Red Hook

At the beginning of RED HOOK, Artie seems to have recovered from the horrors of finding the truth about his nephew Billy.  As the book opens, he is celebrating his marriage to Maxine Crabbe at the party given by Tolya Sverdloff at his loft in the meat packing district. But Artie is called away to Red Hook where a body has been found.

Sid McKay, a famous retired journalist has found a body on the waterfront near his loft. He has called Artie, and while Artie tries to find out what’s going on, Sid himself is murdered. There follows the unraveling of too many lives. Caught up in this is Valentina Sverdloff, Tolya’s beloved daughter. Before the end of the book, there will be more murders and more revelations some about the lies journalists tell in covering up stories, some about Sid McKay’s strange past.

RED HOOK is also where Artie discovers one of the last remnants of old New York, of the industrial, even pre industrial world of commerce, of ports and ships of working men and crime—not much different from that in the film, On the Waterfront. In Red Hook, he realizes all the murders are taking place on the periphery of the city, the south Bronx and the Hunt’s Point market, near the surreal and murderous world depicted in Bonfire of the Vanities, on the High Line, a defunct rail line—about to be made into a park for all the yuppies who live near it in the old Meat District, where the warehouses used to smell of blood in the early mornings. Each murder is committed with a weapon made from a piece of this old New York, now being eaten up by real estate dealers and hedge fund types and artists with dough.

from Red Hook

"I turned on the radio and discovered it was sunny in New Jersey, but in Brooklyn the strange apocalyptic weather cell followed me all the way to Red Hook, the small fat lip of land that stuck out opposite the Statue of Liberty off the coast of Brooklyn, a few minutes south of Manhattan, surrounded on three sides by water.

We were at the beginning of the hurricane season; already we were catching the backlash coming up from the south. The summer had been strangely cool in New York. A long wet spring, a cold summer, now the sudden storms.

Columbia Street was shut up and silent on Saturday morning; garbage cans overflowed, a homeless guy, half naked lay in a doorway covered with wet plastic bags. I was on my way to Sid McKay’s building, glancing at a scrap of paper with his address, when I spotted a cop near Van Brunt Street and went over and asked him for directions. I was surprised to see him on the deserted street. He said there had been some trouble by the docks, back side of Red Hook he said, over near the water, and told me the place I was looking for was one of the old brick Civil War warehouses about half a mile away. When I got closer, I saw two blue and white police cars; the lights on top were flashing. I ignored them, went to Sid’s, discovered he was out, went back to the docks. The guys in yellow slickers were crouched by the dock that stuck out into a narrow inlet. I pulled up and parked, and I was waiting there now while the cops with the bolt cutters surveyed the corpse.

I wasn’t getting anywhere with the cops, and I was pretty edgy, half thinking it was Sid in the water. I looked at my watch. I tried Sid on his phone again; there was no answer. I waited another ten minutes. I was pretty uneasy. Where the hell was he?

Across the inlet was a derelict facility the shape of a ten story cone, turned red from rust, where sugar cane had been stored when it came off the ships. I’d heard somewhere Ferdinand Marcos, or his cousin, owned it once.

All that sugar cane coming from across the world, had been stashed here on the edge of America; fire had reduced the machinery, chutes, gears, wheels, slides, to a kind of burned mess; it resembled burned sugar that had hardened; someone called it melted cheese. A couple of boats were parked along the inlet, good looking pleasure craft; a security guard drifted by and tried to make conversation and told me the harbor master sometimes let his friends tie up. I asked him what was going on; he shut up and walked away. 
The boat where the corpse half lay was a shabby motor boat with a small cabin, as far as I could see, but from what I knew there were crummy old boats everywhere out here in these half empty docklands with the canals and floating docks and inlets.

A police photographer in a neon orange vest—I could see the orange through the murk—darted around trying to get a good angle on the dead man.

I went closer where I could see the body and see the inlet out to the smudge of river; the Statue of Liberty was invisible."