I’ve been a cop a long time, twenty years, more, but this was so surreal, for a second I thought I was hallucinating. I didn’t know what to do, not when the body against me seemed to breathe in and out of its own accord.
Was she still alive?
From above came the sound of a solitary plane; piercing the blue sky over the city, it came in low over the Jamaica Wetlands on its way into JFK.
I had to know what was under the tape.
Holding the body still with one arm, I lifted a small section of tape off the face. The tape rasped against the skin. It had been crudely done. The tape came away easily. I touched the skin near the nose lightly, and I saw one of her eyes and thought I felt it flutter, as if it might suddenly open.
She was dead. I never was an expert on physical death but she had been on the swing a long time, far as I could tell.
Wrapped up first? Dead first?
I wanted to beat it, get out, go back on vacation, but I had to wait for help. I didn’t want some other kid like Dina stumbling in here and seeing this.
Listening for sirens. Wishing I had a cigarette. Sweating in the hot sun, all I could do now was wait.
I didn’t know what else to do so I sat on the swing next to her. Together, the dead woman and me, we swung back and forth, to and fro, like kids early in the morning with nobody else to see them.
Behind me was the sound of sirens, of voices, of footsteps. I got up off the swing, turned and saw them coming, a small army trooping onto the playground.
Somebody had removed the gate so the ambulance people could get through. Uniforms, detectives, forensics people, all of them streamed in. It was like a tribal ceremony, the woman wrapped in silver tape on the ground now, everyone else moving around her in a ritual dance.
I spotted Bobo Leven, a young detective who was Russianborn. I went over and told him what I knew and then I started out of the playground. Bobo tried to follow me. I told him it wasn’t my case. I happened to be around, but I was leaving. He wanted my help, but I said I was sorry, I had to go, I was on vacation.
“Good luck with the case,” I said finally, shaking loose of Bobo Leven, hurrying away now as a couple of photographers from forensics brushed past me to take more pictures of the corpse like the paparazzi of the dead.
CHAPTER THREE
On the wall of Olga Dimitriovna’s place were three photographs, black and white pictures of children staring straight at the camera, and she saw me look at them as soon as I entered the apartment.
“Yes, you imagine these were taken by Valentina Sverdloff, isn’t that right?”
I nodded.
“Please, come in, Artemy Maximovich,” she said, a wiry woman about eighty, sharp as a bird, with a humorous face who was crazy about reading, especially novels. I placed the bag Tolya had given me on a table, and she took one out and admired it.
“So, tea? Coffee? A sandwich also? You are hungry, Artemy Maximovich?” She went into the tiny kitchen to prepare food.
I put my head through the kitchen door and said I’d have a sandwich with my coffee. I wasn’t hungry, but I knew she was a solitary old lady who wanted me to stay a while and talk. I didn’t remember the photographs.
“Valentina gave them to me, a month ago, I think.”
“You know Val?”
“Of course. For a time she comes to me for her Russian lessons. But not lately. The photographs are of children at her orphanage in Moscow.”
“What orphanage?”
“Where she gives money,” said Olga. “I think perhaps not an orphanage but a shelter for girls. Please say hello. Please, sit down,” she added.
The apartment was small, the furniture old. Olga still gave Russian lessons, she had told me, but the money wasn’t much. From a radio came a Beethoven sonata.
Out of the window here on the sixteenth floor, I could almost see the playground where I’d just been. In the other direction were the nineteen brick buildings of the Boulevard Public Housing project. I could see the vast Linden Houses, too, tens of thousands of people stacked up in scores of towers and below them the tangle of urban outlands and inner suburbia, bagel stores and storefront churches, squat low synagogues, C-Town supermarkets, Chinese restaurants with bulletproof windows, makeshift mosques, Indian takeouts. And the water, the Jamaica Wetlands, the network of wild islands where water-birds congregate and the dirty strip of beach where gulls pick over garbage for their breakfast.
I love the water. I used to go out on the party boats from Sheepshead Bay and fish for stripers and blues. A few miles away from where I stood is a secret place I go sometimes, a nice tavern at the edge of the wildlife sanctuary, where you meet other cops and fire guys, Irish mostly; you drink some beers or Guinness and there’s a breeze and it smells unbelievably sweet.
My phone was ringing, but I turned it off and sat with Olga Dimitriovna and ate my fried-egg sandwich and chatted in Russian. She told me there had been three muggings in her building. I told her to keep her door locked at night and the chain on, and I gave her my cell number.
“Anatoly Anatolyevich Sverdloff is a good man,” she said. “He gives to everybody. Please say thank you.” Olga pushed her wire-rim spectacles on top of her head, thanked me again, and offered me a glass of brandy. I refused.
“Please, come back, Artemy,” she said. “And tell Valentina to come.” She kissed my cheek, papery lips against my skin, and handed me a box of chocolates, which she had wrapped carefully with fancy gold paper and a red ribbon. “For Mr Sverdloff who sends me the books. You’ll give this to him?”
“Yes, of course,” I said.
“Tell Valentina I miss her, please.”
“Is there anything else I can do for you?”
She shook her head. “But maybe I will call you for help with some of my neighbors. They are afraid.”
“Of the muggings?”
“Of everything, crime, black people, of the new kind of Russians, of anything different, of a feeling that they may have to move again, or leave America. Most are legal, but they are afraid. They pull down their blinds and pray to God,” she added. “Except God isn’t listening. So some of us fight instead. We fight landlords. We remember how to fight. Goodbye, again, Artemy.”
As I walked along the corridor of Dimitriovna’s floor, I could hear classical music from behind the doors. Doors opened a crack, mostly old people looking out to see who it was, and if it was safe, and seeing other tenants looking out of their apartments, greeted each other in Russian, and fixed social arrangements for cards and tea. One elderly man held the door open long enough to take a good look at me.
“Who are you?” he said in English with a thick accent. “What do you want?” He was angry, I could see he felt I was some kind of interloper, somebody without any real business up here. Maybe he figured me for a developer.
Decades back, these high-rise towers had been built to house immigrants, forty bucks per room back then. They were almost trashed in the 1980s by gangs and guns, and people bolted their doors and rarely went out.
Now the crack dealer creeps had gone the place was threatened instead by Trump, or some other feral developer: take it over, raise the rents, blow it up, co-op it. Looked like by fall the deal would be done.
But Olga Dimitriovna and her friends weren’t going to budge easy, not without a fight, not after they’d made a life, a village up on the sixteenth floor, the old-timers helping the new ones, everybody in and out of each other’s apartments, sitting out on nice days on green and yellow plastic deckchairs, as if the sidewalk in front was a front porch; or making trips over to Brighton Beach to shop or eat on special occasions or maybe to the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan for music once a year.
They would resist. They would organize. If necessary, they would fight. They had survived everything else. Stalin, Hitler. Coming to America.