THE CHINESE MAN IN THE BLUE SUIT believed ardently in the principle that contemplative thought should precede action, especially violent action, and so for several days after the incident with the Chen girl and the two White Dragon boys he sat and thought and did nothing. In his youth he had, in contrast, been a passionate advocate of violent action with no thought at all, thought itself having been rendered nugatory by the intellectual achievements of the Great Helmsman. Later, bobbing in the vast sludge of broken humanity left by the Cultural Revolution, he had discovered individualism, and for a while he imagined that the discovery was original. Later still, he met others, former Red Guards like him, without education, family, culture, or hope, who had also become individualists, and together they rediscovered feudalism, a system in which a few strong individualists become rich through the imposition of pain and terror upon the weak. This suited him very well, and it suited the leaders of his country, who had found, contra Marx, that feudalism was necessary for the operation of a communist state since, unlike communism, it worked.
He stared into the steam rising from his teacup and through the amber liquid to the leaves on the bottom, and tried to fit them into the shape of a character, although he knew he did not have the skill, if skill it was. He should have an oracle cast, he thought, although he had never found them useful in the past. Regrettably, their usefulness seemed to depend on the cultivation of self-knowledge, something he was disinclined to do, as he suspected, rightly, that it would interfere with his goal of accreting to himself as much raw power as he could. Still, he knew others believed, and that was what was important. After the brief bubble of chaos brought on by the Cultural Revolution, the dense substance of Chinese life had flowed back into its original immemorial spaces. It no longer paid to advertise disbelief. People might think you were unlucky, which was a disaster for any cooperative enterprise among the Chinese, at home or abroad.
He drank, slurping. The man in the blue suit spent a good deal of his time here, sitting on the lumpy bench of the rearmost of the four booths, facing the streaked window and the street. There were no other customers in the restaurant at this hour, understandable at ten in the morning, but there were few at any hour. Nevertheless, the tea room, a twelve-by-twenty-foot box on Bayard Street, was on paper enormously profitable. It was called Li Gwún, or Lee’s Place, that is, the Chinese equivalent of “Joe’s,” and its primary purpose, like that of a great many similar holes in Chinatown, was not the dispensing of the world’s most sophisticated cuisine but the metamorphosis of illegal cash into spendable income. It was, in fact, a Chinese laundry, and a wholly owned subsidiary of the man’s organization.
He was calling himself Leung nowadays, which did not mean much, as underworld Chinese change names nearly as often as they buy shoes. What was important was what he represented, that and the plan. When Leung thought about the plan, the two words that came into his mind were yù and bàng. The first means a kind of wading bird, a snipe. The other means a clam. They are the first two words of a Chinese idiom, based on an ancient fable. The clam lies open on the shore, and the snipe grabs it. The clam closes its shell on the snipe’s bill. Neither will let the other go. The snipe holds on because of greed, the clam because it fears being eaten. A fisherman comes by and catches them both. The success of the plan depended on keeping the contending parties focused on one another and not on the fisherman creeping closer.
Thus the attack on the White Dragons was disturbing. He was supposed to be invisible in his character as a no-name Chinatown gangster, a loyal vassal of the Háp Taì tong, a nobody, the creeping fisherman. Who had ordered the interference? The men who took the ma jai off the street so smoothly and professionally were unlikely to be local talent. Most of the people Chinatown called gangsters were petty extortionists, clowns who thought that a big score was a bunch of them ordering a meal in a restaurant and not paying. The ma jai had not seen the faces of their captors, which had been concealed behind ski masks, but they claimed that the leader had spoken to them in what sounded like Viet–accented Cantonese. That made more sense. One would use a Vietnamese or a Fujianese for that sort of thing. He himself had used a Vietnamese for the business in the Asia Mall. Thinking about that, he considered the possibility that Chen had hired protection for his daughter, and then dismissed it. Chen would not dare, although he did have the temerity to complain about the killings taking place on his property, which was why the demonstration against his daughter had been necessary.
