Redemption Street (12 page)

“Who told—”

“No one had to tell me. You carry yourself like a cop. When you’re a haberdasher for your life, you learn how people carry themselves. It’s no different than in the jungle or in the camps. An animal survives by being able to see who carries himself like a predator or like prey.” Mr. Roth looked down at his drink. When he picked his head up he was smiling. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to go on that way. It’s just that, when old people are together, we talk a lot but we never say anything. It’s like you’re suddenly aware that God is really listening and you better watch your mouth. You’re gonna be seeing Him soon enough.”

“You believe?”

“There was a French philosopher, I think, who once said something like if you can’t prove God doesn’t exist, you better act like He does. You know, Mr. Moe, it doesn’t matter if I believe in Him or not. What matters is if He believes in me.” He held up the bottle of scotch. “Another?”

I liked listening to Mr. Roth, but if he was going to plumb the depths of metaphysics I needed more than one scotch. I held up my empty glass for a refill.

“So …” he said.

“You wanna know what I’m really doing up here?”

He winked at me. “All I said was ‘So …’ “

Mr. Roth sat patiently as I introduced him to the cast of characters. Surprisingly, he seemed unperturbed by the Yellow Stars.

“Life is life,” he said, “and dress-up is just dress-up. What does it matter to me?” He did remember the fire, but couldn’t add any detail. “I was here with Hannah—my wife was still alive then. She’d spend the whole summer, and I’d come up on Saturday night to Tuesday every week. I couldn’t leave the store for too long. That summer we were at Grossinger’s with friends. When we got up that Sunday morning, the dining room was buzzing with the news. What was bad was that it was mostly kids. We all had kids who’d worked up here in the summers. That hurt. You know sometimes when you hear terrible stories on the news about a typhoon or volcano killing thousands of people, you can ignore it because when was the last typhoon in Brooklyn? But when it could have been you or your kids …”

I tried asking him about his kids, but he just deflected the questions. Eventually, I got the hint and moved on. We had one more drink and finally got around to talking about the good old days. I told him about my one week of glory at the Concord.

“The Concord, huh, Mr. Fancy Moe? Maybe I should call you Your Highness. From what I hear, only royalty and the rich stay at the Concord.”

I held out my hand. “Kiss the ring and maybe I’ll let you call me Moe.”

He liked that. When he finished his drink, he sang me a song: “We’re gonna hitchhike up to the Catskills….”

“We lived for the summers, to come up here and be amongst ourselves,” he said unashamedly. “You don’t know the pressures of coming from another place, a different culture. We could speak Yiddish or Polish without the guy on the subway next to you giving you the eye. We could be ourselves again for a little while. Oh, the silly things we used to do.”

“Like …”

“Will you respect me in the morning if I tell you?”

“Mr. Roth, I get the sense I’d respect you no matter what.”

His mood turned suddenly dark: “Don’t be so sure.”

“Okay, but what about the silly things?”

He brightened up again. “Sometimes we’d plan and rehearse all week for a wedding, but not just any wedding. They called it a mock wedding. The men would dress up like women and the women like men. And we made up funny ceremonies. You know, like what we imagined the
goyim
did in their churches. And maybe there was a little drinking and a little fooling around. It was like a big party and play and a little revenge all at once. But it was fun like I can’t tell you. It would seem so stupid now, but I miss it.”

“Why don’t you get your friends together here and—”

“Forget it! It’s not like on the soap operas. You can’t bring back the past.”

“I didn’t mean to get you—”

“You didn’t upset me, Moe. I’m maybe just a little tired and a little drunk, you know?”

“Okay, Mr. Roth. I understand. Why don’t you get a
bissel
sleep.”

“Sounds good,” he said, stretching back on the bed, yawning. “Sounds good.”

I shook his hand and rolled the comforter over him, but when I got to the door, he called after me.

“What is it, Mr. Roth?”

“Remember what I said before about not respecting me?”

“I remember, yeah.”

“I like you very much, so I’m gonna give you some advice. Be careful of the people you like. Unlike in the jungle, humans can learn to carry themselves like prey when sometimes they’re the hunters.”

“Are you talking about yourself?” I asked.

