“Here’s what I want you to do,” I said.
“Tell me, Nicky. Anything. I’m yours.”
“Prepare the summary, but also prepare option two. Be certain you can revert to it if needed.”
“No problem. Your executive summary of the Shmulie Shimmer case will be ready in twenty minutes, unless you need me to scour the foreign press. Then my task shall take longer. I am fluent in seventeen languages but can get by in most any tongue. But then I’ll have to translate everything for you, save what’s in French, Hebrew, Yiddish, and German.”
“Don’t forget Aramaic and Syriac,” I said.
“Showoff.”
Maggie went about her work, and I went about my breakfast.
The buzzer sounded as I finished a second cup of tea. I looked at the camera. Mingus. To ring my doorbell, he’d have had to leave the foyer and go outside. He mouthed the words “touch-up,” pointing to his cap with the profusion of dulling orange hair pouring out.
I looked at the clock on the kitchen wall. Nine twenty. He was due at ten. He was early, but it was Mingus. To him time was a relative concept. I counted myself lucky that today he hadn’t buzzed at five in the morning, as he had more than once. I pressed the button. A few moments later he stood at my open door.
“Morning, Prof. Mighty cold out there today,” he said.
“Hello, Mingus. Come on in.”
He entered and went directly to my computer screen.
“Where’s the digital Ms. Dietrich?” he asked.
“She’s out in cyberspace doing a job for me.”
“I hope she’ll be back in time so’s we can play Name That Tune.”
Crap. I forgot. Well, a deal’s a deal.
“We’ll play. Sure. If we have to, we’ll retrieve Maggie before her work’s done. Meanwhile, go take a shower. Don’t forget to take your hat off.”
“I never forget, Prof.”
He had forgotten once and emerged from the shower upset. So, I always reminded him.
I kept some towels in the closet set aside for Mingus along with fresh underclothes, socks, a shirt, and a pair of pants. His mood on any given touch-up day determined whether he would avail himself of any of these. Since Maggie wasn’t there to do it for him, he turned the water on by himself. In a moment I heard him singing in the shower. Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row.”
They’re selling postcards of the hanging,
they’re painting the passports brown,
the beauty parlor is filled with sailors, the circus is in town.
Here comes the blind commissioner, they got him in a trance.
One hand is tied to the tightrope walker, the other is in his pants.
And the riot squad, they’re restless. They need somewhere to go.
As lady and I look out tonight on Desolation Row.
I loved that song. I never figured out what it meant when I was a kid, but I had a Jewish city boy’s faith that Dylan wasn’t messing with our heads when he wrote these strange lyrics. They meant something. It had, in fact, become an anthem for New York. Folks saw in it an ironic, hidden message pointing toward a brighter future.
Waiting for Mingus and Maggie to complete their respective tasks, I had a moment to think.
I wondered, What am I going to do about Shmulie if I find him? Abe wanted to know his condition and, if alive, wanted me to persuade him to make that single overdue call. What if Shmulie Shimmer were alive in some upper-middle-class suburb, grilling hamburgers and treating the neighborhood children to candy dressed up to look like tiny bunny rabbits wrapped in aluminum foil? What if I found that suburb? Would I leave that information alone and get on with my life?
Or might I use that knowledge, pay my old chavruta a visit, perhaps armed with a Zap Lazar Pistol. Who besides his dying father would miss that mamzer?
Vengeance brought Lorraine to mind.
The evening my daughter received her acceptance to Columbia School of Law we celebrated at my place. I cooked Thai, and she brought the wine. More than acceptance, they gave her full tuition on merit. No one could question how a father would feel about that.
“You don’t use chopsticks with Thai food,” Lorraine informed me, as though sticking a pair of Chinese chopsticks into pad Thai was an insult to civilization. “Dad,” she said, pushing her hair behind her shoulder, “I don’t know if I want to go to law school.”
“Of course you don’t,” I said while deftly chasing a peanut around my plate with those chopsticks only to have it fall from the plate onto the table, then the floor. “Why would anyone want to go to a first-rate law school on full scholarship?”
