“It’s Sheldon Horowitz,” Abe said, correcting him because his father had not.
“I see,” said Henkler.
Abe tilted his hat forward and flopped down into a wooden swivel chair. It was his father’s desk. He picked up a folder containing a list of weapons rejected by the prover after their final inspection.
“Maybe this is your problem right here,” said Abe. “The prover pretends to find a few blemishes and these otherwise perfect weapons find their way to the dumpster and then out the door to the Mob, who then uses them to gun down some rivals. I think I solved your case, Mr. Henkler.”
“Yes, that’s a vivid imagination you have. But every weapon rejected by the prover is accounted for and destroyed.”
“Destroyed?”
“We can’t be lowering our standards, now can we?”
“Of course not. You only want the best here. Like my father, for instance.”
“Exactly right,” said Mr. Henkler, placing his hands in front of him and knitting his fingers. “I’m sorry for the loss of your uncle. I hear he was a very interesting man.”
“I’m trying to find out who killed him,” Sheldon blurted out.
“Are you now?”
Nate started to laugh and nearly tripped over himself getting to Sheldon to shut him up. “No, no. It was a road accident. A terrible, terrible accident, and Sheldon was in the truck at the time. A car was passing them in foul weather. Joseph lost control of the wheel.”
“He was run off the road,” Sheldon insisted. “By a man in a suit and a mustache. I think he was a hit man for the Mob.”
Mirabelle crossed to Sheldon and placed her hands on his shoulders. She looked at Mr. Henkler from beneath her wide-brimmed hat, and said in a low voice, “We’re conducting a murder investigation, you see. We might need firearms of our own, actually. I see they now make women’s guns small enough to fit into a garter belt.”
“OK!” shouted Nate, opening the office door and ushering the children outside. “Thank you, Mr. Henkler, for your time. I’m going to put the boys to work papering the guns in the packaging room. It’ll be good for them to get their hands a little dirty and see what perfection looks like. I will continue with my review of comparing the manufactured numbers with the packed numbers to complete my survey of missing units and see if we can’t find a pattern. Do they always go missing on certain days of the week, for instance? Who might be working at those times? Good day, Mr. Henkler.”
“Mr. Corbin.” Henkler nodded as the family moved out the door and closed it behind them.
“With me,” said Nate through clenched teeth.
Sheldon followed his uncle and cousins across the vast production floor to a storeroom where racks upon racks of blue-metal pistols and rifles were being collected, wrapped in paper, and then placed into crates as gently as babies are placed into cribs.
Nate pulled the three offenders into a corner where the industrial pounding sheltered their voices from the packers.
“Let me explain something,” Nate said. “Mr. Henkler is a great man. Beloved. He hires veterans who have lost limbs in the Great War—people no one else will hire—and has put them to work on the factory floor as respected professionals. He promotes people like me who are often overlooked or passed by because the world is not a perfect or fair place. He has the respect and attention of Samuel M. Stone, who has the respect and attention of the mayor, the governor, and, as far as I can tell, the heads of industry in every major nation on earth. We do not joke with Mr. Henkler. We do not embarrass ourselves in front of Mr. Henkler. We do not put our futures and finances at risk by being anything other than absolutely professional and reliable for Mr. Henkler. You two,” said Nate, pointing at the boys, “will remove your jackets, roll up your sleeves, and help Mr. Carmine there in the blue shirt wrap the guns for packing. There is a correct way to handle them so your grubby fingerprints don’t end up on the perfectly polished metals. We don’t want the first thing a new customer sees is a blemish caused by you. The order from the principal is ‘perfection.’ Anything less than perfect on the line is removed by the order of Mr. Stone. Spending a morning surrounded by perfection will hopefully have a lasting impression on you.
“Hat off,” Nate added.
Abe rubbed his hands together and removed his hat.
Sheldon was sufficiently intimidated and could already feel the wrapping paper and heavy guns in his hands. Abe, however, was not.
“They make close to a hundred thousand items here a year. You said you’re losing at most twenty guns a week. How is this a big deal and why don’t you just tell the cops?”
