When I’d stopped being a little boy, I found out some of the things my father had done in the KGB. He never told me. I asked around. At home I overheard my mother in the other room yelling at my father. As a teenager, I tried hard not to like him. Tried not to love him. It didn’t work.
He was my father and he remained tall and handsome and sweet and funny, the guy who brought me chocolate candies wrapped in gold paper and, later on, the jazz records you couldn’t get in Moscow unless you had connections. My first Miles Davis. My first Stan Getz and Ella and Charlie Parker albums.
But my father was always a true believer. Those days, he still believed in socialism, in the system, in the greatness of the project. He told me about Yuri Gagarin, and Tupolev, and the USSR space program. About his own time as a very young guy still in his teens, fighting the Germans in the Great Patriotic War.
Some of the time, he asked me about school and friends and what I was reading; he knew I sneaked books that were more or less forbidden. My mother bought me black-market editions of paperbacks in English – westerns, mysteries, stuff like that. My father never yelled at me, he never threatened.
I had a friend at school named Mikhail – we called him Misha Three because there were three Mikhails, all of them Mishas to their friends – who came from a working-class family where the father was a factory worker, a real Stakhanavite who won prizes for productivity.
When Misha Three turned fourteen, he told his father he hated the USSR and he was going to defect, a fantasy that kept him going. His father said that if he tried, he would report Misha to the KGB. A year later, Misha went on a school trip to Poland and jumped out of the window of some crummy building in Warsaw. The father had to go get the body. My father wasn’t like that. He never threatened.
There had been a day once when I played hooky and he found out. It was spring and a bunch of us just took off for the river.
My father was waiting for me when I got home. I must have been about twelve. We sat at the kitchen table, and I stared at the poster of Paris my mother kept taped to the wall, and my father made tea for both of us, and offered me a spoonful of cherry jam from the jar. My mother wasn’t there; maybe she was working; maybe she was shopping, eternally hopeful she would find some French shoes.
What I remembered after all these years was the session with my father at the kitchen table and how the tea got cold, and the jam congealed in it; drinking it anyway, I stuck my fingers in to reach the sodden lump of cherry jam at the bottom of the glass. Restless, my foot tapping against the linoleum on the kitchen floor, I held the tea. My father told me to sit still. I couldn’t look at him and he told me my inability to look at him made me seem shifty.
He didn’t sound angry. He was polite and soft-spoken that afternoon and only a little aloof, but there was a chill in his voice and his eyes. Right then I realized that it was probably the way he behaved during interrogations. I started sweating. By the time you were interrogated by a senior KGB officer, it meant you had done something bad; bad things would happen to you afterwards. Kids I knew whispered about it; people talked about the KGB, if they mentioned it at all, in hushed voices.
My father went on and on, asking me questions, gazing at me with those chilly blue eyes, until my mother came home and made him stop.
Later, when I was in New York and I became a cop, I discovered I was as good as my father with suspects. I had inherited not only the eyes, but some of his ability to make people talk. I hated that. I tried to lose it. In Billy, I could see him, my father; and myself.
Waiting for Billy near the garbage dump, I was hot and I pulled off my jacket, and threw it onto the back seat of my car. From across the dirt road, Billy was waving at me, and throwing pebbles, and fiddling with his red Swiss Army knife, and I called out to him to hurry up.
He took his time, then skipped over and climbed in the car. I got in. Billy straightened his T-shirt. He ran his hands through his hair, fastened his seat belt and locked the car door. It seemed to take forever.
I turned the key in the ignition, hit the gas, and by now Billy was changing the stations on the radio constantly, unable to settle on any of them, and I lost it.
I slammed on the brakes. I undid my seat belt, and turned to Billy and said in the same low hard tone I used with suspects, “Just stop playing games. I know you talked to Luda on the phone yesterday, I know you made her cry in the toy store, tell me what you talked about. Where is she?” I leaned into him, my face almost in his. He shrank away. He shuddered as if I were literally shaking him.
