I looked at the quivering men at my door and felt sorry for them, mere messengers. We were told to bring you in, one mumbled.
Tell the court I’ll see them tomorrow, at 9 a.m. sharp, in the revealing light of day. There will be no nighttime shenanigans. Good evening.
I shut the door and waited for the sounds of their steps, first shuffling, then sprinting to get away. I bolted the door, inserted the police lock, looked in on the children who had slept through it all, assured my wife that everything was under control, and got to work on the small laptop I keep at home.
When I finally returned to bed at 3 in the morning, my wife hugged me silently and did her best to remind me that I am only a man, of flesh and blood, not iron. I knew that even though she was against what I was doing—for reasons of safety rather than principle—she couldn’t help but be proud of the way I was handling it.
* * *
I slept well, and in the morning dressed as usual, in my charcoal gray suit, white shirt, black overcoat, and silk muffler. I pocketed the Glock as protection against the court’s manhandling, their method of intimidation. This was a non-jurisdictional court, therefore without metal detectors, and without the routine of body searches, both unnecessary. A handful of appointed rabbis, intrinsically honest, would act as judges, but they owed their livelihoods to their patrons, the men who nominated, appointed, and paid for their services. There would be some younger scholars available to act as mediators. Also present would be the man who was bringing the case against me. Who would it be? I expected to see the man I’d fingered, the jealous brother-in-law, or if he didn’t want to show his face, a representative.
I followed my regular routine, stopped first at the mikvah which was buzzing. It was a perfect setting for murder, an underground hell, where locker room odors envelop you on entrance through the unassuming side door. Hurrying down the stone stairs and long tiled hallways, the curl and drip of the waterlogged vapors take over and then the low rumble of bass and tenor voices. At the entrance to the lockers, the bath attendant hands you your towel, one per person, and you move along toward your designated locker and the bench in front of it. You undo your shoes, remove your socks, left foot first, then the left leg of your pants, and so on, in the order in which you were taught to undress. Dressing, you reversed it, right foot first, insuring against the possibility of getting the day off on the wrong foot. And still the act of undressing provokes other indiscretions. While your hands are at work, your ears don’t remain idle. They tune into the nearest conversation in the aisle, then onto the next nearest, and so on, staying with each one long enough to hear whether it’s of interest. And of course there always is something of interest, a bit of information, gossip someone heard at home the night before, husbands picking up at the mikvah where their house-bound, child-bound, telephone-addicted wives left off the night before.
I didn’t have to wait long to hear my own name, and then the name of the man I’d fingered, Reb Shloimele, the chief administrator of Szebed, though to hear the talk, not for much longer. A well-respected man of the community the day before, today his name was mud. With the generous helping of hyperbole typical of mikvah gossip, someone equated Reb Shloimele’s crime with that of the biblical Amelek’s, Israel’s oldest enemy. In other words, Reb Shloimele was a sentenced man.
* * *
This time I expected the crowds, and the journalists with cameras. And I knew how much Szebed would hate it. The rabbis wouldn’t approve. No one would like it, but the publicity would serve to protect me. I pulled the brim of my hat down to conceal my face and made my way through the throng. Questions, microphones, and cameras were pressed on me. I walked straight through, succumbing to none. The Internet had done the work, the chat rooms had been devilishly successful; it was enough. I had no reason to add fuel to the fire and further enrage the sitting judges.
Inside, without much of a greeting and none of the usual friendly handshakes, two men attempted to lead me, strongarm style, to my place at the table, completely unnecessary since on my own I’d shown up at the courtroom. I shook them off and walked alone, pulled out the chair, sat. The judges frowned, but said nothing. They were pretending at busyness, each taking a turn at thumbing through a pile of continuous-feed paper in front of them, the tabs and holes that fit a dot matrix printer’s sprockets still attached. Someone had provided them with a complete printout of the chat room conversations, a fat manuscript titled “Hasidic Noir.” I suppressed a smile.
Throat-clearing and short grunts indicated the start of proceedings. One judge asked whether the defendant knew what he was accused of.
No, I said. As everyone here knows, I am a God-fearing, law-abiding Hasid whose livelihood is detective work. I solve petty crimes, attempt to bring to justice those who break the law, my small effort at world repair.
