“Okay, but don’t let it happen again.” She sighed wearily. “That place over there—” she bobbed her chin at the hotel “—is a sewer. A mother with a kid can’t be too careful.”
“I know, I realize that now. I’m sorry, okay?” He took a pack of gum from his shirt pocket. “How about you?” he asked, raising his eyebrows. “You want a stick of gum?”
She half smiled in spite of herself. “Why not?” She took a stick and put it in her mouth.
“Looking for a job?” Simms asked, nodding at the classifieds. “Yeah. Soon’s I find one, I’m getting out of that dump over there.”
“Listen,” he told her, “I go to this place at night, it’s kind of a community center, and sometimes I hear about job openings over there. If I hear of anything I think might interest you, I’ll let you know.”
Her eyes flashed suspicion. “What do you think that’ll get you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t sleep around, man.”
“Hey,” Simms said righteously, “I’m just trying to be a nice guy. Lighten up a little.”
She sighed again. “Well, you just never know. Seems like everybody’s out to get something.”
“I know. It’s hard to tell who’s being straight with you sometimes.” Simms drummed his fingers on the tabletop. After a moment, he asked, “So where’s Debbie?”
“She’s in daycare until three.”
“How’d you happen to give her a name like Debbie?” he asked. “I mean, that’s kind of an all-American girl-next-door name.”
“Maybe I’d like her to grow up to be an all-American girl-next-door. Anything wrong with that?”
“No, not at all. No offense intended,” he said quickly. “Hey, speaking of names, what’s yours?”
“Lupe Mercado,” she told him.
“I’m George Simms,” he said. He extended his hand and, after first hesitating, she shook it. “If you ever need anything fixed in your room,” he said, “just let me know. You don’t have to fill out a form and wait your turn, I’ll do it for you right away.”
Lupe shrugged. “Okay.” There was a tiny pinch at the top of her nose.
“I better be getting back,” Simms said, rising. “Thanks for not being mad at me anymore.”
Outside, as he waited to cross the street, he looked back and saw her watching him suspiciously. He smiled and waved. She still doesn’t trust me all that much, he thought. But for his purposes, that was okay. All he needed was a little trust.
For a week, Simms watched Lupe Mercado come and go. Her routine never varied. First thing in the morning she took Debbie to daycare, then she spent the rest of the morning job-hunting. At noon she was usually back at the hotel for the free meal served by Help for the Homeless. After lunch she’d sit in the lobby or go across to the coffee shop and read the classifieds again to see if there was anything she missed that morning. Sometimes Simms would see her using one of the pay phones in the lobby to call about jobs. Then, just before three, she’d leave to get her daughter from daycare.
Now and then Simms would speak to her in passing or wave to her across the lobby, but he didn’t intrude on what she was doing or in any way act as if he was presuming a friendship. All he wanted to do was keep her aware of him until he was ready.
He picked Thursday as the day. Thursday: late in the week when people were tired, not as alert, laboring toward the weekend. Simms had already selected the boiler-room door that led to the alley as the way by which he’d leave the hotel. He knew he’d have to move fast—Max Wallace would be after him very quickly.
At three-thirty, Simms was on the seventh floor when Lupe Mercado got off the elevator with Debbie and came down the corridor to 704. Simms pretended to be in a hurry.
“I was hoping I’d run into you,” he said in a rush of words. “I only got a second—there’s a bad leaky pipe in the basement I got to tend to.” Fumbling in his pocket, he pulled out a slip of paper. “This lady’s got a dress shop down in the Village. She wants somebody to work in her stockroom—says she’ll train somebody with no experience, says it’s good pay plus a discount on clothes. Give her a call as soon as you can, the job might still be open.” Pressing the slip of paper into her hand, he hurried down the corridor to the fire stairs. He made sure his footsteps sounded loudly as he ran down to six, and halfway down to five. Then he abruptly turned and crept quietly back up to seven. Standing just around the corner from the corridor, he heard Lupe speaking to her daughter.
“I’ll be at the phone in the lobby—just for a few minutes. You stay inside until I get back. Don’t play in the hall.”
