“Do you know who I am?” said the voice of the ghost.
“Yes. I know who you are.”
“Do you know why I’m here?” The ghost’s eyes glowed with the brightness of eternal youth.
“You’re here for me,” Bruno said.
“Yes. You’re going to tell me what really happened. You’re going to tell me why we were driven off the road.”
“I didn’t mean for it to end like that.”
“Start talking before I send you to hell.”
Old Bruno Krupinski took the ghost of the dead Jew at his word. The rifle in his hands was only a prop; the Grim Reaper took your soul without having to use a gun. The ghost of Joseph Horowitz would extend his hand and Bruno would be whisked away to eternal damnation and this was his only chance to confess and repent and lighten his burden before death came, the death that part of him had wanted ever since his wife left him with two boys and said that they were all no good.
She went west to freedom like they all do.
A part of Bruno—the last good part—was still a Catholic whose grandparents talked of the old country. That part of him believed in ghosts and damnation.
Christ was a Jew. Why wouldn’t the Grim Reaper be one too?
Of course he would appear as the man Bruno had killed. Who else?
“We were skimming,” Bruno said, pouring himself another drink and punching it back. “We were buying your pelts and selling them down in Hartford per our agreement. But we were selling them down there for more than we told you. So that was the first part.”
“I always knew you were cheating us,” said the ghost with the rifle. “But you didn’t run us off the road because you had a good thing going.”
“Yeah, well,” said Bruno, scraping his fingernails against the fabric of the armchair like an excited cat. “The people in Hartford weren’t the nicest types. This was all off the books. No taxes. No paperwork. At one point in 1937, we wanted to raise our prices because the Depression was wrapping up and costs were increasing. But the Mob didn’t want to pay more, and they were the kind of people you don’t ask twice. So, we came up with the idea of stopping off in Springfield on the way down to Hartford. We sold off about twenty percent of your stock for about thirty percent more. You got paid the same either way, so you didn’t ask questions, and the Hartford crew had no idea how many you’d given us, so they didn’t know we’d off-loaded merchandise before it got there and made that extra cut. Smooth as silk.”
“But you got caught.”
“People in Springfield talked to people in Hartford. We didn’t think of that. You see, there are a lot of guys with connections out there. And they stay in the game by watching out for one another’s deals. We didn’t know how tightly that web was wound. I guess we found out.”
Bruno nodded in recognition of the full weight of his own greed, stupidity, and arrogance.
“Springfield stopped buying, of course, but we had made some friends and one guy we knew tipped us off that Hartford was coming for violent payback. When you said you needed to borrow the truck”—Bruno took another drink, not as a reward but as preparation for the endgame—“the boys said it was providence. Like God wanted it to happen that way. If we just let it all play itself out, we’d be as snug as bugs and could start over again. Maybe go east to Boston and make a fresh start.”
“You knew. Say it.”
“We knew.”
Sheldon slid back the bolt and chambered a round dramatically. “Who was driving the truck, old man?”
“Oh, I don’t know that. Our Hartford guy was Ernie Caruso. He’s the one we shorted and the one who wanted blood. Ernie runs a team for Ray Patriarca. They’re the biggest Mafia in New England.”
“Who’s Lorenzo?”
“I don’t know any Lorenzo.”
“Lorenzo was the driver.”
“If you say so. There are a lot of people in this game, but there isn’t that much muscle. Only half a dozen guys are out there slitting throats and making widows in this region. There are a whole lot of kneecappers, you see, but not a lot of baby killers. It’s not just the killing, you see. It’s the not talking. They don’t spread that kind of work around too much or someone’ll talk. It’s inevitable. Maybe this Lorenzo is one of those half dozen. Makes sense, but I don’t know.”
Bruno had come clean. He was ready for death. There was just one more thing he had to say. “You’re shorter than I remember you.”
Sheldon didn’t understand this. “How the hell could I be shorter three years later ?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know how things work on your side.”
