Chapter 6

Lerner conducted the interrogation in a small dingy room on the third floor of the precinct. Hawkins and Ableson sat to the side, Hawkins close to the wall, a little in the shadows of the room. Ableson watched his friend. He could see the tension in his back, and Ableson knew what he was thinking. This man—Juan Comera was his name—had seen the men who killed the boys in the basement. What if he said he saw some old men with black skullcaps and beards? What if he described Levy? Ableson watched Hawkins shift in his chair, trying to relax. He’d known Hawkins so well, and for so many years, he could almost hear the other man’s thoughts.

How much did he really trust Levy, Hawkins would ask himself. Totally would be the answer. Then why was he nervous? Could Levy really kill five young men without a trial or any chance to speak for themselves? Not just kill them, but beat them to death and cover their bodies with mud? Could Levy plan that and then do it? Never, Hawkins would answer. But his body still wouldn’t relax.

Lerner started the interrogation.

“What kind of car did you see?” Lerner asked Comera.

“It was a van, not a car. A green Dodge van,” Comera answered. He was twenty-­four. He was wearing clean chinos and a blue sport shirt that had been washed, ironed, and mended too many times.

“What about the plates?”

“I couldn’t get the number,” Comera said, “but I think they were New York. They were orange and black like ours.”

Lerner nodded. Hawkins shifted in his chair.

“Can you tell us any more about the van?”

Comera shook his head. “Only that it had curtains; a lot of them do. I don’t know what color.”

Good, Ableson thought. The man was a clear, to-­the-point witness.

“Fine,” Lerner said encouragingly. “Now just tell us what happened. Everything you can remember. And try not to leave anything out, no matter how silly or insignificant it seems.”

Comera nodded. “Where do you want me to start?”

“What made you look out of the window in the first place?”

“Noise,” Comera said.

“What time was it when you first heard it?”

Comera said, “About five-­thirty. I work in the Bond Factory in Long Island City. I get out at four-­thirty, it takes about forty minutes to get home. My sisters and father weren’t home yet. My mother was in the kitchen, and I’d opened a beer and turned on the TV. The local news. They were talking about the weather, which was lousy, and the traffic, and I fell asleep—at least I think I fell asleep—and when I first heard the noise I thought I was dreaming about home. I’m from Ponce,” he said, “in Puerto Rico. Outside the town. And a lot of the people there keep their own animals. Pigs, chickens, a cow or two. And in the fall they’d slaughter them and you could hear the noise they’d make. And I hear this noise like animals screaming . . .”

Ableson looked at Hawkins. He was leaning forward in his chair.

“. . . and I think I’m dreaming that I’m back in Ponce and someone’s killing pigs outside. But I open my eyes, see the TV, and I know I’m in Brooklyn, not Ponce. Only I still hear that noise.”

“You went to the window then?”

“No,” Comera said.

“Why not?”

“I was scared.” Hawkins didn’t move, the tape slid through the recorder.

Lerner prompted, “But finally . . .”

“Yeah, finally I did,” Comera said. “But I kept down, right at the sill.”

“Why?” Lerner asked.

“You wouldn’t ask that if you’d heard the noise; I didn’t know what was going on or who was doing it, and I didn’t want anyone out there to know I was watching.”

“What did you see?”

“The van, and three guys standing on the sidewalk.”

“Describe them, please.”

Hawkins looked out of the window and Comera said, “Two were short, one was tall. Very tall. They were wearing plastic raincoats, the kind that fit in a bag, and rain hats, like sailors or fishermen wear.”

“Slicker hats?” Lerner asked.

“Yeah.”

“Did you see their faces?”

Ableson forced himself not to watch Hawkins.

“No,” Comera said and Ableson heard Hawkins shift in his chair.

“Not at all?” Lerner asked.

Comera shook his head. “But I think they were white.”

“Had the noise stopped?”

“No, man, it went on and on. Not just yelling . . . wood split, glass broke, stuff crashed. I thought that house would fall down.”

“So the rest were still in the basement.”

“What rest?” Comera said. “There was one more guy.”

Ableson and Hawkins looked at each other.

“One man caused all that racket?” Lerner asked.

“That’s all I saw.”

