Tender Death Read online

  God, she was so hungry she felt light-headed. She unfastened her seat belt again and slid over to Teddy’s window. She looked back across the street to Del Soma’s.

  She saw Teddy, preoccupied, empty-handed, not even looking toward the Rover, come around the corner and go into the deli.

  21.

  “I WENT AROUND the corner to a Chinese restaurant I know to see if I could get us some egg drop soup,” Teddy said in response to her casual question. “Here, take this.” He thrust a cardboard box of coffee and sandwiches at her. “But it was closed.” He shrugged and dumped a six-pack of Heineken on the backseat. “What else would I be doing?” He showed her such a wide-eyed innocent face that her skin prickled on the back of her neck. She heard, Don’t you trust me? unsaid. She thought, Of course, I trust you. Shouldn’t I?

  They were driving again, down Canal and right across the East River, which looked dangerous, with chunks of ice and sporadic little black whirlpools. She had read somewhere that the East River had vicious currents and was a fighting river. They drove off the Manhattan Bridge onto Flatbush Avenue. They were in Brooklyn.

  “Do you know how to get there?” Wetzon asked, looking down at the box on her lap. Teddy was drinking coffee with one hand as he steered with the other.

  “Yeah. Did a story once on the Cafe Baltic. It’s quite a place—the hub of the Russian émigré social scene. And the wheeling and dealing that goes on there ... You might say”— he grinned at her— “it’s a Middle European Four Seasons.” He laughed out loud.

  “Shut up and drive,” she grumbled, knowing he was making fun of her fascination with the famous New York restaurant. She unwrapped her sandwich. “Oh, joy, a hoagie.”

  “You mean a hero,” he said, referring to the Italian-style stuffed sandwiches.

  “Hoagie in South Jersey.” She pulled out the slimy red pimientos and gripped the bread firmly. “Hate red peppers.” She took a big bite. The fruity olive oil dribbled on her chin, and she blotted it up with a paper napkin.

  “Your friend Carlos has made quite a name for himself.”

  “Isn’t it great? He’s such a talent, and besides that, he’s a nice guy.”

  Teddy stared at the roadway, giving her his magnificent profile. “What’s the name of the firm, Wetzi?”

  She didn’t answer him at first. “Let it be, Teddy.”

  Turning to her, his eyes crackled, then softened. “Sorry.”

  “Okay. Let’s forget it.” She tried not to be irritated, but she could feel herself doing a slow burn.

  “I’m going to go around Prospect Park and pick up Ocean Parkway. Say a prayer that it’s as good driving as Flatbush.” They were making better time than she’d hoped. “This is Grand Army Plaza,” he said, referring to a circle with massive monuments draped in snow. She could make out horses among the statuary but very little else. “If we kept going through the park, we’d pass the Brooklyn Museum, the Library, and the Botanic Gardens, but ...” He drove around the Plaza and along the edge of Prospect Park, passing people on skiis, groups of children in vivid winterwear, adults with sleds, some going into the park, some leaving.

  “It’s funny, isn’t it, that most Manhattanites never go to Brooklyn, or any of the outer boroughs.” The only place in Brooklyn that she’d been in besides the Heights and Atlantic Avenue for the antique stores, was BAM, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and that was because of the dance companies that appeared there.

  “Unless you grew up in one of the boroughs,” Teddy said, “or work takes you there, Manhattanites are the biggest snobs around.” He looked over at her. “You’re not talking much, lady.”

  “I’m afraid to. You might get information out of me, digger. You should be doing Sixty Minutes.”

  “Ah, that’s just it. That’s what I’m aiming for.”

  “Oh, Teddy! Is there a chance?”

  “I’m working on it.” He turned onto Ocean Parkway, and the Rover skidded, spinning sharply into the wrong lane. Wetzon braced her hand on the dash and felt her body surge against the seat belt. Teddy steered into the skid expertly, taking his foot off the gas, putting it on again lightly once they were righted.

  A cab, which had been driving a distance behind them, passed them and then stopped. The driver opened his door and called out to them. Teddy rolled down his window and waved. “It’s okay.”

