Israel (43 page)

They waited until she had left to begin digging the grave. As they worked one of the men said, “She is cold like that because she has British blood.”

Yol disagreed. “She is like that because she is born and bred a Palestinian.”

“Don't cry, don't cry,” Abe Herodetsky mumbled in his sleep. “I'll fix it. Don't cry—”

“Abe, wake up!” Leah prodded, startled awake by her husband's moans. “Wake up, wake up.”

He came out of his nightmare soaked with sweat, gnawing at the back of his hand to keep from screaming. He bolted upright, eyes wide and wild as they peered into the bedroom's shadowy corners. “Haim—”

“You were muttering in Russian,” Leah told him, “dreaming of the old days in Russia, that's all.”

Abe, still dazed, nodded vaguely. “Yes, a dream.” He shuddered. “What a dream, Leah. It goes back to when I was a youth—”

“Not so loud. You'll wake the baby.”

“Becky's sleeping in the parlor with the door closed. She can't hear me.” Still, he turned on his side and put his head close to Leah's on the pillows so he could whisper.

“I was in my village in Russia. I was maybe seventeen and Haim about eleven. I had begun to teach him to be a cobbler.” He laughed a trifle hysterically. “All this is
the true part, you understand. . . . One day he was cutting leather and the blade slipped, giving him a nasty gash between his thumb and index finger. It bled something awful. Haim began to cry and I went to tend to him.”

“Nu?” Leah sleepily demanded. “That's all of it?” She turned over, wiggling her backside until it was pressed against his belly. “Sleep . . .” she yawned.

“No, wait. Here's the nightmare part,” Abe whispered. “In between Haim's cutting his finger and my going to him, he ended up in Gallipoli with the Zion Mule Corps. Remember when that was in the newspapers and I was so worried about whether Haim was there? Well, in my dream he was, but as a little boy, you see? Remember that photograph they published? That battlefront scene with all the dead men and the blown-up wagons—well, that was where I was looking for poor little Haim. He was crying for me, and there was all that blood, but to reach him I had to step over the corpses of those dead soldiers . . . Leah?”

He couldn't see her face, but he could tell from her shallow, rhythmic breathing that she'd fallen back asleep.

And why shouldn't she sleep? Abe asked himself. The baby runs her ragged the whole day.

He reached over to the nightstand, brought the alarm clock close to his face and squinted. It was eleven o'clock.

“It's still Sunday night,” Abe muttered to himself, “still March twenty-fourth. That is what's real. My dream is not.”

He leaned back against the pillows and closed his eyes. They popped open. He was haunted by the image of that hazy corpse-strewn battlefield with little Haim in the middle of the carnage, covered with his own blood as he cradled his cut hand and called for Abe to come soothe him.

Haim, something is very wrong. I know it is, Abe brooded. Something has happened to you.

Across the bedroom the clothing heaped upon a chair
began to slither like snakes. That's my eyes playing a trick in the dark, Abe thought. It's an illusion, as was my dream. Leah is right. There's nothing to be concerned about. Haim is no doubt quite fine. My dream is not about Haim but about my own unhappiness.

He got out of bed quietly so as not to disturb Leah. There was no point in trying to sleep. He stepped into his slippers, wrapped a flannel robe about his nightshirt and went out into the parlor.

Their daughter Rebecca, five months old, was sound asleep in her crib. She was a good baby that way, rarely waking before they got up.

Abe gazed down at his tiny daughter. I love you, he thought. I am very happy to have you, my Becky. Then he silently rapped his knuckles on the wooden railing of the crib.

Knock wood, Abe said to himself. Count your blessings, just like Dr. Henderson advised you. Let God know that you are thankful in case He should misunderstand.

His nightmare concerning Haim had sprung from his own disappointment over not having a son. His disappointment made him feel guilty, which ruined his sleep, causing nightmares. It was quite simple.

He went into the kitchen, closed the door and switched on the overhead fixture. Squinting in the harsh glare, he stooped down to open the cupboard beneath the sink. He reached back, stretching and straining to get his hand into the narrow space between the wall and the pipes. His fingers touched the neck of the bottle. He carefully threaded the quart of vodka through Leah's maze of cleansers and brought it over to the kitchen table.