If the Chens were of no consequence, who had intervened? Leung could not imagine that the thing had any other purpose than to send him a message. As he read it, it was this: we know who you are; we are watching; we can get to your people; and we can get to you. That was the message he himself would have sent with the action on Canal Street—a daylight abduction, which meant an additional footnote: we’re tough and competent. The message could not be from the Wo Hop To triad. If they thought he had betrayed the Sings, he would already be dead in some particularly unpleasant way. His comrades in the Da Qan Zi triad might have sold him out. That was always a possibility, and he certainly had rivals enough. But he had carefully balanced the rivalries heretofore, and the promise to his triad leadership of what he intended to bring to them was more than sufficient to stifle with avarice any move against him, at least until the fisherman had the snipe and the clam firmly in hand. That left the Italians. The more he thought about it, the more he felt that this was the correct solution. He had expected something like this, but not in so subtle a fashion. That was the Vietnamese influence. The Italian had given the contract to a Viet gang, both to insulate himself from suspicion and because he wanted to see what Leung would do under pressure. He had, of course, no idea that Leung was all by himself in New York, that he was operating with only the barest toleration of his triad, on speculation, that the yù bàng plan was his alone. If they penetrated this veil, he was finished.
He thought briefly about the little American in Macao, and what he had learned from him about the absurd machinations of American law. The man could talk for hours about it, introducing strange concepts that had no Chinese equivalent. Due process. Conflict of interest. Plea bargaining. Immunity. He was a drunk and an opium addict, but he had long periods of lucidity, and Leung had listened with close attention. The man was dead now, but what he had taught Leung had fermented like a tub of soy beans in the young gangster’s head and become, after the passage of years, a part of the plan.
Leung slurped the last of his tea and rose to leave. They wanted to see what he would do under moderate pressure, perhaps expecting a tentative push in return. Instead he would advance his plan and respond with a devastating counter blow, one that would remove the Italian entirely from the board.
Mary Ma washed dishes in the kitchen of the Golden Pheasant, a big, brightly lit, old-fashioned tourist restaurant on the second floor of a building on Mott, a few doors up from Pell. The appreciation of Chinese cuisine had recently come a long way in the city, and there were now large numbers of gwailo New Yorkers who could distinguish between the various regional cuisines and be boring about how to eat Peking duck. The old Golden Pheasant, however, catered to the tour-bus trade, terrified gaggles of ladies from Indiana shrieking with nervous laughter over chopsticks, soy sauce, and lobster Cantonese with flied lice. The Ma family was three years in the country, six years out of the PRC, beginning to make it in America in the good old way, working two jobs apiece, living like dogs in two tenement rooms, keeping their one kid in school, saving every penny. (Mrs. Ma was shocked to her soul when, a few days after her arrival in town, she observed a group of children tossing pennies against a wall. Playing! With real coins! What if they lost one?)
Aside from violating the child labor and minimum wage laws of the state of New York for eight hours a day, Mary Ma was more or less on her own. From the age of ten she had worn the latchkey necklace, that badge of striving families, and saw her parents mainly at work, where Mrs. Ma was a prep cook and Mr. Ma a waiter. Mary Ma had started school in Guangdong in the PRC, continued in Hong Kong, and had been registered in public school on the second day after the family’s arrival in New York, speaking little English, and that with a faint British accent. She was lonely, as all such children are and more than most, since she was a member of the Chinese generation that has no siblings by order of the leaders of the PRC. In the fourth grade, however, she had with uncharacteristic boldness advised the gwailo girl at the next desk, who was having incomprehensible difficulty with a math problem that Mary Ma had solved in eight seconds, and to her immense surprise the girl had thanked her profusely in Cantonese.
Thus was born her friendship with Lucy Karp, and thus was she brought into the charmed circle of the Chens and the Karps, and supplied with the role models every immigrant child needs to become American. From Janice she learned how to be Chinese and cool, she learned that thick leather boy’s oxfords are never appropriate no matter how well they wear, that iridescent blue-framed harlequin-shaped eyeglasses are a bargain for a good reason and that small wire-framed ones are better and nearly as cheap, she learned that makeup is not the unmistakable sign of prostitution, that the cheap brands of blusher are about as good as the costly ones, that it is not a sin against the ancestors to have some spending money of one’s own, that parents deserve respect and obedience but do not necessarily represent the source of all earthly wisdom.
From Lucy there came lessons more thrilling, even terrifying: about films and music—who is hip, who not; that girls are the equal of boys, and often smarter, that making a boy look a fool is not a sin but amusing; that the correct response to insult is not shame but counter-insult and aggression; that the street has its own rules, some of them not thought of by Confucius; and (this, of course, indirectly, but the most important of all) that a big part of growing up in America is the invention of the self, and there are no real constraints on this choice—not class, not race, not even sex.
