A plane flew low overhead and the noise seemed to distract Sid, or maybe he didn’t hear me, but all he said was, “Congratulations on getting married, Artie. Give my regards to Tolya Sverdloff. Tell him I’m sorry I won’t make it to the party tonight. I just have to get out of here.”
“Out of where?”
“Red Hook,” he said.
4
“Artie? Congratulations, man!”
Sunday night and I was married; I was married, and guys I worked with and some I had worked with way back, twenty-five years ago, were pumping my hand and grabbing my shoulder and women were kissing me, and we were all beaming at each other. At Tolya Sverdloff’s apartment, people crowded in, a band played, and they were good, and waiters swirled across the floor with trays of drinks. There was the smell of flowers everywhere from huge bunches of roses and lilies. I was married.
Late that afternoon, after I got back from seeing Sid in Brooklyn, after I put on my new suit, a judge with an actor’s voice who came in specially for us had married Maxine Crabbe and me in his chambers downtown; her two girls were witnesses. Now, a few hours later, we were at the party.
The band, a trio, bass, piano, drums, played “Manhattan”.
“We’ll have Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island, too . . .” I found myself singing under my breath, caught up in the crowd, surrounded by it, celebrating.
Even from across the huge loft, Maxine seemed to shine in her new silk dress and I was starting over to her when Danny Guilfoyle, my first boss, and his wife Dinah appeared. I kissed Dinah, and Danny hugged me so hard I figured he might lift me off the ground because, in spite of Dan being seventy-five now, he was still tough. Dinah, not much younger, seemed to have barely aged, and I asked her if she’d sing something. She had been pretty well known once, and she could scat great, and she grinned and said maybe, maybe I will, darling, for you, Artie. I got another glass of champagne.
Across the room I saw Mike Rizzi who owned the coffee shop opposite my building, and Sonny Lippert who I worked for a lot on special cases, and my half-sister, Genia, and her husband Johnny Farone. Lois and Louise, my ex-neighbors who had moved to Florida, were there. Everyone had come.
People talked some about the Republicans and the convention; I heard someone say he’d been caught up in traffic earlier, the city jammed with delegates and demonstrators. Mostly people drank and laughed.
“Dance with me, OK, Artie? Will you?”
It was Maria, one of Maxine’s kids. She wore a dress. Specially for you, Artie, she had said. Except for the hated school uniform, Maria only wore jeans that were so ripped they were like sacred rags. But she’d put on a red summer dress with flowers on it and thin straps and she wore red sandals. I got bouquets of roses for both girls to hold. They were twelve now, Maxine’s twins. Millie was a real little nymphet, platinum hair, beautiful, knowing and vain. I could see her across the room, flirting with Tolya.
Maxine knew I liked Maria better and she told me I couldn’t play favorites, but I figured it was OK because Millie got the attention. Maria was shy and smart, a daredevil. We listened to music together, I let her drive my car out of the beach and she got me to teach her some Russian words.
Later, I said. I’ll dance with you later.
“Promise?”
“Promise,” I said, and then more people came up to me, and after a while I needed a cigarette.
Maria hovered near me while I stood in the doorway of the terrace that ran the whole way around Tolya’s loft on top of a building in the Meat Packing District. I lit a cigarette.
“Artie?”
“What is it, sweetheart?”
“Nothing,” Maria said. “Just I’m happy you’re with Mom.”
“Me too.”
She stayed near me, not speaking. She made me feel connected. I liked kids. I wished I had had some. After the case with Billy Farone, my own nephew, it scared me, what they could do and how it got to you. I felt that way after Billy killed a man. A guy I worked with had said bitterly, “All kids bring is shit.” He was wrong. In spite of Billy, I didn’t believe kids brought you shit.
I reached for Maria’s hand. It was warm, sweaty, and substantial. She held my hand tight and we went outside and looked out at the Hudson River together.
The buildings were backlit by the setting sun, the sky silvery in the last late light.
