Redemption Street

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  I took a deep breath and repeated my new mantra: “Look, I’m sorry about your sister, but—”

  “She’s dead! Don’t you even care that she’s dead?”

  “That’s it! Out! Right now, get the fuck out!”

  Fidgets thought about striking out at me. I could see it in his eyes, which, for the first time, seemed like crazy eyes. Finally, they matched the rest of his demeanor.

  “Karen Rosen,” he whispered her name like a plea. “Try to remember her. When I’m gone, someone has to remember.”

  Before I could say a word, he drifted out of the store. He did not look back, but I could not take my eyes off him. At last, he faded into the rest of the faceless crowd on Columbus Avenue.

  “So what happened?” Klaus, the store yenta, was anxious to know.

  “You were right. He was just some nut job.”

  “Good, I could use your help,” Klaus confessed. “We’re busy.”

  We were always busy. Business was booming. It had been from the moment my big brother, Aaron, and I had opened the shop on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. For Aaron’s sake, mostly, I was pleased. Our success had, for the first time since we were kids, allowed Aaron to escape from beneath the shadow of our father’s dreadful adventures in businessland. Neither Aaron nor my dad ever understood that it was the business, not my father, that had failed. Me, I was just along for the ride. If I hadn’t blown out my knee, I’d still be on the job, patrolling the streets of the 60th Precinct instead of the French reds aisle.

  Don’t misunderstand. I kind of liked the wine business, and making real money had a major upside. I owned a home for the first time in my life and finally drove a car that didn’t look like it belonged permanently attached to the ass end of a tow truck. Katy could afford to stay home with the baby and still do freelance design work out of her basement studio. My pension money was cream and went straight into a college fund for our little girl, Sarah. Yeah, it was all cake, but too much cake’s a bore. I wasn’t bored yet, not really—just restless, I think. There’s only so many times you can explain the difference between champagne and méthode champenoise before you get itchy.

  At least we did have a stimulating clientele: mixed bag of actors in various states of employ, Juilliard students, TV producers, Columbia profs, black kids drifting down from Harlem, and tourists who, after too many hours at the American Museum of Natural History, needed a buttery Chardonnay with just the proper hint of oak. On Friday and Saturday evenings we did big volume with the under-twenty-five crowd from New Jersey and the boroughs. Though their selections tended to come with screw-off caps rather than corks, we still let them in the front door. Aaron and I never lost sight of the fact that, in spite of our fancy locale, we were just two schmucks from Brooklyn who’d made good.

  I did get to meet a few famous people. I mean really famous people, not just this week’s hot soap-opera star. John Lennon, for instance, bought a case of Perrier-Jouet for a friend’s birthday gift. He was kind enough to take a picture with me. Emboldened by his generosity, I asked him if Paul McCartney was really the selfish, self-centered prick the press made him out to be.

  “Nah,” he said. “The real Paul’s dead, you know. He was a great mate, a generous sort, but the sod actor we got to replace him is a genuine shite. We’d have gotten rid of him, too, but he was a better bass player than the real Paul. Not as good a songwriter, though. Do you suppose the Paul who wrote ‘Yester day’ would write roobbish like ‘Silly Love Songs’?” John winked at me, stuck out his tongue, and left.

  I hadn’t lied to Mr. Fidgets. This was our busy season. Yet, in spite of the huge influx of cash, there was something about the week leading up to Thanksgiving that made me blue. Was it that Mother Nature made sure to give us a nice kick in the ass to remind us that winter was just one calendar flip away? I used to think so. Now I’m not so sure. Maybe it’s the inevitable onslaught of Christmas. All those holiday songs are great the first 3,411 times you hear them…. But it wasn’t the music.

  Christmas in America is an existential nightmare for Jews. We try to be both part of it and apart from it, and neither works. It was especially tough for Katy, unpracticed as she was at the ordeal. A Catholic all her life, she’d converted to Judaism of her own volition. I thought she was nuts for doing it, but … I had suggested we get a tree to sort of ease the transition, but Katy wouldn’t hear of it. Maybe a tree would have made it harder for her. I was too embarrassed to admit the tree would have been as much for me as for her.

