Boogaloo On 2nd Avenue (26 page)

"Yes. A copy shop."

"So vhy do you never come to our meetings with the police where we try to convince them to clean the neighborhood so that drug dealers are not shooting people on da street and sings like dat, which are very bad for business?"

"You are right," said Nathan, suddenly gregarious. "I should come. When is the next meeting?"

"At three o'clock at the Boys Club." His face, voice, even posture, shifted as he looked toward the door. "Ah!"

The moment Nathan dreaded was now here. Karoline was standing in the doorway with a tray of pastry that glittered. The gems were little squares of Rigó Jancsi, the Rigó Jancsi they had made. Their Rigó Jancsi. Nathan felt as though she might as well be showing Sarah their bedsheets.

"Mr. Seltzer, do you know my daughter, Karoline?"

"Yes, I think so," said Nathan, and in trying not to look at her, he accidentally collided with her mother's sad stare.

"And this is his daughter, the
Kuchenschmecker.
She is trying to eat the neighborhood."

Sarah smiled what was intended to be seductively and said,
"ihk been ayn Cookiescmecker."

"Also!"
exclaimed the delighted Moellen in German. "And you are a
Leckermaul.
Do you know vat ist a
Leckermaul,
a sweet-mouth!"

"Tooth," his wife corrected.

Moellen smacked his forehead.
"Jah."

Sarah repeated,
"Leckermaul,"
and smiled a chocolate-smudged grin as she finished her cat cookie,
"Ihk been ayn Leckermaul, zout bedottin ik schone..."
Her German quickly broke into a combination of Yiddish and made-up syllables, a made-up language, though she seemed nonetheless convinced that she was speaking German. Soon she was singing,
"Bay dem schtetl schteyt a schtibl.
"

"Vat is she singing?" asked Moellen.

"Nothing, a song," said Nathan. He did not want his daughter being cute in front of Karoline. It showed how stupid he was for sleeping with her. Couldn't all this familial merriment stop? thought the increasingly desperate Nathan.

But Moellen was merry. "I remember you were a
Leckermaul
in your day, too."

"You have a good memory."

"That's my business." He pointed to his head with its thinning straight hair. "I have a very good memory"

"Yes, you do."

"Maybe Mr. Seltzer is still a
Leckermaul,"
Karoline teased with a perfect Prussian accent while Nathan cringed as though just smacked across the face. "Mr. Seltzer," said Karoline with laughter hidden so deep in her voice that only Nathan could hear it, "would you like to try a Rigó Jancsi?"

"It's Hungarian," said Moellen.

"No, thank you," said Nathan. "I'm not supposed to eat chocolate."

"How unfortunate," said Karoline. "And do you do what you are supposed to?"

"He can't eat chocolate," Sarah confided to Karoline with an earnest face, "because he's having a midwife crisis."

For a very long moment, the three Moellens studied Nathan. "Ah," said Karoline. "But you're not."

"No," said Sarah, breaking into a smile across most of her face as she quickly grasped the implication. Then she reached up and took a small square. As Sarah ate, Nathan was remembering the taste, and even while he felt desire firing from synapse to synapse across his body, he was resolving to end this before it was too late. End it now. He thought he saw a smile of approval from Mrs. Moellen.

Leaving the Edelweiss, Nathan looked troubled and Sarah looked very happy. "Look," she said, pointing her little finger across Avenue A. "There's Uncle Mordy back from vacation!"

It was a squatters' demonstration, and Mordy was leading the other tenants who had been removed from his building, marching down the street with an inappropriate smile and his loose shoelaces flopping around his ankles. The others were all at least fifteen years younger than Mordy, who looked like the bizarre leader of a Boy Scout troop for misfits.

"Mordy, do you have a place to stay?" Nathan asked.

"I want to be in the parade," said Sarah.

"No, they threw me out on the street."

Sarah reflected on the image of being thrown in the street.

"So come stay with us."

"Thanks. I'm all right."

The police were gathering and watching the squatters, but most of the people on Tenth Street were more interested in the ongoing police investigation inside the East Village Gourmet. The policeman had not yet come out. Joey Parma was interrogating Felix.

"What species of tomato is this?"

