Israel (53 page)

“And they weren't just our Jewish customers,” Abe added. “There were goyim as well. They made that Irish bunch hesitate long enough for me to telephone Stefano, and he sent some of his men to chase them away. But it was our customers—including Mr. Ronzi—who saved us.”

“Because even then we gave credit?” Becky smiled, egging him on. Talking business was one of the few things that could bring the light to his eyes. “They owed us, Father?”

“Because when the seller treats the buyer right it's like magic. Buying and selling is what made the first civilization. Love, hate—all emotions—as well as the act of taking by force—animals can do all that. But to work out a system where goods and services are exchanged in a fair manner—this only mankind can do. It's what separates us from the animals.”

Abe winked. “Every night you go off to the library. I see the books you bring home, every one of them on retailing, but there are still a few things I can teach you that maybe the big shots who write the books don't know.”

“Like letting the customers run up six-dollar tabs they haven't a hope of paying?”

“‘Cut 'em off when they don't pay,' is that what those fancy books tell you? Well, if I did tell Mr. Ronzi that he couldn't charge anymore, you know what would happen? He'd be ashamed to face us, which means that he'd do his shopping somewhere else. Now, somewhere else probably wouldn't give him credit. He'd have to use his cash to feed his family, which means that he wouldn't
be able to pay us anything at all on the bill. We'd lose a customer and the six dollars. The way we're handling it now, he pays us a little and he charges a little. Eventually he'll make good on the whole thing, believe me.”

Becky was charmed. She'd studied revolving credit, but here was her father explaining it to her as if he'd invented it.

Abe was collecting the credit slips and putting them away. “Believe me, I can't get nervous about being owed a few dollars now that people have money in their pockets again. God bless Roosevelt. Not when it was so bad a few years ago. You remember those days, yes?” Abe shook his head.

“We gave nothing but credit in those days, and the wholesalers gave credit to me. Everybody was so happy just to keep each other from going under. If a customer could pay me a little something or else trade me a pair of pants from his business or a nice dress for my little girl, that was all right too.”

“I remember how all of a sudden the men started pushing the baby carriages and shopping for their wives, who were taking in sewing.”

“All the sweatshops had laid off their workers,” Abe interjected.

“They used to hang around to talk with you about politics. Remember the to-do when the Arabs revolted in Palestine? It must have been ten years ago, the summertime. I remember because it was so hot. The Jews held a big demonstration in the city against the British. You wanted to march and carry a sign, but you couldn't go because you didn't want to close the store and I was still too young to stay here alone. I remember one of the men who used to hang around shot off his mouth that he was a Communist and that the Arabs were right to fight for the liberation of their land from the capitalist Jews. I never saw you get so
mad. That was the first and only instance of you throwing out a customer.”

“A putz like that, his business I didn't need. Besides, he was the second one. You should have heard what I said to Mrs. O'Malley, who made your mother fall off that ladder.”

“Father,” Becky began, “you have taught me a lot about business.”

“That's for sure,” Abe agreed, turning to the cash register.

“Maybe you could teach Danny some things.”

“Hah!” He rang up “No Sale” to open the cash drawer and removed the rumpled dollar bills.

“Really, Father. He wants to work here.”

“Come upstairs. It's time for supper.” Abe put the sheaf of bills under the loose floorboard that had served as his safe for so many years.

“I was already working weekends at his age.”

“He can't do anything except mouth off to me,” Abe snapped. “I can't trust him. He's not reliable.”

“Father—”

“We'll see.” Abe waved away the conversation. “Maybe when he's older.”

Becky sighed. It was hopeless. Her father hadn't even asked where he was so late at night.

“Come on, turn out the light and we'll have supper.”

Becky glanced at the clock: eight-twenty. “1 was hoping to get to the library.”

“I can't cook the supper like you do. You make it just like your mother used to—what? Why are you looking at me so funny? Come, I'm hungry.” He shuffled away toward the stairs.

Sighing. Becky followed. There was always tomorrow night for the library.

