So I got in the car, and he asked me again if we could go eat somewhere and if he could drive a little bit and I said sure, why not, partly because I was hoping we could get to a place with a phone. I made conversation about fishing. I thought about how big he was now, almost as big as me.
Was I sizing him up in case I had to fight him and force the information about Luda out of him?
He drove. There wasn’t much traffic over this side of the island, though I knew the marinas and beaches would be filling up. After a while, I said, “You want to go to the beach? Take a swim or something? You want to see if we can find a boat to take us out, over to Perth Amboy where the good fishing is, I mean I once went over there to Jersey and it’s fantastic.”
I was faking it and I thought that he knew, but I kept talking, spinning fantasies about a trip I’d taken in a fishing boat off Jersey just opposite Staten Island, and the guys on it, and the good times, and the great catch. Blue fish. Stripers. Couldn’t remember. Wrong season. Billy knew.
He kept driving.
Looking ahead, watching him only from the corner of an eye, I was smoking, my window open all the way down so I could rest my elbow on it and the breeze took the smoke away. The sky was pure blue and the sun was hot on my arm. I thought: who is this boy?
When Billy was born, back then I hardly knew Genia, but she had asked me to be his godfather. I told her right away that I didn’t know anything about being a godfather or religion, for that matter, but she said she wanted someone of her own, someone Russian. Please, Artemy, she had said to me, please do this. I have no one else in America, so you’ll come, OK?
I was broke. Genia took me shopping. We went to Brooks Brothers, which was Gen’s idea about how real Americans dressed, and we chose a nice gray suit and she paid for it and I bought a white button-down shirt and a red knitted silk tie, and we went over to the Plaza and had tea in the Palm Court.
After tea and cakes, we drank Manhattan cocktails, which Genia ordered. Because of the name, she had said. It was one of the good times we’d had together. We had laughed about the baptism; we didn’t believe, not her or me; we had been raised good atheists in the Soviet Union. “Opium of the people,” Gen giggled and ordered another cocktail.
Johnny Farone had a big Catholic family. Genia went along with the christening, the whole works. I showed up. All I knew about it was from the great scene in The Godfather where the baptism is cut in with a lot of bloody murders.
My Brooks Brothers suit made me look like a guy from Wall Street in the church in Brooklyn. I read out the responses, including stuff about Jesus Christ and the devil.
In the long frilly christening dress Genia got for him, Billy was one of those angelic babies, blond curls, blue eyes. Genia – I remembered she wore a bronze-colored suit – held him, and the godparents stood around in a circle all dressed up. I tried not to smile when I said the part about renouncing the devil, or maybe it was Satan they called him.
Afterwards there was a big party at Gargulio’s near Coney Island with a lot of Italians and a lot of Russians. Johnny was one of the few outsiders the Russkis trusted.
A woman in a purple velvet dress with a low neck got up and sang a Russian song a cappella and it haunted me for weeks afterwards, just the sound of her voice.
So I went. I said stuff I didn’t believe in a church where I didn’t belong. When Billy was eight or nine, we started fishing together. I began caring about him.
He was smart as hell, but intense and obsessed with fishing and fish, his fish in the tank at home, even fish he saw in a market or in a pail near one of the fishing boats. He was pretty much a loner in those days. To Billy, other kids were boring, though he was friendly for a while with May Luca at the Catholic school they both attended.
Whatever had been wrong with him, I always figured he’d grow out of it. Anyhow, you didn’t offload a kid because he didn’t come out the way you wanted. So he was different, so what? Then he hurt Heshey Shank. Killed him. Say it, I thought to myself: Billy killed Heshey.
I tried to replay it, the time I found him with Heshey Shank’s body out at the beach club on Breezy Point. As if he could read my mind, Billy interrupted.
“Let’s stop there,” said Billy pointing out a silver-colored diner with a pink neon clock out front. “You can call someone there if you want, tell them they should come and take me away.”
“Nobody’s going to come and take you away. Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Then let’s go get something to eat. I like desperately want a cheeseburger,” he said. “With fried onions.”
“What made you think I’d call someone to come take you?”
“Because I lied about Luda,” said Billy.
We sat opposite each other in a red leatherette booth. The waitress was Russian. Billy ordered his burger and fries in Russian, which impressed her. I recognized her as one of the women sitting under the dryer at Queen of Hearts beauty salon. I didn’t know if she recognized me.
I ordered a cheeseburger too, and we both got Cokes.
“Can I have some onion rings?” Billy said. “And fries?”
“Sure.”
“Cool.”
The place was almost empty. A couple of fat young white guys sat in their red booth at the far end of the diner slumped low in their seats. Looked like they were eating off their hangovers from the night before.
For a few minutes, waiting for our food, Billy read a newspaper he found on the table. The waitress appeared with the burgers, and stood talking Russian to Billy a while. She told him about growing up in a village near Saratov, and what it was like, and he listened intently. Then one of the fat young guys called her over to bring more coffee.
“So, listen Artie, go use the phone if you need to,” Billy said finally. “I’m really sorry about losing our cell phones, I really am, it was like a giant idiotic mistake, I had grease on my hands or something and they just slipped. So there’s a payphone over by the wall there. Don’t worry, I can just eat my lunch.” He bit into his burger and the cheese squished out around the sides.
