“Always the victim or the asshole, aren’t you? This time you’ve managed to be both.” He sounded exasperated. “You get jumped by a half dozen neo-Nazis who want to stuff you into a dumpster and you’re worried about being too violent?”
“The pleasure of it, Simon.”
“I don’t get it, Matt. No, correct that, I don’t get you! You haven’t been non-violent since the Vietnam war and I’m not sure you were non-violent then.”
“Try ‘since the days of Martin Luther King,’” I offered.
“But when you finally win a damn brawl against rednecks who want to gas Jews and fry Blacks, you’re all over yourself?”
“Simon, I went looking to beat on them. I didn’t even wait to see if she’d been hurt.”
“You didn’t wait because you know the Avengers for what they are. I was the naive one. You understand them. You rushed in because you thought the lady needed help.” He paused, then added, “And because you’re stupid.”
“Well, you’re at least half right.”
“So let’s drop this mea culpa crap. Those pieces of shit got what was coming. And they’re going to get more when they realize they are going to spend the rest of their working lives earning money for a Black lady.” He clicked his teeth with genuine pleasure.
“You been in touch with Cheryl?”
“Of course. She wants to know if you’ll forgive her.”
“Make her stop that, Simon, I can’t take it. How is she?”
“About a week better. They don’t need to operate on her hands, but it’ll be a slow go.” He stopped then asked delicately, “What about you? How long do you think it will be before you’re on your feet?”
I didn’t answer.
Simon waited, then pushed on, “Look, I don’t want to rush you…”
“Yes you do,” I said.
There was a second of silence, a small laugh, and a considerable easing of tension in his voice. “You’re right, Matt-man, I do. I still can’t get a lick of information out of anybody.”
“So you want me back doing what?”
“More of the same. I was wrong to call you off the Hasids. Go back and get as much as you can. The news blackout doesn’t change my concerns, it adds to ‘em. My Jewish brethren like the silence, but want the legalities finished. They dislike the ambiguity more than I do.” Simon hesitated then continued, “I don’t want dime one hanging over Reb Yonah’s head. Otherwise it will be an open invitation for more anti-Semitic bullshit.”
What could I tell him? That I’d been blindsided by a gawky Hasidic teenager into a bonebreaking miss of my dead daughter? That I was frightened to see more of him? “I don’t know,Simon, I feel all right, but my face looks like Carmen Basilio after a whupping.”
“So I hear.”
“Who you been talking to?”
“Lou. He said you were pretty withdrawn so I didn’t bother you.”
“It didn’t stop you from calling today.”
“Yeah, well, you’ve been withdrawn long enough.”
“You sure you weren’t looking for the first opportunity to get me working? I mean you’re on a mission from God here, Simon.”
I couldn’t bring myself to say anything about Becky. Nor could I turn him down. Most of me wanted nothing to do with Yakov, the Yeshiva, the entire case. But I was still angry about Cheryl’s slender body bent and broken on the hospital bed. Also, a sliver in me still wanted more of the kid. It might not be a healthy sliver, but it was there. I wasn’t finished.
“You really are stupid.” Simon’s voice was suddenly gruff. “I’ve been talking to Lou because I wanted to know how you were doing!”
I suddenly realized how incredibly difficult it must have been for Simon to stand still during my recuperation. Especially since he knew he was waiting on a depression. “Look, Boss, I’m sorry. I’m finding this whole situation a difficult do. Give me another day and I’ll jump on it. Actually, walk on it. I’m not ready to jump.”
“Well, if you can’t jump, you better stay the hell out of trouble.”
I laughed and hung up the phone.
The laughter didn’t linger. Most of the next twenty-four was metal on metal, as if the past week had suddenly slipped away and I was back to where my hurting began. But as the day trudged into another restless night, what little sleep I had was free of nightmares.
By early morning, my throat ached from too many cigarettes, my mouth dry from alcohol dehydration. It was still dark when I dragged myself from bed. I plodded into the kitchen and put up the coffee. I wanted to drown the stale, burnt, bourbon after-taste.
