Suitcase nukes. The radioactive stuff, the enriched uranium, plutonium, cesium, beryllium, usually came from some poor slob who hadn’t been paid for months and carried it out of a nuke plant in Russia in a saucepan. People were hungry in the Russian hinterlands; old people didn’t have heat; scientists didn’t get paid so they did what they had to. The big players took it from there.
American ports were as leaky as it got and you could get anything in. Usually the radioactive shit got through tucked in with antiques from Indonesia or tablecloths from Ukraine. I’d seen one of the canisters; it had held cesium. It was lead and painted yellow, the paint chipped. It looked like a cheap coffee thermos, but it was heavy. The hardware, labeled as tool and die machines, could be shipped through Germany, and then south, Iraq, Iran, Syria.
You didn’t need a fancy nuclear bomb, either; everyone knew. You got enough of the radiologicals, and added some crappy parts—a detonator, a piece of an alarm clock—put it with conventional explosives and took it on a ship or on board a plane or even a subway. Hit the Trade Center with that, you had a nuclear missile almost as terrifying as anything buried in the ground out in Wyoming. Fucking boom, as a friend of mine once said.
A hundred thousand people would be streaming up Broadway, the unlucky ones, their faces falling off, their skin peeling off, dying as they walked, and then thousands more, and no one at St Vincent’s with any idea what to do.
Jack had described it all; I could read his lust for the subject. It wasn’t that no one else had reported it. It was that Jack was obsessed. He sketched out fictional scenarios that would scare the socks off your fucking feet. There were clippings of his pieces from Long Island newspapers and local Brooklyn giveaway sheets, stuff reprinted in foreign papers and magazines.
He had covered the territory for years, he had consulted with medics, engineers and weapons specialists, he had even calculated the numbers of deaths; behind the cool calculations and figures and language, you could see that he was hot for the subject and he had been everywhere, traveling on any story he could get that took him to Russia, Iran, China, anywhere he thought he could detail sources of radioactive material; he described the mules who humped the stuff out of the Middle East and through Central Europe, some of them girls who worked as prostitutes and did it unknowingly, just carried canisters of the stuff in their bags. Some got cancer. A few had died of radioactive poisoning.
Probably it came down to that: Jack sat in front of his computer in the building in Red Hook that looked like crumbling bread and outlined the end of the world.
Weapons of Mass Destruction. Jack was in with it before it had a name. He got himself into conferences and spoke at universities.
For hours I read through the stuff that Sid had hoarded in his folders, moving through it, trying to make sense, restless, panicky that I’d never get to the end.
I spread the files around again, and picked my way over them, and kept looking for something that would show me what Sid knew about Jack that made Jack kill him.
By now, a sea of paper was scattered on Maxine’s floor. A snowstorm. I was getting nuts from it. A blizzard. Shut up, I thought. Read. Hurry.
I tried to picture Sid carefully cutting out pieces from newspapers, printing out stuff from the Internet, filing it, attaching paper clips, writing labels. There had not been a TV in his loft. Didn’t like the noise, he said. Sid liked his news recycled on his own time.
After about my fourth cup of coffee, my head cleared up and I realized I felt like I was reading a bad novel. Something didn’t click, didn’t fit, didn’t hang together, the jigsaw puzzle was missing a piece of the sky.
At the window, I looked out at the green lawn that sloped down to Shore Drive and the Belt Parkway. Cars buzzed past, and beyond them there were a few boats on the water. The Verrazano Bridge stretched elegant, a thin whip of metal across the Narrows to Staten Island, and I thought of how Maxine loved to stand at the window when the sun went down over it.
The “Guinea Gangplank”, she told me her uncle used to call the bridge, when guinea was a common slur for Italians, and people thought the mafia pushed their victims off the bridge.
The water was smooth, but the hurricane that had flattened Florida was coming up the East Coast; it was the worst hurricane season in a hundred years. I began worrying about Maxine down on that little Jersey peninsula, the scraps of beach that a storm could flood. She’d only laugh at me.
