A Cat Tells Two Tales (24 page)

22

I was sitting next to Detective Harry Hanks in his ugly unmarked police car, holding Jack Be Quick on my lap. We were double-parked across from the Café Vivaldi.

It had not been easy getting him there. The scene in the police precinct had been volatile.

“So what do you want me to do? Arrest the girl for breaking your friend’s plate-glass window? Okay. I’ll do that. Or do you want me to arrest her for attempted kidnapping of a white cat that didn’t turn out to be a white cat at all?” He was getting more and more irritated and he started accentuating his questions by poking his finger in the air. “Or do you want me to arrest her for accessory to murder? That’s it, isn’t it? That the same guy who paid her to steal the cat and to set up Bruce Chessler also murdered Bruce Chessler.”

“Calm down, Detective.”

“No, you calm down, lady. Because that little black girl never saw a person she could identify in the bar that night. She was there when the shots were fired, but she didn’t know who fired them. Were you ever in that bar, lady? Of course you were. Where the kid was sitting, you can’t see your hand in front of your face. So you want me to arrest the black girl and the diamond merchant on the basis of phone calls? You must be kidding.”

“I have a lot more,” I told him.

“Where? In your pocketbook? In your shoes?”

“No, in a café not far from here.”

And that was how, after a struggle, we ended up in the unmarked police car, staring across the street, against a strong sun, into a coffeehouse.

“These three old Russians . . . how do you know they’re inside now? I can’t see a thing.”

“Oh, they’re in there,” I said. “The owner of the café told me. They have met for years on the last Thursday of each month.”

“Listen, lady,” he said, exasperated, “I don’t want any more conflict with you. Just tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it. Then just promise to leave me alone.”

“Go in with me, Detective, and protect me when I confront them,” I said.

“From what you told me about their ages . . . are you sure they’re assaultive?” he asked.

“We’ll see, won’t we?”

“Do we really need the cat?”

“Oh, yes, we really do,” I replied.

We left the car double-parked. We shut the doors. The three of us, including Jack Be Quick, walked through the door of the Café Vivaldi.

The three old men were sitting at the same table I had seen them sitting at before—that time I had followed Bukai to the pet store on Hudson Street where he had sequestered the white cats.

For a moment I was frightened . . . very frightened . . . not physically . . . and I clutched poor Jack Be Quick so tightly in my arms that he gave a long, low growl.

That was when the three turned toward me. I had never been this close to Chederov and Mallinova. Chederov had thick white hair that fell down over the most lined face I had ever seen. Mallinova had a painfully thin lantern face. They were all wearing cramped suits, as if they were the board of directors of some long-closed bank.

“May I join you, Mr. Bukai? We’ve already met, if you remember. And this is my friend Detective Harry Hanks.” At the mention of the detective, they stared at each other. They said nothing. Detective Hanks pulled two chairs up to the large round table. We sat down. I still held Jack Be Quick.

There was a glass of double espresso in front of each of the old men. And toward the center of the table were two untouched pieces of Italian cheesecake.

No one spoke for what seemed the longest time. I could hear Bukai breathing heavily to my left.

It was I who must talk. But to whom? It was I who was going to indict them. But who was going to receive the indictment? It had to be the detective. I would talk to Harry Hanks.

I was about to do the kind of theater piece I had always despised: a one-woman monologue reciting facts. But there was no other option.

I began. Detective Hanks was the audience. I ignored the other three.

“We are sitting with three rich old men. They came to America penniless except for their reputations as dramatic artists, as professionals in the world’s most prestigious theater company—the Moscow Art Theatre.

“Now they are very wealthy men. How did they get their money?

“Let me tell you. They formed a theater group in the 1950s—the Nikolai Group—and it survived for ten years.

“Each year the Group made a trip to South or Central America to perform.

“I have traced the itinerary of that group. It is very odd. One oddity is that they visited only countries or cities that were in the midst of either political or economic turmoil. Isn’t that strange? One would think they would avoid those places. Most theatrical companies do. But not the Nikolai Group. Oh, no.”

I hesitated and looked around the table. Mallinova was very pale. Bukai was grimacing and stirring his espresso with a tiny silver spoon.

“You see,” I continued, “they weren’t on tour for aesthetic reasons. They were smuggling in diamonds and smuggling out cash. For diamonds have traditionally been the repository of wealth for South Americans during wars and revolutions and inflation. In France and the Middle East, it is gold. But in South America it is diamonds.”

Hanks arched his eyebrows. I slid across the table to him a piece of paper I had prepared; on one side was the Group’s itinerary in South America . . . on the other side the visits were correlated with social, economic, or political turmoil. Hanks studied the sheet.

