Disturbed Earth (25 page)

31

A couple of bussers sat in Farone's empty restaurant, playing cards, drinking coffee, gabbing in Spanish. Stranded by the storm, they had stayed over at Farone's. Most of them, the bus-boys, were Dominican and lived in Washington Heights up near the Bronx. There were no customers.

On a stool Johnny Farone sat, alone, a glass half full of red wine in front of him, his elbows on the bar, his head in his hands.

He looked up and saw me; his eyes were bloodshot.

I climbed up on the stool next to him. To shake him out of his torpor I said, very softly, "Genia took your money, Johnny. It's Genia that's been ripping you off. Did you know and not tell me? What else is there that she's keeping to herself that's going to kill your little boy? If he's still alive. If Billy's alive."

"I thought it was her," he said. "I wanted you to find someone else, I prayed for it, man, that it would turn out to be a crooked accountant or a slime ball maitre d'. Anything. I couldn't stand it, the idea, I give her everything. I told her she could have what she wanted, but she needs the secrets. You understand that, Art? She has to have secrets from me. You get it? I don't get it. That's why I don't go home, that's why I sleep in the fucking office here. She told me: don't call the cops. So she calls you. Now she's mad at you, she says, Artie betrayed us. He's like his old man that was a spook. I don't know what she means. I listened to her, and I did what she said and now I figure now my boy is dead because of it." Tears streamed down Johnny's face.

I took a photograph out from my pocket and placed it on the bar and said, "You ever see this guy?"

Johnny looked at the picture of Heshey Shank.

"Is this him?"

"I think so."

"I never saw him," Johnny said. "Oh shit, man, I never saw him and he took my boy. But why?"

"Talk to me, Johnny. What is it you didn't tell me about Billy?"

He picked up his wine.

"She made me promise, Genia made me."

"I love Billy," I said. "You know that, right? You have to help me.

He said, "Genia thinks Billy isn't right. She wants to take him to doctors and stuff, she thinks he's sick in the head. You don't know what I'm talking about, do you? I tell her it's just a phase, let him grow up. I say let him spend some time with my mother, the older people are patient, don't make him play with kids he doesn't like, but Gen thinks she puts an evil eye on him. She says when he was little he spent time with her old man, that general, you know, that's dead now, and he scared Billy. Then my ma tells me Billy's not even mine. I'm fucked up, Artie. I don't know what's what anymore."

Johnny turned his head in my direction and his face was uncomprehending.

"You believe it, that Billy isn't yours?" I asked, as gently as I could.

"I don't know what the hell I believe anymore. I'm just scared. I'm scared shitless, they took Billy, they killed the Luca girl, they snatched the kid in the city. Maybe it's them terrorists. I don't know."

I was dry as dust from talking and a sore throat and I reached over the bar for a bottle of water and drank some. Next to me, Johnny stared straight ahead and in the mirror his face and mine were reflected behind the bottles.

"Johnny, tell me what's wrong with Billy, tell me, OK? I'm on your side." I said it softly in an even voice, then added, "I don't want to have to go to Gen, I don't want to, she's already hysterical, she can't focus."

"I wish the weather would fucking clear up," he said. "I think of Billy out there alone and no shoes, maybe, they took off his shoes and cut off his shirt with a razor, I heard the reports, and he's out there with some creep and it makes me crazy and I don't know what to do. Maybe he froze to death."

"I'll help you, I will, but you have to give me something to go on." I put my hand on his arm.

"You knew all along it was Gen taking the money?"

"It looked that way."

"Yeah, I know," he said. "But why? I give her everything she wants. I say, whatever, you can have it, but why would she want cash?"

"I don't know. Let's talk about Billy."

He said, "You heard Gen was with Zeitsev, right?"

"I heard. Is it true?"

"Yeah, it's probably true. But what could I do?" Johnny mumbled. "Everyone was nuts, 9/11, that shit, everyone running around crazy, everyone fucking everyone and crying all the time, and people with the fucking yellow ribbons and memorial services and we knew loads of those guys, cops, firemen from over by Rockaway. So I thought it would pass. It didn't pass, you know? It just seemed like things got better, but they didn't." He paused and wiped his eyes. "I love him, Artie, man, Billy is still my kid."

"Tell me about him," I said again.

