Grab Bag (2 page)

Bittersohn nimbly avoided the trap door under the silken carpet, kept a tight hold on the necklace until he had made sure he was well clear of Lightfingers, then walked briskly—more briskly than before now that he was free of that annoying bullet—to a nearby pawnshop. There he greeted the pawnbroker.

“Hi, Sol.”

“Hi, Max. What are you after today?”

“Money.” Bittersohn tossed the magnificent handful of fabulous gems on the worn oaken counter. “What am I offered?”

“How hot is it?”

“Not very. Anyway, you won’t be keeping it long.”

“Maxie, is this one of your ingenious subterfuges?”

“Trust me, Sol. Here’s the exact sum I want.” Bittersohn named a figure. The pawnbroker, after a bit of a struggle for they were unusually luxuriant, managed to raise both eyebrows simultaneously.

“Precisely that?”

“Precisely that.”

“If you say so.”

The pawnbroker paid over the money and made out the ticket. Bittersohn, still striding briskly albeit beginning to experience a sense of fatigue, pocketed his gain, left the shop, and hailed a passing hackney, being careful to inspect the interior for exotic foreign ladies and any henchman who might still have escaped Dr. Yang’s impetuosity. He gave a fashionable address, then sat back and braced himself against the impact of Boston’s historic potholes. It did make a difference, having that bullet out.

Lady Ychs was at home. Her maid Ylyse said so. There was little Ylyse did not know about Lady Ychs. “You weesh to see her, M’sieu?”

“Not particularly,” said Bittersohn, stifling a yawn. “Just give her this with my regards.”

“A … ’ow you say? … a pawn teeckeet? Mais, M’sieu!”

The maid vanished, clearly nonplussed. A moment later, Lady Ychs herself appeared, trailing yards of black chiffon and marabou.

“Monsieur Bittersohn,” she cried imperiously, “for why you offer me zeese … zeese insult?”

“For why you want your diamond necklace back, that’s for why. All you have to do is apply at the address on the ticket and pay my friend Sol the stated amount.”

“But why so strange an amount? I do not comprehend.”

“It’s elementary, my dear Lady Ychs. You simply add my standard fee for recovering Du Barry necklaces to my outstanding invoice for retrieval of your Montespan bracelet, plus one per cent brokerage fee for the gentleman behind the counter, and viola! Next time you feel an urge to use your diamonds as bait to lure some unsuspecting victim into the nefarious toils of your confederate, Dr. Yang, perhaps you’ll pause and reflect. Oh, and the sable coat. I’d let it age for a decade or two before you start wearing it around Boston. Adieu, Lady Ychs. Please note that I didn’t say au revoir.”

It was with a sense of deep personal satisfaction that Bittersohn strode over the bricks and cobblestones of Beacon Hill, to the brownstone house where one surpassingly lovelier than any languorous adventuress in a new sable coat, who scorned all paltry artifice of fashion and did her own hair, would be awaiting his return. Outwitting the evil machinations of Dr. Yang had been merely one more spot of bother at the end of a long and grueling ordeal by paprikash. Getting Lady Ychs to pay a bill had been a genuine triumph, something that no other man had ever yet accomplished.

And there she was, flinging wide the portal, stretching out eager arms. His own true Sarah.

“Darling,” she cried, “whatever kept you? Your luggage arrived an hour ago. I was so overcome with joy, I tipped the messenger a dollar.”

“Wastrel!” He clasped her fondly to him, but his loving hands encountered only voluminous folds of crêpe de Chine smelling faintly of moth flakes. “Where the hell are you?”

“Oh sorry, darling. This is a dress Aunt Emma gave me and I haven’t got around to taking it in yet. It’s one she bought at Crawford Hollidge in 1947. Actually I’m a bit concerned, as the design appears to be coming back into fashion. You don’t think it looks too awfully à la mode?”

“You could fray the sleeves a little. How about some breakfast, darling?” It had been a long time since that last plate of gulyas.

“Of course, darling. Go make yourself comfortable while I warm up the coffee.”

Home at last! Bittersohn divested himself of the Savile Row suit that had served him so long and so faithfully, and draped it over a massive wooden hanger that had belonged to Sarah’s great-uncle Nathan. There was still a lot of good wear to that suit. He took off his handmade shoes and inserted shoe trees, noting as he did so that the soles were wearing a bit thin from all that brisk striding. To the cobbler they should go. There was still plenty of stride in those shoes.

