Disturbed Earth (19 page)

"Get the fuck over there. OK? I need you. I need you to sweet-talk these babes, as much as anything. You know that world, right? You're the social babes' favorite detective, right?"

By now, I was yelling into the phone. Listen to me, Sonny, I yelled. LISTEN! But the signal was gone and I couldn't get him back.

23

The walls of the apartment on North Moore Street were red and lined with original movie posters from pre-war Germany; Dietrich, Billy Wilder, Von Stroheim gazed down at me while I negotiated with the security guard to let me in. Billy Wilder had an impish face; a magician's face; it said this guy can do amazing tricks. I seemed to remember that he had been a gigolo in Berlin in the 1920s. Except for Woody Allen's pictures, or maybe even counting Woody,
Some Like It Hot
was my favorite movie.

Grudgingly, the guard passed me on to another guy, who led me through the enormous loft to a collection of couches and chairs which contained three women, also perfectly arranged, like sculptures waiting for the viewing public.

One answered a phone that rang constantly; she spoke softly; she avoided touching the receiver with her fingernails, which, glistening with polish, were almost black. Another sat perfectly still; eyes shut, she wove her fingers together, apparently on hold until the next task.

The third woman, seated in front of a long low green glass table on short steel legs, snipped and plucked cards off the bouquets of flowers that were lined up in front of her. She read them, then added each card to a growing stack on the table and, a short fat gold fountain pen gripped between her thumb and her middle finger, made notes on a yellow legal pad.

When I introduced myself, she pushed her glasses up onto her head.

"Are you Olivia Blixen?" I said.

"Olivia is resting," she said. "She can't see anyone."

Dull snowy light flooded the apartment; there were skylights in the eighteen-foot ceilings, and the light and snow showed through them.

"What about Marianne Vallaeys?"

She corrected my pronunciation and said, "I'll see."

There was no invitation to sit, so I stood and looked at the flowers: tight bundles of pale roses, mauve, pink, yellow, in small round jars; translucent orchids potted in moss and lime green crackle vases; cream colored tulips, two feet long, that bent over the pots they were in, their fleshy heads touching the glass table. But who sent flowers to people whose kid had disappeared? Was there floral protocol for a kidnapping?

"Detective?"

I turned around.

"I'm Marianne Vallaeys." She held out her hand. The fingers were very long, the nails short and pale, the grip firm. She wore gray slacks and a gray cashmere sweater; I felt the softness of it as a sleeve grazed my hand.

She was small and self-contained and she gestured to a chocolate colored leather chair. I sat. She sat on the edge of its twin and leaned forward.

I shaded my eyes against the light and looked at her and I remembered. She was one of the women from the glass apartment on Perry Street. She had worn one of the floaty Japanese dresses and spent the evening kissing the other Jap dress a lot, marking territory.

"We've met," I said. "Saturday night. The party on Perry Street. Your party, I think."

"I don't remember. So many people."

"You're the mother?"

"I am one of Tatiana's mothers. Olivia is the other. If you mean which of us literally gave birth to Tati, it was Olivia."

"So she's the real mother. Who's the father?"

"It's not important," she said.

I said, "It would help me."

"Her father is a film director in Denmark. Copenhagen," she said. "He's a friend of ours. He came over, we brought him over, and he fathered Tatiana, but he's not involved in her upbringing."

I nodded towards the three other women. "So who are they?"

"Sally is our secretary," she said gesturing at the woman with the phone. "Dana looks after the house." She indicated the woman with the flowers. "I don't mean she's a maid, we have people who do the cleaning, of course, Dana takes care of the household, she organizes other staff, she orders food, that sort of thing."

The woman with the locked fingers had risen from her chair and was pacing up and down. Her head was bowed as if in prayer and she wore black jeans and a black sweater; a necklace made out of huge chunks of raw coral bobbed on her chest as she paced.

"She's my ex. Andrea Mariano. She's also the mother of my other child. My son, Sacha."

