Neptune Avenue Read online

  For decades the Italian mob’s Genovese family had kept a stranglehold over this wholesale outlet, controlling unloading, parking, and even “security,” but the city had finally chased it out. Jack wondered if Russians might be trying to fill the gap.

  He asked a vendor where he could find Daniel Lelo’s office. As he made his way around scummy puddles toward the other side of the market, he wished he had worn older shoes. (Actually, he wished he had worn shoes he could later throw away.) He found an eddy in the swirl of activity and paused to study the workings of the place before he plunged deeper in. Normally, this was one of the things he loved most about his job: while most people were stuck in one place all day, he got to roam around and plumb the city’s hidden worlds.

  Throughout the lot, pairs of men stood engaged in fierce but jovial negotiations.

  “Whaddaya need?”

  “Sea scallops. How much?”

  “T’ree dalluhs a pound.”

  “T’ree dalluhs! Fuck you, ya fuckin’ bastid!”

  “They’re t’ree dalluhs. Don’t gimme a song and dance—if you wanna dance, come back Saturday night.”

  The vendors seemed to come in three sizes. There were huge musclemen who looked as if they could heft a whole swordfish by themselves; a few Hasidic Jews, medium-sized; and a number of small Asian men with tough faces. Dwarfed as he was by the big guys, Jack was glad of the shorter company. There wasn’t a woman in sight—it was an all-male preserve, like the NYPD had been a generation or two before. At first Jack wondered why anyone would want to work here—up all night, ankle-deep in fish guts—but as he listened to the men barter and banter, he could see what drew them. The place was not really so different from nearby Wall Street: both were self-enclosed realms, like locker rooms. Everyone knew how he fit into this milling world. Daniel Lelo’s world. Daniel had invited Jack to come down, but he had never managed the enthusiasm for such an early, smelly visit. Now that he had seen this brawny place, it was hard to reconcile it with a man who liked to read fancy novels. But then, smart Russians had been forced to take up all sorts of manual labor when they hit these shores—Daniel’s quip about brain surgeons and taxi drivers had not been so far off the mark.

  Jack dodged another forklift and ventured out. At the open north end of the market he could see the East River. The sun, now rising over the hulking Brooklyn Bridge, filled the puddles here with gold. In a covered section of the market, the shouts of vendors were punctuated by the slap of fish being thrown onto hanging scales. Bright lamps shone from high in the rafters onto tables piled with ice and gleaming carcasses. The place was a morgue for fish.

  Each company had its own lane, and the ethnic origins of each were often obvious. There was a LaRocca Fish Company, a Mount Sinai Fish … Jack moved along the bright rows until he came to Daniel’s business, Black Sea Imports. Several big men were hard at work there. One used his hook to snag fish under the gills and flip them onto a table; another steered a circular saw through a mighty tuna. Outside, the fish was dull gray, but its flesh was ruby red.

  A short, bald-headed man wearing clean clothes marched down the lane bearing a clipboard; he stopped now and then to give orders in Russian. A manager. He had an air of brisk competence—he needed to, since most of the workers were twice his size—but he looked haggard; maybe he’d had to take on a lot of extra responsibility since the death of his boss. Jack noticed that his left hand was wrapped in a big white bandage.

  Jack moved into step beside him. “That looks like some top-quality fish.”

  “I have tuna and swordfish. Also mako.” The man kept glancing at his workers; his harried air did nothing for his salesmanship.

  “If I was buying, I’d definitely shop here.”

  The manager paused to tell a forklift driver where to unload, then looked at Jack. “You are not buying?”

  “I’m sorry about your boss.”

  The man’s blue eyes searched Jack’s face. “Who are you?”

  “I was a friend of Daniel’s. We were in the hospital together a while back.”

  The man’s gaze softened, then grew puzzled. “Why you are here?”

  “I’d just like to ask you a few questions. Have you ever heard of a man named Semyon Balakutis?”

