“So can we come in and talk to you?” Libby asked again.
The brothers exchanged a look, the kind of look she and Libby exchanged when they were about to make up an excuse for not doing something.
“Our apartment is a mess,” Igor said.
“We would be ashamed to invite you in,” Ivan agreed.
“Forgive us. But we will talk to you,” Igor said, “if you want to meet us at the Kebob Shack in a half hour.” Then, before Libby and Bernie had time to say anything else, Igor gave them the address and closed the door in their faces.
Chapter 6
“What do you think that was about?” Libby asked, staring at the closed door. She wanted to ring the doorbell again, but decided there probably wasn’t any point in it.
“I think there was someone else in there,” Bernie said to her sister as she turned and walked toward the elevator. She trailed her fingers against the plaster wall as she went, enjoying the sensation of the coolness seeping into them. “Someone they didn’t want us to see.”
“I didn’t see anyone,” Libby objected.
“I think I did,” Bernie replied.
“Who was it?” Libby asked.
Bernie shook her head, “Not a clue. Maybe a girlfriend. I didn’t get a good look.”
“So you don’t think they’re just giving us the brush-off?”
“No, I don’t, but I guess we’ll find out if they don’t show up at the Kebob Shack,” Bernie told her, although that was the last place she wanted to be. An ice cream parlor, yes; a kebob shop where there was a griddle going, no. On the other hand, she didn’t want to have to drive back to Brooklyn again either. The Belt Parkway had been a nightmare.
The shop Igor had mentioned was located five blocks away on Coney Island Avenue. By the time Bernie and Libby found another parking space near the restaurant, twenty-five minutes had elapsed. At that point, Bernie would have been happy to pay to park in a garage, but there were no garages in the area, so Bernie had endlessly circled the neighborhood until she found a parking space. It was tough to find one large enough for Mathilda.
“It would have been faster to walk,” Bernie groused as they entered the restaurant.
“Yeah, but at least the van sort of has air-conditioning,” Libby observed, referring to the fact that the Kebob Shack didn’t. “This place feels like an oven.”
It was in the eighties outside, but to Libby’s mind with the heat radiating off the sidewalks it felt as if it were in the nineties. The Kebob Shack was empty, and as Bernie and Libby entered, the smell of old grease from the griddle rose to meet them. The word shack perfectly suited the place. It was a hole-in-the-wall with a grill, a Formica counter, a scuffed black-and-white tile floor, and five small round tables with two chairs apiece pushed under them. The menu tacked above the counter was in Hindi, and the walls were decorated with pictures of Pakistan. A fan whirred up above, and the door was open to let in any breeze that happened by.
Bernie and Libby had just ordered coffee, and Bernie was fanning herself with a takeout menu when the two brothers arrived. They’d both shaved, slicked back their hair, and changed into khaki pants and tight-fitting, black T-shirts.
“We don’t have much time to talk,” Igor said.
“Then why did you tell us to meet you?” objected Libby, who was aggravated at having to be down here at all.
“Because we just got another job,” Ivan said. “Last minute. At the Tatania. It’s a big club in Brighton Beach. We have to get ready. At the time when we told you to meet us, we did not know this would be the case.”
“I’ve heard of the Tatania,” Bernie said as she took a sip of her coffee. It was surprisingly good. She sat down at the table in front of the window. “So how did Zalinsky get your name?”
“We are well known in the community,” Igor replied.
“Which community is that?” Bernie asked.
Igor snorted as if the question was too obvious to answer. “The Russian community. We are asked for at many big parties. That is how Zalinsky hear about us. We think we make big money when he ask us to work for him. He is a big deal, very rich, and he would be having many parties, and many famous people would be at this play and see us, so we would get lots of business and that he would be paying us very well. But that’s not what happened.”
Bernie leaned forward. “So what did happen?”
Ivan took up the narrative. “We did not get paid. We should have listened to Magda.”
Libby leaned forward. “You know Magda?”
“She is our cousin,” Ivan said. “She tell us not to take the job. She tell us a lot of times he doesn’t pay people.”
“But we don’t believe her,” Igor explained.
“Anyway,” Ivan said, “we think that even if he doesn’t pay us it would be, how you say, good . . .”
“Exposure?” asked Bernie.
“Da,” Ivan continued. “Good exposure, because there be many people there, and they would see us and like us. So when we get there and Magda comes running over and says she is sorry but Zalinsky does not have money in his account to pay us, we are not upset. But then a few minutes later, he comes over and swears our cousin is wrong and he will pay us the next day. This we believe.”
Igor slicked back his hair with the palm of his hand and admired his profile in the window. “Magda, she was mad at us for coming. She tell us to go home.”
“How come?” Libby asked.
“Because she no believe what Zalinsky tell us, and if we no get paid, she no get paid,” Ivan said.
“She’s your agent?” Bernie guessed.
Ivan nodded. “I tell her sometime you must give the cow away to get the milk.”
“But she no agree,” Igor said. “She say we no have any business sense, but we have good business sense. We talk to many people after the play and give out many cards.”
“She still mad at us,” Ivan confided. “But she always mad at everyone.”