*     *     *

It was a cold night, but that suited Danny. He walked with his hands jammed into his pockets, his coat collar turned up, an unlit Lucky Strike dangling from his lips. In cold weather coats and scarves bulked up a scrawny fellow's build, making him look tougher. An upturned collar helped as well, as did the cigarette. As soon as the cigarette got damp and began to shred, Danny would throw it away and replace it with a fresh one. He never lit up, it made him cough and that was not tough. He had half a dozen assorted packs in his pockets, filched from the store while Becky was upstairs fetching his coat.

Danny strode along Division Street. It was nine o'clock, and for the hour and a half since leaving Cherry Street Danny had been loitering outside the branch of the New York Public Library located on Jefferson near East Broadway. That was the branch Becky used, and Danny had been watching for her to show up. He did that most nights, never letting his sister know that he was watching for her, but taking comfort all the same in knowing her whereabouts on his nocturnal wanderings.

Tonight she hadn't shown. Danny guessed his father had thought up some excuse to keep her home. The old man often did stuff like that, and Becky always took it.

Danny made a right on Eldridge. Two doors up was Jerome's Luncheonette, a dingy hole-in-the-wall with a long black counter and high-topped stools bolted to the black and white checkered tile floor. Other than Jerome, the old geezer of an owner, Danny had never seen an adult in the place. It was where Rudy Lipsky and his chums hung out, drinking Cokes and smoking cigarettes, when they weren't out cracking Irishmen's skulls.

“Here he is,” Rudy told his friends as Danny entered the luncheonette. Rudy Lipsky was fifteen years old and stood six feet tall. He was pimply and fat but also strong. He didn't mind being hit in a fight as long as he could give back what he got. The other boys in the gang—Alan, Leo
and two named David—were all in their early teens. All were smaller than Rudy but much larger than Danny, whom they called the little pisher.

“You got 'em?” Rudy demanded.

Danny, a doglike grin creasing his features, nodded. “Two Pall Malls, three Chesterfields—” He was making a conscious effort to slur like Rudy. He put the cigarettes on the counter. “It's thirty-five cents.”

Jerome eyed the exchange, but a hard look from Rudy sent the elderly counterman back to polishing his soda glasses. Cigarettes were selling for nineteen cents a pack, so Rudy and his boys were getting a good deal.

“You know, kiddo, I'd buy more if you'd bring 'em,” Rudy offered.

Danny nodded. “I can't take any more than this at a time, Rudy. My old man'll get wise.”

“Yeah, well—” Rudy shrugged and lit a match on his thumbnail to puff a Chesterfield.

“What you doin' with the money, anyways?” one of the other boys asked as he slit open a pack of Pall Malls. “Bet you get all the candy and tonic and Pall Malls you wants from your old man's place,” he continued enviously.

“He don't sell—” Danny shut up. What he needed the money for was a secret he was not about to share, not even with Rudy's gang.

“You beat it, now, pisher,” Rudy muttered, blowing blue cigarette smoke into Danny's upturned face. “Come back when you're growed.”

The other boys laughed, just as they always did. “Unless you got more smokes to peddle,” one of them added. Danny shook his head, turned and trudged out of the luncheonette. Outside he turned up his coat collar against the wind and hurried up Eldridge.

Always it was the same hope and always the exact same disappointment. How he longed to join Rudy's gang, to belong, to walk full of pride with the other boys,
patrolling the neighborhood, keeping it safe from roving gangs.

He was too small. He just didn't measure up, not to the other boys and not to his father.

He turned left on Delancey and continued to where it intersected with the Bowery. He walked uptown past the darkened shops until he reached the East Village.

He got careful here. No cigarettes hanging from his lip, no tough sauntering. When he crossed East Houston he'd entered into an ill-defined strip of no-man's land, a buffer zone between the Jews of the Lower East Side and the Italians who owned the West Village. A Jew, even a tough guy like Rudy, could get hurt if the wrong sort got hold of him. Danny furtively darted along, staying out of the streetlamps' glow. At times like this being puny was an advantage. He breathed a sigh of relief as he entered the candy store on East Fifth between Second Avenue and the Bowery. In a few minutes he would have what he'd come for and be on his way home.

