Bittersweet Brooklyn: A Novel Read online

  ALSO BY THELMA ADAMS

  Playdate

  The Last Woman Standing

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Thelma Adams

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503904606

  ISBN-10: 1503904601

  Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant

  To my grandmother

  CONTENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  True events inspired Bittersweet Brooklyn, which is based on meticulous research. However, in narrating the story, certain factual elements, characters, and timing of events have been altered to dramatize lives that passed largely under the historical radar. Fiction often requires good guys and bad guys—real life is rarely so clear-cut. Every individual is the protagonist of their own life story. To quote a favorite African proverb, “Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter.”

  Chapter 1

  Brooklyn, October 1935

  It’s tough torching a fresh corpse, so the Williamsburg Boys Club killers stuffed their shredded victim into the back of a Buick. They’d douse the stolen car with gasoline and ignite it. Then, at least, the cops would suffer distinguishing the upholstery from the body. It wasn’t pretty, but it was Louis “Pretty” Amberg in the back of that green sedan on October 23, 1935.

  Amberg was no near-and-dear to Thelma Schwartz. The thirty-three-year-old hadn’t met the mobster while he was still alive, swilling vodkas at her older brother Abie’s Brooklyn hangout beneath the ramp to the Williamsburg Bridge. But she’d heard stories about the mean drunk with the lazy left eye. Abie’s gang said the Russian immigrant had good table manners, meaning the opposite: he’d stuck a fork in Milton Berle’s face when the performer had insulted Pretty’s bulldog mug from the Vanity Fair Club stage.

  Word to the wise: never sit in the front row at a comedy show.

  Unlike Pretty’s eyes, Thelma’s were her second-best feature: glowing green below arched eyebrows and thick auburn hair. A skinny widow with a kid, she knew she got looks when she wore lipstick and stiletto heels and bent over, showing a neckline more daring than the next. And those looks improved as the night wore on. Her best feature: her legs. Like everybody else’s, they began at her ankles and connected to her hips—but they took their sweet time. Her long limbs had magic in them, at least according to Abie.

  That Wednesday, Thelma had dropped by Abie’s Marcy Avenue dive unannounced and desperate, fresh from being mauled by a bruiser in the alley behind the Arcadia Ballroom. Feeling raw and ashamed, she’d sought brotherly comfort—and cash. Late nights like this had left her with a female problem that Abie’s money might solve, if not soothe. When she was hurting, she turned to Little Yiddle, although she never used that nickname herself. It used to be that she was always welcome, but lately that had changed as her brother’s underworld “business interests” had appeared to expand.

  She’d hurried down the two steps to the basement entry of the three-story redbrick building, strangling her lapels as the wind rose. Rocking from one foot to the other in thin-soled shoes, she regretted being on her brother’s doorstep. Turning, she glanced up and down the street to assess her exit, but she observed a stranger lurking in the shadow of the bridge. He hovered just beyond the circle of streetlamp light, a fedora sheltering his eyes.

  As she watched, the man also shifted from one leg to the other in the frigid night. She was afraid of being alone in the dark without a man’s protection, but not as terrified as she was of being stuck at home with a kid every evening for the rest of her life. When Abie failed to answer, she let herself in with the spare key she kept for emergencies. She hung her coat on a hook before pouring a drink. After kicking off her heels under the octagonal card table, she settled down to play solitaire and nurse her grievances with a vodka neat (the poor person’s martini), when she heard grunts from the kitchen. She stayed seated, doing nothing to investigate the source, feeling nothing but trouble rising and her nape hair prickling under the clasp of her cheap heart-shaped locket.

  After a while, Abie swung through the kitchen door, unrolling his sleeves.

  “You gotta get out of here,” he said, his eyes dead, the whites red streaked. When she didn’t move, he became agitated. “Now! Grab your coat. Go!”

  Thelma choked, stung by his betrayal and frozen by the gut punch of disgrace—the familiar emotion of being unloved and unlovable. “That’s some welcome, brother.”

  “You don’t get it. Get outta here. I’m not kidding, kiddo.” His creased face gray and sweaty, Abie removed his handkerchief from his pants pocket and swabbed his brow. At forty-one, he was a very short, fit, bigheaded man with a strong chin, handsome between flappy ears that would have dwarfed a man twice his size. “This is for your own safety. Grab your stuff now, baby, and scram.”

  She didn’t recognize this desperation, his frenetic urgency. “You’re calling me baby like I’m one of your cookies? Where am I supposed to go, Abie? I can’t find a cab this late and I’m broke.”

  “Shh,” Abie hissed, looking over his shoulder. “Maybe you should have thought about that before.”

  “Since when am I unwelcome?” she hissed back. She felt three years old, wet and weak. He’d always understood her. He’d always championed her. Who was she without her reflection as the favorite in his eyes?

  One after the other, she’d made the choices that landed her here on Marcy Avenue in the bridge’s shadow on a dark block after midnight. She’d taken the risks, a widow trying to squeeze a spritz of joy from a cold night, packing up her cares and woes, feeling low and hoping she’d meet another man to rekindle her heart’s flame before it was too late. “You sound like Annie,” she said.

