BUTCH KARP PAUSED OUTSIDE THE IL BUON PANE BAKERY ON the corner of Third Avenue and Twenty-ninth Street. Crouching so that he was mostly hidden by a pair of elegant multitiered wedding cakes in the big storefront window, he peered between them to catch a glimpse of the old couple working behind the counter.
Neither was much more than five feet tall, though the man had a couple of inches on his wife. He had a full head of kinky gray hair that looked like a cap of steel wool with two large ears protruding. Her hair was ginger-colored and framed an elfin face with merry blue eyes.
Moishe and Goldie Sobelman were in their eighties, but they were sprightly and animated as they interacted with their customers. Karp’s smile faded when he saw them coincidentally extend their arms toward customers at the same time. He noted the purple blemishes on their forearms, knowing the discolorations were old tattooed numbers placed there by monsters more than fifty years earlier.
Moishe did most of the talking to the steady stream of customers, although Goldie interacted in her own special way. Without speaking a word, she would smile as a hungry visitor walked up, and she would point to one delicious treat or another in the display case. Invariably, the customer would nod and grin.
Karp had never once seen a customer shake his head and order something else. He wondered if it was because she knew them and they always ordered the same thing or she just had a sense for what someone might like that particular morning. As he watched, he corrected himself about whether Goldie spoke or not. Maybe not with her voice, but she was constantly talking with her hands, which flitted around like barn swallows in a combination of American Sign Language and her own interpretations.
Moishe spoke to her and signed with his own hands. But he really spoke to her with his eyes, which followed her every move as if he was looking at a beautiful painting for the first time. Every so often, she would glance over at him and wink; then they’d both laugh.
Now, there’s real love, Karp thought. And it was a love that they turned around and poured into their work, a love their customers returned.
It was always a wonder to him that the Sobelmans had any love for humanity. Goldie was the sole member of her family to survive the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. There was no physical reason she couldn’t talk, nor was she deaf, but for more than sixty years, she had refused to speak. “She is afraid that once she started recounting the horrors of what they did to her in their ‘medical’ experiments, she would not be able to stop screaming,” Moishe once told him. “And she doesn’t want to sully the world by recalling their evil.”
Gentle Moishe was one of the few survivors of the infamous Nazi death camp at Sobibor in Poland. He and a few hundred of his fellow prisoners had staged one of the only “successful” concentration-camp uprisings and fled into the forests. However, they’d been hunted down like animals, and most of those who got away died fighting their former tormentors. Sobibor itself had been bulldozed shortly after the revolt in an attempt by the Germans to cover up their atrocities.
Karp had asked his friend how they could now exhibit so much love for their fellow men. “We will never forget and never forgive those who did what they did to us,” the old man had replied. “But you can’t blame all of mankind for the acts of individuals, even a nation of individuals. And if we’d let our experiences define the rest of our lives, then the Nazis would have claimed two more victims. Goldie and I are not going to give them the satisfaction. Instead, we will love each other and try every day to see the good in other people—that is how we will get our revenge on the cursed Nazi ghosts.”
As Karp looked through the window outside the shop, Goldie suddenly turned toward him with a smile, as if she’d expected to see him drooling over the pastries like a little boy. She waved him toward the door.
Her hands flew as he entered the shop. He caught “Good morning” and “Wonderful to see you” and tried to sign the same thing back, though he knew his signing was woefully inadequate. Still, she clapped her hands and tapped her husband on the shoulder to get his attention.
“Good morning, Butch! Shalom!” Moishe exclaimed in his lightly accented English as his face creased into a thousand smile lines. “You’re early. The others aren’t here yet.”
Karp laughed. “Well, I have a confession to make. I had a sudden craving that wouldn’t wait for—”
Before he could finish the sentence, Goldie was handing a gigantic piece of cherry-cheese coffee cake over the counter to him. The sight of the warm, gooey pastry stopped him in mid-speech, something hundreds of defense attorneys had never been able to accomplish.
