Riptide

by Paul Levine

  One look at Violet that first day and Harry knew she wasn’t in the running for Orange Bowl Queen. She was the kind of woman who looks better from across the street than across the counter. Still, he admired her style, the way she perched on a barstool, her legs wrapped around the metal post like snakes on a tree trunk. She was fresh talent in a part of town where the favorite nightcap was prune juice. Round, full breasts, low-cut blouse, chiseled features, and hair bleached too often and too harshly. Maybe a cocktail waitress at a Ramada Inn, Harry Marlin thought at first. Probably heard every line from every costume jewelry salesman on the East Coast, but play your cards right, a pushover and no hassle in the morning.

  Harry remembered the first words he spoke to Violet. He had patted his thinning hair, smiled, and asked, “How Tjout some chili, honey?”

  “How hot is it?”

  “How hot you like it?” he replied, flashing the wide grin.

  She examined him as if he were a roach on the bathroom tile. “Just coffee, Jose, and save the bullshit for your señoritas.”

  “My name’s Harry and I’m not a Latino,” he said, anxious to distance himself from the guys who smack their lips at every chica on the block. “My family’s from Beirut.”

  “Mine’s from Macon,” she said, “a shithole full of clover kickers. Where’s Baberuth?”

  “Lebanon. And it’s not doing so good neither. Haven’t seen your classy chassis around here before. This is my place, you know. But just temporary. I’m working on a couple of big deals. You know anything about the stock market?”

  “Sure, a little.”

  Violet Belfrey knew as much about the stock market as she did about nuclear fission, but for a reason she could not explain, she wanted the soda jerk with the sappy smile to like her.

  “Great, let me tell you about my investments, all imaginary of course, for the time being.” So Harry talked about his mythical stock portfolio, his puts and calls and selling short. He invested the way some guys play the ponies, with a make-believe grubstake on paper. “Today I’d be a rich man if I’d had the dough to put in.”

  Violet listened and the romance began. She would have dinner at Harry’s after selling tickets at Kazdoy’s theater. On Sundays, the Grill was closed and Harry treated Violet at an Italian place with a clean checkered tablecloth, and afterward they walked along the empty boardwalk and listened to the gentle shorebreak.

  With a full moon over the Atlantic, they crawled under the walkway, where Violet’s skilled fingers stroked him with the light touch of a pool shark on a cue stick. She bent over him and Harry leaned back, legs spread in the sand, watching Violet’s platinum hair streaked by moonlight filtered through the slats of the boardwalk. Then he closed his eyes, at peace with the world, and thought, Harry Marlin, you sumbitch, you’ve let your sorry ass fall in love.

  * * *

  It had been a month since she’d told Harry about the bonds when he finally asked, “How much you figure the old codger has in that cabinet?”

  “Never you mind.”

  But the same question kept haunting her. How many eagles were perched there with only a thin, hollow door and a combination lock in the way?

  So close to paradise. Maybe it was time.

  She wore her tightest jeans to the theater and wiggled her can like a bitch in heat. Still no rise from the old man.

  She asked if he’d like his shoulders rubbed and he said no.

  Like me to clean the office?

  No again.

  Anything you want?

  Nothing, thank you, darling.

  Shit, getting nowhere fast. She had a buzz in the back of her mind, worked it over, slept on it, finally was sure about it. Next morning, she told Harry.

  He shook his head. “You want me to do a B and E?” he asked. “No friggin’ way. Never had a felony rap. Don’t think I could do hard time at my age.”

  “Harry Marlin, what kinda man are you? You wanna play the stock market for real but you don’t have jackshit. You been a-fussin’ about them bonds ever since I let on about ‘em. Now let’s see if you got the hair on your balls to do somethin’ besides talk.”

  CHAPTER 5

  The Cranes Are Flying

  Jake Lassiter parked his 1968 Olds 442 convertible in the alley behind the theater. Lincoln Road was empty of pedestrians. Wealthy matrons once shopped there, riding trams from store to store, wrapped in mink at the first breath of November. Then Saks closed, restaurants and art deco hotels were boarded, and the street was taken over by Marielitos — the tattooed Cuban prisoners — who urinated in empty door fronts and terrorized the neighborhood’s feeble retirees.

