Disturbed Earth (20 page)

Part Four

25

A reporter for Fox TV who lived out in Brooklyn near the beach got wind of Billy's disappearance Tuesday morning and broke the story. Genia blamed me for it. She called up and yelled at me in Russian and said I had betrayed her and that I was my father's son and I had killed her boy by putting it all on the TV; he would be dead because of it, she screamed. I didn't, I said; it wasn't me who put it on TV, but she wasn't listening.

Johnny Farone called a few minutes later and begged me to come out to Brooklyn. Please, Artie, man, he said. Find my boy for me. He was still holed up at the restaurant, snowed in, he said, taking care of business. A couple of his workers couldn't get home; they had bedded down in the bar. He couldn't leave them.

Please, Art; please. I'm begging you, he said. In his voice I could hear the panic that would make everything worse. Johnny was not a subtle guy. The men who worked for him would know by now that his boy was gone. Reporters would call him and he'd talk to them and blub on the air.

Already there were pictures of Billy on TV and in them he looked angelic, and these images of innocence and its betrayal would set off a kind of communal hysteria, especially combined with the kidnapping of the girl in Tribeca.

Already, as I flipped through the channels on my set, the box was filling up with images of the two children. God knew how the TV station got Billy's pictures, unless it was Johnny who gave them out. Or his mother, or the school, or the church. Good intentions really did pave the road to hell and probably to kids dying, which was the same thing.

There was always someone who could be seduced by a reporter with a beseeching voice and tears in her eyes—we only want to find Billy, we only want to help—into handing over pictures, usually for free. It didn't help. It gave the monsters who did this stuff more reason to kill.

A Florida station tracked down old man Farone, Billy's grandfather; on camera he wept and called for people to return his Billy safe.

On Tuesday, because I knew all hell would break loose, now the long weekend was over and the snow had stopped, I went to see a guy I hated. I'd lost most of Monday getting my car fixed, and I was in a hurry. It was a guy I saved up for special occasions.

Somehow Britz—his name was Samson Britz—got information no one else could, but he was a creep. As soon as I called him I was sorry; stepping into a room with him was like stepping into a sewer. He held court in a bar not far from the fish market. You could smell it.

Britz had been a cop. I was pretty sure he specialized in fake green cards and other immigrant necessities. He was originally from Odessa and he lived out in Brighton Beach. He spent his days, though, in the bar on the fringes of Chinatown not far from the East River. From the window of the bar, he could see the Manhattan Bridge and Brooklyn on the other side.

He was short and dapper and one of his ears had been cut off and sewn back in the wrong place. He said, with a chilly laugh, it was because he always had his ear to the ground, and then someone stepped on it. Stepped on it literally, he said, held him down and trampled his ear because he heard too much. Next time it will be your tongue. If you don't shut up, it will be your tongue. Monkey no hear, no see. He had reported this to me years earlier and then cackled.

Britz liked an audience, he liked his own performance. Now he offered me a thick loose joint like the Jamaican guys smoke. I didn't want it because it had been in his mouth and was damp from his saliva. I said I was allergic to marijuana.

The bar was long and dark and shabby, and gold tinsel left over from Christmas dangled halfway down the dirty front window which was plastered with beer ads. A quartet of elderly Chinese guys sat at a round table in the front, playing cards and drinking Tsing Tsao. In back sat Britz; he sat there most of the day, drinking Diet Coke.

When I arrived, he was waiting for me at his table, impeccably dressed as always in a suit and tie, as always with well-shined shoes. His hair was clean and freshly cut; he looked like a little elderly boy. He was probably about fifty; hard to tell.

He got up and shook my hand, gestured to the chair next to him and asked what I needed. He pretended he would always do you a favor gratis; he kept track. Britz was always adding up how much he had done for you, how you had repaid him, you could see him calculating, and he was ice cold about it; he was an accountant of small favors.

Currently I was in the black and he owed me. Still you had to put out a little for him, so we sat and I drank coffee and we looked at the catalogue from Sotheby's he had on the table in front of him.