"I'm confused."

"Before I was with Olivia, I was with Andrea. We have a son. Andrea and I are civilized about it, we have shared custody. Sacha spends three and a half days with each of us. Obviously his other mother, my ex, would want to be here with us." She held her hands out, palms up, then clasped them together. "I can't imagine how this could happen. I researched everything, the building, our security people, the neighbors. I was very careful. I realized this kind of thing happened to people like us, and I took every precaution and now I think, what for? I think I'm cursed. I think I've missed something."

Her involvement with herself made her impenetrable. She barely mentioned the missing girl. Everything was turned back on her. She was her own most interesting subject.

"Where is your son?"

"Sacha is at school," she said. "It was too horrible for him to stay home. It's alright. He has a bodyguard who waits for him outside the school."

"How old is he?"

"Fourteen."

"Do you want to take me through what happened?"

"I've told the police the whole story, we have private investigators on it, we don't know what else to do."

The girl, Tatiana, had been going to a friend's for supper the night before. The friend lived in the building. It was arranged with her mother.

She would go by herself, Tati insisted. She was almost eleven and it was only four floors down, and she begged. The women, Vallaeys, Blixen, said no, absolutely not, but Tati cried and stamped her foot and said it was unfair, that she felt as if she lived in a prison. If she had a father, she'd said, he would understand. The kid pulled out all the stops. She worked on the women. And they let her go.

They watched her leave the apartment and get into the elevator. It was only four floors, after all. I'll be back after supper, Tati called. I'll be back. Come home by eight. Call us. We'll come get you, they said, but she made her lip tremble again and they said, OK, OK. They watched her get into the elevator, watched the door shut. The girl never came back.

It only took a couple of hours for them to discover the kid was gone. When Tatiana failed to return at eight, Blixen called the kid's friend. It turned out that Tatiana had called her friend to say she wasn't coming. No one worried. They assumed that Tati had changed her mind. The story was eerily like Billy Farone's.

"We called all her friends," Vallaeys said. "We called everyone and then we called your people. You're the third detective we've seen. In a way we've been expecting this, we've lived in a kind of horror of something happening to one of the children, it's why we have private security."

"Expecting?"

"Olivia, my partner, is very famous in her own circles; people know how much money she has; we knew our child was vulnerable. Christ, I wish we'd stayed in Sweden."

"Excuse me?"

"I was born in Uppsala. In Sweden. It is in Sweden."

"I know where it is."

"I'd like you to go now," she said abruptly. "This is not helping me. We have many people on this. Mr. Lippert promised he would come himself."

"I'll be glad to tell him."

I was pissed off. I had to get out of the hothouse. The smell of the flowers was making me gag. I gave her my card.

"If you think of anything, any way I can help, just call," I said, not meaning it. Our conversation had lasted less than five minutes and that was plenty.

"Thank you," she said. She was very cool.

All day the image of those banked flowers floated into my head, a funeral for a child who had only been missing for a few hours. Flowers for sympathy, corporate communication. The bouquets cost hundreds and were fabulous and reminded me of times I used to hang around with some of Lily's friends. She knew people like that who lived in startling apartments with big-ticket art. I had liked it a lot when she took me to their parties; I was a sucker for it all. I loved the glamor. I loved the smell. It almost fucked me up completely, especially the year I worked a case on Sutton Place.

Even before I left the building, I knew I had to get back to Brooklyn. I had to make Lippert understand or if I couldn't, I was going back anyhow, back to Brooklyn, to find Billy. Half the detectives in New York would work the Tribeca case, if there was a case. I tried not to think about May Luca. I tried not to remember her body the way it was, tossed, naked, like a piece of meat, out on a boat in the marina.

As I left the building in Tribeca and walked down the street, I realized it was a block away from the place where JFK, Jr., had lived. I remembered now, I remembered when he died and the flowers piled up in mountains. People came and stood all day and night after he died.