“You knew she was missing, didn’t you, Billy?” I said. “It was something you said to her on the phone that made Luda walk out of the apartment, wasn’t it? She’s a little kid. She doesn’t speak English. Now tell me where the fucking hell she is.”
“I don’t know,” said Billy, holding back tears. “I swear to God, I don’t know. She didn’t say anything, but my Russian isn’t that good, maybe I didn’t understand. Maybe she didn’t understand me. Don’t. Please, Artie, don’t yell at me. I didn’t do anything. I know people think I’m bad, and I know I did something horrible once, but I promise. I didn’t hurt Luda and I don’t know where she is. I know everyone thinks I’m bad, but I’m not anymore. You have to believe me. Otherwise I feel I’m in some kind of horrible maze and I can’t get out and no one can hear me.”
30
Hank Provone’s rental property turned out to be one of those double-wide mobile homes you didn’t see that much around New York. I’d seen plenty of them out west when I went to Montana, but not in the city.
Still, it looked pretty solid, and it was set up on concrete blocks and newly painted, white with yellow around the windows. New gravel covered the little driveway, and there was a yard out back with some chairs and a table.
In front was a garden planted with yellow and white flowers, even a fountain with a stone mermaid, a drizzle of water coming out of her mouth. By now I was so edgy I felt like a guy walking a high wire, trying to balance in the middle while I figured out where to put my foot next.
As soon as I pulled into the little street and stopped on the gravel drive, Billy was out of the car, looking around.
The house opposite Hank’s had a FOR RENT sign stuck in the front lawn. The house next door, where there was an overturned garbage can near the front door, looked shut up. You didn’t get the feeling that there was anyone much around.
“The yard out back leads right down to the water,” Billy yelled. “It’s so great. Come see, Artie, we could even fish right here, there’s a little dock and everything. It’s completely neat.”
Carrying our bags out of the car, along with a sack of groceries I brought from home, I went into the house and set them down and picked up a few bills lying on the floor. When I opened the windows, the breeze that came in smelled a little bit salty. I put some food – bread, cheese, ham, fruit, eggs, milk, soda, beer – in the refrigerator and waited for Billy to come inside.
When I asked him in the car what he had said to Luda, he’d just looked at me like I was beating up on him. When he begged me to believe him, I’d felt like crying. I believed him. I had to. But once I had started thinking about Billy and Luda, I couldn’t stop.
So now I waited inside the kitchen watching Billy through the window. Finally, I went out and sat on the front steps.
Without a word, Billy came back from the water, and went past me into the house where I followed him. He started fooling with the fishing gear and bait and other stuff. The way the light fell through the window, Billy was half in shade, leaning against a table with a blue bowl of wax fruit on it. He picked up a fake green apple.
“Tell me now,” I said softly.
“I kind of don’t think that Luda really understood what I said to her,” said Billy. “My Russian isn’t so hot, like I told you.”
“Bullshit.”
Billy, who seemed not to have heard me, said, “I’m so glad it’s just us here, Artie, I really am. I wanted it to be just you
and me, for us to have some time together, not anyone else.”
“We’ve been together all week.”
“I mean just us. All week there’s been other people all the time. I wanted you to myself.”
Had he manipulated me? Did he plan it, getting me to bring him out here, just us alone? It was crazy. All the kid wanted was my attention.
“I’m thirsty,” he said.
“I put sodas in the fridge.”
He went and got a can of Sprite, popped it and drank half of it in one gulp. Then he belched loud, and giggled.
“I’m sorry about that,” he said. “It was so good. You want one?”
“I want to know about Luda.”
“I felt sorry for her,” Billy said. “I was with her that morning at your friend’s, Mr Sverdloff’s – Tolya, right? He said I should call him Tolya – and also at the toy store, and I felt bad, Artie. She didn’t speak English. The girls who came to the party were horrible little New York girls. They were ten, but they were like little grown-ups, always posing and talking about clothes and stuff, and Luda had no idea how to join in and she seemed so like lonely, so I stuck around with her for a while, and I told her we could get some dolls made up that would keep her company. She asked me about America and I told her it could be really hard if you didn’t speak the language, and if you were like foreign, and I said did she miss people back in Russia, and she started crying.”
