Redemption Street (21 page)

“Understood. Thanks, Doc, I appreciate the information.”

“Did any of this help?”

“It’s like your business, Doc, it’s hard to be sure right away. I’ll let you know.”

Talk about your basic dead end. How appropriate, I thought, that this was all about the aftermath of a fire. The whole of it was now smoke, because the flames had burned themselves out sixteen years ago. It dawned on me that I hadn’t found anything new because there was nothing new to find. That the only flames that had burned these many years burned in the hearts of the Hammerlings and the Rosens.

Denial, like gravity, is a great unseen energy of the universe, but, unlike gravity, denial can be created and destroyed. I was about to prove it. The power of Arthur Rosen’s denial hadn’t died with him, but I think I was on the verge of putting it to rest. I had had enough. Enough of the infection of sadness, of Anton Harder and Judas Wannsee, of smoky bars and small-town New York. I had a wife who loved me, the most beautiful, smart, and adoring daughter ever born, and a business to run. I had had my fill. What was it that Freud said? “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” Well, sometimes an idiot smoking in bed is just an idiot smoking in bed. Wouldn’t the Rosens and the Hammerlings have been better off if they could have seen there was tragedy enough in that?

Bang! There was furious, insistent pounding at my door. It had to be Sam.

“What’s the matter, Sam?”

“Hurry, there’s a fire. Come quick,
boychik.”

I threw on yesterday’s clothes and flew downstairs. Sam was waiting at the base of the grand staircase.

“Come!”

I followed him out the front door, onto a carpet of fresh snow, around the side of the main house toward the area between the utility sheds and the old pool. Sure enough, one of the old sheds was aflame, and if the wind shifted, the main house might be next. We grabbed some fire extinguishers from the kitchen and doused the flames. The fire had actually looked a lot worse than it was. Sam seemed understandably shaken. When I tried to comfort him, he said it wasn’t the fire that upset him so.

“If it was only the fire, so what? So I would have gotten maybe the insurance better than the money from selling. You know what they say, six in one hand … It reminds me of the old joke about the town veterinarian who also does taxidermy. His motto is: Either way, you get your dog back. Well,
toteleh
, either way I’m getting the money.”

“If it’s not the fire, what is it?”

He beckoned me to follow him. The words
DIE JEWS
had been spray-painted on the walls of another shed. They were painted in a familiar shade of yellow. I’d seen its like only a week before. There was something that didn’t fit, but, as with everything else in this case, I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Then, when Sam started raging, I lost focus.

“I’m gonna go kill that disrespectful little
pisher,”
Sam threatened, throwing his extinguisher canister against the shed wall in disgust. “That hateful little bastard.”

“No, Sam. I think it’s about time for Anton Harder and me to have a pow-wow of sorts. Let’s go inside and have breakfast. We’ll talk it over over eggs and bacon. Firefighting gives me quite an appetite.”

Sam and I discussed calling in the local constabulary. We each had our separate reasons for not sprinting to dial 911. I told Sam about my bizarre run-in with Lieutenant Bailey, carefully omitting the details about the police file. Sam said the Old Rotterdam Police Department made the Keystone Kops seem like the FBI. He recited a litany of complaints about the local force that practically reached back to the nineteenth century.

“And corrupt!” he hissed, waving his hands. “No offense to your former employers, but these guys make the bagmen on the NYPD seem like amateurs. The local cops take more under-the-table money than a cheap whore. They bleed all the hotel owners dry up here. But soon all the blood’s gonna run out.”

Now that we had clearly established that the cops weren’t to be involved—not yet, anyhow—I asked Sam to give me as many details about the old Fir Grove property as he could remember. He had a remarkable memory. I guess he had room in that brain of his for something other than dirty jokes and cynicism. He knew every foot of the place, ways to access the property that Anton Harder’s people would probably never discover. He drew me a fairly detailed map, based, of course, on the old layout of the place. Combining his encyclopedic memory with the intelligence I’d gained on my recent visit to the shantytown that had once been the Fir Grove resort, Sam and I figured I had a good shot at finding the little Harder before he found me.

