On the Nickel Page 7

  Eventually a thin woman with graying red hair came out into the puddle of brighter light by the door. She looked vaguely familiar to Maeve.

  ‘Hello, there, I’m Sister Mary Rose.’

  It was the voice that did it, and the nervous energy that the woman gave off. Omigod! Maeve thought. But she betrayed no sign, because the woman obviously didn’t recognize her. After all, she was almost ten years older now and Maeve’s jump from nine to eighteen was much bigger than this woman’s forty-five to fifty-four.

  ‘I have a mother and young girl in the car who really need shelter.’

  The woman sucked her teeth an instant. ‘We’re always full by this time.’

  ‘They need a place really really bad, ma’am.’

  ‘Don’t get in a tizz. We’ll set up cots or something until we have room.’ She used a key from a chain around her neck and unlocked the gate. ‘Bring them in. Let’s see what we can do.’

  The woman hurried away into the building. Eleanor Ong was her name – whatever her nun name had been before and probably was again, Maeve thought. Her father had been madly in love with her then – yes, it was almost ten years ago, not too long after he’d left her own mother. Eleanor had already quit some convent, but apparently she’d gone back, or she’d gone back to work with her order on some dispensation. The coincidence was just too great, but life was like that.

  Maeve vaguely remembered that her dad and Eleanor had been tied together and thrown down a storm drain during a heavy rain by a couple of Mafia thugs, and the relationship had turned out badly after that. The poor woman couldn’t handle her dad’s life, she had said, like several other women had said later. But why not? Her dad had never been a Sunday School picnic, but he always gritted his teeth and set off up that sad lonely honorable road that everybody else just talked about. It was why she loved him so desperately, and Eleanor Ong should have, too.

  Maeve brought Felice and Millie out of the car, clutching their string-wrapped suitcases. Once they were into the yard, Maeve closed the gate behind them so it at least appeared to be locked. ‘That woman said she’ll find you a place to sleep. I gotta go.’ She felt terribly vulnerable out there on the street alone but she didn’t want to get mixed up with the nun.

  ‘Thank you, Maeve,’ Felice called through the fence. ‘You been a prayer’s answer. We won’t forget you.’

  ‘I won’t let you. I’ll come tomorrow and find out how you’re doing. I want to get the doll some clothes.’ Though she had a ton of second thoughts about coming back here. She was afraid Eleanor would recognize her in some way. But that was a pretty long shot. Eleanor reappeared as they were still talking, and she decided she’d better disguise her voice a little.

  The nun greeted Felice and Millie warmly where they waited patiently. ‘You’ll have to be on fold-a-beds for a few days, but they’re pretty comfortable. I use one of them myself. You’ll have a private space and you can lock the door. We’ll get you some food tonight if you haven’t eaten.’

  ‘Oh, no, we ate up a storm thanks to this kind young lady.’

  Eleanor turned to look at her, and Maeve decided it was past time to split. ‘Gotta go,’ she called in an unnaturally deep voice.

  That only drew Eleanor’s attention. ‘The Lady Lone Ranger rides off. Hi-yo, Silver.’

  ‘That’s sexist,’ Maeve said automatically, then fought to unlock her car.

  ‘I think I knew a girl like you once,’ Sister Mary Rose called wistfully. ‘I have a memory for faces.’

  ‘No way. No no. I’m from Kansas.’

  ‘Give my regards to the others in your family back in Kansas.’

  All the hair on the back of Maeve’s neck stood on end.

  There was a soft rap on Conor’s door, and he guessed, by its volume if nothing else, that it probably wasn’t anybody dangerous. He opened on a very short old man wearing one of those Jewish skullcaps, navy blue with a white pattern around the rim – what were they called? He felt bad he didn’t remember. The man also wore a thick wool suit and white shirt but no tie.

  ‘Hello, sir.’

  ‘You’re new here. I’m your neighbor, Samuel Greengelb. I bet Vartabedian’s gonifs haven’t had a chance to threaten you yet. Feh, the room smells of carbolic.’

  ‘It’s just 409. I was spraying to clean up the cockroaches.’

  ‘With all due respect, nu, you should spray the gonifs the first time you see them. That will take the smell away. Listen, have we met?’

  ‘No, sir, I don’t think so.’

  The old man sighed. ‘I have to check these days. I sometimes forget things.’

