THE
LAST JEW
STANDING
Coming
August 16, 2007
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The
house Rachel and I bought stood in stylish Hyde Park
near my old place, a few blocks south of the new Koenig
Lane overpass. I liked it because it was in the middle
of town, the streets were numbered and the avenues were
lettered, giving me a sense of order. I hopped into
my blue Chevy Caprice, a car issued me by the department,
identical but for the color, to the Caprice my partner
Joey had died in. This spooked me when I first saw it.
Now I took it as par for the course, Joey’s ghost
peeking up and saying hello. I headed west on 45th Street
then north up Burnet.
When
I got to Denny’s, Pop and the girl were standing
in the parking lot. I pulled up near them. The girl
had a cloth tote bag over her shoulder and she clutched
it close to her side with her elbow, while holding a
cigarette close to her lips.
The
other arm wrapped around her waist.
She
had dark, deepset eyes, disproportionately large for
her Slavic features: the sharp nose, the stark, high
cheekbones, the unearthly white-blond hair cut straight
just below the shoulders. What made all this spookier
was pale white skin, smooth and delicate like an eggshell,
a china doll. The clips on her yellow raincoat hung
open exposing a ragged sweater and floral skirt, and
she wore sneakers the quality you’d find in a
supermarket. Sleeping, she looked like a ten-year-old.
With her eyes open, she was probably about twenty. A
jaded twenty.
Pop said, “This is Irina.” The “r”
had a Russian trill to it.
By
way of greeting, Irina eyed me with suspicion.
When
I was a kid in Elmira, one of my friends had a black
cat that got pregnant before she was full grown. The
kittens came out okay, but the cat’s torso stopped
growing after that, though her legs reached full size.
People would look at her twice, trying to figure out
what was wrong. This is what I thought of when I saw
Irina.
I
turned to Pop, his breath barely making clouds in the
cold night air. He stood near her but not too near,
one shoulder oddly positioned higher than the other,
eyeing me like he was waiting for a judgment, like a
kid waiting to get smacked, or in his industry, a functionary
waiting to get shot.
He
gestured to the restaurant. “We could do better
than this.”
“When
I was a kid, you used to say, ‘Food is food.’”
He
shrugged. “People change.” He opened my
passenger door and flipped the seat forward to let Irina
in the back. Then he slid in next to me.
We
headed south, through the middle of town. Irina lit
a cigarette.
Finally
I said, “So, Irina. What do you do?” Pop
groaned.
She
blew out smoke. “In Russia I was waitress.”
“Uh huh. What about here?”
Silence,
drag on her cigarette. “Here, I am prostitute.”
Long
silence. In the rearview mirror, I saw Irina smoke with
desperation; her fingers shook as she raised the cigarette
to her lips. She would sit still for minutes, staring
and filling the car with smoke, then suddenly turn her
head and look behind her. We rolled past downtown on
Lamar, toward the river. Then across the bridge, and
into South Austin, over to Congress and down to the
Magnolia Café, all-night haunt of hippies, vegetarians,
near vegetarians, dopers, insomniacs, cab drivers and
cops.
We
entered unnoticed and sat ourselves in a vinyl padded
booth. Pop and Irina ordered burgers and I got eggs,
which seemed more suited to a late-night snack but I
didn’t know where they’d been or what kind
of appetite they’d worked up. The waitress, like
the rest of the staff, wore some combination of tattoos,
dreadlocks and piercings. I think the house rule was
that you had to have two of the three. A trifecta would
get you the manager’s job. They’d carved
a hole in the kitchen wall and turned it into a breakfast
counter, though I never saw anyone eat there. Pop and
Irina sat across from me and I wondered about the nature
of their connection. Mostly, they looked beat. Irina
reached for a cigarette.
“You
can’t smoke in here,” I said.
Her
eyes bulged. She scoped the room, saw no other smokers
to prove me wrong, then slapped the cigarette pack on
the table.
Pop
looked around. Community bulletin board. Art on the
walls. Diverse crowd. “This your place?”
he asked.
My
father came from a world where the last place you were
likely to find a guy was at his home. You asked around
until someone told you where he drank, shot pool, got
laid, or boxed. You could tell a guy was at his place
by the way he walked in. Was that my place?
