Little Odessa

by Joseph Koenig

  Ten different ways of laughing in his face came to mind. She selected a silent one. “Why not?” Slurring the words intentionally.

  “Most of these pieces came from a Southampton estate where they’d been assembled over seven decades. I bought the collection at auction and added to it as I saw fit.”

  “That gold clock, that Russian clock,” Kate said. “You bought that.”

  “Gilt bronze,” he corrected her. “And it’s French, by Japy-Fréres, around 1880.”

  She surveyed the room as if she were making an appraisal. “Tell me about everything.”

  He came down the steps and opened a mahogany break-front, removed a cut-glass flagon and two Jacobite air-twist glasses. Kate brought hers into the yellow glow strained through a wall lamp’s parchment shade. She twisted the slender stem in her fingers. “They’re beautiful,” she said. “What are they?”

  “Imitations,” he told her, working out the cork. “The real ones are quite rare and fragile. We don’t want that kind of responsibility.”

  “No, not now,” she agreed. “If I have another drop, you can’t hold me accountable for anything.”

  I won’t.

  Some light spilled across his eyes, betraying an eagerness his voice hadn’t given away. She was in the driver’s seat now, but found it strange and uncomfortable. Well, what did she expect after letting Nathan use her so long as a Band-Aid for his ego? She wondered if she was a hopeless pushover. Nicholas was going to help her find out. He was the best-looking man she’d ever known and possibly he’d learned to kiss. More than that didn’t interest her. If she kept her feet on the floor, she could be in bed with Nathan by four.

  She took the bottle and tilted it toward her glass. She took a sip and then a smaller one and then filled his to the top. “On second thought,” she said, brushing up against him, “I insist you do.”

  9

  TWO THINGS THAT TICKED Nathan off—a girl with a pretty face who let her body go and the same girl who wasn’t ashamed to show it. Worse were the exhibitionists, who flaunted it at a defenseless public. One was onstage now, doing a pathetic breathless hula, ruining his meal. He rubbed his hands along his thighs, confirming the tight fabric of new muscle. If he’d been put in charge for more than one night, the girl would be scraping plates in the kitchen.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the waiter, a Sephardic Jew with gray Harpo Marx hair pouring from a dented fez. He dealt a cold dish off his towel-draped arm and set it in front of Nathan. “The house specialty,” he announced.

  Nathan juggled the flavor on his tongue like a judge at a wine-tasting. “Balyk,” he said. “What do Arabs know from sturgeon?”

  The waiter had trailed at Lindy’s and considered himself a certified Broadway character. “Not so loud,” he winked. “They think it’s gefilte fish.”

  Nathan yawned and looked at his watch. Five hours till closing and he was starting on his second supper. If he didn’t push the table away, a week in the Nautilus room would be shot to hell. He’d nosh a little, then go upstairs and stretch out in one of the reclining chairs that seemed to be everywhere. You had to hand it to Kate—the staff was drilled so well, he’d never be missed.

  He went to the office. He lay back in a gray Barcalounger and shut his eyes, but already was getting hungry again. He called the kitchen to tell the cook to put together a doggie bag and to close without him. The restaurant business was definitely not all it was cracked up to be, not for him. Kate would understand.

  In the smudged moonlight of a night threatening rain, Seventy-sixth Street glowed with Victorian charm. A police car rolled by, the officers eyeing Nathan until he fished the key from a pocket and measured it against his palm. He paused outside the brownstone and took another look around. He loved it here, far from drab, utilitarian Brighton Beach—the beginner’s America. It occurred to him that if the house were his, he and Kate would have been married years ago. Married and no doubt divorced.

  As he went up the stoop he saw light seeping from the door. What was Kate doing back so early? The way she’d taken off, he would have laid odds she was seeing another man. He’d surprise her—and she’d help him do a J and polish off the food and then he’d find something silly to fight about so they could play kiss and make up, jump in bed and maybe not get to sleep before dawn. He nudged open the door and went in as quietly as he could.

