A Cat Tells Two Tales (21 page)

17

Lev Bukai exited from his magnificent dwelling at about ten thirty in the morning. I had been waiting since nine, having decided that surveillance was my only logical move. There was nothing else I could think of. My wait was eased by the knowledge that Basillio was also waiting—for Chederov. Risa had agreed to follow Mallinova, but we could never find out where he lived.

Bukai moved very slowly toward Fifth Avenue, so slowly it seemed the sidewalk was moving instead of him. He carried a yellow cane and he was dressed much too warmly for the late-August weather—a jacket and tie. He crossed over to the park side and entered Central Park at Ninetieth Street, where the horse path meets the reservoir.

Then he began a painfully slow walk down the east side of the park to the sailboat pond, where he finally settled himself down on a bench and watched.

I seated myself on a small grass-covered hill about fifty yards from the beach. I could see him but he could not see me.

He dozed and woke and dozed and woke again. He shifted the cane from one hand to the other. He smiled at the small boats in the water, at passing nannies with their baby carriages, at dog walkers. He seemed totally at peace with the world.

I should have brought a book along, I realized. The sun and the heat and the bucolic milieu were making me sleepy.

He sat on that bloody bench for three and a half hours. Then he stood up, stretched, and began the laborious walk back to his house. I followed. By the time he reached his door he seemed totally exhausted and the young woman whom I had met earlier had to come outside and help him in. It was obvious Lev Bukai was not going out again this day. I went back to my apartment.

When I opened the door I was startled to see Risa on the carpet, poring over one of my old scrapbooks.

She looked up, embarrassed, and explained: “I got the chills, so I looked in your closet for a wrap and found this. I hope you don’t mind.” She looked very cute and vulnerable and apologetic and I didn’t mind at all. I had invited her to stay with me as long as she was frightened and she could do what she liked.

“I didn’t know you were so famous,” she said.

I laughed. “That was in Minnesota,” I explained. “I was the Minnesota actress who was going to come to New York and rock it on its heels with my interpretations of deep parts . . . big parts . . . significant parts. It didn’t happen. I basically have become a star in the cat-sitting world.”

She went back to the scrapbook. I made myself a small salad with cottage cheese and took it into the living room to eat.

“Did you find out anything?” she asked.

“Well, I found out that Mr. Bukai likes to watch toy boats for hours.”

“You know, this is really very exciting. I once saw a movie about Murder Incorporated. Do you think these old men have a gang? A murder gang? Is that why you are following them? Do you think they murdered Bruce?”

Her kind of buoyant, naive enthusiasm startled me.

“Where are you from originally, Risa?”

“Maplewood, New Jersey.”

“Where is that?” I asked. The name of the town seemed vaguely familiar. But maybe there had been a town called Maplewood in Minnesota.

“Oh, out there,” she said, obviously not interested in pursuing her geography any further. She went back to the scrapbook. I could see her staring at a large picture of me in
The
Trojan Women
during my first season with the Guthrie Theater. Ah, what a star I was!

“Did Basillio call?” I asked.

“The phone didn’t ring at all when you were gone.”

“You sure? I was also expecting a call from a Mrs. Gordon about a weekend cat-sitting assignment.”

“Wait,” she admitted, “the phone did ring but I couldn’t get to it in time . . . I had fallen asleep . . . so I thought I would put on the answering machine, but I didn’t know how to work it . . . and so—”

I stopped her with my hand. It was okay. Did she want anything to eat? She jumped up, flew to the kitchen, and came back with what was left of the cottage cheese in its container and a soup spoon. We ate together and stared at Bushy, who was staring at us because he liked cottage cheese. Pancho flew by only once and flicked his half-tail at us as if we were flies.

“Doesn’t he ever stop running?” Risa asked incredulously.

“ ‘Stop and die’ is Pancho’s motto,” I explained. She shook her head sadly.

By five Basillio still hadn’t called. Risa had fallen asleep over the scrapbook.

I felt a sudden need to walk quickly, to stretch my legs, to get out of confinement. I went out of the apartment, down the steps, and onto the street. I began to walk uptown.

