Hunting Arnold
Hunting Arnold
Hurrying down the steps of my apartment building, cheap Mexican briefcase with embossed Aztec calendar slapping against my thigh, I notice two men staring at me from across the narrow street. Instantly, they spin around, fascinated by the fire hydrant and my neighbor’s droopy hydrangea bush, a bit straight out of Monty Python. I unlock my lime-green Karmann Ghia, climb in, stare at them—they stare back—and drive off, the encounter quickly forgotten in the challenge of teaching Shakespeare to would-be auto mechanics. Next morning, they’re back, dressed in beautifully tailored suits, waiting for me. In Gowanus, trouble isn’t even awake at 7:00 AM., so I walk over.
“Can I help you?”
`They flash badges, hand me cards, speak with startling English accents, “Scotland Yard, Criminal Investigation Division,” words I recognize from Ian Fleming and John Le Carre. British detectives arrived in Brooklyn to investigate...me?
“We have a few questions,” one of them says pulling a black leatherbound notebook from his jacket pocket. It’s so Hollywood-familiar I almost laugh.
***
It hits me: They’re here for Arnold, the seductive scoundrel manning the front desk of the hotel in South Kensington when I arrive in London as a Newsweek intern. Arnold Epstein, an engaging, glib, and fantastical liar, nephew of an Israeli general, ladies’ man, world traveler, trader in precious metals, and the fantasies of those naïve enough to become entangled in his web. A rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief, depending on which Arnold you encounter.
`My first friend in the UK, schooling me on politics, football, royal gossip, vintage sportscars, hole-in-the-wall restaurants, mad-rich Arabs, Chelsea girls, punks, a musician named Elvis Costello then performing in a century-old gay pub on Old Brompton Road across from my faded, pink ghost-haunted bed-sit. If the need arose, Arnold would slip me a key to an empty room while he spent his nights on a cot in the hotel basement.
I’m mesmerized by his tales of gold-trading for Mocatta Metals, a firm founded in 1671, his seduction of the daughter of the richest, most prominent Jewish family in Calcutta—I have no idea there are Jews in India—infuriating her local suitors, their spectacular Bollywood-style wedding, relocating to London and living—Mick Jagger is a neighbor— on posh Cheyne Walk.
Arnold introduced me to a constellation of characters I would never have met: Cluny Wells, the young Rod Stewart’s girlfriend who shared Eel Pie Island adventures; redhaired Fiona who sold antiquarian lace on Portobello Road and hosted an elegant dinner on my 30th birthday; the male model represented by an agency specializing in ugly people; the son of an MP who drove tractor-trailers overland from France to Saudi Arabia, adventures out of Arabian Nights; an Olympic sprinter who traded his Crockett and Jones shoes for my unobtainable Adidas running shoes; Rowan Beech, a snooker player who lost his car in a match, leaving me somewhere on the Thames in the middle of the night.
***
In London, I’m sensing possibilities far beyond my Gowanus roots. Arnold, in his 40s, is short, balding, unfortunate looking, trapped I decide, in an oppressive class system that miraculously seems permeable to me. A combination Walter Mitty and J. Alfred Prufrock—until he disappears with my lifesavings. He takes Sal’s money too.
The scam involves an exotic car, an obsession I’ve had since high school when instead of working out physics and geometry problems, I spent endless hours imagining being a first-time buyer weighing options on Corvette Stingrays I still can’t afford. I can distinguish 1960 Chevy Impalas from 1959s, Chrysler 392 cubic inch hemi engines from Pontiac 421s. When I discover a car’s model year is inscribed on its taillight lens, I goofily examine every parked car in Gowanus quizzing myself. `
What undoes me is the Allard J2X, a postwar British sportscar powered by a Cadillac V8 engine, a predecessor of the Cobra, that tyrannosaurus on wheels. It begins when I overhear Arnold at the front desk chatting with a grinning car collector from Los Angeles. Of course, Arnold has unearthed a J2X languishing on a country estate long after its original owner passed away. A “barn find,” the holy grail of car fanatics.
A green-eyed monster stirs in my heart.
***
Arnold rings my doorbell a year after I tell him to look me up if he ever got to New York, a thing I thought highly unlikely. When I arrive back in Brooklyn after my internship, I’m certain a job offer is forthcoming. I’d worked hard, developed fresh story ideas, never made a mistake, got along with my colleagues. Instead, Rod Gander, Newsweek’s Chief of Correspondents, tells me to come back “in ten years.” Unemployed, in a troubled relationship, imagining myself in love with a Swedish woman I’d known for three days, five years earlier. Rather than resumes, I write longhand letters she never acknowledges. Soon enough, I’m back substitute teaching, averaging $80 a week with my shiny Ivy League degree.
