The Head of the House

by Al Zuckerman

  Ernie’s daughter Melinda, next to her father, looked dangerous. Not talking or eating or drinking, her eyes always on the move, darting everywhere. Her slightly craned-forward head made her look like a carnivorous bird, a hawk sizing up a pack of rabbits. People nodded to her, but passed on without stopping.

  Rhea Meiselman, Iz’s gray-haired younger sister, sipping an apricot-flavored Manhattan, felt happy for Linda whom Rhea always had liked and pitied; and Rhea felt glad for Izzie too. Linda’s getting herself settled with a nice boy from a respectable family, what a joy and a relief that had to be for her brother.

  Yet Rhea also was ill at ease. Though everyone was neatly dressed, hair combed, smiling, Rhea knew that of these men munching cocktail frankfurters, more than one had to have committed or engineered murders, not to mention lesser cruelties. Her brother Rhea accepted and adored. But now when he was surrounded by hoodlums masquerading as decent people, her dear Izzie too seemed repulsive to her.

  Rhea turned to her husband Jacob, who seemed to be enjoying himself chatting with Dukey Maffetore. She shuddered. To the unknowing, Mr. M. ran a large trucking company; but Rhea years ago had gleaned bits about Pirone’s implacable enforcer, The Duke. Yet she forced herself to stay calm. Sorting out bad from good, she’d learned, was not a simple thing. Her Jacob was the best man for the job, but it had been Izzie’s influence that had propelled him into the presidency at Solomon University; and it was Izzie too, behind the scenes, who saw to it that there was money for one of America’s few Jewish-sponsored universities—to build dormitories, libraries, and to pay the philosophers, physicists, and other searchers after the Truth. Money, and the good it could do, she’d come to realize, was often tainted. Even Harvard, those stately white bell towers on the Charles, the distillation of America’s finest minds, founded by old Boston fortunes—and hadn’t those largely been squeezed from the flesh of African slaves?

  She downed her drink, and another.

  Nervously patting her hair down, though she’d just been in the ladies room fluffing it up, Linda trod across the McCarter’s lobby, her shoes clacking much too loudly. People were bound to be wondering where she’d been. What if someone actually put the question to her, what would she say?

  She thought she recognized someone emerging from the half light in the corridor at the far end. It was, yes, her Zaydeh! Pop’s tiny pop, who’d snuck secret dollars into her little fist as far back as she could remember.

  “Zaydeh!” she almost squealed.

  “Sweetheart Lindeleh.”

  She bent and kissed him. So short and growing shorter. Foul tobacco breath—those Fatimas. Mustache so bristly it hurt. Her heart, though, was overflowing. The Zaydeh was a Sabbath observer, orthodox, never went anywhere on a Saturday. Yet he was here.

  “I’m so glad. I—I,” she stammered, “wasn’t expecting you.”

  “If you had expected, a pach in tukhus, a good spanking’s what you’d deserve.”

  He was the world’s worst tease. Grinning, she asked, “Did you just get here?”

  “Ai yai yai, you should be ashamed.”

  “You mean—you stayed over?”

  He nodded.

  “You’re swell, you know that?”

  “Never mind the fancy compliments. Smart girl, you couldn’t pick any other day of the week?”

  “Well,” she shrugged awkwardly, “with the game and all.”

  “Shah, never mind,” he soothed away her distress. “So if I didn’t want today to be here, don’t worry, I wouldn’t be.”

  She kissed his stubbly cheek again.

  The Zaydeh plunged into the party. Linda held back, alongside Leroy, half-hiding behind him. She squeezed his hand. She needed another minute before these people swallowed her up with their handshakes, hugs, fierce kisses.

  A woman caught her eye. “Leroy, over there—” Linda pointed with her chin—“is that. . .?”

  “Un hunh,” he nodded.

  “Really?” Linda’s eyes were popping.

  “Yassuh, in technicolor, outta Hollywood, Californye-A, Sybilla Garborg.”

  A good head taller than any other woman there, and topping most of the men too, the Swedish actress who during the Forties had captured all America’s heart couldn’t help but be noticed. Her height was remarkable, but it was more—like a star, a real one in the sky, she gleamed.