"I think it was my old man that ruined him. You know about my old man, the way he felt up little girls, you heard? I'm not saying he did anything to Billy, but Billy was crazy for him, he just seemed like a really cuddly grandpa. We didn't know dick about his other pastimes until maybe it was too late. And the Luca girl. Billy was friends with her. She was the only kid in the neighborhood that played with him. Sweet girl, OK? He wore her red T-shirt. The one they cut off him. And the old man touched her, and my ma went crazy.

"May's mother went nuts too, of course, and said Billy could never see May again, she said Billy probably inherited his granddad's, you know, tendencies, which is bullshit, Artie. Bullshit. He's a little boy. He sat in his room for weeks afterwards and if I tried to explain he would just sit and rock and shriek her name."

"Go on," I said.

"We didn't know until last Christmas, that's when the girl's mother told him never come in this house again and then told us why. She's dead. Billy's gone. Then Gen told me my old man done it to her girl, too, to Ellie. I mean he didn't fuck them or nothing, you know, but he liked to feel them up. Or maybe he did worse. I don't know. I can't think about it. He's my father, Artie, " Johnny said, and wiped his eyes. I didn't want him to stop. Go on, I thought, keep going.

"My ma threw him out. My pop was furious, he needed the kid, he said, he'd come here and cry. Billy felt deserted. He loved his grandfather. He's not like other kids. He's very smart, creepy smart, he can talk like grown-ups, he talks like people in books, he can remember things, he can remember like a hundred kinds of fish from a book, he can remember the colors of fishing flies, gaffer hooks, knives, he can make fancy flies. He sold some to people. We used to go by the Aquarium over by Coney and he'd stay for hours and hours and hours looking in the tanks. Sometimes I see him at home staring at the fish tank for hours. He makes up ways to feed them, it's really fucking weird, he says you have to release the fish food in a certain way. You tell him, listen, it's time to go to school and he screams. I said to Gen this kid needs some discipline, but she says, no he needs a doctor. She wants to take him to a different city for a doctor. She doesn't want people knowing. She thinks they put people who need help in a nut house. I say, Gen, honey, it's not Russia, it's not the old days, she won't let me help." Johnny stopped suddenly. "My God, Artie, I don't know what to do," he said.

"Do you think Genia's glad Billy's gone?" I said, getting out some cigarettes and offering them to Johnny, who shook his head. "I know this is tough but she wouldn't let me call the cops and I had to and then she got mad and I had to ask myself, does she even want Billy back?"

He shuddered. "I don't want to think about that," he said. "I can't think about it. What should I do? Tell me. I'll do what you say, Artie, I'll do whatever, even if Gen doesn't want it. Anything. I'll ask Zeitsev for help, if I have to. You think Billy is his kid?" he said suddenly. "I don't care if he is, I just want him back."

"You never saw this guy, Heshey Shank?"

"I knew a cop named Shank," he said. "Stan Shank, right? Sure. He partnered with my dad. My old man loved him. He loved him more than me."

"Heshey, the guy we think took Johnny, is Shank's half brother."

"Oh Christ," Johnny said.

I said, "I have to see Genia. Stay here, OK. Just sit tight. In case anyone comes. Is she alone?"

"I think she has a girlfriend with her."

"What girlfriend."

"A friend from Russia. Marina something, I think."

"Try to remember her last name."

"G, something with a G."

I thought of Ivana, the jogger from the beach. Her aunt was friends with Genia.

"Is it Galitzine?" I said to Johnny.

"Yeah, her. Artie, man, listen I'm useless, but I want my boy back. Tell me, anything, I went to the bank." He pulled a wad of money out of his back pocket. "Take it. In case. I don't care how much. I'll sell the restaurant. I know you'll find him, you were like another dad for him. I was never jealous, I mean I was a little bit but I saw how good you were for him. OK? You'll find him?"

"I'll try, Johnny," I said, and he hugged me, then turned to talk to one of his guys who approached the bar.

The guy, a tall man with a solemn face, held out a piece of paper.

"They put this under the door in back," he said with a heavy accent. "Just now. I seen it slide under."

Wordlessly, Farone looked at the sheet of paper and passed it to me.

On the single sheet of cheap copy paper was the face of a clock drawn in perfect detail. The hands showed midnight; next to the twelve was a drawing of a bomb exploding.

"You think it's a warning, you think they're going to kill Billy by midnight. Tonight?"

