The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats

by Hesh Kestin

  While the pot-bellied tailor reconstructed three of Shushan’s suits, I followed Justo into Shushan’s bedroom, the largest, a tan leather easy chair in one corner by the window but little else to indicate it was the primary residence of a human being other than a large white-porcelain ashtray by the bed that said BELMONT on it and two photos, one of which I assumed was Shushan’s mother as a younger woman on a boardwalk somewhere, perhaps Atlantic City as it had been before it became Las Vegas East, and another of two children, a robust boy of nine or ten reading a picture book to a delicate girl several years younger, both seated on an old-fashioned sofa covered in clear vinyl whose surface was electric with glare from the camera flash. So this is how gangsters start out, I thought. One moment a bundle of tears and pee and the next reading picture books and the next on the front page of the Daily Mirror. Probably, I thought improbably, this is what someone would say about me: one day an honors student at Brooklyn College, the next on the front page of the Daily Mirror. At the moment I didn’t want my picture on the front page of anything.

  “I’ve seen this room, Justo.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Have a look in the closet.”

  I opened the closet door. Suits. A rack of thin ties, mostly shades of silver and gold. On the floor room on a wire rack for three pair of shoes. A pair of glowing ox-blood cordovan loafers hung neatly on one side, a second pair of impeccable blue suede oxfords on the other. In the middle, nothing. These must have been what he was wearing when he disappeared. I tried to recall it. Gray suit, white shirt, silver tie, gold links on French cuffs. I remembered: when last I’d seen him, only the night before though it seemed like weeks, Shushan had been wearing a pair of highly polished black crocodile shoes. I remember noting his belt precisely matched his footwear. I looked at the suits. If Shushan Cats was anything other than dead it made sense he would have taken a change of clothes at least. So there would be two suits missing. The suits hung on wooden hangers that fit into their own slots on the closet’s metal bar. Four hangers were missing. Three suits were in the other room, being lengthened. Only one was missing. Shushan must have been wearing it when he... disappeared.

  “Not that closet,” Justo said. He pointed across the room.

  I went across and around the bed. The door wouldn’t budge.

  Justo went to the near side of the double bed and reached behind an end table. The closet door popped open an inch, as though a latch had been released. I pulled the door open. A staircase.

  “Am I supposed to go up?”

  “It’s yours, boss.”

  “I’m not anyone’s fucking boss,” I said, but went up, contradicting in action what I had claimed in words.

  Though it was close to midnight, I entered a world of light. The room at the top was enclosed in glass. Through the panes the moon shone in like a fireman’s searchlight within thick smoky darkness. At the periphery I could make out stars that on a moonless night would be a shower of bright points. From the buildings on the surrounding streets more lights shown, and below on Sixty-First and Sixty-Second and on Madison and Park the lights of nighttime commerce vied with the streetlamps that from this high up seemed to march uptown and downtown, east and west, like sentinels. It was as if this building, a residential hotel in a comfortably bourgeois neighborhood, was the center of the city, and the city, whose limits I could probably see when the sun rose over Brooklyn and lit up the East River, was the center of the world. Just as my eyes became accustomed to the room, bright lights flashed on around me.

  “Don’t you want to see what you got?” Justo asked.

  19.

  The entire room was encased in French doors leading to a wraparound terrace that on its west side overlooked Park Avenue and beyond that Fifth and Central Park, and even further the lights of the gently winding Palisades Parkway across the Hudson in New Jersey, while to the far right could be seen the generous arch of the George Washington Bridge. In the center of the room was a square twenty feet wide, the outline of a room within a room. On the side facing me was a fireplace, split logs stacked in an alcove next to it and, surrounding that, paradise: books. And books. And books. All arrayed on thick cream-painted shelves from several inches above the parquet floor straight up to the ceiling twelve feet above. I knew it was twelve feet, because I estimated if I stood on my own shoulders the top of my head would just about reach the ceiling. In it small bright lights in regular rows were buried like jewels. I walked around the square. Each side contained... books. Twelve-feet tall by twenty-feet wide by four sides, with a foot between shelves. Leaving out space for the fireplace, that would be about forty shelves. I walked over to the wall and counted the number of books on what seemed to me a representative shelf. Two-hundred and forty-nine. Say two-fifty. Times forty shelves.

