Tarnished Gold

by Ann Aptaker

  The meeting has finally turned my way, and I smile, a big, brash smile that hurts the bruises on my face, but it’s a satisfying pain. “Yeah, I’ve had difficulty with Huber. You can see some of that difficulty right here in the split in my lip and the black-and-blue beaut on my chin.”

  Mom mutters, “What did I tell you. Cossacks.”

  I say, “But he’s more than just a Cossack. He may be dirty, too.”

  Sig waves that away. “They are all dirty,” he says. “Maybe he’s just greedier, wants more money.”

  Like a kid with a secret that could win me candy from the grownups, I say, “Nope, that’s not it. It’s not money he’s after. It’s me he wants. And to get me, it seems he’s thrown in with Jimmy Shea. So now he’s Shea’s man, Sig. Or worse, Shea may be Huber’s.”

  Most people, when they hear they’ve been betrayed, register some degree of shock, or at least disappointment. Their eyes might open wide, maybe their eyebrows go up, or maybe those eyebrows go in the other direction and dive into a frown. Not Sig Loreale. He just sits in his chair, breathing slowly, steadily, and very, very quietly.

  The tension in the dining room is stretched tight as a rubber band, until Sig finally says, “How do you know this?”

  “I won’t break a confidence, Sig,” I say, “but the source was there when the deal was made. The tip is good. You know me long enough to know that I can tell if a story is good or bad, and this story is a good one.”

  He considers this for a minute, then gives me a nod in acknowledgment of my judgment. “I will look into this,” he says, stirring his tea again, each scrape of the glass announcing bad news for either Shea or Huber or both.

  This is my moment, my chance to get something back for the shocker I just tossed in Sig’s lap. So I say, “While you’re looking into that, there’s another matter concerning Jimmy Shea I’d like you to look into, Sig.”

  Slowly, he stops stirring the tea and looks at me. “About a freighter that sailed two years ago,” he says.

  Here it is again, that reach of Sig’s, as deep as it is wide. It’s not enough that he knows what everybody in the city is doing, he knows what everybody is saying, even the whispers. And it’s a sure bet that hearing about my interest in the freighter didn’t come from Jimmy Shea or anyone in his outfit. Why pass along a tidbit they could hold over my head for their own gain? And it didn’t come from Drogan. The way Loreale picks all the pockets along the waterfront, Red’s no friend of Sig’s. And it certainly didn’t come from Iris Page. She couldn’t get to Sig no matter how many guys she serviced on her way to the inner sanctum. No, it came from a source even deeper, maybe someone Judson nicked while digging his way to China. So I’ve got another assignment for Judson: find the leak and plug it. I won’t ask how.

  I say, “That’s right, Sig. I want to know about a freighter that sailed from Pier 8 in March of ’48 with a bunch of hijacked women aboard. I want to know where it went and who received the flesh on the other side. Jimmy might’ve been in on it. And even if he wasn’t, he knows more than he’s saying.”

  I catch Mom out of the corner of my eye. She’s chewing a piece of honey cake, cutting another piece with her fork. Anyone walking into the dining room would think she’s just an old lady enjoying her cake and paying no attention to the conversation at her table. But they’d be wrong. Mom’s not missing a trick. She’s hearing it all, storing it away.

  I control a smile that wants to creep into the corner of my mouth. Sig would ask me why I’m smiling, and I don’t want to be the one to tell him that his soft spot for Mom Sheinbaum could some day be his undoing.

  His attention still fixed on me, Sig says, “This is about that woman you’ve been looking for, yes? If I remember correctly, her name is Sophie.”

  I hate hearing her name through his killer’s mouth. But his saying it was his way of acknowledging that he owes me a favor, a favor not from tonight’s revelation about Shea and Huber, but an almost two-year-old favor, when I delivered Opal’s killer to him, whether I meant to or not. I hate trading on such a sleazy debt, but if it means finding Sophie, I’ll do what it takes, even swim in slime. So I say, “That’s right, her name’s Sophie. And I have reason to believe she was on that boat.”

