Brooklyn Noir

by Tim McLoughlin

  He glanced past the others and saw that she was not looking at him. She stared at bookshelves, or the ceiling, or the floor. Her face had an indoor whiteness. The color of ghosts. He signed a book, then another. And the girl he once loved began to come to him, the sweet pretty girl who asked nothing of him except that he love her back. And he felt then a great rush of sorrow. For her. For himself. For their lost child. He felt as if tears would soon leak from every pore in his body. He heard a whisper of someone howling. The books in front of him were now as meaningless as bricks.

  Then she was there. And Carmody rose slowly and leaned forward to embrace her across the table.

  “Oh, Molly,” he whispered. “Oh, Molly, I’m so, so sorry.”

  She smiled then, and the brackets that framed her mouth seemed to vanish, and for a moment Carmody imagined taking her away with him, repairing her in the sun of California, making it up, writing a new ending. Rewriting his own life. He started to come around the table.

  “Molly,” he said. “Molly, my love.”

  Then her hand reached into the leather bag and he knew what it now must hold. Passed down from her father. A souvenir of long ago.

  Yes, he thought. Release me, Molly. Yes. Bring me your nickel-plated gift. Do it.

  Her hand came out of the bag, holding what he expected.

  HASIDIC NOIR

  BY PEARL ABRAHAM

  Williamsburg

  It was a day no different from other days, a not unusual day in which I was doing not unusual things in my own slow way, what my wife who is quick in everything refers to, not always appreciatively, as my meditative manner. I’ve tried to explain that slowness is my method, the way I work, that this is how I solve my cases and earn a living.

  Yes, she says, that’s all right while you’re working, but a meditative mind doesn’t serve such tasks as feeding a child or stopping for a quart of milk on the way home.

  She doesn’t know that she’s asking for the impossible. At the end of the day when I close and lock the door to my office, she wants me to turn the lock on my thinking mind, along with my desk and files, and arrive home free and clear, prepared to give her and the children my full attention. And probably she has a right to such a husband, but the habit of brooding can’t be turned on and off at will.

  On this not unusual day, doing my not unusual things, stopping before morning service at the mikvah for the immersion that all Hasidic men take once a day, twice on Fridays in honor of the Sabbath, the word my brooding mind picked out of the male rumble was MURDER.

  Murdered in cold blood, I overheard a man say.

  The delayed response—the speaker was probably under water—when it came, was a Talmudic citation, not unexpected in a world in which the Talmud makes up a large part of every young man’s curriculum. More was said, there were details, some of which I’d previously heard and dismissed as talk, and names—the victim’s, the victim’s rival, and also for some reason the victim’s brother-in-law—and I was all ears.

  I waited my turn for immersion with murder on my mind. After all, such violence isn’t a daily occurrence in our world. And the victim, a man belonging to Hasidic aristocracy—a nephew of the Grand Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum—known as the Dobrover rebbe, one of two relatives in line to inherit the Grand Rabbinic throne, wasn’t just anyone. The rivalry between Dobrov and Szebed had been part of the Hasidic scene for as long as I could remember, dating back to the old rebbe’s first stroke. For years there’d been volley after volley of insults and injuries between the two congregations, and the tales of these insults grew long beards. Along with others in the community, I’d grown a thick skin and generally remained unruffled by even the tallest of such tales. But murder! That was unheard of. And where did the Dobrover’s brother-in-law, Reb Shloimele, administrator of Szebed’s boys’ school, enter into this story?

  I spent the rest of the morning at my desk, closing the files of the usual, petty white-collar crimes, my regular paying cases, but my mind was preoccupied with this murder, which had arrived without a client, no one to pay for time or expenses. After so many years of hoping for the opportunity to stand the detective’s real test, praying even, God protect us from evil, for a case replete with gun, body, widow, the complete grim pattern, here it appeared, a Hasidic murder, a rarity in this community, and I couldn’t pass it up.

