by M. H. Baylis
‘Hello,’ he said, bending down to Rex’s ear over the hubbub of voices. ‘We didn’t get a chance to speak before. I am Simmy Dordoff, the gabbay.’
Once again it occurred to Rex that Simmy Dordoff cut a remarkable figure. About six foot four, he had the physique of a young farmer, now crowbarred into a perfectly cut, charcoal grey waistcoat and trouser combo.
Bidding for equal attention with the man’s mountainous physique was the magnificent set of copper-coloured ear curls, which performed a dinky curtsey each time their owner moved his head.
‘Where is the Rebbe?’
Simmy beamed and held up a massive finger. ‘Coming. Now can I ask you a question? What brings you here?’
‘I heard you don’t have these dinners very often,’ Rex shouted back. ‘I thought I should see it.’
Simmy chuckled and shook his head, the ringlets flinging out like Cossack dancers. ‘A tish isn’t a dinner. It’s dvekus.’
Rex looked confused. ‘Dvekus means cleaving,’ Dordoff explained. ‘It’s a moment when a Rebbe and his followers come together in joy, and we all join with God.’
In the room, it felt as if a dial was slowly being turned, bringing the intensity of the singing and the clapping and the stamping to the brink of some sort of tipping point. A chant had started up, made up of short syllables that grew ever longer. He wondered whether Moses Limburg, or any of the Bettelheims’ other relatives, were here. It wouldn’t be easy to spot them in the crowd.
Simmy Dordoff smiled. ‘You feel it? Every time Jews gather together to do this, we’re making something happen.’
‘You’re certainly making a lot of noise.’
Dordoff laughed heartily. ‘It’s tikkun olam. We’re repairing the world. Not just with the singing and dancing. But every time we joyfully fulfil any of the six hundred and thirteen commandments.’ He joined finger and thumb in a circle and put it close to Rex’s eye. ‘Our first Rebbe explained it this way. Each one of them is like a grain of mortar and one day, when some Jew, somewhere, has completed the last one of the trillions of commandments that need to be fulfilled, a chasm in the created world will be filled again.’ He cast an arm around the room. ‘Which Jew will it be? Somebody here, maybe, singing a holy song? Or a member of the faithful in Brazil, or Yemen, or Birmingham, Alabama, putting on tefillin and reciting the morning blessing. We don’t know. Isn’t that a wonderful thought?’
‘It depends what happens when you’ve filled your chasm up,’ Rex shouted.
‘Then creation is repaired, the Messiah comes, God is united with the lost side of His nature and…’ Dordoff shrugged, beaming still. ‘We don’t know. Enough of our prophets and holy men say it will be good for us to know that it will be good and we should all try to make it happen.’
‘So actually, it would happen sooner if there were more people out there doing what you do. Does that mean you try to convert people?’
‘You thinking about it?’
‘Too painful. Seriously, though. Do you go out there, trying to get new members?’
‘We live our lives. Sometimes people are attracted to the way we live our lives and they ask to join us.’
‘Like Yaakov Bettelheim,’ Rex said, remembering what Mrs Greenhill had told him at the jewellers.
‘Yes, like Yaakov Bettelheim,’ Dordoff confirmed, a little bit too quickly, to Rex’s thinking. ‘Here –’ He reached onto the table. ‘You wanna frank?’
Rex took the tepid frankfurter. ‘I thought you guys had given up meat?’
The smile wavered before returning full-beam. ‘Who said?’
‘Bloke in the butchers.’
Dordoff nodded. ‘Okay, okay. And did anyone tell you we never go out at night, and we haven’t got a Rebbe and we’ve got horns and tails?’
‘Erm… Some of the above.’
Grinning enigmatically like a conjuror, Simmy Dordoff removed his fur hat, then lifted the skullcap underneath it. ‘See them?’
Rex smiled. ‘People seem to have some funny ideas about you lot.’
