Tender Is LeVine: A Jack LeVine Mystery (16 page)

“Since the end of May.”

“It’s September, Jack,” he said helpfully.

“How does NBC explain that?” Barbara asked.

“Poor detective work,” I told them.

Lansky shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think they wanted him back, he’d be back, big fucking company like that. I think they pay up a long time ago.”

“Maybe they don’t want to set a precedent—paying big ransom for kidnapped stars.”

Lansky just shook his head, unconvinced.

“You don’t buy it?” I asked.

“I don’t buy it.”

“You think they want him missing?”

“I think they want him dead,” Lansky said, then arose. “I gotta pee. You two don’t talk behind my back.”

Lansky slid out of the banquette and crossed the room toward the lavatories, which were just beyond the bar. Barbara watched him go, then smiled the demurest of smiles at me.

“I guess you’re a little surprised,” she said.

“Surprised? I’m speechless,” I said. “How the hell—”

“I was never in love with him, Jack. It was just the excitement. It was all kinds of things, actually.”

“Where’d you meet him?”

“First a cigarette.” I shook a Lucky out of a fresh pack and played the gentleman, lighting both of us up.

“I had graduated high school,” she began, taking the lit cigarette. “Thanks.… It was the summer … 1947. Some friends and I went to the Copa to hear Dean Martin sing, one of his first big engagements, I think. We were there maybe ten minutes when this man approached our table, started talking to us, said that a friend of his wanted to meet me. The friend of his turned out to be Meyer. Not sitting ringside or anything. Near the back, that’s his style. He likes to sit by the exits.”

“You knew who he was?”

Barbara shook her head. “He was just a name, I didn’t really know much about him. But he was very polite and very funny and he had a kind of force to him.”

“No kidding.”

“I don’t mean it in that sense. Listen, obviously, I don’t condone what’s he done in his life. But you have to understand, I had grown up in this refugee world where timidity was basically like a code of conduct. To meet a man who didn’t live like that, to meet a man who felt in complete command every second of his life, that was just a revelation. And he treated me very, very well.”

“So you didn’t go to college.”

“No. I told you, remember? Back in New York? I took a couple of years off. My parents didn’t care all that much; they didn’t think a girl necessarily needed a college education anyhow.”

“So what did they think you were doing?”

“They thought I had a job. Which I did, sort of. Meyer got me hired by this printing concern he had an interest in, but the deal was, I could show up or not. When I traveled with Meyer, I would tell my parents the boss needed me to go with him and take dictation. He was almost seventy, the boss, a nice old Polish Jew, so they didn’t give it a thought. My mother would help me pack, in fact.” Barbara smiled. “Although she didn’t much approve of my clothes, I have to admit.”

“So you and Lansky traveled together.”

“Yes. We came down here, we went to Rome once or twice, Miami. We weren’t together all the time, understand; I was still living at home and he’s married, after all.”

“In a fashion.”

She nodded. “In a fashion. He was separated when I met him, then he got remarried, but it didn’t change anything. That’s the world he lives in. People are sort of married, but it’s not in the way that most of us know. He and his associates live in a world of laws, but it’s
their
laws. It’s not like anarchy. It’s their code and they get married in a certain way. So yes, Meyer was married, but we saw a great deal of each other, and the life he lived and the way he treated me … it certainly opened my eyes.”

“I would think so.”

“But there’s a big downside, of course, because there’s no future in such a relationship, or such a life, really. After two years, I’d had enough; I didn’t want to be possessed by someone, which is what it is with Meyer—you’re essentially owned by him. I wanted to continue my life, go to school. So I told him I wanted out.”

“How’d he take it?”

“He was great about it. Said he wasn’t surprised, it was time for me to go on with my life, I deserved it, he would never stand in the way. Said all the right things.”

“You were what, then, twenty?”

