Onion Street

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

No ringing telephone this time, just Aaron shaking me awake. Given a choice, I preferred the phone.

“What? What’s up?” I said, my head still foggy with sleep.

Aaron dropped me and I collapsed back onto my bed. My big brother didn’t let me go back to sleep, though.

“Get up, Moses. Get up right now,” he barked at me.

When I didn’t respond quickly enough to suit him, he dumped a glass of cold water on my face. The water did a better job of getting my attention than the shoulder shaking.

“What the fuck?” I sat up, wiping the water off my face with my T-shirt.

“Go do your business and I’ll meet you in the dining room in five minutes.” It wasn’t a polite request. It wasn’t a request at all.

Normally, I don’t respond real well to my brother bossing me around or his attempts at being a third parent, but there was something, maybe the tone of his voice, that compelled me to do as he said. So five minutes later and slightly more awake, I found myself at the table. Aaron had a cup of my mother’s reheated death coffee waiting for me. I drank some of it, too much of it, and wondered how much worse could Drano have tasted and how much worse for you could it be.

“Okay, big brother, what’s the word?”

“You may be fooling Mommy and Daddy, but not me. What’s going on with you? Is it drugs? Are you in some kind of trouble?”

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“Bullshit.”

Of course it was. I didn’t believe it myself. How was he supposed to swallow it? He held up a piece of paper and read his car’s odometer numbers to me.

“Thanks for the wine. It’s a nice gesture, little brother, but I’m not stupid. Where the hell did you go to put on all that mileage?”

“The Sea of Tranquility.”

“The moon shot’s not scheduled until two years from now. I want the truth.”

That’s what I gave him, if only a little piece of it. “I went to Koblenz, Pennsylvania.”

“Never heard of it. Why would you go there?”

“Because Koblenz, Germany, is too far away and I don’t have a passport.”

“You’re especially not funny in the morning, Moses. What were you doing in Koblenz?”

I gave him another sliver of truth. “I went to visit Samantha Hope’s grave.”

“Wasn’t she the girl who — ”

“Yeah. Bobby’s girlfriend, the one who got blown up in December in Coney Island.”

“Bobby has a car. Why didn’t you take his?”

“I didn’t go with him. I went alone.”

“Why?”

“Because.”

“Don’t be an ass. You sound like a five-year-old.”

“Sounds about right,” I said.

“Okay, forget that for now. What’s this?” Aaron held up my coat. “And don’t say ‘it’s my coat.’ I know it’s your coat, but it’s filthy and it’s torn and there’s dried blood all over it. Your sneakers are caked in mud, and the bottoms of your Levis are still damp. Your shirt stinks from sweat.”

It was tough to argue with the truth. I had been so full of adrenaline last night, and then so exhausted when I got home, that I hadn’t given a second thought to my clothes. Apparently, my brother had done that for me. I had to say something or Aaron would keep pushing. He was like the prosecutors on Judd, for the Defense. He was better than them because he didn’t lose. He’d missed his calling in life.

“I guess I got into a fight last night.”

“You guess?”

“I got into a fight.”

“With who?”

“With whom,” I corrected. “It’s ‘with whom did you get into a fight.’ It doesn’t matter anyway. It’s over now. It’s done.”

“This is Brooklyn, Moe. Fights are never over.”

He was right about that too, especially this time. Susan Kasten wasn’t done with me, nor did I think Jimmy — George Wallace — was going to forget that I broke his nose and nearly smashed his windpipe. I decided to go on the offensive, or I knew Aaron would wear me down.

“We’re not kids anymore, big brother. You can’t fight my fights for me. You can’t protect me.”

“Well, you need protecting because you’re acting like an irresponsible idiot. Like I said, you may have Mom and Dad snowed, but I know you haven’t been going to school. You can’t just not go to school like that.”

“How would you know? You haven’t taken a fucking risk in your whole life. You’ve never drawn outside the lines. All you ever do is follow the rules and toe the line.”

“I’m not going to apologize for doing the right thing or for having goals and trying to achieve them. What do you have? Do you even know what you want? You’re wandering around BC like a moth looking for a flame. Now you’re not even doing that. Do you want to be like Dad?”

“I know who I am.”

“You don’t know anything, least of all who you are.”