“It’s a helluva coincidence,” he noted. He pushed the paper toward the center of the table for any of the old men to study. None of them made a move toward the paper.

“But it’s circumstantial as hell,” he added.

I continued. I was beginning to grow into the heady role. I felt a sense of analytical power . . . that I was projecting it.

“We all know that Mr. Bukai is a partner in a diamond firm now run by a gentleman named Sedaka. His father, Daniel Sedaka, died in 1972. He died at home, among his family, content. But if you will retrieve from your files, Detective Hanks, a May 11, 1949, article in a now-defunct newspaper called the
Daily Mirror
, it describes how three individuals were indicted for the theft of a large shipment of diamonds consigned from Amsterdam to New York. One of those individuals was Daniel Sedaka. The diamonds vanished in Toronto. The senior Mr. Sedaka was tried but the jury refused to convict. Those diamonds were eventually sold on the black market in South America for huge sums of cash. And it was all clear profit.”

Mallinova raised his hand for the waiter and gestured that he wanted water. I waited until the water was served.

“So,” I continued, “the Nikolai Group eventually disbanded, with everyone happy—everyone rich. But then, alas, a crazy young man comes on the scene. He is the grandson of a colleague—Maria Swoboda. I’m talking about Bruce Chessler.”

Mallinova drank his water. I could see his eyes staring through the top of his glass at Bukai.

“Now, Bruce Chessler was a very tormented young man. He lived a marginal existence . . . a typically pathetic out-of-work actor’s life, surviving through small-time drug sales. One of his customers was a theater hanger-on named Arkavy Reynolds. One day, probably, Arkavy needed speed and had no money, so he gave Bruce Chessler some information instead. Dirty information . . . about some revered people. Arkavy thought Bruce would find their diamond-smuggling scheme amusing. How Arkavy got the information, we’ll never know. But he was a very resourceful lunatic. Anyway, Bruce didn’t find it amusing. Bruce loved the theater with a passion and he hated those who debased it. The hypocrisy of his grandmother’s colleagues—these hallowed names from the Moscow Art Theatre—began to fester in him. Since they were thieves, he reasoned, he would steal something from them.

“Bruce Chessler didn’t steal money from them. He stole something much more prized by the old Russians—their last link to the Stanislavski tradition of the Moscow Art Theatre. You see, Stanislavski had a white cat named Constantin, with black spots on its face and rump. And soon there were kittens and many such cats. And when the émigrés left Russia, they took their felines with them, and once in this country, they kept the line alive. If you want to see them, Detective Hanks, we can go to a pet store on Hudson Street, where they are now being boarded. There are three white cats with black spots in there. They belong to these old gentlemen here, and they were what Bruce Chessler stole.

“What a stupid childish act it was . . . stealing cats from old people. And then he just gave them away. He gave them away because he intuited that he had gone too far . . . that the three old men were afraid he was going to go to the police about the diamond smuggling of so many years ago. It never dawned on the old men that Bruce Chessler had absolutely no hard evidence and that the statute of limitations made any prosecution improbable. What they really wanted to protect above all were their reputations . . . their delusions that they were artists . . . that the great Moscow Art Theatre tradition rested nobly on their brows. So our three elderly friends had to make sure. They had to get rid of that irrational, vindictive young man. After all, he was threatening their immortality. They acted murderously. They frightened Sedaka Junior into killing Bruce Chessler and his bohemian information source, Arkavy Reynolds, and then stealing back the cats.

“You see, the Russians were not merely silent partners in the diamond firm. They owned the controlling interest. If Sedaka refused to comply with their wishes, they could have simply fired him. And Sedaka lived a very expensive lifestyle. He chose to murder rather than be poor. I’m sure, Detective Hanks, that if you put a little pressure on the diamond merchant, he will happily implicate his benefactors to cut his own sentence.”

I leaned back, suddenly exhausted, talked out. My throat was beginning to tremble.

Detective Hanks was staring at me, obviously absorbed in my story.

I turned to Bukai. He, too, was staring at me. I smiled at him.

He picked up his espresso glass and flung the contents into my face. It happened so fast I couldn’t evade the lukewarm coffee, which splattered over me.

Hanks stood up swiftly and started toward the old man. I raised my hand to stop him. He sat back down, reluctantly.

I wiped the coffee away, carefully, with Bukai’s napkin, and then wiped Jack Be Quick’s face, since he also had been splattered.

“Yes,” I said, “these old men love their white cats so much they will go to great lengths to get them back if stolen. They were even going to take Jack Be Quick, whose photograph I had doctored to simulate a white cat with black spots. Why? Because they thought Bruce Chessler had stolen it from another émigré. They were the guardians of the white cats . . . as if that would redeem their prostitution. Stupid, sad old men, willing to do anything to die with some semblance of honor.”

