Earlier, I had seen one half of the favorite local joke: the Hasids. Now it was my turn to meet the hayseeds. This was where the other half lived. No wonder Sam warned me to leave my jewelry at home. I somehow got the feeling no one was going to invite me in for a little chopped liver on matzoh.
“I’m a cop!” I lied. “I got my badge in my pocket.” I nodded my chin at my chest.
“Let’s see. Slow.”
I waved my badge at him, but he didn’t put the gun down. Cops, apparently, weren’t the rage around here either. There were several other trailers in the little compound, and Mr. Pump Action and I were beginning to attract a crowd. Doors were opening and people, including women and children, in various states of dress, were sticking their heads out to have a look-see. It did not escape the attention of my friend with the shotgun that we were no longer alone. He eased up a bit now that we had an audience.
“That’s not a local badge!” he shouted for everyone to hear.
“NewYork City,” I answered.
“Jew Yorker, huh? Okay, you can put your arms down and go pick up your piece.”
As I knelt to pick up my .38, I took a look around. Along with the double-wides were a few ratty car-trailers, sheds, even a shack or two. There were cars in various states of disrepair strewn about the place, some with flat tires, some on milk crates. Not every residence flew racist flags. But there were dogs, lots of dogs, though most of them were a lot scrawnier than my pal the Rottweiler.
I also noticed that no one, not even the guy with the shotgun, was willing to approach me. Everybody seemed to be waiting, but for what or whom was unclear. It didn’t remain unclear for very long. The front door of the double-wide immediately to the right of Mr. Pump Action’s swung open. All heads, including mine, swung that way, and the crowd held its collective breath. Through the door came a little man so thin he was nearly two-dimensional. Only in the movies do Nazi types look like blue-eyed, blond-haired supermen. In real life they usually look like the kids no one wants to play with. This clown was no exception.
He stood about five foot seven on tippy-toes and was, I guessed, in his mid-twenties. He looked like a cat sneeze could snap his femur. He wore his hair slicked back, but the natural wave of his dark-brown hair defeated the look of authority he was going for. Having tried to tame my own hair in this manner and to the same end, I almost felt sorry for him. He had a rather too-long face, plain brown eyes, and a skinny nose that had caught too many unblocked left hooks.
“Cops are unwelcome here,” he squeaked at me.
“Yeah,” I said, “I got that.”
“What’s your business?”
“Sightseeing.”
Everyone had a good laugh at that one. Skinny came down from his perch and approached me, making sure Mr. Pump Action kept his weapon on me. He strode right up into my face.
“We don’t get many sightseers around here,” he prodded, playing to the crowd.
“I don’t see why not. With this kinda hospitality, I’m surprised they don’t come by the busload.”
“Okay, everybody,” he said, turning, “go back to what you’re doing. We’re not gonna have any trouble. Are we?” he whispered to me out the side of his mouth.
“Not from me.”
He waited until the crowd broke up before addressing me again. He also motioned for the man with the shotgun to come join us.
“My name is Anton Harder,” Skinny declared without offering me his hand. His smile, I noticed, had vanished along with the onlookers. “Who are you and what are you doing here?”
I figured to let him choke on the truth—my version of it, anyway. “My name is Prager. I’m up from the city on an investigation. We got an arsonist in lockup confessed to starting the Fir Grove fire all those years ago. Maybe he’s fulla shit. Maybe he’s not. Personally, I think he’s one of those guys who confesses to any unsolved crimes.”
“The Fir Grove fire was an accident!” Harder snapped through clenched teeth. “Some bitch or nigger was smoking in bed.”
“Hey, I’m with you, but I go where the brass sends me.”
“I saw your badge through the window,” he said, pushing me gently to start walking. “It didn’t look like a detective’s shield.”
So Anton Harder wasn’t an idiot. He knew what was what.
“I never said I was a detective. Sometimes on task forces plainclothes cops do some of the legwork. So—where’s the workers’ quarters—I mean, where were they?”