Tribeca was jammed with expensive lofts and fancy furniture stores and antique shops, but it was still forlorn. After 9/11 it remained in the "Zone" for months; there was no traffic at all, only the cloud of dust hanging in the perfect autumn sky. At night, in the light from the stadium spots, you could see it, too, but hazy, eerie, surreal. Kids played baseball in the street watched by National Guardsmen, young soldiers from a different America. People wandered, half dazed by what had happened, half intoxicated by the sublime weather.

I dug a couple of Advil out of my pocket and swallowed them dry, and then I heard the sound of hooves. A horse emerged from the stable out back of the First Precinct; another followed and the two mounted cops clip-clopped daintily into the snow-covered streets.

You could imagine New York as it had once been down here, the cobbles, the horses, the sound of horseshoes, the horseshit steaming up from the snow. For a second, a minute, I watched the horses step high down Hudson Street.

24

All that mattered now was getting my car started. I had made it home from Tribeca on foot. I cleaned the snow off my car and then decided to give it an hour before I set off to Brooklyn, hoping the main roads would be plowed. The roads across the city were in lousy shape.

I turned to look across the street. Mike's was shut up. The block, my backyard, my village, looked unfamiliar, abandoned, desolate. I went back upstairs, killing time.

In my front door, the wedge of paper had remained in place. Everything was the way I'd left it an hour earlier. Through the walls of the building I could hear kids yelling and laughing and blasting music; someone was using a vacuum cleaner. I thought about Lily for the hundredth time. I was lonely as hell.

The only solid thing I knew about Billy's case was that he had been friends with May Luca and that his grandfather had messed with her. And he had worn her red T-shirt the morning he left home, the shirt that was found near the boardwalk in Brooklyn, soaked in blood, slashed with a razor. Nothing else, just Ivana's desperation, Genia's fear, Johnny's helplessness.

I'd listened to their stories and their lies, I let myself be dragged in without telling anyone and now I was on my own, without the support of the office, or Lippert who was distracted by the Tribeca case. When he focused, he'd be pissed off I hadn't told him about Billy as soon as I suspected.

Genia was hiding something about Billy, something about the kid that wasn't right, something no one mentioned. Over and over, like a mantra, they said how bright he was, how good at school, at fishing, at reading grown-up books. OK, unlike his father, he wasn't a hugger and he kept to himself and what he loved, fishing most of all, obsessed him. They worried, but I thought: so what?

I tried to think back to the times I'd been with him; times we went fishing. Billy was always so passionate, it thrilled me. He liked to touch the fish, he liked the feel of their flesh. Liked to put them in his net and then, tenderly, put his fingers through the string. His face would break into a smile, he would fling his arms out with joy.

Once we cooked some of the fish at a campsite out on the island. Once we made sashimi and he ate the raw fish. The Billy I knew was not the same boy his parents worried about.

Genia had made me promise I'd give it a day before I told Lippert about Billy. I had promised. And then I told him or at least I left him a message telling him. Better to betray the promise I made to Genia than find myself adrift in this community of lies. It was time to declare Billy a missing child; time to let the air in before we all choked to death.

In the old days, my father, who spent most of his career in the KGB, said you did what you had to, you told your people, it wasn't a lie, or a betrayal if you were an agent; it was your business, your game, and it was an honorable game. My mother would say, "bullshit," or the Russian equivalent. She never swore. Peasants, anti-Semites with thick necks and crude accents, these people used filthy language, she said. They were illiterate; they didn't know better.

Before I went out, I tried my mother in Haifa again and a nurse put her on the phone. I waited for her to say my name. The nurse had said she'd been calling for me.

She didn't know who I was, though, and she was incoherent and talked in disjointed sentences, sometimes in Russian, sometimes in Yiddish, which she had spoken as a child and which I didn't understand. Frustrated she started to cry. Someone took the phone away from her, and I sat, smoking and feeling my eyes fill up.

