And then a rosy-cheeked woman was smiling at him. The manager of the bookstore.
“Oh, Mister Carmody, we thought you got lost.”
“Not in this neighborhood,” he said. And smiled, as required by the performance.
“You’ve got a great crowd waiting.”
“Let’s do it.”
“We have water on the lectern, and lots of pens, everything you need.”
* * *
As they climbed to the second floor, Carmody took off his hat and gloves and overcoat and the manager passed them to an assistant. He glanced at himself in a mirror, at his tweed jacket and black crew-collared sweater. He looked like a writer all right. Not a cop or a fireman or even a professor. A writer. He saw an area with about a hundred people sitting on folding chairs, penned in by walls of books, and more people in the aisles beyond the shelves, and another large group standing at the rear. Yes: a great crowd.
He stood modestly beside the lectern as he was introduced by the manager. He heard the words, “one of Brooklyn’s own …” and they sounded strange. He didn’t often think of himself that way, and in signings all over the country that fact was seldom mentioned. This store itself was a sign of a different Brooklyn. Nothing stays the same. Everything changes. There were no bookstores in his Brooklyn. He found his first books in the public library branch near where he lived, or in the great main branch at Grand Army Plaza. On rainy summer days he spent hours among their stacks. But the bookstores—where you could buy and own a book—they were down on Pearl Street under the El, or across the river on Fourth Avenue. His mind flashed on Bomba the Jungle Boy at the Giant Cataract The first book he’d ever finished. How old was I? Eleven. Yes. Eleven. It cost a nickel on Pearl Street. That year, I had no bad dreams.
During the introduction, he peered out at the faces, examining them for hostility. But the faces were different too. Most were in their thirties, lean and intense, or prepared to be critical, or wearing the competitive masks of apprentice writers. He had seen such faces in a thousand other bookstores, out in America. About a dozen African-Americans were scattered through the seats, with a few standing on the sides. He saw a few paunchy men with six or seven copies of his books: collectors, looking for autographs to sell on eBay or some fan website. He didn’t see any of the older faces. Those faces still marked by Galway or Sicily or the Ukraine. He didn’t see the pouchy, hooded masks that were worn by men like Seanie Mulrane.
His new novel and five of the older paperbacks were stacked on a table to the left of the lectern, ready for signing, and Carmody began to relax. Thinking: It’s another signing. Thinking: I could be in Denver or Houston or Berkeley.
Finally, he began to read, removing his glasses because he was near-sighted, focusing on words printed on pages. His words. His pages. He read from the first chapter, which was always fashioned as a hook. He described his hero being drawn into the mysteries of a grand Manhattan restaurant by an old college pal, who was one of the owners, all the while glancing up at the crowd, so that he didn’t sound like Professor Carmody. The manager was right: It was a great crowd. They listened. They laughed at the hero’s wisecracks. Carmody enjoyed the feedback. He enjoyed the applause too, when he had finished. And then he was done, the hook cast. The manager explained that Carmody would take some questions, and then sign books.
He felt himself tense again. And thought: Why did I run, all those years ago? Why did I do what I did to Molly Mulrane?
I ran to escape, he thought.
That’s why everybody runs. That’s why women run from men. Women have run from me too. To escape.
People moved in the folding chairs, but Carmody was still. I ran because I felt a rope tightening on my life. Because Molly Mulrane was too nice. Too ordinary. Too safe. I ran because she gave me no choice. She had a script and I didn’t. They would get engaged and he’d get his B.A. and maybe a teaching job and they’d get married and have kids and maybe move out to Long Island or over to Jersey and then—I ran because I wanted something else. I wanted to be Hemingway in Pamplona or in a café on the Left Bank. I wanted to make a lot of money in the movies, the way Faulkner did or Irwin Shaw, and then retreat to Italy or the south of France. I wanted risk. I didn’t want safety. So I ran. Like a heartless frightened prick.
* * *
The first question came from a bearded man in his forties, the type who wrote nasty book reviews that guaranteed him enure.
