Zaddik, page 3
There had been a brand-new mezuzah on the doorframe, but Schumach doubted that this woman was Jewish. Maybe her husband, God rest his soul, was Jewish, although obviously not pious. I’ll get this over quickly, thought Schumach, who felt acutely uncomfortable in the presence of women, especially unmarried women, especially young, unmarried, non-Jewish women.
But Rudenstein insisted upon going on and on about her husband, who, she said, had died in an auto accident. There were no children. Then she kept offering Schumach food that, this obviously not being a kosher home, he could not possibly eat. Not wanting to offend her, he did accept a glass of water. Even that took time to produce.
After what seemed to Schumach to be at least an hour, the woman produced the jewelry. One glance told Schumach that he had wasted his time. Most of it was costume jewelry. All of it was cheap stuff, garbage. Only one ring had a decent diamond solitaire, a little yellow, maybe three carats, and the band was rose gold.
“I’m sorry, lady,” said Schumach, dismissing the rings and bracelets and earrings spread out on the coffee table. “I can’t help you. This kind of jewelry is not my business. But this one,” he said, looking at the solitaire through his loupe, “is not bad. It’s not the stone; that’s cut all wrong. But I can tell this is an old ring. By the setting. Nobody makes them like this anymore. See how high the stone is set. I don’t know if I can sell it, but I like it. Okay. I’ll give you three thousand dollars.”
“Three thousand?” the woman said, apparently shocked. “This was my husband’s mother’s engagement ring. My father-in-law bought it for her in Warsaw before the war. She gave it to her son to give to me when we got engaged. If I had had a son, I would have given it to him for his wife when he got engaged.” The woman paused as if overcome. Her wide-set, dark brown eyes seemed to grow moist. Schumach felt pity well up in him, and he stared at the floor.
Schumach sighed. “Your father-in-law had good taste. It’s a nice ring. But I’m not a collector. My advice to you is to go down to the Diamond Exchange and take it around to the booths. Maybe you’ll find someone to give you what you think it’s worth.” Schumach had wasted enough time and had no intention of hondeling with this shiksa widow.
“Mr. Schumach,” she said, leaning toward him, “how about six thousand dollars for the ring and you can take all the rest?”
Schumach, who was acutely aware of her body, particularly her breasts swelling out of her dress, could feel his cheeks burning in embarrassment. “Listen, lady,” he said, looking away. “I feel sorry for you your husband died. A terrible thing. But three thousand dollars is my price.” He shrugged.
“Please, Mr. Schumach,” said Mrs. Rudenstein. “Let me make a phone call. I have to ask somebody about this. Just a few minutes.”
She left the room, and Schumach looked at his watch. It was past noon, and his stomach was growling. At this rate, by the time he got to the office it would be two o’clock, he’d have missed his afternoon prayers and his lunch. And since it was Friday, he had to be home by four to get ready for the Sabbath. Maybe he should forget about going to the office altogether.
Schumach sat there ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, squirming. Then the woman came back with a new offer: $5,000 for everything.
Maybe I could sell the ring for $5,000, thought Schumach. Rose gold is popular these days. I could sell the rest for another $500. All this for a $500 profit? Well, as Zally said over and over, you could drive from here to Chicago and not find $50. A profit is a profit.
He looked at his watch again. Nearly one o’clock. It would be crazy to go to the office now.
“Maybe I could go to four thousand dollars,” said Schumach. “But now I have to make a call. Could I use your phone?”
“Of course,” said the woman, leading him to a small, spare bedroom. It looked to Schumach like nobody, least of all a young married couple, had ever slept in it. Painful memories, thought Schumach. She’s already cleared the room of any trace of her husband. The phone was on a table next to the bed.
Schumach dialed the office. He let it ring twelve times before hanging up. Strange, he thought. Zally and Shirley never took lunch at the same time. Could Zally have closed up for Shabbos? So early?
Schumach shrugged and went back into the living room to close the deal with the young widow.
