Authors: Bernard Malamud

Idiots First (10 page)

BOOK: Idiots First

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“Give me a for instance,” Schwartz said.

“Like take a bath, for instance.”

“I'm too old for baths,” said the bird. “My feathers fall out without baths.”

“He says you have a bad smell.”

“Everybody smells. Some people smell because of their thoughts or because who they are. My bad smell comes from the food I eat. What does his come from?”

“I better not ask him or it might make him mad,” said Edie.

In late November Schwartz froze on the balcony in the fog and cold, and especially on rainy days he woke with stiff joints and could barely move his wings. Already he felt twinges of rheumatism. He would have liked to spend more time in the warm house, particularly when Maurie was in school and Cohen at work. But though Edie was good-hearted and might have sneaked him in in the morning, just to thaw out, he was afraid to ask her. In the meantime Cohen, who had been reading articles about the migration of birds, came out on the balcony one night after work when Edie was in the kitchen preparing pot roast, and peeking into the birdhouse, warned Schwartz to be on his way soon if he knew what was good for him. “Time to hit the flyways.”

“Mr. Cohen, why do you hate me so much?” asked the bird. “What did I do to you?”

“Because you're an A-number-one trouble maker, that's why. What's more, whoever heard of a Jewbird? Now scat or it's open war.”

But Schwartz stubbornly refused to depart so Cohen embarked on a campaign of harrassing him, meanwhile hiding it from Edie and Maurie. Maurie hated violence and Cohen didn't want to leave a bad impression. He thought maybe if he played dirty tricks on the bird he would fly off without being physically kicked out. The vacation was over, let him make his easy living off the fat of somebody else's land. Cohen worried about the effect of the bird's departure on Maurie's schooling but decided to take the chance, first, because the boy now seemed to have the knack of studyingâgive the black bird-bastard creditâand second, because Schwartz was driving him bats by being there always, even in his dreams.

The frozen foods salesman began his campaign against the bird by mixing watery cat food with the herring slices in Schwartz's dish. He also blew up and popped numerous paper bags outside the birdhouse as the bird slept, and when he had got Schwartz good and nervous, though not enough to leave, he brought a full-grown cat into the house, supposedly a gift for little Maurie, who had always wanted a pussy. The cat never stopped springing up at Schwartz whenever he saw him, one day managing to claw out several of his tailfeathers. And even at lesson time, when the cat was usually excluded from Maurie's room, though somehow or other he quickly found his way in at the end of the lesson, Schwartz was desperately fearful of his life and flew from pinnacle to pinnacleâlight fixture to clothes-tree to door-topâIn order to elude the beast's wet jaws.

Once when the bird complained to Edie how hazardous his existence was, she said, “Be patient, Mr. Schwartz. When the cat gets to know you better he won't try to catch you any more.”

“When he stops trying we will both be in Paradise,” Schwartz answered. “Do me a favor and get rid of him. He makes my whole life worry. I'm losing feathers like a tree loses leaves.”

“I'm awfully sorry but Maurie likes the pussy and sleeps with it.”

What could Schwartz do? He worried but came to no decision, being afraid to leave. So he ate the herring garnished with cat food, tried hard not to hear the paper bags bursting like fire crackers outside the birdhouse at night, and lived terror-stricken closer to the ceiling than the floor, as the cat, his tail flicking, endlessly watched him.

Weeks went by. Then on the day after Cohen's mother had died in her flat in the Bronx, when Maurie came home with a zero on an arithmetic test, Cohen, enraged, waited until Edie had taken the boy to his violin lesson, then openly attacked the bird. He chased him with a broom on the balcony and Schwartz frantically flew back and forth, finally escaping into his birdhouse. Cohen triumphantly reached in, and grabbing both skinny legs, dragged the bird out, cawing loudly, his wings wildly beating. He whirled the bird around and around his head. But Schwartz, as he moved in circles, managed to swoop down and catch Cohen's nose in his beak, and hung on for dear life. Cohen cried out in great pain, punched the bird with his fist, and tugging at its legs with all his might, pulled his nose free. Again he swung the yawking Schwartz around until the bird grew dizzy, then with a furious heave, flung him into the night. Schwartz sank like stone into the street. Cohen then tossed the birdhouse and feeder after him, listening at the ledge until they crashed on the sidewalk below. For a full hour, broom in hand, his heart palpitating and nose throbbing with pain, Cohen waited for Schwartz to return but the brokenhearted bird didn't.

