Little Odessa

by Joseph Koenig

  Kate stopped and turned around. She took off her glasses and squinted at him. “I really don’t want to talk about it now, Detective.”

  He stood at the door, watching her slide into the limousine. “Don’t call us …”

  11

  SHE PINCHED THE METAL teeth together, tugging at the tab. A stitch popped and she pulled the black dress over her head and stepped out from under it. She hated that dress, her funeral dress, snatched off the bargain rack while her father lay dying in a Caledonian Hospital cancer ward. She toed the dark puddle of cloth, then bent down and fit it on a hanger. In a couple of hours she’d want the dress again. Infante had asked to see her at the Knights and she was looking forward to it like another funeral—her own.

  She sagged against the bed and forced her eyes shut. Though she had been up for most of two nights, she was too edgy to relax. After a while she gave up trying and toyed with the Venetian blind, guiding a block of shadow over the pillow. She reached for the clock and she was amazed to see that it was already after three o’clock. Impossible, but she must have been out for close to ninety minutes. She felt more used up than before.

  She found Infante filling an ashtray at a booth near the kitchen. He was a pear-shaped man in his early forties with shadowy crevices like dotted lines in his hollow cheeks. “I was beginning to think I’d been stood up,” he said. His sloppy frown repulsed her.

  “I was at the cemetery.” She kept her chair pushed away from the table. “What did you want to talk about? Is there anything new on the investigation?” she asked, knowing she was the last person he would tell.

  Infante placed his hands on the table palms up, as if he was showing all his cards and none were aces.

  “What, then?” She was trying to sound annoyed, not having to work at it.

  “I’ve been running down your story,” he said, “and there’s parts that don’t hang together. Frankly …” He scraped the torn edge of a fingernail along a furrow extending from the point of his cheekbone to his chin, rooting at a cluster of stubby hairs. “What you gave us is a load of crap, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  Kate moved her chair back another few inches. “You’re entitled to your opinion, I suppose.”

  He focused between her eyes, trying to unsettle her. “That’s all you’ve got to say?”

  A broom handle slapped against the dance floor and Kate started. She saw the afternoon porter pounce on a dime and three pennies like they were gold nuggets. As he scrambled for more treasure on his hands and knees, it occurred to her that she had forgotten to book a dancer for the weekend and she made a note to give the musicians the time off with pay. No way she was going to pinch-hit again, feeling the way she did.

  “Am I boring you?” Infante was asking. “Because if I am, you’re in for plenty of excitement before you know it. Homicide’s all for locking you up till they get what they want out of you.” He paused again and his face softened. “It wouldn’t hurt if you leveled with one cop, put him on your side.”

  It was either a come-on or a trap, and each possibility was as appealing as the other. She didn’t trust him in spite of his concern, or perhaps because of it. “I have a cop on my side,” she said. “I have him all over me.”

  A waiter was setting tables along the wall near the windows and she got his attention and mouthed the word seltzer. “Why are you so worried about my welfare?” she asked Infante. “Last winter, you couldn’t wait to put me in jail.”

  “Every girl who airs it out on Times Square ought to have the pleasure. The smart ones might take the hint and go back home to mom.”

  “Please don’t do me any more favors,” Kate said.

  “This is murder two we’re talking about. If we have to lock you up again, it’ll be as a material witness or even accessory, till something better comes along. If I was you, I’d be stockpiling favors. All they cost is the truth.” He took a fresh pack of Camels from his jacket. “You could start by telling me where you were the other night.”

  “How many times do I have to repeat it? Stan’s been very good to me since the burglary and he asked me out to Jersey to eat.”

  “There’s not enough restaurants in New York?”

  Kate shrugged. “There’s a place he likes, it’s his favorite.”

  “He never mentioned it. What’s it called?”

  “I forget … a fish house.”

  Infante used a brief silence to arch his eyebrows.

  “And after, it was getting late and … well, we couldn’t go to the brownstone because I’d asked Nathan to stay there in case there was trouble again.”