Lerner thought, then said, “Maybe the rest didn’t leave until you stopped watching.”

“No. I saw them drive away and no one else came out.”

No one knew what to ask next. Then Lerner said, “Go back to when the noise stopped.”

“It just stopped. Like a stuck horn stops. Then the three on the sidewalk go down the stairs and I couldn’t see them. Then they come up in a minute, and there’s four of them.”

“Could you see the fourth man’s face?”

“No. He was wearing a big plastic poncho with a hood pulled down.”

“Then what?”

“They opened the van panel, helped the fourth guy in, then they got in and drove away.”

“Why did they help the fourth man? Was he hurt?”

“I don’t think so. I think he was just big and clumsy.”

“How big?” The question came from Hawkins. It was the first time he’d said anything.

“Real big,” Comera said, “the tallest of the four.”

“You said one of the three outside was very tall,” Hawkins said.

“The fourth one was even taller.”

“How tall was the third man?” Lerner asked.

Comera considered and looked at Hawkins.

“Maybe as tall as him.”

Lerner said, “Stand up, Roger.”

Hawkins got to his feet. He looked enormous in the low-­ceilinged room.

“Try to see him in relation to the van,” Lerner said. “Was the third man that tall?”

“Yes,” Comera said softly, staring at Hawkins. He looked scared.

“And the fourth man was even bigger?”

Comera didn’t answer; he was still staring at Hawkins.

“How tall are you, man?” he asked.

“Six three,” Hawkins said.

“Oh God,” Comera moaned. “Oh my God, the fourth one was bigger . . .” He held his arms wide to show them how much, then he looked at the spread and widened it even further. “Two feet . . . oh my God . . . three feet.”

Pescado shut off the recorder and looked at Hawkins. His face was red and he was holding a peeled orange in one hand.

“I came all the way from Brooklyn to hear this shit,” he said. “And it’s total shit. No one’s nine feet tall.”

“Maybe he was only eight three,” Hawkins said mildly. He still had the headache and everything in the room looked out of focus. He’d tried to call Levy three times, but Luria answered every time and said Levy was sleeping. He’d asked to talk to Rachel then, but Luria said she was busy. Alma kept calling, but he hadn’t called her back, and the speech which he was supposed to give day after tomorrow was only half finished.

“No one’s eight three either,” Pescado said, sectioning the orange as he talked. “You gotta come up with something better than that.” Orange juice dripped on Pescado’s trousers as he leaned forward. “In the first place your witness is lying or crazy. There’s no way one unarmed man could beat five other men to death. No way in the world.”

“Maybe he was armed,” Hawkins said.

“He wasn’t. Did your genius witness see any weapons?”

“No,” Hawkins answered.

“Right. Because there weren’t any.”

“So maybe they took them away or hid them . . .”

“They didn’t. Weapons leave tracks. You know that, Roger. You show me a stab wound, and I can probably tell you if it was made by a butcher knife, a bowie knife, a nail. You hit someone with a baseball bat—it looks like you hit him with a baseball bat.”

“Okay,” Hawkins said warily, “no weapons.”

“Not unless they were made of clay.”

“Is there such a thing?” Hawkins asked.

“I never heard of it,” Pescado answered.

Hawkins was quiet and Pescado opened his copy of the Post. There were pictures of the outside of the clubhouse, and of the basement room after they’d taken the bodies away. Hawkins didn’t look at it. Pescado said, “Roger, one of the boys was torn apart.”

Hawkins remembered the leg on the floor. He closed his eyes and breathed through his mouth.

“How did they do that?”

“I don’t know,” Pescado said. “I never saw anything like it. There’s more.”

“I’m waiting,” Hawkins said quietly. He kept his eyes closed.

“The boys had their knives out. All of them.”

“So?”

“If they had their knives out, they must’ve used them. Right?”

Hawkins didn’t answer.

“But there was no blood on them, Roger.”

Hawkins opened his eyes. “That’s crazy,” he said.

“Yeah, crazy.”

