Disturbed Earth

by Reggie Nadelson

  I said, "So Billy might take a ride with some creep who offered him a fishing trip. He might go willingly. You wouldn't have to grab him."

  "Yes."

  "And he wouldn't be able to judge that the creep, that this Heshey Shank, would hurt him."

  "That's what I've been thinking," Zeitsev said. "I've been desperate because I knew this and I've been everywhere I could think of and called in a hundred favors, and nothing." Zeitsev's voice shook.

  "You have any idea where he is?"

  He shook his head.

  "You're not in business out in Brooklyn anymore?" I asked. "I don't care right now. You understand that, right? I just need to know."

  "When my father died, before he died, when he was shot by some other thug in the street, he called me. He summoned me, you know, as if he was a czar, and I had to sit by the bed, we all sat, it was like an audience. You remember how it was in his house? You came to eat once, didn't you?"

  I nodded.

  "He had this idea of himself as a ruler, a man of power and taste, and every other bullshit Russian idea." Zeitsev ordered another Scotch.

  "Yes."

  "I hated it. I hated it all my life. I swore when he died, I'd separate myself from all of it. It took a while, I closed everything down, all of it, the gas scams, the Medicare deals, the drugs. OK, I still have a few minority interests mostly because if I gave them up it would get noticed and I'd probably go to jail, but mostly it's over." The drink came over, and he drank it fast. "You know who helped me? You want to know? Your friend Anatoly Sverdloff. Tolya understood. He helped me sell, he didn't ask for money, he just understood and helped me. He's a good guy. I'm indebted to him." Zeitsev emptied his glass and, aimlessly, put it to his eye and looked through it.

  "You're kidding."

  "I know Sverdloff doesn't like me, but that's the thing about him. He'll help you anyhow, in his way.

  So now my father is buried, thank Christ, and it's over. I'm telling you so you'll trust me about Billy. OK? It's all over, it's been over for almost ten years. They hate me there for it, people think I told the feds everything I knew. A few think I'm still some kind of power broker. Ironic, right? Either way, I'm probably dead." He laughed bitterly. "The truth is they hate me and it's mutual. But I wish to God I could get some help this time. No more. The guys I could once count on, I begged for help, I offered anything, and they said, fuck you."

  "You really don't have any idea where Billy is, do you?"

  Suddenly, as Zeitsev ordered his fourth Scotch, he started to cry.

  "No," he said. "I don't. I don't know anything."

  35

  Tolya was my next stop. It dawned on me as I drove away from Riverside Drive that I had to tell him I'd been an asshole. The last time I'd seen him he had turned the corner out in Brighton Beach and vanished, and when I returned the yellow Hummer, I didn't thank him.

  On my way to Brooklyn, I went to his building in Soho. He was out. The hotel on Thompson Street said they hadn't seen him that day. I got to Brighton Beach, to the building where his mother lived, just in time to see the ambulance cart him away.

  At Coney Island Hospital, his mother sat in the hallway, half cracked now, unable to speak English, talking Russian in fractured sentences. I held her hand, which was waxy and covered in brown spots. Lara Sverdlova had been in the apartment when Tolya stumbled in, a hole in his side, blood pouring out. Somehow she called the doorman, who called an ambulance, and the Hassidic medics, who were passing, got Tolya out of the apartment and to the hospital.

  Now he lay on the hospital bed like a beached whale, tubes stuck in his nose and arms, an oxygen mask over his mouth. He seemed dead. He didn't move while I looked at him or when I leaned over and talked into his ear. I wanted to cry.

  All around us the ER was jammed with patients; the noise, people screaming, doctors running, nurses yelling out orders, rattled me. Worst of all was that Tolya didn't hear anything. He didn't move. To me, Tolya seemed to have disappeared, leaving behind only his immense body like a prehistoric carapace. Someone had removed his shoes and his feet hung over the edge of the bed. On the greasy linoleum floor, his black suede Guccis were stranded like abandoned boats.

  An intern, coat smeared with blood, saw me and pulled me to one side.

  "You're family?"