At Thirty-fourth Street I stopped. The streets were black with people leaving work. Only there and then could I admit to myself where I was going—to that bar on Forty-fourth Street.

I wanted to see Joseph Grablewski. The realization shocked me at first but then made good clear sense. It seemed the logical thing to do. Like the surveillance. The thought came to me that I was beginning to confuse desire and logic. If so, it was pathetic. I pushed the problem out of my mind.

The bar was crowded. Once inside the coolness and the dimness, I wondered if the long day in the sun watching Lev Bukai had given me a sunstroke. Was that why I was in the bar?

Joseph Grablewski was sitting in the same booth, wearing the same clothes, drinking the same drink. He stared dimly, as if someone was seated opposite him. I walked quickly to the booth and slid in beside him—not across from him like the last time, but beside him. My shoulder was touching his. I could smell him—a mixture of vodka and sweat and anxiety . . . a desperate smell.

“What is the matter?” he asked. His fake solicitousness enraged me for some reason or another.

“The matter? Nothing’s the matter with me. It’s with you,” I yelled, and my hand hit his vodka glass so that it slid across the table and upended.

Then I started to cry. And I started to babble. About Bushy and Pancho. About my class in the New School. About the old scrapbook that Risa was looking over. About my desperate need for a part, a real part. I was talking about theater . . . about what I loved . . . and I talked about my last lover, the horse trainer . . . and the last murder I had solved, of that wonderful demonic old man Harry Starobin . . . and I talked about curtain calls and scripts and makeup . . . back and forth I babbled and then, exhausted, turned to face him as I pressed myself against his chest, fiercely, as if we were lovers, as if by doing that I could erase the past fifteen years . . . or bring him back his mind.

Without looking at him, I let my hand run over his face. But it wasn’t an old face my fingers felt; it was a young face; and it wasn’t the face of Grablewski—it was the face of Bruce Chessler.

My God! I pushed myself away from the man and stood up. People were beginning to stare at me. The waiter started to walk over. I ran out. I needed to rest. I needed to gather my forces and talk to my cats. The investigation of the three old men was beginning to unravel me, but nothing yet had happened to do so . . . not one single thing . . . not one solitary juncture. It was all objects in space: diamonds, theatrical programs, white cats, punk girls, wealthy émigrés. All, as Grablewski had said, lackluster clones of Stanislavski.

18

Basillio lasted seven days on surveillance before he resigned in disgust. He told me the old man he was watching went around the block twice a day and that was it, except on Saturday, when he walked to Bloomingdale’s and bought a tie, and on Sunday, when he went to the D’Agostino on Fifty-seventh and Ninth to shop. Since we never found where Mallinova lived, that left me alone, doggedly waiting for Bukai to emerge each day. I began, in fact, to welcome the drudgery because it kept me from any further lunatic forms of behavior vis-à-vis Joseph Grablewski.

I kept on. I was dogged. I would follow the strands to the center just as Bruce Chessler had followed them to his death. That it kept me from Grablewski was no doubt important—I wanted to get control of that escalating danger . . . a pathetic attempt to escalate an old unrequited love. And the worst delusion of all—that there was some relationship between Bruce Chessler, the boy who loved me, and Joseph Grablewski, the man I had once loved as desperately and futilely. Oh, there were so many strands now—Arkavy Reynolds, diamonds, speed, white cats, theatrical contradictions. So many . . .

My doggedness paid off on the second Tuesday in September.

Bukai left the house, crossed Fifth Avenue, but did not enter the park. Instead he boarded a downtown bus, with me five passengers behind him. He rode all the way downtown, got off at Eighth Street, walked through Washington Square Park onto La Guardia Place, south on La Guardia Place to Bleecker, and then turned west on Bleecker.

It was a long, arduous walk for the old man, but he kept it up. Finally he turned off Bleecker and into a coffeehouse—Café Vivaldi—a wonderful place where I had been many times.

I waited across the street. He did not reemerge. So I crossed over and sat down in the sidewalk-café section of the coffeehouse. From where I sat I could see Bukai’s head through the window.

