The Mighty Walzer (22 page)

It’s amazing what you can move when you have right on your side. The Copestakes’ Ford wasn’t as big as our Commer but it had good brakes and was laden with blankets and pillows and eiderdowns and counterpanes and bolsters and palliasses and sheet-sets and pillowslips and valences in boxes and, from the weight of it, a good few mattresses and bedsteads and quilted headboards as well. Inch by inch, though, heave by heave, we bumped its nose and then half its chassis out into the street. We’d have succeeded completely had my father’s ‘And one, and two, and three!’ not woken the Copestakes, with whom their van also happened to be laden and who had been sleeping the deep sleep of the devious among their wares.

What followed was a fracas of such unseemliness that in the end only the police could restore order. Quickly coming to an understanding of who was up to what, the Copestakes scrambled out through a side door, rubbed the sleep from their eyes and, calculating that they were no match for us physically, began placing bricks, of which there is never any shortage on a bomb site, under the tyres. No sooner did a brick go under one tyre than we removed it from another. And no sooner did we remove it than they replaced it. The quicker they moved, the quicker we did; and the quicker we moved, the quicker they did. ‘Front offside!’ my father shouted to me. ‘You take the front offside. Get that brick away. Offside,
offside!
That’s nearside, you tsedraiter!’ The chase around and around the van had got so hectic that it was difficult to remember whether you were kicking bricks out or stuffing them in. ‘Rear right!’ Copestake called to his kid. ‘There’s nothing under the rear right.’ ‘But I thought I’d just put one under the rear right.’ For a split second we had all the wheels free. ‘Geshwint!’ my father yelled. ‘Push!’ But we could never keep all four tyres free for long enough to make any further progress in our bumping.

Even before we had become rivals for the bomb site we hadn’t much liked the Copestakes. My father had gone to the same
primary school as Copestake Senior and remembered him as a sneak. And funnily enough I had gone to primary school with Copestake Junior and remembered
him
as a sneak. It’s possible that neither of them actually sneaked but both just looked as though they did. It was their complexion that gave you the impression of surreptitiousness. They had a dirty shine on them like cockroaches, and they moved furtively like cockroaches too, turning up and vanishing and turning up again you couldn’t tell from where, just as they’d appeared from inside the bedding this morning while we were rightfully bumping their van into the road. One other thing I remembered about Copestake Junior from primary school was that he sold tickets to see Reeny Cohen do pee-pees in the garages behind Huxley Avenue. I can’t say what his arrangements were with Reeny Cohen, but if she didn’t know he was profiting from her water then sneaky was definitely the word for him. Otherwise plain disgusting.

It was this over-and-above dislike for the Copestakes that erupted in the early morning on London Road when, after what had at first been a silent chase around the van — silent as far as our talking to them or their talking to us was concerned — Copestake Senior suddenly took it into his head to start cursing. ‘Putz!’ he shouted at my father. ‘Kaker, yentzer, tochesleker.’ In other words: prick, shit-head, fucker, arse-licker.

‘Hob saichel,’ my father shouted after him, ‘mit der kinderlech.’

‘Hob saichel! You push my van into the fucking road and you tell me to hob saichel.’

‘No swearing. I don’t care what you do in front of your own family but I’ve told you, no swearing in front of my kid.’

They were both breathing heavily, both panting, and if you had turned up on the scene innocent of what was afoot you would have been hard pressed to decide which of them was chasing the other.

‘You want me to worry about your kid, now? I’ll tell you what I think of your kid, Joel Walzer — Ich hob your kid in toches!’

And that was when the police had to be called, otherwise my father would have torn him limb from limb. As I’ve said, we were biblical.

Spoil it for one, spoil it for all. The police closed London Road to casual traders, and for a number of years not even a barrow boy was allowed to do business there.

It wasn’t a serious blow to us. We could, as I’ve already said, return to one of our old Saturday gaffs. But it set the Copestakes back. It seemed to turn them off the markets too, because suddenly they materialized, cockroach-like, on Cheetham Hill Road as Copestake’s Cash ‘n’ Carry Bedding Emporium — Retail Service At Wholesale Prices. A move that was bound to infuriate Beenstock’s Cash ‘n’ Carry Bedding Emporium — Wholesale Prices With Retail Service, which was only half a block away on the other side of the road.

Ike Beenstock was the brother of Sam Beenstock, otherwise known as Sam Sam the Bedding Man, for whom Sheeny had worked before coming to us. I mention that only because it always seemed to me possible, though I never made enquiries, that it was through Sheeny that Ike Beenstock made the acquaintance of Benny the Pole. But it’s also the case, I admit, that anyone who knew anyone who frequented the Kardomah was in a direct chain of hearsay that led ineluctably to Benny the Pole.

