The Best Revenge (12 page)

Zalatnick perched himself on one of the high stools, gestured for me to take the adjoining empty one. I noticed some of the men glancing over in my direction. One of them had a snicker on his face.

“The routine,” Zalatnick said, “is this. You take this saw, it's very delicate, and you cut Lincoln's head out of a penny. If you break the saw blade, finished. If Lincoln's head has an extra bump when it's out, flunk. If a piece of Lincoln gets left behind in the penny, good-bye. I have to warn you, nine out of ten can't do it.”

“How do you get the saw blade through the penny to start cutting?” I asked.

“I'll drill a hole for you over here,” Zalatnick said, heading for the small drill press.

“Please,” I said. “My penny.” I handed a brand new copper coin to Zalatnick. “I'd like to practice once on my own penny.”

Zalatnick looked at me. I guess it was the first time a greenhorn had suggested practicing on his own coin.

“Be my guest,” Zalatnick said. “Ruin yours instead of mine.” He drilled a hole in my penny right near Lincoln's nose. He loosened the saw blade, put it through the hole, then retightened the blade.

I went to work, carefully trying to carve out Lincoln's face and my future.

After ten minutes, Zalatnick came back from his workbench to see how I was making out. “Ready for the test?” he asked me.

“A second,” I said, deep in concentration. A moment later the Lincoln head fell out of the penny.

“Practice over?” Zalatnick asked, a penny in his hand. Then he noticed the Lincoln head on the bench. He picked it up and examined it under an eye loupe. A moment later he picked up the frame of the penny's remains and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger. “You've never done this before?”

“Never,” I said.

The men were now staring at me openly.

“Pay attention to your work,” bellowed Zalatnick, then gestured for me to follow him into the privacy of his office.

“You've got a lot of confidence,” Zalatnick said. “And a steady hand.”

“Thank you,” I said, my right hand in my pocket feeling the brand new cut-out penny and Lincoln head Max had provided me with to substitute for the other one if the work hadn't gone right. Truthfully I was very glad I didn't have to use my backup penny. Now I could keep it as a souvenir of a crime I didn't commit.

“I'll teach you twenty minutes each morning if you come in twenty minutes to eight, before the men. You get carfare and lunch money. When you produce stuff I can sell, you'll get a dollar an hour to start. That's a lot of money.”

I nodded.

“I'll provide you with a loan apron,” Zalatnick said. “When you're making money, you buy your own.”

I nodded again.

“Okay?” Zalatnick concluded, standing. “Come in Monday.”

“I'd like to borrow a saw and two blades,” I said, “for practice over the weekend.”

Zalatnick must have thought, Boy this is an ambitious
pisher.
“If you break a blade, you pay for it.”

“Of course,” I said.

“One more thing,” Zalatnick said, nodding toward the homely young woman. “She's mine.”

I practiced all day Saturday and Sunday. When I finished with the drilled pennies, I cut into undrilled ones and tried all kinds of experiments for the fun of it, making Lincoln look bald or putting a bump on Lincoln's nose. By Monday morning at seven forty, I handled the delicate saw as if it were an extension of my own hand.

“Some apprentice!” Zalatnick told Max the following week. “He's as good as Moshe, who's been with me for three years!”

“Then start paying him,” Max said.

And so within a year, I was making out of metal a leaf so real-looking an onlooker could fool himself for half a second into believing it was from a tree. And within two years, as anyone who knew me could have predicted, I had parted company with Zalatnick and set up a shop in Chicago. Within months I had seven apprentices of my own. My apprentices worked as hard as I did. We all wanted to be perfect. Soon my shop of master workmen had a Saturday morning lineup of customers who, in those wild days of the twenties, had money to spend as if there was no tomorrow. Tomorrow, meaning 1929, was still a few years off.

But whatever my hands did for metal, they did more for the ladies that I met, and to be quick about it, though I might have taken up with any of three dozen beauties in Chicago, I eventually settled in to live in sin with a tall, and it was said royal-looking, beauty from Kiev, a properly educated woman who carried herself like a queen, and who joined with a carpenter's apprentice from Zhitomir to effect God's will.