Hawkins tried to think. A man six nine or seven two could look huge on a rainy evening in the street light. There might be weapons that Pescado never heard of . . . maces of wood or clubs made out of clay. But the bloodless knives didn’t make sense, and never would, no matter how many witnesses they found or how much evidence they uncovered. The headache pounded and he stopped thinking and pulled the speech to him. The last paragraph read, “We have to prove more than the cops before us. They just had to prove that they were regular guys because no one believed that they were. We have to prove . . .” He pushed the speech away and picked up the Post. There was a picture of the basement room on page two, and yearbook and communion pictures of the boys. The one who’d cried was Jorge Ortiz; he was fifteen and a freshman in high school. The Post said the funeral was that afternoon, at one.

He called Levy again, but now the line was busy. Why had the boy cried? Because Adam had a father? Or because his wife was pregnant? Hawkins looked closely at the picture. He had been a handsome kid, trying to grow a mustache. He looked again at the clock. It was twelve-ten. He put on his jacket, told Betty, his secretary, she could get him on the car phone in an emergency but that he was going to a funeral and didn’t want to be disturbed.

The church was yellow brick, big and ugly, and looked like it was meant to house a swimming pool. It was in a section of factories and gas stations mixed with asphalt-­sided houses built to fit odd-­shaped lots. A few trees came up through holes cut in cement. The murders made page one in the Post and News, and TV cameras waited at the foot of the church steps to catch the glistening of tears on the mothers’ faces, or even better, on the fathers’.

Hawkins put on the plain sunglasses he kept in the glove compartment; he couldn’t see too well with them, but it was a disguise of sorts. He kept to the side of the steps as he eased his way through the crowd and into the church. The families were in the front; the women were mostly overweight and pretty and they sat together in the first row, weeping and rocking. The men were in the second row. They wore shiny dark jackets with tight shoulders and sleeves that were too short. Hawkins stooped at the end of the row. One man saw him and nudged another, then another, until they were all staring at him. The looks were hostile, and he wondered weakly if it was because he was black or because he was a cop. He also wondered if they’d feel better if they knew how bad his head hurt. He smiled at them, but none of them smiled back and he went to the back of the church and stood to the side, while the priest went through the service for the dead.

The service was in English, but the sermon and eulogies were in Spanish so Hawkins couldn’t understand what they were saying about the dead boys, about death itself. He leaned against a bilious-­yellow stone pillar and looked out over the dark heads of the people. Almost all of them were from San Juan or Ponce, or villages on the coast. They lived within a few blocks of each other, went to the same butchers, vegetable stands, movie houses. They had bright painted plaster statues of the saints at home on false mantels or dressers or windowsills. They had souse for wedding feasts and trumpets for funerals. The trumpet started now, a beautiful moaning sound, and a drum came up under with a slow Caribbean beat. The pallbearers lifted the coffins and came up the aisle toward him, their tight jackets hiked up.

He left the church with the crowd and stood to the side at the top of the stairs as they carried the coffins down the stairs to waiting hearses. Sobbing mothers followed their sons’ coffins, the cameras moved in to catch them coming down, and Hawkins turned and thought he saw Jacob come out of the crowd and head down the street. He didn’t want to attract attention by calling, so he pushed through the crowd and down the stairs to the sidewalk, keeping the mass of people between himself and the cameras. The black-­coated man walked fast toward the subway entrance at the end of the block and Hawkins went after him. He reached the head of the stairs just as the man went through the turnstile and Hawkins ran down the stairs, feeling in his pockets for a token. He didn’t have one and there was no agent on duty to buy one, so he jumped the turnstile and ran into the passage to the westbound trains. The passage was empty. When Hawkins got to the southbound side he saw the man standing at the center of the platform with his back turned. Bare low-watt bulbs shone from the high arched ceiling. Dirty white tile walls caught the light, threw it back, making the air look misty. There were no trains coming, the station was silent and empty except for the two of them, and Hawkins knew as soon as he reached the platform that the man ahead wasn’t Jacob. The man turned slowly, and Isaac Luria faced Hawkins.

“It’s Jacob you want, isn’t it?” Luria asked softly.

Hawkins couldn’t answer.

“You can’t have him,” Luria said, “because he’s leaving you. Right now, he’s saying good-­bye to the shop, to the streets, the people. To you. Say good-­bye back, and I’ll convey the message.”

