Tongues of Fire

by Peter Abrahams

  Krebs studied the old file. There wasn’t much in it, and what there was didn’t help. Fairweather waited until he was finished and then said, “We looked for the woman. Nothing. Disappeared without a trace. As for the drug dealer, what’s his name—”

  “Cohee.”

  “Right. Cohee. Shot four or five years ago. Some sort of gang war apparently. There was something a little odd about it though. What was it?” Fairweather thought for a while, then shook his head. “No go. Anyway, it’s not important. We did turn up Katz and his wife.”

  Krebs reread the brief record of his talk with Katz, long ago. Katz had known nothing. Neither had his wife.

  “Still want to see them?”

  “Yes.”

  On the way Krebs scanned what Fairweather had brought on the Sudan. “Is this all there is?”

  “That’s what they say. It’s been like that since the embassy closed down. But it’s the same old thing.”

  “What same old thing?”

  “That’s happening in all those places. Islamic brown-colored northerners fighting Christian and animist black southerners. With a few secessionist movements thrown in.”

  Krebs looked at the last page in the file. “We’ve got three people in the whole country?”

  “Only one full time,” Fairweather said. He leaned over and pointed to a name on the page. Gillian Wells. She was a reporter for a magazine called L’Africaine.

  Fairweather stopped in front of an art gallery on upper Madison Avenue. L’Oeil said the sign, in slim silver letters. In the window hung a large oil painting draped in black velvet. It showed a woman bathing in a forest pool. A man was watching her from behind a tree. He had hooves instead of feet. In the bottom corner a rabbit was looking on. It had a little white tail.

  Krebs opened his door and got out. Fairweather got out too. “Wait here,” Krebs said. Fairweather got back in.

  Krebs went inside. More nudes hung on the walls. Many of them were bathing in forest pools, some singly, some in twos and threes. At the rear of the gallery a fat man sat behind a little antique desk, reading a book. His head was bald, except at the sides where hair grew in thick curly clumps like earmuffs. As Krebs came closer he put down the book and began writing on a pad of paper.

  “Mr. Katz?”

  “Yes?” the man said, lifting his pen reluctantly. Krebs read the writing on the pad, upside down: “Quentin Katz, Quentin K., Mr. Q. Katz, B.A.”

  “Do you remember me?”

  Katz looked at him closely. “Were you the one who was interested in the Bouguereau?”

  “No.”

  “Really? You look a lot like him. Anyway, it’s sold,” he added as a door opened behind him and a tall, gray-haired woman emerged carrying three sides of an ornate gilded frame.

  “Quentin, where the hell—” She stopped when she saw Krebs. “I knew there’d be trouble,” she said. Katz looked at her, then looked back at Krebs.

  “Why is that, Mrs. Katz?”

  “Ms. Finkle,” she said. The muscles in her thin face bulged slightly, as though she was grinding her teeth. “I’ve retained my maiden name.”

  “She was one of the first,” Katz said proudly.

  “Why did you know there’d be trouble?” Krebs asked again.

  “Because he brings trouble.”

  “Who?”

  “Isaac Rehv. Why else would you be here?”

  Katz opened his eyes wide and his mouth a little to show that he had recognized Krebs. “You’re still investigating that restaurant business? After fifteen years?”

  Krebs looked over Katz’s head at his wife and said, “When was he here?”

  The telephone rang. Katz answered it. “L’Oeil.” He pronounced it to rhyme with oy. “Just a minute.” He handed the telephone to his wife. “It’s your father.”

  “Hello, Daddy.” She listened. “Can’t I sign them here?” She listened some more. The muscles in her face stopped working so hard. “Okay. I’ll be there. Do you need Quentin too?” Her father said something that made her laugh, a high-pitched laugh that was somehow very aggressive. Krebs would not have wanted to be on the receiving end of that laugh; he wondered if that was why Katz had grown earmuffs. “It means ‘the eye’ in French,” the woman who had retained her father’s name was saying. “Yes, L’Oeil,” she said, pronouncing it in a way that sounded French to Krebs. She listened, laughed again, and hung up.