I had to get the fog out of my eyes so I retreated into a shower. Standing under the hot, wet sting helped roll away the fatigue, but didn’t do much for my head. I might be able to understand the causes for my lingering depression, but that was a long leap from a fix. I lifted my face into the spray and thought again about quitting the job. But the idea had me shaking like a long-hairdog after a dip in a dirty pond. I convinced myself I was just shaking awake. I also convinced myself to start working that day, just as I had promised. I was so busy convincing I almost pitched my naked butt onto the kitchen floor before I realized the large Black shadow hulking at the table was Julius.
Instead of belly down I stood dripping, searching for my voice. Julius’ heavily lined dark brown face remained impassive though I knew he enjoyed the moment. He hoisted his permanently slouched lids and tilted his head. Still too surprised to see clearly, I knew his eyes were bloodshot. His eyes were always bloodshot. Went well with his tightly curled salt and pepper hair.
Julius was one of the building’s originals. Despite his vaguely menacing persona, the tenants adored him. Mrs. S. said she slept better just knowing he was around.
When I first became the super I had my doubts; Julius didn’t look like any night angel to me. We boy-dogged each other for a long time before the hair on both our necks settled. Then he delivered his proposition.
“I’ll slide you one of these,” he said, pushing the first canvas gym bag across my kitchen table. “Instead of rent.”
It took a ten-second sift. “You’re overpaying.”
He didn’t answer, just flashed a little red-eye, and left. That had been the beginning and, slowly, over time, we became tight. He made his living brokering various enigmatic transactions. It wasn’t dope. I once asked and he became seriously offended. I never asked again. It didn’t matter what we knew, or didn’t know. We liked each other. Julius said we got along because we both lived a couple of steps beyond the campfire. It surprised me to think he even saw the flames.
“A little early in the morning to play Tarzan, Slumlord.” His deep voice snapped me back. Now I knew the scene was a smile. “Slumlord” was his term of endearment. For the second time in less than a week I pounded my chest, this time careful to keep away from the faint yellow splotches that still sectioned my body.
Julius put his hand over his eyes. “Too ugly to see all that white meat shake. And you’re splashing me.”
“Bullshit, you just can’t stand looking at a man with a couple more inches.”
He pulled his hand away from his face. “Only place you got a couple more anything is around your gut. That sub shop be the death of you.”
I nodded and walked toward the bedroom. “Yeah, well, the worms have an order in for a steak and onion,” I said. “You know how much I like to please. Help yourself to the coffee.”
By the time I returned he had two poured. “You been keeping unusual hours,” he said. “Unless you turned professional pugilist, you also been keeping unusual company. You having another midlife crisis?”
I shook my head as I lit two cigarettes. “Nope. Did that already.”
The corners of his mouth twitched. “I’d say a couple of times. But five minutes ago you were patting your chest and talking about the size of your iron.”
I smiled. “I won the fight. It probably went to my head. Or somewhere.”
“If you won, the way you look after a
week on the mend, you must have fought yourself. Usually you do that inside your head. Nobody looks as bad as you and calls himself a winner.”
“How do you know it’s been a week?”
“You have a worried father-in-law. Asked me to look in once in a while. When you get trashed you eat a prodigious amount of sleeping pills.”
I shook my head. “I don’t understand you. You hand me the fucking drugs, then give me shit about them.”
“Ever the way, Matthew. An ancient Chinese method of medicine. Doctor be responsible for his patient’s life.”
I wasn’t thrilled with the metaphor, but I had been known to call my stash the medicine chest. “Well, I’ve used up the sick bed. Barrister Roth wants me back on the job.”
“I take it Simon’s job is what prettied you up?”
“A sidebar.” I gave him the play-by-play. When I finished talking I had the uneasy feeling something I couldn’t see was eying me from behind a bush.
“I’d say you ran into a nasty crowd, boy.”
“You couldn’t tell that from my face?”
“Your face asks and every once in a while receives. It’s something else to lay out a lady. Even if they’re down on her pigment, breaking hands is cold.”
He shook his head and continued to think out loud. “Now that the police ran in the punks, you won’t be talking to anyone. Even the neighborhood good guys won’t crack. You spend ten more years living there maybe someone’ll bullshit with you over a boilermaker. Maybe.”
