“He gave me up without a fight. He didn’t want me. He didn’t want me and I sure as hell don’t want to live with him ever. Miss Delvane must be lying or probably he’s just telling her that because it makes him sound better.”
As snow slanted to the glass in thicker skeins, Mr. Yoshioka turned from the window to face me. “You may be right, Jonah. Most likely you are. But as long as your father is out there, you should be … watchful, cautious.”
“I am. I already am.”
“I want you to know that I am so sorry for telling you.”
“No, sir. You should have told me. It’s okay. Thank you.”
“A boy your age should not have to deal with such things.”
“I’m not my age,” I told him.
“Indeed you are not your age.” He smiled, but maybe less with amusement than with melancholy.
Distressed but not because of Miss Delvane, I followed him to the front door.
As he slipped loose the security chain and opened the deadbolts, he said, “ ‘Kogarashi ya / Ato de me o fuke / Kawayanagi.’ ”
“Haiku,” I said. “Is that the word?”
“That is the word. The poet Senryu.” He translated: “ ‘Bitter winds of winter / But later, river willow, / Open up your buds.’ ”
“That’s a pretty poem.”
“I agree. I will be in touch when I know more, Jonah.”
For whatever reason, he had stopped always calling me Jonah Kirk. It was just Jonah now. I didn’t know what that meant, but I liked it.
“Happy new year, Mr. Yoshioka.”
“Happy new year, Jonah.”
He bowed to me, and I bowed to him, and he opened the door, and I stepped into the fifth-floor hallway. As I headed toward the front stairs, he closed the door, and suddenly I thought that I would never see him again, not alive at least, that all the talk of murder had somehow made a target of him, not a target specifically for Drackman or Fiona Cassidy, but for fate.
Shaken, I halted and looked back toward his apartment. The fear was baseless, and yet it continued to grip me.
This was voodoo thinking. But all children are prone to voodoo thinking because they’re essentially powerless and because they lack so much knowledge of how the world works; therefore, they’re quick to imagine mysterious and sinister forces pulling strings behind the scenes, magic and monsters.
In my case, having had prophetic dreams and having had a piano conjured for me by Miss Pearl, I knew that the world was a many-layered mystery. Everyone told me voodoo was nonsense, and I didn’t really believe in pin-stuck effigies and effective curses, but I did believe a devil walked the world, ceaselessly harvesting.
I went through the door at the end of the hall, started down the stairs, and had to sit before I reached the first landing, because my legs felt rubbery. I trembled as if I weren’t in a warm building but instead were sitting in the falling snow, on a stone stoop as cold as ice. Five—maybe ten—minutes passed before the tremors stopped and my legs no longer felt weak.
I’m not sure I understood at the time why that episode occurred. Decades later I realize that, as a child, I was fond of some nuns and kids at Saint Scholastica and had much affection for Mrs. Lorenzo and Mrs. O’Toole, but I loved wholeheartedly only my mother, Grandma Anita, and Grandpa Teddy. And though I never thought about it this way in those days—it wasn’t a thing a child would ever contemplate—that was the largest universe of love I could at the time imagine. But the universe was expanding. I feared for Mr. Yoshioka because he was becoming a surrogate father to me. The better that I knew him, the more I loved him—and the more I feared losing him.
45
January of 1967 brought tragedy when three astronauts—Virgil Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee—died in a flash fire in their Apollo capsule during a simulated countdown at Cape Canaveral. The horror of their deaths set the tone for the year to come.
Later there would be the famous Summer of Love, thousands flocking to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco to form communes, bliss out at free concerts by acid-rock bands, and make love instead of war. They called it Hippie Haven and meant to start a new and better world, but by the end of summer, crime was soaring in Haight-Ashbury. Hospital ERs were overwhelmed with people hallucinating and psychotic from bad LSD trips, while addiction to hard drugs and deadly overdoses had become epidemic. The music darkened from Scott McKenzie singing about wearing flowers in your hair to the Doors’ celebration of psychosis in “The End,” a throbbing carnival organ evoking menace and madness. Buffalo Springfield proved prescient in “For What It’s Worth,” in which their music and voices stirred in the listener a deep uneasiness as they sang about violence in the streets: “There’s something happening here … There’s a man with a gun over there.”