I looked at my plate.
“What did you mean you lied about Luda?”
“I didn’t lie just about Luda.” His mouth was full. He put down the burger on his plate, picked up the ketchup and squirted it on the meat. He swallowed and picked up the burger again, then added pickles to it.
“Stop fucking eating and tell me what you mean, you didn’t lie just about Luda.”
“Luda was extra,” Billy said. “It wasn’t exactly part of my plan at first.”
32
Billy had planned the whole thing as soon as the bad dreams started. In the dreams, he saw that only Artie could save him, literally saw the letters of Artie’s name hanging in front of him, and him, Billy, reaching out for them and needing to get with Artie as soon as he could. Sometimes the letters were made of ice and they melted and dripped away when he touched them. Sometimes he was at home in Brooklyn and his mother told him not to write the letters on the wall.
In Florida he learned that kids who were good sometimes got a few days out of the institution. First you got yourself out of the hospital section, which was what they called it, though it was really a prison ward with locked doors. After that you had a chance. You did well in your therapy. You took your meds if you were on anything. You aced your classes. You didn’t try running away. You showed up for sports and looked enthusiastic and didn’t headbutt the other kids.
Compared to the crazies and losers who made up most of the population, it was easy for Billy. He became a star. He knew that most of the others were poor and dumb. Ninety percent of them were from economically deprived backgrounds, as they called it, which made Billy laugh because most of them were just stupid fuck-ups.
Billy knew he was smart. He knew how to talk to grownups. The doctors and teachers liked him. They could talk to him. They gave him books, which he read. He got invited to eat with some of the younger teachers, him and one or two other boys, th
e ones who didn’t eat like pigs.
The honchos who ran the place looked at him as a possible success story. Told him how one of the kids had actually gone to Princeton. He told them he’d like to go to Princeton. He told them he knew that Albert Einstein had taught at Princeton and that F. Scott Fitzgerald had attended Princeton and he, Billy, had read The Great Gatsby. Also, there was that movie with Russell Crowe about the guy at Princeton who could see numbers or something.
The grown-ups made Billy a pet because, as he knew, there wasn’t a whole lot of choice. What other boy could they shoot the shit with about what was on the news? What other kid told them he hated violent video games, and preferred reading books and newspapers? It made them feel successful, the way he improved, got better, took things in.
Billy also discovered he had a talent for mimicry and he made the other kids laugh by imitating the teachers. He steered a skillful course through the institution.
After a while, he realized the same talent he used to mimic teachers could be used to imitate anyone. He watched TV shows about nice families and normal people; most of the TV shows they were allowed were about more or less happy families. Billy saw he could turn himself into a perfect specimen. It didn’t matter what you felt; it was how you acted. Wasn’t it? It seemed to him that it was all that mattered because that was how people judged you.
Billy told himself he was working his passage home. He’d read the phrase somewhere in a novel about sailors, some sailor who got stuck in a foreign place and had to take a job on a lousy ship to work his passage home.
Sitting in the diner on Staten Island, leaning forward in the red booth, Billy told me all of this, his hands clasped together lightly on the edge of the table.
It wasn’t that he felt he got a raw deal in Florida; he just didn’t want to be there. Wanting something was what mattered. Why should he be there if he didn’t want to be? So he worked and got good grades and behaved and planned for the time he could get away.
To pass the days, when he wasn’t in class or reading or watching the TV shows, or playing baseball – he was developing a good arm – he liked the old classic movies, westerns like High Noon, or war movies like Bridge On the River Kwai where there were really interesting feats and the good guys foiled the enemy. He looked at DVDs of old movies, like The Great Escape.
He loved the escape stuff, men in jails who tunneled out with spoons or rolled under barbed wire and made it safe. He knew it was make-believe. Billy knew that. You didn’t escape like that.
There was one doctor he got really close to. Andy Swiller, the young guy I’d met, was from Brooklyn; like Billy, he was a Yankees fan. Billy let Swiller think he was special for him. There was another doctor, too, who was much more gullible than Swiller and after two years and four months, he recommended Billy be allowed to go home for a few days. Swiller was reluctant, but Billy got him to agree.
Usually they let the kids out for a few days but because Billy lived so far away they gave him two weeks. He fixed it so that I would pick him up instead of his mother. Billy had heard about the trip to London from Johnny, who would tell you anything because he was an idiot. Billy knew Genia wouldn’t come pick him up a few days before a trip so he asked for me to come. Can Artie come? All he had to do was ask.
When he heard about the bombings in London, part of him hoped his parents were dead. If they were dead, it meant he could be with me. We could be together all the time, Billy said.
“What about Luda? What did you mean you lied?” I said again and again, but it was as if he didn’t hear me, just kept talking, determined to finish his story in a certain order.
“Then what about the old man,” I said. “What about your grandfather? I thought you were friendly with John Sr.”
“Yeah,” Billy said. “When I was little, he was OK, I liked him.”
“And after?”