  “Our sister wouldn’t be so dim to come here this late.”

  “Kick a girl when she’s down.”

  “Get in line. Take a number.” Abie fumbled for a cigarette. “You gotta learn to pick yourself up, Temmy. This is my last warning: get out.”

  “I’ve always been here for you.”

  “So now you’ve gotta shovel on the guilt? I’m your brother
, for God’s sake.” He smacked his forehead, resigned, and then sank down beside the card table. Thelma slid an ashtray closer. He sighed, adding a smoker’s cough to its tail. “If you’re staying, Temmy, then pass me the deck. We’ll play a hand while we wait. It’s probably too late anyway.”

  It was 2:00 a.m. Abie riffled the deck on the felt. The cards scattered, escaping his jittery fingers.

  “You’re shuffling like an old lady.”

  He stopped and glared at her, the whites of his eyes wide. She’d never seen him so unhinged. She extended her hand. He flinched.

  She began, “What can I—”

  “Play cards.”

  “Deal,” she said. He did.

  Once the game started, Abie quietly unloaded, as if he were filling Thelma in on a radio serial she’d missed while she was out dancing. She reached over and removed the cigarette from his dry lips and placed it between hers. She puffed, then discarded as he began to explain that Pretty had angled for control of the Brooklyn rackets, crossing the ambitious Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, who’d slain the Russian’s brother Joseph the previous month. Enraged, Pretty entered the rival gang’s headquarters, roaring that he’d be avenged. But Lepke struck first, telling Abie to set the trap by inviting the bereaved sibling over to the Marcy Avenue apartment that doubled as the Williamsburg Boys Club for drinks and girls.

  The kitchen door swung open, revealing a husky, pockmarked man in his undershirt, his eyes feral. “You didn’t get rid of her?” he asked, incredulous. “What, Little Yiddle, is this amateur hour? Bring me the girl.”

  “She’s my sister. Leave her out.”

  “Quit stallin’,” said the stack of bricks.

  “I begged you, Temmy. I’m not the boss.”

  “But we’re in your place.”

  “Right, like I planned on opening a kosher butcher shop,” he snorted. “Just shut up and follow orders. You’ll be okay.”

  “What’re my odds?”

  He didn’t answer, so she crammed her blistered feet back into her heels and stood up. Whatever she was facing beyond the door, she was certain she wasn’t dressed for it. She yanked up her neckline, but it wasn’t getting any higher. Her heart pounded. With these party shoes and the corner guy, she wasn’t running anywhere this late in the game.

  After squeezing Abie’s shoulder, steely beneath his shirt, she shoved the door with false bravado, sending it banging against the wall. She was trying to play it as cool as Jean Harlow in that Jimmy Cagney gangster movie Abie loved, The Public Enemy—but that didn’t last. The first thing she saw was an empty vodka bottle standing on the kitchen table beside three glasses, two empty, one full—the dead man’s glass.

  And then she saw a corpse stretched on the floor. Even in her wildest imagination, this was not what she’d expected. She ran to the sink and puked.

  “Don’t block the drain,” said the goon with a half smile, as if her terror amused him. “Take a last look, sister, but make it snappy. You got work to do.”

  She swiveled, propping the small of her back against the sink. Beside the stove, the body lay on the checkerboard linoleum. She swallowed hard. Her palms sweat. She couldn’t see Pretty’s face. The assassins had rolled him into Abie’s bedspread, his wing tips visible, feet splayed. Although she knew he was no angel, she felt pity viewing his Florsheims. She’d been aware her brother broke the law, but this was murder: she’d stumbled into a crime scene with a victim whose name she knew. She was an accessory after the fact, abetting a felony, a loose end. She turned and spewed in the sink again.

  Pretty was Jewish, like she was, an immigrant like her European parents. Now he’d been reduced to a flesh puddle on the ass end of Williamsburg. This was where they’d ended up: Jews killing Jews before the Gentiles had a chance. Thelma refused to believe that they’d become the embodiment of the crude caricatures anti-Semites published in the city’s broadsheets. But she couldn’t explain this: the man in the chenille wrapper. One bloodstained shoelace had come undone. Red gore like a cow’s afterbirth splashed the floor.

  The pockmarked stranger handed Thelma a bucket and mop. She raised her hand to refuse, but the man shook his head no. Apparently, if she was there, they were going to use her—the story of her life. Maybe the killers had to tie her to the crime or flay her, too. She glanced from the gore to the goon, unable to figure out how she was going to clean her way out of this mess, but when he said, “Quit stalling,” she realized she’d rather scrub than be rubbed out and join Pretty.

  Looking away from the stranger, Thelma removed her good dress and stripped to her slip, as if she were about to clean her mother’s kitchen floor. She threaded her hem through her bra so the fabric wouldn’t absorb the blood. Her protruding ribs humiliated her—but this wasn’t the situation for vanity. Nobody would be ogling her flesh that night.

