The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats by Hesh Kestin Page B

Shushan said. “You can practically say anything that works.”
    “I wouldn’t mention Jesus Christ,” Cohen said.
    “I wasn’t going to.”
    There was something about them of an old married couple: they must have been together a while. When one moved the other looked. And when one looked the other caught his eye to say, It’s nothing—I was just shifting in my seat.
    “Russy, give these nice coppers something to eat,” Shushan said. “And drink.” He winked. “Or are you guys on duty?”
    “It’s a condolence call, Mr. Cats,” the Irishman said. “I mean, technically we’re on call. I mean, if there was a shooting in the next block or something. But the NYPD isn’t that technical about these things. A wake, something like that, it’s okay. Ain’t that right, Stan?”
    Cohen nodded. “The last thing we’d want you to think is this is a police matter. It’s personal, that’s all.”
    I brought them a mid-level bottle of Scotch and a couple of tumblers with ice. They didn’t hesitate.
    “This is my sister,” Shushan said. “Ira you know.” He skipped Myra entirely. “And this is my protégé, Russell.”
    The cops examined me with renewed interest.
    I looked at myself with renewed interest. Protégé? Uh, do I get to go to jail now or do we wait until after the mourning period? “I’m just helping out,” I said weakly. “For the
shiva
.” I turned to Kennedy. “The wake.”
    “Yeah, well, don’t worry, kid,” Cohen said. “We don’t have an interest in you. That is, if we don’t have no call to. Anyway Mr. Shushan here is a kidder. He’s famous for a kidder. You know what he said when we arrested him?”
    Kennedy picked it up. “He said, ‘What took you so long?’ Ain’t that something? I got to tell you, Mr. Shushan, if every hoodlum in this town was as much a gent as you it would be a pleasure to be a cop. As it is, we got them dagos they’ll spit in your eye as soon as say good morning. They’re surly bastards is what they are. I’d rather arrest a whorehouse full of niggers”—he looked over to Shushan’s sister—“cat-house I mean, than one of them wops, and their ladies is even worse. You go to search their house they wouldn’t offer you a cup of coffee or even a glass of water. It’s like they take it personal. Like their husbands ain’t what they are, what they know they are.”
    “My mother, my late mother,” Shushan said. “She used to say you shouldn’t judge other people, because maybe they didn’t have the advantages you did.”
    Terri shot me a look, and then a wink. She had caught it as well. The cops never would. Ira and Myra had probably never read a book in their lives. It was just Terri and me. She smiled in complicity. I kept quiet. What was I going to say: Shushan, your mother was F. Scott Fitzgerald? Your mother wrote
The Great Gatsby
, on whose opening page Nick Carraway, the narrator, speaks that line? Instead I coughed, hard.
    “You okay, kid?” Shushan asked.
    I stood, swallowed, and made my way to the kitchen. “It’s nothing. The rye bread. I got a caraway seed stuck in my throat.”
    I’m sure Shushan got it. But I wasn’t aiming for Shushan. I was aiming for his sister. Maybe I had a chance after all. She was stifling laughter. If you can make a woman laugh, that’s a base hit.
    When I returned with a glass of water and a grin the cops were growing expansive on the one interest they shared with their host.
    “Well, you got a chance,” Cohen was saying. “The papers like you, Mr. Cats. That’s something. I don’t think the
Daily Mirror
would want to see you go away. Every morning you’re on the front page they sell more papers.”
    “Unlike the dagos,” Kennedy said. “Take a guy like Sfangiullo, they put him on the front page and everybody hates him. He’s just another bloodsucking
mafio
, know what I mean? And one of them is pretty much like the next. Carbon copies. They don’t touch nobody’s heart strings because