The Bait

by Dorothy Uhnak

  Frankie’s hands rested on a shoulder of each of the brothers and he leaned his face between them from the row of benches behind them. “Okay, kid, we’re being called next. Come on, Murray. Take it easy, Davey—this’ll take a few minutes.”

  David sat rigidly watching Frankie Santino walk easily up to the front of the room, looking like some sharp little bookie. Five hundred bucks. The schmuck. The schmuck. Five hundred dollars. David let his breath out slowly, closing his eyes for a moment. Okay, so pay the man and that’s it. That’s all of it.

  Murray stood beside Frankie Santino and when Frankie poked him, Murray looked straight ahead and in a low voice said, “Guilty.” He stood uncertainly until guided by Frank’s hand, which led him across the room to a desk, where he sat beside some graying Negro with glasses, who wrote down his name and address and occupation on a printed form. He did not answer any of the questions: Frankie spoke for him and then, finally, Frankie pressed the man’s shoulder and clamped Murray’s arm and led him around the fenced-in section of the courtroom, waving David toward them, and they went out into the hallway.

  Murray’s eyes were burning and dry and he closed them tightly, screwing up his face against the aching throb inside his head. This was a hot place and he wanted to be out of here. He accepted the slip of paper Frankie pressed into his hand without looking at it, not listening to the words Frankie was saying, but nodding. Murray closed his eyes again feeling within him a great, familiar pit of emptiness like a hole swallowing him up. When he opened his eyes, they rested directedly on the face of some girl, who had come up to Frankie. Murray stopped blinking so that he could see her better. There was something familiar about her.

  “Mr. Santino,” Christie Opara said angrily, “why wasn’t I notified that you had waived to Sessions?”

  Frankie Smiled easily. “Why, hello, Detective Opara, honey. This here is Mr. Davey Rogoff, brother of Murray, who you already know.”

  Christie glanced at David who kept his eyes fixed at some point past her head, then at Murray who looked different, dressed in a suit and tie. She shrugged off Frank Santino’s hand, moving just a slight step backwards, but she couldn’t shake off his lewd little eyes which skimmed her body without subtlety.

  “Can you believe that this little girl with those big round eyes is a cop?” Frankie asked no one in particular. David wasn’t looking at him and Murray seemed a million miles away, lost behind his glasses. He leaned close to Christie, “Honey, you can lock me up anytime.”

  “I might have to one day,” Christie said coldly. “Mr. Santino, can you give me the sentencing date?”

  “Sure, sure, but you won’t have to be there.”

  “I know that.”

  Frank poked David. “You bet she does. This little cookie knows all there is to know, don’t you, Christie Opara?”

  Christie bit the inside of her cheeks, her eyes narrowing contemptuously at the small, stocky man. She had met Santino in court many times; had been subjected to his crude insinuations and raised eyebrows and booming voice and had responded with controlled anger, keeping her poise and scoring convictions against him. “Never mind, Mr. Santino, I have to write up my report for the probation officer, anyway. I’ll get the date from him.”

  Frankie’s smile stayed on his lips but he watched the girl walk into the courtroom with a tightness in his throat. The little bitch. One day, he would get her on that witness stand and that cold, smug sureness would fall apart: he would shred it apart into little ripped up pieces.

  Murray Rogoff reached his arm into the barrel, and the cold cleanness of the water seemed to extend through his body. He could feel the thudding of the strong dark bodies as the carp churned themselves in small circles against his arm. For a moment he let his arm hang there, then his fingers seized a tail and in one quick motion, the cool water running along the inside of his arm, he held the fish up before the squinting eyes of the customer. The customers were all alike: the old women with colorless eyes and lumpy bodies who could measure and calculate to the ounce how much they were getting for their money.

  “Nah, nah, hah,” the old woman wailed, rocking her head from side to side.

  His father’s voice, whining, insistent, argued with the customer and the exchange, in Yiddish, was rapid and to the anticipated conclusion. “Cut him up, Murray,” his father said and Murray slammed the cold body onto the butcher’s block, his free hand reaching for the sharp knife. Deftly, he severed the head, turned the quivering body flat on its side, slashed it open and in the next movement, his fingers, bloody and wet, entered the body and gathered the yellowish guts, which he threw into the pail at his feet. The old woman, watching closely, began arguing and Murray’s father reached down, grabbed up the mess in both his hands, and held it before the woman’s face. She shrugged: it was hers. It was part of the fish. What business of his was it what she did with it? It was hers.

  Murray reached for two clean sheets of newspaper from the stack against the wall and carefully spread them out on the small marble counter beside the chopping block. He wiped his hands down the front of his solidly stained apron and squinted at the headlines: “Dancer Strangled in Bronx Apartment House.” There was a picture of some girl in a white blouse, her hair pulled back in a pony tail. She was smiling and directly under her picture were smaller words which said, “Third Victim in Three Months.” After that, there was a paragraph in regular size newsprint which Murray found hard to read: “Carol Logan, age 23, was found strangled early this morning behind a stairway in her Bronx apartment house. Police believe she is the third victim of a rapist-murderer responsible for the March murder of career girl Jody Lane in Greenwich Village and music student Agnes Lichtenberg of Riverside Drive last month. Story page three.”

