Monday the Rabbi Took Off

by Harry Kemelman

  Gittel’s feelings as she listened were ambivalent: On the one hand, the government seemed to think that the young man was tied up with the terrorists and had actually perpetrated an outrage in which a man had lost his life, and on the other hand, she was sorry for this very nice man opposite her, so it was hard to imagine a son of his being guilty of a criminal act.

  “Why don’t you get a lawyer?” she asked. “At least, he’d be able to arrange for you to sec your son.”

  Stedman shook his head and gave his reasons just as he had explained them to Donahue. “Besides, according to my friend at the embassy, this is a Shin Bet affair and it’s not being handled according to the regular routine.”

  “So what are you planning to do?”

  “He managed to get the name of the man in charge, a certain Adoumi, and I’ve been trying to see him, but he’s been dodging me.”

  “Avner Adoumi?” asked Gittel.

  “That’s right. You know him?”

  “I know him well.”

  “If you could perhaps arrange an appointment,” he pleaded.

  Her face grew stern. “This is a terrible crime against the state of which your son is suspected, Mr. Stedman. The Shin Bet, I’m sure, does not act capriciously. But Avner Adoumi is a public servant, and you have a right to see him. He must not be permitted to dodge his responsibilities. I will take you to see him—right now, if you like. He’s likely to be home.”

  Dan couldn’t contain his gratitude. “But I can’t ask you to put yourself out. If you’ll just give me his address—”

  “And what would you do if he slammed the door in your face? Believe me, Avner is quite capable of it. No, I’ll take you there and I’ll see to it that he at least listens to you.”

  “Do you mind if I come, too?” asked the rabbi.

  “Not at all,” said Stedman, now in high spirits. “The bigger our gang, the better. He’ll see that he can’t bottle this thing up.”

  The Renault started without trouble. Gittel drove, of course, and Stedman sat beside her while the rabbi sat in back. They were curiously silent during the short trip, each engrossed in his own thoughts. Gittel drove up to the house on Kol Tov Street and, with the two men trailing, marched up to the door and rang the bell.

  Adoumi came to the door. “What are you doing here, Gittel?” he asked. “Who are these men?”

  “This is my friend Daniel Stedman, and this is my nephew, David Small.”

  He smiled. “Oh, the rabbi from America, the one who doesn’t keep the Sabbath. What do you want?”

  “We want to talk to you,” said Stedman. “I want to.”

  Adoumi hesitated for a moment and then shrugged. “Well, come in then,” and stood aside for them to enter. He made a vague, apologetic gesture at the newspapers on the floor and the general disarray of the room. “My wife is in the hospital.”

  “So you have to make a regular pigpen here for your wife to clean up the first day she gets back?” stormed Gittel. “You’re afraid she won’t have enough work to keep her occupied?”

  “I was planning to clean up the place before she got back,” he said meekly.

  “I’ll clean up. You talk to Mr. Stedman.” She began to pick up the newspapers. Adoumi motioned the two men to chairs.

  They watched her for a moment, and then Stedman said, “My son, Roy—”

  Adoumi cut him off sharply. “Your son tried to cross the border into enemy territory. That is a military matter when a country is at war and a matter for the military courts. I have nothing to do with it.”

  But Stedman was not to be intimidated. “My information is that the matter rests largely with you. And my informant is reliable,” he said evenly. Before Adoumi could reply, he added, “This attempted flight across the border—did you arrange it?”

  “What do you mean?” But Adoumi was not angry; he was grinning.

  “I mean that it was too apt. The police questioned him about the bombing and then conveniently neglected to return his passport. If they had any real evidence to tie him in with it, they would have arrested him right then and there. But since they didn’t, I do not rule out the possibility of your inducing him to do something foolish like running away.”

  “The innocent do not run away,” said Adoumi.

  “Unless they are frightened into it,” said Stedman. “This Arab friend of his, was he one of your people? Was he by any chance an agent provocateur?”

