“Thanks, Mike. How’s everyone?”
“Everyone’s real good. City’s nervous. The market’s on a roller-coaster. There are more poor bastards sleeping on the streets and the girls turning tricks, they get younger and younger. I worry about mine. You want me to sit with you a while?”
“Go home. I’m going to sleep a few hours,” I lied. “Then I got stuff to do.”
“You need help?”
“I’ll let you know.”
He said, “Let me know, OK?”
As soon as Mike left, I picked up the invitation I’d put in the kitchen, stuck a pistol and ammunition in my pocket and another gun in my waistband, went out and got a cab because my car was in the shop. I didn’t wait for Sonny. I left him a message. I told him to meet me.
The guy behind the wheel was half asleep, the city was dead; slush spewed out from the wheels as we turned up Greenwich Avenue.
The address was Little West 12th Street, not far from the river. I paid off the cab and looked for the entrance to the club.
33
The blast of heat, light and music sucked me in out of the freezing black and white night. It was like being enveloped in a comforting blaze, yellow, noisy, hot. And there was the music. Someone playing “You’re Blasé”, a tune only Stan Getz plays as far as I know, playing it like an amateur would play Stan’s version. It was my favorite tune. It was as if someone was expecting me.
At the bottom of the rickety stairs, I gave a skinny kid with a ponytail the invitation and ten bucks, and went into the small, crowded club. There were benches along the walls and a few tables, and every seat was taken. Kids in jeans, mostly, and a few older fans were all intent on the trio on the bandstand, all tapping their feet, nodding their heads. In a shiny satin baseball jacket with jazz embroidered on the back, one guy hunched his shoulders, closed his eyes in some kind of ecstasy, then hissed, “Smoking!”
There was a small bar where you could get beer, wine, apple juice, but no one cared about the booze. It was Sunday night, when anyone could sit in. These were the kind of maniacs who went out to play in any weather.
A club without hookers looked good to me. No hookers, no strippers, no guys with thick necks or sex tourists like Finn. Just the music.
On the walls were famous jazz pictures: Dexter Gordon with the smoke from his cigarette swirling up; Miles Davis backstage at Carnegie Hall; Dizzy, cheeks blown out, playing his bent horn; Percy Heath and Horace Silver studying sheet music; Satchmo in Egypt by the Pyramids.
The trio on the stage, piano, bass, sax, wasn’t bad. They finished and everyone pounded the tables, stamped their feet, clapped; the man with the sax put it gently on a chair, strolled through the crowd and held out his hand to me.
Joe Fallon was wearing a red polo shirt with long sleeves, the collar up, jeans, a black fleece vest. His face pink from playing, he took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes and said, “I’m pretty terrible. I took lessons for years and years, and I know a dentist who still plays a lot better than me. You like my little club?”
“Your club?”
“My kid, Billy’s, really. I gave him and some friends the money to set it up and run it. I’m just the angel. A backer. Where else can I play?”
A guitarist came on, but he lost his way on the tune and the crowd booed him. He got it back together long enough to finish; clutching his guitar, skin sweating, he rushed out of the club.
I said, “Let’s go get some coffee. I want to talk.”
“Come in the back.”
There was a kid thought he was Erroll Garner who started playing the piano, a tune named “Red Top”. I followed Joe through the bar, down a hallway and into a back room that doubled as an office.
He put his arm around my shoulders. “It’s so good to see you. How’s Lily? You brought her home?”
“Yes.”
“Good. That’s good. If I can help … You hungry, Art? Billy’s bringing some food over from Pastis, because I’m starving. He always brings extra in case some musician stops by. Anyway, I want for Billy to meet you. He’s a good kid.”
From the club, through the paper-thin wall, the music rolled in to Joe’s room. The shelves were jammed with jazz books, original Blue Notes albums, postcards. A table held another stack of records, a couple of phones, piles of paper. There was an old leather sofa, a couple of armchairs. From a fridge, Fallon took a bottle of wine and held it up.