Bernie sat back and resumed fanning herself. “Why?”
Ivan and Igor both shrugged.
“It is the way she is,” Ivan said. “She difficult person.” He shook his head. “She not sunny-side-up kind of person. She brood.”
“Aren’t you Russians famed for that?” Bernie couldn’t help asking.
Ivan burst out laughing. “Da.” He pointed to his brother and back to himself. “We, no. We happy people.”
“Can you tell us anything about Zalinsky?” Libby asked.
Igor thought for a moment. “I think he hard man to work for. I think maybe that is why my cousin is so unhappy.”
Bernie sighed and took another sip of her coffee. “Anything else you can tell us?”
Igor shook his head. “We just speak to him on the phone. He call us up and tell us what he want and when he want us, and I tell him yes, and then at that date Ivan and I go there.”
“Did you talk to Zalinsky before the performance?” Libby asked.
Ivan shook his head. “When we arrive, we come into the theater, but he was screaming at someone, so we left.”
Bernie pushed her coffee away. “Did you see who he was yelling at?”
“A little Chinese woman,” Igor said.
Bernie and Libby exchanged looks.
“Hsaio?” Libby asked.
“I do not know her name,” Ivan replied. “But she very upset. Almost crying. We did not want to embarrass, so we shut the door and left. Then we go find Magda to tell her we are there.”
“And what did Magda say?” Bernie enquired.
“She said we are idiots,” Igor said. “But I still think not. I think we get business out of this.”
Ivan nodded. “All publicity is good publicity.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” Bernie said. She looked down at the two addresses she had for Magda. “She lives around here, doesn’t she?”
“She live with her babushka here,” Ivan said, “and rent small house in Longely.”
“Do you know if Magda’s
here now?” Bernie asked because Magda hadn’t been at her place in Longely when she and Libby had stopped by.
“She still angry at us. She not talking to us now, so we do not know this,” Ivan said.
“I don’t think she talk to you either,” Igor added.
“I guess we’ll find out,” Bernie observed, starting to get up.
“One thing,” Igor said. “An important thing.”
Bernie sat back down and waited. “The pierogies that you make.”
“What about them?” Libby asked, even though she had a pretty good idea what Igor was going to say.
“You should not be making them again,” Ivan told her. “They are not good for your reputation.”
“This I know,” Libby agreed. “There’s one thing that doesn’t make sense to me.”
Now Igor and Ivan waited.
“How come he hired you to guard a two-million-dollar teapot?” Libby asked. “Wasn’t he afraid it was going to be stolen?”
Ivan shook his head. “He tell us he taking care of everything. We just have to look good.”
“Do you know what he meant?” Bernie asked.
Igor shrugged. “I think he mean he’s guarding it himself. Magda tell us he always take care of everything himself. He always think he know better than everyone else.”
“I’ll go with that,” Bernie agreed.
Chapter 7
Magda’s grandmother lived in Little Russia at 3 Brighton Court, a house in a narrow alleyway between two major avenues. The address wasn’t on Bernie’s GPS, and after circling around the area for several minutes, she’d given up, stopped, and asked for directions. The first woman she asked had shrugged and shaken her head, but the second one had given her the information she needed.
It took another five minutes after that before Bernie found Brighton Court, and five more minutes until she found a parking space. The spot was a few feet away from an open fire hydrant, and when Bernie exited the van, she stepped into a stream of water running down the street, but she did manage to sidestep the horde of shrieking kids dressed in bathing suits and flip-flops running in and out of the water’s spray.
As Bernie turned into the alleyway, a light breeze carried in the salty smell of the Atlantic. Bernie smelled it and smiled. To her mind, that smell was tanning lotion and grilled hamburgers and night-blooming flowers, all the smells of summer wrapped into one. She took another deep breath and thought about how nice it would be to be at the beach before getting back to the business at hand.
The address she and her sister were looking for turned out to be in the middle of the alleyway. It was one of five white clapboard bungalows with gray trim, all lined up with military precision. Each had a small backyard with a chain-link fence around it, and as Bernie walked toward Magda’s grandmother’s house, she wondered how this row of houses had escaped the developers’ wrecking ball, or whether the residents were living in its shadow.
A short, white, wrought-iron handrail ran up either side of the three steps that led up to the front door. Two elderly, heavyset women—both with scarfs tied around their hair, both wearing floral print dresses and orthopedic shoes with Cuban heels—were sitting on the steps talking to one another. They stopped chatting when Bernie and Libby walked around the garbage cans on the curb and came toward them, waiting to see what the sisters wanted.
“We’re looking for Magda, Magda Webster,” Bernie said when she and Libby got close enough to talk.
The woman on the far right looked at Bernie and Libby and shook her head. Then she said something to her friend in Russian.
“She’s not here,” the friend translated.
“We were told she was,” Bernie countered.
The English speaker translated the sentence for the other woman, who Libby and Bernie assume did not speak English. She shook her head again and began talking in rapid-fire Russian. Bernie and Libby waited. After a minute or so of animated conversation, the second woman asked Bernie and Libby who told them Magda was here.
“Igor and Ivan,” Libby replied promptly.