But he was not alone. Two other old men sat with him. I knew who they were instantly: Chederov and Mallinova. The words of that punk girl, Risa, came chillingly back to me: a Murder Incorporated of old men. But who really knew what they were doing there?

They ordered coffee and exotic pastries and I could dimly hear that they were talking in what had to be Russian.

I ordered an espresso and sipped it, watching the street, listening to the sounds from inside.

A man passed, walking a dog. He smiled at me. I smiled back, broadly. I was happy. My speculations had been confirmed. I had postulated that the three old men were not random hates of Bruce Chessler’s, that they were a unit, a set, that whatever existed in their group or in their relation to others could only be understood because they were acting or not acting in concert. There had been other members of the Nikolai Group, but only these three had garnered Bruce Chessler’s almost lunatic hate—and only these three were relevant now. At least to the young man’s death.

The man walking the dog crossed the street, holding the leash tightly. I started to speculate as to why dog people make good street cops, for example, but only cat people make good investigative detectives. It had to do with the interpretation of behavior. With dogs, everything was hands-on or paws-on. The dog wagged his tail, licked your face. You put him on a leash, hit him with a paper, soothed him with a bone, scratched his head.

With cats it was different. To know your cat’s feelings or to interpret its behavior, you had to rely on clues, on interpretations of past facts and past complexes of facts, none of which were mathematically precise.

My musings were interrupted by the sound of scraping chairs. Why was the meeting being adjourned?

What had the émigrés agreed or disagreed about? What had they been discussing? Were they twisted assassins or were they lovable old men?

Mallinova left first; then Chederov. Bukai remained seated, but I could see he was paying the bill. I left my payment on the outside table and waited across the street.

After he exited, Bukai began to walk slowly through the streets, finally ending up on Hudson Street. He walked two more blocks downtown and then vanished into a store.

It was a pet store. Maybe he’s buying a turtle, I thought, to accompany him on his walks.

I peered into the window. The front part of the store carried specialty dog bones, exotic cans of cat food, leashes and mufflers and all kinds of pet paraphernalia, ranging from the practical to the absurd.

Deeper into the store were the cages. It was obviously a place that boarded dogs and cats as well as sold them.

I could see Bukai in the rear section staring into one of the cages.

My antennae—or whatever it was between my actress’s ears—began to pulsate.

He could be in the store, I realized, for a number of reasons, and at least two of them might be most interesting.

When he came out, I was faced with a dilemma. If I kept following him, I wouldn’t be able to go into the store. If I went into the store, I would lose him.

I went into the store. A young man with a bright red bow tie and baggy pants asked me if I needed help. I told him I was just looking.

I spent about five minutes staring at a gray parrot in a large cage with a price tag of $741. Would my cats like it? As a friend? As a meal?

Then I slowly meandered to the rear, where the beasties were boarded and sold.

“Clara,” I screamed, not able to contain myself when I saw the large white cat with the black-spotted rump and face in the cage. She regarded me coolly.

The young man in the red bow tie looked at me with severe disapproval for my outburst.

The trouble was, there were three Claras in three separate cages! It was an astonishing sight. I started to giggle crazily. Then I got hold of myself.

Why not? I thought. One was my Clara. The other two were the cats given to Risa and then taken.

I could see that Bukai had brought them some tidbits.

Only one of the Claras was eating the gift.

A sudden calm came over me as I basked in the safety of Clara and her friends. I was beginning to perceive a pattern. I was beginning to close the circle . . . to pull the strands closer to the center.

“Are you looking for a kitten?” the young man asked, smelling a purchase.

“Not right now,” I said, and quickly walked out of the store.

19

It was ten
a.m.
the next day. I was having my second cup of coffee and treasuring the events and revelations of the previous day. Risa had decided that during her last few days with me she would make herself useful—so she was running up and down the stairs to the washing machines and dryers in the basement, carrying pillowcases full of supposedly dirty clothes, I had the feeling that she was wreaking havoc by throwing some things of mine into a machine that simply should not have been there. But her instincts and intent were so good and so refreshing that I didn’t have the heart to intervene even to ask a question. Let her ruin a few things, I thought.

