Disturbed Earth (6 page)

7

Put on the TV! Put the TV on!

It was late Saturday afternoon and I was at Mike's coffee shop, listening into my cell phone and yelling out to Mike who was frying bacon for a BLT for me on the griddle.

Turn on the TV, and he reached up to the set he kept on a shelf over the glass case of green melon slices and red Jello; he switched it on in time for us to catch a glimpse of Sonny Lippert and me in Coney Island.

I sat on my stool and stared at the TV and thought about how often I'd heard it, someone calling: Put on the TV. Last time, a few weeks earlier, Mike turned it on and we saw the shuttle fall from the sky. It fell invisibly, leaving only a graceful trail of white smoke. Later that day I saw body parts for sale on eBay.

"How do you think that works? I mean, do people just pick them up off the ground, like a finger or something, and put them up for auction?" I wanted to ask but I kept my mouth shut.

Put on the TV. It had become a regular occurrence, these early morning phone calls, the news—the attacks, crashes, bombs—passed around the city, relayed, absorbed. 9/11. The snipers in D.C. The shuttle. It always seemed to happen in the morning when I was talking to Mike about the miserable state of New York sports.

I spent a lot of time in Mike Rizzi's coffee shop, which was opposite my building. I ate breakfast there, sometimes lunch. Mike kept the block running. He took packages, he kept an eye on the local kids, he knew the gossip. He was a cheerful optimistic guy. Whenever I left town, the first thing I did when I came home was stop in at Mike's. He'd see me pull up and wave and I'd go in and we'd shoot the breeze—who was moving in on the block, or out, how much the real estate prices were up, which asshole had failed to deliver his pies, if there had been any trouble with the crack-head kid who lived on the corner. Getting back to Mike's gave me a sense I'd survived another round.

Mike was a good-news junkie. He reported small triumphs regularly, his wife's attempts to sell the necklaces she made out of seashells, his discovery of a new flavor of Krispy Kreme donuts; it didn't matter. His big Italian face would split open and he'd ask me a million questions about my trip and I'd be home.

He picked up the glass coffee pot; I remembered it later, I remembered how the black liquid looked in the half full pot, the way the aromatic stream poured from the lip into the thick cup in front of me, the way the crumbs of the pie I ate littered the plate and made a pattern on it that I examined like tea leaves. I didn't know what the hell I was looking for, some kind of salvation, maybe, something to wake me up, make me stop thinking about Lily leaving.

I'd lost her. I'd done it. Hadn't I? Maxine said to me once, "She loved you, and you just let it go. You didn't really pay attention. You didn't understand she needed taking care of," and I thought, what? What did she mean? Lily was ferociously independent; she hated it when I made a fuss. Didn't she?

I got everything wrong with Lily, I thought now. I got it wrong and I also messed around with other women because I was a jerk and then 9/11 happened and I was at work all day and night and Lily was scared and angry.

"Sometimes I think we got what we deserved, America, I mean," she had said to me, and I blew up at her. She told me she thought we should understand why people hated America so much; she talked and talked about it when all I wanted, me and other cops and firemen, was to hang the bastards who did it to us. Hang them. Fry them. Lock them up forever. There were American flags hanging everywhere in downtown Manhattan; I put one up on my fire escape and it made her nuts; she despised the obsession with the flag. I couldn't listen. I was so angry I couldn't hear anything she was saying. I didn't notice it was her way of dealing with the terror.

She lost friends in the Trade Center, too, friends, a cousin, an ex-boyfriend. I didn't pay much attention. I didn't notice when she started avoiding me. Then she left for good. Got married to someone else, took Beth, and left. I missed Beth. I had started believing she was mine in a way, and then they left. It was the thing I tried not to say out loud; that Lily was gone for good was a fact, but I denied it. It made me feel short of oxygen. I read somewhere that frogs shut down completely if it's too cold; they turn off all their systems and remain like that, until spring, as if dead. Sometimes I wished I could do that.

