I could see something now.
Someone was smashing in the front window.
I started to scream.
The figure was inside now, through the window.
I looked around, desperate, searching for something to stop the intruder.
And then there was absolute silence. It was so quiet that I could hear the pads of Jack Be Quick’s feet.
The intruder heard them also—the intruder was there for the white cat that did not exist.
Where was the light? I thought desperately. There must be a switch on the wall. Where was the light? I ran my hand along the wall like a crazed blind person. My hand touched something. I pushed up. The whole store was flooded with light.
In front of me, holding a steel pipe, stood a small thin black woman with a closely shaved head.
My God, it was the poet! It was the young woman from the bar! It was Elizabeth.
She stared at me. Exhausted. Frightened. Panting.
She dropped the iron bar that had splintered the window. It clattered to the floor. There were streaks of blood on her wrists.
“Why are you here?” she asked in a hoarse whisper, terrified.
“To make sure you don’t get the white cat,” I said.
I ran back and gathered Jack Be Quick in my arms and approached her, thrusting the large nonwhite Abyssinian close to her face.
“You see, there is no white cat here, none at all. We were just waiting for you.”
Her eyes roamed over the walls and the windows and the machines, as if she were searching for a way out.
“Who sent you?” I asked.
She seemed to draw inside of herself.
“Was it Bukai . . . or Chederov . . . or Mallinova?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know those names.”
“Then who?”
“I don’t know his name.”
“He paid you?”
“No. He didn’t pay. He paid for what happened in the bar. He paid me to point out Bruce. And then he threatened me. He said if I broke in here and got the white cat, he’d forget everything. If not, he’d tell the police that I was an accessory to murder.”
“Why did you point him out?”
“I didn’t know he would be murdered. I had no idea. I just wanted some extra money. Some spending money. You know—for books and things. Don’t you believe me? I had no idea.”
Her legs gave way. She sprawled on the floor. I remembered our conversation in the bar, about that Indian philosopher—Patanjali.
“How much did he pay you to point him out?”
“Five hundred dollars.”
“And what else did he get for the money?”
“Nothing, I swear. Just that I would hold the booth in the bar so that Bruce would be there; so that he would not see the bar was too crowded and go elsewhere. That was all I had to do. Talk with Bruce in a booth until he came in.”
“Who is he?”
“I told you, I don’t know his name.”
She started to weep. She kept raising her hands as if to explain, and then lowering them.
“Did you have a phone number?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Give it to me.”
She shook her head. She was clearly frightened.
“Give it to me,” I said, closing in on her.
She stared at me as if evaluating what kind of threat I represented, as if determining how far I was prepared to go. She understood she was in very deep hot water . . . either with the police or with the man who had hired her in the beginning.
Then she removed a crumpled paper from her pocket.
A phone number was penciled on one side.
I dialed the number. A recorded message came on. The voice said: “You have reached Sedaka and Sons, Diamond Merchants. If you are using a pushbutton phone, please press one for our accounting department . . . press two to schedule an appointment . . . press three if your call is personal. Thank you.” The phone fell gently out of my hand and back on the receiver.
I smiled grimly. Everything was going just fine. Jack Be Quick walked regally over to the squatting, frightened poet and rubbed his back against her knee. She seemed to shrink further into herself.
22
I was sitting next to Detective Harry Hanks in his ugly unmarked police car, holding Jack Be Quick on my lap. We were double-parked across from the Café Vivaldi.
It had not been easy getting him there. The scene in the police precinct had been volatile.
“So what do you want me to do? Arrest the girl for breaking your friend’s plate-glass window? Okay. I’ll do that. Or do you want me to arrest her for attempted kidnapping of a white cat that didn’t turn out to be a white cat at all?” He was getting more and more irritated and he started accentuating his questions by poking his finger in the air. “Or do you want me to arrest her for accessory to murder? That’s it, isn’t it? That the same guy who paid her to steal the cat and to set up Bruce Chessler also murdered Bruce Chessler.”
“Calm down, Detective.”
“No, you calm down, lady. Because that little black girl never saw a person she could identify in the bar that night. She was there when the shots were fired, but she didn’t know who fired them. Were you ever in that bar, lady? Of course you were. Where the kid was sitting, you can’t see your hand in front of your face. So you want me to arrest the black girl and the diamond merchant on the basis of phone calls? You must be kidding.”
“I have a lot more,” I told him.
“Where? In your pocketbook? In your shoes?”
“No, in a café not far from here.”
And that was how, after a struggle, we ended up in the unmarked police car, staring across the street, against a strong sun, into a coffeehouse.
“These three old Russians . . . how do you know they’re inside now? I can’t see a thing.”
“Oh, they’re in there,” I said. “The owner of the café told me. They have met for years on the last Thursday of each month.”
“Listen, lady,” he said, exasperated, “I don’t want any more conflict with you. Just tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it. Then just promise to leave me alone.”
“Go in with me, Detective, and protect me when I confront them,” I said.
“From what you told me about their ages . . . are you sure they’re assaultive?” he asked.
“We’ll see, won’t we?”
“Do we really need the cat?”
