Neptune Avenue

by Gabriel Cohen

  He found Linda Vargas in the task force’s file room, pouring herself a cup of coffee.

  She grinned. “I heard about your win yesterday. Nice job.”

  He waved the compliment away. “The guy basically hung himself. If you’ll excuse the expression.” He poured himself a cup, then put a new filter in the machine. “Hey, what’s going on with the Lelo case? Anything new?”

  Vargas frowned. “Still no witnesses. No forensic evidence. I would kill for a little something exotic here. Maybe a little beaver fur …” She shook her head. “If Balakutis is our man, he sure pulled off a slick little murder.”

  Back out in the squad room, Jack reclined in his desk chair, rotating slowly from side to side. All over the room, his teammates were doing phone interviews, reading files, scanning computer screens. He scratched his cheek. The Lelo case wasn’t his, officially, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t continue to help out. … After a minute, he sat up straight and picked up the phone. For lack of a better move, he figured he’d take another run at Andrei Goguniv, Daniel’s fish company manager.

  Someone picked up, but it wasn’t Goguniv.

  “Andrei?” The voice continued in rapid Russian, sounding worried.

  “No,” Jack said. “I want to speak to Andrei. Is he there?”

  “Not here.” The other person hung up.

  Jack called his contact in the fish market security office.

  “No prob—I’ll go over there and check on it.”

  A few minutes later, the man called back. “I just went up to the Black Sea office. Goguniv wasn’t there. I had a hard time finding anyone who could speak any English, but it seems that the guy didn’t show up for work today.”

  “Is he married or anything?”

  “I got his wife’s name,” the security officer said. “I just called: it turns out he didn’t come home last night either.”

  “And she didn’t tell anybody?”

  “You know how it is with these people: they think we’re all KGB or somethin’.”

  As soon as he got off the phone, Jack called across the room to Linda Vargas. “You busy?”

  She set down a file folder she’d been reading. “Why?”

  “I think we should take a little ride.”

  ANDREI GOGUNIV’S BENSONHURST DOMICILE was a modest brick home, with a white wrought-iron fence surrounding a tiny concrete front yard. An aluminum awning provided a little shade over the front door, and a small American flag, extended on a pole from a second-story window, drooped in the summer heat.

  Goguniv’s wife, Galina, was a plump little blonde. She looked as if she hadn’t slept at all in the past twenty-four hours. She kept jumping up to pace around her small living room, with its big old TV and plastic-upholstered furniture. “He goes to work yesterday, as usual,” she said in a thick Russian accent. “Every day, he comes home at eleven A.M.—you know, he works in the night at the market. But yesterday, he doesn’t come. One o’clock, two o’clock, he doesn’t come.”

  Linda Vargas sat perched on the edge of an armchair, a sympathetic expression on her face. “Did he call you?”

  The wife shook her head. “No. Is not like him. If he is only an half hour late, he will call me. He is good husband.”

  “Has he ever stayed out all night like this?” Vargas asked. Jack knew where she was heading—maybe the man had a girlfriend stashed away somewhere.

  Galina shook her head. “Never. For twenty years we is married, and we is together every night.”

  “Do you have any idea where he might have gone?”

  The woman sank down into the sofa and put a hand over her eyes. “I don’t know. I don’t know.” She began to cry.

  Vargas pressed on. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Goguniv, but we need more information. The, uh, things that happened to his hand … what did he tell you about that?”

  Galina wiped her eyes. “He says was ‘accidents,’ but I don’t believe. One time, okay—is dangerous job, with saws and hooks … But two times?”

  “Was he acting differently than usual, around the time of these incidents?”

  Galina chewed her lower lip. “He was very … how you say? Not paying attention.”

  “Preoccupied?” Jack said. “Nervous?” He felt sorry for the poor woman.

  She nodded. “Yes. Nervous. Something is not good at work, but he is not telling me. And now I am afraid.”

