by Hesh Kestin
“You know why I’m here, pretty boy? I’m here because we appear to be partners, and I’m looking out for my interest. Nice suit—Shushan is going to be pissed you’re wearing it, but there’s some doubt he’s going to be back, isn’t there? Don’t answer. I’m sure you’ve been going through this with everyone and his parakeet, so I’ll make it easy for you. Whether Shushan shows up again or not, you’ve got a job to do and I expect you to do it with no whining, no complaints, no fucking Oh-I’m-just-a-sweet-kid-bullshit. This is all about performance, and you have to perform, not least because you are going to be someone’s target whether you cop out or step up to the plate. Uh-uh, not a word. All I get all day is punks of all genders, all professions, all types telling me how hard it is to roll out of bed in the morning and do something without feeling sorry for themselves. You know what Shushan used to say? Life is combat. You didn’t have the advantage of the Marines and Korea and everyone shouting Semper Fi! day and night, but you’ve got the next best thing, which is that if you walk away from this you’re going to be Lord Jim, remember him? He walked away. You can’t walk away. Aside from all the people who are going to see you as a target you’re going to have me and a lot of other people seeing you as a meal ticket. In case you don’t know it that includes Justo here, that lunkhead by the door and his zaftig wife, and a cast of characters you probably won’t ever know exists. Listen: Every month Shushan writes checks to a couple of dozen charities, hospitals for sick kids, cancer victims, schools, plus individual people who need help in one form or another, to say nothing of researchers doing work on everything from schizophrenia to heart disease. Kid, what you’ve inherited is a business, but it’s a business that throws off enough money so that a lot of people benefit. If the wrong kind of people take over, if you allow other people to muscle you out, then you’re spitting in the face of all the good my brother did, and all these people that depend on you are going to be abandoned. So when you feel sorry for yourself and want to split just think for a moment about what you don’t know. People are always making decisions based on what they think they know, but they rarely consider what they don’t know. Am I making myself clear, sweet pea?”
Sweet pea was apparently being given an opportunity to protest, but he couldn’t. Sweet pea was smitten. “You’re saying Shushan was a kind of Robin Hood, for real, and I have to keep that going?”
“Shushan was as much Robin Hood as I suck dick,” she said. “My brother was a tough s.o.b. who discovered he made too much money to spend and so he took care of me and his organization and enough good works so he could feel that what he did was covered by an overlay of charity and beneficence. It made him feel better than your normal garden variety snake-in-the-grass hood who doesn’t see anything in the world except victims and cops. My brother saw there was something else. That doesn’t mean he didn’t like to bang heads or strut around like king of the hill, which he would do anyway, but he discovered he could feel really good about his crummy occupation by putting the money to use for something outside pussy and booze and cars and real estate. Net-net, sunshine, you’ve inherited the whole package.”
“I’m not cut out for this, Terri.”
“Probably not, but you’re not going to feel good about yourself if you walk away from it either, and you might also consider that no one is really going to allow you to do so. It comes to this: Lord Jim or Lord of the Flies. Shushan says you like The Great Gatsby and Huckleberry Finn? Am I right?”
“I didn’t realize you two discussed my taste in literature.”
“I’m not fucking talking about literature, moron. I’m talking about your life. Huckleberry Finn, the whole book is about doing something for someone else, getting a poor Negro slave out of the way of the slavers, and Gatsby, I don’t have to explain that to you. It’s the story of a man who had everything but love, and how love became more important to him than a million shirts. You know why people love Jack Kennedy? Because they feel in their hearts the presidency wasn’t his goal but what he could do with it, that we finally have a president who cares about something outside himself and his close circle. Despite my brother’s nearsighted fucking Neanderthal political opinions the truth is we do have a son-of-a-bitch president, which we will always have because that’s the only way to become president, but he’s a son of a bitch with a mission, which is to validate himself as a human being, probably because his father was a well-known piece of shit. You want to validate yourself as a human being?”
“I never considered it one way or another, Terri.”
She took a long tug at her drink, the kind that would have sent me into a paroxysm of coughing. “Trust me, sweet-face, every day human beings have to make decisions that some people like to call existential, because everything hinges on their making the right choice. But some days are more important than others. Today is one of those days. Nobody can stop you from running out on yourself, but if you stick you’re going to feel a lot better even if it all doesn’t come out the way you’d like.”
I lit a Lucky and hoped that in doing so I would have enough time to consider.
She read my mind, the bitch. “The thing is, my young friend, this is not a decision you can put off.” With that she stood, finished her drink on her feet, and came and sat by me.
The smell of her was overwhelming, at once vaginal and floral, with strong notes of Scotch, smoke and a heady sweet muskiness of breath that made me want to do anything to please her. “What do you want me to do?”
“Take care of business,” she said. Her hand dropped to my knee like a soft promise. Then she squeezed it until it hurt. Like her brother she was small but intense, able to deliver power to a specific point as though all of her were concentrated on the one act. “And don’t forget that Shushan handed me cash every month so I could live way beyond my income. You fail and you let me down. You don’t want to let Terri down, do you?”
