by John Gardner
“Yes. Any further proofs?”
“He said you might need another to establish identity. He told me that you would remember the night they invented champagne.”
“So we’re talking about a large man of German origin?”
“Yes, and I have to talk to you.”
He moved further down the aisle. She followed, letting thirty seconds pass.
“It’s possible that I’m under FBI surveillance,” he said, still not looking at her. “You have transport?”
“A rented Colt. Outside.”
“I have a Lincoln. …”
“Registration ONE 391.”
This time he glanced at her and she smiled.
“Get out to your car when we leave and follow us,” he said. “We’ll do a little run around the houses to see if they have any mobiles out. It is possible that they’re only watching the house. If it’s all clear, my wife’ll move one of our packages so that it’s visible through the rear window. Overtake and fake a breakdown. Okay?”
“Got it.” She gave him a dazzling smile and added, “I go, I go. … Look how I go. …” and so was gone.
Naldo did a full run around to make sure no mobiles were tracking them. He took 29 North, turned into Carrsbrook. Then down, past the neat houses with their manicured lawns, onto Rio Road and into the Fashion Square Mall; then back onto 29 North and over to the Rio Hill Mall; parking and walking into Brendel’s where he stayed for ten minutes before driving out and heading south, exiting onto Route 250 and off again, doing the side roads.
Pucky lost all sense of direction, but on a straight and deserted narrow road she saw Barbara lean back and toss a package onto the rear shelf. She accelerated, overtook and went straight on, pulling off the road after about a mile, getting out and opening up the hood, praying nobody else had overtaken Naldo.
The Lincoln pulled up, stationary for just enough time for Naldo to get out and let Barbara take the wheel.
“Shut the damned thing up,” he told Pucky. “Shut it and get behind the wheel.” Then, for the next fifteen minutes he sat, giving her terse instructions—“Left at the next junction … Right at the T. …”
Finally, they pulled over into a picnic area a mile or so from Monticello, Jefferson’s home, the area’s showplace. Pucky spent ten minutes giving Naldo the instructions she had been ordered to pass on. At the time, Naldo did not confirm whether Herbie had been in contact or not.
Barbara pulled up in the Lincoln and Naldo simply said, “I’ll be in touch. Stay close to a phone. I’ll call you in the next couple of days,” which, Pucky thought, was tantamount to admitting he had a direct line to Kruger.
Later, Naldo used a public booth to telephone Herbie, just as Louis Passau was getting interesting about the second Thursday in December, 1912.
(10)
“I WAS NOT A bright boy, at age eleven.” Passau began his story of the events which seemed so important to him. “Skinny looking, underfed, yes. But bright, as in smart, no. Sure, I could read and write. I knew some history dates, yet when it came to genius, I was not. Until the second Thursday in December 1912, that is. I didn’t know, Herb. Not the slightest idea.
“I was coming back from the Talmud Torah. Going home at the end of a long and not very rewarding, day. …”
Now that his parents allowed him to come and go by himself, Louis Packensteiner really loved the streets of New York. “There was always something to see; a view I didn’t notice before; noises unheard. It was excitement, and the clamor—music to my ears. I tell you, I sometimes hear those old noises, like I’m transported right back to the second decade in this lousy century we’ve lived in, and I can still hear and smell those streets. It was so different then: the lights for one thing and, in Hester Street, among the stalls there were naphtha flares which made shadows. It was wonderful, and I used to drag my heels, take more time, dawdle on the way home.”
He was dawdling on that December night. Almost all the stalls and street traders were gone and the darker side of Hester Street had started to encroach on the friendly gusto of daytime.
So, it was with surprise that, on reaching the top end of Hester Street, young Louis found himself almost alone. Then the bigger boys appeared all around him, stepping from the dark pools near the buildings.