Chapter 4 Forty-seventh Street, Manhattan
Friday, September 3
WHEN THE CUTTER was buzzed into Zalman Gottleib’s office, he stepped swiftly behind Shirley Stein, grabbed her red hair in his left hand, pulled her head back, and severed her jugular vein and carotid artery in one stroke. She felt little but the unpleasant sensation of her hair being pulled. Blood spouted from her throat, spattering the bulletproof glass as her body instantly went into shock. The Cutter tossed her away from him, turning his back as the body shuddered and jerked on the carpet.
The Cutter walked swiftly to Gottleib’s desk, noting that the door to the safe was open. That would make it easier. Gottleib, who after telling Shirley to let in the Cutter had returned his gaze to the little stones spread out on his blotter, had neither heard nor seen his secretary’s murder. He stood up to meet his customer.
Gottleib was surprised when the man stepped quickly around the desk; he was surprised when the man reached out, ignoring Gottleib’s hand extended in greeting, and, pulling him by his collar, threw him down painfully across the arms of his chair. Then Gottleib saw the glittering knife.
“The stone,” said the Cutter.
“What stone?” asked Gottleib, his voice quaking. “I have lots of stones. Take. Take what you want.”
“The Seer’s stone,” said the Cutter.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Gottleib.
“Then die,” said the Cutter.
“Wait,” said Gottleib. “I gave a stone to a setter, Ari Levin, on the ninth floor.”
“Good,” said the Cutter. “Now I will let you say the Shema.”
Zalman Gottleib knew he was dead. Really, he had known it from the moment he had felt the Cutter’s hands upon him. All right, he thought. I’m ready. And to his surprise, Gottleib knew that to be the truth. He had been ready ever since his wife, his Sarah, had died five years ago. So, calmly, he began reciting the Shema, the first prayer he had learned as a child, the last utterance of Jewish martyrs for centuries:
Shema Yisroel, Adonoy eloheinu, Adonoy ekhud.
“Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.”
The Cutter held back his hand. But when Gottleib began speaking the prayer’s second verse, “Blessed is the Name of…” the Cutter’s patience ran out, and as he had cut Shirley Stein’s throat, he cut Zalman Gottleib’s.
The Cutter stepped back quickly to avoid being splattered by Gottleib’s blood. He watched Gottleib trying to finish the Shema, his trachea severed, his lips moving soundlessly, the only noise in the office the Cutter’s breathing.
For a moment the Cutter thought of heading right down to this Ari Levin and taking the Seer’s stone. But the Cutter had survived by never deviating from a plan, never improvising, unless his very life was threatened. He would not start now. Levin, and the stone, would have to wait for a new plan from the Magician.
When Gottleib lay still, the arterial blood pumping out of him like an ocean tide, the Cutter climbed up on his desk and knocked out a soundproof square of the dropped ceiling, revealing the metal struts above. Then he stepped down, took the rope out of his pocket, and bound Gottleib’s ankles. He lifted Gottleib’s body onto the desk, tossed the end of the rope over a strut, and pulled until Gottleib hung upside down.
The Cutter tore off Gottleib’s blood-soaked shirt, then pulled his tallis katan over his head. As the Cutter had seen his father do so many times, he examined the knife and saw that it had suffered no nicks and was therefore still valid for shekhita, ritual slaughter. Not that anyone would ever know if it wasn’t, thought the Cutter as he inserted the point of the knife just below Gottleib’s sternum, but I observe the ritual as closely as I can in order to please myself. And, of course, my father.
He jerked the knife upward, slicing Gottleib open, watching as his intestines spilled out onto the desk. Then, prying open the rib cage, he examined the lungs. Not a smoker, the Cutter thought. Gottleib’s lungs were a healthy pink. This man is Glatt kosher, the highest level of kashrus, the Cutter thought, chuckling to himself.
The Cutter began removing cardboard boxes filled with little envelopes of diamonds from Gottlieb’s safe. He ripped them open, spilling the sparkling stones on the carpet, setting the scene for the police. It was a hailstorm of wealth and beauty.
