‘What about his looking for people from the camp?’
‘He had a photograph from the camp: some of the SS men and women. Beata saw it once in Leon’s room. She said they were at a picnic, all of them smiling and laughing.’
‘I didn’t find anything like that in his room. Did he ever see one of these people?’
She drank some ice tea. ‘Beata says that he thought he saw some of them in August. Because Leon was worried that the heat made his horse sick, he was going back to the stables early, and he thought he saw them near Columbus Circle.’
‘Who?’
‘He called them “the doctors”.’
‘The doctors?’
‘Yes.’
‘What doctors?’
Rhonda pushed her soup away. She took a cigarette from the pack near Cassidy’s coffee cup and lit it. ‘You know they experimented on people in the camps.’ It was not really a question. ‘Doctors used inmates as guinea pigs. You know that, don’t you?’ Her voice was tight. The words were hard to get out. ‘They froze people and tried to revive them. They burned them. They cut them open without anesthetics. They used them to test new drugs. Leon was one of them.’ Her voice rose. ‘Doctors! Men and women who swore to first do no harm. Doctors!’ She smashed the cigarette into her plate, jerked up from the table, and rushed away. She pushed open the door to the ladies room with a crash and disappeared inside leaving silence in her wake.
An elegant old woman in a dark red dress and green hat with a pheasant feather aslant smiled at Cassidy from a table nearby and reached to pat the hand of the white-haired man sitting across from her reading the Daily News. Sympathy for a lover’s spat.
Rhonda came back as Cassidy was finishing his sandwich. ‘Sorry.’
‘For what?’
‘For yelling, I guess.’ She gripped the back of the chair hard. ‘Can we get out of here now?’
‘You don’t want to finish your soup?’
‘No.’ She headed for the door walking fast.
Cassidy dropped money on the table and went after her. When he got outside, she was headed west on Houston. He caught up to her halfway down the block. She glanced at him and kept going. Her jaw was set and she looked like she could walk through a wall.
‘Are you okay?’
‘No.’ She kept walking as if speed would free her from what was turning her inside out. ‘I had to get out of there. Half the people in there would have been dead if they had lived in Germany in 1939. Dead for no reason.’ Her anguish twisted her face. ‘I don’t want to be Jewish. I don’t want anything to do with it. I don’t want to carry it. I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to know.’ She turned and threw herself at him, and he almost fell catching her rush. His back thumped against the wall behind him and saved him from going down. She buried her face against his shoulder and cried shuddering sobs, and he patted her back and made the soft, useless sounds men make when women cry.
After a while Rhonda’s crying slowed, and he could feel her tighten in his arms. He let go and she stepped back and took a deep breath and let it out.
‘Okay. I’m okay. Sorry about that.’
‘Hey. It’s okay. It’s fine.’
‘Give me your handkerchief.’
He took it from his jacket pocket and gave it her. She blew her nose and handed it back and caught a glimpse of herself in a store window.
‘Oh, God, I look like hell.’ She took a comb, compact, and a lipstick from her purse, and then shoved the purse at him to hold while she made repairs. When she finished, she took the purse back and stowed the tools and snapped the purse shut like punctuation. ‘Jesus, no wonder they keep the girl reporters away from the tough stories.’
A few passes of a comb, lipstick, and a compact’s powder puff, and she was restored, at least on the outside. How did women do that?
‘Why don’t you stop beating yourself up.’
She looked at him for a moment and then smiled. ‘Okay. A good call. Any sympathy, I’d start wailing again.’ She looked at her watch. ‘I’ve got to get back to the paper.’
‘Let’s get you a cab.’
They walked west toward Broadway, keeping an eye out for a cruising taxi.
‘These doctors,’ Cassidy said, ‘did Beata and Lena believe Leon really saw them?’
‘They don’t know. Lena was with him when he went after a shoemaker over near St Marks Place. Leon accused him of being one of the guards who took people to the gas chambers. It turned out the man had never been out of New York State. It wasn’t the first time he went after someone who turned out to be just a guy.’
‘What about Freddy? What did they say about him?’