A month later, Arnold is still camped out in my tiny office, brewing his tea, doing laundry, carefully pressing his few shirts and slacks, hogging the bathroom, charming my mother with his plummy accent, constantly jotting notes on paper scraps, whispering into my phone. He says he’s prepping a pitch—an indoor soccer league--for ABC’s Roone Arledge, a name I associate with Howard Cosell, “Dandy Don” Meredith, Frank Gifford, “Monday Night Football, “The Wide World of Sports,” “Nightline.” In short, another universe.
When he tells me he has a line on another Allard in the UK, this one priced thousands of dollars below market value, I practically swoon. Am I this naïve? Gowanus is a petri dish of luxuriant schemers and con artists. Arnold drops clues like breadcrumbs: an orthodox Jew who eats ravioli, braciole, sausage, a mountain of treyf at my parents’ Sunday dinners, who tries to have his way with Ruth my observant Columbia classmate the moment I set them up. He’s hardly “repairing the world.”
One afternoon, on Flatbush Avenue, we’re accosted by a group of bearded, black-clad Hasidim standing outside an orange van that looks like a food truck. A “Mitzvah Tank” emblazoned with the face of an elderly, white-bearded, rabbi and a logo, “Judaism on the Go!”
“Are you Jewish?” one shouts.
Nope,” I answer shaking my head. Growing up, I was so not Jewish I mistook two Hasidim for the Smith Brothers cough drop makers. Arnold says nothing. That night, he wonders if I know 770 Eastern Parkway. In college, I delivered mobbed-up Italian ices to a Black-owned luncheonette on Kingston Ave., a few blocks from Eastern Parkway. A dicey job.
“That’s Crown Heights,” I say. “Not far. Want to take a ride?”
The nonstop talker is suddenly at a loss for words. “No...No...No. I couldn’t,” he mumbles.
“Sure?”
“Another time.”
In London, I was startled to learn Arnold was a disciple of Menachem Schneerson, a 75-year-old Hasidic rabbi based in Brooklyn. The “Rebbe” is the driving force behind Chabad, a Jewish renewal movement so fervent his followers consider him Moshiach (messiah). Arnold insists Schneerson, it’s his likeness plastered on the Mitzvah tanks, literally performs miracles.
770 Eastern Parkway is the Rebbe’s World Headquarters, a Gothic Revival mansion that his followers have duplicated 35 times in cities as far off as El Paso, Milan, Jerusalem, Sidney. Imagine a pope with three dozen Vaticans. I’ve seen hundreds of the Rebbe’s black-clad Hasidim sporting shtreimel (round fur hats) payot (side curls), and tzitzit (tassels), running around Crown Heights like ants on an anthill.
***
Arnold’s mention of a second Allard inflames my old obsession. I have a bad history with cars. While other college students drive MGs and VW bugs, I work two jobs to restore a ’53 Ford hot rod with a missing front bumper and a turquoise metalflake steering wheel. The “speed shop” owner—I’d paid in advance to get him “to work faster”—disappears. I appeal to Uncle Honey, and he delivers a well-deserved “slap in the head” for my stupidity. A Gowanus character, “Jackie Carr,” persuades the thief’s father, a pastry store owner in Bensonhurst, to make good.
In the Catskills, I spend $300 on a red 1960 Alfa Romeo Fat Ernie discovers rusting behind a gas station. Starts right up, but nothing else works. Undaunted, I drive 130 miles back to Gowanus, then decide I’ll ride through Prospect Park’s curvy inner loop “to see how it handles.” When the cops pull me over, there are too many violations—speeding, failure to signal, wrong plates, no inspection, no insurance, no registration, no headlights, taillights, brake lights—to fit on a citation. We go back and forth until finally, one shouts, “Just get it the fuck out of here!”
I persuade Sal, now married with two young children, and a mortgage on a Connecticut starter home, to partner with me on the second Allard. It doesn’t take much convincing: we’ve already calculated our profit after flipping the car to some moneyed WASP in Greenwich. Besides, our Allard wouldn’t last two minutes with “Anthony Lips” and “Philly Horse Teeth” roaming Gowanus.
