CHAPTER 8

THE RATIONALITY OF ALL THINGS

I SIPPED MY TEA, removed my glasses and rested them on the coffee table. I looked at Abe sitting across from me, squinting.

“You’ve come to see me about Shmulie, haven’t you?”

He nodded.

“Sorry, Abe. Not interested. I finished with Shmulie a long time ago,” I said. “Before the trial, I’d seen him maybe a couple of times. I knew all about him.”

Every citizen of the City of New York knew about Shmulie selling that crap to anyone who’d fork over thirty bucks to get “high and low,” as was the saying. He’d call me from time to time and want to talk, but I never accommodated him.

I leaned back and ran a couple of fingers over my bald patch.

“I knew for a long time what he was up to and I . . . well, Abe, I got to tell you . . . I hate him for what he did. I can’t think of a happier day in my life than when he got busted. He turned on Esther Lacey and he got away. All right. That made him one lucky son of a bitch. But at least he got put out of circulation and Lerbs went away with him.”

Abe’s face twisted into a knot. “Maybe to you he’s a closed book, but not to me. He’s my only child. Now that Marta’s gone I’m alone, and let me tell you, alone is everything they say it is. Anyway, something’s wrong.” He pulled at a thread sticking out of the top button of his vest. It unraveled.

“Before Shmulie went away I visited him at Rikers. We talked. Not much. But we talked.”

The image of 300 pounds of Shmulie Shimmer in an orange jumpsuit provided me some satisfaction.

“We hadn’t talked like father and son for years. For decades, if the truth you want to know. But that day we talked like there was something between us. He was sorry he’d been an embarrassment to me and Marta. He said he wished things had been different. He wished he knew how to get all those people out of those comas. That’s why he agreed to cooperate—not just to save his own skin. I don’t think he was afraid of prison. He cooperated to stop the damage.”

My skepticism faded as Abe’s tone became earnest.

“You weren’t there, Nicky. You weren’t there. You didn’t hear the sadness in his voice and see it in his eyes. He was sorry for all the people he hurt. He was.” He pulled some more at the thread. He pulled off the dangling button and slipped it into his shirt pocket. “I know it doesn’t matter,” he continued. “He hurt people. And so many.”

Abe pushed himself up from the chair, and, groaning, he stood, walked slowly to the lone window in my living room, and stared into the setting sun. The single ray of light that occasionally crept into my apartment in the late afternoon shone on him, affording him a jolt of life. When he backed away and turned toward me, he became once again an emaciated old man.

He stood over me. “Shmulie promised he’d contact me when he got to wherever they were taking him,” he said. “We knew we’d never see each other again. I made him promise he’d contact me—just once—to tell me he was okay. I wanted only to know he was all right. Just once he promised he’d call, Nicky, and Shmulie never broke a promise. That was one thing. He never broke a promise.”

He placed himself near the chair and, leaning onto the armrests, lowered himself onto the seat with a grunt.

“It’s been a year and a half now. Nothing. I’ve heard nothing. No email, letter, no card, no phone call, no nothing.”

He rubbed the spot on his coat where the button used to be, pulling at the remaining bit of loose thread. “I went to the FBI and talked to someone. He didn’t talk like a mensch, this guy. He was angry with me, and we never even met before. He was mean, short, like he was hiding something. I don’t know what he was hiding, but I got a bad feeling from him.”

“You want me to track down Shmulie because he never called you?”

“I’m worried. He said he’d call. He told me he would . . . Yes. Track Shmulie down for me and tell me he’s all right or he’s not all right. That’s all I want to know.”

“It won’t be easy,” I said. “Once the FBI moves someone, he’s yesterday’s news. Shmulie’s got a new name, a new home, all new numbers, a new history. They sometimes do surgery on the famous ones, including new fingerprints. So Shmulie might even have a new look. Maybe they even sucked all the fat out of him.”

I dwelt for a moment on the image of Shmulie Shimmer slimmed down, his fat pants held up by suspenders like a circus clown. “I have no idea how and where I’d begin the job. If I wanted the job. Which I do not.”

What little color resided in Abe’s face drained away, and he became a ghost. He blinked and squeezed his lips, forming a tight, pallid circle.

What did he expect from me? That I’d jump to his tune out of old neighborhood loyalty? Did Abe really expect that I’d look for his wretched son because he had found us a tutor when we were kids and sat up with us every night, fed us sugar cookies?

In the face of my silence, Abe said, “Nicky, you can’t tell by looking at me maybe, but I’m dying. It’s cancer.”

“Where is it?” I asked.

“Where isn’t it? The doctors say I’ve got maybe three months. Five with luck, and I don’t feel so lucky, you know? Don’t let me go to my grave not knowing what happened to my boy.”

“Trust me, Abe. You don’t want my services. I’m useless as a detective. You know how many cases I’ve had in my career as the new Philip Marlowe? Six. Six lousy cases in three years. You know how many I solved? Two. Two out of six. Thirty-three percent. I haven’t had a case in months. Who’d call me knowing they’d have a one in three chance?”

He looked at me with cheerless eyes. “Nicky,” he said. “I want only you to do the job, to find Shmulie. I trust you. You tell me he’s alive, I know I have a son somewhere in this world. You tell me he’s dead, I sit shiva. You I know. You I trust. You’ll follow the job to the end. You always followed everything to the end.”

I should have taken that as a warning of what was to come. “To the end.” To the end of what? The end of my life? This phrase was a bad omen.

As the room darkened, I reached for my glasses. “Don’t ask me to do this, Abe. Please.” To this frail man I would never divulge the real business between me and Shmulie. But the roiling in my gut and a mild pounding in my brain provided me ample reminder of what that business was.

Abe’s fingers found another loose button to serve his nervous fingers. “Nicky,” he said. “I’m looking you in the eye and I’m asking. Don’t do it for Shmulie. I don’t blame you for hating him. Part of me hates him, too. My God! How could it be different? Do the job for me, then—not for him. You don’t hate me, do you?”

No matter how much of a bastard Shmulie was, Shmulie was Abe’s bastard.

I had not the slightest idea how I’d look for this man. Where would I find the truth about Shmulie Shimmer? I had no interest in getting myself involved in hunting for my old chavruta. Me, I had important essays to leave unfinished and classes to skip.

I looked at this wizened old man sitting in my apartment in the dark, a shadow from my past. A shadow, I realized, I’d always loved. So, with a large measure of ambivalence, I took the goddamned case.

We sipped our tea, chatted a bit. I called an Uber. In the elevator down we reminisced about the old days, when things were better, when Shmulie and I were the yeshiva’s Talmud stars. We stepped over Mingus, who, eyes closed, traveled in some more peaceful world. Then we stood by the curb awaiting his Uber.

“You’ll find my boy then?” he asked, like a five-year-old talking to a policeman because his puppy had disappeared.

“I’ll do what I can, Abe.”

We shook hands, a gesture that turned into a clumsy but sincere hug.