  ‘Come in, sir, please. Mr Greengelb. My name is Conor Lewis.’

  ‘An interesting name. Of the Irish, no?’ He took a step inside the room.

  Conor shrugged. ‘The last name is Welsh really, but my mom was real Irish, from Cork – Brigid Glanchy. That where-you’re-from stuff doesn’t mean anything to me. I’m a mongrel American.’

  ‘Heritage should mean to you, my son. Look, there are three of us who live here for many years, and we’re fighting back against the new landlord. We joke we are the three Musketeers. The new owner of this hole is Armenian and he should know better. They were once victims, too. But the thugs he hires are the true mongrels – they’re of the lost ones, men with no family, no roots. They’re from the army or worse – just guys sent to places of much killing for money. Fighting dogs, you point them and take off the muzzle.’ He shrugged.

  The man came in stiffly and Conor realized again just how short he was, barely to his chin. A selfish thought occurred to him – that there were interesting songs to be found in this man, and then less selfishly, there was obviously a real drama playing itself out here. Something his father might admire. And he liked the man’s abrupt manner, almost rude. He’d never seen anything like it. ‘Sir, please sit on my chair. I can’t offer you coffee or anything yet.’ Conor sat opposite him on the bed.

  ‘You look like a smart boy. You play chess?’

  ‘I’m afraid not, sir. My friends at school always said they preferred games with more chance of cheating.’

  Greengelb laughed. ‘I been playing chess with a dead Russian Jew for many years, name of Boris Shpilman – forty years dead but in all the books. Real problems he posed, all the time. The Shpilman Gambit. The Shpilman Knight Opening. Oy.’ He tapped his forehead with three fingers. ‘Very hard to outthink this man.’

  Chess didn’t interest Conor, but the rest of the story did. ‘Sir, can you tell me about these thugs who come around?’

  ‘The akhzers pound on our doors late at night and yell at us for the owner, Vartabedian. The elevator they have already kiboshed. They are heartless men who have no brain of their own. You watch – soon they will cut off the heat or the water or some new atrocity. I curse them and say they should lose all the ill-gotten money they are paid to painful and bungling doctors. Let them suffer and remember.’

  Conor couldn’t help laughing at the colorful curse. ‘If I stay at the Fortnum a while, do you think they’ll threaten me?’

  ‘Nu, probably not.’ He gave an elaborate shrug. ‘You they can throw out any time. You don’t have a lease from the old owners. Bless the souls of 4-G Property Management, who that was. They were good to us for fifteen years, paid a Jamaican super named Bevan who kept the place up, painted the halls, changed the bulbs, fixed stuff. The 4-G stood for four guys from the Valley, but we knew them as the four goy dentists. When all this loft insanity started, sadly the four dentists saw a chance to make big money. The four shmos is all they are now. Vartabedian will probably throw us out in the end, and he’ll bring in cheap labor to rebuild the place and sell his “artist lofts” for millions.’

  ‘How can you stop him?’

  Greengelb shrugged. ‘He’s got the bigshot lawyers. And we’re at the end of our rope, but we don’t give up easy. Morty Lipman is my nexdoorekeh, room 324. We’re D’Artagnan and Athos. And Joel Wineglass upstairs is with us, too. Maybe Porthos.
But those gonifs of Vartabedian’s never even heard of all-for-one or Milady. They’re ignorant as bricks. They never read nothing but Donald Duck.’

  Conor was a bit chagrined that he’d never read Dumas either, though he’d seen the movies.

  ‘These thugs,’ Greengelb said with a smirk. ‘I watched them one day in the coffee shop over on Broadway arguing about what side the jellied toast falls on. Amazing shmucks, truly. As if this is science.

  ‘The little one, always clinging to a knife, he says, “The jelly side up, it’s got more air resistance.” Strange that he’s the optimist. He’s the really evil one.

  ‘So the big one holds the toast out and drops it with a flip, and it falls on the dry side just like the meshuggenah says.

  ‘“My mistake,” the big thug says.

  ‘“What you mean?” the knife guy says, very suspicious.

  ‘“I jellied the wrong effin’ side.”’ Greengelb cackled at his own joke, real or apocryphal.

  Conor did his best to laugh anyway.

  ‘You sure I don’t know you?’

  ‘You do now.’

