In 1943, as the uprising in the ghetto against the Nazis collapsed, as tanks blew out whole apartment floors, as soldiers went door to door with flame-throwers, as they gunned down folks on the run, as the Nazis razed the ghetto, making it into a deathscape, Jakov escaped down into the underground, nearly suffocating as he inched forward through the sewage, the stench of slop and shit, at last getting out of the city into the woods. Once he was in the woods, however, entranced by the stillness and distracted by the twittering of birds, he was clubbed unconscious by a partisan who wanted his shoes, a partisan who stripped him naked and tied him up and left him in the grass for the Nazis.
In Auschwitz, Jakov was ordered to work with the Kanada section crew, the “blue” commandos of Jewish prisoners who were in charge of herding Jews out of the cattle cars. He worked diligently. He was then moved to the “red” section – where he helped to undress Jews who, on final inspection, had been selected to walk naked on “the road to heaven.” In his mind’s eye, he could not help himself, he calculated the day-to-day number of naked bodies – an arithmetic that enraged him – but then on waking each day, he was relieved to be alive, and with increasing anger he willed himself to work beyond his exhaustion. An SS officer recognized this consuming rage to live in Jakov and promoted him to the platzjuden, those who were in charge of a sorting area, a kind of flea market for gabardine coats, violins, artificial legs, corsets, menstrual rags, irons and ironing boards. Shortly after that he was given a stool among the goldjuden, prisoners who cleaned and sorted gold teeth that had been pried from the jaws of the dead. Finally, he became one of several Kapos working under a Jewish “commandant.” Few prisoners were surprised that he was made a Kapo. Everyone, Jews and Nazis, felt in him a cold implacable fury, a fury far deeper than anger. And even more unnerving to other prisoners, he seemed to have a faith in that fury – a faith that it was his fury, if only he could keep it constant, that would carry him through from day to day, it was his fury that would keep him alive. When he heard another Kapo say, “We will all die. We are dead men on vacation in a life that has no meaning, no God,” Jakov said: “If God created the world and created us in His own image, then this place is either proof that He is a complete failure, or this is His place, too, and there is a way to stay alive here on His terms. I do not intend to die, so I assume God is not dead.”
Once a month, between trains, as several of the Kanada crew stretched out on the grass under the chestnut trees and drank watery coffee and vodka, an SS officer, to amuse himself, allowed – under very close guard – two prisoners to play Russian roulette with a Colt .45 the officer had taken from the body of a dead American soldier outside the town of Casino in Italy.
A prisoner who played and came out of the game of roulette alive was given two bottles of vodka on top of his regular ration, and two days off with no work, with nothing to do but drink.
The men who chose to play roulette were usually in a state of exhausted hysteria, feverish in their sleeplessness, or they had become muslimmen – men who were apathetic and yearning to die – or they were hopelessly drunk.
Jakov had played the game three times, against three men who had put the muzzle in their mouths. The third game had been played on the evening before the camp had been rousted at dawn by Soviet armoured divisions advancing out of the east. All the prisoners had been forced to begin a march double-file down snowbound back roads into Germany.
Several Kapos were strangled in the night by the marchers, but not Jakov, who – remembering how the partisan had snuck up on him in the Warsaw woods – kept an eye peeled, watching everyone.
Between two snowbound villages, Jakov Przepiorko and Herschel Soibel had trudged through the snow side by side. They had hardly looked at each other but Herschel had said, “You’re a plump little rat.”
Jakov, saying nothing, had fallen back in the line.
In Toronto, Jakov Przepiorko became Jake Piorko. For more than a year, with a fake driver’s licence that he’d paid for with a gold tooth, he drove a half-ton delivery truck for Future Chicken, a slaughterhouse on Spadina Avenue. He was the only Jew on the trucks. The other drivers were black. Within weeks, he was running a card game in a locker room behind the Future Chicken killing floor. When one of the drivers said to him, “You ever smell anything like this joint, man?” he only smiled.
He began to lend money at high rates to the drivers who had lost at cards, and then he made a loan to a butcher who worked on the floor. “Don’t make me draw blood,” Jake said, trying for a small joke as he gave the butcher, whose apron was splattered with blood, the money.
