Lieberman's Day Page 8

  Frankie Kraylaw was nearing panic too, but for a very different reason.

  Nothing wrong with his plan. Sit, let the Lord enter his mind, sip the hot drink, ignore stupidity, blasphemy, remember the greater goal given him, the test for which he had been commanded to return from distant lands to redeem his family. And yet they sat where he could not avoid them, not if he was to be able to see the entrance to the Clark Street police station.

  Two women, little more than girls, painted, tight dresses under their open coats. And a man. They ate, they drank coffee, and though he could not see beneath the table he was sure that the man was reaching over, touching the young women where he should not, making them laugh the laugh of the demons. And words would come, the sick words of the city, of corruption. Cunt, fuck, asshole, prick. Frankie could not cut the words out with prayer. Could not move to avoid them, could not keep himself from glancing at them, praying for a bolt of lightning that would crack the window, launching shards of glass to tear them to pieces.

  “You,” came the voice of the man.

  Frankie kept his eyes on the window.

  “You, kid, you with the pink titty cheeks,” the voice of the man came again.

  “Leave him alone, J.J.,” said one of the women. “Don’t start no shit here. Come on. Cops are right over there.”

  “What am I doin’ that’s so bad?” said J.J. “I wanna talk to the fuckin’ kid, be friendly, maybe offer him your pussy for dessert. What you say, kid?”

  Frankie turned his head from the window. The devil was distracting him for his trial and he was succumbing. The policemen would come when he looked away at the demon and the temptresses.

  Both women were dark, pretty, Mexicans maybe. He couldn’t be sure. One was smoking and chewing gum at the same time. The man was dark too, but his hair was yellow, almost white, unnatural. All of them were looking at Frankie now.

  They were the only customers in Wendy’s. A fat young woman behind the counter was talking to a kid in a white shirt who was making something on the grill.

  “Kid, you a deaf asshole?” the man called J.J. said. “I hate myself when I pull this shit,” he said to one of the girls, who giggled. “But it’s just in me. You know?”

  “Whatever,” said the gum chewer, flicking ash in the general direction of the aluminum ashtray.

  “Let’s just go, J.J.,” said the other girl.

  “We got no work for hours,” J.J. said, shrugging her off. “This’ll take a minute. We can all go get some beauty sleep.”

  The girl shrugged, resigned, and sat back looking at her fingers.

  “Kid, you are pissing me off here,” said J.J. “I’m jus’ tryin’ to have a little friendly conversation between strangers. This is a big, cold city. You make friends where you can find ’em.”

  “The Lord is all the friend I need,” said Frankie.

  “What?” said J.J., almost choking on his coffee. “You hear what he said? The Lord is all you need? What about at night when you start thinking of a nice piece of pie like Lauren or Jess here?”

  “Stop now in the name of the Lord Jesus,” Frankie said, clasping his hands together.

  “I can’t believe this,” said J.J., getting up. “I didn’t know they really grew fruitcakes like this anymore.”

  Frankie fixed his eyes on the window, beyond the window to the front of the Clark Street police station. Two uniformed policemen, both black, came out and hurried around to the rear of the building.

  “I’m gonna have to insist that you look at me when I talk to you, little Jesus,” said J.J., taking a step toward Frankie.

  The fat girl behind the counter picked up on what was happening and stopped talking to the kid in the white shirt.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” said J.J. “Friend and I are just having a little fun here. We’re just two couples cooling down after a night on the town.”

  The girl looked at J.J.’s false grin and then at Frankie, who did not meet her gaze. She started talking to the kid in the white shirt again but kept glancing back at J.J., who advanced on Frankie and leaned over on his table, palms flat, breath stale from rot and brimstone.

  “Hey, kid, Jesus is fine but will he be there to go down on you when you need him?” J.J. whispered in Frankie’s ear.

  Before J.J. could really start his laugh, he felt himself flying backward as if the wall had exploded. Someone screamed and J.J. couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see anything but black, and then he felt the knee in his stomach, and again, and something in his ear.

