by Ann Aptaker
I give that the only response I can: a contemptuous chuckle. “Don’t bet on it. Sig holds his dough very tight.”
“I’m not talking about dough. I’m talking about the rackets and all the skim. My information will make him a fortune in real estate development, more than he could ever make on the skim. But handing those rackets over to me is my price.” The guy’s so bloated with himself I’m afraid he’ll float up from the couch like a gassy balloon. “So c’mon, Gold,” he says, “get me to Loreale, and I’ll even cut you in for a piece. Whaddya want? A piece of the flesh action? Bet you’d like that.” He says it on a smarmy laugh and a nod toward his sister.
Lilah’s been the fly on the wall all this time, but no more. “Mickey, please! You can’t just give me—” She almost chokes on whatever it is she can’t say.
And then I get it: the sexy dress, the classy coat, her expertise between the sheets, her answer that she lives here sometimes. Lilah’s a working skirt, selling her goods, not for Sig but for Mickey, and this hovel fronted by a tattoo parlor is what’s known in the trade as a notch joint, a flesh parlor where her own brother set her up to do business. Mickey Day is slimier than a snake in a sewer.
My gut churns with an anger so cold that if I spit at Day he’d freeze solid. “I’m through with you, Day,” I say, and move to leave. But not before I extend a hand to Lilah. “You don’t have to do this. I can get you to—”
Day interrupts my bit of chivalry. “You want that old Greek jar back, Gold?”
I stop dead in my tracks.
“Yeah, that’s right,” he says. “Bet you didn’t see that one coming, didya.” He knows he’s got me, his slitty eyes crinkling, his monkey’s mouth grinning, enjoying his cheap victory. “Why don’t you sit back down, have another drink while we talk business,” he says. “Lilah, pour us both another scotch.”
After Lilah, obedient again, pours the drinks, Day tells her, “And now scram.”
I say, “She stays. She’s got a right to hear what you’ve got her caught up in.”
The grin folds up on Day’s face. “She ain’t none of your concern, Gold. Stay outta my family’s business if you want to get your old clay jar back.”
He’s way ahead of me, at least for the moment. I nod at Lilah, letting my face pass the idea that sooner or later I’ll get her out of here. I guess she got the message because she gives me a quick, careful smile before she walks out.
Another slug of scotch settles me enough to sit down again and talk business with the sleazy character whose whiskey I’m drinking. His round, ridiculous face only makes his self-satisfied grin look meaner. I resist the temptation to pull my gun and put holes in his teeth. “Okay, Day, that old clay jar is called a pyxis, and how do you know about it?”
“Yeah, right, a pyxis, I know,” he says with a tsk. “Silly name. Anyway, you can thank Uncle Sam. Did you know your taxes paid for my, um, education?”
“Wouldn’t be the first time the government had a thief on the payroll. Congress is full of ’em.”
Day likes my little joke, raises his glass in toast. After downing the whiskey, he says, “It was the US Army that set me up. I was in the Quartermaster Corps during the war, made connections all over Europe, legit as well as black market. I got to know who has what and how to get it for the generals and all the other brass. And when the war was over, I stayed on a little while, kept those connections going. Could be that you and I know some of the same people, Gold.” Day seems to like the idea.
I don’t.
“Anyways,” he says, “the boys over there keep me in the know about what’s movin’ around, know what I mean?” He says it with a conspirator’s smile, like he shares a world with me. I don’t smile back. “Of course, my racket’s not as fancy as yours,” he says, all smooth contrition. “Just a little side business of mine. There’s still shortages of certain stuff in broken old Europe, stuff I can lay my hands on, or find people who can: a case of nylon stockings here, butter and sugar there, maybe some costume jewelry. Y’know, small stuff. But it keeps my ear to the ground, and when one of my guys heard about you moving this pyxis outta Greece, well, I knew I could get your attention, so I grabbed my moment, you might say.”
“Yeah, you might say.” It comes out dull and flat as stale crackers. I promise myself to make it my business to find out who did the talking in Greece, who ratted me out, but that comes later. Right now, I’ve got the annoying Mickey Schwartz Day to deal with. “So it was your guy who jumped me in Piraeus?”
