Finally, I saw a guy directing a truck as it backed into a loading dock and I leaned out. He gave me directions.
A sign out front proclaimed that the wholesaler specialized in the world’s best lamb. The letters “RK” were on a sign, the company name, I guessed. Next door was a chicken operation. It was a warm, humid evening and I got a strong whiff of the stink of chicken.
I kept going into the RK receiving office where a guy at a computer terminal made a call and then got up and escorted me through the warehouse.
It was huge, two stories high, and almost empty. Most of the boxes had been moved out across the city; more would come in before dawn. A man bundled up in a one-piece quilted jumpsuit passed and waved his hand. It was freezing in the cavernous dark space. It felt like hell.
“In there,” said the guy who brought me to the office.
I opened the door.
Two men, their backs to me, were at the desk, and I could see a bottle of vodka on it. One of them was Tolya. He heard the door open. So did the other guy. Ronnie Kruschenko, he said, and got up to shake my hand. He had a patch over one eye, like a pirate, or else a man who had had a cataract operation. He congratulated me and I remembered he had been at my wedding.
On the desk was a large blue can of caviar and a plate with bread. The desk itself was eight feet long and made out of fancy inlaid wood. The walls were covered in gold wallpaper and there were framed pictures of Ronnie with various dignitaries. On a shelf that ran the length of the room was a collection of china sheep.
Lamb was Kruschenko’s thing, and I guessed the sheep were some kind of icon for him. There were a lot of them. Rows of them on glass shelves. Pictures of Ronnie with various prize animals and famous chefs. I noticed the carpet had a flock of sheep woven in it.
Kruschenko offered to show me around. He was a voluble, genial guy and he let me know he began as a butcher at the market, like a lot of Russians, and had worked his way up to buying the place. He asked if I needed anything, lamb, beef, he could put me on to some prime retailers, or give me a whole side, since I was a friend of Tolya’s. Anything he said. These days, he added, the market catered to everyone, goats for Caribbean customers, halal butchering for Muslims.
“We can do live slaughter,” he said. “You smelled the chickens, right?”
He gestured at the vodka, and I shook my head. There was a knock on the door. Kruschenko yelled, “Yeah? Come in.”
In a butcher’s coat, a man walked into the office, went over to Kruschenko, whispered in his ear. Kruschenko didn’t introduce him. The man looked at me warily, and said, “Who’s he?”
Kruschenko told him to relax and walked him out of the office.
“I’m sorry,” he said, returning. “People get nervous about outsiders. Please, forgive me.”
“Sure,” I said. “We have to go anyway.”
“Give me a minute, Artyom,” Tolya said.
“No,” I said. “I need you.”
He lowered his voice. “Give me a minute. Please.”
While they finished talking, I waited at the other side of the room, impatient, staring at an oil painting of lambs. When I turned around, I saw Kruschenko take an envelope out of his desk and hand it to Tolya. It looked like money.
I said, “Let’s go.”
“What the fuck was that?” I said to Tolya when we were in the parking lot. “I had to come all the way up here to find you because you needed meat?”
“I need cash,” he said. “I told you on the phone. It’s why I couldn’t talk. I told you I had to do this. What’s your problem, Artyom? I do even a little deal, you follow me?”
“What do you need so much cash for now?”
“I need,” he said and took a cigar out of his case and lit one, and stood in the dark smoking furiously. He peered at me. “What?”
“You went after Jack and Val last night, right?” I said. “I saw you drive off. I was worried. You looked terrible. You didn’t get to them?”
“What could I do?” he said. “I didn’t feel so good. Listen, I crashed my car. I lost them.”
“You didn’t call me? Where’s Val?”
“What?”
“Jack knew all about you before he started dating Valentina, he knew about me. I’m talking years ago, I mean ancient history. Come on.” I started towards my car. “Let’s get back to the city. We can talk on the way. “Where is she?”
“I’m calling,” he said, walking with me, then running, short of breath, smoking.
