“Where you goin?”
“Bathroom. There ought to be a scissors in the medicine chest.”
Harry poured eight rolls of tape onto the mattress along with a disposable razor and some shaving cream that he hadn’t wanted, a toothbrush that he had. More than ten minutes went by before she came back with a pair of blunt-nosed scissors. “The bathroom next door?”
She shushed him. She sat facing him and plucked a corner of the tape over his heart, then tugged sharply. “Does that hurt?”
Harry winced.
“I warned you it would,” she said, as she peeled back several inches more. “Get ready now. This is going to smart.”
She tore the tape down to bare skin. As Harry squeezed his eyes shut, she put her hands against his shoulders and pushed him onto his back, slithered on top of him. “Hey,” he gasped, “you’re crushin’ me.”
She pressed her face to his neck, his cheek. “What are you going to do about it?” she whispered.
Harry inhaled deeply through the taffy hair and felt the blood surge to his skin. Woooeee, he wanted to shout. He said, “You wouldn’t believe the punishment I can take.”
“We’ll see.” Kate kissed him, and pushed off carefully, and then bent down and took off her shoes.
“That the way they do it on Times Square?”
She stood up quickly. Harry saw color in her face and thought that he had just shot himself in the foot. He was trying to think of something to say when she reached behind her back and he heard a zipper slide in its track. “No,” she said as the dress fell away. “More like this.”
“That is tight,” Harry said, and kicked off his own shoes.
Jesus, Harry said, that is tight.
15
HARRY STIRRED, OPENED HIS eyes. Kate was sitting against the headboard with her legs under her, watching him. She put her fingers on his eyelids and pressed them shut, kissed them. She said, “You know, just because something happens once doesn’t mean it’s going to happen again.”
“I thought it happened three, four times already,” he said. “I wasn’t countin’.”
“You know what I’m trying to say.”
Harry yawned. “Yeah, but why say it now?”
“I don’t want there to be any misunderstanding later.”
“There’s gonna be,” he said, “you don’t let me go back to sleep.”
“Just so long as you—”
“I’m not lookin’ you should make an honest man out of me, that’s what’s worryin’ you. Usually, I’m the one who says it’s time we had a little talk, though I try and wait at least till everybody’s dressed.”
Kate flushed.
“On the other hand, I’m startin’ to get used to bein’ around you. It’s a comfortable feelin’ and beats sleepin’ with strangers, which is unhealthy and is something I generally avoid, although it’ll do in a pinch.”
“Don’t think I feel any differently,” she said. “About you, I mean.” She reached for the blinds, bent one of the slats and gray light pushed aside the gloom.
“What’re you doin?” He moved her hand away.
“People are coming home from work already. We should try to salvage part of the day.”
“What’ve we got to do that beats this?” He didn’t let her respond. “I didn’t expect a roll in the hay. I can’t say I wasn’t thinkin’ about it, ’cause I was thinkin’ about it all the time. Now you’re tellin’ me I got lucky, and let’s leave it at that. You made your point. But your timing is way off.”
Kate shifted uncomfortably. “If I didn’t get it off my chest right away, I was afraid I’d do something I’d regret.”
“What’s that?”
She hesitated. “I’d attach myself to you.”
Harry stroked her thigh, and she covered his hand with hers. “It’d sound better, you didn’t look like you were swallowin’ arsenic.”
“That’s just what it would be for me if I stayed with you,” she said. “My life’s such a mess the way it is. And yours …” She lifted her hands, then brought them down and cinched them around her knees. “I need someone, something to hang my hat on. Can you imagine what we’d be like together in a few years?”
“As I understand it, that line of thinkin’ went out a while ago,” Harry said. “A woman in her twenties, she should be lookin’ for some excitement, find the right guy for that. She gets in her thirties, she can ditch him for Steady Eddie, to have kids with. In her forties, she keeps herself in shape, she can trade up to an older guy who’ll be glad to give her things, a fancy house, furs, like that. She gets bored, there’s always plenty of young guys don’t do anything in the afternoon. She reaches her fifties, her sixties, well, I don’t know too much about that. And after, about all you’re interested in is someone to change your bedpan. I never said we should stay together the rest of our lives. But it’d be nice we played a few encores and see where we go from there.”
Kate said, “I’m not worried about what happens when I’m seventy. I’m worried about whether I’m going to see tomorrow.”
Harry pushed himself up to a sitting position and leaned back beside her. “You get around to tapin’ my ribs, I can travel,” he said. “I can ride a roller coaster without it killin’ me, I don’t see any reason I couldn’t survive a few hours on a plane. Let’s see how far we can get on the money we have—mine, you don’t wanna touch yours—and worry about everything else later.”
She pulled away. “What good does it do when we have to come back?”
“For starters, it keeps us alive. Which is a step in the right direction every time.”
“What about clothes?” She looked pained. “I still haven’t gone back to the brownstone.”
“You’ll buy new ones.”
“And, aren’t we forgetting somebody?” More pained, yet relieved to have an argument he couldn’t dismiss so easily.
“Who? Ormont? You got your own problems. There’s nothing you can do for him anyhow.”
