The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats

by Hesh Kestin

  He laughed. “Russell, listen to me. Are you alone?”

  “More than I’ve ever been.”

  “What am I hearing?”

  “Hamsters,” I said. “I always wanted some as a kid.”

  “Good, good,” Fritzi said. “I’ll pick you up, tomorrow morning at eight. Wear a dark suit, dark tie, white shirt. Shave.”

  “I don’t have to be there.”

  “My boy, listen. The judge will note there is no defendant. She—”

  “It’s a lady judge?”

  “It’s 1963. They can vote too.”

  “Hell of a year so far. Go on.”

  “Her honor will note there is no defendant, and may make any number of decisions. She can vacate the indictment. I’ll motion for that. Hopt v. Utah 110 US 574, 28 L Ed 262, 4 S Ct 202 (1884). She may go for it. There is such a thing as the Fourteenth Amendment. No defendant, no due process. But considering the newspaper interest—there will be reporters, a lot of them—it’s likely she’ll adjourn for a month, two if we’re lucky. She can’t adjourn indefinitely, of course. But that will take the pressure off for a while.”

  “What pressure, Fritzi? The man is either dead or disappeared.”

  “Listen to me, legal eagle. Assume that some time in the future Shushan re-appears. Should this trial be concluded it can not be reopened.”

  The thought chilled me. I had handed out Shushan’s money like sticks of gum, sat in his place with Auro Sfangiullo, fucked his mistress—and almost fucked his sister. “You’re telling me Shushan is alive?”

  Silence. “My boy, I honestly don’t know. My job, one way or another, is to defend my client. I’m on retainer. If Shushan should come back some time in the future he will have beaten the district attorney. The feds may go after him, of course, but we’ll blow up that bridge when we come to it. Of course, if he never comes back, nothing is lost but my fees which, considerable as they are, are not much to a man of Shushan’s wealth—of your wealth, Russell.”

  “Tell me again why I have to show up at the courthouse?”

  “It looks better. Here before the judge is the very man who as Shushan’s designated heir is already running the family business, as it were. I can call you to the stand and ask you to state if you have spent Shushan’s money, if you have taken steps—we need not specify—to run his business. If the judge asks if you consider Shushan to be alive, what will you say?”

  “That I don’t know one way or the other.”

  “But that you are working on the assumption he is not among the living.”

  “I just paid for a monument at Beth David.”

  “Beth David?”

  “It’s a cemetery. Just a monument, no date of death.”

  “Excellent, excellent,” Fritzi said. It was as though he had just bit into an especially tender and flavorful piece of meat.

  I could almost hear him salivate. “And if I don’t come? If I don’t want to be in the papers more than I have to? Fritzi, believe it or not, some of us don’t want to be on the front page of the Daily Mirror. You know what, I’ve been called Maniac Brainiac once too often.”

  “Believe me, the reporters will be there, because that’s what they do. But the timing couldn’t be more favorable. It couldn’t be better if we’d planned it. Lad, this whole week every paper in New York, hell, in the world, will be exclusively devoted to Kennedy, Johnson, Oswald and what’s-his-face.”

  “Jack Ruby,” I said.

  43.

  Terri had zero interest in being in court; Darcie less. I felt the same, but considering that Fritzi had been there for me, springing me from the clutches of an assistant district attorney who did not have my best interests at heart, I would be there for him. And perhaps for Shushan. Dead, alive or simply unclassifiable, Shushan Cats had changed my life. Terri was right: books, which had been all, were now merely a pleasant memory, a backdrop, a frame of reference. My adventures in literature could not hold a candle to my adventures in Little Italy, in Chinatown, at the Westbury. Whether purposely or not, I had read to experience the world through the eyes of others. I was now experiencing it through my own, to say nothing of other parts of my anatomy. Thus it was with some reluctance that I rose from what had become a triple bed, washed, shaved, put on a fresh white shirt still in its wrapper—monogrammed at the right cuff RN—a dark tie, and a charcoal-gray cashmere suit from Shushan’s closet that Miguel has magically altered to fit. I could not however walk even a yard in Shushan’s shoes. I had my own, a full complement of them, in black and russet and gray suede. Thus attired for court I slipped a brown crocodile wallet filled with cash—there was a mountain of it in the safe upstairs—into the inside breast pocket of my suit, picked up my key and—for the first time unaccompanied by either Justo or Ira, whose day off it was, stepped into the brass-lined elevator, greeted the two desk clerks and burst from my cocoon onto East Sixty-Third Street. Alone.

