The Sea Beach Line (35 page)

We reached the old red brick warehouse where the art was kept, and entered just as easily. Inside, it wasn't all that different from the storage facility where I lived. The same track lighting, the same cold cement and thin carpet. The same rows of steel doors. The only differences were that the doors here had key panels instead of padlocks, and this place was air-conditioned.

When the other guys got the electricity cut off, Roman took out a large LED flashlight, and led us down the row until he found the unit number he was looking for. He had a couple security codes written out on a scrap of paper, and he got the door to pop open on the second try. Inside, about a dozen paintings sat on a metal rack. They were contained in bulky wooden storage frames that were clearly not display quality, but allowed enough space for the paintings to be wrapped in polyurethane without having the wraps actually touch or constrict the paint.

“I'll go grab the dolly,” Roman told me, handing me a smaller LED flashlight from his coverall pocket, “while you locate the painting. Oil painting, on canvas of about one hundred forty centimeters by about ninety centimeters. The subject is Jewish, a rabbi. But expressionist, not normal like the portraits in Judaica shops and lawyer offices.”

I was worried that I wouldn't be able to find the right painting—this was the only discreet, independent task I had been given—but when I came to it, just a peek under the plastic wrap was enough for me to see that it was as Roman had described it. The rabbi was on his knees, with his face turned up toward the sky. His face was dark, with straight creases. His mouth hung open, and his large brown eyes searched the cosmos. His beard, made of loose swirls of gray and black paint, wilted down to his chest. His talis was pulled tight over his head, not for ritual reasons, but out of a need for shelter. The black night was mosaicked with stars that looked like uncut white, blue, and purple diamonds, and filled the whole background. The painting reminded me of Galuth's work, though this image was sparser, less complex, than the picture of the woman falling from the train tracks.

Roman came back with the cart, and together we carefully slid the painting down onto it. The painting was light, and we could have carried it by hand, but it felt safer to rest it on the middle of the dolly than to risk bumping the corner of the painting in the dark. As it was, we had to be very careful going around the corners of the narrow aisles with the dolly in the dark. The old oil paint was already cracking, and the canvas probably couldn't take too hard of a bump without some flaking off. I could see why Roman had wanted to bring a helper along.

“This way,” he said, directing me to a corridor that led into another, nearly identical room of storage units. We stopped in front of one, and Roman typed in another number from the sheet.

“We're not carrying it out?” My heart had been beating faster, in expectation of the moment when we broke the picture out of the warehouse, under the nose of the armed guard.

“No,” Roman answered. “Some art handlers will come and carry it out next week in a crate. It will be a routine, legitimate job for them. They will have a work order. No one will pay any notice. But enough questions. The lights will be on in five minutes. Let's get it in there.” Just like that, before I even understood that the heist was happening, the heist was over. The lights snapped back on, and ten minutes later,
we were walking out the front door, empty-handed, telling the guard to have a good one.

After we'd dropped off the HVAC guys and were driving back to Manhattan, Roman took a half-full pint bottle of Sobieski vodka out of his jacket pocket. He kept one hand on the wheel and managed to unscrew the cap with the other. He took a long slug, lowering the bottle's contents by a good three-quarters of an inch. I wondered if this was a victory ritual, or if Roman had been nervous about the job. He offered the bottle to me, and I took a sip. When I handed it back to Roman, he drained the rest and tossed the empty bottle in the backseat. Maybe he drank like this every night, and was just waiting for work to be over so he could get to it. The vodka put Roman in a more talkative mood.

“You weren't raised by Al, huh?” I wondered why he asked this. Did I not seem like Al's son to him?

“Not really. Only when I was very young.”

“I know how that is. I left my parents at the age of twelve to go to special gymnasium school.”

“A gymnasium? Like, a preparatory school?”

“No, like a school that is a gym, where you work out and do athletics. I was a strongman. I mean, really, a real strong guy. I am still, actually, but then, oh buddy. So you know how some people go to university? Or like your papa, he went to the arts institute? I went to the weight-lifting institute.” We turned up Bedford Avenue. The street was full of Satmar families. For some reason, Hasidic families always have their kids out on the street in the middle of the night. I wondered if the family Rayna had run away from was like these families.

We crossed back over the Williamsburg Bridge.

“You know,” Roman said, “your father likes to go out and have a good time.”

“I guess he does.”

“You ever been partying with the old man?”

“No. I was too young to drink the last time we spent any time together.”

“Too young to drink . . . I'm not understanding.” He looked over at me with pity in his eyes.

“I mean, too young to go out drinking. I was a minor.”

“Oh.” He shrugged. “You too young to drink now?”

“Nope.”

“Well, let's pull over and wet our whistles, then?” Apparently, once Roman started drinking, he liked to keep going. “There is a place I like on Avenue B.”

“That sounds fine to me.” I knew Rayna was at home, worried, but this seemed like a good opportunity to learn more about Roman, and hopefully about Al as well.

“You know what they said when I first came to New York City? Alphabet City: first you come to Avenue Awful, then Avenue Bad, then Avenue Crazy, then Avenue Dead. Now it's all changed. No thanks to me. Ha ha! But I like the changes, truthfully. Nice place to get a drink, now.”

We went into a bar called the Sack. There were high-backed stools at the bar, and overstuffed chairs upholstered with animal-print fabric elsewhere in the room. The place was very dark, even though there seemed to be bright lights everywhere. We sat at the bar and Roman ordered us each a shot of vodka. He offered a toast to my father. Then we got another round and I offered a toast to his family. Then Roman proposed a toast to the family of the bartender, who was so kind in keeping the shots coming quickly.

