Little Easter (7 page)

“Sorry,” I came back over, “not buying today.”

“From me, you couldn’t afford to buy,” he let the diamonds roll off his palms like so much dust into a folded paper envelope. “You lookin’ for Mojo? I’m Mojo.”

“Mojo Monkowitz?” everything about me was incredulous.

“Listen
totaleh,
vit a last name like Minkowitz, vould it matta vhat vent in front?” he asked in an accent thick like chicken fat on rye bread.

“You got a point. How—”

“Before we start with the questions, he cut me off, returning to a less theatrical dialect, “who sent you? Nobody comes to Mojo without being sent.”

I handed him Larry’s business card and my infantile drawing of the heart. He read the card, looked at the drawing and shook his head.

“You friends with this man?” Mojo inquired, holding up the business card.

“We grew up together. Did a little work together. I wouldn’t call us friends.”

“Good. Larry Feld is not a righteous man,” Minkowitz sat down and inspected my artwork. “I knew his parents. Good people. Sad little people, but they ran a clean shop. You knew them, Izzi and Anna?”

“Lived two doors down from ‘em for eighteen years. But it’s hard to really know camp survivors,” I offered my opinion.

“Quite so,” he showed me his numerical tattoo. “I do these favors not for the son, but for the pain of the parents. You understand this?” He seemed anxious that I understand and I nodded that I did. “You want to know who handles pieces like this, who makes pieces like this?”

“That’s the big question.”

“Describe a little better what the piece is made out of. How many stones? How big?”

I gave him the specs to the best of my memory. As I did, he shook his head in agreement as if I was simply reinforcing the conclusion he’d already arrived at.

“Fischel Kahn,” Mojo winked. “Fine work. Not much demand for his stuff anymore.”

“Where’s his booth?”

“Four aisles over, but he’s retired maybe fifteen twenty years already. Sold his business to an Iraqi Jew,” Mojo’s sour expression returned. Despite the monolithic image, there were large groups of Jews that couldn’t stomach one another.

“Shi—” I stopped myself. “Sorry.”

“Quiet. Quiet,” Minkowitz waved off my apology and began stroking his beard as if it were a Siamese cat. “Can’t a man think a little?” A moment passed. “Sylvia . . . Sylvia . . . Sylvia Kim!” Mojo’s eyes lit up.

“Kim? An Asian?” I wondered.

“Used to be Kimmelmann. Now it’s Kim. She’s got her own shop. Next aisle over. Once worked for Fish. Maybe she can help,” he handed me Larry’s card and my rendering and shook my hand. “
Mazel
and
brucha
, luck and a blessing to you on your journey.”

“I understood. Thanks. What do I owe you?”

“Like I said before,” the survivor admonished, “from me you can’t afford to buy.”

“You think she’ll remember the piece?” I questioned as an afterthought, pointing at my drawing.

“Listen, Mr. Fancy Picasso with the drawing already. If she was around when the piece was sold, she’ll remember. We’re very good at remembering.” He looked at his tattoo and went back to work.

Sylvia had frosty blond hair that was blown and permed and sprayed into submission. Her teeth were as white as the Himalayas and as natural as astroturf. The skin on her face was Florida tanned and taut as if it were a plastic bag stretched to its limit. Her flaming nails weren’t quite as long as piano keys and there was so much jewelry on her fingers, I could barely see the flesh. She was covered in enough metal and mineral to cover half the Periodic Chart. I wondered if she floated when the hardware came off.

But none of it affected her memory.

“Nice couple. Nice couple.” She got a far away look in her violet contact lenses. “He was a roughly handsome boy, German, Irish maybe. She was a looker, a Jewish girl. She spoke the language.” I took that to mean Yiddish. “Had a figure to die for and the features of a goddess. They were a funny pair.”

I described Johnny and Jane Doe to Sylvia.

“Could be them. Got a picture?” she asked.

“Sorry.”

“Got a girlfriend? she winked at me with black lashes as long as butterfly wings.

“Sure do,” I lied.

“Now I’m the one who’s sorry. What’s this all about?” Rejected, she suddenly got curious.

I showed her Larry’s card.

“Why didn’t you say so?” We were friends again. “Anything else I can do for you? Anything at all?”

“No thanks, Sylvia. Here,” I gave her one of my old business cards with the office number scratched out and my home number scribbled in. “If there’s something else that you recall about the couple or the piece, even if it seems trivial or insignificant, call me.”

