Red Hook

by Reggie Nadelson

  Then, early Thursday, the story of the school siege in Russia began filtering through: rumors about kids held hostage; rumors about children murdered, of parents forced to choose which kid to take out of the school with them; rumors of slaughter. I saw my Russians on a street corner that day, huddled together, weeping.

  I caught some of the convention on monitors outside the main hall and I thought how much the politicians sounded like men I grew up watching on TV, same rhetoric, same bullshit: strong government was what mattered; anyone who didn’t think so was an enemy of the state. “Enemy of the state.” I heard some asshole use the expression, and it made me feel physically sick. Stalin’s favorite label.

  I was never political. I voted some of the time; sometimes I didn’t vote. Depended who was up. I liked Clinton OK, but, and I never told anyone, I mostly liked him because I felt a lot in common with a guy who like me, if he was honest, if I was honest, wanted to sleep with practically every good-looking woman he saw.

  All I ever really wanted was to be a New York City cop, and maybe for the Yankees to be good again like they were in the 90s, and the Red Sox to lose big.

  Growing up, first Moscow, then Israel, I had choked on politics. By the time I got to New York, I figured I could live my whole life without it.

  By Thursday, when I got off work early thanks to a friend who helped me out, I was desperate to get out of the city and I got a cab and called Maxine and said I’d set off in a couple of hours. She said they were having a great time, and they missed me, and I told her about the Russians eating ribs at Virgil’s and made her laugh. I didn’t mention that I’d seen Lily on the street.

  “I’ll see you really soon,” I said.

  “You’ll come, though, won’t you? The girls would be disappointed if you didn’t come.”

  “Sure, I’m coming,” I said, wondering why she was suddenly anxious.

  “Is there a lot of security?” she said.

  “Like a fucking war zone,” I said. “Only up around the Garden, though, around midtown.”

  “Protestors?”

  “Yeah. I think they’re going to lock up as many as they can.”

  “Well, maybe they should just be glad they live in America, you know?” Maxine said. “Where are you?”

  “On my way home,” I said, as we sped down Seventh Avenue.

  It was ghostly in downtown Manhattan; it was like a neutron bomb had dropped: the buildings were standing, but there were hardly any people, even on this balmy summer night. The cab cut east on Spring Street. The restaurants were empty. The terrace at Aquagrill, usually packed in nice weather, was almost deserted. The Tasti-D-Lite store had shut up early.

  I couldn’t remember so much silence in the last few years, not since 9/11. A million people had left town. I heard some were scared of attacks. Some were scared of the security, or the protestors, or traffic, but all week I’d felt it like a light layer over the city: fear; quiet; anxiety. “What I always loved about New York was the noise.

  I loved the street noise, the way people felt free to yak or yell or sing, speak, mouth off, even lean on the fucking car horns. When I was a kid in Moscow there was almost no noise, hardly any cars, hardly any laughter or music in the streets, everyone afraid. My uncle who had lived in Prague told me that the thing he adored about the Prague Spring was the noise. The Soviet tanks rolled in, Prague went silent.

  I got home, got the bag with Sid’s files out of the car, got my mail, went up, dumped everything on my desk, ripped off my clothes, went to the fridge and got a cold beer.

  While I drank it, I glanced through Sid’s stuff, and all I could see was a bunch of newspaper clippings and some notes on the old ship he told me about. I didn’t have time for more. I couldn’t see anything, and I wasn’t going to ruin my vacation, or Maxine’s, reading the files. I put Sid’s folders away in my desk drawer, locked it, put on a T-shirt and jeans, picked up the bag I had already packed for the beach and went out. I was going to the shore. I was going to meet Maxine and Millie and Maria. One stop, I thought; I’d make one more stop and then I’d go. I had promised. I’ll be there by midnight. I’ll be there. Love you, Maxine had said. See you soon.

  On my way, I drove through Chinatown. Across the street from the bar where I used to go with Lily, I stopped. Crouched down in the front seat, looking out, I felt like a creep.