“I was always a strong boy,” Roman told me. “Even before I went to weight-lifting institute. One time, I was ten years old, and I came home with my mother to our apartment in Odessa. We couldn't get up to the staircase, because these three drunks passed out in front of the door. Me, I just picked them up and moved them out into the courtyard, far away from the door. I stack them neatly, one on top of the other, like firewood. Because I was still a good boy, then.

“I liked it there, you know, in Odessa, when I was a boy. People talk about how terrible communism was, and they are correct. But there was niceness, when I was a kid. There were no more purges, everyone had enough to eat. You lived with your parents in apartment. Everyone
lived with their parents, in the identical apartment. You came down into the courtyard and played with your friends, who wore the same sweaters as you to keep warm. Then you went upstairs and ate the dinner.

“I come here, it's whole other world. Everyone is in their own world, actually. In Brooklyn, black thugs walk around with unloaded pistols in their belts, trying to lecture you from the book of Corinthians. Pakistani mosques make the call to prayer from megaphones. Hasids ask you on the corner if you are Jewish. Some of them want to circumcise you. Some of them want to sell you stolen laptop computers. You know what I mean?”

“I do,” I said. What he described wasn't really the America I'd grown up in, but I'd always seen glimpses of it through Al, and now it was a world I was really starting to see, being on the street every day.

“It's funny about Hasids though. I talk to them a lot, for business. Mainly Glupskers, but Satmars, Skverers, all these syndicates. Sects. What have you. They are an odd bunch. I am Jewish too, you know?”

“Yeah?” He didn't look Jewish. Maybe it was the muscles.

“Oh yes! I came here as ‘refugee status' and everything. It's just, you know, there wasn't ever anyone around to show me how it is to be Jewish. What to say, or do, like a Jew. Timur is from an old Bukharan family; he knows all rituals and everything. But me, I never got to learn any of it. I never learned any of the, you know, the book.”

“The Talmud?”

“No. The book.”

“The Torah?”

“That's the one. You see, my parents, maybe they didn't know much about it either. I didn't have any grandparents . . . there were not many people from the generation of the Great Patriotic War around.”

“Your grandparents died in the war?”

“No, I don't think so. My family is family of thieves. A long line of Odessa Jew thieves. You know about Odessa Jews? When Tsarina Katerina built her great port, she insisted there be some Jewish smugglers there, so it could be a real respectable port. She had to pay the Jewish smugglers to smuggle in the Jewish smugglers. Probably, my
grandparents were all sent to the gulags for attempted profiteering. But I couldn't say, really. No one ever spoke about it.

“Another round, bartender! To the dead Jewish thieves of Odessa! To the tsarina!”

The bar was spinning, and my face felt very hot. Roman ordered more shots immediately after we finished the ones in front of us. I had lost count of the rounds.

“A drink to your father's memory!” he said. It wasn't until after I drank the shot down that I realized he had said my “father's
memory
,” not my “father,” or my “father's health.” Did he actually believe my father was dead? Did he
know
my father was dead? Had the liquor caused him to forgo a farce? Or was that reading too much into the ramblings of a drunk man?

“Roman,” I said. “Have you been in touch with the man who drove my father when he left town? I'd like to meet him.” I was tired of being kept at arm's length.

“What's that?” He squinted, trying to place what I was saying. “Oh, yes, the man who drove him to Grand Central. He left town as well. Hasn't been around. I'll let you know soon as I hear from him.”

“Sure. Thanks.” Before it was the bus station, now it was the train station. Roman could have been getting his facts mixed up because he was drunk, or he could be making them up as he went along. My only actual confirmation that Al was alive was Roman's story. I had not talked to the “witness” myself. It wasn't even clear he existed. And even if he did, my 911 call was proof that people would lie for Roman and Timur.

“I have to get going,” I said, but Roman grabbed me by the shoulder and forced me back onto my stool.

“More shots!” he shouted. “Many shots for my friend and I!” He started buying shots for people around us as well. I finally managed to slip out as Roman was trying to lift a giggling blonde girl over his head.

When I left the bar I was so drunk I couldn't walk in a straight line. I stopped to wretch into a trashcan, but nothing came up. I wanted to lie down on the street and go to sleep, but I forced myself to walk all the way across town to the storage facility.

I stopped for a slice of pizza and a liter bottle of water, and forced myself to drink all of it. Between the grease, the water, and the spring night air, my head started to clear a bit.

Rayna was awake when I made it back to the storage space. She sat in bed, with the lantern on.

“Why are you still up, Rayna?” I asked.

“I was worried about you. I knew you were doing something bad with those men. I was afraid you would disappear, like your father did.”

“No, no. I'm fine, Rayna. Everything is fine, Rayna.”

“Are you sure? You sound strange. You keep saying my name.”

“I'm a little drunk. But not so much as earlier. I just need to drink some more water.” She handed me the jug, and I took a long drink.

It was warm in the storage space, and the alcohol made it feel even warmer. I took off my pants, and came and laid down on the mattress. I cuddled up to Rayna, and lay with my head on her chest.

“Everything is really fine?” she asked again.

“Yes. There was no problem with the business thing. Only . . . only my father's friend said some things that made me think he thinks my father is really dead. I don't think he is. But what if he is . . .” I hated that my faith was wavering. I hated that I was letting myself doubt that I'd find Al.

“You don't know what you don't know, Isaac. You are a good son either way.” Was I? I didn't think my mother would say so. What would Al say? I was maintaining his name on the street, and now in the criminal world. I believed that was worth something. What did Rayna know, or understand about what I was doing? Or did she just mean that I was a good man? Was I a good man? Could I be a good son of Al's and also be a good man, or were those two different things?