by Al Zuckerman
“The field guys are working at it, you know, to dig out more—nail the thing down.”
“I mean with Izzie, does he know? What’re you doing with him?”
Shmegegge, why couldn’t he have kept his yap shut? “Nothing,” he shrugged, “there’s nothing I can do.”
He watched her eyes widen.
“Honey, the crypto fellows,” he all but pleaded, “are only guessing. This thing came in with a code name. It could maybe stand for Izzie, but it might not.”
“With him”—she spoke the word as if “him” were General MacArthur or the Pope—“you’re talking maybes?”
“You don’t think I feel bad?”
“That man,” she groped for the words, “you have an obligation.”
“No question. But still I can’t call up and just tell him this.”
“You’ve got to.”
Her whisper hit as if it could bite him in two.
“I shouldn’t even be telling you,” he thrashed back. “I could be stuck in jail just for letting out what I already have.”
“He wouldn’t let that happen to you.”
Andrew blinked. He wanted to protest, but she was right.
“Shmendrick,” she hissed, and it was the openness of her contempt that stung him, “in this whole world you’ve got one friend. Don’t you see what a chance this could be?”
“Look, I would like to tell him. If this thing was sure, I would tell him.” He managed not to stammer, to hide the hurt. “But now it’s, well, premature, asking for trouble even. Don’t you see?”
“You know what I see? A job, one that pays money, so we don’t have to do our eating out always in some Howard Johnson’s.”
Edith’s lightning opportunism. Already worked out in her head, a whole deal: inform Izzie, and in the next breath hint Andrew could be—available. For what? To manage, say, one of Izzie’s golf courses, or new motels, or horse-book parlors. Andrew shuddered. God knows he’d had his chance with Hargett, starting way back when Izzie first was supplying Passover wine. Iz had wanted Andy for keeping accounts, quiet work, strictly inside, a hundred a week. Andrew’s mouth had watered. Even then, though, some inner voice had made him say no. But why dredge up ancient history? Now, 1952, Izzie not only was legitimate, but bigger somehow than legitimate. Yet last time in Miami, Andrew remembered his twinge of revulsion at seeing Iz’s bodyguards half-blending into the shrubbery outside the penthouse elevator.
“If the situation were reversed, you think he’d hesitate even a tenth of a second,” Edith pounded on, “before he’d warn you?”
She was right of course. Except, their situations would never be reversed. Who would plot to kill a Deputy Chief of Internal Communications, fourteenth office to the right of the elevator? Who could tell him apart even from a thousand others who daily filed in and out of the Justice Department building?
“So what are you sitting there, the absent-minded professor? Pick up the phone,” she ordered.
Andrew needed peace of mind about breaching security more than Izzie needed warning. He shook his head.
“That man,” she was seething, “in all our years is the only one who’s consistently been … what’s the matter, your nothing job? Who’d those tight-asses promote this year, or last, or the one before? You know a Jew doesn’t go one inch higher than where you are now, unless you get a Congressman to shtup you, and the only way that’d happen also would be from You-know-who!”
She was right there too. Izzie could help probably with a promotion. Andrew smiled inwardly, pleased he’d never thought to bring it up with Hargett. He wouldn’t start now.
CHAPTER 2
Leo Kremish buzzed the secretary. “No calls now, Celia, all right?”
“Yes, Mr. Kremish.”
Dynamic International’s forty-four year old Board Chairman tilted back in his mahogany swivel chair and beamed.
Not too many years before, a refugee, a fifty-dollar-a-week analyst in a brokerage house by day, evenings a teacher in a Minneapolis Hebrew school, poor as the dark, he’d gone prospecting in corporate financial statements and struck gold. He’d theorized that companies with extensive physical assets and huge cash reserves might be acquired—or a controlling interest in them at least—for amounts less than their bank balances alone. And were he to control one such cash-rich company, then the acquiring process could be repeated, and again, proceeding upward toward higher numbers, vaster magnitudes. If somehow he could piece together that one first impossible deal, then with his brains and daring, he could—no ifs, no maybes—grow rich, fantastically rich.
