by Ann Aptaker
She gives me a sultry smile. “Sorry, can’t tonight, Cantor.”
My surprise must be all over my face, because when Rosie strokes my cheek it’s as if she’s trying to rub my bafflement away. Softly, sweetly, her voice wrapping me in its warmth, she says, “Listen, one of my regular fares needs me to ferry her around tonight, paying me good money, and I don’t want to lose the business.”
After my rough exit from Piraeus and a cold week on a damp ship, I don’t want to lose Rosie tonight, so I lean in even closer, brush my lips on hers. “Okay, later, then,” I say. “Meet me at my place after you drop your fare and I’ll open a bottle of Chivas. We’ll relax awhile, let the scotch smooth us out, and then I’ll open…something else.”
Rosie’s breathy, purring, “Mmmm,” is so seductive I want to climb over the seat and take her right now, even if it’s in full view of the doorman who’s coming our way. “Tempting,” she says. “But I don’t know how late I’ll be. Better not wait up.”
That sure throws ice water on me. I need a deep breath to get clear of my oafish disappointment. “Sure,” I say, “don’t worry about it,” and mean every word of it, even though I’ve just been shoved to the side of the road. I have no right to Rosie. She deserves the love I can’t give her. And if she finds it in someone else’s arms, like maybe the arms of this regular fare, she’s entitled to it.
The doorman opens the cab door. I grab the satchel, get out of the cab, and watch Rosie drive away, the cab’s red taillights absorbed into the sea of other red taillights in Fifth Avenue traffic, hiding Rosie’s journey to I don’t know where.
The washout of losing Rosie for the evening is soothed a bit by the anticipation of twenty-thousand in cash crossing my palm when I deliver the pyxis to the client in the penthouse. Money can soothe the pain of almost anything.
Almost anything.
But not everything. Not the loss of my beloved Sophie. Sophie de la Luna y Sol, my Sophie of the Moon and the Sun, stolen from me, grabbed off the street, sold to a flesh boat heading to parts unknown. Nothing—not all the money I make, not all the booze I drink, not all the women I bed to satisfy my rutting urges—is able to heal that wound.
The doorman’s, “Are you expected?” jolts me out of my memories. The way he looks me over, like he’s just swallowed something sour that’s giving him gas, I’m afraid he’ll pop the shiny brass buttons on his fancy brown uniform.
“Yeah, I’m expected,” I say. “Tell Mrs. van Zell that Cantor Gold is here.”
“Wait here,” he says, and goes to the intercom beside the entry door. While he’s dialing upstairs, I brush my coat, position my cap, and make myself presentable to meet with one of the highest of New York’s high society darlings, Mrs. Miranda van Zell, widow of Rupert van Zell. Yeah, those van Zells, real Knickerbockers, descendants of the folks who came over with Peter Stuyvesant when the Dutch sent him to govern their New Amsterdam colony. As far as I know, Rupert had little or no interest in art. I’d never met the man before he died a couple of years ago. A freak accident, the papers said. Choked on a cherry pit at a dinner party. Maybe it’s true. His widow, though, is crazy about art, especially ancient Greek stuff. She sits on the board of the fanciest museum in town and throws a lot of the van Zell money toward stocking the museum’s Greek collections. Which is where I come in. This isn’t my first waltz with Miranda van Z.
All spiffed up and ready to go, I head for the entrance. I can almost feel that twenty grand tickling my palm. Instead, I feel a rough tug on my shoulder spinning me around, and I see a brawny guy in a dark fedora and overcoat, see his jowly face, hard, hooded eyes, and bulby red nose just before he throws his thick fist into my cheekbone, setting it on fire. It’s followed by a hard pull on the satchel, ripping it from my hand. I’m reeling from the jab to my face, the pain burning right through cartilage and bone, but I make a grab to get the satchel back, yanking the strap like an angry animal. I can’t shake it loose; the guy has a grip on the satchel tight as a steel coil. The doorman’s shouting, “Hey, get off there!” and tries to pull the galoot off me. Another thug, a little guy with a pointy chin, enters the act, shoving the doorman. With a groan, the doorman’s hustled off behind me, and after another groan I hear him thud to the ground. Pointy Chin joins Bulby Nose in wrestling the satchel from me. I can’t take on both guys.
