Act of God (16 page)

Bernstein said, “You know, I don’t approve of this, right?”

“Mrs. Rivkind told me that was the general opinion.”

“Well, Abe was my partner but her husband. She wants to spend their money on you, it’s hers to spend. You and Beverly finished here?”

“For now.”

“Come down to my office then, get this over with.”

I thanked Swindell and followed Bernstein into the corridor. “Who has the offices across the hall?”

Over his shoulder he said, “What?”

“The offices on the other side of this hall. Who’s in them?”

“Nobody.”

“Can I see them?”

Bernstein let out a deep sigh, then fished around in a side pocket, coming out with a chain that held at least twenty different keys. He walked back to the door opposite Swindell’s office, having no trouble choosing, the first time, a key that opened the cylinder lock on it. He swung the door open for me.

I looked into an office that wasn’t just unoccupied but abandoned. Two old desk chairs, each missing a wheel, a couple of plastic chair runners with broken-off corners and deep cracks in the plastic, a framed landscape somebody had sliced through with a knife, three old IBM standard typewriters. The dust on the linoleum floor looked undisturbed, the view out the windows that of the red brick building next door.

I said, “Hasn’t been used in a while.”

“Try decades.”

“How about the other one?”

Bernstein locked that door and moved on up the hall to the one across from his and Rivkind’s office. Same key, so far as I could tell.

“A master?”

He said, “What?”

“The key. A master for all the doors on the floor?”

“Oh. Yeah. Easier that way.”

He didn’t elaborate, but did swing this door open for me, too. More modernly appointed, no obvious junk, carpet on the floor so no dust layer to disturb. “Who used to have this?”

“Our day manager.”

“Where’d he go?”

“To Heaven, I hope. More directly, St. Michael’s in Roslindale.”

“The cemetery.”

“Right.”

“How long ago?”

“Two years. Heart attack, went out like a match.”

I looked at him. Bernstein said, “I know what you’re thinking.”

“That it’s odd you haven’t replaced him?”

“No. This economy, it was a break he went so quick, we didn’t have to lay him off and could give his bonus to the widow. No, what you’re thinking is, ‘Sight unseen, I’d have bet Bernstein’d have the big one before this other guy,’ am I right?”

“No.”

He made a derisive face. “You’re telling me, you saw me walk into Beverly’s office, you weren’t thinking about some kind of fat joke?”

The bass drum image came back. “I thought about it. Not exactly a joke, but I thought about it.”

Bernstein said, “All my life, I’ve been like this. I weigh three-ten now, have for twenty years, and before that it was two-seventy, two-eighty, around there. I go for a plane, they try to make me buy two tickets. I go shopping in the food market, people watch what I put in my cart. I was in school, the other kids made oink noises when I tried to eat in the cafeteria. You live a certain way long enough, there’s nobody can fool you about what they’re thinking.”

“I’m thinking, who else has a key to this office.”

“This one? Abe had one, a master like mine. The big Irish has one. …”

“That’s Quill?”

“Right, right. Security. Beverly’s got hers.”

“Also a master?”

“Yeah. It just makes it easier, like I said. Who else? Probably Pearl and Larry, though when they ever used theirs I couldn’t tell you.”

“Darbra Proft?”

“No. She was just a secretary, not here long enough for that.”

“To be trusted with a master, you mean?”

“With any key, except to her own door.”

I pointed to the closed door next to the partners’ office. “That one?”

“Yeah.”

“I noticed you said ‘was.’ ”

“What?”

“When you mentioned Darbra, you said she
was
just a secretary.”

“Right.”

“Why past tense?”

Bernstein looked at me hard. “Because she doesn’t show up for work, doesn’t even do us the courtesy of calling in, and this after she got a week’s vacation only three months into the job, she doesn’t have a job in my mind anymore.”

“Can I see her office?”

“All right.”

He used the same key to open the final door on the corridor, the one closest to the swinging doors back to the store. A cubbyhole more than an office, with just a desk and computer terminal and the collection of paperclip holder and stapler and in-boxes you’d expect.

“Mind if I have a look?”

“What, at her desk?”

“The drawers.”

“The hell could her drawers have to do with Abe?”

