Little Odessa Read online

  Ali got out of the chair. He went down on his knees again and began picking scraps of meat off the rug.

  “I said it’s a dealer’s stash, right?” When the Arab didn’t respond, Harry dropped down from the bunk and grabbed him by the collar, backed him against the wall. “You were sayin’ …”

  Ali smiled ecstatically. “It belongs to my former partner.”

  “Partner in what?”

  “The restaurant business.”

  Harry glanced at the overturned pot near the hotplate and laughed. “You gotta be jivin’.”

  The Arab put his hand on Harry’s shoulder, but didn’t try to push away. “Not so long ago, I was part owner of a restaurant with an …” He stopped, the word caught in his throat as if he was choking again. “With an Israeli,” he finally managed to say, placing the accent on the second of four syllables, “and it was his habit always to keep large amounts of money in his vault.”

  “How come?” Harry asked. “He doesn’t believe in banks?”

  “His whole life he is a refugee, and so he sleeps better having cash within reach, even in New York.”

  “Where’d he get it all?”

  “From me,” Ali said unhappily. “He was skimming the profits from our business, cheating me and my brother and the IRS all at the same time. And now he is leading the good life on my money while I rot away on false charges that I stole from him.”

  “Where’d you say this was?”

  “On Seventy-sixth Street, inside the largest brownstone on the north side of the block between Amsterdam and Columbus.” He began scribbling on the back of an envelope. “His name is Ormont, and if you should find him at home you have my permission to kill him. To kill his dog, too, which is his favorite thing in the world and, I must warn you, the most ferocious son of a bitch I have seen. Here,” he said. “One million and one thanks.”

  Harry glanced at the address. “Why you givin’ me this? You’ll be outta here pretty soon yourself, you could find somebody be glad to go in with you for a percentage.”

  The towelhead put his hand back on Harry’s arm, winked at him.

  For the first time since he’d been clean Harry Lema was back on the Lower East Side. On a wet, dreary afternoon he was wearing glacier glasses with brown leather blinkers, tapping his umbrella against the sidewalk as though he’d suddenly gone blind. Which, in a way, he had, courtesy of all the faces on the street he could live very nicely without seeing again.

  What had brought him downtown were the secondhand clothing stores. He steered clear of trendy Saint Mark’s Place, prowling the tired side streets off the Bowery that the new money hadn’t discovered and the old wanted no part of. At a Volunteers of America thrift shop he found what he was looking for—a gray cotton jacket with Speedy in torn script over the breast pocket and frayed sleeves creased like a mummy’s lips. He extricated a near match from a tangle of threadbare trousers in a wet wash cart and brought everything to the register.

  The cashier was dressed entirely in black, showing off a tight body Harry rated a strong seven or weak eight and spiked hair between high, white sidewalls. “You want to try these on,” she said, “there’s a mirror behind the shoe department.”

  Harry took off the dark glasses. No, he said, the only pants he wanted to get into were hers.

  The girl was in no mood for wise guys. She said, “You’d have nice eyes if they weren’t so close together, like maybe your mom was screwing around with her brother. You ever ask her about that?”

  A guard came over tapping a leather sap against his thigh, and Harry gave the girl her money and let the matter drop. His eyes were too narrow. They were also too blue and the gentlest thing about him, something many women—although not nearly enough—had noticed. In Cranston, Rhode Island, where he had passed long stretches of a troubled adolescence that ended when he was about thirty, passed them working a metal press while I-95 traffic hummed past the barred windows, some of the de-creppos in the ACI medium-security weight room had noticed the same thing. And so he had raised an un-encouraging full beard that came in scraggly and seemed to be losing territory ever since.

  He walked back along Second Avenue, to a green Olds Cutlass they were still looking for in Riverdale. He tossed the package on the seat and plucked a ticket from the windshield, returned it to a Chevy parked beside a meter hooded in a paper bag. He drove downtown and turned east toward Tompkins Square. Take away the college kids pushing out of the Village, crammed five and six into eight-hundred-dollar cockroach flats, and the park looked about the same, a few raggedy green patches in a ground-glass desert, the benches lined with junkies in the clouded euphoria of their afternoon fixes.