  Linda remembered Sybilla Garborg in so many different ways: an invalid confined to a wheel chair in a creaky London mansion, her death by strangling more and more imminent, then saved by Charles Boyer; a young bride to a Nazi diplomat in Brazil, inches from death, she’s spirited away by Gregory Peck, or was it Cary Grant, or were there two such pictures?

  But how come Garborg was here? She hadn’t been sent an invitation—Linda had mailed them all herself.

  Then Linda’s eyes widened. Her body numbed with surprise. Next to Scott—and there was no mistaking her—his mother! Naomi Kremish had come after all. Linda’s eyes welled up. She shut them to blink back the tears.

  Then she felt a tiny chill. Wasn’t this maybe too good? Could Scott’s mother have changed, really, so much, so fast?

  What else, though? She couldn’t have come here, all this way, to—make trouble. Could she?

  Linda edged her way through to them.

  Eyes dabbed dry, she tried smiling warmly. “I’m so glad you came.”

  “I’m sorry if I made you worry that I wouldn’t.”

  Linda shrugged. “It doesn’t matter now.”

  “You look quite lovely.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Kremish. And you won’t regret this.”

  “And you’re bright. And I admire you.”

  It was starting to get mawkish.

  “Naomi, look”—Scott’s father, arriving, rescued them—“Sybilla Garborg, your favorite. Come, let’s meet her.”

  Izzie raged inside. He wanted Nutsy Dubrowsky out of here, and his glamor girl too. The kollyikeh, barging himself and his hotsy in here, turning the place into a gawking circus. Iz’s pleasure at Naomi Kremish’s unexpected turn-up had been wiped out by Dubrowsky’s presuming he was welcome.

  The Nut, since he’d highballed it to California, had taken over things fast out there—everything from the horse wire service to the movie craft unions to Sybilla Garborg, and with much ballyhoo. Too much: newspapers referred to Julie as a “debonair gangland personality, a sportsman with underworld connections,” which made him, of all people here to be shmoozing with Naomi Kremish, the worst. He had been sent an announcement, not an invitation, same as had gone to numerous other individuals linked with Iz in major deals. The others had all had the courtesy to send gifts and stay away. Nutsy had elected to march right in, and with a news item on his arm. So now for both families, Hargett and Kremish, there’d be almost no escaping the spotlight.

  The Nut knew Iz despised publicity. But Julie surely meant no harm, just didn’t begin to comprehend how a father—when it came to his kids—needed respectability.

  Hannah distracted him, taking his hand and then hugging him. He hugged her in return, but had to force himself.

  He’d often spoken on the phone with her about David and Linda, but he hadn’t seen her for several years, actually not since David’s high school graduation. She was thinner, faded-looking.

  “Mazel tov, Izzie.”

  “You too, Hannah.”

  “Scott’s a nice boy. I pray to God it can work.”

  “Never mind. He’s getting a precious girl. And the credit for her, ninety-nine percent, goes to you.”

  She gave him a sour look. “You don’t have to sell me anything.”

  “How’s your life, Hannah?”

  “I could give you complaints, but at least I sleep nights. How’s yours?”

  He smiled wryly. “Still a few nightmares. But after so many years, I think I’m getting used to them.”

  “Too bad.” She was shaking her head.

  Her pity made him furious, but he smiled, squeezed her hand and slip
ped away.

  Years back, she’d been the furious one—with him, his friends, his business; and then, he’d pitied her. Could there be, he wondered, some kind of meaning to this reversal?

  * * *

  Iz, taking a bite of matjes herring, sharp, the way he liked it, sipping a glass of seltzer and feeling a bit mellower, stood with the group around Jake Meiselman who was describing the jungle warfare involved in luring a brilliant young physicist to join his faculty. Iz’s mind, though, was wandering.

  Sybilla Garborg, so soft-looking, yielding, tender, with her shining girlish eyes, throatily, half-breathlessly saying, “Ah, so at last I meet you. You think it is the truth, what Julie tells me, that you are the smartest man in the world?”

  Iz was impervious. But he let himself enjoy it.

  And Madam Kremish, her chin high as though she’d had a crown fastened on her head at her birth, saying, “I’d heard you were a remarkable man. Now I know you are.” Then imploring, “Please be kind to my son.”

