by Ann Aptaker
That went better than I deserve.
There’s a safe built in to the wall behind my desk. The safe’s behind a painting I liked enough to buy legit. I do that from time to time, especially if it’s the work of a living artist, which this one is. After all, the guy’s entitled to make a living. The painting’s by one of the new abstract bunch who’ve taken to painting what goes on in their heads instead of what goes on in the world. About a year or so ago, this guy Rothko started painting fuzzy-edged rectangles and squares of different colors. They look like spaces I could crawl into, get lost inside a slot of brown or a chasm of green or a tunnel of black. I don’t know what I’d find in there. Maybe Sophie.
Maybe that’s why I hung the painting in front of the wall safe, because inside the safe, next to the strongbox where I stash cash, is a framed photo of Sophie and me that I kept on my desk for months after she disappeared, until it became too tough to look at every day.
I pick up the photo after I stash the remaining five grand. The sight of Sophie still nearly buckles me over, the way her dark hair falls to her shoulders like the mane of a gypsy’s pony. I’m the happy idiot next to her. We’re cheek to cheek, grinning after our first night together. We’d made love over and over until dawn, the wildness of it releasing the gods who lived inside us and who’d never show themselves to anyone else. I’d gone to heaven that night. I wish I’d never come back.
Chapter Six
Marcus Stern’s town house on Riverside Drive is the odd Greek Revival number in a row of four gewgawed Beaux-Arts palaces on the block, the morning sun tracing a line of gold along their corniced rooftops. The Stern house looks as if it’s been squeezed between its bigger, flashier sisters whose limestone curlicues do their best to ignore the brick-and-marble upstart in their midst. But the brickwork on the Stern place is as well cared for as the curlicued girls on either side of her. Her white-framed windows, marble front stairs, and fluted white columns are as trim and crisp as the new money stacked in Marcus Stern’s bank account. The only smudges threatening this otherwise confident façade are the black hearse parked at the curb and the single black limousine parked behind it.
I pull into a parking spot across the street but don’t get out of my car. I just stare at the limousine and the hearse. It’s the smallest funeral procession I’ve ever seen.
Okay, so Mrs. J didn’t have a lot of family in America, just her brother, his wife and kid. But what about friends? There must be other people besides me who knew her. Hell, even Vivienne knew her. A woman as sociable and smart as Hannah Jacobson must’ve had a pal or two, someone to have coffee with, or maybe play a hand of canasta. Where the hell are they?
Mrs. J deserves better. She deserves a standing-room-only sendoff on her way to meet the souls of her husband and children and probably the souls of old friends, too, all devoured in the Nazi frenzy. Maybe their ghosts will show up at her funeral. I hope so. A great lady like Hannah Jacobson shouldn’t exit this world unescorted.
The tantalizing sight of a young woman, blond and pert, coming out the door and down the front steps of the Stern place blunts my brooding. Her short, bouncy hair glints in the sun and bathes her pretty face in a silky light that young women wear like a glowing second skin. In her dark blue coat with its fashionably turned-up shawl collar and a handbag tucked under her arm, she’s lithe and graceful as silk in a breeze.
She must be the Stern daughter, Francine.
She’s followed out of the house by a woman I assume is Francine’s mother, Mrs. Katherine Stern. Her pinched-waist princess-style black coat, little black hat with a small silly feather, and her slightly haughty, slightly unsure posture give her away as the sort of dame who’ll never accept that her fiftieth birthday is moments ahead or maybe already moments behind. She’s blond like her daughter but her hair is longer, a more formal shoulder-length style spilling from her little hat in a tightly controlled wave. She looks as if she’d punish any strand that rippled out of place.
Marcus Stern is the last out of the house. The brim of his fedora shadows his eyes but the lower half of his face is visibly jowly. His black overcoat hangs with the discipline of expensive tailoring forced to cover a bulky, slightly stooped frame. I’d peg Stern at about sixty-five.
