Looking for Przybylski Read online

  ALSO BY K.C. FREDERICK

  Accomplices

  Country of Memory

  The Fourteenth Day

  Inland

  After Lyletown

  Looking for

  PRZYBYLSKI

  K.C. Frederick

  Copyright © 2012 by K.C. Frederick

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.

  For information, address:

  The Permanent Press

  4170 Noyac Road

  Sag Harbor, NY 11963

  www.thepermanentpress.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Frederick, K. C. –

  Looking for Przybylski / K.C. Frederick.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-57962-273-2

  eISBN 1-57962-338-7

  1. Self-realization—Fiction. 2. Life change events—Fiction. 3. Detroit (Mich.)—Fiction. 4. Road fiction. I. Title.

  PS3556.R3755L66 2012

  813’.54—dc23 2012016406

  Printed in the United States of America.

  For Toni, of course.

  But also for my sister Fran Clancy, in recognition of the help she’s given to all of my books, and in memory of my brothers Tim and Mike.

  CHAPTER ONE

  When Ziggy Czarnecki walks into Rok’s funeral parlor for Eddie Figlak’s wake he isn’t thinking about his old nemesis Przybylski, he certainly isn’t thinking about going to California; all he’s hoping for is to get this unpleasant business over with as quickly as possible.

  Eddie’s drawn a pretty good crowd, Ziggy can see right away. But then, he always was something of a crowd-pleaser when he was alive. At a certain time of the night he was likely to launch into a long, complicated story that went in circles and lost itself, about how he could have been this or that—a doctor, a lawyer, an airline pilot: whatever was the last thing he saw on TV before his meter clicked off—and sooner or later he’d forget himself and start all over, the story becoming even more complicated the next time around. Then he’d get sad, and cry, maybe, and likely toward the end he’d start screaming about Stella, his wife, asking God what sin he’d committed that could possibly justify his being hooked up with her. Really, when he got going like that you could listen to him all night; he should have been a priest.

  Ziggy’s put off coming to the funeral parlor as long as he could. A lot of people like wakes, he knows, but he isn’t one of them. For one thing, when you get to be his age, you can’t help feeling that when you walk in everybody figures you for the preview of coming attractions. So he just signs the book at the entrance to the chapel where Eddie’s laid out, puts his head down and makes a beeline through the dim voices straight for the casket. He drops to his knees at the kneeler and buries his face in his hands as if he were praying. Only then, when he’s ready at last, does he look at Eddie Figlak.

  Man and boy he knew Eddie for almost sixty years, through the long bad times and the sweet short (so they seem now, anyway) good times of the numbers; but when he looks at his dead friend tonight, the first thing he feels is disappointment. There he is, lying in the silk-lined casket with the plaster face of some old pope and the comfortable paunch nowhere to be seen, hands folded on his chest with a purple-beaded rosary; and he’s wearing the most god-awful shit-colored double-breasted suit that makes him look like a Yugoslav just off the plane. Eddie, whatever his faults, was a sharp dresser, and when Ziggy sees that $29.95 Goodwill special he can’t help thinking it’s got to be Stella, who’s having her last laugh, dressing him up this way; unless it’s the work of old Sam Rok, the undertaker, who’s charging high and buying cut-rate clothes for his customers’ going-away outfits.

  Ziggy’s still thinking about that awful shirt his friend is wearing when he has to blink because he could swear he saw Eddie’s hand move. And what was that? Who the hell could be belching like that here in Rok’s parlor. His first thought is that it had to be Mike Skowron, who pops onions into his mouth the way most people eat peanuts—but isn’t Mike supposed to be laid up at home with a bad back? He looks at Eddie again, keeping his eyes away from his friend’s face this time. Who gets the rosary after the funeral? Of course, they’ll tell you they bury it with the body, but you can’t just believe that. Sam Rok probably strips . . . There, out of the corner of his eye, he sees it once more and he almost jumps from the kneeler: it’s Eddie’s head that moves this time, it actually jerks up an inch or so from the silk pillow where it’s been resting. Jesus Christ. Ziggy looks away, and for a couple of seconds he’s embarrassed for his friend, though nobody else in the room seems to have noticed. Then he realizes what he’s just told himself: that Eddie’s corpse has actually moved.