Then Basillio called. His voice was low, clinical.

“Grablewski is in the hospital, Swede, and I heard it’s bad. He collapsed in that bar last night, or yesterday afternoon.”

“What’s the matter with him?”

“I don’t know. Like I said, all I heard was that he collapsed and was taken to Beth Israel.”

I was silent on the phone. The phone receiver seemed odd to me, as if it shouldn’t be capable of transmitting sound. Inside of me there were all kinds of turmoil, but nothing came out. The thought that Joseph Grablewski was in pain was almost unbearable to me. It made me mute.

“Do you want to see him?” Basillio asked kindly when my silence persisted.

“Yes,” I whispered.

“Wait there,” Basillio said, bless him, and hung up the phone.

A half hour later Basillio and I stood at a reception desk in one of the small wings of Beth Israel’s alcoholism ward. We circled each other nervously, waiting for a Dr. Wallace.

He arrived in ten minutes or so, a very tall, stooped man who looked about seventy-five. He had bulging eyes and glasses that were perched on his forehead.

“Who are you?” he demanded, unfriendly, impatient, skeptical.

“Friends of his. Can we see him?” I asked.

He shrugged mightily and moved off, gesturing with one hand that we should follow. We passed through an open door and then a locked door and came to a ward divided into small cubicles of two beds each.

Dr. Wallace stopped in front of one. He pointed. I stared at the figure on the bed. It looked like a dead man. Grablewski was lying on his back, his arms strangely folded, as if he had just emerged out of some kind of restraint. His body was absolutely pale . . . as if some fiend had drained his blood. I could see that he was breathing; his chest was moving. His eyes were half open but not focusing. He looked childlike on that bed. The sight of him made me weak. I grasped the end of the steel cot. Basillio reached out to steady me but didn’t make contact.

“What happened to him?” I asked plaintively.

“Are you kidding me? I thought you were his friend,” Dr. Wallace said, his voice stacked with contempt. His response confused me.

“If you’re his friend,” he continued, “you know he’s an alcoholic, don’t you? And you know he’s been an alcoholic a long time.”

There was silence. We were all standing, not speaking, and seeming at cross-purposes.

“Okay, ladies and gentlemen,” Dr. Wallace said in a resigned, sardonic voice, “let me give you the lesson you crave. The gentleman you are looking at is suffering from a common condition called fasting alcoholic hypoglycemia. It is usually seen in malnourished alcoholics. It is characterized by conjugate deviation of the eyes, extensor rigidity of the extremities, unilateral or bilateral Babinski reflexes, convulsions, transient hemiparesis, trismus hypothermia. It is caused by a multifactorial inhibition of gluconeogenesis by ethanol—booze. Your friend was brought here in a comatose state and given glucose intravenously. He is coming around quite nicely.”

Dr. Wallace, having finished his bewildering exposition, nodded and then left. He stopped once and called back: “By the way, only about eleven percent of untreated cases of this syndrome die. So don’t worry too much about your friend.”

There were other humans on other cots, but I felt totally alone with Joseph Grablewski.

I pulled a steel folding chair close to the cot and sat down. I was twelve inches from his face. It was sad . . . so indescribably sad. I was suffused with all kinds of bizarre guilt . . . as if somehow by
not
doing something I had put him there.
Not
become lovers? When? Years ago? Or now?

“Look, he’s come to. He recognizes you,” Basillio said. The patient’s eyes were indeed flickering and he moved one of his arms down by his side. I noticed that there were tremors in his fingers and his tongue flicked in and out of the side of his mouth as if on a desperate search for water.

“He’s trying to speak to you, Swede. Go closer to him, he’s trying to say something.”

Yes, I could see that. I could see that he wanted to speak to me. It made me ambivalent. I wanted to be close to him . . . I wanted to run away. His plight was threatening me. His alcoholism sickened me.

