A Cat Tells Two Tales (25 page)

24

Thanksgiving came and went. Christmas came and went. In January the diamond merchant Sedaka was sentenced to twenty-five years to life for the murder of Bruce Chessler. The charges against him for the murder of Arkavy Reynolds were dropped. The three old émigrés were sentenced to eight to fifteen years each for conspiracy to murder. All charges relating to diamond smuggling and theft were dropped. Mallinova died from a heart attack two weeks after the sentencing. Chederov suffered a stroke and was hospitalized. Only Bukai, of the three, went to jail.

I don’t like to see people sent to the penitentiary, but I really had no sympathy for the Russians and Sedaka. They were murderers. In fact, I was on a sort of permanent high because it had been my efforts that solved the case. As for Joseph Grablewski’s revelation that the young man’s love for me was an acting-class exercise—well, I felt a bit stupid, but then I realized that it was probably my swallowing the tale of “doomed love” that had started my investigations. So my foolishness had paid off.

Everything was going well with me. There was a good possibility that I would land the part of an old crazy woman in a very strange and very beautiful play written by a Chilean woman, which was to be staged in the spring at Princeton University by a new drama society. I loved playing old crazy women with thick corrosive makeup dripping all over. It was a harmless perversion. As for cat-sitting, it was always there when I needed it.

My own cats were doing quite well, although Pancho had developed a mange-type rash on his back that required me to rub some evil-smelling substance on it a few times a week. This meant I had to catch Pancho. Which in turn meant that I was becoming physically fit, because to catch Pancho when he knew he was about to get anointed was more than difficult. I had to plot strategies . . . to lie in wait for him and then pounce. Once I grabbed him, he would fix his betrayed eyes on me until the deed was done. Poor Pancho, he never really trusted me.

In fact, I was so “up,” I decided to buy a toaster oven. It was just when I was percolating in the last phase of that decision that Basillio called and asked me to meet him for a drink.

The moment I saw him at the bar on Second Avenue just north of St. Marks Place, I knew he had something important to tell me; a plum of some kind. He was drumming a tune on the bar and bouncing up and down.

He patted the stool next to him. I sat.

“Now,” he said grandly, “before I begin telling you my news, I have to ask you a personal question.”

“How personal?” I asked, ordering a glass of club soda with a twist.

“Trust me, Swede, trust me. What I want to know is: have you gotten over Joseph Grablewski?”

I exploded. “What are you talking about? Nothing happened between him and me. Nothing. It was just a kind of nostalgia for me. You were the one who sent me to him. Remember? Yes, I was happy to see him again, and acted like a little girl. But nothing happened. Nothing could happen. He’s a walking tragedy. I haven’t seen him in months. It was another one of my temporary aberrations.”

“Good. I was afraid that if I gave you some terrific news about him, it might send you into a tailspin. You did love him once, Swede.”

I sipped the club soda. He was insulting me, in a way. He was saying I would begrudge Joseph Grablewski some kind of happiness. He was saying I was a vindictive spurned woman.

All I said was: “Tony, you’re very close to getting some club soda on your head.”

He laughed, kissed me on the head, and pulled a newspaper clipping out of his pocket. Dramatically, with flourishes, he spread it out in front of me.

It was an advertisement from the theater section of the
Village Voice
:

ANNOUNCING THE WORLD PREMIERE OF . . .

Why Not?

By the famous Russian Symbolist Poet

A. A. Blok

Produced and directed by

Joseph Grablewski

The long-lost play by the most respected artist of revolutionary Russia is finally brought to the stage, in English, directed by one of the legends of the American theater.

The advertisement then went on to announce that the first previews would be the week of February 19 at the Cherry Lane Theatre. Then it listed the cast and some other credits.

I sat back, astonished. It was truly wonderful. Almost wondrous. The man seemed to have risen from the dead. I remembered the last time I’d seen him, in the bar, when he had said his usual limit for sobriety was three days.

I turned to Basillio. I was crying. I said to him: “Believe me, Tony, I am extremely happy for him.”

He nodded in assent. I could see that he too was engaged with the sheer heroism or luck or whatever it was that had prompted the reemergence of Joseph Grablewski.

But all he said was: “I never knew he wrote a play.”

“Who?”

“Blok. I read all his poems as a kid. Remember ‘The Twelve’?”

I had heard of that long revolutionary poem, but I had never read it.

“I think Blok died in 1921.” Basillio kept talking about Blok, slowly at first, and then escalating into one of his crazed drama lectures about the problems of putting poets on in the theater . . . about how you needed plain speech.

I wasn’t listening. I wanted to do something. I wanted to celebrate. I wanted to give Joseph Grablewski something . . . a poem . . . a flower. I wanted to let him know that everyone who ever listened to him in the old days, everyone who ever heard him talk about theater, was grateful.

“Remember what he looked like when we visited him in the hospital?” Basillio suddenly asked.

Then it dawned on me what I must give him. I had in my possession what he really would appreciate—the love letters his pupil had penned to me as an exercise. Yes, Bruce Chessler’s letters.

“Have to go, have to go,” I called out as I started out of the bar.

“Wait, Swede, wait . . . where the hell are you going?”

But I was gone. I was walking back to my apartment, fast. I was like a twelve-year-old kid who had finally found the right gift for her teacher.

Sixty seconds after I flew through the front door of my apartment, scaring poor Bushy half to death, my enthusiasm dampened.

I couldn’t find the letters where I thought I had left them.

I couldn’t find them in the cartons. I couldn’t find them in the closets . . . or the files . . . or the cabinets . . . or the valises. They were nowhere . . . gone . . . vanished.

My balloon was deflated. But where were they?

