Fresh Kills

by Reggie Nadelson

  “Have you seen him at all?” I said.

  “Who?”

  “Billy,” I said. “Your son.”

  “Don’t be mad with me, Artyom. Yes, once I saw him,” said Genia. “Johnny goes to see him. You think I’m bad person, bad mother? It scared me very much this place they put Billy. It reminds me.”

  Our father, Genia’s and mine, had been in the KGB. When she was born, he was already married to my mother. Genia said he forced her mother to give her up for adoption. He didn’t want her around. According to Genia, he never made any effort to see her.

  Once, when Genia was a young woman, she had waited outside his office and followed him on the street. She told him who she was. He greeted her politely, but that was all. The USSR was a prudish country. An illegitimate baby would have wrecked his career.

  In the Soviet Union Genia had been scared all the time, because she was illegitimate, because my father – our father – was in the KGB, because later he lost his job. In Brooklyn, she was still scared. The business with Billy had involved cops and the legal system and an institution in Florida. I knew Genia thought it was the kind of place they sent crazy bad kids from poor families.

  Even after almost twenty years in America, fear still claimed her. Genia was scared of governments, of the law, scared that she would be sent back to Russia because of our father, because of her history, because of her son. In her mind, deported to Russia, she would be locked up. This kind of fear was the real fallout, the garbage that was left over from the Soviet Union, and it made people sick. Genia had never believed in her own life, not the bad luck or the good.

  “Will you go?” She took another drag on her cigarette. “Please.”

  “I’ll go.”

  “You will? Oh, Artyom, thank you.”

  “What about when you get home from London and Billy’s still here?”

  “I don’t know.” Sitting on a blue and white striped cushion near her pool behind her big house, Genia tried to work out how she should feel about her son. “Maybe will be OK then.”

  “Where should I pick him up?”

  “I’ll write everything down, Artyom. I’ll make all the calls. We’ll be away only four, five days. When I am home, I will see him. I’ll try. He’ll come here to be with us at home. I promise.” Genia smashed the butt of her cigarette in a heavy glass ashtray on the table next to her. “I swear to you.”

  She reached into her jacket pocket again and gave me a set of keys. “Here, I give you keys to my house, in case you want to stay here with Billy. Use the pool. Enjoy.” Everything had been arranged.

  “Artie?”

  “What?”

  “It is allowed for me to go to London?” Genia spoke in her formal English with a thick accent. “They let me back?”

  “You’re an American,” I said as she got up to go inside and tell Johnny about the plans. I followed her and thought, poor Genia. She was an American citizen, but she would die an immigrant.

  In the living room, Johnny Farone was asleep on a white suede sofa, his feet tangled in a black cashmere blanket. Genia tugged at his arm. He opened his eyes and sat up.

  “Hey, Johnny, how’s it going?” I said because I couldn’t think of anything else.

  He hauled himself up to a sitting position. Johnny was fat. His skin, what with gout, diabetes and liver problems, was a strange mouse color. Leaning forward so he could see his swollen feet over his stomach, he tried to jam them into stiff sandals that lay on the floor, then gave up.

  “John, Artie is going to pick Billy up in Florida,” Genia said. “Please say thank you.”

  “Thanks man.” Johnny pulled his orange polo shirt down over his plaid Bermuda shorts. “Thanks a lot. That’s great. I was really looking forward to taking Genia to London, you know? We planned this trip long before we heard Billy was coming home.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’ll be nice for him, Artie, you know? I mean you understand the kid and he loves you so much, and all the stuff you guys did together, baseball and fishing and stuff.” Johnny reached for a bowl of chocolate truffles on the coffee table and popped one into his mouth. “And we’ll be back and then he can be with us. God, I miss him a lot,” said Johnny, who was a good sweet man who loved his kid.

  “How’s the restaurant, Johnny?”

  “Did I tell you I’m opening a new place over in Staten, brand new, waterfront, seafood, marina, everything,” Johnny said. “There’s a lot of money out there now, rich Russkis, everything. Guess what I’m calling it.”

  “What?”