After the Sterns get into the car and the funeral procession drives off, I invite the ghosts of Mrs. J’s family and friends into my Buick, then fall in line behind the limousine.
*
New York buries its dead on the outskirts of town. Most of our cemeteries are in the borough of Queens, whose small old villages are nowadays in a chokehold of boxy suburban tract housing and stores crammed with household schlock that offer up the American Dream on the cheap. Driving along Queens Boulevard is like driving through an America that’s burst her corset, freeing herself from the double-whammy constraints of Depression-era privation and wartime frugality, and now revels in the privilege of growing acquisitive and fat. As I roll through streets clogged with woodie station wagons and sedans gaudy with chrome, I wonder what these neighborhoods will be like ten, twenty, thirty years from now, if there’ll be a tree left standing or all mowed down in the name of progress. I wonder if there’ll even be a parking space.
Our little funeral procession finally breaks free of the commercial clutter and drives into the cemetery. Headstones and greenery take over, a front lawn to the Manhattan skyline shimmering in the distance across the East River like an apparition of the heaven awaiting the city slickers buried here.
Nearing Mrs. J’s grave site, I hang back and pull over but stay in my car. Explaining my presence to the family will go down a lot better after they’ve buried Mrs. Jacobson without the distraction of a stranger.
Anyway, that’s the story I tell myself, but who am I kidding? I’m hanging back from the funeral because the rabbi conducting the service would look me over and probably give me the stink eye, a look I’ve gotten from the God boys since I put on my first suit as a teenager prowling for love under the Coney Island boardwalk. If I get that look from this guy, I’ll react the way I always do: I’ll want to spit in his face but won’t do it. I’ve never been able to spit in a rabbi’s face.
So I watch the funeral from my car. I see Marcus Stern lower his head and cover his eyes with his hand, his bulky body sagging like a sack of old potatoes. His wife touches his arm but her gesture is stiff and mechanical and doesn’t seem to give her husband much comfort; anyway, he doesn’t acknowledge her. And Francine isn’t paying attention to either of her parents, lowering her head from time to time then raising it again and taking a deep breath as she looks at her aunt’s coffin.
The rabbi’s voice, thin and reedy in the cadences of the ancient language, slides around gravestones and drifts toward me like a wraith. Those words, those old sounds, come at me as something foreign and familiar at the same time. I recognize only bits and pieces but the archaic chant pulls memories out of me, memories of burying my mother, and then a couple of years later my pop, both of them dead of overwork and disappointments.
The graveside service and the rabbi’s chant drone hypnotically on, the sun glimmering off the polished coffin, making the air around it shimmer, or maybe the shimmer is the dance of the ghosts keening over Hannah Jacobson. The glow lingers as the coffin is lowered into the ground.
The funeral service is ending. Marcus Stern, unsteady on his feet and helped by the rabbi, is the first to toss the customary shovelful of dirt into the grave. It must be tough for the guy to bury the older sister who only a few years ago came back into his life.
His wife and daughter then toss their shovelfuls. Mrs. Stern gets rid of the dirt like it’s—well, just dirt. Francine spreads her shovelful as if she’s sprinkling flower petals over the coffin.
It’s over for Hannah Jacobson’s family, but not for me. I can’t say good-bye to Mrs. J yet. Neither of us will know any peace until I track down her murderer.
I get out of my car, give the family a minute or two to gather their wits after the servi
ce ends, but I don’t dare lose them before I have a chance to toss them a few questions. Funeral or not, I’m still squeezed between the Law and the Mob, and I can’t let a little thing like good manners get in the way of saving my own life.
I’ve barely taken two steps toward the family when Francine Stern heads in my direction. Her parents call after her but she doesn’t seem to give a damn.
The lithe, fresh-faced college girl I saw coming out of her house earlier today has turned into a worldly-wise dish advancing on me with a stride that advertises no-nonsense, but whose luscious green eyes hint at a rather robust taste for nonsense of various kinds. I guess it’s true, what Judson said about her; she’s an eighteen-year-old handful.
