The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats

by Hesh Kestin

  “What are they so Chinga sad about?” Justo asked no one.

  “They lost a hero.”

  “But he was a shit.”

  “They don’t know that,” I said. “It’s all image. We know only what we think we know.”

  “Chinga,” Justo said. “I hope Shushan ain’t dead.”

  A moment of silence while the Crystals rounded on. “Me too,” I said, but for the first time wondered if I meant it. Uncertainty, doubt, not knowing what I knew or didn’t—I had been living with this for a week.

  But by the time we pulled up to the restaurant with the chickens and geese and who knows what other creatures hanging in the steamy window like crimson mummies, I realized that it didn’t matter. Shushan Cats could be sitting at a table inside waiting for me, smiling, laughing, taking everything back, and I would still never know certainty again. One way or the other, I had busted out of my cocoon. I was in the world. Nothing would be as it was. I was coming to like it.

  The three countermen greeted me with raised meat-cleavers, grinning over uniformly crooked brown teeth; it was clear I had replaced Shushan in their eyes. Yet if they had even noticed me before it was fleeting, just another face in Shushan’s entourage—did everyone in New York now know who I was, and how did they know when I was just finding out?

  Except for one large table in the rear hidden by a screen, where I could just about make out a small party sitting at a large round table, the restaurant was empty. Four waiters stood like a frieze at the rear wall, napkins on their sleeves, smiling in welcome beneath an enormous Chinese poster celebrating a hydroelectric dam. It was eight-thirty on a Saturday night. Why was the restaurant empty? Were all lovers of Hunan cuisine in mourning for Shushan Cats?

  Then Jimmy Wing came up, thin and durable as only an ascetic Chinese can be in a Carnaby Street suit, and ushered me to the table behind the screen, where Royce and the brothers were already settled down with an open bottle of Johnnie Walker Black, with them Jimmy’s mute companion, Tommy, and an older Chinese who sat almost motionless, as though waiting for food to be brought to his lips.

  “We took over the place for the evening,” Jimmy said, winking. “Otherwise too noisy.”

  39.

  It was time to repay a debt, of course, which is why I had brought these two groups together, the yellow and the black, so they would get the bad news at the same time, lest they convince themselves—gangsters are no less paranoid than anyone else—that the other was receiving the long end of the stick. Immediately Jimmy Wing presented me in what I assumed to be Mandarin to the elderly gentlemen, who was introduced as Mr. Sue. He may have been one of the Chinese at the funeral, or not.

  “Mr. Sue is my godfather,” Jimmy said.

  “You mean...”

  “No, I mean my godfather. As in godfather, not...”

  “Not godfather,” I said.

  “Yeah. Godfather, not godfather.” Jimmy released a sidelong smile. “But, as it happens, Mr. Sue is also not without a certain status in the Chinese community.”

  “I understand.” I turned to Mr. Sue. “I’m honored to be in your presence, father.” I seem to have been using that word all day. But this father was no priest. Not by accident do priests dress in black and white. Mr. Sue’s habit was a continuum, with no absolutes. His hair was a cloud of silvery wisps, his lips thin and dry under a salt-and-pepper mustache that gave him a slightly Latin American look, and his suit, shirt and tie were in various shades of grey, so that his pale face looked like it had been mounted on a granite plinth. His eyeglasses were silver, the lenses tinted with a touch of lead.

  Jimmy translated. “Son Wing—that would be me—has explained your situation, which is very difficult. In a few words, let me say that I and my associates will be pleased to see you in Chinatown, and to offer any assistance necessary should you require it. Or even wish for it. An old man like me can not last forever. I live in the hope the people whom I represent and your people will continue to share a common interest. Especially in these times, when nothing is certain even about what is certain, friendship is to be cherished.” After the translation—for all I know Mr. Sue had expressed his opinion about the tripe-in-duck’s-web soup—the gentleman gave his hand to the nonsyllabic Tommy, who pulled him slowly to his feet and walked him out the door, possibly to a waiting sedan chair.

  “More food for us,” Jimmy said.