  “When was he here?” Krebs asked.

  “Last week. Tuesday,” Katz’s wife said. “Only he wasn’t here. He came to the apartment.”

  “What did he want?”

  “Wait a minute, dear,” Katz said. “I don’t know if we should be so quick to answer all these questions. It was never proven to my satisfaction that Isaac had done anything wrong.”

  “It doesn’t have to be proven to your satisfaction,” Krebs said. “I want facts and I want them now.”

  “You have no right to talk to me like that,” Katz said. “Not here, on my own property.” He started to rise from his chair.

  Krebs leaned across the desk and pushed him back into it, hard. “Let’s not open up the question of whose property it is,” he said. He saw a flush rise to the surface of the fleshless cheeks of Katz’s wife. For a moment he thought it was anger. Then he looked at her eyes and saw it wasn’t. “What did Rehv want?”

  “Money,” the woman said.

  “Did you give it to him?”

  “No.”

  “How did he react?”

  The woman shrugged. Katz pushed back his chair and stood up. “We told him we couldn’t very well lend him money after he had left us so abruptly. He understood. Now I wish we had lent him the money. Given it to him, goddamn it.” His voice broke.

  “Did he say what he wanted it for?”

  “No. What difference does that make? We should have given it to him anyway. He’s a good man. Anyone can see that.”

  “Quentin, don’t be a jerk,” his wife said angrily. Krebs liked having her there: She did all the work. “He stole your passport.”

  “We don’t know that for sure.”

  “Then who did?”

  “Passport?” Krebs said.

  “We let him stay overnight,” the woman replied. “He said he had nowhere else. He was gone when we got up in the morning. A few days later Quentin noticed his passport was missing from the desk.”

  “That doesn’t prove a thing,” Katz said.

  Krebs ignored him. “Was the boy with him?” he asked Katz’s wife.

  “So there is a boy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Quentin’s passport wasn’t the only one missing. Joshua’s was gone too. He’s our son.”

  “The boy wasn’t there, then?”

  “No.”

  “None of this proves he took the passports,” Katz said. “Maybe we mislaid them. What good would they do him anyway?”

  They both looked at Krebs for an answer. Anyone could glue new photographs on top of old ones, he thought. It might work. “Have you got any idea where he went?”

  “No,” Katz said quickly.

  “Stop trying to be clever, Quentin,” his wife said. To Krebs she said: “Try the Aliyah Synagogue. The rabbi there has a fund for refugees. Quentin told him about it.”

  “Why not? He’s a human being, isn’t he?”

  “You’re breaking my heart,” she told her husband.

  Krebs walked out of the gallery, past the soft pink women in their forest pools. Once he had wanted only hard women, women like Sheila Finkle. At the time they hadn’t noticed him. Lately they did. But now he wanted soft pink ones—like Alice had been; and maybe still was. And they were not interested.

  He got into the car. Fairweather was reading a newspaper. “It’s going to mean the end of baseball. No pitcher is worth ten million a year. I don’t care who he is.”

  Krebs did not argue that. “Was that all there was in the file?” he asked.

  “I think so.”

 
“You think so?”

  “Jeez. Don’t get mad. Yes. That’s all they gave me.”

  “I thought there was more.” Krebs was trying to remember the psychiatrist’s report. He knew there was something in it he wanted to see.

  They drove to Brooklyn. Fairweather turned the air conditioner on full. He loosened his red tie and unfastened the top button of his pink shirt. “How can anyone live here in the summer?” Somewhere above the haze the sun rose higher and higher. It was good weather for growing tropical flowers, but there were no tropical flowers, only a few wilted plants in dirty apartment windows.

  The Aliyah Synagogue was a small brick building that stood between two takeout restaurants, one Chinese, the other Italian, both for sale. It might have been an old factory except for the stained-glass Moses over the door, holding out two tablets like the bill of fare. Fairweather parked in front and turned to Krebs with his eyebrows raised, waiting to be asked along. He wasn’t.