And Lucy introduced the immigrant child to the bosom of the American family. (With what difficulty did Mary Ma explain to her parents what a sleepover was, and its purpose, and assure them that they would not have to reciprocate, and that there was no loss of face in this!) Used to analyzing the deeper meaning of every act for political consequences, the Ma parents were flabbergasted that their offspring was being entertained in the home of a public prosecutor (the honor!), something that could never have happened in the Red mandarin society of the PRC, but naturally they were terrified that she would let something slip about the provenance of their green cards. Mary would never have revealed to her parents that Lucy Karp knew all there was to know about this aspect of the Mas’ American journey, and that secret was one of the things that tied her most closely to Lucy and Janice. A certain amount of foolish secrecy is involved in most friendships among girls of that age, but in this case the secrets were not foolish at all, were real and dire. It made the friendship closer, more intimate, and as water to the thirst of Mary Ma, who had almost no one else to love. That was another lesson: there was American stuff that your folks could never, ever understand, even if, as in Lucy’s case, they were Americans born.
The disaster at the Asia Mall had thus affected Mary Ma’s life even more than it had that of her friends. Suddenly Janice was distant and vaguely “busy,” Lucy was practically incommunicado, and the phone conversations Mary had with both of them were brief and unsatisfying. Unlike her friends, however, Mary could not afford to sulk, her social resources being much thinner. Besides this, she was compelled by a sense of shame about the way she had lost it and blubbered in the aftermath of the killings.
On a Monday morning, then, ten days after the events in the storeroom, she left her family’s tenement apartment on Eldridge Street and strode down Canal, her round face as grim as a round face ever gets, her fists clenched, looking much like one of the girls marching boldly out of the picture plane on one of those flower-colored Maoist posters touting the Great Leap Forward. She was headed for Lucy’s home, with what in mind she hardly knew, but resolved to fight for friendship in whatever way might present itself.
She walked by the Asia Mall, looking sideways to see if she could catch a glimpse of Janice through the windows. She thought of just bursting in and demanding to know what was up, but quailed at the thought of going into that place just yet. She was cursing herself for a spineless wretch when she spotted a familiar face emerging from the glass doors.
“Hey, Wang!” she called out, just as if she were a boy, which was permitted in America.
Warren Wang looked up, saw who it was, and waved.
She continued west on Canal, and he fell in with her. He was carrying two large plastic Asia Mall shopping bags.
“Where’re you going?” he asked.
“Wherever I feel like,” said Mary Ma, and added, “The highway is my home.”
“No, really.”
They stopped to let traffic pass on the corner of Broadway. She pointed at a phone number on the side of a passing truck. “I’ll tell you if you tell me what’s interesting about that number.”
“What, 4937775?” His eyes unfocused briefly. “Um, it’s a Smith number. The sum of the digits equals the sum of the digits of its prime factorization minus one. Forty-two. So, tell me, where?”
“I’m going to Lucy Karp’s.”
“Forget it. She locked herself in a closet and swallowed the key. I’ve been trying to talk to her for a week.”
“You have? I didn’t know you were a friend of hers.”
He laughed ruefully. “Neither did I.” Upon which he related the strange incident involving Janice and the two ma jai. “I called her up as soon as I got home,” he continued, “but it was like nothing ever happened. ‘Forget it, Warren.’ Okay, I’ll forget it, and then I ask her if she wants to go hang out or something, hit the arcade or the movies, but nothing.” He sighed. “I guess it was like a scam, them being, you know, nice and all.”
Mary was silent for so long that the boy stopped and looked into her face.
“What’s wrong?” No answer. “Earth to Mary . . .”
Mary’s face had gone the color of old parchment. She forgot to breathe for a long time, and when she did it came in a strangled whoop. When her mind unfroze, she found that she was running up Broadway. At Grand she looked around wildly, but all she saw was the normal street traffic and poor Warren Wang standing there, his shopping bags drooping from his hands, his mouth open in surprise. The terror she had felt in the storeroom was back again, redoubled. There was only one reason for Janice and Lucy to be followed, which was that somebody knew they all had seen the murders. This thought, once comprehended, blasted through Mary Ma’s considerable intellect like a gas explosion, leaving behind it a single bare instinct, similar to the one that drives the whooping crane two thousand miles to a tiny patch of Texas. In five minutes she was at Crosby off Grand, her finger jammed into the button for Lucy Karp’s loft, imploring Guan Yin, goddess of compassion, that Lucy might answer. Which she did, but coolly.