  “We do not shoot our own agents,” Adoumi said. “You have been seeing too many spy movies, my friend.”

  “Anything a Hollywood director can dream up, an Intelligence man can also think of,” said Stedman. “He could even have pretended to be shot.”

  “Oh, he was shot all right, believe me. But he’s alive and can be questioned.”

  “And has been questioned, I think,” said the rabbi.

  Both men turned to him, and Gittel paused in her work.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If he were critically injured,” the rabbi began diffidently, “I think you would have interrogated him immediately to make sure you got what you wanted from him before he died. And if he were not critically injured, I don’t think you would wait until he were fully recovered. So I think you have questioned him, and obviously he has said nothing to implicate Roy, or you would not have referred earlier to his crime of crossing the border; you would have had something more serious to charge him with.”

  Gittel did not continue with her tidying up. She gave her nephew an approving nod and slid into a chair. Adoumi, too, looked at him with respect.

  “That’s a rabbinic pilpul,” he said. “I didn’t think you American rabbis went in for that kind of thing. I do not say you are wrong.” He considered a moment. “No,” he corrected, “but the interrogation of the Arab is still going on—”

  “Sure,” Stedman chimed in bitterly, “and before you finish with him, he will have guessed what you want him to say.”

  “We don’t work that way here,” said Adoumi angrily.

  “Every police force works that way, or for that matter, anyone asking a series of questions, like a teacher, if only subconsciously,” said the rabbi quietly. “I don’t know what induced Roy to leave Jerusalem. It may be that his Arab friend persuaded him, and he in turn could have been frightened by your people. Or he could have had some reason of his own. But if it was a crime for Roy to leave the country, it surely is not a serious crime. You do not retain people here by force as in the Iron Curtain countries. You merely require them to fill out certain forms and follow certain procedures if they want to leave. So, from that angle, all you have against him is that he did not follow official procedure. Normally, that would involve what? A judicial reprimand? A small fine? A few days in jail? So it must be something else that you are holding him for. And that can only be the bombing of the apartment on the next street. Now if it can be proved that he could not have had any connection with that—”

  “And how can you prove that?” Adoumi challenged him.

  The rabbi tossed the copy of Haolam on the table in front of Adoumi. “That picture proves it. Have you seen it?”

  Adoumi glanced at the magazine. “I have seen it,” he said. “You say there’s something here that proves your man could not have done it?” He picked up the magazine, and no one spoke as he studied the picture. He left the room and returned a moment later with a magnifying glass to look at it more closely. Both Gittel and Stedman had twisted in their seats and leaned over to look at the magazine that he left lying on the table, but as soon as he returned, they straightened up again. He went over every square inch of the photograph with the glass, his head moving up and down while they waited in silence. Finally, he put down both the glass and the magazine and looked his question at the rabbi.

  “The doctor saw him to bed before he left,” the rabbi began. “He assumed, and I suppose you people agreed, that he must have got out of bed to get a drink from the bottle on the mantelpiece.”

  “So?”
r />   “So the way he’s holding the bottle, he could not have poured a drink,” said the rabbi.

  Adoumi glanced at the picture again.

  “If he tilted the bottle, it would go down his arm,” the rabbi offered.

  “So perhaps he was going to take the bottle back to bed with him, maybe to leave on the floor and to sip from every now and then.” Adoumi was not impressed.

  Stedman and Gittel looked at the rabbi, who shook his head slowly and said, “No, he wasn’t going to do that either. The bottle was kept on the shelf. These apartments are the same, yours and his, and the shelf is like this one”—he broke off to walk over to it and measured himself against it—“about shoulder high for him. In the picture he’s holding the bottle with the thumb down like an Indian club—”

  “Indian club? Oh, yes, I know.”

  “Well, he couldn’t take it down from the shelf that way, not without twisting his arm and shoulder in a most unnatural way. Even for you, who are much taller, it would be unnatural.”