“After, when I knew Johnny wasn’t my real father and the old man wasn’t my grandpa, it was different. Weird, it was grandpa’s idea in the first place for me to go home on vacation. He put it in my head. I didn’t trust him anymore, and he stopped liking me because I wasn’t really his own grandkid,” Billy said. “He didn’t like me anymore. I could tell.”
Billy repeated himself, outlining carefully what he had done. The calm boy sitting opposite me in a diner on Staten Island was filled up with rage. It was invisible. Billy could hide his emotions, but I knew. He glanced at the phone, then at me. Waited for me to go call someone. Call a cop. Or Florida. Get rid of him. I sat where I was.
“Luda?”
“Yeah. I lied to you. I’m sorry,” said Billy. “Before you got home yesterday – I think you said you were over at your friend’s, Mr Lippert’s – I called Luda. They just got back from East Hampton. I asked her to meet me. I did that, I told her she was in trouble with the police, I already told you that part. I knew what would make her come out and meet me.”
“How did you know?”
He picked up half an onion ring that remained on his plate and examined it, then put it back.
“I knew from my mom that people from Russia are scared of the cops, so I told Luda the cops would be looking for her because she was illegal.”
“Was that why she kept asking for me?” I said, watching the two fat guys pay their check and waddle out of the diner.
“Maybe she thought you could protect her,” Billy said. “Right from Wednesday morning when we went to Tolya’s house, she wanted to be around you.”
“What about the dolls?”
“I wanted to warn her.”
“About what?”
“About what could happen to her if she got caught,” Billy said.
“Go on.”
“I took the baby dolls from the toy store, I thought it would be a kind of like good warning. I heard Mr Lippert talk about the little girl that was killed in Jersey, and that she had her doll with her and they cut off the doll’s foot, which gave me the idea.”
“You listened in on the phone?”
“I don’t remember. Maybe you mentioned it or something.”
“You got the dolls out of the toy store that night? Wednesday night?”
“Yeah. We were having such a good time at the ball game that day, you and me, and then we had to go to Luda’s stupid party. It was easy just to take some of those dolls. Things aren’t that hard, Artie, if you give them like some thought. Right? I mean it’s sort of what they teach us at school. Just think things through. I put them in a shopping bag and left the store, and I sort of expected an alarm to go off because they had those store tags, but nothing happened,” Billy said. “I had this idea I could scare Luda with them, you know?”
“You were going to show her a doll with its foot cut off?”
“I wasn’t sure. Something like that. I didn’t have time. I got a little nervous.”
In Chinatown, Billy found a warehouse with the door unlocked. He put the dolls into the fridge. Pretty easy stuff, he said. But after that, he couldn’t get Luda to come see, which was frustrating – that was the word from his vocabulary book. He made a call to the cops using a fake Russian accent. He found Sonny Lippert’s number on my desk. He called the local precinct. It was all kind of fun, he said. Like a puzzle.
But afterwards, he started worrying, mostly about the fat guy from Brooklyn – he meant Stan Shank – who was following him.
“What were you going to do with Luda?”
Billy looked up, his blue eyes soft now, and said, “I wasn’t going to hurt Luda or anything, I didn’t want to hurt her, you know, I just wanted her to go away. I need to smoke,” he added. “Can we go outside, please?”
I put some money on the table, and followed him into the parking lot.
“Do you want to call someone?” said Billy for the third time, voice not threatening or challenging, just wondering what I would do.
“Why don’t you finish your story?”
“I think I’d like to go back to the house with you, Artie, if that would
be OK,” Billy said, digging in his pocket for a cigarette, and not finding one.
I passed him a pack I had, he extracted a cigarette, lit up and handed the pack back. I took one.
“I was kind of hurt when you stole my phone, you know, Artie, it was like you didn’t trust me, or whatever,” said Billy. “I’m OK with that now.”
I inhaled as much nicotine as I could, sucking the drug deep in my lungs because I figured it would calm me down. I felt sick. From the moment Billy knew he could get away from the facility in Florida, he had worked on his plan.
Maybe the plan went wrong when Billy told his grandfather he was going to New York. Maybe the old man told his friend Stan Shank. Maybe Vera Gorbachev, whose stepson Frank Laporello was married to Debbie, Shank’s daughter, was involved. Gorbachev had worked on Rhonda Fisher’s guilt so she asked Sonny Lippert to send me over there. I had been chasing my own tail. It scared me, the whole thing, how one favor, Sonny asking me to visit Vera, led to so much horror. A little thing. The kind of thing you did every day. What if I’d never gone at all?
“I’m sleepy,” Billy said now. “Can we just go back to the house a while? I’d like to take a nap, Artie.” He tossed his cigarette out onto the ground of the parking lot.
“Where is Luda?”
“I don’t know,” Billy said. “Honest. I don’t know. I just asked her to come and meet me, and she said OK, and I said where to go, I told her how to take a taxi and what to tell them, and then I didn’t see her. She didn’t show up.”
“Didn’t you think she could get lost? Or scared? Or something bad could happen?”
Billy got in the car, put his head back against the seat and closed his eyes. He didn’t wait to see if I got out of the car to use a phone. He seemed to trust me. I got in.
Fresh Kills Page 28