  I’d had a modicum of experience working homicide, on the fringes really, assisting the New York Police Department on several cases in the nearby Italian and Spanish neighborhoods. The police chief still calls occasionally with questions about this part of the city that an insider could answer easily. And now, after so many years, it was as an insider that I’d come across this murder, and it was also as an insider that I knew to judge it a politically motivated crime with perpetrators from the top brass. With the Dobrover rebbe out of the way, Szebed could take the Grand Rabbinic throne without a struggle. If I seem to be jumping to conclusions, note that I grew up in this community and continue to live here; I am one of them.

  Anywhere else, murder, even when it occurs with some frequency, is front-page news; in the Hasidic world, it’s kept out of the papers—another sign that this was an inside job. Our insular world, may it long survive, transported from Eastern Europe and rebuilt in Williamsburg, New York, an American shtetl, has made a point of knowing and keeping politicians, judges, and members of the press in our pockets. I knew too well how this worked.

  I also knew that asking questions was not an option. One question in the wrong place, one word even, could alert those who didn’t want talk. When the highest value in a community is loyalty to the greater cause, meaning the continuity of the status quo, all means to this end are imbued with religious significance, and are thereby justified. It was quickly becoming clear to me that this murder had been handed me for a reason, that it was for this case that I, a Hasidic detective, the first one in the history of Hasidism, had been bestowed upon a community that usually eschewed new things. I owed it to the higher powers that created me to pursue the murderers, but I would have to watch my step.

  * * *

  At noon, I walked the ten blocks to Landau’s on Lee, my regular lunch counter, selected not necessarily for its excellence in food but for its distance from my office, because my wife insisted on some daily exercise, though I was partial to their sweet and sour pickles and their warm sauerkraut, having grown up on them, and would have walked twenty blocks for a Landau frankfurter with all the trimmings. On this day, I hoped to overhear something useful. It was late November, a cool stimulating day. I buttoned my black coat, pulled my black hat forward, and wrapped the ivory silk muffler twice around my neck, a gift from my wife when we were bride and groom.

  The windows of Landau’s were already steamy with cooking. I took the three steps down, entered, was greeted by the elderly Reb Motl Landau, who has known me, as he likes to say, ever since I was this high, indicating a place above his own head. I’m tall, 5’11”, which is considered especially tall in these parts, populated as it is by mostly small-boned Jews of Hungarian descent, modyeros, the Romanian Jews like to call them, intending a bit of harmless deprecation since the word is also the name of a particular nut eaten there.

  Without waiting for my order, Reb Motl set a loaded tray down in front of me, as if he’d seen me leave the office ten minutes earlier. My lunch: a frankfurter as starter, beefburger as entree, along with two sour pickles, a glass of water, and an ice-cream soda, nondairy of course.

  I took my first bite, a third of the dog, noted the three-person huddle at the far end of the lunch counter, and raised an eyebrow in question.

  Reb Motl nodded, drew five fingers of one hand together, meaning patience please, and went to serve another customer. He never played dumb and deaf with me. And we didn’t waste words.

  When Reb Motl returned, he picked up my crumpled wrappers as if this is what he had returned for, and grumbled, What don’t you already know?

  The word on the street? I asked.

&nb
sp; You mean word at the mikvah, he corrected.

  I nodded.

  Guilty, he said.

  I raised my eyebrows in question, meaning, Guilty of what?

  Read the book, Reb Motl said.

  What book? I asked, using only my shoulders and eyebrows.

  Published to make the sins of Dobrov known, Reb Motl said, and moved on. This was a busy lunch counter and he couldn’t afford to pause long enough to forfeit the momentum that kept him efficient.

  I stopped at the bookstore on my way back to the office, wended my way past the leaning towers of yarmulkes at the entrance, the piles of ritual fringes, stacks of aleph-bet primers. As always, Reb Yidel was behind the counter, and when I asked for the book, which turned out to be a pamphlet, really, he pointed to a stack beside the register. I looked at the title page to see who had undersigned this bit of slander, and found no name, no individual taking responsibility for it. The printer, however, was a company known as the printing house for Szebed, and I said to myself, of course it would be Szebed, who else, but I was also disappointed. The motivation behind Szebed’s publication of such a pamphlet was too obvious, too facile to be interesting, and I wished for a more complicated community with more difficult cases, obscure motivations, a case that required mental agility, intricacies I could take pride in unraveling. It was use of the mind that had attracted me to detective work in the first place.

