RED HOOK
Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Also available by Reggie Nadelson
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Part Two
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Part Three
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Fresh Kills
Part One
Chapter 1
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Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781409008811
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Published in the United Kingdom by Arrow Books, 2006
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Copyright © Reggie Nadelson 2005
Reggie Nadelson has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
First published in the United Kingdom by William Heinemann, 2005
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To Richard David Story
RED HOOK
A journalist and documentary film maker, Reggie Nadelson is a New Yorker who also makes her home in London. She is the author of seven novels featuring the detective Artie Cohen (‘the detective every woman would like to find in her bed’ Guardian), most recently Red Hook. Her non-fiction book Comrade Rockstar, the story of the American who became the biggest rock star in the history of the Soviet Union, is to be made into a film starring Tom Hanks.
Also available by Reggie Nadelson
FICTION
Bloody London
Skin Trade
Red Mercury Blues
Hot Poppies
Somebody Else
Disturbed Earth
NON-FICTION
Comrade Rockstar
Part One
1
“Blue skies, smiling at me, nothing but blue skies do I see.”
I was still half asleep early Sunday morning when I heard someone down in the street whistling “Blue Skies” and it was the kind of tune that ran through your head all day. I had heard it on and off for months now, most of the summer, the guy whistling so clear and pure.
I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and got up and, still naked, picked up some cigarettes, went to the window and pushed it open wider, then leaned out.
The light was just coming up in the sky, smudgy, pink, metallic. Below me, on the sidewalk, I saw him. He had on a neon orange work vest, blue pants and shirt and a baseball cap. Head down, he was shoveling garbage, pushing it along the curb with a broom into a gray plastic garbage can on wheels. He went on whistling “Blue Skies” and I watched him and listened, lit a cigarette and sat on the window sill of my place on Walker Street. It was late summer and hot out. I was happy.
I was getting married and I was as content as I’d ever been since I got to New York more than twenty-five years ago. The music was a good omen, so piercing and sweet, especially coming from the garbage guy; he probably worked for one of the community groups that hired the homeless to clean up what the city didn’t.
That was it: the sun coming up over the East River to my left; a hot bright day; the pavement swept clean, and the guy in the orange vest, whistling. I love the Stan Getz recording of “Blue Skies” but this sound, the whistling so pure it was more like singing, somewhere between Mel Tormé and a hymn.
My cellphone went off. I listened to the message. Sid McKay had called me again. He had called the night before, had asked me to come out to Red Hook, said he was worried about something. I didn’t go, was caught up in my own plans, then felt bad. Now there was the urgent message. I looked at my watch. It was only seven. I could make it out to Brooklyn and back in plenty of time for the wedding. Sid had helped me out on a case that mattered to me a lot. He took a big risk to help me and he never asked for anything back. Sid was a friend, and I owed him.
I took a shower, put on some jeans and a T-shirt, went out to my car and headed for Brooklyn. The city was quiet so I took the Brooklyn Bridge instead of the Battery Tunnel, which was faster but cost eight bucks coming and going.
From the bridge, I cut across to the Expressway and down to Red Hook on the river. It took me fifteen minutes. Van Brunt, the main street, was deserted. Along with the squat two-story houses were a bagel store, a few delis, a barbershop, a liquor store, a place that did metalwork, a church and not much else. I drove down to the water.
The old docklands were silent Sunday morning, ancient as the city, full of its romance with the water, beautiful, serene in the early light glinting off the river.
The dead man in the inlet a few feet away from me, what I could see of him, was trapped under the rotting dock. Spreadeagled, legs drifting in the water, I heard someone say he looked like a Christ figure.
The old receiving dock in Red Hook ran alongside an i
nlet that fed out into the river. On one side of the inlet was an abandoned plant where sugar had been stored. On the other side was a long brick warehouse.
People stood in a row at the edge of the water, muttering to each other, staring in the same direction like people on the street looking at fancy TV sets in a store window. A pair of detectives were there along with a guy in uniform, a diver, his wetsuit glistening and black, and a department photographer. A bearded man in overalls and work boots with a dog on a leash stood a little apart from the others, probably just a passerby out walking his mutt.
I looked at the corpse again. I had been on my way to the brick warehouse where Sid had an office when I saw the flashing lights on a car near the inlet.
