Some of his Jewish friends told him he was a closet goy. He told them he was also a closet Jew. It was Meyer’s belief that Israel was not the homeland, but a foreign country. He was dedicated to the concept that Israel must survive and, in fact, endure—but there was never any question in his mind that he was first an American, next a Jew, and never an Israeli. He knew that Israel had accepted within its besieged boundaries homeless Jews from all over the world—but he never forgot that America was accepting homeless Jews long before Israel was even a dream. So yes, he had given money to plant trees in Israel. And yes, he hated with all the passion in his soul the acts of terrorism against that tiny nation. And yes, he longed to see those biblical places he knew of only from the days of his youth, when he was going to heder six days a week and was, in fact, the most brilliant Hebrew student in the class. He was pleased that Christmas and Hanukkah fell on the same day this year. He suspected in his heart of hearts, anyway, that all religious holidays had been agrarian holidays centuries ago; it was no accident that Easter and Passover came so close together each year and sometimes—as with this celebration—fell on exactly the same day. Lou Moscowitz, who was a detective/2nd on the squad, told Meyer he was no longer a real Jew. Meyer Meyer was a real Jew with every fiber of his being. He was just his own kind of real Jew.
The burglar had indeed done a lovely number in the Feinberg house. As the detectives went through it, itemizing the stolen goods, they discovered that many more items had been taken than Feinberg had originally surmised. The premise that the burglar had backed a truck into the driveway now seemed entirely plausible. He had even stolen the boys’ bicycles from the garage and had taken the younger boy’s prize collection of Queen albums. The loss of the albums seemed to distress the kid more than the loss of his new movie camera, a Christmas gift he had left under the tree after opening it. The family’s original outrage at the theft was giving way to a numbed sense of loss that had nothing whatever to do with the value of the goods. Someone had been inside this house. An unwelcome intruder had entered and pillaged, and the most valuable thing he’d stolen was the family’s sense of inviolate privacy. Since the detectives lacked any real knowledge of whether the burglar had been armed with either explosives or a deadly weapon, the crime seemed to be third-degree burglary: “Knowingly entering or remaining unlawfully in a building with intent to commit a crime therein.” But the criminal law language was hardly adequate to define the crime that had been committed against the Feinbergs. They would none of them forget this day as long as they lived. For years to come they would tell about the man who had come into their house on Christmas Day, the same day as Hanukkah that year—and of what had happened to the two detectives ten minutes after they left the scene of the crime.
Meyer and O’Brien’s attention might not have been captured by the moving van had this not been Christmas Day. The van was parked on a side street some fifteen blocks from the Feinberg house and indeed well outside the stone walls that circumscribed the Smoke Rise development. The left rear tire of the van, the one away from the snowbanked curb, was flat. A man wearing a brown leather jacket and a blue woolen watch cap was changing the tire. A tire iron and a lug wrench were on the partially scraped pavement beside him. When they saw the van, neither Meyer nor O’Brien said a word to each other about a moving company working on Christmas Day. They had no need to. Meyer, who was driving, pulled the unmarked sedan into the curb behind the van. Both men got out of the car, one from each side of it. The pavement was still slippery with patches of hardened snow the plows had missed. Their breaths feathered from their mouths as they approached the man lifting the spare tire into place.
“Need any help?” Meyer asked.
“No, I’m fine,” the man said. He was in his late twenties, Meyer guessed, a white man with a rather pale complexion that seemed almost chalky against the darkness of his eyes and the black mustache under his nose. The lettering on the side of the truck read CULBERTSON MOVING AND TRUCKING COMPANY. The license plate was a commercial plate from the next state.
“Got you working on Christmas Day, huh?” O’Brien said casually.
“Yeah, you know how it is,” the man said.
“Must be an important load,” Meyer said. “Sent you to pick it up on Christmas.”
“Listen, what’s it to you?” the man said. “I got a flat here, I’m trying to change it, why don’t you just fuck off, huh?”
“Police officers,” O’Brien said, and was reaching into his pocket for his shield when the pistol appeared in the man’s hand. The move took them both by surprise. Not many crib burglars—as house and apartment burglars were called—carried weapons. The man committing a burglary at night, especially in a residence where there was a human being at the time, ran the risk of the heaviest burglary rap and might well be armed, even if the gun charge would lengthen his stay in prison. If they’d expected any show of violence—and they truly hadn’t—it might have come by way of a sudden grab for the tire iron on the pavement. But the man reached under his jacket, instead, and the gun appeared in his hand, a .38-caliber pistol pulled from the waistband of his trousers and aimed directly at Meyer now.
The gun went off before Meyer could react and draw his own pistol. The man fired twice, both shots taking Meyer in the leg and knocking him to the pavement. O’Brien’s gun was in his hand at once. He had no time to think that it was happening to him again. He thought only, My partner is down, and then he saw the man turning the gun toward him, and he fired instantly, catching him in the shoulder, and then fired again as the man toppled over, the second bullet taking him in the chest. The gun still in his right hand, O’Brien knelt over the wounded man, grabbed for the handcuffs at his belt in a clumsy left-handed pull, and then rolled him over with no concern for the wounds pouring blood and cuffed his hands behind his back. Out of breath, he turned to Meyer, who lay on the street with one leg buckled under him.
“How you doing?” he asked.
“Hurts,” Meyer said.
O’Brien went into the car and pulled the radio mike from the dashboard. “This is Eight-Seven-Four,” he said, “on Holmsby and North. Police officer down. I need an ambulance.”
“Who’s this?” the dispatcher said.
“Detective O’Brien.”
As if the dispatcher hadn’t already guessed.
The nearest hospital to Smoke Rise was Mercy General on North and Platte. There, as a holy crucifix of nuns fluttered about him in the emergency room, an intern slit Meyer’s left trouser leg on both sides, looked at the two holes in his leg—one in the thigh, the other just below the kneecap—and phoned upstairs for immediate use of an operating room. The burglar who’d shot Meyer was afforded the same meticulous care—all God’s creatures, large and small. By 1:00 that Christmas afternoon, both were doing fine in separate rooms on the sixth floor. A patrolman was posted outside the burglar’s room, but that was the only difference.
The burglar’s name was Michael Addison. In the van he’d stolen from the Culbertson parking lot in the next state, the police found not only the loot from the Feinberg job but also the flotsam and jetsam of several other burglaries he’d committed that day. Addison refused to admit anything. He said he was a sick man, and he wanted a lawyer. He said he was going to sue O’Brien personally and the city corporately for having shot an innocent person trying to change a tire. O’Brien, leaning over his bed, whispered to him that if his partner came out of this a cripple, Addison had better move to China.