Pipsqueak (5 page)

Chapter 7

T
he apartment was dark when I got home, and by the look of things Angie had turned in. So I quietly shouldered the front door shut, flipped the bolts, took a step forward, and placed the parking sign on the soda bar. This was the curbside parking regulation sign from in front of our home, which I’m compelled to manipulate so I can park with impunity.

Maryland is for Crabs, and Virginia is for Lovers. But as you enter New York City, the welcome signs actually greet you with:
PARK LEGALLY AND AVOID TICKET AND TOW
. Our city motto should read,
Don’t Get Mad, Get Even.
And I get even by switching the signs in front of my building. When I’m not around, the
NO PARKING ANYTIME
sign holds my spot. When I get home, a little quick work with a cordless drill and the sign suddenly reads,
NO PARKING M
–
W
–
F
8
AM TO
6
PM
or
NO PARKING T
–
TH
–
SAT
8
AM TO
6
PM
, depending on the day and time.

Anyway, my eyes were adjusting to the gloom as I walked behind the soda bar to the refrigerator. I grabbed a beer and turned to open it on the counter. In the folding wedge of light from the fridge, I caught a glimpse of two hairy, naked feet. I froze. Someone was lying on the bar.

From the darkness came a lilting, Slavic drawl. “Eh, Garv, it’s lookink, my friend, yes?”

“Otto.”

“Yes, Garv, eetz Otto, old friend. How’s looking?” Otto’s silhouette was suddenly sitting upright on the bar, his oaken grasp pumping my wilted palm. He flicked a lighter, and his impish goateed face glowed with happy wrinkles. “Ah, you lookink, Garv, very lookink.”

Lookink
is just one of Otto’s vernacular inventions that can mean many things, one of which is
looking good
. He’s a Soviet émigré with a unique brand of pidgeoninski English, one of these fellows who is like a stray dog you ultimately regret bringing home but can’t bring yourself to ditch. Angie discovered him fixing watches in the subway some years ago and drafted him into her service for jewelry production work like soldering and polishing. I found use for him cleaning and repairing taxidermy. Then he left us to fulfill a lifelong dream: to become part of the American beach subculture, preferably at a nude beach. That was over a year ago.

“Otto, I thought you were in Maine. Selling hot dogs on the beach.”

“Garv, December, very bad hot dogs sell. I go Calivornia. Burritos, very nice. And veemin! Nice, not like burrito. Maybe like voodchuck, soft, round, eyes big, but teeth, maybe not so big, and—”

“Must you sleep on the bar, Otto?” I turned on a deer-foot lamp. “We have a perfectly nice sofa right over there.”

He flashed his steel dental work. “In gulag, Otto sleeped at floor. When KGB punish Otto, make to sleep him on vooden pole, eh?” He showed me with his hands how wide the pole was, and I remembered his previous rendition of the story. Apparently, when he was in the gulag, one of the punishment devices was a horizontal wooden pole no wider than your wrist, upon which a prisoner was required to stay for days at a time. This was more difficult than it sounds, and if your foot touched the ground or you fell off, guards would beat you and throw you into an isolation box towed out onto a frozen lake where you’d likely freeze to death. Otto perfected a technique of lying on the pole, his spine perfectly aligned so that he could sleep balanced on the rod.

“Back like rock,” he continued. “Bed like bosom. Very nice, but no good to sleep, Garv. Tell to me: Yan-gie, she say may for you work at Otto, yes?”

I poured some beer into mug number thirty-seven and handed it to my friend the mutt, whose pajamas were Lakers sweats. “I guess, maybe. But why did you leave California?”

“Have come New York to see Luba.” He slurped foam.

“You’re not still married.” Apparently, Otto was married, in a fashion, to a woman named Luba. He’d go back to her for a while and then get thrown out again. We’d never met her, but by piecing together Otto’s reports she was a veritable gorgon who didn’t put up with any of his nonsense.

“But of course.”

“Luba will take you back, after you left her?”

“Otto go to beach, not leave.”

“Well, how come you’re not with Luba tonight, then?”

