“I’m not a Jew,” Pickering said. “It’s an advantage, let me tell you. Guy has a date set up for Saturday night, he can’t wait till Sunday to pawn his watch, so he comes here. The days of taking a dame bicycling in Central Park went down with the Arizona.”
Jacob tried not to sound impatient. “I saw The Lost Weekend in the service. Ray Milland hasn’t a cent to pay for a drink, so he walks all over town looking for a shop that’s open on the Sabbath.” He wanted to know about fence work, but so far the conversation was all small talk.
“I saw that one.” The dull eyes brightened. “Hey, he was trying to hock his typewriter! I guess you and me were meant to partner up.”
“A match made in Hollywood.” He waited. “Tell me about the hockshop business.”
“I never use that word. It sounds common. You see those three balls hanging outside? Every honest pawnbroker in town has ’em. They go back to the Medicis in Italy, a family of physicians originally. The balls represent pills. It’s a respectable profession, older than the presidency, and a damn sight less crooked.”
“I didn’t mean to offend.”
“Undertakers.”
“What?”
Pickering repeated it. “There’s crooks for you. They had their way, you could fit every pawnshop in the city in one block down by the garment district. They got first dibs on the estates: Victrolas, fainting-couches, Persian rugs, pump organs, oil lamps wired electric. That’s why their visitors’ rooms always look like Queen Victoria’s shithouse and smell like old people. The rest they sell on the side. Think about it. There’s always a used-furniture store next to a funeral home. Buzzards.
“We’re a close-knit group as a rule,” he went on: “If a guy can’t unload something in his neighborhood, there’s always one who can’t keep it in stock where he is, so he gets it wholesale. Everyone benefits, no one feels cheated. But I don’t do business with undertakers. They’re always pawning rings and watches, stuff they took off stiffs before they nailed the lid shut. Sometimes they don’t even bother to scrape off the pancake makeup. Ever shake a funeral director’s hand? Clean as a whistle and pink as a monkey’s butt. It’s the formaldehyde.” He shuddered.
They were sitting in the little room on the other side of the beaded curtain, Pickering in a brown mohair armchair worn shiny on the arms, Jacob on a piano stool. He couldn’t swivel more than six inches in any direction without bumping into toasters, portable radios, candlesticks, sets of silverware in rosewood boxes, bridal gowns, pocket watches, picture frames, racks of pipes, overcoats, shotguns, and pile upon pile of military decorations. There was an ancient black iron safe that would contain the especially valuable items, gold fixtures and jewelry, with a fringed shawl on top of it and on top of that a brass lamp in the shape of a wicked-looking cherub. A six-foot birchwood canoe swung on ropes from the ceiling. Mildew and dry-rot hung heavy in the air.
None of it was junk. The appliances would all be in working order, the silver sterling, the firearms clean and oiled, the canoe seaworthy. At a glance, including what was probably in the safe, Jacob calculated the man was sitting on a fortune in convertible assets. Manhattan millionaires came in all packages. The average thief would walk past Linus Pickering and Ira Winderspear without a glance, and pass up the score of a lifetime.
“I don’t deal in hot merchandise,” Pickering said. “I never saw the percentage. In the Depression there was always something coming in, you paid a nickel on the dollar and stood pat. Nobody ever redeemed anything, and after six months you marked it all up and stuck it in the window. Sooner or later somebody with dough came around. Wartime was tough, sure. Everybody was hanging on to what he had, fixing up, making do. Some days it didn’t pay to open up.
“Couple of guys went over to the black market, sold tires and gasoline out the back door. Dumb. Who wants J. Edgar Hoover on their neck? I sweated it out. Man comes in with a brand-new suitcase, I know right away he boosted it from a luggage shop. Him I don’t give the time of day.”
Jacob didn’t believe him; if corruption had a patron saint, he would look, talk, and dress like Linus Pickering. “Tell me about the ones who went over to the black market.”
“No names, understand.”
“Understood.”
