Act of Revenge (17 page)

“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.

Chapter 8

RETURNING HOME FROM HER HOSPITAL visit, Marlene felt emotionally
bedraggled and not at all looking forward to family life, especially not to another
tense evening with Lucy. But when she arrived at the loft, she found not Sylvia
Plath Jr. but Little Mary Sunshine, happily giggling with her brothers in her room,
in
her
room, a treat almost beyond comprehension,
Lucy's room being, for the twins at least, the domestic equivalent of the
Forbidden City. Besides that, the loft was tidied and swept, and the table laid for
dinner, also Lucy's work, since the concept of “tidy” had never
imposed itself on Posie's custardlike mind.

“Hi, Mom!” they all chorused when Marlene stuck her head
in to view this marvel. Marlene had often noticed the peculiar complementarity of
her moods with those of her daughter, as if they were at either end of the same
seesaw. Lucy had clearly emerged from her recent private hell; Marlene felt herself
descending into her own. She tried to be glad about her daughter's return to
the broad, sunlit uplands, but as the evening passed, she could not help feeling
that Lucy's mood had an aggressive edge to it, as if to say,
“You've tried to make me miserable, wretched Mom, but I have
transcended your wicked designs.” Karp was charmed out of his socks, which
didn't help much either. Marlene retired early with a headache and a pint of
plain red wine.

Lucy retired early as well, not to sleep but to finish the last of the
Claudine books,
Claudine s'en va
, which was about
(and here she moved the story around in her head, describing it to herself as she
would describe it to her pals) this woman Annie, and how she was married to this
dork, a real conceited guy, and then she met Claudine, and Claudine had turned into
this terrifically cool and sexy woman, yeah, she was still married to that guy, but
it was all different somehow, she wasn't squashed by it anymore, and anyway
she shows Annie that Annie doesn't really love her husband, and he
doesn't love her and they should break up, which was a big deal in those
days, but she does anyway, and Claudine thinks about seducing her but doesn't
because she promised her own husband that she wouldn't do stuff like that
(Lucy, the dirty little thing, made a mental note to maybe modify that in the
retelling) and Annie does set out for the future and life goes on. She mused for a
while, imagining herself installed Claudine-like in some apartment with her father,
a man engaged in his work but always ready to devote his entire attention to his
little girl. Claudine had not been supplied with a mom, which was one of the chief
sources of the delight Lucy took in the novels.

She closed the book and placed it neatly in its proper place on her
bedside shelf. A satisfactory ending, the kind she liked, and she was glad that
Claudine had moved on from merely arranging her own life to arranging those of her
friends. This was also Lucy's ambition, especially when her friends were in
some trouble and the arranging might offer some Kim-style skulking and even a
measure of violent adventure.

Mary had, of course, been sensible in her Mary way: children did not
catch killers, especially not oriental professional killers, but now that she had
her friends again, Lucy was not slow to imagine plots by which some satisfactory
conclusion to the Asia Mall murder case could be brought about. Lucy's
interest in this was not principled but personal: those murdering bastards had
nearly messed up her life and should pay for it with their heart's blood.
With these and similar thoughts, of a violence rather more common among young girls
than their parents suspect, she drifted off to sleep.

And awoke full of energy, more than she had felt in weeks. She fed,
toiletted, and dressed in mere minutes, and was out of the house at just past seven
and on her way to her mother's office while her brothers were still having
their wake-up whine. The fine weather continued, but now she noticed it as for the
first time, balmy springtime in the city, and was buoyed up by it, and it lent
bounce to her step as she trotted down Broadway to Walker.

Bello & Ciampi had a suite on the second floor of an undistinguished
loft building otherwise devoted to galleries and the sale of oriental rugs. The firm
name was painted in gold on the large semilunar window around the portrayal of a
staring eye, with
investigations-security
below, which Lucy
thought unbelievably tacky. Her mother had surrendered part of the space when the
firm had contracted with Osborne and Harry Bello had moved uptown. She had an
anteroom for her secretary-receptionist, one large room behind the big window with
the sign on it, a toilet with shower, and a couple of windowless cubbyholes in back.
One was fitted out as a kitchen, and Tran lived in the other.