  I showed him my badge.

  "Then you might want this," he said and held out a flat object that had been hastily wrapped in brown paper.

  It was a fishing knife with a long sharp blade. It was covered in blood.

  "He had it inside his jacket when we brought him in," the doctor said. "You're the first cop that's showed up."

  I gave him a card.

  "You call me, you understand?" I said. "Any change. OK? Any change in his condition, you let me know right away."

  "Yeah, OK, you're pretty upset for a cop."

  "He's my brother," I said. It was how I felt.

  It was Sunday and it rained like crazy that night; buckets of rain poured down and hit the still frozen streets, the snow left from the blizzard the week before. The temperature dropped, ice covered the streets and cars spun and hit each other like bumper cars, the whole city like a deadly arcade game.

  On 125th Street there was a nineteen-car pile-up. It rained so much the roads flooded. On the FDR, people abandoned their cars and waded, knee deep in some places, to the off-ramps and the exits.

  Around midnight, still sitting in the emergency room, watching the traffic reports on a soundless TV, I got a call from Samson Britz. Glee in his voice because I would owe him, he told me that Stan Shank's wife had called him. A big Russian came to the house, she said, and accused Stan of involvement with the Billy Farone case. Shank told the Russian to go fuck himself and then he went for him.

  "There were weapons involved?" I asked "Stan's fishing knife," Britz said. "You're in the red now, man, you know? You owe me now. So call me."

  Without me knowing, Tolya had been working the case. Because he knew how I felt about Billy. Because it reminded him of his own child and how she had been kidnapped. All the time I'd been suspicious of him, he was crashing through minefields, unworried about himself. Now he lay, silent, motionless, beached on the hospital bed that was too narrow and too short for him.

  I got on the phone and arranged a transfer to a decent hospital for as soon as he could be moved. Then I called Mike Rizzi. I needed wheels no one would recognize. I woke him up and asked if I could trade cars with him for a day. Yeah, he said, happy to ride the Caddy, could it wait until morning when he'd be back at the coffee shop? No, I said.

  An hour later, in the pouring rain, he met me near the entrance to Greenwood Cemetery; I didn't want to go to his house, which was close by, so we met and he tossed me the keys to his battered old van. I gave him mine.

  "You OK, man?" he said before he drove away. "You sure you don't want to come home for some soup or something?"

  I said, "No," and asked about the kids and said to keep them safe. He drove away and I climbed into his van and pushed aside battered pie boxes. Driving the van, I felt invisible.

  I drove back towards the coast. Worked through everything I knew while I drove. Drove slowly up and down every back alley I could think of peering at nothing, helpless. Where was Billy?

  The streets were empty. People were home; their kids were home. The city seemed deserted. Overhead I heard planes, passenger planes, fighter jets, I didn't know. I tried to keep Maxie in my head while I drove; it kept me sane. I loved her, didn't I? It was right to marry her and settle down, the right thing, the good deal; it's what a grown-up would do. I was tired.

  Billy Farone would have been easy prey for a sicko like Heshey Shank. I'd seen it in the video. Billy went willingly. Smiling, buying him pizza, Shank had befriended Billy. And someone told Ivana where to look for the clothes that were drenched in blood, some of it from a cat's blood. Someone told the FBI I had letters from an Arab friend. It wasn't because of the crackpot homeland defense act; it was
because someone wanted me out of the way.

  Heshey Shank was not a smart guy. Vicious maybe. Retarded. He could have butchered Billy. He could have killed a cat and put the blood on the clothes. Used the cat's blood as a blind. Kill a cat, or half a dozen, it wouldn't matter to someone like Shank; it wasn't rational. Not unless someone really had whispered in Ivana's ear: find your luck under the boardwalk, make yourself rich, or famous. Tell the cops.

  Did Heshey's brother Stan play a role? What about old man Farone? I'd tried to get to him in Florida but a woman at the house where he was staying slammed the phone down over and over and I didn't have the resources or the time to get a plane and I didn't believe he would hurt his own grandkid.

  Again I wondered: did someone want me in a trap? Was I the bait for Lippert? The big catch?