The Cutter looked around the room, admiring his work. Zalman Gottleib’s body revolved slowly at the end of the rope. The blood dripping from his throat made circular patterns on the white desk blotter and splashed drop by drop onto the diamonds—the trillions and half-moons, the stars and baguettes—scattered on the desk. It’s magic, thought the Cutter. It’s alchemy. I’ve turned those diamonds into rubies.
For a second it occurred to him to gather up some of the diamonds and take them with him. An unworthy thought, he scolded himself. How can good come from this if I act like a gonef, a thief? I have never taken anything that did not belong to me. Never. I will not start now.
He placed the knife on the desk. Let them find it, he thought. Let them try to find me.
He examined himself. His hands were bloody. He would have to keep them in his pockets as he left the office until he could go to the washroom at the end of the hall. His black coat and pants did not show the blood, but he could feel where they were wet with it. Well, they could be disposed of easily.
He glanced at Shirley Stein’s body lying on the blood-soaked carpet. Another unworthy thought flashed through his mind, but this one he gave in to. Turning her over with his foot, he bent and ripped open her sweater, pulling up her brassiere. Freed, her breasts flopped to the left and right. The Cutter stared and felt nothing.
Yes, I am truly a golem, he thought as he left the office, glancing left and right down the hallway, closing the door behind him, hearing the lock click into place.
I am a golem, and I am not responsible.
The Magician will have to decide what to do next.
A phone in the office began to ring. It rang twelve times.
Chapter 5 The Lower East Side, Manhattan
Saturday, September 4
LADISLAW CZARTORYSKI — who in Poland was known as Vladimir Cartovksy, and whose old comrades-in-arms often called him the Magician — sat on the edge of a plastic chair in a dark room in an apartment on East Fourth Street between Avenues B and C. He was waiting for the Cutter.
The room stank of ammonia and rat droppings. Roaches skittered over the linoleum floors. Throughout the building and up and down the street, junkies stuck needles into their arms and legs, injecting weak heroin cut dozens of times with milk sugar, quinine, and baby powder. Then they’d pass the needle to a friend and along with it hepatitis or AIDS.
Sometimes the junkies would get lucky, and their $25 waxed-paper bag of heroin, stamped with the dealer’s ironic logo—King Kong, Midnight Express, Make My Day—would be purer, stronger. Then they’d feel the heat swell through their veins, making their eyelids heavy, bringing the sweat to their foreheads. And sometimes they’d close their eyes in bliss and die.
Czartoryski supplied some of that dope. The opium paste came from his friends in Cambodia. It was smuggled by his Palestinian friends to factories where it was refined in Turkey, Algeria, and Morocco and then distributed to his German and Scandinavian friends, who brought it to New York concealed in diplomatic pouches, BMWs and Porsches, briefcases, handbags, and sometimes vaginas and assholes. It was, thought Czartoryski, a beautiful example of the interconnectedness of the modern global economy. And after paying off the Italians for the privilege of operating in their city, Czartoryski deposited his profits in a numbered Swiss bank account.
It was a good business, but not interesting. No, what interested Ladislaw Czartoryski was diamonds, and one diamond in particular: the Seer’s stone, or what the Magician always thought of as the Czartoryski diamond.
Czartoryski imagined himself an aristocrat, a man of the world, an entrepreneur. He was nearing his seventy-first birthday but looked younger, a healthy sixty-five. He was short, trim, and he still had a sufficiency of silver hair combed sleekly against his skull. Once a member in good standing in the youth brigade of the Polish National Socialist party, then a member, in similar good standing, in the Polish Communist party, and now a rosy-cheeked elder statesman of the “new” Poland, Czartoryski believed in making new friends but keeping the old. The Cambodians were new friends. The Palestinians, whom he helped and who helped him, were somewhat older.
His oldest friends were the men of the Odessa, the secret society of SS veterans that had facilitated Czartoryski’s escape from Poland after the war. Many members of the Odessa, such as Klaus Barbie, had ended up in the American intelligence community; others had been placed in the Soviet; and still others, such as the founder of the Odessa, General Reinhard Gehlen, had helped create NATO’s intelligence service.