Crying out a greeting in Arabic to Mr. Habibi, who ran the rug emporium
on the ground floor, she ran up the steps and pounded on the door. She knelt and
shouted through the brass mail slot and peeked through it, and shortly she saw a
pair of feet in rubber zoris approach.

Tran greeted her and walked back through the office to his room, which
contained a neatly made-up iron cot, a particle-board wardrobe, a pine table, a
wooden swivel chair, and a small block-and-board bookcase, its lower shelves full of
books, mainly paperbacks, in French, English, and Vietnamese. On its top shelf sat a
twelve-inch black-and-white TV, with a coat hanger antenna, and a cheap clock-radio
cassette player. The walls were bare and white. Tran sat in the chair, and Lucy
perched herself on the edge of the bed. The office, and Tran's quarters
within it, were among Lucy's favorite places. She had been coming here since
early childhood, and it was here that she had developed her taste for snooping. She
still came to snoop into Tran's doings, and to spy on her mother, that sink
of iniquity, and it did not occur to her that her presence here also allowed her
mother to keep tabs on her, both directly and through Tran. Lucy was a capable
conspirator, an extraordinary one for her age, but she was not quite ready for the
major leagues, where both Mom and the Vietnamese had long been players.

“What are you doing?” she asked after the usual long
silence.

“I am playing pyramid, as you see. Is there something wrong with
your vision?”

“I meant, what are you doing
today
?” Silence, the flap of cards. Peevishly she said, “You
always play that stupid game. You never win.”

“So you imagine. I like this game because it is almost impossible
to cheat at it, and almost no hands play out. It is thus a good model of real life
in both respects.”

“One can cheat in real life,” said Lucy. Tran raised his
head from the cards and gave her one of his famous looks. Lucy had trained herself
to meet her mother's gaze, which was powerful enough, but Tran's eyes
were in a class of their own, with a range that ran from Santa-like merriment to the
matte black merciless gaze of a large shark. For an instant it was like staring at
hot anthracite; then it softened and he said, “Only about trivial things,
money or romance. I was speaking of the essentials, that is, life itself. In any
case, today I must see the boyfriend of one of our clients, who has persisted in
unpleasant behavior.”

“Will you pound his lights out?”

“Certainly not,” replied Tran prissily. “I am a
feeble and elderly oriental person and do not, as you say,
pound out the lights
of people. No, I will simply indicate to him in a
variety of ways that he is being followed, and that neither his home, nor his place
of work, nor his auto, is secure, should anyone wish to do him an injury, and I will
further indicate that such intrusions will cease when he ceases his unwanted
attentions toward his former mistress.”

“What if he doesn't?”

“In that case, we will threaten him with a visit from you. He
will crumple like a dry leaf. Please be careful with that book.”

Lucy had been examining the objects set on the shelf affixed to the wall
behind the head of the cot, in perfect disregard of her host's privacy. She
palmed a couple of Camels from a pack there, flipped through a little notebook, and
opened the book in question, an octavo volume printed on vellum paper like a good
Bible, bound in soft blue leather, much battered and stained. She had seen it
innumerable times but had never focused upon it until now. It was, she saw, in the
Vietnamese language. She read the title aloud, “
Truyen
Kieu.
” Someone had written something on the flyleaf in ink, but it
had run and faded and she could not make out its meaning.

“ ‘The Tale of Kieu,' ” she translated.
“What's it about, refugees?”

“In a way. Vietnamese who have fled Vietnam are called
Viet-Kieu
because
kieu
means
migrant, but the association is there, because Kieu had to flee her home also. She
is our patron saint, you might say. A girl who suffered much.”

“It's about a girl?”

“So the title suggests. It is the Vietnamese national
epic.”

“Yeah? Can I borrow it?”

Tran pinched his nostrils and looked uncomfortable. “Hmm. I
don't know. Except in prison, it has not been out of my possession for many
years. It was a gift.”

“Who from?”

“From Linh. My wife.”

“Oh. Did she write in the front? What does it say?”

