Elsinore (24 page)

“Had to have some fun, Sid. My birthday was coming up.”

Holden couldn't keep his eyes off the murals. Hirsch's dream city began to make sense. The boy cantor had built the twentieth century around himself. All the sky machines and hanging gardens of stone must have “visited” Hirsch while he lived in a coal cellar as the little gentleman from Milwaukee.

“It had nothing to do with birthdays,” Holden said. “Or the Manhattan Mimes. Or Aladdin. Or leaky accounts.”

“You're right. I wasn't taking early retirement. I'm not like you. I had to flush out Swiss and the boy general, oblige them to make a move.”

“What if it was your own paranoia?”

“All the more reason to act. I'm an impatient man.”

“So you let me play president of your best laundering operation. That angered Schatz.”

“Drove him crazy, Sid. There's a difference.”

“And then you took me on the road to the Cardinales, because you figured Schatz might just link up with Ethan and his two children. And you wanted to give Ethan a little shove in Schatz's direction. You hit their pocketbook, demanded three million.”

“It was my money. I could draw on whatever I liked.”

“But you knew what would happen.”

“I was prepared for the consequences, if that's what you mean.”

“You didn't wait for Swiss. You started the war. And you sweetened it by taking me to Bibo and asking for your bonds.… Old man, you were inches away from dying.”

“I'm a gambler, Sid. I gambled on you. I had a whale of a time.”

“Where's little Judith?”

“Best not get on the subject of my girl.”

“Where is she?”

“Convalescing, Sid. And you can't find her. I didn't raise my girl so she could live. with some bumper. Holden, she's not for you.”

“You never raised her. She was one more toy.”

“Not now,” the billionaire said. And Holden was in some kingdom where he couldn't win.

“I suppose you gave Aladdin back to the Swiss.”

“Had to. But it doesn't affect your status. You're president for life.”

Now it was Holden who laughed. “Every bounty hunter in America wants my blood.”

“That can be changed.”

“How? If I bump Bibo for you?”

“Bibo's lost most of his ambition. He was only one more anarchist in Bilbao. I let him return to Pescadores. He can't harm me now.”

“And Marcus Reims? Marcus is out there, old man. Marcus doesn't forget.”

“Don't get silly on me. I'll have to call a doctor … or gag you right away.”

“Gag me then. Because Marcus wants to know why you abandoned Kronstadt, why you left her in Ethan's hands.”

“That Ethan has a big mouth. But Kronstadt's not your business.”

“I think she is, old man. We're all Marcus Reims. You. Me. The Coleridges. My dad. Murderers deluxe.”

“Shut your mouth, Sid.”

“Did you get tired of Frieda? She stopped pleasing the little gentleman from Milwaukee. Got yourself a new kettle of fish?”

The blue-green eyes went pale and watery. The murals surrounding Hirsch no longer mattered. All the luminescence was gone. A bicycle with wings was one more fancy, like piss in a bucket.

“She wouldn't go with me. She had nothing here. Dirty bloomers. The garbage she collected. But she. wouldn't go. It was her home, she said.”

“But you knew Ethan would kill her.”

“Of course I knew.”

“Why didn't you kidnap Frieda, knock her over the head?”

“Kidnap Frieda? She'd have bitten off my arm … I was helpless. A man without a synagogue. I had to go.”

“Did you sing kaddish for her?”

“I was chasing grafters in Seattle. I couldn't run into some strange shul.”

“You're a cantor. A cantor can make his own shul. You didn't want to sing for Kronstadt.”

“I'd sing for you, Sid. I would.”

“Like you sang for my dad.… Who gets to bump me, old man? Who gets the nut? Will Abruzzi's men be waiting for me outside the elevator?”

“Don't get morbid. I could learn to forgive and forget”

“I wouldn't let you, old man. I'm going to find little Judith.”

Hirschele's eyes recaptured that heartless blue. He was the paradise man, not Sidney Holden.

“You're God's elect,” Holden said. “Hirschele, how did you make a whole congregation cry?”