Now he was. In one amazing decade he’d amassed companies with more than a billion in sales—an empire. From his Fifth Avenue eyrie, looking out on Saint Patrick’s, the Empire State and New York’s teeming streets, this silver-haired, slightly chubby conglomerateur, Polish accent notwithstanding, ruled scores of textile mills, hundreds of budget womens’-wear shops, thousands of auto supply stores—to name but a sampling.
In the last five months, though, he himself had become ruled by lust, or love—he wasn’t sure—for an English girl, who now was playing with his ear, stroking it inside, lightly, circling with one finger slowly, then gliding to the rim, going evenly all around, brushing delicately into the tiny half moon below his lobe. He turned his head, took her hand and kissed each fingertip.
Naomi Kremish, emerging from the teak-paneled elevator onto the sixty-first floor, Dynamic International’s reception area, for whose decor she had once spent a year searching after French Renaissance carved commodes; she, First Lady of this enterprise, who, back in 1929 had been the first Jewish girl ever to be chosen Miss Minnesota, was at this moment white with rage. She’d warned Leo, relayed every one of the hints, allusions, veiled innuendoes. He’d shrugged, changed the subject, pooh-poohed. “Stories … bobbe-mysehs … embroideries. … If Hargett were a mad dog, would he have for friends—never mind bankers, Senators—but also painters, rabbis?” And it had made sense, sort of, and she’d been appeased, partially. Now, though—no more.
“Tell Mr. Kremish I’m here,” she spoke coolly, keeping her voice low, “and I’d like to see him.”
“Uh your name please? And do you have an appointment?”
Naomi breathed in sharply, held herself back from snapping at the plastic-haired, prerecorded mouth. Because how was the ninny to know? It had been a while—two years almost since Naomi had entered here into Leo’s sanctum sanctorum.
“I’m his wife, Mrs. Kremish.” And statuesque, her pleated Dior skirt aswirl, she stalked past the dazed receptionist, through the brass-studded double doors.
Her pop’s insurance agency had been the biggest Jewish-owned one in Minneapolis. Naomi, growing up, had had private French lessons, ballet, horse dressage—all that money could buy. But peanuts compared to her greenhorn fiancé’s vaulting ambitions. When Leo first had described his business plans to her father—she remembered Pop’s quiet, his breath taken away, then his slightly mocking smile. Such khutzpah, it implied, marvelous—but impossible. Naomi, though, had known better. And when four years later her husband, still in his twenties, had bought out her dad’s interest, that had been grudgingly invested, Naomi had felt her heart nearly burst with pride in Leo and love for him.
How blind not to have realized his Napoleonic lusts could never confine themselves to business. But after her first hurts, flirtings with the idea of leaving him, she’d begun to regard his sex drive as at one with his financial ardor, and, with time, she’d made peace.
Now she strode up to the sentry-like cluster of desks athwart Leo’s anteroom. His assistants—they couldn’t be called secretaries at their five-figure salaries—a thirtyish brunette and a fortyish dyed redhead, both jumped up to greet Naomi.
“Mrs. Kremish!”
“Hello, Celia.”
“Congratulations.”
“I hear she’s a lovely girl.”
“And a bright one.”
“We’re dying to see what she lo
oks like, and to meet her.”
“But I guess it is always hard”—and now Celia, the older one, seemed to sense Naomi’s mood—“seeing your only son go and marry.”
Over my dead body! she wanted to answer them. But Leo would handle this. He had better. Oh God, please!
“Look, I’m in rather a hurry. Does my husband know I’m here?”
She watched them exchange looks. “The girl out front,” Naomi asked, “called in to you, didn’t she?”
“It’s uh,” the brunette diffidently ventured, “not a good time, Mrs. Kremish.”
“Can I get you a cup of coffee, Mrs. Kremish? He won’t be too much longer, I’m pretty sure.”
Something flashed in Naomi’s head, plunged in her gut too. She understood. Oh my God, did she dare?
“No!” henna-tinted Celia pleaded.
“You can’t go in there.”
Would they stop her?
In a second she’d already whipped shut the door behind her and was staring down at … pale flesh, middle aged flab. And his chippy of the day.
Then she panicked. This brazenness of hers—so totally insane. God, she needed him, more than she’d ever needed anything.
“I had to see you,” she struggled to explain. “I’m sorry if I’ve embarrassed you. But, Leo, it’s—we have no time, not with that engagement to be announced tomorrow.”
