The woman’s first husband, an Affiliated by the name of Avram or Avraham, in the one time they ever took a vacation photos allowed release by his widow and her lawyerhusband: an apparently insolvent, incontinent, bonebald mensch who’s standing short even in his orthopedically reformed, Pittsburgh platform shoes and Cincinnatty cap, his frame largely fat, slowmoving, his pugilistically puffy face distinguished most prominently by its soured nose, an embittered, prickly pickled bird’s, it’s described. And soon, the rumor mill’s up and run by a blind, threelegged horse: how he’d been a travelagent, and that that’d been kosher, not a front, though he’d WITHHELD — diversifying his portfolio, selling illegal spices, Eastern Bloc paprika take to American table back in the alte days, his mittelmensch’s name it was that of Laser or Glazer Wolf though that’s probably an alias, also he’d owned & operated a chain of the bathroom’s in the hallway motels up and down the Gulf Coast (storage they functioned as, deaddrops to launder the stain: Szeged’s product being cleared out from Miami and up north through the service entrances, until a bust the year before his death — only a handful of bellboychicks had been caught redhanded; despite whatever deals were pepperdangled, it was all too spicy for anyone to talk). Not that my husband was ever aware, she’s sure of it. Anyway, he’s dead, spit spit spit, isn’t that enough of a punishment — and, nu, so her husband it’s revealed after further investigation, gravedigging into the unmarked files for the worst of the wormiest dirt, had forged bonds, would deliver them to associates bound in prayerbooks, opposite the Mourner’s Kaddish. He’s dead, spit, don’t spite his memory. My wife, also my client, maintains her innocence. Boilerplate. And then a boilerroom scam, hardselling off futures, options, foreign exchange, half the Dead Sea’s salt to every resident of Central Brooklyn, coldcalling at furious heat from a basement wholly unfinished just east of India, the one with the dot. Another rumor awaiting verification between a mouth and an ear has it that his brother, hymn, his widow’s brother-inlaw, also dead, had been a ritual slaughterer for a foreign interest shadily in the black. A former bombmacher with one finger left triggerhappy. Statesponsored assassination, it was. He had terrible gas.
No comment, she says in the line filing up the steps to the courthouse.
What she said, her lawyer says to the microphones, or else she denies, I’ll leave it up to you to decide…turning from the steps down below her grown full of truffled fedoras to trip and fall over this pig wrought if only ironically idolatrous in the form of a pushke, a charitable repository, a box tzedakah, and so stumbling upon even more litigation — sarcastically speaking, though if anyone takes them seriously don’t think they won’t serve: one of an inedible, incredible many of them these porkbarrelled porkbellies lined all the way up the steps in two rows on both sides of the line — little fourlegged piggypink banks soliciting for every cause under the expenditure of the sun.
