by Linda Barnes
I heard a sharp intake of breath, a long hollow pause, and then the chuckle again. This time it grew into a laugh.
“What is it you want, señorita?” he said. “Much as I might enjoy trading these insults, I cannot stay on the line.”
“The connection isn’t very good.”
“I can hear you.”
“Do you want her? With you?”
“No. She would be no good to me here. She would be someone my enemies could use against me. It would be dangerous for her. All I want is to know about her. To help her, if I can. I have money to send, for her education. Enough for anything she wants.”
“You should talk to her mother.”
“If I send money, it will be for the child alone.”
“You could send it to me,” I said into a long echoing pause.
“I hear the beginning of a bargain.”
“You’re a businessman.”
“I can smell a deal,” he said.
“Listen. I need to know something about your business. Or rather, a related business, and I can’t find it out any other way. A small counterfeit drug company called Cee Co.”
“Counterfeiters of regular medicines? That’s a nasty business.”
Nasty. Coming from someone like Carlos Roldán Gonzales. Nasty.
“Our two worlds don’t often intersect,” he said.
“My world doesn’t intersect at all.”
“Understand this, señorita. What I sell, people want to buy. I make no pretense about what I sell. I am not a thief or a murderer.”
“I make no accusations,” I said flatly. “I made a request. I asked a favor.”
The silence stretched. I swallowed, remembered to breathe.
“I might be able to find out something,” he said reluctantly. “But these are dirty people.”
“I need a wholesaler of a fake chemotherapy drug called Cephamycin—a name, a place to start.”
“Do you know in what country this person operates?”
“The drug enters Karachi. In Pakistan. That’s all I know.”
“Is this important to the girl, to Paolina?” It was the first time I’d heard him speak her name. He hesitated before he said it.
“If I get an answer I’ll stay employed, so I’ll be able to look after her a little.”
He said, “I must go now.”
“How will you—”
“The man from Miami will contact you.”
“If I get no information, there’ll be no money conduit to Paolina. Not through me.”
“Will it trouble you? The origins of this money?”
“I’ll have to think about it,” I said. “It would bother me to tell Paolina she can’t go to college.”
“You have been saving money for her. This I know about you.”
“Yes.”
“But not enough.”
“I’m working on it. She might not need your money.”
“I would like to give it to her. It surprises me that I would.”
“Why?”
“I’m a man of causes. I thought I would always only give my money to causes.”
“Maybe you should keep on doing that.”
“Why?”
“I like Paolina the way she is. I don’t know how you bring up an heiress.”
“Not as I was brought up, señorita.” Across thousands of miles I heard a deep sigh. “That is all I can tell you.”
The line went dead.
Señor Carlos Roldán Gonzales had hung up first.
45
“Ma nish-ta-nah ha-lai-lah ha-zeh mi-kol ha-lay-los?”
“Why is this night different from all other nights?”
At their best, my seders bear little resemblance even to my mother’s radical gatherings, little resemblance to most seders at all. Haphazard is the word I’d use to describe them, and true to form, this year I was celebrating belatedly, having missed the traditional first-night and second-night observances. A small group assembled at my house on the eighth and final night, to eat, sing, and drink. I rarely miss the holiday altogether.
We each have our appointed tasks. Gloria makes potato kugel, a kind of enormous rectangular pancake, because she has a knack for greasy and fattening dishes. When she brings along one or more of her huge brothers, she makes multiple kugels. Roz buys enormous jars of gefilte fish at the supermarket, and white horseradish sharp enough to make your eyes water. She also brings men. Lemon’s a regular.
This year, to my surprise and chagrin, Roz had invited the therapist-almost-next-door, Keith Donovan, evidently her latest conquest. Donovan’s eyes met mine more than once during the evening, and I’m pleased to report that, on each occasion, he was the one who glanced away.
Ah, well, I thought philosophically, she’s more his age. And he could continue his study of women comfortable with violence, even branch off into the behavior of women who wear strange Tshirts and shave their heads. Roz’s shirt of the evening was hot pink and read: WILL WORK FOR SEX.
