I arose and watched as she slowly crossed the room, fully aware that everyone in the joint was staring at her, not only because she was approaching the great man’s table, but because she was wearing a flowered chiffon dress cut just below her knees that clung to every perfect bend in the road. As she neared the table, Barbara looked at me with a serene and bemused expression that said, Surprised to see me?
I was not only surprised, I was numb. My legs felt like concrete posts.
“Hello, Miss Stern,” I said in as firm a voice as I could muster.
“Jack.” She held out her hand and I shook it. “Meyer.”
Lansky patted the banquette.
“Sit by me, darling,” he said.
Barbara smiled at me cryptically and sat down beside Lansky. He pecked her on the cheek; she responded by patting his arm, still keeping her eyes on me. If she had kissed Lansky full on the lips, there’s a strong chance I would have broken down and cried, which is something I rarely do in hotel bars.
“When did you get here?” I asked casually, Señor Composure himself.
“Late last night.” Our waiter came trotting up to Barbara Sterns side. One thing you had to say for Lansky, the guy commanded some fabulous service. Speaking fluent Spanish, Barbara ordered herself a local beer and requested some limes on a dish.
“The lime peps up this local beer,” she explained to me.
“You’ve been here before,” I said.
“Oh yes. A couple of times.”
“So you came down last night,” I repeated. I felt like I was speaking to her in code.
“Yes. There’s a flight that gets in around nine.”
“She was smart enough to let me know,” Lansky interjected. “No cabs for this little girl.” He put an arm around her and gave her neck a little squeeze.
“And you, Jack?”
“Just got in a few hours ago.” I sucked on a pistachio, trying to feel my way. “How’s your mother doing, and your sister?”
Barbara shrugged. “About the same. I told Mom I’d be away for a day or two. She was okay about it. She understood.”
“She did.”
“Sure.”
Her beer arrived at the speed of light, and the accompanying slices of lime. The waiter placed another bowl of nuts on the table, this one large enough to feed a family of squirrels for the winter. Lansky happily grabbed another handful.
“I probably shouldn’t be eating these,” he said. “I don’t think they’re so healthy. But I never could lay off them.”
“Oh, Meyer. Enjoy yourself.” Barbara spoke to him like he was her uncle. Lansky smiled at her and I sat sipping my Cuban seltzer, trying to get a fix on their relationship. I had no doubt that they had been lovers at some point—no way Lansky was going to restrain himself from shtupping someone who looked like Barbara Stern—and maybe it was just wishful thinking on my part, but what I saw passing between them now indicated that the heavy breathing was most likely a thing of the past. What remained was just the good-natured affection of a beautiful Cornell undergraduate for a murdering sonofabitch.
Lansky beamed in my direction.
“He’s trying to figure this out, our friend Mr. LeVine. Am I right?”
“Oh, Meyer, don’t play games,” Barbara said. “It gets tedious.”
“‘Tedious,’” he repeated. “The mouth on this kid. The problem is, she’s overeducated. That’s one thing nobody ever accused me of.”
I was starting to tire of all the chitchat, Lansky or no Lansky. I guzzled my aqua, cleared my throat.
“I’m not trying to figure you and Barbara out,” I lied. “Not at the moment. All I want to know is where Toscanini is stashed, what, if anything, you know about it, and why you wanted to talk to me. Not necessarily in that order.” I looked to Barbara. “Am I correct in assuming that your father got involved in this business because of you?”
Barbara looked daggers at me. “And therefore I’m responsible for his death?”
“Watch it,” said Lansky, his eyes turning as lifeless as a pair of ball bearings.
“I didn’t say you were responsible for his death.”
Barbara was no longer listening to me. Her eyes puddled up with tears.
“No, he did not get killed because of me, nor did he get involved in this because of me. He never knew about Meyer and me. But when my mother called me Tuesday night and told me what had happened, my first instinct was to call Meyer. That was the order of events. I called him from Ithaca right after I heard.”
