Zaddik, page 5
Chapter 8 Forty-seventh Street, Manhattan
Tuesday, September 7
A DAY AFTER THE MURDERS of Zalman Gottleib and Shirley Stein had been discovered, rumors were still flashing through the diamond district’s offices and exchanges, the prayer rooms and luncheonettes.
Zalman Gottleib had been shot, stabbed, poisoned, beheaded. His secretary, Shirley Stein, had been tortured, raped, mutilated beyond recognition.
Thousands of dollars’ worth of diamonds had been stolen. Hundreds of thousands. Millions.
It was the Russians, the Arabs, the Colombians, the Israelis, the Mafia.
Gottleib was a cheat, a saint, a spy. He had been having an affair with his secretary.
“What?!” shouted Sidney Metzer outside the elevator in 30 West Forty-seventh, the home of the Diamond Dealers Club on the ninth and tenth floors. “The man was in his seventies, for God’s sake.”
“So?” asked William Goldberg as the men pressed into the crowded elevator. “A seventy-year-old man can’t fool around?” Goldberg was sixty-five.
“He was a Hasid,” said Metzer, who, although he lived in Crown Heights, attended the Lubavitcher synagogue, and was observant, was not.
“So? Take off the beard and payes and what have you got? Aren’t the Hasidim men like you and me?”
Before Metzer could answer, the elevator doors opened onto a tiny, crowded anteroom. Men pressed their faces against a small bulletproof window so that the man behind the desk could recognize them and open the double-locked doors to the Diamond Club floor.
Once through the doors, the club members—men who had been nominated and screened by two committees, whose bank records had been examined and applications approved by the club’s two thousand members—charged back and forth across a ballroom-size room with high ceilings, fluorescent lights, and a slippery, stained linoleum floor. Undistinguished wooden tables, some with desk lamps, lined the walls by the high windows.
Men sat at these tables with diamond loupes held up to their eyes, picking through glittering mountains of diamonds. Their deft fingers wrapped and unwrapped parcels of gems in double-sheeted paper—the outside sheet white, waxy, and strong; the inside sheet a pale blue tissue.
Visiting dealers with name tags affixed to their lapels bargained, rushing from table to table. Diamonds bought by one man were sold five minutes later to another for a profit of 1 or 2 percent, then sold again and again. Loudspeakers called the names of dealers in English, Hebrew, and Yiddish, summoning them to telephones or to the foyer for meetings. It was bedlam.
But today, although the club was as noisy as ever, and as crowded as ever—maybe even a little more so—there was less business being done. Instead there was more talk. About what happened to Zalman Gottleib. About what it meant to the street, to the business. The small prayer room off the main floor was more crowded than usual, with men reciting their afternoon prayers or talking to each other in hushed tones.
Many of the Satmarer Hasidim in the prayer room had been at Gottleib’s funeral that morning and had said the mourner’s kaddish over the grave. The funeral had been arranged by the Satmarer burial society, which had supplied the handfuls of soil from Israel that the mourners sprinkled on Gottleib’s simple wooden coffin.
Because Gottleib had been murdered, he was buried, as a sign of wrath, in the clothes he had been wearing when his life left him.
As the mourners left, each plucked a few blades of grass and threw them over their shoulders, saying, “He remembereth that we are dust.”
Upstairs, on the tenth floor, behind the closed doors of the club’s boardroom, thirty-six men sat and stood around a polished wooden table. These were the club’s board of overseers. Some were clean-shaven, impeccably dressed in gray and olive Armani suits, Charvet shirts, and Hermès ties. Others had bord un payes and wore black kaftans and yarmulkes. Still others wore frayed white shirts, ancient khaki pants, colorfully knitted yarmulkes, and sneakers. Few wore jewelry.
Several of these men were sight holders. That meant they dealt directly with the De Beers diamond syndicate, whose Diamond Trading Company handled 95 percent of the world’s total production of diamonds and through whose Central Selling Organization passed 85 percent of the world’s uncut stones. These sight holders traveled to London, to Syndicate headquarters at 17 Charterhouse Street, ten times a year, on every fifth Monday, to pick up and pay for the stones they had requested.
