Little Odessa

by Joseph Koenig

  “Just put the left in front of the right, the left foot in front of the right, and they’ll have enough to see.”

  She hiked her veils around her hips and tiptoed two flights down. Howard ran interference as she dashed into the alley past a disbelieving old man scavenging returnables from a dumpster. They came back inside through the kitchen, where he fed her snips of toasted pita smeared with tabouleh while a skirling clarinet set her swaying like a cobra in an air-conditioned basket.

  The sound thickened under the weight of a Moroccan oud and Kate stepped out between the tables. The musicians, in burgundy fezes and embroidered vests, lowered their instruments as she acknowledged the casual applause. She circled the floor slowly as they started up again, tried her feet in the familiar places. Feeling her body come alive, she rewarded the crowd with a rare smile. Though she wouldn’t admit it, she loved what she was doing, considered the eight weeks with a fat women’s dance class in the basement of the Bensonhurst Y the best investment of her time she’d ever made.

  The volume picked up and the tempo grew frenzied, faster than the psychedelic storm which climaxed her routine at the Starlight. Acidophilus rock for the yogurt set, Howard called it. She shut her eyes, undulating in place, the sweat running freely between her breasts. What she lacked in technique she masked with enthusiasm and the youthful suppleness of her body.

  Beyond the colored lights the house was half full, couples mostly, patriarchal Turks sipping sweet Arab coffee at tables barely large enough to balance a demitasse. The pillows in the window seats were empty. She searched the room, but saw no one with the casual arrogance that would give away Howard’s movie friends.

  The music stopped on a dime and she came to a halt two cents later, arching her arms shakily above her head. The backbone of a round of polite applause was a violent pounding from the kitchen door. The crowd tried again and she held her pose, then exited through the clamor.

  “You saw,” she said, steadying her voice with a hand against her chest. “So what was that crack about not eating enough?”

  Howard tossed his jacket around her shoulders and nudged her out of the draft. “An invitation to join me for dinner. I have another favor to discuss with you,” he explained. “I want you to spend a few nights at my place.”

  Kate accepted a glass of mint tea, trying not to look too annoyed. “I thought we’d covered that.”

  “Did I say I would be there with you?” He dug under her shoulders for a blue-and-white El Al ticket envelope. “I go on vacation next Sunday night,” he said. “Four exciting weeks in eretz Yisroel. I want you to stay with Isaac Grynzpun.”

  “Who’s that?” The annoyance starting to show.

  He replaced the ticket in the jacket, brought the lapels together under her chin. “Don’t worry, you’ll have him eating out of your hand.”

  “Who is he?”

  “My best friend and trusted adviser,” Howard said. Kate pulled a sour face, but before she could say anything he added, “My wolfhound, the great grandson of my companion in the years when the Germans were chasing me all over Russia. Like myself, a survivor. It’s a fine name, don’t you think?”

  “A Russian wolfhound? I didn’t know you like dogs.”

  “Don’t call him that, not if you want to stay his friend.”

  “Why, being a dog’s not good enough for him?”

  “He thinks he’s American,” Howard said and ushered her into the dining room.

  They took seats at the window booth closest to the kitchen. One of the musicians followed carrying menus. “What’s good,” Howard told him. An order, not a question. The man in the fez nodded and went smartly away.

  “You never danced better,” Howard told her.

  “That’s a hell of a compliment.”

  “No, by any standard tonight you were excellent.”

  “The machers, what did they say? I looked everywhere trying to pick them out.”

  “You didn’t look far enough,” he told her. “They’re still in California.”

  She studied the smoked tumbler as if it were a crystal ball. “I thought you told me—”

  “Did I? You must excuse me if I did. Tonight’s audition was for my benefit only. The way you danced, I’ll tell them to come for a look soon as they arrive in town.”

  “When will that be?”

  “Some time after I’m gone. They’ll show up without introducing themselves, and there will be your big opportunity without your even knowing it. You had better be this good every night.”

