Love in Bloom's (18 page)

Then he pulled back. He gazed at her, let out an uneven breath and said, “See you later.” And strolled out of the stairwell, letting the door thump shut behind him.

“Asshole,” she muttered. He shouldn’t have kissed her that way, not unless he was planning to move beyond kissing as soon
as possible. What was this twenty-hour rule? What kind of crap was that? He didn’t know her that well? He could sure as hell get to know her better—in a lot less than twenty hours. Ten hours tops, he could know her inside and out. She wasn’t that inscrutable.

Sighing, she clomped down the stairs to retrieve her pen. She scooped up her pad and shoved open the door. God, he made her angry, kissing her like that, leaving her all hot and flustered. The smug bastard.

Still, she picked up her pace as she reentered the store. The sooner she saw him, the sooner the clock would start running.

Ron Joffe studied the handwritten notes he’d just taken during a phone conversation with one Reuben Melnick, a pickle wholesaler who had enjoyed extensive dealings with Ben Bloom during the latter’s decades-long tenure as the head of Bloom’s.

Interesting.

“Sure, I knew Ben,” Reuben had said. “Quite a guy. To know him was to know him.”

“You didn’t love him, then?” Ron had asked.

Reuben had chuckled. “Only person who ever loved him was that secretary of his. Don’t know if you met her—tall, gawky redhead. Her name escapes me.”

“Deirdre Morrissey,” Ron supplied.

“That’s it. Irish girl. Very devoted to him, if you catch my drift.”

Ron pictured Reuben to be in his sixties and beefy, the sort of guy who would punctuate every second statement with a nudge to the ribs or a poke in the arm. Ron was glad he’d been able to do this interview over the phone.

Reuben was the third food dealer he’d spoken with; the first two had never done business with Bloom’s, although one of them said he’d crossed paths with Ben Bloom a few times at coffee bean conventions and had always considered Bloom “on the chilly side.”

Ron wondered whether Julia was as chilly as her father was
reputed to have been. One kiss—a rather unsatisfactory one, at that—hadn’t told him much.

“The guy lived and breathed work, know what I mean?” Reuben had said. “I met his wife once—a big surprise. I hadn’t known he was married.”

“Because he was so close with Deirdre?”

“That, too, but mostly he seemed married to the store. He’d flirt around, you know—I figured him as someone who liked a little action to keep the juices flowing. But commitment? Till death do us part? That kind of love he saved for the store.”

“What did you think of his wife?” Ron asked.

“Somewhere between gushy and pushy. She seemed to love the store, too, but I could tell it wasn’t in her blood. She had more polish than he did. But she married him, you know? That pretty much meant she’d married his store, his mother, the whole shebang.”

Ron’s impression of Sondra Bloom matched Reuben’s. This was good. It meant he could probably rely on Reuben’s impressions of everyone else. “Did you ever meet his mother?” he asked.

“Ida Bloom.” Reuben released a long, wheezy breath. “Met her once. She looked me up and down, told me she thought I was overcharging on the kosher dills and her husband would turn over in his grave if he knew what I was taking the store for. Ben apologized for her, said he thought my prices were fair. Which they are. My stuff has the garlic ratio perfect, and the cukes don’t go limp. You want crunchy, you gotta pay. Ida didn’t want to pay for anything.”

Ron wished he knew more about the food business. He was an expert on Wall Street, he could hold his own in any conversation on the Federal Reserve and he could fake it when the subject was retailing. His MBA was in finance, but he’d written enough pieces on enough subjects to know a little about a lot.

Food was a whole different thing, though. Maybe Kim Pinsky should have put one of the restaurant critics on this story,
Heidi, or What’s-His-Name, that chubby guy who hyperventilated about wines. He could have waxed rhapsodic about the superiority of crunchy pickles over limp.

But Ron was glad Kim hadn’t put the magazine’s foodies on this story. If she had, he never would have met Julia Bloom.

