Manhattan 62 Read online

  Also by Reggie Nadelson

  Artie Cohen series:

  Red Mercury Blues

  Hot Poppies

  Bloody London

  Sex Dolls

  Disturbed Earth

  Red Hook

  Fresh Kills

  Londongrad

  Blood Count

  Other novels:

  Somebody Else

  Non-fiction:

  Comrade Rockstar

  First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2014 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  This paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2015 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Reggie Nadelson, 2014

  The moral right of Reggie Nadelson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Paperback ISBN: 978 1 84354 840 9

  E-book ISBN: 978 1 78239 134 0

  Printed in Great Britain.

  Corvus

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  LONDON

  WC1N 3JZ

  www.corvus-books.co.uk

  For Vladimir Pozner, a Greenwich

  Village guy, and true friend, with much

  gratitude and affection

  Contents

  Prologue: New York City, 2012

  Part One

  Chapter One: October 16, ’62

  Chapter Two: October 17, ’62

  Chapter Three: October 17, ’62

  Chapter Four: October 17, ’62

  Chapter Five: October 18, ’62

  Chapter Six: October 18, ’62

  Chapter Seven: October 18, ’62

  Chapter Eight: October 19, ’62

  Part Two

  Chapter One: October 19, ’62

  Part Three

  Chapter One: October 22, ’62

  Chapter Two: October 23, ’62

  Chapter Three: October 23, ’62

  Chapter Four: October 23, ’62

  Chapter Five: October 23, ’62

  Chapter Six: October 23, ’62

  Chapter Seven: October 23, ’62

  Chapter Eight: October 23, ’62

  Chapter Nine: October 24, ’62

  Chapter Ten: October 24, ’62

  Chapter Eleven: October 24, ’62

  Part Four

  Chapter One: October 24, ’62

  Chapter Two: October 25, ’62

  Chapter Three: October 25, ’62

  Chapter Four: October 25, ’62

  Chapter Five: October 26, ’62

  Chapter Six: October 26, ’62

  Chapter Seven: October 26, ’62

  Chapter Eight: October 26, ’62

  Chapter Nine: October 27, ’62

  Chapter Ten: October 27, ’62

  Part Five

  Chapter I: October 28, ’62

  Chapter Two: October 28, ’62

  Chapter Three: October 28, ’62

  Chapter Four: October 29, ’62

  Chapter Five: October 29, ’62

  Chapter Six: October 30, ’62

  Epilogue: New York City, 2012

  Acknowledgments

  The story of what would later become known as the Cuban missile crisis is replete with accidental figures whose role in history is often overlooked: pilots and submariners, spies and missileers, bureaucrats and propagandists, radar operators and saboteurs.

  Michael Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight

  The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now; in the sounds of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest editions.

  E. B. White, Here is New York

  Before him lay Washington Square. Only eighteen hours in New York and he loved everything, every inch of it. Ah, the square!

  Dawn Powell, The Golden Spur

  PROLOGUE

  New York City, 2012

  WHEN THE SOVIET UNION finally fell apart, in the aftermath, there was a trickle of information, then a stream, then a tidal wave. It was the big story for a while, this tale of the goddamn Cold War, of them and us, politics and war, gulags, massacres, nukes, the KGB and CIA, and of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The truth—some of it—about the main actors and the accidental spies, the betrayals and lies; there was plenty of it, God knows, even here in New York City. But also about ordinary things, the stuff about the Russians—what they felt and secretly thought, ate, desired, the music they loved—that most of us had never been told. Most of us; I already knew some because of Maxim Ostalsky.

  Still, in all that flood of information, there was nothing at all about my old friend Max. I did my share of looking. I even thought about going over to Moscow. But he had disappeared into thin air, as if he had never existed, like smoke from those Lucky Strikes he learned to love so much.

  Max Ostalsky had been my friend, once. He was the most interesting man I’d ever met, different from anyone else, and there are times I still miss him. If he’s alive, wherever he is, I can only hope he’s forgiven me.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  October 16, ’62

  TOMMY PERINO, WHO LIVED upstairs from me on Hudson Street, was twelve and small for his age. A skinny kid with a tuft of dirty blond hair sticking up from his head, he peered out at the world through narrow, wary blue eyes. Tommy didn’t give much away. He lived with his father in two rooms, where they had made a life after the mother just took off and left them.

  The old man worked the night shift at a cement plant by the river. The Perinos couldn’t afford a television set and I had given Tommy a key so he could hang around my place and watch a ball game, maybe raid the refrigerator if he wanted. Some of the time he’d just show up out of the blue and scare the living daylights out of me like he did that Tuesday night in October when I was sweating out a bad dream.

  It was the kind I had been having on and off since I came home from Korea, a messed-up kind of dream: somebody punching me in the face over and over, the stink of blood, somebody screaming my name out, in English, or that Gook language they had, somebody else singing Russian songs, and James Brown moaning, “I lost someone, my love, Someone who’s greater than the stars above”, the 45 going around and around on my phonograph, “I’m so weak. Don’t take my heart away.”

