Word Made Flesh

17

Boz Lustig’s is a greasy all-night cafeteria in the Bohemian Wing of Bangkok Park. It serves an array of tried and true recipes from the homeland—fazole na kyselo, kanci, a slew of holub dishes, nothing fancy and everything suspiciously inexpensive. Lustig himself works the steam tables, matching the customers step for step as they point to their selections, his hair-swaddled arms ladling the soupy courses into the slotted plastic trays whose bottoms testify to their black market origins with the stenciled words SPOONER CORRECTIONAL FACILITY.

To step into Lustig’s joint is to be assaulted by a combination of aromas not commonly found in American eateries. The uninitiated can sometimes swoon, and though the bulk of Boz’s customer base is made up of transplanted Maisel natives, the collegiate art crowd from the Zone will occasionally venture in, charmed by the enormity of the green leather booths and yearning to bask in the accidentally Deco-noir lighting thrown by a dozen bare bulbs that hang from fraying fiber cords in the pressed tin ceiling. Lustig will take the outsiders’ money, but he always serves them from the coldest end of the steam pan.

The cafeteria is sandwiched between a Pest-B-Gone extermination franchise and Leppin’s Pawnshop, whose proprietor has earned the nickname “Lucky Leppin” by managing to drop a total of five would-be armed robbers in the past year alone. The blood is washed off this particular sidewalk so often that the exterminator gifted Leppin with one of his spare garden hoses.

These days, the cafeteria does its peak business around three in the morning, not because the denizens of the Wing have discovered this is when Boz finally relents and brews fresh kava, but rather because this is the hour that the neighborhood mayor of the Bohemians, Hermann Kinsky, has of late been waking with pangs of postdream hunger and lumbering down from his crib at the Hotel St. Vitus with his trusted business aide and legal advisor, Gustav Weltsch. Hermann has fallen into a habit of enjoying a predawn feast in the largest booth in the establishment as he receives the night owls among his people. Word soon spread that this was prime time to hit Kinsky up for all manner of favors — loans, employment opportunities, housing, sometimes even a good word to his friends on the city council. Insomnia spread too, when it became an unconditional given that if Boz Lustig was serving the boiled hare’s tongue stewed in a gillyflower white sauce, Hermann Kinsky was a happy man and consequently intent on lavishing assistance on his less-powerful brethren. Gustav Weltsch would sit perpetually half-asleep over a cinnamon cocoa giving nonstop, yawn-broken warnings that Hermann cheerfully ignored.

But if Kinsky’s people still love him like a flesh-and-blood guardian angel, his status among the rest of the city’s neighborhood mayors is at its lowest ebb since the day he disembarked from the freighter that brought him to this country. Kinsky has had a bad year. His heir apparent has run off to become a filmmaker and the nephew who ran his street muscle met an unfortunate end. Subsequently, the Gray Roaches, who worked all his filthiest departments, the extortion and the pharmaceuticals, and who served as the Wing’s only border patrol, fell into chaos and disbanded. Hermann has been reduced for the past six months to renting the services of a variety of hit-and-run street soldiers from out of town, and it’s more than embarrassing for Kinsky to be leasing non-Maisel muscle. It’s dangerous in a variety of ways. It sends out a message of instability and weakness. If push comes to shove and another tribe makes an expansion move into the Wing, Hermann can’t count on these mercenaries laying down their lives for Bohemian territory. It’s the difference between having family and having a labor force. The difference, as always, between love and money.

Gilrein has eaten at Lustig’s once before. Ceil took a meeting with Kinsky on Lacazze’s behalf and Gilrein tagged along. Kinsky was as polite as his Eastern Euro-peasant ways would allow, as if he needed his pragmatic intelligence to control the reflexive absurdity of discussing business with a woman. And not just a woman but a female policista. How has this country prospered so, Hermann wondered, with such nonsensical ways?