He said he planned on collecting art some day. He had connections with some members of the Ukuza, the Jap mafia, he said, who came to New York once in a while to shop. They said, buy art. There's no record of ownership, no fixed prices; art was whatever the market said it was. Britz told me about guys in Nippoland—it was what Britz called Japan—who kept Renoirs hidden for years, or decades, until the prices soared. You could fix the market and no one came at you with knives. The auction houses were very sedate, he giggled.

Renoirs were good business, Britz added, turning over the slick pages of the fat catalogue. He pointed out the prettily colored paintings he liked best. I didn't like Renoir, I thought the stuff was like pictures on a Christmas card, but I hadn't come for the art.

OK, he said, so, what you need? I asked him what he knew about people in Brooklyn who molested children, who might live out by the water, who might snatch a kid. I asked him if he knew any cops by the Brooklyn Coast who might be involved.

"They put you on this shit, detective? They dump you in Brooklyn, you don't got no promotion or nothing? Listen, I don't like what they do to kids, you know. I don't go near that stuff, maybe except someone needs a vacation in Thailand, that kind of thing, maybe a woman, maybe someone likes them young. I don't know if I can help on this one." He leaned back and looked at me, wondering what I would offer, even though he knew it was his turn to put out.

"Just get me something, Sam, OK? Who likes little kids, boys, out by the water, that kind of thing. Is there a ring? Are they buying and selling? Kiddie porn? Babies involved? Call me, OK." It wasn't a question.

I let him ramble a while more.

OK, he said, he would look into it and see what he could find, and then he wanted to shake my hand again. I hated it. His hand was very small and very dry, and crippled with arthritis and it was like shaking with a dead man where rigor had already set in.

All hell did break loose that day. School was out, kids were restless, they made their parents nuts trying to keep after them. Children who left home for an hour without telling someone became instant victims. The city ran wild with rumors. At Billy's school out in Brooklyn, when I checked, a worried teacher whispered to me that there had been problems in his class, other kids didn't like him, and I said, what kind of problems, what kids, but she just shook her head and I couldn't get any more.

When the third child disappeared, the city went berserk and some people thought it was terrorism. May Luca dead. Billy Farone disappeared. The girl from Tribeca. As soon as the news about the kid in Tribeca broke, the media was at the story like a starving tribe on a group of aid workers bringing food.

A reporter on NY 1 unearthed the old cases that Lippert had told me about. The cases had never been solved, not the murder of the girl whose feet were chopped off or the kid left on a Long Island beach. Pictures surfaced on obscure web sites, pictures showing the bloody stumps where the girl's feet should have been. Again there were reports of body parts for sale on auction sites. The twenty-first century's big trade wasn't in drugs, it was in human beings, for sex, or illegals or slave workers, or organs for transplant; now body parts. Cheaper than drugs.

The ambient fear in the city, the leftover terror that had lingered since 9/11, the lousy economy, the cold weather, the constant pummeling by the government—red alerts, duct tape—the coming war, people went nuts. I went nuts.

On TV, people talked biological weapons; they talked nukes. I had worked on a case involving a suitcase nuke once. I knew what even minute amounts of nuclear material could do: a few spoonfuls of cesium and you could make downtown Manhattan uninhabitable for years. It was the first thing I thought on 9/11.

Running down to the towers, I thought: nukes. As soon as I saw people streaming uptown covered in dust, I imagined them with their skins flayed, trailing their own skins, like coats, in the dust.

When I left Britz, Chinatown was almost empty. Where the sidewalks were normally jammed with people shopping for fish and vegetables and money and deals, it was empty and not just because of the snow. SARS had scared everyone off the streets. The virus that began in China—another country that messed its people up with the commie legacy of secrets—had infested whole buildings in Hong Kong. Lousy plumbing in one building meant shit dripped through the pipes and the virus with it. Without knowing they had it—or maybe they did know—people flew with it on planes and it broke out in Canada.

Toronto was shut down. New York would be next, people were convinced; people thought SARS and remembered AIDS. SARS would come through Chinatown. People stayed away. The neighborhood was empty as if grief stricken. The plague year, someone had said to me the week before. On the street near my car, in white masks, a pair of women hurried past me.

