“I didn’t have breakfast,” said Sonny. “Let’s sit outside, Art. You’ll have a slice.”
After Sonny used the bathroom, we carried the coffee and the pie onto the deck at the side of the restaurant and sat down. Lippert munched some pizza. “Take a slice, Art.”
“Can’t,” I said. “I just ate. You want to talk to me about your case, the little girl in Jersey with the doll?”
“You feeling magnanimous, man?” He glanced across the road at the neat rows of houses, most of them sprouting American flags, neat lawns, sprinklers, stuff like that.
“Sure.”
“Not now,” Sonny said. “I was up all night thinking about the bastards who did this, that they’re out there, man, maybe in Jersey, maybe looking for more little girls.”
A large black guy emerged from an SUV that had pulled up in front of La Rocca’s and went inside. You could hear him through the open door laughing with the owner.
Lippert turned his head. “Times must have changed over here. You know Staten Island was the only place above the Mason-Dixon line to side with the South during the Civil War, man? So the Italians who lived here did not like the you-know-who coming over from Brooklyn and they figured when the Verazzano Bridge opened in ’63, the ‘outsiders’, which to them meant black people, would just overrun the place. No one said it but they figured Staten Island was for white people, Irish was OK, but the other kind, I’m putting it a lot more polite than they did.”
“I caught that, Sonny.”
“Instead, more Italians arrived and the bridge became known as the ‘Guinea Gangplank’. The two local growth industries were real estate and garbage, and I remember, yeah, man, I do, the strategy for real estate was to find a place with trees and then, in the middle of the night, cut them all down. Next morning, it was no big deal to get the zoning board to agree to let them build houses there – to reduce the erosion that came from cutting down all the trees, which was Italian logic.” Deep in his storytelling, Sonny snorted with laughter. “There was a wooded hill next to this college where I taught for a while. One morning all the old-growth forest had gone. There was just mud. The zoning commissioners were there before the mud dried, and permission was given to build thirty ‘Mother-Daughters’. You know what those are? Like semi-attached houses, one part up, one down, where the daughter starts in the basement. As mamma declines – check the ankles, man – she moves down to the basement, and the daughter and whatever of her family remain – the husband is now mostly with the girlfriend spending nights in the Holiday Inn – take over the upper two floors. Gotta think about the gene pool, man. So long as it’s white. Russians been moving in now. White Russians, you could say.”
“Yeah, fine, Sonny. So thanks for the history, you want to go? I ought to see this Gorbachev woman or whatever she’s called, Rhonda’s relative, because I have to get back to the city.”
Sonny wasn’t ready to go. He had moved into one of his riffs and, like a musician high on music or drugs, he was impervious to anything else. It had taken me years to understand it was Sonny’s displacement activity, the way he kept the horror at bay: when he was working an ugly case, Sonny escaped into his past. Once, in the middle of a story about his childhood, he had suddenly turned to me and said, completely lucid, “Suspends all thoughts of death, man. My stories. You know?”
Now Sonny finished his slice and said, “Once upon a time, Artie, Staten Island was a place where people went to hang out in the summer, rich people in mansions, working people in fishing huts along Raritan Bay or the Atlantic shore. Even before the bridge, before the ferry. Staten Island ferry’s a hundred this year, you know that man?”
“No, Sonny.”
“And then someone thought about garbage. It’s garbage, man, don’t you see? Garbage is a perfect metaphor for economic mobility, for the wasteful economy of the US of A. Every one of us makes ten tons of garbage a year. Garbage is disgusting. It smells. No one wants to take it away after it’s put out onto the streets by building supers in New York. To solve the problem, we transmuted garbage men into sanitation men, gave them decent wages, great health care, and allowed them to retire on more than full salary after twenty years, or sooner if they could manage to develop a work-related disabling injury, which most of them are naturally able to arrange. Man, we produce so much garbage. But then we thought, what the fuck do we do with it after the sanitation men collect it? This is all about transportation and real estate, especially in places such as New York where property is so valuable, you get my drift?”
