Hawes stared at the distant lights of Isola’s buildings and sucked in a draught of mesh-filtered spring air.
He wondered why it was so quiet.
He wondered just exactly what all those people were doing out there.
Some of those people were playing April Fool’s Day pranks. Some of them were getting ready for tomorrow, which was Easter Sunday. And some of them were celebrating a third and ancient holiday known as Passover. Now that’s a coincidence which could cause one to speculate upon the similarity of dissimilar religions and the existence of a single, all-powerful God, and all that sort of mystic stuff, if one were inclined toward speculation. Speculator or not, it doesn’t take a big detective to check a calendar, and the coincidence was there, take it or leave it. Buddhist, atheist, or Seventh Day Adventist, you had to admit there was something very democratic and wholesome about Easter and Passover coinciding the way they did, something which gave a festive air to the entire city. Jews and Gentiles alike, because of a chance mating of the Christian and the Hebrew calendars, were celebrating important holidays at almost the same time. Passover had officially begun at sunset on Friday, March thirty-first, another coincidence, since Passover did not always fall on the Jewish Sabbath; but this year, it did. And tonight was April first, and the traditional second seder service, the annual re-enactment of the Jews’ liberation from Egyptian bondage, was being observed in Jewish homes throughout the city.
Detective Meyer Meyer was a Jew.
Or at least, he thought he was a Jew. Sometimes he wasn’t quite certain. Because if he was a Jew, he sometimes asked himself, how come he hadn’t seen the inside of a synagogue in twenty years? And if he was a Jew, how come two of his favorite dishes were roast pork and broiled lobster, both of which were forbidden by the dietary laws of the religion? And if he was such a Jew, how come he allowed his son Alan — who was thirteen and who had been barmitzvahed only last month — to play Post Office with Alice McCarthy, who was as Irish as a four-leaf clover?
Sometimes, Meyer got confused.
Sitting at the head of the traditional table on this night of the second seder, he didn’t know quite how he felt. He looked at his family, Sarah and the three children, and then he looked at the seder table, festively set with a floral centerpiece and lighted candles and the large platter upon which were placed the traditional objects — three matzos, a roasted shankbone, a roasted egg, bitter herbs, charoses, watercress — and he still didn’t know exactly how he felt. He took a deep breath and began the prayer.
“And it was evening,” Meyer said, “and it was morning, the sixth day. Thus the heaven and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day, God had finished his work which He had made: and He rested on the seventh day from his work which he had done. And God blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it, because that in it He rested from all his work, which God had created in order to make it.”
There was a certain beauty to the words, and they lingered in his mind as he went through the ceremony, describing the various objects on the table and their symbolic meaning. When he elevated the dish containing the bone and the egg, everyone sitting around the table took hold of the dish, and Meyer said, “This is the bread of affliction which our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt; let all those who are hungry, enter and eat thereof, and all who are in distress, come and celebrate the Passover.”
He spoke of his ancestors, but he wondered who he — their descendant — was.
“Wherefore is this night distinguished from all other nights?” he asked. “Any other night, we may eat either leavened or unleavened bread, but on this night only unleavened bread; all other nights, we may eat any species of herbs, but on this night only bitter herbs ...”
The telephone rang. Meyer stopped speaking and looked at his wife. For a moment, both seemed reluctant to break the spell of the ceremony. And then Meyer gave a slight, barely discernible shrug. Perhaps, as he went to the telephone, he was recalling that he was a cop first, and a Jew only second.
“Hello?” he said.
“Meyer, this is Cotton Hawes.”
“What is it, Cotton?”
“Look, I know this is your holiday —”
“What’s the trouble?”
“We’ve got a killing,” Hawes said.
Patiently, Meyer said, “We’ve always got a killing.”
“This is different. A patrolman called in about five minutes ago. The guy was stabbed in the alley behind —”
“Cotton, I don’t understand,” Meyer said. “I switched the duty with Steve. Didn’t he show up?”
“What is it, Meyer?” Sarah called from the dining room.
“It’s all right, it’s all right,” Meyer answered. “Isn’t Steve there?” he asked Hawes, annoyance in his voice.
“Sure, he’s out on the squeal, but that’s not the point.”
“What is the point?” Meyer asked. “I was right in the middle of —”
“We need you on this one,” Hawes said. “Look, I’m sorry as hell. But there are aspects to — Meyer, this guy they found in the alley —”
“Well, what about him?” Meyer asked.
“We think he’s a rabbi,” Hawes said.
2
The sexton of the Isola Jewish Center was named Yirmiyahu Cohen, and when he introduced himself, he used the Jewish word for sexton, shamash. He was a tall, thin man in his late fifties, wearing a somber black suit and donning a skullcap the moment he, Carella and Meyer re-entered the synagogue.
The three had stood in the alley behind the synagogue not a moment before, staring down at the body of the dead rabbi and the trail of mayhem surrounding him. Yirmiyahu had wept openly, his eyes closed, unable to look at the dead man who had been the Jewish community’s spiritual leader. Carella and Meyer, who had both been cops for a good long time, did not weep.
There is plenty to weep at if you happen to be looking down at the victim of a homicidal stabbing. The rabbi’s black robe and fringed prayer shawl were drenched with blood, but happily, they hid from view the multiple stab wounds in his chest and abdomen, wounds which would later be examined at the morgue for external description, number, location, dimension, form of perforation and direction and depth of penetration. Since twenty-five per cent of all fatal stab wounds are cases of cardiac penetration, and since there was a wild array of slashes and a sodden mass of coagulating blood near or around the rabbi’s heart, the two detectives automatically assumed that a cardiac stab wound had been the cause of death, and were grateful for the fact that the rabbi was fully clothed. They had both visited the mortuary and seen naked bodies on naked slabs, no longer bleeding, all blood and all life drained away, but skin torn like the flimsiest cheesecloth, the soft interior of the body deprived of its protective flesh, turned outward, exposed, the ripe wounds gaping and open, had stared at evisceration and wanted to vomit.
The rabbi now owned flesh, too, and at least a part of it had been exposed to his attacker’s fury. Looking down at the dead man, neither Carella nor Meyer wanted to weep, but their eyes tightened a little and their throats went peculiarly dry because death by stabbing is a damn frightening thing. Whoever had handled the knife had done so in apparent frenzy. The only exposed areas of the rabbi’s body were his hands, his neck, and his face — and these, more than the apparently fatal, hidden incisions beneath the black robe and the prayer shawl, shrieked bloody murder to the night. The rabbi’s throat showed two superficial cuts which almost resembled suicidal hesitation cuts. A deeper horizontal slash at the front of his neck had exposed the trachea, carotids and jugular vein, but these did not appear to be severed — at least, not to the layman eyes of Carella and Meyer. There were cuts around the rabbi’s eyes and a cut across the bridge of his nose.