Flesh and Blood

by Thomas H. Cook

  “He died suddenly, Rabbi Kovatnik,” the old man said. “And after that, the new rabbi lived across the street. So they closed the basement.”

  “When was that?”

  The old man squinted toward the calendar. “Right after Rabbi Kovatnik died, I think. Things have been left to go since then.” He shook his head despairingly. “What a pity. It’s not a bad building. Not a bargain, I admit it. But not such a bad building.”

  Frank’s eyes moved slowly down the bleak row of iron beds. “There were three sisters,” he said, as his eyes turned toward the old man. “Do you remember them?”

  The old man nodded. “Gilda, I remember. And the oldest one.”

  “Hannah.”

  “Ah, yes, Hannah,” the old man said. “What her father didn’t have in the head, she got it.” He looked at him intently. “She was your friend, maybe?”

  “No.”

  “But something to you, yes?”

  Frank nodded. “Something to me. yes, she is.”

  The old man shrugged. “I did not know her very well,” he said. Then he turned and pointed down the street. “I lived on Second Avenue in those days. But we came to synagogue here, and so I would see them, the girls.” He smiled. “Hannah was the leader. When the rabbi died, she took them away.”

  “To Orchard Street,” Frank told him.

  “And did they stay together, the sisters?” the old man asked.

  “For a while.”

  The old man laughed. “Oh yes, I remember.”

  “Remember what?”

  “Was a scandal or something,” the old man said. He waved his hand. “I can’t remember.”

  “What kind of scandal?”

  “They went to work,” the old man told him. “All of them. Even the youngest, the pretty one.”

  “Gilda,” Frank said.

  A kind of odd radiance rose in the old man’s face. “Yes, Gilda. Such a beautiful girl. She must have been thirteen.”

  “What about a scandal?”

  “For a bachelor, they went to work,” the old man said. “Yes, a bachelor, I think it was. People said it wasn’t right, him taking in those three girls.”

  “They lived with him?”

  “Upstairs from him.”

  Frank took out his notebook and wrote it down. “Where was that?”

  “Around Orchard Street,” the old man said, “but it’s all been torn down. Nothing but projects where it used to be.”

  “The man, what was his name?”

  “Feig,” the old man said instantly. “Sol Feig.” He shook his head. “People said it wasn’t right. The rabbi’s daughters, you know.” He shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. It was the middle of the Depression. People have to eat.” He glanced over toward the row of beds. “She was such a bright little thing, Hannah,” he said, “always taking charge.” He smiled. “The old people still talk about it, how Hannah ran things. Even the rabbi. Around her little finger, that’s where she had him.” He lifted a single crooked finger into the yellowish air, then made a circle around it with his other hand. “Around her finger,” he repeated.

  “That sometimes happens,” Frank said.

  The old man nodded. “Such a smart little girl, Hannah. A quick mind, that one. Everyone said, ‘Watch Hannah, she’ll go far.’” He cocked his head slightly and looked at Frank quizzically. “Where did she go?”

  Frank glanced back toward the row of beds. Their dark gray shadows seemed to climb slowly up the rough, grimy walls. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “But you are looking for her?”

  “In a way.”

  The old man nodded. “We go, now,” he said as his hand moved toward the light.

  Back on the street, Frank waited while the old man carefully locked the gate. Then they walked slowly west toward the Bowery.

  “Do you have any idea what happened to the sisters?” Frank asked when they reached the corner.

  “No.”

  “How about any other relatives?” Frank added insistently. “Nephews, nieces, cousins? Anything?”

  The old man shook his head emphatically. “When they left this street, we heard only there was a scandal.”

  “You mean about them living with Feig?”

  “Something was bad, something about Feig,” the old man said. “Don’t ask. I’m an old man. What do I know?”

  “But that’s all you heard?” Frank asked. “Something about a scandal of some kind?”

  “If there was more, it was not for me to hear,” the old man said. “I was a little boy. When my parents spoke about such things, they spoke in Polish. Polish they used for secrets.”

  “But as for yourself,” Frank said, “you never saw or heard from them again?”

  “Never,” the old man said emphatically. “Who knows what happens to people when they leave the neighborhood?”

  Frank glanced back down Fifth Street. From the corner it looked like a long black tunnel.

  It was a long walk from the old synagogue to the New York City morgue and night had fully fallen by the time Frank got there. Silvio Santucci was the night orderly, and Frank had made it his business to take him out for a drink not long after getting his license. Santucci worked what he called “the graveyard graveyard shift,” and Frank had sat in the dark bar for several hours listening to his tales of high-class corruption. “When the Archbishop’s sister goes off a roof,” Santucci had said toward the end of the evening, and with an air of conclusion, “it ain’t a suicide, you know? She may have been depressed. She may even have left a bitchy little note detailing her complaints. But it ain’t no suicide. Hell no. The fucking wind blew her off, blew her over a six-foot storm fence topped with another foot and a half of concertina wire.” He had then smiled impishly. “I believe that, Frank. But then, what can I say, I’m a fucking fool.”

  “Hello, Frank,” Santucci said now as Frank approached his desk.