That same summer, the worst race riots in the country’s history broke out in Detroit. Thirty-eight died and entire sections of that city were reduced to smoking ruins. Meanwhile, the war in Vietnam escalated.
Much to my surprise, months passed without my father abruptly looming out of the shadows. I didn’t see Fiona Cassidy again or Lucas Drackman, but I knew they had not gone away forever. Considering the weirdness of the previous couple of years, the sudden ordinariness of my daily life seemed like a setup, false calm meant to encourage me to let my guard down. And after a while, the quiet became tedious, because I guess a person can become as addicted to danger and to weirdness as much as to dope of any kind.
Mr. Yabu Tamazaki of the Daily News had nothing more to tell us about the whereabouts of Drackman when the Cassidys and Mrs. Kolshak were killed. I had mistakenly believed that he must be a reporter, but he was instead the curator of the newspaper morgue. In his great enthusiasm for the case, he began to mistake himself for a reporter, and when discovered investigating those murders, he was asked to explain himself and, in the absence of an explanation, was told in no uncertain terms to focus solely on the job for which he was paid.
I learned this one snowy day when I came out of the community center after a piano session and found Mr. Yoshioka walking home, looking rather dashing in a well-cut topcoat, neck scarf, and fedora.
“Mr. Tamazaki does have a degree in journalism,” Mr. Yoshioka explained. “In this city, however, most reporters have traditionally been of other ethnic backgrounds, mostly Irish. The Irish are very good at journalism because they are very good also at politics, and politics and journalism are twined. Mr. Tamazaki has no more interest in politics than he has in hara-kiri, which is to say none at all.”
“Now what are we going to do?” I wondered.
“Mr. Tamazaki will continue to research the case more quietly, entirely on his own time. And there is also Mr. Nakama Otani, who is interested in the case as a sideline to his primary work.”
“He’s the one who found where my father is living, with Miss Delvane on the north side. He calls himself Nick or Nicholas but never Nickie.”
“That is correct.”
“He’s good at chatting people up.”
“No one is better.”
“Who’s he chatting up now?”
“We will leave that entirely to Mr. Otani. Because he is doing the chatting, he alone must choose those to whom he wishes to chat.”
“What does he do besides chat? Is he a reporter?”
“Mr. Otani does many things well, though he is a humble man who, if you praised him, would deny his competence and plead that he is only lucky.”
Whenever it came to revealing anything about Nakama Otani, Mr. Yoshioka became secretive and often responded to my questions with answers that seemed to be answers only if you didn’t think too hard about them.
We were passing under bare-limbed maples through which snow streamed, and though my subject wasn’t snow, I took the opportunity to reveal my recently gained erudition. “ ‘The sleet falls / As if coming through the bottom / Of loneliness.’ ”
“Naitō Jōsō,” said Mr. Yoshioka. “A poet of the seventeenth century. He was once a
samurai, and then he became a priest. A man of many disciplines.”
“Sorry I can’t say it in Japanese.”
He obliged: “ ‘Sabishisa no / Soko nukete furu / Mizore kana.’ ”
He looked so pleased that I had memorized even one haiku, and his smile was the widest I had ever seen on him, but he didn’t inquire what had inspired my interest. Because haiku were important to him, almost sacred, maybe he thought that to ask such a question would be too personal. More likely, he knew that my respect for him was the source of my interest in that poetry, and he would have been embarrassed to hear me say as much.
And so the months passed with me suspended in a peculiar state. I felt that I was walking a ledge, yes, but each time I looked down, the ledge was only two feet off the ground. Maintaining a high degree of wariness and the suspicion for which I was known—at least to Mr. Yoshioka—proved difficult when none of the bad guys came sneaking around.
We kept waiting for more bombs to explode, like those that had trashed the military-recruitment centers. Surely if Fiona Cassidy was a skilled bomb-maker, she’d had plenty of time in 6-C to build more than two. But nothing exploded.