"They are from Jersey Rutgers. That is where they developed them. They are like beefsteak tomatoes but rounder. I lay down straw so that they don't touch the soil, and I grow them straight up on strings, cutting off all the side shoots. I pinch off the top, too."

"This is so delicious. It's too good for my mother's sauces. I heard that at Jean Jacques ... You know?"

Felix tried to look as though he knew something about Jean Jacques.

"He does some kind of a reduction of tomatoes with sugar."

"A ketchup."

"No, not a ketchup. It's a reduction over maybe five hours and the sugar and maybe some vinegar...."

"That's ketchup," Felix insisted, but he saw that he was irritating this slightly unpredictable cop. "Yes, these would be very good for that kind of thing."

"Yes, the intensity of the flavor. And they are all grown in Manhattan?"

"The originals were from right here in the neighborhood. But now I am getting them from casitas all over the barrio and the South Bronx. At home we grow them in between onion rows, which is better for the tomatoes. But here there is no room." Felix realized that he had just made a mistake, referring to "home," but this was of no interest to Joey Parma.

"It would be interesting to see if the Bronx or Manhattan has better soil."

"What you need for tomatoes is spring rain and summer sun."

"Just like wine grapes!"

"It's a vine. They are related."

"Still, soil has to make a difference. It does with wine. They had farms in all of the boroughs at one time. Probably farmers knew the difference in soil. Maybe you people do. Does it grow better in Manhattan or the Bronx?"

"We have a tradition of growing anywhere. San Juan is full of crops," said Felix. He had almost slipped, had almost given himself away by saying "Santo Domingo."

His mother dragged the Fat Finkelstein of his generation into the Boys Club for the neighborhood association meeting—truly dragged him by the arm, shouting at him in Spanish as they struggled. Nathan had not realized that this Fat Finkelstein was Latino. The boy's recalcitrance turned to fear once he realized that Nathan was in the room. Did he think he was going to be forced to confess that he had been sticking out his tongue? Was that what he imagined to be the purpose of this meeting? Had Nathan Seltzer called the meeting to discuss his tongue wagging? His bright little dark eyes stayed on Nathan while his mother shouted at him.

Attendance, provoked by the three recent chalk outlines in the street, was considerably better than at the previous meeting. One indication of the new seriousness of the issue was that Sal Eleven had come. Before the meeting started, he made his way to Nathan and, standing to one side so that his words would go directly in Nathan's ear, explained, "The way I see it...," waving his hand in the same gesture he used to dismiss everything in life.

Nathan waited politely for more, and when nothing came, he said, "What do you mean?"

"I mean, they can't shoot. You know what I mean? They are never going to hit anything but a window, and even that would be blind luck. They buy these cheap guns and they can't aim." He leaned closer to Nathan's ear and whispered, "I got insurance for my window."

When Nathan stepped back and looked at him, he nodded his head emphatically He meant what he said. His window really was insured. It was a particularly curious attitude, because Sal Eleven spent the entire day behind his counter directly in front of his insured window.

"But three men are dead on the next block."

Sal gave a big dramatic shrug.

"You mean someone in the neighborhood did it? To get rid of the dealers?"

Sal would only shrug and say, "I think they were shot by someone who knows how to shoot." Then Nathan realized what he was saying. Sal thought the Mafia had killed the drug dealers. But why would they leave the bodies? A warning?

Once the meeting began, Sal became silent. He had said everything he had to say, and it was for Nathan's ears alone. Why had he come?

People were sitting in tan metal folding chairs. At the front of the room was Joey Parma and a uniformed officer, a broad-shouldered giant of a man with close-cut blond hair and the suggestion of a potbelly on the front of his huge frame. His name was Lipinski. A man was talking whom Nathan always thought of as Doberman, a wiry man with thick, smudgy lenses on wire-framed glasses mended at one stem with tape, a man Nathan never talked to because he kept two, possibly three ferocious-looking black Dobermans who pranced down the street with chain-link collars, looking primed and ready to kill. It was always rumored that he beat those dogs to make them mean.

Doberman insisted, "You cannot deal with the problem unless you attack it at its roots." Quite a number of people agreed with this, and he felt encouraged to talk on. "If you are not willing to take on the causes, you ain't gonna solve nothing."

