One Fine Day the Rabbi Bought a Cross

by Harry Kemelman

  “You mean that Small fingered him?” demanded Ira Levinson.

  “Fingered? Oh, I see what you mean. As I understand, he told them that young Ish-Tov was from Barnard’s Crossing.”

  “Have you—are you going to notify his parents?”

  “I wouldn’t without the express permission of Ish-Tov, and only at his request. He’s of age, you know. Of course, you can do as you like, or think best. When are you planning to return, by the way?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Ah, that’s unfortunate.”

  “Why is it unfortunate?”

  “Because I have notified our attorney, who will be seeing the young man in a day or two. We should then have more information as to what took place and the degree of the young man’s involvement. It may be that he is being held only as a material witness.”

  “Well, that’s a fine how do you do,” said Ira when they were out on the street. “Do we tell Rose and Louis?”

  “We’ve got to. If our Jay were in the same trouble, wouldn’t you want to know?”

  “Yeah. We’ll have to. Or maybe I’ll call Small. Let him tell them. He’s a rabbi. That’s his job.”

  “But the Smalls won’t be coming back for quite a while.”

  “So he can phone them. After all, he fingered him.”

  “He probably just told that friend of his that Goodman was from Barnard’s Crossing and was at the yeshiva. You mentioned it yourself when he showed us that photo,” she pointed out.

  “Sure, but I wasn’t talking to the police. And he was. I knew there was something fishy about that photo. If I hadn’t stopped you, and you had gone on to say the face looked familiar, we’d be sitting in the pokey right now, waiting for the high muckamuck in charge of corpses to arrange for us to view the body. I’m calling the rabbi. The phone is probably in the name of that old lady they’re living with. Do you remember her name?”

  “Schlossberg. Gittel Schlossberg.”

  “I’ll have the people at the hotel switchboard look it up.”

  “Oh, I have the number.”

  “I must say you’re taking this rather coolly, Rabbi,” said Levinson.

  “Well, it doesn’t come as a complete surprise,” said the rabbi.

  “You knew there was something in the works when you fingered him?”

  “Fingered him? That’s a strange expression, Mr. Levinson. I gave the authorities Goodman’s name as someone who was from Barnard’s Crossing. I gave them your name as well, and Mrs. Small mentioned that in a few days there would be a busload of people from our town in Jerusalem.”

  “So you gave them my name as well. I don’t suppose you bothered to mention how many Israel Bonds I’ve bought, or that Sheila is secretary of the North Shore Friends of Israel?”

  “I didn’t think they were interested, Mr. Levinson.”

  “And you’re not surprised that they arrested Goodman?”

  “No, because he called me yesterday to say that they had retained his passport. His arrest doesn’t have the same significance that it would have in the States. Here it is a normal part of the investigative procedure. But I’ll inquire and see what I can find out, and let you know.”

  “We’re leaving tomorrow morning early.”

  “Oh, well—”

  “And I’ll have to tell the Goodmans. I promised them that I’d look up their son. So they’ll ask me, and I’ll have to tell them.”

  “I suppose you will. I hope you won’t alarm them unduly.”

  “I can only tell them what I know, Rabbi.”

  To Miriam’s inquiry later, he said, “I think the Levinsons are planning to be troublesome.”

  30

  It was not easy for Rabbi Small to reach Uri Adoumi, and when he finally did make contact with him, Adoumi seemed reluctant to meet with him. Seemingly he was busy all during the day, and to the rabbi’s suggestion that he come to his house in the evening, he explained, “I have one unbreakable rule, Rabbi. I see no one on business at my house. Sarah is very nervous, and it would upset her.”

  “Then how about coming here to Gittel’s?”

