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.
There was a woman behind the counter. She was probably in her early forties, but in the shadows of the little diner she could have passed for a decade younger. Her hair was very dark, and when I passed her I could see no trace of gray in it. She was also beautiful, and smelled faintly of cinnamon and cloves. She nodded at me, but she did not smile.
I took the seat across from Epstein but turned so that I also had a wall against my back, and could see the door.
“You could have told me that you were persona non grata at the Orensanz Center,” I said.
“I could have, but it would not have been true,” said Epstein. “A decision was made, one that was entirely mutual. Too many people pass through its doors. It was not fair, or wise, to put them at risk. I am sorry to have kept you waiting, but there was a purpose: we were watching the streets.”
“And did you find anything?”
Epstein’s eyes twinkled. “No, but had we ventured farther into the shadows then something, or someone, might have found us. I suspected that you would not come alone. Was I right?”
“Louis is nearby.”
“The enigmatic Louis. It is good to have such friends, but bad to have such need of them.”
The woman brought food to our table: baba ghanoush with small pieces of pita bread; burekas; and chicken cooked with vinegar, olives, raisins, and garlic, with some couscous on the side. Epstein gestured to the food, but I did not eat.
“What?” he said.
“About the Orensanz Cen R aOrensanz ter. I don’t think I believe that you’re on such good terms after all.”
“Really.”
“You don’t have a congregation. You don’t teach. You travel everywhere with at least one gunman. Today you have two. And there was something you said to me, a long time ago. We were talking, and you used the term ‘Jesus Christ.’ None of that strikes me as very orthodox. I can’t help but feel that you might have earned a little disapproval.”
“Orthodox?” He laughed. “No, I am a most unorthodox Jew, but still a Jew. You’re a Catholic, Mr. Parker—”
“A bad Catholic,” I corrected.
“I’m not in a position to make such judgments. Still, I am aware that there are degrees of Catholicism. I fear that there are many more degrees of Judaism. Mine is cloudier than most, and sometimes I wonder if I have spent too long divorced from my own people. I find myself using terms that I have no business using, slips of the tongue that embarrass me, and worse, or entertaining doubts that do not entertain me. So, perhaps it would be true to say that I left Orensanz before I was asked to leave. Would that make you more comfortable?” He gestured once again at the food. “Now eat. It’s good. And our hostess will be offended if you do not taste what she has prepared.”
I hadn’t arranged the meeting with Epstein to play semantic games, or to sample the local cuisine, but he had a way of manipulating conversations to his own satisfaction, and I had been at a disadvantage from the moment I traveled here to meet him. Yet there had been no choice. I could not imagine Epstein, or his minders, permitting an alternative arrangement.
So I ate. I inquired politely after Epstein’s health and his family. He asked about Sam and Rachel, but he did not pry further into our domestic arrangements. I suspected he was well aware that Rachel and I were no longer together. In fact, I now believed that there was little about my life of which Epstein was not aware, and it had always been that way, right from the moment my father approached him about the mark on the man who died beneath the wheels of a truck, and whose partner had subsequently killed my birth mother.
When we were done, baklava was brought to the table. I was offered coffee, and accepted. I added a little milk to it, and Epstein sighed.
“Such a luxury,” he said. “To be able to enjoy a coffee with milk so soon after one’s meal.”
“You’ll have to forgive my ignorance…”
“One of the laws of kashrut,” said Epstein. “One is prohibited from eating dairy products within six hours of consuming meat. Exodus: ‘Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk.’ You see: I am more orthodox than you might think.”
The woman hovered nearby, waiting. I thanked her for her kindness, and for the food. Despite myself, I had eaten more than I had intended. This time, she did smile, but she did not speak. Epstein made a small gesture with his left hand, and she retreated.
“She’s a deaf mute,” said Epstein, when her back was turned. “She reads lips, but she will not read ours.”
I glanced at the woman. Her face was tu R a face wasrned from us, and she was examining a newspaper, her head bent.
Now that the time had arrived to confront him, I felt something of my anger at him dissipate. He had kept so much hidden for so long, just as Jimmy Gallagher had done, but there were reasons for it.
“I know that you’ve been asking questions,” he said. “And I know that you have received some answers.”
When I spoke, I thought that I sounded like a petulant teenager.
“You should have told me when we first met.”
“Why? Because you believe now that you had a right to know?”
“I had a father, and two mothers. They all died for me, in their way.”
“And that was precisely why you could not be told,” said Epstein. “What would you have done? You were still an angry, violent man when we met: grief stricken, bent on revenge. You could not be trusted. There are some who would say that you still cannot be trusted. And remember, Mr. Parker: I had lost my son when first we met. My concerns were for him, not for you. Pain and grief are not your exclusive preserves.
