I know Eddies and Joes all over town. I know their birthdays. I send cards. I’m everybody’s favorite guy.
“It’s not what you know in this town, but who,” Dan Guilfoyle told me when I first joined his squad. Danny had showed me how it worked, how the NYPD graded its precincts, who got a bone, which specialists would help you, who the wireheads were, even who you could call down at Quantico and Langley, where they have experts who analyse weapons, blood, DNA, fibers, foodstuffs, radiologicals, even feathers. There are guys who only examine frigging feathers. When Danny retired from the West Side of Manhattan out to Sag Harbor, I missed him a lot.
Waiting, I watched cops come and go, watched agents pass silently through the unmarked doors. The FBI shared some offices here along with Organized Crime, Eastern District and other Feds, part of the interlocking impenetrable competitive justice system in New York that would by now be in gridlock due to Ustinov’s death.
Most of the time, the NYPD only talks to the FBI when someone orders them to. The Federal Prosecutors compete for collars with the Attorney General. On this one, there would be State Department, CIA, who the hell knew?
In the city alone, there are entire divisions of specialists—intelligence, Bomb Squad, Hazardous Materials, special squads, PR people. Down at Police Plaza, there are so many of them it’s hard to figure out who is where, which is why some wise-ass dubbed it the Puzzle Palace. Then there are the private security guys, tough as hired assassins because they don’t have to follow the rules, and contract security firms like Kroll, big as governments. A guy I know in that line had been sniffing around me. It’s good money, but I’d had it with institutional life and I’d already applied for my PI license.
“Agent or attorney?” Joe or Eddie would call every time the elevator opened.
“Counselor” is how the lawyers addressed each other, like courtiers, and they were slick as high-bred dogs only dressed in rich men’s clothing. The agents wore bad suits, muscular hips straining against the cheap fabric.
I waited for Sonny.
“It’s not what you know but who,” Dan would say. “The rest is academic, boy. It’s like fixing your toilet. You don’t have to know how it works, do you? All that matters is knowing what plumber to call, what’s his number, and if he owes you.”
I owed Sonny.
“You can go in now, detective,” Joe finally called out and I went through the door, past Rhonda, Sonny’s long-suffering secretary, into his office.
Sonny Lippert was all smiles. “Sorry for the delay, Artie. How about some coffee?”
Sonny’s so cheap he can make a nickel cry and I figured he’d ask me a buck for the brew, but what the hell; I could play his game better than he knew.
I smiled back. “Love some.”
Rhonda appeared bearing a coffee pot big and shiny as an imperial samovar. Sonny waved her away. “I’ll make it. Yergacheffe,” he said, sticking his nose in the coffee bag. “Ethiopian. Starbucks. Costs a bundle, babe. So. You think there’s a connection between Ustinov’s death and the Russian mob?” Sonny fussed with the coffee while he talked.
“How would I know, Sonny?”
I knew the point for Lippert was always the Russian mafia in Brooklyn. It was his obsession. The Ustinov killing was probably outside his jurisdiction, but he wanted a piece of it for himself anyway. The Russian mob was the prize that would get him elected Attorney General, he believed, and he wanted the job bad.
Sonny has all the accoutrements in his office, the leather chair, the view from the window, the pictures of the wife and kids, a baseball in a lucite box on his desk signed by Jackie Robinson himself, or so he says. Maybe this buys him street cred in Brooklyn, or maybe it actually matters to Sonny; I never ask.
“What’s wrong with the Feds? With the cops, for that matter? Also, I hear they got a special squad going.”
Sonny made coffee. Then he made the speech.
“Come off it, you know what’s wrong. For years, the department graded the Brighton Beach precinct ‘residential’. Hardly any of the cops speak Russian. We’ve got zero penetration in the community. We’re no further along than we were in 1986 and you know it, man. The FBI picks up Ivankov, they brag they don’t even know Russian like it’s some goddamn badge of honour. We don’t know who’s running things. We don’t know how tribute is paid. You go in a deli on Brighton Beach, the cash drawer is empty, there are eight bullet holes in the wall, someone’s bleeding, you ask the goddamn Russian behind the deli counter what happened. ‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘Nothing.’ ”
“Things are changing.” I knew it was bullshit.