  Reb Yidel rang up my copy but remained unusually silent.

  Know what this is all about? I asked casually, as if my interest were entirely benign.

  He shrugged, a careful man with a business and family to protect, and an example to me, who was also a business and family man, who could also benefit from caution. But it was precisely such caution that the perpetrators counted on to help them get away with their crime. They knew that few, if any, among us would risk antagonizing a powerful congregation with fat fingers that reached everywhere.

  Any truths? I pressed on.

  Who knows? he shrugged. I was pretty sure he knew, and waited.

  There’s a kernel of truth in every lie, he quoted.

  And who is credited with writing the pamphlet? I asked as harmlessly as I could manage.

  It is believed to be the work of Reb Shloimele, Szebed’s school administrator, Reb Yidel answered neutrally.

  The same Reb Shloimele who is also brother-in-law to the Dobrover? I asked, knowing the answer.

  Reb Yidel nodded, but declined to say more. I slapped a five-dollar bill down on the counter and left without waiting for the change. Here finally was a detail to ponder, a motivation to unravel.

  At my desk I thumbed through the cheaply printed pamphlet. There were accusations of corruption in the Dobrover kosher seal. Discrepancies were cited. A box of nonkosher gelatin, pure pig treife, was discovered in the kitchen at Reismann’s bakery. The egg powder used in Horowitz-Margareten matzohs came in unmarked industrial-size boxes. And the pizzafalafel stores in Borough Park, also known to be under the Dobrover seal, were inspected no more than once a month. How much could go wrong in the twenty-nine days between inspections? the writer asked rhetorically, then concluded that for a kosher seal, Dobrov’s stamp stank of non-kosher.

  I turned to the next chapter. So far, this was the kind of gossip you hear and dismiss regularly. What wouldn’t Szebed do to annex Dobrov’s lucrative kosher-seal business?

  The next chapter attacked the Dobrover’s intimate way with his disciples, their secretive, late-night gatherings and celebrations, accused him of messianic aspirations, and ended with the warning that the dangerous makings of the next false messiah were right here in our midst. This too I’d heard previously and considered hearsay. Besides, the days of messianic upheaval and dangers, dependent as they were on seventeenth-century superstitions and ignorance, were long past. We were living in a world in which every yekel and shmekel could read the news, had Internet access. The information super-highway, to use the words of a smart but foolish president, has arrived in our little community in Williamsburg too.

  These allegations were followed by an interview with a former disciple in which a discerning reader would quickly recognize that the words had been placed in the mouth of the unwary young man. There were incriminating quotes from a Dobrover son and daughter, who, the pamphleteer pointed out as further evidence of criminality, had turned against their own father. The final chapter featured the court arguments that led to excommunication. From this, a facile argument for divorce followed, since the wife of an excommunicated man would suffer unnecessarily from her husband’s exclusion.

  I closed the book in wonder. In the standard course, such a series of events—going from initial suspicions to allegations to accusations to excommunication by the court—would span a lifetime. For all of it to have gone off in a couple of years and without much of a hitch, a well-planned program must have been in place. But who had planned so well, who had known the ins and outs of Dobrov, and who had so much private access to family members? I needed to find the children, talk to the sons, the eldest daughter too. Did they understand that they’d been used—abused, rather?

  At 5, when Hasidim gather in the synagogues for the afternoon service, I turned the lock on my office door and walked to the Szebed synagogue, congregation of the murdered man’s cousin and rival for the Grand Rabbinic throne. Inside I noted the recent interior renovations to the brownstone. Exterior work was still in progress. And was it jubilation I sensed in certain members of the congregation, jubilation at the Dobrover’s death?