“She didn’t want the dolls.”
“Not at first. Later. You weren’t there. I think you were on the sidewalk with Lily smoking or something.”
“Go on.”
“I tried to like make Luda feel better. I said it was OK if she wanted to go back to Russia. That’s what she was asking me about on the phone yesterday, she wanted to know if she was safe here because she heard so much about terrorists maybe it wasn’t any different from Russia. I said I could help her because she was probably illegal. I heard Valentina say, I thought I did anyway, or someone said, that Luda didn’t really have all her papers. I told her I’d help her. I said, I can help you. I wanted to. That’s why I said it.”
I was betting Billy had scared Luda bad. Maybe she walked out of the apartment to try to get home to Russia – I knew about children who left home intending to walk huge distances to some kind of perceived safety – or maybe to meet Billy. He had said he’d help her.
“Did you say you’d meet up with her? Is that why she left? Did you tell her you’d help her, which was nice, it was OK, nobody would blame you, but were you going to meet her?”
Billy shook her head. “I didn’t say that. I promise. I just told her what I thought and said she could call me or whatever, and she said, what about Artemy? Will Artemy help me? Will he be there? I told her you would be there soon, and both of us, we would take care of her. Artie, I don’t want to talk about this stuff anymore,” said Billy. “Let’s go out and at least look at the water. There’s this dock down there. I’ll carry your stuff for you, if you want.”
“I’ll follow you.”
“Why?”
“I just will. Go ahead.”
Looking over his shoulder, Billy went down the path. As soon as he was out of view, I was going to call Tolya.
My phone wasn’t in my jeans or my jacket, not in my carry-on bag, or anywhere in the house. Not in the car either. I felt panicky, and went back in the house and picked up the phone on the kitchen counter. There was no dial tone. Maybe Hank hadn’t reconnected it after the last tenants left.
I ran down the path to where Billy was standing at the edge of the water, flicking the fishing pole out as far as he could with a graceful gesture of his hand and wrist. He reeled in the line, took the fly at the end of it and examined it. It had bronze and bright red feathers.
“You have your phone?” I said.
He turned around, and looked at me. “I dropped it in the water,” he said. “It was an accident.”
“Where’s my phone?”
He shrugged.
“I can’t find my phone,” I said. “Where is it?”
He looked at the water.
“You dropped mine, too? You threw my phone into the water?”
“I just wanted us to be together without you always calling all those people you know,” Billy said. “You know so many people, Artie, and there’s never really like time for us, me and you, just time like you told me about you and your dad when you would go fishing outside Moscow and nothing could get in the way. “You told me about the river where you went and the big cheese sandwiches and thick black bread and the Russian ice cream that tasted a little bit sour, like vanilla yogurt, and how you would sit on the banks during the summer, and sometimes go for swims, and there was no one else, and no cell phones, and it was all I wanted. Honest,” said Billy, smiling at me before he turned back to the fly he was examining.
31
I didn’t have a phone. I didn’t have a weapon with me either, because I had left it at home. I didn’t want Billy around guns. There were too many cases of kids playing around with guns that went off and someone getting hurt or dead.
Working on the tangles in some fishing line, Billy sat cross-legged out on the crumbling little dock, blue water behind him, sun on his face.
Again I watched him through the kitchen window of the house. From the fridge, I got a beer – it felt cold enough – and drank it. For a while I tried to work out if someone had cut the landline or it was just out of order or – it’s what I’d thought first – Hank Provone turned it off between tenants. Maybe I was just paranoid.
The day got hotter. In the bedroom I found the air conditioner, turned it on and left the door to the main room open. I picked up the bills I’d left on the kitchen table and looked through them.