“White OK?”
“Sure.”
“You got my invitation?” Fallon sat in a chair, leaned over and took off his loafers. No socks. “My feet are killing me.”
“Yeah. They were killing you in Paris.”
Joe smiled. “Feet. Knees. I’m a mess, Artie. I’m a fallible guy here, but then what do you expect when you turn forty, right, man? You’ve been home long?”
“Not long.”
“Look, I know a great doctor at Sinai for Lily. He’s a neurological guy, the best, the Pope of neuros. And if your insurance won’t cover, you know, hey.”
“You left Vienna after me?”
“Next morning. Straight to London, got the first flight home. I should have called, but Billy needed me. Kids.”
“No other stops?” I unzipped my jacket.
Joe glanced at me. “What are you talking about?”
“Making conversation.” I took off my jacket so he could see the weapon.
“You’ve got a gun with you?”
“Old habit. I was a cop.”
“You’re not going to kill me, are you Artie?” He laughed. “My playing’s not that terrible.” He paused. “What the fuck am I talking about?” He poured the wine into a couple of glasses, then looked up as his son came through the door.
A carbon copy of Joe without the glasses, Billy struggled with a tray, set it down on the desk.
“Hey, Dad.”
Fallon introduced us. The son was in his early twenties. He shook my hand, then set out the food, the steak and fries, the bread and salad.
“You eating with us, Billy?”
“I already ate. Have fun,” he said and went into the club to catch the rest of the act.
Joe Fallon fell on the food. “I’m sorry,” he laughed. “I was so fucking hungry.”
I wasn’t hungry. I watched him eat. He tossed me a pack of cigarettes. Out of the blue, he said, “Wasn’t your dad KGB, Art?”
“What’s that have to do with anything?”
“I was just remembering. He was a real guy’s guy, wasn’t he? He did the business. He had a real job, he went out in the morning and came home at night, and in between he stood up for the Party, the country, all that.”
Joe couldn’t shake his past, or mine. I kept on smoking and finished the wine.
He said, “Isn’t that right?”
“Sure, I guess.”
“Then they dumped him, I remember. My parents talked about it. It was a famous thing in our school. People whispered. It must have been tough on you.”
I waited.
“Your mother gave the game away. She was always talking about politics. I never heard anyone else talk like that. Very seductive. She was really good looking, wasn’t she? All us boys were crazy about her.”
“Go to hell.”
“Sorry. Christ, I didn’t mean anything. It was a compliment. I loved your mom.” Fallon leaned over the table, and put his hand on my arm. “I just had a really great idea.”
I waited.
“Come and work with me, Artie. What do you need this security business shit for? We could have fun and you’d make some money, I was thinking of opening more clubs, uptown, in Europe maybe, put jazz back on the map, get the word out. Maybe set up a small record label, I’ve been wanting that. You could use the money, I know that. You don’t want to be in hock to Tolya Sverdloff all your life.”
“I’ll make you a deal.”
“Anything,” he said.
“You tell me some stuff I want to know and I’ll come and work for you if you want, OK? You hav
e any socks?”
“What?”
“I need some air. It’s cold. You’ll need your socks.”
He laughed. “I hate socks. I’ll get some off Billy. He’ll be here all night long. I’ll get my kid’s socks if you want me to put on socks so bad.” He humored me; he thought I was nuts because of Lily.
When I looked at Fallon, I could barely remember little Joey Fialkov, the kid who fixed everything. He remembered me; he had the details of my whole life on file in his head.
I kept the tone light. “You still want to be in my gang?”
“What?”
“You wanted to be in my gang when we were kids.”
“Sure,” Fallon said. “Or you could be in mine. So what do you want to talk about?”
Joe Fallon put on the socks, then his shoes, the black sheepskin jacket, and what looked like Dizzy Gillespie’s beret. He followed me out of the club.