“That’s where we’re going, Officer Prager.”
The three of us took a short stroll over another hill and down into a little glen. At the crest of the hill I could make out the foundation of a building that was no longer standing. It was partially obscured by the snow, but not completely. So this was where the workers’ quarters had been. As we moved down toward its location, a horrid stench came up the hill to greet me. It was two parts Fountain Avenue dump mixed with three parts Knapp Street sewage plant. My tour guides seemed to take no notice of the foul odor. When we got up close, the smell was so overwhelming I had to cover my nose and mouth with a gloved hand.
Harder made a sweeping gesture. “This is what you came to see.”
In the woods beyond the old foundation were piles and piles of garbage left to sit and putrefy in the open air.
“Cesspool’s right under your feet,” Mr. Pump Action wanted me to know. “Be careful where you step, now. We wouldn’t want you to drown in shit after coming all this way.”
Harder snickered. Then there was silence. And now that I was here, I wasn’t sure why I’d bothered to come. I guess I had had a need to see the place for myself, the place where they had died. Their bones and souls were long gone from here, as was any hint of the fire. Maybe I had wanted to come and add one more name to the list of fatalities. Arthur Rosen’s name needed to be uttered here, so I said it aloud.
“What was that?” Harder pounced.
“Nothing,” I said. “Just some dead guy’s name. That’s all.”
Then Harder said something very odd. “Fitting tribute.”
“What is?” I wondered aloud. “To whom?”
“The cesspool and garbage, to the trash that died here. Fitting, isn’t it?”
I could easily have twisted his head off his twiglike neck before Mr. Pump Action could even have raised his weapon, but I wasn’t here to play out a scene from Gentlemen’s Agreement or to preach on the brotherhood of man. I had just wanted to see the place.
“All right,” I said, turning in the direction of the hill, “I’ve seen enough.”
“No,” Harder protested, “don’t go yet. There’s something else I want you to see. This way, Officer Prager, please.”
We strolled a further thirty yards on away from the garbage and the cess. And here was a most incongruous sight: a lovely and perfectly trimmed thicket. The thicket was rectangular in shape, measuring a good twenty by twenty feet, with the hedges a good seven feet in height. We walked around the bushes and passed through an archlike opening in the shrubbery. A single gray granite cross stood at the head of what appeared to be a grave. The name Missy Higgins was etched into the horizontal bar of the granite cross. At the foot of the grave was a stone bench. Fresh red roses lay at the base of the cross. The flowers looked especially bloody set against the pure snow.
I stared intently at Harder, but he did not return my gaze. He was focused on the cross. I opened my mouth to speak, and though Harder could not have seen this, he anticipated my question.
“They weren’t all kikes and niggers, you know.”
“No one’s really buried there,” I said rather feebly.
“No,” he agreed. “She’d still be alive if she’d stuck to her own kind.” He turned. “You can go now, Officer. And don’t come back around here without a warrant next time. We wouldn’t want to mistake you for a deer or a trespasser. Peter, show Officer Prager off the land, will you?”
Peter Pump Action nodded that he would and gave me a shove with the
butt end of his shotgun. We took a more direct line toward where the old pool area was as Harder faded away over the crest of the hill. I couldn’t help watching the little man fade out of sight. I tried engaging Peter in a conversation, but he wasn’t much of a conversationalist without an audience. He left me by the swimming-pool slide without so much as a ta-ta.
Climbing the steps to the guest parking lot wasn’t any easier than it had been getting down. When I finally got to my car, I saw that I’d been rewarded for my efforts with a brick thrown into my rear windshield. And, as if that wasn’t enough, the word JEW was spray-painted across the hood in a particularly bright yellow paint. The brick, at least, had not penetrated the glass, managing only to pit it. Spidery cracks spread across the glass. I camouflaged the spray paint with some slush and snow, leaving behind the Fir Grove grounds and the angry white men who now lived there.
