Neptune Avenue (11 page)

She laughed shyly.

Leon set off, using the cane more as a fashion accessory than a support; he seemed to be in pretty good shape. As soon as they were down the block, Jack turned to him. “What was that business about me not coming to see you? How many times did Louise and I invite you over for the holidays?”

Leon didn’t answer. What could he say? “How’s your wife?” he asked instead.

“We got divorced fifteen years ago.”

Leon shrugged. “I’m sorry. She seemed like a nice girl.”

“What about you? Did you ever get married again?” Leon’s wife had died when Jack was just a kid.

His uncle cocked his eyebrows back toward his lady friend. “Why bother?”

LEON’S APARTMENT WAS THE
same as Jack’s childhood memories of it, only dustier and smaller. A hallway lined with plastic plants that somehow managed to look withered. A smell like old egg salad. Jack had always loved a picture of a waterfall over the kitchen door: it had a light inside and the water shimmered. It was still there, though the light wasn’t on.

“The place looks good,” he said. He would have liked to start asking immediately about Semyon Balakutis, but he didn’t want his uncle to think that he had just come for such a selfish reason, after so many years.

Leon led him into a narrow kitchen. The room was walled up to shoulder height in translucent milky orange tiles that reminded Jack of a wax candy he had liked when he was a kid. This was definitely a bachelor’s kitchen, but he admired the sense of neatness and order. Leon pulled out a couple of stools from under a small table. Then he went over to the sink, ran a dishcloth across a bar of soap, and washed out two little cut-crystal glasses. He held them up: “From the Old Country.” Jack half expected him to pull out a box of saltwater taffy, but instead the old man set out a chipped plate on which he arranged sausage slices, a couple of pickles, and some cubes of rye bread. He pulled a bottle of vodka from the freezer and filled the glasses.

Jack’s eyebrows went up. “Not my usual breakfast, but thanks.”

Leon’s back straightened and he assumed a dignified expression.

“
Odem yesode meofe vesofe leofe
—
beyno-lveyno iz gut atrink bronfn.”

“I don’t speak Russian,” Jack said.

Leon made a face. “What Russian? This is Yiddish. Your father didn’t teach you anything?” The bitterness was still there.

“What does it mean?” Jack said, avoiding the old grudges.

Leon let go of his sour expression and grinned. “A man comes from the dust and in the dust he will end—in the meantime, is good to take a sip of vodka.”

They clinked glasses and tossed down the liquor, followed by a bite of food.

“You still a cop?” Leon asked.

“Yeah. I’m a detective.”

“A big shot, eh? Good for you—you were always a sharp kid.”

Jack looked up in surprise. He wanted to say, Are you sure you don’t mean Petey? It was his brother who had been sharp. Good in sports, funny, popular … “How about you?” he asked. “You must be retired, no?”

Leon shrugged. “Life is wonderful. I sit in front of a drugstore all day with a bunch of old people, like a bunch of goddamn penguins, waiting to see who falls off the iceberg next. I should never have given up my store.” He went to the refrigerator and got out some chopped liver, then came back with a bashful look. “I’m thinking about writing my memoirs.”

“Your
memoirs
?” Jack tried not to scoff. Who’d want to read a book about a man who’d spent most of his life operating a luggage shop?

“What?” Leon said. “You don’t think I have stories? My whole life I wasn’t selling suitcases. Let me ask you something: how many men can say that their lives were saved by a giant pig?”

Jack laughed. “A pig?”

“Your father didn’t tell you this story?” The disapproving expression was back.

Jack shook his head. “He didn’t talk much.”

“He didn’t say how we escaped from the Nazis?”

“He always said there was no point in digging up the past.”

“Maybe if he had talked more, some anger would have gone out of him. Like a balloon.”

“Why did you stop speaking to each other?”

Leon frowned. “That’s another story. Right now, I’m telling the one about the pig.”

“Okay.” Jack settled back on his stool. Life held many mysteries, and he was grateful for an answer to any of them.

Leon hunched down on his stool and clasped his hands between his knees. “When the Nazis invaded our town, it was nineteen forty-two. Ten of them came, and they rounded up eight hundred Jews.”