That's the end of that dirty bastard, the salesman thought and went in. Edie and Maurie had come home.

“Look,” said Cohen, pointing to his bloody nose swollen three times its normal size, “what that sonofabitchy bird did. It's a permanent scar.”

“Where is he now?” Edie asked, frightened.

“I threw him out and he flew away. Good riddance.”

Nobody said no, though Edie touched a handkerchief to
her eyes and Maurie rapidly tried the nine times table and found he knew approximately half.

In the spring when the winter's snow had melted, the boy, moved by a memory, wandered in the neighborhood, looking for Schwartz. He found a dead black bird in a small lot near the river, his two wings broken, neck twisted, and both bird-eyes plucked clean.

“Who did it to you, Mr. Schwartz?” Maurie wept.

“Anti-Semeets,” Edie said later.

NAKED NUDE

Fidelman listlessly doodled all over a sheet of yellow paper. Odd indecipherable designs, ink-spotted blotched words, esoteric ideographs, tormented figures in a steaming sulfurous lake, including a stylish nude rising newborn from the water. Not bad at all, though more mannequin than Kni-dean Aphrodite. Scarpio, sharp-nosed on the former art student's gaunt left, looking up from his cards inspected her with his good eye.

“Not bad, who is she?”

“Nobody I really know.”

“You must be hard up.”

“It happens in art.”

“Quiet,” rumbled Angelo, the padrone, on Fidelman's fat right, his two-chinned face molded in lard. He flipped the top card.

Scarpio then turned up a deuce, making eight and a half and out. He cursed his Sainted Mother, Angelo wheezing. Fidelman showed four and his last hundred lire. He picked a cautious ace and sighed. Angelo, with seven showing, chose that passionate moment to get up and relieve himself.

“Wait for me,” he ordered. “Watch the money, Scarpio.”

“Who's that hanging?” Scarpio pointed to a long-coated figure loosely dangling from a gallows rope amid Fidelman's other drawings.

Who but Susskind, surely, a figure out of the far-off past.

“Just a friend.”

“Which one?”

“Nobody you know.”

“It better not be.”

Scarpio picked up the yellow paper for a closer squint.

“But whose head?” he asked with interest. A long-nosed severed head bounced down the steps of the guillotine platform.

A man's head or his sex? Fidelman wondered. In either case a terrible wound.

“Looks a little like mine,” he confessed. “At least the long jaw.”

Scarpio pointed to a street scene. In front of American Express here's this starving white Negro pursued by a hooting mob of cowboys on horses.

Embarrassed by the recent past Fidelman blushed.

It was long after midnight. They sat motionless in Angelo's stuffy office, a small lit bulb hanging down over a
square wooden table on which lay a pack of puffy cards, Fidelman's naked hundred lire note, and a green bottle of Munich beer that the padrone of the Hotel du Ville, Milano, swilled from, between hands or games. Scarpio, his major domo and secretary-lover, sipped an espresso, and Fidelman only watched, being without privileges. Each night they played sette e mezzo, jeenrummy or baccarar and Fidelman lost the day's earnings, the few meager tips he had garnered from the whores for little services rendered. Angelo said nothing and took all.

