CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I MADE THE CALL to Epstein from a pay phone on Second Avenue outside an Indian restaurant that was offering an all-you-can-eat buffet that nobody wanted to eat, so in an effort to drum up business a sad-faced man in a bright polyester shirt had been posted at the door to hand out flyers that nobody wanted to read. It was raining softly, and the flyers hung damply from his hand.
“I’ve been expecting your call,” said Epstein, once he had identified himself.
“For a long time, from what I hear,” I replied.
“I take it that you’d like to meet.”
“You take it right.”
“Come to the usual place. Make it late. Nine o’clock. I look forward to seeing you again.”
Then he hung up.
I was staying in an apartment at Twentieth and Second, just above a locksmith’s store. It extended over two decent-size rooms, with a separate kitchen that had never been used, and a bathroom that was just wide enough to accommodate a full rotation of the human body, as long as the body in question kept his arms at his sides. There was a bed, a couch, and a couple of easy chairs, and a TV with a DVD player but no cable. There was no phone, which was why I’d called Epstein from a pay phone. Even then, I’d stayed on the line for only the minimum time required to arrange our meeting. I had already taken the precaution of removing the battery from my cell phone, and had bought a temporary replacement from a drugstore.
I picked up some pastries from the bakery next door, then went back to the apartment. The landlord was sitting on a chair to the right of the living room window. He was cleaning a SIG pistol, which was not what landlords usually did in their tenants’ apartments, unless the landlord in question happened to be Louis.
“So?” he said.
“I’m meeting him tonight.”
“You want company?”
“A second shadow wouldn’t hurt.”
“Is that a racist remark?”
“I don’t know. You do minstrel songs?”
“Nope, but I brought you a gun.” He reached into a leather bag and tossed a small pistol on the couch.
I removed the gun from its holster. It was about seven inches long, and weighed, it seemed, less than two pounds.
“Kimber Ultra Ten Two,” said Louis. “Ten-shot box magazine. Rear corner of the butt is sharp, so watch it.”
I put the gun back in its holster and handed it to him.
“You’re kidding,” he said.
“No, I’m not. I want my license to carry back. I get caught with an unregistered firearm, and I’m done. They’ll flay me alive, then toss what’s left in the sea.”
Angel appeared from the kitchen. He had a pot of coffee in one hand.
“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.”