Red Hook

by Reggie Nadelson

  “You didn’t want to share that with me? You didn’t want to tell me? You didn’t trust me? You’re turning into your father’s son, Artemy Maximovich. You don’t trust even your friends when there’s a case, you wait to see if they offer you information first.”

  My father had been a KGB guy all his life. Even after they fired him, even after my parents left Moscow, it was who he was. He had been good at it, he was subtle, he could ask the right questions. Sometimes I wondered if, sitting across the table in an interrogation, people felt fear. I had adored my father, but I hated what he did and it took me years to admit it.

  “It’s not my case,” I said again. “It was a homeless guy, a drunk, a junkie who died. How do you know Sid?”

  Tolya pushed his plate away and picked up his wine again. “I knew Sid from way back. Not well. Then a year ago, more, less, I ran into him at a bar in Red Hook. He recognized me, and we talked.”

  “What about?”

  “You. He knew you. I knew you. I remembered he had helped you with Billy Farone. He was a lovely man, he spoke wonderful Russian, he could recite Pushkin. He had been a good journalist and he was in mourning for his profession. I thought he was lonely.”

  “Was?”

  “Did I say was?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t know.” Tolya examined his wine. “I had fallen in love with Red Hook. I tell him, Sid, I want to buy here. He says, I will help you, I know this place, I know the people, the history. I keep notes. I have information. It was an obsession for him, Red Hook. He helps me.”

  I said, “Was Sid in trouble?”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “When he called me, he said someone was stalking him, he mentioned Russian thugs, he talked all kinds of paranoid stuff, then he says someone is following him, and a guy turns up dead in an inlet near his place. I think it was Sid who found the body.” I picked up my own glass.

  I didn’t tell Tolya that the dead guy was Sid’s half brother; it wasn’t his business.

  “People get crazy about real estate, about the waterfront, you remember the murder in SoHo when there was a building everyone wanted there?” Tolya said. “On Greene Street? You remember? Crazier than doing business in Moscow in craziest times, right? When there’s a lot of money, people kill.”

  “For what? For the real estate?”

  “For the information.”

  “What did Sid know?”

  “Sid knew everything. He knew but he didn’t act. He liked knowing. He had files. He kept meticulous notes, he knew everything about Red Hook, every building, its history, its financing. He knew it all.”

  “And he told you.”

  “Some.”

  “You wanted his files?”

  Tolya avoided my question and looked at his spaghetti. “Where is he?”

  I said, “Long Island. He has a place.”

  “Good. I have his number. I call. Make sure he’s OK. Yes?”

  I nodded and tried not to let him see it worried me, his calling Sid, his getting involved.

  “Is that why you took me to Red Hook earlier? Because of Sid?” I said.

  “I wanted to show you was all. Go on vacation, Artyom, go meet Maxine. Maybe I go on vacation, too, end of week. Maybe Florida, yeah, probably for sure, Friday, I will go to Florida, check up on this and that, and then maybe I’ll travel,” he said. “You know that Sid is paranoid, he was a man with nothing left to do except gnaw on the past. It will be alright. You believe me?”

  In the parking lot, Tolya gave me the keys to his Escalade.

  “You think you are too many sheets in wind for driving?” he said.

  “No. I’m a cop, aren’t I?” I knew I’d had too much wine, but I figured I was OK. “How will you get home?”

  “One of my guys will come,” he said, then added, “You’re wondering if I saw her?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I saw Lily. She’s back in New York for good this time, I think. Beth’s in London until school starts. Lily’s here alone. She’s here to protest the Republicans. She says she’ll do what it takes to keep George Bush out, she’s willing to go to jail, she says. She’s such an innocent,” he said. “She thinks it makes a difference.”

  I said, “What else?” I was sweating.

  “She asked me if you wanted to see her at all.”

  I lit a cigarette.

  “Do you miss her so much?” Tolya said.

  “Stop,” I said. “No. I don’t. Leave it.”