  Adoumi got up and walked over to the shelf and went through the motion. “All right,” he admitted. “So why—”

  “Why did he hold it that way? To use as a weapon, of course. It’s the only reason for holding the bottle like a club, because he was going to use it as a club. And that means that there was someone in the room that he was either going to attack or from whom he was going to defend himself,” he added.

  “But—”

  “And it couldn’t have been Roy, because when he got there, the doctor was just leaving and had locked the door behind him.”

  “He could have come back afterward and come in—”

  “With the door locked?”

  Stedman’s face relaxed in a tentative smile, and Gittel, too, smiled and nodded approvingly.

  “But look here”—Adoumi was exasperated—“if the door was locked and no one could come in, there was no point in his arming himself with the bottle. Which means he must have been holding it that way for some other reason.”

  “Unless it was against someone who was there before the door was locked.”

  “But that’s absurd. There was only the doctor. Why would he arm himself against the doctor?”

  “Why not ask the doctor?”

  “He’s out of the country.” Adoumi gnawed on his upper lip in annoyance. Then his face cleared, and he smiled. He came back to his seat. “This is all very interesting, but entirely beside the point. You always find baffling little angles in every case of this kind. The point is that the man was killed by a bomb—”

  “How do you know?” the rabbi interjected quickly. “That picture shows that he was struck on the head, on the temple. He could have been pushed and struck his head—on the corner of that same mantelpiece.”

  “Yes, and precisely the same thing could have happened from the force of the explosion.” Adoumi was once again at ease, the momentary doubts induced by the rabbi’s argument now gone. His tone as he continued, disinterested, even ironic. “Or are you suggesting that after he fought with the doctor, or whatever happened, that someone came along and planted a bomb on his windowsill? That would be a pretty remarkable coincidence you’ll have to admit. What’s more,” he added triumphantly, “it’s the bomb we are primarily concerned with, and you haven’t demonstrated that your young man could not have come back and planted it, locked door or no.”

  “As you say, it would be a remarkable coincidence and so not very likely,” the rabbi admitted. “The likelihood would be that if Memavet were killed by a blow on the head, then the killer would have been the one who planted the bomb.”

  “Why? Why would he want to bomb him if he had already killed him?”

  “Why?” the rabbi echoed. “Because anyone can kill with a blow on the head, and so anyone can be suspected of it. But a bomb implies terrorists, and they are usually obliging enough to claim the credit for it.”

  “But you have suggested that it was Dr. Ben Ami who did the killing. Where would the doctor get a bomb? Do you think doctors carry them around in their bags?”

  The rabbi was troubled and his face showed it. “I am relatively new here, so I don’t know what is possible and what isn’t. But the country is at war and has been for some time. I thought perhaps a bomb, or at least explosives, might not be hard to come by. Gittel had mentioned that Dr. Ben Ami got you this apartment, so I thought that perhaps he was connected with the contractor in some way—”

  “He’s his brother; he’s Phil Resnik’s brother,” Adoumi interjected. “So what?”

  “Well, contractors do a lot of blasting,” the rabbi went on doggedly, “and I thought—”

  “You thought he could just go to his brother and ask for a few sticks of dynamite?” asked Adoumi jocularly. He laughed. “Was it your idea that Phil Resnik gave his brother some dynamite to experiment with,” he went on, his voice dripping with sarcasm, “or did Dr. Ben Ami run down to see him at home after he killed Memavet, get the dynamite, wire it up, maybe rig a timing device to it, and run back here to set it?” His eyes flicked at Stedman and Gittel and saw that they were squirming in embarrassment. His tone changed, and he went on, not unkindly, “It is a good effort, Rabbi, even ingenious, but the fact of the matter is that it wasn’t that kind of bomb at all. It was a special type that the terrorists have used before. It looks like a small plastic radio. We have run descriptions of it in the press….” His voice trailed off as he realized that the rabbi was not listening. Instead, he was staring up at the ceiling.

  “Resnik, Resnik,” the rabbi murmured. “It must be.” He leaned forward. “When we went to see Memavet, Dan and his son and I, he told us a long story about a terrible injury he had received at the hands of a certain Dr. Rasnikov.”

