Linger Awhile

33 Grace Kowalski

31 January 2004. The doorbell woke me a little after nine in the morning. Irv was still asleep and snoring peacefully. ‘Who is it?’ I said over the intercom.

‘Well, it ain’t Little Joe the wrangler,’ said J Two.

Afraid to think of what she might have been doing since she went out last night, I went down to let her in. She looked a mess and there were spatters of blood all down the front of her. ‘They got the gold,’ she said. ‘I was too late to stop them. Where’s my horse?’

‘You haven’t got a horse,’ I said. ‘You’re not in a film now, you’re in London.’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘How come he knew my name?’

Irv was with us by then. ‘Who?’ he said. ‘Who knew your name?’

‘The old guy who came on to me in Gaby’s Deli.’

‘What’d he say to you?’ I asked her.

‘He talked crazy, said he’d brought me into the world and wanted to know why I wasn’t in Geldings Green.’

‘Golders Green? Oh my God,’ I said, ‘that was Istvan. What happened then?’

‘Nothing right then, only after I threw up I didn’t feel so good and when I saw his neck I went for it. How the hell was I to know?’

‘Know what?’ said Irv.

‘That he’d run dry so soon. I never meant to empty him.’

‘You killed him?’ I said.

‘I guess you could say that — he passed out while I was still trying to get a little nourishment out of him and that’s all she wrote.’

‘Oh God,’ I said, ‘it’s all my fault. I wanted to teach him a lesson and this is what I did.’

‘You didn’t do it alone,’ said Irv. ‘I was in it with you from the beginning, and before that I was the one who got Istvan into this whole Justine thing, so I’m guiltier than you are. If I hadn’t gone to his place with a bottle of Bowmore Cask Strength Islay Malt he might be alive today.’

‘His last words,’ said J Two, ‘were, “That’ll teach me to let Irv Goodman give me a bottle of Scotch.”’

‘Thank you,’ said Irv. ‘How wonderful to have his last words to cherish.’

‘OK,’ I said, ‘we did a bad thing but beating ourselves up about it isn’t going to bring Istvan back. Maybe we can move on to doing a good thing.’

‘Like what?’ said Irv.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. J Two had fallen asleep in a chair and was snoring loudly. We were both looking at her and our eyes met.

‘Well,’ said Irv. ‘That’s why they put erasers on pencils, isn’t it.’