The Sea Beach Line (42 page)

Past Times Square I came to Eighth Avenue, an avenue still full of old drunks, dive bars, and peep shows, thanks to the looming influence
of Port Authority, the largest bus terminal in the United States of America. Eighth Avenue was the kind of place where Al made sense. I hoped I might see him coming from the bus station to the bar with a duffel bag on his shoulder, but it didn't seem likely.

Once I crossed Eighth, I was firmly on the West Side. Hell's Kitchen. I read in a true-crime book that the last Irish gang in the neighborhood, the Westies, supplied the union labor for the construction projects that gentrified the area and drove out the remaining working-class Irish families. Everyone is devoured, but usually people devour themselves, and there's no one else to blame.

It was a warm day, and old men were drinking beer outside Andrew's building. Andrew had mentioned that the lower floors were filled with the residents of the SRO that had been here before the luxury rental building was built. Keeping the SRO inhabitants on had been a stipulation of the deal that allowed the developer to build on the property. The old men would eventually die, and their apartments would go market rate. In the meantime, the type of life my father had lived and the type of life that Andrew lived were only separated by a flight of stairs.

Andrew opened the door in sweatpants and a New York Islanders jersey. I was a little taken aback, as I'd never seen him dressed so informally. During the workweek, of course, he wore suits. Lounging around Becca's apartment on the weekend, he wore khakis and polo shirts.

“Hey, Edel the Kid. Thanks for coming by.” We clasped hands.

“Sure. My pleasure. How are you doing?”

“You know. Been better.” He shrugged, and turned back into the apartment. “Come on in.” I followed behind, noticing the bulky monitoring device just below the elastic ankle band of his sweatpants. The apartment had been remodeled recently, and Andrew owned nice furniture, but the place was a mess. Dirty clothes lay across the floor. New-looking sports equipment—a bag of golf clubs, a pair of roller blades, different sizes of free weights—was piled in the living room. A PlayStation 2 video-game system lay as far from a large television set as its cord would allow. There were books too. Not a lot, but more than I expected. Business textbooks. Pop-psychology books about
“success.”
The Great Gatsby
. Some Michael Crichton. Some Jack Higgins.
Tough Jews
by Rich Cohen. Two coffee-table books about Israel.

“I'd offer you a beer,” Andrew apologized, “but I'm not allowed to have any booze in the house.”

“That's okay,” I said. “I mean, I'm okay.”

“You want to go to the roof? I'm already going stir-crazy in here. And it's only the first day. I'm in for months of this. First I was locked up at the federal building for a day, now I can't leave this building. If I go past the front stoop, my ankle monitor triggers an alarm. I was running up and down the staircases this morning. You feel free, during moments when you're sitting comfortably, reading a book, but you're not free at all.”

“A gilded cage,” I said.

“Yeah. But having a job was sort of like that too. So whatever. It'll give me time to catch up on hobbies. Hey, do you know how to play chess?”

My father had taught me the rules of chess when I was a small child, but I didn't really learn to play until later on, in the Sheepshead Bay days. Al had a regular Sunday afternoon game with a guy named Jerzy, who worked at the horse stables by Prospect Park. We'd get off the F train at Fort Hamilton and walk across Ocean Parkway on the pedestrian overpass. Between the overpass exit ramp and the sidewalk was a line of four concrete chessboard tables with attached concrete seats, like the ones in Rayna's pigeon story. I don't know why the city had placed the tables there, and I never saw anyone else playing on them. It was like the space had been made just for Al. We would sit at the third table from the ramp, and play a few games while we waited for Jerzy. Al inevitably beat me, but he'd give me good advice along the way, to keep things somewhat balanced.

When Jerzy would show up, stinking of horseshit, I would move aside and give him my seat at the board. Jerzy was a Pole—an actual Polish Pole, not a Polish Jew—and he fancied himself something of a chess master. They would play a few games, and trade nips from a plastic bottle of Sobieski, shouting, “
Na zdrowie!
” Jerzy would say things like, “Ah, I see your plan! Nimzo-Indian Defense, and then
move into a good old Queen's Gambit.” It never seemed to me that Alojzy did have a plan, let alone one with a fancy name attached, but he generally won. After an hour, Jerzy's break would be over, and he'd trot back down the block to the stables. Every time, Al made the same joke about Jerzy needing to go take care of the cavalry horses, so they'd be ready for the charge against the tanks.

Up on Andrew's roof, there was a wooden picnic table with attached benches. Andrew put the chessboard on the table and we set up the pieces.

“It's funny,” he said. “I hadn't played chess much since junior high, but with things getting so crazy over the past few months, it's been one of the only things that holds my interest.” He won the first game easily. He toyed with me a bit, letting me take a few pawns and a knight and lead myself into a trap. I should have seen it coming.

“So, what happened, Andrew?” I asked, as I set up the board for the next game.

“I don't know. I guess your sister just decided . . .”

“No, I know about that. I mean, this thing you're arrested for.”

“That thing. It's fraud. They're charging me with fraud.”

“But are you guilty?” I knew better than to ask this inside, but I didn't think the building's shared rooftop could be bugged. The question had to be asked, for his and Becca's sake. Andrew could be innocent, framed by overzealous investigators, or superiors who needed a fall guy. If he was innocent, or even partially innocent, Becca had to know, so she could stand by him.

