The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats (18 page)

SPRUNG BY MOB MOUTHPIECE

KID CRIME BOSS

MEETS THE LAW

DA: NEXT STOP, GANG WAR

“Fritzi,” I said, “Would you mind dropping me at the Westbury?”

“Bright lad,” he said as we took off uptown. “But you’ll have to be brighter sooner. I know you will be. Shushan Cats would not have picked an imbecile.”

How had I not noticed the desk clerks? Both had my father’s flat, disappointed ex-copper’s expression, like racehorses reduced to pulling a cart, and gray-flannel suit jackets that fit too loose on one side and too tight on the other—these were not the kind of men who had suits custom made for a shoulder holster. Both had closely cropped gray hair, one with a clipped yellow-tinged mustache that spoke of nicotine and vanity, the other half-glasses on a ribbon around a fleshy neck that spilled over the collar of his white shirt. To my surprise they greeted me like a beloved guest newly returned to take up residency. Both came out from behind the desk and pumped my hand.

“So good to see you back, Mr. Newhouse,” Yellow Mustache said.

Fleshy Neck picked this up. “Mr. Newhouse, I just want you to know, on behalf of the entire staff, that anything you need, day or night, you just have to pick up the phone. We’re all broke up about Mr. Cats, a wonderful man and a great boss. Me personally, when I had a little trouble with alcohol, Mr. Cats himself drove me to rehab upstate, a three-hour drive, and paid for everything, and when I got out two months later he was there and drove me back and the next day I had my old job waiting and a raise if I stayed on the wagon. A prince of a human being.”

“The whole staff, everybody, it’s like we lost a father.”

“He was a lot younger than you,” I said.

“So are you, sir, but irregardless he treated us like his own children,” Yellow Mustache answered. “You can’t understand how broke up we are, everybody. Always a smile, always a joke. A job like this, anywhere else you’re more or less a piece of shit, excuse the language, but with Mr. Cats everyone was individual.”

“I’m going to miss him too,” I said.

“You got baggage, sir?” Yellow Mustache asked.

“Mr. Newhouse’s things will be along later,” Fritzi said.

“Yes, sir,” Yellow Mustache said.

“We’ll take good care of you, Mr. Newhouse,” Fleshy Neck said. “Don’t you worry about nothing.”

If there is anything that is a cause for worry, it’s the admonition not to. Riding up in the elevator with Fritzi—he took up most of the space—I had the feeling I should know more about what I shouldn’t be worrying about. But I didn’t ask. I figured Fritzi was doing his part of the job. And I was right, because Justo Ocero had the other part. He opened the door even before we reached it and kissed me on both cheeks. No one had done that to me before. For some reason it seemed appropriate, though this might merely have reflected my taste—and education—in films: Jean-Luc Goddard’s
Breathless
, François Truffaut’s
Shoot the Piano Player
, Michelangelo Antonioni’s
L’Avventura
and Federico Fellini’s
La Dolce Vita
. Though somehow I understood Justo’s kisses were different, I wouldn’t know how different—as reflected in the movies, at least—until years later, when I saw
The Godfather
. Now I was merely somewhat embarrassed and oddly comforted. Outside of sex, kisses were alien to me: I couldn’t remember my mother’s, and the closest my father had come to this kind of intimacy had been a firm handshake, a fake clip on the jaw and a discrete “Attaboy.”

“Ironic,” Justo said. “One day Shushan is mourning for his mother, now we’re mourning for him.”

“We’re not mourning until we know for sure,” I said.

“He’s right, Ocero,” Fritzi said. “See that. He’s making decisions already.”

I looked at him. Fritzi was right, but I was only thinking of what I knew and didn’t. There was no body, not yet. Maybe I’d call a rabbi and ask what to do: vaguely I recalled the case of Israeli submariners whose vessel disappeared without a trace—the rabbis had had to deal with the sticky question of whether the crewmen’s wives could remarry. Here there was no wife, at least not that I knew of, but there remained the question of status. Can we mourn when we don’t know for sure? Does there come a time when death is presumed? Whatever that time, it was clearly too early. “It’s a question,” I said. “And I don’t have the answer. But we’re going to look very foolish if we sit down to mourn and Shushan Cats walks in with a tray of cold cuts.”

“I’m afraid that’s not going to happen, Mr. Newhouse,” Fritzi said.