This time I would pay attention. I wasn't going to lose Maxine because I was an asshole. I was feeling better. I really was. Sitting there I was celebrating with a huge slice of key lime pie. Tuna without mayo and decaf would have been a better option, I'd already had pie for breakfast but I wanted more pie, and caffeine.

"Cold out, right, Artie?"

"Yeah. Really cold."

"Witch's tit in a brass bra we used to say when we were kids," Mike said. "That's how cold. Maybe I'm going to try skiing this year."

I laughed and he poured more coffee. It was freezing. Coldest winter in twenty years, people said over and over, hating it, loving it, whining. Chunks of ice littered the river. A vicious wind blew all the time, howling, bleating, making you want to stay in bed all day, hibernate like the bears. We complained. New Yorkers loved extremes; it made us feel superior, made us feel we were survivors. People wrapped their babies up in plastic like meat for the freezer, someone said. I thought about the long weekend ahead.

"Artie? You OK?"

I've known Mike Rizzi ever since I moved into the building across the street, almost a dozen years. He grew up in the neighborhood, over on Mulberry Street. He was Italian but he was nuts about Greece; he figured a guy who inherited a coffee shop in Manhattan along with a lifetime supply of cups with a classical frieze had a debt to Greece. It was his destiny. The picture of Anthony Quinn as Zorba remained on the wall even after Quinn died.

"Quinn's a Mexican," I used to say.

"Greek in spirit," Mikey would say.

"How long have you been down here, Mike?"

"Must be fifteen, sixteen years. Since my old man retired."

He was here when I moved in; this part of Broadway was still raw and cheap and a cop like me could almost afford an apartment. Weird artists squatted in lofts nearby. Sweatshops still occupied most of the buildings then; you could tell by the steam pipes that stuck out of the old walls.

From my window in the building opposite Mike's, I could see his place. Above it there had been a shop where girls, bent over their machines, sewed wedding veils. It was gone now; a design firm had moved in. Pretty girls in black sat by the open window and smoked.

In the afternoons, when business was slow, sometimes I saw Mike studying, Greek history, or the menus from wholesale bakeries; pies were his draw. He liked it known he served the best pies around, which was a magnet for cops and firemen and a few other regulars.

In the early morning in the winter when it was still dark and there was nothing else lit up on the street, I sometimes looked down from my place at the coffee shop below; it looked, illuminated from inside, like a toy diner.

When I was still with Lily, sometimes I went up to Balthazar for breakfast with her and some friends she had there, and we ate the buttery croissants that left flakes on your hands and mouth and oatmeal scones, and we talked books and politics; sometimes I watched another group who were also regulars; they laughed more than we did; sometimes they yelled with laughter and they were older than us; I envied them.

"You OK, man?" Mike said again, watching me. "You have to stop thinking about it, Lily, and the other thing, both." He gestured at the picture on his wall because he saw me looking.

Mike kept the picture of the Trade Center in a place of honor in the middle of the mirrored wall over the juggernaut of cereal boxes and a cake-stand with a pile of Danish pastry. It was a photograph of the buildings before they fell. In the margins, one of Mike's customers had painted angels and over them the names of the friends Mike lost: firemen, cops, people who used to stop by; I looked at it every morning when I ate breakfast. I couldn't stop looking; 9/11 was like an addiction.

September 11. We heard the thunder. We saw the fireballs. Mike's windows cracked, the dust was everywhere. Then people came running. The Dust People, they swamped Mike's place, it was jammed up with people and the dust. We called it dust because we didn't know what else to call it. Eighteen months ago. People felt embarrassed because they were still dreaming bad stuff; they kept it in now, they didn't talk about it, but nothing was the same. Everybody felt it down where I still lived on Walker Street. You couldn't live in downtown Manhattan and stay the same, especially if, like me, you were a cop and knew guys who got incinerated. Cops. Firemen. Emergency workers. The ones who lived through it had asbestos in their lungs. Coughing blood was something you kept to yourself; I was still coughing, but I canceled the doctor's appointments and told myself it was the cigarettes I had to stop, and couldn't.