How any sort of glamour or intrigue was able to attach itself to the specific fact of Benny’s being a Pole, given how many Poles there were among us, is a mystery to me to this day. My mother’s mother, as I have already explained, not only came from Poland but made a little Poland around her wherever she went, but we never thought that that lent her fascination or allure. Nor did we once consider referring to her as Granny the Pole. In Benny’s case, though, Polishness was all at once transformed into a sinister and shadowy quality, suggestive not of smoked sausages or peasants who stank of their own animals, but brotherhoods and contraband and seduction. Benny the Pole could fix things. Benny
the Pole could find things. Benny the Pole could lose things. But above all, Benny the Pole could pull.

Because not everyone dared venture into the Kardomah — and even those who had successfully negotiated Laps’ sometimes lacked the nerve to make the transition — Benny the Pole put on a free public pulling demonstration on the footpath outside the Kardomah on Market Street every Saturday lunch-time in good weather. Even in the week, provided it wasn’t windy, this was a seething pitch. Need a new watch, cheap? A diamond ring? Tickets to see Manchester City? Tyres for your Jag? Radio for your Jag? The Jag itself? The footpath outside the Market Street Kardomah was the place to go. The talk was good too, if you were of the right age. Burial boards, heart disease, cures for arthritis, facials, tailors, football, horses, cars (especially the rights and wrongs of owning a Mercedes), poker schools, holidays in Rimini, and birds. The facials helped but in the end it was only the birds that kept you young. Tsatskes. Every boy must have his tsatske. Which was why Benny the Pole enjoyed such celebrity. He possessed the secret of eternal youth. And on Saturdays, from about twelve, you could watch him work.

What did he have going for him? Not looks. He was a knobby rather than an aquiline Pole — that’s if he was a Pole at all — with scarred, over-sunbrowned skin and tuberous eyes which lacked even the saving Polish grace of expressing sadness. He didn’t have much in the way of physical presence either, being more on the tall side of short than the short side of tall; though it was hard to gauge the amount of meat there was on his bones because of the way he wore his coat, loose over his shoulders like a cloak, with the sleeves empty but menacingly mobile, giving him the impression of being a man with four arms. His toupee was among the worst I’d ever seen, both for fit and for colouring; yet because of the success with which it was associated every Kardomah frequenter over fifty wore one just like it. (Hence their reluctance to gather on the footpath on windy days.)
Discussing him once with a woman who’d yielded to his spiel — by which I don’t mean to imply that there were any women in Manchester who
hadn’t
yielded to his spiel, only that they didn’t all discuss him — I learned that he had beautiful violin-like feet, small, curvilinear, harmonious, with an almost feminine instep. He was without doubt conscious of this natural advantage, for he was known to spend a small fortune on pedicures and was always sensationally shod. I cannot say that I vouched with my own eyes for the truth of the rumour that he never wore the same pair of shoes twice; I saw him on too few occasions for my observations to be worth anything on that score. But the three or four pairs of shoes I did see him wear I never forgot. Only on Benny the Pole had I ever seen gold heels. Only on Benny the Pole had I ever seen sneakers made from the cheek pouches of the Komodo dragon. So maybe his secret was in his feet, in the lightness with which he approached his victims.

He was the first man in Manchester to jingle. Before Benny the Pole no man resident in the north of England would ever have thought of wearing a chain around his wrist let alone around his neck. Unlike most fashions, which start among the young and slowly catch on with the more conservative generations, the wearing of gold chains in Manchester took off first among the old. Our grandfathers dared before we did. They gathered outside the Kardomah with too much face on show somehow — barefaced, that’s the only word for them, as barefaced as camels — and like camels ready to be mounted, they snorted and showed their brown teeth and jingled. Jingle, jingle, croak: I can still hear the sound of them and see the dust rise as one by one they drew themselves up to their full height — full for them — held on to their toupees, stepped out into the path of a young woman and offered her a shtup. Still shtupping, or at least still offering, at seventy. And for all of that we had to thank Benny the Pole.

The offer of the shtup — the offer of it, not the request for it - was the distinguishing feature of Benny the Pole’s technique. I’m
not at all sure that there was anything else. Of course there were bound to have been some crushing refusals in the early days. But by the time Benny the Pole was an accomplished fact, any young woman chancing her arm alone in Market Street would have known who it was that was accosting her, and must have felt a tremendous weight fall from her shoulders. For imagine the insult to your person in walking past the Kardomah at a lunch-time on a Saturday and
not
being offered a shtup by Benny the Pole.