“Isaac,” Kate said. Jesus.
“We can’t just let him starve. When I left, he had enough food and water in his bowl for only one day.”
“The mutt’s got some camel in him,” Harry said. “He can hold out till you send someone the key.”
“He’ll be dead.”
“I happen to know for a fact he can go lots longer than …” He saw her waiting to ask how he knew, and stopped. “…Now, you wanna get out of town, or you wanna stick around till they find us? Like I gotta ask you, like it’s a tough choice.”
“Oh, keep quiet,” Kate said. “It’s almost time for supper, and I haven’t even had lunch, and you expect me to make my mind up about something like this.”
“What’s the big deal? We get on the plane and go.”
“That’s easy for you to say. You have nothing to come back to.”
“What’ve you got?”
“I need to think about it,” Kate said. “Why don’t I make supper and we’ll see just how badly you want to stay with me. You can take a shower while I run down to the store for a few things. Does that sound fair to you?”
Harry swung his legs over the side of the bed and padded out of the room. “Medium rare,” he said.
She hadn’t returned by the time he stepped out of the tub. He went into the bedroom and got into his clothes, then pulled the blinds. Seabreeze Avenue was alive with pedestrians moving head-down from the subway through an October thundersquall. He wandered into the kitchen. Under the toaster was a note in a determined feminine hand.
I may be late so make yourself at home. We’re having supper with Isaac. I’ve gone to pick him up.
Kate sprinted the last block to the brownstone, looking over her shoulder. The key was in her fingers. She ran up the stoop and slammed the door behind her, threw the bolt and chained it, put her back against it as if the big bad wolf were threatening to blow it down. In the anteroom she stood catching her breath as she shook the rain from her hair. “Isaac,” she called into the darkness
. “Isaac, are you okay?”
She switched on a light and climbed toward the landing. A damp breeze fluttered against her cheek, and she made a mental note to close all the windows before she left. She heard a stair creak above her and halted with a foot in midstride. “Isaac?” she said again.
Her answer was the scuff of leather against the runner. She backed down two steps, pivoting as she grabbed the banister and began running.
“Kate?”
She pumped her legs harder, taking the steps two and three at a time.
“Kate, where are you going?”
Her knees felt rubbery. She lunged for the door, opening it before she dared turn around. A light came on over the landing illuminating brown loafers without socks, baggy cotton trousers, then a white shirt open at the neck. Her body tensed and she backed onto the stoop. “You?” she called inside, unsure of herself. “Is that really you …? Howard?”
He came onto the landing tousling gray ringlets over his forehead. “You look like a dybbuk is chasing you,” he said. “Who did you think it was?”
Kate didn’t answer. She came back in and went up the stairs, meeting him below the landing. He looked tanned and fit, with an amused smile that announced he’d never seen such a fool. But she was beyond embarrassment. She threw her arms around his neck and let him hug her, her tears wilting the collar of the fresh white shirt. “I thought—”
Clinging to him, she began to sob. He put a firm hand on her shoulder and prodded her upstairs, sat her at the kitchen table and drew a glass of water from the sink. “Yes?” he said, trying to hide the smile that refused to go away.
“I still can’t believe …How could you do this to me? What are you doing here?”
“What questions,” he said. “This is still my home, isn’t it?”
Isaac Grynzpun crawled out from under the table and rubbed his back against Kate’s legs. She started, then dropped to her knees to pet the big dog all over. Then she began crying again. “I … I thought you were locked up in jail.”
“I was,” Howard said.
“But when did you come back? How did you get out?” Forcing herself to look him in the eye.
He let her see his smile. “No thanks to you.”
Kate stood over him and kissed him again.
“Where were you?” he asked. “I was waiting, and waiting, and—”
“Oh, Howard,” she said through her tears. “I’m sorry, so very, very sorry.”
“Not half so sorry as I.”
“I know,” she said contritely.
“And what about my restaurant? When I left, I still had one. Now it’s closed.”
“God,” Kate said. “I have so much to tell you.”
“I should say the same thing. But mine is such a complicated story. I think it would be better if I heard yours first.”
“Tell me all of it,” she demanded. “Tell me right now. Don’t leave anything out.”
Howard bent an elbow behind his back, turning to show her the twisted arm. “Since I have no choice …But I must warn you in advance there are details I am not prepared to divulge, even to you.”
“I understand,” she sighed, as if the fact in itself was a trust too heavy to bear.
“Good, then,” he said, sipping from her glass. “As I told you over the phone, new bureaucrats have installed themselves at the highest echelons of the IDF, the Israel Defense Forces, men with whom I have no relationship. As eager as they are to get their hands on my electronic gear, that is how severely they view the other goods I bring to Israel.” He shrugged. “And who can blame them? These men had me kidnapped, brought to them so they could order me to give up all the krytrons that I had or they would prosecute me as a drug smuggler. They wanted also to teach me a lesson, show me who is boss. In the future, they said, my special privileges would cease. When I refused to cooperate, they threw me in prison, and a waiting game ensued. I would be there yet, if the prime minister’s office did not intervene. The IDF men were instructed that the krytrons were needed immediately and so I would be allowed to pass unmolested through customs one last time. And that is how I am here today.”