I stood up and placed Jack Be Quick on the center of the table.

“Now, there’s a reason why I could use Jack Be Quick as a stand-in for one of the white cats. The white cats bear an uncanny physical resemblance to Abyssinians—which Jack Be Quick is. But they’re not Abyssinians at all . . . they’re just plain old Moscow Art Theatre wardrobe cats.”

I pushed Jack Be Quick gently onto his back and began to stroke his stomach. He lay there happily.

“Look at him, Detective Hanks,” I said.

“I’m looking. So what?”

“Can you see what makes Abyssinians different from other cats . . . why they look like cougars?”

“The paws . . . they’re bigger.”

“No, the pads, not the paws. They have larger pads on the feet.”

“Okay, okay, so what?”

“Well, Detective, why don’t you just take a peek into Jack Be Quick’s front-left paw?”

“Why?”

“He has an important present for you.”

He reached over, gently spread the pad, and said: “There’s something in there.”

“Right.” I reached over and pulled out a small diamondlike stone.

“Is this the way they smuggled the diamonds? I know South American animal quarantine laws are a joke, but . . .”

I laughed. Tweaking the detective’s nose was refreshing. But enough was enough.

“I have no idea how they smuggled the diamonds in and the cash out, Detective. Probably in their underwear. But in those years, before the drugged-out rock bands, traveling theatrical groups were never searched by customs agents in any country. It was a long-honored gentleman’s agreement. In the 1950s, for example, a well-known British ballerina visited this country often with her troupe and her constant companion—a bottle of Polish vodka . . . which was illegal to bring into the country at that time. No one bothered her. In those days, before the rock bands forced them to crack down, artists traveling on tour could bring into a given country whatever they wanted—and take out what they wanted. Provided they were discreet.”

I dropped the fake stone, actually a pebble, into Bukai’s empty espresso cup. Jack Be Quick walked over to inspect what he had been carrying.

The waiter dropped the bill onto the table. It was such an absurd ending to my performance that I started to laugh. Then I looked around. No one else was laughing. The faces of the three men had crumbled. Their bodies seemed to have been scraped of substance.

I turned away from them, toward the door to the café, and stared for a long time. I had the strangest feeling that Bruce Chessler was about to walk in. What a bizarre delusion. Did I require applause from his ghost? For what? For a fine performance? For unraveling the conspiracy? For making sure that the old men would probably die in a penitentiary somewhere rather than in their town houses? It was hard to understand.

23

“It’s not often a beautiful woman buys me lunch in a restaurant where the house salad costs twenty-two fifty,” Basillio said, staring at his sparsely laden plate with both horror and awe.

We were seated in one of those posh new restaurants on lower Broadway, south of Houston and north of Canal.

A week had gone by. I felt very good. I was still celebrating. Sedaka had blown the whistle on the three old men. Hanks said he’d get twenty years to life for the Chessler and Reynolds murders. As for the three old men, Hanks had no idea what they’d get. How does one sentence eighty-five-year-old men? I wasn’t celebrating their coming pain; I was celebrating the truth, which was, in an odd sense, a vindication of Stanislavski and the Moscow Art Theatre. I don’t know how, but it was. It was as if the Russian theatrical tradition had hired me and paid me with unspoken affection.

“What I still don’t understand, Swede, is how you tied together the fact that there was something strange about the Nikolai Group’s tours and the fact they only went to countries where diamonds would be very much in demand because of turmoil.”

“Well, look Tony, I’ve been around the theater too long not to recognize that those tours were somehow fakes. Theater companies can’t do it that way. The Group had to be going to each specific country for a reason, and that reason had to be lucrative. What little underfunded company can fly down to Rio for two days with their whole cast and baggage and then turn around and fly back? No way. So I took the month, year, and place of each trip and checked it against the
New York Times Index
for those dates. Each visit was the same—the Nikolai Group seemed to be courting danger. They went only to places that were in turmoil one way or another. They had to be bringing something in or bringing something out. Then I remembered that Bukai’s original connection with the diamond firm had been with the father, not the son. So I started researching old man Sedaka . . .”

“And the rest is history,” Basillio added, grinning.

“The white cats are still a problem,” I said, suddenly noticing one of the strangest little rolls I have ever seen nestled in the wicker bread tray. I extracted it and studied it as a cat would.

“Where are they?”

“Oh, they’re still in the pet store. But the pet-store owner won’t release them unless Bukai signs a consent order. And the old man won’t sign anything. He wants them to stay there. He still believes other white cats exist and are being threatened.”

“What about the fake white cat?”

“You mean Jack Be Quick? He’s back with his owner.”

