Disturbed Earth

by Reggie Nadelson

  The house in Brighton Beach where she had lived with her old man and her daughter had a sagging couch on the porch and a rusted bicycle in the front yard. Inside, in the dark brown living room, was a stained yellow sofa where I sat and listened to her father's story of his triumphant days in the Red Army. The war medals that hung on his bony chest in rows clanked when he walked or got up to pour me some vodka.

  Once Elena, who was a pale girl who refused to learn English, played a melancholy tune on her flute, Ravel, something like that. I ate apple cake and fled.

  Elena was the product of an early marriage that had lasted a couple of years. The husband, Genia said, was a drunk. She left him behind in Russia, she told me. Johnny had adopted Ellie.

  The old man was dead now. Elena, who turned out to be a musical prodigy, had grown up beautiful. She had a scholarship to Juilliard. And Genia was married to Johnny Farone with an eleven-year-old named Billy who liked fishing and me.

  Johnny got up to greet a guest. Genia said to me in Russian, "Johnny doesn't know the world, you see? Johnny knows about pasta. Veal. He understands mushrooms. He can pick a good Super Tuscan, OK? We have a nice time in Italy in the summer. That's what he knows about, Artemy. He's wonderful with the restaurant, he is in Zagat now, but that's it. You understand me?" She picked up a cashew from a bowl on the bar and ate it and looked at her long, manicured nails. "Johnny's nervous because of the Luca girl," she added. "But it's nothing to do with us."

  "What's going on between you and Johnny? He says he sleeps in his office."

  "When it's late," she said. "Everything is fine."

  "So, nothing. Not my business, right? None of my fucking cop business. So what are you reading, Gen?" I knew she was a passionate reader. I tried to warm her up talking books because Genia was from a generation who read a lot, because they loved books, because there was nothing else to do.

  "Bulgakov," she said. "I'm re-reading. Once in a while, I like mysteries, for my English."

  "You ever go over to see Dubi Petrovsky?"

  "I don't like him."

  "How come?"

  "He asks too many questions, how do you feel about the USSR, how do you regard America? And he has a big mouth," she said. "Look, please, don't ask Johnny stuff, Artemy," she said. "If you need to know something, something about the neighborhood, something about my son, ask me. Johnny's too easy. He talks too much nonsense. He's too willing. He loves you. He thinks he owes you."

  "What for?"

  She smiled slightly. "For introducing us, you know? He admires you, too. Johnny gets his ideas about life and cops out of the movies and the TV. He gets his movies mixed up, too, so one day it's the mob, he thinks the people around here are from The Godfather, the next day he's in land of Tom Clancy. Johnny is an American. After 9/11, he tells me, Gen, I have to enlist. I say to him, 'What as?'"

  "Did he say?"

  She shrugged. "The Marines, God help me. He's forty-three years old but he's like a child. He talks too easy," she said. "Especially out here," she added and nodded her head at the room. "He'll get us in trouble."

  "What kind of trouble?"

  Genia signaled the bartender, who brought her a vodka martini; she drank it in two gulps.

  "Why do you ask these things? You know what it's like out here."

  "So tell me about this family where Billy is staying over."

  She shrugged. "How many times? I told you. Nice people. Rich and nice. Billy's at school with the kid. Real private school. Fancy, you know? Not just Catholic school. I took him out of Catholic school after this business of priests. Sick dirty men," she said. "Johnny wanted Catholic school, I said no. Sometimes I begin to feel like at home, things coming apart, this great American empire of power is all corrupted, you know, but I don't say so to Johnny or his family, I just take care of my boy and wait."

  "Wait for what?"

  "To know if we have to run again."

  I took her hand. "You won't have to run."

  "You believe too much," she said.

  "Gen? Listen, anything else you can think of about May Luca, the little girl, anything you heard in the street or the store or the beauty salon, that kind of thing?"

  "She's dead."

  "You know that?"

  "They're always dead. They always are. They never find them, not the girls."