‘Freddy’s a very different case. Freddy went into Auschwitz when he was seven. He was there for more than four years, and he survived. Very few children survived, but Freddy did. He scares them. They think he’s possessed.’ She waited to see if Cassidy would laugh.
‘What does that mean?’ A man plagued by prophetic dreams and waking nightmares holds a less skeptical view of what might or might not be real.
They stopped on the corner. A cab slowed, but Rhonda ignored it. ‘Do you know what a dybbuk is in Jewish mythology?’
‘Some sort of ghost, or monster.’
‘Close enough. It’s a spirit of a dead person who possesses someone living. A malicious spirit.’
‘Freddy’s possessed by a dybbuk?’
She shrugged. ‘Not by a dybbuk. Not by something malicious. The opposite. They say ibbur is a positive form of possession. If I got this right, it happens when a righteous soul occupies a living person to complete an important job, or to fulfill a mitzvah, a religious duty of some sort that can only be done by someone living.’ She waited for his reaction.
‘So Freddy survived because someone who died needs him to do something.’
‘Maybe not just someone. Maybe a lot of people who died at Auschwitz. That’s what they say.’
‘What do you think?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t believe in ghosts.’ She raised her hand, and a cab swerved to the curb.
‘Will I see you tonight?’
‘I don’t think so, Mike. I’m feeling, I don’t know, kind of solitary.’
She got in the taxi. He watched until the cab made a left on Broadway and disappeared downtown.
TEN
The stalker sat on a folding campstool behind the window on the fifth floor of an abandoned building on Bethune Street. He had been there since late afternoon, and now it was dark. He had a clear view over the rifle’s sights to the front of Cassidy’s building on Bank Street. Two carriage lamps lighted the front step, and the interior hall light shone through the arched fan of glass above the door. The rifle was an M-1 Garrand, the standard-issue rifle for the American soldier in World War Two and Korea, and he knew it well. He had calculated the distance to Cassidy’s door as 296 feet, 206 feet for the block between Bethune and Bank, 15 feet each for the sidewalks, and 60 feet for the width of Bank Street. The height of the building put the distance at just over one hundred yards, and he would have to adjust for shooting down from a height. He had killed men with the rifle at three times that distance.
It was dark when Cassidy got out of the cab in front of his building on Bank Street. A few cars rolled on the elevated highway, and he could hear the sing of their tires on the pavement as he put his key in the lock of the outside door.
The first shot blew out the fanlight above his head on the right side of the door. The second blew out the fanlight on the left. Cassidy dropped to one knee, twisted the key and knob, flung the door open, and threw himself inside. A third shot ripped splinters from the stair banister in the hall. Cassidy drew his pistol, hooked the door with his foot, and pulled it close. Part of his mind registered that the gunman was using a rifle. Two shots banged into the door. It was a metal cored fire door and the bullets clanged against it but did not blow through.
The door to one of the first-floor apartments opened, and the
tenant, Calvin Bull, a fifty-year-old artist, stood in the doorway, wide-eyed. A paintbrush in his hand dripped bright yellow paint on his shoe. He saw Cassidy on the floor with a gun in his hand. ‘What the hell, Mike? Those were shots.’
‘Get back in your apartment. Stay away from the windows. Turn off the lights.’ Cassidy got to his feet, turned off the hall lights, and ran up the stairs to his apartment. He ignored the envelope someone had shoved half under the door. He moved quickly to one of the windows without turning on the lights. No one moved on the street below or in the buildings across the street. There were taller industrial buildings farther north, and the gunman could have been in any one of them. The rifle gave him plenty of range.
Cassidy pulled curtains across the windows and went into the windowless kitchen and called the Ninth Precinct on Charles Street. He identified himself and reported what had happened. While he waited for the cops to arrive, he retrieved the envelope from under the door and opened it. There was one sheet of folded typewriter paper inside. It held a message printed in block letters:
PRETTY GOOD SHOOTING, HUH? SEE YOU SOON
The cops were there for an hour. They searched the area but could not establish the gunman’s location. All the likely buildings that had a view of Cassidy’s front door were dark and locked for the night. They would come back in daylight to see if they could find the gunman’s perch. They examined the crime scene and dug out the bullets that had gone through the fanlights to the back wall of the hallway. The detective in charge, a man named Tarbuck, took his statement, put the note in an evidence bag, and asked all the obvious questions about who might want him dead.