  He caught the FDR at Houston Street. He turned on the radio and switched off his mind and headed uptown on automatic pilot. The Harlem River Drive funneled him into Inwood and he followed the accusing finger of the island to a mock Tudor apartment house in the shadow of Baker Field.

  He entered through the laundry room and emptied his package into a washer, watched it spin a while before running upstairs for something to read. Back issues of The American Turfman were spilled over the convertible sofa in his cubbyhole studio. He glanced at a sleek bay gelding in a blanket of Texas bluebonnets and did his best double-take, slapped his forehead with the heel of his hand.

  “The flowers,” he said out loud. “The fuckin’ flowers. How can anybody be so dumb?”

  Through a hole in the shade he looked out at the stadium clock. Nearly six-thirty—too late to take care of everything else and still hunt down a florist. He slapped his head again, but not so hard.

  He filled a glass with chocolate milk and drank it standing at the sink. What now … call the whole thing off? No, that would be the sensible thing to do, a blot on a perfect record. There had to be something else.

  Racking his brain, he remembered the winter he was so strung out that he ate sugar right out of the bowl, waking in the middle of the night with a craving for real candy worse than anything he’d ever felt for nose candy. Too wasted to move, he would phone Western Union and send himself a candygram—the big Whitman samplers, the gold Godiva ballotin, the heart-shaped boxes in February with the lace cards wishing, “Love, Harry.”

  He’d let his fingers start hiking again.

  He found four pages of FTD florists in the yellow pages, dialed one on upper Broadway. “What I’m interested in,” he explained, “is a bouquet with some bulk to it.”

  “I’m not sure I understand what you mean,” the florist told him.

  “Something substantial,” Harry said. “No daisies or daffodils, something you could get lost in it.”

  The florist didn’t answer right away. “Have you any particular flowers in mind?”

  “I’ll leave that up to you, so long as they’re big ones, meaty, and lots of ’em.”

  The florist laughed uneasily. “This is some sort of joke, am I right?”

  “No joke,” Harry said.

  “Then let me suggest mums. They’re very fresh, very bright. A bouquet of chrysanthemums will run you—”

  “I don’t care what they cost,” Harry said. “Are they big?”

  “Oh, they’re beautiful,” the florist said.

  “I didn’t ask—”

  “Nice and big.”

  “Good,” Harry said. “Let me have a couple of bouquets’ worth, make ’em up into one big one.”

  “That’s hardly necessary. One will be quite sufficient by itself.”

  “Two’s what I want,” Harry insisted. “I can never seem to get my fill of … uh, mums.”

  “I feel exactly the same way,” the florist said. “Where would you like these delivered?”

  “The address is 330 West 218th Street, the apartment is 4F and the name’s Lema. Harry Lema. Bill it the same way.” He pulled out a drawer beneath the kitchen counter and began toying with the drawstring on a small flannel bag. “And hey, can I have ’em by ten? It’s real important. Tonight’s something special.”

&
nbsp; “Shall I include a card? We have them for all occasions.”

  “I don’t need …” Harry wrapped his hand around the wooden grip of a small pistol and slipped it out of the bag. “You have anything in the way of, ‘Sorry about your loss?’”

  He held the gun to the light, admiring the sheen on the dark, stubby barrel. Then he put it to his temple and pulled the trigger twice. Though he had no reason to doubt it was the same empty starter’s pistol he’d been hiding in the drawer, he blinked each time he heard the hammer click. He squeezed off a third shot at the hole in the shade squirting watery light into the room, then dropped it on the counter and went down for the wash.

  It was ten past ten when someone buzzed up from the lobby. Half-hidden behind a paper cone dripping orange and yellow was a man in a rumpled uniform not very different from the freshly ironed one Harry was wearing. Harry saluted nattily, as though there were stripes on the other man’s sleeve, and relieved him of the parcel, chased him away with a couple of dollars pressed into his palm.