New York was a city on water. The island city: New York. Forty percent of the city was water; it was a floating planet, an archipelago, islands, rivers, wetlands, swamps, ponds. Eight million people lived here, and the commuters and tourists all somehow moved back and forth over bridges, through tunnels, on boats. A lot of the city was built on landfill. Seawalls under the big buildings held the water back. One day the city would flood bad.
I loved it, loved the tribal way it operated with as many rituals and taboos as a chain of South Seas islands. You could be on Staten Island and have no idea what was going on in the East Village and not care. People near the Whitestone Bridge with its watery views were barely conscious of Chinese immigrants in Sunset Park in Brooklyn, ten miles away. On City Island in the Bronx people ate seafood looking out at Hart’s Island where the poor dead were buried by the city in Potter’s Field and where the dead guy in Red Hook would probably end up. I’d been out there once for a funeral of someone I felt responsible for and it was a bleak place where inmates from city jails did the burying and the wind blew off the river, like something from a nineteenth-century Russian novel.
In the outer boroughs people lived whole lives as New Yorkers. New York was made of the five boroughs, but Manhattan was different. Everyone referred to it as “The City”, a place apart.
“Artie, you OK?” It was Maria.
“I’m great,” I said, and she hugged me, and I felt that heavy warmth you got from a kid who liked you, and then she skipped away towards a group of other girls, other people’s children.
I turned my head and saw Maxine in the middle of the room, surrounded by people, and she waved and I waved back and then my phone rang.
It was a message from Sid. I leaned out over the terrace wall and looked south at the harbor towards the Statue of Liberty. Around the bend from where the statue stood were Red Hook and Sid. I didn’t call him back.
I knew he had lied to me, I knew he was scared; he said that he felt threatened. I didn’t know how real it was, but I had gone that morning, and I was here now and I didn’t want to think about it or the corpse in the inlet, or the sound of the saw, or the stink, or Sid. I had talked to the detectives on the case. Enough, I thought, and I was putting my phone in my pocket when Maxine came up alongside me and put her arm around my waist.
The band was playing “Someone to Watch Over Me”. I could feel my eyes fill up.
“You’re singing out loud,” Maxine said.
“Which is not why you married me; my singing, I mean.”
She laughed. “I love you a lot, but maybe not when you’re singing. You look great, though, the new suit is really cool on you,” she said and kissed me. “What’s the matter, honey?”
“Nothing at all,” I said. “To me, I always sound just like Mel Tormé when I sing,” I added, then I kissed her back. She smelled like almonds.
“The shampoo,” Max said, and took my hand and we went back inside where she gestured at the crowd. “Did he tell you, your friend Tolya, did he tell you he was doing all this?”
“Are you OK with it?”
“Sure,” she said. “Of course I’m OK. It’s fabulous, but why would he, I mean there must be two hundred people, and half the champagne in New York, and God knows what else. I mean, just the flowers.”
“It’s the way he is,” I said.
In the loft, half an acre of it, the central air conditioning purred, ceiling fans moved the filmy white curtains along the windows. Little trees with real lemons on them stood in terracotta pots, and everywhere there were huge clusters of white lilies and roses, white, pink, yellow, red, lavender, the k
ind that threw out a rich smell that mixed with the smell from the fruit on the long bar.
Four bartenders crushed fruit in blenders, fresh lime and pineapple for Caipirinhas, peaches for Bellinis. The pineapple smelled exactly the way it had the time I went to Hawaii years earlier, up around the northern shore where there were pineapple plantations and the air actually smelled of the fruit, sweet, intoxicating; it made you drunk without the alcohol.
Waiters in black pants and white shirts and aprons circulated around the loft with platters of shrimp, oyster, lobster, and caviar set in glass bowls of cracked ice. There was more food on two tables opposite the bar. Around the edge of the room and out on the terrace were small tables draped with linen and set with more flowers, and already people were sitting down at them, eating, yakking, drinking.
In the middle of it all, circulating like the ringmaster of a circus, was Tolya Sverdloff He had offered to give us the party and now I saw his head bobbing above the others, moving through the crowd, kissing the women, hugging men, holding up a glass, toasting, laughing. The music played louder. More corks popped. Half expected to see a girl swing down from the ceiling on a trapeze or a dancing bear appear.