  No matter how much money and security Johnny provided, Genia's world remained full of bad things, and she worked constantly to defend her family. Her terror, I saw now, was always there, just beneath the surface. I put my arm around her. "You told the cops?"

  "Don't be stupid, Artemy, we don't talk to policemen here, you know that."

  "Hello, Genia," a voice said from behind us.

  Suddenly Genia's face lit up, the tension in the tightly wrapped skin eased and she looked beautiful. We both turned around. The handsome man who had appeared plucked her hand off the bar and bent over it as if to kiss it and smiled with just enough irony to make the gesture charming.

  "Detective," he said and held out his hand to me.

  "Elem Pavelovich, how are you?" Genia said and flushed. "Do you know each other?"

  I shook his hand and then stood and watched him and Genia talking together, their heads almost touching.

  I knew Elem Zeitsev. His old man, a big time hood, was dead now. The oldest son, Elem was about fifty, good looking, quiet, smart.

  He was a lawyer. In the nineties, he got rid of his father's businesses and made his own money and made himself legit. I liked him; I liked him even though he had asked me once if he resembled JFK, or maybe because of it. The vanity was somehow charming.

  "Just like JFK's hair," I'd said.

  Before he went back to his table, Zeitsev shook my hand again, kissed Genia again, and said, genially, "Tell your husband the duck with the figs is from out of this world."

  Genia touched her lips and turned to me.

  "It's good for us Elem comes so often. He comes all the way out from the city," she said, as if to make an excuse for talking to Zeitsev.

  "What do you mean?"

  She said, "Nothing. It's good for business, that's all."

  I kissed her cheek. "Is Ellie alright?"

  "She's great. You'll come to her next recital?"

  "Sure."

  "How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice." Johnny guffawed at his own bad joke as he came out of the kitchen with a platter of stuffed clams, but I already had my jacket on. He looked disappointed.

  "Johnny, I ate a huge dinner."

  "You'll come again soon?" he said. "And you won't forget the thing we talked about?"

  I nodded. Genia was watching me.

  "What thing?" she said.

  "A surprise, hon," Johnny said quickly.

  I yawned. I figured I'd go by Maxie's even though I was exhausted.

  "You're going home, now?" she asked me eagerly. "You're going back to the city?"

  "You mean you want to get rid of me?" I smiled, but I added, "Is that it, Genushka, you mean back to the city where I belong?"

  "Yes," she said and walked to the door with me. "Yes. Where you belong."

  13

  They found May Luca's body later that night. Outside her house, the flowers piled up, the shrine grew until it reached halfway down the street. The memorializing escalated as soon as her death appeared on the news. As if the praying helped, as if there was a God who heard. She was ten and she was dead. I sat in my car and watched.

  Silently, people tip-toed up to the front gate of the house and placed cellophane cones of flowers, teddy bears, rosaries, candles, notes; children brought pictures of May they'd drawn with crayons; in one she was an angel in the sky. An elderly woman placed a photograph of the girl and a votive candle on the ground.

  It was late Saturday, but somehow people knew and they gathered and the crowd grew. Down the dark block were lines of people, many of them children, all with candles, like a crusade. Reporters hovered around the edge of the crowd. Vans from local TV
stations appeared. The place was lit up with their lights. You could hear the buzz of the reporters as they interviewed people on the sidewalk. A police chief with a fancy uniform gave a short speech about the beautiful little girl and the tragedy and how he had committed himself to justice. It was always like this now. Any tragedy, the word got out fast and people moved in with their tributes. I hated it. It reminded me of Russians who gathered at cemeteries and in groups with their pictures of dead relatives and shitty red carnations and the apparatchiks who showed up to get in on the grief.

  This morning she'd been alive, now she was dead. I had never seen May alive. She had slipped through our fingers. I'd almost never been on a case that ended so fast, and I hated the fact that part of me was relieved it was over. I had never completely let go of the idea that the clothes by the beach were Billy Farone's even when it didn't make sense. I had been like a man grabbed by some crazy fear and it had made me stupid. Now a little girl was dead.