“I found stuff in one of the files I took from Sid’s place, articles Jack wrote where he identified you and me as working that Red Mercury case back in Brighton Beach, years back, you remember, the year we first met Jack, at that party, his wedding at his place on Crosby Street. We were all there, I remembered, you, me, Lily, Sid. I think Jack’s dating Val because he’s interested in you. Your past. Your history, your access, your money. You were right,” I said. “And he’s still obsessed with nukes. He thinks they’re coming in through Brooklyn. Hoods in Brighton Beach. Ships in Red Hook. He wants to get at the Russians through you. Through Valentina.”
Tolya stopped dead in the middle of the street and sank into himself like a frog, his head sinking between his shoulders. He stared at me. “Where is he?”
“I think he went to Russia. I thought you knew. Where is she?”
“My God.”
“What is it?” I said, watching him tremble. “What?”
He seemed to shake himself and he ran now, towards his car. It was a new black Escalade.
“Valentina!” he bellowed.
I said, “Where is she?”
“She calls me, she says, Daddy, I want to go to Moscow. Mom’s going, and I’ll go with her. She lies to me. Artyom. She’s going with that asshole.”
I grabbed his sleeve, and he stopped and looked at his watch, a new fat Rolex, platinum, with numerals that glowed green in the dark surrounded by a thick ring of diamonds.
I said, “Can you stop her?”
He opened his phone and made three calls in succession, calling the airport, the airline, someone in Moscow. He said to everyone he called, “Call me back.”
“I think Jack was involved with Sid’s death,” I said.
“My God,” Tolya said. He yanked open the door of his car. “My God.”
Before he could get in his SUV, I said, “Get in my car. You can’t drive the way you are. Just get the fuck in.”
Silent, trying to get some breath back, he obeyed, and I must have done a hundred down the drive. I almost killed us. In front of Tolya’s place on the west side, I slammed on the brakes. He ran.
*
A few minutes later he was back. From the doorway of his building, he waved at me and tried to smile. I thought the effort might kill him.
I got out of the car and put my hand out.
“No, is OK. Is good. She didn’t leave,” he said. “She is with her girlfriends in East Hampton. She leaves me message. She leaves little note, not on phone, on my bed, she leaves note with bunch of flowers, and box of chocolates on my pillow. Dear Daddy, I am in East Hampton. Is OK. So I call, is OK. I hear her voice. I’m going to see her,” he said. “I have to see her.”
“That’s good. She’s OK. I need you here.”
He looked exhausted. “I’ll get a helicopter. I’ll be back in a few hours. I need to see Valentina. Make sure. OK? She said Santiago went to Russia, he went, I’ll make calls, there are people I can reach out to, when he lands, while he’s at the airport. Wherever he is. Your friend Sonny Lippert, I never liked him, but get him to make some calls, OK? Calls to Immigration. He’ll do it?”
“Yes,” I said. “You want the rest of Sid’s files? You want to read the stuff on Jack, the other things?”
“Later,” he said, looking at his watch. “I have someone coming to pick me up to take me to the heliport now. I can’t wait. You think I give a shit about real estate right now?”
“But you still want them?”
; “Sure. Why not? I’ll get them from you some time,” he said, and I knew he was grateful about Val, but still angry I didn’t give him what he had asked for. It wasn’t the way friendship worked with him.
“I can take you to the heliport,” I said.
“I have someone.”
26
“I’m addicted,” Sonny Lippert said when I found him on the viewing platform at Ground Zero. “I’m more addicted to this than to the booze, you know?”
I’d been to his apartment building and when the doorman said he was out, I gave him ten bucks to tell me that he knew that Sonny sometimes went over to West Street late at night, that he mentioned he sometimes went to look at the pit.
“I can’t stay away.” He leaned against the fence that separated him from the hole in the ground.
“Come on,” I said. “You can’t do this anymore. Let’s go back to your place. I need your help, Sonny. I need you to help me. I’m pretty sure that Jack Santiago killed Sid McKay, I read the files, there was serious stuff.”