All these men were globe trotters, regularly visiting the capitals of the diamond world: London, for the sights; Antwerp, where some of the best stones in the world were cut on the Pelikanstraat; Amsterdam, where the diamond dealers had their banks and where smuggling, or “submarining,” was the order of the day; Tel Aviv, where the Israeli government built the twin twenty-eight-story skyscrapers of Ramat Gan for the cutters and traders and where dealers who couldn’t get syndicate sights could buy small rough stones. Some dealers got invited to Moscow: there the Russians only sold; they did not buy. And there, rather uniquely in the diamond world, there were no Jews involved. Some traveled to Johannesburg, South Africa, the home of De Beers’s Consolidated Mines, Ltd., which was a world, and a law, unto itself.
And all these men, no matter how they dressed or appeared or comported themselves, were wealthy beyond most people’s dreams.
Today, for once, they sat quietly, listening to the club’s director, Fred Feldman, report on his conversation with the police captain.
While downstairs rumor held sway, here, upstairs in the boardroom, the information was of higher quality. But the facts were bad enough.
When Feldman finished, the debate began.
“First Jaroslawicz,” said Sherman Teicher, who had inherited his club membership from his father, “then Peretsky. Then Gupta. Now Gottleib. I don’t know about you, gentlemen, but I am taking my business elsewhere.”
“Oh, so you’ll move to Israel,” said William Goldberg, recently elected to a director’s two-year term with no pay, “and get blown up by some Arab meshuggener.”
“The point is,” said Robert Katz, a man in a beautifully cut fawn-colored suit, a sight holder who dealt exclusively with the diamond palaces—Van Cleef & Arpels, Tiffany, and Harry Winston—“we have become targets here. Any shmuck can come to the street, hit someone over the head, and walk off with a fortune. We need protection, and we need better protection than the police seem to be able to give us.”
“We got more cops on the street than ever before,” said a Hasid.
“Exactly my point,” Katz said.
“I told the captain we would cooperate fully,” said Feldman, whose father had also been a club director and who was trying vainly to convince the members that they should move the club to a larger, newer, cleaner, and more expensive location on Fifth Avenue.
“Of course,” said an elderly Hasid leaning against the wall, staring at the ceiling as he spoke. “Let us cooperate fully. Let us all open our safes to these Irisher policemen. Let us show them our goods,” he said with heavy sarcasm. “Let us explain how we do our business here. Let us explain mazl un brukha. Maybe we should invite the IRS, too? And after that, let us welcome them all into our homes to question our wives and daughters. Or perhaps, Mr. Director, we should take them to the police station ourselves? Maybe they’ll find a nice Irish boy, or a shvartzer maybe, to bring home.”
“This is not the Gestapo we’re talking about, Mendel,” said Feldman.
“No?”
“Look,” said an Israeli dealer who had moved to New York two years ago, “the police are fine, but we should do something ourselves. It is our business, our lives.”
“What can we do except cooperate with the police? It’s their job to find killers.”
“We should do both,” said Sidney Metzer. “We should cooperate with the police—as much as we can—and do something ourselves. I have an idea, if we are willing to pay. I have heard of a man who was once a policeman, a detective, studying at the Lubavitcher yeshiva. A rabbi I know, a Lubavitcher who teaches there, Rabbi Kalman, mentioned him to me. Shall I speak to Reb Kalman?”
And after much debate, it was agreed.
Fred Feldman went back to the director’s office. He had a phone message. An Ariel Levin wished to see him.
Well, thought Feldman, that could wait.
Chapter 9 The Mathew Rosenthal
Lubavitcher Yeshiva
Crown Heights, Brooklyn
Wednesday, September 8
“I THOUGHT YOU UNDERSTOOD,” said Dov Taylor. “The last thing I need right now is to go around knocking on doors, asking people about a dead man.”
“You know,” said Rabbi Jacob Kalman, the yeshiva’s director and the gabbai, or personal secretary, to Reb Menachem Mendel Seligson, the Lubavitcher rebbe, “I’ve been looking through those old family papers you gave me. Very interesting.”