“Um, Mary, I’m kind of involved—”
“Wah! Lòuhsì!” Mary sobbed, and then started babbling in Cantonese, at which point Lucy, without another word, pressed the button that would send the elevator down to the street.
What Lucy had been involved in was prayer, actually on her hard little knees in her bedroom, clicking through her rosary, concentrating, hoping for an end to the fog of pain and confusion she had endured these past days, the isolation from her friends, the gnawing sense that she was letting her family down, and, barely acknowledged, the roiling pit where her feelings about her mother lurked, generating fumes of acid. Lucy prayed often. The preacher’s kid as rakehell is folkloric, but that train runs in the other direction, too. Being the child of an agnostic Jew and a heterodox semi-lapsed Catholic, raised in a society growing more secular every year, it was perhaps natural that she should couch her juvenile rebellion in such terms. She was the most religious person she knew not in holy orders, and this gave her no little pride, which rather defeated the devotion, although she was only on the outer edges of understanding that.
When Mary rang, Lucy found herself annoyed at the interruption, and then, as she waited foot-tappingly for the elevator to rise, it struck her, in a wonderful wave of understanding. She had been praying, as everyone should, not for a solution to her problems, but for moral strength and the clear light, expecting something mental, some heavenly voice perhaps, such as was vouchsafed by St. Teresa, but no, here it was in the person of poor Mary Ma, the opportunity to extend loving kindness to an unhappy friend, which she immediately saw as the perfect answer to her present spiritual need, better than any amount of angelic advice, and presenting as well the opportunity to ask forgiveness for being such a complete jerk.
Mary Ma was not used to being a sign from God, and was unprepared for the enthusiasm with which she was greeted, the kisses, the embraces, the rushing, heartfelt apologies. The two repaired to Lucy’s bedroom, locked the door, and exchanged tearful vows that they would not let anything tear them apart again. Besides being quite sincere, the whole business was very Colette, which gave Lucy considerable satisfaction. She was at the age when behaving spontaneously like someone in a book is particularly fine.
“So . . . what about Jan?” said Mary Ma after all this had been going on for a good while. She was quite over her fear, which had, after all, been ninety percent loneliness.
“Did you talk to her? I mean after.”
“Yeah, but she was still freaked. I couldn’t get ten words in a row out of her.”
“Uh-huh. She’s freaked out about her family. Janice wants everything to be a certain way, and if it doesn’t go that way she thinks if she doesn’t think about it, it’ll sort of disappear.”
“What should we do?” asked Mary.
“We should find the killer ourselves and bring him in!” said Lucy in a dramatic voice.
Mary Ma gave her a look. “That’s ridiculous. We’re a couple of kids. No, the first thing is to get Janice back together with us and find out what’s going on with her family and this thing, is she getting threatened or anything. The next thing is to make sure that none of us are on the street alone in case they try anything again. We should really hang out together like we used to. Also . . .” She paused and looked closely at Lucy, her eyes glinting behind her spectacles. “How did you get rid of those gangsters?”
“A friend of mine helped us. Why?”
“Just thinking. Have you got any money?”
“What? Why?”
“We could hire our own gangsters,” said Mary Ma.
“Mary!” cried Lucy, looking at the other girl rather as Dr. Frankenstein had at his monster when the thing first stirred.
“It’s the logical thing. But first we have to grab Janice and get her back to the real world.”
Lucy sprang from the bed. “Let’s go now!”
Mary’s face fell. “Now?” she said hesitantly, which gave Lucy some satisfaction, as signaling the retention of her leadership in action, and this was augmented when they arrived at the Asia Mall and Mary got the willies at the entrance to the storeroom.
Lucy grabbed an arm and yanked, and would not let go, presenting Mary with the choice between entering what Lucy persisted in calling the Cavern of Death and causing a face-destroying scene. Lucy kept a protective-coercive arm around the other girl as they went down the narrow aisles between the bins.
They found Janice alone in the little stock office, where she had been put to filing invoices. She yelped and tried to flee, and Lucy had to get physical with her, which was not that unusual in their long relationship. Lucy told her (into her ear, lying atop her, Mary Ma assisting with the legs) in their usual mixture of English and Cantonese that she loved her, that she was her sister forever, that her heart was breaking, and that if Janice didn’t relent, she would kill herself. Thereupon she leaped up, plucked a stapler from the desk, held it to her temple, and grimaced, her eyes shut. At which point Janice, whose own life had been as much a misery since she had walked away on Canal Street, laughed (and had missed that, too—who else made her giggle like Lucy Karp? No one), and then they were all laughing and crying, and tickling one another, until Mrs. Chen came back and threatened to beat them all with a broom, and (secretly transported with relief ) gave them all something useful to do.