  “Boss, let me save you the trouble,” Justo said. “That’s about ten thousand books.”

  “Ten thousand books,” I repeated stupidly. “That’s what I got.” I looked at Justo. “There’s ten thousand fucking books here?”

  “Shushan liked to read.”

  I shuddered. “Liked to read? A lot of people like to read. But ten thousand books is more than like to read, Justo. It’s the equivalent of a public library in Queens or some state capital in the midwest or somewhere. When does he have the time to read all these?”

  “Shushan, he wasn’t much on sleeping,” Justo said. “Chinga, he’d be out at night sometimes and come back and read, get maybe four hours and do some work and then read more. You know what he used to say?”

  “Surprise me,” I said, my eyes still glued to the rows of books, all in neat alphabetical order by author—Cather, Cervantes, Chaucer, Chekhov, Conrad, Dante, Darwin, Dickens, Donne, Dostoyevsky...

  “Shushan, he used to say he didn’t have the advantage of a college education, so he had to make up. He could sleep later, when he was dead, God rest his soul.”

  I moved around the room to the shelves facing north. Here the titles were organized by subject. Hundreds of books on European countries—many, many on France, some in French—and then Asia, the Middle East, Africa, South America. I took another turn and came to the west side: world history, philosophy, economics. The south side, in random order or perhaps one I could not make out, held biographies: Ghandhi, Babe Ruth, Jefferson, Henry James, the cowboy star Roy Rogers—a virtual supermarket of super names. I pulled down a biography of Sir Walter Raleigh. It opened easily. An unread book will crack. This was silent. Several pages were dog-eared. I checked one on Houdini. The same. Three dog-ears. Just as the first, it seemed to have been page-marked in doses of about a hundred pages, which probably meant that’s how it was read. On the east side a curious mixture: Basic texts on real estate and the stock market, Judaica with emphasis on the Diaspora, and four shelves on crime—not murder mysteries but academic works: The Recidivist, The Criminal Mind, American Criminal Justice, The Enemy Within.

  “Like I said, he liked to read.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “He sure did.” Then it occurred to me. “How would we know if there are books missing?”

  “You mean,” Justo asked, “Like stolen?”

  “Like missing. Like...”

  “Like maybe where he is now he took some books with him?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re real suspicious. I don’t know. A public library has a catalogue. So you could match the books up with the cards in the catalogue. But Shushan, he didn’t need no catalogue. He knew where all his books are. He would sometimes go in and say he needed to find a book and within seconds his hand was on it. He liked to recommend books. Sometimes when we was talking he’d go upstairs and get a book, or he’d invite me up. But it’s funny. I went to college but pretty much I never read a book after, and not too many during either. I mean, I was a business major. What was I going to do, re-read Small Enterprise Bookkeeping for the plot? But Shushan, he always respected me for a college degree. I used to tell him, Boss, you could teach in college you got so much knowledge, but all
I got is a piece of paper that says I’m a chinga Puerto Rican accountant. It’s like he had a chip on his shoulder about the size of the Bronx. Also, you know, he put his baby sister through school. What am I saying, school? Schools. BA, MA, PhD. And he paid for her therapy. For the regular stuff, and then when she had to do it a different way to become a psychotherapist on her own. And he still takes care of her.”

  “She seems pretty independent to me.”

  “Oh yeah, she is. But he bought her that apartment, and a place in Key West to replace the one in Havana, and a lot more. You’ll see the paper trail. He wasn’t just generous with her. He was generous period.”

  “I know, a regular Ruben Hood.” It hit me. “What paper trail?”

  “Shushan, he was very careful about documentation. Every Chinga penny that came in and went out, there’s an entry. Okay, some things we had to be a little more discrete about than others, but he liked that I kept the books tidy. More than once I had to tell him this was not exactly a great idea, because even though it’s all coded a real good hand at cryptology could break it in a week at the outside. So that’s dangerous, you know. But Shushan wasn’t afraid. First off, the IRS—he always filed. And more or less on the up and up. He figured that was the way they would get him if they could, so it was a cost of doing business, and he gave so much away, with the foundations and the charities and all, that most years the tax burden wasn’t what you’d call onerous. His word, actually. My job was to keep it less onerous. But also he was patriotic. Semper fi and all. Here’s a guy he volunteered for the Marines in the Korean War, so he wasn’t going to cheat the US government out of its share, if you know what I mean.”