How was he going to get close to her? By writing a story that said her late father, the erstwhile head honcho of Bloom’s, had been a little too cozy with his assistant? And her mother was manipulative and heavy-handed? And her grandmother was too cheap to pay the going rate for crunchy pickles?

Julia would surely be overcome with desire after reading such an article.

He needed more time, more perspective, more of a chance to figure out how to write a playful little exposé about the famous deli on Upper Broadway without alienating that famous deli’s president, who without even trying turned him on like a halogen spotlight.

He tapped the space key on his computer to kill the screen saver. The shape-shifting soccer ball disappeared, replaced by the text of his regular City Business column. This week it offered a chipper little dissection of how monetary policy in Washington wound up lining developers’ pockets in the tri-state area. Nothing profound, nothing he’d stayed up nights sweating over the way he’d stayed up nights sweating over Bloom’s.

Specifically, one particular Bloom.

He e-mailed the column to Kim, then lifted his phone and punched in her extension so he could warn her it was on its way.

“Is it brilliant?” she asked.

“It’s fine.” Self-congratulation didn’t suit Ron.

“And the Bloom’s piece?”

“In progress.” He hesitated, then asked, “Where did it come from?”

“What do you mean?”

“One day you suddenly said, ‘Ron, do a story on how
Bloom’s is faring one year after the death of its president.’ Where did that come from?”

She chuckled. “You reporters aren’t the only ones who have sources, Joffe. Why?”

“Well, I’m finding stuff out, but it’s nothing catastrophic. We’re talking minor tremors, not major earthquakes. No higher than three on the Richter Scale.”

“Three can start the china rattling.” She had grown up in the Bay Area. When it came to seismic activity, she knew her Richter numbers. “If you need more time, take it. Just tell me you’re going to wind up with a worthwhile story.”

“I can make it work,” he promised, suspecting that she knew more about Bloom’s than she was letting on. She knew enough to think he was going to break a few plates with his article. If only she would share what she knew with him, it would make his life a hell of a lot easier. “I can’t figure out what angle to take. I have no idea who pointed you in Bloom’s direction, or why. Can you help me?”

Kim didn’t answer right away. She was a sharp editor, married to an equally sharp lawyer. When the two of them were in the same room, a kind of Ninja aura filled the air. “Someone told me the company was in trouble,” she finally said. “I was stunned. I thought, this is a New York institution. If Bloom’s falls, we’re going to have to question the existence of God.”

“So who told you the company was in trouble?” he pressed her.

“Someone close to me. Someone I trust. That’s all I’ll say, Joffe. Don’t give me a hard time, okay? Just write the damn story.”

“I’m doing my best.” He hung up, glared at his notes from his conversation with Reuben Melnick and muttered a couple of choice four-letter words. He had
something;
he knew that much. He just didn’t know what he had.

Other than a bad case of lust for Julia Bloom.

“I
don’t get it,” Jay said.

He was seated across from Stuart in one of those intense beef restaurants that had sprung up throughout the city. This one, modeled after a clichéd gentleman’s club with walnut paneling, leather chairs and inch-thick carpeting, specialized in martinis big enough to swim laps in and steaks sized by the pound. Jay had ordered a two-pound sirloin, even though he knew he’d never be able to finish it. Leaving food uneaten on his plate made him feel terribly upper class.

Stuart seemed intent on making small inroads into his twice-stuffed potato, which was the size of a bocce ball. Jay had opted for the steak fries, figuring it was hypocritical to worry about the extra fat when one was also ordering a two-pound sirloin. The steak fries were thicker than his thumbs and flavored with lots of salt and a hint of garlic.

After a lunch like this, he wouldn’t want a big dinner tonight. Maybe he’d skip dinner altogether. Wendy had tickets to some
thing for that evening—he wasn’t sure what, but it had to be better than the Messiaen concert she’d taken him to a few months back: two agonizing hours of atonal music. “I’m sorry,” she’d said. “I thought this was that really pretty thing they always play at Christmastime, where everybody stands and sings ‘Hallelujah.’”

