Everything to Lose. Andrew Gross

“I tell you that Sergei Lukov is patient man. He shows you restraint, out of respect for your circumstances. I think you know what I’m saying, right? But even a starving whore stays at home when her putchko is aching …”

      “Meaning what …?” The man in the Knicks jacket put his back against the scaffolding.

      “Meaning everyone has their limits,” the burly Russian replied. Then he shrugged. “Maybe the saying was not so good.”

      The other man took a sip of coffee. “I think I get the routine.”

      “’Course you get routine. Your people invented routine, right? You probably seen this movie a thousand times. Hey—you sure you don’t want one of these?” The Russian showed him the half-eaten sausage that looked small in his meaty palms. “I come all the way from Brooklyn just for these. You’re missing something good.”

      “Thanks, but I never eat anything that would have killed me if it was alive.”

      Yuri furrowed his brow. “Pig are so vicious over here?”

      “Boar,” the man in the Knicks jacket said. “Cinghiale means wild boar. It’s Italian.”

      “Oh.” The Russian looked askance at what was left of his sausage and chomped another large bite off nonetheless. “Boar, huh? Anyway, you know it goes up, Thursday. Three days. Eighty thousand then. Pig or boar.”

      “Like the national debt.” The man in the cap pointed to the digital sign on a building high above them, the numbers racing. “Except with a Russian accent.”

      “Ha! Good one! Except is Ukraine …” Yuri elbowed him good-naturedly. “Back home, you could get knife in skull for that. Or radiation bath. Chernobyl cocktail, we call it. Very popular at home today. Here, Ukraine, Russian … Like pig and boar, no one knows difference. No harm, no worry, right?”

      “No harm, no foul,” the man in the Knicks jacket corrected him.

      “Yes. Sorry my English is, how you say, work in progress.” Yuri shrugged. “But my math is still good. And real meaning is, what you don’t want is for this loan to become even more expensive. By that I mean you have no way to pay, so we need to collect, how you call it … in trade. Maybe at your job. I think you have strong idea what I mean by this.”

      The man looked at him. Neither of them were laughing now. He nodded. “I have a strong idea.”

      “Good. So then you know how life gets truly fucked up for a good guy like you. Where loan gets really expensive. Then it’s not just money—money you can always find. It’s kind of life loan, if you get what I’m saying? And you keep paying and paying. Clock never stops. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick …”

      “I get it,” the man in the Knicks cap said.

      “I know. Because people like us, once we get in your life, we don’t leave so easy. We like cousin from Tbilis who stays on your couch. Your wife cooks for him, mends socks, washes clothes. Then one day you come home and catch him fucking your wife on your couch. And he looks at you with pants down and says, ‘Fuck are you doing here …?’ You see my point? Like that, but whole lot worse. Anyway, I’m trying to do you good turn here. Even though I offer to buy you lunch and you turn me down. I still try to give you good advice.”

      “You seem to have a lot of sayings, Yuri.” The man in the Knicks cap crumpled his Styrofoam cup and tossed it in a bin.

      “Is true. And I have one more … You don’t need beard to be philosopher. And I’m glad you appreciate”—Yuri chortled and elbowed the man— “because Thursday, seventy thousand becomes eighty. Then goes to ninety. Then …” He wiped his chin with his napkin. “Don’t keep Sergei Lukov waiting too much longer.” He backed away, winking, but a wink that no longer had mirth in it. More like a warning. “Because next time, pig or boar, won’t make one piece of difference, understand what I mean, Lieutenant?”

       CHAPTER EIGHT

      It had been three months since the driving winds and unchecked tides from superstorm Sandy swept over Staten Island, battering the middle-class communities of Tottenville, Oakwood, and Midland Beach, situated along New York Bay.

      A lot of us who lived in the area never fully appreciated the full impact of the storm. In Armonk, thirty miles to the north, it was mainly a wind event—downed trees and mangled power lines blocking the roads for weeks, resulting in close to two weeks without power.

      The heartbreak of the Jersey shore and Staten Island seemed a million miles away.

      But driving across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge three days later and seeing the devastation for the first time, it looked to me as if the storm had just happened yesterday.

      Homes along the shore were split wide open. Streets were still blocked with whatever the tides and winds had thrown around. A tanker was aground, with the famous message written on the hull: FEMA CALL ME! There were mountains of random debris. From the bridge I could see boats and cars still piled in streets and driveways like discarded toys. Power lines twisted at right angles. My mind flashed to the angry residents who appeared on the news, screaming about how FEMA hadn’t even come around yet, how insurance companies were ignoring them, how they were living in cramped, remote motel rooms, unable to even gain access to their own battered homes.The rebuilding hadn’t even begun.

      I swung off the bridge onto Hylan Boulevard. Midland Beach was about two miles south.

      Where Joseph Kelty had his home.

      I was lucky to even make it to St. Barnabas’s, ignoring what the GPS was telling me, searching for any street that was even open. I had to walk the last three blocks on foot. The church was on Rector Street, a few blocks inland from the demolished shore.

      There was a line of people leading into the church, an old red-stone Romanesque-style structure with a bell tower. I took a seat in the back and waited while the pews filled in. Finally the organist played a hymn and people turned; the family began to file down the main aisle. I saw a nice-looking man in his mid-thirties with his arm around the shoulders of a young boy. He had to be Kelty’s son and a grandson. He followed a woman who looked around my age with her husband and two kids. They took their seats. Maybe a hundred people were there. The organist stopped. Finally the priest stood up.

       “O God, you are my God, I seek you,

       My soul thirsts for you;

       My flesh faints for you,

       As in a dry and weary land where there is no water.

       So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary,

       Beholding your power and glory.”

      “We are here today to celebrate the return of our friend and neighbor Joseph Kelty to his immortal father.”

      A few people wept in the first rows. The priest went through his blessings and prayers, and when it was time to remember the deceased, he called Kelty “a little rough around the edges, except where it counted—in his heart and in his deeds.” He called him a “salt of the earth, good-hearted man, who came into this life without much and would have left the very same way were it not for the bountiful blessings of his family he had built up.”

      A co-worker stepped up to the altar, a round-shouldered black man with a graying beard who introduced himself as “Carl. From the tunnels,” who said, “Joe Kelty was as solid and dependable a man as any who ever worked the lines.” He said he would pick up any shift when someone called in with a problem, rain or shine. “Except for his grandson Chris’s birthday. We all knew that day, June seventh.”

      Several people in the pews laughed.

      “And when he worked his way up to supervisor,