  “The Staten Island Fishing Club,” said Johnny, triumph in his voice. “You like that? You like it? I mean, the way you and Billy like going fishing and all. It will all be for Billy some day,” he said, as if nothing at all had happened to his son.

  Johnny Farone had made it big with Farone’s, the restaurant he owned in Brooklyn, and he had worked like a dog for it. He had started from nowhere, a fat guy who owned an auto parts shop originally and didn’t expect much. Success made Johnny generous and loyal – he couldn’t believe his luck. After he was diagnosed with diabetes, he tried to keep off the cream sauces and big Barolos and sweet liqueurs and red meat, the things he loved most next to his wife and kid, but what else was there for him, he asked. I liked Johnny.

  I headed for the stairs.

  “Where are you going?” Genia caught hold of my sleeve.

  “Billy’s room,” I said. “See if there’s anything I should take with me.”

  “You should ask me first,” she said. “You should ask, Artyom.”

  “I’m sorry. Let’s go up together.”

  Genia hustled me out of the living room and through the front door.

  “I need a cigarette, Artyom, come outside.”

  On the front steps, she lit up, and I said, “You can’t smoke in your own house?”

  “Makes furniture stinky.” Genia sat down on the front steps and I sat beside her, reached for her cigarette and took a couple of drags.

  “I thought you quit,” she said.

  “I’m trying. When are they letting Billy out?”

  “Saturday.”

  “I’ll start early Thursday, make sure there’s plenty of time.”

  “Thank you, Artyom,” Genia said in Russian. “Thank you. So I will go to London with Johnny for a few days, OK? I don’t like going on planes, but he begs me, he says, Gen, they’re giving me this big award for restaurants in New York, they honor me, important magazine, please, you’ll like it. So you see, I am like all American wives now.” She gestured at the house. “I redecorate. I go shopping. I accompany husband on his business trip.”

  Again I reached for her cigarette.

  “Keep it,” said Genia and lit up another one. “First time, I went to Florida, Billy was in locked ward, Artemy. Locked ward. Locks on doors.” Genia wrapped her arms around herself. “His room is very nice, very comfortable, and corridors so warm and fuzzy, clouds painted on nice sky-blue walls, pictures by children, like hospital for children, but there are locked doors. All I can think about is wards for crazy people in Soviet Union. I can’t go back.”

  I kissed her cheek. “I hear you.”

  “I will owe you,” she said.

  “You don’t have to owe me. It will be fine. I’ll take Billy’s fishing stuff with me in the car,” I said. “He’ll like that.”

  “I don’t know where it is.”

  5

  “You want steak?” Sonny Lippert said when I arrived at Peter Luger’s in Williamsburg, where he had a regular table and a house credit card. It was the only way you could pay there except with cash, and they didn’t give those cards to a lot of people. After I had dropped Billy at his parents’ house, it only took me twenty minutes to get to the restaurant.

  “I ate.” I was still a little pissed off the way Sonny treated Billy on the beach.

  “With the kid? You ate with the kid?”

  “My nephew, OK? Billy.”

  “Yeah, yeah. S
it down, man,” Lippert said. “Come on, at least have a drink.”

  “I’m driving.”

  “Ha ha ha.” He picked up his wine glass and sipped at it. “It’s a nice Cabernet. California stuff, I forget the fucking names of these things. Trouble with drinking wine is wine bores come out of the woodwork. Pour some for him,” he told the waiter. After his heart attack, Sonny gave up Scotch for wine.

  The restaurant was busy. Big men, their bellies shoved under the edge of the tables, chowed down on the best steak in New York, along with hash browns, double-fried fries and creamed spinach. Most of the guys, their jackets hanging over the backs of their chairs, had tassels on their loafers. A lot of expensive red wine got passed around. A man in a monogrammed shirt, voice booming, counted his table. Seven guys, he announced, meant seven bottles. Each of the bottles probably cost a grand.

  At his corner table, Lippert cut a piece of the rare porterhouse, dripping blood and butter, ate it slowly, swallowed, and drank a little more wine.