  Two cars, oncoming, also stopped until Teddy had the Rover back in the right lane.

  “Notice how polite and nice everyone is,” Teddy said. “I love New Yorkers. We always get such a bad rap.” He nodded at the drivers as he passed.

  “I’m noticing that the streets are beginning to look a lot less traveled.”

  “Well, this is Brooklyn. As we said, an outer borough. Our sanitation department doesn’t love Brooklyn as much as Manhattan. Too many poor people here.” He edged the Rover left again and they entered a wide, majestic thoroughfare with many lanes and a spacious island in the middle. The spacious island might as well have been in the Antarctic because all the vegetation was completely buried in snow.

  “Wow!” Wetzon said. “This must be beautiful in the spring. Are we really in Brooklyn?”

  “Dis here is Brooklyn all right, bubbie. God, I love this. Give me my sandwich, will ya—I’m getting in the mood.” His preoccupation seemed to have vanished. With few other cars on the road, he threw caution to the wind and began to pick up speed. “We’re almost there.”

  On both sides of Ocean Parkway stood ample stone houses, fronted by small snowy lawns. Some of the houses were attached like row houses, but others would have been classified as mansions in Manhattan. The side streets were almost obliterated by snow.

  “You’re very quiet, Wetzi.”

  “I’m not sure how we do this, Teddy.” She was beginning to worry whether she wasn’t taking them on a wild-goose chase. “Do you think we should just go in and ask at Tsminsky’s for Ida and say that I have an old aunt who needs care, or something like that?”

  “They’re very clannish and careful about strangers here. Hard to shake old habits.”

  “The KGB will get you if you don’t watch out?”

  “You got it. How about we do that, leave a name and say we’re going into the Baltic for a drink and she can find us there? Then they won’t feel they’re being pressured and we can wait where it’s warm. And maybe we can pick up some information from people there.” He waved his arm. “We are now passing the famous Kings Highway.”

  She looked up at the sky. The blue had turned to gray. She shivered and rolled up the window. “I don’t think we have a hell of a lot of daylight left.”

  “How old a guy is your broker Tormenkov?”

  “Late twenties.” She rubbed her hands and put her gloves on. It was cold. “Why can’t you wait until I can give it all to you?”

  “Because I’m a reporter, and I smell something really big here.”

  A blustery wind battered the white-coated trees with wicked force as they drew closer to the Atlantic Ocean. It was almost as if the sharp winds blowing in off the waters blew the snow inland, away from the beaches. There was always much less snow near the ocean, or so it had seemed to her when she was growing up in New Jersey near Seaside Heights.

  “Did he and this Ida look alike?”

  “Not at all. It’s probably just coincidence. Tormenkov may be as common a name in Russia as Smith is here.” She said it, but she didn’t believe it.

  Teddy made a sweeping turn and drove down a broad street with rundown storefronts, clothing stores, cleaning establishments, a furrier, the Restaurant Odessa, which had the marquee of a movie theater, and a boarded-up furniture store. On the other side of the street she could see a windswept boardwalk and farther, the beach and the ocean.

  “I’m giving you a quickie tour of Brighton Beach Avenue,” Teddy said, “then we’ll park behind the Baltic. There’s a lot there and we won’t be so obvious.”

  They passed a movie theater showing Conan the Barbarian.


  The people on the street, and there were quite a few bustling along, scarves to faces, hands to hats, looked foreign. The men wore flat caps or berets. Robust women in various versions of the omnipresent quilted polyester storm coat had woolen scarves tied under their chins and carried shapeless plastic grocery bags. Everyone looked middle-aged or older.

  “Where are the children? Where are the young people?” she asked out loud.

  “They don’t hang around.” Teddy pointed to the left. “There’s your ice cream shoppe.” He pronounced the e as a second syllable.

  “It’s open.” A small surge of adrenaline raced through her.

  He drove another block, the chains clanking on the almost snow-free road. “There’s the Baltic.” He made a left and another left and pulled into a lot with a small assortment of cars. The Rover was the only one without a blanket of snow on it. The lot itself was windswept and almost clear.