There was a long pause. Read this then, the judge said, and handed me a sheet of paper.
The complaint against me: libel, for attempting to besmirch a man’s name, to ruin a reputation.
The rabbi sitting directly across the table waited for me to finish reading, then said, You know as well as we do that a man guilty of libel must be judged, according to Jewish law, as a murderer. Destroying a man’s reputation is a serious crime.
I nodded and said, I’m well aware of that law because it is precisely what I believe Reb Shloimele guilty of.
I made a long show of extracting the cheap pamphlet from my briefcase, pushed it across the table, and announced, as if this were a courtroom complete with stenographers, Let the record show that this slanderous pamphlet was submitted by the defendant as evidence of Reb Shloimele’s guilt. Murder via slander, false slander, moreover, since not one of the accusations have been proven true without doubt.
I paused, looked from face to face, then continued slowly: And this court is guilty of acting as an accomplice to this murder. Even if Reb Shloimele managed to gather enough signatures to support the excommunication, and all the signatories were surely his Szebeder friends, by what right, I ask on behalf of Dobrov, did it grant the Dobrover rebbetzin a divorce and break up an entire family. Since you’re citing Jewish law, you also know that breaking up a marriage unnecessarily is equal to taking life.
The rabbi’s fist came down on the table with a thump. Enough, he said. Neither Reb Shloimele nor this court are on trial. Our sins are beside the point right now. You, however, have a lot to answer for. If you thought or knew that someone had been wronged, you ought to have come directly to us, and quietly. Instead, you took the story to the public, and not just the Jewish public. You are guilty of besmirching not only the name of a respectable man among us, but also the name of God, and worse, in front of the eyes of other nations. Retribution for befouling the name of God, as you well know, arrives directly from heaven, but this court will also do its part. You will be as a limb cut away from a body. Your wife and children will share your fate.
I took stock of the situation, decided that I was willing to take my chances with God, and since in the eyes of these men I was already judged guilty, I couldn’t make my case worse. I took a deep breath and went all the way.
Which of you here would have been willing to listen to my story? Which of you here isn’t paid, one way or another, by the Szebeder congregation. According to the law of this nation in which we live, you qualify as collaborators, and therefore ought to recuse yourself from this case. I exhaled and stood. And if, as further proof of your guilt, you require a body, here it is.
I took long strides to the door, opened it. As planned, an EMS technician wheeled into the room the Dobrover rebbe himself, frail and wraithlike, a man of fifty-three years with an early heart condition, attended by his young son in the Litvak frock.
The Dobrover appeared before us all as the Job-like figure that sooner or later every mortal becomes, but in his case the suffering had come at the hand of man rather than God, and that made all the difference.
The room remained silent for long minutes. An excommunic
ated man shows himself in the courtroom for only one purpose: to have the excommunication nullified, to be reborn to the community. This court had difficult days, weeks, probably, of work ahead.
I’d done my part for Dobrov. Now it remained to be seen what Dobrov would do for me. In the meantime, no one took notice when I snapped my briefcase closed loudly, adjusted the brim of my hat, and left. I had become a dead man, unseen and unheard.
* * *
©2004 Pearl Abraham
NO TIME FOR SENIOR’S
BY SIDNEY OFFIT
Downtown Brooklyn
I’m talking murder. Murder!” she says.
It’s past noon. I’m sitting in my office near DeKalb and Flatbush, knocking off a corned-beef-lean bathed in cole slaw on seeded rye from Junior’s. And there stands Sylvia Berkowitz O’Neil, not looking her age, in high heels, short skirt, and enough makeup to drown Esther Williams and Mark Spitz on a bad day.
Before I can crack wise, Sylvia takes her first shot. “Yer eating at Junior’s? I’m working day and night, night and day, with an economy deli for the neighborhood, and you’re supporting the competition? And don’t tell me you never heard of Senior’s!”
Senior’s? She’s got to be pulling of my legs. But not Sylvia. A kid with an old baseball cap on backwards is standing by her side, the spitting image of Seamus “Scoop” O’Neil, my former pal, who run off to City Hall with Sylvia back when we were an item.
“So what’s up? Why me? Why today after—has it been thirty, forty years?”
