A Cat Tells Two Tales (20 page)

“It was all nonsense,” he continued, “the theater is all nonsense. Probably has been nonsense since the Greeks.”

He sipped his vodka, then drank some Coca-Cola, then lit a cigarette.

“If I remember, also, you tried to get into bed with me. You tried real hard.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Sorry,” he muttered. “I had other agendas at the time. And you probably would have caught a social disease from me. Anyway, in retrospect it was all a mistake. Look how well you’ve aged.”

“Still vaguely beautiful?” I asked, laughing. The laugh seemed to defuse my awe and painful nostalgia.

“Decidedly so.”

A waiter came over. I ordered a club soda. Joseph Grablewski ordered another Stolichnaya.

He stared hard at me.

“So, you sought me out once again to verify your original desires. You want to sleep with me. You want to confirm a desire—how long?—fifteen years old. You want a ripe old alkie like myself to share your bed to confirm that at one time in the past you were right—that the theater is of great cosmic importance and that I am-slash-was one of its gurus. You are still in the theater, aren’t you? Could you be anywhere else?”

“My name is Alice Nestleton,” I said in response, “and the only reason I’m here is to ask you about some Russian-émigré theater people.”

“Who?”

“Their names are Bukai, Chederov, and Mallinova.”

He laughed hugely, sweeping his arms backward. “A third-rate gallery of Stanislavski clones. God, I haven’t heard their names in years. I thought they were all dead.”

“And I thought you were dead,” I retorted.

“Lev Bukai . . . director of the ill-fated Nikolai Group . . . left the Soviet Union I don’t know when . . . in Paris for a few years . . . debacle as dramatic consultant for the old Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo . . . brought to the United States by Hurok in the late forties . . . arrogant, retarded son of a bitch.”

I was astonished by this alcoholic’s almost total recall.

“What about the others?”

“What about them?” He sneered and drank his vodka.

Then he said: “Do you want me to tell you about the productions of the Nikolai Group? . . . Their repertoire? . . . Their special brand of fakery? All fake . . . all those émigrés were fake. They couldn’t stand the revolution’s heat and its poverty and its demand for real theater, so they left for the usual bullshit—artistic freedom.”

He began to laugh so loud I thought he would fall over. Then he stopped suddenly and stared at me. He reached over and touched me on the side of the face. I pushed his hand away as if it were poisonous. He reached over and touched me again on the face. I let his hand stay there. I wanted it to stay there. It was astonishing, but my old feelings for him were beginning to resurrect themselves.

“How old are you?” I asked him, breaking the spell.

“Sixty-six chronologically . . . one hundred and sixty-one spiritually.”

The bizarre thought came to me that I should take him home with me and take care of him and give him some soup and some coffee and then sit down and talk. How I wanted to really talk to him then . . . right then . . . about the theater . . . about the old times . . . about what he knew and why he kept it a secret . . . about why he had pulled into himself and the vodka. The thought frightened me. I was becoming very frightened.

I moved as far away from him as I could in the booth.

“I want to know where Lev Bukai got his money.”

“How do you know he has money?”

“I know. I saw his home.”

“Why should I tell you?”

“Do I have to give you a reason?”

“Not really. I just want one.”

“Because something terrible happened and it may involve him.”

“Everyone knows where Bukai got his money.”

“Where.”

“Diamonds. He’s part owner of a diamond firm. Did you really think he got his town house by producing and directing ridiculous plays by Gogol?”

“What firm?”

“I don’t know.”

“Please think.”

“It was some kind of funny-named firm . . . Syrian or Egyptian. No . . . Turkish. That’s what I heard—a firm run by Turks . . . or Turkish Jews.”

“Can’t you remember?”

“Give me some Turkish names. I’ll try.”

“I don’t know what a Turkish name is.”

“Wait,” he said, rubbing his nose lightly as if the gesture brought him recall. “It was the same name as a singer . . . an old pop singer. Wait . . . right. Sedaka . . . like the singer Neil Sedaka.”

“Thank you,” I whispered.

He had given me what I came for. Or had he? I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to talk about something else, but words wouldn’t come. A feeling of almost unbearable sadness seemed to envelop us. I had the feeling that if we had had an affair—right then—everything about our lives would have been different. I would no longer be struggling. He would not be drinking himself to death on Forty-fourth Street. I would not have a history of broken affairs and a broken marriage. Everything would have been different. Even the theater . . . yes . . . even the theater . . . together we would have made a difference.

I was lapsing into megalomania. I couldn’t afford it. Bruce Chessler’s loud sport shirt seemed to be waving toward me. I had a murder to solve.

“Visit me again,” he said softly. I nodded as I left.

16

“I really question the wisdom of this move. We’re going over the line, Swede.”