He took a quick shower, being careful not to waste the soap, put on a pair of faded but exquisitely darned pajamas, and reached for his bathrobe. It was one his mother’s brother Hymie had bought off a pushcart on Blackstone Street back in 1926. Truth to tell, Uncle Hymie had never worn it much, but Max’s mother had artfully frayed the sleeves to impart the proper aura of aristocratic penury. Smiling a bit at the endearing foibles of womankind, his kind of womankind, Max Bittersohn sauntered out to get his breakfast.

ONE OF THE QUESTIONS
writers often get asked is, “How long does it take you to finish a story?” The answer seems to be that it takes as long as it takes. Some of them pretty much write themselves in a month or a week or even, sometimes, a day. Others take longer. This one was started in 1966, looked at occasionally and shoved back into the file drawer occasionally during the past 19 years, and at last finished up for this collection in a way that came as a surprise even to the author.

I never quite understood why I kept on going to Monique. The first time was simple enough. I was desperately tired and in considerable pain, and looking for relief.

I am one of those thin-skinned, small-boned little women who are almost indestructible, actually, but always well provided with alarming symptoms of one sort or another. Often these vary from day to day, but at this particular period in my life, I’d developed an ache in my back and legs that was sometimes bad and sometimes worse but never let up, day or night. For months I’d dragged around in misery, trying to cope with all the things that never seemed to get finished, no matter how hard I worked. I don’t know what made me think of massage, but anyway I did, one raw January afternoon when the pain was even worse than usual. This was before all the scandals about topless massage parlors, of course.

Not knowing what else to do, I looked in the yellow pages. There was one name listed under “Massage” that I recognized. Truth to tell, I’d never been inside the shop and had never realized it was anything but a hairdresser’s. However, I’d seen the sign often enough back when I was living in that part of the city, and I suppose the place appealed to me simply because I could find it without effort. I phoned for an appointment and went that night, directly after work.

From then on, I began to go faithfully every Thursday at half-past five, even though the so-called treatments were costing me more than I could conveniently spare and not really doing me any good. I think I was getting a perverse enjoyment out of wasting money on myself for a change, instead of forking it over into one of the hands that were eternally stretched out toward me.

It was a tacky little place, I found, strictly a one-woman operation. Monique, she called herself, though I doubt if that was her real name. She came from somewhere in Europe and looked as though she had been modeled out of piecrust dough that had been made with too much shortening and baked until not quite done. She wore elderly white nylon uniforms that strained at the buttonholes and white nurses’ shoes that were clean enough but sadly run over at the heels. She talked nonstop in a mixture of street slang and incongruously erudite expressions that I suppose she picked up from some of the intellectuals who lived around that rarefied neighborhood. She knew what the words meant but pronounced them wrong, with a heavy accent in a loud, insistent voice.

Monique had a knack of creating a sort of blowsy comfort. First she would lead me to a minuscule back room, hand me a clean sheet, and leave me to take my clothes off. After I’d undressed and was struggling to swathe myself decently in the sheet, she’d come back, whip away the sheet, and settle me into a queer kind of chair that was in fact a steam bath. This had a heavy plastic cover she’d zip up tight around my neck once she’d got me settled to her satisfaction.

Here was a situation ready-made for claustrophobia. Once zipped in, I was a prisoner. I couldn’t have stood it, I don’t suppose, except that on my very first visit I’d happened to see her open a door behind the chair that was normally kept bolted, and set out a bag of trash in the back alley. Perhaps a back entry was an odd sort of place to pass off as a steam room and perhaps I ought to have had qualms about sitting there naked virtually cheek to jowl with the trash cans, but I was familiar with city ways and knew one didn’t waste expensive space, however dark, cramped, and unattractive.

Besides, I wasn’t supposed to look at the dingy walls. I was supposed to shut my eyes, relax, and enjoy the steam. The chair would heat up fast and I’d begin to perspire under that heavy plastic. Monique would be doing somebody else’s hair in the next room. Every so often she’d poke her head in to make sure I hadn’t come up to the boil and tell me how much better I was feeling.