  The man’s face closed up as if a steel shutter had just gone down—but not before Jack noted an unmistakable flicker of fear. The manager moved on quickly. “Excuse me. I am very busy today.”

  Jack kept pace with him. “I just—”

  “Valery!” the man called out. One of his largest employees, a somber giant wearing a bloodstained dress shirt with torn-off sleeves, turned around, then picked up a hook big enough to gaff a whale.

  “I’m also a detective,” Jack said quietly. “NYPD. We’re just going to have a peaceful little talk.”

  The little man looked pale as a fish yanked out of water. He said something in Russian to his colleague, who set down the hook. “We go upstairs,” the manager said, and hurried off down the aisle.

  Above the side of the market, a row of picture-windowed offices looked down over the lanes. Jack followed the manager up a drab stairwell into an equally drab fluorescent-lit room. Cheap paneling, plastered with calendars, schedules, health department notices. The man walked over to the big window, which blocked out the cacophony of the market below. His eyes darted to a pull cord for a louvered shade.

  Jack shrugged. “You want a little privacy, go ahead.”

  The man lowered the shade. If he was a target of extortion, Jack mused, he would not want to be seen having a private discussion with a cop. The manager came around behind his desk and sat. He looked as if he was about to cry.

  Jack took the other seat, an orange plastic chair. “Don’t worry. I’m here to help. What’s your name?”

  The manager muttered a reply, and Jack had to ask him to repeat it. Andrei Goguniv.

  “Was Balakutis trying to extort money from you?”

  The manager gripped the edge of the desk, then winced. Jack noted the bandage on his left hand again. A little spot of blood was seeping through the back of it. Fresh. “I don’t know this name. Please, I have to meet a customer.”

  Jack leaned back, doing his best to keep his body language open and unthreatening. “Is he giving you a hard time?”

  Goguniv pretended to busy himself with a pile of papers on his desk; it was obvious that he was thinking furiously.

  “If this is about extortion,” Jack said, “then there’s only one way out. If you’re paying him, he’s not going to let up until your company is sucked dry. You need to come to the police, and we’ll put a stop to it.”

  The manager looked up, a pained expression on his face. “Please, mister, this is a mistake. I don’t know nothing about it.”

  Jack softened his voice; the man seemed likable, and he felt sympathy for him. “What happened to your hand?”

  Goguniv looked down, but then his eyes rapidly shifted away. “An accident. There is many accidents in this kind of work.”

  Jack leaned forward. “We can put a stop to this. We can put this man away, where he won’t be able to hurt anyone for a good long time. I promise you’ll be safe—you have my word on it. He’s just one punk; we have forty thousand cops.”

  The man squirmed like a fish trying to escape a hook. “You are arresting me?”

  “Of course not. Why would I arrest you?”

  Goguniv stood up. “I think that if I am not under arrest, then I do not have to talk with you.” He scurried out of the room.

  Jack followed him down the staircase and out into the lane, which was brightening with the morning sun. “I can help you, whatever it is.”

  The man kept walking. “I do not need help.”

  Jack grabbed his arm, but Goguniv pulled away.

  “Please, mister. Go away. I don’t want no trouble here.”

  Jack stood back and watched him flee. He turned to find the huge employee with the bloodstained shirt staring curiously. Daniel’s manager w
as surrounded by such massive friends, yet he was still shivering in fear.

  Before he left the fish market, Jack stopped in to the security office to show Balakutis’s photo and ask if anyone had seen him around. The officer at the desk took a good look but couldn’t recognize him. He showed the picture to a couple of guards who happened to be in the office: no luck. They promised to check with their colleagues.

  Jack was not deterred. The panic on the face of Daniel’s manager had told him what he needed to know; it was just a matter of time before the evidence backed it up.

  He hoped that the proof would not end up being this man’s blood-soaked ear.

  A COUPLE OF HOURS later, he found Semyon Balakutis alone in his doughnut shop office. The man looked up in surprise. Jack hadn’t even said anything to the girl behind the register this time, just headed straight for the back.