“You weren't there, Sid.”

“I talked to the president of Hester Street.”

“He was just a choirboy.”

“And a witness to the holy man who had people killed.”

“Shut your mouth.”

“How did you do it? How did you make them cry?”

“Me? I was a crooner, Sid. I had the tonsils. I'd look up at the balcony, see all the lovely daughters, widows, and wives, and my heart was going like mad. That's how come my voice was so sweet. But what would you know? You worship the Duke of Windsor. You wear his clothes.”

“Leave the Duke out of this.”

“The Duke and his Duchess. Both of them were mad about Hitler.”

“Who says?”

“Kiddo, I did an awful lot of deals with the Third Reich.”

“As Hirschele Feldstein or Howard Phipps?”

“Both. A cantor's millions were as good as gold.… I cheated them out of whatever I could. Guns, art, or blood. I'm a trader, Sid. I dealt with whoever there was to deal. I'm not ashamed of it. But the Duke was Hitler's pal. The Duchess danced with a swastika around her neck.”

And for a moment Frog had the desire to throttle Hirschele in his Supper Club. It wasn't the bodyguards that compelled him to wait. Holden wouldn't kill a cantor.

“You're a liar, old man. I have a record of every jewel she ever had. There's no swastika on that list.… how much did you pay Mrs. Church to finger me at Grand Central Station?”

“We were talking about the Duchess.”

“Come on, did she do it out of loyalty or love?”

“I'm holding the girl, Sid. She had to do what I say … or she'll never see her.”

“Suicide poker, that's what you like to play. With my dad, with Swiss, with your own little girl. Did Ethan teach you all the rules?”

“There are no rules. That's the beauty of it.” And Frog saw a figure among the other figures. She wasn't a wax doll, like the maître d'. It was big Judith in a party dress she might have worn years and years ago. She looked like a panther. And Holden understood. She belonged in the room. The Supper Club was a graveyard without big Judith. The murals had no melody without her. Hirsch had built himself a crazy shul. The first installation. And Kronstadt must have prepared the way. With her wildness and her dirty feet.

Shit, Holden said. Another Kronstadt. The wild girl of the Supper Club. And Holden could dream of what it had been like. With a full orchestra. Muted trombones. Dark ladies in dark dresses. With men who were nothing more than chaperones, in their ties and tails. Big Judith taking her panther steps, while all the men went out of their minds. She was there to drive them berserk. And Hirschele must have seen it as punishment, a visitation from Kronstadt's secret sister. Not an uptown heiress. Not a runaway girl. But someone he could never really control.

Holden was scared. He had to get the hell out of there. He'd been surfacing around too many ghosts. He got up from the table and ran out of the club.

22

A wind might have been pulling at him. He walked to Aladdin. He was no longer the invisible man. All of Hirsch's sheriffs knew about this Salvation Army soldier. But Frog wouldn't give up his coat. He wanted to see how Abruzzi's men had triggered his own door. He rode upstairs, expecting a haunted house. He discovered a small hotel. The shop was packed with nailers and cutters, Nick Tiel's old gang. The cutters worked at a furious pace. Frog went to the designer's room. He found the Swiss, who had Nick Tiel's paper tacked to the walls. Andrushka was modeling one of the Swisser's new line of coats, a glorious sable. She'd started as a mannequin in this same shop. She'd thickened a bit during her Paris years. But she was still the girl he'd married.

“Holden,” Schatz said. “We've been expecting you. Will you take off that ridiculous coat? I need you around. All the buyers want to meet Sidney Holden.”

“Bruno, haven't you heard? I've been sentenced to death.”

“Don't be ridiculous. You're part of the corporation. You're president. You sign the checks. Tell him, Andrushka.”

“We're counting on you,” she said. “We couldn't survive.”

“You'll have to.” And Holden realized that she'd always been a mannequin, even in the Swisser's arms. Swiss must have lent her out to Bibo and how many other boy generals? Holden's error was that he'd tried to reform the twig, take her out of the fur shop, so she could study Caravaggio. It had been nothing more than cotton candy.

