by Ann Aptaker
But tonight I’m counting on the cops passing me by. I’ll be riding in one of thousands of cabs in New York. Cops don’t pay attention to a cab with a passenger in the darkened backseat. They won’t know I’m on the move.
We’re coming up on the pier. Drogan’s cut his lamps and his mast light. He’s running slow, dark, and quiet as he lines up the tug against the old wharf. Rosie’s cab is barely visible in the shadows, her headlights off and the engine idling. Only the windshield reflects a stray glow of furnace fire from the copper refinery farther down the creek.
I put on my overcoat and cap, pick up the briefcase where I stowed the folio, and walk out onto the deck, ready to disembark the tug. Tonight’s work is almost done. A wad of cash is almost in my hands.
Before I step off the tug, I nod up to Drogan in the wheelhouse. He nods back at me. Our nods confirm our next moves. He’ll pilot the tug to an even more out-of-the-way spot, maybe even out to sea, and sink my raincoat and my other clothes where they’ll never be found. Tomorrow morning, I’ll meet him at his berth and give him his cut of tonight’s payoff.
Drogan shoves off as soon as I’m on the pier. There’s nobody around now except Rosie, but I step lightly anyway. Call it a habit of my trade. In just a few strides I’m at Rosie’s cab and getting into the backseat.
That trace of fiery glow from the copper refinery drifts into the cab, highlights Rosie’s blond hair, turns it into an aura of pink mist. The light slides along her cheek as she looks over her shoulder to greet me. Even in this thin light, Rosie is a peaches-and-cream temptation whipped up by the Heavenly Angels of Lust. She says, “Welcome home. I missed you. What’s that?” in a whisper as erotic as it is tender.
“What’s what? My briefcase? You know the one. I’ve put the goods in it.” The words are barely out of my mouth before Rosie’s out of the cab and sliding next to me in the backseat.
“No,” she says, “not that. This.” She takes my chin between her fingers and says, “Jesus, Cantor, what the hell was it this time?” scolding me like a schoolmarm chastising her most troublesome child. “You gambled with your life again just for the thrill of it? Or did you step in front of some guy’s brass knuckles?”
“The wind pimped me out to the capstan on Drogan’s tug. Damn thing was rough trade.”
“Sure, go ahead, make jokes, but that gash looks nasty.”
“I thought I cleaned all the blood off.”
“Yeah, well, looks like you got most of it, but even in this lousy light that gash is red as a stop sign. You’re gonna have a new scar.”
“In that case,” I say, sliding my arm around her waist and pulling her to me—even in her cabbie’s rough duds of jacket, work shirt, and slacks, Rosie’s body is all curves and softness, inviting as a favorite pillow—“I hope you’ll like playing with the new scar as much as you like fooling around with the old ones.”
Supple and warm against me, she whispers, “Sure, Cantor, you know I—” But she stops saying what she knows I don’t want her to say and does what she knows I want her to do. Her kiss goes down better than words. She’s delicious, a perfect welcome-home treat.
I wouldn’t mind taking the kiss further, all the way to fucking her right here in the backseat of the cab, but there’s a bundle of cash calling me across the river. So all I do is mumble between tastes of Rosie’s juice. “Listen, I told Mrs. Jacobson…I’d be at her place…before ten o’clock. I’ll finish up tonight’s business as quick as I can, then how about you and I go to my place, open a bottle of scotch—”
“Then you’ll open me.”
“Yeah…” Welcome home.
Chapter Two
Drive out of the Midtown Tunnel and Manhattan hits you like an explosion. Light comes straight at you, then rushes skyward, lifted on the tumult of the city’s noise. But explosions have fissures of darkness, too, and the explosion that’s New York has plenty of darkness coiled inside its bursting light.
I know something about those dark fissures. Some of them I know intimately, enjoy the sins and pleasures that lure me there. Some I know to stay clear of, where things happen that are none of my business. And some I’ve stumbled into and almost didn’t make it out alive.
