Cold Morning (21 page)

Chapter Twenty-one

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday—Bruno on the stand. Over seventeen hours. For eleven of those hours Wilentz assailed him. Brutal, sarcastic, angry, snarling—all to the end of getting Bruno to fall apart—to confess. It never happened. On Wednesday Bruno left the stand, looked at the jury, found the face of the plump woman juror with the bad cold—and smiled at her.

That afternoon, at twilight, Marcus drove me to Manhattan. I hadn't told Aleck I was leaving, but he'd seen me headed out with an overnight bag. I'd be staying the night at my own apartment, catching a ride back with Willie the following noontime. He had to pick up Kathleen Norris who was speaking about the trial before a women's club near Gramercy Park.

Later that night George Kaufman picked me up in a taxi at my apartment, and we headed to Yorkville, the old German neighborhood in the Upper East Side.

George was looking spiffy in a dark black suit with a red bow tie, oversized, and his signature pompadour seemed more treacherous than ever, a steep Alpine ascent up that high forehead. His huge thick glasses magnified his small brown eyes as he sat back in the taxi, stretching out his long, spindly legs in the scant space available.

“Edna, Edna,” he hummed, an elfin smile on his face.

“Thank you for setting this up, George.”

“You always surprise me, Edna, your adventures into mysterious lands!”

“Yorkville is steps from your apartment, George. Hardly the uncharted hinterland.”

“I know, but I expect fireworks whenever we travel together.”

“Nonsense.” I looked out the window at the dreary winter Manhattan landscape. “A pleasant dinner with an old man whose accent will most likely be impossible to understand.”

He laughed. “I'd have thought that your short time in jittery Jersey would have allowed you to fathom any dialect, given the harsh, tin-can drawl of folks south of the Hudson River.”

“Aleck is from Jersey.”

“Aleck was discovered, full grown and pudgy, in a satin-lined jewelry box owned by a Russian princess.” A pause. “Who smoked perfumed cigarettes from a long ivory holder.”

The last time I had dinner in Yorkville I'd been with George and his wife, Bea, and we'd gone to a familiar Germany eatery, Otto's on Eighty-sixth Street, a tiny, gaslit hole-in-the-wall that served the best sauerbraten and Weiner schnitzel. But since then the atmosphere of the neighborhood had shifted—not for the better. Moss Hart reported that Otto's, also a favorite haunt of his, now displayed a black-and-white profile photograph of Adolf Hitler in the front window, and the table by the front door was filled with strident pamphlets touting the glories of the German-American Bund, whose meetings were held locally—and were loud and drearily anti-Semitic. A fundraiser had been held there to raise money for Hauptmann's defense, mostly decent German immigrants, but news reports suggested Nazi supporters maligned David Wilentz—sneeringly calling him “Wilentsky the Jew.” The pro-Nazi Friends of New Germany.

“So the Weiss Deli on Eightieth?” I asked George now.

He nodded. “For obvious reasons.” A sober expression on his face. “Old Man Weiss recently told me he opened his deli one morning and found a swastika smeared on the front door. Weeping, he told me that. His sons scrubbed it off, but he fears he may have to close.”

I was furious. “But this is America.”

“Edna, Edna. You are the world's last and most wonderful idealist. You expect the world to be good and beautiful and true.”

“Yes, I do.”

A twist of his head, affectionate. “That little girl from Appleton, Wisconsin, marching out into the world to slay dragons.”

I smiled. “These days I'll settle for the end of a bombastic buffoon with a toothbrush moustache.”

The taxi pulled in front of the dim-lit deli, the “e” in “Weiss” blacked out, and a cardboard placard at the bottom of the plate-glass window announcing a Saturday night special of brisket with gravy. A wonderful idea, I considered, though this was not Saturday.

“The name of the man we're meeting here?” I asked.

“His name is Josef Brenner, an immigrant from Munich, Germany, back at the turn of the century. His father was a rabbi, but he's been a handyman at one of the tenements in the neighborhood. His son is Marvin Brenner, a whiz kid assistant director on Broadway shows that Ziegfeld produces. You've probably seen the son scooting around Schubert Alley a thousand times. Bea knows his wife, a girl named Leah from Riverdale, and a few phone calls were made.” A shrug of his shoulders.

“Bingo.”