Downtown that day, I didn't want to think about it anymore, or about the days afterwards we spent digging. I dreamed about it every night. It changed me. People thought: get over it already; you could see it in their faces, so I tried. I didn't want to travel, didn't want to leave my neighborhood, my friends, my apartment. If New York was going to stay standing, I had to put my arms around it.

I was feeling OK, I told myself; I was fine. It was a three-day weekend.

"You doing anything special for the weekend?" Mike said.

"President's Day, right? Which President?" I said.

"Yeah, well they merged them, we used to have Lincoln's Birthday and Washington's Birthday and they were like a week apart, so they made them into one. I thought you took that on your test to be a citizen."

"We're talking twenty-five years since I signed up." I grinned. "More than."

"Yeah? We should have a party. You want me to make you a party, red white and blue cake, all that?"

"I'll think about it, Mike, OK? Maybe that would be nice."

"You want another piece of pie, Artie?" Mike looked at my empty plate. "It was good, right?"

"It was sensational," I said. "Yeah, great."

He slipped a second piece onto my plate and glanced at the sports section of the
Post,
engrossed in the news that Spree had been stopped in his Range Rover for possible speeding, still mumbling about how the Knicks had dismissed Spree the year before and then had to take him back. New York basketball had been in decline for Mike since the Knicks dumped Patrick Ewing. Mikey was a sweet guy, but he held a long hard grudge where sports were concerned.

A noise in the street startled me.

I jumped. Mike looked up. I got the notebook out of my back pocket; instead of writing, I doodled on a page and drank the coffee. I had gotten into the habit of writing stuff down during those weeks when time seemed suspended. Wrote stuff down so I'd know what I was thinking. I was scared. I was scared I was losing my mind like my mother.

War was coming. The economy shot. The shuttle down. Snipers in Washington D.C. Homeland Security, the stupid fucks who didn't know dick about security, just scared everyone. The homeless out on the streets again like you hadn't seen them for ten years. The country on alert. Yellow. Orange. Red. Lily gone. I didn't know how they felt out there in the rest of America; in New York, we blustered and yelled and joked and shopped, but we were scared.

9/11 hovered like a ghost. You looked up, waiting for the next plane, still expecting it, flying too low along West Broadway. I heard about this guy who lived on the 26th floor of a building near Washington Square.

That morning he's shaving and peering in the mirror, working his electric razor along his face, thinking about the day ahead, maybe choosing a tie in his mind, or wondering if he's going to cut the deal he's been working on or get a date with a girl he likes, maybe not thinking at all, and he hears a plane roaring by and he looks out of the window and sees into the plane, into the plane windows, into the faces. He sees their faces.

"Artie?"

"Yeah? Sorry."

"Why don't you get serious about Maxine? She's a nice girl. I like her. Bring her over this weekend. Angie's going to make braciol, OK? I'm calling her now. I'm calling her and saying you're bringing Maxine Sunday, we'll eat and we'll rent a dumb movie and get a little drunk, OK? She's a good girl. She loves you, you know. Come on, say you'll bring her over."

Mike took a UPS package from under the counter.

"This came. I forgot."

"Thanks," I said, and put on my jacket and, on the way across the street, ripped open the package. It was a book on fish for Billy whose birthday was coming up. Twelve already. He'd be twelve.

8

"How the hell do you know it's a girl," I said to Sonny over the phone, the half opened package still in my hand, my front door ajar. It came to me out of the blue: maybe it wasn't a girl.

"Where are you?"

"I just got home."

"Listen to me, Art. It's a girl. Every other case, it's been a girl. The case I told you, the other case, the girl with the green sneakers before, it was the same. The girl on Long Island. This is the same. He goes for girls."

"You're sure?"

"What's the matter with you?" he said and hung up.

I shut the door and put the package on the kitchen counter. Billy would be twelve in a few weeks. Gen had called to say it was a big birthday for him, so I got the book. I also planned on taking him fishing somewhere great, maybe out to Montauk if the weather held. One day I'd take him out to Montana for the real thing. Some day if Gen let me. It was the way I felt about the kid that had made me crazy out in Brooklyn earlier, but it was OK now, he was upstate, the blood-soaked clothes were not his, I told myself for the fourth time and then I got a beer out of the fridge.