‘What people? Gentiles? No. You mean Jews. In fact, you mean other Hasidic Jews. You know why? Because we won’t take sides. Everyone else – Satmar, Lubavitch, Belz, Ger, Bratslaver, Skverer – they want to know, where do you stand on Israel? Where do you stand on adoption, and conversion, and Islam, and changing your socks on the Sabbath? They want to know, all the time, what side are you on? Who are you against? And we say: against nobody. With God. We haven’t stopped buying and eating meat! But the community here expects that everyone will buy from either Mega Glatt or Mehadrin. Because you see, where you buy your meat from, says which kosher slaughter board you side with, which of the officiating rabbis you support. So it ceases to be anything to do with God’s law, and becomes about money, and politics.’ He laughed. ‘We refuse to play the game! We don’t eat a lot of meat, it’s true. When we do, we get it from Antwerp!’
Rex nodded, half-admiring, although the solution seemed in some ways as perverse as the problem. ‘Whose idea was that?’
‘The Narpal. Our Rebbe.’
He seemed about to say more when the noise in the room suddenly cut dead. Silence swelled and filled every corner like a balloon. The men parted and through the middle of them, someone pushed a tiny, wizened child in a wheelchair.
‘The Narpal,’ whispered Simmy.
The Narpal had minute, twisted limbs, and was propped into a sitting position by an array of velvet cushions. As he came closer, Rex saw that the figure in the chair was actually a young man, with a fuzz of downy hair on his chin and upper lip. He gazed at the world through thick, fishbowl spectacles, and his head and fingers jerked, periodically. Rex had seen the Narpal before, he remembered – freed from his afflictions, in the idealised line drawing on the tiled wall of Yitzie Schild’s shop. In the reverential silence, Rex watched as the young Rebbe was wheeled around the table, stopping by each man for a moment of communion that seemed to take place entirely without word or gesture.
‘You want to meet our Narpal?’ Simmy asked softly.
‘I’d like that. What does Narpal mean?’
‘It’s an acronym, Mr Tracey. From the main syllables of Na-ar ha-Plaot. Boy of Wonders.’
‘Wonder Boy?’ Rex found it hard to suppress a smile.
‘You think it’s funny?’ Simmy asked, but he said it in an amused way, as if he found Rex as strange as he knew Rex found him. ‘The last Rebbe chose him as his successor even before he was bar-mitzvah, because he knew.’ Simmy tapped the corner of his eye. ‘He knew there was something special about him. You would call it holiness.’
Rex recalled the fraught exchange he’d caught between Yitzie and his wife in the grocer’s shop. Maybe not everyone agreed that this sick young man was holy.
‘And everyone’s happy? I mean, happy to have a very young and sick man as a leader?’
‘He isn’t so young. He is eighteen. Anyway, we can’t help it if some people only look on the surface,’ Dordoff replied, now less friendly.
‘What about the Bettelheim family? Was that why they were leaving the sect? Why Moses Limburg told me they had to be made an example of?’
The smile vanished completely.
‘Are the Bettelheims’ relations here tonight, Mr Dordoff?’ Rex went on.
‘They’re with the bodies at the mortuary,’ came the stony response. ‘Or as near as you’ll allow them.’
‘Not me, Mr Dordoff. I just wondered why Moses Lim–’
The Narpal came near. Rex caught a sharp, sweet hospital smell familiar to him from the long months of visiting a wife in a coma. He saw a cannula attached to the young man’s wrist with a pink length of plaster. It was plain that the Narpal was very ill, and yet there was something arresting about him. Perhaps it was the softness of his skin, and the tapered beauty of his extraordinarily delicate fingers. Or was it simply the almost palpable love and awe radiating in the direction of this twisted, poorly human from a packed roomful of men.
Two vas
tly magnified, ice-clear blue eyes stared right up at Rex. Ridiculously, he felt himself bowing. The Narpal murmured something and Simmy Dordoff bent down low to catch it.
‘He says you knew God, but now you hate Him,’ Simmy said, straightening up.
‘Well, that applies to 99% of all Roman Catholics,’ Rex quipped. In truth, though, the comment made him nervous.
Dordoff merely relayed this to the Narpal, and then brought back a response. ‘Very soon, you will witness a miracle.’
After that pronouncement, the Narpal was wheeled away. Rex wondered whether he would have a silent moment of communion with everyone in the crowded hall. But then another chant started up, gradually snaking its way through the place until everyone seemed to be joining in. Simmy Dordoff took a deep swig from a slivovitz bottle and passed it to Rex.