But the crimes and dangers inside the city’s darkness are nothing compared to the horrors that Hannah Jacobson survived, an orgy of monsters with gluttonous appetites for torture and murder. After devouring millions, the monsters simply vomited them into mass graves, emptying their bellies to devour millions more.
The Dürer watercolor in the briefcase next to me in the backseat of Rosie’s cab doesn’t seem like much of a trophy for surviving the monsters’ teeth and claws, but maybe having this small piece of her life back will give Mrs. J some comfort, a way to feel the breath of the family she lost to the ovens of the Nazi feeding frenzy.
Anyway, that’s the feeling I got when she hired me to find the watercolor and recapture it. She’d been petitioning the US government and the Allies’ art retrieval offices to seize and return her family’s looted artwork, a first-rate collection of German masters from the Middle Ages through the nineteenth-century Romantics, but all she got was the usual bureaucratic runaround. Bureaucracies move as slow as clogged sewers, and Hannah Jacobson, a woman in her seventies, doesn’t have time to wait for the crap to clear the pipes. So she asked a curator she’d been working with if there was another way to restore her family’s artwork, and the curator, a discreet dame I’ve done business with, introduced Mrs. Jacobson to me.
Compared to the criminals who murdered her family and savaged a continent, Mrs. J, a grandmotherly little woman with alert blue eyes and a comforting-as-chicken-soup smile, considers my smuggling racket a reasonable customer-service operation. After we were introduced, and after she looked me over and said I’d have fit right into the nightlife of pre-war Berlin, she wasted no time in hiring me to retrieve her family’s collection piece by piece and by any means necessary. We see eye to eye on that last point.
I’m looking forward to making the old lady happy as Rosie turns the corner onto West End Avenue and parks in front of Mrs. J’s building. It’s a good-looking spot built during the apartment house boom of the ’20s. An awning running all the way to the curb introduces twenty-two stories of limestone and light-colored brick gussied up to resemble palaces in Europe where a lot of New York’s teeming masses originally came from. Not the palaces; just Europe.
Rosie’s in a teasing mood. After she kills the engine, she says, “Don’t be long,” in a way that’s equal parts invitation and scolding.
“Keep your lovely fires burning,” I say. “I’ll be back before you know it.”
“Oh, I’ll know it,” she says, her voice a carnal moan and a wise laugh in equal measure. Perfect Rosie.
Like a kid lured by available candy, I reach across the front seat to stroke her a little bit right now, put some of her luscious warmth in my hand, but the building’s doorman is already approaching the cab. I haven’t seen this guy before, but then again, I’ve only been here one other time, during the day shift. Anyway, this guy’s a short-stack with a pinched face, an elf in a green uniform. The doorman-elf opens the cab before my fingers can reach anything more than the shoulder of Rosie’s jacket.
My quick thrill washed up, I get out of the cab. The doorman asks, “Are you expected?” His greeting is friendly enough, but as he gets a better look at me, his face folds up like he’s suddenly caught a bad smell. He examines me up and down, making sure I really am what he thinks I am: an oddity he’s heard about but never expected he’d see a real live one. And judging by his awkward fascination with the scars on my face and the gash on my chin, I guess he figures I’m gutter trade to boot.
At times like this I like to pull out my slickest smile. It amuses me, and this uniformed elf doesn’t look like the kind who’ll ram his fist in my nose, so I let my words ooze through my smile. “Kindly tell Mrs. Hannah Jacobson that Cantor Gold is here.”
The guy walks ahead of me to the bui
lding, relieved of the temptation to either stare or sneer. As he picks up the intercom at the front entrance, I walk past him and into the lobby. I’m halfway to the elevator when I hear him say with that oily friendliness of someone angling to be remembered with a big tip at Christmastime, “Yes, of course, Mrs. Jacobson. I’ll send her right up.”
By the time I step into the elevator, my grin’s not slick anymore. It’s just big and wide and it sure feels good and it’s not meant for anyone’s enjoyment but mine.
*
The floral carpeting along the twelfth-floor hallway is the extra-thick variety that doesn’t just muffle your footsteps, it swallows them. A gorilla in hobnail boots could be stomping to your door and you’d never hear it.