After a last smash of a fist to my gut, doubling me over, I finally lose my grip on the satchel. One of the thugs yanks it away, and both guys run into a waiting dark sedan and drive into the night. My Dancing Goddesses are gone.
My face stings. The pain in my gut churns all the way up through my chest. But I pull myself together, cursing the thugs, the pain, and the loss of my twenty-thousand-dollar treasure as I stumble over to the doorman, who’s still on the ground. I say, “You okay, fella?” but the fella’s not okay. He’s been knifed. He’s lying in a pool of blood, dead.
Poor schnook never figured he’d meet his end on his cushy job on fancy Fifth Avenue.
Hanging around over the guy’s body, risking being seen by anyone coming in or out of the building, could jam me up when someone calls the cops—which someone certainly will—and the blue boys arrive like a swarm of stinging bugs. So I get off the street and into the lobby, a palatial affair with enough marble to build a library. I should probably take the service elevator at the back of the building to avoid being spotted, but the main elevator’s already here, the door open. I don’t waste time, just get in. The brass and mahogany elevator’s as ornate as the lobby, but right now I’m less concerned with the elevator’s hoity-toity decor than with the speed it travels to the penthouse. And I hope to hell it doesn’t make any stops along the way. My battered face is in no condition to meet strangers. Not with a dead man at the front door.
I make it to the penthouse without interruption and ring the van Zell apartment. It’s the only one on the floor.
A minute later, the door’s opened by the butler, a dignified sort with neatly trimmed gray hair and large round eyes.
“Good evening, Charles,” I say.
The normally unruffled Charles is ruffled plenty by the sight of the bruised and disheveled me. He tries with all his butler’s dignity to control his eyebrows from rising nearly to his hairline, but fails, and his eyes open wider and rounder than usual. “You’re hurt! Shall I—”
“I’m fine, Charles. Just take me to Miranda. She’s expecting me.”
“Yes, Mrs. van Zell informed me of your arrival. Follow me, please.”
I follow Charles out of the vestibule and through the large, airy, walnut- and stained-glass-paneled gallery that leads past the dining room, living room, and solarium on one side, the tea room, music room, library, and study on the other. The bedrooms are upstairs, but I’ve never seen them.
Charles gives two discreet knocks on the study door and just as discreetly opens it. “Cantor Gold to see you, madam.”
A low, throaty feminine voice, equally arrogant and playful in an I-dare-you sort of way, says, “Show her in, Charles.”
He steps aside, I walk into the study. Charles closes the door behind me with a nearly silent click.
I’m in a small, cozy room filled with a couple of first-rate sofas and club chairs thickly upholstered in pale green velvet. The room’s wrapped in silk-covered walls of deep blue, the color of a night sky in an exotic locale, the damask pattern catching flickers of light from the fire in a carved marble fireplace. The firelight shimmers on pricey paintings of country landscapes hung on the walls, none of the paintings newer than the late eighteenth century, and likely depicting the van Zell’s ancestral holdings when New York was still green and hilly and Dutch. Muffling my footsteps is a dark blue Chinese silk rug whose colorful sprays of flowers are muted in the firelight. And in the middle of the grandeur, getting up from a delicate Louis XVI desk with gold trim at its dainty feet, is an elegant woman on one side or another of fifty. She’s decked out in a light blue Persian caftan whose silver embroidery sends an aura around
her. Light from the desk lamp brushes her strawberry blond hair falling in waves to her shoulders. The light also glints in her green eyes, which always seem to size you up. The light magnifies her know-the-score smile, which fades when she gets a full look at me.
“What on earth happened to your face?” She has one of those smoky aristocratic voices that treats trouble like an inconvenience that doesn’t know its place. “You’re hurt.”
“Don’t worry about me,” I say. “I’m in better shape than your doorman.”
“Frank? What’s the matter with Frank?”
“He’s dead. And your pyxis is gone.”
She doesn’t say anything, just stares at me, eyes narrowing.
I fill the silence. “Miranda, I could really use a drink.”
