A woman’s voice on his answering machine offered Cassidy information on Leon Dudek’s burial if he wanted to come. He did not recognize the voice.
In the afternoon, Cassidy got an unmarked car from the police garage, and drove to Queens.
The Machpelah Cemetery in Queens was halfway to Idlewild Airport. Cassidy parked near the elaborate cemetery office with its tower and green-tiled roof, left a POLICE placard on the dashboard, and walked through the massed gravestones of the long dead and newly dead to Leon Dudek’s gravesite. The air was cold, but the sun shone out of a clear blue sky. The beauty of the day seemed to make a mockery of man’s dark and solemn rituals of death.
A small gathering of people waited at Leon Dudek’s grave. Stacks of pale autumn sod and a pile of dirt lay next to the harsh rectangle cut in the earth. Cassidy saw Lena and Beata, the two women stoop sitters from Dudek’s apartment building. They stood with Rhonda to one side of the hole. Rhonda saw him and nodded, but there was no invitation in the gesture. The landlady, Mrs Tanenbaum, stood nearby with two older men he had never seen before. They wore heavy dark wool overcoats and stood with their hats in their hands. They could have been Leon Dudek’s brothers. They were stooped, and round shouldered from years of hard labor and marginal living. Their gray hair was cropped short, and their faces were pale and hollow cheeked, and their eyes had seen too much. A rabbi stood at the end of the open grave. Metal pipes supported Leon’s plain pine coffin over the hole. Two gravediggers hunkered near a granite mausoleum twenty feet away smoking cigarettes and talking in low voices.
The young man called Freddy watched from the partial concealment of a marble monument. He wore a black nylon windbreaker over shirt and a sweater. His eyes found Cassidy and then slid away.
The rabbi’s service was short. He spoke in Yiddish, and his voice was strong. The mourners stood with their heads bowed, except for Freddy who stared at the coffin. At the conclusion, the gravediggers flicked their cigarettes away and were joined by four other workmen at the graveside. The workmen lifted the coffin by ropes that ran under it, and the gravediggers slid the pipes out. The workmen lowered the coffin into the grave, then pulled the ropes free, coiled them and carried them away. The gravediggers leaned on their shovels and waited while the rabbi and the mourners picked up handfuls of dirt and dropped them on the coffin.
The dirt was powdery and dry in Cassidy’s hand. It fell on the coffin lid with a whisper. He dusted his hands together to brush off the last of it and turned to find Rhonda waiting for him. She wore a black dress, a black coat, and a black hat with a short, dark veil that blurred her face and left her eyes unreadable. ‘Thank you for coming, Michael.’
‘You’re welcome.’
She looked at the others walking back toward the cemetery entrance. ‘You’d think there’d be more to mark the end of a life.’
‘Yes.’
‘Sad.’
‘I’ve got a car. Can I give you a ride back?’
She thought for a moment. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. I don’t think I like you much right now.’
‘It would give me time to apologize.’
She searched his face. ‘Really? Is that what you want to do?’
‘I said some lousy things I had no right to say.’
‘Yes, you did. Some others, I don’t know. Maybe you were right.’
‘Ride with me. We can talk.’ He wanted this to happen.
She thought about it and then nodded. ‘Okay.’
‘Give me a minute. I want to speak to that Freddy guy.’ But when he turned, Freddy was gone, and the gravediggers were shoveling dirt into the hole.
They went to Chumley’s and ordered martinis and steaks and French fries and iceberg lettuce with Roquefort dressing and a bottle of Château Neuf-du-Pape, a splurge at eight bucks. They had talked on the drive in from Queens, and it almost felt like they had regained the ground they had lost in argument, but there was still tension, things that could not be unsaid, wounds still raw.
The night had turned colder by the time they left the restaurant. They walked up Bedford Street to Hudson and continued north. There were not many people on the streets, some late diners headed home like they were, some dedicated drinkers moving from bar to bar, club hoppers headed to the Vanguard or the Half Note, and a few of the solitarios, the lonely night-time people who swam through the city at all hours on mysterious errands.
When they turned west on Bank Street, Cassidy again had the feeling there was someone shadowing them. ‘Hold on a second.’ He stopped and put his foot up on a fire hydrant and re-tied a shoe that needed no re-tying, and used the moment to watch for movement from the corner of his eye. He saw nothing. They went on.
‘What was that about,’ Rhonda asked.
‘I’ve got an itch that someone is following us.’
‘Maybe it’s just cooties.’ But she took his arm for comfort and looked back along the dark street.