“I don’t think I should be in law school, Dad.” She edged her food onto a large spoon with a fork the way they did it in Thailand, or so she claimed.
“And the reason for this?” I asked, sipping the wine.
“I’ve been in school for seventeen years and I’m tired. Besides, I don’t think I want to practice law.”
“What do you want to do?” I asked.
“I want to open a gourmet sandwich shop on the Upper West Side.”
Some version of this was her standard ruse, intended to raise my hackles.
“Well then, law school is the perfect place to begin,” I said. “The graduates of Columbia Law all work and live in Manhattan. Just befriend each one, all your professors, and all the support staff, and your clientele will be assured. You’ll be pedaling your bike with this and that piled on focaccia all over Manhattan.”
She gave me a familiar glare that included a smile.
“Go to law school,” I said. “Your fortune is assured.”
We ate and let “The Birth of the Cool” fill the air between us.
“Go to school. The world needs you,” I said. “If you still want to sell sandwiches down the road, then you can write your contracts. Your education won’t have been wasted.”
She nodded and smiled. Not exactly an admission of defeat as much as the acknowledgment that law school had many uses beyond slaving away in a law firm or slugging it out in a courtroom.
“All right. A three-year free ride to Columbia. What can I lose?”
My only child taught me the many ways to love one’s offspring. That night as I considered her next three years, I loved her not more, but differently, again.
Now, recalling my daughter’s fate, I wanted at that fat slob. And I realized that this desire, and not only sympathy for Shmulie’s father, constituted the reason I took the job.
Mingus emerged from the shower. He was dressed in the clean shirt and pants I’d placed in the linen closet. He was holding his cap in his hand, roots sticking out. Fluorescent orange and graying brown.
“Time to cover those roots, eh, Mingus?”
“If you please, Prof.”
We returned to the bathroom. I sat him on a high stool and put plastic sheeting on him. I applied the orange dye while he leaned back into the sink, his head fitting into it. “Hip, hip, hooray,” he said, as he always did.
After we finished, I fed him breakfast, including coffee, for which purpose I kept a stash in my freezer. Herbal tea, he told me, was his idea of an early death every time I offered it.
He took his last sip of the brew and looked at me. Cocking his head like a puppy, he said, “Now let’s play Name That Tune.” I judged Maggie should have returned. I walked over to the screen and saw Marlene, a smoky, full-faced image, a cigarette in hand.
“You’re back.”
“I’m back, Nick. Have I got stories. Did you know, according to your Israeli friend, Shmulie developed the formula for Lerbs in high school?”
I knew. I was Mickey’s source, the one and only time I’d ever spoken publicly about Shmulie’s high school activities. I kept silent now as I’d kept my silence since I blabbed to my friend Mickey the journalist.
“Do y
ou know why they call the drug Lerbs?” Maggie asked.
Mingus piped up. “No, why?”
“Because,” I said, cutting off Maggie’s narrative, “the first generation of them was supposed to look like tiny chocolate Easter bunnies.”
Shmulie had baked them in the shape of bunnies the size of a fingertip, and wrapped them in colorful aluminum foil with cute little bunny faces printed on the foil.
However, instead of looking like bunnies, they looked more like baby mice or rats. People began calling them “Little Rat Babies,” which morphed into LRBs or Lerbs. The name stuck like a dead fly on a windshield.
Mingus played with his yellow cap, looking at me with interest. “I remember that shit,” he said. “Did it once or twice myself. Didn’t like it. Stuff made me tired and all I did was fall asleep.”
Maggie chimed in. “The drug was a downer and a psychedelic in one. The more you sank, the higher you flew.”
“Me, I only went to sleep,” said Mingus.
Maggie said, “This stuff sold all over the world, beating Coca-Cola and McDonald’s hamburgers combined. By the millions, maybe billions. Shmulie became a very wealthy man.”
“Well and good, but what can you tell me about Shmulie?” I asked Maggie.