  Frank nodded.

  “So,” Santucci said. “Come to wet my whistle again, or cash in on the last one?”

  “Cash in.”

  “Stands to reason,” Santucci said. “No such thing as a free drink, right?” He leaned back in his chair. “So what can I do for you?”

  “I’d like to see a body.”

  “Any one in particular?”

  “Hannah Karlsberg.”

  “How come?”

  “I’m working on the case.”

  “That’s Midtown North. Got an okay?”

  “Not in writing.”

  “You talk to Tannenbaum?”

  “Yes.”

  Santucci nodded. “Okay,” he said. “No big deal.” He smiled cheerfully. “Hell, I’d of let you in anyway, Frank, you know that.” He stood up and headed down the brightly lit corridor which led to the freezer room.

  “Ever been here before?” he asked as he plunged through the wooden double doors.

  “Not this one,” Frank said. “Others.”

  “Karlsberg’s in number 14,” Santucci said as he marched to a wall of stainless-steel refrigerator cabinets. “Here you go.”

  “Thanks,” Frank said.

  “Not a relative, right?” Santucci asked. “You said a case.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Good,” Santucci said lightly. “That’s the only fucking thing I hate, showing the stiffs to the relatives.” He shook his head. “I don’t get paid for that. That’s cop shit.” He grabbed the metal handle and swung open the door. “Heeeeeere’s Johnny,” he cried with a short laugh as he drew out the carriage.

  A huge black bag covered Hannah Karlsberg’s body.

  “You just interested in the face,” Santucci asked, “or the whole thing?”

  “Her face,” Frank told him softly.

  “Easiest part,” Santucci said. He reached over and unzipped the bag a few inches. “Looks like a nice old lady,” he said as he glanced down at Hannah’s face.

  “Yeah, she does,” Frank said quietly. The skin was very pale, the lips a deep
blue, but the face itself seemed soft and kindly. He could imagine how she must have looked in her youth, neither plain, nor beautiful, but a face that could be either with high rounded cheekbones, large oval eyes, and a full mouth.

  “She was slashed real bad,” Santucci said, “but I guess you know that.”

  Frank looked up. “Yes,” he said. “And her hand, I know about that.”

  “That’s the psycho touch if you ask me,” Santucci said, “that’s the thing that lets you know it wasn’t her favorite kid with an eye to the insurance.”

  “Unless it was faked,” Frank told him.

  Santucci shrugged. “Always a possibility. Is that what Tannenbaum figures?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Want to see it, the hack job?”

  For a moment he didn’t, then suddenly Frank realized that he had to see it, that it was part of what he had to know.

  “Yes,” he said, “I want to see it.”

  “Fine with me,” Santucci said. “I’ve showed a lot worse things in my time, you know?” He drew the zipper down a few inches farther, then reached in and brought out Hannah’s lower arm. “There you go,” he said as he laid it across the plastic. “What I call the psycho touch.”

  The arm was white and smooth, except for the few slits which the autopsy had confirmed as defensive wounds. The hand had been severed at the wrist, and from the look of it, it had been done raggedly, with a twisting, tearing force that had left tattered skin and jagged bone in its wake.

  “It looks messy to me,” Frank said.

  Santucci smiled. “Well, I’ll say this, a surgeon didn’t do it.” He glanced down at the hand. “Or even a fucking butcher, if you know what I mean.” He shook his head. “This was a yank-and-pull job, if ever I saw one.” He looked at Frank. “Of course, this guy was probably in a hurry, right?” The smile broadened. “Not to mention his frame of mind.”

  “I read the autopsy report,” Frank said. “Did anything else come along after it?”

  “No.”

  “Any visitors drop by?”

  “Cops and you, that’s all.”

  “No word from the family?”

  “Far as we can tell, this old lady was like the old ME used to say, ‘alone in the fucking universe.’”

  Alone, Frank thought, as his eyes once again drew down toward her face. He saw her with her sisters in their bedroom, then with the other workers in the shop, and finally standing before the sweeping crowd at Union Square. Alone, he repeated in his mind, and the word seemed to move through him like a darkly weaving ribbon.

  It was a long walk from the East Village back to midtown, but he took it anyway. The night was dark and cold, but the movement of the crowds, the noise, the speeding traffic seemed to connect him to the city. It was as if the random jostling and nameless faces provided him with something that worked in the place of something else that never had, a sense of being woven, despite his isolation, into an immense, eternal fabric.

  He stopped at La Femme Gatée, the small delicatessen at the corner of Ninth Avenue and 49th Street. A few of the regulars were there, the old lady with her two pet dogs, the exhausted night watchman who patrolled the building site across the street, the Puerto Rican super who read El Diario in the back corner of the room.

  He ordered a coffee, then sat down at one of the large windows that overlooked the street and began to go through the stack of old newspapers Etta Polansky had given him. The first was dated December 12, 1931, and toward the back there was a letter which had been written by one of the union’s younger members, a woman who worked a sewing machine on Orchard Street.

