Disturbed Earth (2 page)

"What smell?"

"I don't know. I got something in my mind that stinks and I can't get it out and ever since I got here I keep smelling it. Never mind." He pulled on the cigarette then tossed it as far as he could.

A camera van from a local station rolled into view and Sonny yelled, "Get those fuckers out of there." He turned back to me, and then looked down at the blood-soaked clothes on the black rubber bag.

"Nobody called, you know, man? Nobody cares enough to make a call." He gestured to the van with the body bag. "Who does this, Artie? Who does this shit to a child? I stay up all night reading big books so I can find out who's evil enough to do things like this, man, and I still don't know anything. I thought it gave you wisdom. It doesn't give you shit."

"What about the age?" I said. "You made a guess by the size of the clothes?"

"Yeah, maybe eleven. But we're guessing."

"By her jacket?"

"Yeah."

"What else?"

"The T-shirt, it was a girl's T-shirt for an eleven-year-old, we checked with the store already. Also, the feet," he said. "The size of the sneakers."

It hung there. We stood, two helpless guys, looking at the way the words seemed to hang frozen on the late morning air, and neither of us wanting to touch them.

"What else?" I said.

"Skin," he said. "Skin in the bottoms of the sneakers. Skin and blood, like somebody ripped them off her."

"What about socks?"

"No socks."

"Isn't that weird? It's freezing. What kid goes out without socks in this weather?"

"Yeah, I don't know, there were no fucking socks, anyhow. Or maybe the socks are some other place. That's why they're digging all those holes." His voice was flat, affectless.

I threw my half smoked cigarette on the ground and looked down at the black bag again, at the zipper that threw silver sparks in the bright sunlight. Sonny held onto my arm like a dog caught in my sleeve and I followed him away from the van and back towards the site.

A construction guy—someone must have called him in—was using a jackhammer to dig into a piece of still frozen ground. People milled around. Somewhere I heard a flag flap in the wind, that eerie sound a flag makes when it's battered by the wind, and the metal pulleys clank against the pole. I couldn't see it and it bothered me, no flag in sight, only the noise, the whipping of the fabric like wet laundry.

"Art?" Sonny was moving again, back to the ambulance.

I was distracted. I put on my sunglasses.

"Why the bags?" I asked finally.

He shrugged. "I didn't know where to put the clothing," he said. "I didn't want it out in plain sight."

I lit a fresh cigarette for myself.

"What do you need?" I said.

"I need help. I need to follow this. How are you fixed this weekend?"

"Nothing special," I said. "It's a holiday Monday so I took the three days, but I'm OK for whatever you need. Just tell me. You want me to go into the office, whatever; just say."

"I wanted you here because the jogger who found the baseball jacket is a Russki, you know, and her English isn't great. She's over there." He gestured to one of the police cars. A woman in sweatpants leaned against the hood of Lippert's car, head down, her hands over her face.

"You want me to talk to her?"

"Yeah, talk to the jogger, man, and go home and wait. I want you by the phone where I can get you."

"I have my cell."

"I want you by your regular phone. I don't want people listening in, the cell's like a megaphone, any fucker can clone it, you know? I don't want some rookie dickhead at the station house out here either fucking it up. They're obsessed now, make a collar, get a case. I want you by the phone, twenty-four seven, you understand? So talk to the Russian. I'll put it around I want you on the case because of your language skills. I'll make that the deal."

I was surprised. "But it's not?"

He shrugged.

"You'll have a dozen people working this," I said. "Including a detective I saw from the local house who probably speaks some Russian. So why am I really here?"

"I trust you."

"I don't understand, you mean there's cops involved, you think there's other guys in this?"

"I just want someone I trust in a clean space. It's just a feeling," he added. "I'll say it's because of you speaking Russian, OK?" He repeated himself for the second time: "Like the old days, man? I'll say I need you because you speak Russian, that you know the community, OK, man? Which is true, right? More or less."

I nodded.

"Evidence like this, a little girl dead someplace, no one knows anything, no one even knows who the fuck she is, when the body turns up, we'll get blamed. They'll say we didn't work fast enough. We didn't care about it because it was out here, out in Brooklyn, by the water, in certain communities where there's only immigrants, you know? The shit will rain down on us, you know that. Media shit. Everyone just waiting to stoke the fear," he said. "And there's nothing you can do about it, you say, remember the snipers, you say, remember the other kidnappings, you remember, and you beg them, we beg the fuckers give us a little space to deal with this and their lawyers scream First Amendment. Christ, I'm sick of the fucking Constitution."

He reached out again as if to take my hand, a gesture I'd never seen him make; all he did was grab the sleeve of my jacket.

