Nick Bones Underground

by Phil M. Cohen

  I grabbed the device from Menkies’s hand and threw it on the sidewalk.

  “You’ve not seen the last of—” came the voice out of the device, as I stomped it to electronic pieces.

  “That does nothing, you know,” Menkies said.

  “It gets him away from me for the moment. That’s enough.” I still had other fish on my line. “Tanzer,” I said.

  “What about him?” Menkies said.

  “Why does this guy work for you? Who is he to you?”

  Rubbing his cheek, the blood now beginning to dry, Menkies said, “You ask the wrong question, Nicky. To me, Tanzer’s nothing. He’s the accountant. Could be anyone willing to earn a lot of money. You’re asking the wrong question.”

  “What’s the right question?”

  A long moment passed as the rabbit hole descended yet another few feet. “The question is, who is Tanzer to Shmulie?”

  “Why?”

  “Shmulie made me hire him.”

  “Shmulie made you? When? Do you know where that fat fuck is?”

  “What is Shelly Tanzer to Shmulie?” Yitzi placed his hat on his head. “He’s Shmulie’s son.”

  In a world of surprises, this one soared to pretty near the top.

  “Say what?”

  “Shelley Tanzer is the spawn of a one-night stand between Shmulie and some poor undergraduate in Pennsylvania thirty, thirty-five years ago.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Nicky, I don’t joke.”

  True enough. The words Yitzi Menkies and joke never, ever went together.

  “How do you know this?”

  “I know.”

  “Who’s his mother?”

  “I have no idea. Some girl from Delaware, one of his undergraduate students. He got her pregnant. They never lived together, but he always supported her. She raised him, but Shmulie kept an eye on him.”

  Menkies continued. “One day, right before we built the Rebbe, the Center gets a call. It’s Shmulie. He’s been a friend of ours for a while, you know? He tells me he’ll make it worth our while if I hired Tanzer. Why, I ask, and he told me the truth. Could I give his son a job? He’d employed the boy himself, he said, but he didn’t think that was going to continue. He offered a great deal of money. A very great deal.”

  “You had no qualms?”

  Menkies tinkered with the brim of his cowboy hat. “An accountant is an accountant, you know? One has to feed the monkey.” He rubbed a hair hanging down from above his upper lip. “Our partnership with Shmulie’s son brings in a shitload.”

  “How much is a shitload?” asked Maggie, sounding now exactly like the old girl.

  But I knew the answer—twenty-five million per annum above operating expenses.

  “Do you know where Shmulie is?” I asked, waving the pistol inches from his face.

  “If I knew, I might actually tell you. But it would do you no good. You’re finished soon enough.”

  I raised the pistol again. Menkies pulled off his ten-gallon Ponderosa hat and hid his face behind it. “I swear to God, Nicky. I don’t know. Why don’t you ask Shmulie’s son, Shelley Tanzer?”

  I already had. Would another visit yield a different answer? Maybe.

  I’d been drugged, kidnapped, lied to. Well, who cared about being lied to? Everybody lied; everybody’s lied to. My computer had been infected. The nutcase in my foyer had been transformed into a different nutcase. The accountant living underground was Shmulie’s progeny. Abe Shimmer, the old man who sent me on this quest for want of one phone call, had been murdered simply to send a message. Could it have been as cruel and utterly useless as that? Not to mention the resurrected Schmeltzer.

  In all the thrills of the evening, I’d let an important issue slide. I raised the gun one more time and pointed it vaguely at Menkies’s belly. “What about the Lerbs?” I asked.

  “What about Lerbs?” he asked.

  “You told Tanzer to dose me.”

  Body bent, tense, nose twitching, he said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Nicky. I’ve never given you a moment’s thought before you showed up for prayers. Why should I? You’re nothing but a bad high school memory.” Maybe he did it; maybe not. At the moment, what did it matter who gave the order?

  “Go home,” I said to Menkies. “Go be with your resurrected rebbe and plan the Next Big Thing.”

