Zaddik Read online

  Zaddik

  David Rosenbaum

  FELONY & MAYHEM PRESS • NEW YORK

  All the characters and events portrayed in this work are fictitious.

  ZADDIK

  Copyright © 1993 by David Rosenbaum

  All rights reserved

  A Felony & Mayhem "Hard Boiled" mystery

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  First print edition (Mysterious Press/Warner): 1993

  Felony & Mayhem print and digital editions: 2016

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-63194-039-2

  For Sarah

  “Hot a Yid a vaybeleh

  Hot a vayb a Yideleh…”

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue Brooklyn, 1954

  Book One

  Chapter 1 Forty-seventh Street, Manhattan Friday, September 3 The Present

  Chapter 2 Forty-seventh Street, Manhattan Friday, September 3

  Chapter 3 Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and Flushing, Queens Friday, September 3

  Chapter 4 Forty-seventh Street, Manhattan Friday, September 3

  Chapter 5 The Lower East Side, Manhattan Saturday, September 4

  Chapter 6 Forty-seventh Street, Manhattan Monday, September 6

  Chapter 7 Sullivan Street, between Prince and Spring, SoHo, Manhattan Tuesday, September 7

  Chapter 8 Forty-seventh Street, Manhattan Tuesday, September 7

  Chapter 9 The Mathew Rosenthal Lubavitcher Yeshiva Crown Heights, Brooklyn Wednesday, September 8

  Chapter 10 Forty-seventh Street, Manhattan Wednesday, September 8

  Chapter 11 Lambs Club Basement Forty-third Street, Manhattan Wednesday, September 8

  Chapter 12 The Satmarer Rebbe’s House Williamsburg, Brooklyn Thursday, September 9

  Chapter 13 Trattoria Dell’Arte Seventh Avenue Thursday, September 9

  Chapter 14 SoHo, Manhattan Friday, September 10

  Chapter 15 Henri Bendel’s Fifth Avenue, Manhattan Friday, September 10

  Chapter 16 The Diamond Dairy Forty-seventh Street, Manhattan Friday, September 10

  Chapter 17 Forty-seventh Street, Manhattan Friday, September 10

  Chapter 18 Agudath Shalom Kingston Avenue, Crown Heights Friday, September 10

  Chapter 19 West Fifty-ninth Street, Manhattan Saturday, September 11

  Chapter 20 Eastchester, New York Saturday, September 11

  Chapter 21 West Fifty-ninth Street, Manhattan Saturday, September 11

  Chapter 22 Prince Street, SoHo, Manhattan Sunday, September 12

  Chapter 23 Eighteenth Street Bensonhurst, Brooklyn Sunday, September 12

  Chapter 24 Forty-seventh Street, Manhattan Monday, September 13

  Chapter 25 The Parker Meridien Hotel West Fifty-seventh Street, Manhattan Monday, September 13

  Chapter 26 West Fifty-fifth Street, Manhattan Monday, September 13

  Chapter 27 All Things Beautiful Kingston Street, Brooklyn Monday, September 13

  Chapter 28 The Parker Meridien Hotel West Fifty-seventh Street, Manhattan Monday, September 13

  Chapter 29 Sullivan Street, SoHo, Manhattan Tuesday, September 14

  Chapter 30 The Diamond Exchange 4 West Forty-seventh Street, Manhattan Tuesday, September 14

  Chapter 31 All Things Beautiful Kingston Street, Brooklyn Tuesday, September 14

  Chapter 32 Roosevelt-St. Luke’s Hospital, Manhattan Wednesday, September 15

  Chapter 33 The Satmarer Rebbe’s House South Ninth Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn Friday, September 17

  Book Two

  Chapter 34 Lublin, Poland Tuesday, October 12 1814

  Chapter 35 The Market Square Lublin Tuesday, October 12

  Chapter 36 The Seer’s Hoyf Lublin Tuesday, October 12

  Chapter 37 Berel’s Tavern Lublin Wednesday, October 13

  Chapter 38 The Seer’s Bedchamber Lublin Wednesday, October 13

  Chapter 39 The Seer’s Hoyf Lublin Wednesday, October 13

  Chapter 40 Neshe’s Tavern Tailor Street, Lublin Thursday, October 14

  Chapter 41 The Jewish Cemetery Lublin Thursday, October 14

  Chapter 42 The Seer’s Study House Lublin Friday, October 15

  Chapter 43 The Seer’s Sukkah Lublin Friday, October 15

  Chapter 44 The Seer’s Study Lublin Sunday, October 17

  Chapter 45 The Church Lublin Sunday, October 17

  Chapter 46 The Great Shul Lublin Monday, October 18 Simkhas Torah

  Chapter 47 The Great Shul Lublin Monday, October 18

  Book Three

  Chapter 48 Crown Heights, Brooklyn Sunday, October 20 The Present

  Chapter 49 The Savoy Hotel The Strand, London Monday, October 21

  Chapter 50 The Satmarer Rebbe’s House South Ninth Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn Monday, October 21