“You meet folks from all over in this business. Every rung on the ladder. Winos, sure, sell Grandma’s spoons for the price of a bottle. Spoiled rich kids, too: Dad cut off their allowance for wrecking the Cadillac, they swap gold cuff links, a cashmere sportcoat for chickenfeed or they can’t go to the Copa. Junior execs, into the shylocks for a bundle: Season tickets to Yankee Stadium. Some swells, the market took a dive, they can’t cover the margin. ‘Take good care of the wife’s mink coat, willya?’ Housewives, they blew the household expenses at the track, here’s the old wedding ring. Rackets guys, one week they’re wiping their asses with five-spots, next week they can’t buy a cuppa Joe. I got enough custom-made silk shirts still in the box to dress a faggots’ convention.
“Fella came in once with two hundred grand in diamonds and pearls tied in a handkerchief, swear to Christ. He was squirting sweat, glancing back over his shoulder like a crook in a Porky Pig cartoon. I told him to get out before I called the cops. He skedaddled. Later I found out he was ten grand in the red to a gambler—a lousy ten g’s!—and cleaned out the safe-deposit box where his wife kept her valuables to buy himself into the clear. Had no idea what they were worth, she’d gotten them as gifts from her first husband, a stockbroker. The chump was too embarrassed to ask her for the money.
“Kicker is, not one dame in a hundred would blow the whistle on her husband. She’d’ve dropped by to redeem her stuff. At two-percent interest, I’d clear four large the first twenty-four hours. But I shooed the guy out.”
“Any legitimate pawnbroker would have done the same.”
“Think so? Depends on where you’re at, I guess. Only then you wouldn’t be legit, would you?”
“Those are all good stories, and I can use some, especially the one about the man with the jewels. But I want to hear about the dealers who aren’t legit.”
“I’m coming to that. Wet your whistle?” Pickering got up, rearranged some bric-a-brac, and scooped up a glass demijohn half-full of brown liquid. “It looks like shellac, but they wouldn’t be ashamed to serve it at the Waldorf. A tenant in a building I own makes it in her kitchen from dandelions she picks on Staten Island.”
“I’ll try a taste.” The atmosphere in the room was getting close. If the conversation didn’t get more interesting, he’d been thinking of ending it and stopping for a drink on the way home.
His host found two cut-crystal glasses and filled them. “Forty dollars a set uptown,” he said, striking a chime off one with a fingernail. “Here I can’t give ’em away. You should have to show a passport when you cross Fourteenth. Here’s to crime.” He drank.
Jacob sipped, rested his glass on his thigh—and left it there. It tasted like carbolic fermented in sugar.
Pickering picked up where he’d left off. “With that kind of traffic going on all the time, you hear things. One Hung Lo in Chinatown buys a house in Westchester, Joe Greaseball on Mulberry’s driving a brand-new Bentley, Busy Izzie over on First Avenue sets up his old lady in a crib in Miami. I’m making up names here, mixing up addresses. I don’t approve, but I’m no rat.
“They went into the war straight as a donkey’s dick, then somebody sold ’em a barrel of molasses or a set of spark plugs still in the box, and somebody else offered ’em twice what they paid. No going back after that. The war ends, rationing’s over, they miss those quick profits they don’t have to pay taxes on because it was all in cash, no receipts. So the first time some jasper shows up looking back over his shoulder and carrying a shitload of tiaras and bracelets tied in a hanky—well, they don’t show him the door, and it don’t have to be they came from his wife.”
“I’d like to visit one of these places.”
A lump of dandelion wine got swallowed. “No dice. What’d I just say?”
“Nobody has to know you told me. Nobody has to know I know. I’d just like to go in and browse around, see what a fencing operation looks like.”
“It looks just like mine. You think the customers all wear striped jerseys and little black masks like on the Get Out of Jail card?”
At the mention of a card, Jacob set his glass on the floor, got up from the piano stool, and fished one out of his wallet. He’d had them printed—after much deliberation and an uneasy night’s sleep—with the name Jack Holly. “You can reach me here if you change your mind.”
The pawnbroker glanced at it, then stuck it in a pocket of his ash-upholstered vest. “Jesus. I thought you guys just made stuff up.”
“That was before the war. I even wrote about that once, for Battlefield, before I knew what combat was like. I don’t think I could even read the story now.”
“I don’t come through, our deal’s off, that it?”
Jacob shook his head. “A deal’s a deal. But you want it to sell, right? You don’t want to be stuck with a bunch of books like you’re stuck with those crystal glasses.”
Pickering had raised his for another drink. Now he held it up to eye level and studied the specks floating in the wine. “Okay. Since you put it so I can understand it, I’ll think about it.”