Zaddik, page 34
Czartoryski bowed his head. Her odor filled his nostrils. Pineapple and musk. A gust of wind blew a spattering of rain against the window.
After this is all over, a vacation in Capri would be nice, he thought, turning to place a call to Tel Aviv and the Cutter.
How triste that I will be going there alone.
Chapter 51 Mario’s Butcher Shop
Red Hook, Brooklyn
Tuesday, October 22
“SO IT’S MY OLD PAL, the Hebe detective,” said Joey della Francesca, practicing his putting on the carpet in his office.
It occurred to Dov Taylor that he had never in his life seen anything so incongruous as Joey with a golf club in his hands. “Practicing for the Greater Mafia Open, Joey?” Taylor asked.
“I’ve never been able to decide, Taylor,” said della Francesca, tapping a ball across the orange carpet into a frosted Tom Collins glass, “whether you were born an asshole or whether you practice. What do you want?”
From Sarah Kalman to this punk, thought Taylor. Just a few hours before, he had been sitting on a couch in Rabbi Kalman’s study with Sarah as she read from the Lublin “Memory Book.”
Sarah had thought that the book might help him. “After the war,” she had told him, “The Lubavitchers started the ‘Memory Project.’ We didn’t want that life to be forgotten. We didn’t want to give the Nazis that victory. So we asked survivors to tell us what they remembered of life in their shtetls, and we put their memories into these books.”
Taylor realized that he had never been so close to her. Their knees were almost touching. She had looked up from the book and had caught him staring at her.
“What are you looking at?” she asked.
“At you,” he said.
“And what do you see?” she asked, smiling.
“I see a sheyne meydele,” he said, using the Yiddish she had taught him.
“I’m not so beautiful,” she said, pulling her hair off her forehead and looking away. She looked radiant, a human candle burning with light and intelligence. Looking at that face, he thought, you had to believe in God. Biology alone could not have created that.
“Have you found any of the people I dreamed?”
“Oh, yes,” said Sarah. “Here is a man, Nathan Birnbaum, a shoemaker, who recalls a family of butchers, the ben Areyns, and how it was said that one of them was horribly murdered in a pogrom. And, of course, all the people mention the Seer. He made Lublin famous. They’re all proud of living in his city, even those who weren’t Hasids. It gave them a sense of being important.”
Sarah turned some more pages. This close, I can smell her, he thought. Soap, bread, and a sweetness.
“What about the Czartoryskis?” he asked.
“All I can find is the castle,” she said. “Many people mention an old castle on the road outside town called Castle Czartoryski.”
“Can the book tell me where they are today?”
“I don’t think so. Here,” Sarah said, “in the memory of a Rabbi Dov Baer. He says his father told him there was once a great farbrengen, a gathering, of all the world’s Hasidim, and a pogrom broke out during which the Seer fell out of his window and died.
“These people,” said Sarah, her eyes meeting Taylor’s, “they lived all their lives with death and violence and stories about killing. But what’s amazing is that mostly they remember the good things—weddings, songs. They remember the streets filled with children. I think that’s what we do, the Hasidim. We try to fill the streets with children so we can forget the horrors around us. You and your wife never had children?”
“No,” said Taylor, feeling again the frustration and disappointment that had become the defining character of his marriage. “We tried, but…” How could he explain? How could he tell Sarah Kalman about making love because the thermometer said that it was time? Or watching while some doctor injected his sperm into Carol’s vagina as she lay in the stirrups on an examining table? Or going on a bender every time she got her period? Why go through all that again?
“What about you?” he asked. “Don’t you want children?”
“Of course I do. But first I need a husband, and that’s not so easy.”
“I can’t believe that.”
“You don’t understand the Hasidim.”
No, he did not understand the Hasidim. He did not understand how a woman as beautiful as Sarah Kalman could be an outcast among them.
But, he told himself, I do know Joey della Francesca. I know that he’s a thief, a pimp, and probably a murderer. And that’s why I should forget about Sarah Kalman. Because I feel comfortable with Joey.