Tears of desolation filled Hawkins’s eyes behind the flat dark glasses. He saw an empty room with dust balls rolling across a bare floor.

The train pulled in and Luria stood in the open door waiting for Hawkins to say something. When he didn’t, Luria shrugged, “Good-­bye then, Inspector, you should leave us alone now.” The doors closed and the train pulled out of the station.

Hawkins made it from East New York to Flatbush in ten minutes. He stopped at the shop, but the window was empty, the stacks were gone, and so were the little folding table and chairs. He raced around the corner to Sterling and saw the moving van still standing in front of Levy’s building.

He got out of his car and was halfway across the street when something made him turn around. A dark green Dodge van like the one Comera had described was parked three cars ahead of his. He crossed back and went around the front of the van. The license plates were orange and black, like New York plates, except that these were issued by the state of Minnesota, Land of a Thousand Lakes. Without thinking, he went back to his own car, opened the trunk, and found the long flat blade he carried in case he lost his keys or had to open a strange car. He went back to the Dodge, slid the blade between the window and door, felt the blade catch the lock mechanism. He pulled, the lock button popped up, and he opened the door. Two movers came out of the back of the truck and watched him. He sat in the front seat, closed the door, and inhaled. He smelled pine air freshener, stale smoke, and under that something else. A moldy, damp, muddy smell. The pond-­bottom smell he’d never forget. He opened the glove compartment and found the registration. The car was owned by Rachel and Adam Levy. He put the registration back, got out, slid back the rear panel door, and felt the floor. It was slightly damp, as if it had been washed recently. He brushed at the carpet and gray powder came off on his fingers. He took out his handkerchief and wiped it off; it showed up clearly on the white linen.

He knew there was someone behind him, and he turned. It was Levy. He looked at the open van doors, and the gray streaked handkerchief in Hawkins’s hand. He was pale, his yarmulke was pushed off-­center from packing and moving boxes, which he shouldn’t have been doing, and the front of his jacket was covered with dust. Hawkins waited for Levy to look at him, to explain. And if he couldn’t, if there wasn’t any explanation, Levy would talk to him in that quiet voice Hawkins loved listening to. He’d tell him what they’d done, and how. He’d plead for understanding, and Hawkins already knew he would understand. They’d work something out. Levy was old, so were the others. They were mad with grief over Adam. They’d never go to jail. . . . Hawkins waited for Levy to talk. But Levy looked down at the dust on the front of his jacket. He brushed at it, frowning. When he did speak, his voice wasn’t halting or remorseful, it was clear and strong.

“What did you expect?” Levy asked, then he looked right into Hawkins’s eyes without pleading or guilt. “What would you have done?” he asked. He waited, but Hawkins was too stunned to answer. Levy stared at him for a while, then turned and crossed the street. He didn’t look back, and Hawkins watched him until he disappeared into the building.

Hawkins slammed the door of Ableson’s little office. The walls shook.

“Levy did it,” he said.

Ableson didn’t say anything.

“The van belonged to Adam. They tried to clean it up, but this was still there.” Hawkins pulled out the handkerchief. Ableson looked at it, then away.

“They did it,” Hawkins said again.

Ableson nodded.

“Say something,” Hawkins shouted.

“What?” Ableson asked mildly.

“Tell me how you’re going to pin it on them.”

“Tell me how they did it,” Ableson said.

“We’ll find out, Mo. . . .”

“You’ll find out, Roger.”

Hawkins looked murderous. “Get Lerner in here.”

Ableson shook his head. “Adam was a Jew, the kids were Spanish,” Ableson said. “A quarter of the men here’re Jews, ninety percent are white . . . They’ll lose tapes, Roger, reports’ll get filed in the toilet. . . .”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

Ableson went on in the same mild voice, “Those kids killed an innocent man with a pregnant wife and a father who’d been in the camps, and no matter who got them, or how, every man here is glad they’re dead. You understand that, don’t you?” Ableson asked softly.

Hawkins didn’t answer, and Ableson opened his desk drawer and took out a telex sheet. “I found this by accident on Dan Schwartz’s desk this morning.”

