Blood Count

Reggie Nadelson

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781843548379
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857893079
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

As the celebrations of Barack Obama's presidential victory draw to an end in the social melting pot of Harlem, New York, an old woman's death reveals deceit, racial tension, and city corruption... In New York's Harlem, every street is steeped in history, and the music of jazz legends plays in the memories of its residents. Artie Cohen could feel at home here - if he wasn't on the trail of a killer intent on erasing the past... An elderly Russian woman is found dead in her apartment, and Cohen finds himself in the centre of a violent debate between city developers and an older generation of Harlem tenants. Not to mention the tensions between himself, his old girlfriend, and her new, younger lover. Meanwhile someone in these once-violent streets is intent on hauling Harlem into the twenty-first century, no matter what it takes...

CHAPTER 1

Who died?”

The night when I finished a case, closed it up, got the creep who killed pigeons in the park for pleasure—and the homeless guys who liked to feed them, I went to bed early, spent a luxurious hour in the sack drinking beer and watching a rerun of the Yanks’ 2000 World Series win on TV.

As I tipped over into sleep, I realized I’d forgotten to turn off my phone. When it rang a few hours later, still mostly asleep, I ignored it, until the voice on the answering machine crashed into my semiconscious brain.

“We got a dead Russian. Get yourself over here,” said the voice, and I wasn’t sure at first if it was real or I was trapped in that nightmare where you’re buried alive, pushing up on the coffin lid, hearing a phone ring, unable to get to it.

At the foot of the bed, the TV was still on—pictures of Obama in Chicago—and I realized I was safe at home in downtown Manhattan, and then the phone rang again. It was only Sonny Lippert.

“Who died, Sonny?” I was pissed off.

“Didn’t you get my message? I told you, a Russian,” he said. “Get your ass over here, man.”

“Not now.”

“Now,” he said. “Right now. My place.”

“It’s the middle of the night.”

“Listen. Friend of mine uptown in Harlem, he needs some help, right? One of his detectives found a dead guy up in his precinct with some kind of Russian document stuck to him, skewered with a knife, like a shish kabob. He’s asking can I get it translated. Asked if I could call you.”

“Where is it?”

“What?’

“This document?”

“I have it.”

“So fax it over.”

“I want to do this in person,” said Sonny, and suddenly I knew he was lonely and wanted company.

“He’s white?”

“Who?”

“The dead guy.”

“Why?”

“You mentioned Harlem.”

“I told you, man, he’s Russian. Probably Russian.”

Still naked, I went and looked out the window and saw the light on in Mike Rizzi’s coffee shop. “I’ll buy you coffee, OK? Rizzi’s place,” I said.

I was surprised when Sonny said OK, he’d come over, couldn’t sleep anyhow. Sonny Lippert had been my boss on and off for a long time, right back to the day when he picked me out at the academy because I could speak languages, or at least that’s what he always says.

These days I humor him because of the past. He still drives me crazy some of the time, but we’re close now. He helped me with some really bad stuff last summer. When Rhonda, his wife, is away, he sits up alone until dawn reading Dostoyevsky and Dickens, listening to Coltrane, drinking the whiskey the doctor says will kill him.

Shivering, I went back to my bedroom. I yanked on some jeans and a sweatshirt, shoved my feet into a pair of ratty sneakers, grabbed a jacket and my keys, and headed downstairs, where it was snowing lightly, like confetti 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.”

“Yeah, your parents would have appreciated it,” I said. Lippert’s parents had been big Communists back in Brooklyn—it’s part of Sonny’s history; it never leaves him. Now, he stared at the paper and shook his head, deep in some memory of childhood.

“Does that help?” I said. “Is that it?”

Reaching into his coat pocket, Sonny took out two pictures and tossed them on the counter and said, “Take a look at these.”

In one photo was a dead guy on a slab at the morgue. The second was a close-up of the guy’s upper arm where there were some tats, Russian words circling his bicep.

“Same guy as they found the paper on?”

“Yeah,” said Sonny.

Naked, the dead guy had a huge upper body, heavily muscled arms, a slack face. A lot of Russians who work security in the city were once Olympic weight lifters, though I’d picked up at least one hood who’d been a nuclear physicist. Times change.

What were you? I always ask them. What were you back then, before the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author biography
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Acknowledgement
• Contents
• Harlem, November 4, 2008 - Election Night
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14
• Chapter 15
• Chapter 16
• Chapter 17
• Chapter 18
• Chapter 19
• Chapter 20
• Chapter 21
• Chapter 22
• Chapter 23
• Chapter 24
• Chapter 25
• Chapter 26
• Chapter 27
• Chapter 28
• Chapter 29
• Chapter 30
• Chapter 31
• Chapter 32
• Chapter 33
• Chapter 34
• Chapter 35
• Chapter 36
• Chapter 37
• Chapter 38
• Chapter 39
• Chapter 40
• Chapter 41
• Chapter 42
• Chapter 43
• Chapter 44
• Chapter 45
• Chapter 46
• Chapter 47
• Chapter 48
• Chapter 49
• Chapter 50
• Chapter 51
• Chapter 52
• Chapter 53
• Chapter 54
• Chapter 55
• Chapter 56
• Chapter 57
• Chapter 58
• Inauguration Day, January 20, 2009