‘You’re lucky,’ Tarbuck said. ‘Three shots with a rifle before you got the door closed, and he missed every one. Real lucky.’
‘Uh-uh,’ Cassidy said. ‘He missed on purpose.’
‘How do you figure?’
‘He wrote the note and put it under my door before I came home. He wanted me to see it. Hard to do if I was dead.’
‘What the fuck?’
‘He’s screwing with me, whoever he is. He wants me to know he’s out there. He wants me to think about it. He wants me scared.’
‘Someone you put away. Guy sits in the can for a few years thinking about how unfair it was that you nailed him. He gets out, he wants revenge. Someone you put away. Got to be.’ He yawned wide enough to make his jaw crack. ‘Sorry. Fucking night watch. I hate it. It screws up my sleep. By the time I get used to it, I’m back on days.’
‘I’ve just been there.’
Tarbuck yawned again. ‘We’ll come back in the morning, do a canvass of the buildings that might have worked for him, see what we see. I’ll let you know.’
They went away, and Cassidy went up to his apartment, made himself a drink. He turned the lights out in the apartment and stood back from the window and looked at the buildings to the north. Only a few of them would have given the sniper the angle he needed. He thought about who might hold enough of a grudge. Nobody came to mind.
A detective from the Ninth named Blandon called Cassidy the next day just before lunch. ‘We found the building. It’s on Bethune, second in from West Twelfth on the south side. Been abandoned for a while. The front door showed signs of break in. On the fifth floor there’s a place a guy has a perfect view of your front door. There’s crap all over the place, but someone cleaned up an area by the window. The window was open. A couple of cigarette butts on the floor, but no brass. He picked up his brass. And no prints. He was careful. The windowsill had something on it. We have a guy in the squad was a sniper in Korea. He used a beanbag for a steady rest. Says it might have left a mark like that.’
‘Okay. Thanks.’
‘Keep your head down.’
He called a clerk in Records and asked to have his arrest reports from the last five years sent to the station house. Maybe they would turn someone up. In the meantime there was Leon Dudek.
ELEVEN
A stocky welterweight was beating the crap out of a sparring partner in Ring Two when Cassidy climbed the stairs to Stillman’s Gym and paid his quarter to Jack Curley who guarded the door, owl-eyed behind his steel-rimmed glasses. The man who followed Cassidy up the stairs tried to slip in without paying, but Lou Stillman, with his ex-cop’s eyes, spotted the move from his perch near Ring One.
‘Pay the quarter, you cheap bum,’ he yelled, and the man turned back sheepishly and dug in his pocket for change.
It was late afternoon, and the gym was hot and crowded. The lights were on, as they always were, because the windows were covered with thirty years of grime, and what daylight managed to work through them arrived defeated by the struggle. If there had been an exhibition scheduled, or if a big fight was imminent and name boxers were training, the folding chairs and the seats in the gallery would be crowded with silky women in furs and men with cashmere coats over their arms. But today was a workday at Stillman’s, and the East Side and Uptown crowds gave way to trainers and managers, matchmakers from the Garden and St Nick’s and the arenas in New Jersey. Most were aging palookas with lumpy faces, badges of honor won in the ring in younger days. A thin, old man with scraggly white hair and clothes he had bought when he was twenty pounds bigger muffled the receiver of a pay phone against his shoulder and called out, ‘Anyone got a lightweight for a six rounder on Friday in Newark? Anybody got a lightweight for Friday at Newark?’ Three men in old tweed jackets and fedoras broke from the crowd and moved toward him. Under one of the grimed windows a heavyweight with shoulders like a horse stood easy with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth while his trainer wrapped his hands. Boxers waiting their turns shadow boxed and shuffled in the narrow corridor past the rings.
Cassidy breathed in the familiar smell of sweat, coal dust, liniment, disinfectant, and tobacco as he moved through the fight mob. Some of the low hanging cigarette and cigar smoke had probably been exhaled before the war.