Unlike the excruciating noisefest they’d sat through at Alice Tully Hall,
The Messiah
had real words—in English—and tunes you could hum, even if the composition celebrated a
goyish
holiday. His father had admired classical music and played it all the time while Jay was growing up. “Handel was Jewish,” the old man had insisted while they listened to Handel’s grand oratorio about the birth of Christ. “Even a genius has to earn a living, no? How was he supposed to earn a living writing Jewish songs? Those English kings and queens, they were footing the bills, so Handel wrote them Christian music.”

Jay could tolerate any kind of music, as long as it had a nice melody and words he could recognize. He wished he knew whether tonight’s concert qualified on either of those counts. “It’s for a good cause,” Wendy had explained, which worried him. A benefit concert meant she’d spent a fortune on the damn tickets, and he was probably going to have to sit through a sonata for glockenspiel and tuba, or some shrill, crystal-cracking soprano who had won the job by sleeping with the maestro.

“What don’t you get?” Stuart asked, apparently reaching a truce with his potato.

“My niece. She’s taking the whole store thing seriously.”

“Your niece who’s the new president of Bloom’s?”

“She’s a lawyer, for chrissake. What’s she doing running a delicatessen?”

“Bloom’s is more than a delicatessen,” Stuart pointed out. “It’s an institution.”

“Yeah, and the inmates are in charge.” Jay took a hefty slurp from his drink. A martini this size could probably get him painlessly through tonight’s cultural offering, but the effect
would wear off by the time he had to suit up and straighten his bow tie. It was barely one-thirty. By five, he’d be sober.

In fact, he was sober now. No one in his family was particularly susceptible to liquor. Sondra used to say it was because all the Blooms had high metabolism; they burned everything off too fast. She always said this with a deep sigh of envy. Not only did she have more heft than any of the Blooms, but she got tipsy on a few glasses of wine. Sondra tipsy was not a pretty sight.

“So, your niece is taking the job seriously,” Stuart said, gazing around the cozy midtown dining room. At least three other diners were indulging in cigars, and he pulled two out of an inner pocket of his blazer. “Cuban,” he told Jay. “One of my clients gave me a box of them. Kim would give me hell if I lit one up in the house.”

Kim was Stuart’s wife, and Jay had met her a few times. He wouldn’t wish to be on the receiving end of hell from her. Like Wendy, she was blond. Unlike Wendy, she was as tough as gristle, beautiful but hazardous. She worked as a magazine editor, and Jay had to assume she was born to the job. Barking orders at copy boys and shouting, “Stop the presses!” seemed like the sort of activity she’d excel at.

He accepted a cigar from Stuart. Not that he was any kind of a smoker, but why not? He’d already lowered his life expectancy with the well-marbled steak and the fries. How much more damage could a cigar do? He’d work it all off tomorrow at the health club.

“Can your niece handle the job?” Stuart asked once they’d both ignited their cigars and were exhaling pungent smoke at each other.

“She’s driving us crazy is what she’s doing,” Jay complained. “Last Monday she called a meeting. Can you believe it? A meeting.”

“What’s wrong with calling a meeting? We do that all the time at the firm.”

“Well, we
don’t
do it all the time. We’re a family, remember?
We get together for the High Holy Days and Pesach, and we barely survive that. Forcing us to get together on an occasion when God isn’t even in the room?” He shook his head. The cigar’s flavor was what he imagined elephant dung would taste like, but he still had a bit of martini left, and each cool sip rinsed off his tongue and rendered it pleasantly numb.

“And what happened at this meeting that drove you crazy?”

“She asked us to go through all the records. She’s insisting she has to know what departments are making money and what departments are losing money.”

“What’s crazy about that?”