People canceled their travel plans. They avoided Asia for the virus and France for the politics and the Middle East for war and Israel for the suicide bombings. Instead, they stayed home, watched the fearful news on the tube and made their kids stay in and the kids played video games and had nightmares. I couldn't remember so much fear except when I was a kid in Moscow and I woke up nights, screaming, sure the Americans were going to bomb us, nuke us, turn us into dust.

I stopped at a newsstand and grabbed the papers. Billy's face was on the front of the
Daily News.
I drove away and stopped at a red light. An old man skidded across the street in front of me and fell, then crumpled over. Somehow, he got himself upright.

Still feverish, even inside my car I was shivering. While I waited for the old man to cross, I reached in the back of the car for a sweater. My hand touched the plastic garbage bag from Breezy Point. I pulled over to the curb, got the bag onto the seat next to me and opened it. There wasn't much in it—some paper towel balled up, an empty Marlboro carton, the stub of a candle, a pizza box. A cardboard box that stank of pizza sauce from a place near Sheepshead Bay. I wrote down the address and wondered how it had ended up in a garbage can behind a fishing shack in Breezy Point. I was clutching at straws.

26

Waiting for me in Lippert's outer office, wearing tight jeans that showed the curve of her hips and a short furry red sweater, was Rhonda Fisher. She looked good. I'd never seen Rhonda in anything except the shapeless suits she wore to work most days.

In a sense, in Sonny's office, only Rhonda mattered; she was the backbone, she ran things, she knew where the bodies were buried; they were in her filing cabinet and in her computer files and in the back of her tidy brain. Every case Sonny had worked for twenty-five years, every place he had been, every request for help, Rhonda had filed or shredded or coded. She also knew where and when he had fucked up and if he was on the take.

Not money. Lippert would never deal for money. Power. He wanted the kind of power that put you on the inside and that got you what you needed when you wanted to solve a case or work a problem. He wanted to be a hero; he longed for a profile like Bratten or one of the other super-cops, and I was never sure how bad he wanted it or what he'd do to get it.

Early on when I first went to work for Sonny, I got to know Rhonda. I found out her birthday. I sent flowers. I remembered Secretary's Day. I took her to dinner at Windows on the World once when it was there, at the top of the World Trade Center.

After a glass of wine, Rhonda sometimes, when she was in the mood, told me things Sonny wouldn't; she told me about his ambition, about some of the people he stepped on, on his way up. It took me years to figure out that Rhonda only talked if she thought it served his purposes. It was Lippert who wanted me to know how tough he was and she was the conduit.

For years after Sonny's divorce, I waited for Rhonda to leave her husband and marry him; she never did.

Rhonda kissed me on the cheek and gestured towards Sonny's office.

"Thanks for coming so fast," she said.

"That's OK." I'd been driving through Chinatown on my way from the meeting with Samson Britz when Rhonda called.

"He's making an appeal, he wants you there."

"What?"

"TV." She looked at me. "Go on in."

I went into Lippert's office. A two-man video crew was setting up. Lippert was behind his desk. He saw me, he got up and before he could open his mouth, I said, "What am I doing here, Sonny?"

"I'm making something for TV, man. I'm making a request. I want you with me."

I looked down at my jeans and jacket.

"Not on the TV, man. Just keep me company, OK?"

"On the kid in Tribeca?"

"No. The Farone boy."

"Don't."

"Why the fuck not?"

"Leave it alone. The publicity won't help," I said. "Why don't you get one of your guys to check out the grandfather in Florida?"

"I did that. He's been down there since January, like they keep saying on the box."

"I wish you would have talked to me, you know?"

He said, "It's not about you."

"Yeah, well it's always about you. You're doing this because you don't want people saying Lippert's only on the case when it comes to rich kids, you want them saying, oh, yeah, Lippert, man of the fucking people, he's on it big time and not just the rich kid in Tribeca, he's on it with the Brooklyn thing, he cares, man, he's really in there caring and sharing. Right?" I was scared of how the TV appeal would push Billy's kidnapper.

I pushed him into the outer office.

"Listen to me," I said.

His back was against the wall so he listened.

"Billy Farone is my cousin's kid. I tried to tell you on the phone when you were on the train from fucking Boston." I'd never told Lippert about Billy and me. It was something I kept pretty much for myself.