“Regardless, we’ll wait,” I said.

“Okay,” Justo said. “But how long?”

“I’ll find out,” I said. “Meanwhile, it looks like I’m moving in. So I’ll need my stuff.”

“No prob,” Justo said. “Ira-Myra’s is already at your place getting some clothes, and I figured you’ll need your school things, typewriter, books. Anything else you need, he’ll call in before he leaves.”

“Ira-Myra’s has a key to my apartment?”

“
Chinga
,” Justo said. “If Ira can’t get in we been paying him too much for too long. Meantime, I called Miguel and he’s coming up to take measurements.”

“For what, a coffin—who’s Miguel?”

“Mr. Cats’ tailor. Does real nice work. You ever seen Shushan Cats looking anything less than pressed? Only the best material, and class-A work. Tiny stitches. You can’t even see them without a lens. Used to be with Dunhill. Also he can get any kind of fabric, stuff you don’t usually see. God bless his soul, Shushan liked this special kind of wool, vicuña, comes from some kind of llama? From what Shushan says, you can’t even get it legally any more. Miguel has some kind of connection. Very light. You’ll love the stuff. Shoes we got a guy makes them up in a week. Cordovan. It’s made from a horse’s beyond, if you’ll believe that. Fits like a mitten and takes a great shine. Shushan, he was a dresser, God protect him.”

“I don’t need shoes.”

For answer both looked down at what I was wearing, a pair of Frye boots so ancient their color was scuff.

Fritzi coughed. “In this line of work, dress speaks for itself.”

“Yeah,” Justo said. “Like Shushan used to say,
Think Yiddish, dress British
. A shame you’re taller, otherwise you could just wear Shushan’s suits. It’s a fortune in suits. Only the best.”

It turns out that despite my height—at five-eleven I was four inches taller—I could indeed wear Shushan’s suits. In the next half hour Miguel, a pot-bellied Dominican who arrived with a frayed yellow tape measure around his neck, a sample case of fabrics and a catalogue of suit styles, proved this to me by opening up the hems on three pair of Shushan’s trousers and the sleeves on three matching jackets. Room service sent up an ironing board. The tailor went to work.

“Shirts, you’re way too long for Shushan’s sleeves,” Justo said. “I’ll call Brooks. White okay? Later on Miguel can make some up that fit great, but for the moment Brooks will do, if that’s okay. You got a shoe size?”

“Ten,” I said. At least I was going to get some clothes out of this. “But it doesn’t matter, because I’m just as willing to sit here in my underwear until this blows over.” Anyway, I thought, this is a great place to write four term papers back to back: One on the “operatic structure” of
Huckleberry Finn
, one on the Polish roots of Joseph Conrad’s use of the English language in
Heart of Darkness
, one on innovation in Euripedes and the only tricky one, a comparison of de Toqueville’s
Democracy in America
and his later work
L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution—
I’d read neither, and the latter was in French. Almost welcoming the enforced isolation, I walked into the room I had slept in earlier. It was not the same room. There was no bed in it. It was now full of exercise equipment, the best available at the time: a treadmill, free weights and a bench, and a stationary bicycle. In the far corner were boxing gloves, a jump rope, a light bag and a big heavy one hanging like a pendulous icon from the ceiling. “What happened to my bed?”

Justo and Fritzi had followed me in. “You got Shushan’s,” Justo said.

“No way,” I said. “If he’s dead I’m not sleeping in his bed. If he isn’t I’m not sleeping in his bed. I’ll take the other room.”

“That’s Esther’s,” Justo said.

“Esther—Terri—doesn’t live here.”

The lawyer spoke. “A codicil in the testament. I quote: ‘Esther Cats shall have her room in perpetuity.’”

I considered it might be nice to have her visit. “Isn’t there some other place?”

“Shushan would
want
you to have his room,” Justo said. “He’d also want you to have upstairs.”

“Upstairs? There’s an upstairs?”

“Oh, yeah,” Justo said.