“What? Oh, yes. Yes, of course.” Firelight slides along her caftan as she moves across the room to the bar cart, giving her the appearance of floating. I guess she does float above the rest of us up here in her penthouse in the sky. “Scotch, right?” she says.
“Yeah. Chivas. Neat.”
She pours the scotch, hands it to me, and says, “You’d better sit down. You look like you’re about to keel over.”
One of the sofas accepts me in its tender embrace when I sit down and lean back. That’s the difference between first-class furnishings and the cut-rate stuff currently filling up all those new suburban living rooms of the American Dream. The expensive stuff caters to the human body. The cheap stuff feels like it’s doing your rump a favor, and not particularly happy about it.
The smooth scotch takes some of the sting out of my bruises. A cigarette helps settle me.
Miranda could use a bit of settling herself. She’s pacing back and forth, her hands clenched, her mouth tight.
“Nervous?” I say.
Still wearing out the carpet, she says, “A man’s dead on my doorstep. You’ve been beaten to a pulp. And a priceless object’s been violently stolen from me. I’m not nervous. I’m scared, Cantor.”
“And you should be.”
“Well, thank you for making me feel oh-so-much better. Maybe you’d better tell me just who I should be afraid of. If I’m going to be looking over my shoulder for the bogeyman, I may as well know what he looks like.”
“No time to go into that now,” I say. “Listen, Miranda, someone’s probably discovered the dead doorman by now and called the cops. They’ll want to talk to everyone in the building. I can’t be here when they knock on your door.”
“Why not? I could tell them you were here with me when Frank was, well…you know. Unless…Cantor, you didn’t—?” She abruptly stops pacing, stares at me, her body rigid, the idea she can’t say stuck like a stone in her throat.
I say it for her. “No, Miranda, I didn’t kill Frank. So, thanks for the offer of lying to the cops, but it wouldn’t work anyway. I’m tops on their mug-they’d-most-like-to-frame list.”
She gives me that size-me-up look again and chases it with her know-it-all smile. “Yes, I’m sure you are.”
I finish off the scotch, crush my smoke in an ashtray on a side table, and get up from the sofa. “I can’t linger, Miranda.”
“Just a minute, Cantor. You haven’t told me what’s going on. Who killed Frank? And what happened to the pyxis?”
“I’ll tell you, but not here, not now. The cops could be here any minute. I’ve got to get to the service elevator and out the back of the building before they’re at your door.”
“But when will I hear from you? I have a right to know what’s going on.”
On my way to the desk, I say, “I promise I’ll tell you, but not now,” and write an address on a notepad, tear off the sheet of paper and give it to Miranda. “After the cops leave, go to this address. I’ll head over there now and wait for you. And don’t have your chauffeur drive you. Take a cab. The less your staff knows, the better.” On my way out the study door, I call over my shoulder, “And tell that butler of yours I was never here, understand?”
*
The service door exits into a narrow alley that empties into Sixty-Fourth Street, a dozen yards from the Fifth Avenue corner. Out on the street, I hear a commotion of cops on the Fifth Avenue side, see their cars’ twirling lights smear the street and the trees in the park red.
This is no place for me. I pull down the brim of my cap and walk into the shadow of East Sixty-Fourth Street.
Chapter Two
It takes the cabbie quite a while to work through downtown traffic—Rosie would’ve had us out of the Times Square tangle in a few spins of the wheel—but since it’ll be some time yet until Miranda meets me, I’m not too worried about it. The ride gives me time to think, even though I don’t like what I’m thinking: somebody, some big shot with a long reach, a reach clear across an ocean, wants that little Dancing Goddesses pyxis, wants it bad enough to grab for it twice, and kill anyone who gets in the way. Bet they didn’t figure their victim would be a Johnny Honest doorman. Bet they don’t care, either.
I’m thinking over a list of possible big shots by the time the cabbie finally slithers through Times Square, past girls in ponytails and guys with slicked-back hair who dream of knocking ’em dead on Broadway or seeing their names on movie palace marquees, past tourists gawking at the lightbulb-animated billboards advertising everything from cars, to clothes, to Kleenex. By the time we cross Forty-Second Street, my list of big shots thins a bit as the cabbie cruises into the Garment District, its skyscrapers dark now for the night, the designers, fashion models, fabric cutters, seamstresses, and mobbed-up union bosses who squeeze every last dime from the rag trade all gone home.
