The Head of the House

  IN ANTIPOLYE, WHERE JEWISH WAR REFUGEES STARVED …

  Young Sroolik learned he had a taste for vengeance and a knack for survival. He devised a scheme to kill the Prussian soldier who had raped poor Malke. Sroolik knew this was a sin. … He did not know that it would set the course for a lifetime of bloodshed. …

  IN NEW YORK, WHERE IRISH BOYS TORMENTED THE IMMIGRANTS …

  Sroolik found that his new American-sounding name did not protect him from the stones and threats of persecution. The bullies would learn respect one way and one way only. …

  And so began the criminal career of Isadore Hargett. He would become one of the richest, most powerful men in America. He would become a makher. He would become a legend. But he would never lose the memory of what they had done. …

  THE HEAD OF THE HOUSE

  ALBERT ZUCKERMAN

  Copyright © 1978 by Albert Zuckerman

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or part in any form. For information, address Writers House LLC at 21 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10010.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-0-7867-5352-9

  Distributed by Argo Navis Author Services

  To the memory of Peggy Roth, without whose kindness and encouragement I would not have begun this book;

  And to my father, Karl Zuckerman, whose lifelong inner strength and love inspire me to persevere.

  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE

  BOOK 1

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  BOOK 2

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  BOOK 3

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  PROLOGUE

  Isadore Hargett’s rise to power and his ability to keep that power for an unheard of two decades was in no way harmed by the belief of his associates and rivals that he, from among all that army of trigger men spawned by the bootleg liquor industry, had been the most ruthless and, more importantly, the most efficient.

  Over the years he cultivated myths about himself: that he was the boss of all illicit business in America; and that that was nothing but a myth, and in fact that he was a mere minor hotel operator, the butt of fantasizing journalists; that he was a man who abhorred violence, who at the sight of a drop or two of blood would grow dizzy, and that he was the most daring killer in the annals of crime. The facts in this latter regard which he revealed only once, to his daughter, were that during his youth and early manhood, a time when he was reputed to have “hit” whole gangs, including the capos of two major Mafia families, he personally killed two men. Both events shaped his destiny. Especially the first. He was twelve. …

  At the end of an exhausting day’s work, a bony boy trudged homeward along the village’s single street. The earth-colored clay and timber dwellings leaned and huddled one into the next in a continuum of walls, doors, chimneys. A few windows, pitched at slightly odd angles, were unshuttered, and curious eyes watched the boy pass with his sack slung over his shoulder, but no one greeted him.

  Near the end of the village he stopped at an alleyway. On it fronted the cozy cow stall which he, his mother and sisters had been calling home for two years, ever since they’d evacuated Brest-Litovsk and come with other war refugees to the abandoned farms, homes and barns of Antipolye, whose superstitious peasants, convinced the Prussians were blood-swilling cannibals, had fled westward with the battered soldiers of the Czar.

  But to the boy called Sroolik, Kaiser Wilhelm’s Prussians were the good ones. He had only to drive the cart, not help lift the Russian corpses—those potentially disease-bringing remains of the battle which had been fought all around the approaches to the Muchawiec bridge. And the Sergeant paid the boy more bread in one day than Sroolik had seen in a month. He’d grown accustomed during the week to the shrapnel-torn bodies strewn about like mounds of cow dung, to the flies, maggots, the howling dogs, but not to the stench. When there was no breeze, that would upset him.

  Suddenly the boy, hearing frightening noises in the alleyway, froze.

  “Get away from here, you fungus, you putrefying cancer. May the earth spit out your corpse!”

  His mother, drawn to her full height, stately, but with tears in her eyes, woozily brandishing a hoe, was screaming at a strange man. He wore a stained, torn sheepskin, and had eyes that kept shifting in all directions. Clutching at his mother’s skirt, hiding their faces in its drooping folds, were Sroolik’s two sisters, sharp-tongued Malke, thirteen, and his beloved curly blond angel, little Rivke, eight. Behind the man stood a boy about Sroolik’s size, a smaller girl, and a pasty-faced woman who held an infant.

  “Thief, my husband works for the German Army, and they’ve given him a gun, a flesh-blasting rifle, with a bayonet; and if you don’t tramp yourselves away from here this instant, he’ll mangle your entrails.”

  “Madam, you have no husband,” the man answered quietly, and in one easy swing he wrested the hoe from her hapless fingers. “I’ve made inquiries. You’re sick, very sick, and you have no man, only three small children. If you don’t agree to share with us like a pious, God-fearing Jewess should, I’ll throw you and yours out into the fields, and you can shiver and freeze in the cold night, like we have.”

  Sroolik, crouching behind an abutment, longed desperately for his father, for his older brother, Moish—both gone to America. Why? Sroolik knew Poppa had had no choice but to flee, what with him about to be carted off to prison for his business of smuggling young Jews out to save them from conscription by the Czarists. But at this moment Sroolik hated his father. Why only Moish? Why couldn’t Poppa have taken him too?

  Momma, how much longer would she be able to stand, his gaunt, pain-wracked mother? For days she had hardly been out of her chair. In a second or a minute Sroolik knew her strength would go, and Malke and Rivke could never hold her up.

