Nick Bones Underground

by Phil M. Cohen

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe means maybe not,” Yitzi said.

  “Maybe, maybe not. Maybe he’s dead, even. I want to find out. He used to come here to study.”

  “Shmulie did come here from time to time. Why’s that important?”

  “Not sure. Just gathering information, hoping it eventually adds up to something. Right now I’ve got gornisht.” Yiddish for, essentially, crap, which was what I had.

  “I’m not keen to pass on information without a good reason.”

  “I’m looking for Shmulie. That’s about all I have to tell you.”

  “You need my help, but you’re not giving back? No can do. You don’t help me, I don’t help you,” Yitzi said with deep sanctimony.

  I pulled out my device and opened the UniPay app. I tapped in the sum of $1,000, breathing just a little harder. I prayed silently to the God I occasionally believed in that Abe, had the wherewithal to repay me.

  “A grand is now yours. Come and get it.”

  Menkies beamed like the eighth day of Hanukkah. He removed his device and aimed it at mine, pressed a button. The transfer complete, I returned my phone to my pocket. Yitzi put his on the table.

  “For the bar mitzvah fund,” I said.

  “Being the big shot scholar of us you should know we don’t do bar mitzvahs anymore. They went out with bris milah and the prohibition against eating bacon,” he said, popping the final bit of his double bacon sandwich into his mouth.

  “And the prohibition against tattoos,” I said.

  “That too.” He nodded. “Worry not, Nicky. I’ll find a suitable use for your donation.”

  “No doubt.” I finished my sandwich, sipped some tea, and said, “So Shmulie Shimmer was in the habit of coming by?”

  “Yes, yes, he’d visit,” Yitzi said.

  “What would he do?”

  “He’d study. Like everyone else,” he said. “He’d daven, sometimes he’d stay over for Shabbos. Sometimes he’d come mid-Shabbos afternoon, eat with us and study.”

  “How often?”

  “Once a month. Twice a month. Once a week sometimes.”

  “Did he study anything in particular?”

  He screwed up his face, thinking hard. “I seem to remember he had a fondness for Maimonides’ Laws of Repentance, especially right when the Lerbs law was going to pass.”

  “What did Schmeltzer get out of his coming here?” I asked.

  “The pleasure of one more soul brought over to our side.”

  “Shmulie never made a donation to the cause?”

  “Of course, we hope everyone who visits will make a donation. Perhaps you didn’t see the pushka as you entered?”

  “It’s bigger than the Empire State Building,” I said.

  “We hope you’ll consider making an offering on your way out.”

  “You have all the offering you’re going to get from me,” I said, tapping my shirt pocket.

  “Oh yes,” Yitzi replied, patting the phone on the table. “Slipped my mind.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Are you saying Shmulie didn’t do more than put a couple of dollars in the pushka?”

  “He may have occasionally donated more.”

  “How much?”

  “Let’s just say Shmulie wasn’t slow to transfer funds to us. For that reason alone he’s greatly missed.”

  “Any other reasons you miss him?”

  “Do I miss his companionship, his fiery wit, his fat ass in our chairs?”

  “Yes, like that.”

  “Honestly? He was pushy and arrogant. And he didn’t believe in the Rebbe’s return, the fat fuck.”

  Another spontaneous expletive inspired by the missing Shmulie Shimmer.

  “If you think this of him, and he thought that of you, then why did he support you?” I asked.

  “The satisfaction of knowing he was supporting a worthy organization increase its activities and influence in the world.”

  “Even if he didn’t believe in the reason for your existence?”

  “Even if.”

  “What did you do for him?” I pressed.

  “What could we do for him? Honor him? We did that at every opportunity. There wasn’t much. We don’t have a board to put him on. I’m pretty much the board, me and a couple of early converts. So what else is there?” His eyes opened wide and that light-bulb-over-the-head look crept onto his face. “Come here.”

