Looking for Przybylski

by K. C. Frederick

  Suddenly he sees Eddie Figlak sit up in the casket and he’s chilled to the bone. Christ, that wasn’t Eddie, that solemn old man with the dusty clay-colored face and no beer belly. Ziggy grabs his glass and swallows what beer is left. California—that’s where Przybylski has run to. The numbers went down the tube, the place on the island is gone, all those years working for the city in the job the monsignor got him—Christ, that fucking bastard of a Przybylski had no reason to do whatever he did to try to cut the numbers down. After all, they didn’t poach on his territory, nobody was writing up tickets for stiffs. The goddamned fucking bastard Przybylski.

  “You Polacks are too easy. You should do like the big boys:

  you should use a little muscle when somebody crosses you.”

  “Hell, no, you play rough, I figure the rough stuff can come right back at you sooner or later.”

  He met Little Mickey Fingers once on a boat off Miami. “You ever get into a little trouble, call on us. We can handle it for you.” The big white boat was rocking in the water, there was music, booze and broads. Even as he nodded back at Mickey, Ziggy knew he wasn’t ever going to push that button because once you let those gorillas work for you, pretty soon you found yourself working for them. Full time.

  “I mean it,” Mickey had said, touching Ziggy’s jacket. “Any time. Give us a call.”

  Listen, Mickey, I do have a little problem. There’s this undertaker.

  Hey, sure. Give the details to Jimbo there.

  Where did Mickey Fingers wind up? Was it Lake Erie or Lake Huron? And he needed a hell of a lot more than a life jacket.

  “Hi, buddy, how you doing?” It’s Stan Kowal. He must be forty and he’s still living with his mother. Somebody said he’s working again, driving a laundry truck.

  “I’m OK, I’m OK.”

  “They say you were there when Eddie Figlak exploded in the casket.”

  Ziggy looks at Stan’s horseface. He’s all set for a good laugh. “Eddie Figlak did not explode,” Ziggy says patiently. “It’s all scientific. It was the gases that built up.” He stabs at the bar for emphasis and just barely catches the edge.

  “Well, explanations, gas leaks, whatever . . .” Stan’s disappointed, you can see.

  “People can be so dumb sometimes,” Ziggy rasps. “It’s all scientific.”

  Stan looks away. “Christ, I wish I’d have seen it anyway. Did his . . . Did he really have a hard-on like they say?”

  Ziggy tries to ignore the question. He feels something in his hand and unfolds the paper: “Teddy K., 605 Oceanside Lane, Venice CA 90291.” He’s going to play those numbers.

  “Did he?’

  Ziggy waves it away.

  “Maybe he was in heaven already,” Stan giggles. “Jesus, if that’s what it’s like there I’m going to confession tomorrow.”

  Ziggy gets up and stands there a second in order to get his bearings.

  “Hey, where you going?” Stan calls. “The confessionals don’t open till tomorrow.”

  Though he answers too quietly for anyone to hear him Ziggy knows at last what he’s going to do. “I’m going to California,” he says under his breath.

  CHAPTER TWO

  All through the following week Ziggy experiences flashbacks from that night: the shock of seeing his dead friend’s face turned into the solemn, monumental visage of a medieval pope, the horror of Eddie’s sudden popping up in the casket, the breathless hush that fell over Rok’s parlor all at once, the air sucked out of the room for a long moment, followed by the quick shuffle of feet and clang of colliding chairs, people bumping into each other as they struggled to get up, to get away, to get out of there as fast as they could—the gasps and white faces, the panic everybody felt.

  Judging from the shock so many of the mourners carried with them into Connie’s, a stranger might have thought a UFO had appeared out of nowhere and hovered over the casket, thrumming like some giant eyeless insect, one light blinking ominously while the monsignor waved a crucifix in its general direction for a couple of seconds before fleeing in terror. It was at Connie’s, amid the manic roar of people desperate to believe that the dead stayed dead, that Turk told him about Przybylski; and even now he remembers the way that bit of news hit him, turning the familiar scene into something strange, so that even the sight of big Father Bruno wheezing as he set his Vernors down on the bar was somehow touched by the uncanny.