Sylvia doesn’t miss a beat. “I need you, Pistol Pete,” she says. “The cops have got Scoop in for murder. Murder. They say he done in Front Page Shamburger and Sherlock Iconoflip.” Then, “Don’t you ask a lady to sit down? What’s happened to your manners? And this gentleman, about whom you don’t seem to have the presence to ask, is our nephew I.F., named, of course, after the famous Izzy Stone, who you know was Scoop’s hero all these many years.”
So, I pull up two old bridges that I haven’t unfolded in—gotta stop counting the years. Sylvia keeps yammering, reminding me I’m the only private eye she’s ever really known, recalling the days when I was feeding Scoop leads, checking out scumbags for him, so he could blow the lid off the hustlers at Borough Hall—who made the deals with sewer, highway, and bridge contractors. I unwrap a White Owl, pull out the old Zippo, and am ready to light up.
“You are not going to smoke,” Sylvia tells me. “I don’t believe it. You still haven’t caught on.”
That’s Sylvia. Hasn’t skipped a beat, still telling me what to do. I bury the Zippo and start chewing the stogie.
“It happened at their weekly poker game,” Sylvia says.
“What useta be their gang of six, what with the smoking and the drinking, what it done to their lungs and livers and kidneys, not to say their marriages and longevity. Well, now it’s down to the three of them. Was three until Front Page and Sherlock—may their souls rest in a City Room—got knocked off.”
Sylvia is not keen on interruptions, but I cut in. “Gotta play it straight with you for old time’s sake, Sylv,” I say. “Haven’t hustled a case in must be five years. Been sittin’ up here in the office on a long-term lease just passin’ the time. Doin’ a little this and that.”
She knows I never been hitched, and I can tell by the way she kinda half smiles at me she suspects I’m still carrying the torch for her.
“Sanchez over at the precinct says it was poison—arsenic mixed with mustard—that done them in,” Sylvia goes on. “The cops found splotches of mustard on Scoop’s cuff, his shirt, the zipper of his fly. Would you believe it?”
I’m studying the kid’s cap. The mellow blue has me wondering if it’s an old Brooklyn Dodger lid. “Hey, kid, you ever hear of Carl Furillo, Sandy Amoros? Duke Snider? I know you heard of Jackie Robinson. Everybody heard of Jackie Robinson.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?” Sylvia says in a huff. “I’m talking about my husband, held for murder. I’m giving you the facts, nothing but the facts, and you come up with a walk down Memory Lane. Who you think you are—Joe Franklin?”
But the kid is hooked. “Carl Anthony Furillo hit .296 for the 1955 World Champions. Edwin Donald ‘Duke’ Snider hit four home runs, batted in seven, BA .320 in the Series. ‘Sandy’ Edmund Isasi Amoros led the team with .333 …”
“Enough,” Sylvia says, like she’s letting the dentist know one more drill and she’s outa there. “We didn’t come here to talk baseball.”
But the kid has cleared the fences. When Scoop and I seen the last of each other, we had this pact, at least I thought we had a deal, only talk, talk only, about Dodgers, once O’Malley had packed up the gang including the great Sandy Koufax himself and hauled kit and caboodle off to L.A. I’m touched that the kid—did Sylvia say he was her nephew?—has got it all down pat. The memories, my memories of our church that was Ebbets Field.
“Everything isn’t picture perfect between Scoop and me,” Sylvia goes on. “I’m not gonna tell you it is. Like Senior’s. Me opening the restaurant, a deli. I’m ordering my pastramis from Langers. You never taste a smokier, saltier, peppery flavor in your life. ‘Yer ordering pastramis from L.A.,’ Scoop says. ‘I won’t hear of it. First they steal our Dodgers. Now you’re goin’ head to head with Junior’s with an L.A. pastrami.’ That’s what he says. No head for business.”
“Say, kid,” I say. “They call you I.F.? What you know about Izzy Stone?”
“He published an independent newsletter, received a Special George Polk Journalism Award in 1970, the same award the Brooklyn Eagle won for Community Service in 1948 and 1949. Stone thanked the Brooklyn Center of L.I.U. for what he called a great honor.”
The kid gets no further than that when Sylv is back again.
