The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats

by Hesh Kestin

  “Well, I still won’t love the music but, hey, hardship pay.”

  Cohen remained silent.

  “Makes sense. Tell me, Kennedy, what’ll you do for three hundred?’

  “What?”

  “Say I give you three hundred. How about that much and The Platters can fuck you up the ass? Will three hundred be enough?”

  “Dougie’s just talking,” Cohen said to me, leaning forward. “We worked a long day.”

  “Nothing personal, Detective Cohen,” I said. “But shut up.”

  “Hey, I didn’t—”

  “Shut up,” I said. “Now, Detective Kennedy, have you thought how much you require to be fucked up the ass by the entire membership of The Platters, which let me remind you is four gentlemen of the Negro persuasion plus one lady, who—all things being equal—may demur? Come on, pick a number.”

  “I didn’t mean no—”

  “A number!”

  “Okay, okay,” he said, a reluctant choirboy emerging from deep within the bully. “I’m... sorry.”

  “You’re sorry for what?”

  “I didn’t mean nothing by it. I can stand the music.”

  “You can?”

  “Sure. Let’s just pretend it didn’t happen.”

  The radio was selling Volkswagen cars. Tiny things, slow and stolid, four could fit into the footprint of Shushan’s Cadillac—my Cadillac, I supposed. The people driving these two cars could have been two different species. From the perspective of many decades, it appears the Cadillac-Magnons of the sixties inexplicably died out, replaced by hordes of Homo Econocar. In those days driving a Volkswagen—Japanese vehicles were a rare sight even on the West Coast—was still eccentric behavior, like not smoking or drinking in moderation. I suppose Detective Kennedy had been drinking, possibly even in moderation for an Irish dick with no one looking over his shoulder. I didn’t care. On my signal Ira pulled over next to a shuttered linoleum emporium that took up most of a block of Flatbush Avenue midway between the Manhattan Bridge and Grand Army Plaza, where a facsimile of the Arc de Triomphe attested to America’s long on-again off-again romance with France, and with civic fickleness. Unlike the one in Paris, Brooklyn’s arch—like the borough in general—was bathed in darkness. Had it been lit other than by the headlights of cars zooming around it, we could have seen it where Ira had stopped a mile or so away from where Flatbush Avenue met Eastern Parkway. That would be the preferred view, because up close we would soon see piles of garbage rotting picturesquely at its base.

  “What’s up?” Cohen asked, probably because he knew.

  “Pay them off,” I said to Justo, who soundlessly peeled four fifties off a significant roll and passed them back over his head, not looking at the two detectives. “Good night, gentlemen,” I said.

  “What good night?” Kennedy asked, having recovered some of his native belligerence. “We ain’t even at the what-do-you-call society, much less providing security.”

  “The Bhotke Young Men’s Society,” I said to the windshield. “It’s a club for people with certain values.”

  “Sure, sure,” Kennedy said, agreeable.

  “That you don’t share,” I said, still looking forward. “So get out of the car.”

  “What do you mean, Mr. Newhouse?” Cohen said. “We took your money, we’re up for the job.”

  I turned. “Detective, the job was to stand by quietly in case some two-bit hoods like the Tintis try to make trouble for us sometime between when we left the hotel and when we return.”

  “That’s right,” Cohen said. “No problem.”

  “Yes problem,” I said. “Now take your unquiet friend here and get out of the car. You’re paid off. Leave.”

  Ira walked around the car and opened the right-hand door and held it open.

  Kennedy would probably die stupid. “What, right in the middle of nigger-heaven? How are we supposed to get out of here?”

  For some reason the picture of these two white cops standing hapless in a steady drizzle on a forlorn corner at the edge of Bedford-Stuyvesant, where they had no doubt arrested hundreds, if not thousands, of blacks over a decade and a half, some of them possibly for an actual offense, caused the three of us in the front seat to start giggling like children, first myself, then Justo—as a Puerto Rican he had probably grown up in perpetual fear of the likes of Kennedy and Cohen—and then Ira, who appeared at long last to have a sense of humor, or at least an instinctive comradeship. The giggles turned to laughter, then hooting, and for emphasis Ira leaned on the horn, a monster of an instrument with a deep B-flat tone, and rode it as we circled the arch, a monument to the Union dead of the Civil War, exiting left past the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, built in a proto-fascist style that could have been approved by Mussolini, and then the neo-classical Brooklyn Museum. In both these fine buildings I had passed many quiet afternoons absorbing a wealth of knowledge for which, it was turning out, I had little use.

