Little Brothers

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “Swear by the Holy Virgin.”

  “I swear, I swear, I swear!”

  She went all soft again. “Look at me, darling, the tears I’m holding back. Look and you’ll see them.” She came to him, her hands outstretched.

  He could not look at her face, he could only slyly measure his chances of getting out the door.

  “Look at me,” she said again. “When you were a little boy you used to sit in my lap and let me look at myself in your eyes.”

  He gave her his hands and then squeezed hers so hard his own hurt.

  “Angelo, I don’t sleep with Rotelli. It’s not like that …”

  “I don’t care!” Angie shouted.

  She shook his hands in fury. “You dirty, selfish boy! You want a whore for a mother—is that what you want? Maybe you bring her men, hah?”

  “Sicilian bitch!” He hurled the words at her at last and pulled himself away.

  She began to cry in earnest and Angie went out, not waiting to close the door behind him. Her sobs and wails followed him down the stairwell as he ran, faster and faster, until he reached the street and had to slow down because he could not see for the tears in his own eyes.

  “Poor little one, poor little one,” Mrs. Niccoli crooned as he passed.

  From the top floor window Ric called down to him, “Angie, wait for me.”

  He ran again, stumbling, repeating to himself every dirty word he had ever heard in his life. He reached his hideout, half-expecting it to have been destroyed by the police or the hatch locked up, but nothing had been disturbed.

  He was no wiser an hour later for having gone over and over in his mind, unable to stop, the things his mother had said. He was never going to understand her, and he didn’t care, he didn’t want to care. No wiser, but somewhat soothed by self-sympathy and solitude. The roof became very hot. He went to the parapet where there was a breeze. He sat there, his back to the street, to the girl’s window. He didn’t care about her either. He began to fantasy himself as an outlaw, as a man wanted as a criminal who hadn’t even committed a crime. Then he heard his name called out in a girl’s voice, a real voice, and looked across the way.

  Julie was leaning out over the plants, her hands cupped round her mouth. “I’m coming over to see you, Angie. Fix it so that I can come up there.”

  20

  THE DOORMAN WAS WATCHING for Marks. He gave him the message that his father wanted him to come upstairs for a few minutes, and took over the car. Marks assumed something had come through on Grossman. His father opened the door to him and led the way to his study, a room off the vestibule before it opened into the vast living room. Marks caught a glimpse of Matty in the kitchen at the far end of the apartment.

  “Mother’s off. She wants you to have dinner here if you don’t have a better offer,” his father said.

  “Not so far,” Marks said. “You got an answer on Grossman, yes?”

  “Yes, I got nothing,” his father said, sitting down at his desk and turning on a second lamp. Marks could not think of a circumstance in which he would be hurried. “Now let me interpret that nothing for you. Your mother won’t like that shirt.”

  “She bought it for me.”

  “Did she? I keep forgetting she can oblige both twentieth-and nineteenth-century tastes.”

  “Ben Grossman,” the detective prompted.

  “Mmmmm.” His father put on his glasses and then took them off again. For many years he had resembled Toscanini. Now that he was showing his age, the features broadening, but his white hair still a dramatic shock, Ben Gurion came to mind. He was always being taken for someone famous, but not for the famous attorney he actually was. “What it means, Dave, no dossier has ever been compiled. In other words, he was not charged with collaboration.”

  “Probably because no one lived to accuse him.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. He likely did a good deed here or there along the grizzly way. More to the point, he did not do a bad one. A weak one, yes. He would have cooperated to the extent of saving himself, but not at the expense of his fellow victims.”

  “In other words, he entertained Nazis but he did not fiddle Jews into the gas chambers.”

  “I would say so.”

  “You wonder then why he was changed from one camp to the other,” Marks said. “I’ve assumed it was due to the wrath of his brethren.”

  “More likely it was a change within the camp command. He was undoubtedly someone’s pet Jew.”

  “That sounds filthy.”

  “I like to say things like that, David. It’s my way of making sure that we never forget. Now. Whoever is on the door will have put my clubs in the car. Shall we go?”

  “I want to stop in Jersey City to check an address …”

  “No, David. On the way home if you must, but not until we’ve had our game. This bit of investigation I’ve done for you would have taken a week through regular channels. I’m entitled to your undistracted competition … and my usual handicap of course. Tell Matty what you want for dinner.”

  “She knows.” In the hall he called out a greeting to the woman in the kitchen. “I’ll be here for dinner, Matty.”

  She came, wiping her hands on her apron, to see them out.

  “Where did you say Mother was?” Marks asked as his father put on a jockey cap he always wore in the sun.

  “Why, she’d be at a musicale at the Alice B. Toklas Hall.” Which was the other side of his father; the Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center.

  21

  “IT WOULD HAVE BEEN a lot easier for you to come to my place,” Julie said as she took the last step onto the roof.

  Angie offered her a helping hand too late. He pulled the ladder up and closed the door. He could hardly believe the girl was standing on his turf, that she’d come to his hideout. Now that he could take a really good look at her, he could not bring himself to do it, only a glance now and then. “I’m sorry I stole the coat,” he blurted out.

