He waved his hand as dismissively as if I’d suggested we go folk dancing. “Dinner doesn’t mean anything to me. I got jumpy insides. We’ll meet later.” He looked to Barbara. “Eat with her, she’s better company.”
And just like that, he turned and started walking away. I got out of my chair and followed him across the room.
“What’s the problem?” he asked, without turning around.
“I don’t know where we stand.”
“Stand? I met you, you met me. It’s called a meeting.”
“I understand what it’s called….”
Lansky stopped and faced me. I could see Barbara watching us. She was drinking her beer out of the bottle now.
“Listen,” Lansky said, his eyes narrowed to the size of baby peas. “I understand you want the Maestro back. I want to help you and I don’t want anybody hurt.”
“You have any idea who bumped off her father?”
“No, but obviously I have an interest in finding out, right? I have a history with this person. Sounds to me, from what I heard, like a screwup.”
“Please. Two shots in the head?”
Lansky looked at me like I’d just described the theft of a bag of doughnuts.
“Happens. Human error.” He looked back to our table. “Have a nice dinner.”
We had a nice dinner. A place near the water, La Habanera, nothing fancy. Yellow stucco walls, paper lanterns, some cheerfully rotten local art. The very relaxed patrons included local businessmen and some families out for a long easy dinner. There were no obvious tourists to be seen, except for me. I had polio asado, a salad, some beer, and a couple of cups of Cuban coffee strong enough to race King Kong’s heart.
“This coffee could wake the dead,” I told Barbara.
She looked at me wistfully over her coffee cup. “If only …”
How clever was I, making references to the deceased to a girl whose father had been dead for all of four days. When you lose someone close, you lose a layer of skin; it grows back in time, but there is a period when every allusion to death, no matter how glancing or oblique, causes an immediate and stinging pain.
“Sorry. Blame it on travel fatigue.”
She shook her head. “Don’t start editing yourself.” Barbara looked around the room and took me off the hook. “I love this place,” she said. “Don’t you?”
“It’s very comfy.”
“Comfy, lively, but not crazy. Meyer didn’t like it too well. But he hates most restaurants. Hates to eat. I’m not sure what he lives on.”
“Greed.”
She smiled. “Possibly. He’s a complicated guy; there’s a lot going on that he keeps to himself. His first wife was seemingly quite religious, wanted their son to become a rabbi, and I think she gave him a very hard time about his … career, shall we say. Then apparently she went a little nuts, or maybe a lot nuts; I never got the full story. He’s a very hard man, but I think there’s a huge amount of guilt lurking not far below the surface. He’d have these nightmares and sort of wake up, but not really? He’d be sweating, his eyes would be wide open, and he’d be shouting, but not words, just sounds. I’d have to cradle him back to sleep. In the morning, he’d have zero recollection of it. I’d tell him that he was yelling and perspiring and he’d just laugh it off, or say he must have been dreaming about being a kid in Poland.”
“He grew up in poverty,” I said, “but what else is new? How many Polish Jews grew up in the lap of luxury?”
“But he was seriously poor, at least as he describes it.” Barbara sipped her coffee. “Lived on the Lower East Side in a slum that was like one of those old Jacob Riis photographs. Spent his whole life fighting with anti-Semites, in Poland and then here. You know he met Luciano when he was just a kid? They were both about six or seven, actually. They’ve spent their entire lives together.”
Our waiter brought over two snifters of brandy and pointed to the owner. “Con los complementos de Señor Alvarde.”
Señor Alvarde, gray-haired and elegant, was standing next to the bar, attired in tan slacks and a snow-white guayabera shirt. He bowed and waved at Barbara.
“Muchas gracias,” she told the waiter. “Es muy generoso.” The waiter left and Barbara took a sip of her brandy. “It’s not the greatest, but if we don’t drink it, he’ll be terribly insulted. The Cubans are very big on these gestures.”
“So I’ll drink it,” I told her.
She looked at me with an expression I couldn’t quite read. It was as if she were trying to remember something, but couldn’t quite retrieve it.
“Yes,” she finally said. “Then I’d like to get out of here.”