Taylor had known della Francesca, it seemed, for most of his life. Actually, they had met in a bar at LaGuardia Airport in 1968. Taylor was on his way to Infantry Officers School at Fort Benning, Georgia. He was miserable and needed a drink.
When Taylor had enlisted—against the almost hysterical objections of his family and the bitter ridicule of his friends—he’d figured that he’d be made an officer. That sounded better to him than what he had been doing—driving a cab, cutting classes, and hanging out at City College.
Taylor didn’t like the hippies who lolled around the south campus cafeteria at CCNY; they were pompous, phony, and the girls didn’t shave their legs or pits. But he did like the effect it had on them when he told them that he was thinking of enlisting. The girls especially. First they’d call him a fascist bastard; then they’d go to bed with him. Eventually Taylor had told so many people that he was enlisting that it became real. He got drunk one day and did it.
The army told him he could choose between four officers candidates’ prep schools. Armor-tanks sounded too hot; who wanted to sit in a tank in the jungle? Aviation was too exotic; he couldn’t see himself as a flyboy. Infantry was too deadly; the average life expectancy of an infantry lieutenant was, what? five seconds? So he’d picked artillery.
Of course, after basic training, and after eight weeks of advanced artillery training at Fort Sill—being taught to operate the RDFs, range direction finders, and the FADACs, the field artillery direction auto computers, learning his way around the penny-nickel-nickels (the 155-mm Howitzers) and the dime-nickels (the 105-mm Howitzers)—he was assigned to Infantry Officers School anyway.
It was the army way.
In the bar, Taylor spotted Joey immediately: he was wearing his green uniform with absolutely no tags or insignias. He was the anonymous soldier incarnate.
They got drunk together and discovered they were both on their way to Fort Benning in order to train to become corpses.
“No way I’m staying in infantry,” Joey said. “I plan to come out of this alive.”
“What are you going to do?” Taylor asked.
“I’m just going to tell them I ain’t officer material.”
“And you think they’ll listen?”
“Hey? What are they going to do to me? Send me to Vietnam?”
They showed up at Fort Benning a day late, hung over and stinking.
Neither of them became officers.
Both of them were sent to Vietnam.
After that, they seemed fated to be stapled at the elbows. They flew the same World Airlines transport from Fort Dix to Anchorage (where they managed to cadge some beers) to Tokyo (where they were kept in the hangar for forty-eight hours) to their final destination: Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Saigon.
From Tan Son Nhut they were flown to Jungle World, which was what they called combat school, in Chu Lai, hard by the South China Sea, and from there they were piled into half-ton trucks for the ride to Arty Hill, HHB, the headquarters of Head Q Battery of the 3/18th Artillery I-Corp, the proud Americal Division, where Private First Class Joey della Francesca quickly set up a good business selling touc phins, opiated reefer, in ten-joint party packs, and Private First Class Dov Taylor set about seeing how many of them he could smoke and still stay sharp enough to make the right decisions necessary to staying alive.
For two years Taylor sat in a hole at Alpha battery, twenty yards from the big guns, twenty-five miles from Arty Hill, Route One, and the South China Sea, and directed fire into a patch of jungle they called the Rocket Pocket. Every day Viet Cong B-40 rockets would fly out of the Rocket Pocket, killing soldiers, and ruining the days and nights of I-Corps’s top brass. Every day Alpha, Bravo, and Charley batteries would pour 160- and 200-pound shells into the Rocket Pocket.
Like everything else, it was an exercise in futility. First the Rocket Pocket would go quiet, and then, after a while, the VC would crawl out of their holes and the rockets would fly again.
