Zaddik, page 43
In bed, Sarah had lain awake thinking about the woman sleeping in the room next to hers, her brother’s old bedroom. What would Moshe say if he knew? Sarah thought suddenly, smiling in the dark. He’d die. A giant yellow-haired shiksa lying in his old bed.
But Sarah’s smile had quickly vanished. The sudden appearance of this strange creature in her home was disturbing. Obviously the woman was in trouble. That was clear. She was visibly exhausted. Her hands, Sarah had noticed at dinner, had been trembling. But she was also hiding something. That, too, was clear. And Sarah did not believe that Taylor was simply an old friend, or a friend of any kind. This, Sarah had thought, was not a woman who had friends, especially not male friends. This, she thought, was the kind of woman she had read about in novels when she was living in her own apartment and going to school. This was a woman who had lovers.
Was Dov Taylor one of them? Sarah had fallen asleep with that question in her mind, and now, staring at the back of Rubel’s head, it returned, like an unpleasant guest who kept showing up at your door no matter how much you discouraged her.
Of course, what did it matter? Sarah asked herself. Why shouldn’t Dov Taylor have a lover, or many lovers? What business was it of hers, a little old maid who ran a dress shop in Crown Heights?
But this woman? While one part of Sarah’s mind knew that Rubel was an Amerikanishe ideal—tall, blond, slender with a big bosom—another part could not believe that Taylor, or indeed any man, could find her attractive. Those shoulders. Those hands. She was like a man, thought Sarah, not a woman. What would a man do with such a one as this?
And there was something about her that said she was keeping secrets. Sarah did not trust her, did not like her, and now she was annoyed, not amused, that her father had given her Moshe’s old room, the one Dov Taylor had slept in when Sarah had first met him over the Shabbos meal.
“How long are you planning to stay here?” Sarah blurted out.
Maria Radziwell, who had not been paying much attention to Sarah, was surprised to hear the hostility in her voice. She turned around on her chair to study her. Could this pretty little red-haired Jewess be the reason the detective had pushed her away yesterday?
“I don’t know,” Radziwell said in a low voice. “I will go as soon as I can. Mr. Taylor,” she said, looking to see if she could observe any change in Sarah’s expression, “he said he would come for me as soon as he could.”
The doorbell rang. Sarah started and saw that Mary Rubel had also jumped. What is she so afraid of? Sarah wondered, walking down the long hallway from the kitchen to answer the door.
Sarah squinted through the peephole and saw a Hasid looking down at his feet. Probably someone for her father, she thought, lifting the dead bolt and sliding it back. She opened the door halfway. “Can I help you?” she asked in Yiddish. “The rabbi is not home.”
In an instant the man was through the door, his left hand clamping down on Sarah’s upper arm, pushing her backward into the house, almost lifting her off her feet, kicking the door shut.
“Shtil. Do not scream, Miss Kalman,” he whispered fiercely in Yiddish. “Please. Don’t make a sound. Don’t do anything. I don’t want to hurt you.”
Sarah gasped in pain. Her arm was on fire. His fingers, like the iron hands of some golem, dug into her muscles.
“Please tell me where she is,” he said, pushing her backward, making her stumble down the hall.
Sarah turned her head to look behind her and saw Mary Rubel standing in the kitchen doorway. Then she disappeared.
The man had obviously seen her, too, for suddenly Sarah was yanked off her feet as the man bolted for the kitchen, dragging her behind him. Her shoulder wrenched, and a wave of nausea shook her. My arm will come off from my body, she thought.
Then she was flying through the air. She landed on her hip on the kitchen floor and slid up against the refrigerator. Raising her head, she saw Mary Rubel throwing silverware out of a drawer, then turn around holding one of Sophie Kalman’s meat knives in both hands.
The man began walking slowly toward Rubel. “You do not have to be afraid of me, Maria,” he said in English. “I only want to talk.”
Rubel slid to her left, her back against the sink, holding the knife in front of her. The man moved with her, slowly closing the distance between them. He stopped at the kitchen table and casually placed a hand on the back of a chair as if he were going to have a pleasant chat. “Put down the knife, Maria,” he said. “It will not do you any good. You know that.
