Redemption Street (25 page)

I took the card and got out, Gray Suit closing the door behind me. He smiled at me, but it wasn’t that smile of perfect artifice. It had elegant cracks in it, like an old china cup, broken and glued back together. Gray Suit felt pain, other people’s pain. I guess he wanted me to know that. For the first time I wondered if he had a life, what his name might be. The black Lincoln was gone before I could inquire. When I turned toward the shop, Gus the dry cleaner waved again. He hadn’t moved from his chair.

Unlike the shock of mixed feelings I experienced walking into the shop, I was exhilarated stepping through the door to my house. In a city of seven million there are about 6,295,306 renters. I’d grown up a renter, lived as a renter, and would likely have died a renter if not for Katy. Katy gave me a sense of permanence, even if it was only an illusion. She made me see that life, by its very nature, thrust transitions upon us. Why add artificial insecurity to the mix if you could avoid it? And if I had needed any more convincing, watching Sarah’s birth sealed the deal. She wouldn’t have to worry year to year, as I had the whole time I was growing up, if we were going to lose our lease.

Though we never lost that lease and we never moved from that shitty four-and-a-half-room apartment, I had made the move ten thousand times in my head. My dad’s financial circumstances always left us a phone call away from Allied Van Lines. I had said goodbye to my friends, thrown my last pitch, all in anticipation of what was never to come. I would not inflict that gnawing anxiety on my daughter. Nor would I find it impossible to utter the phrase: “Everything will be all right.” Katy taught me to believe that.

Katy heard me come in. She tiptoed up to me, her index finger across her lips. Sarah was sleeping. It was just as well, I thought, noticing the tear streaks on my wife’s face. There was no use in pretending about Patrick. He had been gone for four years now. I was convinced he had run, with good reason, as far away from his father as was humanly possible. Katy, without the advantage of knowing what had transpired between her little brother and her father, suspected Patrick had met a darker fate. Neither of us believed we would ever see Patrick again, though Katy tortured herself with hope.

She pressed herself into me, and I let her press as long and hard as she needed. I stroked her hair, kissed her forehead. After a few minutes, she noticed the Ace bandages wound around my left wrist and the bottle of Dom Perignon in my right hand. When she started to ask about the wrist, I pressed my index finger across her exquisitely thin lips. I hoisted up the bottle.

“I’m gonna put this on ice, and we’ll drink to your brother, okay?”

She kissed my ear and whispered: “Thank you.”

“Meet me upstairs,” I said. “We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”

Katy hadn’t gotten up one step when we heard Sarah happily chatting away. We both sort of shrugged.

“Don’t think you’re getting off so easy, mister,” Katy chided playfully. “You owe me.”

She was right, of course, I owed her everything. I told myself that, later, if the moment was just right, if we’d had just enough champagne, if we’d tired ourselves out properly, I’d tell her the truth about Patrick’s disappearance. I knew I wouldn’t. I owed her everything, but there would always be one debt I’d be afraid to pay.

Chapter Fifteen
December 8th

I let Katy sleep while I changed and fed Sarah. It had been too long a time since I just sat and played with my little girl. We got a kick out of
Sesame Street
, especially since Sarah had overcome her Big Bird-phobia. For her first birthday party/family barbecue, I had the brilliant idea of hiring a guy in a Big Bird suit. Unfortunately, the lovingly klutzy, unthreatening character on TV is only several inches tall. In person, his seven-foot-plus, yellow-feathered torso scared the hell out of all the kids. And since it was ninety-six degrees and humid, Big Bird fainted from dehydration and heat exhaustion. Aaron videotaped me pulling off Big Bird’s head in front of twenty freaked-out kids and giving CPR to the out-of-work actor inside the suit. All in all it was a fiasco, but the kind of fiasco that made me smile. I knew it would be a story we’d all laugh about for the rest of our lives.

Eventually, Katy wandered on downstairs. It’s my guess she had lounged about upstairs to give Sarah and me some extra time together. We put Sarah in her swing and had breakfast together. Katy didn’t understand and I wasn’t ready to explain exactly why I wasn’t in the mood for eggs, bacon, and potatoes. We settled on toast and coffee. It was pleasant to once again taste coffee that tasted like coffee. I had to go. I was about to turn many people’s worlds upside down. For most of them, the next twenty-four hours would probably not be the kind of day to look back upon and smile. Some fiascos are only several days in the making, some several years.