  Though I had been on my own all my life, being alone was something else. After being accompanied, protected, part of something, solitude was a heady experience. The day was clear, but not this clear: I had never seen so clearly. Every dot of color, every freshet of aroma, every note of traffic came to me as a gift.

  At just before eight in the morning the Upper East Side was the picture of probity, civility, order. Norman Rockwell, whose cover illustrations defined the character of the Saturday Evening Post, would have painted the neighborhood as a crisply fashionable utopia—urbane, moderate, calm—where all the doormen saluted and all the children were safe, and everyone was so damn good-looking. A few leaves remained on the slender gingko trees planted every twenty feet or so, tiny older women in tailored coats walked their tiny older dogs in tailored coats, dark nannies pushed prams carrying pale infants, and bankers and admen, editors and lawyers stepped gingerly out of the brownstones that adjoined the Westbury and waved down cabs—a good many in those days still roomy eighteen-foot Checkers—or made for the subway on Lexington a block east. Here and there a school child could be seen waiting with his tall, impossibly thin mother for a tiny yellow van, and a bluff cop would pass on foot patrol, a rarity in the city but mandated here in its richest neighborhood. It was almost forty degrees, warm this early in the morning for November, but I would have been coatless in a snowstorm: other than the ratty leather jacket—it had been well used when I acquired it at a thrift shop—that I had worn when first I had come to reside at the Westbury—had it been only days?—I owned no coat. Because I normally went from the hotel garage to the Eldorado and then only a step from the car to my destination—we parked where we wished—I’d never needed one. I made a note to stop at Trippler after court. According to Justo, Shushan liked their winter coats, traditional and warm, better than Brooks. Madison at Forty-Sixth, a stroll from Nat Sherman’s where I might buy a cigar, or a box. It was all so easy. An overcoat, sir? Something in cashmere to go with the gentleman’s suit? Will that be check or charge, sir? Cash? Certainly, sir. Will the gentleman be wearing the item, or shall we have it wrapped? Hand-stitching every millimeter, Miguel would take weeks making a coat. The unseasonably warm weather couldn’t last that long. While at Trippler I might get a tie for Justo, something a bit less flashy than the white silk ribbons he wore habitually with his dark shirts. And at Nat Sherman’s a box of Churchills for Ira. Maybe a box of candy for Myra. Flying down Madison in the Cadillac I had noticed tiny shops with chocolatière in their names. And jewelers, of course. Maybe something for Darcie who, compensated or not, gave me such pleasure, and for Terri, who gave me such delicious pain. Celeste deserved something too. And I did as well: I didn’t own a watch. I was wearing one of Shushan’s. I looked down at it now—8:01. Gold, Audemars Piguet. Probably a good one. But not my taste exactly. Maybe I would pick out a watch too. Hell, after the brief session at court maybe I would walk all the way uptown, window shopping, or actually shopping. I hadn’t taken a long walk in weeks. I didn’t miss the subway, but those long walks had always made me feel on the edge of somet
hing exciting. I wanted that again. Who knows whom I would meet, what I would see, consider, buy. According to Justo if I wished I could write a check for a three-story brownstone just like that. I could fly south to Florida or the Caribbean—but since Kennedy’s embargo not to Cuba, although Justo explained this might be achieved through Mexico, my passport unstamped. I’d need a passport though. There was a passport office at Radio City. I wondered what was playing at the Music Hall, probably still It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, and the floorshow with all those long-legged dancers. Two weeks before I made it a point to see only European films—Truffault, and Antonioni, that crowd—and now I was considering sitting through a kitschy Hollywood comedy in garish color on a screen as big as my ego. Of course two weeks ago it was critical that I present myself to the world, and to myself, as a bona fide intellectual. Now I had nothing to prove, neither to the world nor myself. Two young women passed, models maybe, or stewardesses—we didn’t call them flight attendants then—or maybe call girls; one looked back. I gave her a wink, and knew I could have her, or a hundred like her, and I considered calling to her—“Hey, miss! Did you drop this?”—but I didn’t need to remove my handkerchief from my breast pocket and wave it. I didn’t need to chase after skirts. I didn’t need to—

  A long blast of automobile horn brought me to earth.