  He opened the paper and sniffed inside. Sweet—but not nearly so sexy as the Whitman sampler. Heavier, though, and lots bigger. The florist hadn’t been shitting him about that. Jesus, it was all he could do to keep his arm steady. He stuck a few stems in a jar and let them stand under the faucet, hefted what was left and discarded a few more. They wouldn’t be missed. The medicine chest mirror told him that whichever hand held out the bouquet it was impossible to see the other one behind it, or the small gun in his fist. He noticed a black-edged card on the floor and put it with the flowers.

  Time to go and still he hadn’t gotten his stuff together, hadn’t even made up his mind what he was bringing along for the job. The thing he needed was a checklist; only it was kind of late to be thinking about that now. The second-story checklist. He liked the sound of it. Maybe he’d print up a bunch and sell them through the back pages of skin mags, like hair restorer. He could move a lot of them in Cranston, Rhode Island … that’s for sure. Then a scolding voice, his own voice, told him: Harry, stop being so fucking cute. You better not be forgetting anything.

  He got down on his knees and swept under the sofa for a blue nylon fanny pack. Empty, it didn’t show beneath the uniform jacket, and with the pistol inside it hardly bulged. He put in two apples and a carton of chocolate milk and an egg salad sandwich from the refrigerator. On the tray below the freezer was a small steak wrapped in tin foil. Still thawing—but you like your meat raw, he figured, you don’t mind it a little stiff, too. He stuck it in the pack, grabbed the flowers and headed for the door. Then he remembered the radio. Damn it, the checklist wasn’t a bad idea. Inside a factory carton with the bill of lading still attached was a Motorola HT220 police scanner. He installed batteries and thumbed the tuner, his forehead accordioning as the Dyckman Street station house broadcast a report of a burglary in progress on West 215th Street. There goes the neighborhood, he thought. He clipped the scanner to his belt. He turned on the TV, switched on all the lights and sealed the apartment with a Medeco D-10 series high-security drop-bolt and a Fox police lock.

  There was a ticket on the Cutlass, which he added to a dog-eared collection in the glove compartment. He caught the Henry Hudson at Dyckman Street and went downtown ten miles below the limit, taking no chances now. With the flowers on the seat it was just like prom night, the same tingle of nervous anticipation he never had his fill of. He took a sip of milk and tossed the carton out the window. Already he had to take a truly wicked piss.

  The chef at the Arabian Knights was Homer Duff of Beckley, West Virginia, and Rhein-Main, West Germany, where he formerly was in charge of a U.S. Air Force mess hall. This was before he was given a less than honorable discharge without right of appeal for chronic alcoholism. When Howard found him, Homer Duff was living at the Salvation Army men’s shelter on East Third Street, serving up great quantities of his specialty, which was anything groups of two hundred or more could get down without too many falling ill or becoming threatening. Luring him away with a free room above the restaurant and all the cheap wine he could drink, Howard gave him over to his Egyptians, who whipped him into a remarkably fast Mideastern cook whose one quirk was the southern tang he imparted to most dishes.

  “What I think it is,” Howard had confided to Kate, “is Homer likes to fry everything in bacon grease. Me, I keep kosher, so I try not to eat here. My customers, the regulars, never tasted anything like it and they love it. If they ever find out …” He finished the thought drawing an imaginary blade across his throat.

  Howard’s last night in New York, Homer Duff hosted a party at the Knights that began winding down about the time El Al Flight 016 landed in Tel Aviv. The following day, a Monday, he showed up for work ninety minutes late. On Tuesday he was missing for three hours before he lurched into the kitchen unshaven and reeking of Manischewitz dry white concord. Midway through a lecture from Kate he broke down and swore on the graves of his children that it would never happen again. That was the last she saw of him. Next morning, she was back at the Knights on four hours of sleep to supervise the kitchen that had become her biggest headache.

