Festival of Deaths (36 page)

B’nai Shalom Synagogue was an Orthodox synagogue, the last vestige of what had once been one of the most thriving Jewish communities in Philadelphia. Now the neighborhood belonged to nobody—black or white, rich or poor, Christian or Jew, European or Asian or Hispanic. For all the apocalyptic pictures painted in the press and in the kind of murder mystery of which Bennis did not approve, Gregor had never seen poor neighborhoods as breeding places of nothing but pathologies. They were simply residential areas for people who needed more money, and since quite a few of the greatest men on earth had had no money at all, he wasn’t about to dismiss the residents of Harlem or Watts as being no damn good at all. The real problem, for Gregor, came in places like this, places that weren’t really places anymore at all. He wasn’t sure what they were, besides dangerous. Being in them after dark made him feel as if he were standing in the Garden of Eden, listening to the serpent creep.

Because B’nai Shalom Synagogue was an Orthodox synagogue, there were none of the bright Hanukkah decorations Gregor had seen not only on Cavanaugh Street but on synagogue lawns in other parts of town. There was just the plain brownstone facade of the place, looking dignified and old in the cold and dark. The uniformed policemen had taken up positions on either side of the front doors. For this one night, the doors had been left unlocked. The uniformed policemen were able to see out because they were standing next to tall thin windows that flanked the doors. In keeping with the best Jewish practice, these windows were not adorned with pictures in any way whatsoever. They were, however, stained glass. They were glass stained just dark enough so that nobody from the outside looking in could tell that anybody was standing beside them.

Gregor and John Jackman were supposed to stay out of the way on the second floor, looking out through a great round window that blossomed over this disintegrating street with all the startling exuberance of a meteor shower. Gregor wondered what it looked like in the daylight, or lit up from behind. It had been designed for celebration and display. Now it was dark and still magnificent, but muted. Everything here was muted.

Gregor and John Jackman got to the site at two minutes to eight. It was close enough to the possible take-off time to make the uniformed men nervous. Neither Gregor nor John was interested in doing a song and dance about rank, although John would have been allowed to. They did what the uniformed men told them and climbed the stairs to the second floor. Then they lay down and put their heads up to look through the bottom-most petals of the scalloped window. Neither of them had any idea if they could be seen from the outside if they were standing up. It was better not to take any chances.

The floor under the window was dusty. John Jackman brushed a matted ball of gray off the front of his suit and muttered,

“If they were that good, we wouldn’t be here.”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “But you wouldn’t want to ruin everything just by giving them a chance to get lucky.”

“If we’d done what I wanted us to do, we wouldn’t have to worry about giving them a chance to be lucky. We’d be tucked in at the Ararat, eating dinner.”

“I’ll buy you dinner when this is over.”

“When this is over, you’ll think of something else to do.”

Out on the street there were the sounds of footsteps. Gregor could hear them clearly through the thin panes of the window. For the first time, he realized he was cold. Terribly cold. He didn’t think the heat was on up here. He knew the window provided nothing in the way of insulation. He listened to the footsteps and said, “Hobnail boots.”

“Or spike cleats,” Jackman agreed. “Doesn’t it figure?”

It did, but Gregor had never understood why. He strained his eyes to see in the dark. There was street-lamp pole right in front of the synagogue’s front door, but the street lamp shed no light. There was no telling how long it had been since the bulb had been shattered by a flying rock. There were no lights anywhere else on the street. The only light there was came from the moon, and that was feeble.

“Here they come,” John Jackman said.

Gregor pulled himself closer to the window and nodded imperceptibly. Two young white men were swinging onto the block from the north, dressed in heavy boots and thick jackets and jeans that looked painted on. Their hair was hidden under dark knitted caps. They brought their own light in the form of cigarettes. Gregor looked again and decided that what he was seeing was joints or else home-rolled. He would bet on joints.

“High,” he whispered to Jackman.

“As kites,” Jackman whispered back. “How much you bet, they get arrested, turns out they got stewed before they ever started on the marijuana?”

“Are they singing?”

