The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats (22 page)

“Mr. Newhouse, I am so, so, so pleased to meet you,” Savory said, actually lisping a bit—I think he did it on purpose. “And I am so, so, so sorry it has to be under these unfortunate circumstances.”

“We’re all going to miss Shushan,” I said. It struck me maybe Shushan was unmarried for a reason I hadn’t considered. Plus, Terri was bent. “We’re praying he’ll turn up.”

Savory looked at Justo. “He doesn’t know?”

“Tell him,” Justo said.

“Of course we’re all chagrined to hear about Mr. Cats.” Savory spoke without opening his mouth beyond a crack, as though there was something in there that might leap out, or maybe enter. Later I realized it was simply vanity: the poor guy had awful teeth, yellow from nicotine, chipped and crooked. His champagne-colored mustache, which must have been dyed because the shade did not exist outside of bouffant-haired gum-chewers from Long Island, grew down over his upper lip like a veil. The total effect was that he had no mouth, only some sort of sounding device which delivered lisps and the occasional sigh. He wore a wide violet silk tie and an oatmeal-colored checked suit with brass buttons. On his cuffs were cat’s-eye links of gold, or gold plate, that matched his huge tie clip, and on his fingers a set of rings that appeared to have been purchased wholesale right out of the window of one of the Eighth Avenue pawnshops. All of this paled, however, before an enormous pair of rose-colored glasses framed in heavy black plastic. These kept slipping down his nose. “But I must admit I’m here on another errand altogether.”

Where had I heard that voice? Breathless as Judy Garland and as brassily New Yawk as Barbra Streisand, who was in the middle of a seemingly endless engagement, her debut on Broadway, of
I Can Get It For You Wholesale.

Justo jumped in. “Arnie has a nice little bookmaking operation in the theater district. He’s an institution among actors.”

“And directors, and choreographers, and stagehands, and just about anyone connected with Thespis and Terpsichore.”

“Thespis?” I said, never having heard the word used in conversation—Terpsichore the same. “Actors bet?”

“Oh, Mr. Newhouse. It’s been a tradition of the stage even before John Wilkes Booth gambled his life away at Ford’s Theater.” With that he sat heavily down on the couch and, in eerie mimicry of myself only moments before, idly fingered the fabric of one of the two remaining suits.

Involuntarily I stepped back, as though his fingers might reach the third suit, on me. “How can I help you, Mr. Savory?”

“Arr-nold!”

“Arnold.”

“Well,” he said, settling into the couch and further into the role. “As you know, Mr. Cats’ organization has been good enough to look after my interests over the years.”

I looked to Justo, who nodded.

“And I’ve always been more than satisfied. In fact, Mr. Cats always said, ‘Arnold, you’re my favorite fag bookie,’ so sweet he was, and he always said, further, that if at any time I wished to make other arrangements he would wish me well. In other words, our agreement was one of shall we say mutual benefit. Well...” His sigh filled the room with the scent of lavender, as though he had been chewing breath mints non-stop all night.

It was 1:30 in the morning. This hoodlum business was wearing. When did they sleep? “I understand.”

“Well, Mr. Newhouse...”

“Russ is fine.”

“Mr. Russ, imagine my surprise when early this evening two rather brutish persons—were I less civilized I would employ the term
goons
—entered my business premises and announced that they had succeeded Mr. Cats, may his memory be blessed, and that—”

“We don’t know he’s dead.” This was getting tiresome.

“Be that as it may, Mr. Russ, I’m sure you can sympathize with my shock when they said they wished to see my
books
.” Theatrical blank stare. “My
books
? Mr. Cats never asked to see my
books
. Mr. Cats never so much as hinted at wishing to see my
books
.” Deeper blank. “You do understand? These horrid people wish to charge me according to what
they
determine is my income, which I don’t mind saying is not quite enough to keep me in ermines and pearls, if you get my drift. Mr. Russ, please tell me you haven’t turned over my account to...” Savory appeared unable even to speak the name. “To such persons.”

Justo said it for him. “The Tintis.”

“Eggs-zactly,” Savory said. “Creatures is what they are.”

I looked to Justo. “This something that happens a lot?”