We were standing outside the building on Forty-seventh Street that housed Sedaka and Sons, Diamond Merchants. It was a street that had always fascinated me . . . and repelled me. It was so much like the theater. Glittering rocks passed hands for enormous sums. Rational people became obsessed with form and color.

I didn’t answer.

“We really can’t just walk in there and ask all kinds of questions. They’ll kick us out. Listen, Swede. What does this have to do with anything? You have this crazy notion that the kid knew he was going to die. So he gave away his white cats. And now you know that this kid hated old Russian theater people and the ones he hated most turn out to be rich. What the hell does anything have to do with anything?”

“Nothing has to do with anything,” I replied, “until you make it.”

Basillio groaned. “Are you going to give me a goddamn lecture on the philosophical aspects of criminal investigation? Don’t! It’s ten thirty in the morning and already eighty-one degrees. Besides, I don’t care anything about criminal investigation as a branch of philosophy.”

“Are you coming?” I asked, making plain to him that I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t.

He followed me, grumbling, into the lobby and up in the elevator to the third floor.

A receptionist who was wearing a beautiful blue silk dress refused us admittance at first. What is your business? Personal, I replied. Not good enough, she said. Please leave or I’ll call security. On and on it went like that. Back and forth. Predictable. Basillio was becoming very embarrassed. We were receiving ugly stares from other people in the reception area, several of them carrying those small strange leather cases under the arm. Diamonds, no doubt.

Finally I said: “Please tell Mr. Sedaka that we wish to speak with him privately—about Lev Bukai.”

They were truly magic words. A minute later a heavyset man of about fifty, with a thick mustache and wearing a beautifully tailored silk suit, white shirt, and silk tie, stepped outside and beckoned for us to follow him into his office. Silk seemed to be the motif of this milieu. Diamonds and silk.

We followed. He pointed out the two chairs we should sit on and then slid himself behind a large, totally empty desk.

“What is this all about, now?” he asked, obviously annoyed and not hiding it, staring first at me and then at Basillio and then from one to the other as if he couldn’t really decide who was the real culprit.

Basillio was squirming. He didn’t understand . . . he could never understand that one must follow each strand back to the center no matter how absurd the strand seemed . . . or how far away the center appeared.

I jumped in. “I want to know what kind of relationship exists, if any, between Lev Bukai and your firm.”

“That’s none of your business.”

“I would appreciate your cooperation in this matter.”

“Who the hell are you, lady?” he exploded.

“The ghost of Christmas past,” I replied. It was odd, but I felt no sense of being intrusive. I was where I was supposed to be.

“Oh, God,” I heard Basillio moan.

The man across the desk stared at me for a long time, as if making an evaluation; as if trying to decide whether I was a cop or an insurance investigator or a bill collector or a plain lunatic.

He seemed to be evaluating the price of his silence. He seemed to be running through options. The longer he remained silent, the more he implicated himself.

Then he gave a great wrenching sigh and said: “Lev Bukai has been a silent partner in this firm’s start, its development, and its success. And he was a very close friend of my late father, who founded the firm. I have met Mr. Bukai maybe twice in my life. I really have no contact with him whatsoever.”

He waited for my response. I felt a sense of triumph. He had told me what I wanted to know. What it meant didn’t really matter. The knowledge was sufficient. Grablewski had been confirmed.

“I want to thank you for your help, Mr. Sedaka,” I said. “I doubt if I will bother you again.”

And then we were out of his office as quickly as we had entered, whisking ourselves out as if our bodies would leave telltale stains on the furniture. Basillio and I walked east on Forty-seventh Street until we reached Fifth Avenue.

“So,” he said finally, bursting, “what the hell does it prove? Three Russian émigrés come to the promised land and parlay their hard-earned cash into what turns out to be a winner—the diamond merchant named Sedaka. It’s the goddamn American dream. What does it all have to do with that poor dead fool named Bruce Chessler—who, by the way, hated them and his grandmother? Really, what does it have to do with anything?”

I put my fingers to my lips for a moment, to shut him up.

“Did anything seem strange about him, Tony?”

“Yeah, it was strange he didn’t kick us out on our asses.”

“I mean about his appearance . . . his face in particular.”

“No.”

“Didn’t you notice that his jaw seemed to be lighter in color than the rest of his face?”

“No, I didn’t. Maybe he forgot to turn over when he went to the Bahamas. Maybe his window is striped from dirt and the sun hits his face in stages.”

“It was as if,” I continued, ignoring his analysis, “he had worn a beard for a long time and then recently shaved it. The skin under the beard, once exposed, would be lighter than the rest of his face.”

“So what?”

“The detectives told me they have a description of the man who murdered Bruce Chessler—a heavyset man with a beard, about fifty.”