“You stole the files?” Sonny looked amused. “You actually broke into McKay’s place and stole from him? I thought you were joking about his files. I told you everyone talked about them, but no one ever saw them, people figured it was just part of McKay’s crazinesses. Did you tell me you stole? You’re the Watergate One, all by yourself, man.”
“I thought you were going to call Immigration, try to stop Santiago,” I said, impatient now.
“You asked, I didn’t say. You made me a story the other night at my office, man, you think I didn’t notice you were spinning it? You think I didn’t know? You thought I was too drunk?”
I kept my mouth shut.
“You got to give me a lot more if you want me to use up a big ‘ask’ with Immigration. We been down this road, Artie, man. So McKay thought Santiago was a fake, and he felt betrayed, so what? Everybody makes up stories these days, one way or another. You manipulate a photograph, you can do that with digital shit, you know, you crank up the prose; you don’t have to file from places you’ve never been. You can do it much much easier.”
I tried to get Sonny to start walking.
“Jack was out with Sid on Tuesday morning when Sid didn’t go home, when they found him beaten up. They went for coffee, and there’s other stuff, reams of shit that Sid kept about Jack. He was going to turn him in. Jack was taking money to shill for the government on nuke smuggling. He faked everything. I read it. It was like he made himself up.”
He turned back to the pit. He leaned against the chain-link fence that was covered with something green, real grass, fake grass to keep people from peering into the hole in the ground. You were allowed to look but only from the official viewing platform. Also, city officials were worried that cars would suddenly stop so people could look. Or was it to keep people from being upset?
Through a little hole in the fence, on the other side of the huge, empty, silent space, I could see Century 21.
“You think they’ll ever build anything down there?” Sonny said. “You think they’ll build, or they’ll just keep fighting about what to build and why they should build it or not build it? Fucking New York.”
“Jack has a bug up his ass about suitcase nukes. You believe it all?”
Sonny looked up from his peephole and shrugged. “For sure there’s been radiologicals that have come into the country,” he said. “A small group of Port Authority people ran some trials, they ran in depleted material, they got stuff right through one of the ports in a fancy teak chest. If you can believe it, Homeland fucking Security said, well, if it was the real thing, it would have been stopped, yeah, like sure, and then we had reports the real thing made it through. We fucking know that, but so what? We stopped some. What we stopped we stopped. “We don’t talk about it. We don’t tell the public. They don’t want to know. The public has a right to know, they say, but they don’t want to know. I heard there was something recently.”
“In Red Hook?” I wasn’t surprised.
“Close by. By the garbage incinerator on the way to Coney Island. You know where I mean?”
“A suitcase thing?”
“Yeah.”
“Anyone hurt?”
“No, nothing went off,” Sonny grunted. “We found it in a shed. Someone must have brought it in for sale, got scared, dumped it. A few ounces of Yellowcake, nothing much. Weapons of Mass Destruction, man, like what was that? A myth? A phrase? Just a sign of things to come. More fear value than anything else, man, that’s what, more value for someone like Jack Santiago, or the politicians.” Suddenly, he began coughing.
“You think Jack just wanted his story?” I said.
“Yeah, probably, could be.”
“The wacko thing, Sonny, is that the way I read it, Sid’s stuff sounds almost as paranoid as Jack’s, he couldn’t stop collecting stuff, he couldn’t turn him in, he was just sitting there spying on him, stashing these newspaper pieces and Internet pieces and notes he was making, and he couldn’t let go. Tons of paper, folders, envelopes, stuff scribbled on old notebooks.”
“Like Dickens,” Sonny said. “Jarndyce v Jarndyce.”
“What the fuck are you talking about? Please, Sonny, please make the calls. Get Jack.”
“Maybe McKay didn’t want to hurt the guy, you ever think of that? Maybe they were close. Maybe he couldn’t stand it, couldn’t turn him in, couldn’t stop thinking about it.”
“Anything else at all on Sid?”
“Like I said, there won’t be any news,” he said.
“What?” I took out my cigarettes.
“Give me one of those.” Sonny reached for a cigarette.
“You saw his obituary?”
