Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground (38 page)

When I turned left into Beale, entering the hurly-burly of the pawnshop district, I actually felt a kind of smartness insinuate itself into my step. I began to breathe a little easier as I drew nearer my father's shop, to feel despite myself a little more like the resourceful Harry of old. But the feeling was short-lived, snuffed out by the sight of the bantam puller, pointlessly restored to his stool before the locked façade of Kaplan's Loans. There he sat for no earthly good reason, the living reminder of everything that was wrong.

Touching a desiccated finger to the bill of his nautical cap, he gave me his mechanical salute, after which he had the temerity to croak, “You is late.”

This was more than the traffic would bear. Here was the two-faced creature himself, my uncle's functionary and my father's demon, the one who'd swapped my grandma for a box full of sparkles—and even in that he'd bungled the job so thoroughly that the cops wondered if the operation was queered on purpose. He had a nerve showing his prune puss around Kaplan's, instead of staying down whatever funkhole he'd made off to when I spotted him last.

“Late for what, you stinking nigger troll!” I shouted so that the whole farcockte street could hear me—let them hear! And when words did nothing to dent the puller's stolid composure, I spat full in his monkey face.

I prepared to stand my ground as he sprang for my throat. Together we would roll into the gutter, splashing blood on the cobbles, biting out plugs of flesh, and spitting teeth. Spectators trying to intervene would themselves be mangled. Meat wagons would draw up as bets went down. But while the gob of spittle slid snail-like down a crease of his stubbled cheek, Oboy remained unruffled. In fact, dabbing with a threadbare sleeve at his wrinkled punim, he actually looked to the cloudless sky like he thought it might rain. Then he leveled his sallow eyes at mine.

“Mistah Harry,” he rasped, and a squawking sound came from his diaphragm, making me think he was about to launch into a speech. That a reticent shvartzer should suddenly let loose a stream of tortured diction was nothing new to me. Go ahead, I thought, do your worst. But laconic as ever, Oboy said only, “Mistah Harry, looka here.”

He produced from his pocket what I had to assume was some instrument for settling the score with me. But it was nothing but an ordinary bobby pin, which he was holding forth like a prize I'd won for spitting in his face. While I tried hard to hang on to my anger, in the presence of such knuckleheaded irrelevance it slipped away. The shrunken homunculus had cheated me out of my moment. He hadn't even done me the courtesy of calling me hypocrite, of accusing me to my miserable face of running out on my father just like he had.

Or had he? Because, as I turned my head to hide the waterworks that were starting up in my eyes, I had another thought: with its cover blown, Kaplan's Loans could no longer front for anyone's funny business. You could credit Oboy with having, however inadvertently, bought the pawnshop a reprieve. Okay, so he'd secured it at the expense of my grandma's remains. But in playing broker to her posthumous mixed marriage, hadn't he also released her from a sort of Ellis Island of the soul?

And now, was it in some similar spirit of emancipation that he was waving this bobby pin under my nose? Like it was the key to the mystery of all his dubious motives? If for no other reason than to end his taunting, I turned back and made a grab for the pin, but the puller snatched it out of my reach. As I was shrugging to show that I'd had it with his stupid game, he hopped down off his stool. He scuttled over to the door of the shop and, lifting the python-thick chain, began to jimmy the giant padlock.

“Nix!” I told him, looking nervously east and west for lurking detectives. “Cheezit!” When he paid no attention, I stepped toward him and turned my back, making a feeble attempt to shield him from view. I nodded and grinned idiotically at the passers-by, a couple of whom responded with a knowing wink. At one point, turning enough to observe the puller's progress, I saw that he'd already sprung the lock. He was unwinding the chain—the sound bringing to mind the scene in “Captain Blood” where they release the galley slaves—and folding the lattice. I stood a hotfooted lookout as Oboy nipped inside the shop and tore the sheriff's notice from the window. In an instant he was back at the door, which he flamboyantly held open for me.