  I was getting sick, the weather changing, a bad cold making me hack like an old man. Only James Brown seemed real.

  I pushed my way to the surface. Tommy was standing over me, his face streaming with blood. He was bloody and scared, and I crawled out of bed and pulled on some clothes.

  “What happened? Tommy?” First thing I thought was that his pop got injured; the old man was a scrawny bastard to be lifting cement blocks. “But it wasn’t his old man,” Tommy said, and I got him into the bathroom, cleaned him up as best I could. It was only
a scalp wound, lot of blood; nothing serious, except the kid was howling like a wounded animal. I had never seen him cry.

  “What is it?”

  “A body on the pier, out by the Hudson, the pier you took me to, Pat,” he kept saying. Blurting it, almost incoherent. “I saw him. I wish I didn’t see nothing. It didn’t have almost no face, like they sliced it off.”

  “What time is it?” I looked at my watch: 11.27 p.m. “Stay here.”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  Jesus, I thought. OK. The kid was scared as hell. I grabbed sweaters for both of us. “Let’s go. What the hell were you doing out there?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Tell me.”

  “You told me you did it when you was a kid, you hung out on the piers, maybe find some salvage.”

  “It’s dangerous. The Mob uses those piers for payback, you hear me? How often you been out there?”

  He looked down. “Most nights. OK, I heard there’s spies coming in on them salvage boats, you know, I heard those guys that look for old metal, chains, anchors, that stuff, and they been running in spies now. Reds. Fucking Commies. Russkis. Cubans. Gonna kill us all.”

  “Spies, my ass. Come on, Tom, there’s no damn spies on the Hudson River. Chrissake, this is New York City, so we’re going to take a look, then we’ll get you to St Vincent’s, get your head looked at.”

  Truth was, I didn’t know anything about damn spies. I was a cop, a homicide detective. But the kid had seen something, and I got my car and we drove out to Pier 46 near the end of Charles Street, between Charles and Christopher, in fact, two minutes by car; three tops. I parked. We ran. Some of the boards on that pier were rotten; you stuck your foot through those soft planks, you broke your ankle. A sharp wind came off the river.

  “Take it easy,” I said to Tommy. “Where is it, this thing you saw?” Right then, I was more worried about the kid than what he said he had seen. He saw too many movies, always pestering me for some change to go to the pictures. When he was a little kid back when we figured the Russkis were gonna nuke us for sure, every time he heard a plane flying low at night, he’d run down to my place and bang on the door until I woke up and let him in.

  “Pat? Over there. Look.” Tommy stayed back while I looked at the black body bag. I knelt down next to it.

  It had been slung against one of the shacks out near the end of the pier. A single bulb dangling from the shack’s metal gutter moved with the wind, the pool of dim light shifting, but enough to catch the body bag. It was damp from the fog that lay on everything—the bag, the pier, my hands and face. The city was only a faint blur of lights, the skyline to the right barely visible.

  I looked down. The bag was partway open. Tommy must have done it. I pulled the sides apart.

  Inside was a man; what I could see, he looked young. His tongue had been cut out, the mouth forced open and stuffed with a pink rubber Spalding ball. Some skin on the face was gone. Nose sliced off. What was left was soaked in blood, and so was the fringe of black hair. When I scraped some of the blood away, I saw the hole in his forehead, made by a .22.

  At first I figured it was Mafia. Like I told Tommy, the Mob used the desolate piers to beat up their enemies, sometimes murder them. Only the Mob did this kind of thing. Luca “Fat Cheeks” Farigno, that fat dwarf of a hoodlum, loved doing it; it proved his manhood; it was his signature. Everyone knew low-level hoods like Cheeks used the piers for payback; break your legs, cut off your ears. Ever since Pasquale Ebola’s time, him and Tony Bender Strollo and plenty more that had been and gone. For sure this was a Mob deal; you talked too much, they ripped out your tongue.

  Maybe the dead fellow was a homo who got caught in one of the Village queer bars the Mafia ran. The Mayor was getting rid of them, queers and gangsters both; he obsessed with the World’s Fair coming in ’64. Mayor Wagner didn’t take shit from the Mob, he always liked to imply. They didn’t like him. Hated him.

  “Tommy?” I yelled out, but the kid had receded back into the fog. “Tommy?”

  There was a payphone the other side of the shack. I put in a dime and called my precinct. The line was busy.

  On a hunch, I got back on my knees, steeled myself, reached inside the bag. Fumbling in the mess of blood and gristle like an incompetent butcher, somehow I yanked out the left arm.

  The tattoo was there, inside the elbow. The worm with the words entwined: Cuba Libre. Not again. Christ, not again! Not a second time. I had seen the tattoo before, months earlier, back in July; seen it on a dead girl’s arm. Now this. The same goddamn thing.

