Lola Bensky

by Lily Brett

  The Ultra-Private Detective Agency also had a brisk business in divorce searches. They located the divorce records of clients’ prospective new partners. Divorce records could tell you a lot about the person you were considering marrying. The arguments and accusations about money were extraordinarily revealing, as were the smaller details such as noisy eating, teeth-grinding or excessive flatulence. The agency also checked divorce files for evidence of drug-taking, alcoholism, child molestation or spousal abuse, which usually took the form of wife beating. Divorce records contained an avalanche of information.

  The Ultra-Private Detective Agency employed two Jewish private detectives, Harry and Schlomo. They were both nervous of the weather. The television set in the back room of the company’s East Village office was permanently tuned to the Weather Channel. Several times a day, one or the other of the two Jewish detectives checked the weather, and was alarmed by news of hurricanes, tornadoes or severe thunderstorms in any part of the country.

  Schlomo carried a large umbrella with him at all times, regardless of the season. It was harder to trail someone inconspicuously if you were carrying a large umbrella in a heatwave, but Schlomo and his umbrella could not be parted. Schlomo was also a religious Jew. He wore a shabby, unintentionally shiny black suit, a black hat and long black peyos, side curls hanging down to his chin.

  Like many Hassidic Jews and a large number of Chinese drivers, he drove like a maniac. He ignored all parking restrictions and road rules. He did sudden U-turns over double lines, drove the wrong way down one-way streets and made wild gestures with one arm out of the window of his battered van to warn other drivers of his intended manoeuvres. The warnings were both incomprehensible and too late. They usually came as the other driver was swerving to avoid oncoming traffic or crashing into Schlomo and his van.

  In his everyday attire, Schlomo was in perfect disguise. No one ever suspected they were being followed by a middle-aged, untidy and anxious Orthodox Jew with a crooked black hat and overly long black side curls. Schlomo had painted a handwritten sign on the side of the van. Brooklyn Academy Supplies. 68 Front Street, Brooklyn. Telephone 718-678-6786.

  ‘No one would be suspicious of a person who gives his name and address and phone number on his car,’ Schlomo had said. Schlomo, who was born in America, spoke grammatically tortured English with a Yiddish accent. ‘Where did you go to school? In Minsk? Or Pinsk?’ his boss periodically asked him.

  ‘In Brooklyn,’ he always replied.

  Schlomo was so inept that no one suspected him of anything. When he wasn’t behind the wheel of a car, he elicited concern and sympathy from most people. Suspects he was following sometimes asked if they could help him. He had a lost look about him. He also had no sense of direction. He carried a hand-held global positioning device with him at all times, a waterproof GPS designed for hiking. With a waterproof GPS, Schlomo never had to worry about the device being damaged if it started to rain. He glanced at the device every one or two minutes while he walked. People often stopped to offer him help with directions.

  Schlomo’s wife also tried to help him. Every morning she put out his black suit, a clean shirt and fresh underwear and socks. She also packed his lunch, together with a printout of the weather forecast, and, in summer, sunglasses, into a black shoulder bag.

  Schlomo’s ineptitude, together with his harmless if not hopeless demeanour, proved to be advantageous. Suspects chatted to him freely, often revealing far more than the Ultra-Private Detective Agency needed to know. Husbands Schlomo was following confided in him. Schlomo often felt sorry for them. Feeling sorry for people was not part of the job description, Schlomo’s boss had frequently reminded him as he handed over the photographs and recordings of the encounters.

  The Ultra-Private Detective Agency was a three-man operation. Well, two men, Schlomo and Harry, and a woman, their boss, Petrushka Inge Maria Pagenstecker. Or Pimp, as Schlomo and Harry called her.

  Schlomo’s colleague, Harry, was also a licensed private investigator. Harry largely concentrated on Internet research. He seemed able to find any information he was looking for. He could do background checks on nannies, dog-walkers, babysitters, house cleaners, house sitters, blind dates and potential partners. Harry could check for evidence of a criminal record. He could find out if someone was being sued or was suing somebody. He could look up a person’s driving record. He could investigate their finances and check for bankruptcies, bounced cheques, notices of defaults on loans, judgements against the person, and tax issues. If you wanted to know anything about your boyfriend or your best friend’s ex-husband or your uncle’s wife or your former violin teacher, Harry could find whatever you were looking for.