  ***

  My renewed computer and I walked uphill to my home in the cold and dark. Somewhere along this walk the strains of the song “Lili Marlene,” perhaps Ms. Dietrich’s most famous song, rose from the backpack inside of which rested Maggie. I preferred the German, but Maggie favored the English:

  Out of the silent space,

  Out of the depths of the earth,

  Lifts me as in a dream

  Your loving mouth.

  When the nocturnal mists swirl,

  I will be standing by the lamppost,

  As before, Lili Marlene.

  A very long day had passed in which unimaginable things had happened, when revelations bent my world—not yet to the breaking point, perhaps, but clearly bowed. Bent world, yet my computer was back, a testimony to technology but also the power of her own autonomous abilities to heal and evolve, and I was slouching toward something not yet determined, being comforted by the stylings of a world-weary woman’s low voice with a thick German accent.

  CHAPTER 32

  IN THE FLESH

  “NICK, THE REBBE. HE’S really not particularly advanced. It’s quite something nonetheless—a receptacle for a dead man’s memories turned upside down.” Maggie sniffled. “Sorry. Still working off the poison.” She sniffled again. “What the human mind won’t concoct.”

  I’d told her the whole tale over breakfast.

  “And Simone. That poor woman. What are you going to do about her?”

  Simone had murdered Abe, but was it my responsibility to turn her in? In any event, I saw no reason to act just then on the matter.

  “I suppose this means the two of you won’t be buying that house in the suburbs and raising kids anytime soon,” said Maggie.

  “That much is nearly certain,” I said with a wave of disappointment covering me like a rubber blanket.

  A familiar knock preceded what had become the habitual interruption by the good prophet, who stormed in like a tsunami at high tide. “I am come—” he said breathlessly, likely because he’d dashed up the several flights of stairs. “I am come to remove your heart of stone, Nick.”

  “What in the world are you talking about?” asked Maggie.

  Turning toward the tablet propped up on my desk, he said, “Ah, the divine Ms. Dietrich hath returned from digital Gehenna. Restored to good health, I trust?”

  “Better than ever, buster,” Maggie said. “I’m back and raring for action. We’re going on a search today.”

  Turning to me, he asked, “And you are searching for whom?”

  But it was Maggie who responded. “Your mother,” she said. “Who do you think? Shmulie Shimmer, asshole.”

  Mingus placed a hand on his testicular area. “Shmulie. Shmulie Shimmer,” he said. “You know his whereabouts?”

  “Not much better than yesterday,” I said. “Though today I have ideas.”

  “Mind sharing?”

  I did mind and told him so.

  “You trusteth not your prophet? Then thou hast for certain naught but a heart of stone.”

  Things had become complicated, I told him. I wasn’t certain I ought to disclose my suspicions yet, not even to God’s elected representative on Earth, not even one so literary.

  His knitted brows and eyes turned upward as if appealing to his heavenly Father. Then, he collapsed on the couch, closed his eyes, and traveled off to prophet land.

  Which was just as well, as Maggie and I had travel plans, too.
I took the remaining Zap and the .38. I packed Maggie in her new case, and we made our way into Manhattan to Track 42.

  ***

  Our entrance into the Velvet Underground proceeded without difficulty. Maggie, muffled within the backpack, attempted to challenge the toll-collecting drone, but nothing came of it. Our business at the border between up and down was conducted smoothly. We made it to the floor of the VU, the VU Cover Band in sight. Today they were playing the Velvet Underground, the short-lived band that launched a thousand imitators. Lou Reed, looking all of twenty-two, singing about the spike of dope going in his vein and how things just weren’t quite the same.

  Amen.

  In short order, then, I was on my way to my third visit with Shelley Tanzer, Shmulie Shimmer’s illegitimate son. A handcar passed, the drivers engaged in a rousing interpretation of “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.”

  “They seem happy in their work,” Maggie remarked.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  I rounded the corner and arrived at Tanzer’s place. I knocked.

  “Who is it?” Tanzer said.

  “It’s Nick Friedman.”

  “Again! Go the fuck away,” he said.

  “That’s not nice,” said Maggie.

