WANDERERS
359
invocation of a proper regulation. What was the world without rules,
she asked the detective, not adding what was appropriate in this
instance, that the trouble with the Jews was that they fled rules,
claiming that rules had rigged the world against them. That's why
they'd had to wander since Christ's time, evading the rules, and then
trying to make up for the evasion by sending nickel postcards back
to those they fled, the enforcers, hoping for a more than even break
the next time. Could she cash checks for everyone who walked in off
the gutters? The Puerto Ricans stood six deep between Columbus
and Amsterdam. Give them an opportunity like that, and they'd make
the Jews, who were clever or mean enough to be pikers, look honest.
She'd worked nearly thirty years around other people's money, and
nobody had ever suspected that her purse held one cent that didn't
belong there. She personally had nothing to lose or gain by enforce–
ment of the rules. Rules was what she went and lived by. Did Lepidus
think she was a country girl waiting for wool to be pulled over her
eyes? So his temper was riled. What did that have to do with rules?
What did what happened have to do with anything but the breaking
of rules?
According to Mendel, he and Lepidus had worked as usual.
When he, Mendel, was indisposed, they worked at the hotel. It was
just as convenient as the closet they operated in on Fourth Avenue.
Gotham Fabrics and Designs. A big name for a small enterprise.
Two men, two desks, cardboard patterns, sample materials, drawing
paper, colored pencils. Not enough for a child's Christmas. That's
all they needed to carry off twelve to fifteen thousand a year. "I've
been with lots of outfits, big and small," said Mendel up in
his
room
where she'd never been before. "There was nothing more efficient
in the world than that Lepidus and myself. I designed. He marketed.
That's all there was to it. I had pencils, he had connections. Three or
four days a week was all the time we needed to put in. Didn't matter
where, down on the Avenue or here in the hotel."
That was the Lepidus-Mendel history. But every history has a
history, and who more than the wandering Jews, barnacling themselves
on the histories of every nation on the ciVilized earth, would know
that. A squad of Irish cops, Annalee Swindleman, and assorted old
ladies, half of them under the earth now, had witnessed Mendel going
berserk with a metal stand-up lamp. Other incidents made longer
history. The punched customer in Buffalo, and a doorman in Minnie