“Do you think if you’d stayed in Brooklyn,” the bearded man asked, “you’d have been a better writer?”
Carmody smiled at the implied insult, the patronizing one.
“Probably,” he answered. “But you never know these things with any certainty. I might never have become a writer at all. There’s nothing in the Brooklyn air or the Brooklyn water that makes writers, or we’d have a couple of million writers here …”
A woman in her twenties stood up. “Do you write on a word processor, or longhand, or a typewriter?”
This was the way it was everywhere, and Carmody relaxed into the familiar. Soon he’d be asked how to get an agent or how he got his ideas and how do I protect my own ideas when I send a manuscript around? Could you read the manuscript of my novel and tell me what’s wrong? The questions came and he answered as politely as possible. He drew people like that, and he knew why: He was a success, and there were thousands of would-be writers who thought there were secret arrangements, private keys, special codes that would open the doors to the alpine slopes of the bestseller lists. He tried to tell them that, like life, it was all a lottery. Most didn’t believe him.
Then the manager stepped to the microphone and smiled and said that Mr. Carmody would now be signing books. “Because of the large turnout,” the manager said, “Mr. Carmody will not be able to personalize each book. Otherwise many of you would have a long wait.” Carmody thanked everybody for coming on such a frigid night and there was warm, loud applause. He sat down at the table, and sipped from a bottle of Poland Spring water.
He signed the first three books on the frontispiece, and then a woman named Peggy Williams smiled and said, “Could you make an exception? We didn’t go to school together, but we went to the same school twenty years apart. Could you mention that?”
He did, and the line slowed. Someone wanted him to mention the Dodgers. Another, Coney Island. One man wanted a stickball reference, although he was too young to ever have played that summer game. “It’s for my father,” he explained. There was affection in these people, for this place, this neighborhood, which was now their neighborhood. But Carmody began to feel something else in the room, something he could not see.
“You must think you’re hot shit,” said a woman in her fifties. She had daubed rouge on her pale cheeks. “I’ve been in this line almost an hour.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and tried to be light. “It’s almost as bad as the Motor Vehicle Bureau.”
She didn’t laugh.
“You could just sign the books,” she said. “Leave off the fancy stuff.”
“That’s what some people want,” he said. “The fancy stuff.”
“And you gotta give it to them? Come on.”
He signed his name on the title page and handed it to her, still smiling.
“Wait a minute,” she said, holding the book before him like a summons. “I waited a long time. Put in, ‘For Gerry’—with a G—‘who waited on line for more than an hour.’”
She laughed then too, and he did what she asked. The next three just wanted signatures, and two just wanted “Merry Christmas” and then a collector arrived and Carmody signed six first editions. He was weary now, his mind filling with images of Molly Mulrane and Seanie’s face and injuries he had caused so long ago. All out there somewhere. And still the line trailed away from the table, into a crowd that, without his glasses, had become a multicolored smear, like a bookcase.
* * *
The woman came around from the side aisle, easing toward the front of the line in a distra
cted way. Carmody saw her whisper to someone on the line, a young man who made room for her with the deference reserved for the old. She was hatless, her white hair cut in girlish bangs across her furrowed brow. She was wearing a short down coat, black skirt, black stockings, mannish shoes. The coat was open, showing a dark rose sweater. Her eyes were pale.
Holy God.
She was six feet away from him, behind two young men and a collector. A worn leather bag hung from her shoulder. A bag so old that Carmody remembered buying it in a shop in the Village, next door to the Eighth Street Bookshop. He remembered it when it was new, and so was he.
He glanced past the others and saw that she was not looking at him. She stared at bookshelves, or the ceiling, or the floor. Her face had an indoor whiteness. The color of ghosts. He signed a book, then another. And the girl he once loved began to come to him, the sweet pretty girl who asked nothing of him except that he love her back. And he felt then a great rush of sorrow. For her. For himself. For their lost child. He felt as if tears would soon leak from every pore in his body. He heard a whisper of someone howling. The books in front of him were now as meaningless as bricks.
