Reckless Endangerment

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “Right. But to move back to the point you were raising, Mr. Haddad, the prosecution in this case is not going to rest on the ethnicity of the defendants, but on the evidence, which is overwhelming. We don’t need anti-Arab diatribes in the courtroom.”

  “What about outside the courtroom? What about this continual inflammatory rhetoric about a terrorist conspiracy?”

  “Well, there’s not much we can do about that, Mr. Haddad,” said Karp. “People can say what they like in this country.”

  “What about this?” the man asked, and from his briefcase he brought out a sheaf of clippings and tossed them on the table. Some of them were columns from the downmarket local dailies, but the bulk were from The Guardian, the Williamsburg sheet that Mendel Lowenstein put out. Karp glanced through them as Haddad railed on. Karp was content to listen passively and make occasional sympathetic noises. He had found, over time, that a good deal of the anger that citizens wished to express against the D.A.’s office could be dissipated through nothing more than courteous listening. He had spent many years listening to the complaints of the relatives of murder victims, and this was nothing in comparison with that. But something was tugging at his mind, something Haddad had said. When the man had run down somewhat, Karp asked, “You said there were three men involved. But there’re only two defendants. Who was the third man? Or do you mean the Daoud boy?”

  “No, my information is that there were four boys involved, Daoud, the two defendants, and one named Ali al-Qabbani, who served as a lookout. That’s another thing, Mr. Karp. Ali al-Qabbani hasn’t been seen since the morning of the alleged crime.”

  “Aren’t the police looking for him?” asked Karp, carefully avoiding the question of how Haddad knew so much about the conspirators.

  “No. They don’t believe he exists. They think the other two are making him up so they can put off the blame on him. Ali planned it, we didn’t know what we were getting into, and so on. And Ali was an illegal. No records, few possessions—he lived in a corner of the room where they met, he did odd jobs, spoke hardly any English. Where could he run to? But he’s vanished.”

  “Maybe he’s back in Palestine. Maybe the terrorist network got him out.”

  “Oh, please! I told you, there is no network. This organization—Against the House of War—it doesn’t exist. It’s a fantasy that’s shared by those idiot boys and Lowenstein. I certainly hope that the D.A.’s office doesn’t buy into it.”

  “Well, personally, I have no opinion either way, and I doubt Mr. Keegan does either. As I say, it’ll only touch on the prosecution as it affects the conspiracy case. What do you think happened to this Ali?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? The Jews got him. Lowenstein and his gang of thugs. But you know very well that the police will never follow up on that angle.”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure of that, Mr. Haddad. Unlike our mayor, the district attorney doesn’t run his own foreign policy. We have a deal with the secretary of state—we don’t negotiate with foreign nations and he doesn’t prosecute murders. I promise I’ll look into it and get back to you. As a matter of fact, I’m meeting with Rabbi Lowenstein later this evening. I’ll ask him about it.”

  Haddad snorted. “What do you expect him to do, admit it?”

  “No, but his denial will be informative. Thanks for coming by, sir. We’ll stay in touch.”

  At Battery Park, the Statue of Liberty ferry was pulling out for its last run of the day. Aboard were a group of seventh-graders from Hyattsville, Maryland, on their class trip. A cluster of boys were at the stern, laughing under a teacher’s watchful eye as they tossed bits of snack food into the air for the miraculously hovering gulls.

  “Hey, look,” shouted one, above the wind and the engines, “there’s a guy swimming!” They all clustered at the rail and looked.

  “Jeez!” said another, “he’s buck naked! You can see his ass!”

  More laughter, shoving to look. The teacher frowned and moved toward them. Then the bow wave of the ferry tossed the man and he rolled slowly over, and they saw that he was not swimming at all.