The corners of Kate’s mouth, sagging under the weight of apprehension, collapsed. “Now I see everything.”
“I don’t,” Howard said. “I see only a closed restaurant, and your strange behavior, and my house in ruins. When I went to the vault, I found poorly repaired stairs covered by a runner which does not quite match the old one. And inside—nothing. Can you explain these things to me?”
“I … I can’t even explain them to myself.”
“That’s no answer.”
“It’s all I have,” she said. “If I tell you what I do know, maybe you can make some sense of it for me.”
“…And I was worried you would be bored,” he said, smiling faintly. They were in the bedroom, Howard on the edge of the Barcalounger while Kate sat up in bed with her heels against the footrest. “That, I thought, would be your biggest problem when I was out of the country.”
“It was the only one I didn’t have.”
He smiled again, apologetically, it seemed to Kate. “I suppose it is my fault. If I hadn’t been so eager to see you take on a little responsibility, none of this would have happened to you.”
“How were you to know? It was just one of those things.” She reached beside the bed for her glass. “Or ten, or twenty of them.”
“But still not so many as cannot be resolved. I am acquainted with Nicholas a long time, and he is not unreasonable. If I talk to him …”
“This is a reasonable person!” She was up off the bed, screaming. “Your house was burglarized, Nathan’s dead, and I was almost charged with murder. And you say he’s just folks?”
“The way he was when he brought you to his place, the man who charmed you, that’s Mike Nicholas. Much in the same way that the real Detective Stanley Bucyk shot Nathan. He is a thorn in my side ever since he was a bagman for the police and I was not his most cooperative … er, client. I ask Nicholas how he can employ such a thug, and he tells me I answered my own question.”
“There must be a good reason why he wants someone like that working for him,” Kate said.
“That is not our concern. I will reason things out with Nicholas. That is to say, I’ll buy him off. After all, your new friend—and what you are doing with such a character is the greatest mystery of all—did take some things from his place. But, as Nicholas still seems to be holding on to my most valuable possessions, I am sure that a deal can be worked out to everyone’s satisfaction.”
“I refuse to believe it’s that easy.”
“Why not?” Howard asked. “Nicholas is a cocaine importer by profession, not some gonif, some hoodlum who looks for trouble he doesn’t need. I think he would be more offended to hear you speaking of him as one than by your breaking inside his house.”
“You’re sure of that?”
Howard nodded vigorously. “The man who tried to ransack my home, he doesn’t sound as smart, or as brave as he would like for you to believe. I would bet that Nicholas’s was the first place he ever broke inside, the first place like that, and he gave himself a bad fright when he realized the kind of person it belonged to.”
“I wouldn’t count on it. It seemed to me that he knew what he was doing.”
“In any event, not even he has anything more to fear. I will call Nicholas, and explain everything, and a deal will be worked out, rest assured. Nicholas will tighten the controls on Bucyk and you will be able to come out of hiding and show your face around our restaurant.”
“I hope so.”
“And where have you been?” he laughed. “In case I have to reach you, can you give me a phone number at least?”
Kate opened her mouth, and closed it just as quickly.
“Surely, you trust me with this piece of information.”
“Of course I do, Howard. It’s just that … I know this is going to sound silly, but Harry, that’s my … that’s your burglar
… Harry says I can’t keep a secret. And I’d hate for him to pick up the phone and hear your voice and know that he was right.”
“This prize catch, he’s a jealous man, no less?”
“Oh, you’re making me feel ridiculous, both of you. I … I’m living in Brooklyn, back in Brighton Beach,” she blurted. “Is that good enough for you?”
“It is, if you promise to phone me, say this evening, so I can tell you how my negotiations with Nicholas went. How does that sound?”
Kate’s eyes were glistening again as she went over to the Barcalounger and kissed the top of his head.
“Go now,” he said. “And leave everything to me.”
“Nick, how are you?”
“Ormont. What brings you back? I heard you went home and got the royal treatment.”
“And give my regards to your parole officer,” Howard said.
Nicholas laughed. “He works for me now.” Thinking about it, he laughed some more. “Something I can do?”
“I believe you already did. I believe it was your man who came in here shooting like a cowboy and took some things that don’t belong to him. What is all this about?”
“It’s about Stan Bucyk,” Nicholas said. “You remember Stan. As I recall, you were the one who introduced me to him.”
“So I know he doesn’t let out a breath without your telling him it is okay to take in the next one.”
“Stan’s a big boy now. I’ve put him on a longer leash. From time to time he gets all tangled up, and it’s more like a noose around his throat. I can’t help that.”
Silence.
“Ormont … Ormont, are you still there?”
“Thinking.” After a longer silence Howard said, “It changes nothing. If I were run down by your car, I would sue you, no matter who was behind the wheel. I will expect to see Bucyk shortly with my things.”
“Krytrons?” Nicholas asked. “Is that what we’re talking about? I’ve been having the dickens of a time trying to figure out what they are.”
“They wouldn’t be worth any more to you if you knew.”
“What are you offering for such a rare commodity?”
Little Odessa Page 21