Then she was there. And Carmody rose slowly and leaned forward to embrace her across the table.
“Oh, Molly,” he whispered. “Oh, Molly, I’m so, so sorry.”
She smiled then, and the brackets that framed her mouth seemed to vanish, and for a moment Carmody imagined taking her away with him, repairing her in the sun of California, making it up, writing a new ending. Rewriting his own life. He started to come around the table.
“Molly,” he said. “Molly, my love.”
Then her hand reached into the leather bag and he knew what it now must hold. Passed down from her father. A souvenir of long ago.
Yes, he thought. Release me, Molly. Yes. Bring me your nickel-plated gift. Do it.
Her hand came out of the bag, holding what he expected.
HASIDIC NOIR
BY PEARL ABRAHAM
Williamsburg
It was a day no different from other days, a not unusual day in which I was doing not unusual things in my own slow way, what my wife who is quick in everything refers to, not always appreciatively, as my meditative manner. I’ve tried to explain that slowness is my method, the way I work, that this is how I solve my cases and earn a living.
Yes, she says, that’s all right while you’re working, but a meditative mind doesn’t serve such tasks as feeding a child or stopping for a quart of milk on the way home.
She doesn’t know that she’s asking for the impossible. At the end of the day when I close and lock the door to my office, she wants me to turn the lock on my thinking mind, along with my desk and files, and arrive home free and clear, prepared to give her and the children my full attention. And probably she has a right to such a husband, but the habit of brooding can’t be turned on and off at will.
On this not unusual day, doing my not unusual things, stopping before morning service at the mikvah for the immersion that all Hasidic men take once a day, twice on Fridays in honor of the Sabbath, the word my brooding mind picked out of the male rumble was MURDER.
Murdered in cold blood, I overheard a man say.
The delayed response—the speaker was probably under water—when it came, was a Talmudic citation, not unexpected in a world in which the Talmud makes up a large part of every young man’s curriculum. More was said, there were details, some of which I’d previously heard and dismissed as talk, and names—the victim’s, the victim’s rival, and also for some reason the victim’s brother-in-law—and I was all ears.
I waited my turn for immersion with murder on my mind. After all, such violence isn’t a daily occurrence in our world. And the victim, a man belonging to Hasidic aristocracy—a nephew of the Grand Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum—known as the Dobrover rebbe, one of two relatives in line to inherit the Grand Rabbinic throne, wasn’t just anyone. The rivalry between Dobrov and Szebed had been part of the Hasidic scene for as long as I could remember, dating back to the old rebbe’s first stroke. For years there’d been volley after volley of insults and injuries between the two congregations, and the tales of these insults grew long beards. Along with others in the community, I’d grown a thick skin and generally remained unruffled by even the tallest of such tales. But murder! That was unheard of. And where did the Dobrover’s brother-in-law, Reb Shloimele, administrator of Szebed’s boys’ school, enter into this story?
I spent the rest of the morning at my desk, closing the files of the usual, petty white-collar crimes, my regular paying cases, but my mind was preoccupied with this murder, which had arrived without a client, no one to pay for time or expenses. After so many years of hoping for the opportunity to stand the detective’s real test, praying even, God protect us from evil, for a case replete with gun, body, widow, the complete grim pattern, here it appeared, a Hasidic murder, a rarity in this community, and I couldn’t pass it up.
I’d had a modicum of experience working homicide, on the fringes really, assisting the New York Police Department on several cases in the nearby Italian and Spanish neighborhoods. The police chief still calls occasionally with questions about this part of the city that an insider could answer easily. And now, after so many years, it was as an insider that I’d come across this murder, and it was also as an insider that I knew to judge it a politically motivated crime with perpetrators from the top brass. With the Dobrover rebbe out of the way, Szebed could take the Grand Rabbinic throne without a struggle. If I seem to be jumping to conclusions, note that I grew up in this community and continue to live here; I am one of them.