They were most definitely singing. Like Sioux warriors or members of the old East Indian militia, they were strengthening their resolve at the start of battle with music. Since they were young men of the twentieth century in the United States of America, every once in a while they would accompany their music on the air guitar. Gregor shook his head again and sighed a little. They were slight, these young men were, small and fragile. Their bones looked as fine as the bones of birds. Gregor was not a believer in the kind of pop psychology that said that all members of racialist groups would be men like this, puny and weak and yearning to satisfy an impossible standard of masculinity. He had met too many who were big enough and strong enough to give long hard pause to Muhammad Ali. Personally, he thought men joined racialist groups when they were too damn dumb to think of any other form of recreation and too damn mean to go to Walt Disney World. As an explanation, it fit just as many cases as the pop psych one.

What the two young men were singing was “Sympathy for the Devil.” Even sitting where he was, and knowing as little as he did about rock music, Gregor could tell they were doing it badly.

“Tone deaf,” John Jackman said. “And with the sense of rhythm of an Eskimo Pie.”

“You have the sense of rhythm of an Eskimo Pie.”

“I know. But I don’t sing except in the shower and I don’t even do that when I have a lady over.”

Gregor didn’t even sing in the shower. When he did, odd things happened to the water. The two young men had reached the front steps of the synagogue now. They were fumbling around in the pockets of their jackets. One of them came up with another joint, lit it, and tried to pass it to his friend. The other pushed it away and found a joint of his own. The one who had had the joint first was wearing a red scarf. The other one was wearing a pair of bright blue gloves. Neither of these details had been clear when the two were still across the street. Since they were clear now, Gregor used them for identification: the first one was Red Scarf; the second one was Blue Gloves.

“Don’t you know anything about AIDS you dumb jerk?” Blue Gloves demanded. “You can get sick to death sucking on somebody else’s joint like that.”

“Nah,” Red Scarf said. “You can’t get AIDS like that. You can only get AIDS letting some faggot pork you up the ass.”

“You can get it by being anywhere near a faggot,” Blue Gloves said. “You can get it just by breathing some faggot’s air.”

“If that’s true, then everybody in town is going to get it. Cause this city is full of faggots and we’re all breathing the same air.”

“Everybody in town is going to get it. That was the plan. The Zionist Underground put the virus in the water and they’re just sitting back and watching the rest of us die.”

“Yeah,” Red Scarf said, “them and the Catholic church. They’re in it together.”

“And the niggers.”

“And the Spies.”

“It’s a worldwide conspiracy,” Blue Gloves said. “I wish I was smarter about all this shit. I get to thinking about it and I get confused.”

“How can you tell?” John Jackman muttered under his breath.

“They certainly aren’t being quiet about it,” Gregor pointed out. “They have to be audible in Delaware. That ought to help the case down the line.”

“Here comes the paint,” John Jackman said.

Red Scarf had taken a can out of his jacket pocket. He turned it over a couple of times and then shook it in the air. Blue Gloves dropped the roach of his joint onto the street and stamped what spark there was left in it under his boot. Then he reached into his own jacket pocket and pulled out a spray can of his own.

“Do you think they believe any of the things they say?” Gregor asked idly, watching them begin to pace back and forth in front of the synagogue’s facade.

“I think they have a hard time remembering it from one day to the next,” John Jackman said. “Except that they think they’ve been screwed. They remember that.”

“Maybe they have been screwed,” Gregor said.

John Jackman snorted. “Their mothers should have screwed up the courage to give them a few good spankings. That’s the only way they’ve been screwed.”

Out on the street, Red Gloves had raised his arm in the air and aimed the spray can at the synagogue’s front face. He set it off in a blur of white and yelled, “Die, you Jew bastards, die!”

He was very loud, but to Gregor he did not sound convincing. Blue Gloves leaped in next to him and raised his spray can in the air, but with less dramatic flourish.

“We will not be destroyed!” he shouted, but he didn’t sound convincing, either.

This was as far as the two uniformed cops had ever intended to let it go; just far enough to get the conviction they wanted, and no farther. Gregor and John Jackman heard the double doors beneath them slam open. A second later, the uniformed cops were on the street and the two white boys were in custody, handcuffed and secure, swearing away in language so foul it would have got them bounced from the Marine Corps.