“But, still, you are right. You should have been told before now, but perhaps you chose the time that was right for you. You decided when to begin asking the questions that led you here. Most have been answered for you. I will do my best to deal with the rest.”
Now that the time had come, I was not sure where to start.
“What do you know of Caroline Carr?”
“Next to nothing,” he said. “She came from what is now a suburb of Hartford, Connecticut. Her father died when she was six, and her mother when she was nineteen. There are no surviving relatives. If she had been bred to be anonymous, one could not have asked for more.”
“But she wasn’t anonymous. Someone came looking for her.”
“So it seems. Her mother died in a house fire. Subsequent investigations revealed that it might have been started deliberately.”
“Might have been?”
“A cigarette smoldering at the bottom of a trash can, with papers piled on top of it, and a gas stove that was not turned off fully. It could have been an accident, except neither Caroline nor her mother smoked.”
“A visitor?”
“There were no visitors that night, according to Caroline. Her mother sometimes entertained gentlemen, but on the night that she died only she and Caroline were asleep in the house. Her mother drank. She was asleep on the couch when the fire broke out, and was probably dead before the flames reached her. Caroline escaped by climbing out of an upstairs window. When we met, she told me that she saw two people watching the house from the woods while it burned: a man and a woman. They were holding hands. But by that time someone had raised the alarm, and there were neighbors rushing to help her, and the fire trucks were on their way. Her main concern was for her mother, but the first floor had already been engulfed. When she thought again about the man and the woman, they were gone.
“She told me that she believed the couple in the woods had R ahe woods started the fire, but when she tried to tell the police of what she had seen they dismissed the sighting as irrelevant, or as the imaginings of a grief-stricken young woman. But Caroline saw them again, shortly after her mother’s funeral, and became convinced that they intended to do to her what they had done to her mother; or that, in fact, she might have been the target all along.”
“Why would she think that?”
“A sense she had. The way they looked at her, the way she felt when they looked at her. Call it a survival instinct. Whatever the reason for it, she left town after her mother’s funeral, intending to find work in Boston. There, someone tried to push her under a T train. She felt a hand on her back, and teetered on the edge of the platform before a young woman pulled her to safety. When she looked around, she saw a man and a woman moving toward the exit. The woman glanced back at her, and Caroline said she recognized her from Hartford. The second time she saw them was at South Station, as she boarded a train to New York. She thought that they were watching her from the platform, but they didn’t follow her.”
“Who were they?”
“We did not know then, and we still do not know for sure now. Oh, we know the name of the man who died beneath the wheels of a truck, and of the boy and girl your father killed at Pearl River, but those names ultimately proved useless. The confirmation of their identities did nothing to explain how they came to be hunting Caroline Carr, or you.”
“My father believed that Missy Gaines and the woman who killed my mother were the same person,” I said. “By extension, he must have believed that Peter Ackerman and the boy who died with Missy Gaines were also the same. How is that possible?”
“We have both witnessed strange things in the years since we first met,” Epstein replied. “Who knows what we should believe, and what we should discount? Nevertheless, let us look at the most logical, or plausible, explanation first: over a period of more than forty years, someone has repeatedly dispatched a pair of killers, a man and a woman, on a series of assassinations aimed at you, or those close to you, including the woman who ultimately gave birth to you. When one couple died, another eventually replaced them. These killers were distinguished by marks on their arms, one for the man and another for the woman, just here.” He indicated a point halfway between his wrist and his elbow on his left forearm. “There is no reason that we can find for why a succession of couples have been chosen to do this.
“The investigations into Missy Gaines, Joseph Dryden, and Peter Ackerman revealed that all led entirely normal existences for most of their lives. Ackerman was a family man, Missy Gaines a model teenager, Dryden already a tearaway, but no worse than many others. Then, at some point, their behavior changed. They cut themselves off from family and friends. They found a member of the opposite sex previously unknown to them, formed a bond, and went hunting, apparently first for Caroline Carr, and then, in the cases of Gaines and Dryden, for you. So that is the logical explanation: disparate couples, linked only by their intent to do harm to you and your family, either of their own volition or acting on the will of another.”
“But you don’t believe the logical explanation.”
“No, I do not.”
Epstein reached behind him a R abehind hind rummaged in the pocket of his overcoat, emerging with a piece of photocopied paper that he unfolded on the table. It was a copy of a scientific article, and it showed an insect in flight: a wasp.
“So, what do you know of wasps, Mr. Parker?”