That there would have been an admixture of fear in many women’s capitulations I didn’t doubt. Benny the Pole could easily have been concealing a sawn-off shotgun in one of those empty sleeves. And that it was a willing fear, an impious curiosity as to where else those dragon shoes trod, a self-demeaning half-readiness to trollop it for a season in whichever underworld the Pole was offering them privileged access to, I also didn’t doubt. I had a low regard for women based on their low regard for me. Not my aunties, of course, but then my aunties weren’t really women. Yes, my sex was responsible for Benny the Pole in the sense that he was made of the same puppy-dog tails as the rest of us. But the all-things-nice sex was still more responsible in the sense that they yielded to him. They could have said no to the shtup. There were other men offering. There were other men too shy to offer. But the women craved the compliment of the insult. In this way what Benny the Pole taught me influenced my misogynistic essays and so helped clear the obstacles between me and Cambridge. And yet — such are the ups and downs of men’s fortunes — when I started university Benny the Pole still wasn’t through his term at Strangeways.

Even though he was given a few years of his own in Strangeways to think about it, Ike Beenstock never recovered from the surprise of learning that Benny the Pole had undertaken the actual arson himself. He talked to me about it once, during one of my university vacations, when I was hungry for Bug and Dniester conversation, and had turned up at his house to collect his daughter
Sandra on a date. ‘I always imagined he’d be farming it out,’ he told me. ‘Don’t get me wrong; to this day I consider it a compliment to me and my family that he looked after us personally. But who’d have expected a gantse macher like him, with his connnections and his dress sense, to go kriching around on his hands and knees with a box of matches?’

Maybe he’d meant to farm it out. Maybe he’d had the very man for the job in mind on the day Sam Beenstock, acting on behalf of his brother, brushed past him on the footpath outside the Kardomah and slipped into his coat pocket the sealed envelope containing the bundle of used flims, the address of Copestake’s Bedding Emporium, and the instruction, written in letters cut out of the
Jewish Telegraph:

I don’t
care
whether you bomb it or
burn it
or what you do, just
get
rid of it

Maybe the very man for the job had gone missing at the eleventh hour, or maybe Benny the Pole just wanted to do something for himself that didn’t end in a shtup. Whatever the circumstances, alone and without an accomplice Benny the Pole climbed over Copestake’s back wall, made free with a can of paraffin, lit the torch and famously lost the shoe by which he was ultimately and irrefutably identified. Who else in Manchester wore two-toned alligator suede slip-ons with built-up mother-of-pearl inlaid heels?

Alone and without an accomplice ... So to whom did the two fingers, which were also found at the scene of the crime, belong?

That they weren’t Benny the Pole’s the police were quickly able to ascertain, by virtue of the fact that he still had five on each hand. Not that they’d ever seriously believed they’d come off the same person who’d lost the shoe anyway, since the shoe was found at the rear of the store and the fingers were found at the front and it was unlikely that anyone would have been nutty
enough to run through the building once it was alight, either without his fingers or his shoe.

There was only one person the fingers pointed at. Aishky Mistofsky.

On the night Copestake’s palace of polyester and foam rubber went up like a volcano, Aishky had returned to the hospital which had looked after him so well the time he’d tried to punch his way out of the phone box. The problem on this occasion related to his other hand. He couldn’t feel it. He so couldn’t feel it that he feared he might have lost it altogether. He hadn’t the courage to look. To be on the safe side, he’d thrust the arm into the front of his shirt, where it pumped blood in time with his heart, then he’d walked to the hospital. He held his nerve admirably until he got to Emergency, where the sight of other people’s injuries and the question ‘What have you done to yourself this time?’ caused him to faint clean away. When he came to in the hospital bed he was sans another couple of fingers and the police were waiting to talk to him. At first they were going to charge him with arson. But once the shoe had led them to Benny the Pole they amended the charge to complicity. Aishky was watching the front of the building for Benny the Pole, that was their theory. Aishky was Benny’s look-out. Eventually they dropped that charge as well. Fantastical as was Aishky’s claim that he’d been innocently wandering along Cheetham Hill Road at three in the morning trying to get his mind in order, and that he’d only crossed the road to Copestake’s bedding warehouse because he’d thought he’d seen smoke, which was the reason he’d pushed open the letter-box in the showroom door — an act of wild impulsiveness that could have lost him a lot more of himself than two fingers, considering the amount of fire that leapt out through the letter-box — they believed him.