Flesh and Blood Read online

  Imalia looked surprised. “She married a South American?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Is it possible that they had children?”

  “I don’t think so,” Frank said. “They don’t appear to have ever lived together.”

  Imalia leaned forward slightly. “But they were married.”

  “I’m not sure what kind of marriage it was,” Frank said.

  Imalia struck a worldly pose. “Well, there’re all sorts of contracts for living together, of course, but that sort of thing usually comes later, doesn’t it?” She smiled. “As they say, ‘when love has fled.’”

  “Yes.”

  “But with Hannah and this Emilio,” she added, “it was odd from the beginning?”

  “He lived in Brooklyn,” Frank said. “Hannah lived in Manhattan.”

  Imalia shook her head wonderingly. “She never mentioned having been married.”

  “He went back to Colombia,” Frank said. “We don’t know what happened after that.”

  Imalia rose from her seat, walked over to the table and poured herself a glass of champagne. “So where does all this finally leave us?” she asked.

  “We’re moving in two directions,” Frank said. “We’re trying to trace the one living sister through the union, and …”

  “What union?” Imalia asked.

  “The American Garment Workers,” Frank told her. “Hannah was a member until March of 1936. I’m hoping I can find someone who knows something about the other sister.”

  “Naomi.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the other direction?”

  “Pérez, the husband. If he’s still her husband.”

  “Two directions,” Imalia said thoughtfully. “It sounds very complicated.”

  “It’s a life,” Frank said, “so it’s complicated.” He closed the notebook and returned it to his jacket pocket.

  Imalia lifted her arms gracefully. “By the way, I gave Karen one of my dresses. Did she show it to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “It was beautiful.”

  “They’re wonderful, aren’t they?” Imalia asked. “Beautiful things.”

  “Yes,” Frank said. He turned slowly and headed toward the elevator.

  “But expensive,” she added, almost sadly. “Very, very expensive.”

  “Most good things are,” Frank said offhandedly.

  Imalia stared at him questioningly. “Do you think that’s so, that good things are expensive?”

  “Yes,” Frank told her. “But not always in money.”

  Imalia sat back slightly, her eyes boring into him. “No matter what you find out,” she said. “About Hannah, I mean. I want to know what it is.”

  “Of course.”

  “I want to know everything,” Imalia added emphatically. “And I want to know it first.” She looked at him commandingly. “Before anyone. Even your associate, whoever he is.”

  Frank nodded. “You’ll be the first,” Frank assured her.

  Imalia smiled thinly, her long white arms drawing a dark blue scarf languidly along her throat. “Good,” she said softly. “Because the customer is always right.”

  21

  It was late in the afternoon by the time Frank got off the subway in the Bronx. He walked down the long flight of metal stairs that led from the elevated tracks to the crowded streets along Sedgwick Avenue.

  According to union records, Philip Stern still lived in the Consolidated Housing Project, two enormous brick buildings which the union had built for its members in the fifties, and which, as Silverman had put it when he gave him Stern’s address, still housed “the real history of the garment trade.”

  Stern’s apartment was on the sixteenth floor, and the door opened almost immediately.

  “My name is Frank Clemons,” Frank said to the short, middle-aged woman who stood in the doorway. “Mr. Silverman said he would call you.”

  “He did,” the woman said. “You want to see Papa, right?”

  “Yes.”

  The woman dried her hands on the large floral apron which hung from her neck. “I was fixing him dinner. You like pot roast, you could eat with him.”

  “No, thanks,” Frank said.

  “He could use the company,” the woman said. “You know how it is with old people, they get into low moods. Papa gets into real low moods.”

  “Is he here?”

  “He likes to sit in the park before dinner,” the woman said. She stepped away from the door. “Come on in. I’ll show you.”

  Frank followed the woman through the apartment and out onto a small, concrete terrace.

  “There he is,” the woman said as she pointed down below. “On the bench next to the street.”

  Frank could see a small man. bundled up in woolens.

  “That’s Papa,” the woman said. “He’s got thin blood. He wears a hat and overcoat all the time.”

  “Thanks,” Frank said as he turned back through the apartment.

  “You can have dinner with him if you change your mind,” the woman called to him as he closed the door.

  Philip Stern sat silently on the small wooden bench, his back very erect, his hands tucked inside the sleeves of his black overcoat. A wide-brimmed gray hat was pulled down tightly over his head, and his throat was wrapped securely in a thick red scarf.

  “Mr. Stern?” Frank said softly as he approached him.

  Two flashing brown eyes shot over to him. “Yes.”

  “My name is Frank Clemons. Harry Silverman gave me your address.”

  “My address?” Stern asked in a deep, steady voice which seemed as dense and powerfully alive as his body. “Why?”

  “Mind if I sit down?” Frank asked politely.

  Stern nodded toward the bench. “Please.”

  Frank took a seat beside him and reached for his identification. “I’m a private investigator,” he said as he presented his card.

  Stern smiled slyly. “Well, I’ve seen a few of those in my day. Informers, too. Who do you work for?”

  “I’m not allowed to say,” Frank told him. “But since Mr. Silverman sent me—”

  “I can trust you,” Stern said.