“It’s New Jersey, Artie, honey. Nothing ever happens here.”
Anyhow, she didn’t want me there.
“I don’t want you to, Artie. I just don’t, not right now,” she had said when I called the night before. Maxine sounded sad and I knew we had lost something.
What was I looking for those hours locked up in Maxine’s apartment?
I kept reading. I always resisted paperwork. I didn’t like the smell of old paper from the time I was a kid in Moscow and my mother leaned on me to use libraries. Love libraries, Artyom, she would say; there will always be something worth reading, and she would give me some money to bribe the librarian who would slip you forbidden books for a price. I once got caught. I was thirteen, fourteen, can’t remember, but I remembered that I was working on some subject I didn’t like, some Marxist–Leninist crap—hard to believe there was such a time—and I was looking through a copy of a Philip Roth novel and I got caught. My father had to come and get me from school.
It was getting late and I was already jumpy but I made more coffee, waited until it boiled, turned off the music, drank the coffee and found some stale Entenmann’s donuts in the fridge. I ate two and got powdered sugar on my shirt.
In the kitchen, I sat on a stool, upright near the window where it was bright so the light would keep me awake.
The last three folders were on the Formica counter in front of me. I opened one. The pages from a yellow legal pad were covered in Sid’s tiny handwriting, beautiful writing done with a fountain pen, as if he had studied calligraphy.
I couldn’t remember having seen these pages. Had I given them to Tolya? Did he put them back? There was a single sheet of the yellow paper, brittle with age, which contained lists of Russian vocabulary. I thought about Maxine’s attempts to learn Russian for me.
There were notes about Sid’s life as a young boy, the meeting with the Russian sailors, his search for the one sailor, Meler, who became his friend.
A couple of pages of notes were stuck to the back of the vocabulary list with some kind of glue. Sid had hidden it, not sure he wanted anyone to find it at all.
The handwritten notes in Russian were all about Jack as if Sid had written them in code. The notes dated back to Jack’s first job working for Sid, followed by more notes he kept over the years. Year after year, he kept an eye on everything that Jack did. He read his articles and columns, he saw him on TV. He took notes on his performances. It gave me the creeps, Sid watching Jack like that.
They must have talked on the phone, too, because there were notes on conversations, and references to tapes from recordings of the calls and receipts from meals they ate together. If you believed Sid’s notes, Jack had become increasingly delusional, paranoid, nuts, or just plain bad.
I shuttled back to the folder with Jack’s newspaper pieces: the articles about the Russian mob in Brighton Beach were full of the mystique of the new mafia, that kind of garbage, and while I picked out a couple of the stories to read, I spotted something that made me spill my coffee.
One of the articles was about a case I had worked almost ten years earlier, the first case I did in Brighton Beach, the one that took me back to Moscow. It was a nuclear smuggling case, real small potatoes, but one of the first. I had never seen the piece before.
There were names in it, mine, Tolya Sverdloff’s. It was the case where I first met Tolya. I wondered how the hell Jack had identified us. I looked at the date. How did he know I worked that case so soon after it was over? Later, maybe he could have looked it up, but back then no one knew.
Maybe his affair with Valentina Sverdloff wasn’t accidental. Maybe what he wanted was to get to her father. Maybe he came to my wedding to get close to me.
I got up. Deciphering Sid’s Russian was hard work, and I was beginning to sweat, not just from the effort, but from fear.
According to Sid, Jack didn’t just fake his datelines, he corrupted his own source material, so that after a while, even if people went back and looked at the stuff he had based his reports on, it seemed valid. You could do that with computer sites, go back generations so that even people who checked could be fooled, and who checked these days?
Jack didn’t care about facts; what he cared about was an idea of himself, a mythology, a narrative. Jack wasn’t interested in facts any more than the politicians were. He didn’t care if there was a canister of radioactive shit floating off Red Hook. He was interested in making the legend. Jack was only interested in making the next big urban legend: Nukes in New York.
