Invisible City

by Julia Dahl

  “Well, if you were a New Yorker, you might know that the Orthodox community does, in fact, have some clout with the department and the city. That’s not a story.”

  “Exactly,” says Mike.

  “But,” he says, leaning forward on his desk, “a rogue NYPD detective and the slow-footing of the investigation into the brutal murder of a pregnant woman because the department doesn’t want to upset a population of voters is.”

  “I agree,” says Larry. “And the investigation isn’t following normal avenues. It’s been three days and they haven’t questioned the husband. He owns the yard where she was dumped. He’s at least worth questioning to figure out who has access.”

  “They also don’t know about the victim’s boyfriend,” I say. “And we do.”

  Morgan raises his eyebrows; I’ve impressed him.

  “What about this Saul Katz character?” asks Morgan. “Is he a suspect?”

  Larry’s phone rings. He answers quietly.

  “They’re sort of acting like he might be, but I think they’re just pissed he’s talking to the press.”

  Morgan considers this.

  I am not dressed to meet the boss. My dirty hair is twisted up in a plastic clip and I’m a month overdue for a lip and eyebrow wax. Albert Morgan is in a hand-cut navy suit. Cuff links on Monday night. I must look like a child: no makeup, chipped purple nail polish, old red Doc Martens on my feet.

  “Ms. Roberts,” he says. “What are you hoping will happen after we leave this meeting?”

  “Well,” I say, “I’m hoping you don’t fire me.”

  “Go on.”

  “I know I’ve fucked up the sourcing, but I’ve got a ton of information on Rivka Mendelssohn. She had a daughter who died about a year ago. And she was considering a divorce. She had looked at apartments with her boyfriend. And her husband had threatened her recently.”

  “This is on the record?”

  “Yes.”

  “From Saul Katz?” asks Mike. Why is he being such a dick?

  “No,” I say. “From a social worker who knew her. And two girls—young women—who were friends with her. They’re all part of this group of ultra-Orthodox who are, like, questioning. On the margins. I have a picture, too.”

  I take the snapshot out of my pocket. I hadn’t even looked at which one I’d gotten. It’s the one of her in the wedding dress. I hand it to Morgan.

  He looks at the photo and nods.

  “Write that up for tomorrow,” says Morgan, handing the photo to Mike. “Friends talk about her, say she was rebelling, the boyfriend, the dead child, whatever you have. But we can only milk the victim for a day. There are about five hundred murders in the city every year. This is a corruption story. We need to connect the husband to the Jewish patrol. I have a very angry commissioner on my ass, but from what I can tell, it’s his people he should be angry at, not mine. You let a source use you. Don’t do it again.”

  “I won’t,” I say.

  “Background your sources. Ask the library.”

  “I will,” I say.

  Larry gets off his call. “That was my source in Brooklyn homicide. They just arrested Saul Katz.”

  “For what?” I ask.

  “Impersonating a police officer and obstruction,” says Larry. “They say they’re looking at him for the murder.”

  “On the record?” says Morgan.

  Larry nods. “They called him a ‘person of interest.’”

  Morgan rubs his hand over his mouth. “Okay,” he says. “We need two stories. Larry, you write up the arrest. I don’t want Rebekah near that. She’s compromised. I don’t think you need to get too detailed about his relationship with the paper. Maybe just that Katz had been speaking to a Trib reporter about the case. Rebekah, we’ll have to name you.”

  I don’t bother arguing. Hopefully, Larry will gloss over the fact that I failed to realize Saul was no longer an active member of the force when I used him as an NYPD source. After all, it makes the paper look bad, too.

  Morgan turns to me. “You write up the story about the boyfriend and the divorce. Mike, make sure photo gets the image. Rebekah is on the family and the Shomrim tomorrow. Confirm a financial connection. Have the NYPD comment on their relationship with the group. Do they train them? What’s the deal? And get the family on the record about the murder investigation. Who do they think did it? Are they worried it won’t get solved?”

  I pull out my notebook to scribble his directions. He continues.