She nodded. “Yeah. But an old twenty. I’d been through a great deal already, remember, in Germany—getting kicked out, the whole deal.” She watched her cigarette smoke rise to the ceiling. “It wasn’t love, Jack; Meyers not capable of love and I certainly could never feel love for him. Genuine affection, yes, but not anything deeper than that. It was just an episode, a totally fascinating episode. Maybe one day I’ll look back on it and have my regrets, but I doubt it. I’m a fatalist.”

“So it was meant to be? You and Lansky?”

“Yes. I think so.” Barbara looked off, drifting into thoughts I would never know, home movies I would never see—of hotel lobbies and nightclubs and terraces overlooking oceans, of men in fedoras having whispered conversations in sitting rooms, of putting on makeup and overhearing monosyllabic phone calls. Then she smoothed her hair and returned to the present tense, to this clamorous bar in Havana. “Anyhow, when it was over, he told me to remember that he’d always be there for me if I needed something.”

“So when your father got hit, you thought of him.”

“Yes. Even before then. When my uncle got brain-damaged in that car wreck—”

“Otto, from the funeral.”

“Otto from the funeral. Very good.” She nodded at me, flashed that brilliant smile. God, she was a heartbreaker, and the more I listened to her, the more I learned of her history, the hotter I got for her. “After that accident, I called Meyer, because the expenses were just horrific—the hospital, the private nurses. Brutal. He came through for me immediately and never said boo about it, no self-congratulation, none of that crap. And he’s still paying for Otto’s care.”

“Nobody ever asks where the money’s coming from?”

“I told my Aunt Gretl, Otto’s wife, that I had a rich boyfriend who was paying and she shouldn’t tell my mother. That was fine with her—she barely speaks to my mother anyhow.”

“And she loves knowing something your mother doesn’t. Puts her one up.”

“Exactly. She told my mother that Otto’s law firm had established a fund to pay for it.” She stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray the size of a catcher’s mitt. “Families.”

“Yeah.”

Barbara took another sip of her beer and studied my face.

“You know, you’re a good-looking man.”

“Please …”

“I’m serious.”

“I look like fifty thousand other slobs. You see them every day in the subway, chewing Juicy Fruit and reading the
Mirror.
”

“Stop it.… No, there’s something really …
strong
there.” She looked right into my eyes and was holding her gaze when Lansky returned from the John. At that moment, Abe Lincoln could have walked over in his stovepipe hat and I wouldn’t have noticed, but Lansky got my attention, clearing his throat loudly behind me.

“I gotta make a couple of calls,” he announced.

“No dinner?” I asked.

He waved his hand as dismissively as if I’d suggested we go folk dancing. “Dinner doesn’t mean anything to me. I got jumpy insides. We’ll meet later.” He looked to Barbara. “Eat with her, she’s better company.”

And just like that, he turned and started walking away. I got out of my chair and followed him across the room.

“What’s the problem?” he asked, without turning around.

“I don’t know where we stand.”

“Stand? I met you, you met me. It’s called a meeting.”

“I understand what it’s called….”

Lansky stopped and faced me. I could see Barbara watching us. She was drinking her beer out of the bottle now.

“Listen,” Lansky said, his eyes narrowed to the size of baby peas. “I understand you want the Maestro back. I want to help you and I don’t want anybody hurt.”

“You have any idea who bumped off her father?”

“No, but obviously I have an interest in finding out, right? I have a history with this person. Sounds to me, from what I heard, like a screwup.”

“Please. Two shots in the head?”

Lansky looked at me like I’d just described the theft of a bag of doughnuts.

“Happens. Human error.” He looked back to our table. “Have a nice dinner.”

We had a nice dinner. A place near the water, La Habanera, nothing fancy. Yellow stucco walls, paper lanterns, some cheerfully rotten local art. The very relaxed patrons included local businessmen and some families out for a long easy dinner. There were no obvious tourists to be seen, except for me. I had
polio asado,
a salad, some beer, and a couple of cups of Cuban coffee strong enough to race King Kong’s heart.

