by Al Zuckerman
The crackling sounds got louder, closer. Then he heard a voice, a man’s, and then a second man answering. He strained to hear better, to catch a meaning, but the snatches of talk were too faint, or disconnected, or in a language he didn’t know. Suddenly they were close, so close he could hear each footfall, crunching down on cones and branchlets, scuffing rocks. The voices which momentarily had quieted now were conversing distinctly, but in a language he couldn’t fathom.
He crouched down, then reached out along the thicker of the two branches and stretched out on his belly, to conceal himself better and also to improve, if possible, his downward view. Seconds later two forms, obscured by foliage, began moving in and out of his view. They wore hats with curled brims, Australian-looking. Their clothes were typical Israeli faded khakis. It was hard to estimate their size from overhead, or their age. Plainly, though, they were not just strolling by, not with binoculars slung from their necks, one with a rifle strapped to his shoulder, the other laden with photographer’s gear, including an impressive camera with protruding lense.
Iz again strived to pinpoint the language, immediately ruling out Italian, Spanish, Hebrew, which left as possibilities, Arabic, Turkish, Persian, or some Balkan tongue. A lot of possibilities.
Then they were directly beneath him. He held his breath, expecting one to tilt his head back and look up; but they kept moving, out of the glade, and then down to the edge of the cemetery, apparently heading for a closer vantage point.
Iz exhaled, untensing, feeling light and springy again. He allowed himself a little pat on the back for calculating that his every move was being watched, and that this burial was being taken seriously.
Then abruptly he began to feel edgy again. What if they were to dig up the body, shoot a picture of it? Who would stop them? And that was just one leap in the dark out of a hundred others which could make this crap-shoot fall in on his head.
But what was happening now? Quietly as he could he hoisted himself to his feet again, trained the high-powered lenses toward the cemetery, managed after some adjusting to focus on his grave area, and discovered the coffin already out, seemingly ready for lowering, the small group clustered around it for the final rite.
Linda, his Lindeleh, he’d imagined her being in black, dignified, with maybe even a demure hat and black veil. Instead, she looked colorful, white skirt, blue jacket. Then he realized that outfit probably was the only dressy one she had with her. No one had warned her, after all, that she’d need mourning clothes. He peered at her face. Drawn, gray-colored, so much older looking. A man, some stranger, was holding her at the elbow. Pity for her swelled up in his throat.
He turned the glasses heavy-heartedly to Poppa, who looked worse. The old man’s head was nodding, as if he had palsy; and his hands, Iz saw, were quivering too, actually shaking, as if he’d lost control over his bodily motions. Iz again felt flooded with remorse. Nonetheless, he kept watching Poppa, couldn’t stop watching him. Something seemed weird, unnatural, as if the trembling was—too much. Poppa, this weakness, this losing control, was not like him. Jesus, could the old man somehow have caught on?
Iz’s heart sank. He clutched at the reddish bark, suddenly afraid of losing hold, of toppling to the ground.
Groping for an answer, his mind fired off possibilities like machine-gun bullets. And then it dawned. Of course! There was no way, no chance that Takasch could have prevented Poppa from the ritual washing of his own son’s body: so the Hungarian could have had no choice but to let Poppa in on the truth, which meant what the old man was doing was joining in the act, actually going Hollywood. Iz had to restrain himself from chuckling.
Then he spotted the boys with the cameras setting up behind an extra-wide tombstone, and he tensed again, cursing his unseen enemy: “May he marry the daughter of the Angel of Death!”—another saying of his father’s.
But the old man might get away with it. How would a stranger know what really he was like? If only Poppa didn’t knock himself out too much.
