Idiots First (12 page)
Authors: Bernard Malamud
But he finished the picture on Saturday night, Angelo's gun pressed to his head. Then the Venus was taken from him and Scarpio and Angelo baked, smoked, stippled and varnished, stretched and framed Fidelman's masterwork as
the artist lay on his bed in his room in a state of collapse.
the artist lay on his bed in his room in a state of collapse.
“The Venus of Urbino, c'est moi.”
“What about my three hundred and fifty?” Fidelman asked Angelo during a card game in the padrone's stuffy office several days later. After completing the painting the copyist was again back on janitorial duty.
“You'll collect when we've got the Tiziano.”
“I did my part.”
“Don't question decisions.”
“What about my passport?”
“Give it to him, Scarpio.”
Scarpio handed him the passport. Fidelman flipped through the booklet and saw all the pages were intact.
“If you skidoo now,” Angelo warned him, “You'll get spit.”
“Who's skidooing?”
“So the plan is this: You and Scarpio will row out to the castello after midnight. The caretaker is an old man and half deaf. You hang our picture and breeze off with the other.”
“If you wish,” Fidelman suggested, “I'll gladly do the job myself. Alone, that is.”
“Why alone?” said Scarpio suspiciously.
“Don't be foolish,” Angelo said. “With the frame it weighs half a ton. Now listen to directions and don't give any. One reason I detest Americans is they never know their place.”
Fidelman apologized.
“I'll follow in the putt-putt and wait for you halfway between Isola Bella and Stresa in case we need a little extra speed at the last minute.”
“Do you expect trouble?”
“Not a bit. If there's any trouble it'll be your fault. In that case watch out.”
“Off with his head,” said Scarpio. He played a deuce and took the pot.
Fidelman laughed politely.
The next night, Scarpio rowed a huge weatherbeaten rowboat, both oars muffled. It was a moonless night with touches of Alpine lightning in the distant sky. Fidelman sat on the stern, holding with both hands and balancing against his knees the large framed painting, heavily wrapped in monk's cloth and cellophane, and tied around with rope.
At the island the major domo docked the boat and secured it. Fidelman, peering around in the dark, tried to memorize where they were. They carried the picture up two hundred steps, both puffing when they got to the formal gardens on top.
The castello was black except for a square of yellow light from the caretaker's turret window high above. As Scarpio snapped the lock of an embossed heavy wooden door with a strip of celluloid, the yellow window slowly opened and an old man peered down. They froze against the wall until the window was drawn shut.
“Fast,” Scarpio hissed. “If anyone sees us they'll wake the whole island.”
Pushing open the creaking door, they quickly carried
the painting, growing heavier as they hurried, through an enormous room cluttered with cheap statuary, and by the light of the major domo's flashlight, ascended a narrow flight of spiral stairs. They hastened in sneakers down a deep-shadowed, tapestried hall into the picture gallery, Fidelman stopping in his tracks when he beheld the Venus, the true and magnificent image of his counterfeit creation.
the painting, growing heavier as they hurried, through an enormous room cluttered with cheap statuary, and by the light of the major domo's flashlight, ascended a narrow flight of spiral stairs. They hastened in sneakers down a deep-shadowed, tapestried hall into the picture gallery, Fidelman stopping in his tracks when he beheld the Venus, the true and magnificent image of his counterfeit creation.
“Let's get to work.” Scarpio quickly unknotted the rope and they unwrapped Fidelman's painting and leaned it against the wall. They were taking down the Titian when footsteps sounded unmistakably in the hall. Scarpio's flashlight went out.
“Sh, it's the caretaker. If he comes in I'll have to conk him.”
“That'll destroy Angelo's planâdeceit, not force.”
“I'll think of that when we're out of here.”
They pressed their backs to the wall, Fidelman's clammy, as the old man's steps drew nearer. The copyist had anguished visions of losing the picture and made helter-skelter plans somehow to reclaim it. Then the footsteps faltered, came to a stop, and after a moment of intense hesitation, moved in another direction. A door slammed and the sound was gone.