“No,” I said, hoping at once that she would not see and at the same time that she would see the rising bulge in my pants. “That’s not what I want.”
23.
Upstairs were a number of things I had missed on first look. For starts, the reproduction of the Georges de la Tour in the bathroom was not a reproduction, or at least not a print. It was an oil, obviously old, its surface cracked, the paint chipped in the lower left-hand corner. I would have removed it from the wall to examine the back of the canvas but it was secured there, unbudgeable, a sign that it had some value at least. If this was a copy, it was an old one. De la Tour had more or less been lost to art history after his heyday in the seventeenth century—he was rediscovered only in 1915—but as if to make up for this in his lifetime he had apparently made a number of copies of this amazing work—de la Tour’s son did as well. The painting glowed. It was alive with reflected light: the virgin—ostensibly Mary but it could have been any child—receiving instruction from an older woman by candle glow, the fire itself an intrinsic component of the young girl’s face. Not only was this the only painting in the top floor—a Jimmy Ernst black-on-black painting hung in the living room below, though I wouldn’t have known what it was but for the fact that I often saw him at Brooklyn College, where he taught—but the de la Tour was all but hidden in a private bathroom in a doubly secluded area of the suite. When I went to piss there it was, facing me as if to tell me something, but all it could tell me was: Am I a fake? I had seen the original, or perhaps just another centuries-old copy, hanging in the Frick Collection down the street—the museum was just around the corner from the Park Avenue urologist’s office where so many little copies of me had been distributed to the barren suburban women who made up his hopeful clientele. Seeing it here offered all the pleasure of a private sin. If anything it was better hung and better lit in Shushan’s toilet than at the Frick, four tiny but intense bulbs focused perfectly on it from the ceiling. If I were any taller I might have blocked the light as I stood before the toilet bowl, and if I stood up really straight I could cover the top of it in shadow. Clearly the
painting was there for Shushan’s pleasure and no one else’s.
Likewise the file cabinets, which were so scrupulously organized and detailed it was difficult to believe Shushan’s business affairs were illegal. From the point of view of the IRS, apparently they weren’t: going back ten years, federal and New York State tax forms all listed Shushan’s business as “security consultancy.” Strictly speaking, this was not debatable. That Shushan provided security for illegal activities—protection would be the word the newspapers preferred—was not in itself illegal. True, bookies were involved in the illegal betting industry, but taking a fee from them to keep gangsters from knocking them over was totally legitimate. It came to me that this is at least one reason Shushan did not even wish to look at his client’s books. Auditing their financial records in order to calculate his cut of their revenues would have involved Shushan in their business and thus complicity in an illegal activity. By taking a flat fee Shushan removed himself from intimacy with or even knowledge of what his clients did. Of course, when it came to the Fulton Fish Market, aside from the regular selling of cheap frozen pollock as expensive fresh swordfish, the market was as much on the up-and-up as any commercial institution. But even here charging his clients a flat fee kept him at arm’s length from the business itself. No one could argue that he was shaking down his clients for a percentage and thus aggressively intruding in their businesses. He was simply paid a flat fee for services rendered, and all his contracts—carbon copies of the contracts were appended to each year’s tax filings, as innocent as could be—could be ended by either party (on sixty days’ notice) at any time. Naturally the market’s wholesalers would be foolish to break off their deal with Shushan, because they’d immediately fall prey to the Tintis, to whose greedy clutches they hardly wished to return. The only variable in these simple agreements was that Shushan’s fees were tied to the Consumer Price Index (“as published in the edition of the Wall Street Journal closest to the day scheduled for price adjustment”), a common business practice: the fish wholesalers and bookies were also charging their clients more as the cost of living rose. No less interesting was what happened to all this money.
Since it had never been earned illegally it did not have to be laundered, and so was invested in what were then considered blue-chip equities, tax-free municipal bonds and, in the main, real estate, this last such a Hebraic compulsion that “Jewish landlord” was not only an American cliché but redundant. From the Jewish point of view, less than two decades after Europe’s Jews lost their property as a precursor to losing their lives, ownership of something immoveable was almost a tactile pleasure. Perhaps Jews went into medicine, law and accounting because no matter where they were driven they could set up anew, but real estate allowed these same professionals to not even think about being driven anywhere. They were not only proud citizens of the United States, but owned a piece of same. Maybe similar desires motivated Shushan.
For all I knew he chose real estate because Justo Ocero favored it for certain tax advantages, or because Shushan loved tall buildings in Manhattan and resorts in Arizona and warehouses in the Bronx and beachfront hotels in Havana. Maybe he was some sort of architect-manqué, a frustrated master-builder who had grown up too poor to get a formal education and now was too rich to need one. As well this would explain the library and the French and Spanish learned out of a half-dozen books and a set of Berlitz teach-yourself long-playing records that I’d found in his library.