  With Pretty’s cheap cologne still clinging to the air, she mopped up the dead man’s body fluid, which turned the rinse water pink. After a while, she hoisted the heavy bucket and sloshed the filth into the sink and, retching, her eyes stinging with sweat and tears, refilled it again and again. Just when she sighed in relief that she was almost done, she spied splashes on the underside of the baseboard, on the insides of the table legs.

  A second stranger with a sandpapery voice entered while she knelt, searching out stains with an old rag. She observed the guys’ ankles as they muscled the body from the room. They should have called him Lumpy, not Pretty, the thugs kvetched. When the back door slammed, she rose, grabbed the third glass, and gulped the dead man’s vodka before leaving the kitchen in bra and soiled slip. The shock began to diminish as the liquor did its work. But the horror increased.

  From his armchair, Abie spat smoke and said, “Get dressed.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.” She carried her crumpled clothes before her, heels in her left hand. Red had been her favorite color. Not anymore. Entering Abie’s bedroom, she noticed the way the bedspread had been stripped away, revealing the shabby, torn sheets beneath. She’d bet his linen was clean over at his apartment on Rodney Avenue, but he still didn’t want anything to do with Tillie and their son.

  Zipping her dress, she kicked herself for dropping by after midnight, for assuming Abie needed her as much as she did him. How could she ever look up to her brother again after scrubbing a corpse from his kitchen floor?

  Chapter 2

  Manhattan, August 1905

  Thelma felt her older sister enter the room before she saw the tips of Annie’s brown shoes, her good ones, and then the heels, rotating in circles, stamping a dance of impatience. The fourteen-year-old was rushing toward womanhood, which included keeping her three-year-old sister quiet and off their widowed mother’s nerves. Thelma, hidden under the kitchen table by the oilskin cloth the color of shmaltz, chicken fat, cradled a lighter in her lap.

  Even with her back flush against the metal leg farthest from Annie, she felt the furnace blast of her sister’s anger as she called, “Thelma,” and then “Thelma” again, as if it were a curse.

  Thelma felt a sudden, urgent need to pee as Annie raised the oilcloth and knelt. Her sister’s close-set blue eyes flashed, enraged, as she spotted Thelma. Mama had warned the little girl not to touch the lighter. She had said Don’t play with matches, don’t touch the stove. As the littlest cowered under the table in a hostile apartment where her family were visitors but not guests, she braced but did not resist. She was terrified and helpless and horribly guilty. Annie didn’t bother to ask her to come out. She reached in with her long nails, as if her sister were a stray cat, grabbing her by her arm above the elbow, where there was so little meat. The little girl squealed as Annie, digging her talons deeper, dragged her out on her rear end over the sticky linoleum.

  “Leave me alone,” Thelma said, emerging sideways into the kitchen’s dusty light. Mrs. Junger had warned the lodgers to stay out except at mealtimes, and this was verboten, forbidden. Annie, spiky brush curlers framing her shiny, round Polish doll face, colla
psed on a wooden dining chair. It was August hot, and there had been a long argument among the tenants over whether to open the kitchen windows during the day to create cross-ventilation or shut them. Nothing worked.

  That humid, oppressive New York summer of 1905, the widow Lorber and her four children were living on Manhattan’s East 106th Street. The United Hebrew Charities paid their rent directly to the Jungers, who leased a large second-floor railroad flat above a pediatrician’s office where babies cried from morning until night. Even with the windows closed, Thelma could smell the corpselike ripeness of garbage in the courtyard and then Annie’s sweat, undisguised by her penny cologne.

  Annie felt her curlers and sucked her teeth in disappointment before reeling the child in between her thighs, which were strong despite their outer softness. Already well into puberty, Annie boasted breasts larger than were good for a girl her age.

  Exhaling peppermint and garlic, Annie demanded to know what Thelma clasped in her fist. The younger sister wondered where the older had gotten the mint and if she had another and if, after the fuss to come, she could request one. Even at three, she knew that simple negotiation. Wait for it. Pain first then, perhaps, pleasure.

  Annie clamped Thelma between her thighs, gripped her right wrist in her left hand while holding the gadget aloft in her right. “Schmulie’s?”

  Thelma nodded yes. She called him an uncle, but he was really a boarder, too. Tall and rickety, Schmulie was a happy bachelor who had two tricks to entertain children. Settled in the kitchen in his undershirt, as much fluffy white hair on his back as his chest, he thumbed the lighter’s trigger and dared Thelma in his raspy voice to blow it out. She never could. He dared. She blew. This inevitably inspired delight and frustration and maybe a penny for her labors if he was flush at the races. His other trick? Removing his dentures and flying the bared teeth at Thelma, clicking like maracas, until she crumpled with laughter, breathless, ruined for any further attempts snuffing the dancing flame.

  As uncles went, Schmulie was a good one, meaning benign, just coaxing a burst of laughter. He never caressed Thelma’s knees beneath her yellow flour-sack dress with its red birds on the pockets, or searched to ensure she was wearing panties like some other uncles did. Although, Uncle Schmulie did pinch her face—she bore a lot of cheek for a skinny girl.