He spoke in Vietnamese. “It says, ‘Naturally, when two
kindred spirits meet, one tie/Soon binds them in a knot nothing can tear loose. From
your kindred spirit, Linh. Tet, 1956.' The lines are from the poem
itself.”

Lucy put the book carefully back on the shelf. “I'm
sorry,” she said, “I thought it was just a book. I don't really
read Vietnamese very well either.” She was acutely uncomfortable now. Some
vast and heavy and awful thing seemed to lurk at the corners of her consciousness,
like a formless bogey out of a dream. It was once again the faint apprehension of
the suffering of Asia, something she touched a dozen times a day, and drew away
from, and ignored like other Americans. She wished very much to pull away from it
again, to resume the persona of a cheeky little girl poking about the room of a
crotchety old uncle, but a feeling came over her then, a feeling like watching the
odometer of a car turn over to produce a clean line of white zeros, and she
understood that this was no longer possible for her.

“You must have been really sad when . . .” she began, and
then stopped, appalled. She didn't know how to talk about stuff like this, as
she had just at the moment realized. The times when she had chattered on, casually
asking him about his life, now recollected, filled her with hot shame.

He sensed this and was kind. “I was sad, of course, but I did not
find out about it until some time later. I was buried alive for four days, in a
tunnel. When I came out, I was not the person I was before. Perhaps I could not have
gone back to being a husband and a father in the same way, or at least that is what
I told myself. And they were simply gone; it was not as if I had to bury them. They
were in the canteen at Bac Mai Hospital, and it received a direct hit from a
thousand-pound bomb. From a B–52, you understand. They fly so high that there
is no warning. Alive and unafraid at one instant, dead the next. There are many
worse deaths.”

“Then why did you come here?” Lucy demanded angrily, tears
starting. “Why don't you hate us?”

Tran's eyes were mild and somewhat surprised, and he answered,
“As to why I came here, this is the land of opportunity, and I badly needed
opportunity. My life in my country was over in a way that I hope you will never be
able to comprehend. Also, when my family was killed, my country was at war, the
whole country, not a small band of confused young men as with America. My wife and
daughter were part of the war. The Americans bombed a hospital. Why should they not?
I assure you that had I access to a B–52, I would have bombed every hospital
from here to California.”

She started to object, but Tran turned on her a riveting stare. He said,
“Listen to me, because this is important. Peace is best. You should make
every sacrifice to secure peace. When you absolutely must go to war, however, you
must try to kill all the enemy you can as quickly as you can, holding nothing back,
until they have surrendered or you have been defeated utterly. It is a great fraud
to think otherwise, as the Americans did, and it prolongs the agony. It would be
better if people said, if we fight, we are going to boil babies in their own fat and
blast the skin off nice old ladies, so that they die slowly in great pain, and we
are
happy
to do this, because what we fight for is
so
important. And if they conclude that it is
not
as important as
that
, then
they should fight no more. Your mother understands this, which is why I am able to
work for her. With these men, you know, she asks, she pleads, she begs them, she
warns them so that they can have no doubts, she offers help. Then, if this is to no
avail, suddenly, overwhelming, merciless violence.”

At the mention of her mother and how terrifically great she was,
again
, Lucy felt herself withdrawing attention. Tran
sensed this as well, and resumed snapping his cards.

“I have to go to Chinese school,” said Lucy, getting
up.

“If you like, I will go with you. I have business in that
area.”

They walked in companionable silence to Mott Street and the Chinese
Consolidated Benevolent Association Building, where they had the Chinese School.
Tran said, in English, “Watch yourself, beautiful. Don't take any
wooden nickels,” and was rewarded by the astounded look on her face as she
passed in through the door. He watched a great deal of TV late at night, for he had
slept badly for a very long time, and when his eyes were too tired for reading he
switched on the set. He preferred the films of twenty-five years ago and earlier,
because the actors spoke more slowly and the plots were simpler and the violence was
not so lovingly portrayed, and sometimes a phrase would stick in his mind and he
would repeat it to hear how it sounded in his mouth. He was slowly learning
American, of an antiquated type that, as it happened, was well suited to his
personality.