Bitter Truth (35 page)

She was quiet for another long moment. “It’s just I don’t really believe in love anymore.”

I didn’t say anything because there was nothing to say.

“I think love is a trick and when we fall for it we end up less than we were before, that’s what I think. It eats your guts out because you think it’s real and you count on it to save your life and then it turns out it’s only a trick.”

“I don’t know, Caroline.”

“True love is a myth, and if I sleep around it’s only to keep proving it to myself.”

“It’s late. We’ve been through a lot today.”

“And I do, over and over again.”

“Let’s get some sleep.”

“Hold me.”

“I’m too tired.”

“Please just hold me. Please.”

And that’s how it started, simply as my holding her, trying to quiet her so I could get some sleep in my own bed, but that’s not how it ended.

I wasn’t especially interested in sex with Caroline that night. After my meeting with Oleanna, after feeling what I had felt in Oleanna’s presence, the love and the compassion and the warm pulse beneath her skin, after all that, sex with Caroline was not what I wanted at all. I wanted to remember what it was like to be near Oleanna, to hold her hand, to rub her bronzed feet. I wanted to think of Oleanna, not of Caroline, so no, I wasn’t interested. Really. But she turned to me and kissed my unparted lips and kissed my neck and rubbed her hand across my chest. She was persistent and I am admittedly weak when it comes to the carnal in this life; I have a hard time turning down either prime rib or sex.

So that night we screwed once again. She was, as she always was, once the engine started revving, distant, passive, not really there, but I didn’t care, I barely noticed, because it wasn’t her I was thinking of as I pressed my tongue to her body and pounded out that rhythm known only by the blood. I was on top of her and I was pinning her hands above her head and I was taking her breasts into my mouth and I was pressing her legs to the bed with my own, but it wasn’t she I was thinking about. What I sensed beneath me in the darkness was not Caroline’s breast or Caroline’s lips or Caroline’s scent, but instead a halo of red hair and soft green eyes and classical features and warm pink skin and perfect feet and the exhilarating aroma of musk. I was screwing Caroline all right, but I was making love to Oleanna.

When my heart had stopped its throbbing and my breath had subsided to normal, I rolled off her and onto my back. Caroline laid her head on my chest.

“I like it here with you,” she said.

I said what I was supposed to say. “I like it too.”

“We’ll keep looking, all right?”

“All right.”

“Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For just being here with me.”

I felt just then about an inch and a half.

38

I
’VE BEEN TOUCHED by it too,” said Beth.

“It was fabulous,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “It’s pretty interesting.”

“I mean really fabulous. I can’t stop thinking about it.”

“That’s fine, Victor. What are you getting?”

“Anything with caffeine.” I looked up at the board and was assaulted by choices. “How does a double mocha latte sound?”

“Nauseating. Just get me a decaf, black. I’ll grab us seats.”

We were at the Starbucks on Sixteenth Street. I was waiting in a slow line for a fast cup of joe. It wasn’t too long ago when it was enough to walk right up to any street vendor in the city and pick up a coffee. It came in a blue cardboard cup and cost fifty cents and right there you could add a pack of Tastykake Butterscotch Krimpets to the order and still get change back from a dollar. But that was before Starbucks came to town. Now you waited in line for steamed milk and cutely named brews from exotic lands with more all-natural flavors than nature could have imagined and after the long wait, and the deciphering of the menu, and the condescending smiles from the coffee people who were far cooler than you, what you got back was a fine cup of coffee doctored to taste like something else and maybe change back from a ten. One more reason to hate Seattle.

Beth was waiting for me at a counter which fronted a window onto Sixteenth. She sipped her coffee, a Brazilian decaf mix, while I took a gulp of my latte. Too sweet, too frothy, like a hot chocolate trying to act tough. I should have known better.

“They’re very impressed with you there,” I said. “Gaylord thinks you’re a very evolved soul.”

She didn’t smile at the compliment, she just looked out the window and drank her coffee.

“She has very beautiful feet,” I said. “Have you noticed?”