  “You finished kissing up?” Royce said, apparently unhappy to be left in the back of the bus. “We here to eat and talk, not to see no fucking Chinese movie.”

  The food began to arrive, coming in stages, unordered, a series of gentle waves washing up intense Hunanese tastes, long smoking and simmering having electrified the flavors, all of them in calibrated degree and in bizarre combination sour, sweet, salty, bitter and hot—this at a time when Chinese cuisine even in New York was mostly chop suey. If last week’s dinner was superb, this evening’s was a feast of rolling flavors, one uncovering the next. The talk was less subtle. Royce had an agenda, and he was as candid about it as the Hunanese were in naming their signature dish chou dofu, which translates to “stinking tofu.”

  “I’d love to help you, man,” I said. “But what you’re asking for is not mine to share.”

  “Mr. Shushan ain’t returning to the land of the living no time soon,” Royce said. “You the heir.”

  “Apparent. We don’t even know if Shushan is... wherever. But I can make it easy for you, gentlemen. Say Shushan is alive. He could be, right?”

  “Then where he be?”

  “For the sake of argument say he is.”

  “For the sake of argument,” Royce said with his mouth turned so far down his lips could have been a mustache.

  “If so,” I said, “then giving up any of his territory, even the small bit you ask for, is not mine to do. I can’t hand over what isn’t mine.”

  “Assuming he alive.”

  “Okay, now—once again for the sake of argument—let’s assume Mr. Shushan Cats is no longer among the living. Let’s just speculate.”

  “Then you would be able to help us out, help an ally out,” Royce said. “I mean, you don’t help your friends, who you help? All we talking about is six blocks in Harlem. It’s rightly ours. Power to the people and all that. We don’t come into where white people live. You got to let us have what’s ours. Specially if Mr. Cats he dead.”

  I thought: No, dummy, it’s Mistah Kurtz—he dead. But there was no sense saying it. Shushan was probably the only gangster in New York who had ever been in a library, much less owned one. “Eloquently spoken, Royce. But assuming Mr. Cats is dead, then responsibility for these six blocks—fourteen actually, but who’s counting?—would fall to me. They’d be mine.”

  “Right on.”

  “And I’d be a fool to give them up.”

  The ensuing silence could be pierced with a chopstick.

  “You saying you going to give our Chinee friend what he want but because we just a lot of uptown Negroes we in line for turd steak with pee gravy?”

  I could feel Jimmy Wing’s narrow eyes on me. “When did I say I was parting with territory, either to benefit you or Jimmy or anyone else?”

  “Everybody expect that, as a gesture,” Royce said.

  I couldn’t help but laugh. “Doesn’t it seem to you a gesture is just that? I don’t mind making a gesture, Royce, but the nature of a gesture is that it isn’t corporal”—I saw the doubt in his eyes—“that it isn’t something you can take to a bank or hide under a mattress. It’s a display. It’s like a mother’s caress. It doesn’t mean she wants to fuck you. It means that you’re dear to her.”

  “Why you on about mothers?” He looked to the three brothers for affirmation, and got it in three dull nods. “Is you going to share the wealth with us Negroes or just with this greaseball chink here.”

  The greaseball chink did not so much as lower an eyelid.

  “Royce, my man,” I said. “Jimmy likes that about as much as you like being called
nigger.”

  “I don’t give a whore’s pussy what he like.” If it wasn’t real anger it was a good imitation.

  Out of the corner of my eye I could see Ira, seated by the door, tensing. A big man like that, he moves in a room it’s felt. Next to me Justo silently sucked his way through a pile of soft-shell crabs with honey-walnut sauce. I allowed myself a sigh. “Tell me, Royce. You and the brothers, would you talk this way to Shushan Cats?”

  He didn’t like where this was going. “If necessary.”

  “But did you ever?”

  “You not Mr. Shushan.”

  “Fucking right I’m not, and fucking lucky for you,” I said as quietly and slowly as I could. “Shushan would have you belly up on the table in the time it takes to whistle the first bars of 'Take These Chains From My Heart And Set Me Free.' You know that?”