I could see that Lippert, already furious at a God who let kids disappear and die, wanted to take it out on me the way I laid my own anger on him. But maybe because it was Billy, all he said was, "What do you know about the kid?"

"I know he liked to fish. Was obsessed with it. I took him fishing. His father owns Farone's in Sheepshead Bay. The restaurant? Billy was supposed to go to a friend's early Saturday, a kid across the street, he never showed up. The mother said he called to say he wasn't coming. No one thought about it until Sunday morning when Billy was late getting home."

"Go on."

"Billy sometimes played with May Luca. He wore her T-shirt?" I said.

"Jesus."

"I know there was some trouble at Billy's school, in his class, kids threatening, I couldn't get anything out of the teacher. I also know Billy's grandmother, Farone's mother, told me the old man, her husband, sometimes took Billy fishing. There was a shack out at Breezy Point."

"You went?"

"Sure I went."

"By yourself?"

"Yeah."

"You're a fucking idiot, man, you know that?" Lippert said and looked over my shoulder as one of the video crew appeared and waved at him. "I have to do this now."

"There's one other thing."

"What's that?"

"The grandfather, old man Farone, he was a retired cop, and the wife threw him out because he liked little girls. Mrs. Farone once found him feeling up May, or that's what she told me.

Lippert tried to sidestep me, but I didn't let him. I held onto his arm.

"Listen to me. Let me work this, please. I'm saying please, Sonny. If you put a bunch of guys on it, they'll trample all over it and Billy will die for sure. Do your TV thing, if you have to, but rein them in. Please."

I knew it was my saying please that convinced him.

He said, "I'll buy you twenty-four hours if I can, OK? I'll put you in charge. I can't stop the local guys, it's already out there, but I'll rein them in, like you say."

"What about this appeal?"

Lippert told the guy with the video camera he could go.

"I'll call the station later," he said. "Tell them it was my decision. Say I'm sorry."

The video guy nodded and said, "I hope you get the bastard.

I have two little girls," he added. "If it was me, I'd string him up'

I said, "Where do you live?"

"Greenpoint," he said. "Over in Brooklyn."

Afterwards, Lippert seemed calmer and he got out the bottle of Scotch he kept in his bottom drawer and some glasses and poured a couple of drinks. I was itching to get back to Brooklyn, but I needed him on my side.

He said, "You're not going to let go of the Farone case, are you?"

"Don't ask, don't tell."

"You're close to the boy?"

"Yeah."

"I'll take you off Tribeca if you want."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome," he said. "I don't know how the girl in Tribeca disappeared with all the security they've got. I'm not sure she didn't walk out. Wouldn't you, with those women? They must have called me fifty times. They call the chief, they call the mayor."

I said, "You can't just say that, because they're rich freaks their kid would walk out."

"Yeah I can." Sonny was in a rage now. "You don't know what people are doing to kids, anyhow. I mean you know there's people out there that watches kiddie porn on the Net, there's people that watches images of child abuse. This stuff has exploded. We live in a country where everyone's praying and calling on Jesus and pedophiles are just getting cagier. Dear Jesus, please redeem me I just abused my nine-month-old baby. Sure I can say it. To you. I can say anything to you, right, man? You're my guy, isn't that right?"

Suddenly everything boiled over in me. I didn't need a lecture.

"Fuck you," I said.

"Back at you, man."

"You ever find yourself tempted, Sonny?"

"What the fuck does that mean?"

"I'm asking. You must have been tempted. You must have known plenty of cops and prosecutors, a dinner at Rao's, a bottle of Chivas at Christmas, a little bag of money or coke, you know the way they do it in those nice little Gucci leather briefcases?"

"Fuck you, man, you are so full of shit," he said avoiding the subject. "What's with you? You been listening to the lower orders, you been gossiping with the workers? You been sleeping with the help?"

I knew he meant Maxine. I didn't take the bait.

"So your only addiction is old novels, right, Sonny? Anyone ever offer you a first edition Dickens?
Moby Dick?
Come on, Sonny, what would it take?"

I baited him. I let off steam and it felt good. I went for him some more, sick of Lippert's volatility, sick of his patronizing me, sick of him.