“I suppose they were only a handful of years older than me, but at eleven years you think a sixteen-year-old is a man. Funny, isn’t it, when we’re kids we wanna be older, when we’re older we wanna be kids again? Anyhow, there were four of them, Herb. A quartet of oafs, brutish, menacing, and there was nobody I could turn to. Hell, there was nobody else around, everyone with any sense was at home. It was a very cold night. I was stupid, being out at that time with no topcoat. Never, never, Herbie, never go out in December without a topcoat. Be your death. It was nearly my death that night. A topcoat woulda acted as padding. The sidewalk was empty one minute, the next it was fulla four guys.”
“Well, what we got here?” asked the leader of the pack, who stood an inch taller man the others.
“We got a little kike,” another sneered, from behind Louis. “A little kike, all on his own at night.”
“Past your bedtime, kike.”
“Whatcha doin’ out this time of night, kike?”
“I’m goin’ home.” He was not yet really afraid of the boys.
“You got money, kike?”
“All kikes got money.” They drew closer, and only now did he feel the real menace.
“I got no money. You let me pass. I’m goin’ home.”
“Give us what money you got. I don’t believe there’s a little kike on the street with no money.”
“Please get outta my way. I got no money, I told yah.”
“We’ll see ’bout that.” The leader spat straight into Packensteiner’s face and, as though it were a prearranged signal, the others piled onto Louis, dropping him to the ground with the weight of their bodies.
He kicked out, and battered upwards with his hard little fists, but that only made matters worse. Both his kicks and fists made some mark on the older boys, who were enraged that he even dared to fight back. One of them, suffering from a fierce little boot in the groin, reeled away, doubled up and cursing—“Kill the little Jew bastard. Jesus and Mary, he’s dislocated my balls. Kill the little fucker.”
They tried to do just that: raining punches on Louis’ head, cutting him over one eye, and splitting his lip. He still struggled and fought, but now he knew fear and could smell it on himself. They started to rip at his jacket, and the thin shirt under it. He began to cry, and one of them gave him a vicious kick in the ribs, which drove the wind from his body. Then another, and another.
He rolled into a ball, instinctively putting his arms over his head, waiting for the blows which were bound to follow, which might even end his life. He was certain they would kill him.
Then, suddenly it stopped. The hitting ceased and there seemed to be another commotion going on.
He peered through splayed fingers. Two of the boys were running away; another seemed to be hobbling, limping off as fast as he could, while the leader of the group was now a victim. A large hand held him by the collar, while an equally large boot was being applied, with wincing regularity, to his backside.
The person doing the kicking was a giant of a man: very tall, with broad shoulders and a mass of graying hair that flowed out behind him like a horse’s mane. He seemed to Louis to be some avenging patriarch, though he was to discover that the man was really only about the same age as his father.
“Now, get the hell outta here, you coward, you goy schnorrer.” The man placed his heavy boot even more firmly into Louis’ tormentor’s rear and let go of his collar, sending the boy flying, so that he ended up, face-down, spreadeagled and scrabbling at the sidewalk.
Louis’ savior now turned to him. “There, vingale, let’s see how much damage they done to you.”
The hands that lifted him up were strong, like the hands of a man used to doing he
avy manual work; yet their touch was soft and gentle, as was the man’s voice. “Oy!” he said, “they’ve bloodied your lip; that’ll be a fat one by the morning; and you got a nasty cut over that eye there. Come on. I live only up the stairs, here, in this building.” He pointed to a cracked and peeling door almost on the corner.
“This guy had to support me, hold me. You know, I could’ve sworn that serious damage had been done to my body. I shook, gasped like a drowning man, felt the pain like hot irons applied to my skin. God, I feel it now, it’s so vivid. Almost eighty years ago and I still feel it, like I can still see the man.”
He had the face of a kindly tyrant; eyes that were a deep dark color—“I never got his eye color right. Sometimes black, others a dark brown”—a great hooked nose, big and curved above thick lips. An extraordinary face. A face that nobody, having seen it once, could ever forget.
“You know, Herb, in a way that man had the face of a caricature Jew; Fagin in Dickens’ Oliver Twist, or the makeup some actors use when they play Shylock. You remember that Brit actor in the musical Oliver, the movie, with over-the-top makeup? This man could have been that Brit actor.