  He remembers the smell of the men’s room in the basement where he’d fled to get some privacy and peace. Only it wasn’t peace he found, was it? Because before that night was over something had got hold of him, like the cold, bony hands of a movie ghoul around his neck, the sudden, surprising conviction that he was going to California and see Przybylski.

  Christ, what had he been drinking?

  It’s like the kind of stories the nuns used to tell: a colossal ray of light from heaven knocks the Christian-persecuting Saul off his horse and blinds him, but even before he hits the ground he’s changed completely, he’s already on his way to becoming the person who’d later be revered as St. Paul. Well, Ziggy lives in the real world. He isn’t St. Paul, and he isn’t Saul either.

  He remembers, though, that there in the basement of the bar as he breathed in the familiar smells of Connie’s men’s room, the idea of traveling across the continent all the way to California and tracking down the sleazy undertaker had given him a charge, no doubt about it. But a charge is a charge, isn’t it? A charge comes and it goes. Except that this one seems to have legs and, days later, Ziggy still can’t completely shake it off, for all he recognizes that he’s a citizen of the real world.

  Here he is, walking down Joseph Campau on his way back to the beat-up Fairlane with a couple of pounds of Richie Zielinski’s best kielbasa, for which he’d driven into Hamtramck, since Richie’s prices are worth the drive. The streets around him are dingy—hell, Hamtramck didn’t used to be dingy, but so much has turned to shit since the good times: nobody cleans the streets anymore, people are scared, there are iron grates on the storefronts and nowadays everybody makes sure they’re inside by nightfall, just like in the old vampire movies. God’s punishment, his mother would say if she were alive. But punishment for what? She firmly believed the Second World War was caused by women wearing slacks.

  So here Ziggy is, trudging through what the world has come to, an old Polack who’s come to Hamtramck to save a couple of pennies on kielbasa, something he does every week, something he’s likely to be doing for as long as he’s able to. Not exactly the way he pictured it when he was on top. On the other hand, if you consider the alternative—and who at his age doesn’t?—it isn’t all that bad. He’s been through some pretty rough times and come out alive, after all, and there are worse fates than driving to Hamtramck every week to get some good kielbasa.

  Still, he can’t deny feeling that charge. Was what Turk told him really true? He’d sure like to know.

  It’s your life, after all, your one shot. You only get one chance to live it and, Jesus, a whole lot of it you can’t fathom at all; but if you do get a chance to understand a little better some part of it, especially something important that changed your life, why wouldn’t you want to find out what really happened? That isn’t asking too much, is it? It isn’t as if he’s trying to change history, as if he’s begging God to give him back everything he’s lost. No, he just wants to know certain things. What’s wrong with that? Something’s stirring in him, for sure. Here on the dingy streets of Hamtramck the thought of smooth Przybylski living out there among the palm trees is bothering him, he has to admit, it’s a hair across his ass. He can see Przybylski with that thin smile of his. In California he’d be wearing sunglasses, making him look even more sinister.

  It’s not as if I want to punch him out, Ziggy thinks. I just want to ask him a question.

  He feels his stomach drop. Here on the street, with the smell of kielbasa wafting up from the shopping bag, it’s as if in the time it takes him to cover a stride, he’s experience
d the full mysterious arc of his life, taking him from that desperate skinny young guy he’d been—with two kids and another on the way—wondering how he was going to be able to support his growing family making Chrysler Airflows until a lucky break got him into the numbers, changing everything, carrying him to the flush years during the war and just after when he had the bar and the cottage and the building on Medbury, all the way to that day in ’52 when the cops cracked down on the Polacks; though when it happened nobody guessed at its full impact, and by nightfall of that day they all thought they’d dodged a bullet.