I come up with whatever thousands of dollars Arnold requires, then drive him to Kennedy Airport to catch a London flight I’ve charged to my new Amex card. A quick embrace, a promise to be in touch “soonest.” I head back to Brooklyn on the Belt Parkway, the lights on the Verrazano Bridge twinkling, me grinning, and my fantasy life, my only real life, swirling up to meet me.
I don’t see Arnold for seven years.
***
At the 72nd precinct, a bored detective half-listens to my tale of an Orthodox Jewish Englishman running off with thousands of dollars I’d given him to buy a car I’d never seen, few people had heard of, and for which I have zero documentation. I can’t even establish my “Arnold” is Arnold Epstein. He’s covered his tracks that well.
When I meet the British detectives in Snooky’s Pub on Seventh Avenue, they’re in a scrum of flirtatious women, all smiles, and charming accents. I’m distraught. Arnold’s mockery of the trust I’d placed in him, and others before him, is a familiar hurt going back to my father’s beatings and insults, Sister Malachy’s relentless cruelty, and a belief I’ve held far too long, that Gowanus is a normal place to come of age.
Arnold is a wanted man. He’s conned a British company into paying him for a shipment of nonexistent Spanish ceramic tiles. The detectives traced him through long distance calls from my phone, followed him to Brooklyn, assuming we’re partners.
He never flew to London. He strolled out of the British Airways terminal, exchanged his ticket, caught a flight to Las Vegas, gambled away our $6000. He then traveled to California posing as the Chabadnik nephew of a decorated general in the Six Day War, giving impassioned speeches to affluent synagogue congregations, collecting donations, and, I learn, seducing rebbetzin.
It hits me: 770 Eastern Parkway. Arnold wouldn’t dare show up. He was terrified because he knew Rebbe Schneerson would look into his heart and see corruption.
Shame and humiliation transform into murderous rage, exactly like my father’s. I’m going to find Arnold.
***
My apartment is a crime scene. A frayed white shirt with a laundry tag hangs in the closet. Names and numbers are scattered on bits of paper in a tiny, obsessively neat handwriting. Under a canopy of Cadbury Fruit & Nut wrappers, legal pad pages, crumpled, torn, but decipherable, including Arnold’s letter to Roone Arledge. Wedged between bed and the wall, envelopes with a London return address.
A business card from a Manhattan antiques dealer named Epstein sends me flying out the door. At Lexington Ave. near 34th Street, I pass a laundry, its imprint on the shirt in my closet, and force myself not to run. Breathless, I rush into the antiques shop.
“May I help you?” The elderly man smiling as I come through the door has a British accent.
I mention Arnold and the smile vanishes. “He’s not here, and I don’t expect he’ll return.”
“He was here. I know he was here!”
He says nothing. I feel like the Ancient Mariner blurting my story to anyone who’ll listen. In a better world, Mr. Epstein pulls a checkbook out of a desk drawer, apologizes for Arnold’s shameful behavior, and my world is repaired. Instead, he orders me to leave.
“Are you kidding!”
“I’m perfectly serious. Arnold is my nephew and he’s stolen thousands from me.”
***
After the sit-down in Snooky’s Pub, Scotland Yard accepts I’m a victim. I make a formal statemen; they grant me a look at the files. I scribble a phone number and address for Arnold’s wife.
It ain’t Cheyne Walk.
***
Months before, I met a Portobello Road dealer selling antiquarian newspapers, not faded World War II tabloids, but centuries-old papers in pristine condition. I buy The Times (Saturday, September 28, 1799), The London Gazette (Thursday, May 16, 1667), and a dozen others for $100. The Times bears orange imprint of the Stamp Act, a blast from my high school past. The tax on documents that triggered the Boston Tea Party
I’d planned to give them away, but with Arnold in the wind, I list them in a collectors’ newspaper. A Wall Street Journal executive responds. When he treats me like a delivery boy, I triple the price.
He writes the check.
I fly Laker Airways to Gatwick, then head for South Kensington, all ablaze with holiday lights and Christmas decorations. Pubs are bursting, well-dressed, smiling young people crowd the streets. Despite myself, I’m caught up in the holiday spirit. Christmas in London.
A barrister is renting my old room in Colherne Court, a graceful apartment block with an enclosed garden. Diana Frances Spencer, later Diana, Princess of Wales, lives in another flat with two roommates. My landlord, Mrs. Mitton, an ambulance driver in the Blitz, offers me a dank space behind the kitchen, no window, little heat, lumpy mattress. Butter, unrefrigerated for days, curdles on the counter. Right out of A Christmas Carol, but at 10 pounds ($18.00) a week, I take it.