“Thanks for last night,” Katy whispered in my ear, trying to fight back tears. “Try not to get beat up for a few days, okay? It’s harder on me than you think.”

“I’ll be all right. Everything will be all right.” I kissed her lightly, but held her for a few minutes.

“I don’t know why,” Katy confessed, “but I almost feel sorry for Andrea.”

I was taken aback. “She probably murdered sixteen people, hid it for as many years, and helped blackmail her brother. With her brother’s money and influence behind her, I doubt she’ll spend more than a few years behind bars. She’ll cop a plea and the world will forget. It always does.”

“I guess you’re right,” she said without much conviction. “I’m just being silly. What are you going to do about Sam?”

“One life at a time, kiddo. One life at a time. Andrea’s, first of all.”

Last summer’s hit was playing on WNEW as I hit the Bronx, and I couldn’t shake it. It was stuck in my head, doing a fierce pas de deux with the lines I was rehearsing to say to all the other players. Doomed by its infectious hook to the annals of one-hit-wonder-land, I thought the song ironically apropos. I was a one-hit wonder myself. I tried to focus. “… Jenny, don’t change your number, I need to make you mine …” It was hopeless. “… 867-5309, 867-5309, 867-5309 …”

By the time I hit old Route 17, I knew what I would say to Andrea almost as well as the lyrics of that stupid song. Parts of me still considered dealing with the ancillary players first: Sam, Lieutenant Bailey,
et al.
But, like I had told Katy, Andrea was necessarily top of the pops. Her debts were biggest, and by choosing to trust R. B. Carter, I might have already given her opportunity enough to slip away. It wouldn’t be the first time. And Sam was the wild card. I hoped he’d bought my act and hadn’t spent the time I was away covering his ass and discarding evidence. I’d know soon enough. The old bungalow colony was just ahead.Walking from the car to the longhouse, I flashed back to the last time I’d seen Andrea Cotter. I could smell the dirty salt water off Coney Island Beach. I felt her touch on my shoulder, a touch I had dreamed about since our days at Cunningham Junior High School. I turned around to see her hair blowing across her pale face in the afternoon breeze. I heard her politely asking if I was Moses Prager. I remembered that I suddenly believed in God. I felt the pen in my hand, the pen I’d used to sign her magazine. I could still see her walking down the boardwalk away from me, never turning to look back.

My heart was racing again, as it had that spring day sixteen years before. Even now, after all these years, in spite of Katy and Sarah, sixteen bodies, and the treachery, the fantasy endured. I remembered what Katy had said about Romeo and Juliet. Juliet was awakening after sixteen years, but this time the blood on her hands would not be hers.

Judas Wannsee was waiting for me alone in the big room. I recalled the feeling of being watched during my first visit here, remembered the video cameras.

“You’ve considered my words,” he said.

“As a matter of fact, I have. A lot of what you said made sense. Maybe assimilation is the curse you say it is, and maybe I’ll get gassed in the next Holocaust no matter what I do or who I know. Anyway, you know that’s not why I’m here. Where is she?”

“Bungalow Eight,” he answered. “Just knock and enter. The door will be open. She’s been waiting for this day a long time. She’s been with us long enough to know you cannot escape your destiny.”

“It doesn’t stop people from trying, does it?” I mumbled.

“Who would know that better than you?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He smiled at me. “You were at a meeting. I think you know exactly what it means.”

“Well, thanks anyway.”

“Don’t thank me,” he warned. “Even when we think we know the gifts we’re about to receive, we can be surprised.”

“Is it the mountain air or what? Can’t anybody up here just say what they have to say?”

He laughed. “I suspect your answer to that question is in Bungalow Eight. No matter the answer, remember to ask yourself if you’re a proud Jew.”

Finding Bungalow 8 required no map, only elementary math skills. Hence, Aaron would have argued, I was at a disadvantage—arithmetic was never my forte—but I managed to find the cabin nonetheless. My palms were sweaty. My heart … Forget my heart. From the moment I put my directional on to turn into the old bungalow colony, my pulse rate was revving higher than my engine. I tried imagining what Andrea would look like after all these years, what toll the years of deception had taken on her. It was already abundantly clear what toll her deception had taken on everyone else. I raised my hand and knocked. The door fell back without my even having to turn the handle.