He sat down heavily and stared at the bottle in front of him. My secret friend, he thought, despising himself. He had opened the bottle Friday evening and it was already half empty. I hate you, he told the bottle. He'd smuggled it into the apartment while Leah was in the
bedroom getting dressed for Sabbath dinner at Sadie and Joseph's.

He took a swig. The stuff went down like the tonic he sold to the children in the store, or at least the stuff he used to sell before President Wilson's food administrator, Herbert Hoover, instituted his voluntary food rationing. The “wheatless Mondays, meatless Tuesdays,” and so on made an empty-shelved grocery store a dreary place to be. The war had even led to suspension of the manufacture of liquor.

Abe helped himself to another drink. “Here's to you, Stefano,” he toasted his friend. Stefano seemed to know where to get everything, including hard drink. There was no shortage of coal in Stefano de Fazio's buildings during this chilly spring, and he always had plenty of gasoline for his trucks and his automobile. Everything Stefano touched turned to gold.

A little while ago there had been something in the newspapers concerning his most recent acquisition. The owner of a meat-packing plant on Washington Street claimed that certain business mishaps and union troubles that plagued him had been instigated by Stefano. The newborn news tabloids enjoyed a field day with their “meat war” headlines, but the whole matter blew over when the
Daily News
published an exclusive, the meat packer's public apology and retraction of all of his accusations.

He sold his business to Stefano at a reduced price and moved away. Stefano won, but the affair cost him. No longer did his name make the respectable papers. There were no more pictures of him shaking hands with celebrities. Stefano seemed hardened by the experience as well. He confided in Abe that friends of the packer had made threats against his life. He'd hired men to protect him—bodyguards, not thugs, despite what the rags printed.

Abe didn't doubt what Stefano told him, and even if
he had, the time had long since passed—if it had ever been—when he would dare to contradict Stefano de Fazio.

Abe had another drink. If only I had Stefano's luck. Just a couple of weeks ago Stefano's wife had presented him with his fifth child. Granted, it was a girl—christened Dolores—but there was nothing wrong with daughters when a man already had two sons.

And there is nothing wrong with only having the daughter, Abe chided himself. Becky is healthy, thank God.

How he hated himself when he was ungrateful like this. His ingratitude was a stain upon him. No matter how he tried to train himself to be happy, to be thankful, his disappointment cropped up.

No son. Never a son
—The realization soured him. He was mean to Leah. He would nag her until she cried. She never defended herself, and that compounded his remorse.

Have another drink, Abe told himself as he sat alone with his bottle in the kitchen of the silent apartment. Drink and count your blessing's.

But he couldn't, and that made him wonder when and how God would punish him, not only for his ingratitude, but also for being a drunkard. Drinking brought him some relief by rescuing him from his own mind, but always the alcohol wore off, leaving him even more miserable than before. Never again will I take a drop, he'd swear, but soon his unhappiness drove him back to the bottle and the beginning of another cycle of despair.

He pointed the bottom of the bottle toward the ceiling, draining it of its last drops. The vodka had done its work. He would sleep now.

Abe put the empty bottle on the back staircase. He'd take it downstairs when he opened the store a few hours from now. Tomorrow when Leah wasn't there to see him he'd hide another someplace in the apartment.

Stefano had given him a case. Next month another
one would be delivered, just like the one Abe had furtively, desperately drunk the month before.

A case a month; twelve cases a year. He could survive.

Meanwhile he would run the Cherry Street Market and care for his family. He would do his best to keep his bitterness inside, where it could do Leah and Becky no harm.

Eight bottles to the case; two quarts a week. When the war finally ended business would pick up. He would fall back into the old routine, fueling himself with Stefano's liquor.

Haim, what has become of you? Abe wondered. “And what has happened to me?” he asked the empty kitchen. He sat down again.

Twelve cases a year, year in, year out. Abe began to cry. He sat alone in the kitchen, his head cradled in his arms, his face pressed against Leah's embroidered tablecloth. He wept and wept, locking his sobs with his sorrow deep inside, so as not to disturb his family.