  Five blocks away, Ocean Drive was rejuvenated with New York money and New York names. South Beach was now SoBe, where young couples of various genders sought out the newest cafes the way computer-guided missiles target tanks in the desert. Leggy models in Lycra shorts wove around traffic on rollerblades. Photographers and artists and Eurotrash dressed in trendy black walked the walk and talked the talk, but here, just half a mile inland, aged survivors of the Depression or the Holocaust shuffled along with canes and walkers, mumbling to themselves or long-lost relatives.

  Violet Belfrey greeted Lassiter at the front door. “Show’s started,” she said. “You missed Mr. K.’s speech. Something about Lenin’s experiment and Roosevelt’s big deal.”

  “New Deal.”

  “Whatever.”

  “How you been, Violet?”

  “Busted, disgusted, and can’t be trusted.” With that, she grabbed his bottom, gave a firm squeeze, and guided him through the turnstile. “Nice toe-kiss,” she said.

  “Tuchis, Violet. Sam should teach you better Yiddish.”

  “You’d be surprised how much learnin’ I been doin’ from old Mr. K.”

  “And I’ll bet you could teach him a thing or two,” Lassiter said.

  In his retirement Sam Kazdoy kept busy clipping bond coupons and showing Russian films at his movie theater. For the last six months, Violet Belfrey sold the tickets and changed the marquee. And hung around, Lassiter noticed. Rich old man and street-smart younger woman, a classic combination. Jake Lassiter saw cunning in Violet’s dark eyes and scavenger’s claws in her bony hands. Years ago, before age and wealth had dulled his senses, the old man would have seen it, too.

  When Violet answered the employment ad, Lassiter wanted to do a background check. “Let’s find out if she’s ever been arrested, sued, divorced, done drugs,” he told Kazdoy.

  The old man refused. “Don’t worry, boychik. Ey, she’s got some titskes,” Kazdoy chortled, cupping his hands two feet in front of his chest. Lassiter never brought it up again and Violet became a fixture at the old man’s side.

  * * *

  Jake Lassiter followed a trail of ancient stains on the threadbare carpeting to a seat in the third row. The chair sagged until the metal seat scraped the floor with the sound of fingernails across a blackboard. Once a showplace — home to ten thousand matinees — the theater now was a dank tomb, the air heavy with dust and humidity, ceiling fans struggling against the tropical night.

  Lassiter was the youngest moviegoer by thirty years. Most were aged widows and widowers, born in czarist Russia. The crowd was an orchestra off-key, playing tunes simultaneously in English, Yiddish, and Russian,’the sounds of Babel rising to the empty balcony. Some chattered throughout the show, their whispers rattling like old mufflers, unaware that as their hearing diminished, their voices took up the slack.

  Kazdoy showed double features, an old American film followed by a Russian classic. The Hollywood comedies and musicals were from his personal collection, bought on the gray market, so he paid no royalties to the movie studios, which he thought were still run by Louis B. Mayer.

  “Tell the whoremongers Samuel Kazdoy don’t pay no blackmail,” he had said to Lassiter a half dozen years earlier. He had hired Lassiter to defend him when the studios sued for copyright violations. The old man settled, paying no royalties but agreeing to refrai
n from showing copyrighted films, a promise he regularly violated. There were no more lawsuits but Jake Lassiter and Samuel Kazdoy became friends, often having dinner together after a movie.

  On this night, Lassiter dozed through The Battleship Potemkin, the classic Eisenstein film. After the show, a beaming Kazdoy moved quickly to the stage on steady legs and, using a microphone, began his weekly sociological essay.

  “Oy, what a mess we’ve got here in Goldeneh Medina, this golden country. They’re knocking down zaydes and bubbes for their Social Security checks. In Moscow, even with no government worth a damn anymore, it’s still safer than New York.

  “Something else, too many lawyers. Everybody’s suing everybody else. I read in the paper, so I believe it even though it’s not the Daily Forward, that a woman got hurt in a bus accident, she’s suing the city saying the injury made her a whatchamacallit…”

  “A nymphomaniac, Sam,” said a man in the front row, a dapper eighty-year-old in a lime-green polyester leisure suit.