“Oleanna?”

“And hands too, but it’s the feet that most struck me. Pink and very shapely. And it’s not just me who thinks it. They bronzed them, have you seen that.”

“Yes,” she said, still looking outside. “I’ve been in that room. I think it’s creepy.”

“Is she, like, married or seeing someone?”

“Don’t think too much about Oleanna, Victor.”

“I can’t stop. The rest of your New Age friends can go jump in a lake for all I care but this Oleanna, wow. What I was feeling was very potent. And this isn’t just my normal quantum of lust. It was something else.”

“She has a power,” said Beth, “an ability to consciously project certain emotions. I don’t wholly understand it, but it has something to do with her control over her spiritual sense organs and a way of communicating directly on the spiritual level. I can’t quite tell if it’s a wonderful and advanced gift or a parlor trick.”

“It was pretty fabulous, I must say.”

“Yes, I’m sure it was. But she used it to manipulate you for nonspiritual reasons and that seems all wrong.”

“Was I manipulated?”

“You walked in with serious questions and you came out, after one session, convinced of her innocence and pledged to help her. Yes, Victor, I’d say you were manipulated. There is something very calculating about Oleanna. She is very determined to get her building built. I’m not sure how much I trust her.”

“So you have doubts about their innocence?”

She picked up a plastic stirrer and spun it lazily inside her coffee. “Not really.”

“Doubts about the church itself?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Really?”

“Some things are troubling. After I heard what happened in your meeting I confronted her. I told her I thought it was wrong of her to use her gifts to twist you around like she did.”

“What did she say?”

“She said it was none of my business, that I was still too low on the ladder to understand. I might not yet understand how she did what she did, but I think I understand her motives well enough.”

“So you’re having doubts. Doubts are good. My entire spiritual system is based on doubt. Let’s go to Morton’s tonight, we’ll each get a steak the size of third base and discuss our doubts between mouthfuls.”

“You’re a snake,” she said, smiling. “I’m just confused. It feels half right and half wrong and I don’t quite know what to do about it.”

“Kick the bastards out of your life is what I say.”

“But it feels half right, Victor. They are helping me tap into something real and powerful. At the same time I think they’re dressing it up with all kinds of crap. Those bronzed feet, those robes that they try to make us wear, the cult of personality surrounding Oleanna.”

“Speaking of cults of personality,” I said, rapping on the window.

Morris Kapustin, who had been walking down the street, stopped and turned and waved when he recognized us. He was wearing a dark suit without a tie, his white shirt open to show his silk undershirt, his broad black hat propped back on his head so that the round brim acted as a sort of halo. Four white tzitzit flowed over his belt. Through his mostly gray beard he smiled and there was about Morris’s smile something so genuinely pleased at seeing me that it was almost heartbreaking. I didn’t often draw out that reaction, never, in fact, except from Morris. It was how a father might react upon unexpectedly running into his successful son in the middle of the day in the middle of the city, not my father of course, being as he was not prone to smiles and I was not truly successful, but someone else’s father, a kind, loving father, a father like Morris.

“Your secretary,” said Morris after he made his way inside, “Ellie,” as if I didn’t know my secretary’s name, “she said I would find you here. Such a fancy place for a cup of coffee.”

“You want something, Morris?” I asked. “My treat.”

“So generous you are, Victor, but no, thank you. I can’t drink now coffee with my stomach like it is.”

“What’s wrong with your stomach?”

“Other than that it is too big? It’s begun to hurt at night,
mine boichik,
and the gas. You know what I think it is? The doctor, he tells me to eat fiber, fiber, fiber for my prostrate.”

“Prostate,” said Beth.

“You too are having such problems?”

“No,” said Beth.

“All that fiber,” said Morris with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Our stomachs weren’t made for fiber. Kugel and kreplach and pastrami, yes. Fiber, no. It’s like eating wood and it is probably what’s wrong with everyone now. In my day there was no such thing as the prostrate, now it’s everywhere. Just last week on the cover of
Time
. That’s what you get from eating wood.”

