Little Odessa

by Joseph Koenig

  “Five minutes,” Harry said. “No, better make it ten.”

  He slipped in through the service entrance to observe waiters divvying up tips with busboys in soiled linen jackets. A weary-eyed man tenderly piecing together a clarinet directed him to the office. He stood at the door watching Kate hunched over a checkbook, and then coughed softly into his fist.

  As if it were a great effort, she looked his way. “Oh no,” she said.

  “So this is hell.”

  She ran to the door and shut it behind him. “What are you doing here? You said you wouldn’t bother me.”

  “Something came up. I—”

  “A deal is a deal. Those are your own words.”

  He sat in one of the gray Barcaloungers, played with it rocking back and forth.

  “Not so hard,” she said sternly.

  He stopped with his body parallel to the floor and raised himself with difficulty, then fell back.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Some of my ribs, they feel like they’re busted.”

  “Then you should go to a hospital, not come—”

  “I figured you’d want to know.”

  “I’m sorry you had an accident, but—”

  “It was no accident.” He came forward painfully until he was nearly upright. “I had new equipment on order at the radio shop,” he said, “and I went down to pick it up. I never should of took the chance. Some gorilla followed me home and jumped all over me. He would of shot me, I think, except I got lucky and took his guns away.”

  “Did you … did you use them on him?”

  “The idea crossed my mind,” Harry said. “But what’s the use? There’s always more where guys like that come from.”

  “Was it Stan Bucyk?”

  “I didn’t get the name. He was my height, about forty pounds heavier, with a gut.”

  “That’s him, that’s Bucyk.” Kate glanced at the door and then went to the Barcalounger. She tilted Harry all the way back, tugged the shirt out of his pants and pulled up his T-shirt. “My God,” she said, and looked away. “Your ribs are practically coming through the skin. What are you going to do?”

  “What you’re goin’ to do is wrap ’em for me. You got any surgical tape around here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Take a look in your first-aid kid, you keep one,” he said. “You don’t see any, send someone to a drugstore for a couple rolls.”

  Kate vetoed the idea with a toss of her head and blew the hair out of her eyes. “You should go to a doctor. I don’t know the first thing about this.”

  “It’s like breakin’ inside houses. What you don’t know, I’ll teach you …You got to,” he said. “I can’t stand the pain much longer.”

  She went through the closet and desk, finding a metal case with a red cross on a khaki field in the bottom drawer. She looted it of iodine and Mercurochrome and aspirin, Band-Aids and gauze before Harry said, “There, that’s one.”

  Kate balanced a roll of tape on the Barcalounger’s armrest. “I don’t see another,” she said.

  “One’ll have to do.”

  She pulled off his shirt and then went to the door and locked it. Harry sat on the edge of the Barcalounger and looked down at a greenish swelling below his armpit. “Wrap it tight as you can. Try and squeeze the ribs back in place.”

  Kate unrolled eight inches, then stopped with the tape between her hands.

  “What are you waitin’ for?”

  “I’m looking for a good place to start,” she said. “You have a hairy chest … very nice. It’s going to hurt a lot when this has to come off.”

  “I’ll worry about it later,” he said, and slapped the tape against his pectorals himself.

  Then he bent forward and Kate pulled the tape around him. “Is it tight enough?” she asked.

  Harry didn’t answer. Kate looked up and saw tears in his eyes. “Keep goin’,” he gasped.

  Kate wove the white strip around his chest five times before the roll was used up and she stepped back to examine her work. “How do you feel?” she asked.

  “I can hardly breathe.”

  She helped him on with his shirt. “Go home and take some Tylenol and stay in bed for a few days. You’ll feel—”

  He cut her off. “I left you-know-who there. Home’s the last place I want to be.”

  “Then where will you—?”

  “I was hopin’ you might have a place,” he said, and quickly put a finger across her lips. “You might want the company. I should mention they know I’m the guy that broke into your house, and they gotta be thinkin’ it’s one for Believe It or Not, the next place I turn up is theirs.”