Cheyne Walk is not far. Laurence Olivier, John Barrymore, Ian Fleming, Mick Jagger, lived in these riverside mansions. Arnold mentioned he’d lived here with his wife. I check the post boxes I can access. No Epstein. He’s bullshitted me again. I spend an hour freezing in the red telephone booth at the foot of Battersea Bridge.
Who am I waiting for?
I track down the scribbled address, a modest house off Edgeware Road. A mezuzah glimmers in the doorway. I ring the bell fully understanding that stranger with a New York accent is a troublesome thing, but I’m hoping to trap Arnold.
“Who’s there? a woman answers.
He’s not there.
I take a breath, introduce myself, recite the litany of sins. She’s lived it. Scotland Yard has been by, and not for the first time. Over tea, I discover the barebones story is true. Arnold did arrive in Calcutta, did sweep a 19-year-old off her feet, did sway her father with his fervor and faith. Within a year, it soured. Arnold traveled constantly for work, then disappeared, taking her dowery and her jewelry. She’s relieved, but she can’t go home, can’t obtain a get (divorce) from the beit din, rabbinical court.
She’s never lived anywhere near Cheyne Walk.
***
Arnold is elusive. Not just a thief who betrayed my trust—my own brother will do that—but a man who painstakingly built a friendship and destroyed it, his motives beyond my experience even with the wise guys in Gowanus. I’ll never get our investment back, what I want is to know why. Had he asked, I’d have found him the money.
***
As the fever breaks, another begins. Nitza, a woman, I barely know—I’ve filled in the blanks with romantic fantasy—is just a flight away. Tall, hollow-cheeked, raven-haired, brooding, a 23-year-old with Lauren Bacall’s husky voice. Her parents, partisans in the Greek Civil War, fled to Stockholm the ‘50s. Nitza’s life, her interests, her politics, her being, is Greek.
We’d met on an overnight ferry from Brindisi to Corfu—my first trip anywhere--as her father, a physician, was attempting to reenter the country to visit his family on the island of Poros. He’s arrested at the dock. Nitza and her sisters, Furies in swirling skirts, long scarves, and jangling jewelry, are shattered and then, Phoenix-like, vengeful.
In days, my uneventful life is melded into lives of drama, loss, longing, and rage, captured in our furious, cross-country bus ride to Athens where the sisters hope to convince an uncle, an army general, to help free their father; a police raid on a bar at the foot of the Acropolis where listening to Miki Theodorakis music will send you to prison; an encounter at the Delphi Wine Festival where youngest sister Pia with a burst of fiery, foul-mouthed Greek, rescues me—an American with mustache and long hair —from half-a-dozen drunken, fascist thugs. Then Pia tears down and stomps a poster saluting the “April 21st dictatorship in front of an outraged crowd. So full of life, she dies of cancer in her 20s.
HHH HMy daughter’s middle name is Pia.
Nitza’s elderly relatives wanting no part of me, ship her off to the Peloponnese. An elderly maid, right out of Shakespeare, gives me a name and I’m off on a three-day odyssey. Nitza literally climbs out a window to join me. She and I spend a night in a cabin tucked away in a fragrant pine forest. The experience binds us a lifetime later.
***
At the Newsweek bureau, a former embassy off Hyde Park, Tony Collings and Malcom MacPherson are busy with “big” stories—politics, IRA violence, never-ending labor troubles, but queries that pour in on Tuesdays—lifestyle, sports, science, art, books, business, entertainment—are often given short-shrift. These fall to me and I treat each one as the most important assignment ever.
I interview Nevill Mott, awarded the 1977 Nobel Prize for Physics (“electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems”). With no science background, all I salvage after an excruciating 40 minutes is Mott’s mention of “higgledy-piggledy atoms.” That’s the phrase that winds up in Newsweek. Next, an American who is refused a case of Usquebaugh Scotch whiskey because he’s “not of noble blood.” A few years later, he buys the distiller outright. Everyone loves a David and Goliath story, and the man appears everywhere. After dozens of phone calls to the palace, trademark attorneys, and the Inverness pub that sold him the label, I discover his tale is bogus.
I cover a months-long London Fire Brigades strike, then a Consumer Reports-style comparison of popular pets. The budgerigar—I’ve never heard of it—is the winner.