  “I don’t know whether I’m sorry or not. All sorts of things seem to be happening as a result. My name is Julie.”

  “Angie.”

  “I know,” she said and held out her hand.

  He gripped it firmly, as she did his. They both let go immediately as though it wouldn’t be right to hold on any longer.

  “I don’t have chairs or anything. You’ll get dirty.”

  She was wearing white ducks and a striped blouse that looked Italian. “There’s always the laundromat,” she said, and looked round for the best place to sit.

  “I hate laundromats,” Angie said.

  “So do I. I keep hoping some day I’ll meet somebody interesting in one, but so far they’re all blobs.” She sat in the shadow of the tent, her knees to her chin. Angie could see her sandaled feet. Neither her toenails nor her fingernails were painted, which he liked. He sometimes wondered what people would think if his mother’s red polish chipped off in the bread dough and they found it.

  “Were you at the police station this morning?” he asked.

  “The Early Early Show. Look, Angie: do you know what I came over here for?”

  He’d known, of course, that it couldn’t be a friendly visit. “Money?”

  “How did you guess?”

  “I don’t have any,” he said. “If I did—you know.”

  “Let’s put our heads together and see if we can’t find a way to pay back his reverence, Father Phillips.”

  From the way she said it he knew she was angry underneath.

  “He says you owe him a hundred dollars.”

  “Wow,” Angie said.

  “It seems a lot more after it’s gone, doesn’t it?” Julie flashed him a smile that went through him all the way to his sneakers.

  He nodded.

  “I feel it’s my obligation as well as yours.”

  “No,” Angie protested.

  “Oh, yes. He was my guest. You’ve got the makings of quite a cat burglar, Angie.”

  “It was a kind of dare to myself. I cou
ldn’t do it again if I tried.”

  She looked at him, up and down. “I wouldn’t recommend it myself … Do you know what Father Phillips is doing now?”

  Angie shook his head.

  “He’s preaching a mission for the rest of his vacation. Salvation. I don’t feel the need to be saved, do you?”

  “Yes,” Angie said.

  She laughed aloud.

  “I was thinking,” Angie said a minute or two later, “maybe I could get some of the money back. Only I don’t know how much I gave away. I guess it isn’t such a good idea anyway. They’d’ve spent it.”

  “People you know?”

  “Sort of. I mean I know one of the persons. She helped me get the money for the plane ticket.”

  “How much?”

  “One hundred and forty-nine dollars.”

  “Which means you put forty-nine dollars into the suitcase.”

  “Fifty-seven. I had eight dollars of my own to start with. I put that in too.”

  “My God, what a conscience you’ve got.”

  “It was a mistake, only I didn’t want to go back afterwards.” He didn’t want her getting any exaggerated ideas about him. He wasn’t going to let anybody think what a nice boy he was anymore.

  “Have you got a pencil and paper in this supply depot?” She indicated the tent.

  In the back of a notebook in which he had started to write something about the stars one night—he’d only written a couple of lines—they figured out that breakfast at seven dollars and a two-dollar tip, plus three dollars cab fare plus a fifty-cent tip, plus fifty cents for the shopping bag came to thirteen dollars.

  “We could have done that in our heads,” Julie said. “Seven dollars for breakfast?”

  “Strawberry waffles with whipped cream and stuff.”

  “And that’s a fancy tip.”

  “This girl is a waitress herself. I called her Alice, only it isn’t really her name.”

  “Tell me about her,” Julie said.

  Angie could feel himself going hot to the roots of his hair. He shook his head. He didn’t think he could tell her about Alice.

  “Oh, dear,” Julie said, “that means it’s going to be even harder to ask her for the money back. Did you really give her eighty-seven dollars?”

  “I gave some to another woman in the park. Her name was Mag and she lives in a mansion on Twenty-first Street and Tenth Avenue.”

  Julie repeated the address. “That must be some mansion.”

  “You mean like Grand Central Station?”

  “Phony. That’s a tough neighborhood. I don’t think we’d better count on getting anything back from her.”

  “She spoke really good English.”

  “All the more reason: she’s a con artist. What did she try to sell you?”

  “Nothing. I just wanted her to leave me alone which is why I gave her the money. I think I gave Alice more than her.”

  “Well, let’s try Alice first,” Julie said and got to her feet. She brushed the dust from her backside and then twisted around to look at something which would not come off.

  “It looks like it’s tar,” Angie said. “After it cools maybe.”

  “After what cools?”

  Angie could not explain. He felt she was teasing him.

  “Never mind,” Julie said. “You mustn’t take me so seriously.”

  Alice had said something like that.

  He found it easier to walk in step with Julie than he had with Alice. She walked so straight and easy. But there was an area in which he was having trouble: the closer they got to the restaurant, the less he wanted to confront Alice.

  Julie said, “Don’t think about it until we get there. Just let it happen when the time comes.”

  “How did you know what I was thinking about?”

  “The way you slowed down.”