Marlene got the call from Raney in her car as she was traveling back to her office from the East Village Women’s Shelter.
“It’s about time,” she said testily. She had not had a good morning.
“Do you want to hear this, or do you want to nag? You know, we’re not married yet, so I don’t have to take shit from you when I’m doing you a favor.”
She covered the mouthpiece, let out a maniacal shriek, so that pedestrians looked over at her in alarm, and then spoke softly into it. “I’m sorry, Jim, my Irish dreamboat, but I had a hell of a morning.”
“On the rag again, huh?”
“I might as well be. Men suck, Jim, you know that? You know something else? So do women. Meanwhile, what’ve you got?”
“Not a whole hell of a lot. Phil Wu caught it out of the Five. What he figures is a Hong Kong job. Gang wars type thing. He says he called the Hong Kong cops, and that’s their take on it, too. Some gang over there, they couldn’t get to these two on their own turf, they figure they wouldn’t be that well guarded in New York, so they set up the hit for here. Wu figures the shooter was on the first plane back home a couple, three hours after he did it.”
“So this is on the back burner?”
“Yeah, more like it fell off the back of the stove, it’s down there with the roach traps and the crumbs. Plus, there is absolutely no heat on this.”
“You mean from the community?”
“Right. Not like it was a couple of Germans got whacked in the Macy’s stockroom. Or some tourist got hit on Mott Street. I believe this case will be transferred from Detective Wu to Detective Can, forthwith and henceforward. Like the man said—”
“Yeah, I know, it’s Chinatown, and I’m getting so fucking tired of hearing that. Tell me something: Does anyone have any hint that there’s some local connection here? With the community, with gang activity in the city?”
“Not that I heard, Marlene.” A significant pause. She could almost hear her pal switching into detection mode. “Why do you ask? Did you hear something?”
Marlene tapped at random a couple of buttons on the handset. “Gosh, Raney, we’re breaking up. Thanks—I’ll get back to you later.”
Stopped at a light at Houston and Lafayette, she addressed her companion. “Something doesn’t jibe here, Sweets. If it was an in-and-out with some torpedo from Asia, what are they doing following Janice Chen? Why the hell is this Leung interested in her? Maybe I should go talk with Detective Can. Meanwhile, I thought my performance this morning was flawless. Flawless, but futile. So often this is the story of my life, don’t you find? I lay the facts before the wretched woman. Brenda, darling, I say, it’s your life, but based on my very considerable experience with relationships fucked up beyond all hope of repair, it is my strong advice to you that you kiss off Chester D. And get some help for yourself while you’re at it. No licensed MSW could have put it better, don’t you agree?”
The dog, catching the tone, made a sound between a growl and a whine.
“Of course you do. You are an intelligent creature. But not Brenda Nero. Not at all, especially when I told her that I had given the very same advice to her darling. What language! Well, really, I wash my hands of her. I intend to testify at Chester’s trial, and I will advise him to plead justifiable homicide. Which reminds me, I have to shop around for a psychiatrist for my daughter, and while I’m at it one for the delightful gun moll Ms. Vivian Fein Bollano, my client. Can you do some research, Sweets? Hop on down to the various papers and pull clippings about Jumping Jerry? No, I better do it myself. In fact, I could get up to the News right now . . . oh, shit, that better not be Raney, trying his sly tricks on . . .” She picked up the buzzing phone. “Hello, Marlene Ciampi.”
The voice on the phone was, however, not Raney’s but that of an official-sounding woman.
“Hello, excuse me, but I’m trying to reach a Mr. Roger Karp. The answering machine gave me—”
“Right, this is his wife. Can I help you?”
“Yes, maybe. Do you know a Sophie Leontoff? This is Beth Israel Hospital calling. Mr. Karp’s number was listed as next of—”
“Oh, God! What happened to her? I mean, yes, she’s our great-aunt.”
“Oh, good. Sophie took a fall this morning, and I’m afraid she fractured her hip. She’s in surgery now.”