  “What if they’re here when I’m not dancing?”

  “We can’t let that happen. That’s why I’m leaving you in charge of the Knights as well as of my house. You book the dancers.”

  “What do I know about running a restaurant?” she frowned. “What do I know about dogs?”

  “Who else can I ask, my former partners, those crooks? They stole my profits and sent them to the PLO. You have to do these things for me.”

  “Howard, I can’t.”

  He dropped his voice, quieting her. “The restaurant practically runs itself, so you’ll be taking twice the pay just to dance. Did you hear? The cook will help with the ordering. As for staying in my place, you’re entitled to a little luxury for once in your life. I know the way you live in Brooklyn. Ask me how and I tell you frankly I don’t pay you enough to live better. Am I wrong so far?” Without waiting for an answer he said, “So if you won’t live with me, live with Isaac Grynzpun. And maybe if you get along with him as well as I do, you’ll be there when I come back.”

  “No, Howard, there’s no chance.”

  “It’s up to you. I’ll be gone a month, so indulge yourself, play the big shot. What have you got to lose?”

  “I know what you think will happen …You’re going to be disappointed.”

  “Don’t be so sure of yourself, Ekaterina. You wouldn’t be the first girl seduced by luxury. I live extremely well, you know.”

  “There are more important things than money.”

  “True, but most of them grow old fast, as old as this,” he said, tugging at the loose flesh under his chin, “and sick, while having the bad taste to remain as poor as they ever were.”

  “If that’s what you want to believe—”

  “Tell me about it, tell me about it after.” He shredded the wrapper from a fresh cigar. “Let me offer a deal. Stay at my place a few weeks and if you still feel the same way, don’t be there when I come back. I’ll call from Israel before I leave to give fair warning.”

  “What if I want out?” she asked. “What happens to Isaac?”

  “Don’t be silly, Kate. He’d never let you go.”

  He caught her wrist and slipped the foil band on a finger. She peeled it off and rolled it into a silver ball, flicked it away. If he was disappointed, he didn’t show it. When she sniffed at the thick panatela like she’d never seen one before, he offered a light. She bit off the end on the second try and puffed three times without coughing, exhaled coolly and examined it again, then knocked off the ash and slapped him on the shoulder. “You’re on,” she blurted.

  And was more surprised than he was to hear it.

  The centerpiece of Howard’s West Seventy-sixth Street brownstone was a burnished gingerbread staircase with potted ficus trees and bench seats on each balustraded landing.

  “Real chestnut,” he bragged, rapping his knuckles on the banister as though the heavy thud would erase any doubt. “When I moved in, it was hidden under fourteen separate coats of paint. It took two months to strip down to the original wood, everything hand-carved. The house was built in 1883 for Miss L. Hamilton Wynne.”

  “Who’s that?” Kate asked.

  Howard shrugged. “I’m new here,” he explained.

  What Kate liked best about the place was the ailanthus forest in the backyard which shut out the sounds of traffic, and Isaac Grynzpun, who lay across his master’s bed with one bloodshot eye trained on the TV. She plopped down beside him to scratch his ear a
nd was rebuffed with a discreet growl.

  “He’s not very sociable,” she said. “Or did you forget to feed him?”

  “Shhhh,” Howard said, leading her away. “He’s watching the news. I’ll introduce you when it’s over.”

  They climbed to the third floor where a grand piano was stuffed inside a dark salon like a ship in a cheerless bottle.

  Another shrug from Howard. “Don’t ask me,” he said. “It was here when I moved in.”

  Kate ran her fingers over the keyboard and whisked the greasy dust against the palm of her other hand. A louvered screen intercepted the light entering through a window with a pine sash, and she raised the slats to peer out at a street mirrored in brownstone from Amsterdam to Columbus. Ginkgo trees grown sturdy beneath a sodium-vapor sun came together in a yellow canopy. A green sedan idling at the curb caught her eye, and she glared at a man looking back through field glasses.

  “Howard, do you know you have a spy?”