“I don’t know, but I’m guessing Mrs. Rivkind also told you I’m looking for Darbra at her brother’s request.”

“She told me. And I told her it sounded like the rest of it, cockamamie.”

“Can I look?”

“Look. Look all you want. Long’s I’m standing here, see what you find.”

Hard to argue with that. The center drawer had a ruler, staple remover, and assorted blank papers and forms. More papers and forms, these with envelopes, in the left-hand top. Second drawer had tissues; a bottle of aspirin; cough drops; plastic spoons, forks, and knives; two different brands of granola bars; and the menus from three take-out places. The third drawer had a collapsible umbrella and a pair of Lady Reebok aerobic shoes with short white cotton socks.

“Any treasures?”

“No.”

“Then come into my office, we can get this over with.”

Bernstein locked Proft’s door. “It’s genetic, you know.”

“Genetic?”

“The obesity. I’m not fat, I’m obese, account of three-ten’s way more than a hundred-twenty-five percent of my ideal body weight. But it’s not like I got some control over it. Just metabolism, you’ve got it in the family, you’re born with it. You can diet, you can exercise, doesn’t matter. Whatever you lose, you pay for it in the side effects. It’s like Biafra, or that Somalia now. Most people spend all their time thinking about food, obsessing over how good it’d be to have this or that. Me, I was cold.”

We moved into the partners’ office. “Cold?”

“Yeah, like shivering. Teeth chattering even, middle of summer, didn’t matter. I tried the diets and I tried the exercise and thank God I finally got this doctor, straightened me out. He told me they did this study on obesity, something like ninety percent of the people in it said they’d rather be blind than fat. Blind. You know why?”

“No.”

“Because when you’re blind, people want to help you out. Nobody thinks to help a fat person because they figure it’s your own fault. But it’s not.”

“Genetics.”

“Like I said. So now I’m just content being me, with some pills here and there for high blood pressure, whatever.”

Bernstein glanced at the bustle-back chair with the bleached spot near it, then shook his head as he lowered himself into the other, mirror-image chair. The seat crackled, the springs creaked. “You know, he was the only one.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Abe. Take a seat.”

I pulled over a captain’s chair. “Mr. Rivkind was the only one?”

“To never make fun of me. He never once looked at me like he didn’t want to be like that, fat. Obese. You know why?”

“No.”

“He was in one of the camps as a kid. Buchenwald.”

Bernstein pronounced the “w” as a “v.” I just nodded.

“Abe, he was like a little kid, and he starved, like all the rest. Things were awful then, unimaginable. I mean, my dieting? Nothing. These starving Africans? Horrible, but at least nobody’s putting them in ovens. Nothing compared to the camps, to hear Abe tell it. That’s why he hired Beverly, you know.”

“She said a probation officer put in a word for her.”

“Yeah, that’s how come Abe got asked. He handled hiring, running the store. Me, I’m more the merchant, the guy who makes the buying decisions on the stock. But Abe hired her because he never forgot the Liberators.”

“The airplanes?”

“No, no. The black troops, our boys, end of World War II. This battalion of tankers, the 761st, I think was its number, but they called themselves the Black Panthers. Maybe that’s where the political guys, the revolutionaries, got the name, I don’t know. They—the soldiers, I mean—they came up to Buchenwald, and I guess the guards—the Nazis—tried to make a fight of it, and the tankers just took them out, crashed through the gate. Abe, he showed me a picture of that gate, somebody took for him later and sent him. There was what looked like an office over it, then a clock with a picket fence and a flag flying over that. I guess the soldiers crashed through the gate, then saw the bodies piled up inside it. The prisoners the Nazis shot beforehand. Piled up like so much firewood, Abe said. ‘Flexible firewood, Joel,’ was how he phrased it. Well, now, Abe, he’d never seen a black person in his life except in the cinema—funny, Abe never called it ‘the movies,’ always the cinema, though you wouldn’t really hear his accent, you didn’t listen close on some words. But there came our boys through the gates, liberating the camp. And they see all these prisoners, heads shaved, ribs sticking through the tattered clothes or no clothes, hands clasped to God, giving thanks for deliverance. The soldiers were crying, these big black American kids, crying their eyes out. ‘Angels,’ Abe called them. ‘Weeping angels.’ ”

Bernstein suddenly, violently, made a blubbering sound, but no tears. “Anyway, when his friend from the temple said he had this woman, needed a job, Abe just had to take one look at her, and he knew—hell, I knew—she had the job. The Black Panthers, they liberated Abe. Abe, he had to give the black woman a chance. And, turned out, she was terrific.”