“You want blood I’ll show you where the blood is,” the butcher said, and he took Jake to the Prince George Hotel, whose owners had connections to Meyer Lansky. In the hotel, a weekly high-stakes poker game was dealt by a man with waxen fingers, Harvey “The Heeb” Laxor, who, seeing Jake’s camp numbers on his arm, said, “No explanation necessary,” and introduced him to Maxie Baker. “Mr. Piorko,” The Heeb said, “meet a gambler.”
“We Jews,” Maxie Baker said, “we bookies, we run all the heavy games in town. We cover the horses, the whole kit-and-kaboodle from which we intend to keep out the Magaddino connection. You’ll find out who they are. The lokshen[6] Mafia we don’t have nothing to do with since a Jew always looks out for a Jew.”
“As it should be,” Jake said.
“And so, that’s what’s with me, I’m telling you, and so what’s with you? You’re from the camps.”
“You were there?”
“It’s a fact.”
“Facts count.”
Jake never spoke again about Auschwitz. With help from Maxie, he set himself up as a businessman whose business happened to be loan sharking. In time, except when he had to go down lanes or into backrooms because his clients looked dishevelled and disreputable, he conducted his business from comfortable booths in three fashionable downtown restaurant watering holes – the Silver Rail, the Savarin, and Bigliardi’s. Uptown, he had lobster once a week in the House of Chan, and then he went over his black ledgers with meticulous care, bringing all interest on debts to the decimal point, licking the tip of his 4H pencil, a habit he had picked up from his old rebbe in Warsaw.
For almost a year, he ponied up protection money to cops on the vice squad at 52 Station, paying them off over lunch at Sai Woo on Dundas Street, and because Maxie had shown him a section in the income tax code that referred to “all bribes, under-the-table payoffs, and illicit gambling income” as taxable, he paid his income taxes religiously, every April 30.
“They’re no different than us,” Maxie said, “it’s all business. The government. All they want is the vigorish, their percentage of the take.” Jake took his percentage and, identifying himself as a professional gambler who accounted meticulously for his expenses – especially his “entertainment” of the police and his forest-green Mercedes – he assumed the air of a grim, well-fed taxpayer who was in the good graces of his government. He allowed himself only a wry smile when he told his bank manager, who wanted to know (because the police would want to know) where all the cash was coming from, “I, too, lend money.” The manager had said, “Thank God you’re not laundering drug money,” but had then apologized because Jake had looked offended. “I got a knack for making bankers feel stupid,” he later told a hooker who asked him what he did for a living. “As for living, that’s what I do at all cost.”
Working out of fine restaurants, taking a compulsive pleasure in eating foods deep-fried or cooked in butter, and having a love of wine and vodka, too, he grew jowly and plump, and then fat, weighing some two hundred and ninety pounds, and he soon became known among gamblers as Fat Jake Piorko.
He gave cash in an envelope to the United Jewish Appeal, as did other mobsters, but he did not go to temple and he never let his photograph be taken, not even when Cy Mann, his clothier on Avenue Road, asked him if he would like a memento snapshot of himself with Bill Cosby, the comedian, another Lou Jacetta customer who
flew in regularly from Philadelphia to have Jacetta make him a suit. Jakov said “No” with such a surprising burst of anger that Mann said, “Jesus, you sound like you’d like to hurt me.”
“No, no,” he said, “sorry, but my hurting days are behind me.” He left the tailoring shop and never went back.
On four occasions, however, he had had to hire Al Rosenzweig – the Piano man – to hurt four men, to collect bad debts.
“We understand each other,” he’d said to Al.
“Yes. Business is business.”
“A loss can be a gain,” he’d said.
“Give or take a knee,” Al had said, smiling.
Over the years, Jake lived alone in several two- and three-bedroom apartments. In each, Jake had painted all the walls and woodwork white, and one or two of the rooms had always stood empty, with no furniture at all. Standing in those stark empty rooms, he always felt a peace he could find nowhere else.