  Linda Vargas reached into her purse and pulled out a photo: Semyon Balakutis. “Do you recognize this man?”

  Galina looked at it without any sign of recognition. “Who is he?”

  Vargas tucked the picture away. “Don’t worry about it. And don’t worry: we’ll find your husband.”

  Jack turned away. He guessed that they would indeed find Andrei Goguniv, but he wouldn’t be willing to bet that the man would be alive.

  He and his colleague headed over to the Fulton Fish Market in the company of an NYPD Russian translator. They interviewed Goguniv’s coworkers at the fish market and showed Balakutis’s picture around. Several of the big men frowned at the picture, but they wouldn’t admit that they recognized Balakutis. Someone at a different company one aisle over finally made a positive I.D., but he couldn’t place the man at the scene the previous day—he said only that he was sure that he’d seen him on a couple of occasions in the past month.

  The two detectives spent the rest of the day tracking down friends and business contacts of Andrei Goguniv, without making any progress as to his current whereabouts, and then they headed back to the task force office.

  Jack would have liked to go deep into overtime with the case; as usual, though, his boss was tight with the squad budget. Jack shrugged: he knew that the search for Goguniv had spread out over the NYPD’s various networks, and he would have to put some trust in the efforts of his colleagues. He punched out and headed down to the outdoor parking lot.

  His car was sweltering. He cranked the air con, then called Zhenya; she lived just a mile and a half away. The call went straight to voice mail. He thought of dropping by Monsalvo’s for a quick beer or of paying a visit to Mr. Gardner, but both options seemed too flat—they reminded him of how barren his social life had been before he met Zhenya.

  He sat there for a moment, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, and then he threw the car into Drive.

  A few minutes later, he stood in the entranceway of Zhenya’s building, pressing the buzzer for her apartment, but there was no response. He waited a few seconds, staring in at the chrome and potted-plant-filled lobby, and then he buzzed again. Nothing.

  He walked back out to his car. He could see a blue strip of ocean framed by buildings down at the end of the block, and he smelled the thick, salty sea air. He considered going for a stroll on the boardwalk, but even in the late afternoon the temperature was still too high, the sun too bright.

  He got back in his car, and then he consulted a folder he had stuffed into the glove compartment.

  THE OLD-SCHOOL ITALIAN MAFIOSI took pains to live invisibly. You might never know that the potbellied geezer hosing down his old Cadillac in the driveway of a Bay Ridge bungalow was the capo of one of New York’s foremost crime families. They hid their money from the IRS and carried on quietly in the hearts of their old neighborhoods, like tumors.

  Semyon Balakutis had chosen a much less subtle home base. A couple of miles from Brighton Beach, along the coast past Sheepshead Bay and Marine Park, Mill Basin had once been an unassuming little Brooklyn neighborhood, but recent sources of New Money—stock market booms? less licit inflows of cash?—had hit it like an overdose of steroids. The fancy cars along the streets spoke of the recent infusion of wealth, but the homes shouted it. Like lottery winners who couldn’t quite give up their day jobs, the residents had kept their small houses, only they’d tried to transform them into mansions. As Jack drove slowly along, he had to dodge contractors’ vans parked along the narrow streets; they were jamming white columns and Gone with the Wind-style staircases onto the front of litt
le brick homes, planting torchlights and statues of lions beside the short driveways, replacing tiny lawns with marble patios.

  As he neared Balakutis’s house, he started to have doubts about his plans for a subtle recon. The neighborhood was almost entirely residential, a small circular piece of land almost surrounded by an ocean inlet; if you weren’t a resident or a contractor, there was little reason to be here.

  Balakutis, as it turned out, lived on the far rim of the circle. Jacked glanced at the man’s residence as he drove by; it was more modern than most of the others. The place was made of gray marble and brown-tinted glass; all the shades were drawn, and it looked more like a bunker than a house. Jack drove around the block and then coasted to the curb about twenty yards away. He knew Balakutis was home because he had called the number on the way over, then hung up when he heard the man’s voice.