I took the piece of paper and ran.

"Where's your friend?" I said to Genia as soon as she opened the door of her house. "Where the fuck is she?"

"Hospital," Genia said holding the door open. I went inside but I kept my jacket on.

"What's wrong with her?"

"Her niece," she said. "Ivana."

"What?"

"She cuts her wrists."

I was sick of it, sick of Genia, sick of everybody, sick of the fear.

"You wanted it, didn't you? You wanted Billy to disappear? It was too much of a problem for you? Isn't that it?" I was holding her arm tight, but she yanked it free.

"You're crazy, you know that, Artemy? You're crazy. You think I wanted my boy to disappear. Talk to my husband if you're looking for problems with Billy. I wanted that boy, he was wonderful but Johnny was always saying he had to grow up, he needs discipline, I want him to see doctor, Johnny and that mother say, take him to church. I think, sure take him to American church where priests touch little boys."

I didn't know what to do. I couldn't leave Genia alone, she was falling apart silently.

"Where's Ellie?"

"She's in the city. She's at Juilliard. I don't want her involved," Genia said. "She has her life. Leave her be."

"I don't want you alone," I said.

"Why, you don't trust me?"

"Yeah," I said. "That's right. I don't trust you. Just call someone, will you?"

"Sure. Sure, I call."

"Promise me, OK?" I said and looked at her and put my arms around her. She held onto me and I realized I really cared about her. More than I thought. More than I understood.

"Promise?"

"Yes, Artemy, yes," she said and I knew as soon as I left she'd call Elem Zeitsev.

32

On Tuesday night, the kid from Tribeca showed up, but the dread had already settled over the city and people were disturbed and a little crazy. Tatiana, the girl with two mothers, had gone to the airport to fly to Denmark to find her father. She had seen
Sleepless in Seattle.

In it she sees a little boy who books an air ticket on-line and flies across the country alone, Seattle to New York, and he's just a dorky eight-year-old, so why not me, Tatiana asks herself. She's eleven. She lives in New York and she has her mothers' credit card and she knows the limo service number by heart, and she goes. Just like that. Sick of being a baby. Sick of being attended by nannies and bodyguards. Anyhow, anyway, she knows her way around airports. She's been in all the first class lounges.

Only the storm grounded her. That and because she curled up in the first class lounge and made a fuss when the woman who ran the lounge told her she could not sit in the first class lounge and would have to move to business class. Tatiana burst into tears and then threw a tantrum. She was her mothers' daughter.

I heard it on the car radio on my way from Genia's house. In the dark, I drove two miles an hour through narrow streets that were frozen hard as a skating rink.

On the radio, every ten minutes the news cycled around; more details of the Tatiana trip emerged. She had planned it. She promised her mothers she was going to supper at her friend's in the apartment building, and she whined and cried and got her way and when she got in the elevator she simply went downstairs, waited until the doorman was preoccupied and skipped across the street where her limo was waiting. She said she wanted to meet her father; she was going to Copenhagen, Denmark.

Maxine made me sleep on the couch. When I left Genia, I didn't know where to go. My own car wouldn't be ready until the morning and there wasn't any point going back to the city and I was scared, scared someone would be in my apartment, scared I might be arrested before I could find Billy.

My mind raced; I didn't know where to go; it was way past midnight; if the drawing with the bomb meant anything, Billy was dead. I kept going. Paranoia took over, and in Tolya's yellow Hummer I felt too visible; I was a sitting duck.

As I drove away from Sheepshead Bay, all I could think about was sleep. All I could think about was Maxie's cozy apartment, her daughters, even the smell of the place. It smelled of girls. It smelled of talcum powder and almond shampoo and Maxie's make-up. I got to her place and I wanted to climb into her big bed and roll around with her and sleep for hours in the warm sheets. But she met me at the door with only a professional welcome.

She put her finger to her lips. The girls were fast asleep in their bunk beds in their pajamas with ducks on them. Max was bundled up in a bathrobe. She got out pillows and blankets and tossed them on the couch, and told me I could stay and retreated to her own room. I went in after her. I said I just needed time, I had to finish the case, before I could think straight about her and me, and she laughed without any humor and went into the bathroom and closed the door.

In the living room, I fell asleep with the scrap of paper with the clock on it Johnny had given me clutched in my hand. Bad dreams washed over me.