  “A nafka,” said a heavy woman next to him, her brown support stockings drooping around thick ankles.

  “Feh!” sputtered the man in green. “No, no, no. A nafka charges money, a nymphomaniac does it for fun.”

  “So who would do it for fun?” the woman asked.

  “That’s right, a nymphomaniac,” Samuel Kazdoy said. “Now, maybe if I was on that bus, she’d have a case.” Kazdoy paused and the crowd roared. “But to get sued for too much shtupping? It’s meshugge. Yessir, too many lawyers we got.”

  Kazdoy was squinting into the lights, trying to spot Lassiter. “Now take my lawyer. Please!”

  The house erupted. They loved his corny jokes even more than the pickled herring at the old man’s delicatessen.

  “Here he is, Sam,” a man with a silver toupee croaked. The man sat directly behind Lassiter and recognized him from previous evenings at the theater. Head bobbing, toupee sliding, the man jabbed a finger into Lassiter’s shoulder blade. “Here’s your mouthpiece, Sam.” Lassiter slumped in his chair as heads turned and arthritic necks craned.

  “Ah,” Kazdoy said. “There’s Jacob Lassiter. He’s a good lawyer, and he got those gonifs in Hollywood off my back. If you need an estate plan, call him up, but he’ll charge you an arm and a leg, then you won’t have a ruble left for your kids, but so what when they’re in Scarsdale and don’t come see you anyway?”

  “How much you charge?” said the man with the sliding toupee, his finger now rapping the back of Lassiter’s seat.

  “I don’t do wills,” Lassiter said, hoping the old man would change the subject. He was in luck.

  “In the Old Country,” Kazdoy said, his voice dropping to signify the importance of the next observation, “they told me that the streets in New York were paved with gold. When I got off that stinking boat in 1912, the first thing I see is a man following a horse with a broom and pail, but what he was sweeping wasn’t gold.”

  Then an abridged version of the familiar tale of the arrival at Ellis Island, of working for a cousin making corrugated boxes, and of starting his own small factory and finally retiring with six mammoth ones.

  That story done, Kazdoy looked ahead. “Tomorrow, first we’ll see a short subject, and I don’t mean Mickey Rooney. It’s about the Moscow subway system and it’s beautiful to look at. They scrub those cars every night, you could eat off the floor. Have any of you ridden in a New York subway recently?”

  A knowing murmur swept the crowd, heads bobbing in affirmation.

  “Then a great war film that shows the horrors, the losses, the sacrifices …”

  Oh no, Lassiter thought, how many times can they watch The Cranes Are Flying?

  “The Cranes Are Flying,” Kazdoy said. “I know all of you love it.” And again, an appreciative stirring rustled through the theater, patrons content that they would revisit the familiar.

  After the show, as Violet was making her way to Harry’s place, Lassiter and the old man locked up the theater. “Let’s get a bite to eat, Jacob,” the old man said, as always. “Maybe the Chicken in the Pot is better than last time.”

  * * *

  Kazdoy’s All-Nite Deli was on Collins Avenue along the ocean but thirty blocks south of the high-rent district and ten blocks north of the trendy club scene. From the window booths, you could see the marquee of a triple-X movie theater advertising an all-male film festival. Next door was a noisy bar frequented by dockworkers who would be shipped out on the next freighter if Immigration ever pulled a raid. On the sidewalk, young women in short shorts and halter tops moseyed along in the universal stroll of the working gal with nowhere to go and lots of time to get there.

  The Chicken in the Pot was no better. A layer of grease coated the soup, heavy noodles sinking to the bottom, while rubbery chicken parts floated near the surface.

  “Eat a little something,” the old man commanded. “Enjoy!”

  Lassiter had a whitefish platter, the smoked fish surrounded by coleslaw and potato salad, last week’s mayonnaise sharp on the tongue. They ate silently, Kazdoy growing tired, the excitement of the crowd wearing off. Lassiter munched a pickled tomato and wound his fork with sauerkraut. Finally, the old man asked, “How about you come to the theater this weekend?”