  “Ms. Roberts, you have not yet lost your position here. But consider yourself on probation. Larry, you’re lead on this. Update me tomorrow.”

  After Morgan leaves, Larry and I follow Mike back to the city desk and we sit down at two computers no one is using. I flip through my notes as I wait for the machine to boot up. These PCs were out of date when I started college.

  “So,” says Larry, “who do you think did it?”

  I hesitate. “I’ve been thinking the husband. She was dumped in his yard. She was cheating. These people don’t take stepping out of line lightly. And infidelity is totally unacceptable in women, from what I can tell. Like, automatic loss of custody of the kids. I tried to talk to the husband, and he scared the shit out of me. He looked desperate. And the people I talked to, the other outsiders, they said he threatened her. Said he’d take her kids away, shun her, that sort of thing. They said he was really angry. And this was, like, a week or two before she died.”

  “What did Saul think?” asks Larry. “Did he say anything? He was feeding you information, but was it to send you in the wrong direction?”

  “I didn’t feel like he had a direction,” I say. It’s nice to be able to bounce what I’ve learned off Larry. Unlike some of the old-timers I’ve met, he seems genuinely interested in his work, despite the fact that he’s probably been doing it for more than three decades. I bet I can learn a lot from him. “He never speculated on who might have killed her. Just that he was sure the department was fucking it up. Not interviewing people. Kowtowing to the community.” I tell Larry who the man Saul assaulted was, and why he said he did what he did. “Obviously, the assault didn’t make the papers, but I don’t remember reading anything about a rabbi sex scandal either,” I say. “Did we cover it?”

  “We wrote a short piece on the initial arrest,” he says. “And another when the charges were dropped. I’ll see if I can get confirmation on the name of the man he assaulted, though I doubt I’ll be able to connect the two cases tonight. What’s your plan for tomorrow?”

  “I think I can get some good information from Miriam, Aron Mendelssohn’s sister. She and her husband live in the same house as the Mendelssohns. And she was there when the husband threatened Rivka. Apparently she got really upset about the whole thing.”

  “Will she talk to you?”

  “She’s already talked to me a little,” I say. “Now I have more information to go at her with. Even if she doesn’t give me details, maybe she’ll confirm stuff.”

  “Okay,” says Larry. “You go to Borough Park tomorrow. But everything has to be on the record. First and last names. The department is embarrassed and they’re going to be on everything you say. If you give them a chance to make you look bad, they’ll take it. Get it on tape if you can. Start small. Be accurate. That’s the most important thing. If all this shit you think is true is true, you’ve got weeks of stories on this. Maybe more. You’re going to write up what you got from her friends now, but what’s the story for tomorrow? What can you get by four P.M.?”

  “I can talk to the family. Get their take on the investigation. And ask about their connection to Shomrim.”

  “Okay. I’ll work on Saul, and getting an official cause of death for Rivka. If the cops don’t have that, they don’t have anything. So we’re set?”

  I nod.

  “Good,” he says, and stands up. “You’ve got everybody’s attention here, Rebekah. Yesterday I didn’t know who you were. Neither did Albert Morgan. Personally, I think you’ve
done some great work. But this could still turn out pretty bad for you. Could turn out good, too. Real good. A big story like this will impress people. Just get it right. And get it on the record.”

  Larry leaves. I take out my notebook and type my earlier draft into the system. To what I already have from Sara Wyman about Rivka’s dead child and the fact that she was questioning her marriage and the rules of the community, I add the bits about Aron Mendelssohn threatening Rivka and Suri’s comments about how Rivka wanted Coney Island to be a “sacred space.” I send the draft to Mike.

  “Rebekah!” he shouts moments later from behind his cloth cubicle wall. I jog over. “It’s way too long. We only have seven inches.”

  I watch as he hacks the story to pieces with the DELETE key.

  The woman whose body was found naked in a Brooklyn scrap pile Friday wanted to divorce her wealthy husband, but was afraid she’d lose her children, according to multiple friends.

