One Fine Day the Rabbi Bought a Cross

by Harry Kemelman

  “But there’s a big mound on either side of the trench—”

  “A half hour’s work.”

  “And how about Skinner? Won’t he see or hear us?”

  “He’s not home. There’s never anybody there Sundays. That’s the housekeeper’s day off. She’s Christian. And Skinner and that Arab usually go off. Usually they don’t get home until after eleven, and make a bloody racket when they do. Look, soon as it’s dark, I’ll show you how to sneak out the back, and you’ll go over there and start shoveling the dirt back. Then I’ll join you a little while later.”

  “Why should I go first? It’s your idea.”

  “Because it might be a grave site, maybe an ancient cemetery.”

  “So?”

  “So I’m a Kohane, a descendant of Aaron. I’m not supposed to be in the presence of a dead body, not even of the bones after centuries. Maybe that’s what they found there—bones. That could be why Kahn was so excited. He’s a Kohane, too. We are polluted by it for a whole year after a single contact. For a whole year we cannot perform a priestly function.”

  To Ish-Tov, Yitzchak’s religiosity, at such curious variance with his general attitude, was always a source of surprise.

  “And it means so much to you?” he asked.

  “A special privilege,” said Yitzchak gravely, “carries with it special responsibilities. Once you cover the bottom with a layer of earth and cover any traces of bone, if there are any, I can then come over and help you fill in the rest.”

  21

  Early Monday morning, as he did every weekday morning, Joseph Kahn descended from the bus and walked to the yeshiva, getting there just in time to join the group in the shachris service, after which he had his breakfast in the dining hall, sitting at the head table with the rest of the faculty. This morning, however, breakfast was somewhat hurried, for the big air-conditioned bus that was to take them all on the teeyul, a holiday trip to Safed, had already pulled up to the door while they were still engaged in their morning prayers. By half past eight they had boarded and were singing, laughing, joking, and waving at passing cars on the road. It did not often happen, perhaps a couple times a year, but it was, of course, all the more enjoyable for that reason. This outing was through the generosity of one of the wealthy backers of the organization, and the occasion was the completion by the advanced class of the section of the Talmud they had been studying since the beginning of the year.

  The trip was a long one, but they would spend the whole day in Safed entertained and fed by members of the organization in Safed and would return late at night tired, exhausted. It was a break from their routine, from the study and the discipline, and they would savor it and talk about it for weeks to come.

  At ten o’clock Monday morning, the chambermaid on the seventh floor of the Hotel Excelsior knocked on the door of Room seven-thirteen, waited a moment, knocked again, and then put her ear to the door to hear if there was any sound of movement within. Hearing nothing, she inserted her master key in the lock and opened the door. Noting that the bed was made, the bedcover neat and smooth as she had left it the day before, she went into the bathroom. There, too, all was in order, the towels neatly folded, the soap she had left, dry and untouched. She considered for a moment and then went to the telephone on the night table and phoned the housekeeper.

  The housekeeper said, “The room was not occupied? The bed was not slept in? You’re sure? All right, lock the door and go on to the next room. And, Yael, don’t mention it to anyone.”

  The housekeeper notified the manager, who came out of his office and motioned the tall, burly security guard to come to him. “Go up to seven-thirteen, Avi, and have a look around. The room was not occupied last night.”

  When Avi returned ten minutes later, he said, “I double-locked the door so his key won’t work. He’ll have to go to the desk, and I’ll open the door for him. His stuff is all there, so he didn’t skip out to avoid paying his bill. Shall I call the Shin Bet?”

  The manager, who had but recently been transferred from the Tel Aviv unit of the hotel chain, said, “Shin Bet? Why not the police? In Tel Aviv we always call the police.”

  “Security is a little tighter here in Jerusalem. If we were to call the police, they’d just call Shin Bet.”

  “All right. Call them.”