“Sure,” said Basillio sardonically, “and he also deals in speed when he’s not cutting diamonds.” He kissed me quickly and hailed a cab. He had to play the boss.

I walked home. It was a very strange walk. I kept thinking about Bruce Chessler and Clara and all the peculiar connections which continued to arise surrounding them. But something else kept intruding—Joseph Grablewski.

His—Grablewski’s—contempt for the three émigrés had been total and relentless, in much the same way Bruce Chessler’s had been, at least according to his girlfriend. And there was a wide gulf between what I and others I knew thought about the old émigrés and what Grablewski and Chessler thought of them. How could the émigrés have earned such widely varied judgments on their lives and time and art? Just because they invested in diamond companies? It was all very strange.

My thinking about Grablewski was becoming more and more intense. I was determined not to go to that bar again. Why should I? But I knew I would go there. I would go there again, I would talk to him again, I would sit in that booth again, directly across from him. I silently cursed Basillio for telling me where I could find him . . . for reminding me that he would have the information I needed.

I finally reached my block and house and began to climb the stairs. Bushy had been sulking lately because of my irregular hours, and I had planned to bring him a goody. I was at the third landing before I remembered, but I wasn’t about to go back down and up. Next time, Bushy, I promised him silently.

“Thank God you’re here,” a voice suddenly yelled out at me as I reached the final landing.

I cringed at the sudden loud noise and shrank back when a figure seemed to materialize out of nowhere—just as Bruce Chessler had appeared that night.

“Don’t you remember me?” the figure yelled again—her voice seemed on the cusp of lunacy.

When my sudden fear vanished I knew quite well who it was—Risa, the girl who had been Bruce Chessler’s on-and-off lover.

“Calm down, calm down,” I said to the obviously hysterical girl. Then she burst into tears and started to tremble so hard that I grabbed her shoulders.

With great difficulty I got her into the apartment, onto the sofa. She had trouble breathing . . . and then would be fine and speak a whole sentence or two . . . and then become incoherent again and gasp for breath.

Finally she calmed down and sat on the sofa like a rag doll, her punk hair sadly askew, her arms strangely dangling.

She started to explain in a singsong voice: “I was in my apartment on East Fifth Street, listening to some music. I live on the ground floor. I don’t know why, but I suddenly looked up and a man standing outside the window started to shoot. There was glass flying all over and my things were breaking and I was sure I was going to die.”

She stopped and looked around as if she finally realized she was in a strange apartment.

“I think it has something to do with Bruce. I don’t know why. But I know it. And I remembered you and thought you could help me . . . keep me safe . . . so I brought you some of Bruce’s stuff . . . what he kept with him all the time . . . or that he kept at my apartment because when he was popping pills and drinking he used to get so paranoid.”

I told her to relax, that she was safe with me, that she could stay as long as she wanted.

I made her some iced tea and showed her where to shower; her clothes were drenched with sweat and smelled of her fear.

After she had showered and drunk and eaten a little she was much calmer and she opened the creased envelope she had brought with her and laid the items out on my rug. Bushy investigated them, found them harmless, and walked away. Pancho flew by them so swiftly he didn’t even notice them.

But I noticed them. They were fascinating.

It was a collection of old programs from the Nikolai Group . . . programs of their performances in Central and South America—Mexico City, Rio, Panama City, Managua, Maracaibo, Caracas, Concepción, Quito, and dozens of others, large and small.

“He always studied them,” she said, “always, and wrote all over them and . . .”

I knelt on the floor to study them more closely, and she stopped talking.

Bruce Chessler had written obscenities all over the programs in black and red and purple Magic Markers.

There was something about the Nikolai Group that had obviously engaged and infuriated him even more than the individual émigrés.

I stood up and sat down on the sofa alongside Risa, staring at the strange assemblage of old programs.

“What do you think it means?” Risa asked, now obviously convinced by the bullets fired into her apartment that there was something more to her boyfriend’s murder than little green pills . . . now ready to reexamine even the most trivial objects.

“I don’t know,” I replied.

We sat in silence for some time.

“Did you love him?” I asked.

“Who knows? I think so. But he was hard to be with. It was not warm or close with him. Do you know what I mean—it wasn’t warm?”

I nodded, reached down and picked Bushy up. Holding him right then, for some reason, made me think of Joseph Grablewski again, and I dropped poor Bushy onto the rug as if he were diseased. He was very insulted.

When I looked at Risa again, she was fast asleep. I knew what I had to do next—pay closer attention to Bukai, Chederov, and Mallinova.

As for her, she was one of those child-woman enigmas who seem to haunt the city from generation to generation. She was a cipher. No matter what she told me about herself, I knew nothing. Her sands were always shifting. This year punk . . . next year wholesome . . . the following year demipunk. Doomed to insubstantial change.