  “No, I don’t think I’d care for that. Gittel would be there and—look, I’ll tell you what. I’m meeting someone at the King David Hotel. I’ll be through in an hour. Suppose I meet you in Liberty Bell Park, near the entrance at one. That’s not far from where you are. Or better still, I’ll walk down King David Street. I’ll start out from the hotel, and I’ll stay on that side of the street. Then we can go into the park and sit on a bench and talk.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  Rabbi Small was there a quarter of an hour early, and was impatient and worried until he saw Adoumi approaching—on time. They met as though by chance and then wandered about in the park until Adoumi found a bench to his liking. “So what can I do for you?” asked Adoumi abruptly.

  “You saw young Ish-Tov, and he identified the photo you showed him. Then you had him come to the police headquarters to make a formal statement to that effect. You also had him look at the body.” He canted his head to one side as he thought about it. “All right, I can understand that that might be part of your normal procedure. But you also took his passport—and kept it.”

  Adoumi shook his head impatiently. “None of that is my doing, Rabbi. It’s a police matter.”

  “I don’t understand. It was you who went to see him.”

  “Sure, because at the time it was my concern. The name—Professor Grenish—I had on a list.”

  “A list?”

  “Sure, we have all kinds of lists: lists of people whom we watch closely, or whom we keep an eye on every now and then, or whom we watch if they go to certain places. The security group in every country does the same. Not lists of people who are criminal, or even suspect, you understand, but of possibles, or of people who are connected with someone who might do something. You understand? Your FBI is no different. So where the person is on one of our lists and is unaccountably missing from his hotel—that’s enough for me to handle it myself.”

  “Why was he on a list?”

  “His name was given to us by Mossad. We work closely with Mossad the way your FBI works with your CIA. Mossad was interested in him because, although Jewish, he was a member of the radical Arab Friendship League. Also, he was friendly with an important Arab—a professor at Harvard—back in the States—whom they were also keeping an eye on.”

  “All right. I understand. So what made it a police matter rather than one for your department?”

  “You did, Rabbi.” Adoumi laughed coarsely.

  Rabbi Small stared at him in astonishment.

  “Uh-huh. You gave me Goodman’s name, and I went to see him. He not only recognized the photo, but admitted that he knew him well, and that it was due to him that he had had to leave school. This Grenish was chairman of the Scholarship Committee and—”

  “Yes, I heard something about that back home.”

  “Did you now? Well, next to the yeshiva there is a house occupied by—”

  “James Skinner,” said the rabbi promptly, and was gratified to see that Adoumi’s face showed astonishment.

  “You know him?”

  “He sat beside me on the plane coming over. We gave him a lift to Jerusalem. We drove him right to his house.”

  “I see. Well, that’s where Grenish’s body was found, on Skinner’s land, next door to the yeshiva.”

  “You mean Skinner found the body and reported it to the police?”

  “No, the body had been buried, and it was unearthed by agents of the Department of Antiquities. They reported it to the police.” He smiled at the rabbi’s bewilderment and proceeded to explain about the trench in Skinner’s backyard and how the Department of Antiquities became interested in it. “So here we have the body of a dead man who turns out to be Professor Grenish, who is the mortal enemy of young Goodman who lives right next door. As I talked with the young man, it occurred to me that this might be an ordinary homicide—a police matter in other word
s. So I told him to report to police headquarters at the Russian Compound. They took his fingerprints and—”

  “He didn’t mention that they took his fingerprints,” said the rabbi.

  Adoumi smiled. “Oh, they didn’t use an inked pad. I imagine Chief Luria gave him a glass of water, or had him pick up a piece of paper that slid off his desk, or maybe passed his cigarette case across the desk and offered him a cigarette. Something like this.” He drew a silver cigarette case from his pocket. “Cigarette?”

  “No, thanks,” said the rabbi.

  Adoumi smiled and took one himself.

  “They matched the prints on the cigarette case or whatever with those on one of the shovels, and that did it. No Arab involvement, no international intrigue. Just a case of two people who had quarreled, meeting by accident, renewing the quarrel, and one of them ends up dead. So the police proceed to make inquiries. They hold his passport so that he’s not likely to run away. Then this morning I was told they picked him up. They took him before a court and got a remand of fifteen days, a secret remand, because there still might be some national security involvement, while they continue their inquiries.”