  In the office of the Shin Bet, Israel’s national security bureau, Uri Adoumi, chief of the Jerusalem section, sat at his desk, thumbing through the stack of files before him. He would pick up a folder, take a swig of coffee, which his secretary had brought in as soon as he had entered the office, then lean back in his swivel chair, his right foot braced against the open deep drawer against the pressure of the spring. Occasionally he would sit up straight to make a note, in which case he would take a gulp of the coffee before again resuming his recumbent position. He was a blocky, bulky man with grizzled, red hair, what there was left of it, that was rapidly turning a yellowish-white.

  An aide, a young man in jeans and T-shirt, opened the door.

  Adoumi sat up and said irascibly, “Don’t you know you’re supposed to knock?”

  “Bourgeois formalities. If I knocked, you’d tell me to come in. If you didn’t answer, I’d think something was the matter, so I’d come in to take a look. Either way, I’d be in. So why should I knock?”

  “In the kibbutz, you never knocked?”

  “If the door was locked, you knocked so they should come and open the door, but if it wasn’t locked—”

  “Suppose Shoshana was in here and we were fooling around?”

  “Aw, you wouldn’t fool around with Shoshana. Besides, she’s sitting at her desk.”

  “All right, what do you want?” asked Adoumi wearily.

  “We got a call from the Hotel Excelsior, from the security guard. One of their guests is missing.”

  “Missing? Since when?”

  “Since yesterday, I guess. He didn’t come down for breakfast, and his bed hadn’t been slept in.”

  “The call came from the police, or direct from the security guard?”

  “From the security guard. He went up and looked at the room. His clothes were still there, so they called us. You want me to run up there and take a look?”

  Adoumi surveyed his assistant, the sweat-stained T-shirt, the worn jeans, the heavy scuffed boots. The Hotel Excelsior was not the most posh hotel, but it was four-star. The guests, probably on a chartered tour, would be respectable middleclass people from whatever country they came from. And the staff would wear clean uniforms, properly pressed. He temporized. “They give you a name?”

  “Yeah. An American. A Professor Grenish.”

  “Professor Grenish? Seems to me I’ve come across that name, Grenish. Look, run it through the computer. Maybe I saw it on one of our lists.”

  While his assistant was in another office, operating the computer, Adoumi sat upright, his hand drumming the top of the desk as he concentrated, trying to remember where he had seen the name Grenish.

  A minute or two later, the assistant returned and said somewhat sheepishly for not having checked on his own, “It’s on one of the Mossad lists. Nothing special, except that he’s Jewish and is very friendly with some high muckamuck Arab. He arrived in the country by boat from Greece, stayed in Haifa. He was there for almost a week and then went to Tel Aviv. He stayed at the Oceanview for a couple of days and then came up to Jerusalem Friday.”

  “Uh-huh. Maybe I’d better go to the Excelsior myself.”

  22

  The manager of the Excelsior, his records spread out on the desk before him, said, “You understand, for some of our guests, staying in a hotel is a comparatively new experience. They register, stay a few days, and then perhaps they go to visit a relative in Tel Aviv or Haifa or Netanya. They are persuaded to stay over, or they miss the last bus, or whatever. Or sometimes they go on a trip and are gone a few days. Sometimes they assume that as long as they haven’t spent the night here, they are not responsible for the price of the room
for that day. Some of them are quite indignant that we should charge them for those days.” He smiled sadly.

  “You always charge them?”

  “Of course. The room is occupied. We can’t rent it to someone else, can we? What do we gain if the guest is absent for a night? A few minutes of the chambermaid’s time? That room she doesn’t have to make up the next morning, so we save the day’s linen and towels. And we save a breakfast.”

  “So if he comes for a week or two, let’s say,” suggested Adoumi, “and in the middle of it he wants to take a trip for a couple of days—say, down to Eilat—he’d have to pay here and in Eilat?”

  “Not if he checks out here first. He can check out, pay his bill, and we’ll even store his things at no charge. Then when he comes back, he registers again. If it’s not during the busy season, he probably would get his old room again.”

  “And if it is the busy season?”