  That had tasted sweet. He’d won her, and more easily than he’d thought he could. Buying up that stock had been a good buy.

  Leo Kremish, Iz observed, was putting the whiskeys away pretty steady, though he did have the balls to cover up and act friendly with the people he was meeting.

  And the kids, they were the best. Iz still smarted a touch about David, wishing him to have been bigger in the game, brainier. But the boy didn’t run from bigger guys, and his head was good enough. And Linda was Iz’s heart’s delight, his angel. So he had to count himself lucky, considering what a long-distance father he’d mostly been. And he had to hand it to Hannah too. She could have fed them poison against him. But Hannah had been smart. And they were all better off.

  Bursting with love for these kids—they looked glorious, vital, capable of big things—he felt his throat tighten.

  In the past, thinking about the kids’ futures, he’d imagined them quite separate from himself: David a white-coated doctor, a surgeon maybe, and Linda with kids, a baby in her arms, a grinning toddler hanging onto a skirt. Now Iz had changed. He felt a longing for them to stay with him, close, tied into him every day somehow—if that were possible.

  The daydream he’d toyed with off and on for so long, to get out of “the business,” was it only a daydream? Why couldn’t he? Look at it as a puzzle. First step in solving it would be to determine who, if anyone, could take over the operation. Who had the know-how, brains, will power, daring, connections? And after all that, then would come the tough part: who could put it over, get the mahkers to buy it. He eyed Dubrowsky. Maybe Julie would be up to it—if he didn’t blow his lid as easy as he used to. But those bullet-headed midwest Ginnies, especially in Detroit and Cleveland, not much chance they’d go along. Iz’s bringing it up even would be interpreted as heeling out, which then would mean—a contract?

  But mightn’t there be other ways?

  What if he found a way to handle it so the changes were so slight, so gradual, that things had the look of going along one hundred percent the same, same payments, couriers, everything, and then let them find out only after he’d been out a year, or two even. … Except, they were always showing up at the casinos to take a reading and drop a few bucks. …

  A tapping on his shoulder, bony, light. Iz could tell before he turned that it was Psyllos.

  “Having a good time, Pete?”

  The lanky Greek’s lips elongated into a forebearing smile. “No, if you want the truth, which you do not. But if you had not invited me, I would have been insulted. So if we weigh the first against the second, the answer changes and becomes more, yes.”

  Iz usually enjoyed the money-trading wizard’s Byzantine circumlocutions. But this wasn’t quite the time for left-handed compliments.

  “Have you met Sybilla Garborg?” Iz asked, his instinct to be an accommodating host surmounting his annoyance.

  Psyllos nodded, crinkling his brow. “Several times.”

  “You don’t like her?”

  “I adore her—in the cinema.”

  Iz’s annoyance began heating up, a sensation he did not relish, especially right now. But this would not be happening, he suddenly intuited, unless Pete, whose every move was calculated, wanted to have that effect on Iz.

  Iz excused himself. Now was not time for Psyllos’s riddlelike mishegoss.

  Then came another tap on his shoulder. Reuben Silverberg along with Morris and Leroy.

  “What’s up?” Iz promptly asked, ignoring the gnawing in his chest, the temptation to flee from the catastrophe he knew they’d brought him.

  “Iz, better come outside,” Reuben murmured.

  “You go. I’ll follow in a minute.” Leaving by himself he’d be noticed by fewer. And the fewer, the better.

  Iz spotted Reuben in the outer lobby to one side of a window, peering out from behind a drape. Morris and Leroy seemed no longer to be around. Iz forced himself to hurry over.

  “Okay. Guess I’m ready as I’m going to be.”

  “Your car,” Reuben swallowed, “someone put a bomb in it.”

  Iz began to grasp for the arm of a chair to steady himself. Then he stiffened, shook off the urge. Being weak would use up time. Every second might be needed. He moistened his lips and asked, “The car at the stadium?”

  Reuben nodded, his mouth numbly half-open.

  Iz felt his gut heat up with anger.

  “Anybody hurt?”

  The eyes behind the steel-rimmed glasses shut now, Reuben nodded again.

  “Harry?”

  One more nod, haltingly.