  Inside, it was hot and dark. Krebs walked down a wide hall. At the end of it a man sat in a chair by a wooden door. His chin rested on his chest, and his eyes were closed.

  “I’m looking for the rabbi,” Krebs said to him.

  Slowly the man raised his head and opened his eyes. He had not shaved that morning, or the morning before. He reached into a cardboard box at his feet, handed Krebs a black skullcap and a white shawl, and pointed to the door beside him. Krebs opened it and went in.

  It was a long narrow room with a platform at one end. The lower part was filled with rows of wooden benches, arranged in three sections. A few people sat on the benches, most of them alone. Krebs noticed that the women sat in the side sections, the men in the center. The men wore skullcaps and shawls; the women did not. Krebs put the black cap on his head and the shawl around his shoulders. He sat at the end of one of the benches in the center section.

  Three men wearing square black hats stood on the platform. Two of them held open a large scroll that was lying on a table covered with white cloth. The third read from the scroll in a singsong voice. Krebs did not know the language. On the bench in front of him an old man rocked back and forth, singing along in a low scratchy mutter. His neck was far too small for his frayed and dirty collar. It was very hot. Krebs felt the skullcap making a damp itchy circle on the top of his head.

  After a while the singing stopped. The man who had led the singing stepped forward and began addressing the congregation. From time to time he made harsh sounds in the back of his throat like a man getting ready to spit, but they were only part of the language. Drops of sweat trickled down from the top of Krebs’s head. His shirt stuck to his ribs. The man on the platform spoke for such a long time Krebs knew it had to be the sermon. When he stopped he returned to his place behind the scroll. The singing started again. Krebs got up and went out. He dropped the skullcap and the shawl into the cardboard box beside the sleeping man. He felt much cooler right away.

  Krebs walked to the other end of the dark hall. On the wall hung a plaque listing everyone who had donated money for the building of the synagogue and how much each had given. He read all the names and the amounts. He looked at his watch. He walked back down the hall. The man in the chair was snoring. Krebs watched him for a while, estimating the value of each article of clothing he wore. Through the door he heard the singing suddenly grow louder. It stopped. The door opened. A few old people came out. A few more. Then the man who had given the sermon. He was middle-aged and round, and much shorter than Krebs would have guessed from seeing him on the platform. Gray pockets sagged under his eyes.

  “Are you the rabbi?” Krebs said to him.

  “I am.” He spoke English with a faint accent.

  “I’d like a word with you.”

  “One moment.” The rabbi touched the sleeping man gently on the shoulder to wake him and turned to Krebs. “Come with me.”

  He led Krebs to a door halfway down the hall. They went into a small office, lined on all sides by shelves of books from floor to ceiling. There were no windows. It was very hot. The rabbi sat behind his desk and switched on a little fan. It pushed the hot heavy air around the room.

  “Problems with the air conditioning,” he said. “Please sit down.” He motioned to a chair.

  Krebs did not sit down. He took a small photograph from his pocket and placed it on the desk. “Have you seen this man?”

  The rabbi glanced at the photograph. “On what authority do you ask me?”

  Krebs showed him a New York City detective’s badge. “When was he here?”

  The rabbi looked at the badge, looked at the photograph, looked at Krebs. “What do you want with him?”

  “We think he killed his wife. We want to talk to him about it.”

  The rabbi sat back in his chair, watching Krebs closely. “I can’t believe it,” he said.

  “Why not, Rabbi?”

  For a few moments the rabbi sat silently, his eyes on Krebs. Finally he said, “You don’t want him for some political reason?”

  “No. Why do you ask that?”

  The rabbi shrugged. “He’s an Israeli. Like me.”

  “That’s no concern of mine, Rabbi. I don’t know anything about politics. I just want to find out if he killed his wife.”

  “I think you’re making a mistake. He did not seem like the type.”

  “There is no type, Rabbi. I’ve worked on enough homicides to learn that. You can’t tell ahead of time who’s going to get mad at his wife and start hitting her with a hammer.”