Farther downtown, my list’s gotten pretty skimpy as we slide past the Flatiron Building, its prow-shaped mass like a ship sailing up Fifth and Broadway. Soon we’re through Union Square, where soapbox spielers still shout their grievances and shake their fists at capitalists and other annoying elements of the American hustle. We finally make it past Fourteenth Street and down into the Lower East Side. Down here, the streets still lilt to the singsong speech of the city’s ethnic tribes, and the aroma of sour pickles and pastrami from the best delicatessens in the world spices the air.
But I’m no closer to figuring who’d kill for the pyxis, can’t get a handle on who’d try to do me dirty. None of the names on my list would make a death play for the Greek stuff. I know a guy who’d gut you for a Michelangelo, and a dame who’d shoot you dead for the last Russian tsarina’s jewels, but my clients for Greek antiquities tend to be patrician pussycats with lots of cash. Conniving, yeah. Killers, doubtful.
But you never know.
It’s not quite nine o’clock when the cab pulls up in front of a brownstone on Second Avenue. Coming here always makes me queasy. I used to come here often, before it made me queasy. But ever since the old lady who lives here came clean a little over two years ago about how she really feels about me, which is none too sweet, I avoid the place. And it doesn’t help that she’s known as Mom—Esther “Mom” Sheinbaum—and that she really was like a second mother to me when I was a tomboy juvenile delinquent. It was Mom who served me honey cake and listened patiently to my teenage heartbreak over some girl I panted after. It was Mom who schooled me in my thieving ways and fenced my swag for our mutual profit. And all that time, as I wallowed in the warmth of her house and the wisdom of her tutelage, she considered me defective goods, even unnatural. My preference for custom-tailored gentlemen’s suits, she told me later, only made it worse.
So I don’t drop by much anymore, but there are times I can’t avoid it. Tonight is one of those times, because if you want to know about the movement of stolen goods through New York—who’s buying, who’s selling, who’s moving it around—you talk to Mom Sheinbaum. There isn’t a thief she doesn’t know, a big shot she hasn’t done business with, a politician she hasn’t bribed, including the mayor. And it’s been this way over fifty years, since New York did its shady deals by gaslight.
So if anyone can get a line on who’s got the Dancing G
oddesses, it’s Mom; that is, if she’s willing, and if there’s something in it for her.
I run up the front stoop and press the doorbell, hear the old, familiar ring.
Here it comes: queasy.
Mom, white haired, button eyed, and built like a small boulder under a grandmotherly brown dress, greets me at the door with a look equal parts surprised, annoyed, and curious. “So,” she says, one plump hand on her hip, the other on the door, no doubt ready to slam it in my face, “it’s Cantor Gold.” It comes out as Kenta Gold, the syllables rising and falling in her Lower East Side singsong. “To what do I owe this rare visit? And unannounced, yet. You don’t call first? But you’re here, so what do you want?”
“Information,” I say, “and a safe spot for a meeting. Someone will be joining me here in a little while.”
“You invite strangers to my house?”
“Something’s been stolen from me, something I was supposed to deliver to a client tonight. She’s meeting me here.”
“This client, she knows it’s gone?”
“Yeah, she knows.”
Mom gives this information a slow nod, like a scholar working through an idea. “So you’re going after it. And you want my help, yes?”
I give that a shrug. “Can you think of any other reason I’d drop by?”
She doesn’t laugh at that exactly, more like a dry, scoffing tsk. But she opens the door.
Inside, the house is plush with the Gilded Age decor of Mom’s youth, the heavy woodwork shined to a high polish, the furniture thickly tufted in dark wine-colored silk. The sweet aroma of honey cake wafts through the house, as always. And as always, it brings back memories I’d rather be rid of.
Tonight, the aroma comes from a loaf of cake on a silver tray on the lace-covered dining room table, the loaf a slice or two shy of complete. Mom seats herself at her usual place at the head of the table while I drape my coat and cap over the back of one of the mahogany chairs, polished to a luster, like everything else in the shadowy dining room.