God's will, it turned out, was that I and the queen from Kiev, Zipporah, should share an apartment on Kedzie Avenue for a wonderful year, and then, satisfied that our backgrounds mattered less than the common ground of a mattress holding two contented lovers tangled in a good night's aftersleep, we agreed, amidst much kissing and relief of our friends, to get married.

Comment by Zipporah

Marriage? Forever? How could an educated woman marry a man who left school at the age of eight? Do I look like a housekeeper who'd tie herself to the tail of her husband's kite? I could fly by myself. I was tall and fair-skinned. Louie was almost as dark as an Egyptian, half a foot shorter than I was, a man who couldn't tell blue from green unless I went with him to pick his clothes. Did I want children from him? True, he did have a magnificent head of curled soft hair, and strong hands that touched like velvet when he wanted to. My skin sabotaged me. It cried out for his touch. All right, so I lived openly with him for a year, but marry?

My father, who I brought over from the old country on my earnings as a teacher, was a six-foot, straight-backed giant with a full red-blond beard, who, if he hadn't dressed in traditional black, you'd never have thought was a Jew. A month after he came he was already playing touch football in the park on Sundays with the
goyim,
who couldn't understand how a man of that age could learn to throw and catch the strange-shaped ball as if he'd been doing it all his life, or why he didn't trip over the tails of his long black coat.

One Sunday, after watching my father play, I sat with him on the park bench and he asked the question I knew sooner or later would come.

“Zipporah, when are you and Louie getting married?”

“I don't know.”

“It seems to me,” he said, “you are already married.”

I recited my reservations. I told him the professor—he knew all about that, too—would be a better match. My father, who came from the same village on the outskirts of Kiev as I did, where matchmakers arranged everything, shook his head. “Love is better.” Just like that.

So I married Louie, my father beaming as if I were marrying Gilbert Roland instead of Charlie Chaplin, that other little fellow who made us all laugh. And I had from him Harold and a year later Ben, and like everybody else we all became part of Louis Riller's audience.

BOOK III

9

Ben

As the cab pulled up in front of my office building, Ezra said, “Why don't I come up with you? Maybe we can figure a way to deal with Manucci.”

I shook my head.

“Two heads are better than one,” Ezra said.

“If you had two heads, Ezra, you could double your hourly charge.”

“I'm glad to see you can still joke.”

I got out of the cab and did a little quick-step on the sidewalk.

Ezra rolled down the window of the taxi. “Put your hat on the sidewalk, maybe someone will throw something in.”

“You know I never wear a hat.”

“Maybe
that's
our problem.”

I watched the cab pull away. Ezra was looking out the back window, but the voice I heard wasn't Ezra's.

Ben, negotiating is not surrendering.

Manucci didn't give an inch, Pop.

Manucci's offered over four hundred thousand dollars to save the show, that isn't an inch?

He wants everything I've got as collateral.

What are you going to do, Ben?

Find Manucci's short hairs and pull.

I never fought with his father.

Maybe you should have.

Hey, I was just beginning to enjoy the argument, where did he go? The only person in sight was a young black messenger riding his bike up onto the sidewalk with a bump. “Hey, whacko,” he shouted, “out of the way.” All I was doing was watching him chain the bicycle to a lamppost, when he said, “Touch this bike, mister, and I'll cut your balls off.”

I let the messenger go into the revolving door first. He pushed it so hard the wing behind me hit my back. He waltzed straight into the elevator, saw me, and darted his arm out to hold the door open. “I'll wait for the next one,” I said.

“Whacko,” said the messenger.

There was only the one elevator.

I watched the overhead indicator light two, three, four, and stop. My floor. This kid, I said to myself, is a messenger, not a mugger. Manucci's the mugger.

When the elevator returned, I took it to the fourth floor. I stepped out, looked left, looked right, nobody.