“Beth was just telling me, Morris, that she is having doubts about her New Age church.”

“Really?” said Morris.

“It seems there is a nugget of truth surrounded by a lot of nonsense,” said Beth.

“A nugget of truth is not so bad,” said Morris. “How easy do you want it to be? Tell me how you eat a piece of corn. You take off the husk, you clean off the silk, you ignore the cob, and then, if it is cooked just right, a few minutes in boiling water, not too much, not too long, just right, there are a few perfect kernels. In the end, that’s a lot of garbage for so few kernels, but they are sweet as sugar, a
mechaieh
.”

“How do you know what’s real and what’s not?” asked Beth.

“If it was so easy, we would all be
tzaddiks
. Miss Beth, please, don’t give up. As Rebbe Tarfon, the great colleague of Akiba, said, ‘The day is short, the task is great, the workmen are lazy, the reward is great, and the Master is insistent.’ ”

“Are you calling me lazy?” I said.

“Spiritually, Victor, you are a couch potato, but I come here not to talk of the divine. Quite the opposite. The old books and ledgers your friend, Miss Caroline, she found. I was in your office, Victor, looking through them and I confess they are more
ongepotchket
than I could ever have thought. Normally with numbers I am pretty good, but these books, it is too much for a
Kuni Lemmel
like me. I need, I think, an accountant to review them for us. The accounting firm of Pearlman and Rabbinowitz, maybe you heard them? I want to hire Rabbinowitz.”

“Sure,” I said, “but tell him to keep his fees down. Without a contract I’m still springing for expenses and it is starting to add up. Any luck with finding what happened to the Poole daughter?”

“Such a thing is not so easy, Victor. Back then there were special places for pregnant women without husbands to go and I have Sheldon looking into that, but the records, they are either old or destroyed so don’t you now be expecting much.”

“I’ve learned not to,” I said. Morris’s face took on a pained expression and he was about to launch into a ringing defense of his work when he saw my smile. He sighed wearily.

“Sheldon also, I have him searching the whole of the country for persons named Wergeld. They have these computer directories on the Internet, places that have every phone number in all of America, which is astonishing, really. Everyone is in there, Victor. Everyone. Pretty soon they won’t be needing people like me anymore.”

“Isn’t technology grand?”

“Insulting me like you are, Victor, you must be in a very good mood.”

“He’s in love,” said Beth, “with a guiding light.”

I shrugged and ignored her smirk. “What has Sheldon found?”

“A few Wergelds scattered about.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his small notebook, crowded with disparate scraps of paper, the whole thing bound with a rubber band. He slipped off the rubber band and opened the book carefully, licking his thumb as he paged through until he found what he was looking for. “One Wergeld in Phoenix, one in a place called Pittsfield in Massachusetts, one in Milwaukee. Nothing yet about connecting them to your Reddmans. We’re still looking. And I was right about those numbers we found on the card, thank you, they are account numbers, for banks that hold much secret money. My friend he recognized some and verified others. But still, before we can learn any more, we must know the code words and get the proper signatures.”

“Which is unlikely.”

“I am not a miracle worker all the time, Victor, just some of the times.”

“I’m not getting very far myself,” I said. “I’m still looking for that doctor to check the medical invoice we found.”

“Who is the Master?” asked Beth. “In that quote from that rabbi you said the Master is insistent. Who is he?”

“For Victor and me, as Jews, such a question is easy. The master is
Ha Shem,
the Glorious One, King of the Universe, praised be He.”

“And for me?” asked Beth.

“That, Miss Beth, is for you to discover. But my guess, after all is said and done, after all your searching and questioning, my guess is your answer, it will be exactly the same.”