It took Fidelman several seconds to breathe. They waited in the dark without moving until Scarpio shone his light. Both Venuses were resting against the same wall. The major domo closely inspected each canvas with one eye shut, then signaled the painting on the left. “That's the one, let's wrap it up.”
Fidelman broke into profuse sweat.
“Are you crazy? That's mine. Don't you know a work of art when you see it?” He pointed to the other picture.
“Art?” said Scarpio, removing his hat and turning pale. “Are you sure?” He peered at the painting.
“Without a doubt.”
“Don't try to confuse me.” He tapped the dagger under his coat.
“The lighter one is the Titian,” Fidelman said through a dry throat. “You smoked mine a shade darker.”
“I could have sworn yours was the lighter.”
“No, Titian's. He used light varnishes. It's a historical fact.”
“Of course.” Scarpio mopped his brow with a soiled handkerchief. “The trouble is with my eyes. One is in bad shape and I overuse the other.”
“Tst-tst,” clucked Fidelman.
“Anyway, hurry up. Angelo's waiting on the lake. Remember, if there's any mistake he'll cut your throat first.”
They hung the darker painting on the wall, quickly wrapped the lighter and hastily carried it through the long hall and down the stairs, Fidelman leading the way with Scarpio's light.
At the dock the major domo nervously turned to Fidelman. “Are you absolutely sure we have the right one?”
“I give you my word.”
“I accept it but under the circumstances I'd better have another look. Shine the flashlight through your fingers.”
Scarpio knelt to undo the wrapping once more, and Fidelman, trembling, brought the flashlight down hard on Scarpio's straw hat, the light shattering in his hand. The major domo, pulling at his dagger, collapsed.
Fidelman had trouble loading the painting into the rowboat but finally got it in and settled, and quickly took off. In ten minutes he had rowed out of sight of the dark castled island. Not long afterward he thought he heard Angelo's putt-putt behind him, and his heart beat erratically, but the padrone did not appear. He rowed as the waves deepened.
Locarno, sixty kilometers.
A wavering flash of lightning pierced the broken sky, lighting the agitated lake all the way to the Alps, as a dreadful thought assailed Fidelman: had he the right painting, after all? After a minute he pulled in his oars, listened once more for Angelo, and hearing nothing, stepped to the stern of the rowboat, letting it drift as he frantically unwrapped the Venus.
In the pitch black, on the lake's choppy waters, he saw she was indeed his, and by the light of numerous matches adored his handiwork.
Winter had fled the city streets but Sam Tomashevsky's face, when he stumbled into the back room of his grocery store, was a blizzard. Sura, who was sitting at the round table eating bread and salted tomato, looked up in fright and the tomato turned a deeper red. She gulped the bite she had bitten and with pudgy fist socked her chest to make it go down. The gesture already was one of mourning for she knew from the wordless sight of him there was trouble.
“My God,” Sam croaked.
She screamed, making him shudder, and he fell wearily into a chair. Sura was standing, enraged and frightened.
“Speak, for God's sake.”
“Next door,” Sam muttered.
“What happened next door?âupping her voice.
“Comes a store!”
“What kind of a store?” The cry was piercing.
He waved his arms in rage. “A grocery comes next door.”
“Oi.” She bit her knuckle and sank down moaning. It could not have been worse.
They had, all winter, been haunted by the empty store. An Italian shoemaker had owned it for years and then a streamlined shoe-repair shop had opened up next block where they had three men in red smocks hammering away in the window and everyone stopped to look. Pellegrino's business had slackened off as if someone were shutting a faucet, and one day he had looked at his workbench and when everything stopped jumping, it loomed up ugly and empty. All morning he had sat motionless, but in the afternoon he put down the hammer he had been clutching and got his jacket and an old darkened Panama hat a customer had never called for when he used to do hat cleaning and blocking; then he went into the neighborhood, asking among his former customers for work they might want done. He collected two pairs of shoes, a man's brown and white ones for summertime and a fragile pair of ladies' dancing slippers. At the same time, Sam found his own soles and heels had been worn paper thin for being so many hours on his feetâhe could feel the cold floor boards under him as he walkedâand that made three pairs all together, which was what Mr. Pellegrino had that weekâand another pair the week after. When the time came for him to pay next month's rent he sold everything to a junkman
and bought candy to peddle with in the streets; but after a while no one saw the shoemaker any more, a stocky man with round eyeglasses and a bristling mustache, wearing a summer hat in wintertime.
and bought candy to peddle with in the streets; but after a while no one saw the shoemaker any more, a stocky man with round eyeglasses and a bristling mustache, wearing a summer hat in wintertime.