“Never.  The Tintis?  The theater district is ours, half of Harlem to the east side of Fifth Avenue, and all of Brooklyn.  He paused. “For bookmaking. Other things, we don’t mix in.  That’s the way the city is broke up.”

“So, Mr. Russ,” Savory said, looking for all the world like he might at any moment break into tears. “What is a person to do?”

Why ask me, I wanted to say, but didn’t. Instead I sucked on my tongue in imitation of thought and asked Savory if he wanted a drink. I was about to get it for him when Justo signaled with his hand palm down and went into the kitchenette. I might have sat there pretending to consider the matter forever had not the doorbell rung. Ira opened it to Terri Cats.

If nothing else, this managed to get rid of Arnold Savory, who chugged down his vodka with a twist as though it were gasoline and he’d been running on fumes.

If Savory was all theater, Terri was all business. And, even at two in the morning, dressed for it. In fact, it appeared we had the same tailor. Both of us were wearing black knit shirts under gray suits, hers double breasted, the jacket so short my eye dropped immediately to her hips, which bloomed out from below the jacket like an upside-down question mark. There was no question mark on her face. Terri walked over to me where I stood and kissed me twice, once on each cheek, then went into the kitchen and came back with a bottle of single malt, not a common drink back then, and a brandy snifter. As she poured the scotch she began to speak, and did not pause.

“You know why I’m here, pretty boy? I’m here because we appear to be partners, and I’m looking out for my interest. Nice suit—Shushan is going to be pissed you’re wearing it, but there’s some doubt he’s going to be back, isn’t there? Don’t answer. I’m sure you’ve been going through this with everyone and his parakeet, so I’ll make it easy for you. Whether Shushan shows up again or not, you’ve got a job to do and I expect you to do it with no whining, no complaints, no fucking Oh-I’m-just-a-sweet-kid-bullshit. This is all about performance, and you have to perform, not least because you are going to be someone’s target whether you cop out or step up to the plate. Uh-uh,
not
a word. All I get all day is punks of all genders, all professions, all types telling me how hard it is to roll out of bed in the morning and do something without feeling sorry for themselves. You know what Shushan used to say? Life is combat. You didn’t have the advantage of the Marines and Korea and everyone shouting
Semper Fi!
day and night, but you’ve got the next best thing, which is that if you walk away from this you’re going to be Lord Jim, remember him? He walked away. You can’t walk away. Aside from all the people who are going to see you as a target you’re going to have me and a lot of other people seeing you as a meal ticket. In case you don’t know it that includes Justo here, that lunkhead by the door and his zaftig wife, and a cast of characters you probably won’t ever know exists. Listen: Every month Shushan writes checks to a couple of dozen charities, hospitals for sick kids, cancer victims, schools, plus individual people who need help in one form or another, to say nothing of researchers doing work on everything from schizophrenia to heart disease. Kid, what you’ve inherited is a business, but it’s a business that throws off enough money so that a lot of people benefit. If the wrong kind of people take over, if you allow other people to muscle you out, then you’re spitting in the face of all the good my brother did, and all these people that depend on you are going to be abandoned. So when you feel sorry for yourself and want to split just think for a moment about what you don’t know. People are always making decisions based on what they think they know, but they rarely consider what they don’t know. Am I making myself clear, sweet pea?”

Sweet pea was apparently being given an opportunity to protest, but he couldn’t. Sweet pea was smitten. “You’re saying Shushan was a kind of Robin Hood, for real, and I have to keep that going?”

“Shushan was as much Robin Hood as I suck dick,” she said. “My brother was a tough s.o.b. who discovered he made too much money to spend and so he took care of me and his organization and enough good works so he could feel that what he did was covered by an overlay of charity and beneficence. It made him feel better than your normal garden variety snake-in-the-grass hood who doesn’t see anything in the world except victims and cops. My brother saw there was something else. That doesn’t mean he didn’t like to bang heads or strut around like king of the hill, which he would do anyway, but he discovered he could feel really good about his crummy occupation by putting the money to use for something outside pussy and booze and cars and real estate. Net-net, sunshine, you’ve inherited the whole package.”

“I’m not cut out for this, Terri.”