39

T
HERE WAS NO Dr. Karpas listed in the Philadelphia white pages, nor in the white pages for Eastern Montgomery County or the Main Line or Delaware County, all of which was not much of a surprise. The Dr. Karpas I was looking for, Dr. Wesley Karpas, performed some sort of procedure on Faith Reddman Shaw in 1966 and thirty years later I didn’t quite expect he’d still be practicing. Faith Reddman Shaw, I was sure, was not the type to let any but the most experienced slip a knife into her. Even in 1966 Dr. Wesley Karpas most likely had a fine gray head of hair and by now was probably long retired to some golf community in Arizona. There wasn’t much hope I’d ever discover for what Grammy Shaw had paid the $638.90. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder why an old lady would have retained an invoice for a medical procedure performed on her more than a quarter century before her death.

I had spent an hour calling every Karpas I could find in Philadelphia and the suburbs and getting nowhere. “
Hello, Mrs. Karpas? Mrs. Adrian Karpas?
” I figured my best chance at finding Dr. Karpas was to grab hold of a son or a cousin or some relative who might be able to give me even a clue as to where he might be. “
Hello, is this Mr. Bruce Karpas?
” The only problem then would be hoping the doctor remembered the procedure and would somehow be willing to tell me about it, all long shots, for sure. “
Hello, I’m looking for a Mrs. Colleen Karpas
.” You would have thought Karpas to be a fairly unique name. “
Mrs. Kenneth Karpas?
” You would have thought that all the different Karpases in the phone book would have belonged to one extended family and known each other well. “
Miss Gwenneth Karpas?
” You would have thought. “
Hello, Mr. Angelo Karpas?
”

“Don’t get your hopes up, pally,” said the voice on the other end of the line, “because I’m not buying nothing.”

“That’s good, Mr. Karpas, because I’m not selling anything. I just have a few questions.”

“You want my answers? Here. The country’s going to hell in a hand basket. They’re sticking it to us seniors, cutting our benefits, raising our premiums, just because we’re too old to kick their butts. You want to know who I’m for? I’m for Perot.”

“Perot?”

“That’s right. You got a problem with that?”

“Why Perot?”

“Because he’s rich.”

“Don’t you think he’s a little crazy?”

“Sure, but who cares, he’s rich.”

“You don’t mind that he bailed last election?”

“He’s rich.”

“Don’t you think his solutions are overly simplistic?”

“Rich.”

“Don’t you think he’s a little too funny-looking with those ears and all?”

“Rich, rich, rich, rich, rich.”

“I get the idea, Mr. Karpas, but I didn’t call to ask about politics.”

“No?”

“No.”

Pause.

“Well then what the hell do you want?”

“I’m looking for a Dr. Wesley Karpas. Is he by chance a relative?”

“What do you want with him for?” said Angelo Karpas.

“I just have a few questions.”

“Well, if you got questions you’re better off asking me.”

“Why is that, Mr. Karpas?”

“Because the son-of-a-bitch is dead. Dead, dead, dead. He was my brother. He died five or six years ago.”

“Did he have a son or a daughter by any chance? Someone I could talk to?”

“There’s a son, big-time lawyer somewheres downtown.”

“Karpas?”

“Nah, Wes changed his name a while ago when he started rubbing in better circles. He wanted a name with a little more class. He wanted to swim with society, so he changed it to the name of a fish.”

“A fish?”

“Yeah, Carp, with a ‘C.’ I always got a laugh out of that, trying to move up in class by calling yourself after some bottom-feeding scavenger.”

“Seems appropriate, don’t you think?”

“You got that, pally.”

“Tell me something, Mr. Karpas. Anyone ever actually call you and ask you for your political opinion?”

“Never. But they got to be calling someone, all those polls. Might as well be me.”

“Might as well. Thanks for your help.”

“Hey, you want to know what I watch on television, too?”

“Sure, Mr. Karpas. What do you watch on television?”

“Nothing. It all sucks.”

Angelo Karpas was wrong about one thing, his long-lost nephew wasn’t some big-time lawyer downtown. Oh he was downtown all right, with an office smack in Center City, but he wasn’t big time. I could tell by the office, situated atop a clothing store on Chestnut, with diamond sellers and insurance agents and a gypsy fortune-teller for neighbors, by the secretary with the high hair, by the quiet in the grubby waiting room while I sat and paged through a six-month-old
Newsweek
. Let’s just say the phone wasn’t ringing off the hook in the law offices of Peter Carp.

