We were seated in one of those posh new restaurants on lower Broadway, south of Houston and north of Canal.
A week had gone by. I felt very good. I was still celebrating. Sedaka had blown the whistle on the three old men. Hanks said he’d get twenty years to life for the Chessler and Reynolds murders. As for the three old men, Hanks had no idea what they’d get. How does one sentence eighty-five-year-old men? I wasn’t celebrating their coming pain; I was celebrating the truth, which was, in an odd sense, a vindication of Stanislavski and the Moscow Art Theatre. I don’t know how, but it was. It was as if the Russian theatrical tradition had hired me and paid me with unspoken affection.
“What I still don’t understand, Swede, is how you tied together the fact that there was something strange about the Nikolai Group’s tours and the fact they only went to countries where diamonds would be very much in demand because of turmoil.”
“Well, look Tony, I’ve been around the theater too long not to recognize that those tours were somehow fakes. Theater companies can’t do it that way. The Group had to be going to each specific country for a reason, and that reason had to be lucrative. What little underfunded company can fly down to Rio for two days with their whole cast and baggage and then turn around and fly back? No way. So I took the month, year, and place of each trip and checked it against the New York Times Index for those dates. Each visit was the same—the Nikolai Group seemed to be courting danger. They went only to places that were in turmoil one way or another. They had to be bringing something in or bringing something out. Then I remembered that Bukai’s original connection with the diamond firm had been with the father, not the son. So I started researching old man Sedaka . . .”
“And the rest is history,” Basillio added, grinning.
“The white cats are still a problem,” I said, suddenly noticing one of the strangest little rolls I have ever seen nestled in the wicker bread tray. I extracted it and studied it as a cat would.
“Where are they?”
“Oh, they’re still in the pet store. But the pet-store owner won’t release them unless Bukai signs a consent order. And the old man won’t sign anything. He wants them to stay there. He still believes other white cats exist and are being threatened.”
“What about the fake white cat?”
“You mean Jack Be Quick? He’s back with his owner.”
“I still don’t understand why they tried to steal him.”
“Bukai and his friends obviously lost count of the progeny of Constantin. They don’t know which émigrés own which cats. That’s why he went for Jack Be Quick. He didn’t know if it really was a descendant of Constantin’s. It sure looked like one. Better sure than sorry.”
“Only in the theater,” he mused, finally giving up on the salad and staring at the remarkable dessert wagon that hovered in the distance.
I realized that I was still holding the strange roll, so I dropped it back into the basket.
“Eat it, Swede. It’s good for you. It’ll fatten you up.”
“I like bread in the morning only.”
“You always were weird, Swede,” he said. I thanked him profusely for his compliment. We sat there for another half hour or so, eating tarts and drinking delicious coffee. Then he went back to work and I started home.
On Fourth Avenue, just before Fourteenth Street, I passed a flower store and saw an expensive bouquet of yellow flowers. I bought it and kept walking.
When I reached Twenty-third Street I stopped. I was perplexed. Why was I going home? The cats were fed. There was nothing more to do. Why had I bought the flowers? For him?
I stepped into the gutter and hailed a cab, which took me to Forty-fourth Street. Had I really bought the flowers for Joseph Grablewski in celebration that he was out of the alkie ward in the hospital? But he had been out awhile.
I walked gingerly into the bar. I was excited, like a girl on a date.
He was there, in the same booth. I started to walk toward him, self-conscious, like at an audition. My vulnerability angered me. God, I was past forty. I had never even slept with that drunkard.
I slipped into the booth across from him and laid the flowers on the table. A glass of what looked like cola was in front of him.
“Another attempt at seduction?” he asked weakly, staring at the flowers.
He looked pale and thin and his hair was cut shorter. He kept his hands palm-down on the table. They were shaking slightly.
“How do you feel?”
“Wonderful.”
“Where’s your vodka?”
“Don’t you know? I’m now a recovering alcoholic.”
“What’s in the glass?”
“Root beer.”
“I want to thank you for your help . . . for the information you gave me.”
“What help?” he asked.
“About Lev Bukai’s diamond connections.”
“Were you one of the people who visited me in the hospital?”
“Yes.”
Since he hadn’t even seemed to remember anything about Lev Bukai, I left it alone.
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did you visit me in the hospital?”
“To bring you flowers,” I said, smiling and pointing to them.
“I don’t like flowers . . . in hospitals . . . in bars . . . onstage.”
I pulled the flowers close to me.
“What do we do? What do we do? Sleep together or not?” He recited the questions in a singsong manner and then began to laugh.
“You must forgive me,” he finally said. “Sobriety brings out my lack of control. But it won’t last long. I’ve never been able to achieve sobriety for more than three days running.”
“Maybe this time.”
“That’s what my students always say.”
I was perplexed. What students was he talking about?
“Do you teach now?”
“When sober. Didn’t you know? Don’t you know that for the past ten years the great Joseph Grablewski has been earning vodka money by teaching psychotic students how to really act . . . how to bring heaven, hell, Marx, and De Sade into their genitalia.”
“No, I had no idea you were an acting coach.”