He went into his office. The district attorney's men must have unsprung their trap. Holden looked at the coats he had, the shoes, the ties, the shirts with royal labels. He locked the office and disappeared from Aladdin.

He visited Vermont in his Siberian coat. Farmers stared at him. They'd never seen a Salvation Army soldier. They spoke some kind of patois that Frog couldn't seem to penetrate. “Elsinore,” he muttered. “A hospital, a home in the woods.” They laughed.

“A hospital. Pas des homes in the woods. Pas ici.”

And Frog traveled from Middlebury to Montpelier. He bribed the selectmen of one little town, offered them a donation to fix the local waterfall if they could find Elsinore. The selectmen drove him around to different spots. He entered sanitariums where the boarders had such white faces that Frog couldn't be certain they were alive. He stumbled upon abandoned whiskey stills, the rotten palaces of neglected robber barons. He searched the back rooms of orphanages, where he found old ladies who'd lost their minds, but no one who resembled little Judith. Frog paid for the waterfall. And then he tracked on his own.

He had no more rats to rely on. He couldn't go back into the belly of Manhattan and build a new network of spies. He went deeper into the mountains. It started to snow. He'd rent a car and return it, rent a car and return it, always with the idea that Elsinore was behind the next snowdrift. He began to hear voices in the howling weather. He caught a chill. He had to stop at a country inn and lie under a thick blanket. Frog had a fever. The snow collected outside his window. There was no mud or oil on the ground. He'd arrived at some crystalline world. He wondered if that was Elsinore. He went out dancing in the middle of a storm. He could feel the outline of a building that moved with the snow. But he could never get close enough. The innkeeper had to drag him upstairs to his room. “I used to bump for a living,” Frog said. “No one puts his hands on me.”

The innkeeper fed him barley soup. When Frog woke, the fever was gone. The innkeeper didn't want to accept money from a Salvation Army soldier.

“I never freeload,” Frog said. “I'm a paying guest.” He dug into his pocket and took out a little twisted tree of hundred-dollar bills.

“That's too much.”

“You've been kind to me.”

“What are you looking for, soldier?”

“A house in the woods. Used to be a sanitarium for very rich people.”

“Ah, the doctors' place. It's closed.”

“Will you take me there?”

The innkeeper lent him some boots. They trudged up a hill. Holden's heart was pounding. They stumbled onto a door in the snow. There wasn't even a proper porch. It was snowing inside the door. Holden realized that the roof was missing. He stepped on a frozen mouse.

He crossed the channel in a rented Plymouth. The ferryman looked him up and down, but he couldn't recognize Frog in his soldier's suit. And Frog didn't have to worry about having Al signal ahead to Ethan Coleridge.

“You some sort of a pilgrim? We don't get a lot of pilgrims on Chappy.”

But when he arrived at the orange house, Ethan stood waiting with a shovel. “I'm sworn to kill you.”

“Feed me first,” Holden said. “I'd like some corn flakes.”

They sat at the table, the old, old man with his shovel and Frog. Ethan looked worried. “What if Phippsy changed his plans? I'd be the last to know.”

“I keep hearing voices.”

“How's that?”

“Voices,” Holden said. “I think it's Kronstadt.”

“She was always a witch. That's why I choked her. But it's a funny thing. I hear her too … every night. It's worse now that the boys are gone. Minot would see the glint in my eye, and he'd say, ‘Dada, it's the dead lady.' That softened the blow.”

Frog had some corn flakes and closed his eyes.

“You shouldn't nod off in my presence,” Ethan said. “I'm holding a shovel on you.”

And Frog had his best sleep since he'd gone on the road. He woke in the attic. This hundred-year-old man had put him to bed. Frog was wearing Minot's pajamas. He went downstairs and had his morning dose of corn flakes. There was still no milk in the house. But he found a radish, some raisins, some prunes. He went out into that empire of junk. The toilet bowls were filled with black snow. The weather vanes sat like spears. Holden could have been a gardener in his own garden.