  THREE

  Karp had not been to Williamsburg in a long time. As a child he had been taken there at long intervals to visit an aunt of his mother’s, Aunt Reva, an elderly widow who lived alone in a small apartment crowded with massive dark furniture and dense with crocheted doilies and old-people smells—Vick’s, frying chicken fat, scorched feathers. Aunt Reva had pinched his cheeks painfully and given him macaroons and tea rich in lemon and sugar in a thick-sided tumbler. He had played on the floor with a menagerie of glass animals while his mother and her aunt had gabbled in Yiddish. The last time in Williamsburg had been when he was twelve. The glass animals had lost their charm. Karp resented the time spent away from basketball. His older brothers no longer had to endure the visits, but Karp, the last baby, still had to go. On this occasion the sulking Karp had deliberately snapped the legs off a glass deer and his mother had smacked him, the last (nearly the first) occasion of violence between them. He had run out of the suffocating apartment, down the stairs to the street, a street not a hundred yards from the street by which he now traveled.

  Karp was not a particularly reflective man. His recollection of that day at Aunt Reva’s had been neatly plastered over, along with the repugnance he felt at the odd, un-Americanness of Williamsburg’s self-ghettoized Jews, along with the usual tag ends of guilt and remorse. Karp was a believer in the sacred American right of re-invention. The Williamsburg of his youth had seemed to him an antique remnant of a doomed way of life. Jews were like anyone else. They played basketball and lived in houses with lawns, and if they were religious they went on Saturday morning to modernistic buildings indistinguishable from Baptist churches (except for the lack of a pinnacle cross) and ate what everyone else ate.

  The idea that people might choose to live like Aunt Reva, that people with education, people his age, might volunteer to live in the tenements and brownstones their grandparents had occupied and pursue a life of piety and ritual, was something his imagination could not grasp. He probably had (something he would be reluctant to admit) more real sympathy with that bunch of black kids hanging out on the stoop of one of the battered brown-stones on Union Avenue than he did with his putative coreligionists. The kids at least played basketball.

  The Jewish part of Williamsburg is a small trapezoid lodged uncomfortably amid substantial districts inhabited by American and West Indian blacks, Puerto Ricans, and (this zone a more recent one) immigrants from various parts of Central and South America. The line is as sharp as any in Beirut or Belfast. On one block the stores cashed checks and sold liquor, Latino or reggae records, and cheap furniture. Every sixth storefront was a barbershop, a hair parlor, a nail joint, or a Pentecostal church. The people were variously brown.

  On the next block the stores sold kosher meats, dairy foods, cheap clothing, and slightly better furniture. There were neither barbershops nor liquor stores, and every sixth storefront was a shul or a ritual bathhouse. The people were white, pale white, the men in black clothes, hatted and bearded, the women scarf-headed and accompanied by clusters of children, each little boy with his knitted yarmulke and dangling side locks.

  “This is it,” said Karp to his driver, a black detective named Morris. They were on Boerum Street, in front of a substantial pink sandstone building, formerly a private home, that had been converted into a synagogue-cum-headquarters for the Ostropoler Hasidim. The house was set back from the street, and an iron paling surrounded what had once been a small garden. This had been paved over in the fashion of the Orthodox, who begrudged the time that gardening would steal from their duty to God. Karp had a vague awareness that an ancient named Reb Moise Koppelman was the leader of this small community. Reb Mendel Lowenstein, the man he had come to see, was the rebbe’s son-in-law and heir presumptive.

  The street in front of the building was thronged with men, dressed either in black suits, with fedoras, or in the traditional long gabardines with
round hats trimmed with red fox fur. They shot hostile looks at the car and its driver. A man came up and told Morris he couldn’t park there. Morris put a cardboard POLICE sign on the dashboard. Another couple of men came up and started arguing with Morris. Karp got out of the car. “You’ll be okay?” he asked Morris.

  “I got a radio and a gun,” said the driver. “How long will you be?”

  “As short as I can make it,” said Karp. He had to push through the crowd on the sidewalk and the stoop, the men yielding to him reluctantly. At the door, a burly youth wearing a brassard marked with a star of David and a lion looked Karp over, frowning. Karp told him he was here to see Reb Lowenstein, and the youth handed him a yarmulke and waited until he had placed it on his head. Then he led the way through dim and crowded hallways to a small chamber fitted out as a waiting room, told Karp to wait, and left. There were a dozen or so men waiting with him, talking softly or reading. The room was warm and stuffy; from time to time men would be called to the door at one end of the room and exit, but the room did not seem to grow less crowded. No one spoke to Karp.

