Don't Ever Look Back: A Mystery (Buck Schatz Series) (15 page)

As he read, Abramsky scrawled right-to-left in cursive Hebrew script on a yellow legal pad with his left hand. His lips were moving as well, and I wondered if he was silently speaking the words he was reading, the words he was writing, or something else entirely.

I had no way of knowing what the hell he was reading or writing or saying, though, because, while I can sound out Hebrew words phonetically, I don’t speak the language, and can’t read it with any comprehension. So I busied myself by looking over his bookshelves.

He had all the expected siddurs and Tanakhs and the various Torah commentaries; huge books like the one he was reading, with gilt edges to the pages and gold-inlay on the covers.

I was surprised, however, to find a whole shelf of paperback detective novels: Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and Ross Macdonald and a collected volume of the works of Conan Doyle. And the spines looked cracked, so he’d probably really read them. Farther down the wall of bookshelves, I spotted what seemed to be the stuff he’d read in preparation for moving to the South: Faulkner and Twain and
To Kill a Mockingbird.

He also had fifty copies of a book about Jewish views on death and mourning. I figured he must give a lot of those away to need so many; the synagogue had been around since the 1870s, and it was an aging congregation even in 1965. The hallway outside his office was covered with big, heavy memorial tablets. Each tablet had four columns, and each column had a hundred little plaques slotted into it. Each plaque was inscribed with the name of a deceased member of the congregation. Next to each name was a little light, like a white Christmas tree bulb. The lights had to be illuminated to commemorate
yahrtzeit
; the anniversary of each person’s death. There were no switches for the bulbs; the only way to light them was to tighten them in their sockets, and the only way to shut them off was to unplug the whole rig, or unscrew the hot little bulbs individually, by hand. Somebody had to go up and down that hallway every week, tightening and loosening, so we’d know whose turn it was to be remembered.

I wondered if Abramsky had to deal with the bulbs himself, but I decided he probably didn’t. That was the kind of thing the synagogue would hire a Negro to do.

Regardless, that hallway full of memorials and that shelf full of books about grieving suggested that this man’s job was so depressing that it was probably a relief for him to teach bar mitzvah lessons to hyperactive twelve-year-olds. I’d much rather deal with a grisly, guts-out crime scene or even a stinking, bloated river-floater than spend an afternoon sitting in a hospital and praying with a person who was losing a fight against something terminal.

Abramsky completed whatever he was doing with his big, fancy book and deposited his notepad on top of a pile of similar notepads that were also covered in his sweat-smudged Hebrew script.

There were two old-looking leather chairs opposite the desk, which weren’t totally covered in paper. He slid into one of them, and I cleared the mess off the other so I could sit as well. “Sorry about that,” he said. “If I don’t write down the thoughts and observations I have when I am studying, I will forget them later on. I’m sure you know how that is.”

“Not really,” I said, tapping the side of my head with my finger. “I mostly just keep everything up here.”

“Then you’re very fortunate, in that regard. Thank you for coming to see me today. I wanted to talk to you about your son.” As he spoke, he leaned forward. He was a soft man, a thing with rounded corners, but he vibrated with weird energy. His hands were always moving; slashing the air to punctuate his speech or crawling across his body as he listened.

“Is Brian on pace to be ready for the big event?” I asked. Although we didn’t adhere strictly to many of the traditions, we still attended the Orthodox synagogue, because my whole family was buried in the affiliated cemetery. So, at his bar mitzvah, my son would have to daven an entire Torah service in front of the assembled congregation. I didn’t even want to think about what my mother would say if the kid screwed it up.

“Yes. He’s doing very well. I think he is just memorizing his
haftarah,
and I’d prefer to see him read the Hebrew, but I’m confident he’ll make you very proud, regardless.”

“So, what’s the problem?”

“Brian continues to be troubled by what he witnessed in front of the synagogue earlier this week. I have to say I’m troubled about it, also.”

I clenched my fists. Things had been tense at home for weeks because of the ideas this prick had been putting into the kid’s head. “I didn’t give Paul Schulman and Ari Plotkin anything they didn’t have coming to them.”