  “Even if she was granted a divorce by the rabbi, Hasidic women rarely retain custody,” said Sara Wyman, a social worker and former member of the Hasidic community to which Rivka Mendelssohn belonged.

  Two weeks before the 30-year-old mother-of-four’s death, friends say that her older husband, Aron Mendelssohn, confronted her about an affair and physically assaulted her in a “safe” house for ultra-Orthodox Jews in Coney Island.

  “He grabbed her,” says Devorah Kletzky, 22. “He was yelling in her face. He said he’d see her shunned.”

  Wyman and Kletzky both told the Tribune exclusively that Mendelssohn had begun “questioning” her rigid Orthodox life after the tragic death of her infant daughter, Shoshanna, last year.

  Wyman said she had “no idea” how Mendelssohn could have met such a gruesome end. “I just hope the police find who did this—she didn’t deserve to die so young.”

  Police have made no arrests in Mendelssohn’s murder. A gardener for the family was questioned and released over the weekend.

  It’s all technically accurate, but lacks any context or background. Mike presses a button and sends the story to the copy desk.

  “Call in with what you have on the family and the Jewish cops before four tomorrow,” he says. And then, without looking at me: “Good luck.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  By the time I walk out of the Trib building, it is nearly ten o’clock, but just as I’m walking down into the F train to go home, Sara Wyman calls.

  “Can you meet?” she asks.

  “Now? Where?”

  “There’s an all-night diner on Flatbush. I’m bringing someone I think you should meet.”

  I walk across Fiftieth Street to the 1 train, and forty minutes later I’m back in Brooklyn. Sara Wyman is already at the diner when I arrive. Sitting beside her is Malka, from the funeral home.

  “Thank you for meeting us,” says Sara. Her hair is a wild, rumbled mess of hat-head and her eyeglasses are hanging on a beaded chain around her neck. Malka looks polished and prim, just like she did in the basement of the funeral home.

  “You are the reporter?” asks Malka as I sit down. She looks uncomfortable.

  “You two know each other?” Sara is surprised.

  “I met Malka the day of the funeral,” I say.

  “You did not say you were a reporter,” says Malka.

  “I know,” I say. “I should have. I apologize.”

  This seems, oddly enough, to satisfy her. Or else she is simply distracted. “Is it true Saul Katz has been arrested?” she asks.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “I suppose it was inevitable,” says Sara. “I’m no fan of Leiby Bronner, but …”

  “You know about that?” I ask.

  Sara smiles. “Word travels. And the community is very divided over the issue of sexual abuse.”

  “There is not division over the issue of sexual abuse,” says Malka, looking cross. “Everyone agrees it is averah. A sin. There is division over the proper response.”

  “Yes,” says Sara. “Of course.”

  “He wasn’t arrested for the assault, though,” I say. “They’re saying he obstructed the investigation into Rivka Mendelssohn’s murder by talking to me.”

  Sara shakes her head. “Poor man. He’s always been solemn. Navigating the worlds he lives in, so many years of not belonging anywhere. No real family. And then when his son, Binyamin, died …”

  “His son died?” I ask. Saul didn’t say that. “When?”

  “Recently,” says Sara. “During the fall. October, I think.”

  “What happened?”

  Sara lowers her voice. “It was suicide. He had a wife and three children, but … he was gay. And when it was discovered, he was forced to leave his teaching job. He rented an apartment in Kensington and that’s where he was found. Hanging from the ceiling. He’d been for days. Neighbors called the super because of the smell.”

  “Oh my God,” I say. I cross my arms over my stomach and wince. “Saul told me he’d been molested.”

  Sara nods. “Yes,” she says. “That is what I was told as well.”

  “Binyamin Katz went to yeshiva with my brothers,” says Malka.

  “Oh!” says Sara.

  Malka is staring into the middle distance.

  “Saul said it was a rabbi,” I say. “And that the indictment failed because people wouldn’t speak out.”

  Malka’s eyes return to the table. “That is accurate,” she says.