  “You’re just trying to frighten me,” Kate said, worry starting to show in a fluttering around her mouth. “They’d never harm me.”

  “Tell it to your boyfriend.”

  She looked at him for a long time, so still that he thought she was holding her breath. Then she said, “What do I do now?”

  “Maybe you don’t do anything. Maybe they get arrested for something else and your troubles are over. Or they catch up with you and your troubles are over anyway.”

  “I’m sorry I tried to send you away.”

  “Maybe they get hit by a truck.”

  Under her breath Kate said, “I wish.”

  “Maybe I’m drivin’ it.”

  “I … I’m starting to see things your way,” she said. “In the meantime, until we get a truck …?”

  “You hide,” Harry said. “With me.”

  Kate started to say something, then caught herself. “At the brownstone? That’s the first place they’d look.”

  “No,” Harry said. “This is. So it wouldn’t be a bad idea, we came up with someplace fast. You still have the nine K? We could get pretty far on that.”

  “Most of it,” she said. “I had to use some to fix up the house. But I’m not touching a penny of the rest. If, by some miracle, I come out of this alive, I’m going to need that money. Without it, I might as well go looking for them.”

  “I’ve still got some of my end, but not enough to travel on. You’d be surprised how quick money goes.”

  “No, I wouldn’t.” She returned the first-aid kit to the desk. Mostly to herself she said, “There’s always Nathan’s.”

  “I’m tryin’ to avoid where Nathan is.”

  “Before he came to live with me, Nathan took an apartment on Seabreeze Avenue. He gave me the key. It might be all right, for a short time anyway. Nathan said it had two bedrooms.”

  Harry extricated himself from the Barcalounger. “They kill us there,” he said, “people’ll know we died pure. It’s a relief.”

  14

  THE NEW BRIGHTON HOUSE was a five-story walk-up with terra-cotta minarets over blunted cornices, a water tank hidden inside a decaying onion dome, ALHAMBRA ARMS chipped and flaking above the pilastered entrance. A professional apartment on the first floor was given over to the office of S. Ivanov, acupuncturist and naturopath. A kosher deli shared a storefront with headquarters of the Coney Island Spartacist League.

  “Here’s home,” Kate said.

  Harry guided the Cutlass to the curb, reluctant to cut the engine.

  “I know it doesn’t look like much from the outside,” she said, anticipating his reaction, “but Nathan said the apartment was nice.”

  “This is great. Just great.”

  Kate prepared a frown. But when she looked at Harry she saw a smile that appeared sincere.

  “What we’re lookin’ for,” he gloated. “Nobody’ll notice us here.”

  He parked in front of a candy store and Kate slid out with a bag of coins in each fist. “Apartment 4B,” she said. “The key is in my pocket. Will you … can I trust you to put your hand in there?”

  The lobby was smoked marble, a massive oak table under a frayed tapestry a monument to forgotten elegance. The air was acrid with the onion and garlic of immigrant cooking. Beside a bank of mailboxes that had been kicked
in by pilferers they found stairs and began climbing. With an eye on Kate’s, Harry brought up the rear.

  “We stay long enough, I ought to be back in shape,” he said, approaching the third floor. “The legs.”

  They trudged up another flight and paused on the landing, breathing hard. They heard the thud of an object striking a wall and then a man shouting over a woman’s tremulous wail and children crying. A door left ajar muffled the sizzle of frying food while letting out its odor. They walked along a scrubbed corridor to an alcove and Harry poked the key at Apartment 4B and pushed inside a living room furnished with a lumpy sofa, some easy chairs and little else.

  “He had great taste, Nathan,” Harry said. “Who was his decorator, the Salvation Army?”

  Kate dropped the bag of coins on the sofa. “These are my things,” she said. “I let him have them.”

  Harry went quickly to a window, snapped Venetian blinds into shape and hoisted them up. Beyond a lot in the pastel of crumbled brick the sky was watery blue above the harder, unforgiving blue of the Atlantic, and all around, taking strength from the gathering dusk, Coney Island’s lunatic glow. “Better’n TV,” he said.

