“You think whoever killed Wallace tortured him to find out his taste in music?” he said. “He was cut so that he’d tell what he’d learned about you.”
“We don’t know that for sure.”
“Yeah, like we don’t know evolution for sure, or climate change, or gravity. He was killed in your old house, while investigating you, and then someone signed off on it in blood. Pretty soon, that someone is going to try to do to you what was done to Wallace.”
“That’s why Louis is going to stick with me tonight.”
“Yeah,” said Louis, “’cause if I get caught with a gun, then it’s okay. Black man always slides on gun charges.”
“I heard that,” said Angel. “I think it’s a self-defense thing: brother-on-brother crime.”
He took the bag of pastries, tore it open, and laid it on the small, scarred coffee table. Then he poured me a cup of coffee, and took a seat beside Louis as I told them everything I had learned from Jimmy Gallagher.
The Orensanz Center had not changed since I had last visited it some years earlier. It still dominated its section of Norfolk Street, between East Houston and Stanton, a neo-Gothic structure designed by Alexander Seltzer in the nineteenth century for the arriving German Jews, his vision inspired by the great cathedral of Cologne and the tenets of German romanticism. Then it was known as the Anshei Cheshed, the “People of Kindness,” before that congregation merged with Temple Emanuel, coinciding with the migration of the German Jews from Kleine Deutschland in Lower Manhattan to the Upper East Side. Their place was taken by Jews from eastern and southern Europe, and the neighborhood became a densely populated warren thronged by those who were still struggling to cope with this new world both socially and linguistically. Anshei Chesed became Anshei Slonim, after a town in Poland, and thus it remained until the 1960s, when the building began to fall into disrepair, only to be rescued by the sculptor Angel Orensanz and converted into a cultural and educational center.
I did not know what Rabbi Epstein’s connection to the Orensanz Center was. Whatever status he enjoyed, it was unofficial, yet powerful. I had seen some of the secrets that the center hid below its beautiful interior, and Epstein was the keeper of them.
When I entered, there was only an old man sweeping the floor. I stared at him. He had been there when last I visited, and he had been sweeping then too. I gues R a too. I gsed that he was always there: cleaning, polishing, watching. He looked at me and nodded in recognition.
“The rabbi is not here,” he said, instinctively understanding that there could be no other reason for my presence in this place.
“I called him,” I said. “He’s expecting me. He’ll be here.”
“The rabbi is not here,” he repeated with a shrug.
I took a seat. There didn’t seem to be any point in prolonging the argument. The old man sighed, and went back to his sweeping.
Half an hour passed, then an hour. There was no sign of Epstein. When at last I stood to leave, the old man was seated at the door, his broom held upright between his knees like a banner held aloft by some ancient, forgotten retainer.
“I told you,” he said.
“Yeah, you did.”
“You should listen better.”
“I get that a lot.”
He shook his head sorrowfully. “The rabbi,” he said, “he does not come here so much now.”
“Why?”
“He has fallen out of favor, I think. Or perhaps it is too dangerous for him now, for all of us. It is a shame. The rabbi is a good man, a wise man, but some say that what he does is not fit for this, this Bet Shalom.”
He must have noticed my puzzlement. “A house of peace,” he explained. “Not Sheol. Not here.”
“Sheol?”
“Hell,” he said. “Not here. No longer here.”
And he tapped his foot meaningfully on the floor, indicating the hidden places beneath. When last I had visited the Orensanz Center, Epstein had shown me a cell beneath the basement of the building. In it, he had secured a thing that called itself Kittim, a demon who wished to be a man, or a man who believed himself to be a demon. Now, if what the old man was saying was true, Kittim was gone from this place, banished along with Epstein, his captor.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Bevakashah,” he replied. “Betakh ba-Adonai va’asei-tov.”
I left him there, and stepped outside into the cold spring sunlight. I had come here for nothing, it seemed. Epstein was no longer comfortable being at the Orensanz Center, or the center was no longer willing to countenance his presence. I looked around, half expecting to see him waiting nearby, but there was no sign of him. Something had happened: he was not coming. I tried to pick out Louis, but there was no trace of him either. Still, I knew he was close. I walked down the steps and headed toward Stanton. After a minute, I felt someone begin to fall into step beside me. I looked to my left and saw a young Jewish man wearing a skullcap and a loose-fitting leather jacket. He kept his right hand in his jacket pocket. I thought I could discern the gun sight of a small pistol digging into the material. Behind me, another young man was shadowing my footsteps. They both looked strong and fast.
“You took your time in there, &rdq R an there, &uo; said the man to my left. He had the slightest hint of an accent. “Who knew you had such patience?”
“I’ve been working on it,” I said.
“It was much needed, I hear.”
“Well, I’m still working on it, so maybe you’d like to tell me where we’re going.”
“We thought you might like to eat.”
He steered me onto Stanton. Between a deli that didn’t appear to have brought in fresh stock since the previous summer, judging by the number of dead insects scattered among the bottles and jars in the window, and a tailor who seemed to regard silk and cotton as passing fads that would ultimately bow down before artificial fibers, was a small kosher diner. It was dimly lit, with four tables inside, the wood dark and scarred by decades of hot coffee cups and burning cigarettes. A sign on the glass in Hebrew and English announced that it was closed.
Only one table was occupied. Epstein sat in a chair facing the door, his back to the wall. He was wearing a black suit, with a white shirt and a black tie. A dark overcoat dangled from a hook behind his head, topped by a narrow-brimmed black hat, as though their occupant were not sitting below them but had recently dematerialized, leaving only his clothing as evidence of his previous existence.
One of the young men took a chair and carried it outside, then took a seat with his back to the window. His companion, the one who had spoken to me on the street, sat inside but on the opposite side of the door. He did not look back at us.