“I still don’t understand why they tried to steal him.”

“Bukai and his friends obviously lost count of the progeny of Constantin. They don’t know which émigrés own which cats. That’s why he went for Jack Be Quick. He didn’t know if it really was a descendant of Constantin’s. It sure looked like one. Better sure than sorry.”

“Only in the theater,” he mused, finally giving up on the salad and staring at the remarkable dessert wagon that hovered in the distance.

I realized that I was still holding the strange roll, so I dropped it back into the basket.

“Eat it, Swede. It’s good for you. It’ll fatten you up.”

“I like bread in the morning only.”

“You always were weird, Swede,” he said. I thanked him profusely for his compliment. We sat there for another half hour or so, eating tarts and drinking delicious coffee. Then he went back to work and I started home.

On Fourth Avenue, just before Fourteenth Street, I passed a flower store and saw an expensive bouquet of yellow flowers. I bought it and kept walking.

When I reached Twenty-third Street I stopped. I was perplexed. Why was I going home? The cats were fed. There was nothing more to do. Why had I bought the flowers? For
him
?

I stepped into the gutter and hailed a cab, which took me to Forty-fourth Street. Had I really bought the flowers for Joseph Grablewski in celebration that he was out of the alkie ward in the hospital? But he had been out awhile.

I walked gingerly into the bar. I was excited, like a girl on a date.

He was there, in the same booth. I started to walk toward him, self-conscious, like at an audition. My vulnerability angered me. God, I was past forty. I had never even slept with that drunkard.

I slipped into the booth across from him and laid the flowers on the table. A glass of what looked like cola was in front of him.

“Another attempt at seduction?” he asked weakly, staring at the flowers.

He looked pale and thin and his hair was cut shorter. He kept his hands palm-down on the table. They were shaking slightly.

“How do you feel?”

“Wonderful.”

“Where’s your vodka?”

“Don’t you know? I’m now a recovering alcoholic.”

“What’s in the glass?”

“Root beer.”

“I want to thank you for your help . . . for the information you gave me.”

“What help?” he asked.

“About Lev Bukai’s diamond connections.”

“Were you one of the people who visited me in the hospital?”

“Yes.”

Since he hadn’t even seemed to remember anything about Lev Bukai, I left it alone.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did you visit me in the hospital?”

“To bring you flowers,” I said, smiling and pointing to them.

“I don’t like flowers . . . in hospitals . . . in bars . . . onstage.”

I pulled the flowers close to me.

“What do we do? What do we do? Sleep together or not?” He recited the questions in a singsong manner and then began to laugh.

“You must forgive me,” he finally said. “Sobriety brings out my lack of control. But it won’t last long. I’ve never been able to achieve sobriety for more than three days running.”

“Maybe this time.”

“That’s what my students always say.”

I was perplexed. What students was he talking about?

“Do you teach now?”

“When sober. Didn’t you know? Don’t you know that for the past ten years the great Joseph Grablewski has been earning vodka money by teaching psychotic students how to really act . . . how to bring heaven, hell, Marx, and De Sade into their genitalia.”

“No, I had no idea you were an acting coach.”

“Coach? My God! Not a coach. Never a coach. Master, guru, savior, shrink—but not ever a coach.”

He drank some of the root beer, very slowly, as if it could kill him.

“Everybody’s heard of crazy Joseph Grablewski’s classes.”

“I haven’t. Who studies with you? Maybe I know some of them.”

“Psychopaths study with me,” he yelled, “and those who are heartbroken and those who despise what there is, and those who are broken by the stage, and those who . . . Not you, lady, never a beautiful lady like you.”

He had misjudged me again. He had made me into the enemy again.

“I don’t make them feel good. I don’t prepare them for stupid plays. I make them into performance artists. I make them grapple with the world. Sometimes it even kills them.”

“You’re talking stupid now, Joseph. Calm down.”

“Am I talking stupid? Am I really? What do you know? A student of mine was murdered a few weeks ago. What an actor he might have become under my tutelage! His assignment was simple: I told him to fall desperately in love with a woman . . . to pine for her . . . to write her love letters . . . to engage her . . . to go to the very limits of romantic fakery . . .”

I put my hands over my ears. I suddenly understood what I was hearing. But I could not deal with the horror of what I was comprehending. I wanted to be dumb, to be senseless.

Grablewski was still talking. I could see his lips moving wildly.

I ran out, spilling the flowers onto the floor. Bruce Chessler had loved me as an assignment! As a classroom exercise projected out onto the world! I walked ten, fifteen, twenty blocks, quickly. Then I stopped, exhausted. And right there, on the street, I began to laugh. Had ever an actress been so elegantly hoisted on her own petard?