“It was very stupid to run,” the man continued, his voice smooth and his words unhurried. “You think we would not find you? It was stupid to steal. You think you could steal from us? But we forgive you. We just want what you took. You can go then. You can go where you want. Perhaps we will give you a little money. You see? We want to be reasonable.”
Sarah Kalman began inching toward the kitchen door, pulling herself along the floor. When I get to the hallway, she told herself, I’ll get up and run.
“I will stick this in your heart, you bastard!” Rubel shrieked.
Sarah heard a crash and turned around. The man had tossed aside the chair and tipped over the kitchen table. Now he was on top of the woman, bending her backward over the sink. Sarah saw the knife high in the air as the man shook Rubel’s wrist back and forth. Then he slammed it down on the counter. Sarah heard the knife clatter to the floor as she scrambled to her feet. Before she could take two steps, the man had grabbed her by her hair, snapping her head back. As Sarah started to scream, the man clapped his hand over her mouth and shook her head roughly.
“No,” he said, and Sarah, frightened and enraged, bit deeply into his thumb. The man growled and stomped down on her foot. The pain caused Sarah to open her mouth wide, releasing his hand. The man struck her face with the back of his hand. Everything was suddenly fuzzy and dark. Was she dreaming? And then she felt herself spinning.
For a moment Sarah saw a woman on her hands and knees on the kitchen floor, her blond head hanging between her arms. Then the man, his hand still in Sarah’s hair, pulled her down the hallway and opened the door to the bathroom. He threw her into the room, and she fell sideways, banging the back of her head against the radiator.
“If you come out, I will have to kill you, Miss Kalman,” the man said, shutting the door on her.
Sarah pulled herself up into a sitting position and leaned against the toilet bowl. Her arm and shoulder burned where the man had gripped it, her elbow throbbed. Her foot ached. She touched her mouth and then looked at her fingers. They were bloody.
Sarah heard another crash from the kitchen, heard plates and silverware hitting the floor. And the rebbetzin always keeps such a neat kitchen, Sarah thought. She’ll be so upset.
Sarah stood up and walked to the bathroom door. She turned the lock. There. She would stay here quietly until that man went away. That horrible man.
She looked at herself in the mirror. Her chin was covered with blood. Her left cheekbone was turning purple. Her hair was tangled.
She bent her head. Her head seemed full of water, as if she had a cold.
She ran the water in the sink.
More sounds were coming from the kitchen. Sarah cupped her hands, filled them with lukewarm water, and then stared into the little pool in her palms. She thought she could see tiny creatures, made of glass, twisting and turning, rising and falling, swimming in the water. Isn’t that wonderful, she thought. My eyes have become like microscopes.
Sarah Kalman was still staring at her hands when she heard a knock on the door. “Go away,” she said in Yiddish.Gay avek.
“We have to go now,” said that man. “Open the door.”
Sarah slowly shook her head. He must be crazy, she thought. Why should she open the door for him?
The door burst open, the wood splintering, the lock torn from the jamb. Sarah stood where she was, trembling, her head hanging over the sink.
“I’m sorry, Miss Kalman,” the man said. He took a white hand towel from the rack and held it under the faucet. Then, putting his hand under Sarah’s chin, he turned her head and wiped her face gently, dabbing her lips with the moist towel. He smoothed her hair. Then he took her by the elbow. “Please, Miss Kalman,” he said, “come with me.”
He led Sarah out of the bathroom. She stopped and turned to look into the kitchen. She saw the table lying on its side. She saw plates and silverware and glasses and cups strewn on the floor.
“I should clean up,” she said softly.
“Later,” said the man. “When you come back, you can clean. I apologize for the disruption. You will need your coat. Where is it?”
“In the closet,” said Sarah.
“The closet by the door?” asked the man.
Sarah nodded, and her face hurt again. There was something she should see, she knew, in the kitchen.