"What about something for your kids, a place at the 92nd Street Y nursery school when they were little? A job at a good firm for the one that's in law school now? What would you sell out for, Sonny?"

"Get the fuck out of here."

"I'm going." I walked to the door and opened it and didn't look back.

"Artie?" Lippert's voice was mournful.

"Yeah?"

He looked up from his drink, forlorn now.

"Who does this shit to kids?" he said.

But I had stopped paying attention. We didn't say goodbye. There was too much hostility in the room. We both knew it.

*

I was leaving Lippert's building, a cigarette already in my mouth but still unlit because you couldn't smoke anywhere in the city anymore when I slipped on the ice. The snow was frozen into hedges along the sidewalk and there was black ice under the snow and I fell. I tried to get up. I wanted to check out the pizza box from the garbage can in Breezy Point. It probably wasn't much but it was something, and anyhow I had to see Genia. I scrambled up onto my feet and dived into my car.

The fact that someone had been in my apartment—I'd meant to raise it with Lippert—nagged at me constantly, raised itself even when I focused on Genia and Brooklyn and the pizza place. I tried to push it away. I drove like a maniac, not the shore route I took to Maxine's, but through the middle of Brooklyn, down Atlantic Avenue. A lone Arab woman in a headscarf hurried into Sahadi's, the food store. In Flatbush, I nearly collided with a man ambling across the street. No one else was out until I reached Ocean Parkway.

Even in the snow and cold, the Hasidic men, black coats flapping, walked to the synagogues and schools, ringlets catching in the wind, holding onto their large black hats. They resembled a flock of birds, a group of visitors from another century; they seemed foreign, alien, different. Further along, waiting for a red light, I saw a swastika scribbled on the wall of a local school.

For the first time, I felt it was me they wanted, the xenophobes, the patriots, the people who looked anxiously at their neighbors and put up more flags. An Egyptian guy I knew—a US citizen—played some Moroccan music in his apartment one night not long after 9 / 1 1 ; the next morning the super approached his wife and told her it was terrorist music and to shut it off.

Did people look at me? Did they see through the facade, the veneer, the all American, all New York cop? Could they see the Russian, the immigrant, the man whose father was a KGB hero, a KGB creep?

I had adored my father. He was handsome and very tall and blue-eyed and he brought home special treats for me in his pockets—little chocolaty candies from Hungary wrapped in waxy paper; medals, too, and badges, sometimes with the baby Lenin's face on them. Maybe it was political conditioning, the candy to be associated with Lenin, but I didn't care, not then. My father helped me with homework and told me tales of his adventures in the Red Army.

He had been to Berlin and Vienna and he had taken photographs that I still have, black and whites of himself and other officers on the great wrecked boulevards of post-war Europe. Once, he had even been to Paris.

I think my mother married him because of it and secretly hoped one day he would take her and she made him tell her about it over and over until, at home, we could all recite the names of Paris streets, cafes and bookshops, parks, fountains, museums, shops.

He liked games, my dad; he taught me chess and he played practical jokes. But, then, games were his business. Games that involved sneaking around and foreign travel. My father laughed and joked with me and he brought me candy and he never really felt like an adult.

It wasn't until later that I understood what he did; that his games included secrets and duplicity and death. When I was fourteen, because of my mother who was rebellious and made a fuss about refuseniks and became one herself, the KGB dumped my father and then I understood.

I began to hate everything around me, the rote lessons at school, the dreary way people dressed, the obsessive little faces of the Young Pioneers as glazed and zealous as their Nazi counterparts in another era.

Still, secretly, part of me believed my father was different, that he had been a hero. It was confusing, but I was a kid and so long as he took me fishing to the river on Sundays, it was OK. I remember thinking, when we went fishing, when we left before light Sundays with our gear, when we sat by the water and he told me stories: this is how it will be when I have sons.

I never had the sons. I was always afraid that if I got married and had a child, I'd lose my escape route. A family would weigh me down and I would drown. All my life I had wanted to escape; now I was a middle-aged adolescent, unmarried, no kids, still frightened. The men I knew seemed grown up, New Age men who attended the births of their children and took turns caring for them.