“Naomi, go outside. We put our clothes on. Then I talk with you.”
When she came back in, Kremish’s anger burst out. “So? You ashamed? There’s no excuse. None!”
“I’m sorry.” She spoke quietly, from her heart. “I really am.”
The set of his mouth she saw softened.
“All right, what’s this big emergency?”
“I just came from lunch with Melinda Blomberg.”
“I hope it was tasty. Now what about Scott, his engagement?”
At his mention of their son’s name something inside Naomi snapped and she had to struggle to keep from shrieking. “Did I tell you, no, not the Hollywood Beach, not for us. But no. Why listen to a narrow-minded snob like your wife? Well now, genius, you get us out of this one.”
Gasping, she saw him tilt back in his chair. His eyes narrowed. And she sensed something else. He seemed maybe worried for her. Leo was good. He was.
“What are you so upset about?” he gently queried.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured, “I should never have brought up the hotel. I didn’t mean to. You couldn’t have known. Nobody could.”
“Known what, Naomi?”
“About Hargett, that his family would be there—or the truth about that man.”
“You got the truth?”
“Melinda’s father grew up with that—creature.”
“You don’t think I checked up on all that stuff? It’s nothing, tittle-tattle. Zero.”
“You have to meet Melinda.”
“You say her father knows so much. I’ll call him.”
“You think he’d tell you anything? He likes staying alive.”
“Naomi, stop.”
“You don’t know!”
He shook his head slowly. “Wrong. This company pays to me a fortune. Why? Because I know about people. That is my whole genius. And you can trust it. Hargett, I tell you, is not a man—to be afraid of.”
“But I am afraid. I’m petrified. And you have been wrong. And this time I know you are.”
He sighed. “I see two possibilities. Either there is nothing to be afraid of, or there is. If nothing, then nothing to be petrified. But if there is this danger, then such a man, should we risk making him angry?”
Her throat tightened. Leo had a point.
Dynamic’s sixty-first floor abounded with keen minds: lawyers who’d clerked for Supreme Court Justices and now argued cases before them, accountants needle-witted enough to interpret rules for the American Institute of Accountancy, marketing men whose campaigns transformed superfluous concoctions into universal needs. Of all these, the mind to which Leo turned when a problem crept into his heart belonged to a man in his early thirties, Aaron Grodno. Boxed on the Corporation’s organization chart as Public Relations Counselor, this ascetic, his thin face framed with curled sideburn locks (payess) and a lush black beard, whom Leo had met from the back seat of a taxi which Grodno was driving, was a Kabbalist, a votary of Jewish mysticism and magic, a cult widespread in medieval times and whose devotees now were rare. Grodno’s duty was to pursue his own bent, to pray, meditate, study the holy Torah (Five Books of Moses) and the esoteric Kabbalic works, the Book Bahir, Book Yetsirah (Book of Creation), its Commentaries by Eleazar of Worms, Isaac the Blind, Judah Ben Barzilal, and the classic of Spanish Kabbalism, the Zohar (Book of Splendor). Occasionally Kremish would ask to meet with Aaron. The youthful seer’s thoughts, unlike Leo’s, were never concrete, but enigmatical yet somehow soul-sufficing.
Leo entered Reb Grodno’s book-strewn office-study with Naomi’s tormented words replaying in his mind.
The Hargett girl. Leo had tried, half a dozen times, to suggest Scott at least drift from her a little. Useless.
The Kabbalist, in a hooded white linen ephod, a vestment like those worn by the high priests of Solomon’s temple, without asking Leo why he’d come, motioned his tycoon-employer to a chair, and began incanting: “Verily, our Torah, which burned before God in black fire on white fire, is like a proud and beautiful princess hidden inside her palace, but who also, unknown to all others, has a secret lover. He loves her so, he keeps passing by outside, looking endlessly up and down for even a glimpse of her. And she. She knows he’s out there. So what does she do? She opens a secret door, a sliver, shows her face for an instant, but then hides it again. So quickly and skillfully that anyone else would see nothing. Her lover alone sees, and he is now drawn toward her with his heart and soul and his whole being. He knows that she, aflame with love for him, has for that moment revealed herself to him. And so is it with the Torah, who shows her true self only to those who love her.”