I might have stood there debating the issue if I hadn't been so anxious not to make more of a spectacle than we already had. So I hesitated only long enough to give the puller a put-upon sigh, then stepped quickly into the shop. Still, it wasn't lost on me how Oboy's ordinarily inscrutable puss—just before he darted forward to resume his perch—had about the liver lips an unprecedented touch of smugness. It was an expression that made me feel eerily as if everything that had happened to date was a part of some devious plan. It had all been by way of arranging a moment when I would walk into these off-limits premises by myself. A dumb idea, I put it behind me as I hurriedly shut the front door.

Then I wished somebody would tell me what to do next. Of course it didn't take an Einstein to figure that, in a place as stuffy as this, you might switch on the ceiling fans. And since the lights were attached to the fans, it involved no extra energy to shed a little light on the subject.

The shop was naturally no less a shambles than it had been the day before, a disorder that took my father's scrupulous chaos a step or two further. The thought of his upset merchandise was undoubtedly causing Sol Kaplan to turn over in his cell. So I asked myself where was the crime if the proprietor's son straightened up a bit in his absence. Even as I wondered why bother, I was already going through the motions. I was making myself useful—did I hear somebody say “for a change”?

At first, afraid that at any second I might be detained by the arm of the law, I worked hastily. I shored up the Saratoga trunks and the toppled Gladstone bags, stood the gardening tools at attention, sorted a shelf of items that were graduated in size from pipes to saxophones. I wound the clocks, plugged in the Wurlitzer, rebaled the scattered magazines and sheet music, stacking them in solid bluffs on either side of the aisle. This was more like it, I thought, and began to relax a bit. I took the time, as I righted the overturned bottles of patentless elixirs, to read their labels: one boasting certain spirit-banishing properties, another the dual attributes of shrinking hemorrhoids and restoring hair. I picked up a stray pair of opera glasses and looked through both ends, examined here a fallen jacket, there a sword in a tarnished silver scabbard, and thought: item, one shiny black clawhammer tailcoat, once owned by a preacher said to have raised the corpse of a man who died owing him money; item, one parade saber with bronze hilt and serial notches, passed according to tradition from expiring father to surviving son at Manassas, San Juan Hill, Belleau Wood …

It didn't altogether delight me to find that I still had such amazing recall of my father's ledgers. Here was information that my already overloaded mind could have done without. On the other hand, it was maybe not entirely to my detriment that my head remained a depository for my papa's accounts, because when I looked in the narrow cubby that he'd set aside for his office, I saw that the top of his old wooden lectern was bare. The cops must have also confiscated his books.

So it seemed that, with my peculiar knack for remembering, I was in a position to render my father a service. Rather than let him come back from the pokey only to be crushed by the loss of his precious ledgers, I could duplicate them, almost verbatim if I wanted. With identical binders and a little speculation as to prices and rates of interest, I could make a virtual facsimile edition—I could even reproduce the crabbed handwriting that overwhelmed the margins like a flight of crows. Wasn't my penmanship at least the equal of my papa's for illegibility? With the exception of the crap acquired during my sabbatical, I could recite for the record the origin of almost every item I recognized and make educated guesses (such as who would know the difference) about those I didn't. I could invent what I couldn't copy from memory; it was my talent. But why would I want to do such a thing?

Why should I be a party to the perpetuation of my papa's legacy of woolgathering and outright lies, especially now when I had the chance to start from scratch? Because, with Sol Kaplan temporarily out of the way, I found myself possessed of a rare opportunity. Given the run of the place and minus the nuisance of my father's supervision, I could make some progress toward putting Kaplan's Loans to rights. There were worse ways of spending your time, I decided, than in taking inventory. If I applied myself, who knew but I might have the new books ready before my father was let out of jail. He'd return to find his accounts in apple-pie order. Every entry would be described with a pruned economy, each debit and credit column a model of sound commercial arithmetic. While I was at it, I might even make a few other changes.

For one thing, I would weed out this cash drawer stuffed with everything but cash, full of stale knishes and expired receipts for items that would never be sold. Such as this one—brittle as an autumn leaf, a moth flying out from beneath it—for a legless rocking horse, or this for a milking stanchion with crotcheted slipcover, a knotty-pine casket with contents unnamed. Later I would get rid of the worthless items themselves.