Whatever his motivation, Shushan as reader was drawn to authority. Most every section had its guidebooks. In economics were titles like Twelve Great Economic Thinkers and Wampum, Gold and Greenbacks, each a general introduction to the field that—like the university survey courses that are prerequisites for advanced study—opened the door to Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thorstein Veblen and the dense and groundbreaking work of Fernand Braudel. In history was the same pattern, and in political science, philosophy and art as well. Literature seemed to follow no such broad outline, perhaps because the classics of fiction are themselves always on display in bookstores. No matter what today’s bestseller—in 1963 the literary sensation was Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus—names like Dostoyevsky, Stendhal, Shakespeare, Twain, Conrad, Hemingway, Lawrence are virtually imprinted on our unconscious and hardly need to appear on a list of great writers. And they were all here, even such academic standbys as The Canterbury Tales and Beowulf. In poetry the selection was weak, or maybe just idiosyncratic: several collections, the best of which was John Ciardi’s How Does A Poem Mean, a shelf of anthologies, plus collections of Yeats, Frost, and a passel of the kind of reader-friendly poets that most English majors had been excited by in high school: ee cummings, Walt Whitman, Hart Crane. On the other hand there was everything in print by WH Auden and Allen Ginsberg, and a few bilingual editions of Rubén Dario and Pablo Neruda. These were heavily marked in pencil, as though Shushan had decided to teach himself Spanish through its greatest practitioners. The library was fascinating, but I was continually drawn back to the file cabinets.
Not least because my father’s name kept appearing.
24.
In the meticulous folders were employment and payroll records, starting as early as 1954, one year after Shushan had completed his Marine service. A record for Newhouse began showing up in 1957, two years before my father had been cashiered from the NYPD, first as Meyer, then as Mike, which was what he was generally called. At first the sums were small, signifying I guessed part-time work, or maybe small bribes, but regular. Once a month, there it was. Then, after my father was compelled to leave the force, the payments grew. They pretty much matched what dad had been making as a detective. These were entered as salary, with deductions for income tax and social security, and went on until a month after he died, at which time a lump sum appeared: $15,000, marked funeral expenses.
My father’s funeral had not cost him anything, but not because Shushan Cats had paid the bill. As a dues-paying member of the Bhotke Society, dad’s burial, his plot and its perpetual care were taken care of. The fifteen thou I recognized right away. The sum had appeared in my father’s account at the East New York Savings Bank. I hadn’t thought much about it, except to think it might be some sort of error that I should not question, lest the funds disappear as abruptly as they had come to be. All I knew was that it was there. I was a grade-skipping high-school senior, sixteen years old. I had no other family. I would have to be living on my own. The money supported me for three years. In fact, as I read the entry there was still a couple of hundred bucks left.
If Shushan Cats had been to my father’s funeral I had not noticed. Certainly he had not visited while I sat for the week of mourning. Was it to spare me embarrassment that a notorious gangster knew my father, employed him? I didn’t know. And I didn’t care. All I knew is that Shushan Cats was turning out to be some sort of iceberg in my life. I saw the glinting tip of him now, but apparently he had been a large submarinal presence all along. I considered asking Justo, but concealing what I knew would probably serve me better than revealing that I knew it. As Shushan said, “Don’t ever let the Itals know you speak dago, unless there’s a good reason.” If caution made sense there, it made sense here.
My problem now was I really had to speak to the Itals. In whatever language. Maybe Fritzi the mob-mouthpiece could protect me from the district attorney, but that was not the threat that I had to keep in focus. The threat was from the people who were already moving in on Shushan’s clients. They wouldn’t stop with a theatrical bookie in a champagne wig, big black-framed rose-colored glasses, an oatmeal suit and a lisp. They would be coming after me. If I didn’t get to the Itals, I would be a prisoner in a hotel suite with ten thousand books until the money ran out. In the midst of all this I realized I had four term papers due.
25.
Gene del Vecchio took about an hour to arrive. He looked like he had just come from the Brooklyn College campus, all tweeds, a white shirt checked in blue and red tattersall and the kind of fo
ulard bow tie that screamed college professor. It was a cold day in November, and he wore a coat so long it practically swept the floor. His red scarf was almost as generous. When Ira let him in he hugged me to him and said, “How’s the incipient gangster?”
“More incipient than gangster,” I said. “Thanks for coming.”
“From what I understand coming here is the only way to see you.” He tossed a copy of the Daily Mirror on the coffee table. With relief I noted that the editors had been forced to look further afield than the life of Russell Newhouse for a front page.
DOGS SET ON
MARCHERS
HUNDREDS ARRESTED
IN ALABAMA PROTEST
“Yeah,” I said. “I saw it on TV. “
“I’m going down tomorrow.”
“Where?”
“Birmingham,” he said. “Fucking redneck cocksuckers.”
I nearly asked if these were the only cocksuckers he did not approve of, but it would have been unfair.
“You think Kennedy is going to do something about it?”
“This is a guy who didn’t vote for the Civil Rights Act when he was in the Senate,” he said. “I’d invite you to join us—three busloads from Brooklyn College, more from Hunter and CCNY and Queens—but I hear you’re tied up.” He opened the paper to page three.