  “How did you know where I was, Sonny? You came out to the beach because you knew I was there? Yeah, I know, you came because I said I was eating pizza on the beach and you knew it was Coney Island. So what else? So, I’m here, Sonny. What?”

  “Like I said, I was going to tell you out by the beach, but with the plane crash, it wasn’t the time. Tell the truth, I was looking for you to invite you to dinner, all of you, Maxine, the kids, and then you said you were out by the beach, so I figured I’d take a stroll on the boardwalk.” He put his fork down.

  “That’s what you wanted? To invite us to dinner?”

  “Where’s Maxine?”.

  “In California with the girls.”

  “You taking good care of her, man?”

  “Please. Skip the domestic lecture, OK?”

  Maxine, who I got married to the summer before, always said we were like two old guys, Sonny and me. He had given me his signed Jackie Robinson baseball for a wedding present, his most prized possession. He had always thought I was a jerk about women, and he wasn’t wrong, but that I finally got it right with Max.

  “I need you to do something for me. I would do it myself, but I have a case that’s getting to me, man,” Sonny said and put his fork down.

  “I’m busy,” I said.

  Mostly these days I was working paper cases. Someone in the department had asked around for a Russian speaker, which is how I ended up at a desk where I read faxes from Moscow and ate too many candy bars.

  The stuff that rolled off the fax machine was pretty worthless. The only interesting thing I’d come across was money filtered through a bank in Chechnya from Pakistan and onto London, and some money, also from Chechnya, laundered through second-hand car dealers near Detroit. Anti-terrorism guys took all of it over from me. Most of what I was left with were bad bank accounts and corrupt real estate deals.

  It was fine except that I missed the noise of the station house and the sound of the guys swearing, and the bang of the locker doors and the late-night stink of stale Chinese food. But I didn’t work nights or weekends; I didn’t feel like I was getting ulcers from looking at dead people, I worked nine to five; it was a life. I could take a few days off when I needed to. It was how I’d managed to get the time to pick up Billy in Florida.

  The waiter, who was paying plenty of attention to Sonny, brought me the Scotch I had ordered and I drank it down, and then looked at my watch.

  “When I was a kid, it was like big old guys ate here, you know?” Sonny said. “I remember we would hang around and watch the cars and the men in big alpaca coats and hats, like they were Rod Steiger in On the Waterfront, you know what I’m talking about, man?”

  I could tell Sonny was starting to wander, and I didn’t know even now if it was a tactic or if half his brain was permanently pickled from all the Scotch he’d drunk. Even now, he spent a lot of time drifting backwards into his childhood, his adolescence in Brooklyn which was inhabited by a huge cast of people, his parents who read Marx to him at bedtime, gangsters, union guys, politicos, prizefighters, ball players, Floyd Patterson, Jackie Robinson, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; in the same past lived the musicians he loved like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, and Sonny counted himself an original hipster which was why he said “man” in every sentence. I had stopped beating him up for it. I never knew how much of it was true, but for Sonny it was so real, it didn’t matter.

  At the next table, a foursome was talking loud French. I half listened. It was business talk.

  Sonny turned to look. “You understand them, man?”

  “Yeah pretty much.”

  “How come?”

  “You know I can talk French, Sonny. What do you need from me?”

  “Your mother, she’s who made you learn, right? Isn’t that it? I fucking hate the language, also they talk so frigging loud, you know?” Sonny said. “Their food’s OK, they write great. You want to know why I hate the language? Not because of the shrub – you know President George Bush. You like that, shrub for Bush Jr?”

  “I heard it before.”

  “I hate their superiority and their anti-Semitism and most of all their language because I didn’t learn it right. I should have done languages, like you, and then I could have read the good stuff in the original. Balzac. Victor Hugo. Flaubert. Shit.”

  “Sonny, I have to go.”