On two occasions, when a delivery boy and then a hooker had got into his rooms and seen how he had surrounded himself with next to nothing, and the hooker had said, “This is no way to live,” and the boy, “Wow, what a way to live!” he had cancelled his rental agreement and moved. He didn’t ask himself why, he only knew that he had suddenly been overcome by an anxiety – a question, What a way to live? – a ringing of numbers over and over in his ear, a tumbling of numbers – 27,609 – his exact calculation, his camp calculation of the naked dead he had seen walking “on the road to heaven.” His anxiety only went away when he had closed the door and secured the deadbolt on a new apartment.
A marriage late in life, a marriage of six weeks when he was fifty-nine, had failed, a marriage to one of his hookers. She was twenty-six and he’d been seeing her for two years. To his surprise, evening after evening, he had found her young plump nakedness strangely moving, a nakedness almost too painful, too pink, too soft, too pliable, and he would stare at her as if she were a discovery, as if, in her youth, something was being reborn in him. When they made love, she made him forget how fat he was. He had given her all the money that she wanted and they had married at City Hall, but six weeks later, astonished at how intimate and easy she was, he had tried to cum in her from behind, and she’d said, “No, no. Not the dirt-track road. That’s a private road. That’s for my boyfriend.” He said, “You mean you’re still seeing him?” and when she said “Yes” with a shrug he hadn’t tried to hurt her; he had been enraged but also surprised at her guilelessness, and so did not want to hurt her. He had just told her to get out. When asked by the apartment superintendent where his wife had gone, he said, “She was good till she went bad,” and he moved to another apartment.
Having gone into semi-retirement, he’d taken an apartment on north Bathurst Street. He’d grown weary, was tired, deeply worn out, not so much in his bones but he felt his tiredness was somehow in his heart. He was eating only one meal a day, and he’d lost weight, some sixty pounds.
One morning, looking in the mirror, he said, in angry distress, “Sixty pounds, that’s the weight of a six-year-old boy.”
He slammed the mirror, cracking the glass.
Enraged, Harry was weeping, he was almost incoherent as he explained to Al Rosenzweig that someone had broken into his apartment. “Which was easy enough, since, among Jews, I didn’t think I’d need a deadbolt lock. But that someone, they took nothing. They wanted nothing but to hurt me. They killed Humbo, they beheaded my parrot. The fuckers, the goddamn fuckers, I can’t believe it. The goddamn fucking Nazi shit chopped off his head…”
Al looked around for the body of the bird, or the head. Does a bird like that bleed? He didn’t see any blood.
“No, no, never mind,” Harry said, “I know who did it. Son-of-a-bitch, I knew I recognized him in the elevator. The fat shit, that bag of suet, that schmuck, he hated the bird…”
“Who?”
“Upstairs. The fuck, he lives one floor up. He should have been killed years ago, a goddamn Kapo. He knew I’d know once I saw him, and he was wearing one of my goddamn hats, can you believe it? He’s standing there under one of my hats, and he says to me in the elevator looking me right in the eye, ‘Someone should kill that bird,’ and he fucking well did…I fucking know in my bones…”
“Maybe you know,” Al said, trying to establish a calm, “maybe you don’t.”
“I know. Believe you me, I know.”
“You I believe, but even so, maybe you’re wrong. You gotta be careful about who you got in mind.”
“Piorko, Jake Piorko. Maybe him you know already. Somehow he’s heavy into the rackets.”
“Piorko I know.”
“What d’you know?”
“I done business with him. He’s a shark. All his life he loans money to losers, all kinds of losers…”
“You two’ve done business?”
“A taste here, a taste there. Nothing big.”
“I’ll give you big. I’ll tell you what I want, not just as a friend, you being my friend, but as a business proposition. Kill the fuck.”
“Harry, I’m older, I’m not so strong, cut it out.”
“Cut out his fucking heart, I say. This isn’t just me Harry talking to you ’cause he killed my bird, beheaded him, chop chop, like they did in the camps, this is Herschel. This is Herschel from the old world, before, when you didn’t know me and you didn’t know what it was like, I wouldn’t want you to know, except now, so that you understand, to watch a Jew eat the bread of a Jew, to watch a Jew take the hand of a Jew and lead him to the ovens, he deserves to die.”
