Disturbed Earth

by Reggie Nadelson

  Johnny dialed again and passed the phone to me. There was no service in the area, the robot on the other end said. No service.

  I said to Johnny, "You stayed here last night?"

  "Yeah. Hey, Art, dude, you look terrible. Listen, I got a good joke for you."

  Johnny's idea of cheering you up was a joke, so I grinned and said, "Go on."

  "So, did you hear the one about the dyslexic rabbi who stubbed his toe and yelled YO!"

  I tried smiling and gave him back his phone.

  I didn't want to make Johnny crazy; I had no evidence the clothes by the beach were Billy's. I knew I worried too much about Billy, but I liked him and I liked that he liked me. It made me less lonely, especially with Lily gone and Beth with her. I still talked to Beth, the little girl I'd helped Lily adopt, but with the two of them in London, it was never the same. After they left, I began seeing more of Billy; I tried to replace Beth with Billy. Sometimes I felt like a middle-aged adolescent, unmarried, no kids, still looking for escape routes. Billy gave me a sense I could care for a child, that I was a grown-up, a man like—I was going to say a man like my father—but he was never really a grown-up either.

  I examined the photograph and the dark blue baseball jacket in it.

  "You OK, Artie?"

  "I'm fine, Johnny. I'm OK. Can I have this picture of Billy? I'd like to keep it."

  "Sure. I'll make myself a copy. He's a good kid, isn't he, Artie? You think he's a good kid?"

  "Sure. Sure I do."

  "It's just like Gen sometimes goes nuts because he's off in his own world, and I tell her, listen, he's a kid, this fishing thing matters, and just because he doesn't like it when she slobbers all over him, I say, come on, Gen, he wants to be a big boy, like macho, like the boys on the street. Right? Let him be. I mean she has to let go."

  "Sure."

  "So give Gen a call later if you want. Come out and eat with us at home tomorrow. Bring a nice girl. You have someone? You always got some good-looking girl, right?" he stuttered. "I mean no one's as nice as Lily, but, you know."

  "Yeah, I know."

  "You want to do me one more'little favor?" he said, "I mean, only if you have time. I mean I'm like so overwhelmed with it being Saturday, and three guys away for the weekend and one more says he has the fucking flu."

  "What?"

  He picked up the second plastic bag from the floor.

  "What is it?"

  "Listen, you're going home to the city from here? So it would be like only five minutes out of your way to drop this at my mother's house. You remember, right? You met her at Billy's christening, right? At his communion, no, you weren't there, were you, but you'll like her, Artie, swear to God and you only have to drop the bag. She's part Polack, anyhow, I mean that's like Russian, right? Her name is Tina. You can call her Tina, it's OK, you don't have to say Mrs. Farone, OK?"

  He held out a piece of paper with an address.

  I wasn't crazy about the idea, but Johnny begged and I took the bag and the address and Johnny got out of the car, and before he closed the door said, "Get back to the city safe, Artie."

  I pulled away from the lot and turned the car around, and in the rear view I saw Johnny watching me go, waving and smiling.

  The city. It still surprised me the way people in the other boroughs, Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island, here in Brooklyn, the vast colonies that surrounded Manhattan and with it made up New York City, still referred to it as "the city." "I'm going into the city," they'd say, meaning Manhattan. It was a foreign country. I knew people in Brooklyn who never ventured over the bridge, immigrants who clung to the coast, terrified of the noise, the crowds, the sheer power. I met one old guy over in Red Hook who, last time he'd been to Manhattan, it was VE Day and he had been a GI in Europe and he went to Times Square. And that was it. He lived a whole life in Brooklyn looking at the Manhattan skyline and never got closer and said to me, what for? What should I go there for?

  All the concrete and money and people packed onto a thirteen-mile slice of land, it scared people. Connected to the outside world only by tunnels and bridges, Manhattan was vulnerable to terrorists and traffic jams and self-importance. It was the center of the world; this was what we believed, even that winter when things were pretty grim. Once, on our way to New Jersey for some fishing, as we drove through the Holland Tunnel, Billy Farone had asked me, "What if the tunnel breaks? What if the river comes through? Artie? What?" But he had seen too many disaster movies.