Mingus interrupted. “Hey, Prof. The game.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll leave you two alone, and you can plan what Maggie’s going to sing.”
I put on my coat and went outside for some air.
Name That Tune was Mingus’s creation. When I left the room, he would give Maggie the name of ten or so obscure songs from across the decades. He possessed a treasure trove of musical memory. He’d pull these songs from his murky mental hard drive and tell Maggie, who would scoop up untold versions from the Internet and choose one. The object was to see if I could recognize them. Simple enough.
When I returned, Mingus was sitting at my desk, face directed toward the monitor. He wore a wicked grin.
“Okay, Prof. Here’s the first song.”
And Maggie started singing. When she sang, she captured Marlene Dietrich’s sultry, seductive German accent and smooth tonality. “They’re selling postcards of the hanging, they’re painting the passports brown . . .”
“C’mon, Mingus. You’ve got to do better than that to stump me. ‘Desolation Row.’ You sang it in the shower not twenty minutes ago.”
Mingus said, “Just getting you warmed up. Just warming you up. Just a kindness. Now you’re gonna get stumped.” He looked at the screen and said, “Okay, Maggie, song number two.”
And Maggie sang,
When she said,
“Don’t waste your words, they’re just lies,”
I cried she was deaf.
And she worked on my face until breaking my eyes,
Then said, “What else you got left?”
It was then that I got up to leave
But she said, “Don’t forget,
Everybody must give something back
For something they get.
I’d heard that song—the melody like “Norwegian Wood.” Ordinarily, I might ask for a few more lines. Today I was in a hurry. “I give up,” I said.
“‘Fourth Time Around,’” Mingus cried with a giggle and squeal of triumph. “Dylan again. It’ll be all Dylan all the time this morning, and I’ll bet you’re not going to get another one.”
Mingus turned to Maggie for the next song. Before he opened his mouth, a flash of green light filled the screen and poured out like a polluted horizontal rain shower onto Mingus’s face. He stiffened and fell from the chair like a frozen halibut.
“What the hell, Maggie?” I yelled.
“I don’t know. It wasn’t me, and I can’t trace the source. That is most peculiar. I can always trace the source.”
Mingus moved slightly and groaned. I bent down, took his hand. He grasped it, and I pulled him up. I helped him to the couch. His eyes were open wide and unblinking. His lips were parted and his head tilted back, his wide-eyed gaze focused on me.
In a hypnotic tone he said, “Go see the fat bitch.”
“Who?” I asked.
“The fat bitch,” Mingus repeated. “Go see the erstwhile partner.”
Maggie piped up. “That would be Esther Lacey. On December 12 of the year of Shmulie’s trial, at 15:07, during a press conference, he said, and I quote, ‘I’m free. But what gives me greater nachas is knowing that my erstwhile partner will replace me behind bars. If one of us has to go to jail, better she than me.’”
“Mingus,” Maggie said, “or whoever has stolen his voice, is telling you to go visit Esther Lacey.”
“Where is she?” I asked Maggie.
“Incarcerated in a women’s prison in Westchester County.”
I looked at the monitor, again filled with an image of Marlene.
“Why hike all the way out there?”
“At least three serious websites attest to the rumor that Shmulie and Esther were lovers, maybe more than lovers, preposterous as that seems,” Maggie said. “Even if they were never romantically involved, Shmulie and Esther were business partners. She knows things. Mingus seems to think so.”
So what if Mingus seems to know things? Who made him omniscient?
I looked at Mingus. “How do you feel?”
He scratched his head with both hands. “I feel like I just got slammed by a busload of tourists. Like I woke up after drinking a gallon of muscatel. Or I met up with a bucket of loose bricks, or—”
“Do you have any idea what happened?” I asked.
“All I know is that Marlene here was about to sing an old Dylan song so fitting for our times, ‘Hard Times in New York Town,’ you know,
Come you ladies and you gentlemen, a-listen to my song.
Sing it to you right, but you might think it’s wrong.
Just a little glimpse of a story I’ll tell
’Bout an East Coast city that you all know well.