“A sweet young man. He told me his father knows the heartbeat of the Yorkville neighborhood, the lifeblood of the Germans, both Jewish and those not so lucky.”

I grinned. “Are those his words?”

“Of course not. I write my own material.”

Jacob Brenner was already seated in a booth at the side of the deli, his body half inclined out into the aisle, peering at the doorway, anticipating. When he spotted us, he stood, half-bowed, and smiled broadly. He wore ivory-blue dentures that didn't fit his mouth, and I was reminded of the stolid farm women outside Milwaukee who prided themselves on those unnatural ivories.

“A pleasure,” he began. “Two famous people, my son says. So I believe him.”

George laughed. “The perfect introduction.”

Dressed in a bulky green cardigan and corduroy pants bunched at the work boots, a slough boy cap on the seat next to him, a plaid hunter's jacket hanging from a hook, Jacob Brenner was eager to chat. A tiny, wiry man, his sparse hair white with patches of iron gray, he had a bony, long face with weepy, red-rimmed eyes. A bushy moustache, dangerously close to being an old-fashioned handlebar configuration, spread from one pink cheek to the other. When he raised his hand to take a sip of dark beer from a stein, his hand shook, the beer sloshing around but never spilled.

We ordered corned beef on rye sandwiches with potato salad and cole slaw, though Brenner insisted he'd already eaten at his daughter's home. “I live with her now,” he told us, adding, a twinkle in his eye, “and a no-good husband but three beautiful granddaughters. A reason to get up in the morning.”

As I nibbled on an appetizer of toast smeared with liver paté, he reached out and took a sliver of bread from my plate. “I'll try that.”

George's eyebrows rose. “One doesn't take food from Miss Ferber's plate.”

He ignored that.

“Tell us about Isidor Fisch,” I started.

George's phone call to Jacob's son had let him know what I wanted to know—any information about Isidor Fisch, the deceased German Jew who, Bruno Hauptmann claimed, had left the fourteen thousand in ransom money in a shoebox in Bruno's closet and then conveniently died of TB in Germany. The “Fisch story,” the glib reporters termed it. But I wanted to understand who that strange man was—how he fit into the scheme of things, if he did. The sickly, tiny man who hung out with the muscular, athletic Bruno. He'd been seen at the Peanut Grill, although not with Violet Sharp and Dwight Morrow and Blake Somerville. Yet…I felt it to my marrow that Isidor Fisch held some answer to the mystery that Annabel Biggs had set in motion.

Jacob's eyes got wide, alert. “You know, I met that man a few times, no more. I can tell you that. Never thought he'd be…mentioned in the newspapers. Oy, this whole Hauptmann trial.”

“How'd you meet him?” I asked.

“So he was around. I take care of a building up the street, I sit on the stoop, and he visits someone on the third floor. He'd stop and chat in the doorway, had a lot to say, but he never looked you in the face, that one. A schemer, that Fisch guy.”

“So he was known?”

He waited a bit. “Well, certain folks
get
known, if you know what I mean. They're…like the folks someone will point out and say, ‘Look at him, the weasel with the shifty eyes. Hold your hand on your wallet.' So the face sticks in your memory.”

“A dishonest man?”

“Hard to say, but that was the thinking. That is, some days. He'd swagger around with cash in his pocket one day, a new hat on his head, suede gloves, and once even a walking stick like he's John D. Rockefeller. Then he slinks around, begging for dimes for the coffee shop or the subway, saying he's dirt poor. He goes to the shul in ripped clothes and begs the rabbi for a dollar.”

“Was he always sick?”

He nodded. “Coughing, coughing. ‘Get to a hospital,' folks yelled at him. Cough, cough. Spit all over the place. He'd pull out a handkerchief that could wipe out a whole country.”

George smirked. “A delight.”

Jacob took him seriously. “Well, he could be, some said. A young, good-looking guy, smart as a whip, he had his friends.”

“In the German community?” I asked.

“Yeah, here, but mostly up in the Bronx. I got me a few friends who run buildings up there. After his name is all over the papers, linked to this miserable Hauptmann fellow, we all talk over beers. Everybody got a Isidor Fisch story.”

“Tell me yours.” I was impatient.

He eyed me suspiciously. “I don't know why this is important.”

