“I did.”
“What?”
“That’s where I went, okay? To see someone who can help.”
“I… why didn’t you tell me that in the first place?”
“I would’ve. If you’d given me a chance. If you’d stopped pressing long enough for me to open the closet and hang my coat.”
“If you could manage to answer a simple question, I wouldn’t need to—”
“Go screw yourself, Tony.”
“What?”
“You heard me. I think you should stick it up your own—”
“Look, let’s not argue like a couple of teenagers. We’re in this together. We’d better remember it.”
“Why? So I can listen to more of your insults and accusations?”
“How about for Pat’s sake? So we can find him. You’re saying you didn’t go to the cops. Okay, fine. Just tell me who…”
“No. I won’t jump when you snap your fingers. Think whatever you want of me, I’m not going to stand for that treatment. I’m sick of it. I’ve decided to handle this my way. And right now that means I’m getting off the phone.”
“Hold it, you can’t—”
“Oh? Keep the receiver up to your ear another second and you’ll find out what I can do.”
“Wait—”
“My way, Tony. Good-bye.”
The receiver slammed down on the hook.
Some thirty minutes after he left Snow Mountain, Lenny Reisenberg found himself seated at the counter in the Second Avenue Delicatessen on East 10th Street, waiting for the corned beef sandwich and kasha varnishkes he’d ordered.
No one could have been more surprised by this than Lenny. His original plan had been to buzz over to Sword HQ, fulfill his promise to Mary Sullivan, grab some take-out on the way back to his office, and eat quickly at his desk. A burger and fries, or maybe a tuna salad from the corner luncheonette… bland filler food to carry him until dinner, in other words. Things obviously had not gone as intended. But while his detour to Chinatown may have been unforeseen, Lenny was at least clear about why he’d headed down there. It was simple cause-and-effect. His fast appointment with Noriko Cousins had left him a bundle of tension and he’d resolved to pick up something to help him unwind. Simple. Lenny’s peregrinations since that time were harder to explain, however. Those wandering feet of his had taken him crosstown into the East Village instead of uptown to his office, a long journey in the wrong direction. What was more, they’d brought him to a restaurant he only visited when in the mood to indulge his occasional craving for Jewish soul food with delightful abandon, not have an automatic midday fill up akin to putting gas in the car at some roadside service plaza. It seemed to Lenny he’d truly gone a little out of his head. Despite the stacks of paperwork awaiting him at the office, he’d stayed away from it for almost two hours, veering farther and farther off course on his supposed walk back. And although he hadn’t felt the slightest bit hungry as he’d left Snow Mountain, or as he hiked here along the Bowery in the cold, or even as his waitress had handed him a menu only two or three minutes earlier, he’d all at once become desperately impatient for a towering heap of cured beef, not to mention that side of pan-fried buckwheat groats and bow-tie noodles….
“Excuse me, is there cheese in the potato kneeeesh?”
Lenny momentarily put his thoughts on hold. Or rather, they came to a short stop on their own. The source of that high piping voice — and remarkably screwy pronunciation of “knish”—had been a woman in a window booth to his right, and he couldn’t resist tossing an inconspicuous glance over at her.
It took perhaps a second for his curiosity to be satisfied. Young, blond, and blue-eyed, she was definitely a Gentile, and just as surely an out-of-towner. In fact, she seemed as if she ought to have been wearing a shiny Wisconsin State Fair Beauty Queen tiara on her head. The guy opposite her in the booth had a similar scrubbed, fair-haired look. Together they sort of reminded Lenny of Barbie and Ken.
Their waitress, a thickset Latin woman, was eyeing Barbie over her pad with apparent shock and horror.
“This is a kosher restaurant,” she said.
Barbie didn’t get it.
“Oh, I see,” she said. Her blank stare indicating the contrary. “But is there cheese in the potato kneeeeesh?”
The waitress tapped her pen against her pad, rolled her eyes. Surely she’d gotten stuck with a simpleton.
“No cheese with meat,” she huffed.
“Oh.” Poor squeaky Barbie’s confusion had deepened. Could the waitress have misunderstood her question? She glanced down at her menu as if seeking enlightenment there, found none, looked back up. “Does that mean the kneeeesh has meat in it? Because I want a potato…”
Glad for the distraction from his own problems, Lenny continued to casually eavesdrop above the energetic gabbing and lip smacking of his fellow deli-goers. In this ethnic hodgepodge of a city, you’d have to scour the streets for a month to find a longtime resident unacquainted with the orthodox Jewish dietary prohibition against serving meat and dairy products together in any form, cooking them in the same pots and pans, or eating them with the same utensils. But did Barbie truly deserve to be faulted for her ignorance? Lenny guessed that she typified a form of New York snobbery and felt kind of bad for her. On the other hand, a blind person could have seen the word kosher on the sign above the entrance. How oblivious to other cultural traditions could you be? Maybe it was Barbie who was guilty of being a snob, and the waitress who deserved his sympathy. And so much fuss over an appetizer, how much worse would things get once Barbie got around to selecting her main course? Besides, this couple had “dud” written all over them as far as leaving a decent tip.
It was, Lenny decided, important to look at both sides before jumping to an opinion.
Now he saw the swing doors from the kitchen fly open, watched his own waitress shoulder through, identified his food on the dishes she was carrying, and eagerly waited for her to put them down in front of him — farewell Barbie and company, hello lunch. This suddenly tyrannical appetite of his really was nuts, he thought. But then Lenny wondered if something other than a need to fill his stomach might have awakened it. A different sort of emptiness within him that he’d subconsciously wanted to stifle. He didn’t want to go deep into psychoanalysis here, but wasn’t that what comfort food was about? He’d slipped into a funk, no question, and it occurred to him there were plenty of contributing reasons. Mary Sullivan’s pained features, her struggle to keep from falling apart in his office that morning. Noriko Cousins’s unassailable indifference. And then the capper, Yan’s sternly uttered words of advice at Snow Mountain. You have problem, better solve it. Taken individually or rolled into a ball, these things had been weighing on him to a greater degree than he’d cared to admit.
Lenny lifted the top slice of club roll off his sandwich, reached for the mustard dispenser, spooned, smeared, bit in. Tasty. He forked a couple of kasha varnishkes into his mouth. Delicious. Lenny ate some more, felt the gloom that had been hanging over his head begin to lighten. Barbie and Ken’s waitress stormed past him toward the kitchen, grumbling under her breath: “Kneeeesh, kneeeesh, why don’t she go back to school?” He chewed, swallowed, wondered how the issue of schooling had come into play with her. Well, Barbie did look like she could be a college student. Maybe the waitress felt Kosher Laws 101 ought to be a basic curricular requirement. At any rate, it was clear that communications hadn’t improved over at the window booth.