Some had drifted, famously, to South America, to Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, and Paraguay. There, they had hired themselves out as freelance Cold War “security consultants.” The Death Squads had benefited from their expertise. Later, so did the paramilitary arm of the Medellin cocaine cartel.
The Magician, who had seen little action in the war and bitterly regretted its end, had volunteered for an active theater of operations and so had ended up in the Middle East.
Indeed, it was during the Zionist takeover of Palestine in 1947 that Czartoryski—who, according to the Odessa’s program, was resting up in Beirut, waiting for the memory of his Nazi past to fade from the minds of Poland’s new Communist rulers—had met the Cutter.
Czartoryski checked his watch and shifted on the unlovely plastic chair, the only article of furniture in this hole that he felt fairly sure was free of lice. His old friend should be here soon.
Czartoryski remembered precisely what he had thought when he’d met the tall, cadaverously thin, teenage Zionist with the blue numbers tattooed on the inside of his forearm: “I wonder if he was at Belzec? Some of them made it out of that camp. I wonder if he recognizes me?”
It would be many years before Czartoryski stopped worrying about meeting survivors of the Belzec work camp near Lublin, many years before he had transformed himself from the muscular, feral thug of his youth to the distinguished diplomat wearing English tweeds he appeared to be today.
Czartoryski had known that the Cutter was mad as soon as he’d laid eyes upon him. Most of them were, the survivors. Especially those like the Cutter, the sonderkommandos, the Jews who survived by hustling their fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters in and out of the gas chambers, who stripped them of their clothing and jewelry, who tore the gold out of their dead mouths, and who buried their bodies, first dousing them with lye. Czartoryski had pried all this out of the Cutter after buying the starving boy a meal and a bottle of cheap Greek wine.
“What’s your name?” Czartoryski had asked the teenager when he had eaten and drunk his fill.
“I don’t have a name anymore,” the boy had said. “My father was a slaughterer in Poland, before the war. You can call me the Cutter.”
My old friend, thought Czartoryski. How easy it had been to convince this boy that he, too, had hated the Nazis. That he had been a nationalist in the Polish Resistance. That he had helped Jews escape. And after letting the boy stay with him, finding him a woman, and giving him money, Czartoryski had helped smuggle him past the British lines into Palestine, where the Cutter could join the other killers creating the Zionist state. And by playing on his guilt, his hate, and his sentimentality, the Magician had made the Cutter his creature, and he had remained so during the long years, working, in essence, for the Odessa even as he worked for the Mossad, the Israeli secret service. Czartoryski smiled at the thought of the old sonderkommando, the man with the blue numbers tattooed on his forearm, still working for the SS after all these years.
Of course, that was the way of the world. Czartoryski himself had had some unusual employers. As had many members of the Odessa. In the world of espionage, old enemies could become new friends at any moment. What did the Arabs say? “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” How true.
Indeed, even now, didn’t the Israelis think that the Magician was running their errand, doing their dirty work? Wasn’t it the Israelis who had told him that the stone—his stone—was in the possession of the Satmarers? They imagined that he would turn over the stone to them—for a price, of course—and they would use it to get back at De Beers, the diamond syndicate. They wanted to destroy a man named Alfred Berg, a member of the De Beers board of directors, but they didn’t want to shed Jewish blood. They were too delicate.
Well, thought the Magician, let them think what they want.
Just then the bell rang in the apartment—one long, one short, one long. The Cutter. Czartoryski got up to buzz him in, opened the police lock on the door, opened the curtains behind his chair, and sat back down. Moments later the Cutter entered.
The beard was gone, exposing the Cutter’s hollow, blue-gray cheeks. The kaftan was gone. The Cutter wore blue jeans, sneakers, and an Italian leather sport jacket. Czartoryski thought he looked sick.
The Cutter closed the door behind him and paused, squinting in the bright light coming from the dirty window behind Czartoryski.
“You have the stone?” the Magician asked.
“No,” said the Cutter.
Czartoryski’s hand tightened on the 9-mm Beretta concealed in his lap. The Cutter was his, true, but a diamond such as this one would be a great temptation to any man, even one as mad as the Cutter.
