Fresh Kills (34 page)

“You knew?”

“How could I not? It was there, and then it wasn't. No one else was in the loft.”

“Why didn't you say something?”

“I think you're going the wrong way, Artie. Give me the map back, OK? I think you should turn left up at that corner.”

“How come you didn't say anything about the phone if you knew I had it?”

“How come you didn't? I wanted you to say something. I wanted to trust you.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Me too. Did you look at the pictures I took with the phone?”

“Yes.”

“Left, left and then right at the next corner. Artie, go left!”

“You want to talk about the pictures?”

“Not really,” Billy said. “I'm just looking forward to our day together,” he added formally, like an adult accepting an invitation. “Did we bring enough stuff? Do we need bait? Are we OK on everything?” He reached into the pocket of his jeans, got out his red Swiss Army knife and, one at a time, checked the blades.

“What are you doing?”

“I just wanted to check that everything's in OK shape,” he said. “What did you think I was doing? Shipshape, isn't that the right expression?”

In the suburban streets now we passed a few kids out on skateboards and bikes. In driveways people climbed into their SUVs and vans and backed out, probably heading for the beach or the supermarket.

It was still very early, but it was Saturday. People out doing regular stuff, they looked like figures in a TV commercial, ordinary but unreal and apart from us, Billy and me.

I turned the radio on, and Billy hit the buttons for some country station he liked. I wanted news. He stopped me putting it on.

Was he afraid for me to hear it? I needed to know what was happening, needed to know about Luda, and when I saw a gas station, I pulled in. I didn't want Billy to hear the call.

I climbed out of the car and Billy followed.

“What did you talk about on the phone with Luda?” I said. “Remind me.”

“I told you,” said Billy. “You're getting old, Artie, you don't remember.” He laughed amiably when he said it. The anger had gone. He punched me lightly on the arm. “You're the best,” he said affectionately.

“So tell me again.”

“I don't really remember that much. Luda was just like talking in Russian and I told her some funny jokes and stories,
I think. She kept saying I have to talk to Uncle Artie, I said you were out, so she started crying. I felt bad for her so I made nice.”

“You want to get me some coffee,” I said to Billy. “Get us some kind of snacks?”

“Sure, Artie.”

Billy ambled toward the store attached to the gas station.

I called Sonny Lippert. The phone was busy. Tolya's phones were busy. I kept hitting the buttons on my phone. No one answered. Nothing.

Billy returned with cartons of coffee, and after we were back in the car, I said, “I feel so bad about Luda. Val wanted me to be her American godfather.”

Sonny Lippert had asked me if there was anyone Billy could be jealous of, someone I cared about. I was testing Billy. If he was jealous of Luda, if he thought she had some kind of hold on me, maybe he'd open up.

“I know that,” said Billy. “She told me. She says to me, oh, I love Artemy I want him to be my American godfather, and I said, wow, that'd be nice because then we'd be related too, her and me, in a way.” Billy drank some of his coffee and got gum and candy out of his pocket. “I always wanted a little sister,” he said. “So I got Juicy Fruit,” he added. “I got spice drops. And some red Twizzlers. You want something? You can have all the white spice drops, if you want, I mean sour pineapple flavor, yuck, but I'd give you the reds, too.”

Eager to please, Billy rubbed his eyes with one hand, and offered candy. I took some gum.

Near the Bayonne Bridge that connected Staten Island to New Jersey, oil terminals rose on the horizon. On the Jersey side was where the big container ships now docked, and Bayonne and the area around it had expanded – tough working-class towns.

The Kill Van Kull separated New Jersey and Staten Island,
and around here on the island were ramshackle houses, a few cheesy new condos, woods, creeks. For this part of Staten Island up in the north, you couldn't see the rest of the city at all. It made me feel I was a million miles from home. Kill Van Kull. Lots of Dutch names, I thought, drifting, tired from not sleeping.

“There's an island around here,” Billy said, “with a bird sanctuary. We could go. I'd like that. What do you think? You think we could do that?”

