“Was that work?” asks Tony when I come back out.
“That was Saul.”
“Does he have a scoop?”
Iris is dumping her purse and her coat on the table. “Who’s Saul?”
“Saul is a cop,” I say. “He helped me out on the stakeout last night. He knew my mom.”
“Really.” Iris looks sideways at Tony.
“I told him.”
“Oh good,” says Iris, coming to sit on the opposite side of the futon from Tony. I am still standing.
“Saul is a detective and he’s Orthodox and he was called to help the police translate when they notified the family of the scrap yard woman that she was dead,” says Tony.
Iris looks at me. “And you just… ran into him?”
“He recognized me. He said I looked just like her.”
“Jesus,” says Iris.
“I know.”
“This is strange, right?” Iris asks. “Or am I just negative because I’m hungover?”
“Borough Park is like a small town,” says Tony. “There are thousands of Jews, but there are far fewer families. He could have known her.”
“Oh, he knew her,” I say, thinking about the way he was staring at me. “Anyway, apparently he’s got some information for me. On the story.”
I dress and tell Iris not to worry. Tony walks me downstairs. Saul’s Chevy Malibu is idling outside the door. Tony gives me a hug and says he’ll call me later. I open the car door and slide into the seat beside Saul.
“Thank you for coming,” says Saul. He’s wearing the same thing he was last night, a cheap white button-down shirt, and a coat and pants that are both black but not quite the same hue. He looks like he hasn’t slept, though I probably do, too.
“How are you?” I ask.
“I read your story.”
I want to say it’s not really my story, that I didn’t write it. But before I do, it occurs to me that whether or not I actually put the words together, my name is on it-and thus I am responsible for it. Or I should have been. “It was short.”
“Will you write another article?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t usually get to make that decision.”
We drive in silence for a few minutes. Just as I am about to ask where we’re going, Saul speaks.
“My supervisors do not know I’ve contacted you,” he says. “I have some information you can use to write a story-maybe many stories-about Rivka Mendelssohn. But you cannot use my name in print. I am a police official with knowledge of the investigation.”
This is not what I expected him to say. But I suppose it makes sense that we establish the rules of our interaction early. Yes, he is the man who provided the first morsel of actual information about my mother I’d been given in, oh, twenty years, but he is also a cop and I am a reporter.
I’ve used anonymous sources before. In my Section 8 fire series, I kept the secretary at the landlord’s office completely out of the story, even though she was the one who confirmed to me that she had seen him give his teenage nephews seventy-five dollars each to install the smoke detectors and failed to check their work. In school my professors warned against allowing people to go off the record or remain anonymous. Once someone is off the record, it’s hard to get them to go back on, they said. And anonymity undermines trust between the reader and the newspaper. Reporters don’t take a formal oath to do no harm or follow a set of ethical guidelines while performing our job-actually we don’t take any kind of oath, or test, at all. I had a professor who thought journalists should have to be licensed, like lawyers and accountants. Then, he said, we’d get more respect. I’m actually not against the idea at all, but it doesn’t matter, because it’s not going to happen. And who would we be swearing to do no harm to? Our source? Our reader? Our editor? Ourselves?
“That works,” I say.
“It is very important that we find who killed Rivka Mendelssohn. If the newspaper keeps writing about her, it might help.”
“Really?” Usually cops say the opposite. “What makes you think that?”
“Well, to begin with, Aron Mendelssohn has not been questioned. You always bring the husband in. Always. And he hasn’t been in. Which could mean a couple things, but what I think it means is that he has exerted pressure.”
“Pressure?”
“The precinct has to deal with this community delicately.”
“Why?”
“They give money, for one thing. And they vote in blocks. There is an informal agreement that the ultra-Orthodox are mostly law-abiding and can police themselves…”
I interrupt him. “Until somebody dies.”
“You’d think so.”
We ride in silence a few moments more.
“Do you think he did it?”
“Aron Mendelssohn?” Saul considers this. “I don’t know. Aron Mendelssohn is a wealthy man. His father donated most of the money to build the yeshiva on Ocean Parkway. He is a business owner, of course. The fact that his wife was found dead at his business is suspicious, but doesn’t necessarily point to him as the killer. He’s never been in trouble with the law, but most Hasidim haven’t. He needs to be questioned. And not bringing him in tells me the investigators are thinking about things other than the most efficient, effective ways to solve the case. It also tells the community that they can stay behind closed doors and pretend it didn’t happen.”
“Is that what they’ll do?”
“It’s what they do when it comes to domestic violence and mental illness and sexual abuse. All of which occurs in the community, just like in any other community. But here the shame of coming forward is compounded. Generally, Jews in this community believe that speaking to the authorities about another Jew is a sin against the community. It’s mesirah, they say.”
“Mesirah?”
“Mesirah. It’s Yiddish. It means reporting on your fellow Jew. In the past, in Europe, if a Jew was arrested and sent to prison, he would be killed there. So it was every Jew’s duty to keep other Jews out of prison, which means not talking to the police.”
“Even now?”
“Even now.”
“But, this is a murder. You can’t just not talk.”
“You can if the police don’t ask you to.”
“But, won’t someone want to talk? Like Miriam? Her sister-in-law was found in a dump.”
“You saw what happened when Aron saw Miriam talking to you,” says Saul. “I’m surprised she risked it.”
It’s a strange thing to say, given that he’s the one who took me to speak to her. He was pushing things even then. Did he know she would talk to me?
“Yeah, but I’m a reporter. I don’t have any actual power. The police have power. They can make you talk.”
“Maybe. Actual power depends on perception of power, to some extent. Many people would say that with access to the minds of a million readers, you had more power than I did there. But really, in that situation, neither of us had actual power. Aron Mendelssohn had actual power.”
“Yeah, but… what about the law? Couldn’t a judge compel people to talk? Contempt of court or something? Interfering with an investigation?”
“Yes, that could happen. But the fact that the investigators haven’t brought the husband in yet is a sign that they are not going hard at this. So is the fact that they didn’t take any evidence with them when they were in the house last night.”
“You’re not an investigator?”
Saul shakes his head. “Not on this case. Not officially. Like I said, I was called in to assist last night.”
“Do you get called in a lot?”
“Every month or two. Usually as a translator.”
“They really can’t speak English?”
“Most can, but many-the elderly and children, for example-have trouble. For boys, their general education ends at eleven or twelve. Then they begin Torah instruction, which is conducted in Yiddish.”