“Kaddish, all right,” said Cressi. “I used to date a Jewish broad. You’re talking booze, right?”
“That’s Kiddush, which is different,” I explained. “Kaddish is the prayer for the dead.”
“I thought I’d see Calvi at the ceremony,” said someone else.
“Probably has gotten too fat to leave the pool down there.”
“Last I heard, the fuck had prickly heat.”
“You dated a Jewish girl, Cressi? Who?”
“That Sylvia, what lived in the neighborhood, remember her?”
“Stuck up, with the hats and the tits?”
“That’s the one.”
“You dated her?”
“Sure.”
“How far you get?”
“You think I dated her for the conversation? I want conversation I’ll turn on the television.”
“Why’d she go out with a bum like you?”
“What do you think, hey? I got charm.”
“You got crabs is all you got.”
“You ever tell your mother you were dating some Jewish girl?”
“What are you, a douchebag?” said Cressi. “My mother would have fried my balls for supper I’d had told her that.”
“With a little garlic, some gravy and mozzarella, they’d probably taste all right.”
“Yeah but such small portions.”
General laughter.
“Hey, Victor, about this shiver?” said Cressi.
“Shivah.”
“They have food?”
“Usually.”
“Well then, after the burial, I say we do some shivering.”
“But if you pass a McDonald’s before that…”
At the cemetery, we strained our backs lugging the heavy metal coffin from a hearse to the cart and then pushing it over the uneven turf to the hole in the ground. As we shoved our way into places around the hole, like a crowd at a street show, a man from the funeral parlor handed out yarmulkes and little cards with prayers and then the rabbi began. The rabbi spoke a little about one-way journeys and the son sobbed and the rabbi spoke some more about ashes and dust and they lowered the casket into the hole with thick gray straps and the son sobbed and then a few of us who pretended to know what we were doing said Kaddish for James Dubinsky. I read the transliteration of the Hebrew on the little cards they handed out so I don’t know if my words counted, but as I read yis-gad-dal v’yis-kaddash sh’meh rab-bo, as I struggled through the faintly familiar pronunciation, I thought of my grandfathers, whom I had helped bury, and my grandmothers, whom I had helped bury, and my father, who was coughing out the blood in his lungs as he got ever closer to that hole in the ground, and I hoped with a strange fervor that my words were doing some good after all.
The rabbi tossed a shovelful of dirt onto the wide wooden lid of the coffin, some pebbles bouncing, and then the son, and then the rest of us, one by one, tossing shovelfuls of dirt, one by one, and afterward we walked slowly, one by one, back to the road where our cars waited for us.
“It’s a sad day, Victor.” A thick, nasal voice coming from right next to me. “Jimmy, he was a hell of a guy. Hell of a guy.”
“Hello, Lenny,” I said. “Yes, Jimmy was something.”
The nasal voice belonged to Lenny Abromowitz, a tall barrel-chested man of about sixty, with plaid pants and the nose of a boxer who led with his face. He had been a prize-fighter in his past, and a professional bruiser, so I’m told, who did whatever was required with that brawn of his, but now he was only a driver. He wore a lime-green jacket and white patent leather shoes and, in deference to the somber occasion, his porkpie hat was black. And as he walked beside me he draped one of his thick arms over my shoulder.
“Haven’t seen much of yas, Victor. You don’t come to the restaurant no more?”
“I’ve been really busy.”
“Ever since the Daily News put those pictures on the front page, people they don’t come around so much as before.”
“Oh, were there pictures?” Of course there were pictures. The Daily News had rented a room across the street from Tosca’s and stationed a photographer there to capture exactly who was going in and going out of the notorious mob hangout, plastering the pictures on a series of front pages. Politicians and movie stars and sports heroes and famous disc jockeys were captured in crisp blacks and whites paying court to the boss. Each morning everyone in the city wondered who would be the next cover boy and each evening the television news broadcasts started with pointed denials of any wrongdoing by that day’s featured face. The only ones who weren’t impressed were the feds, who had rented the room next to the Daily News’s room and were busy taking pictures of their own. As would be expected, since the front-page series, Tosca’s business had been cut precipitously.
“Yeah, sure there was pictures. Front page. Surprised you missed it.”
“I read the Inquirer.”
“Hey, Victor, let me give you a ride back to the city.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll go back with the limo.”
“Take a ride with me, Victor.”
“No really, it’s taken care of.”
His hand slid across my shoulder onto my neck and squeezed, lightly sure, but still hard enough for me to know how hard he could squeeze if ever he wanted, and with his other hand he reached over and gave my head a few light knocks with his knuckle.
“Hello, anybody home? Are you listening? I think maybe you should come and take a ride with me, Victor. I’m parked over there.”
We crossed the road with the hearse and the limousine and the other cars and kept going, across a field of tombstones with Jewish stars and menorahs and torah scrolls carved into the stone, with names like Cantor and Shure and Goodrich and Kimmelman, until we reached another road, where, down a ways, was parked a long white Cadillac.
We approached the passenger side and Lenny opened the rear door for me. “Hop on in, Victor.”
I gave him a tight smile and then ducked into the car. It must have slipped my mind for a moment, what with all the wiseguys at the funeral and the sadness of the pebbles scudding across the top of the coffin and the words of the Kaddish still echoing, but Lenny was not just any driver, and his invitation of a ride was less an invitation than a summons. When I entered the cool darkness of the car’s interior my eyes took a second to dilate open and I smelled him before I saw him. The atmosphere of the car was rich with his scent: the spice of cologne, the creamy sweetness of Brylcreem, the acrid saltpeter tang of brutal power waiting to be exercised.
Slowly, the car drove off along the cemetery road.
20
“I THOUGHT IT BEST IF I PAID my respects from a distance,” said Enrico Raffaello, sitting next to me on the black bench seat in the rear of his Cadillac. He was a short, neat man in a black suit and flowered tie. His hair was gray and greased back, his face cratered like a demented moon. His voice was softly accented with a Sicilian rhythm and a genuine sadness that seemed to arise not from the surface mourning of a funeral but from a deep understanding of the merciless progression of life. Between his knees was a cane tipped with a silver cast of a leopard, and his thick hands rested easily atop the crouching cat. “Jimmy was a loyal friend and I didn’t want to ruin his day.”
“I think that was wise,” I said.
“Did you like the service?”
“It was touching. The son especially.”
“Yes, so I’ve heard. I arranged for it to happen like that.”
“Flying him in from L.A. was very generous.”
“That is not quite how I arranged it. You see, Jimmy was not a diligent family man. He hadn’t seen his son in years and the son refused to come after what Jimmy had done to his mother. Jimmy was wrong in how he handled his wife, granted, but that was no reason for a son to show such disrespect for his father.”