  I went to the Luca place from Farone's. I wanted to see if I could talk to the family, if I could get in. As soon as I got there I knew something bad had happened. I got out of the car and showed one of the uniforms my badge. She was dead, he said.

  They found her naked earlier that night, he said. Naked, he said it again and again as if the fact was more offensive than her death. Her little naked ten-year-old body, still a child, he said, still a little girl, dumped on one of the fishing boats over by Gerritsen Beach, the boat rocking in the marina, the wind blowing it around. Just a baby, he said. He added some thoughts about sharing the grief and finding closure; the TV language of mourning had infected even this tough looking cop with the biceps of a body builder. I recognized him from the beach earlier that morning.

  Dumped on one of the fishing boats, he said, working up a fury so his steroidal face turned purple. An hour after they found her, they spotted the creep who did it to her. He was cleaning the blood off himself with some rags. Before they could get to him, he ran. The cops fired warning shots, then aimed at him. He fell into the water. No one knew why he did it, but local people recognized him as a crack-head who hung around, a nickel and dime thief. It happened too fast. The murder weapon was a carving knife the creep stole from a deli.

  The girl? The cop's voice quivered. She had been grabbed in her own yard; ten hours later, she was dead and so was her killer, and we'd let it all slip away. He stared down at a pink plush teddy bear on the pavement.

  "Which boat?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "The name. What was the name of the boat they found her on?"

  "Yeah, Queen something, Queen of Brooklyn, no, that's not right. Something like that."

  "Queen of the Bay"

  "Right," he said. "Yeah."

  It was the boat I had planned to take Billy on the summer before, the boat we missed. Irrationally, I was glad now that we had missed it.

  For a while, I stood outside the house with the crowd of mourners, event freaks, sightseers who had heard about May Luca. With the cars and flashing lights, the area around the Luca house was lit up like the middle of the day.

  Sonny Lippert emerged after a while and saw me and gestured aimlessly and opened and closed his hands, as if to hold something he couldn't grasp. His face was riddled with grief.

  "Go home, Artie. I don't need you here, she's dead. They got the creep." He was furious. "Three hours ago I was drunk at home and now I'm here trying to explain to a mother why her little girl is dead with a hole in her heart from a knife someone once used to slice pastrami for sandwiches."

  I dragged him aside, dogged him until he came to the edge of the street, away from the crowd.

  "What happened?"

  "He snatched her, he killed her, we shot him, Maybe he wanted us to shoot. I don't know. He was just a fucking crack-head."

  "Where's the weapon?"

  "We found it on him. It matched the marks on the girl."

  "Nobody noticed she was gone?"

  He said, "Jesus, we've been through this. The mother said she went to her grandmother alone all the time. It's a safe neighborhood, she said."

  "The clothes at the beach?"

  "We're waiting," he said. "We're waiting for the match. We described them to the parents. The T-shirt even had part of a label the mother sewed in for May when she went to camp. It's just a technicality now. It's over. Go home, man, get some sleep. Get laid."

  I knew he was holding out on me, and I said, "There's something else."

  Lippert took a plastic bag out of his pocket, opened it and handed me a crumpled piece of paper towel.

  "What?"

  He said, "They found a fucking ransom note, OK? The creep who killed her left a note in the backyard. Some crude thing, a piece of paper towel. He wrote it with one of her crayons. Here."

  I looked at it. The writing was in crude block letters: GIMME TEN THOUSAND BUX FOR YOUR KID.

  "Ten grand," Lippert said. "That was his idea of a big payday. It was for nothing, man. Nothing. We could have had her. But the piece of paper blew across the yard and got stuck under a garbage can. No one saw it until she was dead. Like that. Random. Shitty. Nothing. Like this miserable city, you know. We never figure it out in time. We never catch the hijackers. We never get anything right. The fucking feds don't give us a cent for security; all they do is use the Trade Center for propaganda. I was down in D.C. there and they were all talking about 9/11 like it belonged to them. But they cut my budget. I don't even have enough cops to save a little kid like May Luca."