“Yeah, they really worked the system, the family McKay. They closed ranks, it will go down as an accident. I tried, man, and McKay’s family says it was an accident, or maybe a suicide, suicide by default, he was depressed, he had taken a sleeping pill, he wandered too close to the water, he fell accidentally on purpose, and then he let it go. It’s easy. You suck up the water. Maybe like you said, he killed poor old Earl, and who cares about that, because he was a drunk and a junkie.”
“I want Jack back from Moscow. Get him,” I said, panic setting in. “Before he leaves Moscow. Before he leaves the airport. I been trying and all I get is different versions from different airlines. I have Sverdloff on it. Jack left his place Saturday night. I got people said he went via Paris. Someone else said Polish Airlines or Aeroflot.”
Sonny turned back to the pit and started walking and I followed alongside until we got to the viewing platform. No one else was out. It was late, and we stood together and he looked down.
“I miss it, man,” he said. “I miss it. It seemed simple, you know. We were all on the same side then, or so we believed. Three fucking years next week, is it next week? Yeah, this week.” He looked at his watch. “They’ll play all the songs, ‘God Bless America’, and the families will still hurt and the politicians will make speeches and the dirty little secret is we’re not over it, but now it’s tearing us up. I miss the way it was.” He turned his head and started coughing, and for a minute I thought he was going to cough up his lungs.
“Go back to Red Hook,” Sonny added, “go back one more time if you want and see if you can find anything at all on Jack Santiago that will nail him, some little thing we missed that will help us make a case before they just plant Sid and it’s all over. Funeral’s Tuesday. Do it before that crazy family of his just plants him in the ground.”
He set off towards his building. The sky was a smudgy gray. I took a step in his direction, but he was coughing and walking, and he just put up a hand, to say no, leave me.
I followed him. He was coughing so bad he could hardly walk. I stayed with him in case his legs gave out. We got to his building and went upstairs.
“It’s OK, man, I’m fine,” Sonny said.
He opened the door. The apartment was dark and he fumbled with the light switch, but when he flicked it on,
I saw that something was different from a few days earlier when I’d sat with him out on the balcony while he drank tomato juice. It took me a second to orient myself. The studio apartment had had bare walls, as if Sonny hadn’t intended staying long. Now the walls were covered with a jumble of photographs, some framed, some stuck up with tape.
Sonny followed my gaze as I looked at the wall to the left of the front door. The photographs reached almost to the ceiling. There were photographs of the Twin Towers, of the planes smashing into them, of the fireballs rising up, of people running covered in thick white ash, firefighters, cops, an abandoned bagel cart, workers emerging from the pit with orange fires burning as if from hell, a tea set covered in dust like something from Pompeii, a hundred more photographs. Sonny had created a shrine.
“I’m addicted to it,” he had said; now he just stood and looked at his wall.
“You know what I hated, Sonny, you know what made me really pissed off almost the most?”
“Yeah, what’s that, man?” He moved away from the wall and shoved some newspapers off a table and extracted a half-empty bottle of Scotch.
I said, “I hated it when people used it, politicians, you know. I hated it when people took stuff for souvenirs from the pit.”
“Yeah.”
I hesitated.
“What?”
“I hated it when reporters lied their way down there, like dressing up as firemen, you know, I fucking hated that, all of us busting our asses, and them lying and putting on firemen gear, which was like sacred stuff.”
He looked at me. “You’re telling me Jack Santiago did that?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I seem to remember he was one of them. I remember that.” I was feeding Sonny. I was fueling him up.
“You want Santiago real bad, right?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll do what I can, Artie. I’ll call Moscow. I have someone over there I know. After that, fuck knows, he could be anywhere; he could disappear into the middle of nowhere if he wanted. You’re sure. It’s probably my last big ‘ask’, Artie, man, they want me out, they want to retire my ass, and if this goes bad, that’ll be it. If you say, I’ll push the buttons. If you really need it, if you’re fucking positive that he killed Sid McKay, I’ll get him, I’ll reach out for you, but tell me you’re sure.”
Red Hook Page 24