As I crumpled up the stubs and tossed them into a nearby fishing creel, I gloated over how quickly I had begun to get the hang of things. All at once I was coming into a wealth of practical wisdom. Flushed with complacency, my brain was discharging ideas the way cigars are handed out at a bris. Here was my birthright—the good head for business that had needed only a desperate enough hour to announce itself.

It was clear to me now that Kaplan's would definitely have to drop the loans for a while. No new merchandise should be taken in until this outrageous surplus had first been substantially reduced. For the time being we would become a (perfectly legitimate, of course) retail commodities outfit. In a few weeks, when we'd cleared sufficient capital to make it advantageous again, we could resume the practice of lending money. We could promote our competitive interest rates in the newspaper and on advertising fliers dropped from skywriting airplanes. You would see us compared favorably to our tight-fisted competition on hoardings and the sides of trolleys, on the sandwich board that Oboy might be induced to wear. Firmly established as a going concern, Kaplan's would no longer be prey to anyone's meddling. A certain once necessary evil—which you will notice that I'm not naming names—wouldn't be necessary anymore. In its final phase of reorganization, the shop would be proof against even my papa's excesses; this thanks to the balanced judgment and shrewd entrepreneurial instincts of his son. What with the coming war in Europe, we would make money hand over tochis—war, as I'd always been told, being good for trade.

And when Naomi, God bless her convex pupik, came back from St. Louis to find me an authentic mensch, when she saw how I'd become the bulwark of a reunited family, a breathing testimonial to the recovered pride and sagacity of the Kaplan men, we would be married. So what if we were next to being next of kin. Who's superstitious? If our son—I'd just realized that I wanted a son—if he should happen to be born with two heads, then so be it, we'd give him two names: Pete and Repeat, for instance; or Lucifer and Michael, like the bad and good angels, so the kid could have it both ways.

Again I congratulated myself on the inspired turn my thoughts were taking. Not pipe dreams but capable and mature deliberations, they were worthy of one whose feet were planted securely on the ground. Only to think such thoughts was to acquire weight and substance. My head overripe with momentous ideas, I had to cup my chin in my hands, propping my elbows on the blotter-topped counter for support. We would have a grand reopening complete with tricolor banners and balloons, a raffle in which customers would win what we couldn't otherwise give away. There would be shnaps and sponge cake like at a bar mitzvah, a rabbi to smash a bottle over the till—or so I was imagining when the door chimes pealed and a customer sauntered in.

He was a whip-thin old darkie with a courtly but weathered face beneath a broad-brimmed hat, wearing a dappled gray suit the texture of molting plumage. Tucked under his arm was a brown paper parcel that he carried with an exaggerated importance. I started to tell him we were closed, can't you read?, when I remembered that the notice had been torn from the window. I looked apprehensively over his shoulder, expecting maybe a signal from Oboy—patrolmen had seen the old man enter and trouble was on the way. At the same time, I figured, where was the problem? Just as soon as this character realized I wasn't my father, he would make his excuses and turn on his heel. It was the song and dance I recalled so well from that afternoon of the miscarried funeral.

But this one must have seen something other than my old, not-so-solid self; it was apparent already how I had changed. Or why else would he have politely doffed his hat, revealing a billow of hair like a scouring pad, and smiled a regular gates of horn? Having placed his parcel on the counter, he'd begun to unfasten a bow of shaggy twine.

Grateful as I was for the authority he'd seen fit to invest in my person, I was sorry to have to inform him—clearing my throat with a crowing noise that surprised us both—that he should save his energy.

“We're a strictly retail enterprise here at Kaplan's,” I told him, trying on the argot for size, satisfied that it wasn't such a bad fit. “Cash'n carry's the long and the short of it, policy of the new management. Sorry uncle, no loans today.”

I happened to notice that the brown wrapping paper that the old-timer continued to unfurl contained a book,
The Travels of Marco Polo
no less, its pages gilt-edged like Scriptures, its title embossed in copper on a dun-colored kid binding with a patina-green metal hasp.