“This coffee could wake the dead,” I told Barbara.

She looked at me wistfully over her coffee cup. “If only …”

How clever was I, making references to the deceased to a girl whose father had been dead for all of four days. When you lose someone close, you lose a layer of skin; it grows back in time, but there is a period when every allusion to death, no matter how glancing or oblique, causes an immediate and stinging pain.

“Sorry. Blame it on travel fatigue.”

She shook her head. “Don’t start editing yourself.” Barbara looked around the room and took me off the hook. “I love this place,” she said. “Don’t you?”

“It’s very comfy.”

“Comfy, lively, but not crazy. Meyer didn’t like it too well. But he hates most restaurants. Hates to eat. I’m not sure what he lives on.”

“Greed.”

She smiled. “Possibly. He’s a complicated guy; there’s a lot going on that he keeps to himself. His first wife was seemingly quite religious, wanted their son to become a rabbi, and I think she gave him a very hard time about his …
career,
shall we say. Then apparently she went a little nuts, or maybe a lot nuts; I never got the full story. He’s a very hard man, but I think there’s a huge amount of guilt lurking not far below the surface. He’d have these nightmares and sort of wake up, but not really? He’d be sweating, his eyes would be wide open, and he’d be shouting, but not words, just sounds. I’d have to cradle him back to sleep. In the morning, he’d have zero recollection of it. I’d tell him that he was yelling and perspiring and he’d just laugh it off, or say he must have been dreaming about being a kid in Poland.”

“He grew up in poverty,” I said, “but what else is new? How many Polish Jews grew up in the lap of luxury?”

“But he was
seriously
poor, at least as he describes it.” Barbara sipped her coffee. “Lived on the Lower East Side in a slum that was like one of those old Jacob Riis photographs. Spent his whole life fighting with anti-Semites, in Poland and then here. You know he met Luciano when he was just a kid? They were both about six or seven, actually. They’ve spent their entire lives together.”

Our waiter brought over two snifters of brandy and pointed to the owner.
“Con los complementos de Señor Alvarde.
”

Señor Alvarde, gray-haired and elegant, was standing next to the bar, attired in tan slacks and a snow-white guayabera shirt. He bowed and waved at Barbara.

“Muchas gracias,
” she told the waiter.
“Es muy generoso.
” The waiter left and Barbara took a sip of her brandy. “It’s not the greatest, but if we don’t drink it, he’ll be terribly insulted. The Cubans are very big on these gestures.”

“So I’ll drink it,” I told her.

She looked at me with an expression I couldn’t quite read. It was as if she were trying to remember something, but couldn’t quite retrieve it.

“Yes,” she finally said. “Then I’d like to get out of here.”

We went back to the Nacional without exchanging a word—not during the brief, helter-skelter taxi ride, not as we crossed the lobby, not as we got into the elevator. When I asked her what floor she was on, she looked into my eyes with a bemused and patient expression, and only then did I realize I was on a train that had already pulled out of the station, and I lacked both the power and the will to stop it. Barbara followed me down the quiet, carpeted corridor, staying two steps behind me. A waiter pushing a room-service trolley stopped and bowed as we passed; I nodded back to him like a general reviewing his troops. I unlocked the door to 804; as we entered the room, I went to turn the lights on, but Barbara put her hand over mine.

“No,” she said in a midnight whisper, “no lights.” She took the
DO NOT DISTURB
sign and hung it out in the hall, then locked the door and turned to me, cupping my face in her long smooth hands. “I’m going to shower. You get into bed.”

And then she was gone, into the bathroom, and I heard the shower taps turned on and imagined her taking her clothes off and stepping into the tub, closing the curtain behind her. I thought of that smooth young body standing behind the shower curtain, the water running in rivulets down every sculpted inch of her, and I wondered, as I do at such moments—was it me she was thinking of as she soaped herself up, or was there some other agenda?