  How far could Shank have gone without someone, a gas station guy, a toll taker, a crazy reporter, seeing them, seeing the big goofball, the kid, their pictures on every TV station?

  On a hunch I went back to the pizza place; it was shut for the night, but there was a light on in the back and I banged on the metal gates. Fred Capestro peered through the window then let me in. He looked wary. It took about two minutes to break him down.

  "Last night. I had a feeling he was here," Capestro said.

  "Who?"

  "Billy."

  "How did you get the feeling?" I asked.

  "I don't know. I was in the back, there was no one around, so I was just changing my clothes and maybe the door wasn't locked, and I heard someone. I heard someone in the place, I thought I heard a voice, so I came out of the toilet and he was gone." Capestro was out of breath.

  "Was Billy alone? What about the mongoose?"

  "I didn't see nothing. It just somehow smelled like Billy."

  "How does that smell?" I asked.

  "Fish," he said.

  "But you could have been imagining. Right? Fred, you could have imagined it."

  "There was a pie on the counter and when I came out it was gone, so someone came in. I made that pie to deliver to a guy who likes his pie with Swiss instead of mozzarella and Billy's the only other person I ever met who gets Swiss on a pizza."

  "You called the cops?"

  "I tried, but they were jammed up, and what could I say? A ghost came and stole a pizza?" He shrugged. "I'm sorry. I'm real sorry, man, I am, but it was dark, and I couldn't tell. And it's not such a good idea to run to the cops out here, they get pissed off, they got plenty of trouble, and you run to them with bullshit, they don't come when you got real problems."

  I left Capestro. I figured he dreamed it; he liked Billy and wanted him alive so he believed the kid stole a pizza with Swiss cheese, or did he? Had Billy been back in the neighborhood?

  So I went to Genia's. Through the windows, behind the silk drapes, I could see the lights, though it was already two in the morning. I rang the bell. She opened the door and behind her I saw Johnny and his mother. I gestured to her to come outside.

  "It's cold," she said.

  "What's going on in there?" I said.

  "I don't know what the two of them want from me, Johnny, his mother. It's not my fault."

  I half dragged her out of the door.

  "I'm cold, Artemy. Please."

  I took off my jacket and put it around her shoulders and we stood in the portico of her house, her clutching her keys. I reached around her and closed the door.

  I said, "I don't care if you die of cold. You knew your boy was sick. Didn't you? You knew and you didn't tell me?"

  Genia's eyes were wild. Frantic, she switched between Russian and English, speaking as if she'd lost her ability to speak either language right.

  "Special," she said in the hectic whisper. "Billy is special."

  "But not sick?"

  "Is special," she said. "Special boy, that is all. Different. I talk to people, this is different, not crazy, normal is bullshit. What it means, normal?"

  "Zeitsev says he talked to you about a doctor for Billy."

  "I was scared. Even after I said OK, I mean OK for doctor, there's Johnny and the mother. They say, Billy is fine." Her eyes on the ground, she barely looked at me.

  I took hold of Genia's arm and said, "He was here. Wasn't he? Yesterday? Last night? Was he here? Listen to me, I'm going to find Billy whatever it takes. You hear me? I'll arrest anyone I have to. I'll feed it to the TV people that his own mother wanted him lost. Whatever."

  "He was here," she said. 'I think. I was out for ten minutes. Johnny was at his mother's." She spat the words. "I went to get cigarettes. I go in my car. I go fast. I never left before in three days, Artemy. I came back, something is different, something in the how do you say, molecules.

  I hear from my friend her niece Ivana killed herself, she is dead, because she knew Billy, my friend says. Because she lives in wrong place. Because she wants to become American and be rich and safe. I don't know anything that's going on, I have to get out just for cigarettes, I come back, and the door is not locked. I always lock this door. I couldn't remember, maybe I did not lock it, but I'm not sure. Also, there is a smell."

  "What kind of smell?'