  Chapter 51 Mario’s Butcher Shop Red Hook, Brooklyn Tuesday, October 22

  Chapter 52 Heathrow Airport London Thursday, October 24

  Chapter 53 Wolfie’s Collins Avenue, Miami Beach Thursday, October 24

  Chapter 54 An Apartment in Knightsbridge London Friday, October 25

  Chapter 55 All Things Beautiful Kingston Street, Brooklyn Friday, October 25

  Chapter 56 International Hotel Miami Saturday, October 26

  Chapter 57 The American Bar Savoy Hotel, London Sunday, October 27

  Chapter 58 The Satmarer Rebbe’s House South Ninth Street, Williamsburg Monday, October 28

  Chapter 59 Prince Street SoHo, Manhattan Monday, October 28

  Chapter 60 Dov Taylor’s Apartment Sullivan Street, SoHo Tuesday, October 29

  Chapter 61 JFK International Airport New York Tuesday, October 29

  Chapter 62 Sullivan Street SoHo, Manhattan Tuesday, October 29

  Chapter 63 El Al West Forty-ninth Street, New York Tuesday, October 29

  Chapter 64 The Mathew Rosenthal Lubavitcher Yeshiva Crown Heights, Brooklyn Tuesday, October 29

  Chapter 65 JFK International Airport New York Wednesday, October 30

  Chapter 66 The Satmarer Rebbe’s Home South Ninth Street, Williamsburg Wednesday, October 30

  Chapter 67 Rabbi Kalman’s Home President Street, Crown Heights Wednesday, October 30

  Chapter 68 The Carlyle Hotel Madison Avenue, Manhattan Wednesday, October 30

  Chapter 69 Rabbi Kalman’s Home President Street, Crown Heights Wednesday, October 30

  Chapter 70 East Fourth Street The Lower East Side, Manhattan Thursday, October 31

  Chapter 71 JFK International Airport New York Friday, November 1

  Chapter 72 Williamsburg, Brooklyn Tuesday, November 5

  Epilogue Brooklyn Thursday, November 7

  AFTERWORD

  GLOSSARY

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to acknowledge the following books as sources for Zaddik: Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim, both volumes; Solomon Poll’s The Hasidic Community of Williamsburg; Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog’s Life Is with People.

  Hebrew prayers in the text are taken from the Ha-Siddur Ha-Shalem, translated by Philip Birnbaum. Citations of Jewish law are from the Kitzur Shulhan Arukh, by Rabbi Solomon Ganzfried, translated by Hyman E. Goldin. Yiddish orthography is from the Transliterated English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary, by D. M. Harduf.

  For their knowledge and support, I would like to thank Gary Callahan, Fred Feldmesser, Stacey Fredericks, Sergeant Margot Hill, Andy Irving, Wayne Kabak, Larry Katz, David Maisel, Bill Malloy, J. B. Nayduch, Carl Oglesby, Helen Rees, and Cantor Ellen Stettner.

  Prologue Brooklyn, 1954

  EVERY SUNDAY, when he was five years old, Dov Taylor’s grandmother Rebecca would take him on the subway to visit his tante Lecha, who was very old and very lonely. They would ride the elevated from Borough Park to Williamsburg, and Dov would sit next to Rebecca, a large, soft
woman, at that time sixty-three. One Sunday, as the train clattered along the rails, Rebecca told Dov a story.

  Rebecca and her husband, Dov’s grandfather Sam, were crossing the border into Rumania from Bessarabia, fleeing the Bolsheviks. Sam, who at first had helped the Bolsheviks by visiting Jewish towns to urge the people to give food and lodging to the Red Army, had decided that the Communists were as anti-Semitic as the tsar. He had decided that he and his young bride could have no future in Russia.

  It was dark as Sam and Rebecca crossed the frozen earth of a potato field, but they could see a lone figure approaching. There was no place to hide, and there was no turning back, so they continued walking until the figure raised a rifle, pointed it at them, and told them they were under arrest.