  “Once I saw a mouse, but this is the first I hear …” He went to the window as the sedan pulled into traffic and rounded the corner. “I don’t see anything.”

  “That car,” she said. “There was a man in front watching through binoculars.”

  “The lady next door is dying. The apartment hunters have been circling like buzzards for weeks.”

  “He was looking here,” Kate said. “I’m sure of it.”

  “Could be he thinks I’m sick, too.”

  The door inched back and Isaac Grynzpun padded inside. He was the biggest dog Kate had seen, with a small head as high as her chest. “Isaac,” Howard said, “this is your new mistress, Kate Piro.”

  The dog looked up intelligently and Kate expected some rare trick. Instead, he sat on her foot and allowed her to stroke his long neck.

  “He weighs a ton,” she said, struggling to free herself. “Does he bite?”

  “Yes. And he chews …Say hello, Isaac.”

  Kate stroked the animal cautiously. After a while she told Howard, “He didn’t say anything. Does he like me?”

  “He likes all women.”

  “What does a Russ—a wolfhound eat?” she asked. “Caviar?”

  “Strangers, if you tell him,” Howard said. “Isaac is the world’s greatest watchdog, more efficient than the burglar alarm that is connected to the Forty-eighth Street station house, by the way. He’ll also eat roast beef—yours, if you’re not careful. I feed him dry dog food and table scraps.”

  “Where do you keep it?”

  “In the kitchen cabinet. Isaac will show you when he’s hungry. There’s plenty of food more to your liking in the freezer, and towels and sheets and so forth in the linen closet outside my bedroom. And … I almost forgot.” From a leather case he removed a key with metal filings clinging to the sharp edges. “I had this made up for you,” he said. “Yesterday.”

  “What about the mailbox?”

  “What mailbox? The postman drops the letters through a slot in the door.”

  “I never thought of that,” she said. “I’ve always lived in apartments.”

  “You’ll get used to this, so quickly the other will seem strange,” Howard said. “I did …Any more questions, you’d better ask now.”

  “Just one. How do I thank you for everything?”

  “That,” he said, “I’m leaving up to you.”

  4

  THE TOWELHEAD WAS A closet fruit; Harry Lema could tell. In the six weeks they had shared a room at the Duffy-Lawes House on West Ninety-sixth Street, Harry had never seen him near the showers, or even change out of his clothes. The towelhead had vile habits, and the room—with its soft pastels and indirect lighting and the furniture that looked like it had been ripped off from a suburban kindergarten—stank to the high heavens. He smoked clove cigarettes. He farted in his sleep. He brushed his teeth once a week and cooked all his own meals on the two-burner hot plate on Harry’s side of the room. Arab stuff. Lamb three times a day, stewed in garlic and paprika and onions, the greasy smoke hanging in the air till Harry’s clothes and hair reeked. The window, like all the windows at Duffy-Lawes, was bolted shut. If Harry smashed it one more time, they would put him back in Great Meadows.

  Harry had been calling the halfway house home for nearly four months now, finishing off concurrent two-year beefs for a string of houseboat burglaries at the Seventy-ninth Street boat basin that had brought him to the city. Had he accepted the terms of early release, he would have been out on the street by May. But he couldn’t be bothered with supervision, the endless tug-of-war with a parole officer, the job interviews and urine testing and all the rest of the crap that was as comforting as mother’s milk to the Institutional Man, which was something Harry Lema was sure he wasn’t, as sure as he was that the towelhead was a fruit.

  Harry pressed the pillowcase against his face, breathing through the thin cotton. Then he pounded the mattress and sat up as the dark little man shoveled more condiments into the bubbling pot. Harry held his breath, trying not to deck the towelhead, not with less than two weeks until his time was up. He reached over the edge of the bunk for The American Turfman and used it to stir the heavy air.

  He had finished an article about a son of Secretariat who was an odds-on favorite to break his famous sire’s speed records when he put down the magazine. The towelhead, whose name was Ali, was standing with his back to the wall, not moving, staring up at him with parted lips.