  “Take care, Artemy. Don’t end up one of those sad men who can’t stay with one woman, like my father,” he said. “Like me.”

  He hugged me. “You want to know how I made all my money? Remind me, one day I tell you.”

  “How?” I said.

  “I stole it,” he said, burst out laughing and turned towards the front door of Farone’s place.

  “Where are you going?”

  He laughed. “I am going inside to party with politicians, Democrats, Republicans, who gives a shit?” He raised his hands, palms up. “You know something, Artemy, this election will tear everyone apart. Friends will stop speaking. I make contributions on both sides,” he said.

  “What for? What do you need with the politicians?” I said.

  “To be safe.”

  “You’re an American. You’re safe. You can vote for who you want.”

  He looked at me. “Don’t be naïve,” he said.

  10

  It was after one in the morning when I got out, opened the door of Tolya’s SUV in front of my building, reached inside for my jacket, and glanced up and down the block where a few people were still out on the street: a man walking his dog; a couple drifting up from some restaurant in Chinatown. I was moving slow. I had driven slow back from Brooklyn, trying not to crash the car.

  “Artie?”

  The voice was familiar, low and husky, and part of me wanted to jump back in the car and hit the gas and beat it. Instead, I closed the door and locked it.

  It was Lily. Lily coming across the street, calling out my name, then standing near me, pushing her thick red hair back from her face, and looking at me. Her hair was shorter than I remembered.

  “Hi,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “Hi,” she said, and leaned forward to kiss me.

  I didn’t move.

  “What are you doing here?” I said.

  She crossed her arms over her chest, then adjusted the bag on her shoulder. She was tanned and wore white cotton pants and a sleeveless black shirt.

  “I was passing, I was in the neighborhood,” she said. “I was out drinking. Just out.”

  “I see.”

  “I was around the corner, I was at that little bar we used to go to, you remember, in Chinatown, the place no one knew about, where they sometimes had big bowls of prawn crackers, you remember? I go there sometimes, and I thought I’d see if you were at home. On my way, I mean.”

  “It’s late.”

  “I wanted to see you,” she said. “Just to talk.”

  “I’m really kind of busy.”

  “It’s one in the morning,” she said. “How busy can you be?”

  “I’m going away in a few days.”

  “I see.”

  “Honeymoon,” I said. “My honeymoon. I just got married.”

  “Right.” She sucked on her lower lip. “I thought you might call me. After that time we talked. You remember? When I came back the spring before last, you were sitting in the coffee shop with Tolya and we talked on the phone and I said I was back in New York for a few weeks. You didn’t call. I’m back for good now.”

  “Is there something you need, Lily?”

  “Can we sit down some place?”

  “It’s really late,” I said, not moving, standing with my back to the door of my building.

  She looked up. “We could just go up to your house, and sit for a minute,” Lily said. “I won’t behave improperly,” she added, smiling. “I’v
e missed you, I wasn’t just passing by. I go to the bar in Chinatown because I think I might run into you, and I walk home this way because I might see you. I’m too chicken to invite you and your girlfriend, your wife, I mean, over to dinner. I can’t really get my mind around it, that you’re married. I’m sorry. But I thought I’d just say it, since I’ve never been any good at smuggled messages, right?”

  “Right,” I said and moved towards my front door.

  “So you’re not going to invite me for a drink or anything? I guess Maxine wouldn’t be thrilled.” Lily smiled.

  “She’s at the shore. New Jersey, down by Avalon,” I said. “So I have to go.”

  Lily put her hand out. “Can’t we even be friends? I know I wasn’t so great, but you’re OK now, and I was so crazy after 9/11. Never mind. You’re right,” she said and touched the back of my hand lightly, then turned to go. As she walked into the light from the street lamp, I saw that she looked tired. She turned back.

  “So you’re going away,” she said. “Tonight?”

  “In a few days.”

  “Can I have a cigarette, please?” she asked. “Right. Your honeymoon, you said. Of course. I really am sorry to bother you, are you OK?”

