The rabbi threw the pickup into gear and, his sidecurls flying, gunned it up the hill, past the settlement post office, past the shopping center teeming with women in ankle length skirts and small boys wearing knitted yarmulke. Ya’ara, it turned out, lived in a small two-room apartment on the ground floor of one of the apartment buildings with a view of Hebron. “When her husband abandoned her, she had no resources of her own so our synagogue took her under its wing,” the rabbi explained. He searched through a ring of keys until he came to the right one and unlocked the door. The furnishings were Spartan. There was a narrow cot in one room, with a cracked mirror bordered with plastic sea shells over it and a wooden crate turned upside down serving as a night table. A folding bridge table covered with a square of oil cloth, a motley assortment of folding chairs with a small black-and-white television set on one of them, were scattered around what served as a living room. On the sill of a waist-high bookcase separating the living room from the tiny kitchen alcove were three flower pots containing plastic geraniums. Martin opened the door to the small bathroom. Women’s cotton underwear and several pairs of long woolen stockings hung from a cord stretched over the bathtub. Ben Zion noticed Martin’s expression as he returned to the living room. “We bought the furniture from Arabs whose houses were bulldozed between us and Hebron so we could walk to the Cave of Machpela safely.”
Martin strolled over to the window, raised the shade and looked out at the tangle of streets and buildings that made up Hebron. “What’s the Cave of Machpela?” he called over his shoulder.
The rabbi was in the kitchen alcove, attempting to light the gas burner with a match to boil water in a kettle. “Am I hearing you correctly? What’s the Cave of Machpela? It’s nothing less than the second holiest place for Jews on the planet earth, ranking immediately behind the Temple Mount or what’s left of it, the Wailing Wall. Hebron—which in biblical times was also called Kiryat Arba—is where the Patriarch Abraham bought his first dunams of land in Canaan. The Cave is where Abraham is buried; his sons Isaac and Jacob, his wife, Sarah, too. It is also holy to the Palestinians, who coopted our Abraham to be one of their prophets; they built a mosque on the spot and we are obliged to take turns praying at the cave.” Lighting a burner, the rabbi slid the kettle over the grill. Shaking his head in disbelief, he struck another match and lit a yortseit candle for the dead and carried it back into the room. “What is the Cave of Machpela?” he asked rhetorically, setting the candle on the table. “Even a shagetz ought to know the answer to that one. We always stroll down to the cave on Fridays at sunset to welcome the Sabbath in at this holy site. You and Stella are welcome to join us—that way you can tell the Shabak you actually did some sightseeing.”
Martin decided there’d been enough small talk. “What about Samat?”
Rabbi Ben Zion covered his mouth to smother a belch. “What about Samat?” he repeated.
“Did he run off with another woman?”
“Let me tell you something, Mr. Brooklyn detective who thinks men only leave their wives for other ladies. Samat didn’t need to quit his wife to have another lady—he rented all the ladies his libido desired. When he disappeared in his Honda for two, three days running, where do you think he went? It’s an open secret where he went. He went where a lot of men go when they want ladies to do things their wives won’t do. In Jaffa, in Tel Aviv, in Haifa, there are what my mother, may she rest in peace, used to call houses of ill repute where you can get your ashes hauled by ladies who don’t mind being naked with a man, who, for a price, are willing to do anything to satisfy a client.” The rabbi waved a hand in the general direction of the Mediterranean coast. “Samat had sexual appetites, you could see it in his eyes, you could tell it from the way he looked at his sister-in-law Estelle when she visited Kiryat Arba. Samat also had his share of obsessions that weren’t carnal. What I’m saying is, he had other axes to grind besides sex.”
In the kitchenette, the kettle began to shriek. The rabbi leaped to turn off the gas and set about preparing tea. He returned moments later carrying the kettle and four china cups, which he put on the bridge table next to the memorial candle. Leaning over the table the better to see what he was doing, Ben Zion slipped Lipton tea bags into the four cups and filled the first one with boiling water. When Martin waved it away, he took the cup himself and sank onto one of the folding chairs, his knees apart, his feet flat on the floor and tapping impatiently. Martin scraped over another chair and sat down facing him.
“Why would someone like Samat, who needed to visit houses of ill repute to satisfy his lusts, marry a religious woman whom he had never met?”
“Am I inside Samat’s head to know the answer?” The rabbi blew noisily across the cup, then touched his lips to the tea to test the temperature. Deciding it was too hot to drink, he set it down on the table. “He was a strange bird, this Samat. I am Ya’ara’s rabbi. In the Jewish religion we don’t confess to our spiritual leaders the way Catholics do. But we confide in them. I believed Ya’ara when she said that Samat never touched her on her wedding night, or after. He never slept in the marriage bed. For all I know she may still be a virgin. When Samat was living under the same roof with her, she was absolutely convinced something was wrong with her. I tried to persuade her that the something that was wrong was wrong with him. I tried to persuade him, too.”
“Did you succeed?”
The rabbi shook his head cheerlessly. “To use an old Yiddish expression, I never got to first base with Samat.”
“What was he doing here?”
“Hiding.”
“From what? From whom?”
The rabbi tried his tea again. This time he managed to sip at it. “What am I, a reader of minds? How would I know, from what, from whom? Look, coming to live in one of these Jewish settlements in the middle of all these Arabs is a little like joining the French foreign legion: When you sign on the dotted line, nobody asks to see your curriculum vitae, we’re just glad to have your warm body. What I do know is that Samat went to the Kiryat Arba security officer and asked for a weapon. He said it was to protect his wife if the Hamas terrorists ever attacked.”
“Did he get the weapon?”
The rabbi nodded. “Anybody living in a settlement who can see what he’s shooting at can get a weapon.” Ben Zion remembered another detail. “Samat evidently had an endless supply of money. He paid for everything he bought with cash—an upscale split-level house on the side of Kiryat Arba where you get to enjoy the sunsets, a brand new Japanese car with air conditioning. He never played pinochle with the boys, he never accompanied Ya’ara to the synagogue, even on the high holy days, though it didn’t go unnoticed that she always left an envelope stuffed with cash in the charity box. Admit it, Mr. American detective, I’ll bet you don’t know that shamus is a Yiddish word.”
“I thought it was Irish.”
“Irish!” The rabbi slapped a palm against one of his knees. “The shamus was the synagogue beetle, which was the sobriquet for the member of the congregation who took care of the synagogue.” Ben Zion shook his head in puzzlement. “How, I ask you, is it possible to detect an AWOL husband if you can’t detect the origin of the word shamus?”
The sudden arrival of Ya’ara and Stella saved Martin from having to account for this lapse in his education; it also provided him with his first good look at Samat’s wife. She was a short, overweight woman with a teenager’s pudgy face and a matronly body endowed with an ample bosom that put a strain on the buttons of her blouse; Martin feared that one of them would pop at any moment. In the space between the buttons he caught a glimpse of the pink fabric of a heavy brassiere. She wore an ankle-length skirt popular with Lubavitch women and a round flat-brimmed felt hat that she nervously twisted on her head, as if she were trying to find the front. The little patches of skin on her body that Martin could see were chalk white from lack of being exposed to sun light. Her cheeks were streaked with traces of tears. Stella, dry eyed, wore the ghost of a smile fixed on her lips that Martin had noticed the day she turned up at his pool parlor.