Rabbi Kalman’s habit of never speaking to the point, never answering directly, usually amused Taylor. Today, however, it was simply annoying.
“Forget that,” said Taylor. “The point is, I can’t believe you would ask me to get involved, I don’t care who was killed. You’re just upset because I’m not going to come to class anymore. But believe me, it has nothing to do with you. I’d still like to be able to come here and shmooze.”
“Did you know that your great-great-grandfather was Rabbi Hirsh Leib, the Zaddik of Orlik?”
“Also, there’s nothing I can do to catch this guy that the police can’t do. We’d be wasting your money, my time, and, and, it would be a waste of time,” Taylor concluded lamely, seeing that Kalman, like the Ancient Mariner, had fixed him with a glittering eye and was poised to plow ahead.
“Do you know,” asked Rabbi Kalman, “who was Rabbi Hirsh Leib?”
Taylor looked around the rabbi’s cozy book-lined office off the main study room of the yeshiva. Among the countless Jewish texts and portraits of Rabbi Seligson were candelabras, menorahs, and photographs of Rabbi Kalman with his children and grandchildren. Taylor felt comfortable here, a fact that never ceased to surprise him, considering that he rarely felt comfortable anywhere these days except in AA meetings.
“Yes,” said Taylor. “My grandmother always told me it was a big deal, something to be proud of.”
“Do you know why it was a big deal?”
“No way you’re not going to tell me, right?”
“I think it’s important that you know that you carry the spark of a great and holy man, yes,” said Rabbi Kalman, wriggling onto his leather chair to get comfortable and gazing at the ceiling, summoning the story. “It means that you have a kind of yikhus, merit, that we call zekhus avos, the merit of your forefathers.”
Taylor felt a sudden wave of frustration sweep over him. Why was Kalman pushing him to do something he didn’t want to do? It wasn’t fair. He looked down at his hands and forced them to unclench. Relax, he told himself. Easy does it. Keep it simple. No power on earth is going to stop him from telling you a story, so just relax. Then you can say no, and go.
“First,” began Rabbi Kalman, “you must understand that for Jews things had reached a terrible pass.
“I am speaking of the beginning of the eighteenth century, not so long ago. Many people were still mourning the disaster of the false messiah, Sabbatai Tzvi. You know about him?”
“He proclaimed himself the Messiah.”
“And converted to Islam when he was arrested by the Turkish sultan. He had the spark of holiness in him, but he was ensnared by pride. Many thousands of Jews left their homes to follow him. When he betrayed them, they returned home in despair, only to be slaughtered in pogroms, may their blood be avenged.
“The Russian and Polish and Hungarian lords made laws forbidding Jews to own land, forbidding them to trade with Christians. The peasants were encouraged to go into Jewish towns, burn our books, our shuls, kill men, women, children. We weep for these martyrs.
“So,” said Rabbi Kalman, “that’s the way it was. Then, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, was born in Podolia, in the Ukraine, a child who would become Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov, the Master of the Good Name, may his memory protect us.
“Now, throughout history, there had been many baalei shem, men who knew one or more of the many names of God. And knowing a name or two, they could perform miracles. But the Baal Shem Tov knew the one, true name, and the miracle he performed every day of his life was to bind man to God.
“We call him the Besht.
“It is said that when all the souls of all the men to come were gathered in Adam’s soul, and Adam went to eat the apple, the Besht’s soul walked away and would not eat.
“The Besht became a melamed, a teacher of children, got married, worked as a slaughterer, and then began to wander through Podolia, living in the mountains, fasting and meditating. There is a story told that once he was so deep in meditation that he stepped off a mountain and would have fallen had not another mountain jumped over and put itself under his foot.”
Kalman paused. “Why are you smiling?” he asked Taylor.
“Was I smiling?”
“I said something funny?”
“No. It’s very pretty.”
“You don’t think a mountain can move? You think this is a, a, children’s story?”
“I think it’s a metaphor.”
“Is that a fancy word for nonsense?”
“Come on, Rabbi. Do you think mountains can jump around?”