“Which you neglected to tell me.”
“I hardly knew you. Christ. What did you think, the first thing I’m going to say when we’re introduced is, ‘By the way, I used to date Meyer Lansky’?”
Lansky watched all of this with great amusement. “You can’t browbeat this girl, LeVine, believe me.”
“I’m not trying to browbeat anyone,” I told him with a little heat, then turned back to Barbara “So your parents never knew that you and Lansky had been involved.”
“No. And they never will. I mean,” she took a breath, “my mother never will.”
Lansky stroked her hair with the back of his hand, threw me a rueful smile. “She’s ashamed of me.”
Barbara shook her beautiful head. “It’s not that. She just wouldn’t understand.” No kidding. Hilde Stern would be as enthused if Barbara had started dating Goebbels. I wasn’t too keen on it myself. The thought of Barbara Stern’s long slender legs wrapped around Lansky’s naked little body was, to say the least, dispiriting.
“Okay,” I forged ahead. “So you find out about your father and place a call to Havana.” I turned to Lansky. “That was the first you’d heard of it?”
“Of what?”
“The snatch. Not the killing.”
Lansky shook his head. “No.”
“You knew about the snatch.”
“I’d heard rumors to that effect.”
“What effect?”
“I’d heard there were parties who had taken Toscanini and were apparently looking for a major score. I wasn’t sure about the numbers involved, but I understood they were sizable.”
“Three million bucks,” I told Lansky.
He smiled. “Then I understood right.” Now the little gangster snapped his bony fingers, prompting the waiter to practically fly back to our table. “More Cuban seltzer, por favor,” Lansky told him.
“Que?” asked the waiter.
“Aqua mineral,” Lansky repeated. “Por todos.”
The waiter nodded furiously—”Si’, si! Por todos”—and disappeared again.
“This fucking place is starting to get on my nerves,” Lansky grumbled.
“He’s been saying that forever,” Barbara said to me, squeezing Lansky’s arm affectionately.
“All right,” I said. I was losing my patience. “You’d heard about the snatch. Any idea who’s involved?”
Lansky shook his head. “No.”
“You have no idea.”
“You’re talking facts or guesswork?”
“For openers, let’s say guesswork.”
“That’s a waste of time.” Lansky rummaged through the nuts as if looking for a missing diamond. Barbara took a long swig of her beer.
“Then what are we doing here?” I was starting to feel like a participant in the world’s worst scavenger hunt. “You sent me a note, you want to see me. Fine, I’m here. Now, do you want to help me out or just play these little verbal games, because if it’s the second, I’m getting way too old for it.”
Lansky gave me an empty stare, as if I were a stranger who had just stopped by to ask directions.
“I want to help you, and I want to help the girl.” Lansky patted Barbara’s hand and leaned forward. “What happened to her father was a terrible thing—for a civilian to get hit like that, particularly a person of culture and breeding, an artist. The whole thing is so unnecessary.”
“So you’re a bystander here, that’s your role,” I said to Lansky.
> “Basically.”
“‘Basically.’ Meaning if there’s some sort of payoff and Toscanini gets delivered in one piece, you’d like a taste of it.”
“I don’t think that’s what he’s saying,” Barbara interjected.
“No?” I asked.
Lansky shrugged in a rabbinical manner. “I would just want some consideration.”
“That would be up to NBC,” I told him.
Lansky blinked innocently. “I completely understand.”
“Good. So let me ask you, is Toscanini down here or not?”
“He might be,” Lansky said. “I’m not certain.”
“The ransom note was written on Nacional stationery.” I told him.
He scratched his nose. “Doesn’t mean a thing.”
“Someone could just have taken the stationery,” Barbara said.
“I understand that,” I said. “But do you have any reason to believe that he’s either here now or was here?”
“Yes I do. Otherwise I wouldn’t be wasting your time, Jack. I can call you Jack?”