  “You ain’t Mr. Shushan.”

  “No, I’m more generous. Here’s what’s not going to happen. In return for doing me a favor yesterday in Little Italy I’m not going to move into your operation in Harlem. I’m going to let you continue. I’m also not going to be more angry than necessary regarding your little display of greed here. What you did for me yesterday, and what Jimmy here did, and what the members of a certain Jewish society you never heard of did, those are in the way of favors that friends do for friends. In case you don’t know it, Royce, friends don’t charge their friends for favors, because the moment they do they cease being friends and all you have is a business relationship. You know how things are in business. They’re not as gentle as they could be. In the words of Auro Sfangiullo, what we would have is disorganized crime. Lucky for me it’s still organized enough so that I could have sixty of Auro’s best goombahs in front of the Apollo Theater in an hour. How much grass you going to sell under those conditions? How many women are going to be on the street? I’ll fucking collapse every business you have. Pass the noodles.”

  It is amazing how much noise a group of men can make simply eating. The verbal silence was subsumed in a symphony of slurping, swallowing, chewing and bumping into things reaching across the table. Beer was poured, bottles clinking on glasses. The only words we heard were Chinese: Jimmy Wing ordering the waiters to bring more.

  “You a mean mo-fucker,” Royce said finally.

  I smiled. “It’s for your own good. When you need a favor you know where to turn. Believe me, you want Shushan Cats for a friend.”

  “Shushan? Man, he—”

  “Royce, he could walk in the door any minute.”

  “You sure of that?”

  “Yes,” I lied. “Absolutely.”

  “How you know?”

  “Think about it, you big buffalo. Day after tomorrow he’s supposed to show up in court. If he doesn’t show the district attorney himself is on record saying the defendant is buried somewhere in the pine barrens of New Jersey, or dumped out at sea off Montauk. In ten minutes the judge is going to dismiss the charges.”

  “What happen he do come back?”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea, Royce. They may have to start the whole process again, or maybe they’ll just pretend it never happened. I don’t know. I do know that no one even looking like Mr. Shushan Cats is going to be in that courtroom on Monday.”

  “That be cool.”

  “You know what else be cool?”

  “What that?”

  I signalled Justo, who wiped the anise sauce on his hands on a linen napkin and reached delicately into his shirt pocket, carefully avoiding contact with the lapel of his silk suit. He gave a check to Royce, who unfolded it.

  “This be twenty-five gees.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Intense green, my man.”

  It certainly was. In 1963 twenty-five thousand was roughly equivalent to a quarter million today.

  “For a good cause.”

  “But this much? Why you don’t just give it to the man youself?”

  I smiled as I thought Shushan might, a broad tooth-baring grin. Probably I failed. Shushan had large teeth, several of his molars capped with gold, giving his laughter added sparkle. “Because I want you to give it to him. I want it to come from you.”

  The brothers looked at one another, waiting for more. Finally Royce let it out. “What the catch, man?”

  “The catch is I want you guys to take part in this,” I said. “I want you to be there when those redneck assholes try to bust up some little piccaninny trying to go to the wrong school in Selma, Alabama or people trying to register to vote in Philadelphia, Missisissippi, which activity you probably don’t bother with up here—which is okay, because the right to vote also means the right not to, except that you probably voted for that schmuck Kennedy—or trying to get a tuna on toast at any drug store below the Mason-Dixon Line. I want you and the brothers to be down there, because with guys like you down there the heads going to be busted won’t just be nappy ones.”

  “I don’t get it, Mr. Russell.”

  “You just got it. Now give it forward. In person.”

  “How I going to find Dr. Martin Luther King?” he asked.

  It made me laugh. “I think his current address is the Birmingham city jail.”

  On the way out Jimmy Wing took my arm and whispered, “You know, Mr. Newhouse, the last thing on my mind would have been to ask anything for our help yesterday.”

  The man fibbed well. “Of course,” I said.

  “Only if you could help us with Mr. Sfangiullo...”

  “Of course.”

  “There are issues. Sometimes Chinatown and Little Italy, they encroach. You know, issues of territory, accommodation. Good relations.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Mr. Sue, he knew your dad.”