  Wetzon gathered up the remains of their sandwiches, paper wrappings, and the empty coffee containers and took them with her when she slid out of the Rover. “It’s amazing. There’s so much less snow here,” she said.

  He took the box of garbage from her and dumped it on top of an already more-than-full garbage can as they walked off the lot.

  Wetzon looped the strap of her backpack over her shoulder, making it a shoulder bag, and looked around. The sun had given up for the day and the air was bitter cold. The wind chill probably brought the temperature down into the single digits. She shivered and fished her lavender beret from the backpack and pulled it on over her ears. She folded up her sunglasses and put them away.

  They walked right to Brighton Beach Avenue, shoulders braced against the fierce ocean wind. The Cafe Baltic had once been a bowling alley. Someone had strung colored lights around the front of the building but couldn’t quite hide the giant kingpin and the ball.

  “Here we are,” Teddy said, stopping in front of Tsminsky’s Ice Cream Shoppe. In the grimy window was a dusty display of cheap plastic ice cream arrangements on white pegboard stands. A sad-looking sundae with pink ice cream, an ice cream soda with a dirty straw, and a banana split with orange bananas. A greasy black sandwich board listed sandwiches and prices. Tuna fish was listed as $1.50. A sign in the window, crudely hand-lettered, with misspellings, listed the specials of the day as homemade borscht, and a stuffed cabbage dinner for $5.00. Alongside was writing in Russian. Cyrillic letters.

  “Can’t beat these prices,” Wetzon said, looking up at Teddy.

  “Let’s go.” As he opened the weather-beaten outside door, a bell rang.

  Behind the counter a squat woman, her head a Brillo of dark curls, was pouring water into a coffee machine. She turned at the sound of the bell, put down the large stainless steel pitcher, and wiped her broad hands on her apron. Her small dark eyes were deep set. She looked from Teddy to Wetzon and let her eyes rest on Teddy. She cleared her throat nervously.

  A man sat at the far end of the dingy counter, slurping soup noisily from a large spoon. He looked over at them and put the spoon down loudly. His body stiffened.

  Wetzon looked at Teddy. Did they think because he was black that he had come to rob them? Or was it something else?

  “Vat I can get for you?” the woman asked suspiciously. Under the apron she wore a wine-colored wool sweater with tiny designs. It looked hand-knit.

  “Are you Mrs. Tsminsky?”

  The woman gave a barely perceptible nod and looked over at the man.

  “I’d like to get in touch with Ida Tor—”

  The woman, agitated, interrupted. “I don’t know nossing.”

  The man came around the counter and stood next to the woman. “Leave us alone,” he cried. “Vee don’t know nossing. You have no right—vee are in America ... you go avay—” There was pleading and terror in his voice.

  “Mr. Tsminsky ... Mrs. Tsminsky, please,” Wetzon said, growing frightened. “I don’t mean you any harm. I’m just trying to get in touch with Ida.” She felt Teddy’s arm on her shoulders. “My aunt is old. I need someone trustworthy to take care of her—” She saw the woman’s eyes flicker, change. She glanced over at her husband, whose hands rested on the cutting board near a few pieces of lettuce and several slices of pale, waxy winter tomatoes.

  A shadowy figure stopped in front of the window and appeared to be studying the menu. Tsminsky looked out. “No, no,” he mumbled. He looked back at Wetzon and Teddy. “No,” Tsminsky said, this time loudly. “You make trouble, go avay and leave us alone!”

  “You’ll be doing Ida out of a good job,” Teddy interjected.

  “Right.” Wetzon nodded, feeling guilty for frightening them. “We’ll wait awhile at the Baltic. If you can get in touch with Ida, maybe she can meet us there.”

  The woman looked to her husband again, her hands playing obsessively with the hem of her apron, rolling and unrolling it. The movement was hypnotic, lulling.

  “Wait! No!” Teddy shouted, backing into her, crushing her off balance back against the door.

  “What—” Wetzon’s view was blocked by Teddy’s shoulder. Teddy grabbed her forcibly, lifting her off the ground, swung around behind her, and pushed hard. The door gave under the pressure of their bodies.