“I see,” Moishe said, and nodded. “Trying to get a jump on the competition.” He pointed to the doorway leading to a larger seating area. “The usual table has been reserved for the Sons of Liberty Breakfast Club and Girl-Watching Society. I’ll send one of the girls back with a pot of coffee. I’ll join you in a moment when the rush has died down a bit.”
“Take your time,” Karp said with a chuckle. “I probably won’t be very good company until I’ve inhaled every last crumb.”
“Enjoy,” Moishe replied. Then his smile faded for a moment and was replaced with a look of concern as he glanced over his shoulder at Goldie, who was occupied with a customer. “There is something I would like to discuss with you before the others arrive, if possible. It’s probably nothing, but you have more experiences with these things, so I would like your opinion.”
Karp frowned and started to ask what was wrong, but his friend had turned around to join his wife. So he headed back to the table and soon was happily savoring the coffee cake.
Five minutes later, he had just finished the last morsel when Moishe appeared, wiping his hands on his flour-dusted apron. He saw the empty plate. “Would you like another? On the house?”
Karp shook his head. “No, thank you. My mouth says yes, but my stomach doesn’t have any space left. And if Marlene found out I had two pieces, I wouldn’t be allowed to eat for a week just to make up for the calories.”
“Ach, who cares about calories?” Moishe dismissed the statement with a wave of his hand. “You look very fit and trim. And besides, once a man has reached a certain . . . maturity, he should be allowed a few transgressions against the almighty American obsession with weight.”
“Well, thanks for the compliment, and all I can say is this blazer hides a lot,” Karp said with a chuckle. “But regrettably, I still have to decline the generous offer.” He pushed the plate away and took a sip of coffee. “So tell me, what’s troubling you?”
Moishe sat down with a sigh. “It’s probably nothing,” he said. “Just the paranoia of an old man who has seen too much.”
Karp knew that was no exaggeration. The concentration camp and the hardscrabble days following World War II before he was allowed to immigrate to the United States had been a terrible ordeal. But more recently, Moishe had been worshiping inside the Third Avenue Synagogue when suicide bomber Jamal Khalifa blew himself up and killed a dozen more innocent men “for Allah.”
“I think you’ve earned the right to be suspicious,” Karp said. “Go on.”
Moishe leaned back in his chair so he could see that his wife was still behind the counter. He turned back to face Karp. “I think my store is being watched.”
“What makes you think that?”
The old man shrugged. “A hunch? A gut feeling about people with bad intentions?” He paused and absentmindedly rubbed the tattoo on his arm. “We’ve been lucky. We’ve only been robbed once, and Goldie made him feel so ashamed by offering him an apricot strudel with the money that he left without taking anything except the strudel. My Goldie, she has that kind of effect on people. But there have been others—it’s almost as if they give off a smell that I can detect—and you know they’re thinking about robbing you, or worse.”
Leaning forward, the old man continued in a low voice. “I am not as trusting as Goldie. I have recently purchased a gun . . .” He stopped. “We’ve never talked about this—you are not one of those authorities, like the former district attorney, who believes that private citizens should not have guns to protect themselves.”
Karp shook his head. “Absolutely not. Even if I thought it wasn’t a good idea, I believe that the right to own firearms is an individual right, guaranteed by the Second Amendment, not a favor granted by a state or the federal government.”
“Ah, yes, but what about these gun-control advocates who say that the Second Amendment only applies to the creation of militias?”
“Moishe, I’d say that is a politically motivated, insincere argument,” Karp replied.
“How do you mean?
“Let’s go back to the founding of this country,” Karp said. “America was a frontier nation. People needed weapons for their safety, particularly those on the edges of that frontier, which was about where the Appalachian Mountains are. Pretty close to home. Also, the patriots who fought for independence were reluctant to ratify the Constitution because they were afraid of a strong central government that might interfere with their precious rights. So, historically, it offends common sense to suggest that the founding patriots would give up the individual right to keep and bear arms. Moreover, the Bill of Rights itself was specifically designed to guarantee the most precious personal rights that the early Americans cherished and did not want to be limited by the government.”
