F Train Read online

  The man was short and wiry, his face watchful and intelligent. He wore a navy cashmere blazer, pearl gray silk tie, Gauloise-blue shirt.

  Flo didn’t think he looked like the type who spent a lot of time sitting around bars drinking alone. But New York was always like that, full of unexpected types.

  “You expect them soon?” Flo said to Skelly.

  “The Russians?” he said. “Later, if they show up at all. They usually sit in the back of the lounge, right over there.”

  The lounge, on the other side of a glass wall right behind them, looked almost half as large as a basketball court. Tables for two lined three sides and in the center were three isolated islands for larger groups, each with a long sofa, coffee table, several armchairs. The lounge was carpeted and quiet, too brightly lit for intimacy, more like a caterer’s hall than a cozy rendezvous spot.

  Bucky Skelly lowered his voice and leaned forward over the bar. “The Russians usually take over that last couch section, opposite end from the entrance out to the lobby. They don’t mind the bright lights, it’s like they’re hiding out in full view. The old guys sit on the couch with their backs to the entrance, and the young muscle face them, watching the door. It’s the quietest spot, right in the rear there. And the Russians take it over. They even pay us to move people.”

  The lone drinker nearby laughed, nervously. “They take over any goddamn thing they like,” he said, and raised his glass to Flo and Frank. “Hi, I’m Paul…Kaner.” He let his voice drop when he spoke his last name, the way celebrities sometimes do when they’re trying to appear modest, and he enunciated each syllable as though he were releasing perfectly formed smoke rings into the cocktail bar air.

  Flo glanced at Bucky Skelly for an explanation, and the bartender regarded her and Frank in a strange way as if to give the impression he approved of the man’s intervention and they would do well to listen to him.

  “I have,” Kaner said, “or rather I had an antiques store on Atlantic Avenue. Strictly quality, no fakes. The must-shop stop for every home owner in the Heights and the Slope.” He released a soft, sibilant, self-deprecating half-laugh. “Every home owner with taste, that is. A respected business.” He sipped his vodka. “The shop still looks like it used to look, it’s still there. Only it’s no longer mine.”

  “What happened?” Flo said.

  “Our friends from off the steppes are what happened, the Cossacks are what happened. Ask Bucky.”

  “They made him sell,” said Bucky. “The dead one, Davidov, was in on it.”

  “In?” A sudden note of anguish choked Paul Kaner’s voice. He drained his drink and pushed his empty glass forward. “Another round, Bucky, for all of us, please.”

  “This one’s on us,” Frank said. “We owe.”

  “Most kind.” Paul Kaner watched as Bucky the bartender fixed their drinks. “That’s better. Just please don’t think I go around wherever, hustling drinks.” He held up his full glass ceremoniously, his hand tensed and slightly trembling. “Bucky and I go way back, don’t we, my friend? Never a burglary or a stickup in my shop, and I had Bucky to thank for that. Until the Cossacks came along and there wasn’t anything anybody could do about it. Not even Bucky and his old friends. The Russians got the whole shebang, and you better believe the dead one was in on it, right up to his shifty motherfucking eyeballs. I’ve got a confession to make. It often happens on your third double vodka.” He took a long sip of his drink. “But first, tell me something…you ever kill anyone?”

  “What?” Flo was unsure whether she’d heard him correctly.

  “Have you ever,” Paul Kaner repeated, each word a perfect smoke ring, “killed anyone?” He resumed his fortune-teller’s pose, holding his iced glass with both hands in front of his eyes, gazing into it as though looking for an image of someone being killed.

  Flo didn’t answer. Her business wasn’t his business.

  For the second time, Paul Kaner released a small, sibilant half-laugh. Another sip of vodka and lime, and he explained: “Truth told, it’s certainly a question you could ask of a lot of people though, isn’t it, not just cops. Doctors, nurses, all those veterans back from Iraq and Afghanistan and from God only knows where else. Not to mention drunk drivers and Russian ‘businessmen.’ Hell, why not take tobacco company lawyers, they’ve killed millions. And drug companies, God save us from those bloodsuckers. Then of course we have the good old liquor manufacturers.” He raised his glass. “I mean where do you stop, really? When you come right down to it, exactly where do we draw the line? There must be killers all over the place. It’s a pretty crowded field, isn’t it, so what’s just…one more killer?”