  Harry was in charge of all divorce-file records investigations. He also put statistics together for the Ultra-Private Detective Agency. Because of Harry, the agency knew that they were extremely successful with marital surveillance cases. They caught the partners in ninety-eight per cent of the marital surveillance cases they handled. Harry thought they should advertise that fact. But Petrushka Inge Maria Pagenstecker didn’t believe in advertising. She believed in word of mouth. ‘Advertising is not private,’ she would say. Neither Harry nor Schlomo understood what she meant, but they rarely questioned or queried anything she said.

  Harry pointed out that two-thirds of the Ultra-Private Detective Agency’s clients were women. He also pointed out that when a man caught his wife cheating, in ninety-nine per cent of the cases the marriage would be over. However, if a woman caught her husband cheating, in fifty to sixty per cent of the cases the woman wanted to save the marriage. When male clients found out their wives were cheating on them, they became furious, Harry said. When women discovered that their husbands were unfaithful, they cried. Lola Bensky wasn’t sure the Ultra-Private Detective Agency needed that sort of information, but Harry kept coming up with it.

  Harry wasn’t really suited to surveillance or other forms of fieldwork. He was not socially at ease. He was often tongue-tied and took an extremely long time to answer any questions. He was very thin. And always hungry. He didn’t have the sort of constitution that could set up or monitor a phone or wiretap. However, in front of a computer screen, Harry metamorphosed into someone else. His fingers flew over the keyboard and he moved his mouse with the dexterity of a concert pianist and the speed of a racing-car driver.

  While he worked, Harry could eat doughnuts, bagels with cream cheese, hot dogs and egg-salad sandwiches without pausing or breaking his concentration. Despite everything that he ate, Harry stayed thin. Schlomo was always trying to lose weight so he could hide more easily in narrow doorways. When Schlomo had first seen Harry, he had been thrilled. He had thought that Harry would be able to do any running or chasing that was necessary. But despite being very thin, Harry couldn’t really run. It was just as well that the Ultra-Private Detective Agency didn’t take on a lot of cases that involved running.

  Lola Bensky thought that most Jews weren’t really built or predisposed to be runners. There certainly wasn’t a glut of Jewish Olympic track-and-field medallists. When Jews, regardless of their size, tried to put their bodies into motion, everything bumped into everything else in an unorchestrated and ungainly maze of elbows, knees, arms, legs, hips and stomachs.

  Lola looked at Patrice Pritchard. They were in Balthazar, the eternally chic brasserie in Spring Street, SoHo. If this were happening in the Ultra-Private Detective Agency, Lola would have had Patrice distracted by having the waiter drop a carafe of water on their table, or having the man at the booth across the aisle throw up. As it was, she couldn’t do anything. She had to keep listening to Patrice Pritchard, who had now moved on to the subject of Lola not only having a husband who adored her, but having also had a previous husband.

  ‘I thought two husbands was a sign of failure,’ Lola said.

  ‘God, no,’ said Patrice. ‘It means you’ve been twice as successful.’

  Lola started feeling a little dizzy. She wondered if she could surrept
itiously get half of a twenty-milligram Inderal, a beta-blocker pill, out of her bag and put it in her mouth without Patrice Pritchard noticing. Half a beta-blocker usually stopped her heart from pounding, calmed her down, and diminished the dizziness.

  Lola had the Inderal in a small, clear, round plastic container, which she always kept in her bag. She decided it would be impossible to find the pill without attracting Patrice Pritchard’s attention. Anyway, it was only eleven a.m. and she didn’t want to be swallowing pills this early in the day. She didn’t want to be swallowing pills at all. She kept the Inderal on her for emergencies. She had just lived through three or four years of emergencies and couldn’t quite believe that they seemed to be over.