“Plotkin? What happened to Plotkin?”

“I went over to his house last night, and I shot him.”

It took Abramsky a moment to process this. “Is he—?”

“In the hospital,” I said. “And under arrest for conspiracy to rob a bank, and for assaulting a police officer. He won’t be attending synagogue anytime soon.”

Dismay registered on his face for a couple of seconds, but he tamped it down and blanked his expression. “I’m not unaware that some members of this congregation don’t lead lives as morally upright as I might hope they would. But I don’t consider it my place to judge them.”

“No,” I said. “It’s my place to judge them. It’s your place to chant with them in Hebrew so that they feel like they’re right with God when they go out and steal food from the mouths of widows and orphans.”

“And why is that such a personal affront to you, Baruch?”

“When your father’s corpse turns up in a ditch on the side of the highway, you develop a little bit of a soft spot for the widows and the orphans.”

He sort of shuddered when I said this, and I realized that it was new information to him. I really needed to stop blurting out whatever was on my mind. “Do you want to talk about that?” he asked.

“Hell no,” I said. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Then let’s talk about Brian: I don’t feel it’s appropriate for a rabbi to drive a wedge between a father and a son, so I found myself in the unenviable position of having to defend your conduct, Baruch. And that’s why I felt I had to speak to you. Because I think somebody needs to speak with you.”

“I’m here, ain’t I? If you want to talk, go ahead.”

“As you may be aware, the Torah portion for Brian’s bar mitzvah is
parshah Vayera,
in which HaShem smites the corrupt cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.”

“Sure, I know the story,” I said. “They were sex fiends, and God killed them all.”

“Well, Christian interpretations focus on the sexual aspects of the Sodomites’ depravity, but there’s more to it. The commentaries explain how the people of these cities were miserly and cruel. They wallowed in decadence while beggars starved in their streets. They were vicious to outsiders, using and exploiting and killing them for sport. And they were blasphemers as well; the passage about the Sodomites’ lust for ‘strange flesh’ refers not to homosexual behavior, as is commonly believed, but to their unholy desire to rape God’s angels.”

“Bar mitzvah study has gotten weirder since I was a kid,” I said.

“The Torah has been the same for five thousand years.”

“I guess we just skipped over the parts about ‘strange flesh,’ then.”

“Perhaps, but all of the Torah is sacred, and when you take pieces of it out of context, you lose sight of the thing as a whole.”

“So, what’s your point?”

“For their barbarity and brutality, HaShem determined that the people of Sodom and Gomorrah needed to burn. But Abraham pled for clemency, and HaShem agreed that if ten righteous men dwelt in Sodom, then He would spare the cities. So He sent his angels down to search, and the angels stayed in the home of Abraham’s nephew Lot. But the people of Sodom learned of Lot’s guests, and mobbed the house demanding that Lot turn over the angels. HaShem was appalled, and so the city was condemned. HaShem told Lot to take his family and flee, warning them to ‘look not behind you’ as they escaped the burning city. But Lot’s wife disobeyed HaShem and she looked back, and when she did, she was turned into a pillar of salt. Some say that, by looking back, she revealed that she longed for the carnality and decadence of Sodom, and thus deserved to be purged along with the city. But many scholars believe that, when she beheld the glory and terror of HaShem’s wrath, the sheer awe of it unmade her. When Brian and I discussed this, he said he believes Memphis has become like Sodom.”

“He’s not wrong,” I said. “There’s too much bad history, and too much bad blood here. We’ve heaped too many indignities upon the colored, and we’ve been doing it for far too long. The whole place could go up in flames any day now. And when it does, we’ll deserve it as much as the Sodomites did.”

“Brian told me he worries that you are like Lot’s wife; that you’ve adopted the deviant values of a bigoted society and a repressive and brutal police force.”

“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. If I’m repressive and brutal, it’s to keep the world off his back, and to shield him from some hard truths.”

He leaned forward and put his hand on my arm. I flinched. I don’t like it when people touch me. “I know this, and that is what I told him. I told him that you are not like Lot’s wife. I told him that you are like HaShem’s angels, prepared to bring justice to the deserving, but also looking for hope and redemption in a fallen city. It is right that a boy should honor his father, and so I felt obligated, as his teacher, to defend you to him. But I did not like having to say that, because I don’t believe it was the truth.”

