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Washington Heights
December 29, 1983
On Thursday, I was not at the front room window to admire the lay of the land. The land out there lay like a fucking garbage dump. What this particular window offered was a good view of where 183rd Street crossed Audubon Avenue. “Good” referred only to a vantage point. These were two mean streets. Seven p.m. in winter meant darkness, shadows and damp cold. Except for an occasional car that passed by on Audubon, the blocks were pretty much dead zones tonight. Good thing, too. Washington Heights was one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the City of New York. Every other year the Three-Four, the local police precinct, led all other city precincts in homicides. I think ‘83 was one of those off years when we either placed or showed. If Khalatsyn made a wrong turn in the Heights, he could end up in a really bad situation.
From the front room window I watched. Although I didn’t know what Khalatsyn looked like, I figured he’d be easy enough to spot. Here in the Heights, English was a second language. If I spotted a tall gringo getting into trouble, I’d grab Maxwell and run to the rescue. For CIR, every potential customer was precious, especially when he was the only customer.
I’d spent a long time at the bathroom mirror, prepping. Gone was all the facial hair that kept me warm in winter — a major undertaking that involved cutting away the large tuffs with a scissors, then scrapping away the gristle and fuzz with a razor. A pressed white shirt, black slacks Adah had bought me for my birthday in February, yellow silk power tie, and horn-rimmed glasses made me look more like Library-Man and less like a roofer.
Wish I could’ve put a positive shine on the dumpy apartment I lived in. The squalor inside was only marginally better than the squalor outside. The apartment was shaped like an inverted L. Entering the foyer, to the left a small eat-in kitchen and straight ahead the living room. A narrow hallway with a closet on the right and a bathroom on the left joined the living room and a large room that faced the street, the front room that served as my office.
A torn sleeping couch, light gray and with blue pinstripes, was pushed up against a cream colored wall in the living room. The couch sagged in the middle. On the other side of the room, in front of the windows, was a blue chair made of such abrasive polyester fiber that I rarely sat on it; hence, a lesser sag.
Behind the blue chair were two double hung windows on rotted frames. To the left of the windows a 19 inch color TV (with bent rabbit ears) rested on a white end table my sister had given me. A lint speckled, burnt orange rug lay beneath it all. For panache, a few scenic paintings hung on the walls. They served as an interface to a prettier world. And finally, water stains and peeling plaster marked a corner of the ceiling. The Roofman’s roof leaked.
Fred Flintstone would feel right at home here. Khalatsyn had to think that anyone living in a place like this would do almost anything for money. He might be right, too.
On watch at the front room window looking for a tall white guy, I suddenly heard the doorbell, Thunk! Fitting that in a shit hole like this even the doorbell sounded depressed. That had to be Khalatsyn, but how come I never saw him enter the building?
On the far side of the peephole a tall, well-dressed black man stood silhouetted by the dim lighting of the hallway; he glanced off to his right. I opened the door impatient to get rid of this Jehovah’s Witness.
“Wrong apartamento, addios.”
Before I could close the door on him, “Your Spanish is quite good, Mr. Tettouomo.”
I was suddenly struck dumb. “You’re.........? You’re... Black?” Surprised I could enunciate with a jaw hanging wide open.
He grinned. “Yes I am... Quite observant of you, Mr. Tettouomo.”
“Ah... Ah... Ah... Mr. Khalatsyn?... You don’t... You don’t look Russian.”
He smiled. “But I can assure you, Mr. Tettouomo, I am as Russian as General Secretary Andropov (Soviet premier from 1982 to 1984).”
I laughed. “Only a lot younger and better looking... Please come in, Mr. Khalatsyn.”
I opened the door all the way and invited him in from the cold. I took his coat and laid it on top of the laundry wagon in the foyer. Then I led him into the living room. He sat down on the sofa; I planted myself across from him on the blue chair. Khalatsyn’s large size and structure intimidated me a little. And he sure knew how to dress. He wore a blue sports coat, white shirt, red silk tie and gray slacks. Not a fiber of polyester on this guy.
I smiled back at him through a small gap between my two front teeth. When I was a kid they called me Bucky. I remembered that Adah had told me I had a kind face; had to be the teeth.
Khalatsyn pulled a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka out of his briefcase. “Here’s a small gift, Mr. Tettouomo.”
I thanked him and said I’d save it for New Year’s Eve. Then I asked him to tell me more about himself.
“I live in the Bronx with my wife and nine-year-old son and six-year-old daughter.”
I wondered what his wife looked like. Was she young, blonde, and beautiful or was she one of those Russian she-bears who could put a shot 50 meters? Was she black like him? What about his son, his daughter? Were they cute or brats? Did his family speak English as well as he did?
I also wondered how much of me was being revealed to him. Clean shaven, shirt, tie, glasses, proper voice and diction, had we been sitting in a restaurant these trimmings would be his limited impressions of me. But this wasn’t neutral ground, it was my home. A lot can be learned about people by observing them in their natural habitat. Every so often Khalatsyn’s eyes would dart to a spot in the room, focus on a detail and snap like a camera. Mix and match furniture, paintings, general housekeeping, even the leftover smells of my cooking, he was absorbing them all. And came to a conclusion: “I see you are not married, Mr. Tettouomo.”