I make the chicken soup. From scratch. Its slow simmering constitutes my major religious observance of the year. I have no recipe. No matter what quantity I make, there always seems to be enough. No matzoh balls ever remain in the pot. Sometimes I can almost feel my grandmother’s hand guiding me as I add water, salt, and dill, debate the merit of a parsnip over a sweet potato.
I never met my grandmother, my mother’s mother, the dispenser of Yiddish sayings.
Fish, kugel, soup, that’s it. The entire menu. Chopped liver is traditional, but no one at my seders has a taste for liver except the cat, and T.C. shares his liver ’n’ onions with no one.
At my mother’s seders, fish, soup, matzoh balls, and kugel were all appetizers. The entreés—dried-out soup chicken, overcooked beef—were so anticlimactic no one ever ate them. So I forget about them. If anybody complains of hunger, we go to Herrell’s for ice cream.
I skipped seders for years after my aunt Bea died, started them up hesitantly, almost secretively. I’m often the only Jew present.
Sam Gianelli brings good Italian wine. Mooney came once. His mother, who hates me, told him attending a seder was an occasion of sin.
Paolina attends. So do Marta and the boys. It’s a time for families to be together.
I hadn’t told Paolina anything about the phone call. I hadn’t mentioned it to Marta either. Carlos Roldán Gonzales had come through with a single name and an address. I was off the hook with the WHO and the FDA, and Mooney now regarded me as a probable member of the underworld.
I’d have to deal with Roldán Gonzales’s largesse, his guilt money, in some way. Some way that would satisfy the tax man. That would satisfy me.
Charities, maybe—with Paolina the major beneficiary.
Marta’s smallest boy squirmed and wiggled when it came time for the youngest participant to ask the four questions, the set piece around which the Passover ritual revolves. Eventually Paolina read them, speaking hesitantly in her clear sweet voice.
“‘Why is this night different from all other nights?’” she began.
My Haggadah, the official rendition of the Passover story, gets pared down every year until it’s more a distillation than a discussion. “Because on this night we celebrate the going forth of the Hebrew people. Because we were slaves and now we are free.”
We take turns reading, in English, not Hebrew. Marta refuses to take part, embarrassed by her illiteracy. Sam reads in a rich deep baritone that reminds me oddly of Roldán Gonzales’s voice.
Two days earlier, I’d gone to visit Emily Woodrow. In the waiting room, I’d met up with her husband, who’d beckoned me closer with a stiff and imperious gesture.
“I’m just leaving. Back to the office. I’ve been here for hours,” he said. “She hardly talks.”
I said nothing. I didn’t know what he wanted to hear.
“I’m grateful to you,” he muttered. “The police have mentioned your role.”
Kind of them, I thought.
He went o
n. “What I’d—excuse me. My wife, have you told her about me?”
“I don’t think she needs any additional burdens right now, Mr. Woodrow.”
“I intend to stick by her through this, you know,” he said.
How does he see himself? I wondered. What does he glimpse when he looks in the shaving mirror each morning? A hero forswearing his true love for an invalid spouse? A martyr?
“Well,” he said lamely, glancing at his gold Rolex, “I have to go now.”
“Are you planning legal action?” The words came out of my mouth. I hadn’t planned to ask.
“Yes,” he said. “I am. You may be called to testify.”
“If your wife asks me to, I will.”
I watched him as he waited impatiently for the elevator, wondering uncharitably if he’d come back to Emily for the imagined profits of the lawsuit.
I knocked on her door. No one answered. I entered slowly, in case she was asleep. The television in her private room was on, but she stared out the window at the parking lot below. Her hair was neatly parted and combed. The dark roots showed.
It seemed impossible that we’d met once, just once while she was conscious. I’d seen her through her husband’s eyes, her therapist’s eyes. I’d seen her through her photographs.
Her face looked puffy and swollen, her eyes bewildered. On the television screen Fred Astaire danced with Ginger Rogers, spinning her in widening circles.