  Frank nodded. “Yes.”

  “Okay,” Stern said. “What do you want?”

  Frank returned his card to his coat pocket. “It has to do with a woman named Hannah Kovatnik.”

  The old man turned away slightly, his eyes drifting up into the reddish leaves that hung above him. He did not reply.

  “Mr. Silverman thought that you might help me?”

  Stern’s eyes remained on the gently trembling leaves. “Help you what?”

  “Miss Kovatnik was murdered,” Frank said. “The police are holding her body until a relative makes them release it.”

  “We weren’t related.”

  “No,” Frank said. “But you wrote an article about her in 1935.”

  Stern’s eyes swept over to him. “Did Harry tell you that?”

  “No,” Frank said. “I found the article in one of the old union papers.”

  Stern smiled wistfully. “I wanted to be a writer back then,” he said. “A real writer. The kind who has a feel for things, who cares about something besides his own narrow little life.” He nodded slightly, and the bitterness that had inched into his voice suddenly fell away. “There seemed to be so much to write about in those days. The struggle, you know, the sacrifice. Great themes.”

  Frank took out his notebook and opened it. “That piece you wrote about Hannah,” he said. “It was very good.”

  The old man smiled. “As it turned out, I wasn’t a great writer, but I was a pretty good one. And Hannah? Well, a young man couldn’t have hoped for better material.”

  Frank wrote it down quickly.

  “I tried to capture her,” Stern went on. “Her beauty. Not her body, or her face, or anything like that. Not that kind of beauty. That’s for movie stars, fashion magazines. I wasn’t after
that. I was after Hannah, herself. Not the way she looked, but the way she acted, the way she made people feel.”

  “Her hand in the air,” Frank said.

  “Yes, that’s what I mean.”

  “You did it, I think,” Frank told him.

  Stern nodded. “I think so, too,” he said with a sudden muted pride. “A man can write well when he’s inspired.” He smiled. “That’s the only time a man can write well. Everything else is just some kind of bad faith, as the French call it. Inauthentic nonsense.”

  “And you were inspired by Hannah?” Frank said, returning him gently to the subject.

  “Yes,” Stern said firmly. “Very much. And I wasn’t the only one either. You must have seen that picture, the one of her giving that speech in Union Square.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Those faces, looking up at her. Didn’t they look inspired?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, there you have it then.”

  “Were you at that rally?”

  “Of course,” Stern said. “You don’t cover the world in an office, you know.” Something seemed to strike his mind. “You said you were looking for a relative?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, she had two sisters,” Stern told him. “She was sort of their guardian, you might say. The father was dead.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Gilda was beautiful in her face,” Stern added. “But Hannah, she was beautiful in her mind, her heart, what she thought about and wanted. These things were beautiful in her.” He shook his head wonderingly. “It’s hard to imagine it.”

  “When did you meet her?”

  “While the strike was going on,” Stern said. He shivered slightly. “It was a bad winter. There was so much snow.” His eyes drifted over to the large reservoir which faced him from across the street, its surface rippling lightly in the cold winter breeze. “The wind off the East River was like a sheet of ice, and I can remember how Hannah stood in it hour after hour with that little sign she’d painted. Justice, it said. That’s all. Just one word. In red. Justice.”

  Frank wrote it down. “This was in Union Square?”

  “Orchard Street,” Stern told him. “In front of her shop.”

  “The one Sol Feig owned.”

  Stern nodded silently. “Sol Feig, yes,” he said finally.

  “Hannah was the leader of that shop, wasn’t she?”

  “She was the leader,” Stern said. “Absolutely. And she was a damned good leader, let me tell you. She had a gift, a wonderful gift. She could make you believe in something as powerfully as she believed in it herself.” His eyes flashed suddenly, with a kind of odd, liquid fire. “Do you have any idea what a great gift that is?”

  Frank said nothing.

  “In a leader,” Stern added, “it is the greatest possible power.” He lifted one of his hands from its covering sleeve and drew it into a tight fist. “It’s the gift of inspiration,” he said fiercely. “It’s the power to inspire people to do more, suffer more, than it seems possible for them to do.”

  In his mind, Frank suddenly saw and heard Hannah Kovatnik in all her brief and glowing splendor, saw her eyes staring wildly into the cheering crowds, her body drawn taut in the freezing air, her voice ringing through the bare, leafless trees, blistering, furious, overwhelming.

  “I had never seen anything like her,” Stern said, his own voice suddenly high, tremulous, but not breaking. “She made everything seem possible. More than that. She made a great thing seem possible.”

  “Justice,” Frank said.

  “Yes.”

  Frank could feel a strangely ancient sorrow suddenly move through him, a deep, silent mourning for everything that goes wrong.

  “What happened?” he asked quietly.

  Stern shifted his shoulders slightly. “What do you mean?”

  “With Hannah.”

  For a moment, Stern seemed to move away from him, sinking back into an impenetrable solitude. Then he suddenly straightened himself slightly. “She won,” he said darkly.

  “Won what?”

  “The strike,” Stern said. “Her shop won.”

  For a time, Frank allowed the silence to lengthen between them. Then, abruptly, he broke it.