The confectionery was owned by an old woman, a Christian—his father would have said goy, Danny contemptuously thought. She was Polish and always seemed to be knitting. Danny had rarely seen anyone else in the store, but then he was invariably here at night. A glass counter display of penny candy occupied the front of the little store. The wall opposite was full of shallow wooden shelving above which peeked the colorful mastheads of a vast assortment of slick picture magazines and pulps.

The middle rows of the display comprised
Life, Collier's
and
Time
. Danny ignored them all, as he ignored the crime and western pulps, the automotive periodicals and the ones that featured sports personalities. Behind him the old woman's steel knitting needles clacked implacably. She had the biggest assortment of current titles.

He zeroed in on the lower left-hand corner of the display. That was his special territory, the aviator pulps.

He was in luck. The new issues of
Bill Barnes, Air Adventurer
and
G-8 and his Battle Aces
were on sale. He snatched a copy of each off the rack, feasting his eyes on the cover paintings. As usual, G-8 and his crew were fighting their eternal World War One, skidding their British-built Sopwiths, Vickers guns blazing, through smoky mauve shooting-gallery skies filled with the Huns' blood-red Fokkers. The
Bill Barnes
cover depicted futuristic aircrafts, sleek mono-winged torpedo-shaped flying machines, that existed only in the pages of the pulps and a boy's imagination.

When it happened Danny couldn't say—when the notion of being an aviator took hold in his soul. All he knew was that on the rare occasion that an airplane passed overhead, Danny stopped whatever he was doing to crane his head and shield his eyes against the sun in the hope of catching a glimpse of it.

When you were high in the clouds, higher even than the Empire State Building, it didn't matter if you were puny. When you were behind the control stick you called no man your better and you left your earthbound cares behind.

He'd read everything on aviation in the children's section of the library and devoured what was to be had in the adult section, thanks to Becky's cooperation. He was an avid follower of
Scorchy Smith, Barney Baxter
and
Smilin' Jack
in the daily and Sunday funnies. Last year for Hanukkah Becky had given him the Big Little edition of
Tailspin Tommy and the Sky Bandits
. How he loved that book and loved his sister for getting it for him.

He paid the old woman a dime apiece for the two pulps, stuck them in his jacket and zipped it up. He was halfway out the door when he paused, thought a moment and then returned for
Mechanix Illustrated
.

His father didn't make such a stink about the flying books if he also had something “educational” to read. He
always told his father he found the magazines and the old man either believed him, or didn't care.

Anyway, if all it took was
Mechanix Illustrated
to shut his father up, Danny was willing to pay the cover price. Making his father happy kind of soothed his conscience over swiping the smokes in the first place.

Anyway, that stuff in
Mechanix Illustrated
was kind of interesting.

It would be some weeks before his induction into the army could be arranged, the people at the Jewish Agency told Herschel Kol. With active participation in the war looming before him, it made little sense to Herschel to attend classes. He stayed up for most of every night reading—tracts by Jabotinsky, newspapers that covered the crisis events in Europe, David Raziel's manuals on small arms and the Old Testament, the prophecies of which the Irgun considered manifestos of the future.

He would drag himself from his bed toward noon and stay at the apartment until he could no longer bear his mother's icy despair. Then he would wander the streets of the Old City.

Herschel believed that his decision to enlist was right, but he fretted over Frieda's reaction to it. Frieda hated the British, and with good reason. To Jews too young to remember World War One and any recently arrived in Palestine, the British were not merely political adversaries but murderers. Even before the publication of the white
paper, the British had turned refugee ships packed with Jews back to the concentration camps.

Herschel stayed out of contact with the lrgun after his attack on the coffeehouse, and what they might think of his decision to enlist did not concern him. Not that he imagined they'd think much about it one way or the other. The lrgun had exploited his talents while they were available and would do so again if the opportunity presented itself. The discipline of the Haganah did not exist for the followers of Raziel and Stern. Members came and went—the fact that the organization was so loosely knit had allowed it to survive the arrest of its leaders.