“I’m all right now,” she said to the man. “You don’t have to worry about me.”
The man released her elbow, and Sarah dashed into the kitchen. There, lying on her back beneath the sink, was Maria Radziwell. Her arms were spread out on either side of her, and her legs were open, too. Her skirt was twisted up to her waist, and blood was collecting between her thighs. Sarah could see her panties and felt embarrassed for her. Even a goy should not be left so immodestly, she thought.
The front of her blouse, Sarah saw, was dark and wet. There was blood on her neck, blood on her face, blood in her blond hair. There was blood everywhere, on the cupboards and the floor. The room, Sarah thought suddenly, smelled like the shop where Reb Sternberg hung up his freshly slaughtered chickens.
Who was once a beautiful yellow bird is now a plucked chicken, thought Sarah.
She looked down at her feet. Her mouth filled with her morning coffee rushing up from her stomach. She bent over and vomited.
The man put his arm around her shoulder and turned her around.
“She was a bad woman,” he said. “She was a thief and a prostitute.” He led Sarah down the hallway.
Sarah stepped away from his arm. “Please don’t touch me,” she said, her eyes filling with tears.
The man nodded, opened the closet door, and stepped back. Sarah picked out her coat and put it on.
“Will you kill me, too?” she asked.
The man stood in front of the door. “You don’t remember me, Miss Kalman?” he asked. “You don’t know who I am?”
She forced herself to look into the man’s cadaverous face. Then she looked away. “No,” she said.
“The beard disguises me. When I take it off, you will know. I came to you once on the street,” the man said. “I asked for your permission to speak to your father about a match. I said I would come back for you. You do not remember?”
Sarah Kalman shook her head. She had no desire to remember anything, she had no desire to think at all.
“We will go now, Miss Kalman,” she heard the man say. “You will walk next to me to my car. It is just across the street. You will smile and look pleasantly, as if you were enjoying the sun, enjoying the day. It is beautiful outside.”
The man opened the door and they stepped through it, side by side.
The man was right, Sarah thought. It was a beautiful day.
Chapter 68 The Carlyle Hotel
Madison Avenue, Manhattan
Wednesday, October 30
THE AFTERNOON SUN poured through the hotel window. Ladislaw Czartoryski sat on an overstuffed chair, his eyes closed, letting the sun warm his face. He was feeling drowsy. It took him longer to recover from flying these days, which he chalked down to his advancing age. He scolded himself: You are becoming an old man, Ladislaw, sleeping in the sun like a cat. But he could not move; it was too delicious just to sit there dreaming, letting his thoughts come and go.
For some reason, the past was becoming more interesting to him than the present. Right now, for example, he was remembering the feel of the sun on his face as he sat in a café in Beirut speaking to the young man he would come to know as the Cutter.
How odd that so much of his life had been taken up by Jews. The Cutter, a Jew, was perhaps his oldest associate. Then there were the Jews of his childhood and the Jews in the camps. And after the war, the Odessa had often found its interests running parallel to Israel’s. Sometimes Czartoryski thought that the Israelis should thank men like him. After all, if it had not been for the camps and the work they did, there would be no Israel. For thousands of years the Jews had wandered from country to country, scorned and despised. His father, Czartoryski recalled, used to compare them to fleas on a dog. Then came the war, and its aftermath, and suddenly they had their own nation.
And the Israelis were tough, no doubt about that. Their Mossad had once been the best security outfit in the world. Natural selection, thought Czartoryski, smiling to himself. We eliminated all the weak ones. Another reason they should thank us.
Of course, the new ones, the ones who came of age after the war, were not so strong. They had become bourgeois businessmen, reverting, thought Czartoryski, to Jewish type. His first Israeli would never have trusted him to turn over the diamond. But these new Israelis were greedy and careless. With Jews, thought Czartoryski, it always came back to money, to shekels.
His first Israeli, what was his name? Nir? Ben something? It was probably once Hymie Yidstein; they all changed their European names to Hebrew ones. As if they could erase the memory of the ghetto. As if they could cut themselves off from their bearded fathers, nipping the thread of history to which they felt ashamed to be bound. But now the beards were back. The Hasidim. Again the Yids revert to type.