  He glanced down: Balakutis was counting some money. Jack didn’t know much about the doughnut business, but he doubted that it brought in stacks of hundreds.

  The man started to say something, but Jack cut him off. “Listen, dirtbag: I’m on to you.”

  The man started to rise, but Jack held up a warning hand. “I don’t know what happened with you and the police in Detroit,” he said, “but this is New York. And I’m conducting a homicide investigation. If I hear that anyone I talked to had any kind of an ‘accident,’ I’m gonna come looking for you. And this time, you’ll end up in prison so fast it’ll make your head spin. You understand me?”

  Balakutis’s alarm had turned to outrage, but Jack didn’t wait to hear what the man might have to say; he turned on his heel and left him sputtering.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  AFTER, THOUGH HIS EYELIDS were grainy from lack of sleep, he drove straight to Brighton Beach, like a scrap of iron drawn by a powerful magnet.

  But he didn’t end up at Eugenia Lelo’s building. At the last moment, he resisted the attraction and kept going. He took a right several blocks down, pulled over, and parked.

  Most of the buildings in Brighton Beach were dull brick towers. This one was different, though—it had a faded Art Deco façade that suggested the set of a Fred Astaire movie, or maybe an ocean liner. When he was a kid, he had imagined it coming unmoored and sliding down the block until it drifted out to sea.

  No one answered the intercom for Apartment 3-R. He turned around. A young Hispanic man in a blue jumpsuit was kneeling out on the front walk, prying at the back of an air conditioner.

  “Excuse me,” Jack said. “Can you tell me if Leon Leightner still lives here?”

  The man looked up, squinting against the bright morning sun. “Who’s asking?”

  “I’m his nephew.”

  The man shook his head. “He’s not here. Try outside the pharmacy on Neptune Avenue.” He pointed. “Down there and take a left.”

  Jack thanked him, then turned back and crossed busy Brighton Beach Avenue, thankful for the moment of shade as he passed under the elevated tracks. He continued on to Neptune. Just as in Coney Island, the avenue in Brighton Beach had little character—it seemed like just a way to get from here to there. He passed Trump Village, a row of monumental apartment buildings that would have looked at home in communist Russia, and then a humble little strip mall with a dry cleaner, cobbler, and Chinese restaurant.

  A block down, outside a pharmacy, he spotted a row of old folks lined up on benches and folding chairs, sitting with their heads tucked into their chests like roosting birds. Jack scanned the faces, searching for his uncle. Back in the sixties Leon and Jack’s father had had a mysterious falling-out. Leon had attended Jack’s wedding but left before the reception. In 1977 Jack’s father died. Leon showed up at the funeral, looking like a man with two wild animals wrestling in his guts: anger and remorse. Jack had seen him only a few times since.

  He found him near the entrance, talking to a frail woman with blue-tinted hair. Despite the heat, Leon wore a beige windbreaker with epaulets, and a tweed cap. In Jack’s memory he had been a hale and hearty middle-aged man; now he was a little old geezer with a head shaped like a peanut.

  “Leon?”

  The man looked up. “Yes?” It took a moment for recognition to dawn. The old man turned to his companion. “This is my brother Max’s boy, who never comes to see me.”

  Jack frowned. That was hardly a fair way to put it, but he didn’t want to get into family business in front of a stranger.

  The old man turned to Jack. “This is Yvette, the most beautiful lady in Brighton Beach.”

  The woman smiled and flapped a liver-spotted hand in protest.

  “Can I talk to you?” Jack said. “In private?”

  “Sure, bubbelah.” An old Yiddish term of endearment that Jack hadn’t heard since he was a kid. Leon reached under his seat and picked up a cane. That he still had a Russian accent was surprising, considering that he’d been living in New York since the early fifties. He stood up slowly, then bent forward and kissed Yvette’s hand. “Arrivederci.”

  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. Go
od 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?”