“Oh, yes, we really do,” I replied.
We left the car double-parked. We shut the doors. The three of us, including Jack Be Quick, walked through the door of the Café Vivaldi.
The three old men were sitting at the same table I had seen them sitting at before—that time I had followed Bukai to the pet store on Hudson Street where he had sequestered the white cats.
For a moment I was frightened . . . very frightened . . . not physically . . . and I clutched poor Jack Be Quick so tightly in my arms that he gave a long, low growl.
That was when the three turned toward me. I had never been this close to Chederov and Mallinova. Chederov had thick white hair that fell down over the most lined face I had ever seen. Mallinova had a painfully thin lantern face. They were all wearing cramped suits, as if they were the board of directors of some long-closed bank.
“May I join you, Mr. Bukai? We’ve already met, if you remember. And this is my friend Detective Harry Hanks.” At the mention of the detective, they stared at each other. They said nothing. Detective Hanks pulled two chairs up to the large round table. We sat down. I still held Jack Be Quick.
There was a glass of double espresso in front of each of the old men. And toward the center of the table were two untouched pieces of Italian cheesecake.
No one spoke for what seemed the longest time. I could hear Bukai breathing heavily to my left.
It was I who must talk. But to whom? It was I who was going to indict them. But who was going to receive the indictment? It had to be the det
ective. I would talk to Harry Hanks.
I was about to do the kind of theater piece I had always despised: a one-woman monologue reciting facts. But there was no other option.
I began. Detective Hanks was the audience. I ignored the other three.
“We are sitting with three rich old men. They came to America penniless except for their reputations as dramatic artists, as professionals in the world’s most prestigious theater company—the Moscow Art Theatre.
“Now they are very wealthy men. How did they get their money?
“Let me tell you. They formed a theater group in the 1950s—the Nikolai Group—and it survived for ten years.
“Each year the Group made a trip to South or Central America to perform.
“I have traced the itinerary of that group. It is very odd. One oddity is that they visited only countries or cities that were in the midst of either political or economic turmoil. Isn’t that strange? One would think they would avoid those places. Most theatrical companies do. But not the Nikolai Group. Oh, no.”
I hesitated and looked around the table. Mallinova was very pale. Bukai was grimacing and stirring his espresso with a tiny silver spoon.
“You see,” I continued, “they weren’t on tour for aesthetic reasons. They were smuggling in diamonds and smuggling out cash. For diamonds have traditionally been the repository of wealth for South Americans during wars and revolutions and inflation. In France and the Middle East, it is gold. But in South America it is diamonds.”
Hanks arched his eyebrows. I slid across the table to him a piece of paper I had prepared; on one side was the Group’s itinerary in South America . . . on the other side the visits were correlated with social, economic, or political turmoil. Hanks studied the sheet.
“It’s a helluva coincidence,” he noted. He pushed the paper toward the center of the table for any of the old men to study. None of them made a move toward the paper.
“But it’s circumstantial as hell,” he added.
I continued. I was beginning to grow into the heady role. I felt a sense of analytical power . . . that I was projecting it.
“We all know that Mr. Bukai is a partner in a diamond firm now run by a gentleman named Sedaka. His father, Daniel Sedaka, died in 1972. He died at home, among his family, content. But if you will retrieve from your files, Detective Hanks, a May 11, 1949, article in a now-defunct newspaper called the Daily Mirror, it describes how three individuals were indicted for the theft of a large shipment of diamonds consigned from Amsterdam to New York. One of those individuals was Daniel Sedaka. The diamonds vanished in Toronto. The senior Mr. Sedaka was tried but the jury refused to convict. Those diamonds were eventually sold on the black market in South America for huge sums of cash. And it was all clear profit.”
Mallinova raised his hand for the waiter and gestured that he wanted water. I waited until the water was served.
“So,” I continued, “the Nikolai Group eventually disbanded, with everyone happy—everyone rich. But then, alas, a crazy young man comes on the scene. He is the grandson of a colleague—Maria Swoboda. I’m talking about Bruce Chessler.”
Mallinova drank his water. I could see his eyes staring through the top of his glass at Bukai.
“Now, Bruce Chessler was a very tormented young man. He lived a marginal existence . . . a typically pathetic out-of-work actor’s life, surviving through small-time drug sales. One of his customers was a theater hanger-on named Arkavy Reynolds. One day, probably, Arkavy needed speed and had no money, so he gave Bruce Chessler some information instead. Dirty information . . . about some revered people. Arkavy thought Bruce would find their diamond-smuggling scheme amusing. How Arkavy got the information, we’ll never know. But he was a very resourceful lunatic. Anyway, Bruce didn’t find it amusing. Bruce loved the theater with a passion and he hated those who debased it. The hypocrisy of his grandmother’s colleagues—these hallowed names from the Moscow Art Theatre—began to fester in him. Since they were thieves, he reasoned, he would steal something from them.