  The light was on in the anteroom and a stocky man in a twill jacket crouched on the steps with his back to the door. Some kind of repairman, Nathan decided. His smile melted into lopsided disappointment. He put down his bag and watched the man rip into the staircase. Then he cleared his throat. Stanley Bucyk stood up and whirled around.

  “Short circuit?” Nathan asked.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  A forty-dollar-an-hour union stiff with a monkey wrench up his ass. Nathan knew the type. Once he’d helped his uncle renovate a Sea Gate bungalow and the nonunion guys were almost civil as a rule, even when you had to call them back on the job to try and get it right. “I live here,” Nathan said. “Miss Shapiro upstairs?”

  Bucyk didn’t know what to say. His hand went inside his jacket for his shield, but he didn’t have a shield. He felt for the .357 Magnum he’d taken off an East Fifties pimp. “This answer the question?”

  The burglar! Nathan’s chest began hammering, but he felt strangely in control of himself. He could see why Kate was so freaked out. This was a real thug, hard and vicious. Not real bright-looking either. Kate would have been smart kissing the dog good-bye.

  Nathan nodded.

  “Sit down on the bottom step.” As Nathan shuffled his feet in a compact circle, Bucyk called down, “I changed my mind. I want you here where I can see you, on the landing.”

  Nathan walked slowly up the stairs. The man with the gun was close enough to smell. Nathan saw a dark semicircle under the outstretched arm. His own shirt was sticking to his skin.

  Where the middle steps should have been, the runner was rolled up and the wood removed. Nathan stared into an open vault lined with packages wrapped in paper. Two steps above, piled beside a valise, were some torn envelopes and stacks of currency held together by bank wrappers—fifties and hundreds.

  “You can put your eyes back in your head,” Bucyk sneered.

  Nathan leaped over the missing stairs and kept on going. When he got to the landing, Bucyk motioned him onto a bench seat. It wobbled beneath him as he perched on the edge looking down at the gun and the man holding it.

  “Now lean back and stay like that,” Bucyk ordered. “You feel a twitch coming on, you tell me in advance. Got it?”

  Nathan raised his hand like a first-grader asking for permission to leave the room. He scrunched up his nose.

  Bucyk angled the heavy gun upward. “Your funeral,” he shrugged.

  Nathan stopped clowning and sat rigidly with his hands on his knees. It was one thing to show he wasn’t scared, another to get his head blown off. But he was scared. He could feel his bladder contracting. “It won’t happen again,” he said.

  Bucyk stuffed the gun inside his pants. He tore the wrapper from one of the paper bundles and examined an object that reminded him of an immense tube from an old television. “Know what this is?”

  Nathan’s thighs, still sore from his afternoon workout, were cramping with nervous tension. He shifted his weight and didn’t answer.

  “Me neither,” Bucyk said. “But it’s a cinch it’s worth something to somebody.” He scooped out the rest and put them into the valise with the money.

  Then he reached blindly into the vault and came out with a package held together in the color comics from the Sunday Newsday. He peeled the newsprint away from two small mounds of white powder wrapped separately in clear plastic. Nathan saw them, too, and began sweating again.

  “Know what this is?” Bucyk said.

  “Rat poison.”

  “Yeah, right.” Bucyk hugged the package against his chest as he made room inside the va
lise. He got down on his knees and swept his hand around the vault. “What else we got in here?”

  “Rats,” Nathan said.

  Bucyk lurched away involuntarily. “Funny,” he said, making clear that was the last thing he thought it was.

  One kick, Nathan was thinking, one good kick in the ass and the fucker wouldn’t walk for a week. “Why don’t you stick your head in and make sure you’re not missing anything,” he said, wishing right away that for once he hadn’t opened his big mouth.

  Bucyk reached in up to the shoulder, but came out empty. He zipped the valise and tested the weight in his left hand, shifting it to the other when he barely could lift it. “What’d you say?”

  Nathan dried his palms on his sore thighs. “Nothing.”

  “You said something,” Bucyk insisted. He dropped the bag and yanked the gun from his pants. “What was it?”

  The aching in his legs was becoming more than Nathan could stand. He raked the knotted muscles with his fingers, but got no relief. “I said, ‘Go in for a look.’”