Risa! It had to be Risa! She probably took them with her when she left.

How sad! It was probably her pathetic way of getting back at me. She probably also thought that Chessler’s love for me was legitimate—not a classroom exercise. She didn’t know it was all a fake.

It was stupid . . . sad . . . I wanted the letters back . . . I wanted to give them to Joseph. I started searching for Risa’s phone number, remembering that I had written it down on a piece of paper after she had put it on my wrist with a Magic Marker. I found it and dialed. A voice answered. It wasn’t Risa. The voice said there was no such person as Risa living there and never had been.

I hung up the phone. Could Risa have given me the wrong number by mistake? Unlikely. Could I have transcribed the wrong number from my wrist to the pad? Never. If there is one iron law of life, it is this: actors and actresses never make mistakes in phone numbers. They can’t! Phone numbers are crucial. Directors, producers, agents, jobs, hairdressers. I have done a lot of wrong things in my life but I never dialed a number that I had transcribed wrong. My head is like a desktop computer when it comes to phone numbers.

Maybe Risa was not in fact Risa. Then who was she? And where did she live? The astonishing fact was that I had never even found out the girl’s last name when she was staying in my apartment.

If she was, however, not who she said she was—then what really was her relationship to Bruce Chessler?

And if she was, in fact, Bruce Chessler’s lover, then she had to know that the love letters were fake—an acting assignment. Lovers in the theater discuss acting classes.

Therefore, if she knew the love letters were fake, why would she want to steal them from my apartment?

Was there something in the letters I had missed? Some kind of code? To what end? Coding what?

I dressed warmly and walked to the New School, where I had taught the summer before. There was something there I had to see and had neglected to pick up. It was the bunch of short essays I had asked my students to write on that first day of class. The subject matter was “Theater,” and all I wanted from them was a kind of ad hoc free association to that word.

The New School had sent me several postcard reminders to pick up the papers and other pieces of property I had left behind after the summer term was over—a small umbrella and a few books.

I found them in a massive file hidden behind boxes in the old faculty lounge, categorized under N—for Nestleton.

I leafed through the papers quickly. Few were more than one page in length. It had turned out to be an idiotic exercise, but what did that matter? I wasn’t interested in literary enlightenment or psychological truths.

I found Bruce Chessler’s one-page effort.

What I had suspected or feared turned out to be absolutely true.

The paper I was holding in my hand and the love letters that Risa had stolen from my closet were not written by the same person.

Had Risa written the letters for Bruce? If so, so what? Lots of girlfriends help their boyfriends out in acting classes.

It didn’t make sense, her stealing the letters, when she had written them.

I walked out of the New School, dropping the entire file in the garbage. It was freezing cold outside, but I walked slowly . . . very slowly. What else about little Risa was fake? Maybe her red punk hair? What about the murderous attack that drove her from her apartment to mine? Was that a lie? Why not? Was the point of that to be able to steal the love letters?

I started walking downtown, toward the Cherry Lane Theatre, where Joseph Grablewski would be rehearsing.

Across the street from the theater was a building awning that shielded an outside alcove from the wind. I nestled in the alcove, keeping my eyes glued to the stage door. The cold meant nothing to me. This new thread, Risa, was fascinating.

It began to grow dark. The rehearsal was over. Couples and solitary individuals began to exit, their shoulders bent against the wind as they walked off.

I felt like I was in an old Katharine Hepburn movie, waiting in the darkness outside a Broadway theater . . . a kind of
Stage Door
adventure . . . Stage Door Alice Nestleton. I felt an intellectual apprehension that was so palpable it seemed to smell, like my brain was churning, smoking . . . an absurd image.

Then Joseph walked out. He was dressed for a summer day. His only tribute to winter was a beat-up scarf wrapped like a European talisman around his neck.

He leaned against the theater, waiting.

I knew what he was waiting for. He was staring across the street, but he didn’t see me. Why would he notice? I was not on his mind.

Time passed. We were frozen in our places. Was it a half hour? An hour? I didn’t know.

A young woman appeared on the uptown corner. She started to walk slowly toward the theater.

As she got closer, she began to walk fast, then run.

She flung herself into Joseph’s waiting arms. They embraced wildly. Their passion for each other seemed to radiate and make me weak. She began to kiss him, crazily, holding his head between her hands.

I stared at the old alcoholic and the young woman I knew as Risa.

I knew then that even though the murderers of Bruce Chessler were safely in prison or dead, there was another scenario that could explain the murder.

It was a very possible scenario.

It was very clear to me.

Risa had listened as Bruce spewed out his hatred for the émigrés . . . for their hypocrisy . . . for their diamond smuggling.

She helped him steal the white cats as a vindictive lark . . . as a bizarre way to pay them back for their betrayal of the Moscow Art Theatre.

She wrote the love letters he needed for his acting-class assignment with Joseph Grablewski.

Then something unforseen happened.

She fell in love with Joseph Grablewski.

She wrote blackmail letters to Bukai and his associates, threatening them with disclosure of their diamond smuggling.

The émigrés believed it was Bruce Chessler who was blackmailing Bukai.

At first they paid up, not knowing who was collecting the payoff.

But then the demands became too steep. So they murdered Chessler, never knowing that Risa was the blackmailer.

And what were Risa’s demands?

Money, of course, money. They had plenty.

But something else, also—some of the many valuable scripts the émigrés had managed to smuggle out of Russia when they fled. Among them A. A. Blok’s
Why Not?

Which scenario was correct? I didn’t know.

Risa and Grablewski started to walk. Their arms were locked almost desperately. I watched them until they vanished from sight.

Suddenly I was cold. I started home. As I walked, I began to think about Clara. I hoped she was in a good home—a home with a samovar.