We sat in silence for a while, he on the crate, myself on the couch, until I got up and found a bottle of Stolichnaya, then an unknown brand, in the little fridge. I poured a slug into a water glass. It came out half frozen, slow and thick. What the hell. I poured myself one as well.
“It’s okay for me to drink,” Shushan said. “I read up on Jewish mourning. You got to cover mirrors so you won’t look at yourself after a death. And you don’t greet people. I mean, when they come in you don’t say hello. You just take them in stride. You talk with them, about anything. There’s no limit. But you don’t say hello and goodbye. A greeting is supposed to be joyous. They’re supposed to bring food. Also no music. And you’re not supposed to change your clothes or wash more than so you don’t make people uncomfortable. And someone is supposed to be with you, take care of things like.”
I almost choked on the cold vodka as it reached my throat. “Mr. Cats...”
“It’s just till Wednesday. I’ll pay for your time.”
“It’s not a matter of money,” I said, though I could have used it. Orders from the Park Avenue urologist had been slowing down. Maybe my sperm were slowing down. Maybe after what the brothers Callinan did to me they’d be slowing down even further. I hadn’t thought about sex since it happened, even when I saw Shushan’s sister. Well, I’d been busy.
“Like, someone’s got to cover the mirror in the bathroom. And when people come in open the door. That kind of thing. Walk in the park for a smart kid like you.”
“Mr. Cats... Shushan. I really like you. You’re a fine man, and I know you’re in need. But maybe you’d be better off with Ira-Myra’s, or somebody else that’s employed by you. I’m just a college kid with a lot to do.”
“Like go after the guys who layed into you?”
I looked at him. His mouth was set in a straight line across his face, his small hard jaw looking like it was made of rock. I noticed for the first time that his nose was somewhat off-kilter, just enough. His eyes, which could sparkle when he wanted you to like him, looked dead, a kind of North Atlantic blue. When he smiled they were light and clear, Caribbean. “Ah, no,” I said after a while. “That’s not my thing. My thing is forget about it. The only way I could back at them is with a gun. Even if I were that kind of guy I’d be dealing with the Archdiocese of New York, the Fire Department and the entire NYPD. There’s no percentage in that.”
Shushan pursed his lips, causing his eyes to go even darker. “That’s what the Jews in Europe said. Forgive and forget. Maybe the Nazis will go away. Let me tell you something, kid. They keep coming.”
I finished the vodka in my glass. It burned as it went down, cold at first and then searing. Now that the pressure was off with Shushan’s funeral I could feel it again: it was my body but like someone else’s, like wearing another man’s ill-fitting clothes. Here was too much room, here too tight. I don’t remember the brothers hitting my throat, but it was sore. My stomach hurt too. And my lungs, particularly on the right side, where my ribs had cracked. “They’re not Nazis. I fucked around with their baby sister, that’s all.”
“You knock her up?”
“No,” I said. I suppose I could have told him about the rubbers and the Park Avenue urologist—the last thing I’d wanted was to lose those sperm. “She’s not pregnant.”
“So let me get this straight, kid. You and this girl have intimate relations. Once?”
“Many, many times.”
“Which tells me maybe she was not exactly forced into it.”
“No, she wasn’t forced. She was pissed off I didn’t want to continue.”
“Ah,” Shushan said. “The green-eyed monster.”
“What?”
“I thought you was educated. O, beware, my lord, of jealousy!/ It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock/The meat it feeds on.”
“Othello,” I said.
“Act III, Scene III. See that, I was right. You know your stuff.”
“You read Shakespeare, Shushan?”
“Ah, you know, sometimes.” He smiled. I’d seen that smile before. The little boy with a secret. The smile changed, straightened, the lips compressed, his jaw again hard. “There’s also that bit about a woman scorned. Never pleasant. They really worked you over, eh?”
“I’ll live.”
“You’ll live, eh? You’re such a tough guy, Russy. One day you won’t.”
“Neither will you,” I said. “None of us will. That’s what cemeteries are for.”
“Yeah, but I don’t let nobody do that to me.”
“It was three nobodies. Three big nobodies.”
“So fucking what, kid? You couldn’t do something then, but you can now.”
“Now?”