  “You bet you did.” Bucyk couldn’t have looked more pleased. “You first.”

  Nathan froze.

  “I’m not leaving you here to call the cops,” Bucyk said, “so either I shoot you in the knee and cut the phone wires, or you get in the hole and I nail you in. It’s up to you.” He waved the gun for emphasis. “Me, I have my own idea on this. But I don’t vote.”

  Nathan said, “I think I have claustrophobia.”

  “Your choice.” Bucyk leveled the revolver at Nathan’s leg.

  “On the other hand, it’s a problem I have to face up to sooner or later.”

  Nathan’s thighs were on fire. He stamped his feet and leaned forward and the bench seat tilted beneath him. Bucyk, grappling with the valise as he backed down the stairs, was too busy to notice.

  “You’ll go in the hole, then,” Bucyk said. “Make enough noise when your girlfriend comes home and she’ll hear.” He lowered the bag two steps, then paused. “Catch her in a good mood, she might let you out.”

  “She told you about me?” Nathan asked. “The last time?”

  Bucyk spit in his hand and adjusted his grip. “What last time?”

  Nathan’s legs were killing him. He stood up shakily and the bench fell apart. He held onto the seat and then brought it up to his chest and charged down the stairs behind it. Bucyk let go of the valise, fumbling for his gun. Nathan was leaping over the missing steps when a bullet splintered the mahogany shield and entered his left side. It caromed around his rib cage like a pinball, nicking the aorta. His heart already had stopped beating when both men crashed headlong down the stairs and Bucyk was pinned underneath the wooden slab.

  When the pain began to subside, Bucyk was tracing the outline of a welt that was spreading across his forehead. His hand came away damp and gummy and he tasted blood on his fingertips. He tightened his stomach muscles, drawing strength into the center of his body, directed it toward his shoulders and pushed against the dark wood. The mahogany pressed down just as hard.

  He opened his eyes then. He was sprawled on his back with his head on the floor, dizzy from the impact and the rush of events. His torso was full of a throbbing which radiated from his lower spine where the edge of a step cut across it. As he inched out from under the wood, wetness dribbled in his eyes. He followed its source with his hand, wanting to gag as he explored a warm face slippery with blood.

  Nathan lay face down on the bench seat, crimson bubbling from both nostrils. Bucyk pushed the bloody face aside as he slithered out from under. The slab skidded down the stairs toppling Nathan onto his side.

  Bucyk snatched up the revolver, keeping an eye on Nathan as though he might have to use it again. “Happy now, hero?” he said. He adjusted a small holster under his arm and threaded the barrel inside. “Get what you want?”

  His nose hurt. He touched the tip and maneuvered it from side to side, and the pain traveled across both cheeks and came together again in the back of his head. The room began wobbling, then picked up speed, and he squatted down beside Nathan, searched the filmy eyes for a flicker of life.

  “You had to be a fucking hero,” he said. “Had to screw things up.” He slapped the vacant face and examined his bloody palm, “Think I give a shit about you? Fuck you, what you did to me. I’m talking twenty-five to life, hero, anybody connects me to this.”

  He went looking for a bathroom to wash off the blood, tugging at his nose, pretty sure that it was broken. The medicine-cabinet mirror showed the bridge listing slightly to the left. But he wasn’t positive it hadn’t been that way before. Thirty-four years he’d been living with that face, and now he couldn’t say where the pieces went. He heard a slapping sound behind him and pulled out the gun again, ran through the house till he spotted Venetian blinds fluttering against an open window and ripped them down.

  He went back to the anteroom and set the valise upright. But when he tried lifting it, he couldn’t get it off the floor using two hands. He shut off the light and stepped outside, tilting his face toward misting rain. Then he dragged out the valise and kicked it off the stoop. He ran to the corner and came back in a cab, brought the valise around the block where his van was parked, leaving ten dollars for a ninety-second ride.