“How long has he been in the water?” I said to one of the detectives, her hands jammed in the pockets of a red cotton jacket.
She wore jeans and sneakers and she was chewing gum. I let her know I was a detective in the city, but not much more. I didn’t want to spell it out, or say where I worked. I’d been doing a lot of stuff on child crime, lousy stuff, people who abused kids and I didn’t talk about it if I didn’t have to.
“A while,” she said. “They’re saying maybe since last night some time, maybe, hard to tell until they get him out of there.”
While I was out drinking, I thought, while Sid was calling me and leaving messages.
“Any idea who he is?”
She shook her head. “Not yet. They been down in the water for an hour, trying to get him loose without chopping anything off.” She took off the thin red jacket and tied the sleeves around her waist. “Jesus, sometimes I hate this fucking job, you know? I hope they’re not going to cut him,” she added, gesturing to two men in yellow slickers who appeared from behind a truck holding bolt cutters and a saw, and a bag of other tools. They headed for the dock where they crouched down and examined the body, what they could see of it.
The detective removed the gum from her mouth. “Fucking nicotine gum, tastes like crap,” she added. “You don’t happen to have any cigarettes, do you?”
I handed her my pack; she took one and gave it back.
“Thanks,” she said. “I don’t know what the hell I quit for anyhow. Thanks a lot.” She smiled and she was a pretty woman, not more than thirty-five, great smile, good figure.
“Sure,” I said. “You’ll be here for a while?”
“For you, anything.” She laughed, flirting, then walked towards the dock.
I didn’t want to stick around much while they chopped the guy free. I started over to the warehouse on the other side of the inlet, a couple of hundred yards from the dead body.
The building was divided up into studios and workshops, and I went through the main entrance, up a couple of flights and found Sid’s place. I banged on the door. There was no answer. I went back down.
A new cement pier, maybe half a mile long, ran along the front of the warehouse out into the basin. Phone in my hand I walked out on to the pier. I was uneasy now; I was edgy; where the hell was Sid at this hour? I looked at my watch. Eight a.m. Where did he go this early on Sunday morning? He had said he was here, at the office he kept in Red Hook.
I looked out at the water; the Statue of Liberty in front of me, lit up by the morning light, was a greenish color, maybe from the old copper facing.
Red Hook was a weird fat lip of land cut off from the rest of the city by a couple of highways that had been jammed through Brooklyn. It was a square mile of what had been the biggest shipyards on earth, isolated, surrounded on three sides by water, but fifteen minutes from downtown Manhattan.
In the other direction, away from the city, was the long Brooklyn coast, the piers and warehouses and marinas that ran all the way to the Atlantic Ocean and the beaches that were the seacoast of New York. Out in the water, a yellow water taxi sped by.
Sid had been half crazy when he called me the day before. I opened my cellphone and played back the message I got this morning. On Saturday he had called me two, three times. Please come, Artie, he had said. Please can you come on out? I’d be grateful, he had said. Drop by, he said, as if it was a social invitation, then more urgent: Can you hurry? Hurry!
Where are you? I’d said. A Mexican place, he said. Over on Columbia, corner of Van Brunt, you can’t miss it. I can’t come, I said. I can’t, Sid. I’m getting married tomorrow. I’ll call someone for you. He kept calling anyway, rambling, talking about the restaurant where he was, talking about some homeless guy he was scared of. I’m afraid, he had said. I’m scared.
All that Saturday afternoon, Sid McKay sat out on the roof deck of the Mexican restaurant on Columbia Street, sipping beer as he watched the river turn to liquid tin. He had the iPod his son sent him and for a while he listened to some music, a little Mahler, some Schubert and Gershwin. Above the river, the city was stacked up on itself, like Mayan ruins.
Sid had dropped in to the bar downstairs for a beer, then come up to the deck for lunch. He sat on after everyone was gone, drinking cold beer, reading, a stack of books and newspapers and folders in front of him on the table.
No one bothers him up here. Shutting his eyes for a minute, soaking in the last of the sun, he feels at home. Sid’s a regular. He knows the guy who built the place. Sid knows the bartender, the waiters. It’s his neighborhood. In some strange way, he feels altogether more at ease with himself these days, in a way he never has, not in his whole striving, ambitious, screwed-up life, though he’s aware how febrile he is, how his mood can change like a fever rising, then cooling down.
