I drove through it once on a trip out west, but I didn’t know Roy’s address and I didn’t look him up. Wasn’t much there, just an old railroad siding, a grain silo, a couple shops and a place that made chili. And the endless empty spaces of prairie in all directions. I had wondered what it would be like, living in all that emptiness.
“Congratulations on your daughter,” I said. “The marriage. Cheryl, right?”
“Thanks,” he said.
I waited for him to give something away, tell me why he’d been bugging my friends. We walked. He smoked. In front of us the great gothic arches of the bridge rose in the early sky. The sun through clouds that had moved in turned the river to a stream of hot tin.
“So how come you’ve been talking to my friends, Roy?” I said finally. “You could have just called me up.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m sorry for that.” He didn’t explain.
“Tell me what you need,” I said pleasantly, and I could see he was confused. He had wanted me off my guard, angry maybe, pissed off at least. Figured he’d get more out of me, make me say something I didn’t want to say.
My father, when he was with the KGB all those years back, knew how to get information out of people better than anyone I ever met. In the 1960s and early 1970s, he was a star, enough of a star that they let him travel. He had been to New York.
Always be quiet, my dad had said. Always wait. Getting information is a sort of seduction. Be cool was his message, though he would not have used the word.
The blowhards, the guys quick on the draw with clever retorts, the furious, the overly confident, never learned anything worth knowing.
“So you’re here to celebrate?” I said. “You want a soda, a coffee Roy?” I spotted a guy with a cart a few feet away.
“Thanks,” he said, and I got a couple of Cokes and gave him a can. “You want to walk across the bridge?”
“Sure. You like the guy she’s marrying?”
“What?”
“Your kid.”
“Yeah, yeah, he’s fine. Nice boy, nice enough.” He was distracted.
“I’m sorry you didn’t call earlier, we could have grabbed some lunch,” I said. “I could have taken you by my pal Sverdloff’s new club, he serves nice wine.”
He nodded.
“You’re back on the job?” I said.
“You knew?”
“I was guessing. Lot of guys went back, you were pretty much always a patriot,” I said.
“Since after 9/11,” he said. “Had to do it.” Pettus added, leaning against the brick structure at the center of the Brooklyn Bridge and looking out at the river. “Mostly I work out west, out of Denver, closest place to where I live where there’s a big office.”
“I’m guessing you get here to the city, though, some of the time, that so, Roy?”
“Yeah, sometimes I do some stuff here.”
“Who with?”
“Liaison stuff. Your guys. Ours. Joint Force on Terrorism. This city is the only place they do it right. You didn’t just wait on Washington.”
“Right,” I said.
“Critical,” he said. “Without them, we’d be screwed.”
Pettus put the Coke can to his lips and swallowed the rest of his Coke. He walked to a trash basket and deposited the Coke can, walked back, lit a cigarette and offered me one. I didn’t want it.
“You’re good with languages, aren’t you?” said Pettus. “You’ve lived different places. You have friends.”
“I’m just a homicide detective, Roy, that’s it, and I’m on vacation.”
“You’re better than that.”
“There is nothing better,” I said, and he smiled.
“Your old boss, Mr Lippert, I mean, he used to say you were sharp and smart and you knew your way around. Worldly, was the word I think he used,” Roy said.
In silence, we walked down the slope of the bridge towards the Brooklyn end, and I turned and started back again. Pettus had trouble keeping up and I stopped for a minute and let him catch his breath.
“Artie, there’s no vacation from the terrorists. No vacation. And it’s coming again, Artie, we just don’t see it, it’s coming in a nuke in a container on a ship into Jersey, it’s coming over the Mexican border, it’s coming in some kind of financial meltdown.”
“We’ll be okay,” I said, as we walked to the Manhattan side of the bridge. “In New York we got really good guys, we get good intel on terrorists now, we even send our people to Tel Aviv, London, Pakistan, as soon as there’s an incident, we get our own people on it.”
“That’s what I mean,” said Roy.
“What do you mean?” I said. It was hard keeping cool. I was angry at Pettus for going to Dubi, and to Tolya. “What’s on your mind, Roy?”
For a while he talked some more about terrorism and patriotism, and then he said, “We need you. We need your skills. We need you in places where you can learn what’s going on.
And then I understood.
“You’re saying you want me to be a spook, a spy, a curtain-twitcher, as my mother called them? You want me as a creature- for what, for who? Your people? The CIA? Listen, Roy, man it’s not me, I’m sorry, but I don’t do that stuff. I do cases here in New York. We fight our own kind of terror, homicides, rapes, like always. Maybe Sonny Lippert’s been reading too many spy novels.”
“There are no local cases anymore, Artie. Everybody’s caught up in a spider web of shit, it encircles the globe like the ozone, you follow up something, it takes you somewhere else, borders are fluid, easy to get across, nothing is local.” It was the longest speech I could remember him making.
“This was your idea? Talking to me?”
He nodded.
“Your idea to go to my friends, too, to ask around about me?”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“You knew they’d tell me.”
“I’m sorry about that. People say you still speak good Russian, no accent.”
“You went to see Dubi Petrovsky for this? This is why you saw him?”
“Yes.”
“You asked him how good my Russian is?”
At first I had thought it was my Arabic Roy was interested in, and I didn’t get it because the Arabic I learned in Israel was pretty basic stuff. Now it was clear, the reason for him asking how good my Russian was, I put it all together. I’d been stupid not to see exactly what he was after. But I made him spell it out even while I watched the river, the skyline, the city. My city. Mine. I wasn’t going anywhere else.
“I’m not leaving the city or my job, so you can forget about it,” I said.
“This is another Cold War we’re in, Artie. Things are moving fast. The FSB-what they’re calling the KGB now-run the whole show. They run Russia.”
“I know what the FSB is.”
“Everyone thinks they just got some kind of Russian-style capitalism, maybe a little light authoritarian stuff till they get the economy fixed, but that somehow they’re okay, and they’re our pals. Bush says he looked in Vladimir Putin’s eyes and saw his soul. What’s he think, it’s some kind of prayer meeting? And John McCain he looks at him and sees KGB on his forehead, and he says so, and he thinks this is the way you deal with them?” This was a blaspheming kind of thing for somebody like Pettus who had always been a good Catholic, not pious, but devout, and also a staunch Republican who thought Ronald Reagan was a dead god, and who would walk over broken glass for a guy like McCain. Pettus had been in the Marines in Vietnam.
“I work homicides, it’s all I do, okay? I’m speaking loud enough?” I said. “So I speak Russian, so what? What the hell do you want with me being a, whatever it is, some kind of spy bullshit? I mean they have all that lingo, they talk about trade-craft and curtain-twitchers, and moles and shit. I guess I could study up, read the books.” I kept my tone light. “Why didn’t you just call me for fuck’s sake, Roy?” “I’m sorry. It was stupid. I don’t know. I get used to doing things a certain way. If it will help, I apologize. I’ll apologize again.”