Boogaloo On 2nd Avenue Read Free Page B

nothing," he declared triumphantly
    "But what do you do on Saturdays?" Sarah shouted down from above Nathan's head, instantly erasing the victory grin from Arnie's face. Nathan was pleased. He sometimes called Sarah "the Silencer."
    "Why Saturdays, sweetie?" Arnie asked.
    "Because you can watch television on Saturdays. It's allowed. So what do you do?"
    "Hey," said Arnie, "you hear about that guy Rabbinowitz?"
    "Eli? The blintzes guy on Houston?"
    "They just found him." Arnie stopped and looked awkwardly at Sarah. "On the street. From last night."
    "Heart attack?"
    "No, somebody did him."
    "Geez," said Nathan. "Who?"
    "They don't know."
    "Geez."
    "Geez," Sarah repeated. "How did he get lost?"
    Nathan handed a $1 bill down to Arnie. "You ought to lay low today or you will end up questioned by the police."
    "They've already stopped by. That one over there."
    He pointed at a plainclothes officer, thickset and powerfully built. Why did they have plainclothes policemen? The gray suits they wore were as identifiable as uniforms and too hot for summer weather. At least uniformed patrolmen got a lightweight blue uniform, but there was no summer-weight suit for plainclothesmen. It was the time of year that plainclothesmen were beginning to sweat. But this one was different. He had a summer suit, a vanilla-colored linen. And despite this fine summer wear, he still looked like a cop. Maybe that was why most of them didn't bother about their clothes.
    The officer was across the street, questioning the man everyone called Sal A. There were three Sals. They all sold homemade mozzarella and opinions. Sal A was on Avenue A, and he had the smallest shop, furnished with a counter, a cash register, a tub of unsalted mozzarella, a tub of salted mozzarella, a rack of long seeded bread, and a few trays of delicacies he had prepared for the day. Every morning he baked sfogli-atella, and Nathan, who loved sfogliatella, could smell them from his apartment the instant they came out of the oven, the fine leaves of the pastry turned amber and the hot ricotta cheese inside heaving like lungs. But Nathan, now that he was entering his late thirties, had started noticing changes in his body, including two flabby, rounded bulges above the hips on either side. He would lift up his shirt to stare at them in the mirror, trying to push them back in with his hands. But they would balloon back into position. Sarah, noting the morning ritual, had taken to calling the bulges "Daddy's tellas," and Nathan did not need an explanation. It was short for sfogliatella.
    Besides baking his own sfogliatella, Sal A was different from the other two Sals in several other ways. To begin with, his name was Guido, but he called himself Sal when he opened the store because he could see that in this neighborhood Sicilian shops were run by people named Sal. He was soft-spoken and had thick, silver gray hair. The other two Sals always shouted and were desperately and futilely trying to preserve the few remains of their youthful black hair.
    But the other two Sals would have said that the important difference was that they were from Palermo, the tough, crime-ridden Sicilian capital, whereas Sal A was from Catania, the tough, crime-ridden Sicilian second city at the foot of a live volcano.
    "Hey, Joey."
    "Eh, Sal."
    "Eh, Joey, you want some mozzarell'?"
    "No, gazie, I'm working," Joey, the cop in linen, told Sal A as though there were a specific rule about mozzarella while on duty. In fact, he was saving his appetite for Sal First, who had a bigger shop on First Avenue and whose mother made caponata. In Sal As caponata, the eggplant, olives, and capers were turned dark with a little unsweetened cocoa powder, bitter and intoxicating, like coffee. Sal A always sprinkled chopped almonds on top because their whiteness glowed against the dark vegetables. Sal First said that this way of doing caponata was "Spanish" and would not be acceptable in Palermo. That might have been true because the