Hunting
Arnold
Spring 1978. 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 dowry 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.
My 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.
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