She’s looking at me like I’m a banana out of place on an apple tree, though she doesn’t seem put off by the mismatched fruit. Nearing me, she doesn’t offer any greetings or any other niceties or even a smile, just asks, “You knew my aunt?” with the interrogatory politeness of a stranger asking for the time of day. Before I even get a word out, she follows it up with, “You don’t seem like the type to hang around with Aunt Hannah. How did you know her?” Lack of confidence is never going to be a problem for this kid. I like her.
“We shared a love of art,” I say.
“Uh-huh. Got a cigarette?”
I give her one of my smokes. When I light it for her she keeps her eyes on me. A smirk seeps into those green eyes.
Through an exhale that sends smoke in my face, she says, “You know what I think? I think you’re the piece of bad news the police warned us about.”
“The police think puppies and rainbows are bad news.”
“You’re no puppy.”
“Sure I am. Give me a treat and I’ll wag my tail.”
“What kind of treat are you looking for?”
“Information.”
Her eyes stay on me but the smirk fades away. I get the feeling I’ve disappointed her.
Another pull on her cigarette gives her cover for a minute while she recharges her attitude, then she says, “What kind of information? The same stuff the police wanted to know?”
“That depends. What did they want to know?”
“They said you’re Cantor Gold and they asked if we knew what business my aunt had with you.”
Things could get tricky here. If I play it too pushy about the cops, she might back off, scared that I really am the bad news the cops say I am. So I keep my tone easy, my attitude matter-of-fact. “And what did you tell them?”
“The truth, I guess. That we never heard of you.”
“What do you mean, you guess?”
“I mean, I don’t know who the hell you are. I never heard your name before the police mentioned it. But I can’t say what my parents know. Maybe Aunt Hannah mentioned you.”
“What else did the cops want?”
“Oh, the usual,” she says with a shrug. “Did my aunt have any enemies, that sort of thing.”
“Did she?”
She starts to take another drag of the smoke but can’t, stopped by a sob that’s suddenly clogging her throat. She tosses the cigarette away, catches her breath, and when she’s finally able to speak she’s the innocent college kid again. “My aunt was wonderful. Brave and wonderful,” she says, barely getting the words out. “How could anyone hate her?”
“Your aunt was wonderful,” I say, “but her killer didn’t think so. Listen, Miss Stern, I can help you and your family—”
“Please just go away.” She takes a handkerchief from her bag and dabs her eyes with it. “Look, you’re not the police. What gives you the right to barge into my aunt’s funeral and ask questions? What is it you want, anyway?”
“If I told you justice for your aunt, would you believe me?”
“I don’t know. Should I?” With a girlish sniffle and a last dab at her eyes, she gets her tears under control, though they could spill again any minute. She’s looking straight at me, the remnants of tears giving a sheen to the smirk sneaking back into her eyes. What goes on with this kid?
A rough shout, “Francine!” comes at us from Marcus Stern, lumbering toward us like an irritated bear. He holds his fedora so tight he’s bending the brim. “Francine, I told you to get into the car.” Except for the remnants of his German accent, he sounds as worn-out as any other American father of a modern teenage daughter. Looking me over, he says, “Just what is your business here?”
“Daddy”—Francine jumps in and does my talking—“this is Cantor Gold.”
Stern’s fleshy face goes gray as old dough. “Yes, yes, you’re the troublemaker Lieutenant Huber warned us about.” He turns again to Francine. “Go back to the car. Do as you are told.”
The kid’s not happy about it, but she’s already ignored those orders once today, and as long as Daddy controls the purse strings, ignoring those orders a second time could come with too high a price. She goes back to the car, but not before she gives me a last look with those smirking eyes.
I do my own talking now. “I’m not here to make trouble, Dr. Stern. I’m here to pay my respects. Your sister was a great lady.”
“And how is it you knew her?”
“She never mentioned me?”
“No, she did not.”
“I see. Well, what did the police tell you about me?”
“They said you are a troublemaker, a criminal. And they told me to contact them if you show up.”