I shook his hand off my arm and pulled my pack of Lucky Strikes out of my pocket. I tapped it a couple of times against my palm and then shook a cigarette out.

“I’d prefer if you didn’t smoke in here,” Abramsky said. “The ventilation isn’t great, and smells tend to linger.”

I’d noticed the office was redolent of musty books and stale farts, but I’d been too polite to comment on it.

“Your preference is duly noted,” I said, and I lit up anyway. “Say what you need to say, and then I’ll get out of here before I stink the place up too much. And while you’re talking, you can get me an ashtray.”

“I haven’t got an ashtray.”

“That’s fine. I can use an empty Coke can, or a glass with a little water in the bottom. Or, I guess I don’t really need anything, if you don’t want to get up. It ain’t my carpet.”

He got up, and dug a beige coffee mug out from under a pile of papers on his desk. He held it out to me, and I flicked my ash into it.

“Now, I don’t believe you think of yourself as being like the angel,” he said. “I think you see yourself as HaShem. But you are not HaShem. Only HaShem is HaShem. And I want you to keep in mind what happened to Lot’s wife when she looked upon His wrath. I want you to keep in mind the harm that terrible justice can do, not only to those whom it is inflicted upon, but also to everyone in the general vicinity. Because, though Brian will become a man in the eyes of the Jewish people when he reads from the Torah at his bar mitzvah, you and I both know his childhood ended when he saw his father beat Paul Schulman to the ground in front of the synagogue. That’s what you’ve got to live with, when you dispense wrath.”

I gestured with the cigarette, and he offered me the coffee cup. I stubbed the butt out in the bottom of it.

“Did Brian believe what you told him about me?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “He’s smart. Smart people are hard to lie to.”

I nodded. This was true. The kid knew his old man was no angel. “Thanks anyway, for your discretion,” I said.

“And I’d urge you, in the future, to exercise yours,” he said.

I had to laugh at that, but I don’t think Abramsky understood why.

21

1965

The first thing I did Monday morning was pay a visit to the offices of Charles Greenfield. He kept me waiting until about half past ten, just because he could. His office had north-facing windows, and the sunlight piercing through the canopy of clouds that day, at that time, hit the room at the perfect angle to make Greenfield and his various accoutrements look kind of glorious. He sat on his deep leather throne, with the window behind him, and from my vantage point across the gleaming expanse of his desk, he appeared to be encircled by a luminous halo.

“I’ve arrested a gang of robbers who had plans to take down your bank,” I said.

He didn’t seem impressed. “If the problem is resolved, I don’t see why you should waste any more of my time or yours by coming here to discuss it.” As he said this, he gave me the kind of smirk that let me know he realized he’d wasted much more of my time than I had of his.

“The men I arrested intended to enter your bank through the front door and rob the tellers with guns. I believe they were unwitting dupes in a more elaborate scheme to rob your vault, and I am concerned that scheme has not been scuttled by the arrest of these conspirators. Your money may still be at risk.”

He stroked his chin. “The instant those men entered with guns, a teller or a loan officer would trigger the alarms and the vault would have sealed. If that is the plan, it’s not a very good one.”

I lit a cigarette. “You told me last week that the alarm causes the vault to lock down until the end of a three-hour timer, and that even you cannot open the vault after the alarm is triggered.”

“That’s correct.”

“It occurs to me that Elijah’s plan to rob you involves, and even depends on you triggering the alarm and locking yourself out of the vault.”

“I’m not sure I follow your logic.”

Here, I leaned forward. “Are you familiar with ‘The Adventure of the Red-Headed League’? It’s a Sherlock Holmes story. A robber devised a plot to dig a tunnel into a bank vault from the basement of an adjoining building. If a thief cracked into your vault from above or below, or broke in through a wall, he could easily clean the place out in three hours. All he’d need to do is contrive an event to cause your staff to trigger the alarm, which would lock you out. The thief would be long gone before you could even get the door open and discover the theft.”