Zaddik, page 38
“Bullshit!” Czartoryski shouted. “You told him to refuse me.”
“Very well, Ladislaw, if you insist on being unpleasant. Yes. You’re quite right. I told him to say no. I told him not to compromise himself. I told him that he would be protected.”
“You bastard.”
“Listen, Ladislaw. I can see that you’re upset. You’ve grown attached to the stone. I understand that, too. But your plan was no good. It was too convoluted. Surely you can appreciate that. The fact is, we have the diamond. We will convert it to cash. It will be simple, and we will all profit, you most of all. You will come out of this a rich man, Ladislaw. A richer man, I should say. In any case, I have spoken to the others and they agree.”
“But I do not agree. I do not agree at all.”
“I’m sorry, Ladislaw. This is all settled. I should like you to produce the stone as soon as possible—tomorrow, in fact—so that we may proceed.”
“But I don’t have it,” said Czartoryski.
“What?”
“It’s been stolen.”
“Come, come, Ladislaw. This won’t do.”
Czartoryski looked at Ukridge, slouching with his hands in his pockets. Look how relaxed he is, Czartoryski thought. He is so confident, so self-assured. He feels no need to protect himself from me, and why should he? I am an old man, older than he, and he is in his own home. A lovely fire is burning. A glass of warm Scotch and lemon rests by his chair. A book is open on the table. He was reading before I arrived. He was listening to his music.
Czartoryski moved closer to Ukridge and smiled. Ukridge smiled back, thinly. Czartoryski bent his knees slightly and then drove the heel of his hand into Ukridge’s nose, forcing the cartilage up into Ukridge’s brain. Ukridge took a step backward and then collapsed in sections. First his legs buckled, and he fell to his knees. He tottered there for a moment, and then pitched forward at the waist, his forehead striking the floor, his hands still in his pockets. He looked, thought Czartoryski, like an Arab praying toward Mecca.
Czartoryski hooked a foot under Ukridge and flipped him over on his back. His eyes were open and filling with blood. His lips were still parted in a smile.
Good, thought Czartoryski. Excellent. And it came to him suddenly that there was something he used to like to do. The stirring in his groin reminded him. He unzipped his pants, and, straddling Ukridge, he urinated on his face, the last few drops squeezed through a growing erection. Then he dragged Ukridge to the fire, opened the grate, and heaved his head into the glowing logs.
As the air filled with the smell of Ukridge’s flesh going up the chimney, Czartoryski surveyed the room. Satisfied that he had not touched anything, he let himself out and strolled several blocks before hailing a cab to take him back to the hotel.
The night air was wet and fresh, and Czartoryski felt tremendously revived, as if Ukridge’s dying breath had somehow entered his own lungs to give him new life. This is how I used to feel all the time, he reminded himself. This is why I loved Belzec.
When he returned to the hotel, there was a message for him at the desk. Back in his room, he dialed the number. It was the Cutter. “New York,” he said. “She went to New York.”
“How do you know?” asked Czartoryski.
“What can a whore do? A whore uses men. I found the man she used,” the Cutter answered.
“Then New York it is,” said Czartoryski, thinking that his luck was changing. Act, he told himself, and you control events. Be passive, and they control you.
Tonight, he thought, for old times’ sake, he might engage the services of a prostitute, a tall one, a blond one.
“I love New York,” he told the Cutter.
Chapter 58 The Satmarer Rebbe’s House
South Ninth Street, Williamsburg
Monday, October 28
STANDING IN FRONT of the Satmarer rebbe’s door, staring at his feet, the Kalman woman by his side, Adam Seligson shivered in the chill morning air and thought that he had never been more uncomfortable in his life. Bad enough that he was going to see his future father-in-law, a man he both despised and feared, but to have to see him in the company of this strange old woman—it was almost too much to bear.
Seligson looked at the two guards flanking the rebbe’s door. Typical Satmarer brutes, he thought. Fanatics. Mindless golems who lived only to do their rebbe’s bidding. Do they ever study? Seligson wondered. He sniffed the air. Do they ever bathe?