“I don't think there's any boats anymore that go. I think those were from old times, those islands. Some of those islands were for quarantine, diseases, maybe smallpox, that kind of thing.”

“Who would stop us?”

“So, about Luda, what do you think, I mean would you mind if I was like a sort of godfather for her?”

“Didn't we just talk about this? Sure,” Billy said casually. “That's OK. I'm good with that, like I already said. It's fine.”

Out of the corner of my eye I could see him, but he was relaxed, head back against the seat, feet on the dashboard, a kid having a good time. He ate the spice drops out of a bag, selecting the green ones first, placing them on his tongue, one at a time, and then swallowing.

“You're not chewing those things?”

“I'm chewing, I'm chewing.” He laughed.

Why couldn't I just ask him straight out about Luda and everything else? But if I asked, I thought for the second time, it was the same as accusing him. I'd lose him. It was bad enough he didn't know I was taking him back to Florida that night.

For sure Billy had been at my loft when Luda walked out of Tolya's. Had I been there with him? I worked out the times again. There was no way he could have gone and snatched her, and anyhow, here he was sitting beside me. I breathed out. I looked for some cigarettes.

“Here.” Billy handed me a pack.

Billy rolled down his window and leaned out.

“God, what's that smell,” he said. “What is that? Fuck! I thought they closed the garbage dumps. Sorry, I'm not supposed to say fuck.”

I opened my own window and took a whiff.

“It's methane,” I said.

“Where are we?”

“Fresh Kills. That's what it's called. Used to be this was the city garbage dump,” I said. “They covered it over with some kind of plastic, wrapped it up, put landfill on top, and dirt and stuff, so they could grow grass and trees.”

“You're not wise in the ways of the wild, Artie, are you?” Billy was giggling. “I mean nature's not your thing.”

“Yeah, well, they had to put in pipes so the gas from all that packed-in garbage could escape, otherwise the whole thing would just explode.”

“Like boom!” Billy said. “Wow, that's weird, all that crap just festering away under the grass, getting ready to push up through some golf course. Totally, completely weird. Can we take a look? I could do a science report on it. Festering is a good word, right?”

“There's nothing to look at, unless you want to drive up to the old sanitation plant, I mean what for?”

“Can we?” Billy said. “I want to. Please?”

When we found the road that led to the sanitation plant, I stopped and we got out of the car.

After a few hundred feet, the road turned into dirt; there was a fence with a locked gate and a sign warning people to keep out. In the distance, you could see some of the chimneys from the old plants. The insidious stink of methane got to me.

I said, “Let's get out of here.”

Billy had his face up against the gate, curious, interested.

“Come on.”

“You want to fish, come on, let's get moving.” I was irritated.

Billy dawdled some more. He looked through the fence, he bent down to examine some pebbles, he kicked an empty soda can with the toe of his sneaker.

He was halfway up the path to the old recycling plant. I got out my phone. The reception was lousy out here, but I got through to Tolya who told me Luda was still missing. He was furious I'd called the case in to Sonny Lippert. Told me there were now so many cops on the case Luda was good as dead. Tolya said when the cops came in on a kidnap, the kid always turned up dead. I told him he'd more or less said that already.

I listened while Tolya yelled at me in Russian. I told him Luda would turn up. I didn't believe my own words. He was angry and hurt because I didn't keep a promise. I hung up and saw that Billy was watching me; he didn't say anything, though.

Billy stuffed his hands in his pockets and sauntered slowly towards me, kicking the dirt, ambling around, behaving like a teenager. What bugged me was it felt Billy was putting it on. It was as if he had learned an act, to prove to me he was just a regular guy. I had a sour taste in my mouth.

Out here in Fresh Kills, I felt cut off. Nobody was around, only me and Billy, and him wandering around what used to be a garbage dump, the methane leaking, stinking up everything, getting in my throat and making me gag.

Watching Billy while I waited for him, I started thinking again. Stuff that I had discarded, things I'd pushed down pretty deep, pressed up.

