Riptide

CHAPTER 5

Jake Lassiter parked his 1968 Olds 442 convertible in the alley behind the theater. Lincoln Road was empty of pedestrians. Wealthy matrons once shopped there, riding trams from store to store, wrapped in mink at the first breath of November. Then Saks closed, restaurants and art deco hotels were boarded, and the street was taken over by Marielitos — the tattooed Cuban prisoners — who urinated in empty door fronts and terrorized the neighborhood’s feeble retirees.

Five blocks away, Ocean Drive was rejuvenated with New York money and New York names. South Beach was now SoBe, where young couples of various genders sought out the newest cafes the way computer-guided missiles target tanks in the desert. Leggy models in Lycra shorts wove around traffic on rollerblades. Photographers and artists and Eurotrash dressed in trendy black walked the walk and talked the talk, but here, just half a mile inland, aged survivors of the Depression or the Holocaust shuffled along with canes and walkers, mumbling to themselves or long-lost relatives.

Violet Belfrey greeted Lassiter at the front door. “Show’s started,” she said. “You missed Mr. K.’s speech. Something about Lenin’s experiment and Roosevelt’s big deal.”

“New Deal.”

“Whatever.”

“How you been, Violet?”

“Busted, disgusted, and can’t be trusted.” With that, she grabbed his bottom, gave a firm squeeze, and guided him through the turnstile. “Nice toe-kiss,” she said.

“ Tuchis, Violet. Sam should teach you better Yiddish.”

“You’d be surprised how much learnin’ I been doin’ from old Mr. K.”

“And I’ll bet you could teach him a thing or two,” Lassiter said.

In his retirement Sam Kazdoy kept busy clipping bond coupons and showing Russian films at his movie theater. For the last six months, Violet Belfrey sold the tickets and changed the marquee. And hung around, Lassiter noticed. Rich old man and street-smart younger woman, a classic combination. Jake Lassiter saw cunning in Violet’s dark eyes and scavenger’s claws in her bony hands. Years ago, before age and wealth had dulled his senses, the old man would have seen it, too.

When Violet answered the employment ad, Lassiter wanted to do a background check. “Let’s find out if she’s ever been arrested, sued, divorced, done drugs,” he told Kazdoy.

The old man refused. “Don’t worry, boychik. Ey, she’s got some titskes,” Kazdoy chortled, cupping his hands two feet in front of his chest. Lassiter never brought it up again and Violet became a fixture at the old man’s side.

Jake Lassiter followed a trail of ancient stains on the threadbare carpeting to a seat in the third row. The chair sagged until the metal seat scraped the floor with the sound of fingernails across a blackboard. Once a showplace — home to ten thousand matinees — the theater now was a dank tomb, the air heavy with dust and humidity, ceiling fans struggling against the tropical night.

Lassiter was the youngest moviegoer by thirty years. Most were aged widows and widowers, born in czarist Russia. The crowd was an orchestra off-key, playing tunes simultaneously in English, Yiddish, and Russian,’the sounds of Babel rising to the empty balcony. Some chattered throughout the show, their whispers rattling like old mufflers, unaware that as their hearing diminished, their voices took up the slack.

Kazdoy showed double features, an old American film followed by a Russian classic. The Hollywood comedies and musicals were from his personal collection, bought on the gray market, so he paid no royalties to the movie studios, which he thought were still run by Louis B. Mayer.

“Tell the whoremongers Samuel Kazdoy don’t pay no blackmail,” he had said to Lassiter a half dozen years earlier. He had hired Lassiter to defend him when the studios sued for copyright violations. The old man settled, paying no royalties but agreeing to refrain from showing copyrighted films, a promise he regularly violated. There were no more lawsuits but Jake Lassiter and Samuel Kazdoy became friends, often having dinner together after a movie.

On this night, Lassiter dozed through The Battleship Potemkin, the classic Eisenstein film. After the show, a beaming Kazdoy moved quickly to the stage on steady legs and, using a microphone, began his weekly sociological essay.

“ Oy, what a mess we’ve got here in Goldeneh Medina, this golden country. They’re knocking down zaydes and bubbes for their Social Security checks. In Moscow, even with no government worth a damn anymore, it’s still safer than New York.

“Something else, too many lawyers. Everybody’s suing everybody else. I read in the paper, so I believe it even though it’s not the Daily Forward, that a woman got hurt in a bus accident, she’s suing the city saying the injury made her a whatchamacallit…”

“A nymphomaniac, Sam,” said a man in the front row, a dapper eighty-year-old in a lime-green polyester leisure suit.

“A nafka,” said a heavy woman next to him, her brown support stockings drooping around thick ankles.

“Feh!” sputtered the man in green. “No, no, no. A nafka charges money, a nymphomaniac does it for fun.”

“So who would do it for fun?” the woman asked.

“That’s right, a nymphomaniac,” Samuel Kazdoy said. “Now, maybe if I was on that bus, she’d have a case.” Kazdoy paused and the crowd roared. “But to get sued for too much shtupping? It’s meshugge. Yessir, too many lawyers we got.”

Kazdoy was squinting into the lights, trying to spot Lassiter. “Now take my lawyer. Please!”

The house erupted. They loved his corny jokes even more than the pickled herring at the old man’s delicatessen.