  I felt sick. Sick at the way people took human life like it was garbage and threw it away. Sick because once I saw the tattoo, in my gut I knew somehow Max Ostalsky was connected; or maybe it was what I wanted to believe; he had been my friend, once.

  It had been four months earlier, but another life when I first met Ostalsky on a late spring day in Washington Square, the kind of day where girls with long hair lay in the green grass and read poetry, and somebody with a guitar on the rim of the fountain was playing that song about the damn lemon tree.

  Next to me on the bench where I was taking some sun sat a young guy, looking at a hotdog guy a few feet away.

  Until that day, I never figured buying a hot dog for a complicated operation. Never thought about it until that first time I saw Max Ostalsky, and he was sitting there on the bench next to the statue of Garibaldi, staring at the hot dog man with such a look of confusion, I felt for him.

  Or was he standing by the statue? Afterwards, I can’t remember if he was already on the bench when I first saw him, or if he sat down after me.

  It’s June, hot for spring, and he looks miserable in his heavy gray wool suit. He’s maybe a few years younger than me, twenty-nine, thirty. Tall and lanky, handsome too, with dark hair that falls over his forehead, but in his glasses and that suit, he resembles a young old man.

  He examines the change in his hand. He removes his glasses, then cleans them on the hem of his gray shirt, puts them back on, tucks in his shirt, then ponders the hot dog situation once more, face falling at his sense of failure.

  In his hand is a notebook. Overhead the trees are already heavy and green.

  Stretching my legs, I lean back on the bench and find a pack of smokes in my pocket, and think: I love this damn place. I love it. The Chesterfield I light up smells really fine. In my other hand is a Coke, the cold green bottle nice and icy in my hand.

  Washington Square’s only a few miles from where I grew up, but it’s like the other side of the moon.

  Washington Square!

  That arch at the end of Fifth Avenue where Greenwich Village begins always feels like a gateway to all that’s fun, free, interesting, sexy, an easy transit to a different world where there’s music all the time, where nobody seems to care about making money, and artists and writers hang around the cafés and some of the girls consider a detective like me pretty exotic fare. Maybe seduce me away from my life as a cop into some decadent bohemia.

  In my shirt-pocket is a red plastic transistor radio. I brought it for the game, but instead I’m listening to Ray Charles sing, “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” Ray’s the greatest; except for James Brown.

  “Got a match?” The girl asking is sitting cross-legged on the grass near me, a blonde in tight black toreador pants and a sleeveless black blouse that’s cut in a way you can see plenty of pale skin through the armhole. I snap open my Zippo for her. Raising herself on one long tanned arm to get the light, she says, “Thanks. Cool threads.”

  It’s true. I have on a sharp light-blue knit shirt with navy trim around the collar—it looks pretty damn Italian—that I wear, like they show you in Esquire, outside my new brown slacks. My tan leather slip-ons cost me fifteen bucks, but they’re worth it.

  I spend too much dough on clothes. My ma says I’m a vain bastard. My closet’s jammed with sad items I never put on, including last summer’s nautical navy blazer, and the white wash and wear pants, an outfit ma
de me look like Joey Brown in Some Like It Hot. Not to mention the caramel-colored pinch-front made of some coconut fronds or something I ordered from Henry the Hatter.

  The sun is hot on my face.

  Then I realize that guy in that heavy gray suit is on his feet, still looking at the hot dogs, and I get the sense that he’s foreign and lost. I toss my smoke away. “Can I help you, man?”

  He looks at me. He smiles sheepishly. “No, thank you, I’m quite familiar with American customs, but thank you,” he says, approaching the cart with conviction, sweat on his forehead. He surveys the hot dogs boiling in water, the relish and ketchup. The food man stares back at him. Who is this clown, the expression on his face says? Who is the hopeless young man, hesitating about the purchase of a hot dog?

  Does he feel we’re all watching him, me, the hot dog man, even the girl on the grass? His mouth moving, he’s like a new convert faced with communion wafers, and thinking: do I chew? Bite? Swallow?

  “I will take one of these, please,” he says with real determination.

  “Whadya want on it, pal?” says the hot dog guy, but the fellow just hands over some money, and hot dog in hand, retreats to the bench. He bites into the naked hot dog in a bun, no relish, no mustard or onions.

  I can’t stand it any more. “Man, you really do need help. Trust me. You can’t eat it like that.”

  He seems perplexed.

  “Come on.”

  I explain about the ketchup, the relish, the onions, the mustard, and he looks at me, clearly at a loss. “To tell the truth,” he says, “I was not quite sure how much it costs for each of these extra items, or if one can have several or all. I did not quite expect this, you see, though I have read many books on New York, and about the United States, but they did not say how to do this hot dog, and I had no idea what is this thick red sauce, and the green sauce, or if I must order both. I have no idea if it is normal to eat it with my hands, and if not, where do I obtain a fork and knife?” He lifts his shoulders to show how hopeless he is, and smiles again. This fellow has the kind of self-deprecating smile even a cranky hot dog vendor responds to.