I woke up a few hours later and, staring at the ceiling, I tried to stay awake and put things together, but I couldn't. I slept so hard that when I dreamed, I was in Moscow, I was a kid and it was winter and I woke up to the sound of the snow plows.

"Capitalists" we called them because they worked hard and steady, unlike anything else, rackety rackety rackety; in Moscow you could hear them everywhere, early in the morning. I woke up, for the second time, in Brooklyn.

Rubbing my eyes, I went into the kitchen but Maxine and the girls were gone. A note on the table had my name on it and when I unfolded it, it was in Maxie's handwriting, asking me to lock up and put my keys under the door. She wanted her keys back.

I felt like a bum, crashing on her couch, waking up after she left. I hadn't shaved. And something kept pushing up at me, something in my head wanted to explode and I couldn't catch hold of it.

I took a shower and used a razor I found in the medicine chest. From the fridge I got a quart of orange juice and drank it in huge gulps most of the way down. I felt parched and my throat was ragged and I was sneezing and feverish. I got dressed and went downstairs, where Maxie's neighbor, a young guy with a cleft palate, was shoveling snow.

Like military machines, the snow plows were out in ranks. The sun shone, the snow on the streets was clean, the sky was a blue bowl. Across the highway, the Verrazano Bridge glittered.

I called the tow service, got the name of the shop where my car was, took Tolya's vehicle back to Brighton Beach and parked it outside his building and went and got my own Caddy. The video camera was still on the front seat. Then I went to see if Ivana Galitzine was out of the hospital.

There was black bread on the kitchen table and a bowl of soft butter and the rancid smell from the butter assaulted you as soon as you got through the door. Ivana stood looking at a cigarette that burned on the edge of the sink that was piled with filthy dishes; what looked like meat stew was smeared on them.

I said, "You lied, didn't you? No one around here just goes to a cop, right? You knew where the clothes would be. You wanted the cops to know. You didn't stumble on them, isn't that right? Because if you did, you would have left them and moved on, wouldn't you? You knew where to find them. It was a set-up. Isn't that right?"

She turned around, her eyes were ringed with greasy makeup from the night before. Wearing a pink bathrobe with tufts of dog hair clinging to it, she picked up the cigarette from the sink where it left a burn mark and inhaled. Her wrists were wrapped with bandages.

"I don't know," she said. "I thought there might be reward. I think maybe I get on TV."

"There's a little boy," I said. "He's going to die. He might be dead already."

She held her hands up as if she thought I was going to hit her.

"Tell me," I said.

"Not here."

"Why not?"

"They're listening through the walls," she said and I knew she had been doing bad drugs.

"What are you on?"

She shrugged.

I said, "Then get dressed."

She sat down on a chair.

"Get dressed."

My back hurt from sleeping on Maxine's lumpy couch and my throat was still raw. I coughed and took out a pack of cigarettes anyway and lit one with a lighter Tolya had given me. I'd found it at home in a drawer, a sterling silver Dunhill. I held it in my hand and rolled it between my fingers like rosary beads.

She was staring out of the window and I went to where she stood and caressed her arm lightly.

"Please, Ivana," I said. "Please get dressed and come out for some breakfast and talk to me. I need your help."

Speaking Russian to her in that coercive way, again I remembered my father. I'd never seen him at work, of course; interrogations were conducted somewhere dark and mysterious and we never talked about it at home. But I got a whiff of how good he was when he wanted me to do better at school. I could hear him even now, his voice, soft, beautifully cultured, persuasive, his face attentive; his adhesive blue eyes never left yours.

"Ivana?"

She looked up.

"Come upstairs with me," she said pleading, childish.

I followed her up the stairs with the frayed rotting tan carpet.

Her room was just big enough for a bed and a dresser. Clothes were heaped in teetering piles on the bed, and on the dresser were some photographs.

"Get dressed," I said and turned my back to her.

"OK," she said. "You can turn around."

She was naked. She was a very sexy girl, sexy in a dirty, corrosive way; this time her come-on stuck to me like napalm and I could barely turn away; wanting her was an animal reaction. I was tired, I hadn't eaten and I could barely think.

Cunningly, she watched me; she gave me the creeps and a hard-on at the same time. She ran her hands over her body; she looked in my eyes; she stuck a finger inside herself.