  After fifteen minutes of this, a thin young man with a sparse reddish beard emerged and beckoned to Karp and then led him through the door. On the other side was a small, windowless, cluttered office within which, behind a desk piled with papers, sat Mendel Lowenstein. There were several other men in the room, engaged in some business around an adding machine, which clicked and buzzed as they talked. Lowenstein looked up as Karp walked in and gestured to a straight chair in front of his desk.

  Karp had been in drug dens, in wretched apartments where people had been murdered, places with blood on the walls, and he had been much in the company (almost always without rancor) of some of the worst people produced by his society, but he had not often been as angry or as uncomfortable as he was at this moment. He really didn’t like these people, and although he kept his face neutral, he sensed that Lowenstein knew it. The rabbi was a stocky, brush-bearded man with a high, domed forehead and the large, liquid, intense eyes of a fanatic or a saint, assuming there is a difference.

  These examined Karp for a long, uncomfortable moment before the man spoke.

  “So, Mr. Karp, here you are. What have you got to tell me? Are you going to stop this pogrom?”

  Clearly no pleasantries were going to be exchanged, which was fine with Karp. He said, “I’m not sure what you mean, Rabbi. I thought a pogrom was an anti-Semitic mob organized by the government.”

  Contempt blossomed on the rabbi’s face. “Bah! What, you didn’t see the police beating our boys with clubs? We get slaughtered and the police beat us? What do you call it, then?”

  “I would call it controlling a riot, sir. Objects were thrown at the police station, and several police were injured.”

  Lowenstein pointed a stubby finger at Karp, “See! This is how it starts. This is what happened before the Nazis took over. You, a Jew, sit here in the house of God, may his name be blessed, and defend the beating of Jews. It’s a shandah! A shandah!”

  At this word the clicking of the adding machine ceased, and all the men in the room stared at Karp. Their faces indicated that they had accepted their leader’s verdict. It was indeed shameful.

  Karp felt his face heat, and he allowed himself a calming breath. The rabbi was not finished, however. “You think because you act like the goyim, and eat like the goyim, when the time comes the goyim are going to protect you? Like they protected the six million?” And more of the same for some time. Karp let the man run out his spiel. He was more than adequately familiar with the Holocaust. Karp’s mother had been a fierce Zionist and something of a connoisseur of Holocaust details, and had imbued Karp from an early age with the necessity for Jews to be ever vigilant in an implacably hostile world. The lesson had not taken deep root in Karp’s soul, however, although he had considerable experience with practical anti-Semitism. On the streets of Brooklyn, where he had been raised, it was given that a group of Irish or Italian kids would beat up any Jewish kid they found, and Karp’s own little gang of Jews was not loath to return the favor. That they used fists, sticks, and rocks rather than the semi-automatics that later became fashionable in settling youthful disputes did not detract from the sincerity of their violence, and this experience had, perhaps regrettably, tempered his sympathy for the six million. He simply could not imagine walking meekly with his children into a cattle car, not while he had breath to fight.

  Besides that, as an athlete Karp was a convinced meritocrat. Could you make the shot, could you scuffle successfully under the boards—these were to him the cosmic questions. And he had found early that he had absolutely no religious interest whatever. When he thought about it at all, which was rarely, he considered it to be a kind of talent. He himself could fling a ten-inch ball unerringly through the air into a slightly larger hoop from distances up to twenty-five feet, and he could convict people of homicide. Others could talk to God and get comfort from it. His wife, for example, or his daughter, both Catholics.

  “Go outside!” Lowenstein was saying. “Go three blocks from here in any direction, and what do you find? Jamaica! Egypt! El Salvador! We are closed in by hostile goyim. Every day our people are robbed, beaten up, raped. And what do your precious authorities do? Nothing is what they do. They write up papers, and they forget. No one is ever arrested. You can see them, the cops, thinking, oh, the Jews, they got plenty, who cares! And I’m warning you, we will not tolerate it. Cursed be those who despoil Israel! And now they have started to kill us—”

  “Yeah, right, Rabbi,” Karp interrupted, “things are tough all over. It’s the city, it’s a high-crime precinct you’re in here.” He noted, with some satisfaction, that the rabbi’s eyes had widened. His mouth was still slightly open, showing yellow, uneven teeth. He was not used to being interrupted, especially when he was in full spate about the travails of the Jews.