  He let go of the cord and the blinds clattered to the sill, raising a puff of black dust and paint chips. “Hey,” he said, “what’s the matter with you?”

  Kate was curled up on the couch with her knees under her chin, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I don’t know,” she sobbed.

  “You gotta have some idea.”

  She dabbed at her eyes with a sleeve. “Nathan … he wanted to live here with me so badly.” She got up and began hunting for a tissue. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be.”

  He followed her inside a bedroom built around a double mattress on a plywood board that was propped up like an altar with a cinderblock at each corner. A lamp with a torn shade balanced on a stack of college texts, an annotated Moby Dick and surveys of American literature, against a wall. Along another was an old Webcor hi-fi and an orange crate stuffed with LPs in worn jackets.

  “These are my books,” Kate said. “My phonograph, too. So this must be where I sleep.” She brushed past him toward a room so narrow that Harry was sure he could touch both walls. On the floor a dead strip of foam under a sleeping bag curled against the molding. “And this is yours.”

  “I had a feelin’ you were gonna say that.”

  They backed out to explore a kitchen that was a carbon copy of the one Harry had in Inwood except for a toaster oven and a radio on the counter. Then they returned to the living room and Kate settled into her place on the sofa.

  “It’s not late,” Harry said. “Let’s check out the neighborhood. It might be hard to believe, but I’ve never seen Coney Island.”

  Kate shook her head. “Let’s stay here.”

  “I’ve had worse offers.” He dropped beside her on the sofa, expecting her to cringe. When she didn’t budge, he said, “You’re that scared, huh?”

  “Ever since we went to Queens I knew something would—”

  “It makes you feel better, I’m scared, too.”

  Kate looked at him with eyes that were edged in black. “Please don’t say that.”

  “So,” Harry said, “what do you want to talk about? We got a lot of time to kill together.”

  “Don’t say that either.”

  Harry drummed his fingers against his cast. “You’re so uptight, you ought to eat. Get some food in you, you’ll feel more like yourself.”

  “Damn it,” Kate said, “I’m sick and tired of hearing that from everybody.”

  “Did I ever—?”

  “I am hungry,” she said. “But I don’t want to leave the apartment. There’s a Chinese take-out place on Neptune Avenue.” She got up from the sofa, looked behind it, bent down and picked up a phone. “What do you want?”

  “You decide,” Harry said. “You’re buyin’, unless the delivery boy carries change for a hundred, or takes gold coins.”

  Harry squeezed a finger under the cardboard flap and a green blob squirted up to his wrist. Licking it, he said, “I can’t do this with one hand. You mind?”

  Kate brought the chow mein to her side of the floor and peeled back the flap. “You’d starve without me.”

  “Probably get shot with you,” he said. “But you don’t hear me bellyachin’.”

  “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever had to say about me.” She spooned half the pint onto a paper plate and passed it to him, reached for another container to inhale the warm pungent smell of pineapple chicken.

  “I’d beat it out of town,” Harry was saying, “I could move without my insides snaggin’ on my ribs.” He speared a piece of chicken, brought it to his lips, blew on it and pulled it away without tasting it. “But I can’t. And you’re probably like every other New Yorker, think you’ll die from fresh-air poisoning, you have to cross the river. So as long as we’re stuck here, let’s don’t just wait for your friends to find us.”

  “What can we do to them?” Kate asked. “They’re criminals.”

  “So’m I,” Harry said. “They’re killers, which is something else altogether. I’m not sure I’m ready to compete on that level. Up to now, bein’ a burglar’s been good enough for me.”

  “Why?” Kate asked.

  “Why don’t I shoot ’em?”

  “No, why are you a burglar?”

  “My mother made me one,” he said, tearing open a cellophane packet of soy sauce with his teeth.

  “You come from a broken home?”

  “What …? No,” he said. “That’s supposed to be a joke, though usually you save it for shrinks and probation officers. My folks have a dry-cleaning store in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, a cleansers they call it up there. Couldn’t be tighter. My mother … it wasn’t for her, I probably would be shootin’ people, or gettin’ shot at by them, or be dead several times over. The reason I’m a burglar is I like it, I like the hours and makin’ okay dough for a minimum of work that I find stimulating and is always a challenge. Plus, it also gives me the chance to meet people and make new friends.”