  “Ah, then he takes his chances. We will tell him that we cannot guarantee him his room when he returns. We may even tell him that we can’t guarantee him any room.”

  “I see. Now, in the case of this Grenish?”

  “Let’s see.” He surveyed the top of the desk and picked up a registration card. “Here we are. Professor Abraham Grenish. He arrived on Friday afternoon at five after two in the afternoon.” He picked up a sheaf of papers and thumbed through them rapidly. “He did not have dinner with us that evening. In fact, he didn’t have either lunch or dinner in our dining room at all. That’s not too unusual. I should say the great majority of our guests don’t unless they come in a bus and it’s included in the price of the tour.”

  “And breakfasts?”

  “Ah, that’s usually included in the cost of the room, so practically all our guests have breakfast with us, even though some of them have no more than a cup of coffee and a bun. But not all. Some arrange for just the room. They save a little.” He picked up another sheaf of papers and held them out to the Shin Bet officer. “See, these are lists of the guests and their room numbers. There’s a separate column for each day. As the guest comes to the dining room, we have someone sitting at the entrance with this checklist. The guest gives his name and room number, and it is checked off. Now, our Mr. Grenish, or rather Professor Grenish, had breakfast on Saturday and on Sunday.”

  “All right, so he was here from Friday afternoon until Sunday morning, at least. Is there someone here who can give us a description of him?”

  “Our Arab staff that we use for the Sabbath comes in Friday at half past one. So you can ask the Arab desk clerks. The one who registered him might remember him, but I doubt it. A tour bus came in just about then and they were probably pretty busy. Maybe the porter who took his bag up might remember him if he gave him an especially big tip. But I doubt it. Likewise, the maître d’ who was on duty for breakfast. It’s pretty busy at breakfast time, and most of them, they don’t even look at the guest.”

  “The chambermaid?”

  The manager shook his head. “No. They tend to stay out of the way of the guests. They do their work while the guest is out of his room. You could try.

  “The porters and the chambermaids you can interview now. They work here full time. The Arab desk clerks, some are here only for the two days of the Sabbath. They’re on from Friday half past one until nightfall Saturday. They won’t be here until Friday. I can give you their addresses, though. The picture on his passport—”

  “Ah, you have it?”

  “No, but it may be up in his room.”

  “Didn’t your security guard search the room?”

  “Of course, but I’m sure it was only a cursory search. You know, just to see if what was left was worthwhile leaving to avoid a hotel bill. But if you made a thorough search—”

  “Don’t you believe it. He must have it on him. If he didn’t take it with him, he wouldn’t hide it. It would be on the bureau or in a drawer, and your man would have found it. If he was afraid of losing it or having it stolen, he wouldn’t hide it in his room, he’d leave it in one of your safe-deposit boxes. He didn’t, did he?”

  The manager pulled open a drawer, took out a sheet of paper, studied it for a moment, and then shook his head.

  “I’ll go up and take a look at the room now.”

  “I’ll have Avi, our security guard, take you up and open the door for you.”

  In the room, Adoumi went directly to the bathroom. Avi followed him and stood in the doorway.

  “Clean-shaven. No beard or moustache,” said Adoumi.

  “How can you be sure? Lots of people shave but have a little beard or a moustache.”

  “There’s no scissors. If he had any kind of beard or even a moustache, he’d be sure to have a pair of scissors to trim it with.”

  He picked up the comb and brush. “Short hair,” he remarked. “If you had longish hair, you wouldn’t use a fine-tooth comb like this. You’d pull out too much of it, especially after you’d showered. Ah, yes, here we have some specimens. Brownish, wouldn’t you say? And graying. Give me one of those hotel envelopes in the desk there. That would make him probably anywhere from forty to, say, fifty-five. His own teeth. See that dental floss? And look at the brush and toothpaste. People with false teeth use a special toothbrush and a special toothpaste when they don’t use one of those tablets you dissolve in a glass. All right, let’s see what he’s got in his bag, and in the closet.”

