Then the manager stepped to the microphone and smiled and said that Mr. Carmody would now be signing books. “Because of the large turnout,” the manager said, “Mr. Carmody will not be able to personalize each book. Otherwise many of you would have a long wait.” Carmody thanked everybody for coming on such a frigid night and there was warm, loud applause. He sat down at the table, and sipped from a bottle of Poland Spring water.
He signed the first three books on the frontispiece, and then a woman named Peggy Williams smiled and said, “Could you make an exception? We didn’t go to school together, but we went to the same school twenty years apart. Could you mention that?”
He did, and the line slowed. Someone wanted him to mention the Dodgers. Another, Coney Island. One man wanted a stickball reference, although he was too young to ever have played that summer game. “It’s for my father,” he explained. There was affection in these people, for this place, this neighborhood, which was now their neighborhood. But Carmody began to feel something else in the room, something he could not see.
“You must think you’re hot shit,” said a woman in her fifties. She had daubed rouge on her pale cheeks. “I’ve been in this line almost an hour.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and tried to be light. “It’s almost as bad as the Motor Vehicle Bureau.”
She didn’t laugh.
“You could just sign the books,” she said. “Leave off the fancy stuff.”
“That’s what some people want,” he said. “The fancy stuff.”
“And you gotta give it to them? Come on.”
He signed his name on the title page and handed it to her, still smiling.
“Wait a minute,” she said, holding the book before him like a summons. “I waited a long time. Put in, ‘For Gerry’ — with a G — ‘who waited on line for more than an hour.’”
She laughed then too, and he did what she asked. The next three just wanted signatures, and two just wanted “Merry Christmas” and then a collector arrived and Carmody signed six first editions. He was weary now, his mind filling with images of Molly Mulrane and Seanie’s face and injuries he had caused so long ago. All out there somewhere. And still the line trailed away from the table, into a crowd that, without his glasses, had become a multicolored smear, like a bookcase.
The woman came around from the side aisle, easing toward the front of the line in a distracted way. Carmody saw her whisper to someone on the line, a young man who made room for her with the deference reserved for the old. She was hatless, her white hair cut in girlish bangs across her furrowed brow. She was wearing a short down coat, black skirt, black stockings, mannish shoes. The coat was open, showing a dark rose sweater. Her eyes were pale.
Holy God.
She was six feet away from him, behind two young men and a collector. A worn leather bag hung from her shoulder. A bag so old that Carmody remembered buying it in a shop in the Village, next door to the Eighth Street Bookshop. He remembered it when it was new, and so was he.
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.