“He’ll be with yous in a minute,” said the secretary, flashing the quickest smile I had ever seen, more twitch than anything else, before going back to her nails.

Thanks, doll.

It was the dust, maybe, that got me to ruminating. I remembered when my office was dusty, when the cleaning ladies knew not to care, when the quiet of my phones was loud enough to leave me shaking my head with despair at the future. There was a stretch of time in my life when I wasn’t making any money as a lawyer and it had been a bad stretch. Now, with the steady stream of mob clients coming through my door and dropping on my desk their cash retainers, dirty bills bound with rubber bands, my coffers were filled, my offices were dust free, my phones rang with regularity. But what about the future? Raffaello, my patron, had given up and was selling out. I was designated to set up the meeting with Dante that would, in effect, cut me out of the loop. No more of those fat cash retainers. It was what I wanted, actually, out. The game was getting too damn dangerous for a lightweight like myself but, still, I couldn’t help wondering what would it be like when the game was over. Would it be back to the old life, back to dusty offices and quiet phones and a meek desperation? Or would the grand possibilities that had opened for me in the case of the Reddman demise save me from my past? A million here, a million there, pretty soon I was dust free for life. Maybe I should stop chasing the ghost of dead doctors and get back to work.

I was thinking just that thought when Carp came out of his office to greet me. He was short and square, with a puffy face and small eyes behind his Buddy Holly glasses. He wore gray pants and a camel’s hair blazer. Here’s a tip you can take to the bank: never hire a lawyer in a camel’s hair blazer; all it means is he isn’t billing enough to afford a new suit.

“Mr. Carl?” he asked uncertainly.

“Yes,” I said, popping out of my chair and reaching for his hand. “Thank you for seeing me. Call me Victor.”

“Come this way,” he said and I did.

“If you’ll excuse my office,” said Peter Carp after he was situated in the swivel chair behind his fake wood Formica desk. He indicated the mess that had swallowed his blotter, the files strewn on the floor. “It’s been a killer month.”

“I know what you mean,” I said, and I did, more than he could realize. This was not the desk of a lawyer over-loaded with briefs and motions and trial preparations. There was something too disorderly about its disorder, too offhand in its messiness. My desk was much like this in my less prosperous times, cleared only when I actually had work that needed the space to spread itself out. One brief could take over the whole of a desktop, but the books and copied cases and documents would be in a rough order. Only when I had nothing pressing would my desktop carry the heaping uneven pile of junk paper currently carried by Peter Carp’s. I had put on my sharpest suit for this meeting with what Angelo Karpas had described as a big-time lawyer and now I regretted that decision. Down and out was the way to play it with Peter Carp.

He took his glasses off, wiped them with his tie. Turning his bare and beady eyes to me, he said, “Now, what is it about my father’s medical practice that you’re so interested in, Vic?”

“In a case I am working on I found a receipt for a medical procedure he performed in 1966. I’d like to know what it was all about.”

I reached into my briefcase and pulled out the invoice and handed it to him. He put his glasses back on and examined it.

“Mrs. Christian Shaw. I don’t recognize the name.”

“She recently died,” I said. “I represent her granddaughter.”

While continuing his examination of the receipt he said, “Medical malpractice?”

“Hardly. The old lady was almost a hundred when she died and her body just expired. I expect your father performed noble service in allowing her to live as long as she did.”

“He was quite a good surgeon,” said Carp. “Never once sued in his entire career.” He looked nervously at me and then back at the invoice.

“Did your father sell his practice?” I asked.

“Nope. He worked until the very end, which is exactly how he wanted it.”

“What became of his records, do you know?”

“Tell me what kind of case you’re representing the granddaughter in.”

“Nothing too extravagant.”

“Lot of money at stake?”

“I wish.”

“Trust and estates?”

“Something like that.”

“Because that is one of my specialties. Trust and estates.”