  Checking the map on the seat next to me, I drove towards Johnny's mother's place. Coming into Brooklyn was like entering a foreign country, it was that big and unknowable, the way it sprawled south-east from the tip of Manhattan down to the Atlantic Ocean. Across the bridges, through the tunnel, were two and a half million people, most in low lying buildings, the sublime old brownstones, the chic lofts, the cheap tenements, the classic two-family houses.

  The sections of Brooklyn nearest Manhattan, Brooklyn Heights, Williamsburg, and DUMBO, where the artists had gone and people ate a hundred bucks' worth of sushi for dinner, was where the money went. The endless interior, classic Brooklyn—Flatbush, Bensonhurst, Sunset Park—was jammed with immigrants and their descendants, Italian, Irish, Jewish, Asian, South American, Russian, black. It went on forever, people vying for space, for religion, a foothold on the ladder up.

  The boroughs, but especially Brooklyn, always spread towards water, from the Hudson River, the East River, down to the Atlantic Ocean. The seacoast of New York. Ten miles from Manhattan. Easy to remember here on the coast that the city was an archipelago, a series of islands and inlets, beaches and marshes, rivers, basins, derelict shipyards, wetlands where birds congregated, Jamaica Bay where the planes came in low like big water birds.

  I drove through Sheepshead Bay and looked at the fishing boats and thought about Billy. He was upstate with his pal. Johnny might be stupid about his kid but he loved him and he said he was upstate, so it was OK.

  Out on the dock a solitary fisherman sold fish from a bucket and the customers were lined up, some waiting, some stuffing fish in waxed paper into their bags or carts and lugging it away.

  The neighborhood had changed. For years, except for the fishing, it had been run down, with shabby houses in yards overgrown with weeds. Some Russians had moved in from Brighton Beach. Chinese had come out from Sunset Park. Real estate prices went up, pushed by the boom that spread from Manhattan.

  Along the inlet were the restaurants: Farone's, El Greco, the Sahara. Lundy's, the huge fish place, had reopened, and there was Baku, a new Russian joint in pale fake stone with silver doors. You could get eel salad with teriyaki sauce and listen to Russian rock.

  I passed a couple of old age homes—a lot of old people got warehoused out here in Brooklyn—and a motel without any sign; it was the original hot sheet motel, someone told me, where you could still get rooms by the hour. A massive sewage treatment plant loomed ahead of me, a cathedral of shit with a sign that read "Building a Better Brooklyn."

  The further I drove, the quieter it got; the villages here that seemed to turn in on themselves were set apart, insular and mostly white. There were no subways and only a few bus lines; most people drove their own cars. Much of the area had been made of landfill.

  A lot of the area had been marshland until the fifties and sixties. When new buildings went up in Manhattan, the land was dumped on the Brooklyn coast and new villages were made. Dirt roads were paved. I made the trip warily to Gerritsen Beach. I loved the ocean and the smell of the air, but I had never liked it here. There was too much fear.

  4

  American flags hung from every door in Gerritsen Beach where Johnny Farone's mother lived. It was ten minutes along the coast from Sheesphead Bay, a backwater that ended abruptly at Marine Park where Indians played cricket in the summer.

  From the small cramped houses that were crowded together, flags hung, sometimes two or three of them, from every door. Ira, Hazel, Frank, Noel, Lester, Hyman, Ivan, the street
s had first names; maybe the narrow streets had been named for people who had settled when there were only dirt roads.

  At some houses, little flags on sticks were also stuck in cement planters, the plants dead and crusted with dirty snow. At others a large black flag with the initials POW MIA flapped beside the stars and stripes. The houses were layered over as if every new owner had aspired to something a little better; aluminum siding, plastic tile, fake fieldstone, fake brick, real brick, they had been fixed and altered and remade so the small houses of Brooklyn's coastal communities looked ripe for an archaeological dig. In one yard, dead petunias covered in dirty snow were crammed in a decorative cement donkey cart. On a fence a piece of cardboard, battered by the weather, proclaimed "It's a Boy!" with the baby's name and weight and two blue balloons shriveled like used condoms.