Nate looked at Abe—who was already taller than his father—as though he couldn’t understand how someone so stupid could have come from his own loins.
“Twenty a week is more than eighty a month or upward of a thousand a year. That’s more than one percent of the entire inventory, and at twenty dollars retail on average, that’s twenty thousand in lost revenues to a corporation that employs thousands of people. Beyond that, if word leaks out that we tolerate this, we put our reputation in jeopardy. I already explained this to you. Reputation is everything. There are already questions being asked because the Hartford Courant has heard unconfirmed rumors of our little problem. I’m going to have to solve it before the story breaks.”
“The Corbin Detective Agency,” Mirabelle said. “Sorry,” she added, turning to Sheldon. “I meant Corbin and Horowitz, Private Detectives. Two cases already. Murder and industrial espionage. That gives your Nero Wolfe one on the jaw, doesn’t it?” She winked at Sheldon.
“This family is hanging by a thread!” Nate said, raising his voice. “You think this is a joke? You think my brother’s death—his father’s death—is a joke? Do you?”
“No,” said Mirabelle, her eyes narrowing into hatred, her voice sharp, her enunciation perfect. “I think Uncle Joseph was one of the greatest men I’ve ever known, and I’ll probably never meet another man like him. He was kind, strong, masculine, gentle, uncompromising, and more dedicated to his family than any other man I have ever known. I don’t know whether a man with a mustache deliberately ran him off the road and killed him or not. But what is absolutely clear to me is that if his death was as equally meaningless as Mom’s I’m going to scream and never stop.”
“Nothing happened,” Nate whispered.
“Nothing happened to Mom,” Abe repeated to Mirabelle, placing an understanding hand on her shoulder. “Nothing happened to Uncle Joe either. Nothing’s happening in Germany. Nothing’s happening in Italy. Nothing’s happening in Czechoslovakia or Austria. Henry Ford isn’t trying to turn Americans against the Jews, and Congress isn’t keeping Jewish refugees out of America. Everything’s fine, Mirabelle. We’re overreacting. It’s all going to work itself out. You’ll see. Take Dad’s word for it.”
Nate took Mirabelle by her upper arm and pulled her in close. “You will remove your mother’s evening party gloves and accompany me to my office, where you will do your homework so that someday you might finish high school and not end up a tramp.”
“My homework? You think trigonometry is what’s standing between me and moral downfall?”
“You will grow into a lady, like your mother, no matter how far back I have to clip your wings to make it happen. And you,” he said to Abe. “You will be respectful of Mr. Carmine here and do what he says until I come back and tell you to stop. And you,” Nate said to Sheldon, “will drop this nonsense. I am pained by your father’s death. I know you are too. But I will not have you distracting us from our grief by a child’s revenge fantasy. Are we all clear on how the rest of the morning will progress before we leave for home, dress for synagogue, and bury my brother beside my sister-in-law and my wife?”
Lenny
LENNY BERNSTEIN HAD NEVER RECEIVED a letter before. He’d heard of them. He’d received cards on the holidays from grandparents—cards you shake and watch cash fall out. But a letter? Who’d write him a letter?
Sheldon. Sure. He’d mentioned it. But . . . seriously?
“You sure?” Lenny asked the postman, who stood in the doorway with the flat expression of a grown man being questioned by a thirteen-year-old.
“Am I sure this is a letter?” he said.
“A letter for me?”
The postman recovered the letter from Lenny’s hands, held it up so they could both see it, and pointed at the addressee line on the white envelope.
“Is your name Lenny Bernstein?”
“Yes.”
“Is this your address?”
“Yes.”
He handed the letter back to Lenny and wandered off without drawing the last and final conclusion.
Lenny closed the front door and swung onto the sofa of his parents’ small Victorian house. The windows were open, and the day was breezy and bright. There was stained glass at the top edge of their bay window that cast orange, yellow, and blue trapezoids over a thinning carpet.
He tore the envelope open as though it were a provocation.
The letter was typed. And typed badly. Lenny didn’t know that Sheldon could type, but from the looks of it—eraser marks and cross-outs and accidental capital letters here and there, and missing letters elsewhere—it seemed like he was intent on learning at Lenny’s expense.