“My side of what?”
Sheldon looked around. He believed everything Old Krupinski had said despite his being insane. The information was burned into his mind like a brand now, the names, the logic. There was nothing else he needed. The brothers were still in prison, and this guy was living in one of his own making. Time would take care of him soon enough. Killing him would be both murder and a mercy, and Sheldon didn’t like the combination.
He looked at his watch. “Oh shit. I’m late. I got to go.”
“You’re late?” muttered Krupinski. “You can be late?”
“Stay miserable, Krupinski. You deserve it,” said Sheldon, turning for the door.
“You’re not going to kill me?”
“Take a look in the mirror, old man. You’re already dead.”
* * *
Sheldon ran. The sun had baked the dirt into his skin, but now the sweat from the fear and heat was starting to soften it again. Busting out of Bruno’s front door, he knew he had to hoof it if he wanted to get the rifle back into its bag and make the bus stop so Lenny’s hopes and dreams wouldn’t be dashed.
Except for a few minutes ago, Sheldon hadn’t run with a rifle. Hunters don’t run. Trappers don’t either. If anything, they creep. He’d never really considered how heavy these guns were until now. They were heavier when you were running, that was for sure. He was so lost in his own thoughts that he didn’t see Betsy Durkin until he was almost next to her in the middle of Mr. Abernathy’s fallow field, which was the quickest way to Lenny’s house from the Krupinski house.
“Hey, Sheldon,” said Betsy, with sweetness and a bouncy beat.
Betsy was in Sheldon’s class. They’d known each other since first grade. She was a little on the butterflies-and-rainbows side of life for his taste, but he liked her well enough and she’d always been nice to him.
“Oh. Hey, Betsy.”
“Why are you dressed like a bush?”
“What do you mean?”
She made a motion as though she were washing her face. “You’ve got leaves and stuff in your hair. It’s kind of all over you, actually.”
“Oh, right,” said Sheldon. “Well . . . I had to crawl under a deck to get some stuff I’d left here. It was . . . well . . . it looked like this and now I do.”
“Oh. Why do you have a gun?”
Sheldon remembered he was holding a German army rifle.
“This was my dad’s. I’m putting it back where it belongs. Don’t need it in Hartford. Obviously.”
“Right.”
“And . . . how are you?” he asked, knowing that every second was being chipped away by this discussion, but he didn’t want to be mean to Betsy and didn’t want her talking about this when he was gone.
“Good. You gonna be around?” she asked.
“Ah . . . not really. Me and Lenny are going to the Catskills. Try to get some jobs for the summer. He wants to be a comedian.”
“You too?”
“Not so much, no. Maybe a lifeguard.”
“Can you swim now?”
“No.”
“Hmm,” muttered Betsy.
“There are kinks to work out. Look, Betsy . . . it’s been swell seeing you, but I really got to get moving if I’m going to make the bus. If I don’t, Lenny’s gonna be mad. OK? No hard feelings?”
Then he bolted.
After
Sheldon had packed the Mauser away, he emerged from under Lenny’s deck with twice as much mud, which was now nice and gooey.
Outside, in the blazing light, Sheldon dashed down the road at full tilt, the mud caking on his face. By the time he caught up with Lenny, the bus was emerging from the shimmering distance like a hippo slipping out of an African lake. Lenny’s hands were on his hips. “I was about to have a heart attack!”
“I’m here.”
“Oh my God. Look at you.”
“I know, I know. I’m a little dirty.”
“What is that smell?” Lenny asked, as the bus sighed to a halt beside them.
Sheldon put his rucksack on his back, picked the larger branches from his hair, and rummaged in his pocket for his bus fare. Before boarding, he stopped for a moment to catch his breath and his bearings.
“You know, Lenny,” he said. “Some days really are stranger than others.”
“I’m not so sure, Sheldon. I’m beginning to think you make them yourself.”