  The young soldier marched them through the night for an hour or so until they came to a small shed in the woods. Outside, another young soldier crouched over a small fire, heating a pan of water for tea.

  “I have two people here,” the first soldier said. “Put them in the shed and guard them while I get the major.”

  The second soldier stood up and motioned Rebecca and Sam into the shed while the first soldier went off.

  The shed was a simple, windowless structure with an earthen floor, no more than six feet square. It was just a rude shelter for the soldiers. There was no place to sit, so Sam and Rebecca stood with their arms around each other, shivering from the cold, frightened that at best they would be beaten, robbed, and sent back. At worst they would be killed.

  They did not speak. Rebecca felt protective of Sam, who was a small, slender young man. He had a grave manner and the smallest, whitest feet she had ever seen. She remembered how on her wedding night she had peeked under the sheets while Sam slept and seen how her own feet looked enormous next to Sam’s. Their marriage had, of course, been a shidukh, arranged, but at that moment she had begun to love him.

  Now Rebecca called out to the soldier: “It is cold in here, sir, and for a cup of tea we would be most thankful. We have some money, and we would pay anything.”

  “How much money do you have?” asked the young soldier—who was really no more than a boy—pressing his cheek against the shed’s wooden door.

  “I have a diamond,” said Rebecca. “It belonged to my mother. It’s very beautiful and very valuable.”

  Sam was furious. “He will just come and take all our jewels,” he whispered.

  Before leaving Russia, Sam had turned most of their money into diamonds, which were easy to carry, easy to hide, and far more negotiable than scraps of paper bearing the tsar’s picture. “You stupid woman,” Sam hissed. “Maybe we could have bribed this major to let us go. Now we are lost.”

  The door swung open. “Give me the diamond,” the young soldier said to Rebecca, “and I will give you some tea. But if you tell anyone about this, I will kill you.”

  “Of course,” said Rebecca. “Thank you, kind sir. I have it right here.”

  And then she threw herself at the soldier, her weight driving him hard against the shed’s wall. She put her hands around his throat and squeezed. The soldier tried to lift his rifle, but Rebecca’s body pinned his gun arm against the wall. With his free hand he punched Rebecca’s shoulders, but her heavy coat absorbed the blows. He struck the back of her head, but she didn’t feel it. All she could feel was the soldier’s Adam’s apple beneath her thumbs.

  Rebecca squeezed harder as the soldier dropped his rifle and tried to pull her hands away from his throat. She squeezed harder still as his body bucked against the wall. He let himself slide to the floor, and Rebecca fell on top of him, still squeezing as she watched his eyes grow wide and the spit fly from his lips as he tried to curse her. She brought her elbows close to her body to get her weight behind her hands, trying to crack that little walnut of an Adam’s apple.

  The soldier shook his head from side to side, and his body heaved up and down. Rebecca began to hum, as she did when she sewed or when she massaged one of her patients, for, indeed, in Russia she had been a nurse. And the thought entered her mind that it was a blessing from God that she had such strong hands.

  The soldier’s eyes were popping out of his head, his face a dark purple. Rebecca could no longer feel his breath against her cheek. Then the walnut cracked and blood belched out of the young soldier’s mouth and ran from his eyes down his cheeks. Rebecca straightened her arms and then she jerked back, lifting the soldier’s head and smashing it back down on the frozen earth. She did this two, three times until she felt his neck muscles go loose. She imagined that his flesh would begin to ooze through her fingers like dough.

  After a little while, Rebecca’s hands began to cramp. She let go of the soldier’s throat and stood up. “Let’s go before the other murderer comes back,” she said to Sam, who was staring at his young bride in astonishment.

  They stayed in the forest that night, hugging each other for warmth, and they stayed there throughout the next day. When the sun went down, they slipped across the border to Rumania.

  “So, your grandmother killed a soldier with these hands,” Rebecca told Dov Taylor, who would grow up to be a policeman, a homicide detective.

  As the train pulled into the East Third Street station, Rebecca said, “God will punish me. You hear me, Dov? God will punish me. But if I didn’t do it, there would be no Dov because your mother would never be born.

  “Come, let’s go. Remember to kiss your tante Lecha. She loves you.”

  They walked down the iron stairs from the elevated train to the street, and Dov thought he would not kiss Tante Lecha, who was old and ugly. She was skinny, not like Rebecca, and her hands were like a chicken’s feet. Worst of all, she had one eye that was all white. It had no eyeball because, as Rebecca had once told him, when the Nazis took her away in the train, a cinder from the tracks had flown up and stuck in her eye, and she had rubbed it and her eye had died.