  Sig stubs out his cigar and drinks the last of his tea, enjoying that final swallow as if it was the high spot in his afternoon. “All right,” he says, “I will look into that freighter business for you, Cantor, after you find that Dürer picture and hand it over to me.”

  He knows, I’m sure, by the look on my face, that I want to say, But one thing has nothing to do with the other! I know because of how he’s looking at me, smiling, while he gives me his stone-hard stare. That stare pushes back at me with the force of a fist.

  He says, “So if there is no other business, then you should be on your way, Cantor. You have much to do.” Turning to Mom, he says, “And so do you, my dear Esther,” though his tone is slightly less courtly than it was earlier. Maybe he’s wise to Mom. Maybe there’s no maybe about it.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Everyone has their favorite luncheonette. Mine’s a sliver of a joint down the street from my apartment. The food’s good, the marble counter’s clean, the black-and-green checkerboard linoleum floor’s not peeling or sticky, and the boss is smart enough not to bother fixing the neon sign out front, which now reads Pe e’s instead of Pete’s. The busted sign gives the place a seedy look, which keeps the tourists away. This makes the regulars happy, locals who don’t have the time to wait for a seat at the counter while Mom and Pop Hayseed make up their minds between the blue-plate special and the split-pea soup. It also makes the counter help happy, because the locals are good tippers and Mom and Pop Hayseed aren’t.

  But the best thing about Pete’s is the coffee—rich and strong, with plenty of zing to keep a body going and a brain tip-top. Having finished my chicken on rye, I’m enjoying a cup, letting the tinny clatter of silverware and the quiet chatter of the other customers surround me like a cozy blanket while the caffeine sharpens my thoughts.

  The trouble is I have lots of thoughts but none of them lead anywhere. I’m no closer to untangling this mess than I was when Huber came to my door and told me that Hannah Jacobson was dead. That was two nights ago, and now it’s Friday afternoon and all I’ve got to show for it is another murder, the squeeze from Huber, Shea, and Sig Loreale, and a busted-up face. And oh yeah, suspicions about Vivienne, suspicions that eat my heart out. What I don’t have is the stolen Dürer or the name of the freighter that stole Sophie from me.

  “What’s the matter, Cantor?” The cigarette voice of Doris, my waitress, pierces my gloom. “You look like someone killed your dog. Only I know you ain’t got a dog.” Doris has been behind the counter at Pete’s since it was Mike’s, and before Mike’s, Izzy’s. Above her pink uniform, her perm-waved salt-and-pepper gray hair frames her thin face, a friendly face with a toothy smile and faded red lipstick that’s seeped into the age lines around her mouth. Her brown eyes, narrowed like she’s studying you, are alert to her customers’ needs and moods, which is why she’s holding a pot of coffee in front of my cup. “How ’bout I hotten it up for you.”

  I give her a nod.

  Doris raises the pot and pours the black gold from on high, letting the air cool the steaming coffee on its way down into the cup. She doesn’t spill a drop. “So what’s on your mind, Cantor? Heartbreak? Dough? Gotta be one or the other. Always is, ’cause there ain’t nothing else in this life worth worrying about except love or money.”

  A dull, “Mmmm,” is my general agreement.

  She puts the coffeepot down, rests her elbows on the counter, her chin in her hands, and looks me in the eye, a hash-joint psychiatrist waiting for me to spill what ails me. “Give over, Gold,” she says.

  There’s no arguing with Doris once she’s made her mind up, and she’s clearly made her mind up to dig my troubles out of me. So after a fortifying sip of coffee and a resigned breath, I give over. “If a whole
bunch of people were after you to do something—do the same thing, really, but for different reasons—and you had nothing to go on except a story with too many pieces and none of the pieces fit with the others, what would you do?”

  With a shrug that’s the diploma of Doris’s sidewalk education, she says, “Well, I guess I’d just find the beginning of the story.”

  Suddenly the coffee tastes even better, Doris’s cigarette voice sounds smooth as Ella Fitzgerald singing at Birdland, and my stool at the counter is classier than a booth at the Ritz. “Doris, my sweet, they should give you the Nobel Prize.”

  “Yeah? What for?”

  I give her a smile, an extra fiver along with my buck-twenty-five tab, and say, “For untying the Gordian knot.”