  “Get off, get off, you crazy bastard,” the girl called Lauren screamed.

  “Stop that,” yelled the fat girl behind the counter.

  Then the weight was off him and J.J. could see. Standing over him was a crazed, open-mouthed bloody thing. The thing was kicking him. The thing turned and punched Jess in the throat. She staggered back, holding her neck, trying to breathe. Lauren screamed, “Oh, my God,” and went running for the door as the crazy thing J.J. had let loose grabbed a chair and threw it at her.

  J.J. tried to sit up, but something was broken and he couldn’t move.

  Screaming, more voices.

  The kid who was no longer a kid had picked up another chair and turned toward J.J., who tried to slide backward, gasping, “Hey, I was kidding, for God’s sake. What the fuck are you doin’?”

  And then the horror hit J.J. The horror that came with the realization that the kid had something raw and bloody between his teeth, the realization that it was JJ.’s ear.

  “Oh,” moaned J.J. “Help. Somebody, help.”

  The creature standing over J.J. spat out his ear and brought the chair down on him, crying, “Are you washed in the blood of the lamb?”

  That was all J.J. Prescott remembered, that and the sight of Jess trying to cry and catch her breath. All he would remember until he woke up in the intensive-care ward of Weiss Hospital four days later.

  Frankie was going to hit the demon again, but the Lord whispered in his ear that the bloody exorcism was complete. Frankie turned to the gasping woman, the one who had chewed gum and smoked at the same time. She staggered backward when he looked at her, fell back over a table, and hit her head against the window while trying to scream.

  Frankie dropped the chair and ran for the door, the same door Lauren had run through seconds ago. He ran out into the street knowing that he was a bloody vision.

  He raced through the cold, frightened an old woman on her way to the bus stop, and made his way to the refuge of his pickup truck.

  He pulled the collar of his jacket up to cover part of his bloody face, forced himself to be calm, and turned on the ignition. In the rearview mirror he saw Lauren coming out of the police station with two uniformed policemen who weren’t even wearing coats. They didn’t look in Frankie’s direction. The Lord was still on his side. Praise the Lord.

  He pulled into the slow-moving traffic heading south into the city.

  He had passed the latest test, had defeated the demon, and now he would have to return to his task. The Lord might well place many other obstacles in his path, but now he knew that it was within his power to smite demons and recognize tempters.

  Frankie Kraylaw, with the help of God, would prevail. He would destroy the two policemen. He would wrench his wife and son from this city of evil. Then a new thought struck him, the voice coming as he was sure it had come to Abraham. When the task was completed, when God’s will was done and Frankie had been rewarded on earth for his faith, God might well want him to sacrifice his firstborn son.

  Yes, if God so bid him, he would sacrifice Charlie on the altar of the Lord though he truly loved his son as Abraham had loved Isaac.

  Frankie wanted to say “Praise Jesus” aloud. He tried, but his throat was dry with blood and he choked upon the words.

  There were four people at Maish and Yetta’s 1950s split-level brick house in Lincolnwood when Abe arrived with his bag of bagels, bialys, and cream cheese. He avoided B
ess’s eyes and went to Yetta, who stood, her eyes red, a heavy woman who had given up any pretense of holding herself or her feelings together. She looked and felt in his arms like a sack of cotton left out in the rain.

  Spindly-legged dark furniture and faded flower patterns, gray carpet throughout, two bedrooms, one of which had been shared by David and Edward until they each left for college, marriage, and their own families.

  “Avrum,” she said, clinging to him, almost knocking him over.

  “Yetta,” Abe answered, patting her head and trying to keep his balance.

  Her pain came into him, a sudden wet shock, and she cried. “I can’t remember what he was like as a baby,” she said, holding him at arm’s length to make this statement that astonished her. “Can you remember Lisa?”

  “Some things,” Abe said, looking at Lisa, who stood across the room.

  Bess, dressed in black, was now moving toward him and Yetta. She did not look angry. Bess was erect, slender, as tall as her husband and looking fifteen years younger than him, though only five years separated them. Bess was not a beauty, but she was a fine-looking woman, a lady. Her father had been a butcher on the South Side, but she carried herself as if he had been a banker. She had the soft, clear voice that telephone operators used to have.