  The panic attacks she had experienced years earlier had come back with a vengeance. They had been accompanied by a two-year bout of agoraphobia. Agoraphobia was defined as an extreme or irrational fear of having panic-like symptoms, particularly in wide-open spaces or large crowds or uncontrolled social conditions. Lola had avoided shopping malls and parks and department stores and concert halls. She had chosen the narrowest streets in Manhattan she could find to get to wherever she was going and tried to avoid as many of the larger avenues as she could. She ran across those she couldn’t avoid.

  If she saw someone she knew while she was out, she couldn’t stop and say hello. She couldn’t stand and talk to anyone without feeling dizzy and as though she was about to fall over. Talking while standing up became impossible for her. In order to talk to anyone, she had to sit down. This made cocktail parties, which she had previously seen as merely tedious, untenable. Several times Lola had found herself at a cocktail party, face to face with people’s waists. She was the only person in a crowd of thirty to forty people who was seated.

  Lola had found the agoraphobia and the feeling that she was falling quite terrifying. She desperately hoped that the agoraphobia would never return. But there was no guarantee. Unlike the flu, agoraphobia was not something you could be vaccinated against. She had discovered there was a link between agoraphobia and people who have difficulty with spatial orientation. It had to do with the vestibular system, which contributed to balance and a sense of spatial orientation in most mammals. The vestibular system sent signals to the brain stem, which coordinated eye movement and posture and kept people upright. Lola thought that her vestibular system had definitely been sending the wrong messages to her brain stem.

  Spatial orientation had always been a problem for Lola. If she approached a familiar street from a different direction, she had trouble working out where she was. Spatial relationships had never been Lola’s forte, at the best of times. She found it hard to load a dishwasher. What went where didn’t seem easy to discern.

  A few years ago, Mrs Gorgeous, who was now twenty-three, had groaned and said, ‘Anyone who can calculate calories at the speed of light can work out how to load a dishwasher!’ Lola had been thrilled to tell Mrs Gorgeous about her dysfunctional vestibular system.

  There were quite a few phobias Lola would have willingly taken on, in the place of agoraphobia. There was ablutophobia, the fear of washing, bathing or cleaning; or astraphobia, the fear of thunder and lightning; or hylophobia, the fear of trees, forests or wood; or pediophobia, the fear of dolls; or, the best of the lot, coulrophobia, the fear of clowns. Lola wasn’t crazy about thunder or lightning or trees, forests, or woods, or even dolls. And she could easily have lived without clowns.

  The second round of panic attacks and the agoraphobia that had accompanied them had appeared when Lola was forty-six, four years after she, her son, Mrs Gorgeous, the man she left Mr Former Rock Star for and his daughter had moved to New York. At forty-six, Lola had also experienced depression for the first time in her life. And with that depression came thoughts of sharp blades, bottles of pills, tall buildings and the lure of death.

  It wasn’t as though the years before that had been a breeze. Two years after she left Mr Former Rock Star, her weight had ballooned. She was fatter than she’d ever been. She and the man she’d left Mr Former Rock Star for had had to do reconnaissance trips to restaurants to gauge whether Lola would fit into the chairs, before they could make a booking. Lola learned that chairs without sides, which were more comfortable for her, were not that common in restaurants.

  Lola had also had an abortion. She had become pregnant the week after she’d left Mr Former Rock Star. She had decided that this would be a very untimely moment for a new baby to arrive, a decision she still regretted. And her mother had died. Poor Renia had gone from a bloated stomach that bothered her to metastasised pancreatic cancer and death in exactly four months. Renia had barely known what was happening. She had looked at herself in the mirror one day as Lola was helping her into the bath, and said, in a bewildered and shaky voice, ‘What happened?’ Lola understood Renia’s bewilderment. In the mirror, Renia looked almost as skeletal as she must have looked in Auschwitz.

  Lola had cried for weeks and weeks after Renia died. She didn’t know she would be crying for Renia for the rest of her life. Lola missed her mother. She missed the mother she had and the mother she didn’t have. She missed Renia’s glamour and her fury. She missed her perfume. And she kept longing for a mother who could touch her, a mother who could comfort her. For years after Renia’s death, Lola thought she saw Renia in the street, in stores, on public transport. She ran to the phone when it rang in the hope that it would be Renia on the other end of the line. She bought presents for Renia and only remembered after she paid for the presents that Renia was dead. Renia would need no more presents, would make no more phone calls and would never go for another walk.