  Through the window of the bar, I saw her. She was sitting on a barstool, her back to me, her hand around a wine glass. For a couple of minutes I watched her. I wanted so bad to go in and talk to her, but I pulled out of the space, and stepped on the gas hard.

  *

  As soon as I got out of the hospital elevator in Brooklyn, I heard the sound of rubber soles on linoleum, the way you always did in hospitals. Someone trundled an IV down the hall; two male aides shoved a patient on a gurney; there was the hot sour metallic smell of hospital food; somewhere a patient cried out. At the end of the floor I found the room I was looking for. The door was ajar.

  In the middle of the private room was a bed and on it lay Sid, or his shell, his body, the outer casing that had been Sid, because the rest of him was gone. His face was blank, shut up. I felt bad. I felt like I wanted to cry for him, and for me, too, for fucking up.

  “He’s never coming back,” a male nurse named Luis whispered to me as I entered the room.

  “Why don’t they pull the plug?” I said.

  “They did,” he said. “Nothing happened. They gave permission. He didn’t die. It’s like he’s hanging on for something.” He gestured to the group around the bed. “They’ve been there since yesterday some time.”

  Four people were on chairs around the bed where Sid lay. An elderly woman in a linen suit with a straw hat sat in a Naugahyde armchair, her back not touching the chair; next to her, a wine glass in his left hand, was a middle-aged man in Bermuda shorts and a polo shirt with polo players on the pocket, as if interrupted in the middle of a game; there was a woman who appeared to be his wife, wearing a plaid skirt and sleeveless pink blouse, and a girl in her teens in jeans.

  On a table in the corner someone had set out a large coffee urn and a platter with pastries, and I could see the slick sugary shiny surface of the Danish, and the blue of the berries in the muffins; there were bottles of wine, a row of glasses.

  Luis, the nurse, backed out of the room. I followed him and asked about Sid.

  “After we pulled the plug, and it was the son who gave the OK, nothing happened, and they had to sit and wait,” he said. “I heard one of the women call someone on her cell and say, ‘Bring some wine over.’ A little while later, a young kid, maybe nineteen, twenty, arrives with a bag, and unloads bottles of wine, puts it out, puts out glasses, starts pouring. People have been coming to visit, and in-between the family argue about some bullshit and they all sit and drink and he just lies there.”

  “Where’s the son?”

  “I saw him go out a while back, maybe for a smoke,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I stood against the door and for a while no one looked up, and I listened to the low buzz of family talk that came from around Sid’s bedside.

  Finally, the teenage girl got up from her chair. “Who are you?” she said.

  “I was his friend. You?”

  “My great-uncle, but we were close.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said and we moved into the corridor.

  “I wish they’d just let him go.”

  “I thought they did.”

  “Yeah, but he wouldn’t die. He won’t die.”

  “It’s tough.”

  “Not for them,” she said, gesturing at the group inside the room. “They love it, the bedside thing, the ritual, they do it all the time, makes them feel saintly,” she said. “I can’t stand it. I don’t know why I’m here except for Sid.”

  “You called him Sid?”

  “Sure. We were friends.”

  “You saw a lot of him?”

  She shook her head, started to cry.
“I wish,” she said softly. “They wouldn’t let me. They didn’t want me around him. They thought he was weird, that he was different, that he didn’t behave the way the family wanted him to behave. I liked it. I liked him. I have to go back now.”

  “Weird how?”

  She turned around. “You know, gay. And the Russian thing. He was obsessed. He was crazy for Russians.”

  “Can I talk to you later?”

  “Sure,” she said. “I’m not going anyplace.”

  I didn’t talk to her, though, not then or later. I went over to the nurse’s station. Luis, the nurse I’d seen in Sid’s room, was at a desk, working on the computer. A tiny Jamaican woman was standing at the desk, packing her bag, getting ready to leave, shift finished.

  “You a cop or something?” she asked me.

  “Something.”