  “Why didn’t Bucyk invite you to his apartment?”

  “He says it’s a pigsty.”

  “That’s the first honest statement you’ve made.”

  Kate looked at him unpleasantly until he said, “Go on.”

  “And then we drove around till we had a silly argument and I asked him to bring me home.”

  “But you were going to spend the night with him?”

  “I don’t see where that’s any of your—”

  “You have a mirror handy?” Infante asked.

  “What?”

  “A mirror, you know.”

  “I don’t think so, why?”

  “You ought to see your face,” he told her. “You look like you’re going to retch, thinking about it.”

  Her hand went automatically to her mouth. She caught herself and ran her fingers through her hair. “Do I?” she asked coldly.

  “Out of the question you’d let him get close to you, not if he didn’t have a gun to your head.”

  “So he had a gun.”

  Infante said, “You’re a terrible liar, about the worst I’ve heard. Don’t you practice?”

  “It wouldn’t be that you’re the least little bit jealous of Stan, would it?”

  Infante’s face didn’t change, but his voice did. “What’s he got that I want?” he asked quickly. “You, you think? Don’t flatter yourself. He doesn’t have anything.”

  “Because you’re still stuck in a West Side station house, cuing up chest pains for early retirement while Stan is doing important work for the FBI.”

  Infante grinned as though his face was going to tear along the dotted lines. “Is that what he told you? That’s worse than the crap you’re handing us.”

  Kate sat rigidly, showing nothing.

  Infante began laughing. He laughed so hard that he began to cough, and Kate thought it was an act till the waiter brought her seltzer and Infante emptied the glass before he could gasp out another word.

  “I don’t see what’s so funny,” Kate said. Her stomach felt queasy.

  “You are, you and Bucyk both. He told me, the night he ran you in from the Starlight, he said, ‘Paul, you got to see her. And brains as big as her melons. Brains,’ he said. A lot he knows, you can’t see through a guy like that.” Infante was laughing again. “Stash Bucyk a federal agent?”

  “I didn’t say he was an agent,” Kate told him, the queasiness intensifying as it spread through her body. “He’s a … like a consultant. He does jobs the FBI wouldn’t normally assign its regular agents.”

  “I’ll bet,” Infante laughed, and Kate thought he was going to start choking again. Instead he asked, “That’s what he told you? Why, what’s he up to?”

  “I … I’m not at liberty to tell you,” she said stiffly.

  Infante’s eyebrows arched higher. “Would you be more inclined to if I told you the FBI never has and never will have anything to do with a Stash Bucyk, the exception being if they haul him in on a federal rap?” He tore the cellophane from the Camels and crumpled it into a clean ashtray from another table. Then he nudged the pack just out of reach and glared at it like it was the enemy.

  Kate was looking at Infante with the same icy stare. “Is that why you were so secretive when I tried to reach him after the burglary?”

  “What I was doing was trying to save face for the poor slob and maybe keep him out of more
trouble. In case he didn’t mention it, Bucyk was cashiered out of the department last spring. He’s such a greedy bastard, he was even an embarrassment to the men he was collecting for. You didn’t see him at your restaurant every month with his hand out, the one you grease so it doesn’t ticket all the cars on the block, so he doesn’t chase your customers away?”

  “Here? He was squeezing Howard?”

  “More like a bear hug.”

  She didn’t want to hear more. Why didn’t he cadge a meal and stuff his face, or just go away? “That’s your problem, then,” she said unconvincingly. “He wasn’t stealing for me.”

  “It’s not the issue. If a few bills have to change hands so the precinct doesn’t come down with writer’s cramp, who’s being hurt? The Broadway Merchants Association isn’t squawking.” He brought out a disposable lighter and arranged it on the table beside the cigarettes. “With Bucyk, though, the pad came first. Police work was just a sideline till he figured why not sell out altogether. It almost brought the whole West Side down.”