When they tore up the counters and other fixtures and moved them out, when the store was empty except for the sink glowing in the rear, Sam would occasionally stand there at night, everyone on the block but him closed, peering into the window exuding darkness. Often, while gazing through the dusty plate glass, which gave him back the image of a grocer gazing out, he felt as he had when he was a boy in Kamenets-Podolskiy and going, three of them, to the river; they would, as they passed, swoop a frightened glance into a tall wooden house, eerily narrow, topped by a strange double-steepled roof, where there had once been a ghastly murder and now the place was haunted. Returning late, at times in early moonlight, they walked a distance away, speechless, listening to the ravenous silence of the house, room after room fallen into deeper stillness, and in the midmost a pit of churning quiet from which, if you thought about it, all evil erupted. And so it seemed in the dark recesses of the empty store, where so many shoes had been leathered and hammered into life, and so many people had left something of themselves in the coming and going, that even in emptiness the store contained some memory of their vanished presences, unspoken echoes in declining tiers, and that in a sense was what was so frightening. Afterwards when Sam went by the store, even in daylight he was afraid to look, and quickly walked past, as they had the haunted house when he was a boy.
But whenever he shut his eyes the empty store was stuck
in his mind, a long black hole eternally revolving so that while he slept he was not asleep but within revolving: what if it should happen to me? What if after twenty-seven years of eroding toil (he should years ago have got out), what if after all of that, your own store, a place of business ⦠after all the years, the years, the multitude of cans he had wiped off and packed away, the milk cases dragged in like rocks from the street before dawn in freeze or heat; insults, petty thievery, doling of credit to the impoverished by the poor; the peeling ceiling, flyspecked shelves, puffed cans, dirt, swollen veins; the backbreaking sixteen-hour day like a heavy hand slapping, upon awaking, the skull, pushing the head to bend the body's bones; the hours; the work, the years, my God, and where is my life now? Who will save me now, and where will I go, where? Often he had thought these thoughts, subdued after months; and the garish FOR RENT sign had yellowed and fallen in the window so how could any one know the place was to let? But they did. Today when he had all but laid the ghost of fear, a streamer in red cracked him across the eyes: National Grocery Will Open Another Of Its Bargain Price Stores On These Premises, and the woe went into him and his heart bled.
in his mind, a long black hole eternally revolving so that while he slept he was not asleep but within revolving: what if it should happen to me? What if after twenty-seven years of eroding toil (he should years ago have got out), what if after all of that, your own store, a place of business ⦠after all the years, the years, the multitude of cans he had wiped off and packed away, the milk cases dragged in like rocks from the street before dawn in freeze or heat; insults, petty thievery, doling of credit to the impoverished by the poor; the peeling ceiling, flyspecked shelves, puffed cans, dirt, swollen veins; the backbreaking sixteen-hour day like a heavy hand slapping, upon awaking, the skull, pushing the head to bend the body's bones; the hours; the work, the years, my God, and where is my life now? Who will save me now, and where will I go, where? Often he had thought these thoughts, subdued after months; and the garish FOR RENT sign had yellowed and fallen in the window so how could any one know the place was to let? But they did. Today when he had all but laid the ghost of fear, a streamer in red cracked him across the eyes: National Grocery Will Open Another Of Its Bargain Price Stores On These Premises, and the woe went into him and his heart bled.
At last Sam raised his head and told her, “I will go to the landlord next door.”
Sura looked at him through puffy eyelids. “So what will you say?”
“I will talk to him.”
Ordinarily she would have said, “Sam, don't be a fool,” but she let him go.