  It was Fritzi’s limousine. I had never seen it in the light of day, and assumed it was his. What I had thought was black was deep blue, its top sheathed in crenellated black vinyl, a luxury treatment just beginning to appear. For all I knew this was not Fritzi’s limo at all. Hadn’t Shushan stepped into a car and vanished from the face of the earth? I hesitated, pulling a cigarette out of my pocket—I had learned from Shushan never to expose the pack unless you were offering them around—and lit it with a gold Zippo marked USMC under an embossed globe and anchor that had been in the top drawer of Shushan’s bedside bureau, along with a couple of cartons of Luckies, an assortment of Havanas and an unframed photo of Shushan as a young boy. Idly I wondered why the picture was inside the drawer rather than on the dresser with the others, where it could be viewed. The horn sounded again.

  The limo’s rear door opened.

  If I had any questions regarding why Shushan did things one way or the other, I could have had my answers on the spot. “Hey, Russy, you want an engraved invitation?” Shushan said loudly and too casually as he leaned out the open door. “Wait much longer you’ll miss seeing me convicted.”

  44.

  With Fritzi taking up the entire back seat I perched opposite Shushan and said... nothing. Of substance Shushan said as little. He commented on my suit—“We got the same taste, I got one just like it,” to which I replied, “Not any more”—and on how much I’d “filled out” (how much could that have been in a week?) and what was I reading, to which all I could manage was a shrug. Shushan had been busier, having used his “time at airports” (he left it at that) to plow through Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, The Stranger “by that French guy, and partways through a book by JD Salinger called Franny and Zooey, very talented but tied up in himself, self-indulgent like Esther would say. I liked the Kaymus more. Very serious.”

  “Cahmuh,” I said.

  “Gezundheit.”

  “It’s pronounced—”

  “You know, kid, I got such good reports about you, and then you go and act like you’re twenty years old and correcting your uneducated old man.”

  “I never did.”

  “I don’t mean about him. Let me tell you something, kid. Never correct somebody while wearing his suit.”

  “It’s not your suit,” I said. “It’s my suit. It doesn’t fit Shushan Cats anymore. It fits Russell Newhouse.”

  “Yeah, Russell Casanova.”

  “You’ve been talking to Justo and Auro Sfangiullo. I’ve been under observation for a week, is that it?”

  He laughed. “Not exactly. The earth doesn’t go in an orbit around you, you know. Nah, I spoke to Justo yesterday around seven on the business picture. Il dottore, he was kind enough to visit me later the same night.”

  “Where?”

  “The Sherry-Netherland. It’s a hotel.”

  “I know it’s a hotel.”

  “I didn’t want to bomb in on you unannounced. Maybe for you Darcie would be a problem. Me, I’m comfortable.”

  “You don’t call this bombing in?”

  “Auro says you are one impressive little gangster.”

  “I’m as much a gangster as you are a...”

  “A what?”

  I had almost said intellectual. What was I so angry about, that Shushan Cats was alive and still reading books? That I was alive and wasn’t? This man had changed my life, probably for the better. And even if the change were not permanent, as if anything could be—things seemed to moving pretty fast in November of 1963—resenting Shushan’s return was tantamount to wishing him dead. Dead, I realized, was the key. I wasn’t angry at his return. I was angry at his departure. “You know how many people cried that you were... gone?”

  He laughed. “Fewer than those who celebrated.”

  “Where the hell were you?”

  He laughed again, deeper, a rolling chuckle. “My mother, of blessed memory, she liked to use that tone. Shushi, darling boy, I was all night up with worrying. She got used to it. Maybe you should too.”

  “You plan on doing this a lot?”

  “I don’t do much in the way of planning,” he said, serious now. “But if it should happen, let’s say if Fritzi fucks up in court, I might be gone for a while.”