He said, "I'm scared, man. I'm scared about what's coming down. There's this little girl and there been others around the state, around the country, not to mention the cold cases. I can't even get this on the Amber alert unless I have more evidence. There were other cases I never told you about, I couldn't. We don't know who the hell she is or why someone would do it, but I'm scared. I'm scared about copycats. I'm scared. I'm scared of all of it, the crazies, the terror junkies. I think about it and in my mind I see paper dolls, you know, like I used to make for the kids, a row of paper dolls holding hands and then someone sets fire to them."

"You think this is terrorists?"

"Why not? You want to scare people, how about taking their kids?"

"Come on!"

"You think it couldn't happen? I don't think anymore. I just try to cover my ass." He hesitated. "I can't get rid of the stink."

We had pretended we were OK, like everyone else; we pretended the recovery was complete, but the city was still on the edge of a nervous breakdown even after all this time, and Sonny Lippert had been in the World Trade Center that day.

He had been on his way to a meeting at Two World Trade when it happened, and I knew he was going, I'd talked to him ten minutes earlier. I thought he was dead. I spent half the day thinking Sonny was dead, that a bunch of other people I knew were dead. Later I found him. He was digging at the site, still in his good gray suit, covered in dust, digging and looking for the living and there was no one. For a week we stayed there together. I couldn't leave him. I couldn't leave the hole. Maybe I should have gone home to Lily instead. Maybe if I'd gone home she would have stayed with me. She didn't. She left me and married somebody else.

Sonny said, "If you really have to go out, keep with your cell phone, at least, and call me back on a landline, OK? I mean stay with it all the time, when you take a piss, when you're sleeping. You get a message, you get a beep, anything. OK? And you don't do anything else. You don't do anything else without telling me. Just the phone. OK?"

Lippert could be crazy and lucid at the same time and I wasn't going up against him on this one.

I said, low-key as I could manage, "Maybe she's still alive, Sonny. Maybe this is about something else, the blood, the clothes. She could be alive, you know that?"

"Listen to me. She's not alive, but we'll pretend we're hopeful, like you say. I don't want any of this leaked. I don't want anything on TV. I know you know people around here, but you'll keep your mouth shut, won't you?"

"I hear you."

"I don't want anyone knowing we think this is a repeat of the others, that there's a serial killer involved, OK? We'll take it a step at a time. Because if news about this gets out, we'll have every family on our back, everyone whose kid has been out of the house for half an hour. You hear me? Keep it zipped, man, OK?"

He was over-reacting, he was blowing it out of all proportion, he was way out of the ballpark on this, I was sure of it. What made me go along finally, what made me believe him, was that Sonny Lippert said something I'd almost never heard him say in more than twenty years.

"It was my fault," he said. "The other girl. I didn't act fast enough. It was my fault," he said and walked away.

I kept my mouth shut.

2

The jogger's name was Ivana Galitzine. She was tall and thin with long arms, and she wore gray sweatpants and a thick hooded sweatshirt and pink All Star high tops, same as the blood-drenched sneakers in the black rubber bag; only pink. The laces on the left shoe were untied and trailed on the ground. I couldn't help looking at the shoes; she saw me looking, then put her hands back over her face and leaned against Lippert's dark green Jaguar that he got on a lease cheap. Like a child's, the girl—Galitzine—her fingernails were bitten and the bright pink polish was chipped. I tapped her on the arm and said softly in Russian, "Are you alright? Do you want to see a doctor?"

She put her hands down and looked at me. She was great looking in spite of the frightened brown eyes that darted towards the gang of cops, the mound of earth, then down to her sneakers. Her dark hair was soaked with sweat from her run and she'd scraped it back off her high round forehead. When she finally looked at me, she stared hard, but her light gray eyes were uncomprehending. Nodding, she wiped the back of her hand across her forehead.

"I'm OK now," she said in Russian. She gestured at the mounds of dirt. "I tripped." She was shivering now. "I tripped and I saw it."

"What did you see?"

"The bloody sneakers. The green sneakers." She looked down at her feet. "Like mine, only green and for a child, a little girl-"

"We don't know that it's anything more than sneakers," I said.

"I hate people that does this to children." She was on the verge of hysteria.

"Come on, we'll get some hot coffee and maybe you can tell me exactly what happened. Alright?"

"Yes."

I took her by the arm and we walked silently across to the other side of Surf Avenue and a coffee shop. We sat at a table near the front window and I ordered coffee and asked if she wanted food. She shook her head and, when the lone waitress brought the coffee, picked up a cup and drank the scalding liquid down without flinching. There was no one else in the place except us and the waitress in a pink nylon uniform.

When Ivana had finished, she put the empty cup on the table and asked for a cigarette.

I got the pack out and gave her one and lit it.

"Can you tell me what happened?" I said.