“Not this time, Mr. Moe. Just you watch yourself. A glad hand and a joke may not be what they seem. Go in good health.”

Jesus, another cryptic warning. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out Mr. Roth was speaking about Sam, but exactly what he was saying was unclear. Was Sam Gutterman the Antichrist, or was he going to pad my hotel bill?

Chapter Eight
November 30th

I ate breakfast out, escaping the sage advice and cryptic warnings of my new friends and mentors. A man can stand only so much imparted wisdom. Today I had to focus. Richard Hammerling, Councilman at Large, was batting in the lead-off spot, and I needed to be sharp. Silly songs about the Catskills and fanciful tales of mock weddings were fun but beside the point. Even before I woke up, the vision of Arthur Rosen’s lifeless body weighed heavily on me. The stink of his room was in the air I breathed. I barely noticed the black paint on the hood of my car. The same could not be said about my rear windshield.

Old Rotterdam Town Hall hadn’t improved with age. And with the warmer temperatures and thaw, the surrounding mud served only to enhance its ugliness. It looked even more out of place without the camouflage of snow. I wondered if Hammerling had had anything to do with selecting this neo-Sing Sing design. When I walked in, I checked the big sign to see if it listed the Sunday football scores. It did not, but the little politicos’ names were all still up there for the world to see.

Molly Treat was at her station, faithfully guarding the information table. I tried sneaking up on her, to no avail. Molly, true to her word, knew everything about the place, including, apparently, the sounds in the hallways. Without raising her head away from the papers spread out before her, she pointed up at the big Seth Thomas clock across from her desk.

“I’ve been expecting you. Dick’s set some time aside, but you better get in there. You’re a little late. Room 112.”

I laid down on Molly’s desk the rose I’d bought from a Moonie on Ellenville Road and a cup of coffee. She finally looked up. She was meticulously made up and dressed quite a bit more lavishly than the job required. In any case, she was better dressed than the last time she sat at this desk, or at Hanrahan’s Pub. Though she’d no doubt deny it, I suspected this fashion statement had more than a teeny bit to do with the anticipation of my presence.

“You look lovely.”

“I had fun the other night.” She licked her lips. “But you left too soon.”

“No, I left just in time or I’d be feeling pretty guilty today.”

“Guilty pleasures are the spice of life.”

“And the cause of nine out of ten divorce proceedings. I didn’t know how you liked your coffee, so I got it with a little half-and-half. I figured you had some sugar or whatever in your desk.”

She pulled two packets of sugar out of a drawer and shook them at me. “Now you know for next time.”

“Till then.” I winked. “That was Room 112, right?”

“One twelve. Go to the end of the hall and make a left.”

Room 112 was actually two rooms. There was a drab, uninviting room full of metal desks, filing cabinets, and phone banks for secretarial and administrative staff that was currently occupied by the invisible. I figured it must not have been an election year. During an election year, staffers work round the clock to make sure that every cat is rescued from every tree and that every media outlet in the Free World knows about it.

Richard Hammerling’s office was another story altogether. The walls, what little I could see of them behind the photographs of Richard Hammerling with the famous, semifamous, infamous, and notorious, were painted a pale yellow. The carpet was a happy shade of green and deeper than the rough at a U.S. Open. There were groupings of oversized flags in every corner, ranging from the Stars and Stripes, the largest of the large, to that of the local high-school football team, the Old Rotterdam Fighting Beavers. I wondered if Old Rotterdam Rodney was their mascot. The man himself was seated behind a mission-style desk not quite half the size of the flight deck of the USS
Enterprise
. I checked for incoming F-14 Tomcats before taking a seat.

Before I could sit, Hammerling popped up out of his brown leather chair and threw a hand at me. I shook it in self-defense. He was a roughly handsome man with a grip firm enough to impress a local Teamster but light enough not to intimidate the librarian. Taller than me by an inch or two, with nice broad shoulders and a thin waistline, he was, I figured, about my age, in his mid-thirties. Clean-cut and shaven, he smelled grassy and sweet, like he’d used a bit too much Polo after shaving that morning. His blue suit, light-blue shirt, and yellow silk tie were more Sears than Brooks Brothers, but they fit him well.