‘I want you to do something.’ He put his arm around her and leaned in and spoke softly, a romantic gesture to anyone watching. ‘I want you to laugh as if I said something funny. Then we’re going to turn downtown on Greenwich as if maybe we decided to go for a nightcap. When we’re around the corner, I want you to laugh again and then talk as if you were telling me a story and keep walking.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I’m going to wait at the corner to see if anyone comes around it. Can you do that?’
‘Sure.’ She looked at him with serious eyes.
‘Don’t exaggerate it. Just laugh, keep walking, laugh again, tell the story. Keep walking.’
‘So he thinks we’re going down the block.’
‘Right. If I tell you to run, do it. Don’t hesitate. Don’t come back. Run for Hudson Street. Run for people.’
‘Michael, what are you saying?’
‘Just in case.’
‘Just in case of what? You’re scaring me.’
‘Nothing to be scared of. It’s going to be fine. Do this for me, okay? Please.’
‘Be careful.’
‘Sure.’ They were getting close to the corner. ‘Now laugh.’
She laughed. It sounded strained to Cassidy’s ears, but the follower would not know her laugh.
‘Okay, here we go,’ he said. They went around the corner. He stopped and Rhonda went on.
She looked back at him, worried. He nodded. She laughed again and began to talk in a voice just loud enough to carry. Cassidy stepped into the dark doorway of a plumbing supply store. Halfway down the block Rhonda went silent for a moment and then laughed as if responding to something Cassidy said. Her voice picked up again, fading, less distinct as she walked.
Cassidy took his gun out from under his arm and waited in the darkness. He slowed his breathing to quiet it and strained to listen.
What was that? A footstep?
A vagrant pressure in the air, told him that someone had stopped at the corner. Whoever it was waited and listened like he did.
Rhonda neared the end of the block. She looked back wondering whether she should turn the corner out of sight or continue. She laughed again, and crossed the street.
Cassidy heard a scraping whisper, maybe a shoe against concrete, maybe a sleeve against a wall. A small intake of breath, and then a figure came around the corner hugging the dark shadows along the building. He knew in an instant the follower was too small to be Shaw.
Cassidy lunged from his doorway and grabbed the man by his jacket. ‘Freeze. Police.’ He tried to run him into the wall, but the man was incredibly quick. An elbow caught Cassidy high on the cheek and jerked his head back. Another elbow knocked the gun from his hand. A knee drove into him, missing his groin but numbing his thigh. Cassidy punched the man in the ribs and drew a gasp of pain. The man twisted hard in his grasp and he almost lost him. Stiffened fingers aimed for his eyes scraped across his forehead. He pulled the man back toward the building, hoping to pin him there, but the man stamped a leather-soled shoe down Cassidy’s shin in a rip of pain, and twisted loose leaving Cassidy holding his jacket, and sprinted for the corner. Cassidy went after him. As he rounded the corner, there was a loud metal clang, and a garbage can rolled toward him. He tried to dodge, caught a foot, and went down on the sidewalk skinning his hands and one knee. His assailant was a dark blur headed fast toward Hudson Street.
Cassidy hissed at the sting of the iodine Rhonda swabbed on his skinned knee.
‘Don’t be a baby,’ Rhonda said.
Cassidy fingered the rip in the knee of the pants he held on his lap. ‘I liked those pants.’ He tossed them in the corner of the living room.
‘Let me see your hands.’ He held them out, and Rhonda swabbed iodine on the scrapes, turning his palms dark red.
‘Goddamn, that stuff stings.’
‘I’m going to get some ice for your face.’ She went into the kitchen and opened the freezer and took some ice from the metal bowl he kept there. ‘Did you see who he was?’
‘It was too dark, and the whole goddamn thing was over in seconds. But I know who it was.’
‘Who?’ Rhonda wrapped ice cubes in a dishtowel and then smacked it against the counter until the ice broke up in the cloth. She brought it to him, and he pressed against his cheek where the man had elbowed him.
‘Freddy.’
‘Freddy? You mean Freddy from Leon Dudek’s place? Why would he follow us?’
‘I don’t know, but that’s the jacket he was wearing at the funeral.’ Rhonda picked up the iodine bottle. ‘Hey, hey, enough,’ he protested.
‘Uh-uh,’ she said. ‘If those scratches on your forehead get infected it could leak inside and destroy the few brain cells you have left.’
‘Is that your best bedside manner?’
‘Hold still.’ When she finished, she capped the iodine bottle and put it back in the drawer in the kitchen and dropped the bloodstained washcloth and towel in the laundry bin. ‘Do you want a drink?’
