The Sea Beach Line (28 page)

“When you see the newsstand catch fire,” Roman said, “call the police from the pay phone there.” Fire. So it was arson that I was agreeing to. This was serious. “Do not use the cell phone, use the pay phone. It's one that still works. We checked. You know how they say ‘see something, say something'? Tell them about the fire. Tell them you saw the culprit. This is a picture of his face.” Roman took an old leather wallet out of his jacket pocket, and flipped it open to show me the driver's license of a man named Suhaib Abdul-hak. He was thirty-five, with black hair, light brown skin, and a little mustache. His most noticeable feature was a scar across his nose and left-hand cheek.

“Tell them that the man ran right past you. Very close to you. He stopped to look back at the fire, and you got a close look. Got it?”

“Yes.”

“Then, you must do one last thing. Leave this bag on the sidewalk after you make your call.” Roman picked up a black backpack by his feet and held it open for me. Inside was a crumpled red track jacket, a gasoline can, and some rags. “Mention on the phone that the man was wearing this red jacket.” Roman tossed the wallet inside the bag, and handed it to me. I took it. I was holding the evidence to a crime that hadn't been committed yet.

“Okay,” I said. “Got it. I'm good to go. But I'm just wondering: Why me for this?” I understood why I was willing to go along with this plan, but I didn't understand why I had been chosen for the job. Didn't Roman and Timur have closer associates they could trust with this task? Couldn't the actual arsonists plant the evidence?

“You don't want to help us?” Roman's expression was fierce.

“No, like I said, I'm in. It's no problem. You and Timur have helped me. With the bill, and with my search for my father. I'm sure you'll
continue to help me with that. I'm just wondering why you trust me with such a task? Don't you have other people you can rely on?”

“Is there some reason it shouldn't be you, Edel's son? Some reason we shouldn't trust you?”

“No,” I said. “There's not. Of course there's not.” Since they were trusting me, I needed to see what I could get from them. I pulled the sketch of the dead soldier out of my pocket. I had ripped off the picture of Roman and Timur—it would be too much to show Roman a picture of himself—so only the soldier remained. “By the way . . .” I tried not to sound too eager. “I found a sketch my father made. Do you know this guy?” I handed him the scrap. He inspected it closely, then nodded.

“He was a friend of your father's from Israel. His name escapes me. I don't know what ever happened to him.” He handed the picture back to me, giving the impression he didn't want to touch it any longer than he had to. Once again, I suspected Roman knew more than he was saying. But I'd pushed enough, at least until I completed the task at hand.

“Thanks,” I said. “I should get back to my books.”

I told Rayna that I was going out early the next morning because someone was stopping by on their way to work with some books to sell.

“Don't you want me to go with you, Isaac?” she asked.

“No, it's okay. I can handle the cart myself, and you can sleep until the usual time. We'll leave you the small luggage cart packed with some more books to bring out later in the morning.” She gave me a curious look, like my story didn't quite make sense, but she didn't press the issue.

Just before leaving at four a.m., I paused to watch Rayna as she slept. She was beautiful. Her unbraided hair was unfurled across her face. I wanted to wrap my fingers in her long hair and kiss her. I wanted to make love to her. Mercifully, I was usually too physically tired to think much about sexual urges. And right now, I had a job to do.

I wasn't used to being out quite this early. It was still pretty dark, and there wasn't much traffic except for a few stray taxis and work trucks. Hafid's tables were out when I got to West Fourth, but that was only because he'd left them out the night before. I set up my own card tables, then unloaded most of my boxes and placed them under the tables. There wasn't really time to put out my books, and I was too anxious to engage in the task anyway. I was getting ready to be an accessory to a drug-related arson. Besides, my books were safer packed away than out in the open, as they'd be unattended for a while. Leaving one full box on my cart for ballast, I placed the nearly empty box with the black backpack in it on top.

I knew exactly how long it would take me to get over to Sixth Avenue, but I left early and rushed over, and had to spend ten minutes standing on the corner, pretending to fix the ropes on my cart. The newsstand stood on the avenue, slightly up from the corner of West Fourth and across the wide sidewalk from the closed movie theater. It was basically a green metal hut, with a corrugated green gate pulled down over its window.

The sun hadn't risen yet, but the street is always fully illuminated in Manhattan. The only other people around out on the block were a delivery man bringing crates of soda into a deli on a handcart, and a couple of electrical workers from Con Edison checking something on a utility pole. There were a few people on the other side of the street, including some early commuters coming out of the train station and someone in a red smock unloading stacks of free newspapers from a cardboard box, but they weren't close enough for me to see their faces.

The soda delivery man closed up the back of his truck and drove off. The Con Ed guys were finished, too, and started messing around with the tools in their own truck. I kept my eyes on the newsstand, trying not to be too obvious about it. The two Con Ed workers walked over to the newsstand. One held a pair of bolt cutters, and the other held a duffel bag. So these were Timur and Roman's guys. They were shielded by their truck, so no one across the street could see them. Even someone coming up my side of the street would most likely have their view blocked by the newsstand itself. The guy with the bolt cutters nodded at me, to
show he knew who I was, then clipped the lock of a small door on the newsstand's side. His partner slid inside with the duffel and came back out a moment later. They jumped in their truck and took off.