We went back to the Nacional without exchanging a word—not during the brief, helter-skelter taxi ride, not as we crossed the lobby, not as we got into the elevator. When I asked her what floor she was on, she looked into my eyes with a bemused and patient expression, and only then did I realize I was on a train that had already pulled out of the station, and I lacked both the power and the will to stop it. Barbara followed me down the quiet, carpeted corridor, staying two steps behind me. A waiter pushing a room-service trolley stopped and bowed as we passed; I nodded back to him like a general reviewing his troops. I unlocked the door to 804; as we entered the room, I went to turn the lights on, but Barbara put her hand over mine.
“No,” she said in a midnight whisper, “no lights.” She took the DO NOT DISTURB sign and hung it out in the hall, then locked the door and turned to me, cupping my face in her long smooth hands. “I’m going to shower. You get into bed.”
And then she was gone, into the bathroom, and I heard the shower taps turned on and imagined her taking her clothes off and stepping into the tub, closing the curtain behind her. I thought of that smooth young body standing behind the shower curtain, the water running in rivulets down every sculpted inch of her, and I wondered, as I do at such moments—was it me she was thinking of as she soaped herself up, or was there some other agenda?
It wasn’t the age difference. That didn’t faze me in the slightest; she was no child and her supple mind had already absorbed enough information and pain for a lifetime. When a woman is that beautiful, she learns to make a great many choices early on; the world comes at her like snowflakes in a storm, exhilarating and relentless. Barbara was not yet twenty-two, but she might as well have been forty-two.
But she didn’t look forty-two when she stepped out of the bathroom fifteen minutes later. I was lying beneath the top sheet of the bed, having pulled the blankets down and opened a window to the tropical night air. The bathroom door swung open and the light behind her went out. Barbara was wearing a bath towel and I could see drops of water glinting in her hair as she crossed a narrow shaft of moonlight in the middle of the room. And as she crossed that band of light, at that very theatrical moment, she allowed her towel to drop to the floor.
“Hello,” she whispered.
It was all I could do to keep from just crying out. It was not simply the harmonious beauty of the parts; it was the ease of her revealed body, her delighted acceptance of its perfection, her total lack of self-consciousness. She was just a happy naked girl.
“This is an awfully big bed, isn’t it?” she said, then took one step backward and jumped, landing next to me, face-to-face.
“Good evening,” I said, “and welcome to the Hotel Nacional.” She put her hand over my mouth and giggled. When she removed her hand, she kissed me on the lips very lightly. I kissed her nose, her eyes, inhaled the clean, dense fragrance of her hair.
“You taste good,” she whispered, and then she began to kiss my neck and work her way south and when she got halfway down my body she stopped to survey my throbbing parts with the enthralled gravity of a botanist in a garden. She began to kiss and lick and nibble in earnest. I heard a moan and it was me and then I heard another moan and it was her; when I looked down, she had me in her mouth and was touching herself and her eyes were closed and her head was moving ever so slowly and then my eyes were clo
sed and I was lost in an overrun tropical garden of damp sensations.
I remained that way until the door to the room went flying off its hinges. I looked up but I never saw a thing, just two dark shapes and then the back of my head exploded. And then I remember nothing.
NINE
I thought I heard music, then I didn’t, and it was dark again, and I spiraled away. Time passed, I’ll never know how much, and then I heard it again, that music, except it was sort of woozy and distorted, like someone humming off-key. Though my lids were still shut, I entered a new state of consciousness and I thought I made out shapes somewhere around me; my head was pounding and I felt a rocking motion beneath my body. The humming got more insistent; it sounded almost like groaning, but it had rhythm and force. I tried opening my eyes, but the light flooding my retina made my insides turn like a frightened animal, so I shut my eyes once again. The rocking continued, and so did the humming. Two possibilities presented themselves: I had either been tied to a rocking horse, or I was on a boat. The humming I couldn’t figure.
