City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (26 page)

As he watched, more young men and boys shoved past him, and knelt down to try their luck, pushing out a penny or two. The dice rolled, and a quick, hatchet-faced young man stepped nimbly around the bettors and the shooter, flicking up the money before it could be retrieved, shoving an occasional coin to a winner like a man pushing a bad apple back into a fruit cart.

It was those coins that Lazar found himself the most fascinated with—money for nothing but the risk. He stepped forward, barely aware of the heavy pot still balanced on his arm, and with no further thought flipped down the nickel he had been given for the
goyishe
baker. The hatchet-faced young man’s eyes flickered briefly over it—then he scooped up the dice and passed them along to a smaller, angelic looking boy, no more than a child, who had thoughtfully pressed a penny down on the sidewalk.

“Them dice know who’s fadin’ ya an’ they’ll never, never come to ya—“

The small boy hurled them artlessly off the wall. They flopped back down on the cement: a single white dot showing on each black face. Before Lazar could give it so much as a last look, the nimble young man had grabbed up his nickel, the shooter’s penny, and every other coin along the pavement.

“Yiddishe mazel,”
he muttered in formal condolence—then grabbed the dice back from the child, who looked positively agonized.

New players shoved in, pushing Lazar back from the game—not that he had anything more to play with, anyway. He stood for a long time on the curb, the pot of stew in his hands, trying to think of what to do next. The nickel was gone, and he had no more money and no way to get any, and the baker, he knew, was not about to give credit to some little
yiddishe pisher.

He wandered back along the darkening streets with the
cholent,
still teased by the ignorant, smiling passersby:
Better move your tochis, kinderle.

He walked very slowly, thinking that something had to intervene. A nickel found in the street, an uncommonly generous stranger—he kept his eyes on the gutter the whole way home, looking for lost money. Maybe he could even save somebody from a runaway horse, like all those ridiculous stories about match boys and newsies on the rise he had once thumbed through at the Seward Park branch—

There was nothing. No runaway horse, no money lining the streets. He turned into Forsythe Street, the sidewalk barren of whores now in the late fall weather. Esse was just coming down the steps of their tenement and she stared at him, so concerned, so instantly aware that something was wrong, the way she always knew. He almost choked to see her, but he carried the
cholent
pot on past, unable to say anything. He walked on up the three flights to their rooms, where he put the pot down on the kitchen table, under the stunned gaze of his mother.

“What’s this?”

She looked toward the window, where she could see nothing of the day.

“You will be late!
Shabbos—“

He sat in his father’s chair at the table, staring at his hands.

“I can’t. I lost the five cents.”

“What was it? The
goyim?”

She knelt before him and stared into his face, her eyes so frantic that he could not even tell her the story he had planned.

Better she should see his true nature

“No.
I
lost the nickel. I lost it gambling on the street.”

Better that they knew

She let him alone then. She let him sit silently at the table, looking at the floor until his father came home, and she had to repeat what he had told her in her tremulous, teary voice. Somehow, some part of him enjoyed listening to her tell it, right there in the same room, her voice full of awe at the terrible thing he had done.

“Thickneck! Piece of wretch!”

His father had raged predictably at him, struck his face, torn his own shirt dramatically.

“You wild beast! I do declare you sin!”

It was the worst of all their terrible times in the little apartment on Forsythe Street. It was the same month that the battle over the Grand Rabbi from Cracow had come to a head, and his father’s congregation had kicked him out.

“The worst thing that ever happened to us was making it to America!” the old man lamented, banging his fist over and over again on the table, stalking back and forth like a madman, raving until they could no longer understand him and beating at Lazar with his belt.

That Friday night it had been as if they were sitting
shivas.
They had nothing to eat for Saturday now. It was against God’s law for his mother to cook the
cholent
herself, of course, and it had been too late to round up some
Shabbos goy
and send him off to the baker in Lazar’s place. When they got back from synagogue there was only the cold, half-cooked pot of stew, congealing in the kitchen. Yet his father had sat down at table anyway.

“It is time to eat, let us eat,” he said.

His mother and Esse looked at each other, obviously wondering if the reb were in his right mind by then. He had been all but shunned that day at their synagogue. Some of his oldest friends—men he had known from back in Lodz—had refused to speak with him anymore, sick of his hectoring over the Grand Rebe and their new country. But he insisted they all sit down for dinner.

“This is what we have been given through this
boy.
It is what the Uppermost means for me to have.”

His wife pleaded with him with her eyes but he ignored her, gazing fixedly out across the table as if they were about to receive their usual feast. She lifted the cover of the
cholent
pot—and stopped when she saw it sitting there, coagulating in its own grease.

“I will not serve food like this to my family,” she said—but he jumped up almost gaily, and grabbed the ladle from her hand.

“All right, if you won’t, I will,” he told her. “The son does not obey, and the mother does not serve. If nobody in this family will take their rightful place, I will do all of it.”

He spooned out a heaping portion of the mess onto his own plate first, as usual; waxy orange lumps of fat oozing over onto the table.

“Who wants next?”

No one said anything. The reb snatched up first his wife’s plate, then Esse’s, clopping down more cold, congealed lumps of the stew on each.

“There! There! And now for the little
momzer
.”

Lazar thrust his own plate out at his father, holding it as steadily as he could. The old man’s eyes widened, delirious with anger now.

“Oh, hungry for the fruit of your labors, my little plague? Well, then, you will have all that you can eat!”

He slopped a huge ladleful onto Lazar’s plate, much bigger than the ones on Esse’s or his mother’s—then another, and another. Still, Lazar kept his plate extended, until his father finally let the
kochleffel
fall back into the pot.