“Sorta. One of my Europe guys owed me a favor, so I borrowed some of his muscle. But it was my local boys who jumped you on Fifth Avenue.” There’s that monkey’s grin again.
“Uh-huh. And how’d you know where I was delivering?”
He gives me that in-the-know sneer again, says, “Loreale’s not the only guy with sources, y’know.”
I don’t like the answer, but I have to live with it for now. But once I get the pyxis back, Mickey Day is going to spill his guts. I’ll see to it. Meantime, all I say is, “Well, your thugs did a sloppy job, leaving a body behind. Did you know your boys killed the doorman?”
“Who cares?” He says it so offhand, and with such a casual shrug, it makes my bones freeze. “Look, Gold, I’ve got your pyxis. Got it where you’ll never find it. So don’t knock yourself out lookin’ for it. But you can get it back real easy if you just set up a meeting with Sig Loreale. That’s all there is to it.”
I finish off my scotch in one gulp, hoping it’ll loosen the knots Day’s got me tangled up in, but all it seems to do is make those knots burn. “You’re wrong, Day. That’s never all there is to it with Loreale.”
Without looking at me, like he’s avoiding me, and looking at his hands instead as if admiring his manicure, he says, “Y’know, I think you’re afraid of the guy, afraid of Sig Loreale.”
“And if you were smart, you would be, too.”
Now he gives me a tough guy shrug, or what he thinks a tough guy shrug should be. On him, it’s just a shift of squishy flesh and bone. “Stop jerkin’ me around,” he says. “What’ll it take to get you to set up a meeting?”
“Give me the pyxis back—now—and we’ll talk about it.”
“Talk now. Pyxis later. After I meet with Loreale.”
“Not good enough, Day.”
“Dammit, Gold! What’ll it take? What’ll it take for you to play ball? I didn’t pay off a bunch of guys in Europe just for you to stonewall me.”
An idea is creeping into my head, an idea I don’t like and don’t trust because I don’t like and don’t trust Mickey Day. But I learned a long time ago not to toss an opportunity out of my lap just because the opportunity has a coating of scum. And this opportunity may be too good to pass up. “There is something you can do for me, Day. You can use those European connections of yours to get me some information. I want to know about a boat. A flesh boat that sailed from Pier 8 on the East River docks in March of ’48. I want to know who owned it, who skippered it, and where it went.”
“March of ’48? That’s—what? Over three and a half years ago! It’s history.”
“That’s the deal, Mickey. You get me information on that boat, I set up a meeting with Sig Loreale. Take it or leave it.”
His pursed lips, tight with his annoyance at being outplayed, look even creepier than his monkey’s grin. “Lemme see what I can do.”
Chapter Five
It’s nearly two a.m. when I’m finally free of Mickey’s sleazy company and back out on the Coney Island streets. I’m tired, it’s been a helluva night, and without my car I’ve got a subway ride of over an hour until I get home.
And then it sneaks up on me: I am home. Back home on the honky-tonk streets that formed me. These streets are different now, and not just because much of Coney is boarded up for the winter. The place is still sassy but a little sad, the way an aging Grande Dame is sad when her fancy clothes are not quite in style, clothes she cherishes that spark memories of youth and high times,
a life now kicked aside by the more up-to-date new girl in her swirling skirts and tight sweaters who’s moved in down the block. As I make my way along Schweickerts Walk, a distant bit of carny music and the buzz and jangle of game machines from an arcade on the boardwalk sound tinny and out of rhythm, a little desperate, like that Grande Dame in her determination to still dress up and have fun.
It annoys me to think that the stupid, gutter-crawling Mickey Day could be right about anything, but maybe he’s right about what’s going on in Coney Island. The idea of Sig Loreale trading muscle for real estate has a freakish feel to it, like putting a heavyweight boxer in a tutu and casting him in Swan Lake. But it wouldn’t be the first time big money changes sides as it changes hands, and not the old kind of big money that had the greasy fingerprints of human greed and desire and corruption all over it, but a new corporate kind that has no fingerprints at all, and no human soul.