“He’s already gonna die, he’s too old to live. He must be ninety-fucking-years old.”
“I want you to kill him. I want my old pal Piano to wire him.”
“No, no, this we don’t talk about like pals, you and me. This is business.”
“I’m talking business. It’s a contract. I’m a businessman, you’re a businessman. Ten thousand…”
“Ten thousand what?”
“Ten thousand bucks. To kill him.”
“A bird. You want I should kill Fat Jake over a bird? I can take a finger, you want to really hurt him. OK, two fingers, but it offends me, you gotta understand. It cheapens me. This is a bird,” and Al stomped his foot. “This is like less than treyf,[7] you want me to kill a man for a bird that even someone starving would not eat?”
“Naw, for ten thousand.”
“You think maybe because you know I wired a couple of guys that I don’t take life seriously? Believe me, I take it serious, life. I’m alive, make no mistake.”
“I’m serious. If the bird’s not good enough for us to do the deal, so kill him for all the Jews…he was as ruthless as they got. A Jew cruel to Jews, to help the Nazis, he gave death to Jews and what does he do the second time when I meet him in the elevator…”
“You meet him twice…?”
“I saw it in his face, the first time, but I forgot till I remembered the next day who he was, my plump little Kapo inside that fat fuck and I tell him, ‘I know you.’ Then the bird starts screaming, ‘Dachau, track 6, Auschwitz, track 29, I know you,’ saying, ‘I know you’ like I just said it to him, and Piorko goes nuts and grabs the bird by the throat, trying to strangle my bird, except I got Piorko by his throat, telling him, ‘You fucking Kapo, how come you’re not dead?’ He should be dead.”
“Maybe so, but no one did.”
“No one did what?”
“Killed him. No one cared enough to kill him and now you do. I got two alter kockers trying to strangle each other in the elevator…”
“He was trying to strangle Humbo dead but, instead, he chopped off his head.”
“And so now where is the bird?”
“At the vet’s.”
“They’re gonna put back his head, or what?”
“Cremate him. Put him in a jar.”
“Cremate?”
“Yeah, for me to keep. An urn. What else have I got to keep? Twenty-five hats? Two hundred shoes? Bullshit. You kill
him. Forget the bird. Like Ezekiel said, ‘He that hath spoiled by violence, he that hath given forth upon usury: shall he then live? He shall not live, he shall surely die, his blood be upon him.’ I make the price. Ten thousand. Cheap at the cost for all the Jews.”
On the third Thursday evening of every month, if he was free from business obligations, Al Rosenzweig was found playing the piano for an hour at the Bialik North Bathurst Street Social Club for Ladies and Gentlemen. He played at a white baby grand Yamaha piano, gift of the Junior Ladies Auxiliary, in a long, somewhat narrow recreation room on the “penthouse floor” of a Senior Citizen apartment house. The rec room had a small bar and parquet dance floor, several easy chairs, styled in blue or white leather – the colours of Israel – and ten or twelve card tables with four chairs at each table.
Marvin Rosenzweig, Al’s father, had retired to this high-rise house but after six months he died of a heart attack. Al had been told “in confidence” by a horse-faced woman wearing a shatl, a wig, that his father had “broken his broken-down heart” while “doing sex” with her closest friend, an eighty-year-old widow, “once a slut always a slut” – a story that both astonished and pleased Al. “What a fucking way to go,” he’d said. “Exactly,” the old woman had replied, slapping her wrist coquettishly.
When asked by the officious manager of the apartments what his father, who had emigrated from Berlin in the 1930’s, had done for a living, Al said, “Newspapers. He moved from the Star to the Telegram to the Globe.” It was Al’s own joke because his father and his mother – who had come together in a marriage arranged by a rebbe in Berlin had, for forty years, sold newspapers from inside a small wooden, forest-green newsstand at the corner of the King and Bay Streets banking district. His father had also scalped theatre tickets, and hockey and baseball tickets. It had been a very lucrative sideline. “He had his window on the world,” Al would say, “so he met a lot of interesting people. You know what he said about Fred Astaire? He said Astaire was so good he could give dancing at the end of a rope a good name.”
All the Lonely People Page 16