He handed it to Hawkins. It was from R & I, a report on a dark green 1980 Dodge van registered in Minnesota to Rachel and Adam Levy. It was dated three days earlier. “Schwartz said he meant to send it through, but he lost it or some shit. He had the grace to blush when he said it. And that’s what’ll happen to everything we get on this case. You want to hang them, Roger? I won’t say you should or shouldn’t, I won’t say how I feel, because I swear to God, I don’t know—but if you really want to hang them, take the report, tape, handkerchief, to that Ivy League bunch in Manhattan.”

He took the cassette out of his drawer and held out both hands to Hawkins, one with the tape, one with the report. “Take it to the WASPs, Roger. Because if you leave it here, you ain’t gonna hang nobody. They killed five kids without a trial, without even a chance to talk for themselves, and they’re gonna walk for it unless you stop them.”

Hawkins didn’t move and Ableson’s hands sank and rested on his desk.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I don’t know what I’d do if I were you.” He lifted the tape and report and held them out again. Hawkins hesitated, then took them and left the office.

“Hello, hello! Who’s there?”

It was Pinchik’s voice, sounding like it used to when Hawkins would call him Friday morning to see if he’d be at Vinnie’s on Friday afternoon.

“What is it?” That was Rose Pinchik in the background.

“Some schmuck calls and doesn’t talk,” Pinchik said to her, then back to the phone, “Whatsa matter, schmuck, you can waste a dime to hear me call you names? Nu? Shmekele . . . paskudnyak . . .” Hawkins almost said it wasn’t a dime, it was eighty cents and he needed help. But he couldn’t talk.

“It’s a breather,” Pinchik told Rose, and he hung up. Hawkins stayed in the phone booth until a woman with a string bag and an umbrella banged on the glass. He showed her his badge and she yelled that that didn’t give him the right to just sit in a phone booth when other people had to make calls. What about the call boxes that were everywhere the public phones should be. He wanted to open the door to tell her that he didn’t have the strength to get up and even though she was a taxpayer she should let him sit here until his legs were steadier. But she banged on the door with her umbrella, and a few people stopped to see what was going on. Hawkins got the phone booth door open and walked stiffly out onto the street.

“He’s drunk,” she yelled at the people who’d stopped. “He’s a cop. I saw his badge, and he’s drunk.” He made it to the wall of the building. It was a variety store and across the street was a sign in Arabic and strips of shiny pastry in the window. He was on Atlantic Avenue and he couldn’t remember how he got there. He couldn’t even remember getting into the phone booth in the first place. “Drunk!” the woman yelled.

The sun was over the Island.

It was morning and he couldn’t remember where he’d spent the night. “And they give him a gun,” she yelled. He kept his head down out of the light. He knew there was a bar half a block away that opened at eight-­thirty. He went inside, out of the sunshine, and went right to the can. To himself he looked like an old black bum in the cloudy mirror over the sink, but Lerner would have to listen to him anyway. He had clout in Brooklyn, in Queens, and most of all in Manhattan with the chief and the mayor, and with or without Lerner’s help he was going to start an investigation like they’d never seen.

He left the bar and found his car on State Street. He drove around the block, back toward the Expressway, but the sun blinded him and he forgot to turn and all at once he was in a little street he couldn’t remember and the sun was so bright he couldn’t see the signs. He kept going and made another turn that he was sure would get him back to Joralemon or Fulton, but instead he was under the Expressway, in the shadow of the bridge. The blocks were very short and he could see the bay to his left. He turned again and there was a stone church on the corner, with people just leaving mass, and across the street was a playground with kids in it, and nuns standing at the gates. Another turn and the bay was to his right. He didn’t know these streets at all. The houses were strange, much poorer than in the Heights, and some looked empty. There was a vacant lot, and through it he could see a grape arbor in the backyard of one house. They made wine in the fall, and fruit brandy, and kept it all in the basement for Easter and for next Christmas. There’d be crucifixes on the walls, and pictures of Jesus with His heart neatly exposed, dripping blood. Hawkins turned and turned again, he drove faster around the corners, up and down the strange streets. He wanted to stop and ask someone to help him but the only people he saw were women wearing black dresses and scarves on their heads. They would be scared of a black man, and they wouldn’t speak English. He tried to find some building or street that looked familiar, but all he found was the church with the steps, and the playground, empty this time.