“Maybe,” she read my card, “Dylan Klein, I’ll just call you.” If nothing else, Sylvia was persistent.

I kissed the back of her right hand, nearly slicing a lip open in the process, took one of her cards and was gone. On the way out onto West 47th Street, I bumped into the security guard I’d met on the way in.

“Did you find Mojo, all right?” he laughed and slapped my shoulder playfully. “Don’t look much like a Mojo, does he?”

“No, I had to admit that. “How did—”

“—he get that nickname?” the jolly guard finished my question. “Some big gambler give it to him. Said he had to get his Mojo workin’ and bought a big piece from Mr. Minkowitz. Gambler went to Vegas and practically shut down three casinos. Gamblers been comin’ ever since. You know, to get their Mojo workin’. Moshe. Mojo. It just kinda stuck.”

“Not a very kosher name for a Hasidic Jew,” I mused.

“I wouldn’t know about that. Excuse me,” the guard turned his attention to a group of five kids coming through the door. “Can I help you?”

An inch of gray snow came between my feet and the concrete on 6th Avenue. More of it fell onto my nearly defenseless scalp, melting quickly and cascading down my neck as a dirty stream of water. Running-shoed women with newspaper umbrellas elbowed themselves into other people’s taxis. Buses threw slushy gutter puddles up onto tailored pant legs and nyloned ankles. No one took much notice. They could take it. They were New Yorkers. They could take anything. The problem was, they often did.

The Cursing Millions

Time wasn’t quite standing still.

I was laughing, listening to the radio telling me how bad the traffic was. Oh, New Yorkers could deal with almost any adversity, but driving in a steady snow wasn’t one of them. Four inches of packed powder could bring mighty Gotham to its knees. Just ask the driver in front of me or the one in front of her or the driver behind me or the one behind him. Maybe you should just take my word for it. By now, no one in a car in Manhattan was in any mood to answer questions.

I was laughing because this oil and water mixture of New Yorkers and snow is what had helped to kill a nuclear power plant on Long Island. In order to fire up a nuclear reactor you need to have an evacuation plan. Unfortunately, since Long Island is an island, the only viable means of mass evacuation is over the road through New York City. Even on a holiday in perfect weather, driving to and from New York is a nightmare worthy of a movie. As you might anticipate, it was rather an arduous task for the utility to put a positive spin on an over-the-road evacuation thru the city. But never underestimate the stupidity of bureaucrats. Never!

They were about to pass the plan. I guess the geniuses in Washington thought New York City residents were so tough, they wouldn’t try to save themselves. No, they’d just clear the roads and let their Long Island brethren pass right on through. Oh sure they would. And when they were done waving good-bye to the Long Islanders, the New Yorkers would all climb onto their rooftops, face due east toward the impending meltdown and collectively shout: “Fuck you, radiation. We can take it.”

Just when this ridiculous scheme was ready to sail, some stick-in-the-mud, liberal, left-wing radical, environmentally active, pinko, oddball kook asked this question: What if it snows? Troublemakers! God, don’t ya just hate ‘em? Well, eventually the state bought the plant and shut it down. So I guess we’ll never know what will happen if it snows.

My sputtering Volkswagen was about twenty feet closer to the Queens Midtown Tunnel than it had been just forty minutes ago. The hands on my watch moved even more slowly. But like I said, time wasn’t quite standing still. I had an eternity of seconds to laugh and ponder there in the snow and fumes and hardening dark slush. I shut my eyes and saw the cursing millions on their rooftops. I saw angry black children leaping from car roof to car roof trying to fly. I saw the jaws of the earth open, swallowing all the foolish men. I saw myself getting home sometime in early April. I opened my eyes and found the nearest hotel.

The Hindenburg

The Hotel St. Lawrence was a nondescript soot-faced building buried somewhere on Lexington Avenue below 34th Street. Its heritage could not be described as proud nor even once-proud. It’d never been a poets’ or musicians’ haunt like The Chelsea. Jack Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe hadn’t slept there, so The Waldorf was safe. And at last check, the rat pack, brat pack, jet set and royalty still preferred The Plaza, Pierre and St. Moritz. What the Hotel St. Lawrence offered was rooms, plenty of them and, unlike the aforementioned establishments, at prices a little less inflated than the Hindenburg.