“Abe's my good luck charm,” Stefano de Fazio liked to tell everyone, including Abe himself. When Stefano considered how far he'd come since his start as a lowly presser fifteen years ago, he knew that what he'd always said about Abe was true. The Jew had brought him luck.

Back in 1910 it was a two-hundred-dollar stake; in 1912 it was Abe's testimonials during the election. Once he was in, it had been relatively easy to “borrow” funds from the union's coffers, and once he had some money to work with, the connections had come easy.

Things got a little shaky for Stefano after the war. The government was no longer shipping materiel, the scandal about the takeover of that packing plant caused a lot of his side business to dry up. His warehouses sat empty, and Stefano tried to sell them, but luckily, he'd been unable to find a buyer with the funds to pay cash during the postwar recession.

Then came Prohibition as of January 16, 1920. There were suddenly millions of gallons of legally made booze to
be stored away for safekeeping. A lot of it went into federal warehouses, but there was still an overflow, and the word went out that Uncle Sam was accepting bids for storage contracts. Thanks to his War Department connections, Stefano was able to get a sizable piece of that action. His warehouses on both sides of the Hudson were soon filled with barrels and cases of premium liquor. The government was paying him top dollar for his space besides coughing up a surcharge to cover a security force to guard the valuable property.

The small army of security personnel were all hand-picked by Antonio Bucci, Stefano's most trusted business partner. It was Tony who supervised the operation, seeing to it that the security men were equipped to steal the liquor out of the warehouses and transport it to a network of speakeasies and under-the-counter sales outlets. A case a month went to Abe's grocery store free of charge. It was Stefano's way of making up for the fact that he was far too busy to continue his visits to Cherry Street. De Fazio's organization under Tony Bucci's stewardship charged everyone else a bundle.

Tony was ten years younger than Stefano. He had been a fabric cutter back in the old days and had served as Stefano's campaign manager during the run for treasurer. Tony was a homely, prematurely bald man who wore extremely thick eyeglasses from which he acquired the nickname Tony Gemstones among his cronies. These included Dutch Schultz and young Al Capone, who had once belonged to Brooklyn's Five Points gang but had gone on to better things in Chicago as Johnny Torrio's second.

The thick glasses, taken with his glistening scalp, sallow complexion and vacant expression, made people underestimate Tony, which was a bad mistake. He was an avid reader, an expert at accounting, totally ruthless and as loyal as a dog to Stefano de Fazio.

It was Tony who understood the ramifications of the
Russian Revolution in '17 and convinced Stefano that he should quit the union before the activities of the socialistic Jews brought unwanted public attention.

In 1918, when Stefano wanted to buy out the meat packer, it was Tony who orchestrated—as he had several times before—the harassment and violence meant to cut the selling price and coerce silence. When the scandal broke, leading to embarrassing publicity and hushed, urgent telephone calls warning of an imminent federal investigation, it was Tony who kidnapped the meat packer from his home late one night and took him to one of Stefano's warehouses.

It had been not Tony but Stefano who pressed a revolver to the man's temple and warned him that if he did not cooperate, his brains would splatter across the cement floor and his corpse would be found bobbing in the inky waters of the Hudson.

The meat packer agreed to retract his accusations and sell out at a rock-bottom price, believing correctly that Stefano was quite capable of carrying out the threat. He had already done so five times.

Abe Herodetsky did not know this any more than Mrs. de Fazio did. Maria, a chubby, kind-hearted woman, considered her husband a god for having moved the family out of Little Italy to a home of their own near Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn. The move took place in September of 1923, approximately a month and a half after President Harding died in the White House in the aftermath of the Teapot Dome scandal. Calvin Coolidge took over so successfully that he was easily elected in November 1924.

On election night Stefano threw a party, though Abe and Leah Herodetsky were not invited. Stefano had contributed heavily to various campaigns, and most of his candidates were considered shoo-ins. That night he capered triumphantly, like a tout at the track on his lucky day. Stefano had always been an advocate of the fix, and now
he'd bought himself more protection than any man he knew.