  Iz felt a profound sadness flow through him, numbing his body, even fingers and toes. Images of Harry the Doctor flickered in his memory—a gangling kid rushing to minister to bleeding Julie Dubrowsky, the only kid at the crap game not scared shitless by the gushing blood; Harry a young man, alongside Iz night after freezing night, a Thompson gun across his lap, never complaining, escorting truck after truck to Jersey; Harry toddling baby David on his knee; patiently waiting for orders while the Mayflower crumbled, bald by then, bowling-ball smooth, but with the old toothy grin. “What else we got to do?” he’d ask, no matter how fagged out, and then he’d go do what Iz had told him, even jobs he hated, like having to break some idiot’s leg.

  Harry in ways had been more a brother than Morris. Iz swallowed hard to keep from showing his emotion.

  “Did he go quick at least?”

  “Yeah,” Reuben said, barely audible.

  So hushed. Had Reuben, Iz wondered, actually seen the gore? “You explain to the cops about the party and all?”

  Reuben’s head bobbed affirmatively. “Yeah, they’ll wait.”

  Thank God at least for that. But who WHO could have done this? And why? Later.

  Iz patted his cousin, a touch that denoted approval, gratitude, and an unspoken something deeper. Then he returned to the reception. His smile, as far as his guests could tell, was as cheery as ever.

  CHAPTER 7

  Leo, startled, felt a sudden, almost violent tugging at his arm. His wife. Well, at least whatever Naomi was hot and bothered about couldn’t matter terribly now, not after Hargett’s ballbreaker on the way from the stadium.

  “Come with me, will you please?”

  Her voice, low but suppressed, portended some new pain in the derrière. Ignoring her, he blew a goodbye kiss back to his departing old aunt. Then he sighed and relinquished himself to Naomi who led him to a thick-curtained bay window in a corner, littered now with crumpled napkins and cigarette butts, but clear—as the reception dwindled into its final stage—of people.

  The calming numbness he’d attained by imbibing a lot of Scotch seemed to dissipate slightly. He had a queasy feeling.

  She was scanning the immediate area, double checking against being overheard.

  “I was right,” she finally whispered, “All the time I was right.”

  “Of course. Naturally. What else.”

  “Don’t patronize me. This is serious.”r />
  Her lips began to waver, tremble almost, as her breath came in short gasps. She stammered, straining to form words. Then she clamped her lips together and finally managed, inhaling sharply between every few words, to say, “We’ve got to get Scott away from that girl. No matter what.”

  Desperation, thick, moist, he could almost touch it, and so unlike her. He took pains to speak in a calming tone. “What has happened?”

  Again she peered about. “Someone’s been killed.”

  Leo felt a needle plunged into him.

  Obviously she’d misunderstood, too much champagne, at worst someone had had a heart attack.

  “His car was blown up. Smithereens.” She nodded with a crazed triumphant glint. “Un hunh, a bomb.”

  It sounded fantastic, mad. Leo noted, though, that the men around Hargett were quiet, funereal almost.

  Naomi must be overwrought, talking nonsense. But was this any more nonsensical than that a man not listed by Dun and Bradstreet, not known to the management of any New York big bank (and Leo and his controllers had made inquiries at every one) should have gained control of such a mammoth Swiss bank, and so discreetly that as crucially interested a party as he hadn’t heard one word about it?

  His twenty-seven thousand dollars disbursed to two supposedly top confidential “research” firms had plainly been money pissed away. All they had brought him was a story of a rival bootlegger disappearing in 1929, his removal attributed by nameless informants to Izzie, and in 1935 a tale of a Miami bordello operator supposedly castrated, after which Hargett apparently did nothing but prosper in the hotel business. But no documentation of the alleged crimes, and in the almost twenty years since, not a whiff of a bad odor.

  Leo forced himself to ask, “Who was killed?”

  “The chauffeur, or bodyguard. God knows what he really was. A man, and now he’s nothing. Pulp.”

  Leo breathed more easily. At least it hadn’t been someone—close.

  “Imagine,” Naomi rasped, “I go out to go to the ladies’ room, and there’s a policeman at the desk, another guarding the front door, more out in cars at the curb, all waiting for you-know-who.”