Hearing a door close, Simms peered around the corner. Lupe Mercado was hurrying toward the elevator. He waited until she got on the elevator, then walked quickly to Room 704. When he knocked, Debbie opened the door on a chain.
“Debbie,” he said easily, “call your mother to the door—I gave her the wrong phone number.”
“She went downstairs.”
“Oh. Well, let me in and I’ll wait for her. I have to give her the right number.”
He took a pack of gum from his pocket and put a stick in his mouth. “It’s okay,” he assured her. “Your mother and I are friends. You know I’m helping her find a job.” Unwrapping another stick of gum, he held it through the opening.
Debbie hesitated. Then she took it. Simms unfolded several work orders he had stuck under his toolbelt. “While I’m waiting, I want to check something in your bathroom that needs fixing.” He added just a hint of firmness to his voice. “Open the door now, Debbie, so I can get to work.”
Debbie took the chain off and opened the door. When Simms got inside, he closed and locked the door behind him.
In the lobby, Lupe hung up the telephone and stared at the slip of paper in confusion. It was the number of a dress shop in the Village, all right, but the sales clerk Lupe had talked to knew nothing of any stockroom job that was open. The clerk had called the manager to the phone, but the manager knew nothing about it, either. And the owner of the store was out of town on a buying trip.
Puzzled, Lupe started back toward the elevators. Charlie Hosey was near the elevator bank, repairing a drinking fountain. Max Wallace had just walked up to him. “Where’s Simms?” she heard Wallace ask the maintenance man.
“He went up to seven to do something,” Hosey said. “He ain’t come down yet.”
Lupe stopped and stared at them. “Oh, my God!” she said.
“What’s the matter?” Wallace asked.
Without answering, Lupe ran toward the elevators.
“Simms,” Wallace said tightly. “I knew it!” He ran after Lupe.
Hosey ran after both of them.
In the bathroom of 704, Debbie was sitting on the edge of the tub, watching Simms in fascination. He had emptied the medicine cabinet of all its contents, piling them in the sink. Then, with a power screw-remover, he had unscrewed four three-inch wood screws that held the metal medicine cabinet into the wall studs on each side of it. With a small chisel, he’d pried loose the top, bottom, and both sides of the cabinet and taken it out of the wall. Then he had stuck his arm far down into the opening between the walls and pulled up a pillowcase with Algiers Hotel embroidered across the hem. “Thanks, kid,” he said, tucking the pillowcase under one arm. “Tell your mother to call Maintenance to have this put back in.”
He started for the door and Debbie followed him. At the door, he paused and gave her the rest of the pack of gum. “Your mother’s right, you know,” he told her. “You really shouldn’t talk to strangers or take gum or anything. Promise me you won’t do it again.”
Smiling shyly, Debbie said, “I promise, George.”
Simms opened the door and stepped into the corridor. Max Wallace, just hurrying up, put a gun in his face. “Move a muscle and you’re gone,” he said coldly.
Simms froze. Lupe Mercado rushed past him to gather Debbie into her arms. “My baby! What did he do to you?” she cried.
�
��I didn’t do anything to her—” Simms started to protest.
“Shut up!” Wallace ordered.
Peering past Wallace’s shoulder, Charlie Hosey’s face brightened. “Now I remember you! You’re the bank teller! I always thought you looked familiar—”
Wallace frowned. “That Chase Manhattan embezzler you told me about?”
“That’s the one,” said Hosey. “The one who hooked up with the Lana Turner lookalike.”
Wallace snatched the pillowcase from Simms and looked inside it. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he whispered.
“It must have been hidden in that room all these years,” Hosey said. “Eighty thousand dollars.”
Lupe stared at the bundles of currency in the pillowcase, then turned her eyes incredulously to Simms, her lips parted in stunned disbelief. Wallace put handcuffs on Simms and started leading him away.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Lupe asked, following them down the hall, indignation rising. “We could have shared it! We could have both got out of this sewer! Why didn’t you trust me enough to tell me?”
“Me trust you?” Simms said. “You didn’t even trust me enough to give your kid a stick of gum!”
In the middle of the corridor, Wallace pushed Simms onto the elevator. “You could have tried!” Lupe said. Then more softly she added, “I could have tried—”
“Well, it’s too late now,” Simms said flatly as the elevator door closed them off from each other for the last time.