“Please! No one testifies. They’d rather go to jail than rat on one of their own. Also, they kill for fun.”
“What do you want?”
“I want to see a structure, capos, underbosses. How am I gonna do this with a few cops who speak lousy Russian, some dumber than a lox. I try to get some federal attention, I get Jews screaming at the Justice Department. They don’t want publicity. They’re afraid bad PR will hurt immigration. Brighton Beach is Jewish. The mob there is Jewish. I’m Jewish. I can’t help it.”
“I can’t help you.”
“You have to. I need you,” Sonny said.
Outside thunder grumbled over the river. The heat had to break soon.
“I like my work. I like being a regular cop.”
“Cut the crap, Artie. You’ve been on leave for a month, you’re thinking of quitting. You think I don’t know? Anyhow, you were never a regular cop. You were my cop. My cop. Dig?”
A long time ago, when I first got to New York, before I even went to the academy, I met Sonny Lippert and he cut some corners for me. He helped get me my citizenship. He helped me get a job I wanted. New York could always accommodate oddballs like me, he said. More than once, he helped me and I owed him and he didn’t let me forget. I did stuff for him, still do from time to time. I speak good Russian and Hebrew. I have nice suits. I can check diplomatic abuses without anyone making a fuss. I can soothe ruffled diplomats and I don’t hold my knife and fork like they’re weapons.
“I do your errands, Sonny. I run interference for you. I keep Jewish groups sweet. The FBI likes me. The CIA likes me. Even goddamn Mossad likes me. But I am not, repeat not, going to live in Brooklyn with the frigging Russkis. Why me?”
“I told you. I need an ear. Eyes. On the street. Ustinov is murdered on the TV. Who by? A regular Ivan, a hitman who wants to make a few bucks? A cleaner, some kind of hired assassin with a political agenda? These days, the putzes at immigration let anyone in. I don’t give a rat’s ass about one dead Russian more or less, but finally, finally I got a legitimate reason to squeeze those bastards in Brighton Beach till they bleed. I’m going to make people so scared of the Russian mob, I could nuke the place and people would send money.”
I stood at his window; lightning sliced the sky.
“You’ve got your head up your ass, Cohen. This is not a nice city. This is not George Gershwin’s wonderful town, whatever. It’s a sewer and the Brighton Beach mob want to bend over and crap on it some more and all I’m asking is a little help.”
“Leonard Bernstein.”
“What?”
“‘Wonderful Town’. Leonard Bernstein wrote it.”
Sonny came and stood beside me; I think he would have put his arm on my shoulder, if he could have reached it.
“Look, babe, I know you’re upset. This Ustinov was your friend. I’m your friend, too, know what I mean, it’s important, man, I need you. I do.” Lippert was turning it on like a Hollywood producer who wanted some starlet to suck his dick. “Maybe something about this business scares you,” he added, real solicitous.
I remained silent. It was none of his affair.
Sonny Lippert turned away, leaned back in his chair and put his feet on the desk. Sonny’s shoes were polished black calf with little tassels; the socks were cashmere. When I got to New York, I was crazy to have shoes like that. I bought some, but for years I left th
em home in the closet.
Outside, it started raining. I wanted to know why Ustinov died, but I didn’t want to do Sonny’s errands any more, and I wasn’t going to Brighton Beach for him.
“Maybe Moscow can help you,” I said.
Sonny grunted. “Maybe I could ask Jane Fonda to give Jesse Helms a hand job. Jesus Christ.”
“You’re sure it’s the mob.”
“I saw an advance copy of Ustinov’s book. Suddenly this ex-KGB guy comes over all moralistic about the mafia. Maybe they didn’t like it. Maybe they want to warn a few others. Maybe they didn’t like his neckties. I don’t know. Help me.”
“I’m sorry.”
Sonny sipped his coffee for a while and let me wade ass deep in his silence. After a lot of time, he gave me a tight self-satisfied little smile.
“OK,” he said.
“Just OK?”
“Yup. I was only trying to throw you a bone. You don’t want it, you’re out. No sweat.” He got up. The meeting was done. I couldn’t read his meaning; Sonny has canals in his brain so polluted you could drown in the crap.