She was fine, Emily murmured. Just fine. Was there ice water? Oh, yes, there was. How nice. Ice water.
A nurse described her as disoriented. The doctors weren’t sure what she remembered, what she would remember.
She remembered that her daughter was dead.
At the seder table, I thumbed through my Haggadah. It’s more than a story of slavery and freedom. It’s a tale of God’s wrath. There are dreadful events. Plagues.
I remember the plagues from my childhood seders as nothing more than a game. Stick your finger into your wine cup and splash a drop of sticky redness on the edge of your plate, one drop for each plague. Chant the unfamiliar, meaningless words:
Daam. Tz’far-day-a. Keeneem. O-rov. Dever. Sh’cheen. Ba-rad. Ar-beh. Cho-shech. Ma-kat B’cho-rot.
Don’t suck the wine off your fingertip, Carlotta, my mother would say.
Why, Mama?
It’s bad luck to taste a plague.
Ma-kat B’cho-rot. I know what it means now. The killing of the firstborn.
I know that killing is not the Passover message. I know we spill the wine to show that we cannot rejoice in full measure when our enemies have been so harshly treated.
But a single drop of wine for the killing of the firstborn? I turn the page quickly. My mouth will not shape the words: Ma-kat B’cho-rot.
I remember Emily, what she said to me, glancing up suddenly. I’m not sure she recognized me or knew who I was.
“It’s just—I don’t know. I think I’m dying.” Her voice was still rough, her tone flat, unexpressive.
“That’s not what I heard. The doctors say you’re going home soon,” I said.
She murmured on. I had to bend low to hear her words. “No. It’s not—it’s that I don’t know how to keep going. I kept on all this time, because I thought I’d find out what happened and then I’d—I don’t know—that it would change things. That if I found out how she died, I’d see things differently. That if someone had to pay for her death, if someone else had to die even, it would make it easier.”
“But it isn’t?”
“It doesn’t make anything different. It doesn’t make anything easier. They gave me drugs—Renzel, I think I remember, he gave them to me—and there are things I forget. He made me forget. I’d hallucinate. I thought she was alive. He should have wiped my memory clean. I remember the wrong things. I forget the wrong things. He should have killed me and let that other woman live. She was young, you know. Tina. A beautiful woman. Young. She could have had children.”
“You can still have a life, Mrs. Woodrow.”
“It’s like you read about people who’ve lost limbs, an arm or a leg, and they still feel pain in them.”
“Phantom pain,” I said.
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers pirouetted and bowed.
“Yes,” she said. “I have a phantom daughter.”
On this night that is different from all other nights, I wish I could tell the story of the coming out from Egypt to Emily Woodrow, tell it the only way I can understand it.
“It’s April, Mrs. Woodrow … Emily,” I would say. “I don’t know if you’re a religious woman. I’m not. But I was raised a Jew, and April is when Jews celebrate the Passover. It was always a hard holiday for me as a kid, and it hasn’t gotten easier. Do you know the story?
“I’m going to explain this badly,” I’d say. “I’m no rabbi. But this is the part that always gets to me. God punishes the Egyptians for enslaving the Israelites, and not obeying the word of God. There are ten punishments, ten plagues: blood, frogs, gnats, flies, cattle disease, boils, hail, locusts, darkness—and the last plague is the slaying of the firstborn.”
“God does that?” she might ask.
“The God of my fathers,” I’d admit. “But first this God tells all the Hebrews to put a mark on their front doors—lamb’s blood—so the Angel of Death will pass over their houses. Passover.”
I see her in my mind’s eye, turning her face to the wall.
“I think about it,” I would say, “especially in April. And I think sometimes that if God had told the mothers, it might have turned out differently. They might have acted the way you did. Because you did it, Emily. You defeated the Angel of Death. You marked the doors with the blood of the lamb. Strangers’ doors, the doors of Egyptians and Nigerians and Pakistanis. You made the Angel of Death pass over their houses. You saved their children, the children of strangers.”