I touched him tentatively, on the hand, like he was a dying man and my gesture made me ashamed.

Then I pressed my lips to his head and whispered, “I’m glad you’ll be okay.”

He nodded feebly and twisted his head oddly.

“He wants to tell you something,” Basillio said. “Put your ear by his mouth.”

I did so and waited. I heard sounds but no words. Then, finally, he said something to me that I could retrieve. Then he seemed to collapse and lose consciousness.

We walked out of the ward and onto the street. We stood there watching the traffic, watching the people enter and leave.

“What did he say to you?” Basillio asked.

“It was something odd. He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

“What?” Basillio was insistent.

“He said . . . no, he asked: Did Constantin bite you?”

Basillio laughed. “He was making fun of you. He remembered when you had asked him about those three Stanislavski disciples. Constantin was Stanislavski’s first name.”

“I’m aware of his first name, Tony, it’s just that I don’t think Joseph Grablewski was making some kind of joke.”

“Then what does it mean?”

“He was trying to tell me something.”

“Oh, come on, Swede, the man is in an alcoholic stupor.”

I had to be careful. I didn’t want to make a fool of myself in front of Basillio or anyone else when I discussed Joseph Grablewski. Even in a stupor the man upset me. He upset me . . . not his words. I had only a low-level buzz over “Did Constantin bite you?” Low-level but persistent, like an aching molar.

“If he wasn’t making a joke, then who is Constantin?”

“Is there a vodka called Constantin?” I asked Basillio.

“I don’t think so. At least I’ve never heard of that brand. Maybe Grablewski thinks he’s Stanislavski.”

“No, Tony, Grablewski knows he’s Grablewski, that’s his trouble.”

“Well, look, Swede, I gotta get back to work. I’m sure your old friend will be okay. I’ll be in touch.”

“Thanks, Tony,” I said, and watched him walk downtown quickly, heading toward one of his copy shops.

I didn’t go anywhere. I just lounged in front of the hospital. Grablewski’s stupid whispered comment was like a delayed-action fuse. When I’d first heard it, the words were meaningless. When I discussed it with Basillio, they began to nudge me. And now that I was alone, they were beginning to fester. What was he talking about? Did he mean Stanislavski? Bite me? Had I suffered some kind of attack or setback?

Maybe he was talking about another man called Constantin. Maybe he was talking about a place. Maybe he was talking about a bar called Constantin. Or maybe he didn’t even know he was talking to me; maybe he thought he was talking to one of his drinking companions.

I could not leave that stupid phrase alone. Maybe it was the residue of unrequited love. I could not leave it alone. Watch it fester, Alice, I thought to myself. I walked to the corner and stared at the hospital. Poor man . . . locked in there . . . people sticking things into his arm . . . people restraining him when he got violent—and all so that he could crawl back to that booth on Forty-fourth Street and start all over again.

What was Constantin? Who was Constantin? Where was Constantin? What did the whispered words mean? Then, fifteen minutes after I left the hospital, I was headed uptown in a cab—my destination the same Lincoln Center Library of the Performing Arts that I had visited a short time ago with Basillio.

I knew exactly where to look now for memoirs and histories of the Moscow Art Theatre. But this time I wasn’t looking for references to Bukai, Chederov, and Mallinova. I was looking for a single reference to a single name—Constantin.

But all I could find were references to Constantin Stanislavski. No, I was sure it was another Constantin. I had the odd feeling as I flipped through the indexes that Joseph Grablewski was somewhere in the massive library, laughing at me, mocking me, guzzling his vodka.

And then, in a single beat-up book published in English in 1948 by a Russian-émigré actor named Orlov, I found the indexed reference: “Constantin, cat.”

It was on page 131 of the very bitter memoir.

On that page Orlov recounted how Stanislavski was presented with a white cat named after him by his associates and this cat became a company favorite, not the least because it tended to bite.

I started to laugh right there in the library, so loudly and with such abandon that one of the guards came over and asked me if I could moderate my behavior.