“You can call me Rosemary Clooney; I’m just desperate for information here. What’s your reason for thinking that the Maestro was or still is in Havana?”
The waiter returned with a tray full of the green bottles of aqua mineral. If I drank much more, I might as well sleep in the bathtub tonight.
Lansky waited for the waiter to leave. “I’ve come to believe that my friend Charlie Lucky may have wanted him here, for his safety.”
“Luciano?”
Lansky nodded. “Yeah.”
“When you say Luciano wanted him here for his safety,” I continued, “you’re referring to Toscanini’s safety? Or Lucky’s?”
“Toscanini’s,” said Lansky.
“And you base that on what?” I asked him.
Lansky smiled. “I base it on knowledge, let’s leave it at that. Not facts, okay? I’m not saying I know facts.” The little man leaned forward. “I have some knowledge of possibilities.”
“Okay,” I plowed ahead. “Next question: Is Lucky still around here?”
“In Havana?” Lansky looked surprised. “No. Not for years.”
“He’s in Italy,” Barbara said reflexively, and threw a sort of oops look at Lansky, who just shook his head like a forgiving parent.
“He’s in Italy, yes.”
This made no sense to me. Why the hell would Lucky Luciano be protecting Toscanini—and from whom?
“So if Toscanini is being snatched for his protection,” I said, speaking as quietly as was possible in the increasingly crowded and noisy bar, “I don’t figure the ransom, except to throw people off the scent.”
“That would make sense,” Barbara said. “It sells the kidnapping.”
“He’s missing for a while, right?” said Lansky.
“Since the end of May.”
“It’s September, Jack,” he said helpfully.
“How does NBC explain that?” Barbara asked.
“Poor detective work,” I told them.
Lansky shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think they wanted him back, he’d be back, big fucking company like that. I think they pay up a long time ago.”
“Maybe they don’t want to set a precedent—paying big ransom for kidnapped stars.”
Lansky just shook his head, unconvinced.
“You don’t buy it?” I asked.
“I don’t buy it.”
“You think they want him missing?”
“I think they want him dead,” Lansky said, then arose. “I gotta pee. You two don’t talk behind my back.”
Lansky slid out of the banquette and crossed the room toward the lavatories, which were just beyond the bar. Barbara watched him go, then smiled the demurest of smiles at me.
“I guess you’re a little surprised,” she said.
“Surprised? I’m speechless,” I said. “How the hell—”
“I was never in love with him, Jack. It was just the excitement. It was all kinds of things, actually.”
“Where’d you meet him?”
“First a cigarette.” I shook a Lucky out of a fresh pack and played the gentleman, lighting both of us up.
“I had graduated high school,” she began, taking the lit cigarette. “Thanks.… It was the summer … 1947. Some friends and I went to the Copa to hear Dean Martin sing, one of his first big engagements, I think. We were there maybe ten minutes when this man approached our table, started talking to us, said that a friend of his wanted to meet me. The friend of his turned out to be Meyer. Not sitting ringside or anything. Near the back, that’s his style. He likes to sit by the exits.”
“You knew who he was?”
Barbara shook her head. “He was just a name, I didn’t really know much about him. But he was very polite and very funny and he had a kind of force to him.”
“No kidding.”
“I don’t mean it in that sense. Listen, obviously, I don’t condone what’s he done in his life. But you have to understand, I had grown up in this refugee world where timidity was basically like a code of conduct. To meet a man who didn’t live like that, to meet a man who felt in complete command every second of his life, that was just a revelation. And he treated me very, very well.”
“So you didn’t go to college.”
“No. I told you, remember? Back in New York? I took a couple of years off. My parents didn’t care all that much; they didn’t think a girl necessarily needed a college education anyhow.”
“So what did they think you were doing?”
“They thought I had a job. Which I did, sort of. Meyer got me hired by this printing concern he had an interest in, but the deal was, I could show up or not. When I traveled with Meyer, I would tell my parents the boss needed me to go with him and take dictation. He was almost seventy, the boss, a nice old Polish Jew, so they didn’t give it a thought. My mother would help me pack, in fact.” Barbara smiled. “Although she didn’t much approve of my clothes, I have to admit.”