“He cradled me to his shoulder, lifting me up and heading towards the door. You know what I was thinking, all the time, while this kind old man led me towards the door, muttering soothing things? You really know what I was thinking? I tell you. I was thinking of my mother, and I heard her voice screaming in my head. ‘Louis, you should never, ever, go with any stranger. Run away if a stranger asks you to go with him, Louis, there are people out there who are bad. You will understand when you get older. But I tell you now, and I mean it. Never let a stranger walk with you, it’s the road to things you’d never dream of.’
“She’d say that kind of thing to me at least once a week and the hell of it was that she never told me why. All she’d say was, ‘Louis, trust me. You’ll understand in time. When you’re grown up you’ll understand what some strangers can do to a young child.’ What good was that, Herb? It was then I needed to be told, not in the future, when I would know everything.
“So there I am, petrified, that this is the stranger who’s going to do those unspeakable things to me. This guy is helping me and I am worried out of my head about what my mother’ll say.”
They went up a bare staircase, then into a room that smelled of tobacco, dust and another odor which he could not identify.
Later he was to discover the smell was that of paper. Piles of paper; mainly music manuscript paper.
“Poor young bubela,” the man said in German-Yiddish.
“I’m not poor,” Louis answered, speaking the same language, a warm and pleasant smile. “So,” he said, “a German also. Me, I’m from Austria, from Vienna. And you?”
His lip, eye and ribs were aching and throbbing, but he had stopped crying. “I am from a village thirty miles from Passau, in Bavaria.”
“Good. You know Passau well?”
“No, I’ve only been there three times. I did not like it much. Maybe now, when I’ve got used to New York, maybe now I’d like it.”
“So.” He had set Louis in a high, stuffed chair. Then he extended a large hand which seemed to sprout from a tree trunk of an arm. “Me, I’m Aaron Hamovitch. Shalom.”
They gravely shook hands. “Shalom,” Louis said. “My name is Louis Isaak Packensteiner, and my mother says I should never go off with strange men.”
“And your mother is right, Louis. But thank the good Lord that I’m not a strange man.” He gave a bellow of a laugh, and muttered the liturgy of all adults, saying that one day Louis would understand. “Now that we are introduced, I shall clean up your cuts and then take you straight home. You know the way, yes?”
Louis said, yes, he knew the way.
“Then make yourself at home, here, while I get hot water and some cloths. I must also use iodine which will sting a little, but you are brave enough to stand iodine.”
Aaron Hamovitch disappeared into another room, giving the boy a chance to look around. The furnishings were better than those of his own home, though the apartment was smaller, and more dingy.
A thick carpet covered the floor and there was a profusion of chairs, most of them stuffed with horsehair, like the one on which he was sitting. Small tables, littered with frames containing photographs, were set all over the place, along the walls, and by the chairs. In fact, the walls were just as cluttered, a large gilt-framed mirror almost completely taking up one of them, while every available inch on the others was covered with oil paintings. Louis considered that his benefactor must be very rich.
The centerpiece of the room, indeed, it took up most of the floor, was a large piano, which reinforced Louis’ views, for this piano was larger even than the one that Miss Abrahams thumped on at Public School No 1. It was also highly polished, and seemed to be the only item in the whole place that was free of dust.
He was looking hard at the piano when Aaron Hamovitch returned, carrying clean bandages and hot water in a basin. “Ah, you like my piano, yes?”
Louis said it looked very nice.
“Good. Then we have a little tune before I take you home.” Hamovitch began to clean up the cuts and bruises.
“You play it?” Louis asked.
This launched his new friend off into a long monologue. Yes, for his sins, he played the piano, and the cello, and the horn. In Vienna he had played with the opera—“Under Mahler, crazy man. I saw him several times when he was here in New York. Just before he left to die. Only last year he died, you know.”