PFC della Francesca gave PFC Taylor some good advice during those years. He convinced him to stay away from the body shops—“If you don’t get some fucking horrible Asian clap, you’ll get your throat cut by the hooer’s brother”—and he convinced him not to transfer from Alpha battery to Bravo, even though Bravo was a much cooler place—“They’re a bunch of fucking junkies, and they got bad vibes; I feel it.” Sure enough, one day on the Quang Tra Bong Road to Tam Ky, Bravo company was ambushed and wiped out.
But Joey was never able to talk Taylor out of smoking his touc phins. “That shit fucks you up too much,” Joey would say. “You can nod out all you want in the world, but here, if you crap out, you really crap out.”
But Taylor needed the warm, safe feeling the opiated dope gave him; he knew he’d go crazy and do something stupid without it.
One day Taylor asked della Francesca what he planned to do when he got back to the world.
“Go into my uncle’s business,” he said.
“And what’s that?” Taylor asked.
“Meat,” Joey said. “What are you going to do? Go back to school like the dumb motherfucker you are?”
At that time, Taylor was unsure, but as the days of his hitch dwindled, the idea of becoming a cop began to tickle his brain. Then, one day, after seeing Joey attack a soldier over something or other and beat him bloody, Taylor felt as if he had been given a gift, an understanding of why guys like Joey could be frightening—for by this time Joey had dropped enough hints for Taylor to figure out that Joey’s uncle’s business was more than just sausages and steaks. Their strength, Taylor decided, came from the way they could switch on their rage, instantly, and act on it without fear. While everyone else was thinking, they were moving. Suddenly. Violently. It was also the great truth about war. You had to give it your all without losing yourself to it.
I can do that, Taylor thought. I can match that anger. And I can do it without turning off my brain.
The idea of becoming a cop began to feel right. It would be fun to challenge guys like Joey, and, as a bonus, it would be a very un-Jewish thing to do.
Taylor returned stateside a few months before Joey and stopped thinking about him until a year later, when he saw a story in Time magazine about a Joseph della Francesca who had been busted just as he was about to spill a mountain of betting slips recorded on dissolvable paper into a vat of boiling water. In the story, Joey took credit for the technological breakthrough. Taylor, who was just about to take the police exam, cut out the article and carried it around in his wallet for weeks.
Over the years, Taylor was careful never to use della Francesca as a source, never to ask him a direct question. But from time to time Joey would call him with a piece of information—about who may have shot whom; about who may have ripped off a certain party. The information led to several busts and helped Taylor make detective. He knew that Joey was using him to drop dimes on his enemies, but if Taylor could help himself by helping Joey, why the hell not?
But this was different. Taylor couldn’t wait. The wedding was set for November 5.
“I need some help, Joey,” Taylor said. “Last month somebody cut up a Hasid in the diamond district. I’m wondering if you heard anything about it.”
“I don’t know nothing about it,” said Joey, sinking another putt. “My business is meat.”
“I know, Joey. But you know the Hasidim.”
In New York, kosher meat was big business. Each Hasidic sect considered the other’s meat treyf, unfit for consumption. That meant that each sect had to purchase its own animals, establish its own slaughterhouses, truck its own meat. Five years ago della Francesca had leased a slaughterhouse to the Kozlovers and convinced them to use his trucks. They had paid top dollar, and that had given della Francesca ideas. One day the Satmarer slaughterhouse had mysteriously caught fire, and della Francesca had suggested to the Kozlovers that he would be glad to help the Satmarers out of their difficulty. Soon della Francesca had the Satmarer franchise. Over the next few years he brought the Belzers and the Gerers into the fold. Just two years ago he’d scored his biggest coup—the Lubavitchers.
That was why he was so upset when he heard about the planned marriage between the Satmarer rebbe’s daughter and the Lubavitcher rebbe’s son. If the two sects started eating the same meat, it would cost della Francesca almost half of his business. And that was why today he was so pissed off at that fucking Polack, Czartoryski, who had told him that it had all been taken care of.
“You play golf, Taylor?” asked della Francesca.
“No, Joey. I’m not retired.”
“Fucking great game. Play it until you’re ninety. Get out in the fresh air. Walk around. Good for your heart. Good for your soul, you know what I mean?”