Marlene got the rest of the information, hung a right on Broadway, and sped uptown to the hospital, at First and 16th. She called Karp; he was out—of course, the hospital would have called him first. Sophie was Karp’s maternal grandmother’s younger sister and in Marlene’s opinion the only one of her husband’s relatives worth knowing, an assessment with which her mate concurred. A real character, Sophie—as a young woman she had been a major player in schmatehs, traveling to Paris to steal fashions from the couturiers, and then setting up as a dressmaker there. Caught by the war, she had spent some time in a concentration camp, which had not noticeably depressed her spirits, and had returned to America to become the driving force behind her late husband’s Seventh Avenue empire. She smoked Gitanes, drank cognac, played gin with a group of louche West Side crocks, made an annual trip to Monte Carlo, and would have sewn all Marlene’s and Lucy’s clothes had she been allowed. It was hard to think of her as being sick, but, of course, she was closing in on eighty.
Reporting at the ward desk, Marlene was directed to a waiting room. There were two people there, an elderly couple. The woman was tiny, carefully made up, with huge, bright eyes, fine, sharp features like a mynah bird’s and a thin cap of auburn-dyed hair that fell as a fringe across her forehead. She was dressed in a black silk T, a fawn skirt with stockings, and beautiful tan pumps. She also wore a string of pearls, a Cartier watch, a diamond tennis bracelet, and a good-sized diamond ring. Her husband—and it had to be her husband—was bald on top with a fringe of pepper and salt hair that descended somewhat below the collar of his knit navy sport shirt. He wore a well-cut linen jacket, also in navy, tan whipcord trousers, and alligator loafers with gold fittings. When Marlene entered, the woman was reading a paperback, which she had set into a needlepoint cover, matching her large needlepoint canvas bag, while the man was reading one of the tattered waiting room magazines—a New York.
They both looked up. The woman smiled. “Oh! You’re . . . Oh, God, I’m so embarrassed, don’t tell me . . . for Sophie Leontoff, am I right?”
“Right,” said Marlene. “I think we met at her seventy-fifth birthday party.” She held out her hand. “I’m Marlene Ciampi.” The woman’s hand in hers felt like good-quality kid leather, cool and buttery.
“Oooh! You’re the . . .” The woman’s hands made circular motions about their wrists (meaning? The Shiksa? The Infamous Slayer of Men, Film at Eleven? The Nephew’s Wife?), and then she laughed and said, “Selma Lapidus. This is Abe, my husband. We’re in 5-B.”
The man rose and shook hands, mumbling the conventional. He had the sad eyes of the retired.
“Now I remember,” chirped Selma. “What’s wrong with me! Roger, the nephew, no, the grand-nephew.” She pulled Marlene down next to her on the pink vinyl sofa. “It’s so nice of you to come, and you’re not even related. I tell you, these days . . . when Abe had his surgery two years ago, I had to practically commit suicide on the phone so my daughter would bestir herself to fly in from L.A. She’s in the industry.”
“Um, Mrs. Lapidus . . .”
“Don’t be ridiculous—Selma.”
“Selma. Did they say how it’s going, I mean with the—”
“She’s in very good hands, the best! Dr. Baumholtz is a genius. He did Abe’s hip. Tell her, Abe—you were walking the next day. The next day! And so sweet, a doll! The best orthopedic man in the city, you’ll meet him, you’ll see. I personally am not worried in the least.”
“Of course not, you’re not on the table,” said Abe into his magazine.
Selma rolled her eyes but did not respond to this. “We were the ones who found her. We have a card club in our building, there’s a room downstairs. We play gin, canasta . . . So this morning, I ring, there’s no Sophie. So I get the key—we exchange keys, I mean, you never know, God forbid, we’re not so young, something could happen, and I go in, and I’m telling you, my heart almost stopped, there’s Sophie, on the bathroom floor, she says, “Selma, I can’t move, I knew I should’ve bought that thing. You know, that signal machine. Anyway, she says, thank God it was a Thursday—the cards, she meant—because a Friday, she could’ve been there all weekend, we could’ve been at the beach, we have a place in Southampton. . . .” She stopped talking and looked up. They all looked up, because someone had come into the room.
“Oh, Jake, you’re here,” said Selma. “Good.”
“How is she?” Jake asked, and Marlene looked at him with interest. A big old guy, maybe seventy-five, massive rather than tall, chest like an oil drum, with a lumpy, large-featured face, and crinkled, close-cut white hair. He wore a double-breasted gray summer suit, old but well cut, a white shirt and bow tie, and brown-and-white shoes with decorative little holes in the toe part, highly polished. He held a straw hat in his hand.