“Should there be any limitations?” Moishe asked.
“I do think that reasonable regulations are acceptable—such as not selling weapons to felons or people with a history of mental illness and violence. Moishe, by the way, I would point out that New York, which has the most stringent gun-control laws in the country, has a far higher rate of gun deaths than states like Colorado or Texas, where guns are more prolific and people have the right to carry concealed weapons with permits.”
“So your argument is both historical and constitutional?” Moishe suggested.
“Yes. The act of protecting one’s life and property, rather than relying on government to do it, is as American as my boyhood hero, John Wayne,” Karp said. “It is an established fact that criminals prey on the weakest members of society. A gun changes the paradigm of who is hunted and who is hunter.”
Moishe nodded. “Good. When I fled Sobibor, I promised that never again would I allow evil men to control my life without fighting back. But only since, well, since the bombing, did I think to arm myself. Perhaps I had grown soft in this beautiful country that welcomed me and Goldie; after all we had been through, this was a safe haven. But the attack on the synagogue woke me as if from a dream, and I remembered that you cannot count on the government to protect you from killers and thugs. I don’t know that if someone in the synagogue had a gun, the terrorist could have been stopped. But maybe he could have been, and twelve good men would not have lost their lives.”
“What does Goldie think about the gun?” Karp asked.
Moishe shrugged. “She doesn’t like it,” he said. “She’s seen enough violence, she says, to last a hundred lifetimes. And she thinks I’m being paranoid about being watched and that if someone wants to rob us, I shouldn’t try to stop them. But honestly, the money I don’t care about. Any man wants what’s in the cash register, he’s welcome to it, and I won’t raise a hand. But I will not stand by and allow someone to hurt Goldie or someone in my shop. Nor, like I said, will I let an evil man raise his hand to me.”
“You and I have no disagreement,” Karp replied. “So, what makes you think that your store is being watched?”
Moishe nodded. “There is a woman, brown hair, maybe forty-five years old, good-looking, but she dresses modestly as though she wants to hide her body. She rarely smiles, though sometimes she seems to respond differently to my Goldie, as does any person who walks through our door. She comes in some mornings with a newspaper that she barely reads, orders a piece of the cherry-cheese coffee cake—just like you—and coffee with lots of sugar.”
“What’s so odd about that?” Karp asked with a smile. “I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again, your cherry cheese coffee cake is the best in the five boroughs and quite possibly the world.”
“I thank you,” Moishe replied, but did not smile in return. “But she hardly touches it, maybe one or two bites, and she leaves the rest.”
Karp shrugged. “Well, personally, I can’t imagine anyone being able to stop themselves once they have that first bite,” he said. “Maybe she’s counting calories—like I should be doing—but she can’t resist having just a taste.”
Moishe looked down at his hands clasped in front of him on the table. “Yes, perhaps you’re right,” he said. “Though if she’s counting calories, why does she use six or seven packages of sugar in her coffee at a sitting? Then again, she’s eastern European or Russian—hard to say, as I’ve hardly heard her speak—and they like sweet coffee. But it’s not what she eats or drinks that troubles me, it’s something more concrete. My staff says she asks a lot of questions when Goldie and I aren’t around.”
“Such as?”
“Such as do we live in the apartment above the shop, which as you know we do.”
“Maybe she’s just interested in historic New York buildings,” Karp pointed out. Il Buon Pane was housed in a two-story redbrick building built at the beginning of the twentieth century, as were its neighbors, a surprising anachronism in midtown Manhattan. “It’s pretty amazing that there are still these—no pun intended—mom-and-pop operations in big, impersonal Gotham City. And this woman might just be an architecture buff.”