  Flo looked questioningly at Bucky Skelly, and while the bartender didn’t say a word, the look in his eyes showed Flo he wanted her and Frank Murphy to hold their fire and play along with Paul Kaner. There’d be a payoff.

  “Murder is a serious crime,” Flo said. “Well defined in law.”

  “No doubt, and I don’t mean to cast aspersions on your profession. Or make your job any harder than it must already be. I’m just saying that, as a killer, I’d be one of who knows how many. And in some pretty esteemed company actually. Just look at some of our presidents. Maybe if that boy from Texas had fallen off the wagon, he wouldn’t have enjoyed killing so much. He could have just drunk himself to death and spared God knows how many people out there around the planet. So back to brass tacks: what I’m really driving at here is as a killer I’d have lots of fine company now, wouldn’t I?”

  Flo regarded him quizzically. “Is this what you’re intending to do? Kill someone?”

  “Past tense. Intended. Let me give you the truth now, a whole truth and nothing but, so help me Yahweh, if He’s still listening way up there. Yes, the Cossacks got my business, my antiques store, half my life. But that’s not all they got. They got the other half, too. A man named William McCusker. Ex-priest, a onetime Jesuit. But don’t hold that against him. He was the man I loved. My partner in business and my partner in life. The price they offered me for the business part, all of it, wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t too good either. So to help me make up my mind, as they put it, they stripped William and they burned William with lit cigars—”

  “Oh, my God, the poor man.” If Flo were obliged to say whether she meant the cigar-burned William McCusker or the doomed and homicidal Paul Kaner, she would have found it almost impossible to give a precise answer. “I don’t remember hearing any of this.”

  “Nobody heard, but me.” Paul Kaner paused, lifted his glass, and put it back down again without taking a sip. “I heard all his screams. And I watched him get burned and kicked and urinated on. I had to watch the whole sado trip and I was tied and gagged. After all, the show was entirely for my benefit as sole legal owner of the business. ‘Faggot, nancy boy, cocksucker, butt fucker’…they wrote it all in lipstick, all over William’s body. In great big scarlet letters. I mean, they really enjoyed themselves, the Cossacks, they had a swell time there on William.”

  Flo watched Paul Kaner intently, but saw no change in his calm, nearly numb expression, until he half-smiled at her, apologetically.

  “So when I saw the pictures in the paper. And on TV. Of what happened on the F train, I thought about luck and destiny and things like that, if you know what I mean. ‘But dreadful is the mysterious power of fate.’ That’s from a Greek tragedy, and that’s exactly what I thought when I saw one of the victims was one of the Cossacks, one of the same Russian pigs who tortured William. My God, was I ever elated. I was totally beside myself. You see, I signed right there, the night they put William through all that agony right in front of me…. I signed all the papers. Just to stop them killing him. I sold the shop and everything in it and they gave me a check and I took William home. We lived on Garden Place in the Heights, and I still do for the time being. I washed William and put antiseptic and salve on his burns, and gave him painkillers and he slept. He slept for almost four days, he slept almost all the time it seemed, and then
he went into cardiac arrest and died. Just like that, quietly. Coincidentally, it was the same day their check cleared and got credited to my account. Russian businessmen. So I confess I was thinking about killing the sons of bitches, one by one. Until I saw those pictures in the paper. Someone beat me to it.”

  Flo was stunned. “Could you? Could you really have done it?”

  “I don’t know. You really don’t know until you’ve actually pulled it off, right? Listen, when I was a boy I was a hunter. I used to shoot. I shot deer and birds. I was raised in Oklahoma City, where my father owned a haberdashery, one of the few Jews in Oklahoma. Although I’m proud to say I lost my Okie accent years ago.” He sipped his drink and put the glass down on the bar. “But long ago I also lost the taste for hunting, for killing animals, even for killing buzzards and snakes. And then when I saw those pictures in the paper and online, and I spotted one of them, one of those Russian shits stretched out dead like he’s fainted away drunk on the F train…my God, but I felt the same elation I did when I was a boy in Oklahoma and I shot an animal. Elation, quickly followed by shame. So to answer your question, could I really have done it? I don’t know, maybe not. But I can’t say for a moment there I wasn’t glad someone else did it. And then I looked at those other bodies and I was immediately ashamed of myself…utter, abject shame.”

