Red Hook by Reggie Nadelson Read Free Book Online Page B

Tolya talked to us, keeping an eye on the waiters and caterers, waving at guests, ringmaster, impresario, godfather. Half of me expected him to offer favors to his friends on the occasion of my wedding, but then I’d seen The Godfather too many times, usually over a lot of booze with Tolya.
    â€œTolya?”
    â€œYes, Artyom?” Tolya said, using my Russian nickname, practically the only person I still knew who did. I’d been in New York so long I wasn’t sure how many people, friends, people I worked with on the job, even knew I was born in Russia. It was another life. It had faded. I was a New Yorker, an American.
    â€œWho are all these people?” I said. “I mean the ones I don’t know?”
    â€œYour friends, my friends, friends of people, people we should be friends with. I plan to be King of New York,” he said and burst out laughing. “Maxine, darling, are you OK? Is there anything at all that you want? Tell me, just ask.” He suddenly slipped into perfect English.
    Tolya Sverdloff had been a language student in Moscow in the late ’70s; he spoke five languages, six if you counted Ukrainian. With me he switched between English and Russian without thinking. Sometimes, when he was drunk or pissed off, he talked the English of an immigrant Russian, dropping articles, mixing them up so he sounded like an uneducated hood. He also did it to mock me, too, because, as he had said more than once, “You are so American, Artyom, nothing Russian left in you, not one thing, nothing at all.”
    He kissed me on both cheeks now. He was drunk. I was catching up.
    I said to Tolya, “Where’s your girlfriend?”
    He shrugged.
    â€œYou think I don’t know why you bought this building?” I added and followed his gaze towards the small woman with a wedge of black hair over her forehead, a red mouth and a sullen expression. She was wearing dark Japanese clothes that looked wrinkled, and flat shoes that looked like they were made out of rubber. I couldn’t remember her name.
    In Russian, Tolya swore at me, but he watched the woman as she wandered through the crowd running her hands along the walls as if testing the structural value. She was an architect Tolya had fallen for a couple of years earlier; I didn’t get it; normally, he liked models, he liked strippers, he liked babes, and he liked them young and gorgeous.
    â€œShe makes me smart,” he said and added that while he pursued her, the building was good for parties, and convenient to the river which he loved, and where,downtown near the Financial Center, he kept a large boat.
    â€œCome,” he said. “Come. Both of you.” He held out his hand to Maxine.
    Near the window, Tolya gestured with both arms at the city. From up here, he said, he could keep an eye on the real estate, the new buildings going up, the glass towers in the West Village, the famous new structures by famous old architects that would change the city skyline. He pointed out buildings that he said he already owned, including a squat warehouse across the street, the letters on its side proclaiming it to be the purveyor of the finest meats in America.
    â€œI am in love with old buildings,” Tolya added. “I like to buy everything. You should buy something,” he said to me now.
    â€œWhat with?”
    â€œI help,” he said.
    I said leave the money to me in your will. He laughed.
    â€œYou’re older than me, you bastard,” he said. “You’ll die before me. You’ll be fifty before me.”
    â€œYeah, by three measly years.”
    â€œFour,” he said. “And coming soon.”
    Maxine watched Tolya. She had kissed him eagerly when he gave her the flowers, then drawn back, wary, worried she had been too effusive; like a little girl she was uncertain. Odd, because she was more of a grown-up then I ever was. She looked a lot younger, but she was thirty-eight, a single mother