  Lieberman had done his best, which was not always very good, to keep his wife from being displeased with him, not because he feared her but because he felt the criticism of her common sense.

  “Yetta,” Bess said softly. “Come, let’s have another cup of coffee and show the Reiffels the family pictures. Come.”

  Yetta nodded dutifully and started to turn, but paused to say to Abe, “Maish went to work.”

  “I know,” said Lieberman. “I just came from there. He sent these.”

  Bess took the package and handed it to an overly made-up woman who could have been sixty or eighty.

  “You remember Marge Reiffel,” Bess said.

  “Of course,” Lieberman said with a smile, though he had no idea who this woman was. “How have you been, Marge?”

  “Don’t ask,” Marge said, turning away with a wave of her hand and a tear in her voice as she headed for the kitchen with the bag.

  Bess stood at Lieberman’s side while Lisa led Yetta to the sofa, where an open book of family photos waited.

  “Give him something to eat, Bess,” Yetta called. “He must be starving.”

  “I will,” said Bess, turning to her husband.

  “I wanted you to sleep,” Lieberman said. “I thought you could use a good night’s rest for all this.”

  “I know,” she said. “I figured.”

  “You look beautiful and you smell like perfect memories.”

  “You look terrible, Lieberman,” Bess answered. “And you smell like mildew. You got time to go home, take a shower, change clothes?”

  He shook his head no and watched his sister-in-law sitting with the photograph album on her lap, slowly pointing to a David of the past and telling the story of the lost moment.

  “That’s her history,” Bess said. “That book, some memories of things that don’t mean anything to anyone else. We teach kids about kings and wars but pay no attention to the history that will really count for them, their own lives.”

  “You’re right,” he said.

  “You’d tell me I was right if I said your Cubs deserve to lose a hundred games this year. I’m not mad anymore, Abe. We’ve got grief to deal with here. Are you all right?”

  Lieberman couldn’t answer.

  “Are you feverish, Lieberman?” Bess said, putting her cool hand on his brow.

  He closed his eyes. “Keep it there,” he said.

  She took her hand away and he opened his eyes.

  “Can you stop by the house when Barry and Melisa come home, just before three? Todd’s going to pick them up and keep them for a few days. Lisa got some time off and she’s going to help me here, pick up Edward at the airport.”

  “Bess,” he said. “I’m trying to catch the people who killed Davey.”

  “You want to make arrangements for the funerals, the burial, food, calls to relatives? Maish can’t do it. Yetta can’t do it. Carol is in the hospital trying to …”

  “Enough,” said Lieberman, holding up his hands. “I’ll be home. I’ll change clothes. I’ll get the kids packed …”

  “Lisa packed them.”

  “Then I’ll sit there till Todd comes.”

  “At three-fifteen.”

  “I’ll be there,” said Lieberman. “I gotta go. I’m late.”

  “Stay a few minutes. Rabbi Wass is on the way.”

  All the more reason to get out of here, Lieberman thought, but he said, “Can’t. Bill’s waiting for me.”

  He kissed Bess on the cheek and she stopped him to kiss him gently on the mouth. Her smell seeped into his being and made him feel like sex or sleep.

  “Abe,” she whispered. “Don’t think that way.”

  Her face was in front of his, her brown eyes wide and unwilling to look away.

  “What way?” he said with a patient sigh.

  “The way you looked when that Puerto Rican girl was murdered. Like you’re going to hurt someone, probably yourself.”

  “I’m late,” he said.

  “Three o’clock,” she reminded him.

  “Three o’clock,” he confirmed, moving past her to kiss the seated Yetta, to accept a hug, and to nod to Lisa.

  “You remember this one, Abe?” Yetta asked, pointing at a photograph of her two sons at the ages of about ten and thirteen and a younger Abe who looked in the picture exactly as he looked earlier that morning and as he had looked from his fifteenth birthday.