“Coach? My God! Not a coach. Never a coach. Master, guru, savior, shrink—but not ever a coach.”
He drank some of the root beer, very slowly, as if it could kill him.
“Everybody’s heard of crazy Joseph Grablewski’s classes.”
“I haven’t. Who studies with you? Maybe I know some of them.”
“Psychopaths study with me,” he yelled, “and those who are heartbroken and those who despise what there is, and those who are broken by the stage, and those who . . . Not you, lady, never a beautiful lady like you.”
He had misjudged me again. He had made me into the enemy again.
“I don’t make them feel good. I don’t prepare them for stupid plays. I make them into performance artists. I make them grapple with the world. Sometimes it even kills them.”
“You’re talking stupid now, Joseph. Calm down.”
“Am I talking stupid? Am I really? What do you know? A student of mine was murdered a few weeks ago. What an actor he might have become under my tutelage! His assignment was simple: I told him to fall desperately in love with a woman . . . to pine for her . . . to write her love letters . . . to engage her . . . to go to the very limits of romantic fakery . . .”
I put my hands over my ears. I suddenly understood what I was hearing. But I could not deal with the horror of what I was comprehending. I wanted to be dumb, to be senseless.
Grablewski was still talking. I could see his lips moving wildly.
I ran out, spilling the flowers onto the floor. Bruce Chessler had loved me as an assignment! As a classroom exercise projected out onto the world! I walked ten, fifteen, twenty blocks, quickly. Then I stopped, exhausted. And right there, on the street, I began to laugh. Had ever an actress been so elegantly hoisted on her ow
n petard?
24
Thanksgiving came and went. Christmas came and went. In January the diamond merchant Sedaka was sentenced to twenty-five years to life for the murder of Bruce Chessler. The charges against him for the murder of Arkavy Reynolds were dropped. The three old émigrés were sentenced to eight to fifteen years each for conspiracy to murder. All charges relating to diamond smuggling and theft were dropped. Mallinova died from a heart attack two weeks after the sentencing. Chederov suffered a stroke and was hospitalized. Only Bukai, of the three, went to jail.
I don’t like to see people sent to the penitentiary, but I really had no sympathy for the Russians and Sedaka. They were murderers. In fact, I was on a sort of permanent high because it had been my efforts that solved the case. As for Joseph Grablewski’s revelation that the young man’s love for me was an acting-class exercise—well, I felt a bit stupid, but then I realized that it was probably my swallowing the tale of “doomed love” that had started my investigations. So my foolishness had paid off.
Everything was going well with me. There was a good possibility that I would land the part of an old crazy woman in a very strange and very beautiful play written by a Chilean woman, which was to be staged in the spring at Princeton University by a new drama society. I loved playing old crazy women with thick corrosive makeup dripping all over. It was a harmless perversion. As for cat-sitting, it was always there when I needed it.
My own cats were doing quite well, although Pancho had developed a mange-type rash on his back that required me to rub some evil-smelling substance on it a few times a week. This meant I had to catch Pancho. Which in turn meant that I was becoming physically fit, because to catch Pancho when he knew he was about to get anointed was more than difficult. I had to plot strategies . . . to lie in wait for him and then pounce. Once I grabbed him, he would fix his betrayed eyes on me until the deed was done. Poor Pancho, he never really trusted me.
In fact, I was so “up,” I decided to buy a toaster oven. It was just when I was percolating in the last phase of that decision that Basillio called and asked me to meet him for a drink.
The moment I saw him at the bar on Second Avenue just north of St. Marks Place, I knew he had something important to tell me; a plum of some kind. He was drumming a tune on the bar and bouncing up and down.
He patted the stool next to him. I sat.
“Now,” he said grandly, “before I begin telling you my news, I have to ask you a personal question.”
“How personal?” I asked, ordering a glass of club soda with a twist.
“Trust me, Swede, trust me. What I want to know is: have you gotten over Joseph Grablewski?”
I exploded. “What are you talking about? Nothing happened between him and me. Nothing. It was just a kind of nostalgia for me. You were the one who sent me to him. Remember? Yes, I was happy to see him again, and acted like a little girl. But nothing happened. Nothing could happen. He’s a walking tragedy. I haven’t seen him in months. It was another one of my temporary aberrations.”
“Good. I was afraid that if I gave you some terrific news about him, it might send you into a tailspin. You did love him once, Swede.”
I sipped the club soda. He was insulting me, in a way. He was saying I would begrudge Joseph Grablewski some kind of happiness. He was saying I was a vindictive spurned woman.
All I said was: “Tony, you’re very close to getting some club soda on your head.”
He laughed, kissed me on the head, and pulled a newspaper clipping out of his pocket. Dramatically, with flourishes, he spread it out in front of me.
It was an advertisement from the theater section of the Village Voice:
ANNOUNCING THE WORLD PREMIERE OF . . .
Why Not?
By the famous Russian Symbolist Poet
A. A. Blok
Produced and directed by
Joseph Grablewski
The long-lost play by the most respected artist of revolutionary Russia is finally brought to the stage, in English, directed by one of the legends of the American theater.