  I said, “I’m fine.” I crossed my arms.

  “I’m glad.”

  The space between us became almost solid with tension. I waited.

  She pulled something out of her pocket. It was a set of keys. “I came to give you these,” she said. “I forgot I still had them.”

  “Thanks.” I took them and felt her hand against mine, and figured if I didn’t go, I’d be lost. I was a jerk, I thought. I had always been a jerk about women.

  She said, “So did you change the locks?”

  “I don’t know. Yes. But not because of you. It doesn’t matter. Look, I have to go upstairs.”

  “You don’t want to see me at all, do you?” she said.

  “I have a life.”

  “That’s pretty brutal,” she said. “That’s hard.”

  “I know it is. But you left,” I said. “You went away, you got married, you took Beth with you, so I couldn’t see her, either, you just went and I didn’t know what to do without you, I didn’t even know how to get along, it was like someone stepped on my oxygen and it took me a long time. I can’t afford you now.”

  “I had to escape.”

  “From me?”

  “From everything. New York, America, I began to hate this place, I couldn’t help it, the flag waving, the patriotism, the whole thing.”

  “And I was a cop and I was waving a lot of flags.”

  Lily looked at me. She leaned against the wall of the building and then slowly slid down towards the pavement, half crouched on her haunches, half propped against the stone. I squatted next to her.

  “I’m tired,” she said. “What was I saying? Yeah, you went to a lot of funerals. You had friends who were cops and firemen and you all put flags up and sang ‘God Bless America’ and went to ball games and sat up with the widows and it was stuff I couldn’t deal with, a lot of it, I mean everybody was praying and talking about God and religion, I couldn’t. It wasn’t who I was. And you came home one night and you said, fuck civil liberties.”

  “That wasn’t about you. Jesus, Lily, you really think everything is the way you see it, you think you’re so tolerant but you don’t fucking listen to other people, or how complicated and confused and fucked up we all are. You just pitch your fucking ideological little tent and you sit in it, and you’re so fucking sure of everything, you’re so righteous.”

  “You’re finished? Is that it?”

  “It wasn’t about you.”

  “But it was,” she said. “It was my city, too. And it was like it became the point of it, the grieving, you and your friends were like the widow who’s so involved with her grief there’s no room for anything or anyone else, and even that’s about the ritual. I couldn’t even say what I felt. It never ended.”

  “So you left for that? For politics? You gave us up for politics? You and me? For fucking politics?” I was dumbfounded.

  Where I grew up, politics kept you from being in love; it got in the way of everything good in the Soviet Union; it was perverted and corrupt and shitty. I didn’t get it. I couldn’t explain it to her, either, and I saw her now, angry, her face red, her body crouched beside me, tense. I wanted to hold her. I could have grabbed her on the street I wanted her so bad, and I knew she felt the same.

  “I thought it was because I worked too much, because I didn’t have enough time for you,” I said.

  “That’s so banal. You think I’m that lame? That I didn’t want you to do your work?”

  “But you could never really take on board that I was a cop, could you? Your politics always got in your way.”

  “Well, I learned, OK? I was a fool. I married a nice British guy with good liberal politics, who spent a lot of time talking anti-American stuff and he was good with Beth. He had a little boy from his first marriage.”

  “And he had lots of money,” I said, but the anger had gone, and the tension.

  “It wasn’t for that.”

  My phone rang, and I grabbed it. It was Maxine. She had arrived at her mother’s at the shore earlier and tried calling. It was her second call. I stood up and half turned away from Lily and leaned against my front door. I talked to Maxine about the trip and when I would be there, and how the kids were, and how they dug clams themselves for clam sauce. I told Max I loved her. Behind me, I knew, Lily was listening.

  I turned around. Lily was standing facing me.

  “Why do you talk like that?” she said.

  “Like what?”

  She said, “Like not yourself. The way you say I love you, it’s like there’s someone listening, you’re so solicitous and serious, and you sound, I don’t know, brittle. Like a married man.”