“Yeah,”
I said. “Pretty much. No one gives me shit for
being a cop.” A passing waitress suddenly slowed
her pace.
“Yeah,”
he said, “what’s that about?”
“I’m
a cop.”
“I
heard. Why?”
I
knew from the postcards Pop sent me between the mid-seventies
when he left Austin, and ’81 when the postcards
trailed off, that he heard I’d become a cop, like
he heard I’d gotten married to my college sweetheart.
Who told him these things was something I never learned.
“Who’d you hear it from?”
He
shrugged and started a new conversation. “Is that
the same wife from before? I heard you got married around
’77.”
“No.”
“What happened to the old one?”
If
I wasn’t getting any straight answers, I sure
wasn’t giving any. I said, “You sleep on
the road?”
“We
took turns.”
Eventually
the burgers showed and Pop and Irina laid into them.
I picked at my eggs. “So,” I said to Irina.
“What brings you here?”
That
I addressed the question to her and not both of them
registered loud and clear: He didn’t need an explanation.
She did.
Pop
defended her. “She’s Russian. She could
be your cousin.”
“No,
she’s too young.”
Irina
said, “I don’ need your help.”
Pop
said, “It’s okay.”
I
said, “No, seriously. I like you bringing hookers
to my house. I don’t know why you haven’t
done it sooner.”
“She
was looking for work,” he said. “They kidnapped
her.”
“And
you rescued her? You?”
I
sensed people at other tables shifting to hear us better.
I lowered my voice. “I haven’t heard from
you in fifteen fuckin’ years,” I said. “Not
a postcard.”
“What
are you, a baby?”
“Seriously.
Fifteen years. And now this.”
Irina
said, “I am ‘this’?”
I
stared at Pop until he looked away. “All right,”
he said. He leaned forward and spoke in a strained whisper.
“Kansas City. ’81. I got six to ten. I did
a nickel, got out in ’86.”
“Jesus. For what?”
“It’s
complicated.” I stared him down until he said,
“It was a deal. Two doctors, a house, some papers.
Anyway, they caught me in the house, alone.”
“So…what?
Burglary?”
He
closed his eyes and tightened his mouth. He was ashamed.
He nodded.
If
he’d been caught and tried for larceny, fraud,
money laundering, it wouldn’t have insulted his
dignity. But six to ten for burglary, that was beneath
him. What was worse, he was probably the mark in someone
else’s game.
He said, “I didn’t want to write while I
was inside. You would know where I was.”
“What
about after you got out.”
“I
felt bad for not calling.”
“So
you didn’t call.”
He
shrugged. It made sense. I said, “What about now?”
“We left in a hurry. We didn’t know where
we were going.”
“Pennsylvania
plates.”
What?”
“Your car.”
Oh,”
he said, returning to his burger. He swallowed and something
seemed to get stuck in his chest. He struggled with
it a moment, then showed some relief and took another
bite. “Yeah. That’s not my car.”
“Whose
is it?”
He
leaned toward Irina. “The guy who…”
I
finished his thought. “The guy who Irina works
for.” No argument. He chomped on his home fries.
“You stole a car,” I said. “From a
pimp.”
Irina
said something in Russian, a sentence worth. Pop nodded.
I
said, “Do you speak Russian now?”
He
bounced his head side to side. “Couple of words.
From the old neighborhood.”
“What
did she say?”
He
ate one more mouthful of potato.
“What
was I gonna do?” he said, “Call the cops?
They’d bust her for prostitution, then throw her
back to him.”
I
looked back at Irina. Small nod. That’s just what
they’d have done. That’s just what they’d
do in Russia, too, and though we didn’t like to
see it that way, that’s what we’d do in
Austin. Like most cops, I had mixed feelings about prostitutes,
but not about pimps. Prostitutes committed a crime that
had no victim. Pimps roped in vulnerable young women
and made money off their misery. Pimps were nearly impossible
to catch. They made me angry, and righteous. And they
gave me a feeling of moral superiority that I really
liked.
“Mostly
I been in Vegas,” he said, through a mouthful
of burger and potato, in response to the question I
was probably thinking about asking.
“Is
that so?”
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