Otto put an arm around my shoulder. “Garv and Yan-gie not married, yes? Veemin, when marry, animal not same. Not like rabbit, or voodchuck.” He squinted in thought at his beer. “Luba like bear. When vinter stop, like bear very angry. Except Luba not bite, she throw. Maybe deesh, maybe chair, maybe knife, and—”

“I get the idea.” I slid out from under his arm and the stench of tar plus nicotine. “She threw you out. But you can’t tell me you came all the way back here to see Luba.”

Otto stroked his pointy little beard, grinning to himself. “Ah, Garv, I miz my friends.”

Smiling, I patted him on the shoulder. “See you tomorrow, Otto.” I put my empty mug in the sink and headed for the bedroom.

I sat on the edge of the bed, and Angie said sleepily, “Guess who’s back in town?”

“Our favorite Russian gnome?” I peeled off a sneaker. “Yeah, I found him stretched out on the bar. Like the good ol’ days.” The other shoe dropped.

“Well, I couldn’t turn him away, Garth, could I?”

I stared up at the woolly buffalo head facing the bed.

“Could I?” Angie kicked me from under the sheets.

“You? I guess not.”

Chapter 8

O
f course, I was up half the night explaining all about little brother Nicholas, and Angie was afforded plenty of time to digest the whole story and formulate an opinion by the time we sat down to one of Otto’s breakfasts the next morning.

While Otto isn’t what I’d call a chef, he is a fine cook of various Slavic and a few Afghani dishes. This morning it was paprika poached eggs in a cheese sauce on potato pancakes. On the side were freshly baked biscuits resembling scones. And no Otto breakfast is complete without fruit piroshkis, little dumplings bursting with berries. Decked out in my red and white barbecue apron that said
CHEF
,
DAMMIT
, he swirled around the kitchen stirring, mashing, frying, serving, clearing, and finally washing, all the while humming one of those noble, soaring Soviet anthems.

While Otto has a myriad of less endearing traits, these are almost evenly offset by his agreeable domestic functions. When in our employ, there are no tasks he disdains. If he sees that we are running out of professional jewelry/taxidermy duties for him, we soon find him waxing the floors, cleaning windows, regrouting the tub, ironing shirts, or cooking dinner. He even rotated the tires on the Lincoln. After a couple of weeks of that, you wonder how on earth people live without full-time domestic help.

Angie and I’d finished our meal and were dawdling over coffee.

“So?” Angie said, apropos of nothing of which I was aware.

I glanced up at her from my latest Yasco Taxidermy Supply catalog and sipped coffee. I didn’t answer.

“So, what about Nicholas?”

“Nothing about Nicholas,” I shrugged.

“He’s your brother, Garth. You have to talk to him.”

“Nope.”

“Darling—”

“Angie, this is not open to discussion.” My coffee cup landed on the table with a thud. “If I want to shun my brother, that’s my right. I don’t tell you how to deal with your siblings.”

“As an orphan, I never had the luxury.”

“Yeah, well . . .” My phone rang, and I jumped up to get it.

“Got your blue jay ready,” a voice boomed. “Wanna come git him?”

“Sure, Dudley, be over right away.”

“Got the ring?”

“I’ve got the ring.”

“What you waitin’ for, then?!” He hung up.

“Blue jay ready?” Angie asked. I grabbed my sport coat.

“Yup. He needs me to come over right away to get it, before he goes, uh . . .” I snapped my fingers, searching for the destination. “. . . back home to ol’ Virginny.” I stood behind Angie’s chair and kissed her on the head, giving her shoulders a reassuring squeeze.

“Last time I checked, Dudley’s hometown, Memphis, was in Tennessee.” She pushed her head back into my chest and looked up into my eyes. “Garth, please, I want you to think about Nicholas. You can’t afford to discard family.”

She put her face back into the morning paper. “Don’t forget the ring box.”

I palmed a tiny black velvet box out of the armadillo mail basket next to the front door. “See ya, Sweetums.”

Dudley lives about twenty-five short blocks from me. Using the gridiron conversion factor, that’s about twenty-one football fields. Though with metric the new standard, I suppose we should start converting to soccer fields, which would make Dudley’s, uh . . . Anyway, he’s walking distance on a nice day, due south, near the corner of Renwick and Canal Streets. He’s got a studio loft in a narrow, white brick carriage house, one of those landmark Federal-style buildings sandwiched between grimy postwar warehouses and auto repair shops. Two wooden barn doors form the building entrance, and the ground floor is Dudley’s garage and workshop.