  “But that’s not the end of it, is it?” he said.

  “For most people it was.”

  “But not for Hannah.”

  Stern shook his head. “No, not for Hannah.”

  “She was expelled from the union not long after the strike,” he said.

  Stern’s eyes swept back to the gently shifting waters of the reservoir. He did not speak.

  “There was a hearing of some kind,” Frank added, as he continued to watch the old man closely.

  Stern’s eyes closed slowly, and his hand crawled back beneath the sleeve.

  “A charge was made against her,” Frank continued.

  Stern’s eyes tightened.

  “You brought that charge.”

  The old man’s eyes opened slowly, still staring straight ahead. “How do you know that?”

  “There’s a paper in the union archives,” Frank went on. “But it leaves a lot out.”

  A thin smile rose on Stern’s face. “Of course it does,” he said with an edge of bitterness.

  “What do you mean?”

  Stern looked at Frank pointedly. “Do you think it was easy to make a union in those days?” he asked fiercely. “Do you think it was something you did with your hands in a pair of white gloves?”

  “No,” Frank answered immediately.

  Stern laughed coldly. “You should have been there in the winter of 1935. You should have seen what the papers wrote about us. You should have seen the police charging us on horseback. Like cossacks. Like in Poland.” He shook his head wearily. “Then you would have some idea of what Hannah felt.”

  “About what?”

  “About what she did,” Stern said, his voice still hard, yet strangely weary. “And why she did it.” He turned away, as if to regain control of himself. “But still,” he added after a moment. “But still, there are limits. There have to be limits.”

  “On what?”

  “On us,” Stern told him. “On what we’re willing to do.”

  Frank pressed the tip of his pen against the notebook. “And Hannah went beyond them, the limits?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  The old man stared at Frank hesitantly. “What does it matter? What are you looking for?”

  “The truth.”

  “About what?”

  “About Hannah.”

  Stern turned away again, a single hand grabbing at the red scarf, plucking at it nervously.

  Frank leaned toward him slightly. “What did she do?”

  “She broke a commandment,” Stern said simply, crisply, as if he would say nothing more.

  “Which one?”

  Slowly the old man turned back toward Frank and stared squarely into his eyes. “The ninth commandment,” he said.

  Instantly Frank remembered his Bible-thumping father, how he’d raged from the pulpit, going through the commandments one by one until the dusty congregation had been all but pressed to death by their agonizing weight. It was then that he had learned them, one by one, as they seemed to fall like great black stones from the rocky ledge of Sinai.

  “Thou shalt not bear false witness,” he said.

  Stern’s face suddenly took on an oddly muted anguish. “Yes.”

  “She lied about someone?” Frank asked immediately.

  “Yes.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Sol Feig,” Stern answered immediately, as if the last of his old resistance had given way, and the past was now sweeping back over him, thundering like a wave.

  “The man she worked for,” Frank said.

  “Yes.”

  Frank could see Feig as he now lived, locked in his room on Orchard Street, crumpled in his chair, his watery eyes glaring toward the squat r
ed tenements that faced him from the window.

  “Sol Feig was a greedy man,” Stern began. “And he ran a greedy shop. It was also very profitable, and a few people hoped that the strike would break him, cause him to sell at a loss.” He stopped, and his eyes drifted out toward the water once again. “One of them was a man named Abe Bornstein.”

  In his mind, Frank could hear Bornstein’s voice as he leered at Hannah from his bench in the park: She’s the rabbi’s daughter. She don’t open up her legs for nobody.

  “Bornstein wanted to take over Feig’s operation,” Stern went on, his voice now fully controlled. “He wanted to break him, and he wanted to use the strike to do it. That’s why he came to Hannah.”

  “Why Hannah?”

  “The strike had been going on for a long time by then,” Stern explained. “People were beginning to break. They couldn’t buy food or coal. You have to understand what it was like in the winter of 1935.” He shook his head. “Hannah was working desperately to keep everybody going, but even a woman like her, even a person with that kind of force, can’t do everything. She couldn’t keep her people warm at night. She couldn’t keep food in their stomachs. And without things like that, the fire goes out.” He shivered slightly as a lean wind blew around them, sweeping a line of rust-colored leaves over their feet. “The fire was going out,” he repeated. “Hannah could see it. And so could Abe Bornstein. That’s when he came to her.”

  Frank could see them in the park together, just as Riviera had described them, huddled beside a slender wooden bench, while in the distance, a knot of unemployed men fed wooden slats into a flaming drum.

  “Bornstein had a plan,” Stern went on matter-of-factly. “He had an actress who was willing to claim that Feig had tried to rape her. He knew that a charge like that would put some steel back in the strike. Hannah’s job was to broadcast it throughout the union, let it loose in the neighborhood. The Lower East Side was like a little village in those days. Feig would be ruined. The strike would win. Bornstein would buy Feig out, and once in control, he’d deal with the union in a better way.”

  “Is that what happened?” Frank asked quickly.

  “More or less,” Stern said. “But things got badly out of hand. The rumor finally got to Feig’s daughter.” He stopped. “Feig had nothing but his daughter. Except for the shop, she was his whole life.”