We walked to the end of the street where the bike path follows the river. It was deserted. I had no real plan, but the underground club made me feel trapped, no windows, my back to the wall. It was Fallon’s club, him and the kid who was a dead-ringer for him. On the river, thick white mist was settling on the water and you couldn’t see the other side; Jersey was lost to view.
“These fucking socks are too damn big, they’re all scrunched up. Jesus, Artie, let’s go the fuck back inside. Or come to my house, or something, this is nuts.”
Fallon played the part so well I started to doubt myself. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it was only Zhaba who beat up Lily and killed the others. Maybe Fallon was only a good-natured businessman, rich, easy going, who loved Stan Getz, and I resented him for liking my music as if he’d stolen it from me. He dug in his pocket for gloves, then found a pack of smokes and offered me one. He lit one for himself.
I said, “I asked you in Vienna if you knew Levesque and you said ‘Who was he?’ not ‘Who is he?’, as if you knew he was dead.”
“What? I don’t know, maybe I thought he was dead. I meet a ton of people all the time.”
“Did you think it?”
“Maybe I did. So what? Maybe I remembered after, I would have told you if I thought it was such a big deal. I probably did some business with him way back when.”
“When was that?”
“Christ, who the hell can remember?”
“Give it a try, Joe.”
“Do we have to do this out here?” “I need the exercise.”
“I honest to God don’t remember, so give me a clue.”
“He ran a model agency.”
Fallon looked out at the river, one hand in his pocket. “I’m thinking.”
“Good.”
“I seem to remember something back when the Soviet Union was opening up, you know, and I went back. People suddenly realized the women were gorgeous – what we always knew, right, but everyone else thought they were just fat old babushkas. Levesque, if he was the guy, he had this idea about importing them. One thing maybe led to the other, maybe he was on the make. Is that right?”
“You tell me.”
“He had some kind of model agency or marriage bureau, something like that.”
“Go on.”
“A few of the girls got their name in the New York Magazine. ‘Super Natashas’, they called them. He made some dough.”
“What else?”
“I think I heard something about him going down in a plane crash, though. I’m going to freeze my balls off out here.”
We walked some more. By the time we were at Canal Street, a car rolled slowly by, blue and red lights flashing. A young cop on the job leaned out of the window, checking the path for drunks before they froze to death and the police got another bad rap.
The car stopped, the uniform leaned out again. “Everything OK?”
Fallon made a move towards the cop as if to tell him I had a gun, but I got in front of him and said, very pally, cop to cop, “Hey, how’s things over at the First?” and mentioned a guy I knew who used to work there. We exchanged greetings, then they rolled up the window, pulled slowly away. Fallon was alone with me.
Fallon said, “Listen, Art, I’ll tell you anything you want, but can we go inside? My place, if you want, it’s a couple blocks.”
“I had a real hard time getting stuff on Levesque, no pictures, no real files, no nothing.”
“There were lots of guys like that cashing in on the Russian thing, so what?” “There’s something else.”
“Can we please, please, go indoors. Listen, you know what, I’m going.” He started to jog. “You can come or not, or fucking shoot me.” He smiled. “But I’m not going to freeze to fucking death out here. You can get hypothermia like this, or frostbite, I was reading this book about Everest and how fast you can get it. I’m not doing business without my toes.”
I grabbed his arm hard. “Not yet.” I was buying time, hoping Sonny Lippert got my message and knew where to meet me.
“There was a woman.”
Fallon smiled. “Ain’t it the truth?”
“Martha Burnham.”
He turned towards me, said, “What the fuck’s a Martha Burnham?” His eyes flickered, the lids coming down double-time behind the glasses. He was nervous.
He said, “You know, I really hated you, Artie. It’s amazing how the past can keep a grip on you, you can’t even imagine how much I hated my life when we were kids.”
“You wanted mine so you hated me?”
“Loved. Hated. Both.”
“But you were the kid who could fix anything.”
“Sure. It got me friends. My parents were nothing. My sister was training up as a Party hack.”
“She was a scary girl,” I said.
