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Mike stopped suddenly, his mouth dropping open. For a long moment, Betty thought he was about to collapse, but then he sat upright in the chair, pointing one long shaking finger at an old man coming up the walk. The man, leaning heavily on a cane, wore a Hawaiian shirt over light cotton trousers and sandals on his feet instead of shoes. When he saw Mike Birnbaum begin to stand, he accelerated into a stumbling shuffle, raising the cane as he went.
“It’s Morris Katz,” Reilly explained to Moodrow and Betty.
“It’s Beelzebub!” Birnbaum screamed. “It’s Satan!” The old man spluttered on for a minute, unable to form a coherent word, then finally gasped the appropriate insults. “Did you bring matches with you?” he screamed. “Did you come to finish the job your hoodlums started? Maybe you came to hit me on the head? The one thing you didn’t come to do is commit a rape, because you only get a hard-on when you rub your putz with five dollar bills.”
As Morris Katz’s face began to redden, the spray of freckles across his nose and cheeks lit up. He waved his cane threateningly, but when Birnbaum proved to be fearless, let it fall back to the ground. “Why,” he implored, raising his face to the heavens. “Why did You bring me back here? For what reason? To get one last piece of torture out of my life? Wonderful people You take every day. Saints You take. Infants in their cribs You take. Why do You let this man live who made every minute of my life in New York a misery? This bastard of a schnorrer who never once in thirty-five years paid the whole rent. He’s an old man, Lord. Take him tonight.”
“Pay the rent?” Birnbaum shook with anger. “For this pigsty? Did you even one time send up enough heat? Plaster falls off my wall and I gotta beg for a painter. The hallways are greasy and I practically gotta crawl so I don’t break my back. The…”
“You should fall and break your head!”
“Then I could sue until you’re so poor you gotta live in your own buildings.”
The combatants paused for breath, leaving Betty enough room to interject a question. “My name is Haluka,” she said. “I’m an attorney and I represent the tenants here.”
Morris Katz, his breath coming in gasps, turned to Betty and bowed deeply. “My name is Morris Katz and I’m holding the mortgage on these buildings. For two months I haven’t seen a check, so I call the company and they tell me the new owner is missing. Also his lawyer is dead, so nobody’s in charge. I’m in the court tomorrow.”
“What are you planning to do?” Betty asked.
Morris smiled as if at a child. “You are Jewish?” he asked gently.
“Yes,” Betty answered, grinning in spite of herself.
“In my life I’ve made many mistakes. In fact, I got to admit that certain people think I’m a shlemiel. Me, I don’t argue. What for? I’m a shlemiel who doesn’t give up no matter how many time’s he falls in the soup. I’m a shlemiel who persists.”
“A shlemiel?” Mike Birnbaum yelled, “More like a shmuck.”
“You see how he talks?” Morris replied to Betty. “You see the language that pours out of his mouth? That’s what comes of eating trayf. You talk like a goy.”
This time Betty responded before Mike Birnbaum could frame a reply, “Mr. Katz, would you mind giving me the name of your attorney? Maybe we could work out some details and go into court together. It’d make everything happen much faster.”
“What attorney?” Morris sniffed the air suspiciously. “You think I worked all my life to make some shyster rich? A lawyer I don’t need. I’m gonna fix this place up like a dream. New windows, new roof, new elevator. I’m tired of the Bahamas. The water, the sun…it’s disgusting, already. I can’t even breathe the air. When I go in the casino, I don’t care if I should win or lose. I got a forty-foot yacht—it should sink in the bay.”
“It should sink with you in it, you bastard,” Birnbaum raged.
Betty looked up at Moodrow, finding him expressionless, as usual—only his eyes held any hint of the pleasure he took from the scene. He met her glance and they began to edge away from the combatants.
“They’re just getting going,” Moodrow complained.
“That’s what I’m afraid of.” She took his arm and marched resolutely toward the car. “It’s funny, but I was under the impression that Mike loved Morris Katz. Now he acts like he wants to eat Katz’s liver.”
“From Mike’s point of view, all landlords are greedy thieves who get sexually aroused by shutting off the heat on New Year’s Eve. Morris was a saint only as long as he was the ex-landlord.” He eyed the Honda with distaste, then unlocked the passenger door and passed the keys over to Betty. “Your turn,” he said.
Betty accepted the keys, but remained standing while Moodrow folded himself into the front seat. Finally, she walked around the car and got in next to him. “Stanley,” she said, “I’ve been thinking.”
“How did I know?” Despite the weak humor, Moodrow understood that some decision had been reached.
“Remember I told you about how much I wanted to do it myself. To…” She hesitated, then finished it. “To kill Najowski.”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“And I told you how my job, which I’ve been doing all my life, complicates it.”
She paused and he felt compelled to mutter the compulsory, “Yeah.”
“Well, there’s another complication and that’s that I’m in love with you. I thought love was supposed to conquer all, but this love makes it harder.”
Moodrow tried to straighten up, but only succeeded in jamming his head into the roofliner. “Does that mean you’re not taking off on me? The way you say it, I’m not sure.”
“I’ve decided to leave my job. I’ve got more than twenty years in the pension, so I should be okay for money. As for the rest of it…I’ll just have to wait and see.
Betty maneuvered the overloaded Honda through the traffic at Queens Plaza and onto the 59th Street Bridge, dodging a bus that moved between the cars like it owned the street. “If I leave Legal Aid, I don’t know what I’ll do with myself,” Betty said, once they’d settled onto the outer roadway. “I can’t just clean my apartment all day. Not after twenty years in a courtroom. I have to have a little action. I’ll have to find something.”
The Honda’s windows, in deference to the warm weather, were rolled all the way down and the noise of the traffic was almost as loud as the Honda’s engine as it struggled to push the little car up the steep grade. A quarter mile ahead, the towers of midtown Manhattan, softened by the spring light, rose up on either side of the silent couple.
Once again, Moodrow tried to shift position. His knees still hurt from when he’d knelt in the mud outside Najowski’s window. Most likely, he reflected, he shouldn’t have told her what happened. Most likely, he should have kept it to himself. Or at least softened the truth by admitting that he loved and needed her. But there were times when manipulation didn’t work. When the prize was so enormous, it justified any risk. When the truth really did set you free. One way or the other.
He looked across at Betty as she drove her little Honda along the raised expansion cracks in the roadway. The tires were shifting back and forth rapidly, though the car continued to move in a straight line, and Betty’s mouth was slightly open, the point of her tongue a lighter pink against her lower lip.
In My end is My beginning.
The words stole into Moodrow’s consciousness as he watched the evening light play across Betty’s features. It came from someplace in the Bible, though he didn’t know where, a memory, most likely, from a reading of the Gospels at a long-forgotten Sunday Mass. He did feel as if he was ending and beginning at the same time, that there was no difference between the two. Only a gap, a pause for breath in which it was possible to see the end without fearing it.
“Do you believe this?” Betty asked, tossing the point of her chin at the sunlight reflecting from a million panes of glass. “I love the city when it gets like this.”
Moodrow agreed silently. He’d defined his life by facing down
the ugliest aspects of urban life, by staring at the Medusa without being turned to stone. Now, drenched in spring light, he could admit that he loved the city. He could admit that he loved it as he loved his life and his work. That, if truth be told, he’d never loved it more.
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copyright © 1990 by Stephen Solomita
cover design by Erin Fitzsimmons
978-1-4532-9056-9
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