“How could so few of them do that?”

“They had help from thugs in our village. People who were happy to do it.”

“How old were you?”

“I was twelve. Your father was fifteen. In the middle of one night, they came for our family and put us in a barn with many others. All night we heard shooting, but we didn’t know what was happening. Me and Max, we agreed that if we could escape, we would meet up at a farm across the river. In the morning, the Nazis came. Max told me to run into a stall and hide. There was a giant pig in there, very mean, but I was good with animals.

“A Nazi came into the stall with a pitchfork. He was poking down into the hay, but I was hiding behind the pig. The Nazi was frightened, I think—he didn’t look too hard. They took the rest of the people, including Max, my mother and father, and my sister—”

“Wait a minute—your
sister
? I had an aunt?”

Leon looked sad. “This also your father didn’t tell you?”

Jack shook his head.
Unbelievable
. His father had always been incredibly closed off about his past, but still …

“Her name was Yuliya. Julia, you would say here. A beautiful kid, very funny, very kind …” He sighed and continued with the story. “The Nazis marched them into the woods. There was deep pits dug there. Everyone could see what was going to happen.”

Jack winced.

“There was a young man in our village, a big guy, very strong—he used to challenge everybody to wrestle. He shouted, ‘Are we going to just die like sheep?’ He ran at the nearest Nazi and pushed him down. There was lots of shooting, but a few of them managed to run into the woods.”

“What about your parents? And your sister?”

Leon fell silent and shook his head. A moment later he went on. “I was able to swim across the river. Was nighttime—very cold. I came to the farm, but I heard voices so I ran away to hide. There was bee skeps in a field. I went underneath; it was okay because the bees was sleeping. Soon the voices came closer, and I recognized my brother. Such a reunion we had!

“We went deep into the woods, and there we found a group of partisans. You know what this means? They was citizens who fought the Nazis. For the next year we lived in a shack they had made in the middle of a swamp—”

“My father lived in a swamp for a year?”

Leon nodded, then stood up—evidently he had had enough of these memories, for the time being. He put the dishes in the sink. “This is just one of my stories. So maybe I have a memoir, no?”

Jack felt tired; this was too much to take in at once. He had always thought of his father as a man who inflicted punishment, but he had never imagined the extent of what the Old Man might have suffered. He looked up at his uncle. It seemed incredible that this man and his brother could have lived through such horrors together, yet spent the last decades of their lives apart. “Uncle Leon, I know you don’t want to discuss this, but why did you and my father stop talking?”

Leon seemed to shrink. “It was a business disagreement. Something stupid.” He shook his head, misery etched into his face.

Jack stared down at the table. His uncle had managed to talk about the death of most of his family without much visible emotion. Maybe he had come to terms with it somehow or figured out how to distance himself from the memory. But this wound was still fresh. Jack thought of his own brother, dead at just thirteen, and wanted to put an arm around his uncle. Instead, he got up, filled a glass with water, and set it down in front of the old man. As if that would help.

Leon ignored the gesture. After a minute he pushed himself up from his stool. “You want more vodka?”

Jack shook his head.

“Me neither,” Leon said. He put the bottle back in the freezer, then sat down again. “So. After all these years, why do you come to see me?”

“I want to ask you about somebody.”

“Who?”

Jack reached into his jacket, removed a computer printout, and passed it across the table. A mug shot. “His name is Semyon Balakutis. Have you heard of him?”

Leon made a face. “I have heard things. He likes to call himself a businessman. I think he has something to do with the Cosmopolitan nightclub, on Brighton Beach Avenue.”

Jack leaned forward. “What have you heard?”

Leon snorted. “He’s a thug.”

“Russian mafia?”

The old man frowned. “I don’t like this talk. Because of the movies, people think we are all hoodlums here in Brighton Beach. Most of us work very hard; we just want to make a success of our little beauty parlor or tchotchke shop.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a Russian mob.”