“You’re right,” I said, “I don’t. The joke is that you don’t either. You just think you do. You think you are defined by the rules you follow and the plans you’ve made. You think being good defines you. It’s the other way around. They stop you from defining yourself.”

“I hear Psych 1 and Introduction to Philosophy, but I don’t hear my brother talking.”

“You can hear whatever the hell you want. I wanna go back to sleep.”

Aaron shook his head at me in disgust. “Go back to bed. Go do what you want. You’ll just do it anyway.” He walked away.

“Hey, big brother,” I called after him. “You using your car today?”

He stopped and turned. “Why?”

“I need it.”

“For what? Wait — ” He held up his hands. “I don’t wanna know, do I?”

“Probably not.”

He tossed me the keys. “If this will help get whatever is going on with you out of your system, fine. Just bring it and you back in one piece. Understand?”

“Loud and clear.”

• • •

The next time, it was a ringing phone that woke me up. I wasn’t in a really deep sleep, anyway. I was never very good at going back to sleep after my mind was alert. My mom’s coffee hadn’t helped. I was tossing and turning over how things had deteriorated since I began digging into what had happened to Mindy. I had found the guy who’d beaten Mindy into a coma. So what? Abdul Salaam was in worse shape than her. There would be no waking from his sleep. I’d practically watched Billy O’Day murdered. Susan Kasten’s Committee, whoever the fuck they were, wanted to interrogate and now probably kill me. But everything seemed to come back to Bobby somehow.

Clearly, Bobby was mixed up in smuggling. What sort of smuggling, I couldn’t say. At least now I understood the reason for those stupid airport runs. They weren’t about hitting old people up for flight insurance policies. They were about giving Bobby cover for what he was really up to, but it was more than that. It had to be. The night 1055 Coney Island Avenue burned down, Bobby had shown up just after me and just before Susan Kasten. He had gone up to the third floor and seen Salaam’s body just like I had. Why? What were the odds that Bobby and Susan Kasten didn’t know each other? What were the odds they would show up at the same building on the same evening? Had Bobby smuggled in the boxes Susan and her two flunkies removed from 1055 Coney Island Avenue? What was in the boxes?

“Yeah?” I said, picking up the phone.

“Aaron Prager, is that you?” It was Murray Fleisher. “I can’t hear so good. Must be a bad connection.”

He was right. It was a bad connection between the nerves running from his ear to his brain.

“Yes, Mr. — Murray, it’s me, your future partner.”

“Wonderful.”

“I thought I was supposed to call you this afternoon.”

“What? Did I call you too soon?” he shouted at me as if I was the one losing his hearing.

“No, Murray,” I upped the volume. “I said I thought I was supposed to call you this afternoon.”

“Right, but I figured I would take the chance you’d be home. I got what you asked for … mostly.”

“Mostly?”

“First, grab a pencil and a piece of paper.”

“Got it.”

“One of the license plates belongs to a Ford registered to a Wallace Casey of 34 Trinity Street, Oceanside, New York, 11572. You know Oceanside?”

“On Long Island. It’s where they got the other Nathan’s Famous.”

“See,” Murray said, “I knew you were the sharp one. That’s it. The address is off Long Beach Road and Atlantic … around there.”

“Thanks, but what about the other plate?”

“What? Now your mother’s late? How is she, by the way?”

“No, Murray, sorry for whispering,” I shouted. “What about the other plate?”

“The other plate. That’s the rub, kid, the other plate. Are you sure you got the numbers right?”

“Positive.”

“Then we got a problem,” he said.

“How’s that?”

“The DMV tells me that plate number is registered to an official city vehicle.”

“New York City?”

“Of course. What else?”

“Did DMV tell you what kind of vehicle it is, at least? I think one of the witnesses who saw it clip my car said it was a white Dodge van.”

There was silence on the other end of the phone, a long silence.

“Murray, you still there?”

“I don’t get it.” He sounded almost hurt.

“Get what?”

“It’s a white Dodge van, all right, but why would an official city vehicle just pull away like that after denting your car?”

“Then it was the Ford that did it,” I said, not wanting Murray to get too curious. I didn’t want to have to lie to him anymore than I already had, and I couldn’t afford him showing up at our door.

“Sharp kid, very sharp. So, when is Murray gonna see you? We can have a little nosh. Have a drink maybe.”

“Soon, Murray. I’ll call. Thanks for the help.”

“Anytime, partner.”