  “Paul,” Frank said, his large hands opening as if in supplication. “I think I understand. I can get exactly how you felt, Paul, because something like that happened to me once, too. And I killed the guy who did it, the guy who shot my partner when I was a patrolman. Killing is never normal. I killed him and I felt great. And then right after that I felt as miserable as I’ve ever felt in my life. But there’s just one thing here I really don’t understand, Paul, about your business. What the hell do these Russians want with a goddamn antiques store, no matter how good it is?”

  “It’s an excellent laundry for dirty money. Even better than an art gallery. Even better than fake or overpriced Andy Warhols and Sol LeWitts.” He drank delicately from his glass of vodka and lime. “Naturally, I imagine these ‘businessmen’ always have a great deal of cash to wash clean. So with an established, respected, really thriving antiques business—like mine was—they can do exactly that. Whiter than white. But you’re right, I don’t think it was the antiques that captured their imaginations.” Paul Kaner laughed, his joyless half-laugh.

  Looking at the man, Flo never would have thought anything out of the ordinary ever happened to him. But Paul Kaner proved special. As much as he typified—no, surpassed—her opinion of bars as wells of sadness, places she preferred to avoid, she had to sit there and go right on listening to him. No matter how tempting the idea was to be elsewhere—to be out in Sheepshead Bay with Eddie—she couldn’t head off now. This sad man captivated her, because he was on to something she needed.

  “So there you are,” he said. “You’ve heard my whole confession, my dear friends. And may God help poor little old me. I trust it’s of some value to you.” Paul Kaner stopped and his face twitched. His voice resumed the other tone, flat and near dead. “May it help you nail all the mean sons of bitches who killed on that subway train.”

  “Are you willing to press charges against those thugs, for what they did to you and William?” Flo looked at him anxiously, gauging his reaction. “Would you testify against them if the DA asks you?”

  For a moment, Paul Kaner sat in silence, perched straight-backed on the barstool, slowly sipping his vodka. Then: “I’d rather stay alive, thank you. And I don’t mean to be snide or flippant. Or denigrate you and your worthy work. I’m not being facetious here. Because when it comes to business, I do have confidence in our police force, believe it or not, just ask Bucky. It’s them I don’t trust. The Russians. Or rather, just the opposite. I know exactly what they’d do to me—that much about the Russians you can take to the bank. William was constantly telling me to leave Brooklyn, get the hell out of New York. That I was too trusting, if not downright unthinking. The city is full of monsters…it’s absurd to pretend we’re even an ounce more civilized than anyone else in this world. We only have more money, that’s all. Or we used to. William was screaming that night, screaming for his life, but who knows from screaming? Who pays attention here? You hear all kinds of noises, all the time. It could’ve been a television show and the volume up too loud.” He wrapped his feet around the bar stool legs and again held his glass with both hands in front of his eyes. “It’s been very kind of you to hear me out. Ever since I sold the store and since William…Well, let’s just say, I don’t get to see many people very often. People avoid me. I’m too much trouble. Nothing’s normal. My doctor tells me, ‘Winter kills, move before you die, Paul.’ So I’m moving. To the desert. Palm Springs, here I come, my sunny cactus flowers, ready or not. Follow the doctor’s orders, son. My God, Bucky, when the saints come marching in, what in the name of holy mother Marriott is this parade?”

  Bucky glanced at the lounge. “It’s interview night, almost every Saturday this time of year. Watch.”

  In the lounge behind them, a long line of couples entered, filling each table, one pair per table. The young men wore black suits and white shirts, dark ties and black yarmulkes. The young women were in dark knee-length dresses. At the door between the lounge and the lobby, a late-middle-aged man with a bushy beard, a round black hat, and a long black overcoat planted himself as if standing guard, two young male acolytes at his sides.