  “I can’t. I’m organizing the windsurfing races on the Key.”

  “Windsurfing.” Samuel Kazdoy shook his bald head. “You make any money at that?”

  “Not a cent.”

  “Meshugge. Why do it?”

  “I like the challenge of riding a rough sea with just the wind for power and a chunk of fiberglass under my feet. It’s a thrill to go faster than the lugheads in their half-million-dollar powerboats. It also keeps me sane, makes me forget about my sweaty-palmed partners and my clients who’ve never lost anything but their scruples.”

  The old man narrowed his eyes. “You got no clients you like?”

  “Only you, Sam, and nobody’s sued you lately.”

  “Nm, who should sue me? When those momzers in Hollywood tried, you kicked them in the ass.”

  Lassiter laughed. “As I recall, we entered a consent order. I assume you’ve stopped buying bootleg films.”

  Sam Kazdoy worked his crumpled face into a look of childlike innocence. “That’s for me to know, and Samuel Goldwyn to find out. But you did a good job then, and I haven’t forgotten.”

  “Neither have I. You were my first paying client after I got out of the PD’s office. Plus you always brought me apple strudel. Nowadays, my clients bring postdated checks and perjurious witnesses.”

  “I’m surprised you have any clients. Half the time you’re at the beach, windboarding or sailsurfing or whatever mishegoss…”

  “Sam, didn’t you ever play golf or tennis or go skiing?”

  “Skiing?”

  You might as well have asked him to eat suckling pig. “Didn’t you ever have any hobbies?” Lassiter asked.

  “Hobbies? I should live so long.”

  “But you must have done something besides run your businesses.”

  “I did religious work.”

  “You?”

  “Sure, I made a lot of women Jewish, if only by injection,” Kazdoy chuckled.

  “Well, you should come to the beach this weekend just to watch,” Jake Lassiter said. “Lila Summers from Maui will be there. She’s young and beautiful and one of the world’s great athletes. What more could a man ask?”

  “To be seventy again,” Samuel Kazdoy said.

  CHAPTER 6

  Cat Burglar

  Whadaya mean don’t take ‘em all?” Harry Marlin asked. He was unnerved, pacing in the tiny apartment, throwing his hands around, sweat beading on his balding head.

  Violet Belfrey watched, worried that he couldn’t handle it. Look at him, the little soda jerk — let’s face it, she thought, that’s what he is — coming unglued only hours before he should be grabbing fistfuls of eagles, enough to fill Lincoln Road with three feet of birdshit.

  “You take ‘e
m all, the old man’s liable to croak,” she said. “Besides, if you only take some, like a couple hundred thou,

  he won’t make such a fuss, maybe not even report it to the police.”

  “Vi, baby, you don’t know what you’re asking me to do. It’s like saying, ‘Harry, only stick it halfway in.’ I might promise, but I get the door open, you know damn well I’m gonna ram it home.”

  “Maybe you should just keep it in your pants, you got such little control, and I can do this myself.”

  Harry smiled a crooked, gold-capped grin. “Then what about your alibi?”

  He had her and had her good. Violet would be with the old man when the B and E was coming down. Someone else had to do the job and Harry was the one.

  “Awright,” Violet said. “Ah’ll keep the old man happy as a clam at high tide, but why be greedy?”

  She had finagled an invitation to Kazdoy’s apartment, agreeing to broil some chicken — dry it out good, bubeleh — and once there, high heels kicked off, yawning and slipping out of tight blouse and frilly bra, she’d cook his goose.

  Harry would have all night to root around in the metal drawers.

  If he didn’t fuck it up.

  But look at him now, nervous as a dog shitting razor blades. Should be so easy. But the little man, sweet as he is, couldn’t break into a pay toilet. Now he wants to take ‘em all, cause a big ruckus.

  “Vi, you gotta think big. You said yourself there might be millions there. Millions!”

  “That’s what ah’m worried about. The bigger the haul, who knows, the FBI might be here tomorrow givin’ me the third degree.”

  “The FBI don’t give a shit about an old man’s bonds. They got stolen cars to worry about.”