Walking from the subway to the rebbe’s house had been a trial. In all of his twenty years, Adam Seligson, the Lubavitcher rebbe’s adopted son, had been to Williamsburg only once before, and that was just a few months ago when his future father-in-law had tested his Torah knowledge for three hours, grilling him so fiercely that Seligson, who was prouder of his erudition than of anything else, had left the rebbe’s home feeling like a boy just beginning his aleph-bes.
Now, the thought of being surrounded by so many Satmarers made him uneasy. Would they recognize him as the Lubavitcher’s son? And if they did, would they attack him? Would they rip his beard out by the roots as they did a few years ago to that poor Lubavitcher teacher who had tried to lift the veil of ignorance from a Satmarer boy’s eyes? And would they think that this brazen Kalman woman was somehow associated with him, the man who was to marry their rebbe’s daughter?
He sneaked a peek at Sarah Kalman and shuddered again at the sight of her red hair spilling over her shoulders and down her back. It was obscene. Even though she was unmarried, an old maid, she should cut it off so as not to be such a temptation. When his father had told him to accompany her to the Satmarer rebbe’s home, and to do whatever she asked, he thought immediately of her red hair, the red hair he had seen so many times on the street, and the fact that, as it was written, Lilith, the temptress, also had red hair.
Seligson felt himself becoming aroused. Damn the woman, he thought.
Sarah Kalman could feel Adam Seligson’s angry eyes upon her, and she resisted the urge to glare back at him. He reminded her of her brother, Moshe. Though still a boy, Adam had the same arrogant stare, the same potbelly. Most annoying, he had that same air about him that said that any time he spent with Sarah was bitel Torah, a waste of Torah, a waste of time.
The door opened and a man who introduced himself as Pinchus Mayer led them into the home, up a broad staircase, and into the rebbe’s study. “The rebbe cannot see you now,” Mayer told Seligson, who could not prevent himself from sighing in relief. “He instructed me to give you this book,” Mayer continued, pointing to a large, leatherbound notebook on the rebbe’s desk. “He said that you may read it in here, but it may not leave the room. You have three hours. Spend it wisely.” Then Mayer went into an office off the study and closed the door behind him. He had never once looked at or acknowledged Sarah Kalman.
Adam Seligson walked over to the bookcases and began perusing the rebbe’s collection, humming tunelessly. Sarah Kalman sat down behind the rebbe’s desk and began to read.
The book, the collected personal diaries of all the Satmarer rebbes, was handwritten in Yiddish with a multitude of incomprehensible words that Sarah Kalman took to be transliterated Hungarian. It was difficult going at first—full of Torah commentary, references to sages and zaddiks she had never heard of, banal entries of marriages and births followed by philosophical discourses about the number and nature of the hidden worlds. Sarah skipped ahead to the entries written by the current Satmarer rebbe’s grandfather, and there she found a reference to a briliant, a diamond. She soon found herself swept up in the story, all the while imagining how she would recount it to Dov Taylor.
***
An old woman, it was written, appeared one day at the Satmarer rebbe’s door in Budapest. According to the diary, it was the tenth day of Ab, 5675, or July 1914. The Great War was about to begin.
The woman said her name was Princess Catherine Maria Radziwell, the daughter of an exiled Polish count living in Russia. She had married a Prussian prince, Wilhelm Radziwell, in 1873, and had been banished from Berlin in 1886, accused—falsely, she said—of intriguing with the tsar.
But despite her innocence of that particular charge, her life, she had confessed to the rebbe, had been spent in wickedness. Now, dying, she wanted to make amends. The diamond she had brought would, she hoped, purchase the rebbe’s blessing.
It was not unusual, the rebbe wrote, for goyishe women to come to him for cures and blessings after reaping the fruits of their sinful lives. And the rebbe could tell that this was indeed a woman upon whom the Lord’s justice had fallen. Her eyes were feverish, her skin a deathly white. But the rebbe told her that he could never accept a tainted pidyan—a gift to buy redemption—even one as beautiful as this diamond.
But the diamond belongs to your people, the woman said. I am returning it to you.
And the rebbe knew then that this diamond was the fabled Seer’s stone mentioned by his grandfather’s friend, Menachem Mendel of Rymanov.