Extreme heat usually makes me sick, but I have to admit the chair never did. Monique used to put a spoonful of sulphur into the water that made the steam. This may have had some of the beneficial properties she ascribed to it, though I couldn’t understand why it should.

I would suffer agonies of discomfort in other ways, though, for what seemed like ages but was probably just a few minutes, then gradually adjust to the heat and sink into a pleasant stupor. I suppose the chair reached a certain temperature, then leveled off like an electric iron. Just about the time I was really beginning to enjoy myself, Monique would come to unzip me. She’d help me out of the chair, lead me around a corner into another poky apology for a room, and tell me to get up on the massage table, which she had covered with my sheet. She always emphasized that the sheet was particularly mine. I found this rather appealing and at the same time disturbing, as though my being singled out for this favor was putting an extra strain on her laundry bill.

It was usually about this time that a man with a young-sounding voice popped into the outer room. Monique would dart out and say something to him, then she’d come back and start washing me bit by bit with a loofah that looked like a piece of tripe and dripped chilly trickles down my sides. I felt these keenly and resented her not stopping to wipe them away, but never had the gumption to tell her so for fear the man outside would come to see what the fuss was about.

As soon as she’d washed a small portion of me, Monique would massage the area in a halfhearted sort of way. I always wished she’d rub harder but again I didn’t complain because she’d be talking incessantly about how hard she was working and all the good she was doing me.

There was always a draft around the massage table, no doubt from the ill-fitting back door behind the steam chair. What with being moistened in sections, inadequately dried, then lying there naked while Monique finished off the massage by rubbing me with scented hand lotion and flicking a huge, fuzzy powder puff all over me—she appeared to enjoy this and evidently thought I did, too—I was always shivering by the time she got through and longing to get back into my clothes. However, she would produce a second clean sheet, cover me with it, and instruct me to lie on the table as long as I liked.

Having been made to feel so guilty over the laundry bills, I felt I had to get as much good as possible out of this fresh sheet, so I stayed. She would suggest a nice nap and tiptoe away to chat with her hairdressing customer or that young man—his name was David, I learned—who was always popping in and out but never stayed.

In those days I was barely sleeping at all, let alone on a hard table with only a sheet between me and that constant draft, and nothing at all to shield my ears from Monique’s unstoppable voice. I’d be there until I couldn’t stand the discomfort any longer, which didn’t take long, then get up and put on one of the huge terry toweling robes she kept hanging ready to hand.

I sometimes wondered if the robes got washed along with the sheets and if not, who’d worn them before me, but not to the extent of making a fuss over the matter. The magical sulphur fumes would no doubt have killed anybody’s germs. Besides, I loved those robes. As I mentioned, I am a small woman. The robes came in a size that had to fit all comers, which meant one would envelop me from ears to toes and feel wonderfully snug after all that clamminess and chilling.

Monique would have let me wear them forever, I think. She never wanted her customers to leave. She always got annoyed with me because I left the table so soon, and scolded me for rushing the massage. Once properly chastised, I’d be thrust into a wooden chair with my head tilted over a sort of dripping pan that sawed at the back of my neck, and have my hair shampooed. One week, Monique might go through an elaborate routine with scented lathers and creme rinses she claimed she’d got from Paris. Next time, she might grab a cake of brown laundry soap in her doughy fist and rub it all over my head as if she were delousing me. After an inadequate rinsing, she’d pin up my hair without asking how I wanted it done.

I always accepted these impromptu coiffings meekly since she claimed to be doing them out of the goodness of her heart, even though they’d been rendered necessary by the sulphurous steam from the dryer, not to mention the sloshings from the loofah, and were more than covered by her fees. She might or might not set me under the dryer, depending on her mood and whether she had any other entertainment at hand. As I was apt to be the last customer of the day, she’d often keep me sitting to air-dry while she talked at me in that loud, belligerent voice of hers.

Monique was earthy as a parsnip. I got the impression, despite her hit-or-miss profundities, that she never thought at all, but lived wholly through her senses. She liked being massaged by a man, she told me. She liked food and riding in taxis, and she liked plants. Her little, sunless rooms were crammed with them: huge, coarse-leaved things in old plastic buckets or anything else that would hold water. No dirt, they all seemed to be amphibians.