By profession, he’s an electronics whiz, high-end auto security being a recent specialty. The “alarms” use space-age resources once the sole province of the NSA, NORAD, and the Strategic Defense Initiative. One or two of which, as it so happens, are Dudley’s former employers. He can’t talk about it, and elects not to talk about what goes into his most popular product, Shadow Box. Made of some exotic polymer (in either flat black or white), these sleek little boxes the size of radar detectors are adorned only with one cryptic blinking blue diode. No knobs, buttons, wires, dials, displays, suction cups, hook/loop fasteners, attachments, or switches. Just the little blue blinking light and the embossed words
Air Freshener
. He installs it on the ceiling of your vehicle next to the dome light and clips a chip to your car key, and Shadow Box knows when an intruder has entered the vehicle.

What exactly happens next is open to conjecture—Dudley won’t say. I’ve never seen it in action, but apparently there’s a blue flash and the intruder is “strenuously repelled.” It’s my guess Shadow Box produces a static charge of some kind. In any event, the intruder is zapped like a june bug, after which he usually stumbles out of the vehicle and crumples to the ground, presumably the victim of the
narcotique du jour
. (The “zap” effects are supposedly temporary, but I don’t think the motorist owners of these devices would lose any sleep if the thief were irreparably brain-damaged.) Back at the Bat Cave, Shadow Box has communicated with the chip in the car key, which beeps and blinks blue light. The next course of action is up to the individual motorist. Theo in the East 70s might call the cops and have the “drugged-out” bounder arrested, while Joey out in Sheepshead Bay might just acquaint the intruder with the business end of a Louisville Slugger.

A legal device? Nope, which is why Shadow Box is labeled
Air Freshener
. But it fills a demand among victimized, frustrated, and ultimately vindictive New York motorists with a hankering to kick a little butt. Motorists, that is, with five thousand dollars to spare and the patience to stand in line up to a year for installation. Dudley doesn’t advertise or discuss details over the phone. It’s all word of mouth and all cash.

Upstairs in the studio is where Dudley practices his hobby—avian taxidermy—and that’s where I found him after he buzzed me through the front door. Songbirds are his specialty. Not only is his trade illegal, but so is his hobby.

Most songbirds are protected under both federal (the 1912 Migratory Bird Treaty Act) and New York State law. In some cases, a particular bird might also be listed as Endangered and Threatened as per Title 50, Part 17.11 & 17.12 (Subpart B), by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife statutes. And it’s also possible that a particular bird might be on the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora & Fauna (CITES), Appendices I, II, & III, Title 50, Part 23, Subpart C. What all this means is that it is illegal to be in possession of, say, a bald eagle
living or dead . . . and all parts readily recognizable as parts or derivatives thereof
. . . . Exceptions are made in some cases if you are (or supply) an accredited institute of learning, in which case you have to fill in a lot of confusing paperwork—confusing because much of it is scripted for housing live animals. I’ve done it for many of my mounts that are endangered or protected species, and it requires crossing out and correcting the language of the form itself. While I have sold to various museums, I also have mounts like Fred that are permitted based on the provision of proof they were harvested before 1972 when CITES went into effect.

I support the protection of endangered, protected, and migratory bird species; Dudley does too. But as anybody who watches the evening news can tell you, the law is often nonsensically inflexible in some areas while alarmingly permissive in others. For example, if you find a dead chickadee—one that croaked on its own—you are not permitted to keep it, much less have it mounted. If you find a hawk feather or a gull skull, you may not keep it. Strictly by the letter of the law, these items must be turned over to the authorities so they can be destroyed, even if you can provide documentation that you just found them. And birds, like all animals, die quite regularly as a matter of course, completely free of human murderous intent.

Like most of the citizenry, I’ll go along with the law as long as it makes common sense and as long as it is enforceable. In New York City, we’ve got only a couple of special cops out there policing almost eight million potential violators of Title 50 and CITES. They’re kinda busy busting folks hustling bins of fresh tiger penises and rhino horns. Chances of their getting around to tracking down that blue-jay feather in your curio case are exactly nil. And I think if you tried to give them a dead hummingbird for a proper government-approved disposal, they’d tell you to give it a flume ride to alligator land.

