I felt the beginnings of an erection as I sat there looking at that red-eyed, sorrowful young woman, but there was no love in my heart. Maybe it was the past few days of danger and mayhem that stripped away the bonds of my rage.
“Is something wrong?” Gella asked me in that slightly nasal voice.
She saw the rage and aggression in my eyes. That recognition doused my anger — and my ardor.
“It’s been a tough few days,” I said.
“Yes it has.”
Gella reached for a small, framed photograph that sat on the coffee table. She looked at it and then handed it over to me. It was a picture of Fanny in a fancy green dress. She was laughing very hard and leaning over to the side like she’d done with me and Fearless that first night. It was a very different picture from the ones in Fanny’s bedroom.
“Uncle Sol gave it to me before they arrested him,” she said. “When he gave it to me, he said, ‘Isn’t she beautiful?’”
“She was a wonderful woman.” I handed the frame back. Then I said, “What’s this about your husband?”
“It’s like I said on the phone.” Gella perched on the end of the matching brown sofa. “For a whole day he wouldn’t eat or talk. Then, when I was washing dishes, he got in his car and drove off.”
“Did he say anything before he left?”
Gella shook her head the way one does when faced with an impossible math problem. “He didn’t seem to know that I was there except once.”
“What happened then?”
“He sat up and looked at me.”
“Is that all?”
“It was in his eyes,” Gella said, her voice skating near grief. “He was begging me with his eyes. There were tears, and he tried to say something…”
“What did the police say?”
“What?”
“What did the police say about Fanny?”
“Oh,” Gella said. Maybe she had forgotten about the death of her aunt, maybe she wanted to forget. “They wanted to know if there was any trouble in the family. They asked where Morris was when Sol was attacked.”
“Where was he?” I asked.
“At work. He has a part-time night job working for a man named Minor.”
“Zev,” I said.
“Yes. Do you know him?”
“He came to Fanny’s right after we found her, you had already left for the hospital. Said he wanted to say hi.”
“That’s strange.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t think that they knew Mr. Minor. I’m sure they didn’t.”
“He said he knew them back in the old country, that him and Sol lived in the same town.”
“He never met Sol since Morris worked for him,” Gella said. “And Morris never told me that he was a landsman.”
“What does your husband do for this guy?” I asked.
“He’s learning to be an insurance agent.”
“What kinda insurance?”
“Art.”
“Say what?”
“Mr. Minor writes policies for expensive paintings and sculptures. It’s a very good business.” There was pride in her voice, pride for her smart husband and his good choices. “Morris is already making more money in his night job than he does at the bank.”
“You got somethin’ to drink?” I asked.
The Greenspan kitchen looked even more like Fanny’s, even the wallpaper was the same. The only difference was that where Fanny had mismatched dishes and cookware, Gella had copper pots and dishes all with the same deep blue floral pattern.
She poured me a shot of peach schnapps in a cute little crystal thimble. Gella didn’t understand drinking the way her auntie did. I was sitting in the alcove, her standing before me. I downed the shot and put the thimble down in plain view, hoping that she’d get the hint.
“Sol is dead,” she said.
“When?”
“They called just before you got here. He died in his bed. Heart attack.”
I remembered what the maternity nurse, Rya McKenzie, had said about heart attacks but kept my silence on the subject.
“What did we do to deserve this?” she asked.
I got up and put my arms around her. She was a little taller than I, but still she got her head on my shoulder. I realized what Fearless meant about being there for someone who needs it. It was a small lesson on a bad day, and I wondered if I would remember it later on.
We stood there breathing, sobbing, being silent in the embrace. I was thinking about what I had to do next to keep out of trouble and to help Fearless realize that we were in over our heads. I pulled half away from the clinch, still holding on to her upper arms.
“He have any friends?” I asked.
“Sol?”
“Morris.”
“Oh.” That was a more difficult question. “Morris never had many friends. He was too serious for the young people who came to shul. He was always nervous and shy about how big he was. He was all the time saying how people made fun of him.”
“You got somethin’ to eat in the icebox?” I asked about food because I didn’t want to hear any more about how her Sad Sack husband didn’t have any friends and because I didn’t want to run him down in front of probably the only person who ever loved him since his mother.
“Oh yes,” she said brightly.
There was leftover meat loaf and stuffed cabbage that Fanny had made for them four days before. That and a Cel-Ray soda from the Jewish market was my dinner.
“She was a great cook,” Gella said, trying not to cry over the food. “They were both wonderful. He saved my father and me from the Nazis. He was a great man who would die for what is right.”
She switched over from meat loaf to heroism in wartime so quickly that I almost missed the meaning of her words.
“Some people said that it was because my father was rich that Sol saved us. But all our money was stolen by a man named Zimmerman. Sol knew that.”
“Who’s Zimmerman?”