  Did everyone know my father but me? “How so?”

  “Mr. Sue has long been a major figure in Chinatown.”

  “So you said.”

  “In a case of mistaken identity—you know all Chinese look alike, right?—Mr. Sue was arrested in a minor matter having to do with gambling.”

  “How minor?”

  “Major.”

  “Where does my father come in?”

  “Detective Newhouse, he sprung him.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Mr. Cats asked him to see what he could do.”

  Idly I wondered what else my father had done for Shushan in the years before he was kicked off the force. “And Mr. Sue remembers?”

  “Mr. Sue forgets nothing. Not to the bad, not to the good. And he remembers the sons of those who were kind to him.”

  “He seems like a fine man.”

  “In his time he was the most feared man in Chinatown,” Jimmy said. “Now he is among the most respected. Maybe next year he will graduate to most loved.”

  I clasped Jimmy’s hand as we stepped outside. From within I could see Royce and the brothers still socking it away. “Which I take it is your goal as well?”

  “A long life opens the door to possibility.”

  Inside the Cadillac Ira started the engine. Justo was already in the middle seat, the wide red door of the boat open in invitation. I removed the twenty still clipped by the wiper blade to the windshield. A night in November, it had grown cold. We put the top down, turned on the heat.

  “Whatever you want on the radio, Ira,” I said.

  He smiled under his thin mustache and leaned forward to turn it on. It took a moment to warm up.

  “¡El presidente esta muerto. Viva el presidente!”

  As with the radio, a few seconds would pass before I realized Justo was not talking about Lyndon Baines Johnson. With the sound of Ned Miller singing “From A Jack To A King,” a country song that unexpectedly had crossed into pop, it came to me what I would lose if Shushan returned. I’m ashamed to say it but as the big Caddy sailed uptown I hoped he was dead. By noon the next day I would have my corpse, but it would not be that of Shushan Cats.

  40.

  As usual Ira preceded me into the suite to tuck me i
n. This was what he called it. He just wanted to make sure, he had been trained to make sure, there would be no surprises for his boss when he opened the door. That night there was, but it was pleasant. A woman’s black lace bra and panties, both generously sized, lay on the green couch opposite the door. Ira took one look and decamped.

  When I awoke the next morning Darcie was serving me breakfast on a tray. Never in my life had I eaten a complete Ozzie-and-Harriet breakfast. Now I was having it in bed.

  “You sleep well, honey?”

  “Um.”

  “It’s after ten,” she said, a gentle tone of maternal reproach in her voice. I suppose men who had mothers never need to hear that, never need to take a nipple between their lips—maybe they did or didn’t do it, but they didn’t need it—never took pleasure in the yielding flesh of a woman old enough to be their mother. “I bought orange marmalade, or you could have raspberry jam, or both. You want another cup of coffee, Russy?”

  While I sat up against the pillows happily munching I heard the doorbell ring. Half asleep, it meant nothing. Then, half-awake, everything. Who was this woman lulling me into a sense of well-being? For all that I had fucked her she was a stranger about whom I knew little and, it shocked me to realize, trusted less. Why had the doorbell rung without a call from the desk clerks below to ask if someone could come up? Was it some neighbor asking to borrow a cup of sugar? Bullshit it was. I was out of bed in an instant, looking for something, anything. There was a gun and a collection of baseball bats upstairs, but I had depended on Ira for protection. For all I knew the entire Tinti clan was in the next room, and the closest thing I had to a weapon was my dick.

  Quietly I approached the door and tried to hear over the sound of the television who it was. Ever since the assassination televisions remained on all over the city, probably all over the country. At night from my window the surrounding apartment house windows radiated an eerie blue-white. Now, straining to hear who the bitch had let in all I could hear was a young newscaster named Dan Rather telling us that Lee Harvey Oswald would soon be transferred from the basement of a Dallas police station to county jail. Killing a president got you only county jail? I wondered what killing the heir to Shushan Cats would get you. But it soon became clear that I was not going to be the victim that day.