“You are apparently an emotional man. For a policeman that’s a disadvantage, is it not?”
“I became a policeman ass backwards,” Barry said. “Backed into it.”
Kaufman expressed a look of confusion.
“I had intentions of becoming a rabbi myself,” he added. Why not take advantage of it? he thought. For once, maybe, he could use his Jewish background as a tool. It was always being used against him, making him the butt of jokes, or the object of some ridicule.
“A rabbi? And you became a policeman?”
“One polices the soul, the other the streets. Besides, you’re a rabbi and you became a soldier,” Barry countered. Kaufman nearly laughed. He leaned forward.
“How much pressure is coming down to solve this case?”
“Oh, the usual ton.”
“I see.” Kaufman thought for a moment. “How good a Jew are you now, Lieutenant?”
“Not very, I’m afraid. I barely practice anymore.”
“Does it bother you at all that a Jewish boy was killed because he believed in his people?”
Barry thought for a moment.
“Although I don’t like the fact that it does, it does. I’d rather it bothered me that a human being was killed. I would hope that it bothers me equally when any boy, or any person, is killed.”
“It’s a fair reply.” Kaufman studied Barry for a moment. “Perhaps you would like something to drink?”
“Cold glass of milk, maybe. I think I’m developing an ulcer.”
“Cold milk? Good. Avrum,” he called, and the boy approached. “Go get a glass of cold milk, please.” The boy nodded and hurried out.
“Your son?”
“Yes. I have three. He is the youngest. The other two are over at the Goldsteins with my wife. I will be going there later,” he added, seeing the question in Barry’s face.
“I don’t particularly support what you do,” Barry said, sensing the sincere and honest approach was the best with this man. He seemed not only able to take it, but to expect it. “As a policeman I can’t condone illegal acts.”
“But as a Jew?”
“As a Jew, I’m confused. I confess I don’t follow political events as closely as I should.”
“I disagree with your definition of what is legal and illegal. When you’re in a war, acts that would be illegal in peacetime suddenly become good, even great. We are in a continuous war. It’s as simple as that.”
“Nothing’s that simple. Perhaps we’re not opposing the battling so much as the battlefields you choose, such as the streets of New York.”
“For a Jew, the world is one continuous battlefield. Even the heart of Israel.”
“I understand you had some difficulties over there.”
Kaufman smiled. “You do follow some headlines.”
Avrum brought in a tray with a glass of milk in the middle of it. He carried it very carefully, not taking his eyes off the glass as he walked. When he got to the center of the room, Rabbi Kaufman did not lean over to take the tray. He let the boy finish the job.
“Thank you, Avrum.”
He backed away slowly, staring at Barry, and then disappeared around the corner of the doorway.
“Perhaps you find me too cynical, Lieutenant, but it keeps me alive. David Goldstein should have been a little more cynical.”
Barry took a long swallow of milk and then rubbed his stomach.
“I may have been cynical, but I don’t think I’m as paranoid,” Barry said.
“That’s because you’ve chosen to assimilate.”
“Maybe that’s why I have this damn bar mitzvah nightmare all the time,” Barry said. Kaufman smiled. “Look, Rabbi, what can you tell me about this situation?”
“You are aware, I am sure, that there are illegal Arab aliens here.”
“Of course.”
“We have reason to believe one of them was responsible for David Goldstein’s death. But not alone.”
“How do you know this?”
Kaufman leaned forward. “What if I told you we have found the murder weapon and can trace it to a certain individual?”
“If that’s true, you’re withholding evidence.”
“And if you feel that way, I will not tell you that.”
“Okay,” Wintraub said, smiling. “Let’s talk off the record.”
“Off the record? From now on?”
“From now.”
“Just a moment then,” Kaufman said. He got up and walked out of the room. When he returned, he carried an ice pick in his right hand.
8
Daniel Goldstein’s death reached the New Prospect in the form of his relatives’ canceled reservations. Mrs. Gladys Aldelman, the head clerk and receptionist, crossed the rooms off the main sheet quickly and put them back on availability. She did not know the reason for the cancellations, and she did not care. Reservations had been coming in at a phenomenal pace since the Obermans agreed to sponsor the Israeli rally on the third night of Passover. A first-class suite of rooms was being held for Chaim Eban and his party. It was all very exciting and added a rhythm of importance and a serious mood of business to everything she and her assistants did.
Mrs. Aldelman had been with the Obermans for twenty-two years and was a most efficient worker. Other hotel owners had tried to steal her away year after year, but her dedication to the “family” was too strong. A thin, now completely gray-haired woman, she seemed to have ink smears on her fingers, and often on her face, constantly. Regardless of her long experience as a hotel receptionist, she was always nervous and ended up doing things like putting a ballpoint pen in her mouth, wrong side in. There was often a small, blue dot on the tip of her tongue.