  "Fish," she said. "Fish. Like somebody who works in fish market, or goes fishing, something you can't get rid of even if you wash with lemons. Always I made Billy wash with lemons so he doesn't stink, he likes touching fish, gutting, cleaning, with knife, smell never goes away." She was weeping now.

  "His room?"

  She nodded.

  "Something was missing?"

  "Yes."

  "What?"

  "Fishing nets."

  "You think the creep that kidnapped him brought him back for nets?"

  "I don't know."

  "There's something else."

  "Fishing knife was gone from Billy's room same time he disappears. Always I told Johnny you don't give a little boy a big knife, but he says, he's little man now, and he wants this and this is OK."

  I said, "Did anyone around here lose a cat recently?"

  "Billy's friend, Stevie. His cat goes away. Nobody knows where. Artemy?"

  "What?"

  Suddenly, she pushed me towards the wall of the house, still inside the portico but away from the door. We were sheltered from the wind that was blowing dense fog from the ocean so thick you could see it move.

  Softly, she said in Russian, "You remember when I first called you, years and years back, when I was living with my father on Brighton 6th Street, remember, when Elena was little?"

  "Sure."

  "You didn't think about it, this woman, this Russian who gives you a call from out of nowhere, you never heard of me, did you? You were just polite. I said I was some relative of your father, a cousin, something like this?"

  I didn't want to hear, so I said, "I have to go."

  She grabbed my wrists and held on.

  "You never wonder why I call?" Genia said. "You didn't say to yourself, how can this Russian find me of all the Cohens in the phone book, how does she know my name is Cohen and not Ostalsky, how come she picks me? You are never surprised? You never thought, how does this Evgenia Borisova find me? Your father was already dead, your mother was already sick, you didn't ask yourself how did this Russian woman make contact?"

  "I was working on a case in Brighton Beach," I said. "I dropped by after you called, it seemed useful to have someone there."

  "That's cruel, Artemy. Also untrue. You felt something. Even before Billy was born, and after, afterwards, you kept coming back for Billy, isn't that right?" She wouldn't let g°-

  I nodded and bent over a cigarette, trying to get it lit. The wind blew out the match.

  "You felt something about us, you and me, so I am going to tell you what it is," she said. "You never noticed how come you and me we always take the cigarettes out of the pack the same way, we hold it same way, we always sit on the couch together the same way?"

  Genia lit a cigarette. Again I noticed the way she took the smoke out of the pack. The fog seemed to drap
e itself over my face and it was wet and cold.

  "This old man where I lived before on Brighton 6th, the general, the man you know as my father?"

  "Yes?"

  "He was not my father," she said. "He was not anything to me, just old man who takes me in, lets me work as maid. I came illegal to this country, you knew that, right? But he takes me in and he lets me send for Ellie, whose father I married and get divorced from even before she is born in Moscow. The old general, I live with him as kind of maid but he adopts Ellie, gets me a green card, is not bad man. But not my father. My father was someone else. I decide never to tell you, or tell anyone, but now I am telling you, Artemy." She took off my jacket and gave it back to me because I was shivering. I put it on.

  "Who was your father?"

  She raised her head and looked at me.

  "We have the same father," Genia said. "Your father was also mine."

  "Listen to me, Artemy, your father, our father, he has an illegitimate child a few years before you are born, which is me. He has girlfriend, I don't know, one night stand or big love affair, I don't know. But he is married so this is lousy for his career.

  My mother is young lady who cannot take care of me, they say, so I go to orphanage. Later I hear that the woman, my mother which I never meet, is sent away. I think he makes this happen. He has a family, he is a top young guy in KGB. Where does she go away to, my mother, where does she disappear to, my mom?"

  "How did you find out about him?"

  "People talk," she said. "Later, when I am almost grown, people at orphanage, people who knew my mom, they talk. You think because it was Soviet Union, people don't gossip?" She laughed. "So I find him, I ask him once. I go to see him. I find him on the street in Moscow nearby his office and I ask, and he says I don't know anything. I'm sorry, he says, it wasn't anything to do with me. He is very nice, very handsome." Genia paused. "He gives me some chocolate sweets. But I learn nothing."