The snow and slush worked for about two minutes. The wind and the heat of my engine conspired to expose the yellow paint. Deciding to give the snow-and-slush routine another shot, I steered up onto the shoulder near a bend in the road. I regretted my decision almost immediately, for at the precise moment I shut the door behind me a group of Hasidic men turned the bend.
I was taken aback by my sense of nakedness. I wanted to throw my coat over the hood and run and apologize and explain all at once. I said nothing. There was nothing to be said. Instead, I stood as still as the granite cross. Only my eyes moved, watching their eyes, watching their faces watch me. But the accusal that burned in me was absent from their faces. What I did see were almost imperceptible smiles, subtle nods, a raised eyebrow. Once past, they never slowed their pace. They did not look back. They moved on. Their silence cut through me like shrapnel. I dispensed with the camouflage until I reached the very edge of town.
There’s just something about men and hardware stores. I am by no means a handy sort. The tool I use best is the telephone, to call the superintendent. It’s to civilization’s benefit that it was never dependent upon my dexterity to move from one stage of development to the next, or we’d still be without fire, stone tools, and the wheel. Having said that, I could spend endless hours strolling the aisles of nuts and bolts, plungers and pipes, paints and pry bars. Even the scent of a hardware store was like a siren’s song. Quick, lash me to the mast!
Making a selection was no easy task. I debated whether to go for basic flat black paint to get good coverage until I got the hood properly repainted, or to try and match the red of my car as closely as possible. I went for the black. I waited my turn on line listening to the local chatter.
As the line shortened, my eye caught sight of a ghostly figure passing by the big plate-glass window. I don’t mean Halloween ghostly either. Maybe ghoulish is a better word. He was a tall man with very close-cropped hair. His shoulders were stooped as if he were bearing Atlas’ load, but without the requisite strength. His skin was pale, drawn tightly against the skull and high cheekbones. He was skeletally thin. Because I could not see the lower half of his body, he seemed almost to float. His faded wool coat was three loose threads away from the rag pile. I don’t know why I found him so fascinating. Maybe because there was something about the way he carried himself that made him seem so out of place.
“Will that be all, sir?”
“Huh?”
“The spray paint, will that be all?” the hardware store clerk asked, pointing at the can.
I paid the clerk, and by the time I got outside, my ghost had gone. Safely off Main Street and out of town, I toweled off the hood and got busy spraying. It was a pretty neat job and would do for now. Yet, as I drove back to the Swan Song, I could not help staring at the hood. Though I knew it was impossible, I swear I could see the raised letters JEW beneath the top coat of black. I guess I wasn’t going to feel better about things until a sanding wheel was taken to the hood.
From all appearances, the remainder of my journey back to the hotel went without incident. No one insulted or threatened me or vandalized my car. No one hurled bricks or snowballs or epithets in my direction. But my guts were churning. All of a sudden, the idea of introducing a new customer to the power and dry complexity of a fine French Cabernet seemed very appealing. I was out of my element. I’d lost my chops for the job. I’d grown soft and happy and comfortable. Even when I was on the job I was never as tough as I made myself out to be, and now it was worse.
Eventually, I stopped trying to convince myself of that lie. Keeping the truth about Patrick away from Katy, and the silent collusion between my father-in-law and myself, had taught me a painful lesson: to be an accomplished liar, I had to be brutally honest with myself. Over the last few years, I had honed the skill to a fine art, and was superb at lying to people as close to me as my own shadow. No, I was now so intimately familiar with the mechanics of lying that I understood my current unease had nothing to do with my having grown fat and happy, or with my lack of toughness—perceived or otherwise. The truth was, Old Rotterdam was getting to me.
For all its considerable decrepitude, the Swan Song was looking pretty good to me as I pulled up its long driveway. I’d spent fewer than twenty-four hours as a guest here, yet it felt suspiciously like home. Given my day to that point, a discarded refrigerator box might have felt like home. I also felt suddenly very tired. I pulled into a parking spot, killed the engine, and just sat there with my eyes closed.