The woman recounted how she had gone to South Africa as a correspondent for the Times of London to meet Cecil Rhodes, and how she was surprised to discover that the great English imperialist, the king of the diamond mines, was not a real man. (“An abomination,” the rebbe had written.) Still, Radziwell, by flattery and persistence, had gained entry to Rhodes’s home and confidence. Then, one night, Rhodes had shown her a magnificent diamond that, he told her, he had used as collateral for the loan he received from the American millionaire J. P. Morgan. He had used the money, he boasted, to defeat his enemy, Barney Barnato, and gain control of the Kimberly Mine.
The deal between Rhodes and Morgan had been brokered by the Rothschilds, who had given Rhodes the stone in return for an undisclosed position in the new company he was forming: the De Beers Mining Syndicate.
The woman told the rebbe that she had indeed stolen the diamond from Rhodes, taking it after he had gone to sleep, but that it had brought her nothing but misery. She had hoped to sell it back to Rhodes, but he died just days after she left South Africa. Then she brought it to Barnato, Rhodes’s rival, but by that time Barnato had gone mad. Soon he would drown himself by jumping off a ship bound from Johannesburg to London.
She told the rebbe that upon finding out that she had a loathsome disease and would soon die herself, she slipped back into Poland, and there discovered that the diamond had been stolen from the Jews by Josep Czartoryski, a Polish count who had lost it to the Rothschilds through gambling. Now, she said, all she wanted was to die in peace. And to do that she must return the stone to its rightful owners, the Jews.
So the rebbe accepted the diamond from her hand, gave her his blessing, and never saw her again.
Skipping ahead in the diaries, Sarah Kalman read how the current Satmarer rebbe’s father had used the diamond to purchase his freedom, and the freedom of his Hasidim, from the Nazi murderer Adolf Eichmann. And how when Eichmann was captured by the Israelis in 5721 (1960), he’d tried to bribe them with the rebbe’s stone. One Israeli agent, unnamed in the diary, described only as the one pious Jew among the godless Israelis, returned the stone to the rebbe, whose son was named Joel Teitel.
The diaries went on to recount how no lesser personage than Isser Harel, the chief of all Israeli intelligence, had come to Williamsburg to demand that the rebbe return the diamond to Israel. And how the rebbe had refused, telling Harel that it belonged to Jews of faith, Jews who kept the Messiah alive in their hearts, not to Jews who had replaced the Messiah with a Golden Calf they called the state of Israel.
***
The door off the rebbe’s study opened and Pinchus Mayer entered the room. He cast a disapproving eye at Sarah Kalman and then addressed Adam Seligson, who was sitting on the windowsill, reading by the light that filtered through the dirt-encrusted window. “You must go now, Reb Seligson,” Mayer said.
“What?” said Seligson, looking up from his book, blinking through his wire-rimmed glasses.
“It’s time to go,” said Mayer.
Sarah Kalman got up from her chair and replaced the book on the rebbe’s desk.
“Thank you, Reb Mayer,” Sarah said softly. “And thank the rebbe.”
Mayer grunted and opened the study door, shooing Seligson and Kalman in front of him.
As soon as they were back on the street, Adam Seligson muttered something about an appointment and began rushing down South Ninth Street toward the subway. Sarah Kalman was glad to be rid of him, glad to be alone with her thoughts.
Could the Israelis have stolen the diamond and murdered that poor diamond dealer? she asked herself. After all, treachery and deceit seemed to be the provenance of this diamond. Well, unlike the Satmarers, the Lubavitchers had many friends in Israel, and perhaps they could find out for Dov Taylor. But if it was indeed the Israelis who had taken it, she thought, it would never be returned, and all that Dov had done, and all he had gone through, would be futile.
Her heart ached for the detective.
Chapter 59 Prince Street
SoHo, Manhattan
Monday, October 28
“HI, I’M DOV, and I’m a grateful recovering alcoholic and drug addict.”
“Hi, Dov,” responded the forty or so people in Taylor’s home meeting in the basement of St. Vincent’s Church on Prince Street.
“My life’s been pretty hectic,” Taylor began, not sure where he was going, “and I haven’t been getting to as many meetings as I’d like. I’ve been down in Miami. I was with a heavy drinker, an active alcoholic. It didn’t make me want to pick up, but I felt bad that I couldn’t do anything for him. He’s pretty far gone, but, you know, what can you do?