“I really have to get going,” I said and Sonny finally followed me to my car, where he kept talking.
“How many Jews want to get involved in garbage?” said Sonny.
I turned the key in the ignition. “What is this, a Jewish Princess joke?”
“Real estate to us Jews is the Seagram’s Building or four thousand square feet on the water in Great Neck.”
“Where are we going?” I said.
“Or we figure education is another way up and out if you don’t do real estate. But if your people, like those good Italian Catholic people, are suspicious of education and the subversive things that might even be slipped into a vocational school curriculum, like literature, you know, the way up is through transportation. And garbage,” said Sonny triumphantly. “Like Staten Island. They already had the real estate. So they think, how do you lure someone to live in a place with a name like Fresh Kills? You can’t.
“I mean if you’re Italian, it’s enough already with the kills, you want safety and cannoli. A few of them start thinking, because they’re not stupid, let’s put the garbage in Fresh Kills. And voila, the world’s largest urban landfill site. Did you know that it’s so big, man, it’s one of the objects you can see from space along with the Luxor Hotel in Vegas. Cute, huh? Take a right there, yeah, where that sign is.”
“Very cute.”
“It all added up. Who owned the land in Fresh Kills that the City bought for top dollar? Which zoning board did the City have to deal with? Which social club was hovering over it all? This is not a trick question,” Sonny said. “Who managed to get their hands on the private land that was really public, and take over the ‘carting’ business, and what was this ‘carting’ thing anyway? I mean it was schlepping garbage, right? I was there, I’m telling you. There were a few beach huts and swamps and stuff and now there was this huge fucking landfill. The stink was something.” Sonny laughed. “But you want to know the real thing about this place, it’s where most people settled to nurture their lives and express rage. I mean it. Take another right.”
“You’re sure this is the way to Rhonda’s cousin?”
“You’re going to drop me first. I’ll show you where to go, man, and then you drop me.”
“You’re not coming with me?”
“It wouldn’t be seemly, Art, man. I mean, what the hell would a senior law enforcement guy like me be doing sniffing around some minor Russian thing in Staten Island for his girlfriend? I’ll show you where, though. Also, like I said, there’s someone I need to see on my Jersey case.”
“Fine.” I was feeling faintly irritable – all of Staten Island looked the same to me and it seemed to go on forever.
“There, over there, make the left turn,” said Sonny. “I knew someone said the water got so polluted around Staten Island, you walked in for a swim, man, you came out without feet.”
*
On the way to Sonny’s friends who lived somewhere called Todt Hill, there were plenty of Italian eateries. In the small front yards of the bungalows were plaster statues of St Anthony and all-year Christmas decorations. On one screen door was a marines poster and the words “Standing Tall”. On other doors and walls and in windows were pictures of firemen who had died on 9/11.
Here on Staten Island you still felt some of the anxiety about it all. Flags were everywhere, flags, slogans, red white and blue. The back of a porch swing I saw was covered with a laminated flag. Every other street was named for
a dead firefighter. Staten Island had had more dead firefighters than any other place. I used to laugh at the outer boroughs’ way of naming streets – Father Cappucino Boulevard, stuff like that. Then 9/11.
Maxine got upset when they named a street for her dead husband. “ I don’t need that,” she’d said. They did it anyway and she had to go there and cut a ribbon. I went along with her and felt like a jerk because I was alive.
The rest of the city might have calmed down some – there were days I felt we were over it, or at least in a kind of benign stupor – but on Staten Island, you felt people were just waiting for the next attack, waiting for the next shoe to drop, so to speak. I looked at my watch to check the date. It was July 6; in two months it would be four years since 9/11; four years, no shoe, not yet.
“Nice, huh?” Sonny said as we started up a hilly area with plenty of trees, and some good-looking houses.
“Where’s the house, Sonny?”
“Keep going straight,” he said. “You know I said people came out here to nurture their rage?”
“Yeah, right, rage,” There was no point trying to stop him.