When the calamity occurred on Wednesday, April 19, 1967, it was nothing that I’d been anticipating.
At Saint Scholastica’s, all the students in the fourth grade were gathered in the music room during the sixth period, practicing the choral piece we would sing as our part in the annual spring recital. The head of the music department, Mr. Hern, was a civilian, not a priest. He knew music, but he wasn’t much of a disciplinarian. Some of us boys were horsing around, singing “banana” though the word was hosanna, that sort of thing, when Sister Agnes entered in a rustle of habit, and went directly to the piano, where Mr. Hern was playing well the song that we were doing our best to sabotage. He took his hands off the keys the moment that he saw her, and she whispered something to him, and all of the kids stood on the tiered chorus platform in respectful silence because Sister Agnes was a dedicated and effective disciplinarian.
When she asked me to come with her, I frantically tried to think what I’d done that warranted her attention. I was sure it couldn’t be that she’d been walking by the music room and heard me sing “banana,” but as far as I could recall, I hadn’t committed any other offense that day.
She walked with me to her office, one hand on my shoulder all the way, which was unusual, as if she thought I might try to escape. When I glanced at her surreptitiously, I saw tears standing in her eyes. I thought that the punishment soon to be administered must be so dire, even this no-nonsense nun had pity for me.
Ushered ahead of Sister Agnes, entering her office, I startled when I saw my mother waiting there, standing at a window with a view of sycamores in early leaf. She turned when she heard us, and her face glistened with tears.
I ran to her, and she knelt to take me in her arms, and I asked what I had done. She said, “Nothing, sweetie, not you, you’ve done nothing. It’s your grandma. We don’t have her anymore, Jonah. We don’t have her. She passed away a little while ago, and she’s with God now.”
Ten months earlier, when Tony Lorenzo died, I had thought I knew what Mrs. Lorenzo must be feeling; but now I realized that I had not understood her pain at all. Surely it was as sharp as mine, and mine was excruciating, of such intensity that for a moment I couldn’t breathe. And then I thought, Grandpa Teddy, and I didn’t believe that I could bear to see him racked by grief.
Because Grandma Anita worked for Monsignor McCarthy and because she had done so much good for others in her life, the viewing before the funeral Mass was at the cathedral. So many flowers flanked and backdropped the casket. Among the usual roses and chrysanthemums stood a singular arrangement, not the largest but the most striking, consisting of white peonies with purple-tipped petals combined with purple orchids. I knew from whom they must have come. I took the condolence card from the arrangement and pocketed it. I read it much later, when I was alone in bed at Grandpa’s house and unable to sleep. The name of the sender was not included on the card, but it didn’t need to be. The neatly hand-printed message identified him, and I read it many times before sleep claimed me.
Dawn breaks
And blossoms open
Gates of paradise.
As I explained near the beginning of this story, we stayed with Grandpa Teddy for a week, and then we returned to our downtown walk-up.
I no longer allowed myself to be impatient for some word from Mr. Yabu Tamazaki of the Daily News or from the chatting-up expert, Mr. Nakama Otani. In a low-grade fever of superstition, I felt that my previous impatience, my desire for action, might have in part brought upon us the drama that I didn’t want, Grandma Anita’s death.
Sure, juju was probably nonsense, but if by some one-in-a-million chance it was not nonsense, then somewhere there was a photograph of me sleeping and a fabric eye that perhaps could watch me even from a great distance, and both were in the possession of a woman with purple-blue eyes and a bloody mind and the darkest of dark hearts, who would use those magical items if she knew how.
Nothing more of importance happened until June, when Mom quit her job at Slinky’s where Harmon Jessup, the owner, wanted more from her than she would ever give him, and accepted the better job at the first-class nightclub owned by William Murkett. Of course Murkett proved to be a dirty old tomcat, too, and Mother had to walk away from that job even before her first performance.