  As we passed the far edge of Prospect Park our laughter subsided sufficiently for me to ask Justo, “How would Shushan have handled that?” In ten blocks or so we would arrive at the Crown Heights Conservatory which two evenings a month sheltered the Bhotke Young Men’s Society. I suppose I needed to hear the bad before I committed worse.

  Justo’s left hand came around to my shoulder and gave it an avuncular squeeze. “Same way,” he said. “Same fucking way.”

  33.

  Apparently I was in the Yiddish papers too—at that time New York had two such dailies, and a number of weeklies. In fact, I was more of a sensation in the Yiddish press than in the English: Nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn makes good in the gangster business—or bad. I should have suspected the scope of my notoriety before I entered the hall, leaving Ira outside the double doors through which Shushan had entered my life only two weeks before. Now, as Justo quietly took a seat in the last row like an impoverished Jew in a strange synagogue, everyone stood as though it really was a synagogue and the Torah scrolls had just been taken out of the ark.

  Theoretically I was there to take up my pen as recording secretary, but my entrance caused the kind of uproar even Shushan’s hadn’t. The Bhotke members were workers in the garment center, small tradesmen, shopkeepers, salesmen, tailors, butchers, fish sellers, deli owners, more or less honest business people, with a sprinkling of accountants and dentists and lawyers, even a doctor or two, and they were applauding as if I were Sandy Koufax, another nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn whose bravura pitching had earned him the Most Valuable Player award in the recently concluded World Series, where the (formerly Brooklyn) Dodgers, defected to Los Angeles, had neatly trounced the Yankees in four straight. Hands reached out as I made my way down the center aisle to where Feivel (Franklin) Rubashkin (Robinson) opened his arms to welcome me in a hug whose aroma was purely dental, that sickeningly sweet odor overlaid with porcelain and laughing gas.

  “Brothers of Bhotke,” he announced. “He’s back!”

  Did they think I wouldn’t be? I waved to the standing membership, many of whom I knew by name because I had recorded their ravings about misapplication of funds (“Excuse me, do we really need to pay so much to an outside attorney?”—this from an inside attorney), the suitability of Coney Island for the annual picnic (“So much crowding, so much crime—I got a bungalow colony in Parksville upstate, the society could have almost for free”) and whether or not we should put up a monument at Beth David to those sons and daughters of Bhotke killed by the Nazis (“Who otherwise have no grave, no markers, no nothing—the refuse of history”). Though the membership of the Bhotke Young Men’s Society held divergent views on hundreds of questions, they were clearly united on three subjects: that Walter O’Malley, who owned the Dodgers, should be hanged for removing the beloved Bums to California; that a Democrat, any Democrat, should sit in the White House; that Russell Newhouse should be loved simply for inheriting Shushan Cats’ mantle as Kid Yid, the last of the fear-engendering Jews.

  It amazed me how powerful
the press was in fashioning this public image. Shushan had climbed, fought, gouged his way to the top of the circumcised gangster universe; I had arrived because, as with Saul and David, the departing monarch had tapped me for the job. But so far all I had done was show up. Now I would have to do something. And though I knew what to do, I did not know if it would work.

  Clearly I was not expected to actually take up my role as recording secretary, a job too menial for a man wearing such a custom-made suit, and custom-made rep: the old recording secretary was back at his old post, my old post, inscribing notes in elegantly lettered Yiddish. He smiled in my direction. Feivel (Franklin) gave me a thumbs up. Though I had notes in my head for a twenty-minute speech, I decided to cut it short. This was a crowd that wanted action as much as I did.