“So you and Lansky traveled together.”
“Yes. We came down here, we went to Rome once or twice, Miami. We weren’t together all the time, understand; I was still living at home and he’s married, after all.”
“In a fashion.”
She nodded. “In a fashion. He was separated when I met him, then he got remarried, but it didn’t change anything. That’s the world he lives in. People are sort of married, but it’s not in the way that most of us know. He and his associates live in a world of laws, but it’s their laws. It’s not like anarchy. It’s their code and they get married in a certain way. So yes, Meyer was married, but we saw a great deal of each other, and the life he lived and the way he treated me … it certainly opened my eyes.”
“I would think so.”
“But there’s a big downside, of course, because there’s no future in such a relationship, or such a life, really. After two years, I’d had enough; I didn’t want to be possessed by someone, which is what it is with Meyer—you’re essentially owned by him. I wanted to continue my life, go to school. So I told him I wanted out.”
“How’d he take it?”
“He was great about it. Said he wasn’t surprised, it was time for me to go on with my life, I deserved it, he would never stand in the way. Said all the right things.”
“You were what, then, twenty?”
She nodded. “Yeah. But an old twenty. I’d been through a great deal already, remember, in Germany—getting kicked out, the whole deal.” She watched her cigarette smoke rise to the ceiling. “It wasn’t love, Jack; Meyers not capable of love and I certainly could never feel love for him. Genuine affection, yes, but not anything deeper than that. It was just an episode, a totally fascinating episode. Maybe one day I’ll look back on it and have my regrets, but I doubt it. I’m a fatalist.”
“So it was meant to be? You and Lansky?”
“Yes. I think so.” Barbara looked off, drifting into thoughts I would never know, home movies I
would never see—of hotel lobbies and nightclubs and terraces overlooking oceans, of men in fedoras having whispered conversations in sitting rooms, of putting on makeup and overhearing monosyllabic phone calls. Then she smoothed her hair and returned to the present tense, to this clamorous bar in Havana. “Anyhow, when it was over, he told me to remember that he’d always be there for me if I needed something.”
“So when your father got hit, you thought of him.”
“Yes. Even before then. When my uncle got brain-damaged in that car wreck—”
“Otto, from the funeral.”
“Otto from the funeral. Very good.” She nodded at me, flashed that brilliant smile. God, she was a heartbreaker, and the more I listened to her, the more I learned of her history, the hotter I got for her. “After that accident, I called Meyer, because the expenses were just horrific—the hospital, the private nurses. Brutal. He came through for me immediately and never said boo about it, no self-congratulation, none of that crap. And he’s still paying for Otto’s care.”
“Nobody ever asks where the money’s coming from?”
“I told my Aunt Gretl, Otto’s wife, that I had a rich boyfriend who was paying and she shouldn’t tell my mother. That was fine with her—she barely speaks to my mother anyhow.”
“And she loves knowing something your mother doesn’t. Puts her one up.”
“Exactly. She told my mother that Otto’s law firm had established a fund to pay for it.” She stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray the size of a catcher’s mitt. “Families.”
“Yeah.”
Barbara took another sip of her beer and studied my face.
“You know, you’re a good-looking man.”
“Please …”
“I’m serious.”
“I look like fifty thousand other slobs. You see them every day in the subway, chewing Juicy Fruit and reading the Mirror.”
“Stop it.… No, there’s something really … strong there.” She looked right into my eyes and was holding her gaze when Lansky returned from the John. At that moment, Abe Lincoln could have walked over in his stovepipe hat and I wouldn’t have noticed, but Lansky got my attention, clearing his throat loudly behind me.
“I gotta make a couple of calls,” he announced.
“No dinner?” I asked.
Tender Is LeVine: A Jack LeVine Mystery Page 11