  However, when things finally slowed down, I found I was not thinking of Christmas or even impending Thanksgiving. I found myself looking out into the darkness and into the clog of rush-hour traffic and wondering where Mr. Fidgets had got to. I was wondering about my past and trying to put a face to the name Karen Rosen. But no matter how much I tried, I could not remember her.

  Katy seemed to be half listening to the story of Karen Rosen’s brother over dinner. I wanted to think her lack of attentiveness was because Sarah was being fussy. It wasn’t. It was about Patrick. Katy was always upbeat. It’s one of the things I loved most about her. I couldn’t help noticing, however, her mood crash whenever the increasingly rare lead about her little brother would come our way. Hope has an ugly dark side, and I was witness to it every single time some money-hungry idiot tried to pry a buck or two out of the reward fund Katy’s dad had set up in ‘78. Whenever someone who looked like Patrick was spotted in Whitefish Bay or Bobo-Dioulasso, Katy and her mom would go into a tailspin. Then, when hope faded, some semblance of normalcy returned. The last thing Katy wanted to hear was another story of loss.

  “Good night, honey.” I kissed Sarah’s forehead, but she was already well asleep, and, for the night at least, out of the dark reach of false hopes.

  I watched Katy kiss our little redhead good night.

  “Don’t you remember her at all?” Katy whispered, pulling up the crib rail.

  Her question caught me off guard. “What? Remember who?”

  “Karen Rosen, the woman—”

  “Oh,” I whispered back, nodding my head for us to leave. “I didn’t think you were listening at dinner. No, I don’t remember her. I feel like I should, but I don’t. It’s buggin’ me. Her name goes around in my head, but there’s nothing there, no face attached to it. Christ, it’s weird. I feel guilty about not remembering.”

  “What a shock.” Katy giggled, closing Sarah’s door behind her. “You feel guilty for the sinking of the Andrea Doria and the Dodgers moving out of Brooklyn.”

  “The Andrea Doria maybe, but I had nothing to do with the Dodgers. That was my Uncle Murray.”

  Katy folded herself into my arms, pressing herself into me. It was magic the way she did that, blurring the borders between us. I think the first time she held me this way I knew I could not lose her, ever.

  “I love you, Katy Maloney Prager.”

  “Look in your yearbook,” she purred, her cheek to my chest.

  “What?”

  “For Karen Rosen, yutz!” Katy pushed me playfully away, wagging her finger at me. “Some detective! Put a face to her name. Maybe then there’ll only be the two of us in bed tonight.”

  “I guess the conversion’s taking. Your Yiddish is improving.”

  “And you can kiss my half-Celtic ass, mister. Now go find that yearbook. I’ve got a company logo and letterhead to design. Welcome to the exciting world of graphic arts. Oh, and, by the way,” she said, turning back from the stairs, “I love you, too.”

  Quite a prodigious amount of dust had settled on my copy of the 1966 Abraham Lincoln High School edition of Landmark. That was the name of our yearbook. I don’t know why, exactly. Maybe because the school paper was called the Lincoln Log and all the other good “L” words were taken. When I started thumbing through the yellowing pages, it struck me that Losers might have been a more apt name than Landmark Almost everybody looks like a loser in his or her high-school yearbook, even the beautiful people.

  I thin
k the only saving grace in ‘66 was the conservative nature of everyone’s attire. The real social upheaval was just getting started, Vietnam was still far, far away from Ocean Parkway, and the Summer of Love was a year in the future. The girls’ outfits were strictly proper, and the boys wore all-white shirts, thin ties, and skinny lapels. Boys still wore their hair short and parted. There were one or two Beatle haircuts. The girls … well, the girls featured lots of bangs and hair spray. Pages and pages of black-and-white photos of future Donna Reeds and Dr. Kildares. Today, I guess you’d say the boys looked like Elvis Costello clones. But Karen Rosen was nowhere to be seen.

  Katy had been right to suggest I try and exorcise Karen’s faceless ghost before going to bed. I went to bed all right, but not nearly to sleep. It was good that Katy was working late in the studio or I imagine I would have tossed and turned her to distraction. Admitting defeat, I snuck into the living room and took a few fingers’ worth of Dewar’s.