The former middleweight champion of the world, Rocky Graziano, broke away from a group of admirers and came toward him with his arm around the shoulders of Whitey Bimstein, his old cut man and trainer. He gave Cassidy a nod and paused and said, ‘Hey, Mike. How’re you doing?’ A couple of young fighters nearby began to hammer speed bags in attempt to attract Graziano’s notice.
‘Doing fine, Champ. How are you?’ He stopped to light his cigarette off Bimstein’s cigar.
‘Couldn’t be better.’
‘I hear that Paul Newman guy who’s playing you in the movie’s a lot prettier than you are.’ A movie about Graziano called Somebody Up There Likes Me was due to open in December.
‘Yeah? Well, he didn’t get hit in the face as many times as I did.’
Bimstein laughed, and Graziano ran an affectionate hand over the older man’s bald head.
‘Is Terry Mack around?’ Cassidy asked.
‘Yeah. The other side of Ring Two with that welter,’ Bimstein said. ‘He thinks he’s got something there. He may be right. The little fucker can punch.’
Cassidy found Terry Mack leaning with his forearms on the ring apron while he studied the sparring with educated eyes. Mack was a lean, dark-haired man with a narrow face and prominent chin that, he learned early in his career, could not take a punch. The discovery changed his dream from becoming the light heavyweight champion of the world to becoming the trainer and manager of a champion of the world, weight class not important. So far he had been disappointed, but he was an optimist. He nodded to let Cassidy know that he was aware of him, but he did not take his eyes off the fighters.
By the time Germany surrendered in the spring of 1945, Cassidy had served under eight commanding officers. Three had been wounded, two killed, and the rest promoted out of the company. Terry Mack had been the company commander for the last eight weeks of the fighting, and Cassidy had been his executive officer. Mack had proved to be a brave but cautious leader who understood that the war was winding down, the Germans were defeated, and that the most important part of his job was to bring home
as many of his men as he could, an attitude Cassidy applauded.
Cassidy stood beside him and watched the action in the ring.
Bimstein had called Mack’s fighter ‘the little fucker’, so he had to be the shorter of two men, but he wasn’t little. He was short and broad with wide shoulders and thick, muscled legs. His sparring partner was a tall, light-skinned Negro. Both men wore headgear. The sparring partner’s ribs and stomach were mottled red, and when Mack’s fighter hit him, Cassidy understood why. The punch, a right hook, sounded like someone hitting a side of beef with a baseball bat. Mack’s guy hooked him again, and the sparring partner lurched sideways from the force of the blow. His hands came down, and Mack’s guy hit the side of his headgear and drove him into the ropes. As the man’s hands came up to protect his head, Mack’s guy hit him with a left and a right to the ribs, and the sparring partner spun away toward the other side of the ring. Mack’s guy went after him with short, balanced steps that took him across the canvas with surprising quickness. He walked through the sparring partner’s jab and hit the man twice in his reddened belly, and all the fight went out of him. He tied up Mack’s guy with his arms and leaned on him wearily. Mack rang the bell at his side, and the men broke and touched gloves. The sparring partner slipped through the ropes, eager to get away from the pain maker and lie down somewhere. Mack climbed through the ropes and crossed to where his fighter waited for him. Mack undid his gloves while he talked to him. He stepped back to demonstrate a jab, and then patted the boxer on the shoulder and held the ropes for him to make his exit easier. He walked back across the ring, climbed down, and picked up a leather jacket from a folding chair at ringside. ‘What do you think?’ he asked.
‘He looks like he could knock down a wall,’ Cassidy said.
‘Yeah. He can punch. You know why I like him? He’s always moving forward, and he’s always busy. He crowds ’em. He drives ’em. He won’t let ’em up. He gets in close, and he hits ’em. You get a fighter who wants to crowd ’em and hit ’em, you’re halfway there. Now if only I could get him to learn the jab. He thinks the jab’s for sissies. Jesus. You get one who can jab, but he can’t punch, or he can jab, but he can’t take a punch, or he punches, but he can’t jab. It’s always some goddamn thing. But this one, this one I believe is going someplace. This one’s going up the ladder if he don’t turn out to be too dumb to learn.’ Cassidy offered him a cigarette and lit one for himself. ‘What’s up, Mike? A day off? You want to go a couple of rounds?’
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