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.
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.