At the top left was Sheldon’s return address, just the way Miss Simmons had taught them at school. Below that was the date—September 19—only four days ago. Under that it read, “Dear Lenny.”
* * *
Dear Lenny!
Dear Lenny!,
Everything and notHing has happened since I got here. I work pope woke up today planning to go to school. Instead, we went to the BColt Armory and I wrapped guns in paper for &four hours and then I changed into black clothes and buried my dad.
It was like burying my mom only I knew he was in the boX this time and I could see the pale bearers pallbearers straining to carry it.
When we had the service for my mom, my dad stood behind me the whole time with his hands on my shoulders. He kept touching my head. I was mAd at him and stuff for burying my mom here and not spreading her ashes back at home, but I wasn’t that mad. This time I was standing next to Abe and Mirabelle. They were there the first time too, I guess, but I can’t remember them.
I felt like I was a thousand million miles away watching it through a telescope.
When I was little, my dad came into my room one time after I had a bad dream and he explained that we never have the same bad dream twice. They get use d up and never come back. But this funeral was exactly like going bnack to the same bad dream. I stood in the same place and listened to the same bullshit from the same people. Only this time he was missing.
What else? Hartford’s got a lot of girls in it. And cars. And horses. It smells bad after it rains, which is exactly when you think it should smell better. I figure all the manure gets stirred up like a brown soup, and if it’s hot the next day, the sun burns off the water and you smell it everywhere. Abe calls them shit storms. Maybe that’s the history of the term. If not, it should be. Someday we’ll only have cars and no horses. Will we still have shit storms? These R things I wonder about.
Abe’s OK. He does a lot of push-ups and sit-ups and exercising and stuff, like he’s a boxer or something. He’s lean and tall and skinny but he’s got muscles. I think he’s training for the army or else to take on the Mafia single-handed, but Uncle Nate says America isn’t gonna going to fight any more of Europe’s wars and we’re not going to spill any blood to defend all those European kolonies so they’re all going to have to work it out.
Abe’s not getting on that bus. He keeps reading the papers about what’s happening to the Jews and he gets really, really steamed up. He circles the articles and stacks the papers on our dresser in the bedroom. He’s really pissed at the Italians who are kicking out all the Jews, and obviously SHitler and the Germans.
Did I tell you about the Mob guy watching us from a car across the street? I’ll have to write another letter about that because I’ve only got the one more piece of paper. That’s a whole other thing!
What else?
Anyway, all this with Abe made him get into a fight last Friday. He said there are these guys who listen to some priest on the radio called Charles Coughlin who says the Jews are to blame for everything and are trying to start the war. There were three of them so obviously Abe got his ass kicked but I think he gave as good as he got. Abe said that he knows one of them from his high school and that the other two are dropouts.
Now Abe’s all bruised up and he’s looking for some rev payback. Says one of the guYs is Willie MacCullen and that his dad owns a prawnpawn shop on Park and he wants to rob it. Mirabelle loves the idea and—I don’t know, I guess I’m going too.
You know you have to eat this letter after you read it, right?
So anyway, we’re thinking maybe we’ll knock it over tomorrow night. I don’t know when you’ll get this letter, so maybe by the time it arrives, we’ll already have done it. I suspect so.
What else?
Living in the city is really something else. I get the feeling all the time like they’re trying to civilize me like they did with Huck Finn. Better clothes, comb my hair, say this, don’t say that. I don’t like it so much, but then I look at Mirabelle and see what being civilized might be like. I worry a little cuz because it’s made her elegant and fancy, but it’s made her angry too because she has to keep her mouth shut, which isn’t really for her. She’s one confusing girl, I’ll tell you that. And, yeah, she’s as pretty as I remember. Prettier. It sort of hurts.
I still can’t believe I’m really here and my parents aren’t. I keep thinking I’m coming home soon. I know people die. But I guess I didn’t realize they stay dead. Do you know what I mean?