  It was desolate on the winter afternoon and silent. A man in an orange down vest spreading salt on his front walk watched me wordlessly as I drove by. There were not a lot of red Caddys here; there were never any strangers. The houses looked eyeless, shut up, shut in.

  Mrs. Farone's house had a red brick facade in front and white aluminum siding around the back, and there were two plaster cherubs near the three steps that led up to her porch, where there was a wrought iron bench and a potted plastic dahlia. I leaned on the bell. I heard the footsteps and the door opened.

  The minute I saw Johnny Farone's mother, I disliked her. It was worse than that. One look and I wanted to turn and leave. I'd been a cop for more than twenty years. I've met a lot of creeps, sat with people who should have been locked up and never would be, and some who should have had a needle stuck in their arm, but I'd never met anyone I disliked so much and I didn't know why. The smell, maybe, or the large eyes that shifted away from my face and into the middle distance, looking for something, or someone. She wore black leggings and a blue sweatshirt with NYFD across the front, probably one of those 9/11 fire department souvenirs; around her neck was a diamond cross.

  An aura of malice, like a silky scarf, fluttered around her. It wasn't just her brusque manner or the way she talked. I figured she wasn't expecting me, she wanted Johnny to come and see her and she was pissed off it was me and I was OK with that, but it was something else. I couldn't pin it down.

  I had been expecting an old Italian woman, feet in backless scuffs, pictures of bleedings saints on the wall and tomato sauce in a pot on the stove. Mrs. Farone—I couldn't think of her as Tina—was a good-looking woman. She'd had some work done, face lift, something like that, so she looked more like Johnny's sister than his mother. The eye-lids were very large and smooth and heavily made-up, the purple shadow thick as chalk. There wasn't much expression in her face; the lines were gone; the smile, when it appeared which wasn't often, was rigid.

  Grudgingly, she let me into the house, which was low and dark and smelled of vanilla, probably cheap candles. I only went in because it was freezing out, and I wanted to ask her about Billy and how he was. Rationally I knew he was fine, but it was still on my mind.

  "What is it?" Mrs. Farone's voice could have shattered Coke bottles as she looked at me impatiently. We were in the living room—she called it a parlor—and I held out the bag Johnny had given me. She glanced inside then put it on the wrought iron coffee table.

  "You've seen Billy recently?" I asked as casually as I could.

  "What's it your business?" she said.

  "I like Billy," I said. "I'm his godfather. I think you know that."

  "So ask his mother." She crossed her legs and closed her face.

  "I'm asking you."

  "You're the cop, aren't you? You're the relative who's a cop. You're related to the mother."

  "Genia's my cousin," I said.

  Mrs. Farone delivered the party line, what a good boy he was, how he went to church and visited his grandmother regularly and how except for Genia, she hinted, it would have been fine. She showed me a picture of Billy dressed as an angel for a Christmas pageant. I reached for the picture and saw she wanted to stop me but didn't.

  "You made the costume for him? It's nice. It looks good," I said.

  "Yeah, I did." She smoothed her hair, fixed her collar; she preened. She was a woman who needed attention.

  "That's a nice sweater."

  "Thank you," she said coldly.

  "I take Billy fishing sometimes," I said.

  "I know. He talks about fishing. He talks about you. All the time it's fishing. I tell Johnny, he needs friends his own age."

  Before she could say anything else, the phone rang from the kitchen and she broke off to answer it, trailing that smell of vanilla behind her, so I realized it was her skin not the candles. I waited, listening to her on the phone, hearing her voice but not the words.

  After a few minutes, she reappeared,

  "Go on with what you were saying," I said.

  "I forgot." She was sullen. "Yeah, so thanks for bringing me the cookies." She gestured at the bag Johnny had sent. "I have to go out." She held open the door impatiently.

  I got up and zipped my jacket, went out, got into the car and looked at the map. A few minutes later, Mrs. Farone's door opened and she came out, carrying a wire shopping cart down her front steps. She had fixed herself up for the expedition and she was wearing tight jeans and a short, padded pink ski jacket and big earrings and high-heeled boots. She was smoking and she saw me. She saw me watching her, but she didn't wave or smile or call out. She just turned her head in the other direction and walked away.