“Where’d’ya play ball?” I asked, trying to throw him a curve.

“I was recruited by a lot of schools, even a few ACC schools like Wake Forest and Virginia, but I wound up at Cobleskill Community College. Then I screwed up my knee and that was that.”

Translation: I was good, but my grades sucked. I got bored with school, hurt my knee, and came back home to work in my dad’s business.

“I figure you for a small forward,” I said.

“Shooting guard, but that’s good. You play ball in school?”

“I’m from Brooklyn, Mr. Hammerling. I wasn’t good enough to make water boy.”

He liked that. “But I bet you play.”

“Up until a few years ago, yeah. But I fucked up my knee on the job.”

He winced at that, as if reliving the pain he’d suffered. In spite of myself, I found that I liked him. He sat down and gestured for me to do the same.

“We could spend hours telling war stories, you and I. I played a lot of ball with guys from the city. With them it was always more than just a game. But Molly tells me that’s not why you’re here, Mr. Prager.”

“Did you know Arthur Rosen?”

He didn’t answer immediately, rubbing his hand over his face as he stared at me. “You’re here about my attempts to reopen the Fir Grove boards of inquiry.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“And this isn’t Brooklyn and you’re not on the job anymore and you’re in the office of a duly elected official,” Hammerling admonished.

“Point taken. Sorry, that was out of line. But did you know Arthur Rosen?”

“I know Arthur, yes. But let me assure you, Mr. Prager, my desire to reopen this rather odorous can of worms goes well beyond the rantings of one disturbed man. I—”

“He’s dead.”

“Oh my God. How?”

“Suicide. Arthur hanged himself with a belt tied to a door handle in his room.”

I backtracked a bit, letting the councilman in on how I’d gotten involved with Arthur Rosen in the first place. I told him how Arthur had written the name Hammerling on the wall of his room. That’s about all I gave him, though. Sure, I liked him well enough, and he seemed genuinely shocked by Arthur’s suicide, but I wasn’t going to give out any information unless it was absolutely necessary. I still needed a scorecard to tell the players around here. I wasn’t about to reveal anything to anyone who probably knew the players better than I did.

“I wouldn’t eat my heart out with guilt,” Hammerling consoled me. “Mr. Rosen could be very lucid at times and was obviously an intelligent man, but he was very unstable. In some ways, though I would never have wished this on him, he was more a hindrance than a help. It doesn’t exactly help a politician’s credibility to have his biggest backer for a very unpopular cause be an out-of-town lunatic. If you get my meaning. My opponents used Arthur against me every chance they could.”

“Then why bother if this is so unpopular a cause?”

“Because it’s a just cause. It’s the right thing to do, Mr. Prager.” He pointed at a picture on the wall that featured himself holding Old Rotterdam Rodney, the celebrity beaver. “So much of what a local politician does is horse crap. Sometimes I think the meaning of life is fund-raising and publicity seeking. That’s not what I got into this for. I want to help the people of this area thrive. I want us to get out from under the black cloud that’s hung over this community for the past sixteen years.”

He sounded earnest enough, but I half expected red, white, and blue balloons to fall from the ceiling and “America the Beautiful” to start playing in the background as he accepted his party’s nomination for governor of the Empire State. I let him get it out of his system.

“But are you making any headway? Are you gonna get any of the inquiries reopened?”

The air went right out of him. “It’s always two steps forward, one step back. Just when I think I’ve cobbled together the votes, things always seem to fall apart. I’m good at building a consensus, at putting together coalitions. With this thing, though …” He pointed to his forehead. “See this flat spot here? It’s from banging my head against the wall. Sometimes it’s like I’m fighting an unseen enemy.”

I nearly bit through my tongue. I was pretty sure his unseen enemy had a name, drove around in a big black car driven by a svelte man in a perfect blue suit. But, like I said before, I wasn’t here to give out information, just collect it. Maybe, when I got to the bottom of whatever there was to get to the bottom of, I’d make an anonymous call to Hammerling’s office and let him know who he was fighting and how deep his enemy’s pockets were.

“Don’t you ever get discouraged?” I asked. “I mean, you’ve probably gotten all the mileage you’re gonna get out of this, right?”