  Maeve came home pretty late – on a school night, too – and parked as quietly as she could on Greenwood Street. She’d had just a single twinge as she’d passed the street sign at the corner. She could never completely forget that the street, and its namesake klika, were burned into her life now, an Old English G tattooed on her left breast that neither her dad nor Gloria had seen. She tiptoed up the walk. Her dad was somewhere deep inside, but she was shocked to find Gloria waiting on the glide on the front porch, nursing a beer.

  ‘No sneaking home here, hon. Stakeouts are my game.’

  ‘I knew I should have gone back to Redondo.’ That was her mom’s house where she could always sneak in, a half-dozen ways. ‘So, you do a lot of stakeouts?’

  Gloria frowned. ‘Sit.’

  Maeve sat on the rickety Adirondack chair that tended to throw you back hard if you weren’t careful. She was avoiding the glide where Gloria sat. Gloria creaked the glide a little with a kick. Maeve wondered if the balky glide had been there since Boyle Heights had been the first Jewish suburb of L.A. a century ago, before the Jews had moved on west.

  ‘You don’t ask the questions. I ask questions. That’s the deal with cops.’

  ‘It wasn’t really a question.’

  Gloria gave her the fish eye, and Maeve subsided to neutral. ‘Anything. Ask.’

  ‘You know perfectly well that your dad is helpless right now. I know you’re trying to do some work as his stand-in, but it might end up involving him in some way. Don’t get skittery now and start denying things right and left. I know you picked up a couple of sad sacks in Hollywood because you called me about it. Good for you.’

  ‘Should I have just left them in that awful alley where they were living?’

  ‘Remember, I ask the questions.’

  OK, Maeve thought. I’ll play it your way – hardball all the way. I won’t tell you that the woman who runs that shelter is Eleanor Ong, dad’s staggering Really Big Love from long ago – and this torch-bearer, this beautiful skinny woman with all the freckles, might have recognized me. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Ms Hard-Nose Cop. Except you can’t because you won’t deign to meet me on equal terms.

  ‘I just want to protect you and your dad, hon. You can understand that. Is there anything I need to know about all this? Jack has enough trouble worrying about his condition and his damn dog recovering from the cancer – and, I admit it, worrying about me, too. I’m not so easy to live with. He sometimes worries himself sick about this hard case and all her problems.’

  ‘I love you, Glor.’

  ‘Thank you very much, Maeve. Love is not always relevant or sufficient, but it always matters. And I’m glad you care.’

  ‘Do you think I’m hurting Dad? Honestly? I’d rather die than hurt Dad.’

  ‘I have no reason to think so. But can you stay in touch with me about what’s going on?’ Gloria was studying the empty beer bottle in her hand, as if she couldn’t meet Maeve’s eyes. ‘For his sake. You don’t have to find me civil or fair or motherly – just truly fierce in defense of your father.’

  Sure. But trust was already a lost game, Maeve thought, since she was still feeling a bit angry and wasn’t going to tell Gloria about Eleanor Ong. ‘Of course,’ she said, feeling a bit sick inside.

  NOTES FOR A NEW MUSIC

  Day 3

  Met some wonderful old Jewish men who somebody’s trying to throw out of this hotel. My neighbor Mr Samuel Greengelb visited me for a long time. He even taught me some Yiddish, which he speaks fluently. (I didn’t know anybody spoke it anymore.) It’s very sad, too; he’s very afraid that he’s starting to lose his memory. More to come on this. I’m exhausted now.

  It was about nine at night, and Maeve’s father sat in his wheelchair in the kitchen reading a book, with Loco lying across his feet. He’d lifted the foot-pads up to rest his feet on the floor beside Loco – either to gain comfort for himself or to comfort the dog.

  ‘What you reading, Dad?’

  He nodded a greeting to her and held up the book, a Cormac McCarthy that she didn’t know.

  ‘You like it?’

  He made a noncommittal face and then retrieved a notebook to write.

  VERY DARK

  ‘That’s like saying Groucho Marx is funny.’

  He smiled and nodded. Then at Maeve’s urging they had a discussion – if you could call it that – about divorce. Maeve got around to asking him which of the women he’d known in his life, excluding Gloria and his first wife – her own mother, of course – had meant the most to him.

