DISTURBED EARTH

 Although this was the fourth book in the series, it was with Disturbed Earth that Artie really gets a sense of the city he loves. As he realizes that New York is an archipelago, a city state floating on water, more than ever, he resolves that this is where he belongs, that this is where what family he has are, and here is the community of cops and friends that matters most of all.

Disturbed Earth takes place in the wake of 9/11, when the city feels nothing is in place, that the tectonic plates have shift, and people think only about the hole in the middle of the city and the gap in the skyline. Like missing teeth, everyone says.

A child’s clothes turns up on a stretch of waste ground near Coney Island, and because the jogger who finds them is Russian, Artie is called in on the case.

In his private life, Artie is recovering form the departure of his long time girlfriend, Lily Hanes, and is dating Maxine Crabbe, the widow of a 9/11 fire fighter. In a desire for some kind of normal life, Artie talks himself deeper into a relationship with Maxine.

This book is also about Artie’s disturbed past; his cousin Genia has married Johnny Farone and they have a restaurant in Sheepshead Bay, near Brighton Beach and the Russian community. Their son Billy is Artie’s godson, and as close to a child of his own as he’s got. They go fishing together. They share secrets. And when Billy disappears, Artie thinks of the clothes on the beach. His frantic search for Billy take him to the far ends of Brooklyn and New York’s waterside communities. The conclusion is nothing he could have expected and more horrifying than anything he has ever experienced.

from Disturbed Earth

“The City. It still surprised me the way people in the other boroughs, Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island, here in Brooklyn, the vast colonies that surrounded Manhattan and with it made up New York City, still referred to it as “The City.” “I’m going into the City, they’d say, meaning Manhattan. It was a foreign country. I knew people in Brooklyn who never ventured over the bridge, immigrants who clung to the coast, terrified of the noise, the crowds, the sheer power. I met one old guy over in Red Hook who, last time he’d been to Manhattan, it was VE Day and he had been a GI in Europe and he went to Times Square. And that was it. He lived a whole life in Brooklyn looking at the Manhattan skyline and never got closer and said to me, What for?

 All the concrete and money and people packed onto a thirteen-mile slice of land, it scared people. Connected to the outside world only by tunnels and bridges, Manhattan was vulnerable to terrorists and traffic jams and self-importance. It was the center of the world; this was what we believed, even that winter when things were pretty grim. Once, on our way to New Jersey for some fishing, as we drove through the Holland Tunnel, Billy Farone had asked me, “What if the tunnel breaks? What if the river comes through? Artie? What?” But he had seen too many disaster movies.

Checking the map on the seat next to me, I drove towards Johnny’s mother’s place. Coming into Brooklyn was like entering a foreign country, it was that big and unknowable, the way it sprawled south east and west from the tip of Manhattan down to the Atlantic Ocean. Across the bridges, through the tunnel were two and a half million people, most in low lying buildings, the sublime old brownstones, the chic lofts, the cheap tenements, the classic two family houses.

 The sections of Brooklyn nearest Manhattan, Brooklyn Heights, Williamsburg, DUMBO where the artists had gone and people ate a hundred bucks worth of sushi for dinner, was where the money went. The endless interior, classic Brooklyn--Flatbush, Bensonhurst, Sunset Park—was jammed with immigrants and their descendents, Italian, Irish, Jewish, Asian, South American, Russian, black. It went on forever, people vying for space, for religion, a foothold on the ladder up.

 Easy to remember here that the city was an archipelago, a series of islands and inlets, beaches and marshes, rivers, basins, derelict shipyards, wetlands where birds congregated, Jamaica Bay where the planes came in low like big water birds. The boroughs, but especially Brooklyn, always spread towards water, from the Hudson River, the East River, down to the Atlantic Ocean. The seacoast of New York.  Ten miles from Manhattan.

 I drove through Sheepshead Bay and looked at the fishing boats and thought about Billy. He was upstate with his pal. Johnny might be stupid about his kid but he loved him and he said he was upstate, so it was OK.

Out on the dock a solitary fisherman sold fish from a bucket and the customers were lined up, some waiting, some stuffing fish in waxed paper into their bags or carts and lugging it away.
 The neighborhood had changed. For years, except for the fishing, it had been run down, a place where crack-heads roamed with shabby houses in yards overgrown with weeds. Some Russians had moved in from Brighton Beach. Chinese had come out from Sunset Park. Real estate prices went up, pushed by the boom that spread from Manhattan.

Along the inlet were the restaurants: Farone’s, El Greco, the Sahara. Lundy’s the huge fish place had reopened, and there was Baku, a new Russian joint in pale fake stone with silver doors. You could get eel salad with teriyaki sauce and listen to Russian rock.
I passed a couple of old age homes--a lot of old people got warehoused out here in Brooklyn--and a motel without any sign; it was the original hot sheet motel, someone told me, where you could still get rooms by the hour. A massive sewage treatment plant loomed ahead of me, a cathedral of shit with a sign that read “Building a Better Brooklyn.”

The further I drove, the quieter it got; the villages here that seemed to turn in on themselves, were set apart, insular and mostly white. There were no subways and only a few bus lines; most people drove their own cars. Much of the area had been made of landfill.          

A lot of the area had been marshland until the 50s and 60s. When new buildings went up in Manhattan, the land was dumped on the Brooklyn coast and new villages were made. Dirt roads were paved. I made the trip warily to Gerritsen Beach. I loved the ocean and the smell of the air, but I had never liked it here. There was too much fear. “

Easy to remember here that the city was an archipelago, a series of islands and inlets, beaches and marshes, rivers, basins, derelict shipyards, wetlands where birds congregated, Jamaica Bay where the planes came in low like big water birds. The boroughs, but especially Brooklyn, always spread towards water, from the Hudson River, the East River, down to the Atlantic Ocean. The seacoast of New York.  Ten miles from Manhattan."