Robert Tanenbaum - Act of Revenge

The dog, catching the tone, made a sound between a growl and a whine.

“Of course you do. You are an intelligent creature. But not Brenda Nero. Not at all, especially when I told her that I had given the very same advice to her darling. What language! Well, really, I wash my hands of her. I intend to testify at Chester’s trial, and I will advise him to plead justifiable homicide. Which reminds me, I have to shop around for a psychiatrist for my daughter, and while I’m at it one for the delightful gun moll Ms. Vivian Fein Bollano, my client. Can you do some research, Sweets? Hop on down to the various papers and pull clippings about Jumping Jerry? No, I better do it myself. In fact, I could get up to the News right now. . oh, shit, that better not be Raney, trying his sly tricks on. .” She picked up the buzzing phone. “Hello, Marlene Ciampi.”

The voice on the phone was, however, not Raney’s but that of an official-sounding woman.

“Hello, excuse me, but I’m trying to reach a Mr. Roger Karp. The answering machine gave me-”

“Right, this is his wife. Can I help you?”

“Yes, maybe. Do you know a Sophie Leontoff? This is Beth Israel Hospital calling. Mr. Karp’s number was listed as next of-”

“Oh, God! What happened to her? I mean, yes, she’s our great-aunt.”

“Oh, good. Sophie took a fall this morning, and I’m afraid she fractured her hip. She’s in surgery now.”

Marlene got the rest of the information, hung a right on Broadway, and sped uptown to the hospital, at First and 16th. She called Karp; he was out-of course, the hospital would have called him first. Sophie was Karp’s maternal grandmother’s younger sister and in Marlene’s opinion the only one of her husband’s relatives worth knowing, an assessment with which her mate concurred. A real character, Sophie-as a young woman she had been a major player in schmatehs , traveling to Paris to steal fashions from the couturiers, and then setting up as a dressmaker there. Caught by the war, she had spent some time in a concentration camp, which had not noticeably depressed her spirits, and had returned to America to become the driving force behind her late husband’s Seventh Avenue empire. She smoked Gitanes, drank cognac, played gin with a group of louche West Side crocks, made an annual trip to Monte Carlo, and would have sewn all Marlene’s and Lucy’s clothes had she been allowed. It was hard to think of her as being sick, but, of course, she was closing in on eighty.

Reporting at the ward desk, Marlene was directed to a waiting room. There were two people there, an elderly couple. The woman was tiny, carefully made up, with huge, bright eyes, fine, sharp features like a mynah bird’s and a thin cap of auburn-dyed hair that fell as a fringe across her forehead. She was dressed in a black silk T, a fawn skirt with stockings, and beautiful tan pumps. She also wore a string of pearls, a Cartier watch, a diamond tennis bracelet, and a good-sized diamond ring. Her husband-and it had to be her husband-was bald on top with a fringe of pepper and salt hair that descended somewhat below the collar of his knit navy sport shirt. He wore a well-cut linen jacket, also in navy, tan whipcord trousers, and alligator loafers with gold fittings. When Marlene entered, the woman was reading a paperback, which she had set into a needlepoint cover, matching her large needlepoint canvas bag, while the man was reading one of the tattered waiting room magazines-a New York .

They both looked up. The woman smiled. “Oh! You’re. . Oh, God, I’m so embarrassed, don’t tell me. . for Sophie Leontoff, am I right?”

“Right,” said Marlene. “I think we met at her seventy-fifth birthday party.” She held out her hand. “I’m Marlene Ciampi.” The woman’s hand in hers felt like good-quality kid leather, cool and buttery.

“Oooh! You’re the. .” The woman’s hands made circular motions about their wrists (meaning? The Shiksa? The Infamous Slayer of Men, Film at Eleven? The Nephew’s Wife?), and then she laughed and said, “Selma Lapidus. This is Abe, my husband. We’re in 5-B.”

The man rose and shook hands, mumbling the conventional. He had the sad eyes of the retired.

“Now I remember,” chirped Selma. “What’s wrong with me! Roger, the nephew, no, the grand-nephew.” She pulled Marlene down next to her on the pink vinyl sofa. “It’s so nice of you to come, and you’re not even related. I tell you, these days. . when Abe had his surgery two years ago, I had to practically commit suicide on the phone so my daughter would bestir herself to fly in from L.A. She’s in the industry.”

“Um, Mrs. Lapidus. .”

“Don’t be ridiculous- Selma .”

“Selma. Did they say how it’s going, I mean with the-”

“She’s in very good hands, the best! Dr. Baumholtz is a genius. He did Abe’s hip. Tell her, Abe-you were walking the next day. The next day! And so sweet, a doll! The best orthopedic man in the city, you’ll meet him, you’ll see. I personally am not worried in the least.”

“Of course not, you’re not on the table,” said Abe into his magazine.

Selma rolled her eyes but did not respond to this. “We were the ones who found her. We have a card club in our building, there’s a room downstairs. We play gin, canasta. . So this morning, I ring, there’s no Sophie. So I get the key-we exchange keys, I mean, you never know, God forbid, we’re not so young, something could happen, and I go in, and I’m telling you, my heart almost stopped, there’s Sophie, on the bathroom floor, she says, “Selma, I can’t move, I knew I should’ve bought that thing. You know, that signal machine. Anyway, she says, thank God it was a Thursday-the cards, she meant-because a Friday, she could’ve been there all weekend, we could’ve been at the beach, we have a place in Southampton. . ” She stopped talking and looked up. They all looked up, because someone had come into the room.

“Oh, Jake, you’re here,” said Selma. “Good.”

“How is she?” Jake asked, and Marlene looked at him with interest. A big old guy, maybe seventy-five, massive rather than tall, chest like an oil drum, with a lumpy, large-featured face, and crinkled, close-cut white hair. He wore a double-breasted gray summer suit, old but well cut, a white shirt and bow tie, and brown-and-white shoes with decorative little holes in the toe part, highly polished. He held a straw hat in his hand.

A cop, was Marlene’s first thought, and then she changed her mind. A hard guy, in any case, not a regular citizen. His eyes flicked over Marlene as they were introduced, wary but amused. Jacob Gurvitz. He didn’t offer to shake. Selma Lapidus filled him in on Sophie, and he seemed concerned, perhaps more concerned than a neighbor would be. (He was in 12-D, lived there three years, not rent-controlled, a card player, single, just back from Miami; in Selma Lapidus’s zone of operations, personal information leaped into view unbidden, as on a computer screen.) Marlene wondered, a love interest? Sophie would have a guy like this. Maybe a fellow camp survivor. Yes, that could be it, the look. This guy had seen things other than legal briefs and schmatehs .

They sat. Selma talked, a not unpleasant sound, like the whirring of a refrigerator in an empty apartment. After ten minutes or so, she left for the ladies’. The two men looked at each other and grinned, and then Marlene grinned with them. The look said, Selma! Gotta love her, but. .

“You’re an attorney, too, I understand, Marlene?” said Abe.

“Yes, but I don’t get much practice anymore.”

“Neither do I.” He smiled. “You would think the law was all in the head, but litigation is a physical thing. A big case, when a man’s liberty or even a life, in those days, was at stake, you work your touchis off, believe you me. So, when the body starts to go. .” He waved a hand, as if in farewell. “One of our partners had a heart attack, died right there in the office. Another dear friend, also an attorney, had a cerebral on his way to work. Selma said, Abe, that’s it! I’m not planning on being a rich widow my whole life. Out! So. . my dear wife, once she makes her mind up. .”