  He closes his eyes and hides his face in his hands. This time he really is praying: God—whoever—let me be dreaming. All at once he realizes that he’s scared shitless. Maybe he’s going crazy; if he can only get the hell out of here quietly before anyone notices that he’s flipped. At the moment, though, he doesn’t trust his knees to hold him up and he takes a deep breath, inhaling the thick sweet smell of the lilies, praying that when he looks again he’ll find out he only needs a new pair of glasses.

  But after a couple of seconds it’s clear that peace isn’t going to come to Ziggy just with the closing of his eyes, because even in the darkness he’s becoming aware of the commotion going on around him. The background murmur of Rok’s parlor has suddenly quieted and Ziggy feels like a fisherman who just knows, having turned his back in order to dig out a new worm from the bait can, that the lake has frozen solid around him, July or no July. There’s a sudden total silence, as if a giant plug has been yanked out of the room’s floor, then a low gasp, excited voices, a long moan and something that sounds like the beginning of a religious song in Polish. “O Boze”—Oh, God, a woman shrieks and Ziggy knows now that nothing can make him open his eyes. Whatever’s going on he wants no part of, and he’s trying to recall the exact layout of the chapel so that he can ease his way out of here with his eyes still shut; when suddenly he hears another belch, loud as cannon-fire, and he knows it can only be coming from the casket. Before he realizes it he’s looking at Eddie: there he is, dead pope’s face and all, eyelids shut tight, hands crossed on the chest of his double-breasted Yugoslav suit, and he’s sitting upright in the casket.

  Ziggy, drenched with sweat, hears metal chairs tumbling in the background as a strange unpleasant smell reaches him and suddenly, with a quickness he thought his sixty-five-year-old body had forgotten decades ago, he’s on his feet—shouldering his way past white-faced women who are holding on to chairs as if they’re walkers, openmouthed men hurriedly crossing themselves, dashing past the new monsignor who looks like an altar boy; and with all the grace of a bowling ball clattering down the stairs, he’s soon just outside the door of Rok’s funeral home, looking into the cold wet street, his breath frosting on the damp air, and he’s hearing the distant comforting sound of a siren on its way to something perfectly normal, like a murder. Behind him people are shouting and he recognizes the voice of Eddie’s ancient mother wailing, “It’s a sign from God.”

  As the thin aluminum storm door closes behind him, Ziggy stands there in the street for a few seconds, his head filled with the excited cries of the people in that room. He wishes God would just stick to his own business and worry about heaven—things are spooky enough in Detroit these days without signs from the Almighty dropped without warning into Polack funeral parlors. What he needs just now isn’t any sign from heaven; he needs a stiff drink, something to stop the tremors that make his jumpy hands feel as if they aren’
t connected to the rest of him; and the sudden hard pounding of his heart, the breath snatched away from him, like what you’d feel seconds after a close call on the highway.

  Not that, at this distance from what caused it, that rush of his blood is totally unpleasant, any more than the feeling that you just survived some awful danger—he’s alive and alert, he can probably see more acutely than normal. But the feeling sure as hell needs a drink to go along with it.

  The crowd at Connie’s is still fairly small, but Ziggy knows that throughout the evening people will be coming in from Rok’s parlor talking about Eddie Figlak. Some of them will keep repeating the scientific explanation he’s heard a dozen times before he finally left the place, about gases trapped in the body that the embalmer hadn’t been able to get out. “It’s worse with juicers like Eddie,” someone will be sure to say; and others will shake their heads muttering “I don’t know, I don’t know,” their eyes gone glassy—those are the ones who’ll be headed for the confessionals like a thrashing school of smelt on its annual spawning run as soon as St. Connie’s opens tomorrow. And, before a day has passed, the number of those who’ll claim to have seen Eddie Figlak’s last performance will add up to a fair-sized Saturday afternoon crowd at Tiger Stadium.