“How about Darbra?”

Bernstein made the derisive face again. “Not a waste, but not so far from it. Could do the simple things fine, but give her something a little complicated, needed any kind of judgment, and it was a miracle, you got back what you wanted. Beverly felt the same way, maybe she told you.”

“Why keep Darbra on, then?”

“Abe’s side of the business, like I said. He did the hiring and the firing. He also said, ‘She’ll get better, Joel. She’ll get better.’ Only she never did, and now this.”

“This?”

“Not showing up and not even calling.”

“What’s she like as a person?”

“What, Darbra?”

“Yes.”

“There was something a little … off about her.”

Past tense again. “How do you mean?”

“Like … like milk can get, you know? Not exactly spoiled, just you open the carton and stick your nose in and you wouldn’t drink it, you could buy some more.”

I had the same questions for Bernstein that I did for Swindell, but I also thought to save them for the end. “Can you take me over what happened the night Mr. Rivkind was killed?”

“I already told the police all this.”

“Sometimes it helps to hear it again fresh.”

“I don’t know how fresh it’s going to be—what, three weeks later already?”

“I’d still appreciate your trying.”

Another deep sigh. “Okay. We’re open late Thursdays. We’d had some problems, kids hiding in the store, then doing some vandal shit and banging out the back door, two A.M. the cops or the fire department calling me out of bed with the news about our alarm going off. So Abe hires the big Irish—I’m sorry, no offense, it’s just that’s what Abe and I called the guy.”

“That’s okay. Go on.”

“Anyway, Abe and I are up here, trying to talk our way out of the recession, and Finian’s down below, walking through the place, looking for stowaways—I guess the store’s not going anywhere, they’re just ‘hideaways,’ huh?—and Beverly’s doing the dailies so we can see where we stand. I get up to go to the head—these pills I take, they don’t make me constipated, just kind of … irregular, you know?”

“Which bathroom?”

“Which? The men’s room, of course.”

“I mean, the one in the corridor past the fire door?”

“The only one we got. What’s the matter with that?”

“Just seems kind of odd, the management using the same facilities as the customers.”

“Abe’s idea.”

“Abe’s?”

“Yeah. We bought this store together, going on twenty years ago. It doesn’t matter, but you’ll see what I mean. When you looked up at the outside, the facade, you notice anything?”

“Just that it’s a nice building.”

“Nice? Huh, this is a Despradelle.”

“A des … ?”

“Despradelle. French architect, came over near the turn of the century. This whole area, the Leather District, I mean, it burned in 1872, and the warehouse they rebuilt on this site, it burned, too. So around 1900 or so somebody got Despradelle to design this building to replace it. The top of the facade’s got that spike effect, ‘finials,’ Abe said they called them, with the flags. Now do you get it?”

I thought I did. “The way you described the gate.”

“That’s right. That’s absolutely on the button. This building, it looks like Buchenwald’s front gate, only now Abe could be in the office looking down. We bought this store because we were in the furniture business, but I got to tell you, we bought this place because of the building more than the business. That’s what I meant about Abe being like that.”

“Resolute.”

“What?”

“Decisive, determined.”

“Right. Resolute, yeah. That was Abe. He had to have this building, he had to offer Beverly the job, and he had to take Darbra on, too.”

“Because he’d made up his mind.”

“And believe me, it was easier to go along with him than to try to change it.”

“Why Darbra?”

“Why?”

“Yes. I understand about the building and hiring Mrs. Swindell, but why Darbra Proft?”

“I think it was Pearl. She was doing a favor for somebody.”

“Darbra’s brother?”

“I think that was it.”

“You never found out for sure?”

“Like I said, with Abe, it was just easier to go along. He wasn’t a big guy—he always figured the time in the camp, the starvation, it stunted his growth—but he made up that mind of his, you couldn’t change it with dynamite.”

That sudden blubbering sound came again from Bernstein, but again without any other sign.