Boogaloo On 2nd Avenue by Mark Kurlansky Page B

a schnorrer he was." She did not want to charge full price to Ruth's friend Esther, who visited from the Bronx on Saturdays. But Ruth wanted Sonia to charge her. "Otherwise you'll end up operating like a Seltzer." Sonia wrote the observation in her notebook.
    Sonia and Esther would trade neighborhood crime reports while Sonia's skilled fingers reshaped Esther's soft body.
    "We had a shooting down here."
    "It's everywhere now Who did they shoot?"
    From the next room came the insistent Sarah: "By da stupple, struk a stibble."
    "Let's go back to feygele," said Ruth, laughing.
    "Rabbinowitz. Do you remember him?"
    "The dairy place!"
    "Yes," said Sonia, and braced herself for the standard eulogy she had been hearing. But all Esther said, her face framed by an oval cushion at the head of the table, her voice trailing off underneath, was, "Not such a pearl, that one." Sonia would give her a good rub.
    "Feygele, feygele, pi-pi-pi," Ruth and Sarah sang.
    Nathan bought a Times from Mohammed and walked to his shop. What was this sense of predestination, the fatal error? Was it somehow tied to Rabbinowitz? He resolved not to do anything because of the Rabbinowitz shooting. He must be alert not to let that event alter his course. That decision of a decade ago on when to make the deposit would not be part of his destiny
    But then again, might not the decision to ignore the shooting be in itself a fatal error? Could he both not respond to and not ignore the shooting? Was this possible?
    Pepe Le Moko curled his soft black fur around Nathan's leg, always glad to see him. The name came from Nathan's favorite movie, Algiers, which he had seen exactly fourteen times.
    He first saw it at the St. Mark's in a triple feature for a dollar along with the French original. He could no longer remember the third film. Pepe Le Moko, the cat, really did resemble Charles Boyer in his black suits and black shirts. Pepe Le Moko was king of the Casbah in Algiers, a maze of garbage-strewn alleys, stairways, bridges, and tunnels too complex for outsiders, including the police, to find their way through. But if he ever set foot outside the Casbah, the police would grab him instantly. Sometimes he went to a gate and looked out at clean streets and cars and the world outside. But he stayed in his slum kingdom and lived almost regally—until he met Hedy Lamarr. In pursuit of Lamarr, he was lured out and handcuffed by the police right at the port with the whole Mediterranean just out of reach. He sees her, a tiny figure on the stern of an ocean liner leaving for Marseilles, and he runs uselessly toward the ship. He is shot by the police, who think he is escaping, and dies on the dock as the ship sails away.
    Nathan thought about the movie, rerunning it in his memory, imagining Boyer's chocolatey baritone while he stroked Pepe Le Moko's black fur. Thinking of the movie always gave him a strange, melancholy, almost frightened feeling. He realized now that it was a milder version of the same feeling he had experienced on the F train. So that was not the first time. And there were the pillows that morning. When else had this feeling come to him?
    Nathan sank into the pivoting chair in his copy shop and, as he began most days, picked up his newspaper and, to the lively tintinnabulation of a Beethoven piano concerto, turned to the obituary page and began counting. An unusually bad day: Of six obituaries, four had been younger than him. AIDS, cancer, heart attack, and one didn't say. One thing Nathan hated was an obit that failed to give the cause of death. Why did they think people read obituaries? Nathan railed in silence. Not to read about lives. We want to know about the deaths. Life is easy. It's death we are trying to learn about.
    Thoughts of death were abruptly shoved aside in the second movement of the Beethoven when Jasha Sternberg walked through the door and, as though it were contraband, nervously placed on the counter a flyer to be copied. Jasha owned the