Write back, OK? I want to know what Bruno Krupinski is doing and what’s happening to what’s left of my house. And you should get the rifles and stuff from the shed and hide them. Maybe under your deck would be a good idea. Once word gets around that we’re gone, someone’s going to break in and snatchtake the stuff. Fy dad’s rifle—the one he brought back—is a good one. Hold on to it. Oil it. Wrap it up. I’m going to be needing it.
Your fuddybuddy,
Sheldon
Lenny folded the letter and placed it back into the envelope. Gripping it tightly in his fist, he walked into the kitchen and wordlessly removed a pack of matches from a small iron box beside the fireplace. He lit it on fire and tossed it into the hearth.
Pawns
SHELDON HOROWITZ HAD NEVER ROBBED anyone of anything other than their smugness, pride, or superiority until he took away the Krupinski brothers’ freedom, but that was an exception. He had never stolen stuff. He wasn’t a thief and he didn’t much like the idea because he didn’t want the label. So, breaking into a pawn shop as an act of vengeance was going to be something new especially when he wasn’t even avenging himself but someone else for something he didn’t understand. Abe saw slights everywhere and in everything. He said anti-Semitism was the water they were all swimming in, but they couldn’t see it or taste it because they were too used to it. But he could. He had the sight.
Was it a legitimate reason to knock over McCullen’s pawn shop? Probably not. But Abe was family and that was that.
Crouching behind an early 1930s Buick on Park Street in Frog Hollow with Abe and Mirabelle, Sheldon figured he’d be excited by the heist, but he was surprised to find that he wasn’t. It seemed like something to do rather than the thing to do, and since Abe was in charge, Sheldon felt as though he were going along for the ride.
Mirabelle, on the other hand, was loving it. She was dressed in black slacks and a man’s black turtleneck sweater, and somehow the masculine clothes made her look even prettier.
Abe signaled that it was time for them to make their move.
It was nine o’clock at night. Nate was at the office as usual, and Abe said he wouldn’t be home until close to eleven. That was their window
to make the score—or settle one, in any case.
It was Tuesday night and the office workers in the area had all gone home. A few cars were parked along curbs for couples dining out. Two men in hats and jackets strolled by on the opposite sidewalk discussing Roosevelt. Everything was bathed in the yellow of the electric streetlamps.
“So, it’s like this,” Abe whispered. “There’s an alley to the right of the shop. Halfway down there’s a door that leads inside. I’ll use this crowbar to pry it open. Once we’re in there . . . we take what we want. But we do it all quiet-like. Five minutes. We take our bags, we walk out the way we came in, and then we split up and meet back at home.”
“With the loot?” asked Mirabelle.
“With the loot,” said Abe.
“And why are we doing this again?” Sheldon asked.
“Revenge, Sheldon. It’s your idea too.”
“Mine?”
“You asked before if we’re supposed to sit back and take it. I said no. So here we are.”
Sheldon didn’t reply. He did, however, reach into the pocket of his trousers and feel his father’s brass trench lighter. If there was a question in his fingertips, the lighter didn’t answer it.
“OK, let’s do it.”
Abe stood up and walked across the street with the short crowbar palmed in his hand and running up the length of his arm.
Mirabelle took Sheldon by the hand, smiled at him as though they were about to take a ride at the carnival, and pulled him up and out into the street.
Mirabelle had held his hand at the funeral too, had gripped it wordlessly as the rabbi intoned in a language none of them spoke, even the dead. Here in Frog Hollow, in the after-hours quiet of the downtown district, Sheldon’s hand felt warm and hers felt soft. He would have followed her anywhere.
They caught up to Abe in the alley at the door between two garbage bins that stank of rotten meat and buzzed with flies. Abe’s hands shook slightly from nerves, his knuckles still bruised from the fight, as he positioned the edge of the crowbar between the door and its frame next to the doorknob. In a swaying and silent count to three, Abe rocked, rocked again, and then—with all his weight—slammed his hip into the bar, ripping the doorknob and its metal guts out of the old wood and onto the street, where it skidded to a halt and glistened like the golden heart of a slain beast.
How to Find Your Way in the Dark Page 7