Then something hit the glass next to my head. I startled. I must have looked a fool, jumping out of my skin there in the front seat, trying to yank up my coat to get at my gun. When I saw it was Mr. Roth, the old guy from breakfast, tapping the driver’s-side window with his cane, I decided shooting him would have been a bit of an overreaction.
“You all right in there, mister?” he shouted through the glass.
I rolled the window down. “Fine. I was just resting my eyes a little, Mr. Roth.”
“You remember my name!” He was delighted. “I was worried that you’d fall asleep with the motor running or something.”
“I guess I did doze off for a second there, but the car was off. Thanks anyway.”
“I didn’t notice. I was just worried,” he repeated.
“Thanks again.”
He sort of hesitated. His body language suggested he had more to say but needed me to cue him.
“Listen …” I said just to say something, my head still a little foggy.
He smiled. “Would you like to come up to my room later on, or maybe tomorrow, to have a drink? Word around the hotel is you’re here doing research on the golden age of the Mountains.” No one from the city called the Catskills “the Catskills.” It was “the Mountains,” as if the phrase could refer only to one place on earth. What were the Himalayas, foothills? “Boy, I could tell you stories….”
“Sure, Mr. Roth, I’d like that very much. Later today or tomorrow.”
We shook hands on it. Strolling away from the car, Roth didn’t seem to need the cane. He didn’t click his heels or anything, but his walk was definitely happy. Who knows, maybe Mr. Roth knew something about the Fir Grove fire that I didn’t. Besides, with his receding gray hair, pencil mustache, and sad eyes, he reminded me of my dad. Passing a few hours with him yakking about the good old days might do us both some good. I missed my dad a lot, more now that Aaron and I had achieved a level of success which always eluded him. Come to think of it, I realized I’d better call my big brother. Katy and Sarah, too.
The store was still standing, so said Aaron. Friday had been so busy, he’d done as I suggested and called my buddy Kosta. Aaron approved. Kosta, as I had promised, knew his shit.
“Maybe I should have gone into business with him,” Aaron joked.
I wasn’t laughing. It had been Aaron who for years stubbornly refused to include anyone from outside the family in the ownership of the business. Several of my cop friends had offered up big chunks of change for a chance to get into the business with us. Cops and firemen are always looking ahead at what to do after retirement. There wer
e these legends floating around the department about groups of cops who had invested in McDonald’s or Kentucky Fried Chicken. Now they were multi-multi-millionaires, so the legend went.
Yeah, sure. Somehow, no names were ever attached to these stories, but they served their purpose, I guess. Apocryphal though they may have been, they made you think about your future. Most retired cops I run across go into security. It’s what they know. Some open up bars. Like I said, it’s what they know.
Katy didn’t answer at home. I thought she and Sarah might have stayed an extra day at her parents’ place. The thought of calling there again and having her father pick up was less than appealing to me, but I tried it anyway. I got my mother-in-law instead.
“Sorry, Moe. They’re not here. I think Katy mentioned visiting your sister-in-law Cindy and the kids. I think Miriam was gonna meet them there.”
“Okay, Mom, thanks.”
Even at my bravest, I thought twice about dealing with Katy, Cindy, and my sister, Miriam, all at once. I wasn’t up for listening to Cindy and Miriam lecture me on abandoning Katy and Sarah during the Thanksgiving vacation.
I was about to go find Sam and have a little showdown with my new friend about his cryptic warnings concerning the occupants of the former Fir Grove. He found me first. Stepping into my room, he surveyed it as if this were the first time he was seeing it. He was impressed.
“Nice room for such a shithole, you think?” He wasn’t really asking.
“The television reception’s awful.”
“It’s all the tall buildings, boychik—what can I do?”
Redemption Street Page 7