“Here he is, Sam,” a man with a silver toupee croaked. The man sat directly behind Lassiter and recognized him from previous evenings at the theater. Head bobbing, toupee sliding, the man jabbed a finger into Lassiter’s shoulder blade. “Here’s your mouthpiece, Sam.” Lassiter slumped in his chair as heads turned and arthritic necks craned.

“Ah,” Kazdoy said. “There’s Jacob Lassiter. He’s a good lawyer, and he got those gonifs in Hollywood off my back. If you need an estate plan, call him up, but he’ll charge you an arm and a leg, then you won’t have a ruble left for your kids, but so what when they’re in Scarsdale and don’t come see you anyway?”

“How much you charge?” said the man with the sliding toupee, his finger now rapping the back of Lassiter’s seat.

“I don’t do wills,” Lassiter said, hoping the old man would change the subject. He was in luck.

“In the Old Country,” Kazdoy said, his voice dropping to signify the importance of the next observation, “they told me that the streets in New York were paved with gold. When I got off that stinking boat in 1912, the first thing I see is a man following a horse with a broom and pail, but what he was sweeping wasn’t gold.”

Then an abridged version of the familiar tale of the arrival at Ellis Island, of working for a cousin making corrugated boxes, and of starting his own small factory and finally retiring with six mammoth ones.

That story done, Kazdoy looked ahead. “Tomorrow, first we’ll see a short subject, and I don’t mean Mickey Rooney. It’s about the Moscow subway system and it’s beautiful to look at. They scrub those cars every night, you could eat off the floor. Have any of you ridden in a New York subway recently?”

A knowing murmur swept the crowd, heads bobbing in affirmation.

“Then a great war film that shows the horrors, the losses, the sacrifices…”

Oh no, Lassiter thought, how many times can they watch The Cranes Are Flying?

“ The Cranes Are Flying,” Kazdoy said. “I know all of you love it.” And again, an appreciative stirring rustled through the theater, patrons content that they would revisit the familiar.

After the show, as Violet was making her way to Harry’s place, Lassiter and the old man locked up the theater. “Let’s get a bite to eat, Jacob,” the old man said, as always. “Maybe the Chicken in the Pot is better than last time.”

Kazdoy’s All-Nite Deli was on Collins Avenue along the ocean but thirty blocks south of the high-rent district and ten blocks north of the trendy club scene. From the window booths, you could see the marquee of a triple-X movie theater advertising an all-male film festival. Next door was a noisy bar frequented by dockworkers who would be shipped out on the next freighter if Immigration ever pulled a raid. On the sidewalk, young women in short shorts and halter tops moseyed along in the universal stroll of the working gal with nowhere to go and lots of time to get there.

The Chicken in the Pot was no better. A layer of grease coated the soup, heavy noodles sinking to the bottom, while rubbery chicken parts floated near the surface.

“Eat a little something,” the old man commanded. “Enjoy!”

Lassiter had a whitefish platter, the smoked fish surrounded by coleslaw and potato salad, last week’s mayonnaise sharp on the tongue. They ate silently, Kazdoy growing tired, the excitement of the crowd wearing off. Lassiter munched a pickled tomato and wound his fork with sauerkraut. Finally, the old man asked, “How about you come to the theater this weekend?”

“I can’t. I’m organizing the windsurfing races on the Key.”

“Windsurfing.” Samuel Kazdoy shook his bald head. “You make any money at that?”

“Not a cent.”

“Meshugge. Why do it?”

“I like the challenge of riding a rough sea with just the wind for power and a chunk of fiberglass under my feet. It’s a thrill to go faster than the lugheads in their half-million-dollar powerboats. It also keeps me sane, makes me forget about my sweaty-palmed partners and my clients who’ve never lost anything but their scruples.”

The old man narrowed his eyes. “You got no clients you like?”

“Only you, Sam, and nobody’s sued you lately.”

“Nm, who should sue me? When those momzers in Hollywood tried, you kicked them in the ass.”

Lassiter laughed. “As I recall, we entered a consent order. I assume you’ve stopped buying bootleg films.”

Sam Kazdoy worked his crumpled face into a look of childlike innocence. “That’s for me to know, and Samuel Goldwyn to find out. But you did a good job then, and I haven’t forgotten.”

“Neither have I. You were my first paying client after I got out of the PD’s office. Plus you always brought me apple strudel. Nowadays, my clients bring postdated checks and perjurious witnesses.”

“I’m surprised you have any clients. Half the time you’re at the beach, windboarding or sailsurfing or whatever mishegoss…”

“Sam, didn’t you ever play golf or tennis or go skiing?”

“Skiing?”

You might as well have asked him to eat suckling pig. “Didn’t you ever have any hobbies?” Lassiter asked.

“Hobbies? I should live so long.”

“But you must have done something besides run your businesses.”

“I did religious work.”

“You?”

“Sure, I made a lot of women Jewish, if only by injection,” Kazdoy chuckled.

“Well, you should come to the beach this weekend just to watch,” Jake Lassiter said. “Lila Summers from Maui will be there. She’s young and beautiful and one of the world’s great athletes. What more could a man ask?”

“To be seventy again,” Samuel Kazdoy said.