Wills for widows and orphans at a price, no doubt, with Peter Carp conveniently named as executor. I shook my head. “Nothing too complicated or lucrative, I’m afraid.”

“Because if you need any help on the intricacies of Pennsylvania trusts and estates law, I’d be glad to help.”

“All I really need to know, Mr. Carp, is if your father’s records are still available.”

He looked at me and I looked at him and then he turned his attention to the invoice and flicked it once with his finger. “I’m not sure the records that are available go this far back,” he said, “and even if they did, to find something this far back would take a lot of man hours.”

“I’d be willing to help you look.”

“And then there is the question of confidentiality. Without a waiver it is not really proper to hand over the information. And Mrs. Shaw would appear to be in no condition to grant a waiver.”

Did I have the same clever gleam in my eye, sitting in my office, plotting how to grab a few bucks here and a few bucks there whenever opportunity reared its shapely neck? If I did, I never before realized how transparent it was, and how ugly. Looking at Peter Carp for me was like looking at an unflattering snapshot and wincing. “I’m sure, Mr. Carp, that if the records are available we could work something out.”

“Exactly how much are we talking about?”

“Let’s find the records before we discuss details.”

“I suppose there would be no harm in looking,” he said with a smile. His tongue darted quickly out of his mouth, wetting his thick lower lip. “You wouldn’t have any trouble, would you, in making the check out to cash?”

“None at all,” I said.

“Well then, Vic,” said Peter Carp. “Let’s go for a ride.”

The Carp estate was in Wynnewood, an old suburb not too far from the western border of the city. Old stone houses, wet basements, tall trees growing too close to the sidewalk, planted fifty years before as seedlings and now listing precariously over the street. Carp took me to a decaying dark Tudor on a nice wooded plot of land going now to seed. “This was my father’s house,” he said, “but I live here now.”

The inside was dark and dusty, half empty of furniture. Paint peeled from the wood trim in strips and the wallpaper was faded and oily. It felt like the place had been abandoned years before. Carp’s father had evidently maintained it well but after his death his son had done nothing to the place except sell off the better pieces of furniture. I wondered if this was what Dr. Wesley Karpas had in mind when he changed his name to Carp and sought to rise in society, this decrepit and rundown house, this money-sucking semifailure of a son.

He took me downstairs to a basement area and pushed open a door that was partly cobwebbed over. Inside the doorway was an old doctor’s office, white metal cabinets with glass fronts, an examination table, a desk. Still scattered about were strange metal instruments sitting in stainless steel pans. In the corner were piles of medical journals. The place was full of dust and the leavings of animals and with the pointed metal instruments it looked like a discarded torture chamber.

“My father stopped his surgical practice when he turned sixty,” said Carp, “but he saw patients as a GP in his home office until the final stroke.”

Through the examination room was another room, a waiting room of sorts, with a door to the backyard where the patients would enter. And then, in another room, off from the waiting room, were boxes piled one atop the other and file cabinets lined up like a row of soldiers at attention.

“He kept his files religiously,” said Carp, as he climbed over the boxes, heading for the file cabinets. “Every so often he would clear out the files of patients he no longer saw and put them in boxes, but he made sure to keep everything. I would tell him to throw the stuff out but he said you never know, and look how right he was.”

Carp opened one of the file cabinets and searched it and shook his head.

“It’s not in the cabinets,” he said. “Why don’t we start looking through the boxes together? Each box should be labeled with the letters of the files and year they were taken out of the main cabinets.”

I removed my suit jacket and laid it carefully over a chair and then started at the boxes, shoving cartons here and there in search of the elusive “S.” We found two cartons with “S” files, one cleared from the cabinets in 1986 and one from 1978. Carp, refusing to let me so much as peek inside for what he claimed were reasons of confidentiality, examined each and declared there was no file for Mrs. Christian Shaw in either. After thirty minutes more I found a box labeled “Re-Th, 1973” and Carp told me to stand back as he took a look inside.

“I don’t see anything for a Mrs. Christian Shaw here,” he said.

“How about Faith Reddman Shaw?”