He was trapped in a past where he remembered every detail so clearly he could pick them up and examine them when he needed to; it was his way of laying blame for his childhood. Joey was the good-looking member of the family; the sister was a girl who let you feel her up, then reported you. I could still see her, her blouse pulled tight across her breasts, the young Pioneer scarf tied too tight around her floury white neck.
Joey’s sister, with her ardent face, the pale, serious little Communist with the studious pallor, the blonde braids wound around her head, could sniff out dissent in the school hallway. When she sang Party songs, her eyes shone with religious fervor.
My parents used to laugh about the Fialkovs, but we loved Joey. Joey always knew there was something better out there and he made us all love him for seeing it.
“This is ancient history, Joe, it’s bullshit, no one cares, not me, not anyone. If it’s eating you up, go see a fucking shrink.”
“You didn’t know my life,” he said.
“Lucky me.”
“Then I met you in Paris and you were just another miserable fucker like the rest of us with a plateful of trouble, and I could help you.”
“Like you always did.”
“Something like that.”
He was scanning the West Side Highway for a cab, but none passed. I grabbed Joe Fallon’s arm and kept hold of him.
He jerked out of my grasp. “Listen, I’m going. Come or don’t come.” Fallon started across the West Side Highway against the light. “If you shoot me it won’t help Lily, though, will it?”
There was no sign of Sonny Lippert when we got to Staple Street. It was a narrow alley and Fallon stopped in front of a squat nineteenth-century house. He turned the key in the lock. “Come on in.”
A light came on inside Fallon’s front door.
I said, “Who’s in there?”
“It’s on a timer.”
“After you.”
“I’m glad you came, Artie,” he said, and I followed him.
The living room had white walls, a high ceiling, pale floors with silky kilims on them, high windows, sky-lights. A Steinway piano stood in one corner. There was a pair of pale-green silk sofas, a red leather Barcelona chair, a low glass coffee table.
Fallon shucked his jacket onto a ch
air, went to a table in the corner, got a bottle of a single malt I never heard of, and poured the whiskey into two heavy glasses. He perched on the arm of the sofa.
“So what’s this about, Artie? I mean what the fuck are you carrying on like Dirty Harry or something? What’s on your mind?”
On the wall were a Diebenkorn, a Hockney drawing, a couple of Cartier Bresson photographs. Fallon saw me look at them, smiled, kicked off his shoes. He pulled off the socks that were too big for him.
I said, “You ever have any dealings with Yugoslavia?”
“What?”
“You heard me. You do business with Bosnia, Serbia, the rest of them?”
“I went to Belgrade when I was a kid. My mother had cousins, they got me some gig at a summer camp, two weeks, the only two decent weeks in my fucking life.”
“You held onto that?”
“What?”
“Maybe you had a thing for the Serbs?”
“You think I’m a warlord, check out the gold chains.” He burst out laughing, that rolling merry laugh, then poured himself another drink.
“Maybe you were doing funny money in the early nineties, maybe you wanted to keep some of it in different accounts, maybe you put some in Levesque’s account, then decided it was a pain in the ass, it wouldn’t look kosher, a good guy like you with a wife who wanted you to clean up your act.”
“Very smart.”
“It got screwed up because you decided to let it lie but someone tried to forge a check on it.”
“Who’s that?”
“Martha Burnham.”
He finished the drink. “You spin a good little tale, Artemy Maximovich Ostalsky, but you don’t believe it.” He used my Russian name ironically. There was a pale wood desk opposite one of the green sofas and he went towards it.
I said, “Sit down.”
Fallon sat on a chair. “I’ll tell you what, Art, give me your gun and I’ll tell you everything.”
“What?”
“I’ll trade you. Information for the gun.” He bunched his shoulders as if they ached. “You said Lily could recover if she had the information. Her memory, I mean. Didn’t you say that?”
I waited.
“I’ll trade you Lily’s memory for your gun. Fair trade?”
“It depends.”
Skin Trade Page 25