He turned left doing fifty, the tires screeched, and an old woman jumped out of his way. He pulled over then and made himself breathe evenly until he calmed down. He was in Red Hook somewhere and if he turned left, then left again, and kept going, he’d get back to the Expressway. But he drove straight ahead to the river at the end of the street, left the car in an empty asphalt square, and got out on shaky legs.

He walked out on a sort of dock that was covered with abandoned clay conduits, broken cinder blocks, and steel drums rusting in the sun. The asphalt heaved up from the weather and years of neglect, and he had to walk carefully. There was scree further out on the dock and his feet scraped and slid, but he kept going until he was at the edge of the river where it widened to the bay, and lower Manhattan and all the bridges were to his right.

They were going to walk and he was the only one who could stop them. He could do it. The people on that block hated cops, but they hated Jews more, so they’d talk and he’d get a sane description of the fourth man. If he didn’t, he’d do to the tribe what he’d planned for the kids, he’d find the weak link and push. Dworkin . . . little Dworkin with his soft brown eyes was his man. He’d pull him in at midnight and at six in the morning, at all hours, until the old bastard had his days and nights all mixed up. He’d pull him in on Friday nights and on Saturday morning, and there’d be nothing for him to eat but ham sandwiches. Hawkins grinned. He’d make sure the others knew what was happening and they’d push Dworkin, too, so he’d be getting it from both sides. In a week, a month at the most, the old fart’d break and deal. Jews were good at deals, Hawkins thought nastily, and he’d have his fourth man. The big one in the poncho, the key, and once Hawkins had him, he’d have the rest of them.

It’d be a big case, bigger than Son of Sam. Vigilante Jews Kill Five Spanish Kids. Big news, big time. The case would make Hawkins’s name and, best of all, the whole bunch of lying Holy Rollers would spend the rest of their lives in the can. Levy too. Especially Levy.

The prison barber would shave his beard and cut his hair. He’d wear blue work clothes like Meyer Garfield and he’d live like the rest of the killers. But for how long? How long could a skinny old man with skin like white paper last at Ossining? A year, Hawkins thought, maybe two. He’d die alone in his bunk with the toilet next to him in his cell. Or in that bare yard under the basketball hoop with a circle of murderers, rapists, and thieves for company. . . .

Hawkins bent double like a man with a cramp because he suddenly remembered that when Levy left the barber they’d take him to the showers. They’d strip him like they’d stripped the prisoners in the camps. Then they’d lead him, shivering and frightened, to the stone shower room. They’d give him soap like the SS had given the condemned and he’d stand alone on the cold floor under the shower head like all those other people had done, waiting for water or gas to come out of the holes in the rusting metal. Hawkins groaned again and someone touched his shoulder.

“You okay, man?”

A huge black man squatted next to him. He was sixty and overweight; he was wearing a light gray silk suit, gray silk shirt with a maroon tie, and gray alligator shoes. His face was coarse, deep lines ran down the sides of his mouth, and his hair was powdered with gray. But his eyes were large, soft, and kind, and his hand rested gently on Hawkins’s back.

“You sick, man?” he asked.

Hawkins looked past him and saw a gray Cadillac almost the color of the suit waiting at the end of the dock.

“Hey, boy,” the black man said, rubbing Hawkins’s back gently. “Nothin’ kin be so bad. I’ll git you a drink, a steak, find you a little nookie, you’ll be okay, boy.”

“I’m okay,” Hawkins said.

“No, you ain’t. You in awful condition . . . what happened to you?”

Hawkins looked at the other man’s gentle homely face and said, “A man I love is a murderer, and I can make him pay for it—” he stopped. The man put his hand under Hawkins’s arm and pulled him effortlessly to his feet. He brushed at Hawkins’s jacket.

“A man?” he said. “A lover man, a frien’, what?”

“Like . . . a father,” Hawkins answered.

The man stopped brushing and looked very serious. “You can’t bitch aroun’ with yo’ daddy, boy, no matter what he done.”