“Let’s see. I’m also, well, I think I’m getting involved in an impossible situation. A woman. I’m not really involved with her, but I have feelings for her, and it just can’t work. I don’t know what to do about it. Well, actually, that’s not true. I know what to do. I shouldn’t see her. I should find somebody else.
“I guess there’s not much else. The business I’m doing, it doesn’t make much sense. I’m looking for a man, and I just found out that he might he working for people I thought would be the last people in the world he’d be working for. I can’t really explain that. I’m sorry if this doesn’t hang together, but there’s not a lot making sense for me these days. But I’m okay. Thanks for listening. I guess that’s all.”
After Taylor sat down, a tall, slender, pretty young woman stood up. Taylor remembered having seen her before. Her name was Carol. She was a beginner, claiming a little more than two months of sobriety.
“I thought everything would get better once I stopped drinking,” she said, “and, in a way, that’s true. And in a way, it’s not. I mean, yeah, I’m sober, and that’s great, but my life is still all screwed up. Yesterday I was in my car, going up the West Side Highway, and I thought I’d just like to drive into the river. I thought thoughts like that were supposed to go away once you stopped drinking.”
Carol went on to list her troubles; the usual, Taylor thought ungenerously. She had quit her job because she had had an affair with her boss, tried to break it off, and he didn’t want to. Her boyfriend was, as she said, “a heavy drinker, probably an alcoholic,” and he was pissed off that she had stopped. And she wondered how long she could stay sober if she continued to see him. She also talked about taking a sip of nonalcoholic beer at a party and wondering if that was okay or not.
Taylor, and everybody else in the meeting, knew that if she kept drinking the phony beer, she’d pick up a real one sooner or later. But AA was supposed to be supportive, and it was difficult to tell someone that what they were doing was wrong or dumb. After Carol had finished, a man Taylor knew only as Joe, an old-timer, stood up.
“I’m Joe,” he began, “and I’m an alcoholic, and I’d just like to say that, for me, nonalcoholic beer is, like, crazy. I mean, maybe some people can do it, but for me, it’s Russian roulette. It’s like going to bars and drinking Cokes. You can do it, sure, but why risk it? Why risk your sobriety? I just want to say to Carol that I would think about that.”
A few more people chimed in, talking about the dangers of nonalcoholic beer and about sober drunks hanging out with active drunks, mostly without addressing Carol directly. Soon it was time to join hands for the Lord’s Prayer. As Taylor was getting ready to leave, Carol walked up to him and asked if they could go someplace, have a cup of coffee. She reminded him that they had met over a month ago, and that she had thanked him for talking about how screwed up he still was after two years of sobriety.
Taylor remembered—although that month seemed so long ago it was like another life; it was another life—and he remembered finding her attractive then. Now, up close, she seemed older to Taylor, in her thirties, not her twenties, but no less attractive. She had brown eyes and light brown hair, pulled away from her face by a red hairband. Her most distinctive feature was a small white scar on her upper lip. She was wearing new jeans and an oversize black sweater with embroidered red flowers. She seemed very demure, very shy. Taylor thought that it must have cost her something to approach him, and he said yes.
Over espresso in a little Italian place down the street from the church, Carol recited her drunkalog. She had started drinking as a teenager. She didn’t like pot, it made her paranoid, and when her friends smoked, she drank. She drank through college, drank before, during, and after dates. Eventually she was drinking alone in her apartment every night, vodka and orange juice mainly, but she never thought she had a problem until she woke up one morning next to her boss and couldn’t even remember making a date with him.
“It was weird, you know,” she said. “I didn’t even like the guy. I asked him, you know, where we had dinner, stuff like that, and he thought it was funny. I thought I was going crazy.”
Taylor thought about how so many people’s stories were the same and regretted his previous impatience with Carol’s. Perhaps his story was more dramatic, but that was just an accident of his having been a cop. It was as if the booze wrote the script, and the drunk acted it out. And the booze was a simpleminded playwright, using the same plot over and over again. The bottle was always center stage, and there were only two endings: you stopped, or you died.