Julie sounded a lot like Phil. Maybe he’d been the one following me while I’d been drawing blanks. “Phil thinks Washington Clifford may be involved with this case,” I offered.
“That so?” The corners of Julius’s mouth curved down as he shook his head. “I don’t believe it. Mount Washington likes big ripples. The Avengers are not major players. Even within the hate league. You already know this, you won your fight.” He backed his words with a basso profundo chuckle.
“What if it is a big case?”
Julie was skeptical. “Nothing Clifford-big about it. That dead Rabbi may have been important to some Higher Authority, but not to the folks Clifford answers to.”
“Look,” I couldn’t stop trying to make that chicken salad. “What if it isn’t straight up? What if Clifford really is involved and the squelch is his?”
“This kind of quiet comes down when everyone sweats a riot.” He winked conspiratorially, “Even when folks think it’s White on White.” Julie shook his head. “Nobody wants the newspapers slobbering, television going twenty-four a day. Downtown wanted this chilled from the start. Frozen.”
I kept chopping. “Why don’t they just charge the Reb or completely cut him loose?”
Julius shook his head. “He’s not doing time. They just waiting to formalize when it’ll be three lines on page thirty-eight. You can drag yourself around by the nose, but any Kelly or Rabbi in the telephone book be too small for Washington Clifford to notice. You’ve already had all your excitement.” A quick nod of his head. “You’re better off. You won’t be thumping that ugly chest of yours if you’re up against Clifford.”
He was right. For a brief moment I’d let myself hope for meat on the bone, forgetting who the meat was.
A small smile split the ridges of his brown lines. “You got to go back into Hymietown to dig up more dirt.”
I was surprised, maybe offended. “Hymietown? Give it a rest, I heard too much of that shit in the fucking refrigerator.”
Julius somehow managed to get his eyes lower. “Care to bet on the number of times you’re going to hear the word Schvartze?”
I wasn’t offended enough to argue. “What are you trying to tell me?”
He jerked his thumb back over his shoulder in a gesture I knew meant across the ocean. Any ocean. “It took but ten minutes for people to slap each other around once the Big Red Machine closed shop. Ten minutes. And we’re talking Caucasians. Whites whacking Whites behind dislikes so old that nobody can remember what they are. Folks just remember the taste of blood. Hop a plane and you have the same thing in living color. South Africa. Black people taking each other out. Licking the same boot for so long they can’t stand the sight of each other’s tongues.
“Back here, Jews and Blacks were soul brothers until the militants came along. But the only thing those angry Bloods did was hold a mirror to the underside of a two-faced reality. Empty a checkbook into the N double A, but write, produce, direct movies that have Stepin’ Fetchit tapdancing across the screen.”
Julie stopped, stood, retrieved, and refilled. When he sat back down, he lit one of my cigarettes.
“You sure it was Jews who produced those movies?”
A momentary look of disgust crossed his face. “I don’t know whether Jews did Fetchit or not. I’m saying they had clout in that industry but that didn’t stop anyone from making Black folk high-stepping fools.” He opened his eyes wide enough to almost glare. “You want to pretend that ‘We Shall Overcome,’ don’t you?”
I chuckled and shook my head. “Not really. Occasionally I hope things will get better. I still have flashbacks of us against them. Seemed a little less lonely in those days.”
Julius shrugged. “It’s still the same, but the side of the street we’re on isn’t as crowded.” He plunged his cigarette into the rapidly filling ashtray. “When different groups gang together it’s for one reason. Convenience.” Julie lit another cigarette. “These days, it’s rarely convenient.”
I stood and started for the bedroom. “So the older we get, the smaller our world. Eventually it drops to one, then nothing. Like the little dot that disappeared into a ‘ping’ in Zap Comics.”
“Not familiar with the funny page, but sit down, S’lord. No need to fetch the gym bag.” Julie lit a joint he pulled from his old, gray-on-gray vest.