My kidneys were feeling much better, and the blood in my urine, if any remained, was undetectable to the human eye. So, as I relaxed in preparation for my evening’s appointment, I decided it was time to sample that bottle Mr. Roth had left me. When I reached under the bed, I grabbed nothing but air. The gift was gone. I thought about calling down to Sam, but realized one of his angry ex-employees had probably taken it. Revenge comes in many different forms, some of them quite silly and pointless. I needed my wits about me anyway, and as long as I still had Mr. Roth’s address and phone number, I was fine. The bottle itself was unimportant. I owned a wine shop, for Christ’s sakes.

For dinner, Sam and I ordered in a pizza from town. If you liked cardboard with red dye and flavorless cheese, Old Rotterdam was your kind of pizza town. Even eating the pepperoni, one had the sense it had been produced not at a Hormel processing plant but by Dow Chemical. We finished every last crumb, in spite of our better judgment. And, speaking of better judgment, Sam began voicing some doubts about our plan for the evening.

“You sure you wanna go through with this? I mean no offense, but you were a city cop, not a Green Beret. The woods at night can be pitch-black and dangerous.”

“I owe that little prick. We owe him.” I was rather too gung-ho. “Besides, they know I’m a cop. They wouldn’t be stupid enough to kill me.”

Sam shook his head. “I wouldn’t be so sure. What you think their collective IQ is over there? You think Einstein winters with them? Besides, just to point out a minor detail or two, not so you should get upset with me, but you’re not really a cop anymore, and you’ll be trespassing. They could always claim they thought you were a raccoon or something. Hunting is a big thing up here. They’d probably get off.”

“Sam, do me a favor. When you sell the hotel, don’t go into motivational speaking as a career. You’ve got no future in it.”

“It’s not
my
future I’m worried about.”

I left it at that. He was correct, of course. What seemed like such a good idea this morning was no longer looking so wonderful. Our plan was full of holes. Sam hadn’t been on the Fir Grove grounds for years, and I’d spent less than a half-hour there. I’d seen several hungry dogs who would have found an intruder more than a tasty treat. I knew they had at least one shotgun on the premises, and I was willing to bet the ranch it had a lot of company on the gun rack. Whether someone was willing actually to shoot me instead of just aim at me was a separate issue. Pulling a trigger is easy. Killing someone, even someone you don’t especially care for, isn’t. I’d just have to keep telling myself that, because, true or not, I was going.

Upstairs, I picked up the phone to call Katy, but put it down almost immediately. I didn’t think I had it in me to lie to her tonight. Even if I’d been able to say the words, as accomplished a liar as I’d learned to be, I didn’t think I could summon up the voice. She would have heard it, sensed it, and called me on it. Once that happened, I wouldn’t be able to go through with it. There was a good reason they always drafted eighteen-year-olds. No wives. No kids. No lies.

Sam picked the spot for my way onto the old Fir Grove grounds. It was right off the road, through some woods. He assured me there’d be no fencing to cut through or walls, just some tall, tangled hedges. Gee, what a surprise. Tangled hedges seemed to be a cash crop at the old Fir Grove. Once I was on the grounds, it would be only a short walk to the trailers through the shrine and cesspits.

The plan was simple. Sam was going to drop me off by the woods. Ten minutes later, after having given me enough time to get onto the Fir Grove grounds, he’d go down the road to a pay phone and make an anonymous call to the cops. He’d claim there were shots fired, or a fire, or something like that. When I heard the sirens, I’d start working my way up to the trailers. When the sirens were really loud, they would draw everyone’s attention, dogs included. If Harder came out, I’d get into his trailer and wait for his return. If he didn’t come out when the others did, that was okay, too. I knew which double-wide was his. When it was established that the call was a false alarm and everyone settled back down, I’d have already worked my way to Harder’s cabin.

Besides the small .22 automatic and ankle holster I had purchased in an adjoining town that afternoon and my .38, Sam and I had taken a few other precautions. I carried a bag of ground black pepper and paprika to throw the dogs off my scent if necessary. Hey, it always worked in the movies. I also had a plastic bag full of Sam’s private bacon stock in case I had to distract the dogs or buy a few seconds. I carried Sam’s binoculars, a flashlight, and a road flare for signaling purposes. I think I was more prepared for a barbecue than for what I was about to do.

We didn’t talk in the car until we reached the drop-off point.