The man let Hawkins go, and after a moment Hawkins took the tape and the report out of his pocket. The man watched him closely as he walked to the very edge of the dock. He looked down at the river that ran at his feet, crumpled the report into a ball, drew back his arm, and threw the tape and report out into the river. The tape sank at once. The report fell slower, held up by the wind. It hit the water, bobbed, then blended with the other litter and Hawkins couldn’t see it anymore. Tears he couldn’t control ran down his face and the other man took his arm, clucked with sympathy, and led him gently but insistently off the dock to the sunny street.

Chaim Garfield sat at the kitchen table with half the paper. He hadn’t seen one since the holiday started, or heard the TV or radio. He was hungry, and before the formal cold meal to break the fast of Yom Kippur he had half a bagel smeared with butter and cream cheese and a glass of sweet wine. There would be guests soon, people from his shul who visited him every year at the end of the holiday, and his wife and daughters were arranging platters of cold fish and cheeses and hard-­boiled eggs. One of his sons-­in-­law was across the table from him with the news section, the other had turned on the TV in the small bedroom, and his granddaughter was asleep in her portable crib in the big bedroom. The women talked quietly, the TV noise was only a murmur, and he chewed his bagel and looked out at the river, feeling, as he always did when this holiday was over, a great sense of peace. The feeling bemused him. He’d atoned for sins he hadn’t committed in the name of a God he didn’t like, and he couldn’t understand why the experience gave him peace. He shook his head at his reflection in the window. No one noticed. His son-­in-­law finished the first section of the paper and they traded. The murder of the five boys was on a back page and he read the story.

He wondered how Jacob Levy would feel reading the same story. Maybe he was a vengeful man and the murders satisfied him. But then Garfield thought about the mothers of the dead boys and he tried to weigh the two sets of grief against each other, the mothers’ for their dead sons, and Levy’s for his. He knew he’d never be able to take sides and if he didn’t stop trying he’d wind up feeling so lousy he’d have to go to sleep. Then he noticed the word clay in the story. It reminded him of something and he made himself think about that so he could stop thinking about Jacob Levy and the five mothers. He finished his bagel, had another glass of wine, and tried to think what it reminded him of, but couldn’t. He read the story again. The article said the clay might have been used to express contempt, or as part of some esoteric ritual. Neither made sense to Garfield.

“Did you read the story about the five boys in Brooklyn?” he asked his son-­in-­law.

“Yeah . . . some mess.”

“Dave . . . does the mud or clay remind you of something?”

“How do you mean?”

Garfield shook his head. “I don’t know. Just something . . .”

Dave Schermer shook his head. “Sorry, Pop. I can’t help. Don’t worry, it’ll come to you.”

The doorbell rang. “Oy!” Ada cried, “they’re here. Sara, put on water for tea, Chaim, put on your jacket. . . .” She grabbed the platter, rushed out of the kitchen. Garfield reluctantly folded the paper over the story of the dead Eagles. David was right, he thought. It would come to him in the shower some day, or when he was polishing the ceremonial silver, or saying a brocha. Hours, days, years from now; when he’d stopped thinking about it.

Labor Day weekend ended the best season in the history of Bianco Bros. Notions and Variety, and Louis Bianco decided to take his family to Nova Scotia for three weeks. It was a hot muggy day in the middle of September and he stopped by the store to get his deep-sea-­fishing equipment, which was stored in the basement. The heat had seeped in through the stone walls, and the basement was hot and damp. He collected the rods, reels, and tackle box, then stood for a moment smelling the air. After a long hot spell like this, and when the air was very damp, he thought he could still smell traces of the big bottle of Prince Matchabelli cologne he’d broken thirty-five years ago. The stuff had soaked into the cement floor and the heat and dampness brought it out again. He breathed in. He could smell it all right, and he wondered where Abrams was, and Pearce. He’d meant to call Abrams or write to him. He still had his address in the old leather book they kept next to the phone. But the address was as old as the faint smell around him and Abrams had prob­ably moved away years ago, or maybe died. Pearce was in his seventies, if he was still alive. Speiser was dead and so were most of the men on that list by now, Bianco thought.

“ ‘Hardly a man is yet alive . . .’ ” he said softly. Then he tucked the rods under his arms and carried them and the tackle box up the stairs.

By the time he got back home, the story of the boys’ murder in Brooklyn took up two paragraphs on page thirty of the Post and there was nothing in it about clay.