Anyway, one day—was it in Paris? No, it was still Warsaw—they had gotten drunk, and the Israeli had said to him that something secret and intimate had passed between the Jews and the Nazis during the war. He said that in order to survive, the Jews would have to remember what the Nazis had whispered in their ear. They would have to remember how to be brutal.
And they did well, Czartoryski thought, feeling paternal toward the Jews, his Jews. Then he felt a shadow pass across his face. He opened his eyes. The sun had slipped behind a building. He looked at his watch. Three o’clock. In an hour it would be dark.
Where was the Cutter?
He sighed and stood up, his joints stiff. His mood changed. He felt gloomy. He looked out the window and saw the traffic creeping along far below. What was left of the Odessa? he asked himself. After General Gehlen’s death, there was really no one to take his place, no one to give us a sense of high purpose. Now that the Soviets had committed suicide, there was not even an enemy. NATO was a relic; its intelligence operations were without funds. The Americans were turning away from Europe, thinking that they had won their contest with the Communists.
Our old friends in Paraguay, El Salvador, and Argentina are dying; their governments are slipping from our control. The blacks are seizing power in South Africa. What’s left? Czartoryski asked himself. A handful of old men like myself. A handful of young opportunists with no loyalty. Men like Ukridge who think only of lining their own pockets.
I could retire now, Czartoryski thought. With the diamond, I could retire to, say, Jakarta, and live in comfort. There are still comrades in Indonesia, scattered on the islands. We could sit and watch the sun set and talk about the old times when every day we held life and death in our hands.
I should thank the Jews for that, thought Czartoryski. In Belzec, whenever I looked into the eyes of a Jew and saw there the understanding that he was about to receive death from my hands, I knew what a god must feel like.
Alive. So alive.
Perhaps I should go down to Forty-seventh Street before it closes, he thought. Walk among them again. See them looking at me with their frightened eyes.
Czartoryski slipped on his shoes. Now he had a direction, a goal, but his depression refused to lift. As he rode the elevator down to the lobby, his thoughts returned to the Cutter.
Could he have been detained in London? What could he be doing? Why hadn’t he made contact?
I am quite alone, he thought, and for a moment he felt a touch of fear. Then, as he stepped out onto the street, he thought of Ukridge, his face blackening in his own fireplace, and he felt once more alive.
I’m not dead yet, the Magician told himself. Not yet.
Chapter 69 Rabbi Kalman’s Home
President Street, Crown Heights
Wednesday, October 30
IT WAS A SCENE Dov Taylor knew all too well, in a play he thought he had left behind. But now he had a new role in it.
“Tell me about your relationship to the deceased,” Detective Ray Antonelli asked again, the shield in his wallet hanging over his jacket’s chest pocket, a notebook and pen in his hands. He pulled his chair closer to the couch in the Kalmans’ living room where Taylor was sitting. Their knees almost touched.
A little intimidation, thought Taylor. Well, he’d do the same; in fact, he had done the same, many times.
“I met her twice, for a total of a few hours. That’s all,” said Taylor. “That was our entire relationship.”
“You asked your rabbi to take care of someone you only knew for a few hours?”
“That’s right.”
“And you say her name was Rubel, or Radziwell? Is one a married name?”
“I told you,” said Taylor. “I don’t know.” Next, he thought, he’s going to ask for my assistance.
“You’re not being very helpful, Mr. Taylor,” said Antonelli. “I’m sure you can do better.”
“I’ll do anything I can,” Taylor said.
Taylor had wanted to speak to Rabbi Kalman, to apologize for bringing death into his home, to reassure him that his daughter would be safe. But Antonelli, going by the book, had spirited the rabbi away. There would be no communication between principals in an Antonelli-run investigation.
“You’ve got a long night of depositions in front of you, Mr. Taylor,” Antonelli was saying now. “A very long night. I’m going to want to take a full statement. You have no objections, right?”