  “Does he admit he did it?”

  “So far, no. Claims he didn’t even know Grenish was in the country.”

  “But that’s awful. You arrest a young man for murder on the basis of—of a wild guess on your part. If he had met him and quarreled with him, would he have admitted that he’d had trouble with him? Would he even have admitted knowing him?”

  “You forget there are the prints on the shovel.”

  “So what? He might have picked it up once.”

  “I didn’t say he murdered him, only that he buried him, and it is a logical assumption that if he buried him he must have had something to do with his death. When we examined the body, we found no bullet wound, no stab wound, no sign of a blow on the head with a heavy instrument. When we did an autopsy, we found that he had an aneurysm of the abdominal aorta. That’s the tube that goes from the heart down to the extremities. You might call it the main artery. It had ballooned up from a normal of about two centimeters to five centimeters. A sharp blow to the belly could very easily have caused it to rupture. Or it could even have ruptured of its own accord. Death would follow almost immediately. I’m not suggesting that Ish-Tov necessarily struck Grenish, or tried to kill him, or even to injure him. I suspect what happened was that the meeting was accidental, that they recognized each other and started to argue or quarrel. Then there may have been some pushing. Suddenly Grenish falls to the ground. Ish-Tov, frightened, doesn’t call anyone or notify the police. He remembers a trench and dumps him in there and fills it in. He doesn’t know anything about the Department of Antiquities being concerned. He just assumes that the trench was left there because the workmen hadn’t gotten around to filling it yet. Happens all the time in Israel, jobs are left unfinished. We had trouble with our gas stove. We called the gas company and they sent a mechanic over who took it apart and then walked out, presumably to go to lunch, and didn’t come back for two days.”

  “Does Ish-Tov admit to any of this?”

  “No, not yet. But let me tell you something about criminal investigation, Rabbi. You almost never have a perfect case, with every ‘i’ dotted and every ‘t’ crossed. And even when you do, the perpetrator will frequently deny it regardless of how damning the evidence is. But when you have an obvious explanation, it’s usually the right one. I can dream up a scenario that could cover the facts. I could think of a dozen ways that Ish-Tov could have gotten his prints on the shovel. Maybe something like what Luria used to get his prints on his cigarette case. A man is working, filling in a trench. He’s wearing work gloves, naturally. He sees someone, Ish-Tov walking along the street on his way to the yeshiva and he calls him over and then tosses the shovel to him and says, ‘Here, look at this.’

  “But that’s so farfetched as to be ridiculous. What do we have? Here’s a tourist who comes to Jerusalem. He knows no one here, and no one knows him. He comes from Barnard’s Crossing, a town that I’ll bet no one outside your state ever heard of. And he ends up dead and buried next door to a yeshiva where there is a student who also comes from Barnard’s Crossing. That’s quite a coincidence. It isn’t as though they both came from New York. They’re from Barnard’s Crossing, a town of twenty thousand, you said. Then it turns out that they had quarreled; that Ish-Tov claims he had to leave college on Grenish’s account; that his life was changed. Then to top it off, we find the prints of Ish-Tov on the shovel that was used to bury Grenish. Now, that’s a prima facie case if ever I saw one. Keep in mind the basic principle: The obvious is the likely.”

  The rabbi nodded. He sat silent for a moment and then said, “Can I see him?”

  Adoumi pursed his lips as he considered. “Where it’s a secret remand, I doubt it. You planning to do a little investigating on your own?” he asked with a smile.

  The rabbi shook his head dolefully. “I don’t know what I’ll do, but I am the rabbi of the Jewish community in Barnard’s Crossing, and it was I who sent you to Ish-Tov. I feel—”

  “Responsible?”

  “No, but I feel I should do something, at least try.”

  Adoumi rose. “I had better be getting along. My office will be wondering what happened to me. Look, Rabbi, I remember our little business a few years back. So if you come up with anything, I promise to listen.”

  “I don’t know what I can do. But I’ve got to do something,” said the rabbi doggedly. “Maybe I shall hold you to that promise.”