  From the floor of the closet, he picked up a pair of black shoes. “Eight and a half C. I’ve got to check that with a table of equivalent clothing sizes, but I think it’s about a forty-one.” He made a note on the envelope in which he had placed the hair samples. Then standing on one leg, he matched one of the shoes to his own, sole to sole. “He’s shorter than I am.” He reached in and took one of the suits off the rod and held it up in front of him and looked in the full-length mirror. “Yeah, maybe one sixty-seven centimeters.” Then he took the jacket off its hanger, and after quickly divesting himself of his own jacket, he tried to put it on. “He’s a lot thinner than I am. Maybe sixty-four or sixty-five kilos.” He made another note on the envelope.

  “You’ve gone through the pockets?”

  “Uh-huh. There was nothing in any of them.”

  Nevertheless, Adoumi searched each of the pockets in each of the suits. “You can never tell,” he said half apologetically. “Okay, let’s look at the bags.”

  “He didn’t put any of his stuff, his underwear, his shirts in the drawers,” remarked Avi, and he proceeded to pull open each of the drawers of the bureau to demonstrate.

  “That’s a little unusual, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. A lot of guests do it. They just take out suits and trousers—you know, so they won’t crease—and maybe their shoes and a pair of pajamas. The rest they’re apt to leave in the suitcases so they shouldn’t have to pack them again.”

  “But that’s because they stay only two or three days. But our friend was planning to stay for a whole week.”

  Adoumi opened a suitcase and from it drew a long strip of cloth backed by sponge rubber about eight inches wide and a yard or more long. “Our friend occasionally wears a belly-band. That means he’s probably developing a potbelly. I’ll just change that estimate of his weight to seventy kilos.” He made a note on the envelope.

  “Some people wear them because they got back trouble,” said Avi.

  “Yes, but look at these shirts. Size sixteen, whatever that means. About forty-one, I’d say. But do you notice the way that top buttonhole is pulled? Those shirts were getting tight on him. Ah, and here’s one that looks newer than the others and it’s sixteen and a half—say, size forty-three.”

  He scratched his head and then picked up the suitcase and dumped the contents on the bed. He felt the lining and inner pockets. Then he replaced each item, squeezing, bending, feeling each in turn. Then he did the same with the other suitcase. “No passport,” he announced as he straightened up.

  “He probably has it with him,”
said Avi. “Most of them do, as identification in case they want to use credit cards.”

  “I suppose, but it’s better to make sure. Now, I want you to pack up all his things, the suits, the shoes, the toilet articles, everything, just as he would if he were leaving. Then I want you to store them where no one can get at them. Or do I have to have someone come from my office to put them under seal?”

  “No, I can store them all right. But what if he comes back?”

  “Then you’ll call my office, and I or someone will come right down. By the way, did he turn in his key?”

  “No.”

  23

  Adoumi sat with Yaacov Luria, police chief of the Jerusalem district, a thin, cold, precise man who sat with his back straight, with hands folded on the completely cleared surface of his mahogany desk, his eyes fixed unwavering and unblinking through small oval pince-nez.

  “He had breakfast at the hotel, and that was the last that was seen of him,” said Adoumi.

  Luria unfolded his hands and opened a drawer of his desk to take out a pad of paper. From his breast pocket, he produced a mechanical pencil. “Description?”

  “I gave it already to your lieutenant. There isn’t much. Around fifty years old, brown hair beginning to gray, weighs around seventy kilos, maybe one sixty-seven tall, probably beginning to develop a potbelly, wears an eight and a half C shoe—say, a forty-one—and his shirt collar is sixteen or sixteen and a half—say, forty-three.”

  Luria’s eyebrows went up, causing a series of ridges on his forehead as his eyes opened wide. “This is a description? What color eyes? What’s the shape of his nose? Of his mouth? The person who gave you this description knew what size shoe he wore, and his collar size?”

  Adoumi opened his hands in resignation. “That’s what I was able to gather when I examined his effects. No one saw him, or at least no one remembers him. It’s a hotel. He came in with a group of about a hundred people—”