  Sure, I owned a wine shop, but I wanted a real drink. The kind of stuff that didn’t need to breathe or chill, that didn’t have legs, a nose, or hints of pepper and berries. The kind of stuff that burned going down. I couldn’t lay it all at Karen Rosen’s dead feet. I suppose maybe I was a little more bored with our precious wine shop than I’d been willing to admit.

  I stared at the phone like a nervous teenager. What was I going to say? To whom would I say it? Which one of my old friends was going to get the midnight call? It didn’t really matter, because I had old friends in name only. Over time I’d seemed to shed friends as a snake does skins. They tell me it’s natural. Things change. People change. They get married. They have kids. They get divorced. They stop smoking. They take up golf. Some die. I’d accelerated the shedding process by becoming a cop, not the most popular career choice for a college student in the late sixties. Though cops were no longer on the top of everyone’s shit list, friendships are hard to rekindle. Both parties need to be up for the awkwardness of it all. More often than not, it was like a one-armed man trying to light a fire with two sticks.

  I picked the phone up a few times, started to dial once or twice, imagining the conversation.

  Hey, Bob, it’s Moe, Moe Prager…. Sorry it’s so late. Nothin’s wrong…. Three kids, huh? Yeah, I heard you owned a bread route…. No, I’m off the job four years next month…. I fucked up my knee. Listen, anyway, what I was wondering was, do you remember Karen Rosen from Lincoln? That was Karen Bloom, Bob, and she swore to me she was a virgin. Yeah, I know, she swore that to everyone…. So do you remember—No, huh? Yeah, sounds good. We’ll have to get together. Bye.

  The thought of a few conversations along those lines rocked me right to sleep there in the living room. That, and four more fingers of scotch.

  Chapter Two

  November 25th

  The sun was up and bright and felt warmer on my face than it had any right to feel so late in the year. Katy and Sarah had already gone by the time I hit the street. They’d left early for the trip upstate to the Maloneys’ house in Dutchess County. This way Sarah could have a long visit with her grandparents and Katy could help my mother-in-law prepare the holiday fixings. I’d head up myself after work. In the wine shop, the day before Thanksgiving is our second-busiest day of the year, so I decided to prepare for the inevitable onslaught by going to the gym to play at working out.

  I felt pretty good, having last night abandoned Dr. Dewar’s sleep remedy. Twenty-four hours’ worth of perspective had let Karen Rosen recede back into the netherworld from which she had come. I figured I had enough of my own skeletons in the closet and didn’t need to borrow anyone else’s. Maybe someday at a reunion or something her name would come up and my curiosity would be satisfied. Until then …

  “Mr. Prager, sir,” an unfamiliar male voice called my name as I pulled up the garage door.

  It wasn’t a threatening voice. It was stiffly formal. The voice knew who I was, but didn’t want to advertise the fact.

  “Yes.” I turned, matching formality with formality. “What can I do for you?”

  The deep voice belonged to a slight man. The first thing I noticed about him was his suit, a blue pin-striped business affair. Though not the most common attire in Sheepshead Bay, blue pinstripe usually didn’t make passersby stop and stare. It was the cut of it, I think, that got my attention, so perfectly matched to the man who wore it that it seemed a second skin.

  “Mr. Prager,” he repeated.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “My employer would like to see you.”

  The suit gestured with his arm. My gaze followed the tips of his thin fingers to the point where my hedges bent around to the sidewalk. The nose of a black Lincoln limo was clearly visible. During the spring or summer I wouldn’t have been able to see another inch of the car, but the rest of the landed whale was now quite visible through the leafless hedge.

  “Tell him to look out the window. If he avoids the big branches, he should be able to see me just fine.”

  Blue Suit smiled. He had perfect teeth, too, and, apparently, appreciated my wit. “The car, Mr. Prager, please.”

  Unconsciously, I tapped the waistband of my pants to reassure myself. Yes, my .38 was there. Old cop habits die hard. I told myself I still carried the gun because of the wine shop, which was mostly true. I also think I carried it because I could. I didn’t feel particularly threatened by the suit. It was just that the perfect tailoring, the perfect teeth, and the impeccable manners put me on edge. Perfection has that effect on me. It’s so out of place in Brooklyn.

  The movement of my hand did not escape the suit’s eye. He smiled more broadly, showing off still more of his dentist’s handiwork. “I assure you this is neither Candid Camera nor a pantomime of The Godfather. The car, please.”