  If she didn’t quit laughing, Nathan was going to have a lot of questions. And if Nathan started digging the way only he could, he’d have the whole story out of her before she could come up with a safe one. She pinched her lips together, trying on a serious expression, but had to give it up when she remembered Nicholas’s dumb astonishment as she told him she was going home. Nathan would get a kick out of that. Only, how do you tell your boyfriend about a narrow escape from another man’s bed? She touched the knob and the door swung open. Christ, the older Nathan got, the more irresponsible he became. She was praying that someone had reminded him to lock up at the Knights. It was too much to hope he had pulled the steel gate across the storefront like she’d told him.

  She paused on the doorstep. In the feeble light from the street she made out a shadowy form on the stairs, and she ran to Nathan and put a hand on his shoulder and he fell onto his back. A red-black mass of gore had congealed under his nose. She saw another on his shirt. Then her whole world went red and black and hazy. She felt moisture welling in her eyes and fought it as she had fought her laughter a moment ago. Dropping to her knees, she pressed her lips against Nathan’s forehead. The skin was cool and clammy, and as she pulled away she noticed that it was gray.

  “Nathan, say something.” Then she began sobbing. “Please, Nathan …” Offering him the chance to prove this was just another of his jokes. “Please, no.”

  She ran to the kitchen, turning on all the lights. She called 911 and slammed the receiver before anyone asked what the hurry was for a dead man. She dialed Bucyk’s number from memory. Above a smoky cocktail piano somebody was doing a godawful Bogart.

  “This is Marlowe,” he lisped. “My buddy Stan …”

  Kate said, “Shit.”

  “… is out right now, but if you leave your name and number, I’ll see he …”

  As she waited for the tone, a man doing a credible Bucyk said, “Yeah?” The voice was dull and thick, as though he was coming down with a cold.

  “Detective?” she said over him.

  “How’d you like the Bogie?” He knew better than to let her answer. “I was getting ready to turn in, but …How’d it go?”

  She didn’t hear him. “My boyfriend … he’s been shot, I think. He isn’t breathing.”

  “What’s this?” Wondering if he sounded surprised enough, deciding she wouldn’t notice either way.

  “He was here again—”

  “Who was? You’re getting ahead of yourself.”

  “The stairs, they’re all torn apart. The burglar—” She broke down. Bucyk listened for a while and then put the receiver quietly on a table and went into the kitchen for his cigarettes. The apartment, three rooms in a middle-income project in the
West Nineties where police and firemen jumped the waiting list, had been his for six years and still he had no ashtrays. He went through two bags of garbage for a jar lid and when he came back he heard her sniffling, trying to gasp out the words. She blew her nose and began sobbing again.

  “Cry if you want,” he said. “We’re gonna get you through this in fine shape.” He lit up and took a long drag and forced the smoke out quickly. “Feel better now? You sure he’s dead?”

  Her sobs were coming more softly, spaced farther apart. “I’m no doctor … Oh, what’s the use of wishing? Yes.”

  “You called the police?”

  “No, I thought you should know first.”

  “That was smart,” he told her. “I’ll pull some strings to, you know, smooth the way.”

  “You’ll be here when they come?”

  “I’d like to,” he said, “but we can’t drag the Bureau into a murder. I’ll tip Infante to what happened and he’ll put in a call for a meat—for an ambulance and homicide detectives.”

  “Please hurry. I’m so nervous.”

  “There’s something I got to tell you first,” he said. “The dicks are gonna have a prime suspect before they even get there and it isn’t gonna be the guy who stole your dog. It’s gonna be you.”

  “Me?” She screamed it. A little hysterical. “Why me?”

  “Because you’ve been living with the deceased. It’s how they teach it at the academy. Come down hard on the spouse, on the girlfriend. Usually pays off, too.”

  “But all they have to do is look at me and they’ll know I could never—”

  “Be nice if it worked that way,” he told her. “But these are parochial-school boys, a lot of them, and they got a complex about gals like you giving it away while they were doing push-ups with only the gym floor underneath. Their whole life they’re looking to catch up. They find out you didn’t show at the club tonight, they run your name through records and see where you’ve been collared, they finally got a chance to do some serious screwing.”

  “But that arrest was nothing. You told me so yourself.”