Well, Coney’s troubles aren’t my troubles anymore—I’ve got enough problems of my own to worry about—so at Surf Avenue, the dividing line between the amusement area and Coney’s residential quarters, I cross the street on my way to the Stillwell Avenue train station.
But I don’t head for the station. Some long buried instinct suddenly resurrects an equally long forgotten habit and turns me left instead, to West Sixteenth Street. I turn right on Sixteenth, keep walking past shuttered storefronts and car repair places, their owners and families asleep in cramped upstairs apartments smelling of crankcase oil. I cross Mermaid Avenue, keep walking along Sixteenth, past a remembered three-story walk-up apartment house at the corner, past boxy one- and two-story houses and bungalows that are as humble as when I left them, but now with television antennas sprouting like weeds on rooftops, and a few different sort of names on the mailboxes: what once was a neighborhood solid with Goldbergs, Scalisis, Kowalczyks, O’Reillys, even a handful of Smiths and Joneses, is now sprinkled here and there with Garcias and Hernandezes. But it’s only the names that have changed, not the aspirations, the pride to keep the paint from peeling, keep the front stairs swept.
I stop at a small gray flat-fronted house with a well swept stoop of three concrete front stairs painted red. My mother would approve of the cleanliness, but not the red paint. She always insisted on white, making it easy to see if the steps needed scrubbing so my dungarees wouldn’t get dirty when I sat on the stoop.
I’m not wearing dungarees now, and my coat will keep my trousers from getting dirty, so maybe my mother’s spirit won’t mind if I sit on the top step. I stay quiet, don’t even light a cigarette, so the snap of my lighter won’t wake the house’s current inhabitants. I’d rather not go through the hassle of explaining my sentimental journey into trespassing.
It all comes rushing back: the noise of all us neighborhood kids on bicycles, playing stickball, running around, throwing pebbles at the few cars that came by—cheap boxy black Fords, mostly—interrupting our ownership of the street, our mothers and fathers hollering at us in immigrant English to come inside for dinner. The memories are sweet, and I can’t help smiling, but these memories are incomplete. The rest of them are back among Coney’s thrill rides and amusements, where the razzmatazz and the action seduced my young outlaw spirit. Back there is where the shadier amusement hucksters taught me how to be light fingered and shadowy, which helped me in my little racket of lifting trinkets and coins from people’s unattended bags on the beach. I stowed the loot in a strongbox I kept buried under the boardwalk until I took it to the Lower East Side to fence, which was where Mom Sheinbaum grabbed hold of me.
I liked the trinkets. Some were pretty. It took me a while to learn—under Mom’s tutelage—which trinkets could be turned into cash and which weren’t worth my time. But it was their prettiness I liked, especially the ones with pictures enameled or painted on bracelets and necklaces, scenes of old stories or far away landscapes.
I remember one summer afternoon in Mom’s dining room when I was about twelve or thirteen years old. My Coney Island loot was spread out on a velvet cloth on the table while she picked through the stuff and chose the pieces she wanted. I told her I liked the trinkets with pictures; they were prettier and she should pay me more for them. The way she looked at me, you’d think I’d told her I’d found a million dollars. Within seconds we were out the door to Second Avenue and into a cab, a square yellow-and-black box with a long front, whitewall tires, and driven by a guy in a yellow uniform and cap. It was my first time in a cab. My world suddenly got much bigger, got cleaner and classier, neighborhood by passing neighborhood, as we rode uptown. Except for Times Square, none of Manhattan’s midtown streets were as wild as Coney Island, but every crisply colorful awning along Fifth Avenue hinted at the fancy life lived on the other side of those apartment and mansion windows, a high-class life I strained to see. I don’t think I blinked the entire ride to our destination, to the biggest place I ever saw: the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was even bigger than the Thunderbolt roller coaster. Bigger than the grand entrance to Luna Park. It looked like a royal palace to me.
It still does.
Inside, Mom traipsed me all around the place, which I was now absolutely sure was a palace, where lords and ladies in colorful silks and satins and jewels stared out from carved golden frames on the walls. On that day and in that place, I began my love affair with art, and with the money it commands. I made up my mind to learn all I could about both.