The last of the day's sun was coming through the big loft windows and it lit up the place. When I first bought into the building, the space was pretty raw. It took years to fix it right, I did the floors myself, I scraped down the industrial windows. It was the only place I'd ever owned.

I put Little Richard singing 'Tutti Frutti' on the CD player, turned it up loud and ignored the banging on the wall from the next door apartment. The music, the meaningless lyrics, were good and raucous and the beer was cold. I sat on the floor and began looking at the pile of paper Johnny Farone had given me.

Farone's accounts were a mess. I was surprised Genia let him get away with it. Maybe she didn't want to rock the boat. Johnny was her American dreamboat, wasn't he? I dialed Genia's number again; there was no answer. I called her cell phone. Nothing.

For half an hour, I sorted paper. Little Richard irritated me after a while, all that falsetto howling, and I turned it off and put the radio on, listened to Sinatra, then put on Stan Getz's 'Spring Is Here'. It made me think of Lily.

I matched up the receipts with Johnny's books. I put the disk into my computer. A couple of hours later it was clear to me who was taking from Farone's. Hard to believe, I thought, and went back and checked everything again, called Johnny and asked who had access to his books.

"You found something?" he said into the phone.

"Not yet," I said. "I'm on it, OK?" I added, but I was lying.

I was pretty sure it was Genia taking the money from Johnny. Only Gen had access to his checkbooks, his accounts, the cash box. Farone's was a high cash business, like he said, and there was cash missing. Every time I went through it, it came back to Genia.

Maybe she was salting it away for Billy; maybe there was someone in Russia she sent money to; maybe it was for a rainy day or she planned on leaving Farone. But why? He was the best thing that ever happened to her, wasn't he?

And Genia was studying to be an accountant; she'd insisted on doing Farone's books. She was smart; she could fool Farone. I didn't know if she was swiping the truffles and the wine; the cash I was sure about.

I picked up the phone to call her, then put it back. We weren't close. Genia was a distant cousin of my father's who looked me up when she got to New York years ago. I didn't pay much attention. I didn't want to own any part of my past.

After she had Billy, I saw her more often, and she called regularly and invited me to eat with them. Except for my mother who had Alzheimer's and didn't know me, she was the only member of my family I still had any contact with. The others were dead or had disappeared when the Soviet thing broke up and spilled its cracked pieces—those who could get out—in a hundred directions. The imperial crack-up, the Soviet diaspora, gone. Nothing to do with me anymore. I'd left long ago. But Genia called and said it was important, we were all the family we had, and I felt guilty and I went, but always alone. Lily didn't like her.

I looked at Johnny's account book again. I wasn't going to touch this. I'd tell Johnny that I couldn't find out anything, that I couldn't see who was taking his dough. Let them figure it out, I thought, picked up the phone to call Lippert again, got the machine.

I took a shower, got dressed, then went back to my desk and stared at the photograph of Billy Farone. Lippert made me promise I'd stay by the phone, but I was restless. When the phone rang, I jumped for it. I recognized the voice. It was Ivana Galitzine and she wanted to meet. She said she had thought of something and wondered if we could meet and asked me if I would come out to see her later. Or she would meet me somewhere else, in the city if necessary. I said I'd get to her later, and she gave me the address. It couldn't do any harm to stop by Galitzine's place on my way to Maxie. What harm could it do if I went back to see her?

The long weekend stretched ahead. I'd keep the phone with me, like Sonny wanted. Fill up the time, keep my mind off Lily. Later I'd go over to Maxine's.

It was late Saturday afternoon now, usually a bad time for me. We'd always spent Saturday together, Saturday, Sunday morning, me and Lily. I put some money in my pocket. I'd go get my stuff from the cleaner's, I thought. Get my bike serviced. Buy some flowers to take to Maxie's. A blizzard was predicted for Monday, snow coming up the coast; maybe I'd get out my skis and practice in the park.

Don't do anything, Sonny had said. Just stay with the phone. When the phone rang again, I lurched across the room to answer it.