CHAPTER 7
Trekking up the fortress in the dusky coolness as he had most evenings for the three weeks that he’d been in Safad, Iz wondered how much longer he could take this deadening existence, this dreary waiting, waiting, waiting. Doubts had begun plaguing him. What if the news were never to surface publicly? If there were no announcement, no mention, even a roundabout one, in the financial pages or anywhere, of a new ownership or management of the hotels? He might linger here week after weary week, for years, dragging out his days, living only for the once-a-day arrival of the newspapers. This particular evening—Christ, it was August already—Safad’s steeply inclined cobbled streets didn’t seem quaint or even attractive. The old synagogues which on other days had sparked Iz to imagine bygone holiness, men overflowing with piety and ecstasy, now seemed simply grubby, blackened-with-age relics of superstition. Even the citadel to which he’d just climbed, first built in the Twelfth Century by Crusaders, around and below which nestled the town’s white houses, now seemed forlorn, as he too was.
He tried concentrating on the view. Violets, soft crimsons, deep mauves colored the sky and the hazy hills below. He imagined the undulating mountains to be great waves in a petrified ocean, luminous and eerie. The beauty of it all finally touched him as it had on other evenings.
There were things he had to be grateful for too. The bone yard informant consistently reported that the grave had not been messed with. And by now it was hardly likely that anyone could discover anything, even if they dug it up and examined the body. He felt safe here, sure that no one thought of him as anything but another tourist. As to the businesses in the States, true, some probably were in hot water. But eventually they would be whipped back into shape if he could only pierce to the root of this thing and get himself out of here. If. …
He returned to the tiny hotel, slept, awoke, and passed another day at his secluded vigil. Toward the end of the afternoon at a ramshackle cafe across from the Eged Bus station, he picked up the newspapers which daily arrived for him from Lydda Airport.
Then back in his high-vaulted room with the tiny balcony, he first unwrapped the Wall Street Journal, quickly scanning the stock exchange quotations, looking for price changes in the hotel chains, the amusement industry conglomerates, and then in diverse corporations which had one thing in common: a willingness to enter into far-afield high-roller situations, if the potential yield were lush enough. One such, World-Wide Metals, for the last three days had been inching up. Then he discovered that yesterday Psyllos’ firm had shot up, Jesus, seven points! Why? Iz’s heartbeat quickened. He flipped to the commodity quotations, searching for jumps in metals futures that might account for this leap. Platinum, palladium, gold, N.Y. silver, even Argentine pesos and Brazilian cruzeiros in which Psyllos from time to time took positions, all showed only tiny fluctuations. Iz felt himself sweating.
He leafed through the paper page by page, examining every item, hunting for a paragraph, a line, two words, that might at least give a clue to World-Wide’s abrupt increase. And then beneath an ad for title insurance in the bottom right hand corner, a small-type caption, “Metals Firm Diversifies Into Hotels.”
He felt his heart somersault, his blood thickcn. Then the print blurred. He couldn’t read any more. He breathed in, calmed himself, wiped his brow, and began again, trying to swallow the whole article at once. He did manage to pick out, “Mining and metals distributing . . . controlling interest . . . casino operations. …”
His back ached and he felt nauseous. But finally the blindfold was off. This search that had seemed hopeless, never-ending was over, wrapped up. His hundred-to-one shot theatrical had paid out a hatful. He ought to be tickled pink. But he wasn’t. He cursed himself for not picking up on the Greek right after Princeton on that strange day in the steamroom, or twenty different times since then. And Iz cursed the Greek too, because he’d always liked the guy, swapping stories, dickering deals, watching him concoct the most ingenious and fruitful wrinkles, and Iz
had even trusted the Greek sort of.
It all proved one thing—that Iz’s judgment was on the downhill. This mistake was big, and his alone, and once he’d made one such, there’d be others. No, no question any more, it was time to throw in the towel and get out.
First though, the Greek would have to have his little lesson too.
CHAPTER 8
“‘Goldfarb’s Bungalows’—there! Fourth, no, fifth one down.” Leroy was pointing exuberantly.
Linda felt her nervous tautness melt away. If she hadn’t been driving, and if she didn’t feel so diffident toward Leroy still, she would have kissed him for spotting the small sign, one of maybe ten nailed at a variety of angles to a telephone pole, which itself stood at a tilt.
