Elsinore

by Jerome Charyn

  “Who says?”

  “Kiddo, I did an awful lot of deals with the Third Reich.”

  “As Hirschele Feldstein or Howard Phipps?”

  “Both. A cantor’s millions were as good as gold.… I cheated them out of whatever I could. Guns, art, or blood. I’m a trader, Sid. I dealt with whoever there was to deal. I’m not ashamed of it. But the Duke was Hitler’s pal. The Duchess danced with a swastika around her neck.”

  And for a moment Frog had the desire to throttle Hirschele in his Supper Club. It wasn’t the bodyguards that compelled him to wait. Holden wouldn’t kill a cantor.

  “You’re a liar, old man. I have a record of every jewel she ever had. There’s no swastika on that list.… how much did you pay Mrs. Church to finger me at Grand Central Station?”

  “We were talking about the Duchess.”

  “Come on, did she do it out of loyalty or love?”

  “I’m holding the girl, Sid. She had to do what I say … or she’ll never see her.”

  “Suicide poker, that’s what you like to play. With my dad, with Swiss, with your own little girl. Did Ethan teach you all the rules?”

  “There are no rules. That’s the beauty of it.” And Frog saw a figure among the other figures. She wasn’t a wax doll, like the maître d’. It was big Judith in a party dress she might have worn years and years ago. She looked like a panther. And Holden understood. She belonged in the room. The Supper Club was a graveyard without big Judith. The murals had no melody without her. Hirsch had built himself a crazy shul. The first installation. And Kronstadt must have prepared the way. With her wildness and her dirty feet.

  Shit, Holden said. Another Kronstadt. The wild girl of the Supper Club. And Holden could dream of what it had been like. With a full orchestra. Muted trombones. Dark ladies in dark dresses. With men who were nothing more than chaperones, in their ties and tails. Big Judith taking her panther steps, while all the men went out of their minds. She was there to drive them berserk. And Hirschele must have seen it as punishment, a visitation from Kronstadt’s secret sister. Not an uptown heiress. Not a runaway girl. But someone he could never really control.

  Holden was scared. He had to get the hell out of there. He’d been surfacing around too many ghosts. He got up from the table and ran out of the club.

  22

  A wind might have been pulling at him. He walked to Aladdin. He was no longer the invisible man. All of Hirsch’s sheriffs knew about this Salvation Army soldier. But Frog wouldn’t give up his coat. He wanted to see how Abruzzi’s men had triggered his own door. He rode upstairs, expecting a haunted house. He discovered a small hotel. The shop was packed with nailers and cutters, Nick Tiel’s old gang. The cutters worked at a furious pace. Frog went to the designer’s room. He found the Swiss, who had Nick Tiel’s paper tacked to the walls. Andrushka was modeling one of the Swisser’s new line of coats, a glorious sable. She’d started as a mannequin in this same shop. She’d thickened a bit during her Paris years. But she was still the girl he’d married.

  “Holden,” Schatz said. “We’ve been expecting you. Will you take off that ridiculous coat? I need you around. All the buyers want to meet Sidney Holden.”

  “Bruno, haven’t you heard? I’ve been sentenced to death.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re part of the corporation. You’re president. You sign the checks. Tell him, Andrushka.”

  “We’re counting on you,” she said. “We couldn’t survive.”

  “You’ll have to.” And Holden realized that she’d always been a mannequin, even in the Swisser’s arms. Swiss must have lent her out to Bibo and how many other boy generals? Holden’s error was that he’d tried to reform the twig, take her out of the fur shop, so she could study Caravaggio. It had been nothing more than cotton candy.

  He went into his office. The district attorney’s men must have unsprung their trap. Holden looked at the coats he had, the shoes, the ties, the shirts with royal labels. He locked the office and disappeared from Aladdin.

  He visited Vermont in his Siberian coat. Farmers stared at him. They’d never seen a Salvation Army soldier. They spoke some kind of patois that Frog couldn’t seem to penetrate. “Elsinore,” he muttered. “A hospital, a home in the woods.” They laughed.

  “A hospital. Pas des homes in the woods. Pas ici.”