Scarpio, snickering, understood the street scene. Fidelman, adrift penniless in the stony gray Milanese streets, had picked his first pocket, of an American tourist staring into a store window. The Texan, feeling the tug, and missing his wallet, had bellowed murder. A carabiniere looked wildly at Fidelman, who broke into a run, another well-dressed carabiniere on a horse clattering after him down the street, waving his sword. Angelo, cleaning his fingernails with his penknife in front of his hotel, saw Fidelman coming and ducked him around a corner, through a cellar door, into the Hotel du Ville, a joint for prostitutes who split their fees with the padrone for the use of a room. Angelo registered the former art student, gave him a tiny dark room, and, pointing a gun, relieved him of his passport, recently renewed, and the contents of the Texan's wallet. He warned him that if he so much as peeped to anybody, he would at once report him to the questura, where his brother presided, as a dangerous alien thief. The former art student, desperate to escape, needed money to travel, so he sneaked into Angelo's room one morning and from the strapped suitcase under the bed, extracted fistfuls of lire, stuffing all
his pockets. Scarpio, happening in, caught him at it and held a pointed dagger to Fidelman's ribsâwho fruitlessly pleaded they could both make a living from the suitcaseâuntil the padrone appeared.

“A hunchback is straight only in the grave.” Angelo slapped Fidelman's face first with one fat hand, then with the other, till it turned red and the tears freely flowed. He chained him to the bed in his room for a week. When Fidelman promised to behave he was released and appointed “mastro delle latrine,” having to clean thirty toilets every day with a stiff brush, for room and board. He also assisted Teresa, the asthmatic, hairy-legged chambermaid, and ran errands for the whores. The former art student hoped to escape but the portiere or his assistant was at the door twenty-four hours a day. And thanks to the card games and his impassioned gambling Fidelman was without sufficient funds to go anywhere, if there was anywhere to go. And without passport, so he stayed put.

Scarpio secretly felt Fidelman's thigh.

“Let go or I'll tell the padrone.”

Angelo returned and flipped up a card. Queen. Seven and a half on the button. He pocketed Fidelman's last hundred lire.

“Go to bed,” Angelo commanded. “It's a long day tomorrow.”

Fidelman climbed up to his room on the fifth floor and stared out the window into the dark street to see how far down was death. Too far, so he undressed for bed. He looked every night and sometimes during the day. Teresa, screaming, had once held onto both his legs as Fidelman
dangled half out of the window until one of the girls' naked customers, a barrel-chested man, rushed into the room and dragged him back in. Sometimes Fidelman wept in his sleep.

He awoke, cringing. Angelo and Scarpio had entered his room but nobody hit him.

“Search anywhere,” he offered, “you won't find anything except maybe half a stale pastry.”

“Shut up,” said Angelo. “We came to make a proposition.”

Fidelman slowly sat up. Scarpio produced the yellow sheet he had doodled on. “We notice you draw.” He pointed a dirty fingernail at the nude figure.

“After a fashion,” Fidelman said modestly. “I doodle and see what happens.”

“Could you copy a painting?”

“What sort of painting?”

“A nude. Tiziano's âVenus of Urbino.' The one after Giorgione.”

“That one,” said Fidelman, thinking. “I doubt that I could.”

“Any fool can.”

“Shut up, Scarpio,” Angelo said. He sat his bulk at the foot of Fidelman's narrow bed. Scarpio, with his good eye, moodily inspected the cheerless view from the window.

“On Isola Bella in Lago Maggiore, about an hour from here,” said Angelo, “there's a small castello full of lousy paintings, except for one which is a genuine Tiziano, authenticated by three art experts, including a brother-in-law
of mine. It's worth half a million dollars but the owner is richer than Olivetti and won't sell though an American museum is breaking its head to get it.”

“Very interesting,” Fidelman said.

“Exactly,” said Angelo. “Anyway, it's insured for at least $400,000. Of course if anyone stole it it would be impossible to sell.”

“Then why bother?”

“Bother what?”

“Whatever it is,” Fidelman said lamely.

“You'll learn more by listening,” Angelo said. “Suppose it was stolen and held for ransom. What do you think of that?”

“Ransom?” said Fidelman.

“Ransom,” Scarpio said from the window.

“At least $300,000,” said Angelo. “It would be a bargain for the insurance company. They'd save a hundred thousand on the deal.”