  “Meanwhile,” Karp went on, “the reason I came over here was that Mr. Keegan asked me to report to you on the progress of the Shilkes investigation, as a courtesy. As you know by now, we have two suspects in custody, and we will charge them with murder and assault. We have substantial evidence against them, but only with respect to the crime itself. At present there’s no substantive evidence of a wider conspiracy, much less plans for a campaign against Jews generally.”

  “You believe this?” Lowenstein snapped. “You think these stupid savages thought this up themselves, that they were not brought to it by some evil intelligence?” The rabbi had a habit of leaning forward in his chair and drumming his fists on his desk in rhythm with his words. Karp hesitated momentarily. The same thought had occurred to him, but he was not about to share it with Lowenstein.

  “There’s no evidence for it,” said Karp a little lamely.

  Lowenstein swiveled his chair abruptly away from Karp and said something in Yiddish to several of the other men. They responded with sour laughter, and Karp realized that this was the first laugh he had heard since alighting from the unmarked—not, in his experience, the usual state of affairs among Jews. The rabbi swung his chair around like a tank turret and directed the muzzle of his glare toward Karp. Again the finger.

  “Listen to me—while you’re gathering this evidence, which you could trip over walking down the street if you had eyes, while you are looking, we will take care of ourselves. We are not pacifists, Mr. Karp. We have ample authority in the Talmud to protect ourselves against those who mean to harm us. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Oh, yeah, Rabbi. I should point out, however, that we’re operating under the Constitution and the statutes of the state of New York here, which may have a different interpretation of self-defense than your version of Talmudic law. We would not tolerate any attempt to take the law into your own hands, for example, by pursuing people you thought might be involved in the Shilkes murder, Arab boys, for example.”

  Karp was watching Lowenstein carefully as he said this, but the man gave no obvious sign of guilt or nervousness. The clicking o
f the adding machine stopped, though, and the elderly man using it was staring at Karp with an expression of … what? Doubt? Anger? Concern? It was hard for Karp to read these bearded, grave faces.

  Meanwhile, the rabbi sniffed, rolled his eyes, sighed, and made a small dismissing gesture with the tips of his fingers, as if shooing away a small, bothersome creature. Karp might have felt diminished had he not been vaccinated against just this guilt-making ritual by his maternal grandmother, who had used almost the same mannerisms.

  “Go away, Mr. Karp,” said Lowenstein in a weary voice. “Go back to the goyim, live out your little make-believe. Someday, you decide you want to be a real Jew, we’ll still be here, we’ll welcome you with open arms.”

  In the car, Morris said, “How’d it go?”

  “It went shitty, Morris,” said Karp, settling back in the seat and rubbing his face. “The rabbi decided I wasn’t enough of a Jew to understand their situation there. You ever get that, when you were uptown?”

  Morris glanced at him. “What, that I wasn’t enough of a Jew? Hardly ever. Why?”

  Karp laughed out loud, probably for longer than the remark warranted. “No, from the Muslims, from the Panthers, whatever,” he explained. “Like you were letting the team down.”

  “Oh, that. Yeah, some.” He shrugged. “The Uncle Tom business. You let shit like that get to you, you might as well hang it up.”

  While Karp drove back to Manhattan, his wife was doing something that she was as bad at as her husband was at mollifying militant Hasidim, which was teaching women to shoot pistols. She was now in the basement firing range of the West Side Gun Club, on Tenth and Forty-eighth Street, standing behind and to the left of an insurance company office manager named Joan Savitch, who was blazing away with a Smith & Wesson .22 revolver at a silhouette target twenty-five yards down-range. She was getting some good hits, but her pattern was lousy, and although Marlene knew enough about shooting to know that tight pattern was the key, she did not know enough to tell Savitch what she was doing wrong.