  31

  The chessboard was on the desk in front of him when Rabbi Small went to see Karpis again. “Have you solved this one yet, Rabbi Small? It was in yesterday’s paper. It’s a three-mover.”

  “No, I haven’t had a chance to.” He studied the board for a moment and then said, “You might try pushing the pawn.”

  Rabbi Karpis looked at him in surprise. “Why the pawn?”

  “Because it’s the least likely move. These aren’t actual end games. They’re puzzles that people think up. So I suppose the trick is to make the first move one that no one would ever think of making if he were actually playing a game.”

  “Perhaps you’re right. I shall have to try it.” He pushed the board aside regretfully. “But I don’t want to encroach on your time with my personal interests. You want to talk about Ish-Tov.”

  “That’s right. I feel a sense of responsibility.”

  “Why, Rabbi Small? Because it was through you that the police were led to him?”

  Rabbi Small considered for a moment and then said, “Someone from Shin Bet came to see me, someone I had met years ago here in Jerusalem. He came because he remembered that I was from Barnard’s Crossing, which he thought was a little village. He showed me a photograph of someone who was also supposed to be from Barnard’s Crossing, hoping I would be able to recognize the man. But our town has some twenty thousand people. And he was very disappointed that I could not make the identification. So I suggested Ish-Tov as also coming from Barnard’s Crossing, and also some people whom I expected would be visiting me in a day or two—”

  “The Levinsons?”

  “That’s right. And he left the photo with me so I could show it to them. I knew nothing of the matter, you understand, except that I presumed since my friend was Shin Bet, it was the security of the State that was involved.”

  Rabbi Karpis shrugged. “Then I can’t see how you are in any way responsible.”

  “I’m not.” He smiled ruefully. “But nevertheless I feel responsible, somehow.”

  Rabbi Karpis nodded sympathetically.

  “His folks are not members of my congregation,” he went on. “They go to a synagogue in Salem, a nearby town, where they lived for a number of years before moving to Barnard’s Crossing. Still, they are members of the Jewish community of our town, and I am the only rabbi in the town.”

  “Shepherd of the flock?” suggested Rabbi Karpis.

 
“No,” said Rabbi Small sharply. “But I have a sense of jurisdiction.”

  “Then wouldn’t I have a greater claim as far as Ish-Tov is concerned?”

  “Ye-es, but I think his being here might have had something to do with it.”

  Rabbi Karpis pursed his lips. “You mean because he was living here, next door to where the incident occurred?” He studied his visitor. “Or do you mean something else? You do not approve of our operation here?”

  “No, I don’t.” It was pure reflex, and the words were out before he realized he had said them. He laughed shortly. “I have a cousin whom we call Simcha the Apikoros. He is not an atheist or an agnostic. He’s a religious man and observant. But he has some curious ideas. One is, for example, that one may eat dairy products after chicken on the grounds that a chicken does not give milk so that the injunction not to seethe the flesh of the kid in the milk of the mother does not apply.”

  Rabbi Karpis nodded. “I have heard of whole communities who take the same view.”

  “Really? Well, his part of the family runs to businessmen and merchants, whereas my side has a number of rabbis. He is apt to be disparaging, even scornful of my side. Professional Jews, he calls us. Says our profession, especially in America, is just being Jewish. He insists that being a Jew is an amateur occupation.”

  “What does he mean by that?”

  “That we Jews are supposed to participate, we don’t withdraw from life. ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread’ and confirmed in the commandment ‘Six days shalt thou labor.’ Simcha is no ignoramus. He is a learned man, and he studied, but his main concern is his work. Here you have a group of young men whose sole interest is study. It’s like a monastery, except that instead of prayer, they are engaged in study. Some few may eventually become rabbis, I suppose, so in that sense their study is preparatory for the work they intend to do, but the majority, I imagine, study for themselves. They are not engaged in research that would benefit others, but study only for themselves. The intention of our religion is to make men whole rather than holy.”