  The smell of her vanilla skin stayed in my nostrils as I turned the car around and headed to Brighton Beach. Sonny Lippert wanted me near the phone but I had my cell with me and I still thought he was crazy, obsessed with the blood-soaked clothes. There was no body, no one had called in a missing kid.

  Saturday afternoon. I drove down Brighton Beach Avenue. An old woman in a headscarf lugged a suitcase across the street; an elderly man watched her, suspicious, food in his beard as he gnawed a knish; two women, draped in cheesy furs that looked like rat pelts, linked arms and crossed the street, both yapping into their cell phones at the same time.

  Up and down the avenue, people jammed together under the overhead platform where the elevated train ran, shopped and yakked and hung out in front of stores and restaurants, smoking and talking; the insistent voices carried through the afternoon.

  I figured I'd get some sturgeon at one of the food stores. The Russian behind the counter looked at me with hostility and I asked again for a half pound of sturgeon and half of Nova. I smiled at her, but anger was the air she breathed. It was all she knew. For her, anger was more useful than despair, and both better than the paranoia she had probably learned in Russia. Like my cousin Genia's. Gen guarded herself and her husband and child and her business even from me.

  The bag of smoked fish in my hand, I left the store and walked a little, past the Odessa, where a bouncer in thick black leathers eyed me briefly, past more food stores crammed with food: black breads the shape of footballs, chubs with glistening gold skins and fish eyes, blue cans of caviar. The food, the supermarkets, the banks, the clothing stores, all Russian.

  I crossed the street and went up on the boardwalk. I leaned on the railing. On the ocean at the edge of the flat, slate colored surface of the water, lights from a ship blinked. Immigrants had once come on those ships; they had made a break, willing to leave everything they knew for a foreign place, for a better life, or for streets lined with gold. Now people came in airplanes and called home on their cell phones. The break was never sharp; they clung to the place they'd come from.

  From the Olympia Cafe a few yards down the boardwalk, I could hear Russian music. A crooner with a baritone that oozed sentimentally into the cold afternoon was warming up. Already people were drinking. They were laughing and singing and drinking, and none of them had anything to do with the blood-soaked clothes a mile away down the beach. I thought about getting a drink at one of the cafes but it wasn't a good idea, me hanging out in Brighton Beach.r />
  Nothing much had changed since I'd been here a few years earlier except a complex of fancy apartment buildings with water views had gone up. As far as I knew the big time hoods had moved up and out. Long Island. The city. New Jersey. St. Tropez. They left their parents, the older generation, tucked away in gated communities by the beach.

  It was as Russian as ever, as much a weird slice out of the former Soviet Union as it had been when I first came here. More. It had become a kind of theme park with stuff in the shops—dresses with glitter, big furs, fancy china—you probably couldn't even find in Moscow anymore. A lot of the people were old. Their kids have moved on, out into America.

  I was OK now, being here. For years, I'd kept my distance. I never went to Brighton Beach unless I had to on a case and then I hated it. And I kept the hate active, I fired it up, I laughed secretly at the provincial manners, at the women with their bleached blonde big hair, at their stone washed jeans, at how they resembled hookers. I could stoke up a line in sarcasm about them, and about their men and about their lousy neighborhood. Worse, I nursed it.

  At first, when I got to New York, I worked on my English; I got rid of my accent and learned to talk like a New Yorker. Hating the Russians ate me up for years and then, after a while, I tried to let it go. I met Tolya Sverdloff. I went to Moscow on a case and fell in love with Svetlana, Tolya's cousin. Then Svetlana was blown up by a car bomb.

  But the past finally faded. There was no one left in Russia I cared about. As soon as I let it go, I felt better; I even spoke the language with pleasure. I loved its sounds that insinuated themselves back into my being. Sometimes I read Russian to keep it fresh; sometimes, though I could only admit it to Tolya, I enjoyed it. They could write, those bastards; they could write novels like nobody else, poetry, too; I mean Pushkin wasn't chopped liver.

  I turned onto Coney Island Avenue and pulled up at Batumi Books next door to the Hello, Gorgeous Beauty Salon. As soon as he saw me, my friend Dubi Petrovsky ran from behind the counter waving a book.