  “I would appreciate less attitude,” she said, hostile. “Cops been, of course, cops, family, everybody on my case,” she said, speaking rapidly. “I was off duty fifteen minutes ago and I stayed on trying to help and you all just get in my face.”

  I needed information. “I apologize,” I said.

  “You don’t like the way I run things I can get an administrator,” she said. “I can get them to send you hospital policy. Printed. I just can’t talk about patients, even if you are a cop. Not to mention I didn’t see your badge.”

  I got out my wallet to show her my badge. Stuffed in the pocket beside it was the card the security guard who stopped the kayakers gave me. Orwell Properties, it said. An address in Red Hook.

  I could easily have stuffed the card back in with the rest of the junk in my wallet. You could look at something five times and not see it for what it was. Every detective knew that most of what you found out was half accidental: something clicked, or it didn’t, or you made the connection or you overlooked it. I wasn’t any better than a lot of cops. The card would have stayed in my wallet, forgotten, except for the Jamaican nurse wanting to see my badge. She was starting for the door when Luis looked up and said to me, “What about the Russian?”

  “None of his business,” the short nurse said, and then she picked up her bag and left, tiny but imperious even in the way she walked.

  “What Russian?” I said.

  Stethoscope hanging from his neck, Luis leaned on the counter between us, arms folded near a potted plant in a pot with pink tinfoil and a ribbon on it. He took a chocolate from an open box and said the guy who had been in to visit Sid was a big Russian. Huge.

  I said, “He had a name?” Cold sweat broke out on my back.

  “No, but Russian, I think for sure, yeah, and really big. He wanted to know everything that happened. He shook hands with all of us. He tipped everyone. He was crying after he saw the way Mr McKay was. Why? You know him? You don’t look so hot, man. Sit down for a second. You want me to take your blood pressure?”

  The business card that had been in my wallet was in my hand now. For the first time since I’d gone to see Sid Sunday, I was really scared. Panicky. Maxine was waiting for me. It was getting late. I was late. Sid was as good as dead. The card in my wallet read Orwell Properties; it belonged to Tolya Sverdloff.

  14

  My shoe caught in the crack of a piece of broken sidewalk, and I stumbled and broke the fall with my hands. It hurt like hell. I felt like an idiot, but there was no one to see me here on this shabby side street in Red Hook.

  On the narrow street were two houses with high stoops out front, the walls covered with cheap masonry siding. They looked shut up. So did the row of four stores, corrugated metal shutters smeared with graffiti, pulled down tight; a squat evangelical church with a flat roof, was silent; a couple of burned-out cars rusted in an empty lot. At the far end of the street, I could make out where the water began, but it was getting dark, and the light from the single street light pooled in one place so everything else was hidden in shadows.

  Give my regards to Tolya Sverdloff, Sid had said. Sid has files, Tolya told me; he has information. A big Russian had been into the hospital; he tipped everyone. The security guard in Red Hook was paid to keep people away from the waterfront by Tolya’s company. Orwell Properties.

  Tolya had dozens of little companies, he once told me, and reeled off the names; I only remembered Orwell because he thought it was his best joke, naming a company for George Orwell. Tolya carried a tattered orange and white Penguin edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four with him everywhere, the same edition he bought, black market, in his school toilet in Moscow when he was a teenager. I always told him Brave New World was a better book, a hell of a lot more prescient, but he didn’t care. Orwell had been his god for too long.

  When I called Tolya, there was no answer. I kept going, my hands raw and hurting like hell from the pavement where I tripped.

  Florida, Tolya had said. I’ll probably go to Florida. End of the week. Friday, he had said; it was Thursday night.

  I found Orwell Properties two streets over, but it was locked up, a metal gate pulled over the front door. I glanced around, thought about breaking in, tried to shove aside the gate. I didn’t have anything to work with. All I had in the trunk of my car were a few wedding presents and some stuff for the beach.

