She shrugged; her breasts under the pale creamy sweater had a life of their own. “He was a liar. A sneaky little shrimp. The only thing he ever told the truth about was he really was sick. He got very run-down. He said his lungs were bad ’cause of years he spent in Frigidaire rooms dressing fur pelts.”
“You never liked him?” I asked.
“He got on my nerves. He always get me nervous, pacing up and down on the floor and looking out this window to see if Richard come or not. He would go away with Richard, but sometimes Richard didn’t come, and he go away alone. I say, ‘Where you go, Izzy, working or what?’ He say he go down to the stock market.”
“You wouldn’t happen to have a picture of him, would you?”
“I do,” she said. “A snapshot from Hunter’s Island. You can take it. I don’t look so good in it, though.”
“That’s all right,” Evalyn said, and smiled sweetly.
Gerta got up and I watched the cheeks of her ass moving like pistons under the black skirt as she made her way across the tiny, tidy living room and Evalyn kicked me in the shins under the table.
“Do you believe her?” Evalyn whispered.
“About the affair?”
“Yes.”
“It doesn’t matter. If every man who wanted to sleep with Gerta was a kidnapper, no baby in this country would be safe.”
Soon Gerta was back, and the picture of Fisch revealed a dark-haired, acned, jug-eared, smirky Jew in his twenties; bow tie and tweed sportcoat. Even in a still photo he looked like a cocky little smart-ass. In the photo, Gerta, cute as a button but not as cute as in real life, sat behind him and leaned forward, her hands on his shoulders.
Evalyn was looking at the picture. “You seem friendly enough with him here.”
“He was fun, at first. His English was the best of us all. Had a swell line of bull. But even back in the old country, as teenager, he was in the black market. And here, with his schemes, he took fifteen hundred from my Carl’s mother for this pie company that never was, and another almost three thousand from her for invest in furs.”
“That’s a lot of dough,” I said.
“People’s life saving,” she said bitterly. “And my mother, he get from her four thousand.”
It sounded like “t’ousand.”
“And he got some from Erica, too,” she said, “how much, I don’t know.”
“Erica?” Evalyn asked.
“My sister,” she said. “And all our friends—hundreds dollars here, thousands dollars there. But you know what? We thought he was rich—he always said he was worth thirty thousand, easy. But he had other friends, who thought he was poor! I heard that when he moved out of here, he told these other friends that he was evicted! That he had to sleep wherever he could, in Hooverville and on benches in Grand Central depot. That way he could beg off them.”
“What a weasel,” I said.
“I tell you how I figure out he is keeping one group of friends away from the other. When Izzy is going down to the steamship, to go to Germany, Erica and me decide to go down and say goodbye, to surprise him. We go aboard and see Izzy talking with four or five men, strangers to us, but you can tell they was friends with him. Izzy saw us and his face went white as sheet; he came over, angry, and said, ‘What the hell are you doing here, you girls?’ I say, ‘The hell with you, Izzy—we just want to surprise you, to say goodbye, you nasty little bastard!’ The nerve of him. He apologize, show us to his cabin, but then said he was busy and shooed us away fast as he could.”
“He was conning everybody,” I said. “Getting money from your circle by playing the big-shot investor, and milking others using the poor-mouth routine.”
“It worked,” Gerta said, shrugging. “But he was a strange one.”
“Strange, how?” Evalyn said.
“Well, I never see him with a woman. When I first meet him, I thought he was kind of…cute, in a way. Like a little boy. But, uh…he never seemed interested. Most men like me. I don’t mean to be bragging, but…”
“I believe you,” I said.
“And there was this crazy religion of his.”
“What, Judaism?”
“No!” She grinned. “Spooks and stuff.”
“Spooks and stuff?”
“What do they call it? Spiritualist.”
I sat up, knocking the table; coffee spilled. I apologized and said, “Tell me more about this.”
She shrugged. “He belonged to this little church. Not a church, really—just a storefront, all cleared out for benches and stuff. They do silly things over there, I hear.”
“Like what?”
“What do they call them—seances. Did you know Izzy Fisch knew this girl Violet Sharpe?”
Evalyn and I traded quick looks.
