by Neil Gordon
Pauly had known a lot more about her father’s business than she had. It was as if, after her mother left, she had been tied to her father by their shared loss. But Pauly had been his mother’s son, and he had taken every chance he could to learn about the things that the Falcon Corporation and Rosenthal Equities did, inside and outside the law. Pauly would have known. She wished she could ask him.
Nicky would have known, also. And not for the first time, bitterly, she regretted his death.
When she calmed, somewhat, she turned her mind to the fact that there was one other way to learn, and as she thought that, her heart quickened to the point where she knew she would not be sleeping for many hours yet, that night.
She rose, slipped on gym shorts and a T-shirt, and, quietly shutting the door to the living room, took her Canondale racing bike from the closet and began carefully to clean and oil it.
She was going, she knew without admitting it to herself, to take a bike ride the next day to Borough Park.
CHAPTER 9
September 30, 1994.
Brooklyn.
1.
Cristo ama te. So said the bumper sticker on a gypsy cab, fishtailing from the right lane of Court Street in Cobble Hill through blaring cars, then in front of her skidding bicycle and left around the corner onto Union, radio blaring: Cristo ama te.
Alley followed it in a tight turn and then for a time down the street as it bounced on its springs along Union, musing on the sentiment. On balance, she thought it unlikely. When the cab slowed at the Gowanus drawbridge, she coasted easily past it to the gate, then circled slowly while she waited for a tug to pass on the filthy water.
Now, before her eyes, the vista dizzied: the opened bridge, the canal stretching into Brooklyn’s industrial graveyard, the pastel blue of the autumn sky, the street of low industrial plants, then the sky again, a silver airplane in descent toward Kennedy glinting in the sun. And for the first time since leaving the island, for the briefest moment, perhaps a full revolution of her wheels, she felt happy. Then she lowered her eyes in time to see the taxi driver leering at her, his mouth open, his red tongue lifted to touch his top teeth.
The drawbridge descended, and she wheeled across.
It was a trip no one else in the world would have thought of taking. No one else in the world, after all—not even Bob Stein—knew that Ron Rosenthal still kept his parents’ apartment on Forty-ninth Street and Thirteenth Avenue in Borough Park. No one else knew that he kept a set of filing cabinets there, as well as a safe.
Allison knew. She knew because her father had directed her there, years before when he was in some other trouble, to fetch an Israeli passport from one of the filing cabinets. That was the single time she had entered her grandparents’ apartment since their deaths.
As for the combination to the safe, not even her father knew that she had that. Not even her father knew of an afternoon she had spent in her grandfather’s watch-repair and lock store on what had once been the shopping district on Jay Street, thirteen years old, watching her grandfather while the old man, peering through magnifying glasses, set the combination as the letters of her Hebrew nickname.
And because Allison knew all that, she knew that whatever Nicky was searching for when he broke into the Ocean View farmhouse, he had gone to the wrong place.
If he wanted to know about her father’s business, she knew, he should have come here.
2.
The Noor School, Arabic writing, one entrance labeled Boys; another, Girls. Fourth Avenue, Sunset Park, the Pentecostal Meetinghouse, the Iglesia Pentecostal de Jesu Cristo, Inc. Greenwood Cemetery, its turning trees imparting a soft yellow light over the bordering avenue.
She turned left somewhere in the Forties, her breath coming fast and easy, took the long uphill out of Sunset Park in a measured acceleration. As she crested the hill, a commercially zoned district appeared. She passed signs for Tallis and Tefillin Beitlach, then Bobov Meats, then Yitzchak’s Fish Store, two large Hasids in bloody aprons behind the window. Borough Park. Passing the open door of a used-furniture store, she was assailed by the atmosphere of its interior: the precise smell of her grandparents’ apartment, when they were living.
She dismounted on Thirteenth Avenue and walked her bicycle on the sidewalk. Black-garbed men in wide hats and payess , wigged women staring with frank appraisal at her skin-tight bicycle pants. Three girls in calf-length plaid skirts and black down jackets came out of the Sara Shenhler Teachers’ School, happy and confident. She had ridden nearly ten miles from her apartment now without strain, but at this sudden vision of her onetime self she was, at last, breathless.