Gilrein no longer remembers the specifics of that dinner’s discussion, as a good deal of it was conducted in a certain pidgin-Slavic ghetto dialect that Ceil had spent weeks practicing. He does recall the amused look on Kinsky’s face each time Ceil spoke on behalf of the department as well as the unmitigated heartburn he suffered for close to a week afterward. “I tried to warn you,” Ceil said later that night, dispensing a pale green antacid into a table-spoon, “never order the guinea fowl goulash unless your stomach was born in Maisel.”

Gilrein enters the cafeteria to the sound of accordion music and the suspicious mass-glance of the diners. He gets in line behind a trio of young men who appear, by their scent and their freshly crimson-stained coveralls, to have just gotten off the night shift at a nearby slaughterhouse. The threesome gesticulate wildly to Boz Lustig, bathed in a perpetual cloud of steam behind the counter, yelling at him, it seems, not to spare the gravy nor shortchange them in the area of internal organs. Gilrein takes deep breaths till it’s his turn, then signals Lustig for a simple cup of coffee, which the owner retrieves with a maximum of unintelligible grumbling.

Gilrein overpays the man, though it fails to cut the complaining, then takes the coffee mug and moves to the rear of the room where, as he hoped, he finds Hermann Kinsky installed in his reception booth, decked out in his trademark red flannel pajama suit beneath a maroon paisley silk robe, one hand shaking the paw of an elderly and toothless woman, the other shoveling the remains of glazed blood sausage into his mouth. His sidekick Weltsch sits on the opposite side of the table, studying bond prices in the Wall Street Journal.

Gilrein approaches and without waiting for an invitation, slides in next to Weltsch, startling the lawyer and spilling just a bit of his cocoa. It’s a rude maneuver and not too smart considering Gilrein’s noncop status. But he knows from Ceil that Kinsky likes to see someone’s stuff up front and he needs to make it clear to Hermann that he’s not cowed by a gangster who currently has to rent his street balls.

“Are you the new busboy?” Kinsky says and takes a sip of some kind of liqueur from a short fat water glass. “Have you come to clear my plate?”

Gilrein gives a small smile and a nod.

“You know who I am, Hermann,” he says.

Kinsky mimes recognition.

“Of course,” he says and licks syrup from all the fingers of his eating hand. “You were the husband of the Inspector’s woman.”

Gilrein thinks about throwing his coffee in Kinsky’s face, but manages to suppress the urge.

“That’s right,” he says instead, “and you’re the little haberdasher who’s about to get his ass permanently kicked by the Iguaran Family.”

Weltsch looks up from the Journal and stares at this intruder, as if trying to determine if the man is clinically insane or just pathetically stupid. Because the fact is that though Kinsky is more than vulnerable to a hit from Latino Town right now, he doesn’t need the Gray Roaches to garrote one insulting ex-cop. He could do it right here on the tabletop with the help of Lustig or the slaughterhouse crew. And everyone in the cafeteria down to a man would scream out their pride in their mayor.

It doesn’t come to that. Hermann Kinsky almost always wants to hear what a man has to say before he judges whether to preserve or cancel a life. He lets a huge smile come over his jowly face, claps his hands into an explosion over his head, and yells, “Lustig, my friend, becherovka for my guest.”

Boz breaks off from the serving line and immediately comes running, plants on the table an unlabeled brown bottle and a mismatched plastic glass that’s sporting some kind of crust around its rim. Lustig waits for Kinsky’s nod, then jogs away. Weltch pours Gilrein a drink. Gilrein accepts it, lifts his glass toward Kinsky and the two toast one another silently and sip a hootch that goes down like kerosene.

Weltsch, seeing that the threat of violence has been contained for the moment, goes back to the trading news, but says quietly, over the edge of the paper, “His name is Gilrein.”

Kinsky absentmindedly stares down at his tray, looking disappointed, and says, “We dined together once,” nodding as he remembers the night. “I was very sorry to hear of your wife’s demise.”

Gilrein accepts the condolences, however graceless, and says, “Ceil thought you were a comer. Out of all the new arrivals, she said the old boys should keep their eyes on you.”