  On my way out the door, she calls after me, “Who’s Gordon?”

  *

  After a quick stop at my apartment and a short drive across town, I’m at the tradesmen’s entrance at the back of Hannah Jacobson’s building, where a couple of items I picked up at my place—my lock picker’s hook and tension wrench—are doing their job. A few strokes of the hook later, the last pin clicks, the doorknob turns, and I’m in the basement of the building.

  There’s a radio on somewhere down here, broadcasting the afternoon races at Belmont. The announcer’s excited, almost hysterical, as a long-shot takes the lead. I wish I had money on it, but I’ll settle for my good luck that the announcer’s screech and the cheering crowd are covering my footsteps while the building super is hunched over the radio, too caught up in the race to notice me walk by. In just a few long strides, I’m through the door to the stairway.

  I get out at the second floor, buzz for the elevator and take it the rest of the way to the twelfth floor.

  The lock picks come out again and get me into Mrs. Jacobson’s apartment.

  It’s like Doris said: I have to find the beginning of the story, a story that started here.

  I take my cap off in acknowledgment of the sadness that hangs in the place, a darkness that doesn’t go away no matter how many lamps I turn on in the living room. But I can’t let the sadness paralyze me, can’t let the dark mood obscure any details I might’ve missed when I was here with Huber.

  So I stuff my cap in my coat pocket and start looking around.

  Nothing’s changed since Huber and I stood in this room two nights ago. The super hasn’t cleaned the place yet and won’t, until the family—or what’s left of it—finally collects Mrs. J’s belongings. The walls are still spattered with arcs of Mrs. J’s blood. The bloodstain’s still on the carpet between the sofa, the coffee table, and the side table that was chipped during Mrs. J’s death struggle. The bloodstain is even darker, now that it’s soaked in and dried, a large bulb-like shape of blotchy red-brown where a life quietly drained away after a fury of savage madness.

  I’ve seen blood before, the dripped blood of the wounded and the staining blood of the dead. I know what it looks like, know its colors, and there’s something not right about the colors on Mrs. J’s carpet. There shouldn’t be pale watery-looking splotches, and there shouldn’t be tiny pinpricks of white.

  I get on my hands and knees, bringing a lamp down from the side table for a better look.

  The watery splotches are where another liquid must’ve fallen to the floor and mixed with Mrs. J’s blood, diluting it in spots. The liquid was nearly colorless, or at least not as dark as blood. There’s no odor of alcohol, but a faint scent of green tea. The white pinpricks are really tiny splinters of a hard but brittle substance, the splinters breaking when I try to scrape them up from the carpet. I know what that substance is and what the splinters are, the remains of a broken porcelain cup, maybe a cup and saucer. The crime-scene boys must’ve taken away the larger shards by the time I came back here with Huber. I guess they didn’t find any fingerprints on the shards other than Mrs. J’s or they would’ve already made an arrest. But it doesn’t matter that the cops knew before I did that Mrs. Jacobson was seated on the sofa, enjoying a cup of tea, when her killer came to call. It doesn’t matter because the cops are only concerned with Mrs. J’s murder, not a stolen artwork, which they don’t know a damn thing about.

  I get up from the floor, put the lamp back on the side table, and sit down on the sofa. There’s a miserable lump in my throat, but I’m smiling.

  The lump in my throat is from a tearless, choking grief for the grand lady who shared tender moments with me here, a woman of strength and calm dignity who loved life despite the horrors it threw at her. My smile is for her courage and her determination not to let any more monsters rob her of her legacy and memories. Because if Hannah Jacobson was enjoying a cup of tea just before the monster killed her in frustration and rage, then the Dürer was still in Mrs. J.’s possession. It hadn’t been stolen.

  It never was.

  I’ll never know if Mrs. Jacobson told the intruder that the Dürer wasn’t here, or that she never heard of it, or some other tale to keep the monster from getting their hands on it. Whatever she said, they believed her, which is why the killer’s next stop was Marcus Stern’s place. What Mrs. J couldn’t know was that the intruder was possibly a madwoman.