It’s hard times in the city,
Livin’ down in New York town.
Mingus cleared his throat. “Maggie was about to stump you again. Instead, I find myself on the couch, you leaning over me like you’re my mama.”
I told Mingus someone or something came at him out of the monitor, that he passed out and fell. I asked him what he remembered.
“Like I’ve been tellin’ ya, not a blessed thing, Prof.” He ran his hands through his hair again, some of the dye rubbing off onto his fingers. “Except . . . except—”
“What?”
“Except, now I think about it, for just a second or two maybe I heard God talkin’ at me.”
“God?”
“Yeah. The Almighty Him or Herself. I mean, who else would come right into your brain and say, ‘As of now, my man, no longer shall you be called Mingus. From now on, shall you be called Ezekiel, my prophetic voice on planet Earth.’”
“When did that happen?” I asked, wary of this new terrain.
His face became incandescent. “Don’t know for sure. Somewhere between ‘Fourth Time Around’ and you askin’ me if I’m all right, I guess. By the by, Prof, I’d appreciate if you’d call me Ezekiel from now on. Aw, hell, since it’s you, Prof, you can call me Zeke.”
I’ve got a computer that thinks it’s human and a former student who thinks he’s a prophet. And the prophet has just told me to go visit Esther Lacey, locked away Upstate.
“Mingus,” I said.
“Ezekiel or Zeke to you. Mingus has returned to the mountain.”
“Ezekiel, did—did God say anything else?”
Mingus/Ezekiel/Zeke screwed up his face, that crazed, hypnotic look returning with a passion. His head tilted backwards, and with those preternaturally wide eyes aimed down at me, he thundered, “The prophet hath spoken. Why dost thou sittest on thine ass? Move thine as
s! Get thee to the old partner.”
“This could be a place to start,” Maggie said.
“It’ll take the rest of the day,” I said. “Are you sure?”
Marlene with the Hebrew on her forehead returned to the screen.
“In this life nothing is certain save its bitter end,” Maggie said. “For you humans,” she added.
I told Maggie to order an Uber to take me to Penn Station, and make all other necessary arrangements.
On my way to visit the erstwhile partner.
CHAPTER 11
BIG GRAY LADY
ESTHER LACEY WAS SERVING two lifetimes in Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women in Westchester County. The village of Bedford Hills constituted an unusual combination of this maximum-security prison for women and what were once multimillion-dollar celebrity homes to the likes of Martha Stewart and Bruce Willis. The homes had become less fashionable since the Great Debacle.
When New York City went all AI dysfunctional, money—real and virtual—vanished. Cryptocurrency, invisible to begin with, turned to vapor. New York was suddenly as poor as a character out of Dickens, and twice as ugly. Nothing worked quite right. All city services were gutted. Human-driven trains, buses, bridges, streets, streetlights, police, firefighters all came in very short supply because there was no money to pay for them. Thus, my rail journey from Brooklyn to Westchester County, irritating even in the blessed old days, was infuriating, bedeviled by chronic and unpredictable delays at every step. So slow was my journey to Westchester County that when I disembarked from the train, darkness had begun its descent. I promised myself that next time I would take an Uber the whole way, having then only to deal with potholes and broken traffic signals. Doesn’t every noir detective make twenty-five bucks a day plus expenses? Abe’ll pay me back, I told myself with confidence I did not possess.
I occupied my time by reviewing a rather large swath of data concerning Esther. The Internet was rife with stories of Esther remaining in control of an immense criminal network even though she was locked away.
I grabbed a driverless Uber at the village station and made my way over to the prison. We turned a corner, and suddenly it hove into view. I was slapped with the sight of the barbed wire encircling the place. The immediacy of its gray walls and wire and guard towers in the middle of this sedate, once prosperous village filled me with dread. I feared I’d enter the place and fail to exit, irrational as I knew that feeling to be. I sublimated my fright by focusing on the task at hand. I exited the Uber and walked through the entrance and into the visitors’ room.
Nick Bones Underground Page 6