  “I didn’t see anything on the news.”

  “Damn right, you didn’t. Another major scandal hits the NYPD and the vultures’ll have the commissioner’s heart on a platter. There was an internal affairs investigation and the only ones holding their breath were every cop this side of the park.”

  “If everyone looks the other way, why bother about Stan? You’re contradicting yourself.”

  “He went too far. He bent over for a big-time drug dealer from Queens, a disbarred international lawyer with his finger in lots of pies, and torpedoed six months’ work by the DEA and the narcotics task force. If the brass wasn’t so worried about covering their hide, he’d be doing hard time. Instead they whacked him on the knuckles and now I hear he’s henching full time for this guy.”

  “In Queens?” Kate asked, as if those were the only words she heard. “The pusher is in Queens?”

  “He’s wherever you find noses,” Infante said, “but Queens is where he lives, in an exclusive neighborhood called Forest Gardens, though you have to wonder how exclusive if they let in scum like that.”

  “I don’t believe anything you’re saying.” She was kidding herself, not fooling either of them. “You just want to turn me against Stan.”

  Infante reached for the cigarettes, but pulled his hand back. “It’d be a waste of time putting in a bad word for Bucyk when it’s the thing he does best himself.”

  The bottom had dropped out of Kate’s stomach, the feeling more unsettling than anything she had experienced on the Typhoon. “You’re lying,” she said without conviction. “You’re lying or you’re wrong, about everything. Stan knows someone there, but he’s no drug pusher, he’s in the import-export business.”

  Infante smiled condescendingly. “Same thing, isn’t it?”

  “Not at all.” Her voice was rising, breaking against the steely edge of his sarcasm. “He’s Russian. He trades in artifacts from the Soviet Union.”

  “What would someone like that want with Bucyk?”

  “He’s not just in antiques. He’s a …”

  “Yes?”

  “Never mind,” Kate said, and stopped to regroup. “What I told you about Stan and me, is that so impossible to believe?”

  “It wouldn’t be—if a man wasn’t dead and you weren’t in deep trouble.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but it’s the best I can do.”

  “I’m sorry, too. Sorry for you, what’s going to happen.”

  Kate’s eyes flickered and Infante thought she was going to say something. But then she looked away and the moment was lost.

  “I guess there’s nothing more.” He scooped up the unopened Camels and stuffed them in his pocket. “Trying to give up the coffin nails,” he told her self-consciously, eyeing the full ashtray. “Life’s too short to be your own worst enemy.”

  “Save it,” Kate said. “For all the good it will do.”

  She saw him to the door. A thunder squall trapped him under the awning and he turned up his collar and dashed toward a gray Dodge at a meter. Watching him go, she regretted not getting more out of him. But as it was there was too much for her to sort out by herself. She went to the office and rang Bucyk’s number, hanging up on the recording without leaving a message, then rummaged through the closet which doubled as the Knights’ lost and found.

  She hurried outside under a rice-paper parasol wishing someone had left a raincoat her size instead. Broadway was a river of off-duty cabs dammed at a red light. She jabbed the parasol at the wind and pushed toward the subway arcade on the Seventy-second Street traffic island. A couple of winos were sprawled on the first dry stair. She shut her ears as she stepped smartly over their outstretched legs.

  She waited twenty minutes for a local and took it two stops to Columbus Circle. Under clearing skies she thought the city looked dingier than it had before the rain, as though the grime had been washed away to reveal underlying decay. She walked east on Fifty-seventh Street homing in on a gray tower that looked down on Carnegie Hall. The art gallery was closed, large sheets of brown paper taped over the glass doors. She tapped her ring on the glass and a blond girl stuck her head out and said, “The opening is on Saturday.”

  Kate put her foot in the door. “I’d like some information about the last show you had.”

  “The Condoli? I’m afraid it’s already been taken down.”

  “No, the Russian icons.”