Which all brings us to last January, when Angie and I found a dead jay lying peacefully on the snow, waiting to be molested by the next passing house cat. Damn pretty bird too, so I brought it to Dudley for mounting. It’s mainly for our permanent collection, and I can’t see getting in dutch as long as I don’t try to sell it.

Dudley is fifty-one and looks like a bulldog. Brown and bowlegged, with big forearms, a prominent jaw, and furrowed brow, he is completely oblivious to his canine appearance. Unlike a bulldog, though, his forthright demeanor is mostly attributable to his whiz-kid brain. He made a hell of a foreman when we met at jury duty on a whiplash case eight years ago. But our friendship didn’t really take off until we met again at our next tour of duty. See, since they drag you in to jury duty every so many years, it’s not unusual to see some of the same people caught in the same cycle. This time, we weren’t on the same jury, and it wasn’t taboo to eat lunch together (they’re afraid you’ll gab about the case—a no-no).

“Best jay mount you’ll ever see, you old rag-picker!” Dudley pointed a thick finger at me from his workbench as I entered the loft. He was at his computer, which was neatly arranged with all its hardware—modems, zip drives, zap drives, what have you—on a rolltop desk. Reclining in an old wooden four-caster I got for him on Park Avenue, his outfit made him look something like a bulldog would as a southern sheriff: red suspenders and matching Dickies khaki work shirt and pants.

Wainscoting encircled the room, and it was topped with a ledge boasting perhaps fifty domed songbird mounts. Above them, dozens of framed photos and paintings of songbirds crowded out the bare walls.

“I’ll be the judge of that, Dudley. I have seen a lot of bird mounts in my day.” I put out my hand. Oops: I forgot. He’s a tactilophobe and doesn’t shake hands with anybody. In fact, he tries to avoid touching anything he doesn’t have to. The way he sees it, New York is a hotbed of influenza. Dudley’s paranoia has some validity in fact, once you start to look around at the infectious threat of everyday things—elevator buttons, ATMs, doorknobs, handrails. Whenever possible, Dudley uses his pinky finger to operate ATMs, elbows to push elevator buttons, and he’ll shoulder open whatever doors he can or time his entry with someone else’s exit. Gloves? “They just collect germs,” he says.

“Voilà!” With a flourish, he whisked a white silk hanky from the blue-jay mount.

Perched on a birch branch nub, the jay sported an erect crest, his beak parted and his wings partially open. Not like he was about to take flight, rather like he was warding off an approaching rival with bluster and a long chatter.

I beamed, turning the birch log so as to admire the mount from all sides. “Ve-ry nice indeed. Truly, one of a kind.”

“And where’s mine, ragpicker?” He tried to fold his arms, but they were too bulky.

“Voilà!” I put a small black velvet ring box in his paw, and he eagerly snapped it open with the silk handkerchief. “Three-quarter-carat pinkish oval, flanking aquamarine baguettes, platinum setting. Here’s the supply invoice.” Bartered services, the tax cheat’s best friend.

“I de-clare!” He gasped. “It’s stupendous! I tell you, Carmela is going to go ape!”

I swallowed a burp of laughter. Only the other day Angie remarked that Carmela was hairy as an ape. “When you going to pop the question?” I thought of adding “You dog, you!” but behaved.

“This very eve! Today! Maybe right now!”

“Down, boy!” I heard myself say. “Take her to a candlelit dinner tonight and do it then. Romantic, you know?”

“Says you. What do you know about it, Romeo? No ring on Angie’s finger.” He squeezed the ring onto his pinky and admired it at arm’s length, alternately giving me a suspicious look.

“Can’t go wrong doing something romantic. Besides, it’s the way they do it in the movies, a reliable touchstone for what women hope men would do if, in fact, men weren’t fundamentally insensitive louts.”

“Carriage! A carriage ride, maybe? Or the Empire State observation deck!”

“Corny as all get-out, but probably win you points in the long run.”

Dudley struggled to get the ring off his pinky. “Now, how come that clever gal of yours never compelled you to bend your knee and look longingly into her eyes?”

“Marriage? She could just as well propose to me, thank you very much.”

“Hilarious. Really, Gawth, how come?” He grunted, then smiled in relief as the ring came off.

“I guess I never felt she—or I—had to be conscripted into marriage in order to commit.”