Then out of nowhere an odd feeling, something dark, came over me like a cloud coming over the sun unexpectedly; things suddenly felt wrong, out of place, and I knew that the morning in Red Hook, and Sid’s fear, had left me on edge.
A waiter passed with a tray and I reached for a glass of champagne and gulped it.
“You look like a dog when you shake yourself like that,” Max said and kissed me again.
“I do?”
“Yeah, didn’t you know that?” she said. “I asked you before, what’s the matter? Tell. Come on.”
I kissed her. She tasted of pineapple. She wore a pale pink sleeveless silk dress and high-heeled silver sandals and her long legs and arms were tan, her arms so long they gave her the look of an overgrown girl or a rag doll. We had been together more than eighteen months solid, ever since I had worked Billy Farone’s case on Sheepshead Bay. I had known her a lot longer; we had been casual friends for years.
Max had grown her brown hair to her shoulders and she had pinned it at the side with a little green orchid, and she was wearing her grandmother’s pearls and the diamond ring I got for her on 47th Street from my old contact there; Hillel Abramsky had given me a good price, and now it was on her thin brown finger where she admired it constantly and held it up for me to see the rainbow it made in the light from a candle on a table near us. Max had elegant long fingers; I loved watching her fix dinner or do a jigsaw puzzle; I loved looking at her hands.
Hillel was at the party. I saw him in the crowd in a blue suit and I waved and he laughed because he had been trying to get me married for so many years. He said it was better for your health. He once told me he wished I would marry a Jewish woman, not for religion but for the sake of the tribe. I wasn’t sure what he meant.
I had a ring, too, plain gold; Maxine had wanted me to have one. I have never worn a ring in my life and my hand seemed to belong to someone else, but that was part of it, being like other people, getting a life with Maxine Crabbe and Millie and Maria. Everyone I knew was relieved that I had grown up and settled down. After the case with Billy, and the kidnapping and the rest of it, I was finally OK. I wasn’t at the edge of chaos anymore.
This is it, I kept thinking: this is how it should be. I left Max for a minute and went over to the band and talked to the pianist and found out he was a big Stan Getz fan. We discussed some of the obscure tracks, and then he told me his favorite was an old LP called The Steamer that I loved, too, and confided in me that he had once met Stan, and I was like a schoolkid, impressed. He asked me what songs I liked, and then as I went back to Maxie, he grinned and did a couple of bars of “The Girl From Ipanema”.
Maxine was looking in the direction of her mother and her ex-mother-in-law—she had been married to a fire captain who was killed on 9/11—and a group of girls she had grown up with in Brooklyn. She put her arms around me.
“I better go make nice,” she said. “Artie, can I ask you something?”
“Anything.”
“Hey, don’t look so gloomy, you look like a gloomy Russian,” she said. “It’s not so bad, getting married. Anyway, it’s like we were already married, right?”
“Absolutely. I was just thinking about something,” I said, trying to shake the fear I’d heard in Sid’s voice. “And I’m not a gloomy Russian. I’m an American. I know all the words to the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’, I love the Yankees, Frank Sinatra, The Sopranos, Tony Bennett, Ella, Michelle Pfeiffer, bacon cheeseburgers, pizza, New York, you. Yeah, you can ask me anything you want, we can do anything you want.”
“Then can we look at some apartments tomorrow?”
“Sure. You think you found something?”
She lit up like a bulb, girlish and thrilled, and nodded. “I think maybe,” she said. “I think I did.”
We were still commuting. Max had stayed in Brooklyn at her place near Bay Ridge so the girls could finish middle school there. I was in my loft trying to figure out how to renovate it for the four of us. It worked OK. We had been together a pretty long time and we were used to it.
“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for everything.”
“I’m the one,” I said and kissed her but before she could start off towards her mother, Tolya appeared at her side, carrying an enormous bunch of pink roses two feet long, wrapped in crackling cellophane, dripping with white silk ribbons. He presented them to Maxine, a ritual offering, and then kissed her cheeks three times, Russian style. I could see Maxine, swamped by the flowers, loving it. I just grinned. It was such a Russian gesture.