  When I came to this country in 1927, I wanted to make it on my own like a good American does. This was my dream. It was the same as most people have. But since working in my shop, I have come to think that this is not the way to think about America, or myself, or about any of the other people in my shop. I think now that we must stand together, and let all the other people stand with us too. We make the clothes the people wear. But we also eat the food they grow. We are in life together, not apart. We are like the body, which needs all its parts to work. We are like the fingers of the hand.

  Nothing by Hannah appeared for almost a year after that. Then, in the spring of 1933, there was another short letter, similar to the first. After that, there was nothing until February of 1936. By then, it seemed to Frank as he read the short article on page sixteen of the paper, Hannah’s voice had lost all its girlishness. Now it was strong, self-confident and full of a fierce conviction. He could almost hear it ring in the air around him, feel it flowing over him, as the crowds had felt it in the meeting hall and at Union Square.

  Justice is not a rally, no matter how big it is. Justice is not a wage, no matter how fair it is. Justice is a way of looking at life. It is a way of seeing every other person, and the rights of that person and the work that that person does for you, and that you do for him. Justice is the way you fit in, and the way you allow other people to fit in. There is no lone justice. There is no solitary justice. There is no work of justice that isolates another person. Justice is the great unifying principle of all life. A single life may look for comfort. A single life may look for love. But all life, when it is lived together, looks for justice.

  It had been written in the middle of a labor struggle that, according to the union paper, had rocked the garment trades for many months. Throughout the paper, there were grainy black-and-white photographs of strikes, sit-ins, lockouts, of men and women gathered in crowded meeting halls, or huddling outside doorways while the police stood at a distance, staring grimly at the crowd.

  Frank was nearly halfway through the stack of newspapers when he finished the last of his coffee and walked down the street to his office.

  Once behind his desk, he poured himself a single shot of Irish, drank it down, then turned on the desk lamp and began going through the papers once again.

  In early March, photographs of strikes and marches gave way to a raw winter violence. Police in thick greatcoats charged into the milling crowds, or rode into them, lashing their horses wildly as they plunged forward.

  In the March 14 issue of the union paper, there was another article by Hannah. It detailed the particular difficulties of the sweatshop worker on the Lower East Side, the crowded hovels in which they lived, the exploitation they suffered at the hands of the owners and their brokers. Along with the article, there was a picture of its author, a young woman in a thick sweater, her hair held tightly in place beneath a tattered wool cap, her eyes staring fiercely at the camera from behind a pair of plain wire glasses.

  Two weeks later, another picture of Hannah appeared in the paper, this one accompanied by a short article about her which had been written by a man named Philip Stern. It detailed her journey to America, her father’s death, her work at the sweatshop on Orchard Street, and finally her continuing commitment to the union. The accompanying photograph showed Hannah at the Union Square rally, her body held high on the platform, her fist in the air, a sea of faces gazing up at her from below in a kind of frozen rapture.

  For a long time, Frank stared silently at the photograph. He could almost feel the cold winter wind which lifted her scarf and held it fluttering in the air, hear the roar of the crowd as they cheered her, feel the triumph of her hand in the crisp, biting air, sense the sheer, driving power of her voice as it pealed over them, crying out the words which Stern had quoted:

  No man lives without other men. No weight is lifted by a single shoulder. No hope is carried on a single voice. Each man lives in another’s debt. And the payment of that debt is justice.

  Frank turned the page, then went on to the next issue, and the next. The weeks passed in a sweep of yellow pages. The workers returned to their shops. The machines began to hum again.

  And Hannah disappeared.

  Frank folded the last of the papers, and stacked it neatly on top of the rest. He stood up and stretched his long arms in the shadowy light. Then he walked over
to the small sofa which rested by the window at the front of the room and stretched out across it. For a time, he thought of returning to Karen’s apartment, but the idea of paddling across its carpeted floor, or sliding in beneath the lush down comforter, did not appeal to him, and so he simply remained on the sofa, his arms behind his head, until light began to break outside his window.

  13

  Frank had just returned from the corner deli with his morning coffee when Farouk walked through the door.

  “You do remember me?” he asked, his enormous frame almost entirely blocking the light from the basement window.

  “Of course I do,” Frank said.

  Farouk nodded. “That is good,” he said. “I thought that perhaps the liquor might have erased a few important items.”

  “It doesn’t work that way with me.”

  “Good,” Farouk said. He nodded toward the chair in front of Frank’s desk. “I may sit?”

  “Of course.”

  Farouk lumbered over to the chair and eased himself into it. “I make myself available, as you recall.”

  “Yes.”

  He smiled. “Well, in such a connection, I have discovered a few things.”

  “About her business dealings?”

  “Her possessions,” Farouk said. “She owned the apartment she lived in, along with a small house on Long Island. She was not in debt, and no one was in debt to her. She never declared a dependent on any tax form, which means she supported no one but herself.”

  “So there are no lost children,” Frank said.

  Farouk shook his head. “She had no life insurance,” he went on, “ so no beneficiary. Again, a dead end.”

  Frank nodded expressionlessly.

  “As to her will,” Farouk said.

  “The American Cancer Society,” Frank said. “Tannenbaum told me.”

  “He is correct,” Farouk said.

  “Is that all?”