  That was the funny thing: the slide was already beginning even as he and Big Al were in Connie’s celebrating their release from a few hours in jail and swapping their lawyers’ rosy predictions about how things would turn out, already sliding toward his lawyer’s fateful decision to separate Ziggy’s trial from that of the others, who were eventually sent up the river by a judge who wanted to set an example, leaving Ziggy free but baffled and guilty, drifting into booze and the hard years after that, leading all the way to the present, where he’s just another Polack shopping for kielbasa. He was on top maybe a dozen years; he’s been on the bottom now for, what, two dozen? Who could have predicted it? Not his old man, who didn’t try to hide his disapproval when Ziggy quit the factory for the numbers, never really accepting his son’s success; not his mother who attributed all worldly fortune to God’s doings—hell, neither of them gave Ziggy any credit; though his father, if he were still alive, would certainly have pinned the blame for his fall on the son who wasn’t smart enough to stick with a good thing and spend the rest of his life making Chryslers.

  Well, as the nuns used to say, only God knows. Though it’s hard to believe even God could have foreseen that particular turn of events.

  The smell of kielbasa is replaced by the gassy fetor of exhaust from passing cars. Who’d have predicted it for Detroit, either? During the war when all the auto plants ran three shifts making bombers and jeeps and all kinds of weapons, and you’d sometimes have to wait and wait at the railroad crossing while brand new tanks on flat cars lumbered by, squat, menacing, prehistoric, shaking the earth as they passed, their numbers endless, who could have thought the city—the Arsenal of Democracy, they called it then—would fall so low? Who’d have believed the race riot of ’43 was more of an omen than all those tanks?

  Christ, he’s getting philosophical or something. But what got him started has nothing to do with God or the fall of cities or with any of those things that have happened in the big world around him. What he’s feeling, what he’s been feeling since the night of Eddie Figlak’s wake, is an itch, and it’s an itch that needs scratching.

  “What’s bothering you, Ziggy?” Maggie asks him at breakfast about a week after the wake.

  “What do you mean?” he counters suspiciously, looking up from the paper that he hasn’t been reading.

  “I mean,” she says, “you’re walking around like a zombie these days. I know you’re not sleeping. Half the time I’m talking to you and I might as well be talking to myself. Something’s bothering you and you’re not letting me in on it.” She shakes her head. “Look, it’s not like I expect you to be Cary Grant or somebody like that, but this isn’t the way I want to spend my golden years, trying to talk to a doorknob.”

  “It’s nothing,” he says, trying for some force. “You’re imagining things.”

  She turns a look on him and holds him with her eyes. What that look tells him is that there’s no way he’s going to get anything past her, not after all these years.

  He shifts uneasily. “I don’t know,” he concedes, figuring he can wriggle off the hook by telling her a bit of the truth. “Seeing Eddie dead, I guess . . . You get to thinking about, you know, how much longer you might have yourself.”

  It seems a plausible explanation, but Maggie continues looking at him skeptically. Having listened to hundreds of his lies and evasions on every subject over the years, she can probably gauge the exact amount of truth behind every one of his utterances.

  “Oh, hell,” he blurts out at last, “it’s that goddamned Przybylski.”

  “What about him?” she says, looking puzzled. “It’s no secret that the two of you never sent each other Valentines. Why are you even thinking about him now? Didn’t that feud end a long time ago when he left?”

  Ziggy steams silently for a while. “It’s more than that,” he says, “more than just the way he used to act back in the old days.” She stands there across from him in their kitchen, waiting for his explanation. “I heard something the other night.” His voice is tentative, quiet, as if he were some squirming teenager in the confessional trying to find the least incriminating way of telling the priest how often he’s masturbated. “I heard Przybylski was the one who fingered me back when we got busted.”

  Maggie sighs and looks into her cup. “Ziggy,” she says mildly, “all that’s water under the bridge.” She thinks for a moment before going on, “And besides, it was that Lieutenant Nolan of the Rackets Squad who was the bad guy. I thought he got the order from above to bust the Polacks and he was determined to do it one way or another. You said it then, everybody said it. It was a big deal, that raid. It didn’t happen just because of what one Polack undertaker might have said to a cop.”

  Ziggy’s silent. That raid certainly was a big deal. He remembers the headlines in the Times: “$13 Million Gambling Ring Smashed.” As Maggie noted, even if Przybylski had cooperated with the cops, his contribution would have been a small part of the whole operation.

  “Still,” Ziggy says. “Still. He was never man enough to admit it.”