Anywhere else, murder, even when it occurs with some frequency, is front-page news; in the Hasidic world, it’s kept out of the papers—another sign that this was an inside job. Our insular world, may it long survive, transported from Eastern Europe and rebuilt in Williamsburg, New York, an American shtetl, has made a point of knowing and keeping politicians, judges, and members of the press in our pockets. I knew too well how this worked.
I also knew that asking questions was not an option. One question in the wrong place, one word even, could alert those who didn’t want talk. When the highest value in a community is loyalty to the greater cause, meaning the continuity of the status quo, all means to this end are imbued with religious significance, and are thereby justified. It was quickly becoming clear to me that this murder had been handed me for a reason, that it was for this case that I, a Hasidic detective, the first one in the history of Hasidism, had been bestowed upon a community that usually eschewed new things. I owed it to the higher powers that created me to pursue the murderers, but I would have to watch my step.
* * *
At noon, I walked the ten blocks to Landau’s on Lee, my regular lunch counter, selected not necessarily for its excellence in food but for its distance from my office, because my wife insisted on some daily exercise, though I was partial to their sweet and sour pickles and their warm sauerkraut, having grown up on them, and would have walked twenty blocks for a Landau frankfurter with all the trimmings. On this day, I hoped to overhear something useful. It was late November, a cool stimulating day. I buttoned my black coat, pulled my black hat forward, and wrapped the ivory silk muffler twice around my neck, a gift from my wife when we were bride and groom.
The windows of Landau’s were already steamy with cooking. I took the three steps down, entered, was greeted by the elderly Reb Motl Landau, who has known me, as he likes to say, ever since I was this high, indicating a place above his own head. I’m tall, 5’11”, which is considered especially tall in these parts, populated as it is by mostly small-boned Jews of Hungarian descent, modyeros, the Romanian Jews like to call them, intending a bit of harmless deprecation since the word is also the name of a particular nut eaten there.
Without waiting for my order, Reb Motl set a loaded tray down in front of me, as if he’d seen me leave the office ten minutes earlier. My lunch: a frankfurter as starter, beefburger as entree, alon
g with two sour pickles, a glass of water, and an ice-cream soda, nondairy of course.
I took my first bite, a third of the dog, noted the three-person huddle at the far end of the lunch counter, and raised an eyebrow in question.
Reb Motl nodded, drew five fingers of one hand together, meaning patience please, and went to serve another customer. He never played dumb and deaf with me. And we didn’t waste words.
When Reb Motl returned, he picked up my crumpled wrappers as if this is what he had returned for, and grumbled, What don’t you already know?
The word on the street? I asked.
You mean word at the mikvah, he corrected.
I nodded.
Guilty, he said.
I raised my eyebrows in question, meaning, Guilty of what?
Read the book, Reb Motl said.
What book? I asked, using only my shoulders and eyebrows.
Published to make the sins of Dobrov known, Reb Motl said, and moved on. This was a busy lunch counter and he couldn’t afford to pause long enough to forfeit the momentum that kept him efficient.
* * *
I stopped at the bookstore on my way back to the office, wended my way past the leaning towers of yarmulkes at the entrance, the piles of ritual fringes, stacks of aleph-bet primers. As always, Reb Yidel was behind the counter, and when I asked for the book, which turned out to be a pamphlet, really, he pointed to a stack beside the register. I looked at the title page to see who had undersigned this bit of slander, and found no name, no individual taking responsibility for it. The printer, however, was a company known as the printing house for Szebed, and I said to myself, of course it would be Szebed, who else, but I was also disappointed. The motivation behind Szebed’s publication of such a pamphlet was too obvious, too facile to be interesting, and I wished for a more complicated community with more difficult cases, obscure motivations, a case that required mental agility, intricacies I could take pride in unraveling. It was use of the mind that had attracted me to detective work in the first place.
New York City Noir Page 3