Finally I grabbed her wrist and said, "Stop it."

"Why? I hear this is how people gets ahead in America," Ivana said. "Russian girls, especially. You become whore, you make money, you arrived in promised land, right? Is right? So I do. You see? I learn fast. Already I had three, four customers."

I hesitated and she took it as assent, but I shoved her away hard and she half fell on the bed and cowered there. Then, briskly, as if she'd made some kind of decision, she picked up some clothes from a pile and went out of the room.

I followed her. Business-like, she got dressed. In jeans, a man's shirt, a sweater and jacket and winter boots, she waited passively and then followed me to the car. At a deli nearby, I got hot coffee and bagels and made her eat while I drove. The food and coffee calmed her down some.

"Where are we going?" She stared out of the window as I drove towards Coney Island and parked up near the spot where Billy's clothes had been found.

I think she knew all along where we were going, but when I slammed on the brakes, for a second she shrank back against the seat, and said, "Not here."

"Come on," I said.

"Give me cigarette," she said.

"You knew him, didn't you? You knew Billy Farone. Your aunt is friends with Genia, you said so, she sat with Genia yesterday, didn't she, she kept her company. She knew Genia had an affair with Zeitsev, so they were close, your aunt and her. Is it him? Is Zeitsev involved with all this?" I waved towards the waste ground where there was snow now, some yellow police tape sticking up out of it. "What about Genia? Or your aunt? Did you make up all the bullshit about radiation?"

In the front seat of my car, she drank her coffee and watched me.

"I can tell you about boy, this Billy, OK? My aunt that is friends with Evgenia Borisova, like you say, tells me everything. He's not good, this kid. Something wrong with him."

"What's wrong with him?"

"You know, for all my life I want to be American," she said. "I get here, nobody wants me. OK, so I go looking for something. Maybe something under boardwalk, some way to make myself important, so I find this clothes."

"Don't lie." In Russian, I could frighten her. I hated myself for what I knew sounded like abuse.

I reached across her and opened the door on her side.

"Get out."

Again I could see a kind of resolve take over her features and she got out of the car, still clutching a piece of raisin bagel, a smear of cream cheese on her unformed mouth. In the hard cold daylight, she looked like a kid. Out on the ocean, the sun glinted off the blue water.

"Show me," I said.

"Not here," she said. "Under."

Under the boardwalk steps in the dirt and frozen snow, we half walked, half crawled. Here, she said. Here is where the blood-soaked clothes were. I blinked. It was hard to see, strings of sunlight came through the cracks in the boards overhead and blinded me.

We backed out. She asked for cigarettes. I gave her one and lit it.

"So how did it work?" I said. "The business with the clothes? The business with Billy?"

"I can't," she said.

"Yeah you can. Sure you can."

Suddenly, she said, "OK, I know Billy Farone. I baby-sit him one or two times."

"And?"

"Sick kid," she said. "Weird sick little boy. I try to make better. He has evil eye put upon him, so I try to fix for him."

"You knew where he went, what he liked, so you helped the kidnapper, is that it? You were going to get some money, is that right?" I asked her all this softly, and she pulled away from me and started up the steps towards the boardwalk. I followed her.

"I want to walk on beach." She climbed the steps and I followed.

"Tell me what happened."

"I prefer to be dead."

"There's nothing to be scared of."

But she was scared of ghosts, she said. She believed in God and gangsters and her star sign and in the lines in her palm. For all I knew she believed that hair grew on billiard balls.

"Come on," I said. "We'll take a walk on the beach, like you want, OK?"

Shivering she walked beside me on the beach, turning her face up to the wintry sun. She talked in Russian. She told me that every week when she ran, on her Saturday run down the beach, she looked under the boardwalk. She was convinced that she would find something, jewelry, money, a winning lottery ticket. She had been to a psychic, a Russian fortuneteller who told her it would be her lucky month. For luck, she was to look everywhere, and she believed it.

On Saturday mornings when she ran, she looked on the beach and under the boardwalk for her piece of luck. This was how she found the bloody clothes. She saw them and she thought: if I go to a cop there will be a reward. I'll be rich. I'll go on TV. People will like me in America.

What made her think there was money? That if she found something precious under the boardwalk, she'd get rich? Ivana said that an old man told her, a man who said he knew because he had been a cop.