  Ziggy’s been lucky to get his drink before they’ve really started coming in, and he’s been able to belt down the lovely rasping shot that makes his eyes sting without having been dragged into a conversation. “Ah,” he says to himself alone, feeling the alcohol rush to distant parts of his body. He’s comfortable for the first time all day. He holds the glass with the beer chaser and lets himself sink into the dark brown cave of Connie’s with its heavy airless smell, its rows of shiny bottles arranged in front of the long mirror, its beer ads dangling above the bar: huge clocks on plastic chains, revolving disks and illuminated labels. He brings the beer to his lips, takes a sip and puts it back on the cool bar, never letting go of the glass.

  “Christ, that Sophie was something . . .” It’s little Jimmie Bork talking to Walter Romanski, a pair of old guys like himself. “Every time, like when it was summer and you could see those arms—I never saw such arms. Some women have tits . . . Holy Jesus, she could punch her way through that wall, I swear—I’d bet on it.”

  “I could never figure how a skinny guy like Gabby married her.”

  “She wasn’t always that big, they say.”

  “She used to really throw him down the stairs?”

  “Once in a while, yeah.” Jimmie’s quiet for a few seconds. “Christ, I think about those arms. She’d be sitting right here, where you’re sitting. And those arms: each one as big as a ham—only red, because she’d get sunburned.”

  “It’s hard to believe she’s gone.”

  “Yeah. And Gabby too.”

  Ziggy nurses his beer. This is what you have to expect all night, he knows. That’s what he hates about wakes and funerals: not just the caskets and the black, the priest droning and the smell of incense, the shovelsful of dirt; but this: the way everybody’s going to be talking about the old times, all night long, tomorrow, the next few days.

  “That Gabby was a great guy . . .” And there’ll be that too. Gabby Sendlik, who never did a day’s work in his life, who mooched drinks and lived off his 230-pound wife Sophie, the numbers runner, who even occasionally stole money from his own kids—hell, they used to say he’d sell both of them for a bottle of Seagram’s—now he’s being remembered as a great guy. Gabby was a smart guy, maybe: he knew a deal when he had one. But a great guy?

  Ziggy allows himself a grunt as he feels the old ache in the left shoulder—all his aches and pains: the knee, the shoulder, the ear—seem to collect on the left side. He tries to concentrate. Really, he wants to try to remember what it looked like when Eddie Figlak popped up in his casket—it happened so fast that it rushed by him—and the conversation is distracting.

  “Remember when old Gabby climbed the telephone pole and cut the wires so the cops wouldn’t hear the number come in?”

  “He was a hell of a guy.”

  Well, that’s true enough: you have to give Gabby credit for that. The one time he did something out of the ordinary was the day of the raid when he cut those wires. Ziggy still remembers the befuddled look on the lieutenant’s face when his flunky with the buck teeth was standing before him in Ziggy’s front hall, holding the phone as if it were a used rubber john, saying. “I’m getting nothing. It’s dead.” The cops didn’t need any evidence that might come over the phone, there was plenty in the house. Still, it was good to see them frustrated.

  Ziggy laughs to himself. He rewarded Gabby then, gave him a bottle of booze and a turkey, invited him out to the Fourth of July stag party on the island where Gabby got drunk and fell asleep in the sun and got burned like a lobster. Ziggy holds the glass to his mouth, his lips touching the thin foamy head of the lukewarm beer; and he remembers the island: the sun beating down on the blue-green water, the warm smell of the creosoted wood on the dock, the drone of the powerboats on the St. Clair river, Ace Stepaniak crunching up the gravel drive in his white battleship of a Continental, the trunk full of fireworks bought in Toledo, the green willows with the long hanging branches that touched the quiet water of the canal.

  He puts the glass down. Remember Rule Number One. When he lost it all in the fifties and, after a rough decade or so, he decided he’d just as soon keep on breathing anyway, he established Rule Number One: don’t ever look back. He turns when a noise from the door signals the entrance of about a half-dozen people just as Jimmie and Walter move off to the pool table.

  Come to think of it, there never was a Rule Number Two.