Linda right-turned off the black top onto a dirt road, or what had been a road, slowing to a crawl after the first of its canyonlike dips. On both sides poison ivy in lush profusion rambled atop shrubs and up tree trunks. After a few hundred such yards, it was she this time who spied the two posts to what had formerly been an overhead archway, its top now gone. On one post faint letters read, “Goldfarb’s.” Finally.
And now maybe they’d find out why this odyssey. She’d had surmises, God knows, creepy ones naturally mostly, but nothing solid. Far back as Linda could remember, since she’d first known the word “why,” it had been this way, the most commonplace things turning out to be forbidden ground. She had expected that with Poppa laid to his rest, that sort of thing was finished with. Now she’d begun doubting if it ever would be.
After the sitting shivah, the traditional seven days of mourning, which mostly had meant chewing on oranges and dates all day and evening in a hotel suite in Jerusalem reminiscing and watching some of the men cluster in corners and whisper about business, she and the Zaydeh, and the others who’d flown over, all had come back together to New York, and then gone off to pick up their various lives.
The Zaydeh for years had been summering near Monticello in the Catskills, renting the same flimsy cottage with screening that somehow never got fixed. Even as a widower he’d continued going up to it. On first returning to New York, despite the inhuman August heat, the old man had ridden the I.R.T. from the Bronx to West End Avenue every day, personally making sure that Linda and David were all right, that they had no big needs not being met. Soon, though, David had left to rejoin his ship, and Linda had begun taking herself off to the Columbia Library, absorbing herself during the days with an incompleted term paper, and with folk dancing most evenings. So the Zaydeh, no longer needed, had repaired to his kokhalayn, fleeing the heat and reuniting with his cronies.
And then two days later, he’d called, at night. Linda could never, ever remember his telephoning her. Always it had been Poppa, and sometimes she or her brother on birthdays or other state occasions who would put a call in to him. But the Zaydeh to them, never. So at the sound of his voice, she’d panicked. He was sick, or, God, worse. Khayim had had to repeat and re-repeat that his health, “May you know so many good years!” was okay. But then, as to what he wanted from her, well, it was for her to come up tomorrow with, of all people, Leroy. And peculiar as this all was, Linda had not asked why. Her Hargett antennae had caught the signal: no answer would be forthcoming. So now, weary from the long drive, much of it bumper-to-bumper, they’d arrived.
The thick afternoon heat came at them from above and below, rising somehow through overgrown grass. Dragonflies hummed, bees buzzed, but they saw no other signs of life. The cottages were set out in a U, and, except for some laundry on a clothesline, looked abandoned. Not even a radio could be heard.
Leroy noticed that the second bungalow had a sign, “Manager.”
“Vadda ya vant?”
Linda answered into a dark void beyond the screen door. “Where do I find Mr. Khargetnish?”
“Numbuh seven,” a shrewish voice answered.
Seven’s screen door and its inside door were closed. Linda listened. She heard nothing. Could the Zaydeh have gone to a pinochle game somewhere, maybe to the grocery? She looked for a doorbell, then rapped her knuckles on the screen’s rickety frame.
The door opened soundlessly. Strange. Linda had noticed a lot of rust. But there was no chance to ponder this. Her grandfather was whispering, “Lindeleh, come in, come in. And you too,” he added to Leroy.
Abruptly the door closed behind her. Bending to kiss the Zaydeh in the gloom, she almost missed him.
“Lindeleh.”
She started. Was that—a second voice? Her heart was in her mouth. She felt her flesh creep.
Touching her, warm, firm. Was it possible . . .?
“Yeah, darling, me. It’s really me.”
“P-p-ppoppa?” she’d choked struggling to say the one word.
“Baby, baby.” Strong arms held her now, and they were his, really his.
She exulted. And tears streamed down her cheeks, and onto his.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart, sorry sorry. But I had to do that. I did have to. But now, it’s okay. And I’ll be—nothing but good to you.”
Linda wanted to reply, You almost always were; but she couldn’t. Her throat was constricted. She felt dizzy too, and then angry, burning up.