‘This kind of song is called a niggun,’ he said. ‘It’s a word for melodies we’ve kept in our hearts from the time of the Great Temple. Enjoy.’
‘You never answered my question about the Bettelheims,’ Rex said. But Dordoff was already striding off in the wake of the Narpal’s chair, leaving Rex alone in the crowd with the bottle. He passed it to an old man and tried blearily to focus on the scene around him. Perhaps he could find the young man – Moses Limburg – and get him to say more.
He didn’t think he liked Simmy Dordoff much. It wasn’t just because of his steely response to questions about the Bettelheims. Even before that, Rex had been unnerved by the dazzling teeth and the American smiles, and the long Press Release-type statements. Whatever else Hasidism might be, this particular branch was beginning to seem a little like a cult.
But what did that mean? On one level, this was just a bunch of men getting pissed and singing songs and venerating a boy in a wheelchair. Nevertheless, there was something remarkable about it, like the three Kings kneeling before a baby in a stable. There was a kind of spirit in the room, which he’d interpreted as friendliness when he first came in, but whose full and proper name he now realised. It was love. But did God have to be involved?
And could all those wise, mystical words that Dordoff attributed to him really have come from the twitching, twisted form in the chair? Was the Narpal truly a Wonder Boy? Or were other, stronger people using him for their purposes? Was that what Rescha Schild had meant him to see?
He became aware of a disturbance on the other side of the room. A man was shouting, in a high-pitched, hoarse voice, on the edge of tears. The singing died and the black sea parted, revealing a very unholy scattering of fag-ends and bottle-tops across the floorboards. The shouting came from a livid-faced man with a straggly beard, while another, much bigger man struggled with his arms. The second man was Yitzie Schild.
‘Micah!’ the man was shouting at the Narpal and Simmy Dordoff, who were now surrounded by a protective semi-circle of onlookers. ‘Voss veystu? Voss veystu?’ To Rex, it sounded half-question, half-accusation, repeated over and over in a fraught, breaking shout – the sound of a man on the brink. And if Lawrence had shown up, he’d have known what was being said.
The chant started up again, at first softly:
Ce, Vce, Kovce, Dukovce, Ce, Vce, Kovce, Dukovce, Ce, Vce…
It grew louder and louder with each repetition, almost as though it was being wielded as a weapon against the man. Rex saw Simmy Dordoff give some sort of command to Yitzie Schild, and the big man dragged the other from the room. The tone of the struggle wasn’t quite clear: was Yitzie looking after him, or chucking him out?
Rex pushed his way out after them, the dream of sacredness pierced by this ugly little scene, like a fight at a wedding. He didn’t know any Yiddish, but he knew the name Micah. Micah Walther. The boy who’d vanished six months ago. Was the man was his father?
A scuffle was taking place on the forecourt by the time he got there – not Yitzie doing anything to the man, but Yitzie trying, with limited success, to avoid the wild thrashings of the man, who’d armed himself with a rotting floorboard. Rex realised that his face wasn’t flushed as he’d first thought, but almost entirely covered in a port-wine birthmark. Rex’s appearance was enough for the man to drop his weapon and escape through the flapping panels of the security fence.
‘Wait! Can I talk to you?’ Rex shouted, but by the time he’d squeezed himself out onto the Grove, the man had vanished into the night. He started to push his way back through the boards, and saw that Yitzie had been joined by Simmy Dordoff in the doorway. He could tell at a glance that Simmy Dordoff did not want him back in.
Under normal circumstances, Rex would have been inclined to put his head down, place one shoulder forward and, insofar as any man with a limp could charge, charge his way back in. The reason he didn’t do that now was because his phone rang. It was Lawrence.
‘Where the hell were you, Lawrence?’
‘Where the hell were you, more like? I must have called you five times at least. I’m at the North Middlesex. With Terry.’
‘What happened?’
‘I found him unconscious on the floor of your living room. He’s taken an overdose.’