He passed the marijuana. I toked, toked again, then passed it back. We sat silently until the joint worked its way into a roach. I tore off the top of a matchbook, curled it into a tight cylinder and stuck the roach into the end. Julie leaned forward with a match. I inhaled and passed the home-brew holder. He toked and dropped the scorched dregs into the ashtray.
We both reached for the cigarettes at the same time.
“After you,” Julius said, “they’re yours.”
“‘What’s mine is yours,’” I grinned. “An old Jewish expression.”
Julie grunted and lit. “What you have to understand, Matthew, is Blacks instinctively know Jews are busy ‘passing’ and get angry ‘cause they mostly get away with it.”
“Passing? Come on, Julie, that ended when they stopped ripping the ‘steins’ and ‘bergs’ off their names.”
“Passing. Your Avenger homeboys told you the pecking order. Jew, Brown, and Black. That’s one reason why Jews are phobic of the Arab. No one ever wants back on that bottom rung.”
Julius’s intensity surprised me. I’d never before heard a hint of racial identification—political or otherwise. I thought about Simon having joined Sheinfeld’s Temple and felt another rush of the past week’s loneliness. But before I could change the subject, Julius lit another cigarette and clamped his mouth closed.
Quiet settled in and we sat chain-smoking. I retreated to the bedroom and grabbed my stash. It was odd to find myself thrust into a situation where Jewish meant more than Lou’s warmth or a little Yiddish. Jewish meant something to Simon, certainly something to Yakov. Jewish definitely meant something to the Avengers. Jewish apparently even meant something to Julius.
For me, it was something that just was. Like my size or the color of my eyes. I was Jewish when Chana told me I had a Jewish heart. Or when Lou called me Boychik. My handles on the world were personal, occasionally political. Religion was irrelevant, Jewish culture another world.
We walked slowly toward the living room door. I asked if he would see what he could unearth about Kelly. Especially any connection to armored car heists. Julius grunted his reluctant agreement. The door was open and his f
oot in the hall when I reached out and grasped his shoulder. “Julie, you make sense about the case but the other stuff puzzles me. I never feel any of that Black-Jewish rift between us.”
Julius’s eyes opened. Really opened. I almost fell backwards. “Slumlord, I’m truly surprised you have to ask.” His eyes slowly slid back to their sleepy droop. “But then, you do have the capacity to surprise. You don’t get uptight about it, and it doesn’t play between us, because you always remember.”
“Remember what?”
“That at your motherfucking best you ain’t nothing but a nigger turned inside out.”
Better to be outside than inside out. After a week of hibernation, the street was more attractive than Bakelite radios, ziggurats, or Lew Archer fantasies. More interesting than my obscene fondling of the television’s remote. Liberating, actually, on this side of my drunken, stoned depression. I considered movies, junking, an indoor batting cage, but rejected them all. I wanted work not play. Real case or not.
And not just for Simon. I wanted work for me. My newfound balance hadn’t left me indifferent to Cheryl’s damaged hands. I wanted to stick it to Sean Kelly. It didn’t matter that he was six feet under. If I could, I’d push him down another twelve.
But since I couldn’t, I decided to break into his apartment. It was likely the police already had removed everything of value, but doing detective was more powerful than any “likely.” Kelly’s home would give me a clearer picture than the one I had.
And that picture was growing important. Kelly’s “political” conversion, his relationship with Blue, his distance from the Avengers, and the possibility of his acting alone on Simchas Torah had combined to fire my curiosity. Digging up garbage no longer felt like a dirty job, just a small payback for Cheryl’s injuries. It wasn’t much, but it was the best I could do. Maybe it would be enough.
My first drive-by down the tired residential street was a surprise. I had expected to see a cave in the middle of a burned out block. Kelly’s address, one side of a two-family duplex, was no more rundown than the other buildings. The two or three-flats lining both sides of the street were clapboard, asbestos shingled, or aluminum sided. There was absolutely no sign of fresh paint, though all the houses needed a coat or two. Or three. Postage stamp backyards were used as open air closets for broken and rusted toys. The entire area had a defeated feel. No trees, no grass, the unkempt houses virtually flush with the sidewalk.
The Complete Matt Jacob Series Page 65