“It’s not how we do things at Bloom’s. We’ve never done things that way. What does she think we are, a national chain? A franchise like McDonald’s? We’re family. We run on trust. We each have our areas, and we take care of them. No one’s counting how many bialys got sold last week, or how many jars of organic peanut butter. Things flow along.”

“Last time we talked about it, you said the store was shaky,” Stuart reminded him.

“So now Julia is determined to find out how shaky. Like that’s going to make a difference in the grand scheme of things.”

“It might.”

Jay drowned his irritation in a generous gulp of martini. Why was Stuart siding with Julia? A lawyer thing, he supposed. Their brains must have been trained in law school to worship details and fuss over trivia. “She says,” he told Stuart, because even if the guy was annoying he was a hell of an attorney, “we’re bleeding. Not exactly hemorrhaging, but oozing.” He took another draw on the cigar. Maybe he was getting used to it, because it tasted less like elephant dung and more like burned prunes, which was an improvement. “She’s so interested in bleeding, she should have gone to medical school.”

“Bleeding isn’t good, Jay,” Stuart commented. “Even if it’s just oozing.”

“So what do we need, a Band-Aid? She wants to be the president, let her put the Band-Aid on.”

“Does she know where the cut is?”

“If she does, she hasn’t told me. She’s been shut up inside Ben’s old office, reviewing records for days. Every now and then she tiptoes out and vanishes into Myron’s office, or Deirdre’s. Like she only trusts the non-Blooms.”

“Do you think she’s plotting against you?”

Jay hadn’t actually thought it through that far. That was why Stuart was so invaluable: he thought things through. “Who knows? I can tell you she’s not conferring with her mother, either. Or
my
mother. Maybe she’s plotting against the whole Bloom family. Maybe she’s going to figure out a way to cut us all out of the business. That would teach the old troublemaker a lesson,” he muttered, punctuating his bitterness by expelling a thick cloud of smoke.

“Your niece isn’t that old,” Stuart reminded him.

“My mother. She puts Julia in charge and look what happens. The kid takes over and cuts us all out of the action. As my sons would say, she hasn’t got a clue.”

“Maybe you could win points with your mother by locating the source of the bleeding and solving the problem yourself,” Stuart suggested.

Why did Stuart have to be so damn sensible? Especially after consuming profligate quantities of food and drink. This restaurant was the sort of place where privileged men came to sulk about the world beyond its doors. If Stuart were any sort of a friend, he’d indulge Jay in his sulking instead of coming up with all these clever solutions.

“My mother should have put me in charge, right from the start,” he grumbled.

“You’re right about that.”

“We wouldn’t be bleeding, then. Any blood left over from the year after Ben’s death, I would have mopped it up in no time flat.”

A waiter approached silently. Stuart gave a slight nod, and the man cleared away their plates. “The question is, are you going to sit around and do nothing while your niece fumbles? Are
you willing to risk the store just to prove your mother was wrong to name Julia the president?”

“My mother’s the one who put the place at risk.” In another frame of mind, Jay would have realized that if the store was at risk, his career was at risk, too. He received a regular dividend from the Bloom Building rentals, but he pulled a hefty income from the store, and he put that hefty income to good use. Golf, racquetball, Wendy, two-pound steaks—the best things in life were not free.

But he wasn’t ready to sweep in and rescue Julia. Not yet. Let her stumble a bit. Let her discover how incompetent she was when it came to managing Bloom’s. Let her try to solve whatever problems she found, and let her fail. Then Ida might come to her senses and give Jay the title he deserved.

If he were president of Bloom’s, the problems would have never been uncovered in the first place. What happened to a cut when you left it alone? It scabbed over and healed. As long as Julia insisted on poking at the cut, examining it, picking and probing, she was going to keep reopening it, and it was going to keep bleeding.

So let her be the one with blood on her hands, he thought, as he took a satisfyingly indignant puff on his cigar. Let Julia be the one getting blamed when the store refused to clot.

“Myron?”

For the third time in three days, Julia entered Myron’s small, cluttered office and shut the door behind her.