The Sweet Spot
AT SPRINGFIELD THEY CHANGED buses for Albany, and while they were there, Sheldon stripped naked in the men’s room, threw away his clothes, and changed into something fresh. Under a flickering fluorescent light with sunlight busting through the cracks in the old door behind him, he washed himself and rinsed his hair three times with hand soap. He dried off with paper towels. At the end of the ordeal, he combed his hair and strutted out like a new man.
Lenny was on a wooden bench inside the main hall, which was as busy as any major train station. His legs were crossed, and he was reading a copy of the Boston Daily Globe. He dropped the paper’s corner and sized up Sheldon.
“Your boots are a disgrace.”
“They were like that before.”
“How do you smell now?”
“Better.”
“Better than what?”
“How much time have we got?” Sheldon asked.
“None. I got sandwiches and a couple of Cokes. Bus leaves in five. In two hours, we’re in Albany, and from there, we go up to Liberty and Grossinger’s.”
Sheldon sat down next to Lenny. The benches had been polished recently, and at least three brands of aftershave were competing for his attention. As bus stations went, this wasn’t bad. Still, Sheldon wasn’t thrilled about this Grossinger’s plan and he said so.
“Why are we attacking the enemy at the strongest point?” Sheldon asked. “I admit I don’t know as much about this as you do, but I hear that Grossinger’s is kind of the top of the top. That and the Concord. You said there were hundreds of places. Why not try someplace else? Make life a little easier?”
“I’d rather work my way down from the top than up from the bottom, wouldn’t you?”
“I guess.”
“Tips are better if the guests are richer.”
People began boarding the bus, and the boys took their seats on the scorching-hot vinyl. They pulled out of the city onto a black ribbon of road, picking up and dropping off travelers along the way. As the bus chugged along at forty miles an hour with the windows down, the wind blew hot against the boys’ faces and the sun turned their faces a beautiful bronze.
Lenny ate a ham and cheese and Sheldon a roast beef with mustard. As he had threatened to, Lenny worked on his act. He stared into his notebook and talked to himself nonstop in a hushed voice for more than half the journey, chuckling on occasion when he heard his own joke for the first time.
As Sheldon watched Lenny scratch out longer words and write in shorter ones and break long sentences into punchier ones, he sat back and thought to himself how nice it was to have a friend again.
Bored, Sheldon leafed through the 1940 vacation guide for resorts in Ulster, Sullivan, Delaware, and Orange Counties in New York. There was—out there somewhere—a 1941 edition of this same guide, but neither Lenny nor Sheldon had the high-level contacts required to score such a thing.
The guide was produced by the New York Ontario and Western Railway to encourage New Yorkers to take the rains and get out of town. It was more than 150 pages long and contained pictures as nice as postcards. The introduction began:
Your vacation this year, either during the spring, summer, fall or winter, will be one continuous round of healthful pleasure if spent in the counties of Orange, Ulster, Sullivan or Delaware, known as “The Playground of the Empire State.”
The book promised the “bracing air of the mountains” and said that the various resorts “welcome you to happy and health-giving recreation.”
“It sounds nice,” Sheldon said.
Lenny wasn’t paying attention to Sheldon’s reading material. He was working on his act. He erased something and started over, asking, “‘Nazi’ is spelled with one z, right?”
“Yeah.”
“ ’Cuz I hear some people say ‘nazzie’ like it rhymes with ‘snazzy.’ ”
“No. It’s ‘Nazi,’ like ‘putz,’ ” said Sheldon. It was imperfect but good.
“Snazzy putzes,” said Lenny, going with it.
“They do have snazzy uniforms.”
“What were you saying? What sounds nice?”
“All of it. There are hundreds of these resorts like you were saying before,” Sheldon said, leafing through the guide. “They have a two-page spread here for Grossinger’s and—Lenny—I got to be honest with you, there’s no way they’re gonna hire us for anything and I don’t see anyone here letting you tell an evening of jokes. I mean . . . this place is serious. It’s not like anything we’ve ever seen before.”