I half listened, half looked out of the window. Porticos, columns, vast lawns, topiaries eight feet high, up here some of the houses resembled the White House, others looked like mafia palaces, which was probably what they were.
“You know something, Art, man, the weapons they’re using in the so-called Culture Wars, they were field-tested on Staten Island,” Sonny said. “I’m not kidding. The War was for the hearts and minds of the kids. Everyone around here was asking would the government or schools take over from parents? Or that big-time most important thing, the church, and who would pass on the culture, the family values, and sex stuff and the truth about creationism and God. It’s nothing new, man,” Sonny said, “I taught a course, you know, at the college, and you got mostly girls, because boys went to work. Girls got a little time in the subversive world of education before they became a nurse or secretary, or just got married and had babies, and the faculty, who mostly wished they were in the city, were shagging the students and the students were pretending they were hip, and it was OK. I knew a nice girl there. Never mind.
“Anyway, you’d hear how these girls went home and their fathers and boyfriends would rage around about Evil on the nightly news. There would be warfare at home. Mom would hover with platters of pasta, and the girl would say something like, what if Vietnam is wrong, at least they said that back then, probably now they say, so what if there were no weapons of mass destruction or what’s so wrong about Janet Jackson at the Super Bowl, or I’m thinking of going to law school or, worst of all, I want to live in Manhattan for a while. That was like saying you wanted to spend a few years in hell. Make a left at the corner, Art,” said Sonny.” You know what I did?”
“What, Sonny?”
“I was an idiot, so I organized an evening where students could bring their boyfriends and fathers so they could learn about what was happening at the college, and we ordered in drinks and snacks to show hospitality. I get up and welcome them and talk about the curriculum, leaving out the shagging, natch. And suddenly, there’s this beefy boyfriend up from his seat, crawling across the conference table where we’re all sitting and sipping warm white wine from plastic cups and he’s screaming about how the ‘spics and niggers’ are ruining Staten Island. The door opens and framed in it is this guy named Lloyd Stevens, and he’s like an extra large black man.
“He enters as the other guy utters the N-word. Everyone freezes. Lloyd fills up the entire doorway and the light behind him makes him appear even darker, and Lloyd, who runs the college veterans program, says in his softest, calmest voice, ‘I was in my office across the hall and I heard more sounds than usual coming from here and thought I should come by to see if my help might be needed.’
“Lloyd is big and handsome, like Sidney Poitier in The Heat of the Night, and he turns to the crazed Italian guy who’s sprawled on the table, yelling about spics and niggers, and Lloyd holds out his hand and says, ‘Hello, I’m Lloyd Stevens, can I help you get to the coffee?’ I mean, Call me Mr Tibbs, right, Art man?” Sonny was laughing so hard at his own story now that tears ran down his face. “Oh, man, those were the days. That’s the house. You can pull up there.”
Tires crunching over the gravel, I stopped alongside a Porsche and a couple of Mercedes. Before Sonny got out, he said, “You think you’ll be OK?”
“I’ll be fine,” I said.
“So thanks, Art. Anyway, I filled you in on Staten Island, right? Just remember, they came here to nurture their rage.”
“I’m out of here,” I said. “Her name is Vera Gorbachev, right?”
12
A woman poked her head out of the front door of the Gorbachev house the second I parked in front of it, as if she’d been waiting by the window, watching for me. Before I could get up the front steps, she retreated, shut the door on me. There weren’t any cops in sight but the alleged crime was a few weeks old so I wasn’t surprised. I hit the bell, which played the theme to Dr Zhivago, and waited.
The house wasn’t far from the Fresh Kills landfill and it had three American flags out front, one on the door, another hanging from a pole, the third stuck in sand in a cement pot. Another pot held purple geraniums that matched the paint on the door. There were six kinds of siding.