  I took a place at the back of the room, where I would have a good view of all who came and went. During the service, I noticed an earnest young man dressed in the style of a Litvak, an outsider, his face thin and pale, an unhappy face. What was he doing here mid-week? It happened now and then that someone’s Litvak relative visited for a Sabbath and attended services in a Hasidic shtibel, but this was mid-week, when young men were at yeshiva; furthermore, this wasn’t any shtibel, it was Szebed.

  After the service, a birth was announced, the name pro-claimed: Udel, daughter of Sarah. Wine, plum brandy, egg kichel, and herring were brought in, and I watched as the cup of wine was passed from relative to relative. The young man appeared to be one of them, because he too received the cup. I eyed him as he went through the motion of sipping and passed it on. Not an outsider. Definitely related. Probably a brother to the young wife, though why would a Szebeder marry into a Litvak family? I wondered.

  I went up to the table, poured myself a thimble of brandy in friendly gesture, and casually asked another family man beside me, And who is the young man?

  Why, Dobrov’s youngest son, brother-in-law of the new father, the man said.

  Oh, I said, I didn’t recognize him now that he’s grown up—the usual nonsense adults speak, mere filler. Beneath the filler, I was beside myself. A Dobrov son dressed in the short coat and hat of a Litvak, peyos tucked behind his ears. His father and grandfathers must be churning in their graves. And where were the signs of mourning, the ripped lapel on the jacket, the loose flap on the shirt under it? There was none of that. And during the service no prayer for the soul of the deceased had been recited either. Clearly, the son wasn’t mourning the father, not openly anyway.

  I mingled among the men, made my way up to the young man as smoothly as I could manage, put my hand out to wish him a mazel tov. He extended a limp, unwilling hand, responded with the merest nod. His eyes, however, scanned my face, didn’t seem to find what they wanted, and moved on. An unhappy soul, I thought, a very disturbed young man. I attempted to squeeze some reassurance into the pale thin hand, clapped it with my other hand before letting go, then taking a roundabout path made my way to the door, slipped out unnoticed, I hoped, and walked up and down the block, with an eye on the comings and goings at this house, a brownstone whose upper floors served as the Szebeder residence. The new mother, I guessed, was staying here with her newborn, and I wanted to see and know what might be going on among the women.

&n
bsp; It was over half an hour before my stakeout was rewarded. The door opened, the Dobrover widow came to the door buttoned up in her long black fur and carrying her purse. Attending the widow to the door was her daughter, the young mother, and behind her, the Szebeder rebbetzin. Without warning, the daughter threw her arms around her mother and sobbed noisily. I’m quite certain there were wet trails on the mother’s cheeks too. They remained this way, the daughter clinging to her mother, for some moments, then the mother disentangled herself and walked down the wide brownstone stairs.

  Here finally were signs of mourning. I was quite certain this is what the tears were for, since giving birth is not normally, that is if the child emerges healthy, an occasion for ears.

  Not knowing what else to do, I followed the older woman at a distance. As widow of the Dobrover, she should be mourning, sitting out the seven days of shiva. Instead, here she was, walking in the streets, leading me to an address I didn’t know, not the residence of Dobrov, and it was then I remembered the divorce. Having divorced the Dobrover she couldn’t mourn him. Imagine her feelings. I wondered at the torment every member of this family must be experiencing. The death of a husband and father one had disowned in life on what were surely false accusations; this was a tragedy.

  * * *

  It was a deep blue evening with a moon and stars brighter than the street lights, and the shadows of men on their way home grew long and lean. I wrapped my silk muffler tight against the wind. At home it would be past the children’s dinner hour, they would be in bed by now, and I turned in that direction, up Ross toward Marcy Avenue, to tuck them in for the night, reflecting on the vulnerability of a wife and children, the ease with which an entire family can be destroyed.

  I was in time to read several pages about the current favorite, the miracle-performing BeSHT and his disciples, and remained bedside long enough to see willpower lose out to fatigue. One by one, from the youngest to my eldest, who to prove her superiority to her younger siblings made a valiant effort every night to be the last one to fall asleep, their eyes closed.