“What is this? First down Memory Lane, now it’s Old Home Week. The Brooklyn Eagle is dead and so are Front Page and Sherlock. Scoop is facing the hot seat and you’re cutting up about Brooklyn bygones. You taking the case or I gotta fly a shammes in from L.A.?”
“Sanchez, you say?” I say. “Pablo Sanchez. He still around? Must be a sergeant since I seen him last. I’ll give him a call.” Sylvia is pumping her heels, the kid is flipping his lid, brim forward now. I can see the fading white monogrammed B. The number comes to me easy, 84th Precinct, 718-875-6811. I’m still chomping the stogie when I’m on the line with Pablo. “Socorro! Socorro!” I say by way of openers. “I gotta talk to you, amigo. I hear you got Scoop O’Neil in for asesinato. His wife Sylvia put me on the case. I gotta talk to him. No puedo esperar.”
“Come on over,” Pablo says, “Esperaré aquí.”
“I’m on,” I tell Sylvia and the kid. “You might as well come along for the ride.”
* * *
“Sure I know my way around Brooklyn,” the kid tells me as we’re ambling toward Gold Street. “I got a map.” Then he says, “You ever hear of Only the Dead Know Brooklyn?”
“Not now,” says Sylvia, wobbling on her high heels. “I’m in the dumps without more bad news.”
I say, “Yeah. A story by Thomas Wolfe, the elder. I never knew kids your age even knew who he was.”
“Izzy knows all about books and batting averages,” Sylvia squawks. “But ask him to slice a corned beef and it comes out like he’s working the Blarney Stone.”
When we reach the old brown brick precinct house where they’re holding Scoop, Pablo greets Sylv, “Mucho gusto en conocerla, señorita.” Then, he makes it clear, only one visitor at a time in the detective’s office. He’s arranged for me to have a confab with Scoop.
I’m sittin’ on one of those hard-back chairs that must’ve been designed by a chiropractor to increase business when Scoop comes in looking like it’s ten seconds after Bobby Thomson’s home run that done us in in ’51.
“Pete. Pistol Pete,” he says, shaking his head from side to side, the flaps of his graying mustache twitching in the breeze. “It’s been so long, so long ago and far away.” For a second there I t
hink Scoop is gonna break into a song. Scoop useta be like that, a walkin’, talkin’ Broadway musical with subtitles. I understand why Sylv scratched me for him. All that freebee entertainment. Scoop plunks in the chair across the desk from me. “Can you get me outa here? I done nothing wrong. We’re playing deuces wild and I’m drawing to an ace and two twos when they cave in—Sherlock and Front Page, two of the greatest beat reporters who never won a Polk Award.”
“Hey, you win a Polk Award?” I’m checking out Scoop’s memory.
“Nominated twice,” Scoop says with a long sigh. “I had Al Landa and David Medina pitching for me, but couldn’t get past that flack Hershey they brought in from Newsday.”
The marbles are there, so I ask him for the story. “No song and dance, Scoop,” I say. “We only got so long. Sanchez is doing us a favor. Just a run through, not twice around.”
Scoop confirms pretty much what Sylvia has told me—the history of the poker game, the poisoned mustard, the clues on his cuff, pants, fly. I’m taking notes, scratching times, names, the menu. Seems the scene of the crime is a small office off the main drag of Senior’s, the deli Sylvia has opened less than a month ago.
“I never wanted her to do it,” Scoop says. “What we need a business for at our age? We should be rolling in the clover or at least the sands of Miami Beach. But you know Sylvia, once she got it in her head to make pastrami on rye with a slice of cheesecake for McDonald’s prices, there was no stopping her. She’s talking franchises coast to coast, going public on the big board, and we’re lucky if we can pay the bills even with my kid—” Scoop breaks off, shrugs, collects himself. “I mean our nephew I.F. Izzy. Ain’t he an egg cream with a dash of cinnamon if you ever seen one?”
Egg creams with cinnamon? That’s a new one on me, but I let it pass. I’m hearing “my kid” before “our nephew.” I say, “Tell me something, Scoop. This nephew of yourn, he’s your sister’s kid? Molly who I remember lived in Sea Gate before she run off with a retired cutter from the garment district and moved to South Fallsburg?”
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