Sid’s wearing shorts, something he never does out of the house, but it’s a hot day and he came out in khaki shorts and an old green tennis shirt. There’s no one much to see him. Anyone still left in the city is heading out to the beach. You can hear the silence.
The end of summer. The city emptying out like a drain. The Republicans are coming into town for their convention. Life in the times of George W. Bush, Sid thinks. A lot of praying. Lot of propaganda in the news. The Republicans are coming. The invasion, he thinks.
He looks out at the water again. Like everyone else, Sid’s eye is first caught by the vacancy in the sky. Can’t help it. Like your tongue finding the missing tooth. Three years next week since the Twin Towers went down. Three years since everything changed.
He takes off his reading glasses, gets up and leans out over the railing, craning his neck to catch a glimpse of Liberty in the harbor; he’s still plenty sentimental about the view he’s been looking at his whole life. If you go downstairs and across the street and over to the edge of the water, you can look Liberty dead in the eye. Governor’s Island, too, and the Buttermilk Channel in-between.
The history of this area of Brooklyn, of the old docklands, its images occupy Sid’s mind like antique woodcuts: in them he sees the ships and warehouses, the sailors, the carts and horses, and the women who once walked the channel, muslin caps on, long dresses hitched up around their waists, carrying wooden pails of fresh milk; the channel so shallow that they could walk across it in the time it took for the milk to turn to buttermilk.
What was Brooklyn like, he always wonders, when Walt Whitman was the editor of the original Brooklyn Eagle? When this was a separate city, the third biggest in America, alive with people protesting slavery, abolitionists raising their fists and Whitman urging people to stand up for the “stupid and crazy”, to be invulnerable to fear. And there have always been black men in Brooklyn, men like him he thinks, too, half proud, half sardonic. Arms still on the railing of the deck, Sid polishes off his third beer.
There’s even been talk of reviving the Eagle, the great newspaper. People talked about Pete Hamill, of course, also of Brooklyn, for editor. Once, Sid would have liked a shot at editing it himself.
Sid grew up in Brooklyn, has lived here all his life, not near the docks, of course, which were forbidden. The waterfront was dangerous when he was a kid.
It excites him, though, the way this part of Brooklyn is coming back. Out of the wreck
age, he thinks. It is thrilling, people coming in, everyone wanting a piece of the action. Developers prowl Red Hook’s streets these days, wanting in, and some of them call Sid because he knows his way around; they wheedle and plead for information. The historian, the philosopher, the poet of Red Hook, Sid has seen himself described in a magazine article.
Laughing to himself, leaning against the railing for support, he gathers up his books: Pushkin short stories, biographies of Walt Whitman and Paul Robeson. Real poets. Collectively, they are Sid’s bible. He puts the books in the worn green book bag and tries to reclaim the scrubbed boy who bought the bag decades before as a Harvard freshman. Sid puts in the folders that are full of his own notes.
Still standing, he looks down at the street and he sees him. Sees him again. Sees the homeless man and feels panic. The sight rips into Sid’s reverie. His mood changes. He grasps his cellphone.
He calls Artie Cohen again to say where he is, what he sees. Artie doesn’t answer.
He’s already called Artie once, or maybe twice, that morning when he saw the homeless man near his building, the man watching his windows. In spite of the heat, a chill ripples along the skin of Sid’s arms. The man has been around before: a week earlier, he walked up to Sid, hand out, begging. Crossing the street, Sid pretended he was in a hurry, not giving the man a second look. I should have helped him. I should have given him a buck, he thinks now. He dials the phone again.
Artie answers. Artie? Can you come? Drop by? He makes it as casual as he can, but he’s scared.
I can’t come, Artie tells Sid. I’m getting married tomorrow. Sunday. I’m sorry, Sid, he says and reminds him he’s invited to the party. Sunday night, he says. Tomorrow. Come on into the city.
Sid won’t go to Artie’s wedding, though, not a party with strangers. Once maybe, when he was a pretty famous guy, when he worked at the Times, when he showed up on TV, and knew people and went to parties every night, but not now.
They were pretty close, him and Artie, and he tries not to feel resentful at his not coming to Brooklyn. When Artie worked cases that interested Sid and he was covering the city, they had seen a lot of each other. They kept in touch. They helped each other out. But Sid can’t face a crowd.
Red Hook Page 1