Leroy had been raised to be in awe of this man, much as other South Jamaica kids had been learned up to revere Jesus Christ. And suddenly this childlike awe had come back. Hearing Iz’s tale had impressed him like nothing ever had, and moved him too, thrilled him. Simply to conceive of such a scheme struck him as prodigious, but that Mr. H. had also actually carried it off, acting out a fatal heart attack, switching himself with some corpse, then getting it buried, mourned, convincing even his daughter he was dead, and thus ferreting out at long last this unknowable, murderous enemy; the thing was, well, God-like, or near as anyone could come.
Just as inspired, Leroy realized now too, had been Mr. H.’s working out ten thousand minor details, such as, for one, Leroy’s own bread and butter. After the funeral, Leroy had had a shock. All his policy banks but one had done a fade. Which at first had made no sense to him. But then, thinking, it became plain as his nose that without Mr. H. behind him, Leroy’s day-to-day talent for keeping those operations in line and contented didn’t add up to dog shit. That shadowy power which was Mr. H.’s had not rubbed off on him, even the small amount Leroy had allowed himself to believe it had. He had had thoughts about killing himself. And then he’d received a check in the mail. His monthly money, despite everything, was right there. Silverberg had notified him that according to Mr. H.’s will, Leroy would be getting an income from the office buildings and real estate. And legitimate; no one could touch it. It was fantastic. Even he had been planned for.
“So,” Mr. H. softly asked, after they’d dried tears, got their wits back, drunk some iced tea, and said good-bye to Mr. Khargetnish, who’d gone off to the store, “have either of you geniuses got any ideas? What we should do to repay this momzer?”
Leroy’s mind was elsewhere. Why had Mr. H. put him alone in a car with Linda? Why now just the two of them here? Except for the funeral in Israel, Leroy hadn’t seen her in months. From the moment she’d stepped into his car though, he’d wanted her again, to stroke her hair, her cheek. Was he being tested? Sure, Mr. H. was testing him. And Leroy was determined to pass the test—if he could. If. …
Linda shrugged, answering first, “It’s peculiar, isn’t it, your asking us. Don’t you already have a plan that you yourself have, well, in mind?”
“Leroy?” Hargett abruptly asked, steering things back to his own question.
Leroy felt an awkwardness, and a shock too, as the full implication dawned on him. “You want Linda here for this kind of talk?” he asked uneasily.
Izzie, who looked thin and pale and furrowed with new wrinkles, nodded. “I know. It’s different from how I’ve always done things. But this is Linda’s destiny too we’re trying to provide for. So why keep this secret from her?”
“Because, hell,” Leroy shot back, surprising himself with his bluntnes
s toward Mr. H., “these things, she, or any girl, probably’d rather not know about. Right, Linda?”
She slowly shook her head. “Wrong.”
Leroy felt as if punched in the chest. He studied her in the half-light as she sat there on the wicker couch next to her father. So stern, decisive, hard even, so different from the nose-buried-in-her-books girl he thought he knew. And then it hit him. She was, after all, Isadore Hargett’s child. Not like other girls, any more than Mr. H. was like other men.
“It’s not easy, hunh,” Hargett muttered, still waiting for their thoughts.
“Well,” Leroy shrugged, and looked straight at Linda, “I guess whatever we say, you’d know about it anyway, wouldn’t you, when it happened.”
“When what happened?”
“What do you think?” Leroy’s voice was low, just audible. “Seems to me just a question of how, I guess.”
“Poppa, you know you never answered me. Why are you putting this to us?”
Leroy was agog. He’d just pointedly implied the need to murder someone, and she’d taken it coolly as a glass of iced tea, and then had bounced things back to her father.
Mr. H. was nodding, smiling. “You know me, Lindeleh. Sure I have ideas. My head, knock wood, still keeps on cooking. But my ideas, I’ve come around to learn, aren’t the only ones. And even if usually they are the best, still sometimes they can be improved on. So why not your thoughts? Depending on this are all of our lives.”
Leroy shuddered. The boss was not just kidding. A small misstep, and in seconds a bomb could make them into mincemeat.