  He turned off the engine. No more air conditioning—a blast of hot air rushed in as he rolled down the window and sat back to watch. He pictured Semyon Balakutis offering him and Linda Vargas a doughnut, smashing a glass of red wine, burying a hook in poor Andrei Goguniv’s shaking hand.

  Soon he regretted the impulsive nature of today’s surveillance. Normally, he would have set himself up with plenty of water, not to mention a Tupperware container to pee into. (He had learned very early in his career that peeing into a narrow-necked bottle was not the easiest thing to do.)

  After forty-five minutes, he was starting to question what he hoped to get out of this visit. He wanted to reconnect with his suspect, to get a better feeling for the man’s life, but he wasn’t learning much now, just staring at the blank picture window of the man’s house.

  After an hour, the heat was getting to him—he felt parched.

  After an hour and fifteen minutes, the front door to Semyon Balakutis’s house slowly opened.

  Out came a small boy, carrying something on a tray. Moving slowly, with great concentration, the kid—towheaded, maybe six or seven years old—marched slowly along the sidewalk until he was standing right outside Jack’s window. Holding up a glass of ice water.

  “My father says that maybe the detective”—he squinted, as if struggling to remember a line in a school play—“maybe the detective would like a nice cold drink.”

  Jack scowled at the opaque window in front of Balakutis’s house, then turned back to the boy. “No thanks.” He turned on his engine and drove away.

  He wondered how smug Semyon Balakutis would look when he was being transported to a prison upstate.

  AT A RED LIGHT on Avenue U, he pulled over and gave Zhenya’s number another try. Straight to voice mail. Jack cursed under his breath, then headed back into the traffic.

  Instead of making a right on Coney Island Avenue and heading home, though, he continued on to Brighton Beach. He didn’t drive to Zhenya’s building again—lord knows, he didn’t want to become some sort of stalker—but he pulled up in front of his uncle Leon’s building. Five minutes later they were sitting at a restaurant on the Brighton boardwalk.

  The place had a big outdoor seating area, with green carpeting and lavender tablecloths. (Daniel Lelo had brought Jack here during their first joint visit to the neighborhood.) At the next table over sat two women in bright velour sweat suits; one wore orange lipstick to match her outfit. They spoke in Russian, as did most of the other patrons.

  The waiter wore a short tux and a long mustache and carried himself like a retired cavalry officer. He took Jack and Leon’s order: big goblets of ice-cold beer, some pickles, a heap of sautéed mushrooms, and a plate of pelmeni, served with fried onions and sour cream. Jack recognized the little dumplings—they were what Zhenya had brought her husband, back in the hospital. He frowned, remembering.

  “You all right?” said Leon. “Hey, you want I should tell you a good joke?”

  Jack nodded; he could use the distraction.

  Leon took a sip of his beer. The goblet was almost the size of his head. “Okay,” he said. “A chicken and an egg are lying in bed together. The chicken is smoking. ‘Well,’ says the egg. ‘I guess that answers that question.” He grinned. “You like?”

  Jack laughed; it felt good after such a tense and busy week. He watched the passersby strolling along the boardwalk. It was a cultural thing: the residents of Brighton Beach turned out in droves for an early evening ocean promenade. He nodded toward the scene. “Are these people mostly from Russia, or the other republics?”

  Leon frowned. “How is it that you work so close to here but know so little about them?”

  Jack threw his hands wide. “Come on—this is Brooklyn. We’ve got Dominicans, Senegalese, Lithuanians. … Nobody can know everybody.”

  Leon snorted. “These are not ‘everybody’—they’re your own people.”

  Jack sighed. Your own people—it sounded like such a burden. “I don’t know … they just seem rude.”