It’s nearly ten o’clock when I press the door buzzer at apartment 12A. I hope I haven’t stomped all over old lady Jacobson’s bedtime.
But when the door opens, she greets me with that comforting smile of hers, as if she has a nice pot of soup simmering in the kitchen. That Home Sweet Home aura glows from the flush of her face, pinkish from the light against her fluffy salmon-colored robe.
“Ah, Cantor. Do come in,” she says. Her Old World accent makes my name sound swanky, like it has lineage, makes me glad I’m tricked out in one of my best suits.
As I step into the vestibule, she asks, “May I take your coat and cap?” With Rosie waiting downstairs I wasn’t planning on lingering, but my gut’s telling me that doing fast business would be a vulgar breach of the old dear’s etiquette, so I take my coat and cap off and let her put them in the closet. When she’s done, she motions me into the living room.
I don’t know much about Mrs. Jacobson, about how she grew up or what her life was like before Hitler gutted it, but somewhere along the line she soaked up a lot of dignity and the know-how to spread it around. Most of my other clients would be grabbing for the goods by now, quick to pay me off and happy to be rid of the likes of me until their next greedy need of my services. But Hannah Jacobson hasn’t said a word about the briefcase I’m carrying and what we both know is in it.
I know she’s excited about it. I see it in the glint in her eyes, a flicker of desire she’s too well mannered to flaunt. As she leads me to the living room, her robe wrapped around her like a cozy blanket, she’s not a client preparing to do business; she’s a gracious hostess seeing to the comfort of her guest.
Her living room is as comforting and gracious as she is but there’s nothing Old World about it. There’s nothing especially up to date about it either, though it has the pretty colors of Central Park in springtime. There’s a sofa upholstered in pale green damask, matching green damask chairs, and simple but good quality mahogany furniture whose polished surfaces reflect soft pools of light from table lamps around the room. For a woman of cultured taste, there’s a surprising absence of art on the pale blue walls, just a few unimportant but otherwise cheerful landscape and floral prints in carved wood frames, all of it looking like they’re just taking up space. Most of the wall space is bare, waiting.
“Please, you will sit down, Cantor?” She motions me to one end of the sofa while she seats herself at the other. Lamps on side tables provide good light for viewing the watercolor, which I’m anxious to take from the briefcase and conclude the night’s business. But I guess the lamps also throw light on me, because Mrs. J is suddenly paying a lot of attention to my face. She lifts my chin with her fingers, which are stronger than I’d expect and give off a motherly scent of cold cream. “You have been injured,” she says. “I hope I haven’t caused you—”
I interrupt her by carefully sliding her hand from my chin, treating her hand as something precious: the sleeve of her robe had slid back when she reached for me, the lamplight revealing six jagged numerals tattooed on her arm, numbers that brand Hannah Jacobson as a survivor of the Auschwitz death camp. Those numbers kick aside any possibility that I’d allow this woman who survived hell, to blame herself for my scraped face or for anything, ever, at all. “You haven’t caused me a thing I didn’t earn,” I say. “Cuts and bruises and getting swatted around are the currency of my life.”
Nobody’s ever looked at me the way Mrs. J is looking at me, as if seeing inside me and finding whatever human feeling survives the brutality that stalks me. No one has ever looked at me with so much pain, or with so much encouragement, the latter riding on a small smile that quivers at the corners, as if the smile’s fighting to keep life’s threats from breaking through.
I lay her hand back in her lap, let the sleeve of her robe slide along her arm and cover the grotesque arithmetic on her flesh. “C’mon,” I say, lightening the mood as I open the briefcase, “you’ve waited long enough for this. Don’t you want to see your prize?”
The wise eyes that shared a survivor’s secret with me a moment ago now crinkle with an anticipation that’s waited too long and suffered too much. As much as Hannah Jacobson wants this beautiful piece of her life back, she knows it will bring memories: warm memories of love and family, and wretched memories of their torture and death.