  And Frog traveled from Middlebury to Montpelier. He bribed the selectmen of one little town, offered them a donation to fix the local waterfall if they could find Elsinore. The selectmen drove him around to different spots. He entered sanitariums where the boarders had such white faces that Frog couldn’t be certain they were alive. He stumbled upon abandoned whiskey stills, the rotten palaces of neglected robber barons. He searched the back rooms of orphanages, where he found old ladies who’d lost their minds, but no one who resembled little Judith. Frog paid for the waterfall. And then he tracked on his own.

  He had no more rats to rely on. He couldn’t go back into the belly of Manhattan and build a new network of spies. He went deeper into the mountains. It started to snow. He’d rent a car and return it, rent a car and return it, always with the idea that Elsinore was behind the next snowdrift. He began to hear voices in the howling weather. He caught a chill. He had to stop at a country inn and lie under a thick blanket. Frog had a fever. The snow collected outside his window. There was no mud or oil on the ground. He’d arrived at some crystalline world. He wondered if that was Elsinore. He went out dancing in the middle of a storm. He could feel the outline of a building that moved with the snow. But he could never get close enough. The innkeeper had to drag him upstairs to his room. “I used to bump for a living,” Frog said. “No one puts his hands on me.”

  The innkeeper fed him barley soup. When Frog woke, the fever was gone. The innkeeper didn’t want to accept money from a Salvation Army soldier.

  “I never freeload,” Frog said. “I’m a paying guest.” He dug into his pocket and took out a little twisted tree of hundred-dollar bills.

  “That’s too much.”

  “You’ve been kind to me.”

  “What are you looking for, soldier?”

  “A house in the woods. Used to be a sanitarium for very rich people.”

  “Ah, the doctors’ place. It’s closed.”

  “Will you take me there?”

  The innkeeper lent him some boots. They trudged up a hill. Holden’s heart was pounding. They stumbled onto a door in the snow. There wasn’t even a proper porch. It was snowing inside the door. Holden realized that the roof was missing. He stepped on a frozen mouse.

  He crossed the channel in a rented Plymouth. The ferryman looked him up and down, but he couldn’t recognize Frog in his soldier’s suit. And Frog didn’t have to worry about having Al signal ahead to Ethan Coleridge.

  “You some sort of a pilgrim? We don’t get a lot of pilgrims on Chappy.”

  But when he arrived at the orange house, Ethan stood waiting with a shovel. “I’m sworn to kill you.”

  “Feed me first,” Holden said. “I’d like some corn flakes.”

  They sat at the table, the old, old man with his shovel and Frog. Ethan looked worried. “What if Phippsy changed his plans? I’d be the last to know.”

  “I keep hearing voices.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Voices,” Holden said. “I think it’s Kronstadt.”

  “She was always a witch. That’s why I choked her. But it’s a funny thing. I hear her too … every night. It’s worse now that the boys are gone. Minot would see the glint in my eye, and he’d say, ‘Dada, it’s the dead lady.’ That softened the blow.”

  Frog had some corn flakes and closed his eyes.

  “You shouldn’t nod off in my presence,” Ethan said. “I’m holding a shovel on you.”

  And Frog had his best sleep since he’d gone on the road. He woke in the attic. This hundred-year-old man had put him to bed. Frog was wearing Minot’s pajamas. He went downstairs and had his morning dose of corn flakes. There wa
s still no milk in the house. But he found a radish, some raisins, some prunes. He went out into that empire of junk. The toilet bowls were filled with black snow. The weather vanes sat like spears. Holden could have been a gardener in his own garden.

  Ethan carried his shovel for two days and then decided to give it up. “I don’t have to kill you.”

  “Do you know where Phippsy’s daughter is?”

  “Have a radish.”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “Even if I had a clue, I couldn’t tell.”

  They lived on their meager diet, with millions buried in the house. The ferryman would appear with the most essential rations. He must have been Hirschele’s contact. Because Frog never heard the telephone ring.

  He tore up his checkbook. He had no desire to haunt the boutiques of Edgartown. But he kept his uniform clean.

  Ethan started to panic. He picked up his shovel again. He wouldn’t touch the corn flakes.