I measured my words carefully. “I'm doing background stories of the trial, as I think you were told. His is one of the backgrounds. Just who was Isidor Fisch?”

He laughed and eyed my paté. “Izzy Fisch. I suppose it's hard to put him into one box. Folks up in the Bronx say he was a wanderer, living here, living there. A real mensch sometimes, give you the shirt off his back. Other times, like I said, a grubby
schnorrer
.”

A beggar.

“What do you know about Bruno Hauptmann?” I asked.

Jacob ran his tongue across his lip, looked around the room. “Never heard of him before the…kidnapping.”

“Never?”

He shook his head. “Never. Absolutely. Everybody says when we talk, ‘Who is this Bruno?' Somebody said they seen him at parties, he called himself Dick. Dick Hauptmann. This Bruno is…is a stranger.” He drummed a finger on the table. “But that one guy, he said Bruno liked to spend money. Costly suits. Expensive radios, trips, nice car. And him not working.”

“He says he made money in the stock market,” I said.

“Yeah, I know.”

“No connection to Isidor?” George asked.

“That one guy—keep in mind he's a storyteller, that one, you should hear the whoppers he spins—anyway, he says he seen them together at Hunter's Point. Picnicking, swimming. Isidor paddling a canoe with Dick Hauptmann sitting back like a king.”

I laughed. “Nice image.”

Only George smiled.

“But with Bruno's picture in the paper, the mug shot, lots of folks say, Yes, I knew him. He was here, he was there.” He looked over my shoulder toward the street. “You know, the Germans is rallying around him. There are people on street corners with buckets, collecting money for the Hauptmann Defense Fund. Maybe for Anna and the poor little boy. Meetings in the clubs uptown. Germans—even the German Jews”—he pointed at himself—“scared of what's happening. I don't mean the Hitler craziness. That's what it is—madness. But you know that. I mean, after the Great War and the Kaiser and the dead American doughboys, well, Germans got to look over their shoulders in this country. They say that Izzy Fisch went back to Germany to get his parents out, but he died.”

“Do you think Bruno kidnapped the Lindbergh baby?” I asked.

“He could have, ma'am, but folks around here think that's nonsense—a man climbing in a second-story window and walking into a nursery what got no lights on and dragging the baby out from the crib. But who knows? Stranger things have happened, yes?”

“But I'm sensing you're not that keen on Hauptmann.”

He sat back, eyed the remaining piece of toast on my plate—I pushed the dish closer and he snatched it up, a smear of paté glistening on his lower lip—and finally said, “If you ask me, him and Isidor got ahold of the cash. The ransom.”

I sat up. “Tell me.”

Suddenly Jacob looked uncomfortable, fidgeting with the frayed sleeve of his sweater, pulling on a loose thread. “Well,” he drew out the word, tentative, “well, Isidor was what we call a survivor. Day to day, he does this, then that. A schemer, and some of it is outside the law. You know, the bad times since the big crash in 1929 turned good people into them that skirt on the edge of things. Isidor is one of them. He keeps his ear to the ground, hears about deals and schemes, and he's there, ready to play the game.”

“Like what?” From George.

“Hot money.” A sigh. “You ever hear of that?”

“Actually I have. And about Isidor.”

“Well,” Jacob faced George, “say you got a ton of money you gotta unload. Like it's counterfeit or stolen or like the gold bills Roosevelt made everyone turn in to the banks. Well, say you got you a ransom of fifty grand and you can't circulate it freely. So a man like Isidor buys it from you, sometimes ten cents on the dollar. The thief gets his bundle, free and clear to spend, no cops trailing him, and then Isidor got to move it somehow underground to make his profit.”

“And you think Isidor did that?”

A shake of his head. “So they say.”

“Could Isidor have been the man who took the ransom money from Dr. Condon in the cemetery—the notorious ‘Cemetery John'?”

“Could be. But he's more the slippery weasel rubbing his hands together behind the wall, and then counting his change.”

“But Jafsie—Dr. Condon—says the John he talked to coughed a lot.”

“As they say, who knows? The man is dead now.”

“But Bruno Hauptmann?” George wondered. “Is it possible he got the fourteen or fifteen grand from Isidor?”

“Yeah, he claims Isidor left it there, but I'm thinking he knew what was in that box. He was part of the deal.”