Her hands are clenched in her lap, her face has gone stiff, a shield protecting her from unbearably painful thoughts, as I take the folio out of the briefcase and open it. And then a miracle happens, a miracle that a great work of art has the power to pull off. It can heal the wounds of evil. It can drain fear and replace it with joy. It can make Hannah Jacobson smile.
“Ach, ja…” comes whispered in the German of her old life, words she utters as if through the memory of a lost dream. “Ja, this…this is the right one. This is the one that will start to build again my Theo’s legacy. He so loved this picture.”
“Theo?”
“My husband, Theodor. The collection of pictures, it was his. And mine, too, yes, but it was Theo’s vision, it was his passion. He was a true collector, you understand, a man in love with the great drama of German art. But he loved this little Dürer watercolor more than all the others, more than all the big, important paintings with their religious scenes and their battles. He loved this watercolor because it celebrates life. Yes? You can see it, Cantor? You see the life in these stems and leaves?” Her excitement is warm as the sun. I could swear it’s actually nourishing those stems and leaves. “Oh, how my Theo loved life!” she says. “He knew such joy in his days, in his work, but especially in his family, in our dear children…” She stumbles now, tripped up by the horror of children murdered, but she keeps staring at the watercolor, sees something in it, and is finally able to speak again—“Gisela, Artur”—whispering their names. “You know, I was a very lucky woman, Cantor. My husband loved me very much.”
“He sounds like a wise man.”
“Wise? Well, you might say love is a kind of wisdom, yes. Have you ever been in love, Cantor?”
Her question comes at me through a romantic, nostalgia-sweet smile that might as well be a fanged leer taking a bite out of my heart, or what’s left of my heart. It’s been chewed up bit by bit since that March night two years ago when Sophie disappeared. Sophie de la Luna y Sol…the love of my life…the woman I might’ve given up my outlaw ways for, if she’d asked me to. But she was snagged right off the street, fell into one of the city’s dark fissures, one I’ve never found. But I keep looking, and in the meantime the pulpy little slug that’s left of my heart waits for her. No one else will ever have it.
I’m slowly aware of warmth on my right hand. It’s Mrs. Jacobson’s hand on mine, and she’s talking to me. “I am sorry, Cantor. I did not mean to pry. Please, let me offer you a coffee, or perhaps some tea?”
“What? Oh no, I—thanks, but I really can’t stay.” I feel like a heel telling her that, but lingering here suddenly has booby traps I didn’t count on.
“Of course,” she says with the dignity of her instinctive kindness. “Well then, let me pay you and conclude our business. You have certainly earned it. I am very grateful to you, Cantor.” She reaches into a pocket of her robe and slides out a thick envelope. “Ten thousand dollars, yes? As we a
greed?” Her sleeve has slipped a little again, revealing the last digits of those grisly numbers seared into her flesh.
And then I hear myself saying something unbelievable, something so wacko that if Rosie or Drogan or anyone else in my racket heard me say it they’d cart me off to the loony bin. “I can’t take your money.”
Mrs. J’s caught me looking at her arm because she’s suddenly lifting my chin with a no-nonsense push, forcing me to face her. “Of course you will take this money,” she says. “We have made a contract that must be honored. I understand that finding the picture and bringing it here must have cost you considerable expense. And I also understand—understand too well, Cantor—that you need money to live in the dignity you are entitled to. Money is part of your armor, yes?” She glances at my expensively tailored suit, then back at me. “It is your armor against a world that wants you demeaned, imprisoned, or dead.”
This old woman is teaching me a thing or two about spirit. My hand seems to take the envelope of cash and slide it into my inside pocket not by my will but by Mrs. Jacobson’s.
I say, “But it takes money for you to live, too. New York is an expensive town.”
“Yes, it is, but I have what I need. And you are right, my husband was a wise man. Before the Nazis stole his money and his business, he was wise enough to invest in my younger brother’s business here in America. My brother was a professor of chemistry in Berlin and then in New York. Dr. Marcus Stern. Maybe you’ve heard of him?”
