Disturbed Earth (30 page)

"Did you?"

Billy looked up at me with those see-through blue eyes and said, "I wanted to see how it felt."

"How did it feel?"

"Like cutting a fish," he said. "I got scared, so I locked him in and came in here and went to sleep for a while."

"He was bleeding? He suffocated in the nets?"

"Whatever," Billy said. "But everything is shit, isn't it? I listen to grown-ups and the TV, and they say how bad everything is and no one answers my questions and I wanted to have an adventure before I died. You ever feel like that?"

But there was something else. I thought about the way Heshey's flesh looked, the small chunks carved out of it. I sat on the floor with Billy and we talked for what seemed like hours until the sky outside was light and most of the fog was gone.

"You remember my ma's pop?" Billy asked and for a moment I thought he meant my father. He couldn't know, of course. He couldn't.

I said, "You mean the general?"

Billy nodded. He had liked the general. He had liked his stories. When Billy was little, he told me, they went fishing. The old man was the first guy who took Billy fishing and they sat by the water and the general told him stories about the war in Leningrad, where he lived.

"He told me they ate wallpaper paste," Billy said, suddenly. "Other stuff."

"What other stuff?" I said.

Billy didn't answer, and I didn't ask. I didn't want to know what I already knew. The general told stories about Leningrad and the siege and how people foraged for food among the dead. Ate the dead. I knew why Billy had taken chunks out of Heshey Shank.

Out of the blue, Billy got up off the floor and went to the window. I watched him and knew that he left Shank trapped in the nets and bleeding, left him there for days until he bled to death.

Billy said, "The fog is going away, I can see the ocean. Artie?"

Heavy with fatigue, he moved slowly across the few feet between us. I was still sitting on the floor and Billy kneeled down next to me and put his arms around me. I could feel his weight and the soft skin.

Against my chest, Billy nodded his head. Then he said, "I love you."

After a while, curled up against me, Billy fell asleep. A faintly puzzled look was on his face as if he slept perplexed by the fact that what he had done was wrong. He didn't really understand what he did or why; it occurred to me that in that way he was like America.

Carefully, I laid him on the floor, still in his blanket, got up and went outside. I could barely breathe. I managed to get out my cell phone and call Sonny Lippert, and then I went back and sat beside Billy again and waited until Lippert and some of his guys arrived.

"Don't use any sirens," I'd said to Lippert and he put out the word.

When I heard Lippert's footsteps on the wooden walkway outside the cabana, I got up and opened the door and showed Lippert where Heshey Shank lay, dead, on the bare floor of the cabana.

"Go home" was all Lippert said to me.

We looked at each other briefly and didn't speak because we both knew this was something you couldn't say, not yet, we both knew it, and I felt his hand on my arm for a moment.

After some of Lippert's guys showed up, I went to the Farones' and told them Billy was in custody. And I left them. I'd had it for now. There was nothing else I could do. Zeitsev would fix up a lawyer and maybe Billy would get help if he needed help.

Maybe he was just a rotten kid; you could be a kid and be evil. Maybe he was a shattered little boy, crushed by all the grown-ups who surrounded him. I couldn't tell, and if he was sick, it didn't have a name. I couldn't shake the memory of the warm body against me and him saying, "I love you."

No one gave a rat's ass about Heshey Shank; he was just a retard, a pervert who got what he deserved. A cop found Heshey's tape recorder shoved in his pants pocket. He had recorded what happened while he could; it took him three days, like I figured, to die. The tape disappeared somewhere into Brooklyn.

Billy became a kind of hero. Billy, the kid, they called him. BILLY THE KID. That was how the media played it. Zeitsev had all the right lawyers, and within a day or two people were saying what a smart, brave kid he was, a child soldier. His photograph appeared in the papers; every time I saw his face, I saw my own father.

There was much more. There were things that went back thirty-five years, connections I still had to untangle: Genia was my half sister and my father was Billy's grandpa. Heshey Shank had been set up by his brother to get rid of Billy Farone. Was it because old Mrs. Farone asked him? Because she was jealous of the husband she had kicked out but whom Billy adored? Because she knew the kid was Zeitsev's and not her son's? Was it a way to draw me into a trap? In the end, the two crazy innocents, Heshey and Ivana, died from it.

I went back to the city and returned Mike's van and got something to eat. All I wanted was food and sleep. I had been so obsessed with the danger Billy was in, I never figured it for him as the killer. He had made everyone afraid in a city that was already scared to death, it was an easy place to raise the terror. Now he was a hero. At Mike's, I glanced up at the TV on the shelf over the cake-stand and saw Billy's face.

Afterwards

Afterwards, I went home and slept. For the next couple of weeks all I did was sleep and spend time, in between sleeping, with Tolya. He was at St Vincent's where I got him transferred because I knew people there, and they were good and I trusted them.

Maxine and I saw each other and, knowing we were almost a married couple, made plans. We behaved like a couple. We held hands. We inspected furniture we couldn't afford in fancy Soho stores; we lay on an Italian leather bed in Flou and giggled. We looked at converting my loft to make rooms for her girls. I liked it. I liked the sense of security. It was almost spring.

On the first warm glorious day, hot sun, blue sky, my bike propped up just outside, I was at the counter of Mike's coffee shop. Someone came in the door and I looked up from the BLT I had in one hand.

Tolya didn't say anything. He climbed on the stool next to me, ordered bacon and eggs and ate silently while I finished my sandwich.

"How are you?" I said.

"I lost twenty pounds," he said. "I must buy new clothes. We'll shop."

"I'd love to shop with you. I need a new suit. You'll be my best man?"

"You want to talk about the other thing?" he asked finally. "About Billy?"

Genia had taken Billy away to a school out of state.

"No," I said. "Not now."

I didn't want to think about anything except Maxie. I was going through with it. I wanted to marry her. It would change everything.

I took some cash out of my pocket and started to put it on the counter. Tolya pushed my hand away.

"Please."

"Yeah, OK," I said. "Where do you want to shop?"

"You're really going to marry her? The girl who lives in Brooklyn?"

"Yes."

"Artyom, it's not for you, you know, this nice ordinary girl, this marriage, that's stuff for regular, boring people."

"I want to be regular and boring."

He buttered the last piece of toast on his plate, and ate it, then drank another cup of coffee while Mike went in the back and talked on the phone.

"Why not?"

"I got a call last night," he said finally.

My stomach turned over. I pulled a cigarette out of the pack.

"What kind of call?" I said to Tolya again.

He turned to look at me and said, "Lily's in New York."

"Good for her," I said. "Say hi, for me."

"Don't you want to see her?"

"No," I lied. "No." I wanted to see her more than anything I could think of; I wanted it, but I said, "No."

We sat for a few minutes not talking. I drank another cup of coffee, the thick smooth rim between my lips. Then Tolya's phone rang. He listened for a few seconds and turned to me.

"It's Lily," he said. "She wants to see you." He held out the phone. "She misses you."