“I think there is no limit to what the Creator can do. And if you think logically, my friend, you will have to agree with me.”
And this, thought Taylor, was why the idea of his becoming a Hasid was so ridiculous. Put on tefillin? It only made sense if you believed that every word in the Bible was dictated by God and was therefore meant to be taken absolutely literally. If you believed that, then mountains jumped, the sun stood still, and God cared if you tied a box to your forehead.
“May I continue?” asked Rabbi Kalman.
“Please. But I’m not changing my mind.”
“Soon,” said Rabbi Kalman, clearing his throat and staring again at the ceiling, “Jews all over had heard of this man. The Besht. They came to him to be healed, and they stayed to gaze in wonder at his face, which had the sign of God upon it.
“It is said that when the Baal Shem prayed, people saw the terrible fear of God grip his limbs and they themselves felt fear. It is said that the fear of God was so great in him that when he prayed, everyone in the room could hear the beating of his heart. ‘I am surprised, body,’ the Besht once said, ‘that you have not crumbled to bits for fear of your Maker.’
“It is said that when the Baal Shem sang the morning prayer, his voice was so loud that it woke up all the Jews in the world.”
Kalman paused. “That,” he said, “is a metaphor.”
Taylor smiled.
“The Besht performed many miracles,” Kalman continued, “but his greatest miracle was reawakening hope in the people. The moment their eyes fell upon the Baal Shem Tov, they began again to love God. These were the first Hasidim.
“Of course,” he said, “the Besht had many disciples. And many of these disciples became themselves zaddikim, the righteous, and went off and founded their own schools with their own Hasidim.
“One of the greatest of these disciples of the disciples of the Besht was Rabbi Jacob Yitzhak, the Seer of Lublin.
“He was called ‘the Seer,’ ” said Rabbi Kalman, “because when he met a man he could see on his forehead all the lives the man’s soul had lived, right back to Cain and Abel, and saw all the soul’s sins and virtues.
“Each year, Rabbi Yitzhak was confident that the Messiah would come. And each year when he did not, the rabbi did not, like other men, blame the people for their sinfulness; he blamed the wise men because they could not achieve humility.
“It is said that the Seer’s very clothes whispered constantly of his greatness.”
Kalman stared a challenge at Taylor. Taylor felt a wisecrack coming on and then thought better of it. Why stretch this out?
“Now your great-great-grandfather,” said Rabbi Kalman, “Rabbi Hirsh Leib of Orlik, was a disciple of the Seer. It was said that he was a very strong man, physically, like you, and a great horseman, too. It was said that he knew the language of horses, that he could speak to them. Do you like horses?”
Taylor’s answer was abrupt. “Hate ’em.”
“You hate them? How can you hate an animal? People, I understand. But a poor animal?”
“Can’t stand them. Every time I’ve been on one, they do what they want. Maybe Hirsh Leib could talk to them, but I can’t.”
“I’m surprised,” said Rabbi Kalman. “Such things are usually passed on. But, of course, it’s been such a long time. Anyway,” he continued, “it is said that once, when Rabbi Zusya of Hanipol took to his sickbed to suffer for the Jews, the Seer and Rabbi Hirsh Leib went to visit him. When they came to his bed, Hirsh Leib told the Seer to give Rabbi Zusya his hand so he could rise. The Seer burst into tears. And Rabbi Hirsh Leib asked him, ‘Why do you weep? Do you think he is sick because it is his destiny? He has taken suffering upon himself of his own free will, and if he wanted to rise, he would not need the hand of a stranger to do so.’ ”
Rabbi Kalman stopped and fell silent, and Dov Taylor started as if Rabbi Kalman had shouted.
“That’s it?” asked Taylor. “You tell me all this for one little story about my great-great-grandfather? What else do you know about him?”
“You can find out for yourself,” said Rabbi Kalman. “What are you, lazy? Is that your problem? You’re a lazy person.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Taylor, feeling confused, a trifle guilty, and angry at the rabbi for making him feel that way. Today, again, he had called in sick at work.
“You want me to do everything for you?” Rabbi Kalman asked accusingly.