  I should get moving, I thought. Make it down to Jersey in three hours, four maybe, depending on traffic. Every few minutes, I kept saying it to myself. I should go. I looked at my watch. Instead, I drove over to the water and pulled up near Sid’s building. There was a cop in uniform outside. The place would be sealed. I’d have to work a dozen angles to get into Sid’s place, and there wasn’t much I could do for him now.

  Right now, I needed Tolya Sverdloff telling me I was crazy, that he wasn’t involved in some way with the attack on Sid, that he didn’t need information that bad.

  I opened the door and got out of the car and went out on the little pier. It was a clear evening, sun dropping into the water that was like a stream of silver. I sat on a bench.

  “Lily?”

  I had the feeling that she was there suddenly, next to me, on the bench, her red hair ruffled in the slight humid breeze off the river, smoking alongside me, chatting about the day, the world, us; we had always talked all the time; if we were apart, we called each other four, five, six times a day. We could never talk enough. We could never get enough of each other, or maybe that had been me. That night out on the cement pier, out in the river, I had the most intense sense of her being beside me. I woke up. I had dozed for maybe half an hour.

  I was so whacked I was hallucinating. I was hungry. I hadn’t eaten since Virgil’s with the Russians the night before, and I got my car and went to find some food and coffee.

  I still couldn’t reach Tolya; the car radio was reporting a hurricane, second big one in a few weeks, beating up the south coast; the airports in Florida were beginning to shut down. The forecast for the next day was worse. Maybe Tolya was already caught in it. Maybe he was stranded on some highway down there.

  A small woman plugged into a Discman she carried in one hand jiggled up and down to her music in front of a grocery store on Van Brunt Street. I recognized her. She was the woman who had attacked Tolya outside the bar in Red Hook, the woman who had climbed on him like a cat and tried to gouge his eyes out.

  She wasn’t bad-looking, and she seemed sober this time, not drunk or high. She wore cut-off pink sweat pants, and a turquoise T-shirt with a picture of Jimi Hendrix on the front. She was twenty-five, maybe thirty, short, thick, sexy in an athletic way like a gymnast. Her black hair was tied up in a ponytail. She ran inside the store. I pulled up and waited.

  A few people were on the street, going into the pub and towards a restaurant with some tables on the sidewalk. Two black women waited at the bus stop. There was no subway on this isolated peninsula.

  My eyelids sank over my eyes while I waited outside the store. Worried the woman would get away, I finally got out of the car and went into the store where I stood, partly hidden behind the beer and soda. She was examining boxes of cookies
. I watched her while she read the labels carefully.

  Eventually, she picked a bunch of bananas out of a bin and gathered up some potatoes from another one, asked for a pack of cigarettes from the guy at the counter, exchanged gossip with him in Spanish, stopped to light one of her smokes and carried her groceries back out to the street.

  For half a block I followed her on foot until we were clear of the shop and then I called out in Russian. She turned around. I could see she knew who I was. She tossed her smoke away and ground it out with her foot.

  Close up, she was a pretty girl. I took out my own cigarettes and offered them to her, but she shook her head so I lit one for myself. I spoke in Russian to her, my father’s Russian, formal, polite, respectful. I always imagined it was the way he had interrogated people, at least in the beginning. I asked what her name was.

  “Rita,” she said.

  “Just Rita?”

  “Is not enough?”

  “Can we talk?”

  “Yes,” she said and I was pretty surprised she was so forthcoming, so ready to talk, especially since I knew she recognized me as the guy who had been with Tolya when she attacked him.

  “Come home with me,” she said, and I gestured to my car, and we both got in, and she directed me a couple of blocks away to the housing projects.

  The projects were at the front of Red Hook, away from the docks and closer to the highway. Surrounded by scruffy grass, some of the buildings were thirty, forty years old.

  Rita looked at the pink plastic watch on her wrist. “I have to cook,” she said in English and I didn’t understand what she meant, but she indicated a parking spot and we stopped, and I followed her out of the car and into the dank hallway of a building and up to the top floor.