Louis politely said he was very sorry, not having the slightest idea who this man Mahler was. It did nothing to stem the tide of Hamovitch’s words. He had played with many orchestras. Bless him, Gustav had tried to get him a place with the Met when he was there, but—“they would listen to him about nothing. You know how it is?”
Louis nodded, and wondered how it was.
“So, I stay here. I play and I teach. You play, Louis? If you played, we could do some duets. I have transcriptions of all the great symphonies, made for piano—four hands. We could thunder our way through those. You play?”
Louis sadly said he did not play, wishing he could understand everything that Aaron Hamovitch was talking about. He winced as the man applied iodine to his cut lip, and all he knew was, that in spite of Hamovitch’s overpowering manner, the oddity of his face, and the man’s size, he liked him as much as he had ever liked anyone, apart from his lost cousins and his father and mother.
“You don’t play?” The voice seemed as large as the man. “What d’you mean, you don’t play? How old are you? Ten, eleven?”
Louis told him. Eleven. In September he had become eleven. Soon he would be a man.
“It’s a little late, but not too late, Louis, my friend. Really you should start at five or six, but eleven is not altogether late.”
He had finished bathing the wounds. “Right, so now I take you home in a minute. First, I play for you, yes?”
Louis said he would like that and went to stand by the piano.
Aaron flexed his big hands, gave Louis an angelic smile, then began to play.
“Herbie, I don’t think I’ve told anyone the entire truth before. This was a kind of music I had never yet heard in my life. The throbbing stopped in my face and ribs and I was—how can I put it?—I was taken over by a cold, unusually icy feeling. It ran down my spine, then up again to the back of my neck. I thought my hair would stand on end. I can’t explain it. It’s been my secret all these years. I suppose it was excitement, but hearing Aaron play for the first time made me also feel like a giant. More than that, I had never heard this music before, yet, at that moment, it was as though I had known it since birth. Also, and this I have told nobody but you, I had an erection while he was playing. Odd, huh?”
Aaron Hamovitch came to the last dying note. “There. You liked that?”
“It was … it was very pretty.” Louis knew this was a lame answer following all he had experienced. “I cou
ld not find words to say what I really felt,” he told Herbie Kruger.
“Pretty? Pretty?” Hamovitch bellowed at the lad in his good-humored way. “You ever hear this before?”
Louis shook his head.
The man gave a huge sigh. “You say it is pretty. I just played for you the first Prelude and Fugue in C Major. Well-Tempered Clavier. Bach.”
“You want me to bark? Like a dog?”
“Oy!” Hamovitch slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Johann Sebastian Bach.”
“Who is Johann Sebastian Bach?”
“God in heaven, eleven years old and he asks who is Bach. You’ll be asking who is Mozart next.”
“Who is Mozart?”
“Who is Mozart? You really ask that?”
Louis was filled with indignation. “I can’t be expected to know everybody. But I liked what you played. It was wonderful. Listen …”
It was then that Louis suddenly had his revelation. In order to prove the point that he had liked the music, he began to sing. He had a pleasant accurate voice: they had told him that in school and the Rabbi at the Talmud Torah said one day he might even be a cantor, they would see. But now, the voice was bell-like in its clarity.
Aaron Hamovitch sat and stared, his jaw dropping open: for Louis Packensteiner now repeated, vocally, every note he had just heard played on the piano. He la-la-ed, exactly, the entire Bach Prelude and Fugue No. 1 in C Major from Book One of the Well-Tempered Clavier.
“There!” the boy said, defiantly, as he finished.
Hamovitch put a hand around Louis’ right upper arm. “And you never heard this before?”
“Never.”
“Listen.” Hamovitch turned back to the piano and played a few bars of something more complicated. “Sing that,” he commanded.
Louis shrugged. It was easy. He la-la-la-ed and da-da-da-ed, correct to every note, pitch, space, rhythm, melody—even managing to sound as though he could produce harmonies.
“Now sing the first piece again,” Hamovitch demanded.
Louis repeated the first Prelude exactly as before. Not a note wrong.