“Bruce Chessler didn’t steal money from them. He stole something much more prized by the old Russians—their last link to the Stanislavski tradition of the Moscow Art Theatre. You see, Stanislavski had a white cat named Constantin, with black spots on its face and rump. And soon there were kittens and many such cats. And when the émigrés left Russia, they took their felines with them, and once in this country, they kept the line alive. If you want to see them, Detective Hanks, we can go to a pet store on Hudson Street, where they are now being boarded. There are three white cats with black spots in there. They belong to these old gentlemen here, and they were what Bruce Chessler stole.
“What a stupid childish act it was . . . stealing cats from old people. And then he just gave them away. He gave them away because he intuited that he had gone too far . . . that the three old men were afraid he was going to go to the police about the diamond smuggling of so many years ago. It never dawned on the old men that Bruce Chessler had absolutely no hard evidence and that the statute of limitations made any prosecution improbable. What they really wanted to protect above all were their reputations . . . their delusions that they were artists . . . that the great Moscow Art Theatre tradition rested nobly on their brows. So our three elderly friends had to make sure. They had to get rid of that irrational, vindictive young man. After all, he was threatening their immortality. They acted murderously. They frightened Sedaka Junior into killing Bruce Chessler and his bohemian information source, Arkavy Reynolds, and then stealing back the cats.
“You see, the Russians were not merely silent partners in the diamond firm. They owned the controlling interest. If Sedaka refused to comply with their wishes, they could have simply fired him. And Sedaka lived a very expensive lifestyle. He chose to murder rather than be poor. I’m sure, Detective Hanks, that if you put a little pressure on the diamond merchant, he will happily implicate his benefactors to cut his own sentence.”
I leaned back, suddenly exhausted, talked out. My throat was beginning to tremble.
Detective Hanks was staring at me, obviously absorbed in my story.
I turned to Bukai. He, too, was staring at me. I smiled at him.
He picked up his espresso glass and flung the contents into my face. It happened so fast I couldn’t evade the lukewarm coffee, which splattered over me.
Hanks stood up swiftly and started toward the old man. I raised my hand to stop him. He sat back down, reluctantly.
I wiped the coffee away, carefully, with Bukai’s napkin, and then wiped Jack Be Quick’s face, since he also had been splattered.
“Yes,” I said, “these old men love their white cats so much they will go to great lengths to get them back if stolen. They were even going to take Jack Be Quick, whose photograph I had doctored to simulate a white cat with black spots. Why? Because they thought Bruce Chessler had stolen it from another émigré. They were the guardians of the white cats . . . as if that would redeem their prostitution. Stupid, sad old men, willing to do anything to die with some semblance of honor.”
I stood up and placed Jack Be Quick on the center of the table.
“Now, there’s a reason why I could use Jack Be Quick as a stand-in for one of the white cats. The white cats bear an uncanny physical resemblance to Abyssinians—which Jack Be Quick is. But they’re not Abyssinians at all . . . they’re just plain old Moscow Art Theatre wardrobe cats.”
I pushed Jack Be Quick gently onto his back and began to stroke his stomach. He lay there happily.
“Look at him, Detective Hanks,” I said.
“I’m looking. So what?”
“Can you see what makes Abyssinians different from other cats . . . why they look like cougars?”
“The paws . . . they’re bigger.”
“No, the pads, not the paws. They have larger pads on the feet.”
“Okay, okay, so what?”
“Well, Detective, why don’t you just take a peek into Jack Be Quick’s front-left paw?”
“Why?”
“He has an important present for you.”
He reached over, gently spread the pad, and said: “There’s something in there.”
“Right.” I reached over and pulled out a small diamondlike stone.
“Is this the way they smuggled the diamonds? I know South American animal quarantine laws are a joke, but . . .”
I laughed. Tweaking the detective’s nose was refreshing. But enough was enough.
“I have no idea how they smuggled the diamonds in and the cash out, Detective. Probably in their underwear. But in those years, before the drugged-out rock bands, traveling theatrical groups were never searched by customs agents in any country. It was a long-honored gentleman’s agreement. In the 1950s, for example, a well-known British ballerina visited this country often with her troupe and her constant companion—a bottle of Polish vodka . . . which was illegal to bring into the country at that time. No one bothered her. In those days, before the rock bands forced them to crack down, artists traveling on tour could bring into a given country whatever they wanted—and take out what they wanted. Provided they were discreet.”
I dropped the fake stone, actually a pebble, into Bukai’s empty espresso cup. Jack Be Quick walked over to inspect what he had been carrying.
The waiter dropped the bill onto the table. It was such an absurd ending to my performance that I started to laugh. Then I looked around. No one else was laughing. The faces of the three men had crumbled. Their bodies seemed to have been scraped of substance.
I turned away from them, toward the door to the café, and stared for a long time. I had the strangest feeling that Bruce Chessler was about to walk in. What a bizarre delusion. Did I require applause from his ghost? For what? For a fine performance? For unraveling the conspiracy? For making sure that the old men would probably die in a penitentiary somewhere rather than in their town houses? It was hard to understand.
23
“It’s not often a beautiful woman buys me lunch in a restaurant where the house salad costs twenty-two fifty,” Basillio said, staring at his sparsely laden plate with both horror and awe.
A Cat Tells Two Tales Page 25