I flipped the page in my hand, then turned it over, then checked back through a couple more pages of Sid’s notes. According to Sid, Jack was taking money from the government. Some federal agencies were giving him tax dollars to shill for the government, to push its line on certain issues, especially nuclear smuggling.
According to Jack, he took the money and he retailed propaganda as news about nukes. The news about smuggled nuclear weapons, the possibility of a dirty bomb, these made terrific propaganda weapons in the government’s arsenal of fear. Sid used the phrase: Arsenal of Fear. Melodramatic, maybe, but he believed it. For a price, Sid wrote, Jack was retailing fear for the government.
I started gathering up folders, putting things in order when something struck me: why did Sid keep it to himself? Did he feel he couldn’t admit he had been wrong about Jack in the first place, about his golden boy, the good son, the guy he hired, mentored, helped? He had even helped Jack buy into Red Hook. To keep him close? To watch him better?
Did Sid feel he had to check and check again? Had it only been the Jayson Blair mess at the New York Times, the kid who faked his stories, that made Sid pay more attention? He had been gathering material for years, though, adding to it, working on it, rewriting it, getting the evidence.
The more I read, the more I could see that Sid was almost as obsessed by Jack as he was by the facts; they were locked in it together: Sid building up the folders year after year, no longer sure what was true and what was fiction. The two of them, speaking, not speaking, Sid with his folders, Jack working on obscure websites. I had met them both at the same time, at Jack’s wedding on Crosby Street all those years ago.
He knew. I suddenly understood that Jack knew that Sid was watching him, keeping track, making notes. Somehow he knew. It was a game they were both in. Sid appointed Jack to be the good son, and Jack exploited it and then let him know he knew.
Year after year, Jack invented not just his work but himself; he made himself up. Only Sid knew all of it, all the lies and inventions. If he let it out, there would be nothing left of Jack. He would disappear into his own lies. Sid was dead; Jack had needed him dead.
I had to get to Jack Santiago somehow. He had gone to Russia, but maybe he was still in the air, maybe he wasn’t at the airport yet, or at the airport; for the second or third time, I thought: you could stop someone at an airport. Sonny could get someone. Tolya could find one of his guys.
I got up in a hurry and dropped all the files on to Maxine’s kitchen floor.
The paper scattered everywhere, and the warm breeze coming in off the river picked up a single sheet that drifted out of the window.
25
The sun was almost gone by the time I got on the FDR Drive where the traffic was moving OK. It was getting dark earlier, fall coming. I was back in Manhattan, heading uptown on the highway, driving too fast.
The water was on my right, the Pepsi Cola sign winked red at me from Queens. Overhead, when I passed 59th Street, the little suburban tram shunted people to Roosevelt Island. All the years I’d been in New York I had never been to Roosevelt Island.
The city was spread out across the islands, not just Manhattan or Staten Island, or Roosevelt or Randall’s in the East River, but specks of empty land which meant you could land illegal material or people or drugs in a thousand places.
I was tired and I tried to keep focused on the files, on the nukes Jack said had been coming into the ports, on whether he made it all up, working my phone, still trying to get through to the airlines, to Moscow, I was distracted by the water turning dark, the lights coming on.
Tolya had the clout, he could track down Jack Santiago if he was in Moscow, but Tolya, tight-lipped on the phone, just gave me an address in the Bronx and hung up. Hurry, I thought.
My window was open; the humid air closed in on me, I stepped on the gas, moving between trucks and cabs and cars, everyone leaning on the horn because I was driving like a drunk. I wasn’t drunk, but I was tired, and I was going too fast, passing too close. I put on the radio, tried to keep awake, listened to the news.
Up to my left now were the fancy buildings on Sutton Place like cliff dwellings hung out over the East River. I had done a case in one of those buildings. It had been full of rich people and I wondered if they still felt safe, or if they sat up nights now, locked up and scared.