The advertisement then went on to announce that the first previews would be the week of February 19 at the Cherry Lane Theatre. Then it listed the cast and some other credits.
I sat back, astonished. It was truly wonderful. Almost wondrous. The man seemed to have risen from the dead. I remembered the last time I’d seen him, in the bar, when he had said his usual limit for sobriety was three days.
I turned to Basillio. I was crying. I said to him: “Believe me, Tony, I am extremely happy for him.”
He nodded in assent. I could see that he too was engaged with the sheer heroism or luck or whatever it was that had prompted the reemergence of Joseph Grablewski.
But all he said was: “I never knew he wrote a play.”
“Who?”
“Blok. I read all his poems as a kid. Remember ‘The Twelve’?”
I had heard of that long revolutionary poem, but I had never read it.
“I think Blok died in 1921.” Basillio kept talking about Blok, slowly at first, and then escalating into one of his crazed drama lectures about the problems of putting poets on in the theater . . . about how you needed plain speech.
I wasn’t listening. I wanted to do something. I wanted to celebrate. I wanted to give Joseph Grablewski something . . . a poem . . . a flower. I wanted to let him know that everyone who ever listened to him in the old days, everyone who ever heard him talk about theater, was grateful.
“Remember what he looked like when we visited him in the hospital?” Basillio suddenly asked.
Then it dawned on me what I must give him. I had in my possession what he really would appreciate—the love letters his pupil had penned to me as an exercise. Yes, Bruce Chessler’s letters.
“Have to go, have to go,” I called out as I started out of the bar.
“Wait, Swede, wait . . . where the hell are you going?”
But I was gone. I was walking back to my apartment, fast. I was like a twelve-year-old kid who had finally found the right gift for her teacher.
Sixty seconds after I flew through the front door of my apartment, scaring poor Bushy half to death, my enthusiasm dampened.
I couldn’t find the letters where I thought I had left them.
I couldn’t find them in the cartons. I couldn’t find them in the closets . . . or the files . . . or the cabinets . . . or the valises. They were nowhere . . . gone . . . vanished.
My balloon was deflated. But where were they?
Risa! It had to be Risa! She probably took them with her when she left.
How sad! It was probably her pathetic way of getting back at me. She probably also thought that Chessler’s love for me was legitimate—not a classroom exercise. She didn’t know it was all a fake.
It was stupid . . . sad . . . I wanted the letters back . . . I wanted to give them to Joseph. I started searching for Risa’s phone number, remembering that I had written it down on a piece of paper after she had put it on my wrist with a Magic Marker. I found it and dialed. A voice answered. It wasn’t Risa. The voice said there was no such person as Risa living there and never had been.
I hung up the phone. Could Risa have given me the wrong number by mistake? Unlikely. Could I have transcribed the wrong number from my wrist to the pad? Never. If there is one iron law of life, it is this: actors and actresses never make mistakes in phone numbers. They can’t! Phone numbers are crucial. Directors, producers, agents, jobs, hairdressers. I have done a lot of wrong things in my life but I never dialed a number that I had transcribed wrong. My head is like a desktop computer when it comes to phone numbers.
Maybe Risa was not in fact Risa. Then who was she? And where did she live? The astonishing fact was that I had never even found out the girl’s last name when she was staying in my apartment.
If she was, however, not who she said she was—then what really was her relationship to Bruce Chessler?
And if she was, in fact, Bruce Chessler’s lover,
then she had to know that the love letters were fake—an acting assignment. Lovers in the theater discuss acting classes.
Therefore, if she knew the love letters were fake, why would she want to steal them from my apartment?
Was there something in the letters I had missed? Some kind of code? To what end? Coding what?
I dressed warmly and walked to the New School, where I had taught the summer before. There was something there I had to see and had neglected to pick up. It was the bunch of short essays I had asked my students to write on that first day of class. The subject matter was “Theater,” and all I wanted from them was a kind of ad hoc free association to that word.
The New School had sent me several postcard reminders to pick up the papers and other pieces of property I had left behind after the summer term was over—a small umbrella and a few books.
I found them in a massive file hidden behind boxes in the old faculty lounge, categorized under N—for Nestleton.
I leafed through the papers quickly. Few were more than one page in length. It had turned out to be an idiotic exercise, but what did that matter? I wasn’t interested in literary enlightenment or psychological truths.
I found Bruce Chessler’s one-page effort.
What I had suspected or feared turned out to be absolutely true.
The paper I was holding in my hand and the love letters that Risa had stolen from my closet were not written by the same person.
Had Risa written the letters for Bruce? If so, so what? Lots of girlfriends help their boyfriends out in acting classes.
It didn’t make sense, her stealing the letters, when she had written them.
I walked out of the New School, dropping the entire file in the garbage. It was freezing cold outside, but I walked slowly . . . very slowly. What else about little Risa was fake? Maybe her red punk hair? What about the murderous attack that drove her from her apartment to mine? Was that a lie? Why not? Was the point of that to be able to steal the love letters?
I started walking downtown, toward the Cherry Lane Theatre, where Joseph Grablewski would be rehearsing.
A Cat Tells Two Tales Page 26