  “Round Lake,” Yetta said. “See, David’s fishing in a bucket. You know why he didn’t have a shirt on, didn’t wear one all summer?”

  Lieberman looked at the photograph for some clue, but saw none.

  “He thought,” Yetta explained, “that he was going to be a superhero. He’d puff up his little tan chest and try to look strong.”

  “I remember,” he said, looking at Lisa, who saw the same thing in her father’s eyes that Bess had seen.

  “Abe,” she said as he stood.

  “I know,” Lieberman answered. “Your mother just told me about Todd picking up the kids.”

  “I don’t mean about the kids.”

  “I know,” he said. “I gotta go.”

  He was halfway through the crowd when Irving Hamel appeared before him. Irving was not a bad man, but he was an irritating one. He was also young, not yet forty, and a lawyer. He had all his hair and it was black. He wore contact lenses. He stood tall and worked out every morning at the Jewish Community Center on Touhy. His wife was beautiful. His two kids, a boy and girl, were beautiful. Irving Hamel might one day be the first Jewish mayor of Chicago or a Supreme Court justice, but to Abe Lieberman, he was generally a pain in the ass.

  “My condolences about David,” Irving said.

  His suit was dark, perfectly pressed. His condolences sounded sincere, but Lieberman felt, as he usually felt about Irving Hamel, that there was another agenda that would come out in a prepositional phrase or an aside.

  “Thank you, Irving,” Abe said, patting the younger man on the shoulder and trying to move past him.

  “How’s Bess taking this?” Irving said softly, sincerely. “No one ever thinks about how Bess is taking things. She’s always a rock for others, but something like this …”

  “She’ll be fine,” said Lieberman, now knowing where this encounter was leading. “My wife can take on death as well as she’s taken on life.”

  “Oh,” said Irving with an admiring shake of the head. “I know. Lord, I know. The woman is an inspiration to us all But …”

  “Irving,” said Lieberman, invading the man’s personal space by stepping toward him. “Bess isn’t going to resign as temple president. She’s not going to take a leave or have a breakdown. So you’re not going to add a line to the community-ser
vice listing of your resumé.”

  “You think I …” Hamel said incredulously.

  “I know you,” Lieberman said evenly. “Do us all a favor, including you. Fight this another day and another way. Don’t discuss this with Rabbi Wass unless you already have. And don’t discuss it with anyone else but Bess. You want to take her on, be my guest.”

  With that, Lieberman sidestepped the man and strode toward the door.

  Before he left the house, however, Lieberman slipped into an alcove near the front door and used the phone there to make a call. The call led to another call and then another until he reached a boy named Justo Carnito who gave him a time and a place. Lieberman wrote the time and place in his pocket notebook, said “Gracias,” and hung up the phone.

  As he got into his car parked almost directly in front of his brother’s house, Lieberman checked the side mirror and saw the familiar black Pontiac of Rabbi Wass, the young Rabbi Wass, who was forty-five years old.

  Rabbi Wass was one of three pillars of Temple Mir Shavot on California Avenue just four blocks from where Lieberman and Bess lived on Jarvis. The second was eighty-five-year-old Ida Katzman, whose ten jewelry stores, left to her by the departed Mort Katzman, allowed her to make donations that had not only kept the congregation alive but also held the promise of a move in the near future to the former Fourth Federal Savings Building on Dempster in Skokie, in a neighborhood of younger families with growing children and new life for the temple. The third pillar of the congregation was Lieberman’s wife. Bess was not only the president, but also head of the building-fund drive.

  Lieberman’s rear tires slipped as he backed up, and when he gunned the engine, he slipped further into an iced rut of his own making.

  “Wait,” called Rabbi Wass from the open window of his car; Lieberman was trapped.

  Rabbi Wass parked in one of the many available morning spaces on the street of small homes and walked over to

  Lieberman’s car, motioning him to roll down the window. He did.

  “I’ll give you a push,” said Wass.

  “Rabbi, I …”

  “Gently in gear and I’ll push. Strong back. My ancestors were farmers.”