What I should have done was drag Billy away from the dock and into the car and back to the city. Instead I looked for a phone bill. I felt like I was coming unglued, and sweat ran in thick streams down my back.
Maybe I was crazy. There had been times like this before when crap was coming down on me from every side, when I was working on cases that made me drink too much and I wasn’t sure if I was completely sane.
When I got like that, I could get things wrong. Paranoia, denial, fatigue, booze, a missed clue, a lazy-ass appraisal of some evidence. I wasn’t some kind of detective hero, just a regular asshole and sometimes I blew it. If I was wrong this time and I accused Billy of something he didn’t do, it would ruin the rest of his life. It would stick to him forever.
He said he just wanted us to be together. The four days he’d been with me in the city, there were people around all the time. I hadn’t planned it that way, it’s just how things went. I felt dizzy. All Billy wanted was my time. Now we were alone and he was happy.
On the window sill, next to a couple of pots with some kind of herbs in them, was a radio. I turned it on and I saw that the soil in the pots was damp. It was weird. I wondered if Hank Provone had been out here to water his plants and check on his property. Maybe Billy, but what the hell would Billy have been doing here at all, much less watering the basil? How did he get here, if he was here? Stop it! I thought: STOP IT!
I drank my beer to the bottom and tossed the bottle in the garbage can under the sink, and then ripped open the phone bill I found.
My T-shirt was wet with sweat, the air con not really working well. I went outside and around to the rear of the house where the sun was hot but there was a breeze off the water. I sat in one of the dark green metal chairs, and looked at the phone bill.
Dated three days earlier – it must have just arrived – the bill didn’t show a disconnect charge. Hank could have called the phone company after the bill was sent. Or not. It didn’t mean anything.
From the house, which was behind me, I could hear the radio playing something by Sting, and I could see Billy on the dock, and everything suddenly felt surreal and I was paralyzed. I couldn’t figure out what the hell to do, so I sat there in a rusty green garden chair on metal rockers, my sneak
ers in front of me on the green grass that needed cutting, staring at some high yellowish grass and reeds that led down to the water. Billy was intent on his fishing gear: there was no sound except the radio, and me breathing. I could hear my heart pump, my breath going in and out.
I looked at the second hand on my watch, decided to wait until it passed twelve twice before I did anything. Right then I should have somehow made myself get up; I should have but I couldn’t move.
“Where are you going?”
From my chair, I saw Billy turn swiftly, still holding his fishing rod, like he forgot something all of a sudden. Tall, dark hair long over his forehead, his eyes almost hidden by it, Billy made for my old red Caddy that was baking in the sun. I knew what he was going to do and I got up slowly, like somebody in a bad dream.
He got to the car ahead of me. I knew what he wanted. I knew he was going for the car keys. If he threw them in the water, we would be here together, just us. It made him seem nuts. There was no reason to throw the keys away. We were only on Staten Island, we were in New York City and I could turn and walk away and leave him and go get help. He knew that I wouldn’t.
Before I got to the car, I heard the horn. Billy was in the driver’s seat, leaning on the horn, honking, making a little tune of the honks. He was leaning out of the window, honking and smiling. He didn’t take the keys out of the ignition. He wasn’t going to throw them away. I had been crazy.
“You want to take a ride?” Billy said, calling me over. “You want to go get a slice or a sandwich or burger or something, because I’m hungry, and we could see if we can find a place where there’s a better fishing situation. Artie? I don’t think there’s a lot of fish out here. I was looking at the water, I tried to read it, but it didn’t look that fine to me.”
I had been wrong about Billy. Maybe he had simply dropped the phones in the water by accident. Sometimes his hands flapped around. I had noticed a couple of times that in spite of being a generally graceful kid with pretty good coordination, he sometimes resembled a sloppy teenager whose limbs went in different directions, his hands flapping as if they were attached to his arms by strings, like a puppet’s.
Fresh Kills Page 27