I get no feedback. I don’t officially exist, but I’m making $50 a day, have an office, and I’ve found my life’s work. The job is to get “the information,” talk, read, question, understand. My day: 12-hours at the office, a $4 curry at the Hot Pot, then wander Earl’s Court looking for Arnold. I see him everywhere among the hundreds of rowdy Australians, but never find him. What I don’t see is that chasing him is changing me.
Out of the blue, Newsweek International’s publisher whom I barely know, asks if I’d apartment-sit for him while he travels abroad. I suspect he takes pity on me. His flat is on Sloane Square. I phone Stockholm and a day later, Nitza arrives in London.
***
The query arrives Tuesday afternoon. The BBC is working on an Iron Age documentary. A dozen couples, some with children, have spent a year living as their ancestors did two millennia ago. Tools, clothing, shelter, crops, livestock, religion, ritual, social structure. Newsweek wants quotes, background, color, anecdotes, endless detail by “overnight Thursday.”
I find a single tabloid story which reads like a Buddy Hackett bit: Two guys wearing rancid animal skins walk into a pub. After months, they’d taken a night off and made for the nearest village for a pint. It’s England, no one pays them any mind.
Two days to come up with 3,000 words. I go through stacks of newspapers, press releases, rolodexes of experts and academics. I unearth another short, tabloid story. By midnight, I’m skimming the encyclopedia.
Wednesday, I call BBC news bureaus and discover the Iron Age project is under wraps. At this point, I should have talked to my bureau chief, even the writer in New York, but I’m inexperienced and naïve. And scared.
Thursday, I remember that a guest at my 30th birthday party works for the BBC. Fiona, the Portobello Road antiques dealer, gives me her number. Hours later, I reach the woman, desperation leaking into my voice. She gives me the home number of John Percival, the Iron Age producer.
At 7:00 P.M., I make my 20th call to Percival. After a dozen rings, someone answers. Breathless, Percival says he’s in his Jaguar heading to a dinner party, but figured the call might be important.
“I have a few questions,” I squeak.
Ninety minutes later, I’ve got what I need: Using details from Percival’s interview, I build a story: embers drifting from the cooking fire into the night...Druid priests performing ritual animal sacrifice...sexual tensions building...males clashing to establish mastery. (It’s a soap opera!) Then the day-to-day existence: coaxing crops out of barren soil, slaughtering livestock, preparing meals, lugging water, music, merry making, battling the elements.
At 5:00 A.M. Friday, I deliver the pages to the telex operators, stagger home, exhausted but giddy. I’ve done a good job. At 3:00 P.M., I’m back, checking the updated story list.
Iron Age is killed. My heart breaks.
However, a BBC press junket to the Iron Age settlement is underway.
Monday morning, the New York Times runs a lively front-page Iron Age story written by London bureau chief R. W. “Johnny” Apple.
Tuesday, Woody Lovrich, who runs Newsweek’s wireroom, calls.
“Gander wants to talk.”
The last time I spoke to Chief of Correspondents Rod Gander, he told me to see him in ten years.
As I later piece together, Newsweek Editor Ed Kosner sees the NYT story and asks, “Didn’t we schedule this? Where is it?” His lieutenants, aka the “Wallendas,” fall all over each other in their haste. It’ s in the wire room spiked.
Kosner reads it.
Rod Gander says, “Ed loved your story! It’s better than the Times piece.” A week later, Gander offers me the job I keep for a decade...a career that changes my life.
Arnold fades into the past.
***
Spring 1984. The AIDS epidemic. I’m walking down Fifth Avenue after spending a night on a cot in my brother Thomas’s hospital room, yellow biohazard warnings plastered on the door, as nurses wearing HAZMAT suits and respirators hurry in and out. I hesitate in front of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral—Gloria has flooded the heavens with prayers for her dying son—then turn left on East 49th Street heading for Newsweek.
I nearly collide with Arnold Epstein.
In the moment it takes me to process this, he turns, just another window shopper at Saks Fifth Ave. Older, wearing a fedora, but unmistakable.
“Motherfucker!”
I hurry over, grab his shoulder, shove him into the window, but I feel no rage, not even anger. It’s long dead.
He stares like he doesn’t know me. I know he does.
“Leave him alone!” an elegantly dressed passerby exclaims.
“Shut the fuck up!”
“Police!” she shouts. ”Police!”
I hold Arnold close, force him to make eye-contact. There’s nothing there, no fear, no guilt, barely recognition.
I shove him away and continue to work.