Chapter Five
‘I just thought Bertha could do with a little run around, and as I drove down your road I saw the light was on, so I thought perhaps you were still there, and might like a lift…’
Save for a pair of exhausted young Indian doctors nodding off over their toasted sandwiches, Rex and Lawrence were the only customers in the new hospital café. Before the overhaul, it had been a mere hatch. Now it was a bright, plastic-clad restaurant, run by a Brazilian family and decked out in that nation’s distinctive cheese ’n’ onion livery. Rex sipped his coffee and tried to overlook Lawrence’s reference to ‘Bertha’. Lawrence had names for his cars, his suits, even for various items of luggage. On the other hand, irritating as he was, he had just saved Terry’s life.
‘I looked in through the windows and saw him. He’d been sick and there were pill packets all around him.
Lawrence dug in the pocket of his checked sports coat and handed Rex a packet. They were his codeine pills. Rex had taken to buying them on the internet, from India, after his new GP had advised him to try meditation classes to cope with the pain in his foot.
‘Quite a stockpile you’ve got there.’ Lawrence gave him a meaningful look.
‘I’d have hidden them if I’d known he was suicidal.’
‘I know. I know.’ Lawrence said. ‘But why have you got so many of them?’
‘So I don’t run out,’ Rex said, realising, as he said it, how he sounded. Lawrence, to his credit, pretended not to have heard.
Terry had been given an opiate blocker on his arrival at the hospital, and his vital signs were now approaching normal. He was sleeping it off, on a bed in a corridor just behind them. It would have been a different story if the pills had contained paracetamol along with the codeine.
The man behind the counter put a TV on. A fuzzy football match appeared on the screen, along with near-hysterical Portuguese commentary. The two young doctors stirred.
‘I did a bit of digging on your Outrage doodah,’ Lawrence said.
‘Yes?’
‘Yes.’
Rex stifled a sigh. He wanted to take some of the pills, but he didn’t dare. ‘Please just tell me, Lawrence.’
‘Well, if you recall, there were two perpetrators of the wages-snatch. Josef Lapidus died during the chase. Paul Helfeld was shot by the police during the chase and he took two weeks to die. He was coming out with some very queer stuff, according to one of the nurses in the hospital…’ Lawrence paused and smiled. ‘It was this hospital, actually. Fancy that. Anyhoo… one of the things he kept saying, or asking… well, it’s disputed, because he was delirious with meningitis, and he was talking in a language that wasn’t his first to a nurse in a similar predicament. So anyway, according to this one nurse, he was going on about Vulcan.’
‘Vulcan?’
Lawrence, who’d been trying to cut a cheese toastie in half with a plastic knife, finally gave
up.
‘Have you noticed they’ve taken away all the proper knives and forks? It’s the same in the Jerk Chicken place. And the Good Taste Café. I’m thinking of doing a few verses on it for next week’s paper. “Terrorists growled, and cutlery withdrew…”’
‘Lawrence. Vulcan? As in the Greek god?’
‘Roman. God of metals and mining, frequently depicted with a bad foot. Like you.’
‘Yes, well, the only divine thing about my foot is that I sometimes think God did it to me. What exactly did this guy Helfeld say about Vulcan?’
‘As I said, opinions differ. According to one nurse, he asked whether Vulcan had got back to Riga. According to another, he said his mother was in Riga.’
‘Riga, Latvia?’ Kovacs had been there, Rex recalled, and learnt Latvian, so this could have been an angle he’d been exploring.
‘Yup. It was part of the Russian Empire at the time, of course. Apparently the nurses told the local bobbies, but they didn’t think it was important.’
‘Well, they were probably right weren’t they? Even if he did say “Vulcan” then he just meant the other guy he did the robbery with, didn’t he? Like a codename for him?’
‘Josef Lepidus.’ Lawrence shook his steely curls. ‘I don’t think so, because he’d seen Lepidus shot dead on the chase.’
‘So he got confused. The man was dying from a bullet wound after all.’
‘Yes, he might have been confused. Then again no one ever found the money.’
‘So there could have been a third member of the team?’
‘It’s a thought. And it might have been what George Kovacs was going to reveal in his book.’
Rex ran his fingertips over some sugar crystals on the table top. It was plastic, with a log pattern. What if there had been a third man, who’d somehow taken the money back to Riga? Did it really matter? Perhaps to people interested in the events of January 1909, but not, as far as he could see, to those more worried about last Monday.