I called my old friend Hamid in Haifa at his office and got the answering machine with his gentle worried musical voice.

Hamid looked in on my mother every month or so. A Palestinian whose family had lived in Israel for generations, he was the only friend I made at Hebrew University I still kept in touch with. He went on to medical school, I came to New York.

We had met in a cafe in Tel Aviv and we both liked the same music—he was a die-hard Chet Baker fan, and he loved Stan Getz; we both felt like outsiders, though he was born in Israel. He was also the handsomest man I ever knew, and girls flocked around him, but he was shy and eventually he married Sarah—I introduced them—whose parents never forgave me.

I picked up the phone and called their house and she answered, sounding harassed. They were all fine, she said, but I didn't believe her.

All the time I was calling, I was looking at the Arabic dictionary I'd taken down earlier when I realized someone had been in my apartment. I yanked open the desk drawers and pulled out a pile of paper, letters, bills, a manila folder where I kept important documents. Hamid's letters were in it.

Hamid wrote letters. He liked writing and had taught himself calligraphy; he wrote with a pen his grandfather gave him when he graduated med school, his prize possession and he used it for letters and at work but also to draw the perfect cartoons of people he knew and places he saw; his stuff made me laugh out loud.

Hamid's letters came once a month with news of my mother and clippings and the cartoons, always with an American stamp on the light blue airmail envelopes. He got a friend who traveled to the US a lot to mail them here; Hamid said it was faster. I should have paid attention. It wasn't about speed. It was about Hamid being frightened

"The mail here is terrible, Artie," he said when we talked, but I should have known things were lousy for him in Israel and he was scared. Scared to send e-mails, scared to mail letters, he was cautious on the phone. I had asked, the last time I saw him, if he wanted me to get them out, or try, or see if I could work something, and he shook his head. He couldn't leave home. He said it was OK and I let myself believe him.

"Maybe I'll send the kids over for summer camp if I can," he said. "Maybe I'll try." He never mentioned it again.

I was a lazy-ass letter writer so I always called back instead of writing and Hamid always gave me the same news: my mother's condition was unchanged, she had no memory, nothing; she didn't know me or him or anyone else. Mostly she sat in a chair and hummed.

Opening the folder, I got out Hamid's letters and looked at the one on top. On the corner of the blue airmail paper was a faint mark. I found a loupe Lily had sometimes used to look at the photographs she took, and stared at the blue paper through it, which embarrassed me: I felt like a cartoon Sherlock Holmes. Through the magnifying glass, I could see a faint stain, like grease.

Increasingly frantic, I looked through the letters; some were missing, others were out of order. Whoever had been here was interested in Hamid and Hamid was an Arab and it had been the Arabic dictionary where they looked first.

I called Hamid's cell phone and left a message and went back to the letters. Then I got up and got a beer and lit a cigarette, and stared at the books on the shelf over my desk, pulling them out one at a time, seeing that they'd all been taken out and put back.

There were some books in Russian I inherited from my aunt. Novels from a reading group Lily made me go to that I hated. People expressed so many pompous and received ideas I figured they must spend half their lives reading the
New York
Review of Books
in the can; I preferred Lily's fashion magazines. I liked the pictures of the girls. The ragged Tony Hillerman paperbacks were there.

I loved Hillerman's stuff, I loved the desert, the Indians, the clans and tribes, the rituals. Lily and I went to New Mexico on vacation once. It was as far away from New York as you could get. Sometimes I fantasized about moving. I could live out there on the clean empty desert. I loved it, wild, empty, the Navajo DJs on the radio. Sometimes when I thought about running away, I thought about New Mexico, but I knew I couldn't survive anywhere except New York. It was home. But someone had been in my stuff and it made me livid.

Of all the languages I could do, English, Russian, Hebrew, the Arabic came hardest. Mine was nothing special, it was kitchen Arabic I'd picked up in Israel.