  Maggie sighs and sits down across from him. “Ziggy,” she says, “I know you had your rough times but, all things considered, you got through them more or less in one piece. All that’s over, though. You know what they say: there’s no point in opening up closed rooms.”

  Then he finally says it out loud, what’s been taking shape in his mind ever since the night of Eddie Figlak’s wake. “I want to see him. I want to ask him to his face about it.”

  There’s silence as Maggie moves her cup along the Formica table. Ziggy’s ready for whatever objections she’s going to throw at him, but all she says is, “Isn’t he in California? You want to go out there?”

  “Well, yeah,” Ziggy answers, a little miffed. “If that’s where he is, then that’s where I want to go. Unless you can think of some way to kidnap him and bring him to Detroit.” He’s uneasily aware that they’re actually discussing this thing now. He has to say it over again to believe himself. “Yeah, I was thinking about going to California.”

  She doesn’t gasp, doesn’t throw up her hands. “How do you plan to get there?” she asks, as if this were something reasonable, like a trip to Pontiac or Port Huron.

  “I haven’t worked out the details,” he says, “I’m not sure, but . . .” His voice trails off. How did they get on to this subject in the first place?

  “And you think,” Maggie asks quietly, “that if you go out there and ask him something, that’s going to settle things?”

  “Yeah,” he answers, then quickly corrects himself. “Oh, I don’t know, but I know I want to do this. Christ,” he says, suddenly furious at nobody in particular, “I’ve been behaving myself, haven’t I? I’ve been driving in low gear for a while now. I was going to work every day till the city laid me off, and then I start that other job the monsignor has lined up for me next month.” (In his head he says that other shit job, but he knows it’s wise to be outwardly grateful.) “Hell, Maggie,” he says, and just lets it go with a sigh.

  Minutes seem to pass before she says, “Why don’t you visit Charlie then?”

  He looks at her. “Are you serious?”

  “Why not?” she says. “You have some time before you start your job with the DSR.”

  “Christ,” he says, “Charlie doesn’t want to see me. And Gloria wants to see me even less.” The idea that he’d actually choose to spend time voluntarily with B
ig-Time Charlie and his family is beyond belief. But she’s right: it would be a way of getting a foot in the door in California.

  Maggie’s smile is oddly mischievous. “They could hardly refuse you if you asked, could they?”

  All at once Ziggy’s alert. He looks at her narrowly. What’s she up to?

  At last she says, “Look, Ziggy, I know you. Sometimes when you get a bee in your bonnet, you’re hard to live with. Me, all I want is to get through my time the best I can, cutting the aches and pains to a minimum. I’m satisfied if I have a roof over my head, a bed to lay in and food in the refrigerator. I don’t need to go on any crusades.” She shakes her head. “But you’re different. There are things you need that I can’t do anything about. So I say, don’t just keep talking about it. Do something about it if you can.”

  Ziggy feels a chill. He swallows hard, then takes a sip of cold coffee because he has no response to that. Maggie, who’d been thin, pretty and shy when he married her forty years ago, had only dreamed of raising a family, having a house of her own, maybe going to an occasional movie or picnic on Belle Isle. She hadn’t bargained for the roller coaster of the numbers, never really enjoyed the parties, the fur coats, the trips on Big Al’s boat. She’d been happier just staying home, she’d loved the place on Harsens Island best when just she and the kids were there, not when all the numbers people showed up for a shindig. And she certainly couldn’t have been happy about all those trips to Buffalo and Cleveland where she could guess about what went on. Not to mention the business with Helen Nadolnik.

  Ziggy knows he owes her big time. When he went into his fog after all his buddies wound up in prison, she did her best to keep the numbers going; but she never had a chance and people who owed her money just walked away. She shouldn’t have had to go through that, and many a woman would have cracked under the pressure. The experience toughened her, though. With Ziggy becoming increasingly undependable, she learned to drive, she took a part-time job at a nearby nursing home and soon became indispensable there. Ziggy’s absolutely certain that if he were to die, she’d manage. Maybe that’s a blow to his old self-image as her protector and provider, but he can’t help being proud of what she’s managed to accomplish.