I looked at the stout middle-aged gentleman in the blue suit, with his pipe and his smug smile faded, and I almost burst into tears. I was about to cry, "Mordecai! Mordecai!" But of course, my uncle Mordecai was dead. He died when Zelda was five and she never forgot him. What a dear man! What a great guy! Do you want to know what he looked like, what he sounded like, but so exactly you couldn't tell them apart? Rodney Dangerfield. Uncle Mordecai, spitting image of the venerable comic, was not, however, a funny man; on the contrary, he was serious, sensitive, sensible, stable, confident, and commanded the respect of everyone around him. Above all, he was generous. How generous? I'll tell you how generous. When my father's furniture store was about to go under because of a termite infestation that ravaged the entire stock, his brother Mordecai went to the bank in Glenwood and talked them out of foreclosing the place, then lent my father all the money he needed to replenish the stock, never expecting to get a penny of it back. He never did get any of it back, and he didn't care. That was Uncle Mordecai, and the resemblance to this man in the blue suit, and to Rodney Dangerfield, was uncanny. I said, "Who are you?"
The man did not respond immediately. He eyed me up and down. It was clear that this was not the first time a gun had been pointed in his direction. "My name," he said eventually, still scoffing at the weapon that was being pointed at him, "is Abe Egan."
"Aha," I said. "You run this operation."
"I don't," he said. "I'm just the counterfeiter."
"Who runs this operation?" I said.
"I don't know," he said.
"You don't know?" I said.
"I'm just the counterfeiter," he repeated.
"Who pays you?" I said.
He tilted his head slightly, gesturing toward Bill.
I found this a little bit suspicious. Why had Bill fallen silent at the sight of this man if he, Bill, was in charge? "You're lying," I said to the counterfeiter.
"It's true," Bill piped. "He gets paid by the job."
"You run this racket, Bill?" I said.
"Nobody runs it," he said. "I'm telling you we're all partners. It's a business."
"So Zelda's a partner?" I said.
Bill nodded.
I turned to Abe again: "Do you know Zelda?"
He nodded.
But why should I believe any of these thugs? I was pretty convinced that Zelda was not involved in this racket. Wild she is, but not a thief. "Describe her," I said.
"Describe who?" said Abe.
"Describe my sister," I said.
"Who's your sister," he said.
"Zelda is my sister," I said.
"Aha," he said. "Really?"
"Describe her," I commanded.
"Well," he said, "to begin with, she looks nothing like you. She has light brown hair, straight, not very long, with bangs, and usually collected in a pony tail; five-foot-five; slim; in her twenties; wears old, odd clothes; remarkably beautiful. And blind."
Fine. He knew her, and she was involved. Perhaps. "When's the last time you saw her?" I said.
He was reluctant to reply, and seemed to search Bill's eyes for approval. I looked at Bill, pointed my gun at him. He looked the other way, pretending he had not communicated ocularly with Abe. I pointed the gun at the counterfeiter again and told him I would blow his head clean off if he didn't reply. I repeated: "When is the last time you saw my sister?"
"Yesterday," he said.
Yesterday? There was a collective gasp. Bill leaped at the counterfeiter and grabbed him by the neck, crying, "Where the fuck is she! Where the fuck is she!"
Abe, being strangled, could not reply, and Bill continued to ask where the fuck she was, where the fuck she was. I had to shoot in the air to make him let go of the counterfeiter.
"Yesterday when?" I said.
"Last night," said Abe, resetting his tie.
"Where?" I said.
"On Mott Street," he said. "It was pretty strange, I confess. I was walking back to my car after dinner at Il Palazzo, and I literally bumped into her. She was coming out of a Chinese store. A perfume store, I think. I couldn't tell. All the signs were in Chinese. I was surprised to see her, and what surprised me even more was that she recognized me even before I started speaking. She didn't have her dog with her. I said, Zelda my dear, it's Abe. And she said she knew, and I said, Where's your dog? And she said he was dead. I said, How did he die? And she said he'd been hit by a car. I said I was sorry, and she shrugged her shoulders. That was it."