  “Brothers of Bhotke,” I said. “I am pleased and proud to be among you this evening. Being a son of Bhotke, a grandson in fact, means more to me than being in the papers. Until recently you were the only family I had. And so I come back to you tonight to ask your help in showing respect to our perhaps departed member, Shushan Cats, a brave defender of the Jews, who has done as much with the baseball bat as Sandy Koufax has done with the ball. As we await word of Shushan’s fate, and though we may fear the worst, I ask you to join with me tomorrow in a show of solidarity with Shushan, to exhibit to the world at large that though he is missing, though his fate is in doubt, we of the Bhotke Young Men’s Society are solidly behind this Brooklyn hero, a Jew who took shit from nobody. Tomorrow, gentlemen, I ask that you come forward, take a long lunch break from your jobs, your shops, your practices, your day-to-day lives. Tomorrow when you join us in solidarity, holding up the symbol that made the reputation of Shushan Cats, a boxer who fought under the name of Kid Yid, a decorated Marine, a defender of his people, you yourselves will be Shushan Cats, as I have become Shushan Cats. Dear brothers of Bhotke, let us tomorrow show New York, America, the world, that the spirit of Shushan Cats resides in all of us. My associate will now distribute directions to and instructions for tomorrow’s demonstration of solidarity. Long live Shushan Cats!”

  As one the entire population of the room, some two hundred men, rose to their feet. “Long live Shushan Cats!” they shouted. “Long live Israel! Long live the Jews!”

  Was I manipulating them or they me, and Shushan, and any symbol they could grab hold of to obliterate the obdurate memory of a Holocaust that had not only wiped out millions of Jews, including several hundred from Bhotke, but their memory. Most of the Bhotke members had emigrated in the twenties and thirties; some had sailed out of the then-free port of Danzig as late as 1939, the Hitlerites having sunk the next ship in the harbor. Some arrived in the late forties and early fifties, decorated with blue numbers on their forearms or, if they had fought as partisans in the forests, a parallel coldness of heart like that of caged animals who were now free except for the memory of the cages and of those who had put them there. Even those like my father, who had come to America as infants, carried with them the ever-present nightmare of the survivor.

  Of the entire village of Bhotke, only one man had survived the initial slaughter in 1939 when an SS battalion had entered the village. According to his testimony, the village rabbi had gone out to meet the commanding officer bearing the traditional bread and salt of peaceful welcome. He was cut down on the spot, after which those too old or too young to work were herded into the synagogue to die in its flames. Deemed fit for labor, the remainder were trucked off to the Bialystok ghetto, from which they were eventually taken by rail to the death camps. Was it any wonder that a Jew who brandished a baseball bat and feared no one, and who was known to fear no one, might become a hero to the Jews who survived?

  To the members of the Bhotke Young Men’s Society, Shushan Cats was no criminal. The criminal statutes held no validity for those to whom the law meant only authorized starvation, torture, death. Everything done to the Jews of Europe, the Gypsies, the homosexuals, the Communists, the Socialists, the crippled, the mentally and physically retarded and the mentally and physically ill—everything done to these had been absolutely legal, sanctioned by legitimate courts whose judges sat in black robes and vetted each and every decree as binding, fair, in the public interest, legal. Under these circumstances, that Shushan Cats was a Jewish gangster not only could not be held against him, but was a matter for celebration.

  By noon the next day the first of the Bhotke members began to appear on the fringes of Little Italy. A half-hour later there were seventy or eighty. By one a hundred fifty were gathered in the street facing Dolce Far Niente. Justo later told me that by the time I was inside sitting down with Auro Sfangiullo, the supply of baseball bats had run out and Ira had been sent off to the wholesale hardware stores on Canal Street to buy up broom sticks, ax handles and lengths of pipe.

  34.

  “You are a boy,” Sfangiullo said to me as he motioned to a third seat at the table in the rear where he was chewing on a piece of crusty Italian bread with which he’d mopped up the clam broth that was all that remained of his rigatoni. It was not difficult to understand why everyone called him dottore. At once diagnostic and prescriptive, he seemed to be able to reduce everything to symptoms and their cure. “But they say you are intelligent, so maybe an old man in the body of a child, eh?” His lip curled upward on the left side, like a scimitar. It took me some time to realize it was half a smile. “What do you say, Dickie? Boy or man?”