  “Is that what he did?”

  “Someone did. And he was the last person seen with her before she was killed.”

  The rabbi picked up the photograph. “He came here last Wednesday,” he said. “But he looked older than this.”

  “That’s an old photograph. It’s from his immigration card.”

  “In that case he hasn’t aged very much at all. Compared to most of us.” The rabbi handed Krebs the photograph. “I lent him three thousand dollars from the refugee fund.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he is a refugee.”

  “I meant, what reason did he give for needing it?”

  The rabbi tried to look Krebs in the eye, and couldn’t. “He said he had just separated from his wife and needed to find a place to live for himself and his son.”

  “Now he’s becoming a type,” Krebs said. “Was the boy with him?”

  “No.”

  “Have you any idea where he went?”

  The rabbi took out a handkerchief and mopped his face. “He said he would call when he had a definite address.”

  “Has he called?”

  “No.”

  Krebs put the photograph in his pocket. “Did you talk about anything else, Rabbi?”

  “Just Israel.”

  “Israel?” Krebs said, standing up to leave.

  “Yes. We talked about Aliyah.”

  Krebs wanted to keep him talking about Israel, but he did not want to seem too interested. Walking over to the bookshelves he ran his eyes over a few of the titles. “I’m afraid I don’t follow you, Rabbi.”

  “Aliyah means going up. Going up to Israel. I told him that in my opinion, and the opinion of many others in the community these days, the only hope for we Jews is to make that journey an internal one.”

  Krebs took a book from one of the shelves. “An internal journey?”

  “Yes. Israel is a state of mind. We should make it live inside ourselves, as we did for two thousand years.”

  “And what did he say to that?” Krebs asked, leafing through the pages.

  “He reacted quite oddly, as a matter of fact. He became very angry, and shouted at me: ‘I don’t want Israel to live in me. I want to live in Israel.’ I suppose I should have taken more notice of his temper at the time, but I didn’t.”

  “How were you to know?” Krebs closed the book. “Don’t worry about it.”

  The rabbi glanced at the book as Krebs returned it to the shelf. “Do you read Hebrew?” he as
ked in surprise.

  “No,” Krebs said, and went out the door.

  Outside, Fairweather waited in the car. He must have been very bored, Krebs thought, because he was reading the file on Isaac Rehv. “Maybe he’s crazy,” Fairweather said as Krebs got into the car.

  “That’s what Armbrister used to say.”

  “Who’s Armbrister?”

  “Someone you wouldn’t want to trade places with.”

  They drove off. Fairweather wondered when the heat was going to let up. Krebs wondered how far Isaac Rehv could go with stolen passports and borrowed money. And the boy.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  It was hotter than blood. Isaac Rehv could see that by looking out the window of the train at the thermometer tacked to a post on the station platform. It was mounted on a peeling yellow board advertising Keen’s English mustard. The scale of degrees ran from thirty to one hundred. Freezing, it said near the bottom; blood heat near the top. The mercury had risen past the marking for blood heat a little while before. Now it was pressing against the top of the glass column. The sun had been up for an hour and a half.

  The train was full. It was full at four A.M., two hours before it was scheduled to leave. On every one of the hard wooden benches, designed for three people, sat four and sometimes five. Others sat in the aisle. When the aisles of all the cars were filled, people began climbing onto the roof, putting their feet into the windows and pulling themselves up. Rehv and the boy watched the feet go by, some in sandals, some bare with thick hard soles that were yellow and flaking: black feet, brown feet, a few white feet, all of them dusty. When there was no more room on the roof, those left on the platform sat down to wait twenty-four hours for the next train.

  “Water?” Rehv asked Paul in Arabic, offering him the plastic canteen. The boy shook his head. “You’ve got to drink.” But he didn’t want to drink. He wanted to look out the window. Rehv watched him. He wore his white jubba as though it were the only kind of clothing he had ever worn. Except for his curly hair, which Rehv saw was a little too long, he looked not at all out of place.