  Murray felt a sudden confusion staring at the paper: it was dated Saturday, May 7, 1966. It was strange. Something was wrong. Ignoring the old woman who tried to hurry him along, Murray thought about it for a moment, then his face relaxed and it was no longer a problem.

  His father, who always observed the Sabbath from Friday evening through Saturday sundown, would never have purchased the Daily News on a Saturday. The colored boy who delivered ice to them Monday morning had probably taken it from the truck and tossed it onto the stack of newspapers.

  Murray added another sheet of paper so that the gummy guts wouldn’t leak through. His eyes were bothering him again. He wanted to take the glasses off and smash them against the floor: why were they always so smudgy? Murray wrapped the fish into a neat package which he then slid into a brown paper bag. The old women wouldn’t put the newspaper package into their string bags: they wanted what they paid for and a brown paper bag was included in the price.

  Murray turned and plunged his arms into the barrel; the water felt good. He sloshed the coolness over his neck, then took off his glasses and rinsed his face. He didn’t listen to his father who told him it looked funny for him to wash in the fish barrel and that he should go into the back of the store if he wanted to clean up that bad. He didn’t listen to his mother either. Her voice so like his father’s with that same whining sound and all the words running together and always the same things, over and over: Murray, why don’t you and Murray, why won’t you and Murray you must and Murray you should and Murray and Murray.

  “I’m going up now,” Murray said. He ignored their combined voices which pursued him into the hot street, telling him that he had started so late in the day, he should at least work with them until supper time, but Murray didn’t want to work until supper time and he left the shop, as he always did whenever he felt he had to and they couldn’t stop him from leaving any more than they could stop him from leaving the hot string of rooms on the top floor whenever he wanted to, their words and questions just part of their breath and of no meaning to him.

  Murray was tired and he didn’t know how tired he was until his body hit the hard mattress and then he knew he was very tired. Murray was too tired to sleep and he pressed his face into the pillow, ru
bbing his eyes against the coarseness of the pillow-case, trying to burrow into some dark place where it was cool, where there would be dreams that were not dreams, but real. He lay, not moving for a long time, seeking sleep, and then he bunched the soft pillow in his large hands, as though that was the obstacle to rest and he tossed it across the small airless room. He rolled onto his back, stretching his body so that his head touched the metal headboard and his feet were over the edge of the mattress. He strained his eyes, sketching figures among the cracks on the ceiling, and Murray felt a deep sense of uneasiness, as if there was something wrong: something he should remember but couldn’t. Or someone he should remember, but couldn’t.

  And then, Murray felt his body relax: felt the odd and welcome and good feeling of not trying to remember at all, because it all came to him now and he knew he could sleep deeply and soundly because everything would be all right.

  Murray closed his eyes and smiled. His hands wandered down his body, lightly touching the smoothness of his thighs, then resting on the center of his being where he could feel the life of him rising, hard and strong and vital.

  “Christie Opara,” Murray Rogoff said softly, letting himself drift off into a good, safe, relaxing sleep.

  11

  THE HOT WATER OF THE shower hit the center of Christie’s spine and she leaned forward so that the water ran down her body. She straightened, turning her face upward so that her cheeks tingled. Slowly, she adjusted the hot water faucet so that the temperature of the water changed gradually. Finally, taking a deep breath, clenching her teeth against the shock, she stood in the ice-cold water for the count of ten before exhaling, letting the pores of her body close in the clean coldness. She reached out blindly for the towel, patting her face and letting her body feel cool in contrast to the steamy air.

  It had been a long day, even though she had learned not to measure a working day in terms of hours. The job was not an eight-hour deal which you walk away from until nine the next morning. You took the people, with their grating voices and tight lips and calculating eyes, home with you, into the shower with you, trying to scrub them out of your skin. But they stayed there, no matter how much hot water you used to open up your flesh, no matter how hard you scrubbed with a stiff, invigorating bathbrush. When you closed yourself up with icy water, the cleanness was only a fleeting sensation: they were still there, inside of you.

  Mrs. Ogden’s sister had been a somewhat younger replica of the woman Christie had tricked, her eyes the same alert little holes watching her from under heavy eyeshadow over a small sharp nose and a mouth that twisted in protest and indignation. And the two cousins: not at all alike. The one with a high, hysterically shrill voice and bony fingers that kept working frantically along the housedress and throat at the realization that seventy-five dollars for taking phone messages at home was to be something less than a profitable pastime. The other, a young, placid, poker-faced woman, encased in heavy layers of flesh, all squeezed and overflowing from beneath a tight electric yellow shift, her brows blatantly drawn heavy black lines over each eye, her mouth a wild orange slash in her large bland face.

  More than anything else, it was the greed they had revealed which ground into Christie. The women she had spoken to all afternoon and well into the night were not poverty-stricken. They had overly furnished, tasteless homes, husbands who could pay all outstanding bills, children who were overfed and well supplied with bikes and games and outdoor gym equipment. The money had been for the extra day at the beauty parlor, the mink stole and beaded sweaters and cocktail dresses with satin shoes dyed to match which could be flaunted, smugly and matter-of-factly, before the neighbors. And the sneering, insistently repetitious justification: I’m at home with my children.