“A Jew who worked with the SS men that sought out and deported Jews. They knew that some Jews had hidden their jewelry and valuables from German banks because they didn’t want to be robbed by the Nazis. Zimmerman came to my father and offered him our freedom for Papa’s art collection. But my father found out that Zimmerman lied and ran with me. After the war my father was broken. He lived with Sol and Fanny until he died.”
There was nothing for me to say. Sol and Fanny were saints.
“There’s a man named Jonas,” Gella said after a while.
“Who’s he?”
“Simon,” she said. “I think that’s his first name. He’s one of Mo’s friends. He’s not Jewish and so…” She let her own ideas of race and separation hang in the air a moment.
“Would Morris go to see his friend if he was upset? Somebody to talk to and drink with?” I suggested, indicating my empty glass.
“I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “Maybe.”
“Did you call him and ask?”
“I don’t know his telephone number. Morris never writes numbers down, he has a perfect memory.” She was proud of him, and scared for him, but still she wouldn’t call this non-Jewish man.
“You want me to see if I can find this Simon guy and ask him somethin’?”
GELLA BROUGHT ME the phone book. Simon was the only Jonas out of over eighty thousand entries.
“Is he married?” I asked Gella.
“No.”
Maybe it wasn’t only his religion she didn’t like, I thought. “Well then maybe I better go knock on his door.”
I stood up, and so did Gella.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her.
“Nothing.”
“Don’t you want me to go?”
“Yes, but…”
“Don’t you want me to find Morris?”
“I’m afraid.”
“You think he might be with another woman?”
“No.”
“What then?”
“I
want to go with.”
“You mean ride with me down to Culver City in the middle’a the night?”
She nodded innocently.
“I cain’t do that.”
“But I must go.”
“Why?”
“Hedva was killed in her own home. In her own house.”
I looked around Gella’s identical dwelling and knew that she was right.
“Listen,” I said. “You might not know this, but cops like to get target practice on Negro men when they see ’em with white women. You get me?”
She nodded.
“So you have to lay low in the backseat if you gonna ride with me, okay?”
“Yes.”
I wanted her to say something else, something to reassure me, but I didn’t know what that could be.
“Okay then. Now go get that bottle’a schnapps, close it tight, and bring it along.”
“You want to bring liquor to find Morris?”
“Medicine,” I said. “Just in case you or me, or Morris when we find him, gets a case’a the nerves.”
30
I WAS DRIVING in a white neighborhood in the middle of the night with an open bottle of peach schnapps in the glove compartment, a married white woman hiding in the backseat, and a stolen .38-caliber pistol next to the gearshift on the floor. It was a far cry from my bookstore days, selling Popular Mechanics and Batman.
“Tell me somethin’,” I called to the backseat.
“Yes, Mr. Minton.”
“Why you gonna trust me?”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
I didn’t know if it was the question or the articulation of black English versus her own Europeanized English that she wondered about.
“I mean, why would you call me or Fearless when your husband goes missin’? Why not call somebody you know, or the cops?”
“I don’t know many people,” she said. “Just Hedva and Sol, and Morris. We don’t have many friends. And the police didn’t like Morris. That’s why he was upset, because they weren’t trying to find the black man who stabbed Sol.”
“I’m a black man.”
“But Fanny trusted you. She told me that it wasn’t you who came after Sol. And I can see that you and Fearless are good men, not murderers.”
I have never been as certain of anything as Gella was of me.
SIMON JONAS LIVED on the left side of a one-story two-family house on Cassidy in Culver City. The light was on, but that didn’t mean that Morris Greenspan was around. Gella didn’t want to go to Jonas’s door, so I went alone.
“Yeah?” a very large and blond specimen of Americana said. He answered after the fourth ring. “What do you want?”
“Morris Greenspan.”
“Who the fuck are you, nigger?” He enjoyed the last word. It brought a grin to his big mouth. He was wearing blue jeans and no shirt. His skin was streaked with oily grime.
“Byron Leeds,” I said in an amiable enough tone. “I’m a friend of the aunt and uncle of his wife. He drove off, and his wife hasn’t seen him. She said you and him were friends, and, well, I was in the neighborhood.”
“His aunt got killed,” Jonas said. Light began to dawn on his filthy face. “Hey. He said it was a nigger did it, stabbed his uncle too.”
“When did he tell you that?”
“What you say?”
Mr. Jonas and I were at a crossroads. He was measuring my size and disposition while glancing behind me to see if I had come alone. I, on the other hand, had split into two separate personalities. The first and foremost of these was the one that felt an intense hatred for the blond mechanic who hated me and insulted me without the slightest knowledge of my personal worth.
The second character in my internal drama was experiencing pure amazement at this hatred I felt. I never knew that such an emotion was in me. My whole life I had merely been cautious of whites, like I was cautious in a thunderstorm. I didn’t hate lightning but merely took cover when rumblings came in off the gulf.
“I said, tell me when Morris talked to you about his uncle.”
“Or what?”
Simon Jonas reached out for me as he asked his question. I, in turn, leaned away from the clumsy lunge, stuck my hand into my pocket, and pulled out Sol Tannenbaum’s .38.
