More to it always than meets the eye. How many women have slung accusations Elliot’s way? Hi, Barner Funds, Elliot Mendelssohn’s office, how can I help you? Save me a place in the unemployment line please, my boss just called me a bitcharita.
— Sorry, Dad, he says again, rolling his eyes at the phone and leaning across the table to take some bread from the basket.
No worries, son, I’ll just sit here awaiting my salmon with dill sauce and let the lazy day drift away.
— I’ll be right with you, I promise.
And there he goes with the finger again, and a shake of his jowls — he looks farm-caught himself, open-mouthed — and he is scooting back his chair, half the restaurant looking at him, hook, line, sinker.
Where in the world did I go wrong, did I ruin his childhood, did I neglect him, did I not read the right books to him, did I drop him on the crown of his early bald head? He came through the teenage years with flying colors, never caused too many problems. A good-looking kid, came home with his lacrosse trophies, debate certificates, chess medals. No late-night phone calls. No suspensions. No arrests. Amherst, then Harvard, got himself to Wall Street, hunkered down for a couple of years, played the money game, rolled the ball, made it round, but just look at him now, walking past the empty tables, towards the restrooms, watched by Dandinho all the way. An odd look on Dandinho’s face. Surely he’s seen many a customer chatting on the phone, cheating on the phone even? Maybe there’s a house rule against it, cheating and chatting?
I could do with another glass of Sancerre, where’s my medium-medium blonde, come to me, what is your name again, Rosita, Rosita, my stem, my petal, my thorn.
IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
If only real life could have the logic of the written word: characters with conscious actions, hidden causes becoming plain, all things moving toward a singular point, the universe revealing itself as inexorably stable, everything boiled down to a static image, controlled, ordered, logical. In a simple world it should have been a straightforward Jewish funeral, but Mendelssohn was an atheist, or so it was said anyway, agnostic at least, though he certainly had a touch of tradition to him, and he wasn’t averse to playing whatever card suited him. He had married a Catholic woman, and the children were raised between religions, and Mendelssohn himself had confessed to being Jewish when he wanted to be, and Lithuanian most of the time, but Polish if he needed to be, a touch of Russian if so charged, an American in most respects, an occasional European, even Irish every once in a while by virtue of his wife. A mongrel really, a true New Yorker, in a city where people never knew how to die. Cremation. Exhalation. Annihilation. A proper Jewish ceremony would have seen him buried as soon as possible, but then there was the issue of an autopsy and the delay of Mendelssohn’s daughter all the way from Tel Aviv, and the political aspirations of the son, and where his wife, Eileen, was buried, and whether his ashes should be scattered or not, and what he might have written in his will, and who might have had access to his very last wishes.
The service takes place on Amsterdam Avenue in the late morning, five days after the assault. The snow has turned to slush and there are deep puddles by the curbsides where the cars pull in. A sad splash of wheels in the potholes. It is a high, wide angle, but a good grade of footage: every funeral home in the city has its own series of hidden surveillance cameras. The detectives have, over the years, become watchers of funerals. It often surprises them that there are not more services on reality TV: there is something so compulsively informative about them. The way life gets played out in death. The manner in which the widow falls to her knees. Or not. The way in which the son shoulders the weight of the coffin. Or not. The way the father becomes the sole proprietor of the daughter’s death. Or not. The enigmatic notes arriving with the flowers. Or not. The subtle dig put in the eulogy by the rabbi, the priest, the imam, the vicar, the monk. Funerals as indicators of a life, how it was lived, the amount of tears shed, the keening and the rending of clothes, the sheer volume of mourners who choose to show up, the length of time people hang around afterward, the very nature of the way they hold their bodies. It has even struck them at times that they can tell some of the sexual predilections of the deceased just by looking at the clothes the mourners wear: the higher the hemline, the more ambitious the life. Hardly a mathematical formula, but then again so many things are unexplainable, and how is it that we know a life, except that we know our own, and it is brought into focus by the death of those around us.
Elliot is the first of the family to arrive. He steps out from his dark limousine and, interestingly enough, does not go to the other side of the car to help his wife emerge. Rather, he stands in the middle of the pavement and gazes up at the name of the funeral home as if he wants to read some deep significance into it. No outward sign of sorrow, though he still wears a torn black ribbon over his heart, a gesture at least to ancient tradition. His wife is a pile-up of peroxide. She stands alongside him, both together and apart. She has three children from previous marriages, and they step out from the car as if part of a moon landing, teenage boys, all gangle and long hair, looking as if they are already bored with their own patented slouch.
Elliot nods at them, checks his watch, consults his cell phone, a man distracted.
The daughter arrives ten minutes after Elliot. Katya Atkinson. Dark-eyed with grief and travel. She looks younger: early fifties maybe. She wears a dark skirt and a matching jacket. There is something fierce and intelligent about her. A streak of gray in her hair. She steps her agile way over the curbside puddle, toward her brother. Elliot leans down to give her a perfunctory kiss on the cheek.
Together, brother and sister step toward the funeral home and are soon engulfed by others who have arrived almost simultaneously in a polite wave: judges, office workers, neighbors. The super and the doormen, including Tony DiSalvo. Sally James. At least one hundred people. Among them, too, the restaurant manager, Christopher Eagleton, and the busboy, Dandinho, who, upon his appearance, is marked as a person of significant suspicion: why in the world would the busboy arrive at the funeral?
The detectives return again to the restaurant footage, but Dandinho never leaves the building, not once, he simply has his animated conversation with Pedro Jiménez by the dishwashing station, and he is most certainly located on the footage by the bar when the punch is thrown outside the restaurant. Dandinho is, in fact, one of the first to go to Mendelssohn’s aid when he falls. He is calm and controlled when questioned, not a hint of guilt about him, keen to point out that Mendelssohn was one of his favorite customers, that he always took home his leftovers for his housekeeper, tipped well, was old-world, polite, a hint of a twinkle still in his eye. He did not witness the actual punch, although he heard the thump of the old man’s head on the pavement, he thought at first that maybe Mendelssohn had just slipped on the ice, but he knew immediately that he was dead, an awful thing, he felt very sorry for him, a terrible way to go, he went to the funeral to pay his respects, it was the Christian thing to do.