She stood at the corner of her long L-shaped main desk and peered out over the luxurious soft carpeting of the New Prospect main lobby. Occasionally, she would strut back and forth in the small area between the desk and the bookkeeper’s office, looking like the captain of a ship overseeing the sailors. She guarded the plush furniture and shiny gold-tinted fixtures, chastising children, and sometimes even adults, who abused them. She snapped orders at bellhops; directed guests to services and recreations; and reassured elderly people as to the hotel’s ability to cater to their needs and wishes. For some frequent guests, Mrs. Aldelman was something of a hotel fixture herself.
To the Obermans, Mrs. Aldelman really had become family. Even though she had children of her own, she treated David Oberman as if he were one of her own sons, and he never resisted her matronly affection—affection that increased considerably after the death of David’s mother. He stood patiently and obediently as she buttoned his shirts, straightened his collars, or fixed the wave in his hair. Now, as the president and general manager of the hotel, David found it difficult, if not impossible, to treat Mrs. Aldelman as one of his hired help. He could only speak to her in one tone of voice. She was professional enough to maintain an employee-employer relationship, but she still fixed his collars or straightened his hair on occasion. Gloria, David’s wife, teased him about it.
At thirty-seven years old, David Oberman was one of the youngest men to run a major Catskill resort. The New Prospect had been in the family from its beginning as a farmhouse that took in tourists. His grandfather had come from Russia in the early 1900s to escape the Russo-Japanese War, when Jews were being conscripted into service with too great an efficiency. There was a great history here in the Catskills, tied to the development of the old O & W Railroad that stimulated its own business by advertising the up-and-coming resorts in its publication, Summer Homes.
Every summer made more and more demands on the Obermans’ resort facilities, and they were constantly in the process of expansion, but it wasn’t until David’s father, Solomon, began his dealings with major financiers that the New Prospect took on the lush and luxury that was to become so characteristic
of the Catskills by the middle of the 1940s; it lasted through the early 1950s and the late 1960s. It was the period of “megahotels,” theirs being the most complicated and involved of all. The New Prospect had become a little city in itself and survived all the economic downturns.
David’s grandfather never lived to see the construction of indoor pools, skating rinks, tennis courts, and health clubs with sauna baths and elaborate gymnastic equipment. There was a separate sports building that housed a regulation prizefighting ring. Major contenders came to the New Prospect to train. His grandfather never saw the elaborate nightclub, said to be one of the biggest in the world, able to seat a little over three thousand people at once. He never played a round of golf on the grand golf course, already named “the Par Killer,” and the site of two major tournaments. The hotel now had its own landing strip for small-engine planes and a string of stores off the lobby of the main building—luncheonettes, barbershops, beauty parlors, clothes and jewelry shops. It employed over twenty-five hundred people and it required as much power and service as did many of the villages and towns surrounding it.
With the combined effects of the Passover holiday and the rally for Israel, the New Prospect would have a population of over three thousand people during the coming vacation period. David wasn’t particularly overwhelmed by all this. He’d dealt with full capacity and slightly over capacity, booking often during the course of the time he had been running the hotel. However, with a major political event scheduled to occur at his hotel, he was concerned that everything run in its normally smooth way. Astute at public relations, he saw the great value in helping to sponsor such an affair.
“I wouldn’t want to go ahead and make these kinds of arrangements without your complete agreement and cooperation, Mr. Oberman,” Lillian Rothberg had told him over the phone. She waited, testing the air.
“We’d be delighted to host such an activity. I’m sure you know the New Prospect has been at the center of many charitable affairs in its time.”
“Yes, of course.”
“I’ll have my secretary call the Israeli ambassador’s office and inform him that Chaim Eban and his party will have accommodations at our expense.”
“Wonderful.”
“Just let me know how you want the schedule arranged, and we’ll work things out.”
“I certainly will. Thank you ever so much.”
He smiled, remembering “Dynamite Lillian Rothberg.” When she was up at the hotel, she dragged her poor husband around like a dog on a leash. He went from one activity to another, always wearing a look of pitiful longing for a chaise longue or soft chair. She was the type of guest who took complete control of things in the early days—organizing games and sing-alongs. “If you ever need a job,” he told her, “come and see me.”
David Oberman stepped out of his office and started across the lobby to the reservations desk, behind which his seven-year-old daughter, Lisa Sue, was barely visible. He smiled and shook his head. His son, Bobby, stood on the side near the water fountain and took on the posture of a waiting bellhop. He wore a bellhop’s cap and folded his arms over his chest. He was surprisingly tall for ten years old. David attributed that to Gloria’s side of the family. She was barely an inch shorter than he at five feet ten. Her hazel green eyes turned him into jelly. Even now, it was fascinating for him to stand back and watch her, unobserved.
When she turned away from a guest at the main desk, Gloria saw him standing there. He waited as she came across the lobby.
“We’re eating with Pop tonight, remember, so don’t make any other arrangements. I’ve got a roast going over there.”
“He let you work in his kitchen?”
“He did supervise. I hate to see him eating alone in that big house so often.”
David nodded. It was that softness, that sincere warmth for other people that had attracted him to Gloria when she came up as a model to do a spread for Stunning magazine.
“You think you might get him over here for the First Seder?”
“I mentioned it to him, but he said you never asked.”