Her grandparents had lived here, had insisted on dying here in a tiny apartment on one of the long blocks off the avenue: her grandfather had spent his entire life traveling between this neighborhood and downtown Brooklyn, where he had come to own a watch-repair store. Her father had offered them houses from Long Island to Florida; offered them rooms in his own later homes. Nothing would do for her grandfather but this, the neighborhood they had come to after the war: the soldiers who’d liberated him from Dachau had been eighteen-year-old Italian-Americans from Bay Ridge, and old Mr. Rosenthal had never again considered living anywhere but Brooklyn.
There were two of them, and they had been the old man’s only non-Jewish friends in his life, the annual Christmas Day visit to them the only day of his calendar not governed by Torah. She had gone with him when she was young, with her father and Pauly: a long table laden with stuffed artichokes and manicotti, the massive family reclined around it, the children gazing in wonder at the visitors from another world, the parents with bemused pride. These neighborhoods had provided the ground force of the D-Day invasion, and the older men had witnessed horrible atrocity, horrible murder and privation in the European theater that had culminated in their utter stupefaction—eighteen-year-old Brooklyn boys, away for the first time in their lives—before the just-deserted camps, the guards hastily decamped, the phantasmagoric inmates unearthly. Joe Grasso and Peter Corsi, childhood pals from Bay Ridge, had taken Allison’s grandfather—one of the few prisoners who could muster the strength to walk—straight to the barbed-wire square where huddled a few miserable captured guards and offered him a gun. Allison’s grandfather had held the gun in complete confusion, unable to understand what they wanted him to do. So they did it for him, hard boys, used to death, and from then on, they made it their business to take care of the half-dead Jew.
To Allison, it made sense. The rescue of her grandfather had redeemed the war for the two boys, redeemed the atrocious experience to which they’d been subjected. They’d nursed him back to health, coddling him with food, buying his immigration with cigarettes and favors. They’d gotten him into an Italian refugee camp, which was where he found his wife, one of the other five survivors from the Lithuanian shtetl where he had briefly been a child. Almost immediately, she had become pregnant, and they’d been interned there long enough for her to deliver her baby, Ronald, named after Corsi’s recently deceased father. Then the two Italian-Americans succeeded in sponsoring his entry into America. Together, the two had found the couple an apartment, and later Grasso’s uncle had provided the down payment for the Jay Street storefront where old Mr. Rosenthal spent the rest of his working life.
Nothing at the Christmas Day dinner could be eaten by the visitors. When her grandfather had died, Allison had stopped seeing the Italian families. The Jay Street storefront was razed for the Metrotech Building, and her father, who had inherited the property, had made a fortune from its sale to the monolithic corporate development.
Only much later, Allison had learned that her father had put both Grasso and Igneri’s sons through college at Haverford, paid for each year of tuition, each dorm bill, each book, and each date with a Bryn Mawr girl, then law school in Michigan for one and medical school at Notre Dame for the other, the first professionals the two families from Bari had ever produced, as Rosenthal himself was the first lawyer from his family of
tradesmen and shopkeepers.
Near the apartment building, Allison locked her bike to a parking meter with two Kryptonite locks and entered a store on the avenue, the Menashem Bakery. She ordered a spinach knish and a cup of coffee; while waiting for the microwave to heat the knish she read the Xeroxed signs on the wall offering, in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Polish, the guaranteed services of an immigration lawyer, six-week yeshiva-sponsored English lessons, computer courses, and tours to Israel.
While she waited she listened to the Yiddish of two women standing in line for challah—this evening was Erev Shabbat, or Erov Shabbos to these women—discussing the World Trade Center bomber.
“You know why it is? It’s because we let anybody into the country.”
“We should cut off his fingers! Do like they do!”
