he had started up a child abuse unit that almost killed him. The revelations of what people did to children were too much, and by the time he had a heart attack in May he was up to a bottle of Scotch a day.

A glass in one hand now, he stood awkwardly while I held the gift.

Sonny suddenly started coughing. He shoved his glass at me. I took it. He had worked at Ground Zero right after the attack, some of the time without a mask. I
waited while he turned away, head down, and coughed the wracking sick cough.

People said, OK, enough with 9/11, enough. They said give it a break, stop talking about it, get over it. There's other stuff now, they said.

It wasn't over, though. In New York, it was part of the language. People looked up on a beautiful morning and said, “It's a 9/11 day.” The Republicans were in town to exploit it, like all politicians. It was fixed. 9/11 was like a point on a compass where the needle got stuck; it vibrated constantly, but never moved.

“You OK?” I said.

“Yeah, sure. And stop looking at my drink.”

He was supposed to stay off the booze, but I wasn't his keeper. I gave him back his glass.