It’s no secret in Bangkok that, even more than most of the neighborhood mayors, Kinsky is easily flattered. And that flattery can buy you a small piece of his time and maybe even a little advice. But what Gilrein has said is also the truth. Ceil was nothing if not a good judge of the upward mobility of new mobsters in the Park. She saw something in Kinsky that her husband could not. She tried to explain it to him later, after that horrible dinner, back in the darkness of their bedroom, her take on the patterns of Kinsky’s brain, her close reading of the core of this Maisel wise guy: “He may not be as smart as Iguaran or as charismatic as Sylvain or as globally connected as Jimmy Tang, but he’s got that pure gangster’s soul. He’ll end up a real player, like Pecci and Loftus. He’s intuitive about the flow of the street. He can feel the natural course of the market. He’s got that fundamental ruthless ness, that innate understanding of social Darwinism. I’m telling you, he may have been born and raised in Old Bohemia, but he understands the way America works better than a goddamn pilgrim. He’s got the intestines of a down and dirty pomo capitalist. You kill off your enemies and you buy off your friends and when you get your opponent to surrender in the gutter, you kick in his teeth and piss on his head and you take his wallet and his wife. Whatever you can get, whenever you can get it. And the last bastard left standing is king of the hill.”

And Gilrein lay there, spooned behind Ceil’s body, his face against her head, smelling her hair. And it was as if his wife’s voice were coming from someone else, being used by some strange and ambivalent entity, some dark and hidden aspect of God that no one had bothered to explain to him. He tried to hold off a shiver, because it almost sounded like Ceil felt a kind of perverse respect for this monster she was describing, like a confused anthropologist who, miles from home and watching a cannibal feast on his own, couldn’t help but smile at the fact that the savage would go to bed with a full stomach.

Gilrein stares at this Maisel cannibal as Kinsky runs a finger around the pool of thick juice collected in a corner of his dinner tray, then lifts the finger to his mouth and inserts it between his lips, sucking off the molasses-like coating.

“Your wife was a fine judge of character,” Kinsky says. “She will be missed by all who knew her.”

“She left a real gap in the department,” Gilrein says. “Not every detective can finesse this part of town.”

Kinsky agrees vigorously. “No one knows this better than I, Mr. Gilrein. The idiots your people have sent to barter, I can’t tell you—”

“They’re not really my people, Mr. Kinsky. I haven’t been on the job for several years now.”

“Yes, I had heard this. You’re in the”—a pause, looking for the word—“transportation service.”

Gilrein nods over his mug. “I drive a hack.”

“For the red or the black?” referring to the two major fleets in town.

“Neither,” Gilrein says. “I’m an independent.”

Kinsky’s face lights up as if his friend Boz had just discovered some portion of rabbit’s jazyk in the fridge. Even Weltsch manages to nod his approval.

“A dying breed,” Kinsky says.

“There’s only a handful of us left in the city,” Gilrein says. “The fees are brutal. It’s like living in a vise.”

“Acht,” Kinsky agrees, and their mutual disgust with municipal bureaucracy seems to instantly erase their initial discord. “And they have the nerve to call me a thief. This city would take the coins from the eyes of a corpse.”

“And they’d send a clerk to do it,” Weltsch puts in from behind his paper, to the delight of his boss.

“So true, Gustav. More true each day, yes?” Then he takes a sip of his drink and says, “Is this why you’ve come, Mr. Gilrein? You need me to speak to the taxi commissioner?”

Gilrein starts to shake his head, but Kinsky is already saying, “Because I know the man. And though, it is true, this is not the best of times for the family Kinsky, we may be able to work something out. The last I heard this individual was aligned with the black minister—”

“Reverend James,” Weltsch puts in, though they’re all aware that Kinsky knows the name.

“I’m not here about my hack fees,” Gilrein says, letting them have their fun. “I need to talk about August Kroger.”

This gets their full attention. Weltsch puts down the paper and adjusts his glasses as he looks across the table at Kinsky.

“What about Kroger?” Hermann asks.

“He tried to take me down yesterday—”

“Without my permission?” with full mock outrage.