  Blue Pinstripe opened the Lincoln’s rear passenger door for me, but did not follow me into the black limo. Instead, he closed the door behind me and placed himself half a football field ahead of me, behind the steering wheel of the Lincoln. A thick pane of dark glass rose up, blocking my view of the suit. Turning, I noticed I was seated across from a man whose head was bathed in shadow. Though it was evident I was staring directly at him, he seemed in no rush to come into the light, where I could see him.

  “Thank you,” he said, still refusing to lean forward, “I appreciate you taking the time.”

  “Look, can you just say what you’ve got to say?” I asked impatiently. “I’ve got to go to the gym and watch other people work out.”

  He leaned forward slightly, but not quite enough to let me have a good clean look. He held his hand out to me, though not to shake. There was a picture in it. He didn’t have to tell me to take it.

  It was a faded color snap, a teenage girl in pink pajamas with a Siamese cat curled in her lap. She had a disarming smile, a crooked nose, and a poofy hairdo. There was a big stack of 45s at her feet, a portable record player—the kind with a bulky tone arm that you had to put loose quarters on to keep it from skipping—to her left, and a makeup table behind her.

  When I’d taken what my host considered enough time, he said, “Karen Rosen.”

  I recognized her, finally, but now something else nagged me. I knew something about her. What was it? I wondered. What was it?

  “Her brother came to see you the other day at your place of business,” said the man in the shadow. “Arthur Rosen, a shabby fellow with—”

  “My memory’s fine,” I said. “So now I know his name, but not yours.”

  “Carter, my name’s R. B. Carter. Have you ever heard of me?” he asked with genuine curiosity, now extending his right hand to me for a shake.

  “No,” I answered, pulling his hand as I shook it, forcing him out into the light.

  His face meant less to me than his name. It was a plain enough face. There were calm blue eyes, a straight but round-tipped nose, prominent lips, a too-pointy chin. His eyebrows were overly thick and probably required some cosmetic antitrust procedure to prevent them from
merging. His ears were small and close to the skull. He had unremarkable brown hair, parted on the right. I guessed he was a little bit older than me. His palm was dry, his grip self-assured. And, like his errand boy up front, Carter wore a suit that probably cost more than the car. It didn’t, however, fit him quite so perfectly.

  “I am in real estate,” he let me know.

  “My house isn’t for sale.”

  He had an icy-cold smile. “I am in real real estate, Mr. Prager. Your house would be worth less than loose change to me. I own the buildings that Trump, Helmsley, and Tisch don’t.”

  “Somebody’s got to eat the crumbs, I guess.”

  He didn’t like that, but resisted taking the bait. “I do not enjoy the spotlight. Having my name pop up in the Post increases neither my holdings nor my ego. Did you know, I own the building that houses City on the Vine?” Carter offered it as a boast, but it sounded like a threat. “That is your wine shop, if I am not mistaken.”

  “If you want to raise the rent, talk to my brother. And what has this got to do with Karen Rosen?”

  He looked almost relieved. “You don’t remember her, do you?”

  “Now that I’ve seen this picture, I remember her face, yeah. But do I remember anything about her or her brother? No, I guess you’re right, I don’t.”

  “Perhaps,” he suggested, “you would recall Andrea Cotter.”

  “Oh my God!” I was light-headed. “The fire.”

  Yes, the fire. When I closed my eyes I could still see the headlines of the Sunday papers:

  SEVENTEEN DEAD IN CATSKILLS INFERNO

  August of ‘65, I think, a Saturday night. Three girls from my high school were up waitressing at a run-down Borscht Belt hotel. Some drunken asshole fell asleep smoking a cigarette, and the workers’ quarters went up like a Roman candle. The building was already collapsing by the time the volunteer fire departments arrived on the scene. There was nothing to be done but watch and help treat the people that got out alive. Unfortunately, most of the dead, the Lincoln girls included, got the worst and least accessible accommodations. It was a right of passage, I remembered the hotel manager saying. The new staff suffered their first year. For them there would be no better beds the second year. No second year at all. Nor would there be yearbook pictures. The dead girls were Karen Rosen and Andrea Cotter. I couldn’t remember the third girl at all.