Even though I was waiting for it, I was still surprised when the newsstand burst into flames, just as the Con Ed truck pulled out of sight. I heard a thumping sound—more like rushing water than an explosion—and flames shot out the vents at the top of the newsstand. Within thirty seconds, the entire top of the structure was burning. The fire was the brightest thing on the dim morning street.

I looked around. A group of people who had just emerged from the subway across the street stood watching the fire. Their eyes were fixed on the flame; no one seemed to connect it to the Con Ed truck. By the time I started breathing again, the truck was out of sight. A man came rushing out of the deli and squirted at the flames with a bottle of spring water. The quarter I'd been clenching in my fist was slick with sweat. I popped it into the pay phone slot.

I dropped the bag, and booked it out of there before the fire department arrived. The sirens became audible just as I crossed Thompson Street. I went ahead and set my books up even though it would be a few hours before customers arrived, and tried to read more from
Knickerbocker Avenue
, which I had put aside when Rayna moved in with me.

Arturo is thriving in the military. His hard work and dedication are noted by his superiors, and he is sent for training at the 5th Special Forces Recondo training camp at Nha Trang, where they assign him to the elite LRRP platoon of the 101st Airborne. Arturo soon sees brutal combat against the Viet Cong in the DMZ. After receiving a promotion to the rank of sergeant, Arturo signs up for a second tour of duty, during which he distinguishes himself as a squad leader on daring nighttime raids into NVA territory.

I was having trouble focusing, and only made it through fifteen pages of Vietnam before I ended up just sitting on the curb with the book on my lap. I had been excited to be involved in the plot of the story Roman told me, but until I saw the flames, it was just that, a
story. When I saw the paint peeling and the metal buckling, I saw how real it was. Again, I came to the question of why Roman and Timur had involved me. Hopefully this meant that they trusted me and knew they could count on me. And of course, the location made me a logical choice. But still, why couldn't someone else—anyone else—have called in the anonymous 911 tip? I half feared that it was a setup, and they just wanted to draw me in and get my hands dirty so they could control me. But stronger than my fear was my hope that it was a test, that they wanted to make sure I was truly trustworthy before they trusted me with my father's whereabouts. Even beyond that, I harbored a hope that my father knew about the situation, and would receive an accounting of my actions from Timur.

Surely there were other, more pragmatic reasons that I had been chosen for this task. Timur, as the shot caller, was undoubtedly far away from the neighborhood when the arson went down. Roman probably was too. The 911 operators used some sort of call tracking; it would be highly suspicious if a crime in Manhattan was reported from Brooklyn. The actual arsonists could have made the call, from a burn cell phone or the pay phone, but if they did and it was traced to them, there would be questions about what they were doing there. They must have been out on a fake job. And that was assuming that at least one of them was even a real Con Ed worker. As it was, the truck was just part of the scenery.

If the call was somehow traced to me, through a store security camera or something, I could easily explain that I was on my way to set up for the day, and happened on the scene. I was just a witness at the right place at the right time. Roman had wanted a perfect witness, who would indicate the offending party, without leading to any other theories. This all made sense—but it also meant the police might come talk to me. I was jittery all day long, waiting for them to arrive.

Mendy showed up on the street about an hour after me. I was happy for the distraction.

“You're out rather early today,” he said.

“The early bird gets the worm,” I said.

“So they say. I don't know much about birds, myself.”

My first sale of the day was a copy of I. B. Singer's
Lost in America
, a tall hardcover with thick, glossy pages. The special paper stock was necessary to accommodate the color illustrations by Raphael Soyer. Because of the book's superior physical quality, and the fact that it was out of print, I was able to get twelve dollars for it.

My father had been fond of this book. Maybe not fond, but accepting. He usually dismissed Singer as “Jew fairy tales” for nostalgic Americans. “Like your mother,” he said. “They want old-world Jews without smells of old world or of Jews.” But he had liked this book. He said it was the only one where Singer tried to tell the truth. He didn't like the pictures though, too sentimental. As far as countrymen went, Alojzy liked Conrad more than he liked Singer, especially
The Secret Agent
and
Under Western Eyes.
He read all the books by Polish exiles, enjoyed the poems of Sydor Rey, and had great respect for General Anders, who led the Polish march from Russia to Tehran in 1942. Al had read Anders's thick memoirs more than once. Anders and his men marched from Poland to Israel. I connected my narrative to Al. He connected his narrative to these men. Were we all part of the same long thread?

Rayna joined me on the street around ten in the morning.

“Are you well, Izzy?” she asked. “You seem jumpy. In fact, you are acting like me.”

“No,” I said, “I'm fine.”

While Rayna watched the table, I went to call Roman.

“It's done,” I said. “No problems.” I was sure that the men in the Con Ed truck had already told him this, but I felt a need to speak out loud about what had been done.

“I don't know what you are talking about,” Roman said. “But very good.”

The sun was out that day, but the cement was strangely cool. People gossiped about the newsstand fire. The collective assumption was that a kerosene space heater had probably caused it. News vendors loved to use them, and they were notoriously dangerous, especially around stacks of paper. These things happened all the time. Milton was a prime example. I parroted the theory.

Business was slow, as it was a Friday. Still, it had been a long day for me, and I was exhausted by midafternoon. Two yeshiva bochers were out on the street, stopping people and asking them if they were Jewish. Like all eager young Lubavitchers, they wore battered fedoras on their heads, in imitation of their dead rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson. They had been given the afternoon off from class to increase holiness in the world by cajoling secular Jews into performing sacred rites.