Averting his head from the glare of the new red sign in the window, he entered the hall next door. As he labored up the steps the bleak light from the skylight fell on him and grew heavier as he ascended. He went unwillingly, not knowing what he would say to the landlord. Reaching the top floor he paused before the door at the jabbering in Italian of a woman bewailing her fate. Sam already had one foot on the top stair, ready to descend, when he heard the coffee advertisement and realized it had been a radio play. Now the radio was off, the hallway oppressively silent. He listened and at first heard no voices inside so he knocked without allowing himself to think any more. He was a little frightened and lived in suspense until the slow heavy steps of the landlord, who was also the barber across the street, reached the door, and it wasâafter some impatient fumbling with the lockâopened.
When the barber saw Sam in the hall he was disturbed, and Sam at once knew why he had not been in the store even once in the past two weeks. However, the barber became cordial and invited Sam to step into the kitchen where his wife and a stranger were seated at the table eating from piled-high plates of spaghetti.
“Thanks,” said Sam shyly. “I just ate.”
The barber came out into the hall, shutting the door behind him. He glanced vaguely down the stairway and then turned to Sam. His movements were unresolved. Since the death of his son in the war he had become absent-minded; and sometimes when he walked one had the impression he was dragging something.
“Is it true?” Sam asked in embarrassment, “What it says downstairs on the sign?”
“Sam,” the barber began heavily. He stopped to wipe his mouth with the napkin he held in his hand and said, “Sam, you know this store I had no rent for it for seven months?”
“I know.”
“I can't afford. I was waiting for maybe a liquor store or a hardware but I don't have no offers from them. Last month this chain store make me an offer and then I wait five weeks for something else. I had to take it, I couldn't help myself.”
Shadows thickened in the growing darkness. In a sense Pellegrino was present, standing with them at the top of the stairs.
“When will they move in?” Sam sighed.
“Not till May.”
The grocer was too faint to say anything. They stared at each other, not knowing what to suggest. But the barber forced a laugh and said the chain store wouldn't hurt Sam's business.
“Why not?”
“Because you carry different brands of goods and when the customers want those brands they go to you.”
“Why should they go to me if my prices are higher?”
“A chain store brings more customers and they might like things that you got.”
Sam felt ashamed. He didn't doubt the barber's sincerity but his stock was meager and he could not imagine chain store customers interested in what he had to sell.
Holding Sam by the arm, the barber told him in confidential tones of a friend who had a meat store next to an A&P Supermarket and was making out very well.
Sam tried hard to believe he would make out well but couldn't.
“So did you sign with them the lease yet?” he asked.
“Friday,” said the barber.
“Friday?” Sam had a wild hope. “Maybe,” he said, trying to hold it down, “maybe I could find you, before Friday, a new tenant?”
“What kind of a tenant?”
“A tenant,” Sam said.
“What kind of store is he interested?”
Sam tried to think. “A shoe store,” he said.
“Shoemaker?”
“No, a shoe store where they sell shoes.”
The barber pondered it. At last he said if Sam could get a tenant he wouldn't sign the lease with the chain store.
As Sam descended the stairs the light from the top-floor bulb diminished on his shoulders but not the heaviness, for he had no one in mind to take the store.
However, before Friday he thought of two people. One was the red-haired salesman for a wholesale grocery jobber, who had lately been recounting his investments in new stores; but when Sam spoke to him on the phone he said he was only interested in high-income grocery stores, which was no solution to the problem. The other man he hesitated to call, because he didn't like him. That was I. Kaufman, a former dry goods merchant, with a wart under his left eyebrow. Kaufman had made some fortunate real estate deals and had become quite wealthy. Years ago he and Sam had stores next to one another on Marcy Avenue in Williamsburg. Sam took him for a lout and was
not above saying so, for which Sura often ridiculed him, seeing how Kaufman had progressed and where Sam was. Yet they stayed on comparatively good terms, perhaps because the grocer never asked for favors. When Kaufman happened to be around in the Buick, he usually dropped in, which Sam increasingly disliked, for Kaufman gave advice without stint and Sura sandpapered it in when he had left.
not above saying so, for which Sura often ridiculed him, seeing how Kaufman had progressed and where Sam was. Yet they stayed on comparatively good terms, perhaps because the grocer never asked for favors. When Kaufman happened to be around in the Buick, he usually dropped in, which Sam increasingly disliked, for Kaufman gave advice without stint and Sura sandpapered it in when he had left.