  “That’s right,” said Stedman. “I remember. Rasnikov was the name of the doctor who assigned him to the Forestry Detail.”

  “We were perfect strangers to him, mind you,” the rabbi went on. “But he told us just the same. It was obviously an idée fixe with him, and the chances are he told it to many people.”

  The rabbi got up and began to pace the floor, the eyes of the others following him. “Rasnikov, Resnik—it’s the same name. I don’t know any Russian, but I know that the ‘ov’ is a common suffix in Russian and means ‘son of.’ I don’t know what Resnik means—”

  “Shohet,” said Gittel promptly, “a resnik is a shohet, a ritual slaughterer.”

  “Is that so? Well, it’s the same name—shohet or son of a shohet. The one who went to America, the contractor—Phil, did you say?—shortened Rasnikov to Resnik because it had a more American sound just as the family called itself Rasnikov in Russia because it had a more Russian sound. And the one who came here chose an Israeli name because—because many people do and the state encourages it—”

  “You fill out a form and you pay a lira,” said Gittel.

  “Precisely. And although a shohet is a dignified and honorable profession with us, he did not take the name of Shohet or Ben Shohet or Bar Shohet, I suppose because it has unfortunate connotations for someone in the medical profession. Instead, he took the common name of Ben Ami. And Memavet had no way of knowing that Ben Ami was Rasnikov and so did not hesitate to call him when he needed a doctor. That is a coincidence, if you like, but one that is quite likely to happen in this country because it is small both in area and population and because Jews from all parts of the world feel drawn to it. Sooner or later, you are apt to meet the most unexpected Jews. I met one when I had been here less than a week. I would have sworn it was the last place I would see him, but he had come here and settled. After meeting Willard Abbot at the Wall, I do not think it so unlikely that the doctor whom Memavet called should turn out to be his old enemy, Dr. Rasnikov.”

  “And you think they recognized each other when he came in?”

  “If all there is to the story is what Memavet told us, then I doubt if the doctor recognized him,” said the rabbi. “It’s possible, but not likely. The doctor had only seen him a co
uple of times very briefly. There was no reason why he should remember him. But Memavet would remember the doctor. His face was photographed on his mind. I suppose he called him by his old name—”

  “And the doctor remembered him and they fought?”

  “More likely, Memavet came at him with the bottle, and the doctor pushed him away violently, and he struck his head on the shelf.”

  There was silence, and all eyes were on Adoumi as he gnawed on his lower lip to induce cerebration. “It’s possible,” he said at last, “but the bomb, how could he get hold of a bomb?”

  “He probably couldn’t get hold of one if he tried,” said the rabbi, “but after the publicity you gave it, and the picture of it you ran in the papers, he’d recognize one when he saw it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There was no car on Mazel Tov Street, no car parked in front of Memavet’s house. Roy was explicit about that. Which meant the doctor must have come on foot. Where could he have come from? In his statement to the press he said he sandwiched in his visit to Memavet before another call. So he must have come here to see your wife. Anywhere else, even in the immediate vicinity, he would have got into his car. But if he had come here first, rather than get back into his car and turn around in this narrow muddy street, he would walk down the alley that connects the two streets. So he must have come from here.”

  “Well, that’s true enough because he phoned me at my office and asked when I’d be home, that there was something important he had to tell me.”

  “He put it that way?” asked the rabbi curiously. “That there was something important he had to tell you?”

  “Why, yes.”

  “I mean in those very words?” the rabbi persisted.

  Adoumi pursed his lips and stared up at the ceiling. Then he faced the rabbi and nodded. “ ‘I have something important to tell you.’ That’s what he said. I’m sure because I naturally assumed he had just seen Sarah and there had been some sudden change. But he told me he hadn’t seen her yet. The house was dark, you see, so he knew I hadn’t got home yet. Or maybe he noticed that my car was not where I usually park it.”