With her food and coffee, Alley wandered out onto the sidewalk to eat, but at the first bite her throat closed so effectively that she had to step to a curb garbage can, spit the mouthful out into her napkin, and throw it, with the knish, into the garbage. On reflection, she threw out the watery coffee, too. Then she walked down Forty-ninth Street and entered her grandparents’ building.
3.
Everything was the same: the elevator’s wood paneling gleaming with lemon-scented polish, the worn red plush velvet with gilt edges along the door. Everything was the same: the corridor with its dim Deco lighting, the muted sound of Chopin from behind a closed door. In the hallway she understood why she had not been able to eat: her throat seemed to have closed, and for a moment she felt suffocation. Only then did she realize how frightened she was. She hurried down the hallway, opened the apartment door with a key, then, as her hand automatically lifted first to her lips, then to the mezuzah, she experienced a moment of real fear.
But everything was different: the dark parquet floors empty, the green papered walls showing the unbleached places where pictures had once hung. Most of the furniture had been removed from this room, and in its place were four walls of legal filing cabinets, the center of the room occupied only by the massive oak dining table that had once been this home’s heart.
In this room, she felt slightly calmer: it was too changed to be frightening. But to find the safe meant a full search of the house, and at the thought her heart began to thump. She paused there in the dining room, trying to even her breath. After a time, using real physical strength, she was able to walk across to the sliding doors that closed off the living room, and hesitantly opened one.
Here, muffled light from the shaded windows showed the furniture covered in white fabric, the tables with their lamps, the framed watercolors of long-gone villages and landscapes that her grandmother had liked to buy from a store, owned by a Lithuanian survivor, that specialized in remembering these shtetls, rich and happy places from the time before the war. Oddly, it was a fall of light through the shaded windows that most vividly struck her: the sensation of timelessness in the muffled light, the silent room. Her grandmother would sit just there, at the end of the couch, her brunette wig above her half glasses, her short body curved to the couch’s angle. Alley felt her stomach clench at the memory, as if half expecting to see her there. But then the room came back into focus, the covered chairs, the empty couch, and she stepped hesitantly into the sunny silence.
She turned to the sideboard, her eyes finding exactly the little painting of the Jaffa Gate, the framed ketubah— marriage license—witnessed by Joe Grasso and Peter Corsi, hanging in the musty, foreign smell, as if suspended in time. She retreated into the dining room again and rested, as if from an exertion. Finally, slowly, she closed the sliding doors. Nothing, she thought, could be worse than that. And as if liberated by the thought, she went down the hallway, the remembrance of the apartment returning to her with a reminiscence of queasiness in her stomach. The bathroom with its light blue ceramic tile, a phantom smell of soap. The bedroom, a heavy oak bedstead, mattress covered in plastic. At the end, in shadow from the hallway light, was the linen closet. When she opened the door, it let forth the faintest suspicion of her grandmother’s perfume, the lightest hint, but enough to bring a swoon through her. She crouched on the floor, eyes shut tight, balancing herself with one hand on the doorknob. No. She was wrong. Nothing could be harder than this.
When she opened her eyes she found herself staring at the squat black safe. And without a pause, she put forth a hand to turn its combination.
Before her eyes now was the day, so long ago, she had learned it. She’d been visiting her grandfather at lunch hour from St. Ann’s in his downtown watch shop, and he had made her memorize it against the possibility of his memory failing. It had been easy to retain: the old man had customized the lock and set it himself, the consonants of her Hebrew name, Tziporah: he never had mastered English well, but he was fluent in Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, and Lithuanian. Later, when her father had started using the safe, her grandfather had been too far gone to remember that she also had the combination, and then he died. She remembered him now, his capacious linguist’s mind, his dry hand, callused with age and work, caressing her face that day as he watched her with swimming eyes, saying, as he always did, in the Hebrew or Yiddish in which he spoke to her: “Esther. Hadassah. The girl who saved the Jews.”