  The other, who had shaken my hand desultorily after I had pressed my lips to Sfangiullo’s, looked me up and down like a side of beef. “Maestro, I couldn’t say,” he said, saying all. “It’s hard to know what the newspapers are so wild about. Shoeshine, he was one tough kike. But this, maybe he shaves, maybe not.” The man’s expression needed no translation. It was a grin of triumph.

  “You’re Dickie Tinti,” I said.

  “You’re a fucking genius,” he said.

  Sfangiullo placed his bony hand on Tinti’s well-tailored sleeve, out of which a French cuff peeked out enough to reveal a gold cufflink the size of a quail’s egg. “Dickie, this is a guest.”

  “This guest is trying to eat my breakfast, maestro.”

  It was hard to dislike Tinti. For a crook he was at least honestly what he was. I had expected him to be here: What he was was predictable.

  At forty Dick Tinti had succeeded his father as head of a small but violent family dealing in fresh flowers, prostitutes and smuggled cigarettes—some said drugs too. If that last were true he could hardly be expected to sit at a table in public with Auro Sfangiullo, who drew the line at narcotics. But it was also said the good doctor had a piece of a piece of a piece of people who did. On his own account Sfangiullo was scrupulous about heroin, which was becoming a plague in New York. When eventually Auro Sfangiullo died—in bed, of a stroke—all the families without exception rushed to see how much horse they could put on the street. But while Sfangiullo ran the city for the imprisoned Vito Genovese, the white poison would not be sanctioned, at least not officially. In this Auro Sfangiullo was like some revered cardinal who managed not to notice that his priests regularly molested altar boys.

  “Dottore, I hardly expected to come to talk to you about the Tintis and find one of them with you. Would you prefer I return another time?”

  “My boy, if you wish to fix your situation, you should do it sooner rather than later. How many bookmakers on your list these days?”

  I honestly did not know. “One less than last week. Mr. Tinti seems to believe Shushan Cats does not have an agreement with yourself, dottore.”

  Tinti smiled genially. “Nothing personal, but Shoeshine Cats is dead.”

  “You know that for sure?”

  “Kid, let’s just say if he’s not somebody overpaid somebody else a huge amount of money. Shoeshine is no more.”

  I turned back to Sfangiullo. “Dottore, what if Shushan is alive?”

  “What if, suppose that, let’s assume this, for the sake of argument it could be...” The older m
an smiled like a grandfather, not a godfather. “In this world we deal with the little we do know. What we do know is what we read in the papers: Got into a car with the wrong people, never seen again. For the purposes of our business there is no longer a Shoeshine Cats, a lovely man when he was with us. I mean it from the heart: a lovely, lovely man. Very trustworthy. Very... good. Believe me, when we get into business with a person of the desert persuasion, this means that person is on the up and up.”

  “I have every reason to believe Shushan Cats is still among the living,” I said, not believing a word of it. “Meanwhile, Shushan has asked me to hold down the fort.”

  Tinti laughed out loud. “We took over what’s his name, that queer in the theater district, runs a book out of a hotel on West Forty-Sixth.”

  “Arnold Savory.”

  “Exactly. You aren’t holding down the fort, you’re holding down a fart. You know what Shushan would’ve done if we’d moved in on anything of his, even an old sock he was throwing out because it had a hole?” He drew his finger across his throat. “You’d be talking to one dead Dick Tinti, kid. But as you can see, I’m very much alive.”

  “Shushan’s organization has a writ from you, dottore. I ask that you honor it.”

  Sfangiullo nodded his head as though he had already thought this over. “Young man, your boss is dead. I am informed you are the new boss. I know nothing about you other than that you are a smart Jewboy. I knew your father. Also a smart Jew. Smart is good. But you need more than smart to succeed in this business, which is to say survive. The Tintis are not my people. They are independent. So far as I am concerned, the question of the protection of the bookmakers is a territorial dispute.”

  “Because the Tintis are promising you a piece of a percentage they wish to charge the bookmakers, while with Shushan you have a piece of a flat fee.”