He outlined a plan. They had photographed the Titian on both sides, from all angles and several distances and had collected from art books the best color plates. They also had the exact measurements of the canvas and every figure on it. If Fidelman could make a decent copy they would duplicate the frame and on a dark night sneak the reproduction into the castello gallery and exit with the original. The guards were stupid, and the advantage of the planâinstead of just slitting the canvas out of its frameâwas that nobody would recognize the substitution for days, possibly longer. In the meantime they would row the picture across the lake and truck it out of the country down to the French Riviera. The Italian police had fantastic
luck in recovering stolen paintings; one had a better chance in France. Once the picture was securely hidden, Angelo back at the hotel, Scarpio would get in touch with the insurance company. Imagine the sensation! Recognizing the brilliance of the execution, the company would have to kick in with the ransom money.

“If you make a good copy, you'll get yours,” said Angelo.

“Mine? What would that be?” Fidelman asked.

“Your passport,” Angelo said cagily. “Plus two hundred dollars in cash and a quick goodbye.”

“Five hundred dollars,” said Fidelman.

“Scarpio,” said the padrone patiently, “show him what you have in your pants.”

Scarpio unbuttoned his jacket and drew a long mean-looking dagger from a sheath under his belt. Fidelman without trying, could feel the cold blade sinking into his ribs.

“Three fifty,” he said. “I'll need plane fare.”

“Three fifty,” said Angelo. “Payable when you deliver the finished reproduction.”

“And you pay for all supplies?”

“I pay all expenses within reason. But if you try any monkey tricksâsnitch or double cross you'll wake up with your head gone, or something worse.”

“Tell me,” Fidelman asked after a minute of contemplation, “what if I turn down the proposition? I mean in a friendly way?”

Angelo rose sternly from the creaking bed. “Then you'll stay here for the rest of your life. When you leave you leave in a coffin, very cheap wood.”

“I see,” said Fidelman.

“What do you say?”

“What more can I say?”

“Then it's settled,” said Angelo.

“Take the morning off,” said Scarpio.

“Thanks,” Fidelman said.

Angelo glared. “First finish the toilet bowls.”

Am I worthy? Fidelman thought. Can I do it? Do I dare? He had these and other doubts, felt melancholy, and wasted time.

Angelo one morning called him into his office. “Have a Munich beer.”

“No, thanks.”

“Cordial?”

“Nothing now;”

“What's the matter with you? You look like you buried your mother.”

Fidelman set down his mop and pail with a sigh and said nothing.

“Why don't you put those things away and get started?” the padrone asked. “I've had the portiere move six trunks and some broken furniture out of the storeroom where you have two big windows. Scarpio wheeled in an easel and he's bought you brushes, colors and whatever else you need.”

“It's west light, not very even.”

Angelo shrugged. “It's the best I can do. This is our season and I can't spare any rooms. If you'd rather work at night we can set up some lamps. It's a waste of electricity but I'll make that concession to your temperament if you work fast and produce the goods.”

“What's more I don't know the first thing about forging paintings,” Fidelman said. “All I might do is just about copy the picture.”

“That's all we ask. Leave the technical business to us. First do a decent drawing. When you're ready to paint I'll get you a piece of sixteenth-century Belgian linen that's been scraped clean of a former picture. You prime it with white lead and when it's dry you sketch. Once you finish the nude, Scarpio and I will bake it, put in the cracks, and age them with soot. We'll even stipple in fly spots before we varnish and glue. We'll do what's necessary. There are books on this subject and Scarpio reads like a demon. It isn't as complicated as you think.”

“What about the truth of the colors?”

“I'll mix them for you. I've made a life study of Tiziano's work.”

“Really?”

“Of course.”

But Fidelman's eyes still looked unhappy.

“What's eating you now?” the padrone asked.

“It's stealing another painter's ideas and work.”

The padrone wheezed. “Tiziano will forgive you. Didn't he steal the figure of the Urbino from Giorgione? Didn't Rubens steal the Andrian nude from Tiziano? Art steals and so does everybody. You stole a wallet and tried to steal my lire. It's the way of the world. We're only human.”

“Isn't it sort of a desecration?”

“Everybody desecrates. We live off the dead and they live off us. Take for instance religion.”

“I don't think I can do it without seeing the original,” Fidelman said. “The color plates you gave me aren't true.”

BOOK: Idiots First

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