  “Oh.” He drew a deep breath. It seemed such a long time ago he had come along this way—almost happy with the coat—and getting over the Ordeal, not knowing what was really happening to Mr. Grossman. They hadn’t spoken of Mr. Grossman, Julie and him. He realized that she must know something about it, having been at the police station: that was all about Mr. Grossman. It was like knots in a string: you could go out of your mind trying to figure out which one to untie to get at the next one.

  Julie asked: “Where do you live?”

  “On Elizabeth Street, only I’m not going to live there anymore. My mother and I fight all the time.”

  “What about?”

  “I don’t know. Everything it seems like. It just blows up like a bottle of bad wine.”

  “You never know till it happens.”

  “Exactly,” Angie said.

  “Do you know anybody your age whose life is different?”

  Angie thought about Ric’s: he’d take his own over that. “Some are even worse.”

  “Some of us do something about it,” Julie said. “And some don’t. That’s the difference. Some don’t even want to do anything.”

  “I do,” Angie said. “I mean every time I get mad, I wind up crying and then I get madder at myself. It’s how I’m supposed to be super-special because of all she’s done for me.”

  “Crap,” Julie said. “She’s done it for herself.”

  “I’m very glad to hear you say that,” Angie said, “because that’s how I want it. I mean this guy that’s always at the house—maybe I was jealous at first, but I don’t really think so, and now she says all she wants out of him is money for me—to go in business or something. I don’t want to go in business. I’d run away—my father’s in California—only …” He shrugged.

  “Only what?”

  “Well, I couldn’t right now, with the police asking me questions …”

  “That’s an excuse.”

  “I guess.”

  “Unless you really did have something to do with Mr. Grossman’s murder.”

  Angie became wary: it sounded as though she had set a trap for him. He looked at her, trying to figure out if she was putting on an act to get information out of him for the cop. It would be the biggest disappointment that ever happened to him.

  She said, “You have a terrible home life, and a person does not have to take that, Angie, not after they’re sixteen years old. Your father walked out on her, right?”

  He nodded.

  “What she’s afraid of—you’ll do the same thing. Now in my case, if I hadn’t split when I did, my parents would be divorced. And they should be. They just stay together to blame one another for my winding up in Little Italy.”

  “I’ll bet they’re rich,” Angie said.

  “How did you ever guess that?”

  “You’re different. You even talk different. I wish I did. I had a teacher once who talked like you. I used to try to imitate him all the time, but everybody made fun of me. They made fun of him too. Then they said I had a crush on him and … I don’t know.”

  “Your friends wouldn’t approve of me either. I want to blow up the Establishment, and they want it to last till they can get there.”

  Angie only partly understood.

  “Sacco and Vanzetti,” she said.

  “I heard of them,” Angie said.

  “Actually, I don’t know very much about them myself except that people like me demonstrated for them—poets and actors—and they really got screwed by the Establishment.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean by the Establishment.”

  “Big business, big politics, big religion, the people who stay on top. Have you ever heard anyone talk about blowing up Con Ed?”

  “I’m for that,” Angie said, “what they do to the sky.”

  Julie smiled and set a new pace for them. “That’s what it means to be anti-Establishment, and to want to do something about it.”

  “How did you get to walk the way you do, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “It was something I admired—and I had a lot of help in school. In the kind of school I went to, posture was a big thin
g. And then I saw a woman once with a vase on her head, a Greek woman. She was very beautiful and I wanted to be like her.”

  “A Greek?” Angie said incredulously.

  The restaurant was closed. One look at the traffic explained: it was all transient. The weekend visitors to Manhattan would not choose Minnie’s Place short of starvation.

  “I know where she lives,” Angie said, and then wished he hadn’t. What if she had company? He would not let anybody else say anything against Alice, but he thought about the suit of clothes and what she’d said about them. “I don’t really think …” He stopped, taking one look at Julie: her chin was thrust out and her eyes said they were going on. He led the way across Houston Street.

  There was no Alice to be expected on the mailboxes in the first-floor vestibule, but he had to look there for a clue to her real name. B for basement where G. Abramovitch lived. He repeated the name by syllables. “I guess I’d better stick to Alice if that’s her.”

  Outdoors, Julie said, “I’ll wait for you here on the steps. That would be better, don’t you think? Moral support only?”

  Angie nodded and went to the door beneath the steps. Alice opened it before he could ring the bell. “Lover boy!” She was wearing her duster, only it was held together with a safety pin at the important place. “I never thought I’d see you again unless it was in the newspapers.”

  “I’m sorry I ran out on you.”

  “I got the picture from the lieutenant. We got to be pretty good friends, him and me.” She jerked her head toward the steps. Who’s the blonde au natural?”

  She’d been watching from the window, Angie realized. “She’s a friend of the man I stole the sports jacket from.”

  “I thought she was your aunt or something. What’s on your mind, Angie?”

  Suddenly he was angry. “Not a thing, Miss Abraham. Not a goddam thing.” He turned and took the basement steps in one stride.

  “If it’s the money you want back, why don’t you say so?”

  By then he was face to face with Julie who had heard everything. “I’ll get a job someplace,” he said under his breath to her.

  Alice came out to the steps. “How do you do?” she said to Julie. “Angie, the lieutenant wanted to know all about your fat friend. Want to know what I told him?”