You could write a book about the siding on New York houses out here in the boroughs. In the same row as the Gorbachevs’ were houses whose siding included shingle, fieldstone, brick in several colors, wainscoting, clapboard, limestone, brownstone, granite and marble – green, black, gray – some fake, some real. The Gorbachev house itself had fieldstone running up a chimney and something that passed for pink granite on the front. The faux mahogany door had an oval piece of stained glass, featuring some saint, a brass knocker in the shape of an eagle, and a set of wind chimes that tinkled in the breeze. In front, the lawn was perfect, like carpeting, little rows of red, white and blue flowers neatly arranged.
At the side of the house, I could see sticks for tomato plants, a baby blue Ford Escort, maybe eight, nine years old, a garbage can turned upside down and a kid’s tricycle.
“Hello?” a voice said, and I jumped as the door opened again and the woman I’d seen before emerged onto the front steps. “Who are you?” She had a heavy Russian accent.
I showed her my badge, asked in Russian if she was Mrs Gorbachev and told her I had come because Rhonda Fisher had asked me to. She said yes, she was Gorbacheva, but in America everyone said Gorbachev even for ladies, no one bothered with the feminine version. She said I was welcome and I should just call her Vera.
She was different from what I had expected. Her English was lousy, but her Russian was educated. She was tiny, not more than five feet tall even in the backless gold sandals with high heels that went tippy-tap, tippy-tap on the stone steps. I was guessing she was around fifty.
Blonde hair pushed up onto her head, a pencil stuck through it, she was pretty in a faded Slavic way. The air was chilly for July, and she clutched a white jeans jacket around her. Under it she wore a stretchy black skintight top and light blue spandex stirrup pants which, as I saw when she turned and led me into the house, showed off her ass.
In the kitchen, fussing with fancy coffee cups and saucers she took from a cupboard, Vera told me her husband, who had disappeared the night of the burglary, was Italian and his name was Al Laporello, but that she didn’t take his name when they got married. She pointed at a chair. I sat down. There were cookies on the table.
Vera started making coffee in a red espresso machine that stood on the fake marble counter. A radio was tuned to a Russian pop station and Vera left it on so the songs – the kind you heard on the boardwalk at Brighton Beach – infiltrated the room along with the smell of coffee. Then Alla Pugacheva began to sing, which made Vera smile.
“So good,” she said.
Al was older, Vera said. He supervised garbage company where she had worked. She�
�d been trained as a chemist before she came to America. In Kiev, she added. She said she was half Ukrainian, but considered herself fully Ukrainian because it was superior to Russian. Ukrainians were closer to European.
She lit a cigarette, then left it on the edge of the counter while she poured the coffee into the gold and black cups. Somehow I didn’t get the feeling Vera Gorbachev was in real despair about the disappearance of her husband.
“You’re here about the robbery?” Vera put two cups and saucers of aromatic coffee on the table, picked up her cigarette and sat down. “Please take cookies.”
I turned the cookies down. “Yes. Your cousin Rhonda asked me to come,” I said.
“Not my cousin, cousin of my aunt’s husband’s daughter. I think. Nice lady, Mrs Fisher. She brought me lox and bagels, even pastrami.” Vera blew out the smoke. “Rye bread also.”
“She said you wanted to talk to someone who knew Russian.”
“Cops around Staten Island do not speak Russian. My English is lousy. Sometimes people help only because they hear my name, Gorbachev, and they think, oh, maybe she is relative. They ask me, you are related to Gorby?”
“What do you tell them?”
“I say, sure.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Long time,” said Vera. “I never bother to learn English well. Enough for my job, nothing more.” She went to the fridge and got out cheese and crackers, heavy cream for the coffee, salami and a jar of red caviar. She put it all on the table. You could die of a heart attack eating cake and drinking coffee on Russian cases. No self-respecting Russki who let you in their house let you out before they fed you to death. Or maybe it was their revenge on cops.
I reached for a wedge of Brie. “Thank you.”
“Yes. You are welcome. Please help yourself to everything.”
“Would you like to tell me what happened?”
“Yes, of course.”
Fresh Kills Page 10