  “Open up, Shelley. I’ve got business.”

  “I’ve got no business with you.”

  I knocked again, harder this time. The door opened a crack, and Shelley’s face peeked out. “What do you want?”

  “I’m coming in,” I said and pushed the door. Shelley retreated.

  “Are you going to destroy any more of my artwork?” he asked.

  I told him I wasn’t, that I had something we needed to talk about.

  He backed further into his room, near the edge of the light. “Speak, then. I don’t have all day.”

  “It’s about your father,” I said, as I removed the backpack and sat on the couch.

  Shelley’s face betrayed no emotion. “Big surprise, eh?” he said. “The accountant to the great criminal is his issue. Pretty messy, isn’t it?”

  It’s all messy, I thought—this no more than anything else I’d encountered these past days. “So let’s start talking straight.”

  Shelley nodded and sat down opposite me.

  “Yeah, let’s get all this on the table now, maggot,” came the voice from the backpack.

  Shelley sniffed as if there were something in the air.

  “That’s Maggie,” I said. “My partner.”

  “Where?”

  I pointed to the bag. “In here.”

  “I’m the new, trimmer me,” she said as if this would make sense to Shelley.

  “Get on with it, then. What do you want?” Tanzer asked.

  The voice in the bag said, “We’re looking and you’re knowing and showing. Where’s Daddy?”

  “All right. All right. I heard he’s in Levittown. They bought him a nice ranch house out there on the Island with trees and shit.”

  The image of Shmulie Shimmer mowing the lawn and food shopping, this picture was about as absurd as—

  “He’s not there,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Maggie. “Shmulie wouldn’t last a month on the Island.”

  “What do you want from me?” Tanzer said.

  “Are you a special-needs grown-up? The truth. We came for the goddamned, unvarnished truth,” said Maggie. “Tell us or I’ll unleash Nick on you and things will never be the same.”

  I pulled the tablet from the bag and rested it on the couch beside me. “Inside voice, Maggie,” I said in a professorial tone. “I am not joking.”

  Tanzer looked at the tablet, then at me. “What do you want?” he repeated.

  “Shmulie Shimmer,” I said. “I want your father.”

  There was a moment of surrender as if exhaustion had set in. Tanzer’s shoulders sagged, and his chin sank toward his chest. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “All right.”

  He walked to the door. Pulling it open, he said, “Follow me.”

  I returned Maggie to her home in the bag and yet again trailed Tanzer into the bowels of the Velvet Underground. Our walk concluded in front of the same blue door as yesterday. Room 42. Shelley produced a key. After fumbling a bit, he pushed open the door wide enough to accommodate us.

  Producing a small flashlight from his pocket, Tanzer ushered me over the shards of my work from yesterday, through the black room, and led us to the rear. He pulled back the door to a small panel and punched in some numbers. A mechanical voice said, “Enter, Sheldon Tanzer.”

  “Damned thing calls me Sheldon. Always Sheldon,” he said. Pushing the door, he looked at me as it gave way. “You’re on your own, bunky,” he said. On his way out, he stopped and looked over his shoulder. “Sometimes you get what you wish for, but suddenly you don’t want it no more, you know? Then you can’t remember why the hell you wanted it in the first goddamned place.”

  ***

  I entered upon a cavernous room, weakly lit, a couch, chairs, a dining table. On the walls hung copious paintings by Peter Max and Marc Chagall, whether originals or prints I could not tell in the dimness, though I had my suspicions. In the back corner sat a recognizable mahogany desk piled high with volumes of the Talmud, one of which sat in the center of the desk open to around the middle. Behind the Rebbe’s desk sat a familiar figure, who, upon seeing me, leapt up.

  “Nicky, Nicky,” he said. “My God, you’re looking good. Welcome to my subterranean lair.” He pointed around the room. “Brought to you by Lerbs, the drug that makes everyone want to kill me.”

  He strode over to me, his right hand extended like an arrow. We shook, he with enthusiasm, grasping both of my hands with both of his, I because I needed to hold on to someone or something to keep from keeling over.