  I squelch the lump in my throat as I get up from the sofa, take my coat off, and start searching, silently congratulating Mrs. J on her sharpness of mind. Until she could secure the Dürer watercolor, maybe in a safe-deposit box, and then have it insured, framed, professionally secured to the wall, and alarmed, she did the smart thing and hid it.

  Starting with the vestibule closet, there’s nothing in there but a few coats, galoshes, and an umbrella. No false walls, no hidden nooks.

  Back in the living room, I start with the usual places: under the sofa and chairs, under the bookcase and behind the books, in drawers, and under the carpet. Then in the not so usual places: the underside of the small dining table and chairs, between the walls and the furniture, and behind the framed floral and landscape prints. I even open the frames, take the prints out to see if Mrs. J hid the Dürer between the picture and the backing. Nothing. I knock the walls but don’t find any hidden spaces, no concealed safe, no secret cubby.

  My next stop is the kitchen and dinette, where I look in cabinets, drawers, behind the refrigerator, behind the oven, the underside of the enamel-topped dinette table and the steel chairs with gray Naugahyde-covered seats. I even unscrew the seats.

  The kitchen and dinette proving a bust, I check the bathroom, even though I’m sure Mrs. J was smart enough not to store something so delicate in such a damp environment, but you never know.

  I’m right; it’s not in the bathroom.

  And it’s not in the linen closet in the hall.

  So the last stop is the bedroom. It’s got to be in the bedroom.

  It’s a pretty room, with afternoon sunlight through windows that face the street. The light falls across the blue and gold Chinese rug, electrifying the colors, and runs across the blue chenille bedspread. The sunlight touches the photograph on the night table, a recent photo of Marcus Stern, his wife, and daughter, the remnants of Hannah Jacobson’s family. There are no photos of Mrs. J’s husband and children because there are no photos to be had. They were left behind in Germany, to burn.

  I shake myself out of this melancholy reverie and start searching the room, first on hands and knees looking under the bed, the night tables, the blue satin slipper chair, the bureau, and lifting the Chinese rug. I stand up, look behind the mirror, then go through the bureau drawers, which makes me feel lousy. Rifling through Mrs. J’s most personal garments, pushing them aside, looking for hidden compartments or secret latches, feels like a violation, a soiling of her dignity. I’m relieved when I’m finished.

  The closet’s the last place to look. There’s nowhere else. It’s got to be there.

  But there’s nothing in the closet but clothes, the simple but elegant dresses Mrs. J favored, shoes neatly arranged on a rack, and some luggage on the shelf. I take down the luggage, three valises in all, and open them. The de
licate scent of a floral sachet drifts from the quilted peach satin lining and into the room, breaking my heart.

  Except for the sachet in the pockets, there’s nothing in the luggage—no false bottoms, no Dürer watercolor.

  I collapse into the slipper chair, annoyed at how I could get it so wrong. The Dürer’s gone, stolen after all, by a thief so sharp they’ve outsmarted me, even outsmarted Mom Sheinbaum.

  Miffed at being so cocksure of myself, the smart-alecky outlaw who thinks I know a good game when I see one, I kick a valise, hard, sending it sliding across the carpet and crashing against the bureau. I immediately feel crummy about it, as if I’ve put my foot in Mrs. J’s hospitality. I get up from the chair and check if I’ve damaged the valise, and that’s when I see it: a corner of the quilted lining knocked loose.

  I’d been looking for false compartments, false bottoms, but never guessed there might be a false lining, so carefully sewn and padded it passed for the genuine article. I carefully pull the rest of the threads away and stop breathing when the lining finally slips down, the folio sliding into the valise.

  When I start breathing again, I also start smiling again, a smile for my restored trust in my instincts, but mostly a smile for Hannah Jacobson, whose intelligence I should never have doubted. She must’ve prepared this valise while I was still out of the country, confident that I’d succeed in bringing back her prize.

  A last pang of doubt tells me to open the folio, check if the Dürer is really there.

  It is, in all its graceful splendor, its scene of grasses waving as if taking a fresh breath.

  It’s nearly three thirty in the afternoon, and I have plenty yet to do, so this isn’t the time to linger over a great piece of art. I close the folio and put the luggage back into the closet.