Straight ahead were the black-outlined gold letters on my office door. What I read wasn't written there: NICK MANUCCI PRESENTS BEN RILLER'S PRODUCTIONS.

Inside, Beloved Charlotte took her eyes off the package the messenger was handing to her. “Jane called,” she said. “Alex wants to see you. You look terrible, Ben.”

“Thanks,” I said, staring at the messenger staring at me. “What's he want?”

“Somebody's got to sign for the package,” said the messenger.

Charlotte said, “It's a script from Bertha. She said she was messengering it over. Shall I buzz Alex to come in or do you want to wait till you're in a better mood?”

I closed the door of my office. The hat tree behind the door was useless, not just for me. I can't remember when somebody hung a hat there. My finger hit the intercom. “Charlotte, have someone get rid of my hat tree.”

Not a word.

I opened the door. “Didn't you hear me?”

“I heard you. I think you better see Alex.”

“If you know what he's going to talk to me about, why don't you tell me and save him the trip.”

“I'm here,” said Alex, a skeleton rattling coins as he came down the hall from his office into the reception area.

Theatrical producers don't have chief financial officers with MBA's. If a bookkeeper is with you long enough, you call him your accountant. Mine, Alex the Pencil, is an owl of a man, who keeps one eyelid half shut not because of an affliction but because there is much in this world he is not prepared to see. Alex lives alone with his high blood pressure. His life takes place within the four walls of his office, where I usually go to see him so that he can then say to Charlotte, “You see, Charlotte,
he
comes to
me
.”

“Ben,” Alex said in his sandpaper voice, “I sent you a note.”

“Come on in. Sit,” I said, pointing to the high-backed leather chair behind my desk.

Alex flashed me one of his
you're crazy again
looks and did as he was told.

“Ben, we need to talk.”

“I gather.”

“Ben, I don't feel comfortable sitting here.”

Next to the hat rack was an ancient bentwood chair. I picked it up and placed it in front of the desk with its back to Alex so that I could sit astride it and rest my folded arms. “I read your note, Alex.”

“Ben, your liquidity stinks. You get hit by a truck this week, you're going to leave Jane and the kids with a lot of headaches.”

“You driving a truck this week, Alex?”

Alex let out an experienced sigh. “Ben, I wish I earned what a truck driver earns.”

“This isn't the time to pitch for a raise, Alex.”

“I know that better than you do. The only thing I'm pitching is damage control. What I was trying to say before you cut me off is that I can turn most of my assets into cash and you can't. You want to sell your house? You want to sell your Matisse? You want to sell the gold cuff links Helen Hayes gave you? If Jane had to sell your assets as part of an estate, you know how people take advantage.”

“Jane is smart.”

“Then how come she married a play producer? It has got to be the lousiest business on earth. People in other businesses don't have to go begging for new investors every single season. In other businesses you test market. Here, your whole investment is at risk before your first out-of-town audience puts their asses into their seats. Even if they all applaud like crazy, if they cheer like they're having a community orgasm, they don't have one bit of influence on a bunch of critics in New York who are going to decide whether the production lives or dies. The more successful you are, the more they hate you. You call that a business?”

I was about to answer him when Alex said, “Let me finish. This business got a handicap invented by the Devil. You know what it is?”

I said nothing.

“It's love, that's what it is. I ask you about a new play, you say you love it. You know what happens to people in love, they go nuts. They float like crazies up in the air without an engine and without a parachute. All right, people fall in love once, twice in a lifetime, you fall in love every goddamn season. In other businesses people
like
their products, but love? In other businesses you manage a group of people for years, things work smoother when you get to know each other. In this
mishegoss
every production means a new mob of faces, new actors, a new director, a new stage manager, and they all want you to love them like you love the play. Then comes out-of-town, and everybody's sure you picked the wrong play, the wrong actor, the wrong something, and you can't go near your hotel-room window because someone will push you out. That's love? That's business? That's an asylum, and everybody expects you to be the doctor who comes around with a fix of hope that you need more than they do.”