  “I had this French teacher at my high school and I was the smallest kid in the class, and he liked to pick on me. Mr Driscoll was his name and he’d say, ‘Sonny, comment allez vous?’ And I’d freeze. I knew the right answer, but I’d fucking freeze, man, and if I didn’t know the right answer, Driscoll would turn to the other boys in the class – it was an all boys’ school – and he’d say in this weird sinister drawl, ‘Give him the treatment boys. Give him the treatment.’ So all the boys would beat the shit out of me. I ever tell you about him? Or about the shower teacher, Mr Castro, the one who taught us how to soap ourselves? Jesus. I could have read Zola, in the original, you know, if it wasn’t for that pig Driscoll. Man, I could have even read Proust, though not my thing, not all that fancy society stuff, not really, too many fucking countesses and tea cookies, man, but the writing! I could have really read it all, except for Driscoll. Give him the treatment boys. I got to go to the bathroom, Artie.”

  Lippert got up. He reached in his pocket and tossed a Polaroid onto the table, turned and headed for the men’s room. I knew he wanted to leave me hanging, make me wonder what the big-deal case was. I wasn’t going to budge. I looked at my watch and figured it was time to get back to Billy. Then I picked up the photograph. It was a picture of a baby doll. One of its feet was missing.

  “What the hell is this?” I said to Sonny, when he came back to the table. “What’s this fucking picture?”

  “It’s a doll,” he said. “With its foot cut off.”

  “I can see that, Sonny.”

  “Listen to me, you remember those cold cases, the kid on Long Island, the other one out in Rockaway where they found the bodies with limbs cut off? Years back.”

  “I remember. Yeah.”

  “In the hospital, when I was sick, I did some reading, and afterwards, at home, I had some time. There were more. One possible upstate. Now I got a fresh one. Jersey. Near Bayonne. Same kind of deal, Artie. Little girl, man. They chopped off her feet.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “What’s it mean, man? So she couldn’t run away? So why kill her?”

  “I don’t know.” I still had the photograph in my hand and Sonny snatched it away.

  “This is her doll, man. No ID. Just Jane Doe, her and her doll. She had her dolly with her, Artie, man.” He knocked back what was left of his wine. “Who does these things to kids, man?”

  I’d heard him say it before, over and over: Who does this to kids? Lippert had been obsessed a long time; even after he retired, he worked as a consultant with a unit he set up to look at child crime. I felt for him, but I couldn’t help him, not now, not with Bill
y in town.

  “I have to go, Sonny.”

  “You want to see a picture of the girl?” Sonny said. “She was raped, too, the one in Jersey was raped.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Look, I’m not asking you to come on this with me,” he said. “I’m just asking a favor for something where I don’t have time now. Just free me up to pay attention to Jersey. It’s for Rhonda, OK?”

  Rhonda Fisher, who had been Lippert’s assistant for about thirty years, and was always in love with him since way back, finally got her chance when he had the heart attack and she went to the hospital and was there every day. He didn’t marry her or let her move in permanent, but she cooked for him and once in a while he took her somewhere nice for dinner.

  If Sonny still talked like a 50s hipster, or tried to, and if he was still wound up tight, he was a lot lighter of spirit since he’d been with Rhonda. She listened to the music he liked with him. She took care of him. Since he let her through his door, he drank less and ate better.

  Instead of picking on a sandwich – tongue and Swiss, usually – or just drinking dinner when he was out, now he seemed to like food. I watched him cut another piece of steak. It was the first time I’d seen him eat like he actually cared what was on his plate.

  “What?” I said.

  A friend of a cousin, or maybe a cousin of a cousin, but someone related to Rhonda anyway, was in trouble, he said. Russians, probably low class. “They need help. Think of it as a good deed, man, help keep you from coming back a cockroach.”

  “Rhonda’s Russian?”

  “Her grandparents. Both sides,” Sonny said. “Russian Jews.”

  “They’re on Staten Island?”

  “Dead. They’re dead. But there’s some cousins came over in the 80s, and listen, it won’t take long. A couple hours is absolutely all I’m asking.”

  “I don’t know anything about Staten Island.”

  “I’m asking you because of Rhonda. The woman called and asked Rhonda if her boyfriend, meaning me, I guess, had someone who could talk Russian. Look, she sounds like a nice woman. She wakes up one night, the way Rhonda heard it, there’s a burglar, and the husband runs downstairs after the creep and disappears. He doesn’t come back.”