  “What’s going on?” Maggie shouted from within her case.

  I withdrew Maggie from her container and pointed her toward Shmulie.

  “Maggie,” I said, “I’d like to introduce you to Shmulie Shimmer.”

  “OMG! We have found the most high and missing Shmulie Shimmer,” she said.

  “Been a while,” Shmulie said, slapping me on the back as if our friendship hadn’t died fifty years ago. “Welcome to my home.”

  Shmulie’d lost weight, maybe a hundred pounds. His cheeks, once bloated, were now sunken. His neck featured thick, reddish wattles. His hair, gray and thin, was tied back in a ponytail. His pencil mustache had blossomed into a thick patch that fed into a bushy salt-and-pepper beard. He wore a yarmulke—if memory served, the very same large, blue beanie with a Star of David in the middle that had graced his head the day we first met back in eighth grade, now a bit tattered. His clothes did not fit well. His pants were capacious, held up by red suspenders. He wore a flannel shirt that might have fit him well enough a hundred pounds ago. He looked like a sallow circus clown, no longer funny, old, well past retirement age. Shmulie observed me gawking at his clothing.

  “I don’t get out much, you know? Can’t buy clothes.” He pulled at his suspenders with his thumbs. “Drink?”

  “Anything eighty proof or above, several ounces of it,” I said, this being what I judged necessary to achieve anything approaching stasis.

  From a decanter he poured at least three ounces of an amber liquid into a cracked teacup and handed it to me. “The cup’s Mother’s,” he said. “All I’ve got left of her.” He placed the decanter on the coffee table. “Eighty-five-year-old Macallan Scotch whiskey,” he said, pushing in my face, like the Telford’s, his financial prowess. Old habits. He sat on a rocking chair.

  I swigged half of it down, an appalling insult to such liquor. The alcohol, at God knows how many hundreds of dollars an ounce, spread throughout my limbs and ascended into my brain, conveying a minute measure of clarity and balance.

  Shmulie walked over to a Peter Max painting hangin
g slightly off center and straightened it. He turned to me and asked, “What’s the voice in the tablet?”

  “That’s Maggie,” I said.

  “That is I,” she said.

  Shmulie looked at the image on the screen of Marlene dressed in a fur running halfway up her right cheek and a fur hat. A mysterious smile completed the ensemble.

  “So, this is Shmulie Shimmer in the flesh,” she said. “Much less flesh, if I judge correctly. And I always judge correctly.” Pausing a few beats, she added, “So what’s it like as a prisoner deep in the Underground? Ever wish you were in Levittown?”

  Shmulie sat back down, poured himself a drink, sipped and said, “It’s a far, far better life than the alternative.”

  “Meaning?” she asked.

  Shmulie sighed, “I’ve made lots of enemies. I didn’t think I’d survive in the real world no matter how well they disguised me. Even if they relocated me a thousand miles outside Fairbanks, someone’d find me. So this is where I live, and this is where I shall stay.”

  “How can this place be safe?” I asked.

  “All kinds of security measures surround this place.”

  “It seemed easy enough to get in here,” I said.

  “Appearances deceive. This place is under constant surveillance.” He took a delicate sip more appropriate to the quality of the booze. “You know,” he said. “I made enough money selling Lerbs to bankroll a European country for a very long time. And here I sit in my underground home spending my money paying for electric eyes to keep me safe yet contained.”

  Apparently, my presence made him contemplative.

  He rubbed his eyes and exhaled deeply. “Esther is locked away for life because of me. Esther won’t see any of our money. She earned her share. She’s gone forever. We’ll never see each other again. I get a package to her now and again through a third party, but that’s it.”

  Another sip.

  “Everybody bought the stuff when it was legal. From the man in the street to the prince in the palace. The Lerbs experience was remarkable, high and low at the same time, in perfect harmony. On Lerbs you traveled from Lerbsite to Lerbsite, playing. Well, no better toy ever existed. If you wanted a genuine mystical experience, a union with the totality of the universe, you had it. Or a bacchanal otherwise unimaginable, if you wanted that.”