“And will you?”
“I—” He shuts up so suddenly it’s as if his throat’s been cut. He’s looking past me and over my shoulder, the expression on his face like he’s seen a ghost.
I turn around fast, but whatever scared the hell out of Marcus Stern is gone. When I turn back, Stern has a handkerchief to his face, wiping away sweat, the oozy kind that stinks of fear.
“Dr. Stern, what did you see? Who’s after you?”
He puts his hat on, says, “I must go. Do not bother me or my family again or I will call the police,” then walks back across the cemetery and toward the limousine. The stench of fear coming off him could wither the grass.
But his fear can’t be allowed to let him off the hook. He’s the guy who survived, he’s the last of his Old World family. He owes that family a survivor’s legacy of truth. He can’t just toss that burden away like an out-of-date suit.
So I go after him. “Dr. Stern! Dr. Stern!” I grab his arm with so much force his whole body shakes and his hat falls off and tumbles to the ground. “I’m trying to help you,” I say. “If you want to find out who killed your sister, you’re better off trusting me than the police.”
“But they said—”
“Never mind what they said. You of all people should know not to trust the authorities. Your sister didn’t.”
That gets him. I might as well have called the cops the polizei by the look he gives me, this big, lumbering man with the expression of a mouse caught hiding in a cupboard. He finally says, “You have a car here?”
“The light gray Buick over there. That’s mine.”
“I will meet you at your car. Please wait there for me.”
I get into my Buick while Stern explains to his family that he’ll be driving back to town with me. His wife looks over in my direction, though she’s too far away for me to read her expression. Francine is already in the car. After more prodding from her husband, Mrs. Stern finally gets in, too, and the limousine drives away. Stern trudges back to me. He looks so exhausted he might pass for dead.
*
“Okay, Dr. Stern,” I say when we’re out of the cemetery and driving through Queens. “What scared you back there?”
He doesn’t answer me right away, just looks out the window, fascinated by the flashy scenery. “So many places growing,” he says, “so much in America growing so fast. You know, when I first came to this country twenty years ago, this borough, this Queens, it didn’t have very much, just quiet little towns and some farms. A pretty place. Now look—stores and people everywhere. It’s not as pretty.�
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“But it’s making you very rich,” I say. “All that stuff made of plastic that those people are buying off the shelves of those stores. Plastic that you supply. The American Dream is lining your pockets nicely.”
“You know my factory? How would you know my factory?”
“Your sister mentioned it, and that your plastics formula was making you wealthy.”
“Yes, that is certainly so,” he says with a slightly guilty sigh. I’ve seen that act before, especially among educated Old World types, a discomfort with the brute facts of making lots of cash. His sister didn’t seem to share that silly attitude. Good for her.
Stern’s daydreaming out the window again. Sighing, he says, “I miss the quiet of the pretty little farms and villages I used to drive through on my way to work. So nice, it was.”
Never mind the quaint past; I need to get this conversation back to the problem scaring the hell outta Stern’s present. “Look, Dr. Stern, we’re not here to discuss the effects of American capitalism. How about getting to the point.”
“Yes, all right,” he says, finally turning his attention from the scenery out the window and back to me, “but first I have a question for you. How does a person like you come to know my sister Hannah?”
I’ve run into this crap a million times but it still tightens my jaw. Through a tight smile, I toy with him. “A person like me? What do you mean, a person like me? You mean my good tailoring? My nice car? Or maybe you mean my appreciation for expensive art.”
“Oh, you understand art?”
“Your sister certainly thought so.”
“Yes, well, she would know. Hannah loved art. So did her husband. He had quite a famous collection. The Nazis took it. Hannah wanted it back. Did she tell you that?”
It’s not time for me to come clean with the guy, not until I know he’s a good bet, and so far he’s not winning me over. “Listen, we could chitchat about museum pieces all day but that’s not why you’re here. So get to the point. What the hell scared you back there at the cemetery? What did you see?”