  Strange she would say “a gun.” She had no gun. Nor could she know that he, prophetically it seemed, had found one today in a raspberry thicket under the corpse of a Russian officer, and with bullets still in the chamber. So could it have been intended, meant to be for now? When he still wasn’t sure which lever was the safety catch?

  Clearly the man in sheepskin was a liar. He had to be because the stall in which they lived, built for two or three milk cows and some chickens, barely had room for the four of them to stretch out at night. So how could this weasel with his weasel family share with them?

  Sroolik reached into his sack. That evening, besides the usual chunk of German bread, it contained a thick slab of wurst which the barrel-chested Sergeant had given him as a reward for finding yesterday’s rabbit; and a second rabbit Sroolik had not told them about which he’d caught today in the slip-noose snare, and had kept to make a thick meat broth for Momma.

&
nbsp; It was Gunther the corporal who before the War had been a gamekeeper, who had taught Sroolik how rabbits could be trapped. The only fresh meat Sroolik and his family had tasted in two years came from the snares hung from bent samplings, which the pipe-smoking telegrapher had constructed and showed the boy how to care for.

  Underneath the food Sroolik gripped the stock of the gun and pulled it free from the rag in which he’d enveloped it.

  “Thief, liar, murderer, go away or I’ll shoot!” he heard a squeaky voice shout.

  The man frowned, but remained quiet as a tree stump.

  Sroolik moved closer, holding and pointing the heavy gun with both hands, struggling to keep it from wobbling.

  Suddenly his mother slipped to the ground, fainting without a sound. The stranger’s boy turned green as grass, yelped, swung about, and raced up the alleyway, disappearing behind the walled kitchen gardens which lined the rear of the village. A second later the sister leapt after him. The pasty-faced wife with the baby gathered her skirt and was gone too. When the man saw, as Sroolik drew closer and closer, that the black object was a real gun, he growled, spat and walked away after his family.

  Sroolik kept the weapon pointed at the stranger until he had left his sight, and then the boy’s eyes closed and he too crumpled to the ground.

  That night Sroolik, his mother and sisters already asleep at his side, fervently prayed and thanked God. “Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, King of the World, who hath formed man in wisdom; and created in him pipes, tubes and veins. Who hath made us holy with Thy laws. Who commanded us … O Lord, we beg thee. …” Snippets of blessings came back to him, but he had to strain to remember them. In the two years since they’d left Brest-Litovsk, he’d all but forgotten the Ruler of the World.

  The following morning, though, his thanksgiving was forgotten, replaced with two new terrors. When he awoke, there was no wheezing. His momma’s eyes were open, but she’d become a corpse. And then his one remaining bit of security, the gun, that too he discovered was gone. He cried in his heart, his lungs, his throat, as well as through his eyes and nose. Now where was God, the so-called Holy One, blessed be He? Rivke and Malke, who thought he was crying for their mother, in all their lives never saw him cry again.

  Later that day the Germans stationed his wagon at the edge of a Muchawiec river marsh, while the soldiers dragged out water-bloated and rat-eaten Russian corpses. Setting out, Sroolik had hoped-dreamt he’d find another gun, and this one he’d tie with a wirelike leather thong around his neck and keep it hidden inside his shirt. No one could ever steal it away. But the Sergeant had insisted he stay up on the wagon, which Sroolik had to keep moving carefully along the edge of the soft mud, while the troops at intervals would come crashing through the high swamp grass pushing their hideous cargoes with branches and poles or dragging them with ropes.

  Driving back from the pit with the two burial soldiers, he had an idea. If not with a gun, maybe another way to be safe would be to get a German to come live with them.

  But whom to ask? Immediately he thought of chuckling, curly-headed Gunther, who knew everything: all the woods of the forest, trapping animals, sending Morse code messages, the fastest way to dry socks. How Sroolik loved the aromas of his pipe and his sad tender harmonica. Only why should Gunther move from the tool house, and its mouth-watering Edamer cheese and rum smells? Sroolik bit his lip to make the disappointment hurt less, and thought of the others. Man by man he paraded them through his mind: vulture-nosed Corporal Kropp who always bellowed for the wagon to come closer; yawning Deterling who never worked unless the Sergeant was watching him; and the two freckle-heads who had tumbled into the rear of wagon and now slept, dead drunk. Momma had hated them all. Gray-coated mongrels, she’d called them. But couldn’t there be others like Gunther? Or almost as good? He would study where they lived. No sense even considering those billeted in the stone barn or the main house.

  Late that afternoon, the wagon unhitched, he knew his sisters had to be desperate, frantic for his return; but he didn’t go to them. He lingered, greasing his axles, oiling the harnesses, even climbing up on a bench with a broom and combing out the tool house’s cobwebs. Between jobs he made circuitous trips to the latrine, sauntering past the barley sheds, listening for voices, looking in all directions, trying to tab which man lived where. On his third foray Sroolik realized one of the soldiers was watching him. The man, crosslegged on a horse-blanket, sitting against a thick tree near the outhouse, had been whittling at a log. Now he’d stopped and was calmly following Sroolik with his eyes. The anxious boy remembered this fellow. More than once he’d stopped at the wagon and fed the old horse a few beans from his hand. They called him Welzel. Sroolik hesitated. Why not? He turned and went to the quiet man.