  “I can’t chew. Phippsy’s coming to get us. He wants my millions. He’ll set fire to all my paper, turn it into fuel.”

  “Aladdin’s his fuel. The Swisser has a new line of coats.”

  “Well, we’re sitting ducks. Any fool could rob us.”

  And when Al arrived in the middle of the night with two more islanders, carrying empty potato sacks, Holden was there. He sat with Ethan’s Webley in his lap.

  “Don’t try to stop us, pilgrim,” Al said.

  Frog shot Al in the foot. The ferryman whimpered. “It isn’t fair.” He left with his two comrades and the potato sacks. But Ethan wasn’t satisfied.

  “It’s not safe. You could steal my treasure. You could get ideas.”

  “Ethan, I haven’t spent a dollar on this island. Go to bed.”

  One or twice a week Cardinale would attack him with the shovel. Holden’s arms were sore from where the shovel fell. But he was fond of this old, old man. He wouldn’t hurt Ethan Cardinale. And he still had the blessings of an open field. Winter birds would caw at him, follow him from field to field, but Holden couldn’t seem to find much of a trigger for his own life. He’d been bred like some strange plant to bump people. That was the only trigger he ever had. Kronstadt wasn’t a witch. She’d lived between the empty spaces, like Holden himself.

  His fabric had been the clothes he wore. The stolen designs of David, Duke of Windsor. He was no less of a mannequin than the twig. Now he had no signature. He was a soldier in a junkyard. He shared nothing with Ethan. They never talked. Frog couldn’t even remember his own voice.

  And then he heard the roar of a minibus. He could see the word MIMES painted on one of the panels. And he wondered if a troupe had come to perform on Chappy. It was his island now. He was standing in a field. The bus swerved around the toilet bowls and stopped in front of Frog. Mrs. Church got out with little Judith. Judith’s face hadn’t healed. The mouth was swollen. The bones of her eyes were blue.

  “I was never married,” she said. “It was all a lie.”

  “Shh,” he told her. “It must hurt to talk.”

  “There was no Mr. Vanderwelle. I’m not even a lawyer. I never went to school. I lived with mama in the woods.”

  “Shh,” Holden said. He wanted to murder Minot all over again. But Frog had worn Minot’s pajamas. He was living in Minot’s house. He couldn’t even tell the good assassins from the bad.

  “I told Mama I wanted to stay … stay with you … Holden’s island.”

  “Shh,” he said.

  Big Judith stared down at Frog from that height of hers, a panther without a party dress. She could have swallowed Holden. He was helpless around her, like he’d been with Mrs. Howard. Frog couldn’t negotiate with very tall women.

  “Holden, I’m lending my daughter to you.”

  “I’m sick of lendings. I want her to be my wife.”

  “You’re a married man, Mr. Frog.”

  “Means nothing. I’ll get a divorce … Does Howard know you brought her here?”

  “He’ll get used to it. Give him time. But for God’s sake, shut up about marriage. I don’t want him to have a stroke.”

  She kissed her daughter and climbed into the bus. Holden watched her bump across the icy fields. She seemed one more piece of ice in an eternity of ice.

  He took little Judith’s hand. He led her to the orange house. Marcus Reims, he muttered. He’d have to bump Ethan. He couldn’t keep her around a crazy man. He was shivering. He could see some shadow fly in the window. I’ll kill him, Frog said, if he’s holding a shovel.

  Frog opened the door. Ethan had his shovel. He saw Judith. “The little daughter,” he said. His face seemed to flush like a curious rose. He dropped the shovel. “Would you care for some corn flakes?”

  Ah, Holden said, I won’t have to kill him now.

  23

  She drove toward the lights of Manhattan in the Mimes’ very own bus, like some mechanic behind the wheel. Judith didn’t own a license. She’d learned to drive at that madhouse in Vermont. Elsinore, Elsinore, where doctors in blue gowns sat with her while she bumped across the grounds, the madwoman who belonged to Mr. Phipps. Steering that wheel was like discovering another language. Almost as good as sex.

  Judith’s first car was an old Cadillac in the woods that also served as Elsinore’s ambulance. She remembered all the turns as she went round and round the porches and kept seeing the same metal rooster that must have been a weathercock. The rooster made winter noises, like the cackle of ice.