Leon shrugged. “In the eighties and nineties, we had some big shots operating here. I don’t know about all this mafiya business, though. They were not like the Italians. They came from Russia, and in Russia there’s not so much difference between the criminals and the people that are running the place. I went to Moscow on vacation last year. I saw guys like this Balakutis crawling all over the place.
Novye Russkies
—New Russians. They call themselves businessmen, but they’re just out for a fast buck. Capitalism has not worked out so good for most people in Russia, but for criminals,
yes
.” He grimaced. “They drive fancy cars, eat in the best restaurants. They have no class.” He stood up to put away the rest of the food. “Why are you asking me this?”

Jack told him about his contacts with Balakutis so far. “I think he might be trying to extort Daniel’s company.”

Leon scratched his chin. “
Extort
might not be the best word. Maybe he’s offering them a
krysha
.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

Again, Leon shook his head at his nephew’s ignorance. “It means roof. It’s like protection, but different. In Russia or Ukraine, if you want to get a business going, a lot of the time you have to pay off some hoodlum to protect you from other criminals. But he also helps you cut through red tape and get things done. It’s like taking on an unofficial partner who grabs a big chunk of the profits. Thousands of businesses over there pay it.”

“How about here?”

Leon shrugged again. “Some new immigrants might fall for pressure, thinking that they need it. But others realize that they can say no and get help from the police.”

Jack frowned. Daniel, evidently, had said no without the help.

Leon crossed his arms. “Whatever he’s up to, this guy is someone who, if you see him coming, it’s a good idea to cross the street.”

AFTER LEAVING HIS UNCLE
, Jack walked toward the beach, thinking about his uncle, the “boring” little shopkeeper with the amazing past. And he thought about his father. About the Nazis. About an aunt he’d never known he had. When he reached the boardwalk, he stood at the railing; the midday sun baked the beach. On the horizon, huge ships plowed out across the sea. Across the world.

Jack wandered along the boardwalk until he came to the sidewalk cafés, where the old women gathered around the gypsy medicine-sellers and the old men played their chess. He wondered how many of them had survived terrible times in World War II. The war had always seemed as if it had happened far in the past, something for history books, yet it had scarred his own father, and he himself had been born just five years later. Five short years.

His cell phone trilled. He pulled it out and leaned against the boardwalk railing, watching a flock of seagulls beating against a stiff shore breeze.

“Detective Leightner? This is Semyon Balakutis.”

T
HERE WERE STARS IN
the ceiling, thousands of them, twinkling against black velvet. Several hundred people sat in the dark below, eating dinner and watching the floor show. In front of the band, a guy with a strap-on synthesizer and three female singers in gold hot pants were singing some shrill, cheesy pop song.

The maître d’ led Jack around the dance floor to an empty half-circle booth. He soon felt conspicuous—he saw no other single diners, and very few couples; people seemed to come to the Cosmopolitan club in groups. The maître d’ leaned down and spoke into his ear. “Mister Balakutis will like for you to have dinner and watch the show, with his compliments.”

Jack frowned. “Where is he?”

The maître d’ pressed his hands together in apology. “He says he will be a little late, but don’t worry: he is coming.”

Jack almost smiled. Balakutis was no dummy. He was working a game detectives played all the time. He’d left Jack wondering all day what this evening appointment might be about, and now he was keeping him waiting even longer, trying to establish who was in control.

A stone-faced waiter appeared and set down a bottle of vodka in an ice bucket. A couple of others glided up with big trays and started setting down appetizer plates: eggplant caviar, pickled beets, smoked salmon, and whitefish. Jack didn’t touch the food. He was hardly going to break bread with a man who might have murdered his friend. It didn’t matter what he said, though—the waiters kept appearing, like grim genies.

He sat back and checked out the landscape. Rumors always floated around that some of these clubs were frequented (or owned) by the Russian mafia, but tonight the scene just resembled a salesman’s retirement party. Most of the men in the audience looked paunchy and mild, and the women were clearly wives or grandmothers. They were all dressed up. Occasionally they stared at him, and he felt like an uninvited guest at a wedding. There had been a couple of surly-looking bouncers in the gaudy, chandeliered lobby, but that was about it for the potential criminal element. So far, at least—there was a balcony ringing the club, and it was too dark to tell much about the shadowy figures in the booths up there.