“Can you help me, Joey?”
“You’re not a cop anymore?”
“No.”
“Good. About time you gave up that racket. You need work?”
“No. I’m okay.”
“So you got work. This? Is this it?”
“The guy who was killed was a Satmarer. The Satmarers asked me to look into it.”
“They paying you good? They should. They got money up the wazoo, I ain’t kidding.”
“They’re paying me so good, I’m thinking of taking up golf.”
“Go ahead, break my balls. I’m trying to help you.”
“And I like you, too, Joey.”
“Was a guy in town,” said della Francesca after a moment, “last month. A Polack. Old guy. Must be seventy, maybe more. Heard he was hanging around the diamond district with this other guy, a scary old fuck, about sixty, supposed to be good with a knife.”
“This Polack have a name?”
“Czartoryski. Don’t know his first name. Don’t know the other guy’s name.”
For a moment Taylor thought he heard hoofbeats. He closed his eyes. A glint of steel flashed. It was all true. His vision was true.
“You know where he is?” Taylor asked, his voice low.
“No idea.”
“Know anybody who might?”
“Maybe. This guy Czartoryski is international. Wired in, you know. Nobody knows much about him. Not even me. But if I was looking for somebody like that, I’d go to Miami, look up this old Jew broad. Teddy. If she’s sober, and if she ain’t lost all her marbles yet, she knows everybody. Bring her a bottle of Scotch, she’ll go down on you.”
“How would I contact this person?”
“Here…” Della Francesca wrote down a name and a number on a slip of paper. “You can even use my name.”
“Thanks, Joey,” Taylor said, looking at the paper and slipping it into his wallet. “Teddy Lansky? Any relation to Meyer?”
“His wife. His widow.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Nope. Her old man told her everything he knew. All his old wop buddies support her now, keep her lushed up and happy, she don’t go writing her memoirs, The Boss’s Wife.
“You learn to play golf,” said della Francesca, “you give me a call. We’ll play.”
“Sure. Tell me, Joey. How did this Czartoryski fuck you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t even know the guy.”
But I do, thought Dov Taylor. I do.
Chapter 52 Heathrow Airport
London
Thursday, October 24
LATE IN THE AFTERNOON, the Cutter checked into the Post House alongside the M4 just outside the airport. Then he took a cab into Soho. The Magician was meeting him at Bahn Thai, and the Cutter already knew that everything there would be too hot for him to eat.
It was dark when the Cutter arrived. Czartoryski was sitting at a red leather banquette, a bottle of Thai beer on the table in front of him. Oriental parasols with red, blue, and gold dragons hung open and inverted from the ceiling. The Cutter slipped onto his seat across from Czartoryski, who slid a menu over to him.
“The food here is excellent,” Czartoryski said. “Thai food, in my opinion, is one of the world’s great cuisines, yet it’s largely unappreciated. As are most Asian cuisines apart from the Chinese. That is part of Chinese cultural hegemony. Do you know the Chinese are called the Jews of the East? That is because of their shrewdness in business.”
The menu was huge, and the Cutter’s eye fell upon the warning on the top of the page: “All these sauces tend to be hot and pungent and often not to the taste of non-Thais.” He closed the menu.
“Would you like a beer, my friend?” Czartoryski asked. “It goes very well with the food. In fact, apart from beer, only champagne can be drunk with Thai food, and the wine list here is very poor. They do, however, have an ’86 Clicquot. Would you like that?… No? Then a beer it is. Thai beer is very spicy, fuller than Chinese beer, lighter than Japanese beer.”
The Cutter nodded, and Czartoryski signaled for a waiter. “I’ll order for you. The menu is rather daunting. You like fish, don’t you? They have a wonderful whole fish here—a sea bass—marinated in honey and ginger and charred over an open fire. I’ll tell them to serve the chile sauce in a bowl and you can employ as much or as little as you wish.”