  She returned to Manhattan, parked the bus, showered at her loft, shaved her legs, searched through her closets. Judith dressed to kill. A sixty-seven-year-old moll, having to seduce Howard one more time. It wasn’t even noon. She smoked a cigarette, rinsed her mouth with a shot of rye. “The Supper Club,” she said. “The Supper Club.”

  She put on her coat with the rabbit-skin collar, caught a gypsy cab, and arrived at the foundation like a lonesome mama. Howard’s doormen pampered her. “Hello, Mrs. Church.” She had her own bodyguard to take her upstairs. She handed the bodyguard her rabbit-skin coat and walked into the restaurant with a pair of naked shoulders.

  Howard was at his table. He couldn’t take his eyes off Judith. His mouth was shivering. He was like an ancient boy tucked inside a green sweater. “I thought you’d abandoned me. I thought you wouldn’t come.”

  “Didn’t I promise you?” she said.

  “I thought you wouldn’t come.”

  And Judith stared into the heart of that crazy restaurant, and it was like a jungle that had no end. Her whole life had been defined by the contours of this room, the murals, the ceilings, the walls, the waiters who stood like tin men, the musicians in white pants, hugging their golden horns.

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s dance.”

  His face froze against the murals. “I’m a cripple,” he said. “I have to wear special shoes.”

  “You always danced. Even when you were half dead.”

  He got up from the table, wearing his napkin, and fell into Judith’s arms. The orchestra started to wail. It was some lost tune from that time when Howard had his own Cinderella. Judith Church, the dark-eyed belle who danced her days and nights at a palace with polished floors, where the entire population could see down her back.

  Howard danced in his heavy shoes. He didn’t even have the courage to look at her. His trombones were playing “White Cliffs of Dover.” Her one romance had happened in the middle of the war, when all the windows were covered with blackout curtains. She’d met him in this very room, the shy millionaire who doubled his fortune every single month by trading with pirates and all the Axis powers.

  “Where’s my little girl?”

  “She’s not your girl. I raised her.”

  “Where is she?”

  “With the Frog.”

  He started to groan.

  “Stop that,” she said. “You knew where I was taking her. That was part of the deal.”

  “He’s a bumper.”

  “And what are you
?”

  “A philanthropist.”

  She laughed, and he couldn’t keep up with her moves on the floor. “I don’t go around socking people in the head.”

  “You do much worse. You steal their lives and make them suffer. Holden puts them out of their misery.”

  “Go ahead. Congratulate Sid. Is he living at Aladdin?”

  “Stop it, Howard. You know where he is.”

  “On the island? On Chappy? With that maniac, Ethan Cardinale? Ethan killed Kronstadt, for Christ’s sake.”

  “You killed her, old man.”

  He was blubbering now, under the mad pull of the horns. Judith could have jumped out the window.

  “I didn’t strangle Kronstadt.”

  “Yes you did. Ethan was only your twin. Didn’t you tell me that?”

  He stopped dancing. And the orchestra stopped. They could have been at Versailles, or some other house of kings … and little queens like Marie Antoinette. He danced. He stopped. And the music was like a telegraph machine.

  “He’s your twin.”

  “He’s a fucking miser and a maniac. He’d have eaten his own mama for a dollar bill. But I won’t bother Ethan and the Frog if you stay with me.”

  “I promised, old man. Didn’t I promise?”

  “I want it in writing,” Howard said, truculent and sad.

  “Your lawyer or mine?”

  “No lawyers.”

  “Then what would you like?”

  “A note,” he said.

  “Right now? While we’re dancing?”

  “After the dance. I’m not so particular. You’ll have to swear on your life that you’ll live with me.”

  “Howard, I’ll haunt you worse than Kronstadt ever did. Kronstadt will feel like afternoon tea.”

  “It don’t matter … long as you’re mine.”

  “I’ll make you dance morning, noon, and night.”

  “It don’t matter. I have the orchestra. I have the men … but I gotta know. When is my daughter coming to stay with us?”

  “She’s not coming. She has the Frog.”

  “Jesus, his dad was my chauffeur.”