‘There’s a bottle of Jack Daniels on the bar.’
‘What are you going to do about Freddy?’
‘I’m going to go ask him why he was following us.’
Rhonda brought him a glass of bourbon and one for herself, and they carried them to the window and looked out to the lights on the New Jersey shore across the dark water. A freighter was loading at the pier at the foot of Bank Street. He could see its white superstructure and black-and-red funnels above the highway. Bright loading lights illuminated the cranes that carried cargo nets full of crates up from the docks and swung them high above the decks before lowering them into the unseen holds. Cassidy took the cigarette from her hand and took a drag and gave it back to her.
‘Do you ever want to get on one of those ships?’ she asked. ‘The hell with it. Get on and head downriver, and go wherever it’s going, leave everything behind?’
‘All the time. Do you want to come?’ He put an arm around her waist and drew her close.
Freddy stood in the shadows of the elevated highway and looked up at the two people framed in the lighted window. He held his elbow tight against his ribs where the cop had hit him. It hurt when he took a deep breath. Still, it wasn’t as bad as being hit with the wood batons the Kapos carried in the camp. He had hated them worse than the SS guards, because the Kapos policed their own people to gain better rations and better quarters. Jews beating Jews. Jews killing Jews. Jews herding Jews to the gas chambers. He crouched down and made himself small and tight as he often did when the memories came.
The scrape of the straight razor on the ruddy cheeks of the SS officers he shaved every morning in the little barbershop overlooking the parade ground where the prisoners waited for roll call. The snip, snip, snip of the scissors as he trimmed their hair. Below them, the prisoners in their striped shirts and pants and wooden shoes waited to be counted. Even the dead. Those who had died in the night had to be held upright by the living until the count was over. The new SS officers laughed and pointed at them while they waited for their turn in the barber chair, but after a week or so they stopped, because the standing dead were there every morning, normal, not worth commenting on.
It was the barbershop that kept Freddy alive. When he and his father and mother got off the transport train at Auschwitz, he and his mother had been sent left by the officer at the selection desk, left, to the gas chambers, while his father, a skilled barber, had been sent right, to life. But his father had clung to Freddy’s arm and, holding down his fear, speaking with great calmness though his hand on Freddy’s arm trembled, had explained that his eight-year-old son was a brilliant barber who had worked in his shop since the age of five. And so his mother, her eyes full of tears and fear, had been sent left, and he and his father had gone right, and he had strained to hold her in sight until she disappeared in the crowd.
Two years later, his father was dead, dragged down by fever and starvation, and Freddy was the barber for the SS officers. They would come in the morning, well fed, happy, smelling of cologne and tobacco smoke, for a shave and a trim. He was their mascot to be teased and offered treats of chocolate and tinned foods, and occasionally to be cuffed on the head or kicked if an officer was dissatisfied with his haircut. He joked and laughed with them and told them what they wanted to hear. Sometimes women came, the ones who wore their hair shorter than the fashion of the time. There was one in particular that he remembered, a small woman, quick and bright like a bird, but with cold blue eyes, who would come once a month. She came with her husband, who was called Herr Doktor by the SS officers, and who was very proud of his thick chestnut hair, very particular about how it was to be trimmed. She would not talk to Freddy but would watch him in the mirror as he worked on her, and when he was finished, she would examine the result carefully, nod to him, and give him a hard candy that tasted of fruit he did not recognize. The SS officers called her ‘Eis’ behind her back, and while they were polite to her, there was something about her that unsettled even them. She and her husband worked in the medical compound, a place from which no one returned healthy. He wondered what she did that could make SS men uncomfortable.
Sometimes when he shaved one of them he thought about drawing the blade hard across the exposed neck where the large vein pulsed under the skin. In his mind’s eye he saw the spurt of blood and the look of fear as the man realized he was dying. But he had never had the courage to do it, and so he had survived.
The hard edge of the steel highway support dug into Freddy’s back and reminded him that he was here, now, in New York City, and that the memories were just smoke in his head. He had learned that the cop’s name was Cassidy and that he was trying to find Leon’s killer, and he had a vague thought that if he followed Cassidy he might discover who the killer was. But then what? And what about the woman? She was a Jew, a newspaper reporter. He did not know much about her or what a newspaper reporter did. Was she trying to find Leon’s killer? He would have to think about her and what she was doing. He would have to study on it.
He went up the street staying in the deep shadows along the buildings. He did not think they would be watching from the apartment, but the shadows were where he was comfortable.