  He made a move for his car, followed by a cop, a small woman in uniform. He handed her the plastic bag with the note.

  "Just see it gets to the station house before any asshole from the media sees it. I don't want them saying we missed some shit or other, you know?"

  The cop nodded and moved off.

  I said, "Call me when they get something final on the clothes, will you?"

  "Sure," he said. "Whenever. What difference does it make now? I told you, the T-shirt had a label with a letter from the girl's name."

  I waited until Sonny Lippert left. I waited until the crowds thinned out. I sat in my car and watched and waited and then I showed my badge to the uniformed cop outside the door and he said, "Let her be, OK? Let the parents alone tonight, will you?"

  The cop looked around. "Listen, come early in the morning. Come tomorrow. I'll see if I can get you let in. Except it doesn't matter now what we do, does it?" he said, and I walked away, my feet crunching on the cellophane wrapping that held a bunch of shriveled pink carnations.

  14

  I should have gone to Maxie's right away. I should have picked up a pizza, or gone by and eaten the steak or humble pie or whatever the hell she wanted me to eat.

  My head was swimming. May Luca was dead, the case was closed. May had been killed by a local crack-head. It was random; it had no meaning. May Luca had been dragged out of her yard and now she was dead. The baseball jacket was hers. The two bit crack-head who killed her had dumped the clothes, half buried, less than a mile away. That was it, I thought.

  Genia was right. I didn't belong here. Unless I had business, there was nothing for me except grief along this coastal strip of Brooklyn.

  It was after midnight. I got coffee from a deli and drank it black. My adrenalin was pumping. Almost fourteen hours since I'd met Sonny Lippert near the beach. I called Maxie to see if I could persuade her to let me stop by, but there was no answer. She had gone out. Or she was asleep. Or screening her calls and not answering because she was mad at me. Maybe I should have gone by anyhow, maybe I should have just gone and waited for her or used the key she gave me.

  I didn't, though. I called Tolya and left a message that I was coming back to the city. I'd hang out with him in some Soho restaurant and drink wine that went for three hundred bucks. I'd get mindless drunk. I'd have stupid fun with the kind of women Tolya always had around him. Maybe I'd sleep better afterwards.

  Just one stop, I thought to myself. One more stop befor
e I went back to the city.

  It was as if she knew I was coming. Ivana Galitzine was waiting on the porch of the house off Brighton 8th Street, a small, ramshackle house with layers of gray masonry, plastic shingle, fake red brick. The porch was enclosed with glass louvers; some of the slats were missing. Strips of damp wood were nailed over the holes.

  The lights were on and I could see her sitting on the porch, looking out. Smoking a cigarette, she was framed in the window, staring, waiting, for someone? For me?

  Before I could change my mind, she saw me and bolted out of the house and jogged towards the car. I slammed on the brakes. I reached over and unlocked the door and she got in.

  Ivana wore a pair of tight black jeans and a short, thin white sweater. Her midriff was bare. There was a gold stud in her belly button. Her long hair fell over her face. She was a beautiful girl and I was sorry I'd stopped at her house. She was half my age and connected to a case I was working and I knew she had lied that morning. Lied about seeing no one near the scene, lied about how she found the clothing.

  "You should have a coat on," I said because I couldn't think of anything else. I got out a pack of cigarettes and offered her one, but she shook her head, and I lit mine.

  She looked down at her jeans and the old sweater and picked at a piece of lint that had settled on it.

  "It's not so cold, is OK," she said. "I was waiting for you, you know?"

  "You knew I'd show up?"

  "Sure."

  "How's that?" I asked "You like me," she said. "Don't you?"

  "How old are you anyway?"

  "Twenty-two, like I told you," she said.

  "Yeah, sure."

  "OK, I'm nineteen, but so what?"

  Petulant and nervous, she was a kid. A kid with a great body who was coming on to me, who wanted something but what?

  I said, "How can I help?"

  "Take me out someplace. It's my birthday."

  "I can't do that," I said. "I'm working. Anyhow it's after midnight."