More time crept by. I endeavored to sit up and was successful on the second try; I pulled myself upright, moving ever so slowly, my eyes still shut. Every bone in my manly body ached and cracked. Once again I tried to open my eyes and this time I managed to keep them open, at least for a couple of seconds. Yes, I was on a boat, in a small cabin on a top deck, lying on some sort of daybed; through a window I could see the ocean and a cloudy day at sea. Thank God for the clouds; full sunshine would have blown my circuits entirely. I turned and found the source of the insistent humming. Across the cabin from me, perched on a sofa and singing along to a musical score, was Arturo Toscanini.
The score Toscanini gripped in his small, smooth hands had WAGNER written across the top and DIE MEISTERSINGER below in Gothic lettering. The Maestro held the score very close to his face, like a mirror, studying the notes with eyes set so deep they were almost like a blind man’s eyes. And as he examined the score, he hummed in a hoarse, nearly tuneless voice—“Dah, dah, dah-dah, dah-dah-dah-dahhhhh.” The notes ascended and descended, music of genius croaked in the accents of a fish peddler. I leaned forward, my head beginning to clear, and the bed creaked loudly. The Maestro stopped his singing and gazed curiously across the room, putting the score down on the sofa beside him.
“Awake?” he said, looking at me with some curiosity. “Alla fine.”
“Yes.”
“Was a noisy sleep.”
“I snored, did I?”
“Ma! For too long! I took a walk, for the air, and to escape your noise, signore.”
“I apologize, Maestro.”
He nodded, an amused smile on his lips. He really was a beauty, this Toscanini, with a baby’s alabaster complexion and the white hair of a biblical prophet. His eyebrows were dark and his nose was slightly bent, but these slight irregularities only made his appearance all the more arresting. The Maestro didn’t appear to be much taller than five-foot-three, but he radiated the power and authority of a head of state. When he looked at you he made eye contact, yet he seemed to be also looking through you, to some other place, and you got the feeling that you didn’t really matter all that much, that he had much bigger fish to fry, that his real intimates and soulmates were Beethoven and Brahms and Verdi.
I tried to stand up, but got instantaneously light-headed and sat right back down. I was somewhat surprised that I hadn’t been restrained, but then again, we were at sea, and whoever had smashed the back of my skull had probably calculated the odds of my jumping from the boat and swimming to Havana to be long indeed.
“Maestro, may I ask how long I have been here?”
Toscanini took a pocket watch from his black jacket. He was wearing a white shirt with a blue silk necktie, formal gray-striped pants, and a pair of black slippers that looked to have cost as much as my car. He looked spic and span, ready to mount a podium and start the music. I didn’t know what he had been through over the past couple of months, but it obviously had not involved any rough treatment. The old man appeared serene and unscathed.
“You were here, signore, since dawn. They brought you out.”
“Brought me out.”
“Sì. On a little …” He looked for the word.
“A skiff? A little boat.”
“Sì. You were lying on a little boat. I was up already, like every day, up when the sun is up. Five o’clock, six o’clock, I am up. I am outside and they are bring you in and you are lying there like a pesce.” He chuckled. “Like a fish.”
“I don’t doubt it. I had gotten a nice whack on the head and probably a few pharmaceuticals as well. So you were here already on the boat?”
Toscanini looked at me blankly, which was when the obvious fact penetrated my addled brain.
“You’ve been on the boat for a long while, am I right? For a couple of months.”
“Yes. Was necessary, sì? But soon it is over. Today, a la mossa, sì? On the move!” He arose. “Time for a walk.”
“The boat usually hasn’t been moving?” I asked.
He made a circular gesture with his right hand.
“Around and around, like carosello …”
“Carousel?”
“Sì.” The old man leaned forward. “You? You are who?”
“Jack LeVine. I’m a private investigator from New York. Excuse me, Maestro, for not introducing myself earlier. I’m a little off my feed.”
“You are detective?”
“Yes.”
“Like Boston Blackie.”
“Something like that.”
He smiled. “Molto bene. Now it gets interesting.” Toscanini arose and clapped his hands. “Molto bene. Time for a walk. Come, Detective, we take a walk!”
“I’m not sure if I can.”
“Maestro is old man, not walk so fast. You come.”