  It’s stupid, he knows, to think you can keep people out of Connie’s—there’s no way he can have the place to himself tonight, no matter how much he might want it. Hell, he couldn’t even have managed that in the old days when he owned Connie’s. But there he goes, breaking the rule again. All because of Eddie Figlak.

  And it looks like he’s going to have to continue to pay too. The crowd that’s just come in, Rabbit Baranek and his gang of beer-drunks, is only a couple of years out of St. Connie’s High, the kind that like to call him “old-timer.” (Not that he isn’t, but you can mean a lot of different things with that expression.) Ziggy signals Turk, the bartender, for another quick one. Turk doesn’t go back as far as he does, but at least he isn’t a young punk and Ziggy holds him there for a minute like a hostage, to make sure Rabbit and his twerps keep their distance. Turk doesn’t seem to mind.

  “Was it like they said, Ziggy? I mean, did Eddie Figlak really sit up in the casket?”

  “Yeah.” He hopes that’s enough on the subject.

  Turk laughs. “That’s more than he could have done here a lot of nights. What’s Rok doing? Embalming them with a do-it-yourself kit?”

  “Sam Rok’s a cheap bastard. He’ll cut any corner he can find.”

  “I guess that’s one thing you can say about old Przybylski,” Turk sighs. “He knew how to put them away in style.”

  “Przybylski wasn’t that great.” Ziggy hasn’t thought for a long time about the man who used to be the parish’s other undertaker and that’s all right as far as he’s concerned. He remembers the large smooth face, like wax fruit, the gold-rimmed glasses, thin blond hair, mustache and soft purring voice. “I never liked that guy,” Ziggy says, though this is hardly news. “Remember the way he used to sit there and sip Vernors—did anyone ever see him drink real stuff? He’d sit there as if he was watching everybody and waiting for us all to kick off, like he was mentally taking measurements for our caskets.”

  Turk frowns and looks toward the group that’s just taken a table. “What I heard, he sure was measuring yours—” The bartender stops all at once as if he’s just slapped himself and his eyes are suddenly restless. “Hey, I’ve got to run now,” he says, flicking his head toward the TV, where President Ford is shown coming down the steps of Air Force One. “Some guy wants me to switch channels.”
r />   For a moment as Turk moves toward the TV, Ziggy doesn’t know why he feels confused and irritated. Something’s up, but what? When he realizes he hasn’t downed his second shot he makes up for it in a hurry. The whiskey steadies him: it’s like when your car shimmies at a certain speed and you can either slow down or go faster to keep the front end from jolting. With the shot he’s going faster and his head is now clear, he knows what it is that’s focused his attention. It’s Turk’s comment about Przybylski. Was Turk really saying what he seemed to be saying? That the silky undertaker who left the city ten years ago, his caskets full of money, that he had something to do with the police bust back in ’52 that was the start of the finish of the numbers house and transformed Ziggy from the numbers kingpin to just another Polack? The shimmy is gone and the car is flying along the highway, tires buzzing and wind rushing in through the vents: for the first time in a long while Ziggy lets the car speed on, he’s allowing himself to be curious, there’s something out there that he really wants to find out.

  He swallows some beer. He always had his suspicions about Przybylski: from the time he and the undertaker donated money for the electronic scoreboard in the St. Connie’s gym and he was told that Przybylski resented having his name on the device alongside a “cheap crook’s.” “Do you think I like to see my name alongside some bodysnatcher’s?” Ziggy answered anyone who told him that. But though it was true that Przybylski looked sneaky enough for anything, Ziggy never had any real proof that he’d been involved in the bust; and the fact is, there were a lot of people by then who might have wanted to bring him down. But does Turk know something definite? And how can he know?

  Ziggy looks up from the bar and sees his reflection in the mirror: the white, close-cropped hair, the bespectacled popeyes and the sagging face, the figure, even seated, somehow smaller than he expected it to be—it’s always a surprise at first, and makes him feel the way he did when he came back into a room where he’d been watching TV and Maggie had switched the channel: for a moment he’d wonder why the cop show had so many wisecracks until he realized he was watching a comedy; once he made the adjustment, everything was clear.