“I didn’t say I wanted off the case completely. I offered to make myself available to the Sixth.”
“If you don’t feel able to help me, I don’t think you ought to do zip on it. Maybe you’re overloaded emotionally. Schlepping baggage from the past.”
I wondered if he would produce any more travel metaphors.
“So, what? You’re going send an Italian?”
“I have other assets besides you, Cohen.”
“What about the gun?”
“We’ll find it. We usually do.”
“What about the shooter?”
“A thug. A cowboy. In from Moscow, a couple grand. Beats hanging in Moscow sniffing nail polish remover. I don’t really care. I told you I don’t really care about Ustinov. I want the people who hire the killers, the extortionists, drug dealers, pimps, the Russians who screw up my city.”
“Can I see the tape?”
“What tape?”
“He was killed on a TV show. There’s videotape.”
Lippert shrugged. Suddenly he was busy. “Take some vacation, Artie. Go visit Danny Guilfoyle.”
“My leave is almost up. I’m going back to work.”
“What I am saying is I think you ought to finish out your leave time. Take more. I think you are stressed. I already talked to your lieutenant. So long, Art.” He turned his back and picked up the phone.
On Rhonda’s desk, as I was going, I saw an open filebox with Ustinov’s name on it, but Rhonda was watching and I left and waited by the elevator.
“Detective Cohen?”
The light laconic voice startled me with its formality. It was the agent I’d seen at the hospital the night before whose name I couldn’t remember.
“Agent Roy Pettus,” he said, holding out his hand.
I had the feeling the meeting wasn’t accidental. Pettus was a big balding self-contained man, maybe forty-five, with the face of a middle-aged infant. The skin was thin and pink, the eyes round and light blue and he had no eyelashes. What hair he had was yellow, like straw, and even on a stinking hot day he wore a heavy tan suit; the jacket was wrinkled.
“If there’s anything I can do,” he said quietly and handed me a card.
“Thanks.”
“Keep in touch, detective. Maybe I can get you something you want,” he added, and walked briskly away through an unmarked door.
4
What I wanted was to go home. I wanted to go back to work. I wanted the heat to lift and I wanted Lily Hanes to answer my calls. Downstairs from Sonny’s office were courtrooms and on the wall pictures of Presidents, dead and alive. It smelled airless. It reminded me of Moscow.
I called Lily Hanes’ office from the car phone. All I got was her husky voice on a machine. Leave a message. It wasn’t my message she wanted; I was the enemy. There wasn’t any point going to work. I’d been by earlier. Everyone said, “Hi, nice to see you, man.” In this miserable heat they were up to their asses in murder, and I wasn’t one of them any more.
I conned a girl at The Flowers Show into promising me the name of the security firm that did its work, and also into giving me Lily’s home number. It was too easy. Then, in spite of myself, I turned the car around.
Along the river here were the old Brooklyn Navy Yards where an invasion force was once launched and now, on legs like pick-up sticks, herons pecked the garbage. But the herons were on their way out. All along the river the Jehovah’s Witnesses are buying up old brownstones, schools, putting up their publishing houses, gyms, hotels. WATCHTOWER, their big sign read, as those glassy-eyed converts swallowed the neighborhood for God. I knew a girl, a painter, who lived around there in the neighborhood they call DUMBO for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. She had a great view.
I love the river.
If you grew up in a landlocked city like Moscow, five hundred miles from water, stranded in the interior and inescapably provincial, the New York archipelago, the coastal city of bridges and rivers, islands and wetlands, has dazzling glamor. I like to imagine it as a great port, waterways crammed with ships, and when I feel lousy I still go over to the river and bike, or sit around, maybe fish a little. I bought a sailboat intending to see the city from water level, but it’s in pieces now, rotting in the shed on my roof.
Down along Shore Parkway, I saw a kid and his father fishing. They shared an umbrella and I was jealous. I wanted to put my head down and sleep. Instead, I kept driving. Maybe I owed it to Ustinov. Maybe what you knew wasn’t as bad as what you dreaded. I turned onto Coney Island Avenue and drove to Brighton Beach.