Toscanini walked to the door. I arose, and had a wobbly moment, put my palm flat against the wall.
“I don’t know….”
The old man clapped his hands again.
“You come. Is good for your head.”
There was no turning this guy down. He had been a virtual dictator for his entire adult life; if you contradicted him, he didn’t even hear it. Toscanini lingered in the doorway for a moment, stroked his mustache, then stepped outside and took a deep breath.
“Bella! Aria del mare!”
I made my way outside on legs of sand. It was a hot, gray morning, with a steady breeze coming out of the west at about ten or fifteen miles an hour. Or knots, whatever the hell they were. I couldn’t grasp the concept no matter how often it was explained to me, which, in truth, wasn’t all that often. “We don’t need to know that,” my father used to say, to explain his avoidance of any technical knowledge that didn’t involve the manufacture of hats. Over the years I had come around to his point of view—I didn’t need to know about knots. It was breezy, that was enough.
The vessel on whose top deck Toscanini and I were standing was a substantial and costly pleasure boat, about a hundred and twenty feet in length, freshly painted white with three decks and teak fittings everywhere. A nearby life preserver indicated that the name of the boat was Four Aces and that its registry was Key Biscayne.
Toscanini placed both his hands on the railing and looked out over the ocean. In profile, his head looked like it had been carved out of marble.
“Bella, eh, Detective?”
“Bella,” I replied.
“Parle Italiano?” he asked hopefully.
“Just enough to get through a menu,” I told him. “How’s your Yiddish?”
Maestro beamed. “Not bad. Is like Gennano, yes? But more messy.” He took a handkerchief from his pocket and delicately mopped his forehead. “Still they are after me, five years after war.”
“Who, the Germans?”
“No. Fascisti.”
“The fascists are after you? Is that what you’re saying?”
Toscanini looked at me like I was a bassoonist who had just pl
ayed a wrong note.
“You are detective? Why you think I am on boat? For sightsee?”
My mind went slightly blank, as if I had fallen asleep for a half second. Whatever drugs they had slipped me had obviously retained a hefty residual kick. I haltingly attempted to process what the old man had just told me.
“I wasn’t sure what you were doing out here, Maestro…. Staying clear of the fascists, is that it? Personal threats were made?”
Toscanini looked at me, then returned his gaze to the ocean.
“I refuse to play fascist anthem in La Scala for years; then, 1931, there is fascisti riot, screaming, try beat me to pieces, so I leave Italia, come to New York, tell the world I will not conduct in homeland until fascisti are gone. I stay to my word. Not until war is over and no Mussolini.” He loudly smacked his right fist into the palm of his left hand. I looked around the deck—there was nobody else in sight, and for one lost and druggy moment I thought perhaps the old man and I had been cut adrift.
“So you received an actual threat?”
“Always threat—letter, cartolina…. Then in spring, big threat, molto serio. FBI come.”
“The FBI got involved?” I took a deep breath and hoped to get some oxygen headed in the general direction of my brain.
“During tour. You hear about tour?”
“Yes. On the train across America. A great triumph.”
The old man clapped his hands in great, almost childlike satisfaction. “Toscanini train! All over. Bravo everywhere! Do Beethoven Eroica, Schubert Incompleto, Brahms, Dvorak, Strauss. In South of America … Richmond is called …?”
“Richmond, Virginia?”
“Sì. There we play ‘Dixie’ song, people are jumping from seats! Everywhere we go, sold out. People on streets looking for tickets, money in their fists! Everybody happy, even me.” He allowed himself a small smile. “And, Signore Detective, I am not so happy all the time. Music is big suffering for me. I love too much.”
“That’s the way I’ve always felt about baseball.”
The old man shook his head. “Baseball I no like. Is morto, boring. Wrestling I like.” He raised his small hands and made a gripping, choking gesture. “This Rocca, is Italiano—he kill people!” He laughed happily. “Watch the television, is miracolo. Every night, wrestling, pugliato….” He assumed a boxer’s stance.
Tender Is LeVine: A Jack LeVine Mystery Page 12