“For any reason, you don’t like how things are going,
boychik
, you turn your
tuches
right around. This isn’t worth getting yourself …” Sam didn’t finish his sentence.

I shook my friend’s hand. “Don’t worry about me, Sam. I’ll be fine.”

“Who you tryin’ to convince?”

“Whoever it is, I’m not doing a real good job of it. Check your watch.”

Sam patted the back of my neck. “Okay, you take care, you haven’t paid your bill yet.”

“Thanks for the sentiment.”

I stepped out of his old Caddy and walked into the woods without looking back. Though the sky was clear, only a silver sickle of the moon lit the night. Fifty yards into the pines, that light was pretty much lost to me. Flashlight in one hand, .38 in the other, I slogged through the snow for about three minutes. Twenty or thirty yards ahead of me, I could just make out where the woods came to an end. There was a narrow clearing, and beyond it a tangle of overgrown hedges. Sam knew his shit. Then things started to go wrong.

Behind me in the distance, I thought I heard Sam’s car pull away. I fumbled to check my watch, dropping the flashlight in the process. That was stupid of me. I didn’t really need to check my watch. I was good with time. Sam had left a good four or five minutes early. He was supposed to give me ten minutes before going to call the cops. Maybe he had been spotted and was drawing attention away from me. Maybe it was simply a passing car which I’d mistaken for Sam’s. It didn’t matter now. Finding the flashlight mattered.

I must have been a sight there on my hands and knees, groping around in the blackness and snow. When my fingers wrapped around the barrel of the flashlight, how I looked was beside the point. I flicked the switch a few times, and its beam popped back on. I calmed myself, brushed the snow off my pants, and continued ahead. The clearing was just another few yards away.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the downward arc of the baseball bat. My hands went numb. Time stopped flowing smoothly. My eyes caught glimpses of things between seconds of nothingness. I could see the flashlight in the snow, its beam shining on the feet of my attackers. I saw one of those feet sweep my .38 back into the pines. Fists came at me, legs. I was deaf with panic, though a word would filter in between the kicks and punches. “Jew … blood … skull …” I was being dragged now. Then things got very still. I could hear again, but there was nothing to hear. Then there was nothing at all.

And in that split second before nothingness consumed me, I had a revelation. No, I didn’t see God or a womb of light. I did not see Christ smiling down at me. I saw the boots of my attackers in my mind’s eye. I never thought I had an eye for footwear, but apparently I was wrong. I actually thought I recognized one of my attackers’ boots. Layered atop that flash, I had another vision: the burning shed at the Swan Song. I thought of the footprints in the snow, how they all ran between the hotel and the shed. There had been no tracks leading away from the grounds. And in that one lucid moment between clicks of the second hand, all the bothersome loose ends knitted themselves neatly together.

Suddenly I knew who had gone to so much trouble to try and hang the Fir Grove fire on Anton Harder. I still didn’t know why. If I lived through the night, I’d worry about that. I was getting sleepy, the cold covering me like a shroud. I thought of Katy and Sarah, but I found I was worried more about Aaron. I didn’t think he’d ever forgive me for missing my Christmas-New Year’s shifts. It’s crazy what you think about sometimes.

Chapter Thirteen
December?

I woke up. That was something, at least.

I felt like a ripe floater that had been fished out of the East River by Harbor Patrol: swollen, stiff, broken. Even my hair was bruised. My left wrist was particularly stiff and painful. I raised my left arm to have a peek. It was in a neat white splint that ran from just below my elbow to my fingertips. I remembered the arc of the baseball bat and winced. Except for the wrist, I guess I was mostly just bruised. Well, my head did have someone in there trying to pound his way out with a dull hammer. When I rolled to one side, I became aware of the pulpy lump behind my right ear. I didn’t think I’d lost consciousness for convenience’s sake.

I was in a bed, but it was no hospital bed. The sheetless mattress was thin and soft as a Ritz cracker and smelled of last week’s beer sweat. I’m not complaining, mind you. The pillows were fluffy, the quilt was warm, and, on the whole, it was better than being left to die in the dark and in the snow. The walls were covered in cheap wooden paneling, and the floors in worn-out blue carpeting. Grayish light shone through the Windex-starved glass over the bed. The flickering overhead light was a bare fluorescent tube.