  “Where are the records?”

  “The records?” Justo said. “They’re here.”

  “Here where?”

  “Here here,” Justo said. “What do you think you’re looking at, a Chinga twenty-foot square bookcase with nothing in the middle?” And with that he made straight for the center of the fiction shelves, pulled back a book—appropriately it was James’s The Turn of the Screw. A wall of shelves opened inward. “Après you,” Justo said.

  If Shushan was an onion whose layers kept revealing new layers, so was his home. The secret library hid within it a secret office, one side of which was a wall of putty-colored file cabinets and the other held a large desk with a green leather swivel chair behind it and two green-leather guest chairs facing it. To my left a door stood ajar, showing a black-marble shower, a shiny black porcelain sink and matching toilet, over which hung a small print of Georges de la Tour’s Education of the Virgin, which I had used to look at in wonder when I came uptown to smoke a joint and visit the Frick Collection only a few blocks away. On the other side of the bathroom a small cedar-lined sauna was set into a black-marble wall unbroken but for a red terrycloth robe hung from a chromium hook like a fiery ghost. There were no windows, of course, because the office and bath were completely enclosed by the four walls of books, but above us a skylight fully the size of the room brought in enough moonglow to read by.

  “In the summer you can keep it open,” Justo said. “You can’t see it so good now, but it’s a glass roof with a big overhang of another glass roof, so it can stay open even when it rains. Shushan designed it himself.”

  “I’m sure he did,” I said. “In his spare time.”

  “Chinga, he had an architect, but it was his idea. All of this, it was his idea. The architect, he was some kind of ancient French guy. And the builders he had them brought down from Quebec. Everybody who knows about this space, the library, the office, how to get up to it, they’re either way out of town or dead. I know the architect died. You know what? On purpose Shushan chose an architect who was in his Chinga eighties, so as to cut the risk. Shushan, he didn’t like risk.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I mean, he would take chances. He never walked away when he had to step up to the plate, no matter who was pitching, but unnecessary chances never. Like with that priest.”

  “What priest?”

  “You know. You was there.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That priest.”

  “I mean, from what I heard, this was something Ira-Myra’s could have handled, or even someone else, because a thing like that could go very wrong. You’re stepping on toes, if you know what I mean—the church, cops in the family, fire department—but Shushan figured it was important enough for you to see him do it personal.”

  “It was an educational experience.”

  “I’m sure, boss.”

  “Justo...”

  “Yeah, boss.”

  “Please don’t call me that.”

  “What, boss?”

  “Boss. Don’t call me boss. Don’t do it. It’s not the case and it’s inappropriate. You’re twice my age.”

  “Shushan said.”

  “Shushan?”

  “Shushan, that night.”

  “What night?”

  “You know, when he died.”

  “When people think he died,” I said. “Call me cynical but I don’t fucking believe it. He has a trial staring him in the face. He disappeared, that’s all. It’s temporary.”

  “Boss, I got—”

  “You got nothing. Nobody got nothing.” Had I said that? Was I already becoming someone else? “You have zero, Justo. The DA has zero. Shushan has a trial in a week. They can’t try him in absentia. It’s against the law. Missing presumed dead is all we have, and the presumption is based on very little.”

  “They found the car. His blood.”

  “His blood type.”

  “You’re saying another guy with his blood type got knocked off in the same car he got into an hour or so earlier?”

  “Maybe nobody was knocked off. So he contributed some blood.”

  “That was like quarts of blood, boss.”

  “Stop calling me boss.”

  “Shushan said, ‘Anything happens to me, he’s the boss.’ I swear on almighty Jesus.”

  “Yeah, well, when it comes to Shushan Cats I think we’re going to have a resurrection.”

  “Nobody would like that better than me, boss.”

  That was it. I’d had it. “I’m the boss, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Follow me on this. If I’m the boss, I pay your salary—is that correct?”

  “Absolutely correct.”