  We walked to the doorway where he showed me a plaque I missed when I walked in, so dazzled was I by the Chagall. The Shmulie Shimmer Study Hall it read.

  “We named this room after him,” he said, his arm sweeping across the space.

  “Mighty generous,” I said. “But you don’t find it peculiar that Shmulie Shimmer would want to give you anything unless there was something serious in it for him, besides a room?”

  “When someone gives you a big check you say thank you and hope for more in its season. I figured he wanted to be a mensch and help us along.”

  “A mensch Shmulie is not. Shmulie knows what he wants and generally gets what he wants. If he didn’t believe in the resurrection, why care whether this organization is strong and healthy? Makes no sense.”

  “He’d say he was a cultural Schmeltzerite. He liked our food and our music, our developing folkways, but he couldn’t believe our core idea,” said Yitzi. “He came, he studied a little, he noshed, he went home. He got arrested, then disappeared. Haven’t heard of or from him since.”

  Shmulie didn’t cotton to the wacky ideas emanating from the Land of No Mind. Momentarily, I experienced a grain of something resembling respect.

  I looked at Menkies and was impressed. How could I not be? He’d built an empire based on a preposterous lie, on folks’ need to turn their will over to someone. His gang surrendered their minds to the Mind, which was after all only Menkies’s mind, and would do whatever they were told. Schmeltzerism revealed itself to be a burgeoning totalitarianism, amusing now, but why not more lethal not far down the road? Today a tattoo, tomorrow the world.

  A protracted silence passed between us, I looking at this unlikely, shady mastermind, he looking at me, thinking I knew not what.

  “Something else is going on here, Yitzi, right?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?” he said, eyes narrowing.

  “To tell the truth, I’m not certain. But when I was down in the Velvet Underground—”

  “You were there?” he asked in a tone suggesting his vast network might not be so vast.

  “The other day.”

  Yitzi nodded.

  “While down there I saw the Rebbe’s photograph hanging in several spots. The same photo.”

  “I’m not surprised. The Rebbe is beloved everywhere, aboveground and below.”

  “Maybe. I also briefly observed a class in Schmeltzerism taught on the sidewalk by a guy in a loud shirt.”

  “That would be Israel Levin, our emissary to the VU. They love him down there.”

  “What’s your interest in the VU?”

  “Same as anywhere else. People all over need to hear about the New Thought Idea.”

  “That it?”

  “That’s it, baby.”

  “Yitzi, you’ll go down in history as a great and awesome liar,” I growled.

  “What?”

  “Anyone possessing half a brain knows you invented the resurrection. Easy enough to accomplish. All it required was massive exploitation of an idea already heating up in every Kobliner’s superstition-filled brain. You invented the story, the story went viral, and you became the leader, a regular St. Paul to the whole damned world. Damn your snake-oil sightings and your phony dream reports.”

  Waving his hands at me, Yitzi shouted, “No. It was real. It’s all real. Every bit of it. He came to me. He comes to me. To me. I don’t
know why or how, but he did. All real. Really, really real, man. I’m not smart enough to make this up. You’ve got to believe me.”

  “I don’t for a minute believe you,” I said. “Except for the part about not having the intelligence to figure it out for yourself. Somebody put you up to it.”

  An uncomfortable moment passed between us. His head pointed to the floor and his hands dropped to his sides.

  “All right,” he said. “You’re right. I couldn’t have made it up. I didn’t make it up. Someone else did.”

  I heard Yitzi’s foul breath going in and out as we both awaited my reply.

  “That was too easy,” I said. “Why’d you tell?”

  “Because it’s you, Nicky.”

  “Me? Who am I to you?”

  “You and Shmulie. The two geniuses of the class. I always felt close to both of you . . . you know? Like you were the only friends I had there. Especially you.”

  This astonishing bit of distorted news threw me. He’d crumbled like matzah. I needed no gun, no Lazar pistol. He just opened up and came clean. I kept silent for the moment.