“Let’s go.” John Jackman leapt to his feet and heading for downstairs.

Gregor couldn’t leap. It had been twenty years since he even tried. He got up in a much more dignified manner. The foyer was now brightly lit. Either John Jackman or one of the uniformed cops had had the good sense to turn the lights on. The two young men were hopping and jumping and shaking in custody.

Gregor arrived just as the one he’d been calling Red Scarf caught sight of John Henry Newman Jackson. Red Scarf froze. His body went rigid. His eyes seemed to bug out of his head. He seemed to have stopped breathing. Then he started to wail.

“Ricky!” he shrieked. “Ricky! Look at this! It’s the Head Nigger himself come down to do us in!”

“Oh,
fine
,” John Jackman said. “Sidney Poitier, Virgil Tibbs, and the Head Nigger. It’s been quite a week. Let’s go eat, Gregor. I can’t stand it anymore.”

“We can’t go eat,” Gregor said.

“Why not? I’m starving. Of course we can go eat.”

“We’ve got to go back to the hospital and see Carmencita Boaz again,” Gregor said. “We’ve got to go right away.”

D
EANNA KROLL WAS GOOD
in a crisis. In fact, she was best in a crisis, which was part of the reason she was not still living in Harlem and all of the reason she had so many nights like this one, pacing back and forth in front of blank windows and wondering what she was supposed to do next. What she was expected to do next was go home: back to the hotel, back to her room, back to the usual routine, assuming she had a usual routine. Instead, she was walking, back and forth in front of the windows in the waiting area of Five North, wanting a cigarette so desperately it made her chest ache. Five North was very quiet. It was after nine o’clock at night. Visiting hours were over. Patients were medicated and put to sleep. The nursing staff was reduced to a skeleton force, and would remain that way until the morning. DeAnna looked down on the parking lot and the street and the light and dark of Philadelphia and realized she was about to have One of Those Moods. Lotte had Those Moods, too. In fact, she’d had one just this afternoon. Maybe she was having it still. One of Those Moods was a time when you just couldn’t stand it any more, the senseless triviality of everything, the endless posturing of people who wanted to feel important without going to the trouble of doing anything of consequence. That was the trouble with television talk shows. In no time at all, they made you think your fellow human beings were no better than grapefruit with delusions of grandeur. Unless, of course, you were a grapefruit yourself. DeAnna had met a certain Very Famous Talk Show Host, one of those people with near-saintly reputations for Sensitivity and Courage, and he not only had been a grapefruit but had been from the planet Mars. Or maybe it was the planet television. Had she always been so cynical about what she did?

Lotte had gone off to the bathroom fifteen minutes ago. She still wasn’t back. DeAnna cast another look at Carmencita’s door—what for? Carmencita was asleep. Itzaak was in there talking to her as if she could understand every word he said—and then headed down the hall for the bathrooms. The ladies’ room was in the elevator lobby, on the right side of the elevator bank. The men’s room was on the left. DeAnna stifled her perennial impulse to go into the men’s room and see if she could use a urinal and went into the ladies’ room instead.

“Lotte?”

“I am here, DeAnna. I am smoking a cigarette in a toilet stall, like the girls in that movie you gave me about the convent school.”

“
The Trouble with Angels
.”

“What?”

“Never mind. Come out of there and I’ll light a cigarette, too.”

“What will happen if they catch us?”

“They’ll ask us to put it out. And then they’ll ask for your autograph.”

The door to the last stall on the far end opened and Lotte came out, looking diminutive and furious.

“This is a crazy situation in this country, DeAnna, the way it is with smoking. It is one thing to be concerned about health. It is another to turn your country into a health police state.”

“Now, Lotte. Don’t exaggerate.”

“I am not exaggerating. There are three places where smoking should never be prohibited. In hospital waiting rooms. In psychiatrist’s offices. And at tax audits.”

“I’ll give you the tax audit.” DeAnna reached into her pocket for the pack of cigarettes she had taken off Lotte earlier in the day and lit up. “God, I’m feeling tired. Do you suppose Mr. Demarkian has a clue to what’s been going on around us?”