  “And if I pay your salary I can stop paying it—is that not also correct?”

  “Again correct.”

  “Then, Justo, if you keep calling me boss I’m going to stop paying your fucking salary. I’m going to fire your ass.”

  “For calling you boss?”

  “For anything! For taking too long to piss. For wearing a fucking black shirt with a light tie. For being Puerto Rican.”

  “I get you, b—”

  “Call me Russ. Hey, it even almost rhymes with boss. Russ.”

  “Okay... Russ.”

  “And make sure no one else calls me boss, okay?”

  “Okay... Russ.”

  “Good. Now have a seat.”

  Justo sat in one of the green chairs while I went around the desk and took the swivel chair. Idly I opened the top right-hand drawer of the desk. It held a box of cigars, Bolivars. Cuban. The US embargo was two years old, but I trusted Shushan not to let a little thing like a federal embargo stop him, though I’d never seen Shushan smoke anything other than cigarettes. The middle drawer held pens, paper clips, a stapler and a roll of silky thread with a red cross on it that I didn’t recognize. I held it up.

  “Shushan was particular about his teeth,” Justo said. “Floss.”

  “Charming.” I opened the left-hand drawer. Of course it would be there. Shushan was a lefty. It was a big Colt Combat Commander, well worn, its bluing rubbed off on the corners and on the trigger guard. It was a .45, the kind of absurdly impractical cannon, impossible to conceal, my father had had me fire many times on the range, a challenge for a kid: it kicked so hard that after firing eight rounds
my wrist would be so sore for a week I couldn’t throw a ball or even turn a doorknob without serious pain. The heavy steel was eerily familiar in my hand. On either side of the rubber grips was a circle with USMC in it in raised letters. “I’m the boss, right?”

  “But you don’t want me to call you the—”

  “That’s right,” I said, liking this against my will and against all expectation. “Don’t call me boss. But I am the boss.”

  “Shushan said so.”

  “Then tell me, Justo, what precisely am I the boss of?”

  20.

  Predictably, the story of Shushan’s business was the story of Shushan himself. Ever the accountant, Justo began with Shushan’s return to New York after his service in the USMC or, as Justo called it, the Corps.

  After his frontline duty in Korea, the Marines moved Shushan to duty instructing sharpshooters at the Marine training base at Twenty-Nine Palms, California, where he served for six months after declining a commission. In 1953 he made his way back to New York via Greyhound bus. Having been given the name of a Texan who might offer him a job, he made a stop in Dallas, where he found work providing security for a group of bar-owners, minor hoodlum-entrepreneurs, one of whom I’d met the week before in this very hotel suite, before continuing on to New York. Shushan was in a hurry to get home. He was one of those strange hybrids who could put his fist through the neck of a man twice his size but remained throughout his life, which I had to consider might very well be over, his mother’s little boy. Plus his sister was still in school, and Shushan was the kind of older brother who had the need to look out for her. Without even considering the tale of how she disabled three adolescent males in an impromptu street fight, I don’t believe Terri ever required protecting. Shushan’s need to protect her was greater than her need for protection.

  According to the tabloids, which sacrificed groves in Shushan’s honor before his disappearance and whole forests after, once back in Brooklyn he fought as a welterweight for a time under the name Kid Yid—six wins, four by knock-out, one loss, two draws—and then as a middleweight under his own name—Shushan “Shoeshine” Cats—with somewhat less success: five wins, four losses. According to the sportswriters he outmatched himself when he moved up a division—I had someone at the Daily Mirror morgue pull the clips. Shushan got more ink than he deserved: he was a rarity, a throwback, one of the last of the tough hebes. Jewish fighters were consistent champions through the nineteen-thirties and -forties, and Jews such big fans that at least one Italian fighter, Sammy Mandella, judaized his ring name to Mandel, and Max Baer, who fought Joe Louis, had a huge Jewish star embroidered on his trunks though he was a practicing Catholic. Shushan must have seen he’d get what he wanted faster with his head than his fists, though it’s a fact he used them after he left the ring, plus baseball bats, with which weapon he was always closely associated, and—according to rumor—at least on one occasion a gun. Justo told me (a) it never happened, and (b) the other guy had it coming.