“Probably not, but you’re not going to feel good about yourself if you walk away from it either, and you might also consider that no one is really going to allow you to do so. It comes to this:
Lord Jim
or
Lord of the Flies
. Shushan says you like
The Great Gatsby
and
Huckleberry Finn
? Am I right?”

“I didn’t realize you two discussed my taste in literature.”

“I’m not fucking talking about literature, moron. I’m talking about your life.
Huckleberry Finn
, the whole book is about doing something for someone else, getting a poor Negro slave out of the way of the slavers, and Gatsby, I don’t have to explain that to you. It’s the story of a man who had everything but love, and how love became more important to him than a million shirts. You know why people love Jack Kennedy? Because they feel in their hearts the presidency wasn’t his goal but what he could do with it, that we finally have a president who cares about something outside himself and his close circle. Despite my brother’s nearsighted fucking Neanderthal political opinions the truth is we do have a son-of-a-bitch president, which we will always have because that’s the only way to become president, but he’s a son of a bitch with a mission, which is to validate himself as a human being, probably because his father was a well-known piece of shit. You want to validate yourself as a human being?”

“I never considered it one way or another, Terri.”

She took a long tug at her drink, the kind that would have sent me into a paroxysm of coughing. “Trust me, sweet-face, every day human beings have to make decisions that some people like to call existential, because everything hinges on their making the right choice. But some days are more important than others. Today is one of those days. Nobody can stop you from running out on yourself, but if you stick you’re going to feel a lot better even if it all doesn’t come out the way you’d like.”

I lit a Lucky and hoped that in doing so I would have enough time to consider.

She read my mind, the bitch. “The thing is, my young friend, this is not a decision you can put off.” With that she stood, finished her drink on her feet, and came and sat by me.

The smell of her was overwhelming, at once vaginal and floral, with strong notes of Scotch, smoke and a heady sweet muskiness of breath that made me want to do anything to please her. “What do you want me to do?”

“Take care of business,” she said. Her hand dropped to my knee like a soft promise. Then she squeezed it until it hurt. Like her brother she was small but intense, able to deliver power to a specific point as though all of her were concentrated on the one act. “And don’t forget that Shushan handed me cash every month so I could live way beyond my income. You fail and you let me down. You don’t want to let Terri down, do you?”

“No,” I said, hoping at once that she would not see and at the same time that she would see the rising bulge in my pants. “That’s not what I want.”

Upstairs were a number of things I had missed on first look. For starts, the reproduction of the Georges de la Tour in the bathroom was not a reproduction, or at least not a print. It was an oil, obviously old, its surface cracked, the paint chipped in the lower left-hand corner. I would have removed it from the wall to examine the back of the canvas but it was secured there, unbudgeable, a sign that it had some value at least. If this was a copy, it was an old one. De la Tour had more or less been lost to art history after his heyday in the seventeenth century—he was rediscovered only in 1915—but as if to make up for this in his lifetime he had apparently made a number of copies of this amazing work—de la Tour’s son did as well. The painting glowed. It was alive with reflected light: the virgin—ostensibly Mary but it could have been any child—receiving instruction from an older woman by candle glow, the fire itself an intrinsic component of the young girl’s face. Not only was this the only painting in the top floor—a Jimmy Ernst black-on-black painting hung in the living room below, though I wouldn’t have known what it was but for the fact that I often saw him at Brooklyn College, where he taught—but the de la Tour was all but hidden in a private bathroom in a doubly secluded area of the suite. When I went to piss there it was, facing me as if to tell me something, but all it could tell me was: Am I a fake? I had seen the original, or perhaps just another centuries-old copy, hanging in the Frick Collection down the street—the museum was just around the corner from the Park Avenue urologist’s office where so many little copies of me had been distributed to the barren suburban women who made up his hopeful clientele. Seeing it here offered all the pleasure of a private sin. If anything it was better hung and better lit in Shushan’s toilet than at the Frick, four tiny but intense bulbs focused perfectly on it from the ceiling. If I were any taller I might have blocked the light as I stood before the toilet bowl, and if I stood up really straight I could cover the top of it in shadow. Clearly the painting was there for Shushan’s pleasure and no one else’s.