“Go on! Eat up!” the old man cried.

Lazar began to eat—leisurely at first, knowing they were all watching him and despising most of all the pity from his mother and his sister. Soon he began to eat faster—stuffing the soggy chunks of beef, the hard, uncooked little pellets of barley and beans down his throat. It was all putrid, the thorough corruption of his mother’s dish. Yet he kept eating, gagging on the spongy mush once but still forcing it down, one heaping forkful after another.

“Go on! Eat, eat!” his father cried, incensed. “Look at him, this great lump of hog! He can’t get enough of his handiwork!”

Lazar stared at his father, mouth forced into a smirk around the cold and greasy meat. The reb pointed to the open window, through which they could hear the usual depravities of the
goyishe
Saturday night down on the street—the whores laughing, the men singing and jeering drunkenly.

“He should be down
there,
with the rest of the swill!
That
is what he is good for!”

Lazar finished his last bite, leaving only the orange grease stain on his plate, then got up and walked stiffly over to where his hat and coat hung from a peg on the wall.

“Lazar!” his mother shrieked, while Esse watched silently from the table.

“Where are you going, now you can’t stand your shame?” his father bellowed, jumping to his feet.

“Tell me, please,” Lazar said, looking straight at him again. “What are we mourning—me, or the
cholent?”

“Listen to him! Go to the devil with your gangster friends! Leavink the house on a Sabbath. You are
dead
to me, do you hear that? I no longer have a son!”

Lazar put on his hat, managing despite his trembling fingers to flip it up and on his head in one, impudent motion—something he had practiced with the other boys at school. He struggled to keep his voice level, his face expressionless.

“I would rather
be
dead than to stay in this house.”

He turned and walked casually out the door then—even as he wondered where he would go, how he would eat. His mother held out her arms to him; her calls followed him out into the hallway—
Lazar! Lazar!
—so plaintive and heartbroken that had she come after him he thought he might have walked right back in, and knelt at his father’s knee, and asked his forgiveness. And even then, he knew that he
would
have been forgiven. His father would have relished it like some scene from Torah, the errant son returning.

But his mother did not come out, obedient as always to his father’s will. He kept walking, down the winding flights of stairs. Only Esse had come after him. He heard the door open again, his father’s mad taunts echoing out into the hall:

“Let him go, let them
all
go!
Gornisht mit gornisht!”

Esse called after him, watching him descend the stairwell, a dark figure dropping down a dark hall.

“But Lazar, where will you go?”

He waved a hand back over his head, not trusting himself to look at her. It was better that way, better that she had stayed—though he had often thought differently since.

“Something. Anything.”

But he knew now: he was no good.

Esse ran down the stairs after him, but he was already gone. She turned and walked slowly back up, staring at her father now leaning over the banister on their floor.

“Gottenyu,”
he sighed most piteously for himself. “America has made a mountain of ashes out of me.”

He spent that night in an alley that reeked of cat piss and rotting vegetables, and the next morning he walked back over to the dice game on Attorney Street. This time he waited, and watched, until all became clear to him.

There was always the banker: the hatchet-faced young man who ran the games, and handed out the dice, and stepped nimbly about picking up the money. There were at least two other shills, hovering around the edge of the crowd. And then there was the child: the baby-faced boy who had rolled his losing snake eyes and seemed so disconsolate.

Whenever they needed more marks, he saw, the angelic little boy would be called upon to come forward and toss the dice, like he was any other rube off the street. He might even win two, three times in a row—the banker glaring elaborately at him—until enough new players had decided the game was worth a try. Then the hatchet-faced boy would slip him a pair of new dice from an inner vest pocket—a pair that came up snake eyes every time.

When he had learned what he needed to learn, Lazar spent the rest of the morning hunting for the lucky nickel that had evaded him on his long walk home with the
cholent.
It was still not easy to find, five cents did not linger long on the street. He had nothing but time now, though, and he searched the gutters head down until he had managed to collect five pennies that had somehow slipped through the fin-gers of the yentas and the
goniff
peddlers.

He went back to the game then, and waited until the baby-faced shill came forward again. When the dice were in his hands, Lazar stepped in and plunked his pennies down on the pavement. The boy made his point—and Lazar scooped up his money as quickly as he had put it down, not hazarding another toss.

The hatchet-faced banker glared at him but he had no choice: he either had to pay off or alert the marks. One of the shills started toward him as he backed off through the crowd—a tall, broad-shouldered boy—but Lazar was not about to be stopped by anything now and he stared the
shtarkeh
down until he moved sullenly back toward the game.

That day was the start of his fortune. He moved up and down Attorney Street, then Delancey, and all over the Lower East Side, repeating his play. He never milked it, never made anyone mad enough to try to cut him—just moved in when he had figured out the score and made his nickel or dime, then moved on.

By the end of his first day on his own he had two dollars, and by the next day he had ten more, and after that the possibilities were endless. He never went back to his father’s house, not even the day he saw his own picture in the Gallery of Disappearing Men, and wept alone in his hotel room.

And she was still with them, after all this time. She stood before him now, a princess in the street

“Esse, why are you still here?” he asked—forgetting his mission, forgetting even his father’s promise. “Why don’ch you come away?”

—and he knew even then he would have gone with her anywhere she asked, he would have lived with her anyway she wanted.

“You have to stay together,” she told him, though he thought he could detect the doubt in her voice.

“Leave them to their own misery. I got enough for us both.”

“It’s blood money.”

He would make her see

“All money is blood money,” he scoffed. “Come with me.”

She looked at him, her face so horribly compassionate again.

“And do what? A man without anything—without family, or friends, or anything to believe in—what can he be but a beast?”