  Leon looked out at the boardwalk parade. “You need to understand something: Brighton Beach is a time machine. Many of these people came here in the late seventies, in the time of Brezhnev, before glasnost. They’re still stuck there. In the Old Country they had to push and shove to get the last loaf of bread, and they always had to worry about who might be spying on them. Don’t expect an older Russian to smile at you on the street—many of them are still afraid to look up.”

  Jack ran a finger through the condensation that had gathered on his beer goblet. “My father,” he said gingerly, since this was always a sore topic with his uncle, “just wanted us to be Americans.”

  Leon looked out to sea. “I can’t blame him. We came to this country when he was young. He wanted to fit in with the people over here.”

  Jack looked down at the table. “Why do you think he turned out so angry?”

  “If you try to forget too much, it goes sour inside.” Leon shrugged. “But who knows? There is history, and there is what we are. Maybe it was just his nature.”

  “When I was a kid, I used to ask him about where we came from, but he would never talk about it.”

  Leon’s eyes lit up. “Do you know the one about the woman from Brighton Beach who moves to Connecticut?”

  Jack shook his head.

  “She’s Jewish, but her big dream is to join the country club. So she changes her last name, loses the Brooklyn accent, buys fancy new clothes. One day she finds herself sitting at a fine luncheon with a hundred Waspy ladies. All of a sudden, a waiter spills some hot soup in her lap. She jumps up and shouts ‘Oy vey!’ Then she looks around and says, ‘Whatever that means …’”

  A COUPLE OF HOURS later, Jack was sitting on his sofa at home, bored out of his mind with the usual round of “reality” TV shows. He clicked off the set and sat there in the gathering dark, wondering what might have happened to Andrei Goguniv.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  “I TRIED CALLING YOU yesterday afternoon,” Jack said.

  They were out on Zhenya’s balcony. She was bent over the little glass side table; she was gluing a handle back on a broken teacup. She didn’t look up. “Perheps I was leaving my phone in my bag. When the TV is on, at times I do not hear it.”

  Jack frowned. “You were home yesterday afternoon?”

  She nodded but didn’t look up. She worked on her teacup.

  Jack squinted toward the beach below. He didn’t mention that he had stopped by and buzzed her apartment. He knew how loud the buzzer was, from when their takeout food deliveries came, and he knew that it was audible with the TV on. …

  He noticed that she looked tired, with circles under her eyes—maybe he wasn’t the only one who’d had trouble sleeping recently. And she seemed jittery today; one of her bare feet tapped up and down on the concrete floor of the balcony.

  He thought of Andrei Goguniv. Nervous.

  He frowned. “You haven’t heard from Semyon Balakutis, have you?”

  She didn’t look at him, just squinted down at her teacup.

  “I mean,” he continued, “you’d tell me if he was bothering
you, right?”

  She nodded but didn’t look up.

  He felt a quick stab of irritation. These goddamn Russians, playing it so close to the vest … He shook his head, thought of what his uncle would say to him. Your people.

  “I was thinking,” he said. “Maybe we could have dinner in Manhattan tomorrow night.” He wanted to be with her during every free moment. It wasn’t just that he enjoyed her company—he wanted to be around in case Semyon Balakutis made any more of his threats. He thought of Goguniv again; maybe they weren’t just threats.

  Zhenya chewed her bottom lip, then looked up. “I must see my girlfriend Mika tomorrow night. But we can have dinner the next night, okay?”

  He couldn’t help noticing that her eyes had slipped to the left just before her answer, and he cursed Linda Vargas and her scientific interview techniques.

  He felt a sudden chill. Maybe this wasn’t about Balakutis at all. He remembered how stupidly and happily he’d spent his time with Michelle—right up to the moment when she’d announced she was having an affair. He scowled. Christ, Daniel had been dead only a short time. It was weird enough that Zhenya was dating Jack now; was it possible she was seeing someone else too?

  She blew on the teacup to help the glue dry. Then she set it down, scooted out of her chair, and came around and put her arms around him. She gave him a delicious warm kiss on the cheek.

  He winced. He didn’t know whether he was coming or going.