The last tumbler fell on the “hay” of Tziporah and, hesitantly, she swung the door open, then reached a hand inside. It was surprisingly full: a large amount of various currencies in stacks tied by rubber bands. Next she felt something hard, and removed an object that, with a shock, she found to be a large nickel-plated handgun with two extra magazines held against it by a rubber band. Now she leaned down to the floor to peek in, and saw that the remaining contents were manila files. These she removed and put on the hallway floor.
Still crouching, she paused for breath. Looking up, and down the hallway. She was very frightened, she knew. But, she thought, only a fool would expect to be calm.
The thought was some comfort. She began to look at the first page of each manila file as she leafed clumsily through them. There were letters of incorporation for each entity in the sprawling Rosenthal Equities. There were letters of reference, some bearing the letterhead of U.S. government agencies, some military, and many Israeli. There were personal letters, on the stationery of figures like John Singlaub, Amiram Nir, Ahmed Omshei, Robert Gates, David Kimche, Earl Brian—many, many such names. There were six end-user certificates from six countries, some filled out for a wide variety of matériel, some simply signed, and some blank. And then there were documents with no letterhead at all, some in files containing photographs and accompanied by notes from her father, others containing notarized and witnessed documents.
Another pause for breath. She concentrated her attention on these last documents. Most of them detailed small weapons sales, largely to substate entities, which she assumed made them illegal. Some of them included the use to which the weapons had been put. Each was referenced by departments of governments, U.S. or Israeli. Where possible, her father appeared to have obtained signatures from the participants as well as what lawyers called “memorialization” in the form of photographs. Where this had evidently not been possible, there were his own handwritten accounts.
Allison nodded to herself. If MBAs were ever taught the covert arms business, Alley thought, they would learn to keep such records. Clearly, however, he had not yet had the chance to assemble the paperwork on his Bosnian dealings: nothing in the safe referred to them. That meant that there was no clue as to Nicky’s death in there.
The thought, casually come, made a sudden nausea rise in her again. Once she had spent long afternoons playing with her grandparents. Now she was a person looking for a clue to a murder. She breathed deeply, three times, four times. Then she went back again through the documents with a slow, mechanical movement. However it happened, she thought with sudden impatience, this is who I now am.
This time, halfway through, her eye was caught by a Hebrew document.
Reading, she saw it was the transcript of an interv
iew.
The interviewer was Nicholson Dymitryck, the interviewee Dov Peleg.
The subject was her father, and Greg Eastbrook.
Pictures, clearly taken with a surreptitious camera, for they were at floor level, showed the two in a small restaurant.
For a long moment she did nothing. Then, peering closely at the photographs, she saw that Nicky was no younger than he had appeared to her in person. If she could trust the photographs.
What had Nicky been talking to Dov Peleg about Greg Eastbrook for? Scared now, she leafed through the transcript. It ended, and she reached for the next pile of documents, held separate by a rubber band.
Behind it was another transcript, this one in English, and other photographs.
And then the memory came.
Martha had tickets to Patti Smith at the Beacon, they had come home late, seventeen-year-old girls crossing the Brooklyn Bridge in a taxi, stoned. She had left Martha on Monroe Place and wandered down the Heights among the lights of the brownstones. The brief glimpses of ornate interiors, many housing her classmates. Her heels echoing loud and long in the deserted, late-winter streets.
Rounding the corner from Hicks Street to Grace Court, she’d seen that outside her house was a limousine, engine running, parked illegally. There were two men on the street, and one spoke into a radio as she approached. Then, having received a response in an earpiece, he wished her good night. The front door was opened for her by a third man in a dark blue suit, and in the hallway her father was emerging from the living room, shutting the massive door behind him.
“Essie, manishma? Aich haiya ha concert? Tov meaod. Listen”—leaning down to her—“business tonight, doll, I know it’s late. Straight up to bed now, okay? No noise, no nonsense. Keep Pauly up there. We’ll talk tomorrow.” And with a kiss he was gone and she was climbing the stairs, nearly wincing, in her stoned state, under the scrutiny of the blue-suited man, the presence of all these strangers in her house, each bringing on his coat the cold air of winter.