A cop, was Marlene’s first thought, and then she changed her mind. A hard guy, in any case, not a regular citizen. His eyes flicked over Marlene as they were introduced, wary but amused. Jacob Gurvitz. He didn’t offer to shake. Selma Lapidus filled him in on Sophie, and he seemed concerned, perhaps more concerned than a neighbor would be. (He was in 12-D, lived there three years, not rent-controlled, a card player, single, just back from Miami; in Selma Lapidus’s zone of operations, personal information leaped into view unbidden, as on a computer screen.) Marlene wondered, a love interest? Sophie would have a guy like this. Maybe a fellow camp survivor. Yes, that could be it, the look. This guy had seen things other than legal briefs and schmatehs.
They sat. Selma talked, a not unpleasant sound, like the whirring of a refrigerator in an empty apartment. After ten minutes or so, she left for the ladies’. The two men looked at each other and grinned, and then Marlene grinned with them. The look said, Selma! Gotta love her, but . . .
“You’re an attorney, too, I understand, Marlene?” said Abe.
“Yes, but I don’t get much practice anymore.”
“Neither do I.” He smiled. “You would think the law was all in the head, but litigation is a physical thing. A big case, when a man’s liberty or even a life, in those days, was at stake, you work your touchis off, believe you me. So, when the body starts to go . . .” He waved a hand, as if in farewell. “One of our partners had a heart attack, died right there in the office. Another dear friend, also an attorney, had a cerebral on his way to work. Selma said, Abe, that’s it! I’m not planning on being a rich widow my whole life. Out! So . . . my dear wife, once she makes her mind up . . .”
“I can imagine,” said Marlene, and they had another smile all around. “You were in criminal law?”
“Mainly, although in my day there wasn’t so much of this specialization.” After that, the usual exchange of stories, the big cases, how the practice of law had changed in Abe’s forty years at the bar, Marlene’s experiences at the D.A. The possibility of mutual acquaintances was explored, and there were, in fact, a number of these, judges, a lawyer or two. Marlene was aware of Jake Gurvitz as an interested presence, but he made no contribution to the conversation.
Curious, Marlene asked, “You’re not a lawyer, too, are you, Mr. Gurvitz?”
“Nah, I always tried to stay away from lawyers. I was with the bakers’ union. Retired.”
Marlene tried to imagine Jake in floury whites popping a tray of danish into an oven, and came up blank. As the daughter of a union plumber, Marlene knew something about the New York unions in the relevant period, and what sort of folks staffed their upper reaches. So, a “union” guy with expensive clothes, living in an uncontrolled apartment off Central Park West. And a lawyer practicing criminal in the same interesting period. It was worth a shot.
She turned back to Lapidus and asked, “I was wondering, speaking of courthouse people, did you ever run into Jerry Fein back then?”
A pause. She could hear the sounds of the hospital clearly, the distant televisions, the clinking of bottles, the muffled noise of rubber heels and rubber-tired carts. Abe’s smile faded and was replaced by a made-up one, and Jake’s face went into neutral. Did they exchange a look? Maybe not.
Abe sighed. “Jerry Fein. That takes you back. Oh, sure, I knew him, to say hi to, yeah, around the courthouse, you know. A real tragedy. Why do you ask?”
“Oh, his name came up in a case I’m working on, and I remembered the, you know, the, um, tragedy. So talking about the old courthouse . . .”
“Uh-huh. Well, Jerry was a character, all right. Wore a pearl homburg in the winter, and on Memorial Day he switched to a straw boater. You could set your calendar by him. That was what they said. And then Labor Day, he’d show up with the homburg on again and fly the boater out his office window. Huh! There’s irony for you. The window . . . Always beautifully dressed, the rest of it, he had a special way of folding his breast pocket handkerchief, four little points, perfect —”
“Any truth to the rumor he was mobbed up?” Marlene cut in.
Lapidus frowned, and his voice became more animated. “What’re you talking, ‘mobbed up’? What does that mean? Look, the thirties, the forties, in the city, into the fifties, nearly any legal work you did you had some contact with, let’s say, elements. You work for garment people, furriers, trucking, unions, unions! My God, tell her, Jake! It was pervasive. Pervasive. So, what—we should close down the criminal bar? And the cops, in those days, it was hard to tell them from the crooks, this was before Miranda was even born, forget Escobedo! Rubber hoses and worse. Frame-ups? They didn’t like you—pouf! You’re in Sing-Sing. So it was rougher. And we all, I mean the criminal bar at that time, the counselors, we all did things, let’s say, on the edge. But there were lines. Suborning witnesses, jury tampering, concealing evidence in major felonies: some crossed, some didn’t.”