While the pot-bellied tailor reconstructed three of Shushan’s suits, I followed Justo into Shushan’s bedroom, the largest, a tan leather easy chair in one corner by the window but little else to indicate it was the primary residence of a human being other than a large white-porcelain ashtray by the bed that said BELMONT on it and two photos, one of which I assumed was Shushan’s mother as a younger woman on a boardwalk somewhere, perhaps Atlantic City as it had been before it became Las Vegas East, and another of two children, a robust boy of nine or ten reading a picture book to a delicate girl several years younger, both seated on an old-fashioned sofa covered in clear vinyl whose surface was electric with glare from the camera flash. So this is how gangsters start out, I thought. One moment a bundle of tears and pee and the next reading picture books and the next on the front page of the
Daily Mirror
. Probably, I thought improbably, this is what someone would say about me: one day an honors student at Brooklyn College, the next on the front page of the
Daily Mirror
. At the moment I didn’t want my picture on the front page of anything.

“I’ve seen this room, Justo.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Have a look in the closet.”

I opened the closet door. Suits. A rack of thin ties, mostly shades of silver and gold. On the floor room on a wire rack for three pair of shoes. A pair of glowing ox-blood cordovan loafers hung neatly on one side, a second pair of impeccable blue suede oxfords on the other. In the middle, nothing. These must have been what he was wearing when he disappeared. I tried to recall it. Gray suit, white shirt, silver tie, gold links on French cuffs. I remembered: when last I’d seen him, only the night before though it seemed like weeks, Shushan had been wearing a pair of highly polished black crocodile shoes. I remember noting his belt precisely matched his footwear. I looked at the suits. If Shushan Cats was anything other than dead it made sense he would have taken a change of clothes at least. So there would be two suits missing. The suits hung on wooden hangers that fit into their own slots on the closet’s metal bar. Four hangers were missing. Three suits were in the other room, being lengthened. Only one was missing. Shushan must have been wearing it when he... disappeared.

“Not that closet,” Justo said. He pointed across the room.

I went across and around the bed. The door wouldn’t budge.

Justo went to the near side of the double bed and reached behind an end table. The closet door popped open an inch, as though a latch had been released. I pulled the door open. A staircase.

“Am I supposed to go up?”

“It’s yours, boss.”

“I’m not anyone’s fucking boss,” I said, but went up, contradicting in action what I had claimed in words.

Though it was close to midnight, I entered a world of light. The room at the top was enclosed in glass. Through the panes the moon shone in like a fireman’s searchlight within thick smoky darkness. At the periphery I could make out stars that on a moonless night would be a shower of bright points. From the buildings on the surrounding streets more lights shown, and below on Sixty-First and Sixty-Second and on Madison and Park the lights of nighttime commerce vied with the streetlamps that from this high up seemed to march uptown and downtown, east and west, like sentinels. It was as if this building, a residential hotel in a comfortably bourgeois neighborhood, was the center of the city, and the city, whose limits I could probably see when the sun rose over Brooklyn and lit up the East River, was the center of the world. Just as my eyes became accustomed to the room, bright lights flashed on around me.

“Don’t you want to see what you got?” Justo asked.

The entire room was encased in French doors leading to a wraparound terrace that on its west side overlooked Park Avenue and beyond that Fifth and Central Park, and even further the lights of the gently winding Palisades Parkway across the Hudson in New Jersey, while to the far right could be seen the generous arch of the George Washington Bridge. In the center of the room was a square twenty feet wide, the outline of a room within a room. On the side facing me was a fireplace, split logs stacked in an alcove next to it and, surrounding that, paradise: books. And books. And books. All arrayed on thick cream-painted shelves from several inches above the parquet floor straight up to the ceiling twelve feet above. I knew it was twelve feet, because I estimated if I stood on my own shoulders the top of my head would just about reach the ceiling. In it small bright lights in regular rows were buried like jewels. I walked around the square. Each side contained... books. Twelve-feet tall by twenty-feet wide by four sides, with a foot between shelves. Leaving out space for the fireplace, that would be about forty shelves. I walked over to the wall and counted the number of books on what seemed to me a representative shelf. Two-hundred and forty-nine. Say two-fifty. Times forty shelves.

“Boss, let me save you the trouble,” Justo said. “That’s about ten thousand books.”

“Ten thousand books,” I repeated stupidly. “That’s what I got.” I looked at Justo. “There’s ten thousand fucking books here?”

“Shushan liked to read.”

I shuddered. “Liked to read? A lot of people like to read. But ten thousand books is more than like to read, Justo. It’s the equivalent of a public library in Queens or some state capital in the midwest or somewhere. When does he have the time to read all these?”