My head was throbbing; someone had read my letters and I didn't know why and I was furious; it filled me with fury that someone had been here and it never occurred to me until much later that it was the kind of thing I'd done on the job, gone into people's apartments, ransacked their stuff. That was my job; I'd do it again if it would help me find Billy Farone.

But what the hell did they want with my dictionaries? With Hamid's letters? Who were they?

Ever since the Patriot Act—they called it the Patriot Act, though it really meant anyone could smash down your door— was enacted, I had been subconsciously frightened. Like other cops I said it was a fucking good idea, help us catch the bastards, but with me it was bravado. Great, I said. Less hassle with warrants, the judges, the lawyer stuff that kept bad guys out of jail. Anything that helps nail them, the fucks who killed my friends. Let's go for it, I said. I was a hard-ass, of course I was; I could shoot the shit with the other cops about the perps and creeps and how we should fry them.

This was different. This scared me, this patriotic fervor, people beaten up for wearing peace T-shirts, the crazy Iraq thing looming. My loft had been ransacked once. Long time ago when I was working the Chinatown immigrant case. It was obvious back then who did it, they were thugs. They turned my place upside down, the couch upended, papers spilled over the floor, the refrigerator door left open. I had been away and when I came back, the food was rotten. I could still remember the stink of spoiled food, the milk curdled, the lemons green with rot.

This was different. This was covert. They, whoever they were, ghosts, spooks, had been careful. I was more scared in some ways than in London or Bosnia or Vienna. This was my place. My city. My neighborhood, the fringes of Tribeca, Chinatown, lower Broadway; I'd lived here longer than I'd lived anywhere else in my life and I loved it.

I loved it especially when summer came and you could sit on the roof and see the East River smoking in the haze. Or in the fall when the leaves turned gold and were crunchy underfoot or when snow fell. Every romantic version of New York, I was a sucker for it.

Someone had attacked me out at Breezy Point, had followed me to Maxine's. Someone had invaded my apartment and I was betting they were the same person or worked for the same person and it made me feel vulnerable.

As I worked methodically around the apartment looking for more evidence, suddenly it came to me: I'd been an idiot to offer help after 9 / 1 1 ; I had been crazy to mention I spoke some Arabic. After September 11, when all the agencies were desperate for translators, I told them and someone wondered how I learned and the gossip about me took hold and turned into curiosity and questions were asked. I knew how it worked.

I hated the spy world, the self-aggrandizing legends, the myths, the crappy men in crappy clothes that didn't fit. I'd grown up on it—KGB, the Israelis. Or for that matter, the Brits, the CIA—there wasn't much difference. I knew its feel, the shifting shape of a world where nothing was clear and the rules changed all the time. It had destroyed my father and mother; it had wrecked our lives. My parents left Moscow because of the stifling sense someone was always watching.

But New York. For twenty years, more, I did and said what I wanted, I could be myself or somebody else. Now that had changed. I was a suspect. Someone had been here, if they took me in, who would go get Billy?

Panicked, I grabbed my jacket and phone and my gun and ran out to the car. I had to take a chance. Had to risk the car stalling; there wasn't any other way. Out there in Brooklyn, Billy was waiting for me.

I never made it. Before I hit the tunnel, something inside the engine of my car whined and shuddered. The car spun on the icy street, the wheels sank in a drift of snow. I was stuck. It took three hours for a tow truck to get through. It took three more hours to get it into a shop near the Westside highway that was still open, and when I did, it turned out the guy who could fix it was stuck somewhere in the Bronx. I chain smoked, waiting. Eventually he showed up, opened the hood, messed around inside, and charged me seven hundred bucks.

While I waited, something tried to press up through my memory, something out of the past, some image, some event, something that made me feel my father looking over my shoulder. I couldn't tell if I'd dozed off in the chair in the garage and dreamed it or if it was real, the memory of my pop, looking at me. I couldn't fish it out.