“Or no more Simon,” I said, pointing the muzzle at one blue eye.
The fear that came into that eye was immediate and absolute.
“Wh-wh-wh-what do you want?” His voice, his posture, even the color of his grimy face changed just that quickly.
“Morris Greenspan,” I said again.
Someone might think that I would feel on top of the world at a moment like that. There I was, alone with the drop on somebody who represented the enemy of the spirit of my whole race in this inhospitable country. But all I was thinking was that with that gun in my hand, there was a good chance for it to go off.
“I don’t know where Mo is,” he stammered.
“Has he been here today?”
“Yeh. Yeh. We had a drink about noon.”
“Where’d he go?”
“I don’t know. Really.”
“Guess.”
“He’s got a girl.”
“A girlfriend?”
“Yuh. A girlfriend named Lily. He said that he was fed up. He said that he was tired of trying so hard and that he was going to leave, go away, maybe to Mexico.”
“And you think he went with this Lily?”
Simon didn’t answer. I don’t think he even heard me. The skin about his eyes had begun to cringe, telling me in its wordless way that it was time for the gun to go off.
“Simon.”
“What?”
“Where does Lily live?”
“I don’t know.” He was near tears. “I’m sorry.”
Then came the hard part. I wanted to get out of there without getting killed. The blond bully was six two at least, and he did hard labor for a living. I was five eight, a bookseller by trade, and a bookworm by nature. I didn’t think that I could swing the piece of iron in my hand hard enough to stun the mechanic. And I had to believe that he had a gun somewhere in his little apartment. If I just walked away, he’d get to that gun before I could drive off. I was pretty sure that I could nail the guy point blank, but at six paces away I might as well have been packing a cap gun.
Killing him was the best option, that was my first thought. But there was Gella sitting in the car. I couldn’t expect her to be quiet about murder. So then I thought about wounding him, shooting him in the thigh, after that maybe hitting him in the head.
Then I came to my senses. I brought up my left hand to steady my aim. Tears sprouted from Simon Jonas’s eyes, and the high-pitched sound of a small animal came out of his throat.
“Get down on your belly, boy,” I said.
The little animal screeched from under his tongue.
“Get down.”
Simon did a belly flop right there in his doorway. The moment he was down I turned tail and ran for the car. I jumped into the driver’s seat, slipped the key into the ignition, and turned over the engine in record speed. I had taken four sharp turns before Gella could sit up in the backseat.
“What happened?” she asked.
“Get down!”
She obliged and asked again, “What happened?”
“He doesn’t know where Morris is, but he saw him.”
“When?” she sat up again.
“At lunchtime.”
“Was he all right?”
“I guess not if he left you all alone. But Simon seemed to think that he was just fine.”
“Where did he go?”
“Don’t know.”
“Did you ask?”
“Why you think I was there?”
“Why were you running?”
“Because Jonas is a big white boy not too pleased with a black man ringin’ his bell in the middle’a the night.”
“You’re scared?” she said. “But you have the gun.”
“And so you think I can just go up and down the street shooting anybody I want?”
“I just think that you don’t need to be scared.”
“Jonas didn’t know where Morris was,” I said, not wanting to discuss my lack of bravery, “but I’d like to look around the office he has with Minor. Do you have a key somewhere?”
“There’s a duplicate key in the big plant outside the front door,” she said. “Mo leaves it there because he forgets to bring his sometimes.”
IT WAS a four-story office building made from brick; not tenement or factory brick, but solid, English-manor-house blocks. They were red, even in the night, and flawless. There was no fancy entranceway, but the door was flanked by five-foot pine trees set in gigantic terra-cotta pots. There were three windows stacked above the front door, each looking into the hallway of that floor. There was a dim light shining somewhere on three.
“What floor does Morris work on?” I asked Gella. We were parked across the street from the building, on Melrose. There was nobody out at that time of night.
“Two,” she said.
“So the key is in that pot on the right?”
“Under the inside lip of the one on the right as you face the door,” she said, obviously parroting something that her husband had told her many times, “toward the back.”
“Okay. I’m’a go in alone.”
“I’ll come with,” she said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
I had the whole ride up from Culver City to think about that question. I didn’t want Gella to find out about Lily unless she absolutely had to; not that I cared that he had a girl on the side or even how Gella would feel about that, but we were in a tight situation, people were getting killed, and I didn’t need any excess passion boiling in the backseat if the cops pulled us over.
“I’m gonna leave the key in the ignition,” I said, “so that if we have to leave fast again, I can just jump in and hit it. But if I leave the keys and ain’t nobody in the car, then when we come out, there might not be a vehicle to get away with. That won’t do.”
“But there’s no one to run from here,” she argued.
“Maybe not for you alone, but if you’re with a black man, at night, in a closed office building, going through a man’s papers and such without his permission — then maybe there might be a reason to move fast.” By the time I had gotten through that mouthful I had convinced myself.
Fearless Jones Page 20