  That very night the solidly built private moved in, with his blankets, tin dish and cup, little set of chiseling tools, the half-completed bear he was carving, and a rifle.

  Two days later, Sroolik, a painful splinter wedged under his thumbnail, had just started trudging home. It had been an exhausting day of hauling logs needed for making coffins. As he turned out of the landlord’s gate toward Antipolye, suddenly little Rivke darted up from the ditch across the road, clutched his hand, and tugged him back through a scrapingly narrow gap in the hedge. Her cheeks and neck were streaked with dirt, her eyes red from crying. Sroolik was terrified. Malke—something had to have happened to her.

  “Stay,” her little voice quavered, pleaded, “don’t leave us again, ever. Please.”

  “But—I have to go work. You know that. Who else will bring the bread?”

  “I don’t care about the bread. You can’t leave us with him. You can’t.”

  With Welzel, who had brought them two eggs, and patted their heads like a father? It didn’t make sense.

  “With Welzel?” he slowly asked.

  “He beat her,” she moaned. “He’s from the devil, he must have hoofs, cloven feet. I’m positive.”

  His waspish sister must have gotten the man angry. Sroolik’s spirits abruptly revived, soared. “Did Malke yell at him?”

  “No. It was him. He started. Because she didn’t want to.”

  “Rivkele, angel-face, slowly. Malke didn’t want to do something for him?”

  “You know, her clothes. She wouldn’t take off her clothes.”

  Sroolik felt as if a tree had crashed down on his head. He sank down onto the dry tufted ground, resting his numbed face in his hands. Only last night Welzel had told them so marvelous a bedtime story. About Siegfried, a prince, proud and strong, who had seized the splinters of a great sword, pounded them, melted them over the charcoal of the magic ash tree, and then, singing, had reforged a sword so powerful it could split an anvil in two. It had all been very different from Uncle Sholem’s tales of miracle-working rebbes and demonic dybbuks, but the whole evening had felt so safe, as if Momma, and Poppa too, were still with them.

  “Where did he beat her? How badly?”

  Rivke was sobbing, her small bony shoulders heaving. She couldn’t speak.

  “Did she—take her clothes off?”

  A fresh flood of tears choked Rivke. Her pale cheeks, he noticed, had been scratched by brambles, and showed hairlines of blood. Finally she nodded.

  “Malke was crying and kissing his fingers, begging him to be nice, but he wouldn’t stop. He wouldn’t.”

  “… Beating her?”

  “No, his petzel. With his petzel.”

  “You saw it?”

  “Red. So ugly. Sticking out of him like an ice pick, a thick one. Malke was screaming, and still he pushed it and pushed it, and then. …”

  All of Sroolik ached. He had done this to his sister. He had brought the German.

  Rivke began whining. “We have to run away. We can’t go back there.”

  “You and I–and leave Malke?”

  “No! You have to sneak back in the morning when he’s gone. Then she’ll come with us too.”

  Sure. Where? Where could they run
? Across an ocean that stretches to the end of the world? To the artillery-shell crater where they’d buried Momma? Momma had been right. Uniforms did mean the evil eye. All soldiers were pigs. He’d been a fool. Now only one thing could keep them safe. The gun. Welzel’s gun. And if the infidel beast could somehow vanish into the Muchawiec, or the swamp, or a deep well, then Sroolik could keep the gun.

  Sroolik led Rivkele, now mute except for spasms of whimpering, to the pines up behind the village, sat her down, and forced her to chew on a rabbit thigh the Sergeant had smoke-cured. He tried to think. It had come to him immediately—while they were still crouched at the hedge outside the encampment. A trap. But what kind of trap? Where? How to lead the verminous cur—may his eyes melt out of their sockets, may fire consume his heart!—to it? How to keep it all secret?

  Gunther had told him of steel-jaw traps, worked by superpowerful double springs, for the capture of furry bears; deadfall traps in which a piece of meat is attached to a log or slab of stone which falls breaking the wolf’s head or back; hawk traps made of sharp wires and prongs built around an opening within which a live chicken is the lure. Sroolik doubted any of these wonders could be had in Antipolye. But a deep hole in the ground would do, especially if its bottom were lined with sharpened stakes—which is how Gunther had told him elephants and the fiercest tigers were caught and killed in Africa.

  “What will you do”—Rivkele had stopped gnawing on the bone and begun shivering slightly—“if he does that to Malke again?”

  “Nothing.”

  She turned away, and he could tell from her shoulder movements that she was crying again. But he knew he must not tell her—even if she thought him the worst coward and traitor. This secret was bigger, scarier than the tobacco smuggling Momma had done, which she had made them swear never to breathe about.

  He thought and nibbled some bread, thought and tore the webbing from a leaf. After a few minutes he decided that trapping a German swine would not be too much harder than snaring a fleet-footed rabbit.