  Rebecca and Dov walked up the stairs to Lecha’s apartment. Dov watched his feet leave marks in the soot. It was so dirty here, he began to cry.

  “Why do you always cry when we visit Lecha?” Rebecca asked angrily, tugging at Dov’s hand, dragging him up the stairs. “It hurts her, and she is an old woman who will die soon and just wants a kiss.”

  “I hate her,” said Dov.

  “You murderer,” said Rebecca. “You Gypsy. Where did your mother find you?”

  They stopped in front of Lecha’s door, and Rebecca fumbled inside her black velvet purse for the key. Around her shoulders she wore a fur wrap with the head of a small animal with red marbles for eyes and pointy white teeth. “Tomorrow,” whispered Rebecca, “we’ll go to Coney Island. But only if you give Lecha a kiss.”

  Rebecca opened the door. Lecha sat by the window. She turned her milky eye to Dov.

  “Rivkah,” she said. “Doveleh. Give your aunt a kiss.”

  Dov crossed the room slowly and grudgingly kissed Lecha on her yellow cheek, his lips brushing the sharp black hairs that grew from a mole above her lips.

  “That’s a kiss?” Rebecca scolded lightly. She sat down, and she and Lecha began talking in Yiddish. Dov sat down on a big purple chair. A train roared by, and dust blew through the open window.

  He felt guilty and angry. Maybe someday he would kill all the Nazis in the world, and then God would forgive him for finding Tante Lecha disgusting. My grandmother is a murderer, Dov Taylor thought. Maybe someday I’ll be a murderer, too.

  Book One

  Chapter 1 Forty-seventh Street, Manhattan

  Friday, September 3

  The Present

  THE CUTTER EMERGED from the subway on Forty-seventh Street and Sixth Avenue. Like many of the men coming out of the ground with him that autumn afternoon, he wore the bord un payes, the beard and sidelocks, that marked the ultra-observant Hasidic Jew.

  But he was not a Hasid.

  Like the men around him, he was headed for a small office in the largest diamond market in the world.

  But his business was quite diffe
rent from theirs.

  In his right pocket, instead of a little parcel of sparkling stones, a diamond loupe, or a prayer book, was the knife that he had spent the long night sharpening. And during that long night, he had pondered the question: Could good come from evil?

  Didn’t the Holy One drown the Egyptian hosts in the Red Sea? Didn’t He smite their firstborn? Didn’t Jael cave in Sisera the Canaanite’s head with a hammer? And didn’t all Israel call her a heroine?

  So didn’t God Himself use evil to achieve His ends?

  When the Cutter was a child in the camps, didn’t the old rabbi tell him that God was testing His people? That the death all around him was a prelude to the coming of the Messiah?

  As a member of the Irgun in 1947, fighting for the unborn state of Israel, wasn’t the dynamite holy that the Cutter used to blow up the King David Hotel? Didn’t Menachem Begin himself, then a terrorist, later the prime minister, tell the Cutter, then barely in his teens, that those English soldiers who had died in the blast were small potatoes, of no consequence? That the Cutter had struck a blow for the land of Israel?

  And all those throats he had cut for Branch 40 of the Mossad, the Israeli secret service’s covert operations arm, wasn’t that blood shed to keep His children safe?

  And wasn’t his current errand like those? Weren’t these Hasidim a cancer on the body of Israel?

  The Cutter felt himself floating above his body. He watched himself—a tall, pale, hollow-cheeked figure—glide past the Merchant’s Bank of New York, past the shops with the signs in their windows: “Discount Solitaires,” “We Buy Old Silver and Diamonds,” “Diamond and Jewelry Appraisal.” He passed Coopers & Jacobs, Sideman’s, Freeman’s, and Katz’s Jewelry. He saw himself moving through the crowded, narrow street, surrounded by bearded men in black coats who looked like ghosts from some nineteenth-century ghetto. They were Orthodox Jews and Hasidic Jews, Forty-seventh Street’s diamond dealers, diamond buyers, diamond brokers, diamond cutters, diamond polishers, and diamond setters. They pushed their way down the street, their heads down, the little black leather purses they carried containing hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of gems. They huddled in twos and threes, meeting old friends and making new ones. Gossiping. Doing business. Buying and selling. Keeping the stones—“the goods,” as they called them—moving. Making profits both large and small. It was called hondeling, bargaining.