It was dark and musty inside the little shack, shafts of light slicing through the shadows like steel sabers through a magician’s trick box. I sensed her presence. I could hear her breathing, I thought I could smell her breath. Like her brother, Andrea felt comfortable hiding in the shadows. She must have gotten very used to it.

“Come on, Andrea, let’s get this over with. It’s been a long time coming.”

She didn’t say anything, but I could hear her move. A frail arm flashed in the light and out again. Her breathing was labored. And the smell of the atmosphere, which I had taken for mustiness, was something different altogether. The air was sour and antiseptic all at once, like the poor wards at the old municipal hospitals.

“Please,” I appealed, “let’s make this easy.”

A light snapped on. An unshaded lamp made out of a tree branch sat on a similarly constructed nightstand. My hostess stood just beyond the footprint of the bare bulb, in the corner of the room. Her face was difficult to make out, but her plain clothes and yellow star were unmistakable. She took a step forward.

Now my heart simply stopped.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she said, laughing sardonically, grabbing her side in pain.

I couldn’t speak. I felt a thousand things in one impossible jolt: rage, fear, confusion, disappointment, panic.

“I have seen a ghost,” I mumbled at last, “just not the one I expected to see. Where’s Andrea?”

“Dead. She’s been dead for sixteen years.”

“But the poems … I don’t understand.”

An object flew out of the shadows. I flinched reflexively, though I was in no real danger of being hit. Something thumped on the floor at my feet.

Karen Rosen said: “Pick it up.”

It was a girl’s journal. The spine had been taped and retaped over the years. The entries on the delicate yellowed pages dated back to the early sixties. There were poems on some of the pages, Andrea’s poems. I bet there was also an entry about her brother playing doctor with Cousin Helen.

“I took it the night of the fire,” Karen volunteered. “Talk about an albatross…. But it contains everything an aspiring extortionist needs.” She laughed that laugh again, wincing as she did. “I never wanted any part of that—the blackmail, I mean.”

“You had a long time to stop,” I admonished. “And you didn’t.”

“I had only one chance to stop,” she said, “sixteen summers ago. After that, what did any of it matter?”

“What really happened that night?”

“What really happened is that I murdered sixteen people.” She hesitated, as if to gather strength. “Listen, I will tell you everything, and I will abide by whatever decision you make about how to handle things.”

“There’s a ‘but’ here somewhere, right?” I wondered skeptically.

“You have to hear me out, completely. You won’t like a lot of it.”

“I haven’t liked most of it to this point. Nothing you say’s gonna change that.”

“Will you hear me out?” she shouted breathlessly.

“Agreed.”

For the first time, Karen stepped fully into the light and sat down on the bed in front of me. She was thin like some of the other Yellow Stars, but her skin was terribly jaundiced. Initially I thought it was just the light from the cheap bulb that gave her skin that sickly tone, but no bulb was that cheap, and only those fancy new streetlights were that yellow.

“It had been a horribly rainy summer,” Karen began. “It was bad all around. Just before Andrea and I came up here, my boyfriend … Do you remember Steven Glickman?”

I raised my hand over my head. “Tall kid, black hair, good-looking, played on the baseball team—yeah, I remember him.”

“He broke it off with me, and when Arthur found out he went apeshit and threatened Steven that he’d kill him if he hurt me again. That pretty much ruined any hope for the two of us getting back together. He really fucked that up, my big brother.”

I wondered how much she knew about Arthur’s extraordinary efforts to find out what had happened to his little sister, or if she knew what had become of him. I wasn’t going to tell her—not yet, anyway.

“My first week up here, I found out my dad lost his job and that he probably wasn’t going to have the money to send me to Brandeis. Brooklyn College, here I come. Then I got the worst possible station in the dining room. My tables drove me crazy and didn’t tip for shit. I thought about going back home. I was lonely and depressed and … God, I wished I’d gone home.”

“So do seventeen families,” I said tersely.

So far Karen wasn’t exactly scoring a lot of points on the empathy meter. Kids break up. Kids go to work. Kids get lonely. Kids don’t usually murder anybody.