On the road all morning, I had started trying to fit together the pieces. Started trying to account for Billy's time – days, hours. I let the poison in.

I got into the car and turned the radio to 1010; stories about the dead baby in the freezer were followed by news about the dead girl, Ruthie Kelly, who got killed in Jersey and had lived in Brooklyn.

Ten minutes later, Billy was still kicking stones around. He was Genia's son. My father was his grandfather. If I didn't take care of him, who would? I tried to keep myself focused on this. I got out of the car to get some air, but it didn't help.

At the toy store Wednesday night, Billy had scared Luda plenty. Somehow he knew seeing dolls that looked like her would shake her up good. Maybe he did it for the hell of it. Maybe it was his idea of a joke. He talked Russian to her, a nice American boy who talked to her in Russian, a good-looking boy who was almost family. Billy was my father's grandson.

It never ended, this Russian thing. Tolya had warned me over and over that it would never go away. It was part of who I was, my history, but I had refused to believe him until now.

I had made myself into an American, a New Yorker; I didn't have an accent. I buried the whole fucking past as best I could. But when I looked at Billy – he was poking around a grassy knoll near one of the methane pipes – I couldn't escape. I looked at Billy, I saw my father.

When I'd stopped being a little boy, I found out some of the things my father had done in the KGB. He never told me. I asked around. At home I overheard my mother in the other room yelling at my father. As a teenager, I tried hard not to like him. Tried not to love him. It didn't work.

He was my father and he remained tall and handsome and sweet and funny, the guy who brought me chocolate candies wrapped in gold paper and, later on, the jazz records you couldn't get in Moscow unless you had connections. My first Miles Davis. My first Stan Getz and Ella and Charlie Parker albums.

But my father was always a true believer. Those days, he still believed in socialism, in the system, in the greatness of the project. He told me about Yuri Gagarin, and Tupolev, and the USSR space program. About his own time as a very young guy still in his teens, fighting the Germans in the Great Patriotic War.

Some of the time, he asked me about school and friends and what I was reading; he knew I sneaked books that were more or less forbidden. My mother bought me black-market editions of paperbacks in English – westerns, mysteries, stuff like that. My father never yelled at me, he never threatened.

I had a friend at school named Mikhail – we called him Misha Three because there were three Mikhails, all of them Mishas to their friends – who came from a working-class family where the father was a factory worker, a real Stakhanavite who won prizes for productivity.

When Misha Three turned fourteen, he told his father he hated the USSR and he was going to defect, a fantasy that kept him going. His father said that if he tried, he would report Misha to the KGB. A year later, Misha went on a school trip to Poland and jumped out of the window of some crummy building in Warsaw. The father had to go get the body. My father wasn't like that. He never threatened.

There had been a day once when I played hooky and he found out. It was spring and a bunch of us just took off for the river.

My father was waiting for me when I got home. I must have been about twelve. We sat at the kitchen table, and I stared at the poster of Paris my mother kept taped to the wall, and my father made tea for both of us, and offered me a spoonful of cherry jam from the jar. My mother wasn't there; maybe she was working; maybe she was shopping, eternally hopeful she would find some French shoes.

What I remembered after all these years was the session
with my father at the kitchen table and how the tea got cold, and the jam congealed in it; drinking it anyway, I stuck my fingers in to reach the sodden lump of cherry jam at the bottom of the glass. Restless, my foot tapping against the linoleum on the kitchen floor, I held the tea. My father told me to sit still. I couldn't look at him and he told me my inability to look at him made me seem shifty.

He didn't sound angry. He was polite and soft-spoken that afternoon and only a little aloof, but there was a chill in his voice and his eyes. Right then I realized that it was probably the way he behaved during interrogations. I started sweating. By the time you were interrogated by a senior KGB officer, it meant you had done something bad; bad things would happen to you afterwards. Kids I knew whispered about it; people talked about the KGB, if they mentioned it at all, in hushed voices.

My father went on and on, asking me questions, gazing at me with those chilly blue eyes, until my mother came home and made him stop.