"That was it?" I cried. "What do you mean that was it? Where did she go? What was she doing there?"
"That's all I can tell you," he said.
I went up to the good man and pressed the barrel of my gun to his temple. "Now you tell me every fucking detail," I said, cool as a cucumber, "or I will pull this trigger and you will die."
Abe finally began to panic. "She made me pr-promise," he said.
"I'll fucking pull the trigger, man," I repeated.
"She m-made me p-p-promise," he repe-peated.
"Promise what?" I said.
"Not to tell," he said.
"Tell what?" I said.
His lips trembled, and pearls of sweat covered his venerable face, and he looked nothing, right then, like my uncle Mordecai.
"I'll fucking pull this trigger, man," I said.
"Stop!" he cried. "Don't! I'll tell you!"
For some strange reason, I started laughing, and that freaked him out even more and he begged me again not to pull that trigger, because I kept pressing the gun against his temple. I have no idea why I burst out laughing. There was nothing funny about any of this. Maybe it was the shock of learning that Zelda was alive, which triggered some nervous mechanism in me, which released some pent-up energy in the form of laughter. I might as well have farted. I was laughing so hard now that Bill and Ada joined me, and Dana too, handcuffed as she was to the statue. Even Abe started laughing. I was infectious. It died down eventually and I told Abe to proceed.
He proceeded: "She said she was going to meet Jeff Bayou, and she made me promise not to tell."
"Why?" I said. "Who's Jeff Bayou?"
"He's a client of ours," he said. "I don't know what she's up to. I asked her why, and she said, Just don't tell."
"That's it?" I said.
"That's it, I swear," he said. "She asked me not to tell anyone about our meeting. And then she started crying. I said, What's the matter? She continued to cry, and she hugged me tight, and she said that we were probably never going to meet again. I asked her why, but she wouldn't tell me. She continued to cry, and finally she said that I reminded her of her uncle Mordecai, who was dead."
My uncle Mordecai died very suddenly, when Zelda was five and I fifteen, of a cerebral tumor. One day he went blind, one evening actually, as we were having dinner. He was sitting in front of me, and all of a sudden he began blinking strangely. He continued eating as if nothing was the matter. He finished his brisket, and my mother asked him if he wanted more. He said, No, thanks, and he waited until the end of the meal. Then he told my father that he needed to talk to him alone, that he should send the children to play somewhere. Zelda went off to her dolls upstairs, but I hid behind the cow-spotted couch and eavesdropped. Uncle Mordecai said he couldn't see; he had gone blind. My father said, What are you talking about? Uncle Mordecai repeated that he couldn't see a thing, that he had gone blind. My father called a doctor. By the time he arrived, we had come out of hiding. Zelda was there with her favorite doll, Baker. She was crying, and commanding the doctor to make Uncle Mordecai see again. The doctor called an ambulance, and they took him to the hospital. We never saw him again. He died that night on the operating table, as they were excising the tumor from his brain.
I said, "Where are they meeting?"
"She didn't tell me," he said, and when I pressed the barrel harder against his temple, he added, "but I can give you Bayou's address." He gave me an address in Astoria, by the Broadway stop on the N train.
There was one more thing. "You still haven't told me," I said, "when they're meeting."
"She didn't say when," he said. "She said in the evening."
So, any time between six and ten, but closer to six, maybe even five-thirty. I pulled out my cell phone. It was ten after five. I had to get going. I thanked Abe kindly for the information and, pointing the gun at everybody, I made my way toward the exit, walking backwards, and because I was walking backwards, I tripped on something, a ridiculously big toolbox--what the hell was it doing in the middle of the floor?--and as I fell I accidentally pulled the trigger and another bullet went off with a particularly deafening blast and there was another blast. The bullet had hit an old Chinese vase on top of one of the shelves, and the next thing I knew, it was raining gold leaves. How so many leaves could fit in such a small container is a mystery. In fact, now that I think of it, it really makes no sense--unless the vase contained a tightly packed roll of very thin paper-like gold leaves which, upon impact, exploded into thousands of little leaves, like confetti.