“You tell me,” Gilrein says and sits back in the booth. “He’s one of yours.”

Weltsch clears his throat. “Technically, Mr. Kroger has never been in our employ. He is from the old country, but—”

Kinsky thumps the table with one of his enormous fists and bellows, “No Bohemian takes this kind of action without my consent.”

“Take a look at my lips, Mr. Kinsky,” Gilrein says, matching his volume. “I wasn’t getting a goddamn tattoo. So either you want me whacked for reasons I don’t understand or your little pal is running loose out there.”

“I have no quarrel with you,” Kinsky’s voice coming back to discussion level. “And I can’t see any obvious reason for wanting to do away with a taxi-boy.”

Gilrein lets the insult go, tries to decide how much to spill and realizes he doesn’t have anything to barter with, that all he can do is tell his story and hope for some response.

“When they were working me over,” he says, “they kept asking about a book.”

“A book,” Kinsky repeats, as if confused, but Gilrein can feel Weltsch tense up next to him.

“The last person I drove before Kroger’s animals grabbed me was Leo Tani—”

“The fence from San Remo.” Kinsky nods. “Of course, I knew him as Calvino—”

“Leo used a variety of names. The point is he got whacked in a particularly horrible manner shortly after I chauffeured him to some kind of transaction inside Gompers Station.”

“We heard of your friend’s misfortune. But, as you know, these things happen. It’s sometimes a consequence of the business.”

Weltsch sniffs out a laugh. Something about Kinsky’s word choice amuses him, as if murder were analogous to working late or taking a pay cut.

“That’s true,” Gilrein says, folding his hands together in front of him and straightening his posture in the booth. “You’re absolutely right. These things happen in the business,” accenting the words into sarcasm. “The business is a dicey world. People disappear. Fortunes rise and fall. And a two-bit seamstress like Kroger can even topple the king of the Wing.”

Gilrein knows that what Kinsky would like to do, right here and now, is pull his ever-present piano wire from his pocket and turn this guest’s jugular into fish bait. But Kinsky has learned over the last few years that impulse is usually not the most valuable way of reacting in the long run.

He looks to his lawyer and they silently exchange counsel with the cast of their eyes.

“Understand something,” Kinsky says softly. “August Kroger is an eccentric little worm that I have tolerated only because it has been to my advantage to do so. And the moment it is not to my advantage, the worm will be sent back to hell.”

“Then I guess,” Gilrein says, “I was mistaken.”

“It appears so.”

Kinsky pulls his bib napkin free from his collar, swabs at his mouth, and then throws the linen onto his tray. He places his hands on the table and Gilrein feels it tilt as Kinsky pushes himself to standing.

“If you’ll excuse me,” he says, “I am in need of relief.”

He reaches across the table and takes the newspaper from Weltsch, then breaks into a heavy trot in the direction of the lavatory.

Weltsch waits until his boss is out of sight, then turns to Gilrein and says, “I might advise you, for future reference, Mr. Gilrein, that it is not entirely polite, or I might say, wise behavior to come to a man’s breakfast table and then make insinuations about his prowess and his status. In the case of Hermann Kinsky, it is less than unwise. It is a form of barbarous suicide.”

“I didn’t know he was so thin-skinned.”

“It is not a matter of sensitivity, Mr. Gilrein. It’s a matter of respect and ritual. My client lives by a fairly exacting code. I must say, it’s amazing to me that you’ll be forgiven for this breach.”

“Yeah,” Gilrein says, “I guess maybe Hermann is mellowing.”

“Our organization has suffered a minor setback. One of our top managers passed away and we lost a good portion of our labor force—”

“Listen, counselor, I don’t give a rat’s ass one way or the other about the big man’s balance sheet. Save it for the auditor, okay? Just tell me why Kroger came after me.”

“I don’t—”

“For Christ’s sake, Gustav, even when he’s on the ropes, Hermann knows every Bohemian move in town. Kroger spills some blood, Hermann would know it before the first drop hit the dirt.”

Weltsch stares for just a few seconds, then shakes his head in consent and maybe a little relief.