  The door opened wider and Kate caught a spoor of fine French perfume tainted with nail-polish remover. “The gallery is closed to the public until the weekend, while we’re hanging,” the blonde said.

  “It might be too late then.”

  The blonde understood, or thought she did. “Are you representing a foreign buyer?”

  Because it was the first thing to come to mind, Kate said, “I’m not at liberty to tell you.”

  The key to the city. “No problem,” the blonde said. She stood aside, nodding toward an elephant’s foot on the floor and Kate grimaced and dropped the wet parasol inside.

  The front room was awash in gray light entering through floor-to-ceiling windows. Brawny women were moving large canvases around the walls under the direction of a barefoot girl in a man’s suit with padded shoulders. A frustrated symphony conductor, Kate decided, watching her darting hands.

  “The icons will be on exhibit till the end of the month,” the blonde said as they walked into the rear gallery. “Is there anything in particular that you’re interested in?”

  “The man who put them up for sale,” Kate told her. “If you can tell me where I can reach him …”

  “We’re his authorized agent. He demands anonymity.”

  That sounded like Nicholas. Maybe Infante was toying with her. “You mean, because of all the trouble he has in getting them put of the USSR?”

  “It’s not our business why,” the blonde said, examining her nails. “If he doesn’t want his name—”

  “Marissa?” someone called from the office.

  “Excuse me,” she said and went out of the gallery.

  Kate heard her in conversation with a man with a husky voice. She strained to catch a few words, but someone in the other gallery had begun hammering. Then the blonde stepped out of the office and said, “Come with me, please. He’s here now. And he’ll see you.”

  “Who will?”

  A man with glossy black hair was leafing through an art catalogue with his back to her. Looking over his shoulder was a stern figure in the dark cassock of a Russian Orthodox priest.

  “Miss …?” the blond girl said.

  “Shapiro.”

  “Miss Shapiro,” she said, and both men turned around. “This is Metropolitan Nikodim, who brought these beautiful icons from basilicas in Belgorod-Dnestrovsky.”

  The man with the glossy hair was about twenty-five, with a soup strainer mustache hiding a harelip. He turned another page as the cleric smiled and clasped Kate’s hand. “You are admirer of holy art? What may I he
lp?”

  “Oh,” Kate said softly and pulled back her hand. “Oh, shit.”

  There was a phone booth in the lobby and it took two quarters to find out that it wasn’t working. There was another near a bus stop at the corner. Above the drone of seven-mile-an-hour crosstown traffic Kate listened for a dial tone and tried Bucyk’s number once more.

  “Yeah?”

  “We have to talk,” she said firmly. “Where can we get together?”

  “Who’s this …? It’s you? What’s up?”

  “I need to see you.”

  “That’s not such a hot idea,” he said. “It doesn’t look good …”

  A bus pulled toward the curb, the engine winding down through a faulty muffler. Kate slapped a hand over her other ear. “What, I didn’t hear?”

  “I said let’s do our talking on the phone. What’s so important, anyway?”

  “You lied to me.”

  “About what?”

  “About everything, damn it.”

  “You’ve been talking to the dicks again.” He kept his voice low, but with a sharpness to it, as though he was reprimanding a prize pupil who had failed a simple test. “They’re putting ideas in your head?”

  “Opening my eyes is more like it,” she said. “I must have been blind. You’re not working for the FBI any more than … than I am. You weren’t even a good cop. They said you were taking payoffs all over the West Side.”

  “That’s it? That’s the worst they could say about me? Since when’s that a crime? Did you ask them that?”

  She didn’t want to get into it; the illogic was on his side. “I found out on my own. I just came from the art gallery. No one there has ever heard of your Mike Nicholas, or Mikhail Kunavin.”

  “You don’t think he uses his real name?”

  “Enough, already,” she screamed above the traffic. “How stupid do you think I am?”

  Bucyk’s tone changed to something close to pity. “I’ve got to wonder,” he said, “the way you’re letting them jerk you around, cutting your own throat. I warned you this would happen.”