  Fritzi took the floor with a stage cough. “I absolutely guarantee that will not be the case,” he said, full of himself as ever. “Ninety-three percent.”

  Both Shushan and I looked at him.

  “That is, better than ninety percent, but not quite one hundred. For one hundred I’d have to bribe the judge.”

  “Nu?” Shushan said.

  “Her Honor Myrtle Went—”

  “Went?”

  “That is her name, lad. Judge Went, I am afraid, is not susceptible to the usual blandishments.”

  “You tried the unusual?” Shushan asked, his brows arching.

  “An individual close to her honor touched on the subject of a federal judgeship. Judge Went let it be known she was happy in the Supreme Court of the State of New York. She’s due a federal position anyway. She knows it. I suppose she can wait.”

  “While Shushan rots in prison?” I said. “What about the jurors?” Was this me? What next, threatening witnesses? How far had I come in a week? “Ninety-three percent, Fritzi, is not very solid.”

  “Whoa, kid,” Shushan said. “Before you go and start shooting up the courtroom, I’m satisfied with fifty percent. For a lawyer, that’s a good number. And even if we lose we got an appeal. This is America, not Russia. Despite the Kennedys—good news, there’s only Bobby left—who have zero respect for the Bill of Rights, we have an independent judiciary and I have friends in... all kinds of places. Besides, nobody’s rotting in jail. Hey, how much can they sock me for, with good behavior?”

  “Seventeen months,” Fritzi said. “Max.”

  “Believe me, Russy, I’m touched by your concern, but frankly I could use a vacation. I go away you can send me five hard-bound books a week—that’s state regulation, right Fritzi?”

  “Plus no limit on paperbacks and magazines.”

  “So I can catch up. For instance, I could read everything by Monsieur Kaymus—right, kid?”

  “Point made. I apologize.”

  “What do you think, I’m back so you’re going to return to that shit-hole apartment on Eastern Parkway—by the way, one day that’s going to be prime real estate; we should probably buy there, especially near the museum and the library. You know where I mean, a left off Flatbush Avenue when you come to the arch?”

  “I was just there.”

  “Terrific old apartment houses, as good as Park Avenue. Really worth a shot. Collect rent for thirty ye
ars and then take them condo. Where was I? Oh yeah, you being thrown out in the cold. Look, kid, I wouldn’t do that to a stranger. You’re like my own blood.”

  “Thank you, Shushan. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “You were thinking you like cashmere, you like Darcie—she’s something, that broad—and you like long red Eldorado convertibles. Hey, I don’t blame you. But nobody’s taking that away. Wherever I am, Shushan Cats will make sure you’re okay. You did fantastic. I’m proud of you.” He turned away. “Fritzi...”

  “Tell him after court,” the lawyer said. “You do not want an emotional scene in a public forum.”

  “I think he should know now.”

  “Trust me, Shushan,” Fritzi said. “This waited a long time. It can wait another hour.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Be patient, lad,” Fritzi said, his German consonants nearly overcoming his British vowels.

  “Pee bayshent, glaad yourself. What’s the big secret?”

  “Fritzi is right,” Shushan said. “Anyway, we’re here.”

  Outside the courthouse—it was the same building to which two NYPD detectives had escorted me only days before—stood a small mob of photographers, some still armed with the ancient Speed Graphics that would soon be replaced by downsized .35 mm single-lens reflex cameras and these by digital gizmos the size of a pack of cards. Though it was broad daylight enough flashes went off to illuminate a movie set as Fritzi and I walked tight on either side of Shushan. In the brightness I now noticed that Shushan had acquired a tan. It seemed even deeper set off by his pale blue silk tie and light gray suit. Like me he was coatless. Fritzi on the other hand was layered in vest, suit and topcoat replete with velvet collar, all topped by a dove-gray Homburg that must have been custom made for his swollen head. In his hand he carried a briefcase so small compared to his considerable bulk it was hard to believe these were all the papers necessary to Shushan’s defense. Under his other arm was a tightly rolled umbrella—was he planning to use that in court? As we got past the photographers, Shushan walking as tall as his five-seven could manage and smiling like a bronzed Montgomery Clift about to receive an award, a confetti of questions flew up out of the compact mob of reporters behind the lensmen: