Long Island Noir (10 page)
About fifty feet from the hut, I veered toward the railing on the oceanfront. I looked out to see if anyone was on the beach, then peered over and down, in case there was anyone hiding under the boardwalk. No one.
I got to the wooden hut, which was boarded up for the winter, and rapped on the side.
“Hey, anyone in there?”
Nothing.
I checked my watch. Quarter past nine. I’d give it till nine-twenty, then I was out of here.
The wind died down a little, giving me a bit more visibility. I didn’t need it. Not a soul around. To my left, about a hundred yards away, there was a series of high-rises, but in front of me and to my immediate right, there was nothing but a parking area and land waiting to be used for new co-ops or condos. It was eerie. I felt like I was at the end of the world. I thought about Starr Faithfull, as I looked out toward the ocean. On a ship. Fell or pushed. Floating up on shore. It was a good story. Knowing Goldblatt, whatever he was paying for would probably be worth it to him, which meant to me too.
I looked back at my watch. Time’s up.
I patted the envelope in my pocket. Once I was back on the train I’d open it up and take out what I was due. The hell with Goldblatt and his crazy deal, whatever it was. I was heading home.
I got to the bottom of the ramp and was moving toward Broadway, when I heard a noise behind me. Before I could turn around, I felt a sharp pain in my side, in the vicinity of my kidney. Someone had punched me. Hard. I lost my balance and fell to one knee, instinctively raising my right arm to protect myself.
“Stay down,” a raspy voice ordered.
“Whatever you say,” I replied, raising both arms up in submission. The guy was a giant. Or at least he looked that way from where I was sitting. He was wearing an overcoat, a muffler, and a fedora, like he was something out of the ’40s.
Another, much smaller figure moved out from under the ramp and stood beside whoever had struck me.
“That’s some punch you’ve got there.”
“I guess I’m supposed to thank you for the compliment,” he said, with a growl.
“Look, I’m just a delivery boy. You’ve got something for me, I’ve got something for you. Am I right?”
He turned at the figure beside him, who was wearing jeans and a hoodie under a black leather jacket. By the build, I figured it was either a boy or a woman.
“Who are you?” asked the smaller person, who I now knew was a woman.
“Henry Swann. I was hired by Goldblatt to make the exchange.”
“Why didn’t he do it himself?”
“Because he’s a coward,” said the woman, a cloud of carbon dioxide obscuring her face.
The big man laughed.
“You’ve got the envelope?” she asked.
“You’ve got the package?” I said.
“It looks to me like you’re in no position to bargain. Sidney here could just take it from you.”
“That would be robbery.”
“Yes. It would.”
“If you just give me what I came for it will be a simple business exchange. Look, my pants are getting soaked here. Mind if I get up?”
She nodded. I stood. I still couldn’t catch my breath and the pain had me lurching to one side.
“Search him, Sidney.”
I raised my hands. “You won’t find a weapon, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Better safe than sorry,” she said.
“Open your coat,” Sidney ordered.
“It’s friggin’ cold out here, Sidney.”
He raised his hand. “Just fuckin’ open the coat or I’ll open it for you.”
I opened the coat, spreading out the sides. He patted me down.
“See. Nothing. And nothing up my sleeves, either,” I added, sliding my hands down the sleeves of my coat.
Sidney spotted the envelope in my coat pocket and pulled it out. “This it?”
“Yes.”
He handed it over to the woman.
“Now what about what I’m supposed to bring back in exchange?” She opened the envelope. It was filled with cash, and lots of it. Just like I thought.
“You’re not going to give me anything, are you?”
“Nothing but a message for Goldblatt.”
“What’s that?”
“Tell him the next time he tries to fuck with people, he should think twice. And that payback’s a bitch.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You seem to be a smart guy, Mr. Swann, you figure it out.”
Suddenly it dawned on me what was going on. Goldblatt was being hustled and I thought I knew why.
“You wouldn’t happen to be a pissed-off former client of his, would you?”
“Goldblatt has disgruntled clients? What a surprise,” she said, waving the envelope in the air. “Sidney, did you know that Goldblatt has disgruntled clients? Clients he stole money from?”
“News to me,” said Sidney.
“You mind telling me how much is in there?”
“He didn’t tell you?”
“You’d be surprised what he doesn’t tell me. Today, I’m just his dumb-ass errand boy. But I’ve got to tell you, whoever came up with that Starr Faithfull story really knew how to bait the hook. I’ve got to hand it to you. And you know something, I couldn’t care less what you’re doing to him.”
“Isn’t he a friend of yours?”
“Define friend. We’re acquaintances who use each other when the occasion arises. He used me and I was going to use him. But I see that isn’t going to work out.”
She closed the envelope and stuffed it into the pocket of her jacket. “I think we’re finished here, Sidney. I’m just sorry Goldblatt didn’t come here himself. We wanted to give him some extra interest on his money.”
“I could give this dude one more shot … you know, for that scumbag.”
“No. I think we got what we came for.”
“So, just out of curiosity, how much did you take him for?” I asked.
She smiled. “Let’s say it was a lot more than he took from me. How about chalking it up to earning interest on my investment? I’m sorry you got into this, Mr. Swann, but that’s life, I guess.”
“Yes, it is. Especially mine.”
As Sidney and the woman turned away, I said, “One more question.” They turned back. “Was there ever another diary?”
“What do you care?” asked the woman.
“Just curious.”
“It’s none of his damn business,” said Sidney, cocking his fist.
“It’s all right, Sidney.” She pulled his arm back. “No. No diary. And you can tell that to Goldblatt. Maybe it’ll make him feel worse than just losing this money.”
A moment later, Sidney and the woman had disappeared under the boardwalk and I and my aching ribs headed back to the train station.
I didn’t care that Goldblatt had been ripped off. I was sure he deserved it. And I didn’t care that I wasn’t going to get paid. The truth is, the look on Goldblatt’s face when I told him what happened might be a lot better than $250 and the cost of a round-trip ticket to Long Beach. What I did care about was that there was no lost Starr Faithfull diary that might have proved that my grandfather, who was long gone, was right.
I don’t know why that should mean anything to me after all these years. But it did.
J
eff Ziegfeld was always the exception to the rule: the dumb Jew, the blue-collar Jew, the tough Jew. No matter the Zen of the ethnic group the wheel of fortune got you born into, dumb and poor was the universal formula for tough. And he had to be tough because it’s hard to be hard when your name is Jeffrey Ziegfeld. Didn’t exactly make the kids on the block shit their pants when someone said, “Watch out or Ziggy’ll kick your ass.” He was extra tough because his dad liked to smack him around for the fun of it, all the time saying, “Remember, dickhead, no matter how strong you get, I’ll always be able to kick your ass. I grew up the last white kid in Brownsville. And where’d you grow up? Lake Grove, a town with no lake and no grove. What a fucking joke. Kinda like you, huh, kid?”
J-Zig, as one of the other inmates at the jail in Riverhead had taken to calling him, could trace what had gone wrong with his life back to before he was born. Neither one of his parents had ever gotten out of high school or over moving out of Brooklyn. Long Island was a rootless, soulless place where everyone except the Shinnecock, the East End farmers, and the fishermen came from Northern Boulevard or the Grand Concourse or Pitkin Avenue. And even the natives were trading in their roots and souls for money. All the goddamned Indians wanted to do was run slot machine and bingo parlors. The working farms had been converted into condos, McMansions, and golf courses that no one like J-Zig could afford to play. Not that J-Zig knew a rescue club from a lob wedge. The fishermen? Well, they’d become the cause célèbre of Billy Joel, Long Island’s king of schlock’n’roll. Billy Joel, born and bred in Hicksville. Hicksville, indeed.
J-Zig’s head was somewhere else as he sat on the ratty Salvation Army couch in his dank basement apartment in Nesconset. Nesconset, a stone’s throw from his mom’s house in Lake Grove. It might just as well have been a million miles away for all he saw his mom since she’d remarried. He had plenty of reasons to hate his real father, but he hated O’Keefe, his mom’s new husband, even more and that was really saying something. His stepfather, a retired city fireman with a belly like a beach ball and the manners of a hyena, was a drunk and more than a little anti-Semitic. J-Zig didn’t let that get to him. O’Keefe—if the moron had a first name, J-Zig didn’t know it—hated everybody, himself most of all. Jews were probably only fourth or fifth on his list. Besides, O’Keefe’s opinion of him was nothing more than the buzzing of mosquito wings. There was only one man J-Zig ever cared enough about to want to impress.
J-Zig had a terminal case of yearning exacerbated by persistent bouts of resentment. But he was a lazy son of a bitch and about as ambitious as a dining room chair. There’d be no pulling himself up by his bootstraps—whatever the fuck bootstraps were, anyhow—not for this likely lad. One way or the other he was a man destined to be a ward of the taxpaying public. He’d already tried on three of the state’s myriad options: jail, welfare, and the old reliable unemployment insurance. Truth was, he found none of them very much to his liking. The food and company at the jail sucked. Welfare was okay as far as it went, but since he and the wife and her bastard son by another man’s drunken indiscretion had split, he no longer qualified. He liked unemployment fine, but the bitch of it was you had to work for a while to qualify and J-Zig wasn’t keen on that aspect of the equation. So he sold fake Ecstasy outside clubs and stolen car parts to pay the bills.
When he wasn’t making do with the drugs or the hot car parts, he worked as muscle, doing collections for a loan shark and fence named Avi Ben-Levi. Ben-Levi was a crazy Israeli who put cash on the street and charged major vig to his desperate and pathetic clients. Avi might have been a madman, but J-Zig admired the shit out of him. He admired him not only because Avi was only a few years older than him and had everything J-Zig wanted—a big house in King’s Point, a gullwing Mercedes, and the hottest pussy this side of the sun— but because of how Avi got it.
“Balls, Jeffrey, balls. That’s what counts in this world. I came to this country five years ago with three words of English and these,” Avi would say, grabbing his own crotch. “Look at me. I am a plain-looking bastard with a high school education. I even got kicked out of the IDF. Not easy getting kicked out of the Israeli army, but I did it. And here I am. Do you have the balls to make good, Jeffrey? Do you have them?”
That was a question J-Zig sometimes asked himself until it was the only thing in his head. Still, as much as J-Zig yearned for Avi’s approval, he hated being muscle. Well, except when it came to gamblers.
He had no respect for gamblers. They’d borrow the money and blow it that day and then, when J-Zig would come to collect, they’d squeal and beg like little girls. He liked to hear them scream when he snapped their bones like breadsticks. It was the business types he felt sorry for. All sorts of people borrowed money from Avi, but as broke as he could be at times, JZig knew better than to dip into a loan shark’s well. Once they had you, they had you by the balls and then they squeezed and squeezed and squeezed until they milked you dry. Thing was, Ben-Levi didn’t do the milking himself. It was always left to the muscle like J-Zig. It had been a few months since he’d worked for Ben-Levi because the Israeli had wounded J-Zig’s pride. Isn’t it always the way: the people whose love you want hurt you the most? He’d come to the loan shark with an excellent idea about how to streamline Ben-Levi’s business.
“What, are you a mastermind all of a sudden? Listen, Jeffrey, never confuse muscle with balls, okay? You are good muscle, but show me your balls. Until you do, just do your job, get paid, and shut up.” He’d waved his hand in front of J-Zig’s face. “This ring and watch are worth more money than you will ever see in your life, so please, either go to Wharton or keep your genius ideas to yourself.”
Mastermind
. The word had been stuck in J-Zig’s head ever since. He burned to prove the Israeli wrong, to repay Avi for mocking him. He wanted to shove Avi’s sarcasm so far up his ass that they’d be able to see it in Tel Aviv. It didn’t seem to matter what J-Zig did or how hard he tried to please, because his father du jour would always shit on him. He could never remember a time when his real dad had anything but disdain for him. His dad’s pet name for J-Zig was the Little Idiot, as in,
Where the fuck is that little idiot?
or
What did the little idiot get on his report card this term?
That’s how J-Zig still saw himself—a little idiot. Then there were all the other men who had passed through J-Zig’s front door on the way to his mother’s bed. Most of them ignored him. The ones who didn’t treated him like a case of the crabs.
Hey, can’t you ditch the kid? I can’t fuck
if I know the kid’s listening to you squeal through the wall
. Compared to them, O’Keefe was a fucking prince among men. But it was Avi more than any of them he burned to prove wrong.
But J-Zig couldn’t figure out how to do it. He hadn’t hit upon the right idea just yet, though he knew the right idea was out there waiting for him to find it. He could feel it sometimes like an itch on the bottom of his foot that he couldn’t quite get to. If he could only reach it, J-Zig was sure he could finally escape the weight of the gravity that had held him down his entire miserable life.