  Mickey, of course, had been asleep when Christie finally arrived home, after two final hours devoted to typing up reports. He had been just sleepily awake when she had left for court in the morning and that was how she would see him tomorrow morning. Christie, standing in her light cotton pajamas, watched her small son, sleeping, the breath steady and even and moistly warm. The young forehead was drawn into a frown and the pink lips were working over some words, then pulled upwards into a smile of triumph. Whatever the battle he had been fighting, he had just won. She stroked her fingers lightly through his thick dark hair and automatically, in sleep as in consciousness, the strong little hand roughly placed the hair back on his forehead. Christie leaned her face close against her son’s and whispered softly in his ear—not because she had read once in a psychology class a long time ago that whispered words registered, were recorded in a sleeper’s brain and became part of the sleeper’s memory—but because she felt a great surge of loneliness for her child: “I love you, Michael-Mickey, my little Mickey.” Her lips touched his brow and the quick hand raised in protest but she ducked away before he could push her.

  All right, my little toughie; but I’m still going to think you’re a beautiful boy with your hard little body so removed from me now and I’m still going to think you have the most fantastic clear blue eyes in the world. And I will stick to my resolve to keep my mouth shut about all of that, at least to you, but it’s hard.

  Christie watched the small body suddenly fight off the light cover which she had just tucked under the mattress; the legs bent at the knees, then the feet were thrown into the air and the summer blanket went flying. Mickey stiffened his back, his arms reaching over his head, every part of him enjoying the pleasurable stretch of growth. Then, he turned on his side, his face toward the wall, his knees tucked up. He looked so small. Christie put her lips against the back of his head for a last quick kiss then put the top sheet over him and for once he didn’t fight it off.

  In bare feet, she went down the carpeted steps, through the hall and into the kitchen where she had left the small stove light on. She foraged without appetite in the refrigerator. Nora had asked her what she had eaten for supper and she couldn’t remember. There wasn’t a regular meal schedule when you were working on something: you had a sandwich sometime during the day and again sometime during the night, not when it was a normally designated mealtime, not even when hunger demanded it. You ate when you could find a minute or when someone had a chance to run down to the luncheonette and bring back a box of sandwiches and cardboard-flavored tea or coffee or tinny canned soda.

  Christie saw the remains of Nora’s lasagna in the Corning Ware; at one-fifteen in the morning, though there was an emptiness inside of her, Christie rejected it with distaste. She filled a glass to the brim with cold milk and drank it too fast. She filled the glass again, drinking like a child, interested only in quenching her thirst. She rinsed the glass, turned off the light, letting her eyes get accustomed to the darkness. She should have left the small lamp in her room on. Groping for the banister, her feet found the steps and then the landing, but her shin smashed into the small table leg in the upstairs hallway and Christie bit down on her lip, her fingers rubbing the unexpected pain. She listened for a moment, assured that she hadn’t disturbed Nora or Mickey, then, hands extended before her, feeling for the doorway, she entered her own room.

  The room was so dark that she could not pick out any of the familiar forms: not the dresser or the oiled walnut rocker by the window or the table by her bed. Christie eased herself onto her bed, lying with her hands folded beneath her head, her eyes able to make out the small phosphorous dots and slashes on the alarm clock on the dresser—1:25. She counted: 2:25, 3:25, 4:25, ticking off the number of hours she could sleep, if she fell asleep right now. The alarm was set for 6:30.

  Stop counting; stop wasting sleep time. Christie’s eyes closed, she shifted her arm so that it rested lightly across her forehead, her mind became slowly enveloped in the blackness, growing more and more relaxed and freed from words and images.

  The sudden shattering sound caught Christie somewhere in her throat, racing down her body like a shock wave. Instinctively, without solid thought of any kind, she responded with two different actions, each inde
pendent of the other and both independent of her conscious mind. Her right hand reached up over her head and twisted the light switch and her left hand reached and lifted the receiver to her ear.

  “Hello,” she said clearly, as though the loudness of her voice would convince her that she was fully awake. Then again, into the silence, her eyes staring, giving the room shape and the moment reality, “Hello?”

  There was a soft, breathing sound in her ear and Christie could feel a pounding within herself: the reaction of her heart startled into quicker action than it had been prepared for. Listening intently, straining for some voice, some word, Christie asked, “Who is this?”

  The voice was not familiar. “Is this Christie Opara?”

  “Yes, who is this?” Pressing the phone harder against her ear, straining to catch the voice, for no reason she could explain, she asked, “Marty? Is that you?”

  “Hello, Christie Opara.”

  Steadying her voice, lowering it, she asked again, “All right, who is this?”

  Softly, familiarly, almost pleasantly, the voice, not answering her demand, repeated, “Hello, Christie.”

  That was all the voice said and then there was a click in her ear and a dead, toneless silence. Stupidly jiggling her finger on the button twice, not really expecting to hear the voice, which had cut itself off, she said into the steady hum of the dial tone, “Hello? Hello?” and then she placed the phone in place.