“It doesn’t help,” she would say faintly.
“Maybe someday it will.”
“Carlotta,” Paolina said. “You’re not listening.”
“Sorry.”
“Can I have wine? Please? A little?”
“If your mother says okay, you can taste the wine. Taste.”
Marta, her arthritis under temporary medical control, smiled broadly and poured a thimbleful of Barolo into a stemmed glass. I stared at my little sister, a girl in search of a father, and saw Emily Woodrow, a mother in search of a daughter.
“Carlotta?” Sam said. “More wine?”
“Yeah,” I answered, my voice sounding too loud in my ears. “Is it the fourth cup yet?”
“Way past the fourth.”
“Good.”
When I heard the rumbling outside, I thought it was distant thunder. It grew louder, gave a curious squeak. At the first crash, I was on my feet.
What with all the shouts and questions, the delay while I found my keys, I got outside just in time to see a car’s taillights disappear around the corner.
I’d run straight down to the sidewalk, over the grass. I almost tripped over them heading up the walk.
“What?” Sam called to me from the stoop.
It took me a while to answer. I was laughing.
“What is it?”
“The trash cans, Sam,” I said. “They came home.”
Turn the page to continue reading from the Carlotta Carlyle Mysteries
ONE
Drey kenen haltn a sod as tsvey zaynen meysim, my grandmother used to say. Translated from the Yiddish: “Three can keep a secret if two of them are corpses.” I’m tempted to print it on my business cards.
Every going concern needs a catchy slogan.
The catch here is “going concern.” I’m a private investigator. If people kept their secrets to themselves, I’d be out of a job.
If I had a secret, the Green & White Cab Company is definitely not the place I’d choose to dump it. Too many shell-like ears, too many clackety-clack tongues. One thing about cabbies, they talk. Especially after working the gra
veyard shift.
It’s something about night driving; it revs, wires, gives me a rush. By morning I have tales to tell, of weird traffic and wacko fares.
Bars are locked tight at 7 A.M., so I wind up at G&W with the rest of the graveyard jocks, swilling coffee, listening to bad jokes, bitching about meager tips. All of us on a talking-jag high. Maybe a survival high.
It’s a fact: More cabbies than cops get killed in the line of duty.
When I first started driving for G&W, working my way through college, Gloria, dispatcher and co-owner, described her drivers as the Geezers and the Wheezers. To put it bluntly, they were old, the last of the Irish-American career cabbies and proud of it. Held no truck with these new immigrants who could hardly speak the mother tongue, God love ’em.
Four Geezers had a poker game going in a dark corner, all the better to cheat you in, my dear.
“Make any dough?” Fred Fergus called in a quavery tenor. “Glad to take it off ya, darlin’.”
“You can deal your dirty seconds to somebody else,” I said with a grin. Only one of the bunch still cabbed. The others seemed to have taken up residence, smoking and choking, enjoying the clubhouse ambiance.
A guy I knew only as Bear, a diminutive soul with an outsize nickname, was giggling and whispering at a pimply youth, outlining obscene curves with both hands. I’d heard his routine before: Sports and tits, sports and tits, sports and tits. Endless variations on a theme.
Beneath a bare lightbulb, a skinny, underemployed Ph.D. named Jerome Fleckman was earnestly discussing free-market economics and the Marxist social dialectic with “Not My Fault” Ralph. Ralph, in tummy-bulging T-shirt and tight pants, had a miles-away expression on his face. Jerry might as well have been chatting with his refrigerator.
“Looking for Sam?” he asked as soon as he saw me.
Green & White’s other proprietor, Sam Gianelli, is also my on-again, off-again lover. In many ways he marks a turning point in my life. If he hadn’t dumped me to marry “a suitable girl,” who knows? I might never have married Cal on the rebound, never have become a cop. I might be a Mafia wife, instead of a divorcee currently sleeping with her first flame, a man as divorced as a Catholic can get, short of annulment.