“I must’ve said it a hundred times this last week.”
He shook his head. His father, something of a recluse now at the age of seventy, used the entire first floor of the old main house. It was a three-story wooden structure with a large porch that wrapped around the front of the building. His father lived in what had mainly been the first tourist house. The hotel had grown around it, all the modern additions constructed some distance from the lawn and landscaping around the building. It was as if it maintained an aura of religious protection, a temple built for the god of vacations. Nothing on it was replaced. It was always repaired—even to the extent of getting workmen to glue and paste broken pieces of window shutters. If they went over capacity, they utilized the second and third floor. When he told his father that guests resented that, he bit into the stem of his pipe and cursed them for their lack of appreciation.
“These spoiled modern tourists would rather have plastic and neon than good solid wood and thick heavy walls. They don’t know what real quality workmanship means. You can keep this generation.”
David laughed and shook his head, but secretly he appreciated his father’s love for all things antique.
From time to time, David got a call from Solomon, telling him about some problem he had spotted, workers who were goofing off, cars that were parked incorrectly, guests who misused hotel equipment. Most of it was trivial stuff, but David listened and was sure to have the problem corrected, because if he didn’t, his father would let him know.
“Did you mention anything about Chaim Eban?”
“He said he’ll believe it when he sees him.”
“That means he’ll be over here that night for sure,” David said. “To either congratulate us or tell us he told us so.” He added, “Thank goodness for that.” But if David were aware of the conversation going on in a car heading toward Monroe, New York, at that moment, he’d have wished his father, along with his wife and children, would stay in the old main house the whole holiday.
9
Clea sat in the corner of the backseat of the black Lincoln town car and clutched her small purse to her body. When Nessim opened the door, he was struck by the look of fear on her face. Yusuf waited beside him, and Hamid stood talking with El Yacoub. There were two men in the front, neither of whom Nessim had seen before.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes,” she said. He started to get in. She went on, “They said you knew all about this; yet, you hadn’t mentioned anything this morning and you didn’t call. I didn’t know what to think.”
“However, you agreed to go along. You’re learning blind loyalty,” Nessim said, smiling. He patted her on the forearm, and she relaxed some. “It was apparently a decision of the moment.”
He decided not to mention anything about the killing of the JDL member. Yusuf got in beside him, and Hamid shook hands with El Yacoub and got in the front beside the two men. The Claw came to the window.
“So this is the beautiful woman from Palestine,” he said, smiling.
“El Yacoub,” Nessim said to Clea as a form of introduction. Clea leaned forward and smiled.
“Welcome to the cause,” El Yacoub said.
“Thank you, but this morning the cause took things into its own hands,” she said. The Claw laughed.
“Such is our life.” He turned to Nessim and grew serious. “I’ll see you in Monroe. There will be time to talk and make final preparations. In the meantime, Hamid knows everything you need to know for now.”
“Good,” Nessim said, looking at Hamid. He nodded.
“And you, Sword of Damascus,” the Claw said, touching Yusuf’s shoulder. “Sit and listen. Speak only when necessary and move with the organization, not alongside it, and especially not in front of it. Understand?”
“Yes.” Yusu
f was practically whispering.
El Yacoub backed away and they started off.
“This is Ali el-Bunit and his cousin Zvi Monar,” Hamid said, introducing the driver and the man beside him. They nodded back at Nessim. “They’ll be with us as long as necessary.”
“And this is Clea,” Nessim said. “She’ll be with us forever.” Hamid laughed, and Clea squeezed Nessim’s hand.
“What was that stuff with Yusuf?” she whispered.
“Later,” Nessim said. He turned back to Hamid. “Before you begin, you must tell me when and why you became part of the organization. When we parted, you had other ideas.”
“I’ve come to realize that the Middle East no longer belongs to either the Israelis or the Arabs. The future is in hands that are elsewhere. We’re pawns, being moved around at will by bigger and stronger powers. There will be no settlement there until it first comes here.”
“And when I told you those things?”
“I was younger and dreamed of glorious victories on the battlefield—not younger so much in years as in understanding.”
“Your sister?”
“Safe. On the West Bank, in Israeli-held territory.”
“Tell me about this Seder Project.”
Hamid turned around completely.
“You know about the Catskills. They used to call it the Borscht Belt—this playground for Jews up in the mountains.”
“Certainly.”
“There used to be many rich resorts up there, big hotels. They’ve basically died away except for a few where wealthy Jews frolic in the sunshine on their grounds, especially on Passover.”
“So?”
“This Passover, something special is to occur in one of these remaining big hotels.”
“The New Prospect? That brochure in the apartment?”
“Yes. There’s to be a rally for Israel. Chaim Eban will be there to speak.”
“Eban!”
“Himself.” Hamid smiled, but it was the smile of a cat. “Many of the most affluent Jewish businessmen and their families will be there to participate and listen. These are the people who raise the large sums for Israel, sums that can be turned into arms, bullets, and bombs to be used against us. These are people who finance political candidates, candidates who vote pro-Israel because they are in such debt to the Jews.”
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