“Oh,” said Andrew. He looked around, but we were all alone. “Yeah. I guess I am guilty. My lawyer told me not to discuss any details with anyone, until we have a plea deal signed, so I won't get too specific. But I mean, yeah, there's no mistake. I fucked up. I'm pleading guilty.”

So Becca was right. Bernie was right.

“Why'd you do it?”

“It's not like I sat down and decided I was going to commit this huge crime. I just, you know, I cut some corners. To keep people happy. And it added up. See what I mean?”

“And before you knew it, you'd crossed the line.”

“No. That's the thing. There is no line.”

“I see.”

“You do, huh? Have you ever committed a crime, Izzy?”

“Yeah.”

“Right, that drug stuff.”

“No. I mean, that too, but I also helped some guys steal something once. Something valuable.” I wasn't going to go into specifics either.

“Oh. I see. How did it feel?” I thought back to when Roman and I slid the stolen painting into its new storage locker, how anticlimactic it had been.

“Like nothing. It was just work.”

“Exactly.” He moved his pawn, starting the match.

I was more conscious of my long game the second time around, and managed to put up a little bit of a fight, but Andrew still beat me in the end. He took the third game too, with a queen sacrifice.

“I have to be honest, Izzy, you seem more messed up than I am. And I'm the one facing prison time. What's the matter?” Andrew had been honest with me about his situation. I decided I would be honest with him about mine. Besides, I wanted to talk about Rayna. Her absence weighed so heavily on my mind, and though I hadn't wanted to explain it to my family, I needed to talk about it with someone. I would have liked to talk to Mendy, actually, but he was too connected to Goldov and the others. Andrew was barely in my world. He was the safest person to open up to.

“There's this girl. She means a lot to me. And now she's gone, and I have to figure out what to do about it.”

“Becca said you were living with a girl downtown.”

“Yes, that's her. Her name is Rayna. We did live together, for a little while.”

“Where is she from?”

“Brooklyn. She's from a Hasidic family.” I was afraid Andrew was going to make a joke about yeshiva girls gone wild or something. “She's back there now. Her family came and got her. She didn't want to go back.” It sounded less horrible than it was, when I said it like
that. I didn't know if I was softening things for my benefit, or for Andrew's.

“Was this the first time you ever lived with a girl?” His voice was surprisingly kind.

“Yeah.”

“It can be hard.”

“It was hard. I didn't know what to do.” I told Andrew about what it was like between Rayna and me. I didn't get too deep into the details about the storage space or the abduction—I only trusted him so far—but I felt the need to try to explain how I felt about her. What it felt like to sleep beside her. What it felt like to know that she was gone from me, taken against her will to a place she didn't want to be.

“Izzy,” Andrew said when I was done talking. “It sounds like she has serious problems. Like maybe she was abused.”

“I know.” I hadn't articulated the word “abuse” to myself, but I knew that Rayna had been sexually abused. The truth was, I had actively avoided acknowledging the situation. It was easier to think of her as haunted, rather than traumatized. I was sorry that I'd never really discussed any of it with her, except through parable. I was sorry I hadn't asked more questions.

“You probably shouldn't have been living with her. She probably needed counseling. She probably shouldn't have been living with anybody.”

“I know. But we were doing the best we could for each other.”

“You miss her?”

“Yeah. I do. And I worry about her. I don't think her family home is a safe or healthy place for her. That's the first thing. But I do miss her a lot.”

“How long has it been since she's been back there?”

“Almost two days now. Is it weird to miss someone so badly so soon?”

“No. I miss your sister.”

After an hour and a half, I'd lost five out of six games. I only took that sixth one because Andrew had become flustered talking about
Becca. It hadn't occurred to me that he loved her as much as he did. He was still a bread stealer, but he would have given half his stolen crusts to my sister, for whatever that was worth.

“Do you wish you'd done anything differently?” I asked him.

“I shouldn't have let you take my rook. But I wasn't paying attention.” This was the second time Andrew had misunderstood my question. I didn't know if I was asking the wrong questions or if he was evasive by habit now.

“No. I mean, in general. These past months.”

“Oh. Yeah.” He leaned over the table, halving the distance between us, and resting the weight of his upper body on his fists. “I should have stolen more. I should have robbed everybody. I should have taken everything.”

“I think you're right,” I said. I was slowly beginning to figure out what I needed to do. I stood up. “I have to get going.” It was time to get back to my search. The chess games had been helpful, though. I was figuring out what players were on the board, and how they were positioned. Now I needed to figure out what my next move should be.

My mother got me on the telephone back at Becca's.

“Isaac. It's your mother, Ruth Fischer. Do you remember me?”

“Vaguely. How are you doing?”

“I could be better. My children are worrying me to death. One was betrayed by a white-collar criminal, and the other is running around doing God knows what.” Part of me wanted to hang up the phone and not deal with her. The other part of me wanted to start crying and tell her all about Rayna. I didn't do either.

“I was working as a street vendor, earning some money. But I'm not doing that anymore.”

“What is it you're doing now? Looking for some indoor employment I hope?”