"Sure," she said in English. "OK."

"In Russian if you want," I said.

Through the window I saw Sonny Lippert and the others, the cops, the cars, the TV van, all in a dumb show. No voices came through the glass.

Galitzine was confused about how she found the sneakers. First she said she stumbled over them and dug a hole in the ground, and when I asked how she dug it when the ground was frozen, she said the shoes weren't buried, only covered with newspaper, dead leaves, debris. I let it go for the time being and listened. She talked to me in Russian, in a low voice. I took a few notes. For the first time it occurred to me how much power you had as an interpreter. Languages were just something I did; I'd moved around, I picked them up; it was something that ran in my family. But now, suddenly, I realized you could translate the words anyway you wanted. You controlled the scene. Weird, I'd never thought about it before.

Every Saturday morning, Ivana Galitzine said, she ran on the beach early, especially in the winter when it was deserted; she loved this time, she said. She loved the winter, the snow on the sand, the ice cold water, and when she felt brave enough, she went for a dip. She had been a swimmer in high school and she was tall and lean with long arms and broad shoulders, though now she was curled up, hunched over the coffee. But always, every Saturday, she ran, for miles, ran from Brighton Beach to Coney Island and back again and in between she stopped for breakfast.

She had arrived in New York a year earlier and she lived with her aunt and her cousins in a noisy, overcrowded house on one of the back lanes off Brighton Beach Avenue. Galitzine worked in the city at a medical lab and supply company on Lexington Avenue between a Tasti-Delite store and a cell phone outlet and where she could take the 6 train. Her science training mattered more than her English at this job, she said. At night she studied. She went to English class, she watched TV, she read the newspapers; slowly she read the papers, one page at a time, spelling out the words, looking in her dogeared dictionary. She liked math best, she said; and physics. Reading was harder, but math! When she said it, it lit her up and you could see in her face the studious girl who had once been top of her class at her Moscow high school.

"I wake up late today, but still I am going for run," she switched to English. "I run and run, is beautiful morning today, sky blue, very cold and no one around. I run hard and then after I run down from boardwalk going for breakfast, then I fall on this thing. It is still partly buried."

Habitually she ran until she reached Coney Island, where she got breakfast. It was her Saturday treat, she explained; she'd get coffee and the Russian newspapers—on Saturday she allowed herself to read in Russian—and sit for hours and read and drink coffee and eat, one apple pastry shaped like a triangle with powdery sugar, one jelly donut.

That morning she had taken a short cut across the waste ground, where she fell, she said, flat on her face. She wasn't hurt; she was curious. She was a curious girl. She noticed something sticking up and she pulled at it. It was a sneaker. Blood on it. She pawed some of the debris out of the way and found the jacket. A cop was up on the boardwalk and she ran to him and told him about the clothes. If she'd thought about it, she would have ignored the whole thing. Around here, she said, people did not talk to cops much. The police, she added, we don't trust. But he had asked her to wait and she waited.

He ran back with her and she showed him the spot.

"Why?" I said. "What bothered you so much if it was only a kid's sneaker? Was it the blood?"

After a second cup of coffee, she unzipped her sweatshirt. She wore a tight T-shirt underneath; her midriff was bare. She smoked and told me that, at first, she thought it was a foot that she'd found. She freaked out, she went into some kind of trance, she said, she sat on the ground and stared at the thing, unsure what it was; a small animal, she thought. She thought it was the flesh of a dead animal. Then a foot. Then she refocused and saw it was a sneaker.

"With blood," she said.

"Did you see anyone at all around?" I said.

She shook her head. "Nobody," she said. "Only these mounds of sand and earth."

I didn't believe her. It was impossible to imagine a time when the area was deserted, even in the early morning. There must have been a kid on his way to basketball practice or someone on the handball courts or a crazy Russian swimming in the middle of the winter or a junkie or drunk still sleeping off Friday night under the boardwalk. She must have seen someone; she said no, she had not seen anyone. Definitely.

Ivana Galitzine worked on her third coffee and answered my questions politely. But she'd seen nothing at all, nothing except the unfrozen grave. It was her phrase; she used it melodramatically in Russian. Unfrozen grave, she said again with the serious expression of a schoolgirl, and her voice was very young and shrill.

I put some money on the table and got up to leave. I gave her the number of my cell phone and she put the scrap of paper in her pocket, straightened her sweatshirt, pulled the hood up over her damp hair and looked at me.

"Will you invite me for coffee again?" She wrote her number on the back of the check. "Please." For the first time, she smiled. Her teeth were crooked.

"How old are you?" I said.

"Twenty-two," she said. "I am twenty-two today. This is my birthday." She looked out the window to the desolate scene. "It's my birthday and they stole it from me."