He shrugs his shoulders and says, “You know, if it had been up to me, the two-bit seamstress, as you so beautifully dub him, would have been buried some time ago. Even back in Maisel he was under constant suspicion by the secret police. Say what you want about the Communists, they knew a troublemaker when they saw one.”

“So why does Kinsky put up with him?”

“Hermann takes his standard percentage, but mainly it’s sentimental reasons. They came out of the same neighborhood.”

“That’s what everyone says about Hermann,” Gilrein nods, “that sentimental old bastard. I’ll bet he loves a parade, too.”

“Mr. Gilrein, are all the taxi-boys this masochistic?”

“Trust your instincts, Gustav. They’ll serve you well.”

Weltsch takes a roll of mints from the inside pocket of his suit jacket, peels one free and pops it in his mouth, then turns and offers the roll to Gilrein, who declines.

“My instinct,” Weltsch says, “tells me to give you what you want and be rid of you.”

“You’re a good businessman. Time is money.”

Weltsch hunches forward with his elbows on the table and lets his back molars splinter his candy with an unsettling cracking noise.

“The Family,” he says, as if there were anyone left beyond himself and his boss, “has virtually nothing to do with Kroger. He falls under our jurisdiction by fault of genetics and geography. Hermann can’t stand the toad. We’ve always felt that sooner or later he’d begin to imagine he could oversee the Bohemian Wing. It’s absurd, of course.”

“Wouldn’t last a week,” Gilrein affirms.

“A week?” Weltsch raises his eyebrows and gestures out at the cafeteria. “The man is a little dilettante. Can you even imagine him taking his supper in here?”

Gilrein smiles and says, “I’ve got to be honest with you, Gustav. You’re sitting right here in front of me and I’ve got trouble imagining you in this place.”

Weltsch takes it as a compliment and continues.

“A year ago Kroger began making small comments about his licensing costs. He runs several franchises in the Wing. You must be familiar with his publishing concern—”

“I’ve been to the home office,” Gilrein interrupts.

Weltsch grimaces politely.

“Kroger’s yearning for more control began to manifest itself last year. Hermann thought it best to nip the problem in the bud. We’d already decided on a contractor.”

“That’s when the family Kinsky had their first big setback.”

Weltsch nods.

“Jakob, the son, he left the nest and cashed in his stock options on the way out the door. And Felix, the nephew, who was so good on the street …”

He breaks off and Gilrein says, “You know the rumor has been that the son whacked the nephew.”

Gustav meets his eyes and in a low and suddenly unlawyerly voice, he says, “Rumors are vicious things.”

Gilrein drops the subject and steers back to Kroger.

“So Hermann postponed the job on August?”

“It’s been a very unstable time. Perhaps more trying than Hermann would like to admit. The Roaches followed Jakob off into the Canal Zone. People are watching and waiting to see how we rebound. We didn’t think it was the most appropriate moment. Mr. Kroger’s time will come again.”

“No doubt,” Gilrein says. “But who is Hermann using for street muscle these days?”

Gustav stares at him, expressionless, then finally lets a small smile break at the left side of his lips.

“You are a character, Mr. Gilrein.”

“I am?”

“Is this your old friends’ way of renegotiating their contract?”

“My old—”

“Because, let me advise you here and now, we won’t discuss a revision. Your Mr. Oster agreed to a flat monthly fee and he’ll abide by that agreement.”

“Oster?” Gilrein says. “Kinsky is using the Magicians for his street crew?”

“You run back to your police friends and tell them we won’t even discuss it until their term expires. Tell them their behavior is pathetic and we expected more from professionals.”

“Weltsch, I’m telling you, I had no idea.”

The distant sound of a toilet flushing reverberates through the walls of the cafeteria and Attorney Weltsch begins to gather his financial journals together into a neat pile.

“But I just—” Gilrein begins, and Weltsch motions him out of the booth.

“Depending on how things went in there,” gesturing now toward the men’s room, “your life could be in genuine danger if you’re still here when Hermann returns.”