YOUNG ISAAC
JEROME CHARYN
Lower East Side
(Originally published in 1990)
It was West Broadway, a land of small factories that could have produced every button and zipper in the world. Isaac loved to spy on all these button and zipper men, who would leave their lofts in the middle of the afternoon and congregate in a candy store, where they drank a curious concoction of malt and cream soda. They’d arrived in the ’20s from London’s East End. The language they spoke was almost indecipherable, even though Isaac’s dad had come out of the same streets. But Joel Sidel didn’t struggle over zippers. He was the fur-collar prince, and he was gathering a nice little nest. He had an exclusive contract with the Navy to manufacture fur collars for foul-weather coats. It kept him out of the war. He was already a millionaire in 1943, but he wouldn’t give up the tiny house that was ensconced between two button factories. “I’m one of the downtown Sidels,” he liked to say. “Never was an uptown man.” He wore suspenders lined with jewels. He had mistresses of every persuasion. He neglected his wife and children and ran to the Salmagundi Club, where he mingled with artists, because Joel would rather have been a painter than a fur-collar prince. He wanted the Germans to get the hell out of Paris, so he could move in. “How can I go to Montmartre and meet Picasso when there’s storm troopers on every block?”
If Isaac tried to reason with him—“Dad, Dad, you have your business in Manhattan”—the West Broadway Picasso would cuff him on the ear.
“What would you know? You’re a truant. You lie. You steal.”
Isaac could have returned the cuff. At thirteen he was a head taller than Joel. But he wouldn’t have hit his own dad. He loved the old man, as much as he could love a father who played the Bedouin with his own family. If Isaac had become a thief, wasn’t it out of some dread that Joel would abandon him? Joel had his new Jerusalem: the hills of Montmartre. And Isaac had his wealth of ration stamps.
The stamps came in buff-colored booklets issued by the OPA, Office of Price Administration. It was a federal offense to traffic in stolen stamps. “Persons who violate rationing regulations are subject to $10,000 fine or imprisonment, or both.” That’s what it said on the front of each book. But Isaac prized the blue and red stamps, with their pictures of cannons and tanks, aircraft carriers and fighter planes …
He never sold a book to individual clients. That would have been dumb. Because the OPA had their own detectives. Isaac always used a middleman, Stoney Whitehall, the air raid warden. Stoney could work up a deal during air raid drills, while he wore his white helmet and poked around with a whistle and a flashlight, snarling, “Close the blinds, will ya? It has to be midnight.”
He took whatever merchandise Isaac had, paying him in old, crumpled bills that could never be traced back to Stoney himself. When Isaac’s supply was low, the warden would mutter, “I need product, kid. I can’t go out empty-handed. I might get killed.”
Isaac wasn’t a wholesaler. He could clip only one book at a time, from absentminded mothers who left their purses open or forgot to lock their doors, from housewives at the Essex Street indoor market who were much too busy counting their change to notice Isaac Sidel. He was very agile for a boy who resembled a bear. He had none of the obvious signs of a thief. He wasn’t nervous. His eyes didn’t wander. He didn’t drool at the mouth, or play with himself in front of the housewives. He could linger at a merchant’s stall. He was the son of Joel Sidel. He would buy fruit for his woeful family. There was always an alibi for Isaac.
But the warden wouldn’t leave him alone. He waylaid Isaac outside the Essex Street market.
“Stoney,” Isaac said, “you shouldn’t come here. People will talk.”
“Never mind. Gimme what you got.”
He ripped at Isaac, removed the single booklet Isaac had pocketed in his pants. The booklet cost Isaac an hour’s work. The boy had waited like a spider, hovered between two stalls, to catch the right victim. And now Stoney was ruining Isaac.
He slapped the boy. Isaac swallowed blood. Merchants wandered in and out of the market. Stoney walked away.
It was one more piece of bitterness Isaac had to bear. He was losing his dad to the Salmagundi Club and some phantom idea of art. His mom had opened a junk shop to show the fur-collar prince she could survive without him, while his baby brother Leo still pissed in his pants.