Bernie decided that the first woman must have understood what she was saying because she leaned over and carefully spit on the ground.
“I guess she doesn’t like them too much,” Bernie said to the second woman.
“They are worthless,” the second woman replied. She reached up to her shoulder and tugged her bra strap up. “They should be going to school and making something of themselves instead of running around like idiots with those stupid vests on.”
“You could be right,” Bernie said.
“I am right,” the woman exclaimed.
“Okay. You are right. Can we speak to Magda?”
“What you want to talk to her for?” the second woman demanded, not bothering to translate Bernie’s request for the first woman. “Are you police? Is she in trouble?”
“Definitely not,” Libby answered. “We’re here because we want to speak to her about her boss, Ludvoc Zalinsky.”
“Also scum,” the second woman answered.
“More than scum,” the first woman said, for the first time using heavily accented English. She spit on the ground again. “It is good he is dead.”
“Why are you saying that?” Libby asked.
“Why? Why?” The voice of the first woman, who it now seemed clear was Magda’s grandmother, rose in indignation. “He make promises to my Magda, that’s why she stay and work for him all this time and then he say ‘no. I never say this’—and poof, just like this, it is gone. Gone. What she supposed to do now with the children? How she supposed to pay for their education?” she demanded of Libby. She looked her up and down. “You can help with this?” she finally said.
“Probably not,” Libby admitted.
“Then why she should talk to you?” the second woman demanded.
“Because we’re trying to help a friend,” Bernie told her.
The grandmother leaned forward and let go a torrent of Russian.
“Does that mean you’re not going to help?” Libby asked her when the torrent subsided.
“She did not say that,” the second woman replied.
“So what did she say?” Libby wanted to know.
The second woman retucked the hem of her dress around her thighs before answering. “She say Magda, she is at the beach.”
“Maybe we could go talk to her there,” Libby suggested, although she was positive Magda’s grandmother had said a great deal more than that.
“It is a big beach,” the second woman told them. “You will not find them. And she is with her children and her cousins. Even if you do, it will not matter because she will not want to talk to you.”
“Do you know when she’s coming back?” Bernie asked.
The second woman shrugged. “When everyone is ready to come home.”
“Could you call her?” Libby asked. “Tell her we’re here?”
The second woman shook her head. “She no take her phone.”
“Okay then. Can you have her call us when she does get back?” Bernie asked as she dug a pen and a scrap of paper out of her bag and wrote hers and Libby’s phone numbers on it and handed it to the second woman, who said something in Russian to Magda’s grandmother before handing the scrap of paper to her. Bernie watched the lady fold up the piece of paper she’d given her and slip it into her dress pocket.
“You go now,” she said to Libby and Bernie, dismissing them with a wave of her hand. Then she went back to talking to her friend in Russian. After waiting for a minute, Libby and Bernie did as they were told.
As they walked back to the van, Libby ran her fingers along the wooden fence that demarcated the alley’s boundaries. It was dirty, and after a moment, Libby had acquired a fine layer of soot on her fingertips. She wiped her fingers off on a ginkgo leaf and turned to Bernie.
“If Magda’s grandmother is telling the truth about Zalinsky reneging on his promise to send Magda’s kids to college,” Libby said, “that would be quite a bit of money
Magda would have to get her hands on.”
“Hundreds of thousands,” Bernie said.
“The teapot would certainly solve that problem,” Libby noted.
“She’d certainly feel justified,” Bernie observed.
“But if that were the case,” Libby objected, “Magda would want to hire her cousins, not dissuade them.”
“True. And anyway,” Bernie mused. “If Magda were going to steal the teapot, why pick then to do it?”
“Maybe it was locked up in a safe before the performance.”
“Okay. But then how did Magda plan to sell it? Who did she plan to sell it to?”
“Maybe Magda had a partner,” Libby suggested. “A partner with contacts.”
Bernie retied her DKNY wrap dress. “Which brings us back to Hsaio. I think we need to have a chat with her.”
“Definitely,” Libby agreed as Bernie reached into her tote and got out her cell phone.
Chapter 8
As it turned out, Bernie and Libby were in luck. Hsaio Rosenthal was at Zalinsky’s office dealing with paperwork when Bernie and Libby called. She would, she told them, be there for another hour and a half before she had to go down to Columbia University for a meeting with her adviser about her thesis, which dealt with the beneficial effects of exposing six-month-olds to soothing colors.
“No problem. We should be there in forty minutes if the traffic isn’t too bad,” Bernie had told her before hanging up.
Bernie and Libby had been to Zalinsky’s office before. They’d signed their contract there. His office was in his house, accessible by a separate entrance in the back. The house had originally been a farmhouse built in the mid-1800s. Supposedly, it had been part of the Underground Railroad.
Then it had been purchased and rebuilt by a man named Endicott back in the early 1900s. His wife, who had come from Alabama, had wanted to live in a southern plantation manor, and Endicott had obliged to the best of his ability. The house had gone from a farmhouse to a large, white, columned, two-story affair, with a wraparound veranda filled with wicker furniture that no one ever sat on. The irony was not lost on Endicott. He’d written about it in a letter to a cousin that was now sitting in the Longely Historical Society.
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