“I don’t need an evening. I need a solid ten minutes. I got that.”
“About what?”
“Mostly Nazis.”
“Doesn’t sound funny.”
“It’s hilarious. You’re gonna love it.”
“Lenny,” Sheldon said, as if his friend’s name were a lament. “Look at the people listed here in their Golden Book on page seventy-two. Really famous people. Some of them are even on the radio. Eddie Cantor, Milton Berle, Louis Sobol, Barney Ross, John Garfield, Buddy Clark, Abe Lyman, Belle Baker, Leonard Lyons, Nick Kenny, the Ritz Brothers, and George White. If I added you, your name would be the only one on the list we wouldn’t recognize.”
“Belle Baker’s a singer,” Lenny said. “She’s no threat to me.”
“I don’t think they’re going to let you open for Milton Berle.”
Lenny closed his notebook. This was serious business.
“I want us to get jobs at Grossinger’s because it’s where everyone goes. Everybody, Sheldon. There might be three hundred hotels or whatever, but this is it. This is the magical destination. This is Cinderella’s ball. It’s where you go to see and be seen. I don’t expect to perform there. Obviously. I’ll perform where I can. We’ll get some bicycles so we can get around from place to place. I’ll perform in those and we’ll see where it all goes.”
“I thought you wanted to start at the top and all that.”
“We’re going to start at the bottom of the top as bellhops and waiters and stuff. We’ll make more money, we’ll meet fancier people, and I suspect the food will be great. And there will be girls.”
“There are girls everywhere.”
“Rich girls angry at their fathers. That’s the sweet spot.”
“You’d better have a plan, Lenny,” Sheldon said. “Or this is going to be a short trip.”
* * *
Lenny did have a plan. And it was a doozy.
When the bus let them off in Liberty, Lenny took the vacation guide and flipped to the back to consult the Rand McNally map. Out on the street, he confidently pointed. “Thataway.”
* * *
Vacationers and delivery trucks passed them on the thin road as they walked to the northeast, then turned north up an even narrower road that turned out to be the driveway to Grossinger’s. When Sheldon saw it, he understood why it was called a resort.
“Lenny. It’s a campus. There are like twenty buildings here. Maybe more.”
<
br /> “There’s only one door we care about,” said Lenny, sounding like Eliot Ness before a raid.
“I hope you mean the back door.”
“No, my friend. I very much mean the front.”
Sheldon and Lenny stood facing the fortress they were about to assault with nothing but Lenny’s wit and Sheldon’s guidebook. Lenny studied the lines of the faux Tudor facade and watched the bellhops pop out of the main door under the brown roof, grab the luggage of the guests, and zip back inside. Cars were lined up to approach the door. It was a frenzy of patterned effort that was as precise as a military parade.
Sheldon knew immediately that all hope was lost and that they should abandon this windmill-jousting nonsense, find a nice campsite for the night, and tomorrow they could take the bus back to Whately and skim rocks by the river. Because that was nice too.
“That one,” Lenny whispered, choosing a victim. “Follow my lead and say nothing. If you have to say anything, you agree with everything I just said, and you don’t make up anything. I got a system.”
Sheldon nodded. He was fine with this. This wasn’t his adventure. He was along for the ride. How bad could things get?
Lenny walked up to the main entrance as though he were the prodigal son of a sultan. He waved down a bellhop who was wearing black pants and a red double-breasted jacket that was at least two sizes too large. Sheldon trotted behind him.
“Hey,” said Lenny, as though he were arriving for a party. “You one of the new guys?”
“What?” said the seventeen-year-old bellhop. He had a ruddy face that was turning redder in the sun, not brown the way Lenny and Sheldon were.
“Bus just got in. This is our first summer. Who are we supposed to report to?”
How to Find Your Way in the Dark Page 16