My own mom and pop—toiling away in their tiny second-hand bookstall on Mermaid Avenue, and then home, exhausted, in this little claptrap house behind me—never knew any of it, not even on the days they each died, which was just as well. They had a tough enough time tolerating my tomboy activities, at least the ones I let them see, like my insistence on wearing dungarees instead of dresses, or playing stickball with the boys. But the ones I didn’t let them see would sure as hell have made my mother cry, and it would rip me up to hear her cry, the way it’s starting to rip me up now, in my imaginings…
Except it’s not in my imaginings. The sound of a woman crying is in the air. It comes at me from my right, about halfway down the block. I can just barely see her, a dark, bulky shape in the night, leaning against a car at the curb.
The woman’s misery gets me up from my old stoop. Little by little, as I walk along the street, I see more of her, see her bundled up in a heavy coat, her hands to her face and leaning against a battered green ’49 Chevy coupe. By the time I reach her, her crying has choked back to a whimper, the painful kind that claws the throat.
With her hands to her face, she hasn’t seen me, and when I say, “You need any help?” her hands drop and she jolts out of her sobs, terrified. And then the terror dissipates. Her thick face, wet with tears, relaxes. Her eyes crinkle to get a better look at me in the meager light. “Cantor?” she says, her voice raspy with tears, cigarettes, and age. “Cantor Gold?”
I know that voice, and that face, older now, heavier than when I last saw her, when I’d said good-bye to her before I left Coney Island for good. She’d grabbed my arm that day and wouldn’t let me go until she’d given me a tarot reading, a real one—she was a true believer from a family of practitioners stretching back centuries, or so she said—and at no charge, unlike the fortune-telling racket she ran for the marks in her stall near the giant Wonder Wheel ride on Jones Walk.
But what was she doing here on Sixteenth Street instead of in the rooms she shared with her husband above the fortune-telling stall? “Madame Mona?” I say. “Mona Carlotti?” I give her my pocket handkerchief to wipe her tears.
Wiping her eyes and cheeks, she strains to clear her throat of her sobs, then says, “What the hell you doin’ here, Cantor, after all these years? And at this hour? Why you in the neighborhood in the middle of the night?”
“There’s someone I had to speak to. But never mind that. What’s wrong? Why are you out here crying?”
The question brings her sobs back, brings the handkerchief back to her eyes. “It’s Miss Theresa. She’s dying. Sh
e’s in pain. I couldn’t take watchin’ her suffer no more, so I came outside for some air.”
“I don’t remember Miss Theresa. Is she a relative?”
“Miss Theresa’s my dog. She’s old. She don’t hear good no more. She was outside tonight, she loves being outside, but she didn’t hear…she didn’t hear the car coming and didn’t get outta the way.” A miserable moan strangles in Mona’s throat. “Oh, why did I come to live on this hard-hearted street? Didn’t nobody see? Nobody help? Why did I leave Jones Walk? There’s no cars on Jones Walk!” There’s more than sadness in her plea; there’s also bitterness at the loss of times past.
“So why did you leave, Mona?”
Her sigh is so heavy and so long I’m afraid she’ll completely empty herself of breath. “It was time to pack up, Cantor. My husband Vito was gone. Heart attack got him. And new thugs with their hands out tryin’ to get their share of the stalls and games. And then there’s them real estate people snoopin’ around, eyein’ everything like it’s just in their way. Ain’t no fun in it no more. So I got out, I bought this place when old Mrs. Mangione died. You remember Rose Mangione? Her son sold it to me cheap.”
I’m not interested in any more trips down memory lane tonight, so I just say, “New thugs?” though I can’t imagine any new thugs moving in on Loreale, especially if Mickey’s right and Loreale’s cleaning up his rackets with real estate.
Drying more tears, her voice steadier now, Mona says, “You remember Solly Schwartz? Yeah, well, that scum son of his, calls himself Mickey Day, as if that’s some kind of name. He’s been trying to muscle in.”
“I doubt Sig Loreale will let him get away with it.”
“Loreale? The invisible man. Things used to run good when Loreale lived around here. Sure, we paid him plenty. You hadda give him a heavy skim or you suffered for it. But Sig kept things runnin’ good, no trouble from outsiders or cops.”