Festival of Deaths(37)

Chickie looked through his stenographer’s notebook. Itzaak reminded himself that there was no Leningrad any more, there was no Soviet union  , and since he had done nothing wrong nothing wrong could be done to him.

Chickie stopped at a page covered with blotted-ink scrawl. “We checked it out,” he said. “With Immigration and Naturalization. We checked out your green card.”

“What is there to check out about my green card?”

“We checked it out to see if it was legitimate,” Chickie said. “You know. The real thing. Not forged.”

“Of course my green card is legitimate. I have been in the United States for six years.”

“There are people, been here twenty years, their cards aren’t legitimate,” the smaller cop said.

“I am already taking citizenship classes.” Itzaak felt himself go stiff. His head especially went stiff. It went so stiff he couldn’t think straight. “If I pass my test, I will take the oath this coming Fourth of July.”

Chickie looked through his stenographer’s notebook some more. “We checked out your Social Security card,” he said. “That turned out to be legitimate, too.”

Itzaak didn’t answer this. He thought anybody who faked a Social Security card had to be crazy. You had to pay all that money to the Social Security administration. How would you get it back if your Social Security card was faked?

Chickie was checking through his notebook again. “We tried to check out your background in—Leningrad, did you say?”

“It’s St. Petersburg now,” Itzaak said. “It was Leningrad then.”

“Well, things seem to be a little confused over there. We can’t seem to get anybody to give us a straight answer about anything.”

“Like about why you were in jail,” the short one said.

“And what you were in jail for,” Chickie said. “Did you know we knew you had been in jail?”

“It was on your application at INS,” the short one said, “but we didn’t need that. We knew anyway.”

“You can always tell when a man’s been in jail,” Chickie said.

“He walks funny,” the short one said.

“Your application at INS said you’d been in jail for political reasons,” Chickie said. “It said you’d been in jail for your religion.”

“I am a practicing Jew,” Itzaak said, stiff, stiff, paralyzed. “At the time, Leningrad was not a good place to be a practicing Jew.”

“Well, I’ll tell you, Isaac, we were thinking about that. We surely were. I mean, it stands to reason, doesn’t it? If you’d been in jail for, say, murder, you wouldn’t tell the INS that.”

“I was not in jail for murder.”

“Funny about your being a practicing Jew,” Chickie said. “We got one of those in the department. Wears one of those little hats just like yours.”

“Yarmulke.”

“Yeah, yarmulke,” Chickie said. “Thing is, he doesn’t have a Spanish girlfriend just like yours.”

“A Catholic girlfriend,” the short one said.

“He wouldn’t even talk to a Catholic girl,” Chickie said. “So it kind of makes me wonder.”

“Just like we wonder about which Catholic girl your girlfriend really was,” the short one said.

“You say it was Carmencita Boaz,” Chickie said.

“But it could have been either of them,” the short one said.

“Look at it this way.” Chickie slapped his notebook shut. “Your super saw you with a Spanish woman. That was it. The people in Carmencita’s building, they never saw you at all. So it makes us think, if you see what I mean. It makes us curious.”

“Because if your girlfriend was Maria Gonzalez instead of Carmencita Boaz,” the short one said, “you’d probably be in a lot of serious trouble right about now.”

Itzaak Blechmann did not believe that the people in Carmencita’s building had never seen him. He thought they were protecting Carmencita’s reputation, because he came late and stayed all night sometimes. He didn’t blame them for thinking he and Carmencita were doing all sorts of things they weren’t actually doing. What else would they think? He too wanted to protect Carmencita’s reputation. He wanted to protect Carmencita more than anything. Now it appeared that he couldn’t even protect himself.

“I never spoke more than politenesses and business to Maria Gonzalez in my life,” he said helplessly. “She did not like me. And she was very devout.”

Chickie put his notebook back inside his jacket and stood up. “That’s all we came out here about. We just wanted you to know the way we were going these days. We just wanted you to know.”