  “I am married.”

  “Don’t be so pompous, sweetheart,” she said.

  “There was someone listening.”

  “Yes. Me.”

  “You mean I sound like I’m lying.”

  “That, too,” she said.

  I didn’t answer.

  Lily hoisted her bag on her shoulder. She said, “Take care of Tolya, will you? I don’t know what he’s doing but he’s way out on a limb, so watch out for him, OK?”

  “You knew that?”

  “Some. He tells me some,” she said.

  “OK.”

  “So I’ll be at the bar in Chinatown tomorrow night, OK, if you feel like it, I’ll be there. I go by most nights. Unless you want me to come upstairs now? No, I guess not. I know I fucked up with us. With you. I’ve missed you a lot.”

  Lily walked the few steps towards me, leaned over and kissed me very lightly on the mouth.

  “I shouldn’t have done that. So see you, sometime,” she said, and turned to walk away.

  Upstairs in my loft, I stood near the window smoking and watched her walk slowly down the dark street. Lily looked thin and seemed to get smaller. I thought again what an idiot I’d always been about women. I knew men who said their best friends were women, but I usually wanted to sleep with them, Lily most of all; if I said we could be friends, and we saw each other, I would want her. Thinking about her felt like a betrayal of Maxine, of Maxine and me.

  I’d known Lily almost all the time I’d lived in this loft, the only place I had ever owned, a place where I’d scraped the floors myself and fixed the bookshelves, and sat out on the fire escape and watched ball games on TV. I had drunk with the neighbors and slept with plenty of women. Lily and Beth, the little girl I helped her adopt, had spent weekends with me here.

  Then, out of nowhere, it came to me that I had met Sid McKay because of Lily.

  It was a party she had taken me to. Ten years ago. About ten. It was on Crosby Street, when it was a dark alleyway off Broadway, a few blocks away from my place. Derelicts still bedded down at night there and you slipped in rotting vegetables that fell off produce
trucks. I had worked a case around Crosby Street once.

  The party was on the top floor in a huge loft with enormous red and yellow canvases on the wall. It was jammed with people. There was the excited buzz of a good New York party, talk, women, music, booze, drugs. Live music, a band, three, four musicians, I thought. Ricky Tae had been there. Of course, I thought. Rick had known Sid first. Or I had invited Ricky along. Couldn’t remember. We had all known Sid somehow. Sid still kept Rick’s photo. Had they been friends? Lovers? I started for the phone, and I remembered Rick was out of town, on business. Did he invite me to that party on Crosby Street? Did Lily? Was Tolya there, too?

  It wasn’t a party. It was a wedding. Somebody’s wedding celebration, somebody I knew, or Lily knew, or Rick. I remembered.

  Late that night, a good-looking black guy at the party waves at Lily and then strolls across the room towards us, and she introduces him. It’s Sid, handsome, courteous, asking her to dance.

  They go out into the middle of the floor and people watch as Sid waltzes her around the room, very expert, very graceful. The band changes to “You’re The Top”, and they keep dancing. Lily always said, “I can’t dance, Artie. I have two left feet, you know. Or you think it’s because I can never let the man lead?”

  That night Sid leads her around the loft and they’re good and I can’t take my eyes off her.

  I sat up for a while more. My reflection in the window showed me hunched, uncertain. I reached for the phone, put it down. Tolya said Sid had information that people wanted, and that people would kill for it. I didn’t believe it much, but I figured Sid was in more trouble than I’d thought. I picked up the phone again, and then changed my mind for the second time. I went to bed. It could wait until morning.

  Part Two

  11

  There was the noise of a rat scurrying along the stone walls that were thick as a fortress, cool and humid under my hand, a smell like iodine embedded in them, as I made my way up to Sid’s place the next morning. The outside door had been left unlocked and inside I heard the rat, heard water running, music playing. Somewhere someone dropped a shoe on an old wooden floor.