  The first Schmeltzerite Rebbe continued. “I’ve always had great respect for you, Nick Bones. More than you could know.”

  “Who dreamt up this God-forsaken scheme?”

  Menkies bit on an index fingernail. “The identity of my partner, that’s another thing. Him I do not give up.”

  It seemed I’d acquired the upper hand. “What’s to stop me from telling the world?”

  “You think you’re the first person to accuse us of being a phony?”

  Probably not, once I thought about it.

  “We’ve got a whole apparatus ready to go should anyone claim they can expose us. The world can be very, how to say, resistant to these things, especially in the face of a well-coordinated series of credible denials, along with the batch of fake news we’d deploy anywhere we can. Don’t mess with someone’s beliefs and expect to get away with it.”

  I headed for the door, but as I reached it and yanked it open, I realized I’d gone in the wrong direction and opened door 42 instead.

  What I glimpsed inside amazed me—a room packed with electronic gear, humming away. Above the electronics, surrounding the room, were perhaps two dozen monitors displaying images of places around the world, so identified by their labels. In the center of one of these walls hung two somewhat larger monitors. One displayed the image of a door, just a large, blue door, and next to it a completely dark screen.

  Menkies yanked me with surprising force. “Get the fuck out of here.” He slammed door 42 shut.

  “What’s that?” I asked, pointing.

  “None of your damned business,” he said, now pushing me toward the other door. “You’ve worn out your welcome here,” he said. “You come back, I’ve got men who’d be happy to work you over just fine.”

  I stopped. “Do these goons of yours happen to look like black cartons with hats?”

  Menkies stared. “Just get out of here.”

  I made my way through the busy foyer to the exit. I walked by the tables filled with hookah smokers, an aromatic haze hovering above them. A familiar voice shouted, “NB!” I turned to face a smiling, clean-shaven, longhaired man with a forehead that reached about halfway up his scalp. He was bareheaded, wore high-top white sneakers, jeans, and a multi-colored Hawaiian shirt, a wide, bright-red tie hanging loosely around his neck. On his nose sat thick red-framed glasses. Leibel Berliner stuck out his hand.

  Had I any lingering doubt, I now knew, incontrovertibly, I’d crossed the Rubicon onto the other shore, a splendid experiment in self-delusion. How vicious might that craven rodent’s thousands of zealous followers become? Just a bunch of passive idiots, or a threat of some magnitude? I exited the Schmeltzerite Center uneasy.

  CHAPTER 23

  COLD AND GRAY

  “SO, YOU STOLE A bike,” Maggie said like a mother scolding her errant son.

  “I returned it,” I said, fighting the desire to whine.

  “That’s something, I suppose,” she said. “But what if down there the bike had been stolen? What then?”

  “That would have been a problem. But it wasn’t stolen, was it? No harm done. End of story.”

  I stretched out on the couch. Maggie issued a grunt of disapproval so great my bookcases trembled.

  “How did your meeting with the new rebbe go?”

  “More than I expected.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Ratsy Yitzi remains Ratsy Yitzi, ugly and irritating. But now he’s got enormous power, and a very tall tale that he’s whipped up with some very shrewd assistance.”

  “Oh?”

  I told Maggie about the Monday night dream and the Tuesday afternoon reveal, how a packed house sat in a darkened room rolling steel balls in their hands and devouring what poured out of Yitzi.

  “It’s quite extraordinary, actually, in a Benito Mussolini sort of way, if El Duce lived in the New Age.”

  “Fine. But what did you learn about Shmulie?”

  I did not respond.

  “You wasted your time.”

  “Not exactly. I did get a healthy dose of Schmeltzer philosophy.”

  “You wasted your time.”

  “I did get a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich,” I said. “With mayonnaise.”

  “But as for locating Shmulie?”

  “There was no concrete information, that’s certain. But an odd thing happened just as I was stomping the hell out of the place.”

  “Oh?” Maggie said. “I am a fan of oddities, usually.”