He was seated behind his desk, slathering a cranberry bagel with strawberry-flavored cream cheese. The abundance of pink hurt her eyes.

“Look at this,” he said, waving his colorful snack at her. “It’s like having a bowl of fruit, except better.” He took a hearty bite and grinned blissfully. Julia noticed a spot of cream cheese on his bow tie, but tactfully didn’t mention it.

She was glad he’d taken her up on her policy of having employees snack on the store’s food. It certainly seemed to have
improved his morale. “Actually, it’s bagels I want to talk to you about,” she said, dropping onto the metal chair wedged into the corner of his room. In her hands she carried a folder. She’d been examining its contents, running the numbers through her calculator over and over. “I’ve been worried about our bagel department since I first saw the figures last week. This should be our strongest department, right? I mean, bagels. What could be more Bloom’s than bagels?”

“Knishes,” he suggested.

She shook her head. “Knishes are a delicacy. Bagels are a staple. We’re selling tons of them, according to all the figures I’ve seen. More accurately, we’re turning over tons of inventory.”

“But?”

“But the income isn’t matching the number of bagels we’re selling. By my calculation, more than a hundred bagels are disappearing every week.”

He wiped his fingers on a paper napkin and gestured for her to pass him her folder. “How much more than a hundred?”

“It varies. Maybe a dozen dozen. What’s that called?”

“A gross.” He opened the folder, took another bite of his bagel and chewed as he read. “One gross a week? What are we talking?” He blotted his fingers with the crumpled napkin, then set them loose on his adding machine, flicking on its motor and hitting the keys so rapidly his fingertips scarcely touched the buttons. “A little more than a hundred dollars a week. Not a catastrophic loss, sweetie.”

Julia let the endearment go unchallenged. Myron had known her since her training-pants days. As long as he didn’t pinch her cheek, she’d cut him some slack. “In dollars and cents it’s not much. But it bothers me that it’s happening every week. I think someone’s stealing from the department.”

“What, one of the bagel guys? You’ve got Morty Sugar-man there—he’s been with Bloom’s for ages. The man’s solid as a rock.”

“Maybe he’s a rock who filches spare bagels.”

“Or maybe it’s the younger one—what’s his name?”

“Casey Gordon,” Julia muttered. Wouldn’t it be just swell if she had to inform her sister that the man she had a crush on was a bagel thief? “He’s the guy who introduced the cranberry bagels,” she told Myron.” He comes up with all the weird flavors.”

Myron looked stricken. He gazed adoringly at his pink bagel. “I hope he’s not your problem.”

“It’s more than just bagels, Myron. A few other departments are showing small but regular losses, too. The coffee department, the pastry department—everything’s selling, selling, selling, but the income isn’t matching up with the units sold. I’m guessing the reason no one has noticed this is that the sales numbers are so good. Nobody bothered to check and see whether the money coming in made sense.”

“So.” Myron popped the remainder of his bagel in his mouth, swallowed and patted his lips with his napkin. “What are you going to do about it?”

“I was hoping you could give me some ideas.”

“What am I, Scotland Yard? I’m an accountant, bubby. You got theft, you need to find out who’s stealing. Simple as that.”

Julia snorted. As simple as
what?
Hiring an army of rent-a-cops to patrol the store? Installing hidden cameras like the ones they used in convenience stores and banks? This was Bloom’s they were talking about. Bloom’s had an aura, a style—and that style did not accommodate mechanisms for spying on shoplifters.

Unfortunately, she doubted the problem was shoplifters. Shoplifters wouldn’t be moving merchandise out of the store so regularly, in such constant quantities. This was something else, something organized, something premeditated.

Myron patted the folder as affectionately as he would have patted the hand of a loved one. “The store’s breaking even, right? It’s been breaking even for a while. So it’s not growing. This is not the end of the world. I stopped growing when I was fourteen, and I’ve lived another fifty years so far without any ill effects.”