The night we moved out of the downtown walk-up, as Grandpa Teddy was loading our suitcases and shopping bags into his Cadillac and as my mother paid a visit to Mrs. Lorenzo, I raced up to the fifth floor to tell Mr. Yoshioka what was happening and to provide him with my grandfather’s phone number and address. I rang his bell repeatedly, but he didn’t answer.
If you want the truth, I felt a little heartsick about not being able to see him before we left. But I would be able to call him at his work number in the morning or at his home number the following evening. We wouldn’t be in the same neighborhood anymore, not close enough to have tea whenever we felt like it, but I was certain that we would see each other from time to time and that he would keep me informed about the investigation, such as it was. We shared secrets, after all, and secrets can bind people together as surely as does love. We shared an adversary, as well, one who had threatened both of us, and we had a mutual interest in bringing her to justice, regardless of whether she might be a wicked juju priestess or a scheming Bilderberger, or merely someone who liked to cut and who had conspired in the murder of her parents.
Our first few days at Grandpa Teddy’s house were quiet. But the uneasy peace of recent months would soon end.
46
On Monday, July 3, when I met Malcolm Pomerantz, I was ten years and half a month old, and he was twelve years and two months old. I was a short, black piano man; he was a tall, white saxophonist. I had a quickness and, if I say so myself, a certain grace of movement, but Malcolm proceeded always at a measured pace, stoop-shouldered, almost shambling. On the surface, we were so radically different that we would never find ourselves in the same police lineup of suspects.
I was home alone that day. Because Grandpa lived in a low-crime neighborhood and because I had recently reached an age expressed in double digits, my mother had reluctantly conceded that I could stay by myself during the day. Until she found another singing gig, she had only the waitressing at Woolworth’s, and she felt too pinched to pay for a sitter. In truth, she couldn’t have been as bad off as she evidently felt, considering that Grandpa Teddy wouldn’t take a dime from her for rent or food. Although he claimed that having us there, no longer being alone, was worth a fortune to him, and although we were more at home than we had been in the fourth-floor walk-up, it galled my mother to be dependent.
In return for her concession, she provided a list of rules that I swore to obey, the first of which was that I would never, never, never, under any circumstances, open the door to a stranger, not even if he wore a police uniform, not eve
n if he dressed like a priest. On those hot summer days, lacking air-conditioning, we needed to keep a number of windows open to cross-ventilate the house, and although the screens snapped into place from the inside, any of them could be cut or wrenched loose from outside in no time at all. Consequently, if some despicable criminal tried to enter the house by a window, I must at once begin screaming as loud as I could for help; I must race to the second floor, lock myself in the master bedroom, remove a window screen, climb out onto the front-porch roof, and continue screaming until neighbors came into the street to see what had me so terrified.
I had no nearby community center to go to, and right there in the first-floor front room stood a fine piano. I had every intention of playing that grand instrument during the day, and Mom knew that I would; but apparently it didn’t occur to her that when I was pounding the ivories, I wouldn’t be likely to hear a burglar cutting a window screen at the back of the house. If it did occur to her, no doubt she assured herself that no sneak thief was likely to break into a place where he could hear someone rocking a piano.
I was doing just that, rocking through Fats Domino’s “I’m Gonna Be a Wheel Someday,” when Malcolm Pomerantz rang the doorbell. He had to ring it like five or six times before I came to a couple of quiet bars that allowed me to hear it.
Not having forgotten Fiona Cassidy or Lucas Drackman, or my philandering father with his new beard, I approached the door most cautiously and peered through one of the sidelights. On the porch stood an unlikely figure, a gawky boy with a prominent Adam’s apple, slumped shoulders, and arms that seemed half again as long as they ought to be. He dressed like an adult in highly polished black wing tips, gray dress pants, and a short-sleeved white shirt with thin blue vertical lines. I hate to say it, but being dressed like an adult did not mean that he had style, because he didn’t. His pants were cinched a couple of inches above his navel, revealing white socks in the black brogues and making his torso look as abbreviated as that of a dwarf. Even on a warm summer day, the spread collar of his white shirt was buttoned all the way to the neck.