  Ten years after her mother’s death, Lola found herself in a small, sparse post office in Havana. The post office was in one of the many streets in Havana, lined with crumbling, formerly beautiful homes whose skins and shells had the faded, pastel pallor of aged bridesmaids. Lola was trying, with her smattering of Spanish, to post a postcard to her mother. Minutes after the very helpful clerk had assured her that the postcard would reach its destination, Lola realised that no post office anywhere in the world could get anything to wherever it was that Renia was. She had forgotten that Renia was dead. She had been preoccupied with the thought that Renia would love to get a postcard from Havana.

  Lola used to send Renia postcards every time she travelled. In the postcards, Lola could express all the expressions of love that seemed to get stuck in her gullet when she was in Renia’s presence. Lola missed Renia. She didn’t think she’d ever stop missing her. She was not sure which parts of Renia she missed. She had tried to think about it. It wasn’t the long, cosy chats she’d had with Renia. Her chats with Renia were mostly brief. She didn’t miss the things they did together. They didn’t do much together. They didn’t go to the movies together, they didn’t go to the hairdressers together, they didn’t even go for walks together. Occasionally, they went to the supermarket together, which, to Lola’s surprise, had been an oddly nourishing experience every time.

  Lola didn’t think she would have been able to move to New York if Renia had still been alive. She didn’t think she could have left her. Edek had made it easy for Lola to move to New York. He wanted her to go to New York. He saw America as the goldene medina, the land of opportunity. ‘I will join you there later,’ he’d said. ‘You know your husband does very much want to go there,’ he’d added.

  Lola did know that her husband wanted to live there. He had dreamed of living in New York since he was a very poor, working-class teenager in the outer suburbs of Sydney. Although he was her husband, Lola rarely thought of him as her husband. She called him Sweetheart and thought of him as Mr Someone Else. It came from the endless explanations she’d had to give to her friends, her neighbours, her doctor, her dentist and almost everyone she knew, when she left Mr Former Rock Star. ‘I’m in love with someone else,’ she’d said, over and over again. Mr Someone Else loved her. And he loved Edek. Lola knew he’d been plotting with Edek to make sure Edek joined them in New York.


  Lola decided not to take the Inderal. She felt too old to be popping pills. It felt unseemly, not to mention unsophisticated, to be furtively scavenging around in your handbag for pills. ‘Do you think you are going to write more books about the Ultra-Private Detective Agency?’ Patrice Pritchard said to Lola.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Lola said. ‘I have to finish Schlomo in SoHo before I can think about writing anything else.’

  ‘That’s a great title,’ Patrice Pritchard said.

  ‘I might change it,’ said Lola.

  ‘The readers love Pimp,’ Patrice Pritchard said.

  ‘I mostly think of Pimp as Petrushka Inge Maria Pagenstecker,’ Lola said. She was feeling a bit mean for saying, after Patricia had admired the title of her new book, that she might change it. She had no intention of changing it. It had a nice ring to it. But something about Patrice made Lola want to be contrarian.

  ‘They like Pimp, even though she screams all the time?’ Lola said.

  ‘Yes, they do,’ said Patrice. ‘I think that not enough women scream or speak up. Women talk at a very low decibel level, particularly in social situations when there are men around and in the workplace.’

  ‘I quite like the way she screams,’ Lola said. ‘Particularly as I, myself, find it very hard to scream.’

  It was such a relief for Lola to become Pimp. Pimp was very sure of her place in the world. Until she was one year old, Petrushka Inge Maria Pagenstecker had been Rachel Feinblatt. Her parents, Moishe and Fela Feinblatt, had had Rachel’s name changed by deed poll to Petrushka Inge Maria Pagenstecker, in the hope of putting some distance between Rachel Feinblatt and her Jewishness. Pimp was dark-haired, tall and busty. Moishe and Fela Feinblatt had no idea how their daughter, who was five-foot-eleven, had turned out to be so tall. They were both exceptionally short. They were also bewildered by her ruddy complexion, her very large breasts, her choice of occupation and her confidence.