  YOU LEARN SOMETHING ABOUT YOURSELF FROM EVERYONE YOU LOVE

  He quickly inserted the word ‘IMPORTANT’ with a caret after ‘SOMETHING.’

  That was terribly diplomatic, she thought, but not what she wanted.

  ‘Sure, I learned a lot from Beto, too,’ she said. And I hope you never see the tattoo, she thought. ‘But, really, Mr Loved-Each-One-in-Her-Own Way. If you had to say …’

  PROBABLY ELEANOR. DO YOU REMEMBER HER? LONG AGO.

  ‘A little bit. I was very young. What was it about her?’

  LOST. LOVELY. TRYING DESPERATELY TO DO GOOD IN THE WORLD. BUT NEEDY.

  He smiled warmly and laughed.

  AND SOME SEX STUFF I WON’T TOUCH ON.

  ‘Were you her first lover? I know she’d been a nun.’

  YES BUT IT’S COMPLEX.

  ‘You always say something like that to avoid explaining. One of these days you’ve got to start talking again.’

  ‘Ack,’ he said desperately.

  ‘Sorry, Dad. That wasn’t fair. I’d better go home to bed. This is a school night.’

  When she finally got home to Redondo at about ten, she called Art Castro on his cell.

  ‘It’s not a complete report yet, kid, but I know your boy is in town. He accessed an ATM at a Skid Row mini-mart called Mike’s. He’s either staying at one of the flops nearby, or he’s got a pal in one of the fancy new lofts. They’re asking a small fortune for those places. Of course he could be camping out on the street with the schizos and winos. You didn’t say if he brought any gear.’

  ‘Thanks, Art. I’ll tell Dad when he’s ready to go on the hunt.’

  ‘Sure, kid. You’re just keeping his spot on the bench warm.’ He sounded skeptical, but basically not all that interested.

  ‘That’s the deal.’ If she’d learned one thing from her dad it was to keep her mouth shut and resist the temptation to amplify, justify, explain. ‘He owes you one.’

  ‘Oh, a lot more than one.’

  She hung up and thought immediately about her father. Did she really expect him to join the hunt at some point, become reanimated all at once by the challenge, or some other impetus? Good work, Maeve, now you go back to school and I’ll take over.

  It was terrifying to her that he seemed so small and powerless now. He had once been big enough to blot out the
sun, and now he seemed just shriveled and weak – not so much in his wheelchair, but in her head. This silence, when his voice had once filled a whole house, had once perfectly filled her longing for company, for someone to joke with and ask questions and always, always back her up. Dad, oh, I still need you.

  She wasn’t even sure if she’d said any of it aloud, but there was an addendum in her head that she knew she hadn’t said out loud. Don’t go yet, please. She hurried downstairs and threw her arms around her mother, who was sitting on a kitchen stool raising and lowering a teabag in a cup.

  ‘Your dad?’ Kathleen Liffey said.

  ‘Yeah. I can’t stand it. He keeps getting smaller and it makes me smaller, too. I want him to talk to me.’

  Her mother tipped the cup to study the color of the liquid, then kept dipping. ‘Being brave never feels brave, does it? When Jack and I split up – God, that was so long ago – I kept wanting to find him somewhere in the house to tell him what I was feeling.’

  ‘Oh, Mom!’

  ‘But I have hopes. For something in life. I don’t know what. I’m sure I’ve had enough of sorrow.’

  So much for running to her mother for comfort – her mother, deep in her own misery.

  ‘I’m not so terrible, am I?’ her mother asked.

  One problem with positive thinking, Jack Liffey thought, was that adopting an expectant attitude predisposed you to a sense of failure.

  ‘We must be very patient now, Mr Liffey. We’ll start getting it, any time now. I’ve seen it happen many times. Try to press our nice soft foot against my hand.’

  Of course, the alternative was moping. It was important to count your blessings, even as a cripple. It got you a close parking place in most lots, a good spot for your chair at the movies. And once you could accept it, most people offered you help, a push over a big hump, a quick fetch of something you needed. After they got over the terror of meeting your eyes.

  What was that, anyway? People mostly glanced away quickly as if you were a schizophrenic who was about to sit beside them on a bus and tell them all about the tinfoil hat that kept out the rays from space. While children stared hard at you, sizing up a freak for the entertainment value, for tales to pals. The life of Cain.