“Was Fein a line crosser, do you think?”
He shrugged, and then straightened his shoulders and fixed her with an eye, and Marlene understood that he would have been a formidable courtroom presence.
“Marlene, the man is dead twenty-three years, what does it matter what he did and what he didn’t?”
“It could matter to his family, if it had to do with why he killed himself. He was disbarred, wasn’t he, just before? What was that about?”
He waved a hand—New York’s own getouttaheah gesture. “Oh, don’t get me started on that. It’s a long, long story; I’ll give you the short version. Jerry got a royal screwing. His partner set him up, that momser. You know what a momser is?”
“I believe it’s a person whose ethical development leaves something to be desired.”
Lapidus let out a laugh. “Ha! You I like! I’m trying to think of the case it was, that jury. Johnny Gravellotti, yeah, a big hoodlum, they hung him from a meat hook in the old Washington Market. Johnny Shoes they called him, also a sharp dresser . . .”
“Johnny Shine,” said Jake Gurvitz.
Lapidus snapped his fingers. “Johnny Shine, right! Don’t listen to a word I say, honey, I’m losing my marbles. Johnny Shine, and they had Big Sally Bollano for it—there’s another sweetheart for you—and it was a tight one: good physical evidence, ballistics, a bloody shoe print, if you can believe it. The D.A., Garrahy at that time, was slavering. And the jury walks him on it. So, of course they figure tampering, intimidation. And Jerry was the lawyer . . .”
“Wait a second, Fein was Sally Bollano’s lawyer?”
“Oh, yeah, for years. Him and Heshy Panofsky, the momser, that was his partner. Jerry did the courtroom work, Heshy handled the inside, the deals. They had another partner, Bernie Kusher, also a crook, but that’s another story entirely. So the D.A. investigates, and they find somebody got to a couple of the jurors, money changed hands. Something about an envelope with Jerry’s prints on it, with the money. I can’t recall. In any case they charged him with it, and what happens? Jerry pleads guilty, cops to it for a suspended sentence. Nobody could believe it. I mean, let me tell you, Gerald Fein was a fighter, a tiger in the courtroom, and he rolls over like a poodle. Of course, they disbarred him after that. Oh, it was a complete pile of crap, excuse my French.”
“Why? Because Fein wasn’t the kind to tamper?”
“No, because Heshy was in charge of tampering at that particular firm, and everybody knew it. You want to know the kicker in this? Heshy Panofsky is now the Honorable Herschel B. Paine of the Supreme Court of the State of New York.”
“That’s Judge Paine?”
“You know the man, I see.”
“Of course. They’re touting him for the next opening on the Appellate Division.”
“I don’t doubt it. After Jerry left, Heshy changed his spots, he fixed his name, he went with a white-shoe firm downtown, lots of political connections . . . believe me, honey, some things you don’t change so easy. He’s still a momser.”
“So, wait—why do you think he set up Fein to take the fall?”
Lapidus started to answer, but at that moment, in walked Selma Lapidus, beaming, towing a forty-ish man wearing the hospital greens and the confident jock-like air of a surgeon.
“A complete success,” announced Selma, as if she had handled the knife. “And everyone, this is Dr. Baumholtz.”
Selma kvelled, Baumholtz pronounced upon the hip replacement and departed, the visitors all marched off to Sophie’s room. They were shocked at the way she looked, tried not to show it, failed, covered this with jokes, and then Marlene’s beeper sounded and she went off to call in. It was from Osborne, a complicated matter involving security at the Chelsea clinic, and when she returned to Sophie’s room, the old lady was sleeping and the visitors had all gone home.
Leaving, Marlene considered the Abe and Jake show she had just enjoyed. Some information, delivered in a tone meant for casual shopping of secondhand gossip, and there was that maybe look between the two men, and Jake’s silence. Silence while the lawyer talked—it felt to her like something he was used to, professionally. Yeah, she would talk to Abe Lapidus again, for sure, but only after she had accumulated more information on the big questions: Why had Gerald Fein rolled over for a trumped-up charge? Why had Vivian Fein waited over twenty years to try to clear her father’s name? There was no point in talking to someone like Abe unless she knew enough to know if he was lying to her or not.