The Kabbalist’s sing-song voice resonated with the rhythms of centuries-old tale-telling. The substance seemed to bear no relation to Leo’s dilemma. The elaborate metaphor’s flavor, though, and its intimation of planes of being that were higher, did somehow assuage Leo’s heart. But simply basking in the spiritualist’s aura wasn’t enough. Time was pressing. A decision had to be made; unpleasantness, if necessary, faced up to.
Leo cleared his throat. “It begins with my wife. She’s very afraid.”
Grodno rested a hand on his employer’s. “May He cover thee with His feathers, and under His wings shalt thou trust.”
“NO, no, she. It’s my wife who’s afraid.”
“I hear your words. But also I hear your heart. I think I know of whom you are afraid.”
Leo felt ice water splashed in his face. You, the Reb had said. His gut twinged. Yes, he too was afraid.
“Your son, does he know of this—terror?”
Leo shook his head. “But even if Scott did, to him it would be only foolishness—compared with his girl. She you can touch, love, laugh with.”
The adept put palms to his temples, closed his eyes, and began to rock back and forth in his chair. He murmured inaudibly, then more distinctly, “Fear a black bird … flocks of black birds. … They swoop … sharp beaks … but the wise of heart, they too have wings … higher than the birds. …” The votary’s eyes shone. He nodded once, and said, “This man who makes you secretly tremble, if you look into his heart, what do you see?”
Leo shrugged.
“Then in his eyes, what have you seen there?”
Leo tried to recall. Impressions were so contradictory. Hargett’s green eyes beamed merriment, warmth, and then glints of—ice, total impenetrability. Leo noticed he wasn’t saying this aloud.
Grodno, nonetheless seeming to comprehend, asked, “Did you ever see hunger there?”
“I—don’t know.”
“How beautiful upon the mountains,” the former cab driver mus
ed, “are the feet of them that publisheth peace.”
Peace? Could that be Hargett’s hunger? “So then, you think there’s nothing to be afraid?”
The Kabbalist’s gaunt face crinkled into a faint smile. “If thine enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat.”
Bread? Food? Or did he mean money?
“Yes, exactly. His house sits under a cloud. What if he were to leave his, and come to dwell in yours?”
Leo was stunned. Hargett, to come into Dynamic?
Kremish’s heart ached dully. Could he cast aside his own repugnance? And fear? But then who knew if Hargett would even be interested? From the scant bits Leo had gleaned, the man was a kind of king, absolute, beholden to no one. So now, just like that, he’d affiliate himself underneath Leo Kremish? Such a person might consider just being asked an offense. And were he really to feel slighted. … Leo shuddered.
CHAPTER 3
Izzie looked around at the crowd behind him, rising up row after row after row, and he marveled that inside one stadium there could be such hordes of good-looking people. Creamy-skinned girls, blonds, pert-nosed brunettes, flaxen-haired Scandinavian types, all festive, glowing, happy—with themselves, their escorts, with having been invited to this game. Decked with six-foot-long scarves, waving pennants—they made him rue his age. He observed that the older women here were special too—crows feet, graying hair, but still they’d kept nice shapes, most of them. Bundled in fine wools or furs, lapels brightened with giant chrysanthemums, even they had some glow. And the men in their camel’s hair coats and houndstooth caps, their wives’ and girl friends’ arms locked into theirs, looking so relaxed, easy. Iz envied them. They were not being investigated. A sprinkling did seem a little down, what with Dartmouth ahead by a touchdown; but even if Princeton were to get whomped, they’d still all go on to a hearty dinner, back to a home with a fireplace, a sunny office, strictly legit, regular money, quiet nights, no nightmares.
Forget the bad dreams. They were rare these days. A few of the younger Sicilians worried him; Cuba plainly was deteriorating; and Antipolye always would haunt him; but on the other hand, the Nevada casinos kept having to be expanded, as did the Miami hotels. Today, for a change, he was concentrating on his kids—how Scott and Linda both had managed to become part of these spectators’ gracious world. True, these camel’s hair types did come to play in Iz’s gaming rooms and romp in his hotels, and he often enough was invited to dinners at their homes—his bankers, brokers, underwriters, insurers. Still, he did not kid himself about who he was and where he belonged. But with Scott and Linda—and that was the miracle of America—it already was different.