Actually, business at the front desk was pretty brisk, but not brisk enough for management to break out the “No Vacancy” sign. I had my pick of rooms. Wow! I could face brick, steel, or the street. I picked a room with the view, surrendered my credit card and got my key. How novel; a hotel that still used keys. It was real metal and everything, not some encoded piece of plastic. I hurried through the slip cover and green velveteen lobby and into the Seaway Lounge.

Just outside the cocktail quarters, an entire wall was covered in black and white publicity photos of mostly dead and totally forgotten comics. I went in anyway. I’d been in worse bars. I’d sat on less comfortable stools. I’d gotten slower, ruder service from nastier barmen and sipped flatter beer from dirtier glasses. I’d even seen uglier wallpaper in an acid flashback once. But, having noted all this, I wouldn’t bet that I’d be back at the Seaway Lounge anytime soon.

The room was an improvement. Not a quantum leap, mind you, but a step up. Its last facelift had been done when younger men wore acetate shirts and platform shoes. There were starving artist prints on the walls, but mercifully, no dead comics. The TV reception looked more like a blizzard than my view onto Lexington Avenue. Maybe I’d be headed back to the bar sooner than expected.

I dialed Kate Barnum’s number at
The Whaler.
I was ready to deal. Being indebted to Larry Feld made bargaining with Barnum seem like a minor detail. She wasn’t in. I tried her shack in Dugan’s Dump and listened to the phone ring endlessly. I stopped listening and lay back on the bed.

Somebody drummed their knuckles against the door. I let them drum for a bit before answering. And like some witless schmuck, I just flung the door open without inquiry.

“Queen-sized bed,” Kate Barnum commented, looking beyond my shoulder. “That’s good.” She sounded as if she’d made a short detour at the Seaway Lounge before coming my way. “Take this,” the reporter shoved a brown paper bag into my hands and removed her coat. The bag contained some bags of bar nuts, barbecue chips, a full bottle of Grand Marnier and a six pack of Diet Coke.

“You’ve been—” I began.

She cut me off with a light kiss. “Yes, Klein, I’ve been following you around all day. You’re quite the fellow about town. That’s a fascinating assortment of acquaintances you’ve got, but we can talk about that later. I am tired of talking just now.”

She kissed me again and I returned the favor in the growing darkness. The flavors on her tongue—orange, smoke and brandy—began to overwhelm my senses. The kisses deepened quickly without the pretense of challenge and surrender. There seemed an urgent sadness in all of this, a hemorrhaging emptiness and not all of it hers. But as I pulled her familiar sweater off, the apparent urgency diminished.

“Wait,” Burnum demanded, literally holding me at arms length.

She reached into the goody bag which I’d unconsciously let fall at the first sign of passion. The bottle of Grand Marnier appeared in her hand. She broke the seal and took a prodigious gulp. She put the bottle down and finished undressing without my help. I walked to the bed. That seemed to please her. But when I reached for my belt buckle, she shook her head violently. That would be her job, her candy.

I rolled over. She was at the bottle again. She turned the bottle over on her bare breasts and rubbed the resulting stream into the thin patch of hair below her waist. Barnum turned to me, seemingly startled that I was watching. I took the bottle, then a drink, and then her.

Her breasts were surprisingly solid, sticky to the touch and sweet to my taste. Her nipples spread wide over the front of her breasts and their bloom was brownish. I had dreamed them differently, but their real feel and flavor did not disappoint. I played hard with the bumpy brown circles of skin, capturing her erect nipple between my top and bottom teeth.

“Bite, goddamit. Bite!” a breathless voice begged.

I bit hard, very hard.

“Christ!” she cried. I’m . . . I’m . .” her body arched like the back of a bronco, throwing me off to the side.

I moved to mount her, but she held back.

“Wait,” she coughed in the deepening night and fumbled along the rug. “Here,” she handed me what might’ve been a wet nap, but since we weren’t eating ribs or lobster . . .

I didn’t put it on and tried to move my mouth along the dried brandy river, into her positively soaked crotch.

“No!” she pushed me off the bed, her feet against my shoulders.

When I crawled back up, I found her knees down, tucked and spread. Her head faced away from me and a pillow was wedged under her breasts. The full pink of her lips seemed to glisten with a light of their own. I rolled the latex on and went looking for that light.

As I was about to enter she reached back and guided my penis into a spot above where I was aiming. God, it was tight and I could feel the muscles fairly close around me. A groan rose up from Kate Barnum that spoke volumes of the thin lines separating pleasure and pain.