almost as attentive to the son as to the mother during the past few weeks. Tolerating her ministrations with disregard, Ruby had allowed her to change the dressings on his hands and head, applying salves and ointments as a result of which his wounds were practically healed. But now Esther appeared a little puffed with importance in her office as mouthpiece, and Ruby was almost amused to see how her baked-apple face puckered in the effort to translate the twins’ Hebraized Yiddish into American.
“As you know, must not be abandoned, our family treasure,” she submitted, turning to ask the twins: “Vos iz der taytsh ‘treasure’?” The twins advised her to please just repeat after them, which she did tugging at her corset in a show of displeasure at having been left out of the loop: “‘We offer to you the privilege exceptionalary that you should escort it, the legacy—’ What legacy?”
At that point Ruby, having already heard enough, pronounced one of the few Yiddish expressions he knew, “A klug tse eykh alemens (Screw you all),” after which the brothers made it clear to him through an esperanto of persuasive gestures that no was not an option.
The plan was for Ruby to watch over the casket, much as he’d once guarded truckloads of contraband hooch, on the trip down to Tennessee. He would travel with the rabbi by freight train to Memphis, while his recently extended family took a more leisurely route via Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cincinnati, and St. Louis, with Zerubavel ben Blish promoting the Zionist dream along the way. Once Ruby had grunted his tepid assent, things happened swiftly: He left the apartment for the first time in weeks with his strongarm escort. They took a subway to Hell’s Kitchen, where it was Ruby’s turn to play translator, a function he performed with brusque economy on the loading dock of the Armour Star meathouse adjoining the Hudson railyard. Having assumed that the company men in the freight office would either balk or up the ante, Ruby decided to bypass them in favor of going straight to the dockhands, with whom he and his uncles soon struck a deal.
A few days later on a misty morning in early April, a freshly waxed Phaeton hearse from Duckstein’s Funerals drove into the gravel yard. From the rear of the hearse the rabbi in his moldering sarcophagus was transferred by an overhead conveyor directly into a Union Pacific reefer car filled with hanging hams. “You can’t put him instead with flanken?” the twins had inquired, disturbed by the indignity, but Ruby scoffed at their concern. Throughout the operation the railroad laborers, whose palms had been previously oiled, looked the other way. In the meantime, so active was the yard with its switching and shunting, with the clamor of coupling and the hiss of hydraulics, the thud of truncheons cracking hoboes’ heads, that the loading of an old coffin onto a boxcar went virtually unnoticed. Ruby had already swung his duffel along with his father’s salvaged sheep’s pelt onto the refrigerated car. He was in the process of stowing Aunt Esther’s hamper containing a three-day supply of knishes and a thermos of tea, and was about to climb on board himself, when a flashily dressed contingent stepped onto the platform through a billow of steam: a delegatz as it turned out from the mob captain Naftali Kupferman. Ruby wondered what had taken them so long.
They were led by Naf’s chief stooges Shtrudel Louie and Turtletaub, both wearing belted topcoats over their tropical suits. The moron Little Lhulki was also in tow, along with a couple of rookies in Oxford bags that Ruby didn’t recognize. The lot of them appeared to him now as figures of make-believe, caricature gangsters with cute nicknames stepped from the columns of Damon Runyon, the newspaper scribe.
Shtrudel Louie gave Ruby a neutral salute with a finger to the brim of his Stetson: “Naftali says sorry for your loss but it’s not nice to leave town without you should say good-bye.” Mr. Turtletaub seconded the sentiment, adding that the boss’s feelings were deeply hurt, while Shtrudel narrowed his eyes to assess the duplicate brutes that stood in their short pants beside Kid Karp.
Indifferent to the menace in their voices, Ruby said only, “I’m touched.” He had supposed they were keeping tabs on him, had even expected they might try interdicting him if he left the apartment, though he hadn’t thought they would wait till the last minute. Still he knew better than