Despite qualms he telephoned him. Kaufman was pontifically surprised and said yes he would see what he could do. On Friday morning the barber took the red sign out of the window so as not to prejudice a possible deal. When Kaufman marched in with his cane that forenoon, Sam, who for once, at Sura's request, had dispensed with his apron, explained to him they had thought of the empty store next door as perfect for a shoe store because the neighborhood had none and the rent was reasonable. And since Kaufman was always investing in one project or another they thought he might be interested in this. The barber came over from across the street and unlocked the door. Kaufman clomped into the empty store, appraised the structure of the place, tested the floor, peered through the barred window into the back yard, and squinting, totaled with moving lips how much shelving was necessary and at what cost. Then he asked the barber how much rent and the barber named a modest figure.
Kaufman nodded sagely and said nothing to either of them there, but back in the grocery store he vehemently berated Sam for wasting his time.
“I didn't want to make you ashamed in front of the goy,” he said in anger, even his wart red, “but who do you
think, if he is in his right mind, will open a shoe store in this stinky neighborhood?”
think, if he is in his right mind, will open a shoe store in this stinky neighborhood?”
Before departing, he gave good advice the way a tube bloops toothpaste and ended by saying to Sam, “If a chain store grocery comes in you're finished. Get out of here before the birds pick the meat out of your bones.”
Then he drove off in his Buick. Sura was about to begin a commentary but Sam pounded his fist on the table and that ended it. That evening the barber pasted the red sign back on the window, for he had signed the lease.
Lying awake nights, Sam knew what was going on inside the store, though he never went near it. He could see carpenters sawing the sweet-smelling pine that willingly yielded to the sharp shining blade and became in tiers the shelves rising to the ceiling. The painters arrived, a long man and a short one he was positive he knew, their faces covered with paint drops. They thickly calcimined the ceiling and painted everything in bright colors, impractical for a grocery but pleasing to the eye. Electricians appeared with flourescent lamps which obliterated the yellow darkness of globed bulbs; and then the fixture men hauled down from their vans the long marble-top counters and a gleaming enameled refrigerator containing three windows, for cooking, medium, and best butter; and a case for frozen foods, creamy white, the latest thing. As he was admiring it all, he thought he turned to see if anyone was watching him, and when he had reassured himself and turned again to look through the window it had been whitened so he could see nothing more. He had to get up then to smoke a cigarette and was tempted to put on his
pants and go in slippers quietly down the stairs to see if the window was really soaped. That it might be kept him back so he returned to bed, and being still unable to sleep, he worked until he had polished, with a bit of rag, a small hole in the center of the white window, and enlarged that till he could see everything clearly. The store was assembled now, spic and span, roomy, ready to receive the goods; it was a pleasure to come in. He whispered to himself this would be good if it was for me, but then the alarm banged in his ear and he had to get up and drag in the milk cases. At eight A.M. three enormous trucks rolled down the block and six young men in white duck jackets jumped off and packed the store in seven hours. All day Sam's heart beat so hard he sometimes fondled it with his hand as though trying to calm a wild bird that wanted to fly away.
pants and go in slippers quietly down the stairs to see if the window was really soaped. That it might be kept him back so he returned to bed, and being still unable to sleep, he worked until he had polished, with a bit of rag, a small hole in the center of the white window, and enlarged that till he could see everything clearly. The store was assembled now, spic and span, roomy, ready to receive the goods; it was a pleasure to come in. He whispered to himself this would be good if it was for me, but then the alarm banged in his ear and he had to get up and drag in the milk cases. At eight A.M. three enormous trucks rolled down the block and six young men in white duck jackets jumped off and packed the store in seven hours. All day Sam's heart beat so hard he sometimes fondled it with his hand as though trying to calm a wild bird that wanted to fly away.
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