  “Yeah?” Harry said.

  Ali opened his mouth, showing Harry spotty rows of teeth and primitive dentistry. He raised his arms over his head and brought them down quickly in a flapping motion, like he was trying to lift off for a short flight. Harry turned the page. Crazy fucking towelhead, he was thinking as the little man reached over his own shoulder as though he wanted to pat himself on the back and then resumed waving his arms.

  “Never get off the ground,” Harry said, and read another half-column. When he looked down again the towelhead had stopped flapping, like he was coming in for a landing, and his skin was the same light blue as the walls.

  “The hell’s the matter with you?” Harry glanced into the pot, noticed that the food scarcely had been touched. “You chokin’? That what you’re trying to tell me?”

  Ali pumped his head up and down.

  “That’s what I figured,” Harry said, and went back to his magazine.

  He was reading about a great-great-granddaughter of Nasrullah when the towelhead knocked over the pot and the grease oozed into the rust-colored carpet that made Harry sick to be around it. Ali had turned a darker blue and was sagging against the wall. Harry watched him for a while. He said, “Quit carryin’ on, huh?”

  Harry folded a corner of the page and placed the magazine beside the pillow. He switched off his reading lamp. He slid down from the bunk, avoiding the greasy spot in the carpeting as he got into his slippers and went across the room. The towelhead was flailing wildly again, and the back of his hand caught Harry under the chin.

  “Butt out?” Harry asked. “That what you want?”

  The towelhead flapped faster.

  “Then try and be a little cool about this.”

  Harry stepped behind the shorter man and put a half nelson on him, then slid his hands around the thick waist, picturing the Heimlich maneuver poster on the wall of the Duffy-Lawes kitchen. He tightened his right hand into a fist and used the left to sweep it upward into the towel-head’s gut. “Better?” he asked.

  Ali’s head shook violently.

  Harry dug the fist higher and deeper. “That do the trick?”

  The little man twisted in his grasp. Harry surrounded him with his body and raised him off the floor. “Got it that time, right?”

  Ali made no sound. His arms hung loosely at his sides and his head had stopped moving. Harry shrugged. He spun him around and drove a short punch into his stomach, dropping him to his knees. A pulpy mass struck Harry beneath the eye. As he flicked it away, he saw that it was an undercooked piece of lamb.

  Ali wa
s down on all fours taking deep, mournful breaths. His color was coming back. Harry climbed into the bunk and found his place in The American Turfman.

  “I owe you my life,” Ali blubbered.

  “Keep it under your hat,” Harry said. His wrist had begun to throb, as though he’d sprained it, and he probed the tender joint with his fingers. “In this town, anyway.”

  Ali dragged himself to his feet and looked at Harry with tears running freely down his cheeks. “Anything you want that I have in my power to give to you …” He came close to the bunk and embraced Harry’s ankles.

  Harry squirmed away and pulled his legs after him. “Knock it off,” he said. “I was bein’ neighborly is all.”

  “This is not something I forget. I am in your debt.”

  “Don’t bother. It’s on the house.”

  “No,” Ali insisted. “It is a debt that must be repaid.”

  As the Arab retreated to his side of the room and sat in one of the kindergarten chairs, Harry inched back to the edge of the mattress. “Why?” he asked. “What’re you givin’ away?”

  “One million thanks to you, my friend.”

  “Shove it,” Harry told him.

  “One million and one.”

  Harry put down the magazine. “What’s the one?”

  Ali’s eyes lit up as though Harry had done him a greater favor than before. “It is something you may wish to know about when you are back in circulation.” He swiveled around in his chair. To Harry he looked good as new, better even. “There is a vault, in a house not very far from here. I understand that you are a safecracker …”

  “Something like that.” Harry sat straighter.

  “Inside this vault is never less than fifty thousand dollars, and often more.”

  “Belongs to a dealer, huh?” Harry rubbed his wrist again. “Thanks,” he said. “But no thanks.”