“Yes, this is true.” Moishe was quiet for a moment before adding, “But she asked if we worked every day. She made it sound as though she was impressed that two such old people had such energy, but it seems more like spying to me.”
“How often does she come in? Every morning?”
Moishe shook his head. “That’s the other thing. Most of my regular customers have set times that they come in, but not her. Sometimes it’s morning, sometimes afternoon, sometimes just before closing. Not always the same day, and in fact, some weeks she doesn’t come at all.”
“Weeks?” Karp asked, surprised. “How long has she been coming?”
The old man thought for a moment. “I would say several months, off and on.”
Karp pursed his lips. “Is there anything else?”
“So, you think I’m making something out of nothing?”
“No, not at all,” Karp replied. “I’m just in my district-attorney mode and playing a bit of devil’s advocate with you. But that doesn’t mean you’re not right. I was just asking if you had anything else to add.”
“I see,” Moishe said. “And yes, since this woman began coming to the store, there is also a man who watches.”
“A man?”
“Yes. In a neighborhood like this, you know who belongs, who is passing through, and who is maybe up to no good. Sometimes when I am outside, sweeping the sidewalk or returning from an errand or the synagogue, I have seen him.”
“Can you describe him?”
“A large man but otherwise not unusual. What was unusual is that one day, I watched as the woman left the shop and walked across the street, where he appeared to be reading a newspaper. She stood near him, and though she made no obvious gestures, nor did he, I know she said something to him. He nodded—just a little bit—but it was in agreement to what she told him.”
Karp took a sip of his coffee and considered. He didn’t think Moishe was just being paranoid. You don’t survive a concentration camp and being hunted by Nazis and terrorists without developing a heightened sense of awareness regarding danger, he reasoned. Then again, the explosion in the synagogue shook him up big time; he could be a little gun-shy.
It was possible that the man and the woman were casing the shop for a robbery. Il Buon Pane certainly did a lot of cash business. However, if Moishe was right and they’d been watching for months . . . strong-arm robbers were rarely patient enough to watch a target so long.
“Have you talked to Goldie about it?”
“Not really. Oh, I’ve asked her about the woman, just innocently, but Goldie thinks the best of everyone. She told me that there is pain in the woman’s eyes, and she believes that she has been abused in the past. I’m sure if she heard me now, she’d be convinced that I am jumping at shadows. But you know, Butch, you’re not paranoid if they really are after you.”
Karp nodded. “Well, tell you what, I’m going to ask Clay Fulton—you remember him, big NYPD detective who works out of my office—to see if we can’t get a few extra patrols through here and send a detective over who can maybe contact these people and see what they’re up to. You have my phone numbers. If this woman comes in or you spot the man, give me a call.”
Moishe held up his hand to protest. “That won’t be necessary. I was asking your opinion on whether I am being a silly old man. I don’t want to impose or ask for special privileges just because the esteemed district attorney of New York is my dear friend.”
“Nonsense,” Karp said, reaching out to pat his friend on the shoulder. “It’s probably nothing. This city is full of people who march to their own drummer. But I’m a firm believer in paying attention to gut feelings. Let’s not take a chance that these two are looking to get their hands on your cash register. If we prevent a crime from happening, then we’re ahead of the game.”
Moishe smiled and wiped at a tear that had appeared in the corner of his eye. “Thank you. I would insist that it is too much. But I do worry about Goldie if I am away on an errand or at the synagogue.”
At that moment, a half-dozen older men appeared in the doorway. Moishe patted Karp’s hand and stood up. “It appears the Breakfast Club has arrived. I’d better make sure the coffeepots are filled.”
Several of the men were already arguing as they walked over to the table where Karp sat. “What is the point of contention this morning, gentlemen?” he asked.
“The concept of American Exceptionalism,” said one. “Care to chime in?”
“Love to,” Karp replied with a grin. “It’s a favorite of mine.”