  It was then that she saw the long butcher knife in the man’s hand, his wild, fear-filled eyes.

  She heard the woman scream.

  22.

  “GODDAM, I WISH I had a cigarette.”

  They stood panting on the sidewalk outside of Tsminsky’s Ice Cream Shoppe. Teddy’s dark skin had a grayish hue in the pale light. Beads of sweat covered his upper lip and forehead in spite of the extreme cold.

  “Please, Teddy—” He was taking great strides and dragging her along with him. It had all happened so fast Wetzon had not had time to be afraid. And she wasn’t now. She was curious. Why such a violent reaction? Tsminsky could just have said, no, go away, and left it at that. She remembered what Eddie O’Melvany had said about built-in paranoia.

  The Atlantic wind blew needle breaths on her cheeks, numbing them. The drops of sweat on Teddy’s face turned to ice. Teddy came to a stop in front of the Cafe Baltic. Almost reluctantly, he released her, first reassuring himself by looking up and down the street that they were safe from attack, that the madman Tsminsky had not followed them out into the street with his knife.

  “What did we say that upset him so?” Wetzon was dancing from one foot to the other, trying to keep warm.

  “Upset! That’s some understatement, Wetzi. He might have killed us.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  He turned suddenly belligerent. “You yuppies are so into yourselves, you have no sense of danger. You don’t know these people. It’s a good thing I’m here with you.”

  Wetzon gave him a cold hard look. “I do not consider myself a yuppie, you shithead. Don’t you ever talk to me like that again.”

  She walked away from him, down the street. Winter twilight was rapidly turning to evening. People were not hanging out on the street tonight. And of the few that passed them, undoubtedly heading home, no one seemed to have noticed the incident at Tsminsky’s Ice Cream Shoppe.

  “Hey, wait a minute, Wetzi.” Teddy came after her and took her arm. “Come on, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I know you’re not a yuppie.” He gave her his big, charming grin and hugged her, but Wetzon was stiff in his embrace, still angry. “Come on, say you forgive me.”

  “Okay,” she said with great misgiving. Funny how you think you know someone well and then you see maybe you don’t know him at all. She didn’t remember Teddy being so abrasive, but they had been friends a long time ago, and people change. She was certainly not the same person she had been then. “Don’t you think it’s strange that no one even noticed when we rushed out of the store?”

  “Around here,” Teddy said, “people make a point of not noticing.”

  One entered the Cafe Baltic through a revolving door, like a department store. They came into a cold, dimly lit
lobby, with a coat check on the right and a lectern decorated in varied-colored strips of Christmas lights on the left. Neither spot was occupied.

  The tiny slivers of ice on Teddy’s hairline and upper lip melted. He pulled a folded handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his face without unfolding it. “I don’t know, Wetzi,” he said, shaking his head. “We’ve stepped into deep shit here.”

  “I’m still trying to figure out what happened. One minute we were asking nicely and the next minute he went at us with a knife. You really moved, Teddy. You don’t really think he would have hurt us?”

  “Would you have wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt?” He unzipped his coat. “Did you get a look at that guy in the window? Do you think that’s what upset him?”

  “Don’t know. Could have been just some passerby.” She stuffed her gloves, beret, and scarf into the backpack. “But it was just before he went crazy on us—”

  “Tuvya!” A tiny man, his gaunt face full of seams and gnarls, came out of a dark passageway beyond the gaudy lectern. He was dark-skinned, like a gypsy, with large moist black eyes, and was wearing a black velvet jacket, black tuxedo pants, a frilly white shirt, and a red silk ascot fastened in place by a large glittery tiepin that looked suspiciously like a real diamond. “Long time no see,” the little man said in a thick Russian accent, and his laugh thundered. “And who, I may ask, is pretty lady?”

  “This is Wetzi. Wetzi, say hello to my friend, Misha Rosenglub.”

  Wetzon held out her hand and Misha Rosenglub bowed deeply and kissed her hand, barely brushing it with his breath. It was an incredibly delicate movement. Wetzon was charmed.