  When Homer was gone three days, Kate brought in her own chef, until recently the proprietor of the Cafe Tolstoy on Neptune Avenue. Because he was unfamiliar with Arab cooking, a new menu had to be prepared. It featured karcho, a lamb and rice soup Kate decided was very Mideastern, and balyk, smoked sturgeon fillets she couldn’t get her fill of and made no excuses for. Changes also were made in the floor show when she found she couldn’t dance every night and keep the restaurant running. The new girls, booked through the same talent agency that had handled her on Times Square, knew nothing about belly dancing, “couldn’t tell an oud from an Uzi,” as Howard would say. But each one looked great in harem pants, and in the halter tops Kate would bribe them to dance right out of, and there were few complaints—none from the younger, freer-spending crowd that began flocking to the Knights on weekdays, when tables usually went begging.

  On the first of the month the accountant came by to do the books. Kate watched anxiously over his shoulder till he told her to sit down and stop biting her nails, that the only discrepancy he could find was for $6.73, in their favor.

  “What’s the bottom line?” she asked, dropping into the dark brown Barcalounger. “Is it total disaster, or just a small one?”

  “When is Ormont due back?” the accountant asked.

  “Why?”

  “Tell him to stay away. Tell him never to come near the club again.”

  Kate’s stomach did the funny thing it did whenever Nathan dragged her onto the Typhoon and made her sit in the first car. “Oh my God,” she said. “That bad?”

  The accountant polished rimless glasses on his vest and pressed two fingers to the pinched bridge of his nose. “On the contrary,” he said deliberately, as if choosing his words from a limited supply. “What I find here is the most profit the Arabian Knights has shown. The only problem is where we’re going to hide this much money from the government. Suggest that Ormont continue on to China. For his own good have him keep his hands off the business.”

  Kate was waiting up in bed when Howard phoned the house. The overseas line crackled and thundered like a news remote at the edge of a great battle. Or was it his somber hello and perfunctory inquiry about the weather that came across as stiffly as the prologue to a casualty report?

  “I have some bad news,” he finally said.

  “And I have some good. Which should we hear first?”

  “Let me start. That way we’ll end on a pleasant note.”

  “Tell me,” she interrupted, “is everything all right with you?”

  “Yes, fine,” he said. “It’s nothing like that … I spoke to the movie guys and, I’m sorry, Kate. They said no good.”

  “What …? I can hardly hear you.”

  “No good,” he repeated. “They said you danced like you needed trainer wheels. I told them they were out of their heads, but they insisted you were all wrong fo
r the part anyway, much too tall and fair. Now you tell me, who’s nuts?”

  “I guess I am,” Kate said. “I brought in some new girls on short notice. They weren’t very good.”

  “When you knew these guys were coming to see you? Why?”

  “I couldn’t help it. Dancing two shows a night, running things. It was too much.”

  “I don’t understand,” Howard said. “I made arrangements. Everything should be smooth as silk.”

  “There were snags.”

  “What about Homer? Isn’t he helping you?”

  Only if he doesn’t show his face again, Kate was thinking. Howard didn’t have to know. “It depends on what you call help.”

  “I think I’m beginning to see. Did you count the bottles?”

  “It’s no big deal,” she said unconvincingly. “About the movie, I mean.”

  “I’m sorry to be the bearer of such tidings, especially from so far, but I felt you should know right away.”

  “Forget it, I said.”

  “If it’s any consolation, they loved the balyk.”

  Kate’s stomach did the funny thing again. When she didn’t say anything, Howard said, “So I told them, ‘Now I know which of us is nuts.’”

  “Well,” Kate said, “Homer let me have a free hand in the kitchen.”

  “If that’s where you’d rather be.”

  “No, not really.”

  “Maybe it’s not such a bad idea. My friends said they had a great time, they only wished their production company ran as efficiently as the Arabian Knights …They want to steal you away from me, Kate.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “That you were perfectly happy doing what you were doing.”

  “Good.”

  “They know I didn’t mean it.”

  “Howard, when are you coming back? I’m tired of being a boss.”

  “There’s an old girlfriend,” he said, “not so old, actually, still very much a girl, who suddenly finds herself at liberty and who is making my stay extremely pleasant. I may be gone an extra week or two …Now tell me, since we’ve gotten all the bad news out of the way, what is the good?”