“You got to punish them,” Shushan said. “Like you read about my mom. Hit them back ten times. Bust them up bad.”
“I got to go,” I said.
“Because you’re scared?”
“Because they were only protecting their sister.”
“The Nazis were only protecting the fatherland,” Shushan said. “That’s such bullshit it stinks before it hits the floor. She was pissed at you. She sicced them on you. They enjoyed it. Let me ask you, was she raped?”
“I told you. If anybody was raped it was me.”
“So where’s the beef? I’ll tell you where it is. The beef is they hurt you for the simple Irish pleasure of it. I know these guys. The dagos, at least with them it’s business. It’s just for money. Same for the rest. The chinks and the niggers, that’s not their style. The micks, they just like to do it.”
“One was a priest.”
“Yeah, especially them. Now tell me something. I’m going to ask you once. You stick with me tonight.” A statement, not a question. “Maybe those bruisers are coming back.”
“I don’t think so. They had their fun.”
“Yeah, see what I mean? Fun. But you’re right. They’re through with you.”
“I guess I can go to school from here, in the morning.”
“Sure you can. You got a whole bedroom for yourself. There’s a television in there. Color. I’m not supposed to watch, but you’re not in mourning. Just me.”
“I’m sorry for your mother, Shushan.”
“It’s nothing. Death, it happens. She had a long run. Maybe she was poor, but she was proud. You gave her a good send-off, all those people. I was proud.”
“Me too,” I said.
“So what I want to know is this.”
“Sure,” I said. “Anything.”
“You know when Mr. Sfangiullo....”
“Who?”
“Sfangiullo, the old gavone in the dark glasses.”
“That was Auro Sfangiullo? No wonder the cops and the press were there.”
“Be hard to find a guy as ugly as him for the impersonation, kid. Guy’s got pits in his face you could hide bodies in. Of course that was him. Who’d you think, Robert Frost was coming to pay his respects. Bob Wagner?”
Robert F. Wagner Jr. was mayor of New York at the time. “I had no idea.”
“Just another dago crime boss, Russy. They’re interchangeable. One goes, another steps up. They’re not dangerous individually, but you want to watch out when they’re together.”
“Right,” I said. “You wanted to know...”
“When Sfangiullo was standing there and I was asking if they knew of an Italian place nearby, he said something in their language.”
“I remember.”
“What’d he say?”
“He said—” I cocked my head. “How did you know I speak Italian?”
“I didn’t.”
“Then....”
“But when he was talking I happened to look at you,” Shushan said. “I could feel you paying attention. Like an animal does when he’s concentrating. You ever have a dog, Russy?”
“No.”
“Me neither. But I’m interested in animal behavior. You can walk down the street and there’s a dog you can almost understand from the way he stands what he’s thinking. You were like that. Concentrating.”
“Their Italian isn’t very good. It’s thick, and they drop consonants, even syllables. For instance, they would say: They Ita int v’good. It’s not Sicilian. They must be from Naples.”
“Napolida,” Shushan said, smiling. “That’s how they say it.” Now he cocked his own head. We must have been looking at each other that way, half sidewise, like a pair of monkeys. “So what’d he say, our dottore?”
“Dottore?”
“They call him that. A sign of respect.”
“He said, ‘Would you believe this? Not only do we have to come to this Jew’s funeral, but now he wants us to break bread with savages.”
“The dagos, they have no respect for other races. What else?”
“‘For two cents I’d put bullets in all their heads.’”
“Yeah? Sfangiullo said that?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Then he said, ‘Except that I like the Jewboy, even if he is a Christ-killer.’”
Shushan laughed. It came rumbling up from inside like bile. His mouth was laughing, but not his eyes. “More?”
“That was it,” I said. “Not exactly Shakespeare.”
“Not Shakespeare,” Shushan said. “Not even fuckin’ Congreve. Two things I want you to do. Number one. Go to the phone over there and tell the desk clerk to order us some pizza. You like pizza?”
“Sure.”
“Anchovy?”
“Why not?”
“The other thing, whenever you and me we’re in the presence of goombahs, never but never let on you know what they’re saying. Unless you need to. You got that?”
“Sure,” I said, but all I could think was: Congreve?
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