drifting onto the deserted sidewalk.
Who was dead? Some Russian? All I wanted was to go back to sleep.
“Morning,” a voice said, as I walked out onto the street, and I looked up and saw Sam, the doorman from the building next to mine. It was also an old loft building that dated back to the 1870s. But the owners had transformed it into a fancy condo-marble floors, doorman.
A black guy in a good suit, Sam was a presence on the street now. He was a quiet man. Didn’t say much, though once in a while we compared the stats of our favorite ballplayers. I said hi and went across the street to Mike’s coffee shop.
When I tapped on the window, Mike looked up from behind the counter. He grinned, unlocked the front door, waved me to a stool. There was fresh coffee brewing. Some pie was in the oven. It smelled good that time of morning. From the ceiling hung a string of green Christmas lights.
Mike Rizzi pretty much runs the block: he takes packages, watches kids, serves free pie and coffee to local cops on patrol.
In New York, everybody has a coffee shop, a bar, a restaurant where they hang out. It’s the way our tribes set themselves up, claim their piece of territory. To eat, I go over to Beatrice at Il Posto on East Second Street; to drink to my friend Tolya’s club in the West Village, or maybe Fanelli’s on Prince Street.
“What’s the pie?” I said.
“Apple,” said Mike. “You’re up early, man.”
“Can I have a piece?”
He was pleased. Mike’s obsessed with his pies.
“ Deck the halls with boughs of holly,” came a voice over the sound system Mike rigged up years ago.
“Who the fuck is that?”
“Excuse me? That,” he said, “that is Nana Mouskouri, the great Greek singer.” Mike, who’s Italian, is crazy about the Greeks. Over the ziggurat of miniature boxes of Special K, on a shelf against the back wall, he keeps signed pictures of Telly Savalas, Jackie Onassis-he counts her as an honorary Greek-and Jennifer Aniston. “You know her real name is Anastasakis,” Mike says to me about once a week.
“ ’ Tis the season to be jolly…”
“What are you doing around at this hour?” Mike looked at me intently. “You just got home from some hot date? You found a nice woman yet, Artie?”
“Sonny Lippert. Needs me for something.”
“Jesus, man, I thought Lippert retired.”
I ate some pie. “That’s really good, Mike.”
“Thanks. So, you ever see her?”
“Who?”
“Lily Hanes. You could bring her over to me and Ange for supper. Ange always says, ‘When’s Artie going to marry Lily?’ ”
“Sure.”
“What, you met her, like, ten, fifteen years ago? I know you’ve dated plenty of women, and we liked Maxine and all when you got married to her, but you weren’t the same with her like with Lily.” Mike was in a talkative mood.
For ten minutes while Mike pulled pies out of the oven and set them on the counter to cool, while I drank his coffee, we exchanged neighborhood gossip. I agreed to go over to his house in Brooklyn-he drives in every morning, around two a.m.-for dinner. But all the time we were making small talk, I could see there was something on his mind.
“What’s eating you?”
“Nothing, man.”
“You pissed off because McCain didn’t get in?”
Mike’s a vet, served in the first Gulf War, volunteers at the VA hospital. McCain’s a god to him.
“I got over it, more or less. It was that broad’s fault, Palin. Geez. Who invited her to the party?” Mike looked over my head toward the door. “You got company,” he said.
CHAPTER 2
Wrapped in a camel hair coat, Sonny Lippert took off his brown fedora and climbed on the stool next to mine. His hair was all gray now. He had finally stopped dyeing it. He tossed a sheet of paper on the counter in front of me and greeted Mike, who brought him a mug of coffee. “Anything to eat, Sonny?”
“You got a poppy bagel?”
“Sure.”
“Yeah, so can you do it well toasted, with a little schmear, but not too much? OK?”
“You got it.” Mike reached for some cream cheese.
I picked up the piece of paper-it felt thin and greasy, like onionskin-and when I unfolded it, I saw it was printed in Russian. “This is what you called about?”
“Yeah, man, I need you to translate it, Art. OK? They found it stuck in his chest with a knife, like I said, right near his heart,” said Sonny, pointing at the paper. I saw the edges were brown from blood.
“Where’d they find him exactly?”
“Harlem, up by the border with Washington Heights. Church cloister. Half buried, dirt all over him.”
Mike put a plate down in front of Sonny. He picked up the bagel, spread the cream cheese on it, and bit into it. “Nice,” he said to Mike. “Thanks.”
“They whacked him before they buried him?” I said.
“They cut him up good, with a curved boning knife, it looks like, same as they used to stick the paper to his heart.”
“You said he was still alive when they buried him?”
“I said maybe.” Sonny ate another bite of his bagel.
“Who told you?”
“An old pal name of Jimmy Wagner, he’s the chief of a precinct uptown, the Thirtieth. One of his homicide guys found this guy a couple days ago. I think. I think Wagner said a couple days. He thinks it’s mob stuff. Drugs, maybe. Some kind of extortion.”
“Why’s that?”
“He didn’t say, just asked for me to get him a translation,” said Sonny. “Just read it, Art, OK?”
“ Don we now our gay apparel, fa la la la la la la la la…”
“What the fuck is that music?” Sonny said.
“Mike likes it. She’s Greek,” I said. “The singer.”
“Yeah, right. Just translate the fucking Russian,” he said. “Please.”
I gulped some coffee. I put on my glasses. Sonny was amused.
“They’re just for reading, so shut up,” I said.
While I looked at the blood-stained paper, Sonny made further inroads on his bagel. Mike poured him more coffee. I read, and then I burst out laughing; I couldn’t help it. This was stuff I knew by heart, but you would, too, if you’d grown up in the USSR, like I did. I didn’t leave Moscow until I was sixteen, and the stuff had been drilled into me like a dentist going down into the roots.
“You find it funny, Art? It’s a joke?”
“Yeah, I so fucking do.” I read out a few lines.
“In English, for chrissake.”
I read: “ ‘Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.’ ”
“Jesus,” said Lippert. “It’s the fucking Communist Manifesto.”