I put on some loud Brazilian music to keep me awake. Took it off. I was nervous. I put on a Stan Kenton big band album, hit stop, turned on the radio again so the jagged loop of instant news battered my brain. Hurricanes. Destruction everywhere down south.
Finally, I turned into the mind-numbing tangle of roads that led to the Triboro Bridge and the Bronx, and then on to Bruckner Boulevard. Overhead, the traffic on the Bruckner Expressway roared by.
The streets were deserted, there were broken sidewalks, one-story buildings shuttered with metal gates, businesses gone bust, factories shut down, gas stations closed.
There wasn’t much crime up here anymore, not the way there had been when this was Bonfire of the Vanities territory and guys I knew who had to work it were scared. Fort Apache, they called it. Someone I knew who had a business down one of these crumbling streets in those days told me that he drove a Jeep so he could run down anyone who got in his way. The South Bronx? Move fast, ask later, he said.
“I got a Jeep, I got a gun permit,” he said. He wasn’t even a cop.
You didn’t get trouble up here anymore unless you went looking for it. People were even eyeing the South Bronx for real estate.
Hunt’s Point, where the food markets were, sat on the edge of the water. Two hundred years earlier, five or six rich families kept summer estates here. I took a dead-end road and found myself staring at a chain-link fence and an old pier and the water beyond it. From the south end of the Bronx, you could look down along the East River to Manhattan.
Behind me a truck was honking and somewhere from a car radio I heard the ballgame. Getting my bearings, I realized I wasn’t far from the Stadium. It would have been nice to drop everything and head over and catch the game, watch Mariano close for the Yanks, sit there with Maxine and drink a few beers. I hoped to God I hadn’t fucked up that life completely. Tomorrow, I thought. I’ll get to her by tomorrow. It will be OK, if I do that. I’ll spend the holiday with her. It was Labor Day, the last holiday of the summer.
I made a deal with myself: if I got there for Labor Day, Maxine would forgive me.
I took another wrong turn, doubled back, stepping on the gas, desperate to get to Tolya Sverdloff. Up one avenue was a huge produce market, the endless rows of warehouses where fruit and vegetables were shipped out across the city.
In the distance I could see the new fish market. Fulton Street’s market would disappear; the fish would be delivered here. I was looking for meat.
Hunt’s Point was the biggest food depot in the world. Everything came in, and then moved out again and even on Sunday night there was activity, as eighteen-wheelers thundered off the highway and through the security check and into the ma
rket.
My badge got me through security. I drove to a parking lot. On the other side, a row of trucks was attached to huge accordion-like tubes hanging from an overhead rail. It was some kind of clean air deal, someone told me; it was bullshit, he had said. No one used it, it was just a useless sop to some environmental group. There had been other deals up here, rumors of price fixing. It was clean now, more or less, but all the business was done in cash.
The market was like a city: there was a bank, a couple of coffee shops, stores. Some of the purveyors sold to small stores, but most were big wholesalers. A long building with loading docks out front was divided up into separate businesses—lamb, pork, beef. A couple of trucks were backed up to the docks, men unloading goods, a lot of it in boxes, some animal carcasses. Soon it would all be here and nothing left downtown in the Meat Packing District except restaurants serving blood orange mojitos.
The whole place was dense with sound: a few trucks had their engines running; a generator whined somewhere; air conditioning units rattled; planes flew low into LaGuardia; guys on the loading docks yelled out to truck drivers; radios blared the ballgame. It was how the Brooklyn shipyards must have sounded once.
I drove around looking for the address Tolya had given me, getting screwed up in the endless rows of warehouses, worried now.
Hurry. My heart skipped a beat, slipped down, seemed to go wrong. I had to get this thing finished tonight. I wanted it over. Get Jack picked up wherever he was. Get him back to the city. Get it done.
Red Hook Page 23