  I told her about stumbling into 42, about the monitor focused on a blue door.

  I looked around the living room and took note of Ezekiel’s absence.

  “What’s happened with the good prophet?” I asked.

  “He popped up not long after you left, sang about selling postcards of the hanging in the shower, drank some coffee, refused some oat bran, and staggered on out.”

  “Did he say anything?” I asked.

  “Something about searching some more for dry bones, which I assume was a reference to the thirty-seventh chapter of his book. Not that I know where one can find a valley of dry bones in this part of the City, or the chariot he keeps saying he’s going to ascend in.”

  “With Zeke you never know.”

  “True.”

  I looked at the screen. The great German actress appeared in an image from that wonderful movie, Witness for the Prosecution, a tired-looking, German WWII survivor brought to England by Tyrone Power. A fabulous conniver in this film, she gets her comeuppance in the end. “So, what do we do now?” she asked.

  “It’s chilly and gray outside.”

  “It’s February in New York City, Nick. It’s always gray and chilly.”

  I rose from the couch and stretched. “I think I’ll settle down with some tea and read the collected works of Yitzi Menkies.”

  “Your plan has merit, Nick. Stay indoors, and off other people’s bicycles, and out of old Volkswagens.” Another pause. “But what will you do for exercise?”

  “I could borrow the bike next door again.”

  “I’ll assume that’s a joke.”

  “You don’t find me funny?”

  “No, Nick, not funny today.”

  I touched my toes in a demonstration of my physical health. “Not bad for an aging cocker.”

  “You know how beneficial exercise can be, Nicholas. I don’t want your body returning to its previous unfit condition. Shall I be in touch with a repair shop and make an appointment for you?”

  I once had both a wife and a mother. My wife left me, and my mother passed on at a ripe enough age. I now had a domineering computer.

  “I’ll take care of it when I’m ready. Now will you please heat up some water for me? I need to get to
work. And I’d like a cup of tea.”

  Tea sat beside me as I settled into my favorite reading chair and opened Menkies’s book to the table of contents. Prologue, Introduction, Chapter 1: The Old Kobliner Philosophy, Chapter 2: The New Land, Chapter 3: The Land of No-Mind, Chapter 4: The New Thought Idea, and so forth through twelve chapters. Three hundred and seventy-five pages of what promised to be third-rate Jewish mysticism conveyed by a fourth-rate writer.

  But the prose wasn’t too bad. Perhaps Menkies had developed some intellectual muscle. Or he had a good ghostwriter. In either case, the read wasn’t the masochistic exercise I’d feared.

  “The new Schmeltzer philosophy,” he wrote on page 220, “entails a surrender of magnificent proportions. We are always the tabula rasa, receiving the Word from the Rebbe, peace be unto him. The teachings given you make your spirit soar, achieve true Being, and holy Obedience. All is love. The NTI brings the end of melancholy, rancor, pain, inner imbalance. All is well.”

  As I digested this ostensible wisdom, Maggie interrupted.

  “Nick,” she said.

  I was startled. “Yes.”

  “You have a call coming in on your old-fashioned telephone.” I kept my old landline around primarily for reasons of nostalgia. I had used it to call my parents, but they’d been gone now for some years. I hadn’t received a call on that line for a very long time.

  “Can you tell who’s calling?”

  “This older technology prevents me from identifying the caller. Do you want me to disconnect?”

  “No. No. I’ll take it. Send it to my mobile.” I went to my desk where my mobile sat on a pad charging. I picked it up.

  “Nicky? It’s me, Abe.” His voice was buoyant.

  “Hello, Abe. How are you?”

  “Wonderful, just wonderful,” he answered.

  “Good. Why wonderful?”

  “I just got off the phone with Shmulie,” he said, nearly giddy.

  “You’re sure it was him?”

  “I don’t know my own son’s voice?”

  “What did he say?”

  “We only talked for a moment. He apologized for not calling for so long. He couldn’t help it, he said.”