Even more people agreed with this.

"The truth is, there are too many foreigners in the neighborhood—"

Bedlam erupted. The Puerto Rican women started shouting at the Dominican women. Spanish Fat Finkelstein's mother was trying to gesticulate with the same arm that imprisoned her son, the boy shaking as she made her points.

"I have said before," Moellen began, standing near the slouching police in his customary erect posture that made it seem, by comparison, that he was the one wearing a uniform. "This kind of thing is very ugly and not at all helpful. I don't know vhy you come here to say dese sings. I think you should leave, Mr. Hansen." He fixed his eyes on Doberman as though they were lethal weapons.

So Doberman was Hansen. Edelweiss was Moellen. The Fat Finkelstein of the new generation was Latino.

"Foreigners," Doberman insisted. "When I say foreigners I don't mean foreigners. I don't mean people like you. I mean these other people. People who don't have American values. Who don't want to work."

Shouting erupted again and was broken by a quivering voice, a voice that silenced with frailty rather than strength. It was Jackie, the performance artist, in his or her long wig and violet-and-yellow organdy dress.

"Oh, perfect," scoffed Hansen. "Look what country we hear from now."

Sal Eleven looked at Nathan and shook his head and dismissed it all with a hand gesture.

Jackie raised his or her eyebrows in a mock glare. "I wish to say something!"

"Yes, let her speak," said Moellen, though most of the others were saying let
him
speak. Then there was some laughing. Hansen sat down.

"Officer Lipinski," he or she began. Lipinski nodded. "It certainly is hot today. Do you know this entire week has been a record? They are advising everyone to stay home. But you can't stay home in my building. Do you know why?"

Lipinski shook his head cooperatively.

"There is no air-conditioning. The wiring in our building is so bad—so old that you cannot use air-conditioning. It is probably a fire hazard. It's against city regulations."

"I'm sorry, but this is for the housing authority"

"All you have is excuses."

"This isn't a police matter."

"Drugs are supposed to be a police matter," someone shouted.

"How about guns?" someone shouted.

Sal turned to Nathan and shook his head sadly. "They've got to get proper assurance."

"Insurance," Nathan offered.

"All kinds of surance."

The Puerto Ricans were shouting in Spanish. Suddenly Moellen said, "Why don't we listen to these people." He turned to them and started speaking Spanish. It didn't sound like their Spanish. It sounded like a combination of Italian, Spanish, and German.

Slowly, from the gut, a sense of panic began to overtake Nathan. He had to get out of this room. No, he had to try to master this. He had to try to stay.

Moellen was translating for the mother of the Spanish Fat Finkel-stein, who was still directing his trapped and terrified gaze at Nathan. The mother said she had "evidence" and demanded that the boy produce the shell, but the boy insisted he had lost it. With an open hand she swatted him on the head. He began to cry but still insisted he had no shell.

"It's not important," said Lipinski. "We are not looking for evidence."

"Exactly," said one of the Puerto Rican women in suddenly discovered excellent English. "You are not looking for evidence. You are not making arrests."

"I meant at this meeting we are not looking for evidence. We could make arrests. But it wouldn't help you. The only thing that would help you is if I could place a few officers on the block twenty-four hours a day. The plain truth is that I don't have the men."

"All the men are in richer precincts."

"Maybe. I don't know. I have to work with what I have. I'll tell you something else. There is no judge in Manhattan that is going to send a pusher to prison for retail trade. You know, small amounts. They want the wholesalers. We can arrest them and hold them a couple of days until a judge gets to them, we can make it pretty ugly for them in the bullpen those two days, but all the judge is going to give them is an impressive-sounding suspended sentence. They know it. All they have to do is not get caught with a big quantity If we could find some big stash, that would be different. But really big. So we watch them."

"What about that Gourmet?" someone shouted.

Lipinski looked at Joey Parma with confusion. Joey whispered to him, "Puerto Rican vegetable shop on Tenth Street. The best tomatoes in New York. I'm trying to get him to grow baby vegetables. You know, these little tiny zucchini and—"

"What do these people want with him?" Lipinski whispered back.