It was impossible, so I had to run out of the library and calm down by the Henry Moore statue. It was bizarre and funny; imagine a line of white cats that began with a cat given to Stanislavski—and now sixty years later at least one of its progeny named Clara and two unknown siblings are hidden in a boarding pet store on Hudson Street after having been kidnapped by Bruce Chessler and then stolen back. And they are brought goodies by an eighty-five-year-old émigré. But why would Chessler have kidnapped the cats in the first place?

The whole thing was crazy, Grablewski was crazy. And for all I knew, Bukai was crazy.

By the time I got home, I was totally exhausted. Risa had gone out and left me a note that she would be back in the late afternoon or early evening. I told Bushy and Pancho about the mysterious line of white cats . . . if indeed such a line existed.

When I had finally showered and eaten and napped, I realized that I ought to at least follow up Grablewski’s clue. I pulled out the old programs from the Nikolai Group’s travels that Bruce Chessler had so lunatically defaced with his obscenities and carefully went through them searching for something Chessler might have written about Constantin the cat or Clara the cat or any white cat—past, present, or future.

There was no such annotation. It was odd. If Chessler was so obsessed with the émigrés, he must have known that there existed some kind of émigré saying with a double entendre: “Constantin bite you?” There had to be such a saying, or else how could Joseph Grablewski know about it? And surely Chessler’s grandmother must have known about it and said something to her grandson about Constantin, Stanislavski’s cat.

Well, one couldn’t force things. If it wasn’t there, it wasn’t there.

Going through those old programs made me very sad. All those performances done and gone and forgotten. All those people in all those plays in all capacities—gone.

I smiled as I saw the name of Maria Swoboda, my old teacher, so prominently displayed in the programs. And the pictures the émigrés had used! They were all so heroic! More like the photos of operatic tenors.

I began to feel very reverently toward them. I started to stack them by date.

In 1957 they had gone to Mexico City.

In 1958 to Ecuador.

In 1959 to Panama and Argentina.

In 1960 to Venezuela.

In 1961 to Nicaragua.

In 1962 to Brazil and Costa Rica.

In 1963 to El Salvador.

In 1964 to Chile.

In 1965 to Venezuela.

In 1966 to Peru.

In 1967 to Mexico City and Brazil.

After I had stacked them by date, I realized it was very strange that the Nikolai Group had never performed in Europe, only in South and Central America.

I suddenly became furious at myself for not having studied or even looked at the programs seriously before.

There were many other peculiar facts about the Nikolai Group that emerged after one studied the programs.

For example, in most of the years of their existence they made only one foreign trip each year—to one city in one country.

This was very strange. No other theatrical group I was ever attached to did that. Small groups have to perform many times in many places in the shortest period of time in order to recoup their expenses. The Nikolai Group seemed to give command performances as if they were the Bolshoi Ballet—which they assuredly weren’t. How could they have afforded to fly to Buenos Aires, for example, and play in one theater for three nights and then fly back? What was the point artistically, anyway, forget financially?

And there was something even stranger. In the years when they had visited two countries on the same trip, these countries were far apart. This also was unheard-of. European companies, for example, when they came to America to play New York and Boston and Washington, and perhaps Atlanta, always tried to schedule some performances in Montreal, because it was geographically feasible. They wouldn’t schedule Kingston, Jamaica.

The itinerary of the Nikolai Group was in some way profoundly fake!

I was so excited at what I had discovered about the programs that I started to pirouette about the living room with joy, until I realized that I wouldn’t even have picked up the programs again if the alcoholic Mr. Grablewski hadn’t whispered a cryptic comment in my ear.

But the seven strands were indeed beginning to point toward a center. There were Constantin and his progeny—poor Clara. There was a surly diamond merchant. There was a theatrical group that seemed to have defied theatrical logic. There was a murdered young man obsessed by hatred. There were three ancient wealthy émigrés who met from time to time. There was an eccentric bohemian who had been a police informer before he was murdered. And the seventh strand was unrequited love—Chessler’s for me, and mine, at one time in the past, for Grablewski. For the first time since that young man had appeared on my landing I could see dimly toward the center—where the strands were leading.