Tolya threw his arms around me, and handed me a fat manila envelope. I thought I heard him hum “If I Was A Rich Man”. He had started drinking early.
“A small party, you said. You promised. You lied to me.” I was laughing now, looking at the people still streaming in.
“Your wedding party, right? You cannot have wedding without party, or what is point?” asked Tolya, half in English, half in Russian, as he pulled a magnum of Krug from a passing waiter and poured some into my glass. I drank. He poured. Maxine looked at the champagne and Tolya took the flowers from her and set them on a chair and offered her a glass.
Anatoly Sverdloff had grown up, in Moscow, like me, but we met in New York, what was it, ten years ago? In his white linen suit and green silk shirt, Tolya was six-six, three hundred pounds, big as a mountain, and as solid. His white Gucci loafers had been made of alligator or some other dead animal, eighteen-carat-gold buckles on them.
He saw Maxine gaze at the shoes, and a grin spread across the face that, square and dimpled, resembled an Easter Island statue. He pushed the shock of dark hair off his forehead. From his pocket he extracted a gold cigar case engraved with a cigar, a big ruby for the burning tip glittering; he snapped it open and took out a Cohiba and put it in his mouth, then lit it with a quarter pound of solid gold lighter. The smell was delicious.
In his element, Tolya talked to us, keeping an eye on the waiters and caterers, waving at guests, ringmaster, impresario, godfather. Half of me expected him to offer favors to his friends on the occasion of my wedding, but then I’d seen The Godfather too many times, usually over a lot of booze with Tolya.
“Tolya?”
“Yes, Artyom?” Tolya said, using my Russian nickname, practically the only person I still knew who did. I’d been in New York so long I wasn’t sure how many people, friends, people I worked with on the job, even knew I was born in Russia. It was another life. It had faded. I was a New Yorker, an American.
“Who are all these people?” I said. “I mean the ones I don’t know?”
“Your friends, my friends, friends of people, people we should be friends with. I plan to be King of New York,” he said and burst out laughing. “Maxine, darling, are you OK? Is there anything at all that you want? Tell me, just ask.” He suddenly
slipped into perfect English.
Tolya Sverdloff had been a language student in Moscow in the late ’70s; he spoke five languages, six if you counted Ukrainian. With me he switched between English and Russian without thinking. Sometimes, when he was drunk or pissed off, he talked the English of an immigrant Russian, dropping articles, mixing them up so he sounded like an uneducated hood. He also did it to mock me, too, because, as he had said more than once, “You are so American, Artyom, nothing Russian left in you, not one thing, nothing at all.”
He kissed me on both cheeks now. He was drunk. I was catching up.
I said to Tolya, “Where’s your girlfriend?”
He shrugged.
“You think I don’t know why you bought this building?” I added and followed his gaze towards the small woman with a wedge of black hair over her forehead, a red mouth and a sullen expression. She was wearing dark Japanese clothes that looked wrinkled, and flat shoes that looked like they were made out of rubber. I couldn’t remember her name.
In Russian, Tolya swore at me, but he watched the woman as she wandered through the crowd running her hands along the walls as if testing the structural value. She was an architect Tolya had fallen for a couple of years earlier; I didn’t get it; normally, he liked models, he liked strippers, he liked babes, and he liked them young and gorgeous.
“She makes me smart,” he said and added that while he pursued her, the building was good for parties, and convenient to the river which he loved, and where, downtown near the Financial Center, he kept a large boat.
“Come,” he said. “Come. Both of you.” He held out his hand to Maxine.
Near the window, Tolya gestured with both arms at the city. From up here, he said, he could keep an eye on the real estate, the new buildings going up, the glass towers in the West Village, the famous new structures by famous old architects that would change the city skyline. He pointed out buildings that he said he already owned, including a squat warehouse across the street, the letters on its side proclaiming it to be the purveyor of the finest meats in America.
Red Hook Page 4