Not only was I not married, the woman I loved did not love me. Compared to him, a man with a family who worked at the U.N. (possibly for the KGB), I felt like a loser. An uncomfortable loser: “That’s obvious.” My smile served as an apology. “This place certainly lacks a woman’s touch.”
Maybe even a human touch.
“I have a sister,” I felt obliged to add. “She has three boys.”
The ice thickened and our frozen-in-place smiles threatened to turn into permafrost. Small talk couldn’t crack the ice. The nervous energy that served me so effectively on the roof found other outlets: numerous nose rubs and head scratches, brief sorties off the chair and around the room, and loud chatter.
“Before coming to New York, I worked in London for a petrochemical firm. Now I work at the United Nations on special UNESCO projects. The nature of my work is such that I am constantly doing research, but I am unable to spend my limited time in libraries.” Then he asked me about my roofing job.
I babbled about how the job sucked, especially in summer, all the while hoping he wouldn’t look up at the ceiling. As talk gradually shifted to the business at hand, I began to relax.
“I prefer to conduct business on a personal level” he said. “I hope that we can become friends as well as associates. Please call me Michael.”
“OK, Michael. Call me John.” Then I loosened my tie. “Since we’re such good friends now, this is the last time you’ll ever see me in one of these.” I removed the tie from around my neck, leaned over, and hung it on one of the bent rabbit ears.
He laughed.
Khalatsyn gave me my first order, a handwritten list on white tracing paper. He said he needed it for his records, so would I please make a copy for myself. Since I needed a table to write on, I invited him into the kitchen. I sat at the head and he sat in one of the yellow chairs to my left with his back to the stove and sink.
The first five items on the list were statistical data books published by various automotive trade associations. Item #6 was a technical paper. The title as he’d written it: “New direction(s) in organic electrone materials based in tetrathia (ending on one line and continuing on the next) fulvalene.”
Pointing at “tetrathia-fulvalene” and turning the paper towards him, “Michael, is this one word or two?”
“Yes. That’s it,” he said, pointing at the word.
“What is what?”
“That.”
“What do you mean? Like it appears on the paper?”
He smiled and nodded.
Item #7 listed four Texas Instruments reports all beginning with the prefix ALEX. I’d never seen that prefix before. But the last two items looked like they would be the hardest to track down. Khalatsyn had provided the following sketchy information: “8) Fustbus specification. Oct ‘82 US Nim Committee available from L Dept. of Commerce; 9) Trends and perspectives in signal processing. 1981-83 Quarterly journal.”
When I finished copying everything, he pulled two fifties out of his wallet. Without a word, he carefully placed the bills side by side on the table in front of me. He grinned, a grin that said, Yes, asshole, I’ve got your number.
Like no shit! Before the money could gather any dust, I scooped it up and deposited the cash in the breast pocket of my shirt.
“Who knows,” he said with a big smile, “maybe John Tettouomo will be a big corporation someday. Of course I cannot give you a $20,000 order, not yet.”
$20,000! That sure put some pop in my eyeballs.
“For the moment they will only be for $500,” he continued, “because I worry that you cannot handle such a large order right now.”
I assured him I could handle anything.
“Yes, John, we shall see.” He stood up, getting ready to leave. “You know, John, relations between our two governments is rather strained at the moment. People will not understand our business arrangement, or our friendship. We must be careful. You must never tell anyone you are dealing with a Russian.”
“Of course not, but that’s governments not us. Governments are bullshit. My government, and yours too,” I said, shaking an emphatic finger at him. “I truly believe that the best way to promote peace is through strong economic ties. Both of our countries would be less likely to blow each other away if it’s in their economic interest not to. Let’s you and I continue to do business and wait for our stupid governments to wise up.”
I truly believed what I’d just said.
I walked him to the front door and paused. A question desperately wanted to force its way out of my mouth. But how to put such a sensitive question without offending him or making me sound racist?
Michael must be reading my book. “You want to know why I’m a black Russian.”
“And how come you speak English so well? And with a hint of a Southern drawl?”
“My father was a black American born in Mississippi.”
Voice rising: “Ah, now I get it!”
“He immigrated to the Soviet Union in 1933, graduated medical school, and married my Russian mother.”
A smile exploded on my face. “Wow! That’s fantastic! Don’t blame him for leaving Mississippi. I’m white, and I wouldn’t live in that shithole place either.”
He laughed, laid a hand on my shoulder, and gave a gentle shake. “I think we are going to be good friends, John.”
Right back at him: “I think so, too.”
I meant what I said. Although I really liked this guy, that wouldn’t stop me. How I felt about him meant nothing. The Soviet Union had hundreds of thousands of missiles pointed at us. I had to turn his ass over to the FBI.
Sorry Michael, but a guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do... And he’ll do the same to me.
Guess that made us enemies whether we liked it or not.