Isaac couldn’t forget that slap. He met Florsheim, the assistant principal, near the Loew’s Delancey. Florsheim was a failed scholar of Greek. He’d abandoned Euripides to become a glorified custodian in the public schools of New York. It was from Florsheim that Isaac had learned about the terrible fate of men and women in a wounded world. Isaac had been his best pupil before he eloped from P.S. 88 to begin his career as a criminal.
“I know,” Florsheim said, sadness on his scholar’s face. He looked like a consumptive child. He was much more delicate than the girls and boys he had to guard. Isaac had disappointed him.
“Fourteen days.”
“I don’t feel good,” Isaac said. “I need the fresh air.”
“Is that why you live inside a market, breathing chicken feathers?”
“I have to shop,” Isaac said. “We’re alone. My father’s new address is the Salmagundi Club.”
Florsheim touched him with a hand that felt like a broken wing. Isaac couldn’t even consider it a slap.
“You’re stealing ration stamps.”
“Prove it,” Isaac said.
“Fourteen days. I can’t cover for you, Sidel. Soldiers are dying and you steal stamps.”
It’s a living, Isaac wanted to say, but he wouldn’t provoke the scholar into another pathetic slap. He liked Florsheim the way he liked the button men, with their crazy talk.
He left Florsheim and marched to the air raid wardens’ barracks, a storefront on Attorney Street. Isaac had no fear of the wardens, who were idlers and opportunists, peddlers of other people’s merchandise. They wore white armbands, sleeping with helmets over their eyes, like some slothful army. He would have enjoyed shaking them out of their bunks, copping their helmets, and tossing those hard white hats over the Williamsburg Bridge.
“Where’s Stoney?”
He had to ask again, going from bunk to bunk, before one of the wardens sang from under his hat, “Mendel’s. He’s at Mendel’s if anyone wants to know.”
Isaac was disheartened. He could never walk into Mendel’s bar. He wouldn’t have dared. Mendel’s had been the Manhattan headquarters of Murder, Inc.,
until Governor Dewey kicked all those gunmen in the pants. The bar was on Clinton Street, near the Williamsburg Bridge. It had beer mugs in the window, rotting flowers from one of the brethren’s funerals, a peeling photograph of FDR, whom the gangsters considered their President, old hunting scenes of New Amsterdam, with bare-chested Indians and peg-legged Peter Stuyvesant, who was as unkind to criminals as Dewey himself. Isaac dreamt that he would be welcomed into the brotherhood of Mendel’s some day. Nothing seemed more important. Not ration stamps. Not the war. Not the New York Giants, who sat in the cellar in 1943, orphans of their own little war. Nothing mattered as much as an open ticket to Mendel’s. Isaac arrived on Clinton Street, his nose against the glass, watching and waiting for a miracle to happen.
The door opened. Stoney stood with a beer mug, his little eyes like rodents. He talked that crazy talk of the button men.
“Come in, will ya, love? Don’t stand there like a silly cow.”
And Isaac, with a blush on his face, entered the heartland of Mendel’s. It stank of beer and sawdust and foul breath. Isaac didn’t mind. He’d never seen women in a bar, but the women of Mendel’s had broad shoulders and a thick, raucous laugh. They inspected Isaac as if he were some prize cattle. They felt his arm and reached down to stroke his thigh. Isaac was ashamed, because he had on his winter underwear.
“A cute one, Stoney, will you lend him out?”
“Not a chance,” the warden said, basking over Isaac. “The twit is my property.” He winked at the barman, who brought Isaac a glass of seltzer water with a cherry at the bottom. The warden whispered in Isaac’s ear. “Make a toast, will ya, you ungrateful little sod.”
Isaac clutched the glass of seltzer, but he didn’t know what to say.
“To hell with Tom Dewey!” shouted one of the women.
“May he rot with Kid Twist!”
Twist was a Murder, Inc. gunman until he became a stoolie for the Brooklyn D.A. He fell out the window of a Coney Island hotel while he was in the company of six cops. He was the shame of Mendel’s bar, because in the old days Twist would come over from Brooklyn to sit at Mendel’s and buy drinks for the whole population.
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