  Kate said, “We’re running for our lives. Can’t you be serious about this, at least?”

  “I am. I’d like some white rice, it’s not too much trouble.”

  Kate opened a small container and pushed it at him. As he dug a spoon inside, she said, “You expect me to believe that you break into people’s houses because you enjoy doing it?”

  “For the most part, it’s not a bad life, though sometimes it gets kind of lonely. Dangerous, too, but so’s ridin’ on the subways. I hardly do that, take the train, so in the long run everything balances out.”

  “Have you ever been in jail?”

  “Uh-huh,” Harry said, prying a ball of rice out of the cardboard and watching it break apart on the edge of his plate. “Where do you think I learned to be a burglar?”

  “I didn’t realize it was something you had to be taught.”

  Harry put down his spoon. He scraped some rice off the floor and dropped it in an empty container. “It’s not … you shouldn’t try and pick it up on your own. There’s rules you have to follow.”

  “What were you locked up for?” Kate asked. “The first time, I mean.”

  “Dope. I have … I had a problem with that since I was a kid.”

  “Were you a heroin addict?”

  “Later I was,” Harry said. “You could say I had a sweet tooth for cocaine, too, for anything you could snort, shoot, pop or smoke. I lost a few years like that.”

  “You don’t seem like a drug addict. You have a very hearty appetite.”

  “I don’t do dope any more,” he said, “except for grass every now and then. And coke’ll always be a temptation, though I have it under control now. You do coke?”

  Kate shook her head.

  Harry raised his eyebrows, eyeing her as though he were staring over the top of reading glasses. Then he said, “It’s evil shit. I started foolin’ with it my senior year in high schoo
l, thought I was goin’ to be a heavy-duty dealer. I had a wrestling scholarship to URI, and while I was waitin’ for wrestling camp to begin me and a buddy scraped together four thousand bucks, don’t ask how, and flew down to Peru to score kilos. Couple of real jerks we were. Eighteen years old and never been out of New England, didn’t know two words of Spanish, or who the CENTAC agents were down there.”

  “What’s that?” Kate asked.

  “It stands for Central Tactical Unit, and what it was, it doesn’t exist any more, was American narcs stationed overseas. Anyway, we were gone two, three days, and when we got off the plane in New York, customs took one look at our passports, saw the only travelin’ we’d ever done was an overnighter to Lima fuckin’ Peru, their eyes lit up like they hit the pick-six at Aqueduct. The coke was hid in a false-bottom suitcase we’d had made up by some ten-time loser in Providence. It took ’em all of ninety seconds to find it. Turned out the coke was fresh from a CENTAC evidence locker, we’d gone all the way to Peru to buy dope from a narc. Well, forget about the wrestling scholarship. Probably saved my life, I was losin’ so much weight from doin’ dope. Forget about URI, too. I ended up in the federal penitentiary in Danbury, Connecticut, which is not a terrible place to be I found out later. It had a nice element, couple mayors from Newark, New Jersey, a U.S. senator, shitloads of dealers. There were a couple of college professors, forgers, who ran the hobby shop and wanted to teach me engraving. But as it turned out, I don’t have any aptitude for that. I had pulled a zip-six, got out in three years, and eighteen months later I was in the ACI, the Adult Correctional Institution in Cranston, medium security. That’s where I learned how to do B&Es, so I could get in trouble without havin’ to go all the way to South America.”

  “God, you were dumb,” Kate said. “No wonder you landed in jail.”

  “Naive,” Harry said. “I was eighteen years old and didn’t know better than to think you could become a major importer just like that. Like I said, I’d never been out of Rhode Island, which is excuse enough for plenty of things, I was lookin’ for one. The second time I got locked up, another time after that, I was strung out. That’s no excuse either. Now I don’t mess with drugs any more, and everything’s cool.”