  Flo and Frank watched the performance in amazement. “The women all have identical hairstyles,” Flo said. “In fact, it looks like they have exactly the same hair.”

  “Wigs,” says Paul Kaner. “They’re probably some kind of Lubavitcher. The kosher Rockettes. Fundamentalists. They can’t show their real hair in public. Or maybe they’re even shaved bald—some of the women are, you know, in certain sects. It’s so grim.”

  Two servers hustled out into the lounge to take the couples’ orders.

  “What are they doing here?” Flo said.

  “The men are interviewing the women,” Skelly said. “Some of them they’ve probably never even met before. Interviewing for marriage. They always sit in pairs, never two pairs together and nobody on the couches, always a table between them. No touching. And the rabbi stands there in the doorway making sure there’s no hanky-panky, no swapping around. No talking between tables. Nobody orders anything but soda or tea, maybe ice cream, a slice of cake. It’s a ritual, and only on Saturday nights. Our Russian friends often slip in and take up that last couch. With all this show going on around them, no one much notices they’re here. Hiding out in full view.”

  “I’ll notice,” Paul Kaner said. “That’s why I’m leaving…right now.” He slid off the bar stool and turned to the detectives. “Look, I’m sorry I can’t do more to help you. But it’s been a real pleasure meeting you, even if all too briefly. I do hope you understand. I must go home while I can still find my way. I have enough trouble sleeping as it is.”

  “Before you go,” Flo said. “One more thing, Paul. Who’s running the shop now?”

  “Oh, her? You mean the redhead? Wait till you meet the redhead. She’s got to be somebody’s bimbo. Yes, by all means do talk to her. She’s a beaut. She runs the store these days. I don’t really know her, but who can say what you’ll learn from that one, and she is a doozy, believe me. Just don’t say I sent you, okay? You’ve never even met me, though I don’t know who’d attack me now. I don’t mean terrorists, not that kind of threat. What I’m really afraid of are nameless, formless things haunting my brain like Furies. I can get through a day comfortably only when some drinks knock this crazy fear out of me. Anyway, good luck with that redhead.” Paul Kaner stood, and walked away muttering to himself, weaving unsteadily toward the other end of the bar and the exit.

  Flo took out her iPhone and dashed off a few notes to herself. Antiques. Davidov v. Bastards? v. anyone else? Returning the phone to her bag, she turned her gaze back to the lounge. “The store, Fra
nk, for starters it’s money laundering. Not for us to investigate, but we’ll pass it on. And we’ll definitely visit the redhead.”

  “I’m not sure the Russians are coming tonight,” Skelly said. “Or they’d be here by now.”

  He turned out to be right. An hour after the parade of young hopefuls entered the lounge—almost to the minute—on a signal from the rabbi, the couples rose and departed, the men poker-faced, the women beaming or brokenhearted.

  But no Russians.

  “Thanks, Bucky,” Flo said. “We’ll keep in touch.” She had to hope the Russians hadn’t somehow been tipped off.

  Sunday

  10:20 A.M.

  A pale winter sun peeked through the clouds over Bay Ridge.

  Flo Ott mounted the top step of the now familiar red-brick stoop and rang the bell to Arlene Reilly’s home. The two Reilly children were at church before having brunch with their grandparents.

  In her briefcase, Flo carried her iPhone notes from her meeting with Marie Priester’s mother. She felt anxious, but relieved that John James Reilly’s widow agreed to see her again. So far the media had no inkling of the late special agent’s multiple, incommensurable lives. If the likes of the Post’s Terry Dangler caught so much as a sniff of this family’s scandal, Arlene Reilly would have to barricade herself and her children against hordes of media bloodsuckers who made their living preying on others’ tragedies.

  Arlene Reilly’s doorbell still worked, so far she hadn’t disconnected the wires. And when the chimes tolled inside, sounding to Flo’s ears like funereal church bells, she seemed to hear the mournful melody pursuing whomever was inside all the way down to a back room as though whatever joy might have still remained in this stricken home was ebbing away.