Little Odessa, they call it. Parallel to the ocean, Brighton Beach Avenue runs east from Coney Island, under the El, so the trains roar overhead and the tracks filter the light and make the street mysterious. The place is completely Russian; everything is Russian: the Black Sea Deli, the Kiev Bakery, the Shostakovich Music School, a shabby car parts operation named Cosmos Auto Supply. The Anchor Bank welcomes customers in Russian, the signs are all Russian. On New Year’s Eve, people shoot each other up at the Café Arbat.
Ten miles from Wall Street and you’re in a time warp; provincial Russia meets turn-of-the-century Brooklyn at the end of the line, the first step up the ladder, the last coming down. When the wind blows in, you can smell the ocean, the salt, sometimes the garbage.
It was way over a year, maybe more, since I’d been in Brighton Beach. I went to see my mother’s cousin. Genia called me when she got to America and I went to see her in a shoddy two-story house made of masonry and raw brick and cheap gray siding. Out front was a rusted tricycle. Genia lived there—I guessed she still did but I never called—with her daughter and her father; to make ends meet, they rented a room to transients.
In the parlor where the brown drapes were drawn tight over the windows, I was seated on the good chair, its silver brocade covered in plastic to save the fabric. I drank tea while the daughter played the flute. She was a skinny pale kid who refused to learn English. The old man didn’t speak English either, and he interrupted the music with angry stories about his heroic days in the Red Army, half in Russian, half in Yiddish which I didn’t understand.
The melancholy in that brown room in Brooklyn had them suspended in a cloud of inaction, halfway between Russia and America, and it infected everything, except for the kid’s flute-playing. Lost in Brooklyn, I thought. For a minute, I panicked. I felt I had gone back to Moscow. So I drank their tea and ate the apple cake. I looked at family pictures of people I didn’t recognize. I gave the kid some money and fled. I never went back to see them after that. It was late winter and old men wandered the boardwalk, clutching piroshki to warm their hands, staring at the ocean.
On Brighton 6th Street, not far from my cousin’s, I found a parking place. It was getting dark. I didn’t know what I was looking for and I had no weapon. I should have had a gun but I was on leave and when I left Sonny I didn’t really plan on
coming.
I hate guns. I can do it OK. The Israeli Army did that for me, I frigging won prizes for shooting things. And I was used to a weapon, it had become like a body part I couldn’t do without; I think maybe that’s why I was quitting the department. But around here without a gun, I would feel worse than naked.
I found a screwdriver in the trunk of my car and stuffed it in my pocket. It would make some kind of weapon, it was better than nothing.
The rain stopped. People came out of the houses carrying stools and boxes and they sat on them, fanning themselves with Russian newspapers, gabbing in Russian. As I walked, I snatched pieces of the talk and it was always about money. Whichever way I turned, I heard footsteps in back of me, but they belonged to my own demons. Demons that until Gennadi died I had figured were long gone. I was wrong.
“Artemy Maximovich?”
The soft male voice crept up behind me at the Arena Café where I had stopped for some supper. On my table were pelmeni in a tin tray, flabby dumplings like the balls of sick old men. What was in them? Horse meat? Dog? Who the hell knew. I stabbed one with my fork and looked up.
He was a clean-shaven ascetic man and he wore eyeglasses with steel rims like Trotsky’s. He resembled a bookkeeper and, as he sat down next to me, he placed a small notepad on my table.
When I had arrived, maybe half an hour earlier, he had been at a table of men, Russian men, all smoking. The biggest of them had shoulders like a weightlifter and he shoveled kasha and fried eggs into his mouth without removing the cigarette. No one looked at me. Outsiders were unwelcome. That’s where Sonny Lippert was wrong. I could speak Russian, but I was an outsider; this circle was closed.
“Cohen’s the name,” I replied.
“Whatever. Artemy Ostalsky, Artie Cohen. We know who you are. How do you do?” the man said.
“So?”
“We think you should stop chasing phantoms.” The man switched to English as if it was code. “We know who killed Gennadi Mikhailovich. Soon the killer will also be dead. There is no mystery.”
“When pigs fly.”
Red Mercury Blues Page 3