  I’ve never seen a woman quite like Malka before. Her features are tiny and her white skin smooth, like a porcelain doll. And like a doll, she is completely expressionless. The most her face has moved since I sat down is to blink. It occurs to me that she would make a great soldier or spy. Not even Al Qaeda could get her to talk if she didn’t want to say anything.

  “But this isn’t why I asked you to meet us,” says Sara. “Remember when we talked I told you that the reason Rivka Mendelssohn came to me was she had endured the death of a child? After we talked I called Malka. Malka?”

  Malka looks me in the eyes for the first time since I’ve met her. “The baby was murdered,” she says. “She was hit on the head. Like her mother.”

  The way she says it, it seems almost as if she is posing a challenge. I take out my notebook. It’s now or never.

  “I need this on the record,” I say.

  She nods, her gaze steady. “My name is Malka Grossman,” she says, looking at my pen. “Two s’s. I prepared the bodies of Rivka Mendelssohn and her infant daughter for burial. I believe both died of massive head wounds.”

  It takes me a moment to start writing, and then I begin to scribble: m grossman prep R and inf d ‘massive h wounds’

  “Sara, you said Rivka told you the girl had an asthma attack?”

  “She did tell me that. Apparently she was not telling the truth.”

  “Do you have any idea why she lied?”

  “I suppose it’s possible she didn’t know for certain,” Sara says slowly. “Or she wanted to keep the details to herself.”

  Or, I think, she was hiding something. Or in denial.

  “Did anyone else see the bodies?” I ask Malka. “I’m just wondering if I can confirm …”

  Without a word, Malka pulls two neat manila envelopes out of her bag and places them in front of me on the tiny round table. “These are copies of my notes.”

  “Do the police have these?” I ask.

  “No.”

  “Have you ever been interviewed by the police?”

  Malka shakes her head. “I thought my notes were going to the police when I handed them over.”

  “Handed them over?”

  “To Joel Yazbek. Of Borough Park Shomrim.”

  “And he was supposed to give it to the police?”

  Malka nods. “But I have since learned he did not.”

  “Were you alone when you prepared their bodies?”

  “In Rivka’s case, I had an assistant. But I will not allow her name to be used. Absolutely not. I made a decision to come f
orward. She did not and I must protect her.”

  “Fine,” I say. “I won’t even ask her name. But if I need to check something later, can you put me in touch?”

  Malka considers this. “I can. As long as she remains anonymous.”

  That works. I unfold the top of one of the manila envelopes and finger through the contents. Paper and photos.

  “So you prepared these yourself? What exactly is your … title?”

  “My family owns the Mandel Memorial Funeral Home and my husband is the manager,” says Malka. “I am the bookkeeper and volunteer preparing bodies. You are Jewish?”

  I nod. She’s about to tell me something I should “know”—but of course I don’t know.

  “So you know. A woman must prepare a woman for burial. So she can rest with dignity.”

  “Tell me about the little girl,” I say.

  “Shoshanna was brought in by Shomrim. I was told she was dead when they arrived at the home. It’s all in the report.”

  “What about Rivka. Did you give those notes to anyone?”

  “I’m giving them to you,” says Malka. She pauses, then speaks again. “This is not a decision I came to lightly. I’m sure you find our way of life strange, perhaps even repellent. But there are many things you do not know. And many people who tell lies about the way we live. Most Haredi in Brooklyn are descended from Holocaust survivors. My mother’s entire family—six brothers and sisters, her parents and grandparents—were murdered by the Nazis in Poland. We know intimately how quickly our goyish neighbors can turn on us. We know that to survive we must rely on one another, we must support and protect our fellow Jews. We do not do this because we do not believe that sin should be punished. We do this because the strength of the community is vital to our survival. You look at us and you see black hats and wigs and you think we are to be pitied. You think you know better. But you do not see more than you see. You think the prohibition against men and women touching is misogynist. You don’t see the tenderness, or passion, with which a husband touches his wife after she is niddah. You think that clothing that exposes your flesh makes you free. But in my modest clothing I am free from the leering stares of men. I am free to be judged by my intellect and my actions, not my body.”