Boston Cream

CHAPTER 16

The southern sky was dark indigo when I got off the trolley but there were still lighter shades of blue to be seen in the northwest as I walked up Washington Street. The air was cool and damp, the street lights blurred by ragged mist. I looked down at the sidewalk and curb as I walked, like you do when you’ve lost a ring or wallet and you’re retracing your route, as if I might actually see something. Look! There! A vital clue that explains it all. Suddenly we know why one of the most stable people on earth suddenly had to run for his life. Footprints materialize that show the way he went. Snippets and fragments are discovered. There! On that branch! The snagged bit of cloth our forensic team will analyze to ferret out his location.

Oh, wait. We have no forensic team. Which was fine because there was no cloth snagged on the bare branches that hung over the street. There were no vital clues. No footprints or fragments, no clouds of his breath still steaming in the night air. No rings or wallets in the gutter. Nothing but an oily swirl of water running next to the curb.

Someone was playing blues guitar on Rabbi Ed’s street, and not badly. I could tell it wasn’t a recording: at one point as I neared his house, the player stumbled once and had to start his riff again. It sounded like an early 1960s Chicago style: no fuzz or pedal effects, just a nice clear tone that emphasized the actual notes, and he could play them, bend them, make them sing pretty well. I had a vision of a teenaged boy in one of the neighbouring houses, learning at the feet of the masters. Then I got to Rabbi Ed Lerner’s house and realized it was coming from the bay window on the ground level. When I knocked on the door, the music stopped, and I heard a searing screech of feedback before the amp shut off.

The house was a cottage with vinyl siding painted a deep green and white shutters framing the leaded windows. The garden in front had low shrubs along the walkway still wrapped in burlap coverings.

Rabbi Ed was perspiring when he opened the door. He wore the same white shirt and blue jeans he’d had on at the restaurant. “Sorry,” he said, wiping his brow with a sleeve. “I always shvitz a little when I play. Must be my soul coming out.”

“You sounded great.”

The hall was wide, with dark wood wainscotting, archways and door jambs. He led me into the study at the right of the entrance. A turquoise Stratocaster rested in the cradle of a guitar stand next to an old Fender Twin amp. They looked like they could blow a high school dance apart.

“Long before I became a rabbi,” he said, “when I was in theatre school, if you can believe it, I played in a band with some of the kids. We called ourselves the Castoffs and I was the lead guitarist.”

“I’m still digesting the theatre part.”

“Scratch a rabbi, find an actor. Or, God forbid, a comedian. Anyway, that was my undergrad experience. It didn’t take me long to realize I’d never make it as an actor and I didn’t want to be a hanger-on. I made a total break.”

“But you still have your guitar chops.”

“That I can always practise on my own,” he said. “You can’t really act in your living room. And if ever I fall on hard times, that’s a 1961 Stratocaster. I could retire on it. Listen, I have to change for dinner, I’m not wearing this sweaty thing for Shabbos. You want a drink or anything? Glass of wine? I have some Scotch, nothing fancy, but I think there’s Chivas.”

“Chivas on ice would be great.”

“Let me get you that and I’ll tell Shana you’re here. I did tell you my daughter would be joining us?”

“I thought her name was Sandra.”

“To everyone else, yes. Sandra or Sandy, depending if it’s work or friends. But to me, it’s Shana.”

He went off to get my drink and I looked around his study. There was a large wooden desk against the wall in one corner, with a closed laptop barely visible under sheaves of paper. He had bookshelves along one entire wall, with a collection of Judaica and philosophy like David Fine’s, only three times the size. The other wall was dominated by an aquarium in which four or five turtles swam lazily, bumping up against driftwood that stood like a tree in the middle. On the wall above it were photos of Ed Lerner in a variety of settings: breaking ground at a construction site along with three other men, all in hardhats; cutting a ribbon in front of the Holocaust Memorial; decorating a sukkah; accepting an oversized cheque from a man in front of a building called the Vilna Shul.

I leaned in closer. The man presenting the cheque was the congressman from the Eighth District, Marc McConnell. Couldn’t miss that hair and height.

I heard footsteps behind me and ice clinking in a glass. I took a breath to compose myself before turning to face the rabbi. If there was anything to ask about the photo, I wasn’t sure what it was yet.

It wasn’t him standing there with my drink. It was his daughter and she had two drinks. She looked nothing like him, wasn’t cut from the same ursine cloth at all. She was in her mid-twenties, about five-five, with deep grey-green eyes and chestnut curls that spilled past her shoulders. There was the finest mist of freckles across a face that met every qualification for lovely. Shana was the right nickname for her. It means pretty or sweet in Yiddish. One of the nicest compliments you can give a woman is to say she has a shana punim, a sweet face. Which she had.

She passed one drink to my left hand and offered her right. “I’m Sandy Lerner.”

“Jonah Geller.”

“The detective,” she said, smiling. Her teeth were straight and white like she’d never had a coffee in her life.

“Yes.”

“I shouldn’t joke about it. It’s terrible about David being missing. Dad is pretty distraught about it. But I’ve never met a detective, police or private.”

“You’re lucky then. No one hires us for fun.”

“Any luck so far?”

“Not much,” I said. “We have theories but no real clues to support them or tell us where David is now.”

She wore a white blouse with a maroon brocade vest over it and a green peasant skirt cinched tight at the waist with a lighter green scarf knotted at one side. “How is his family doing?”

I shook my head. “If I can’t find him, they’ll be crushed.”

“I feel awful for them.”

“So what’s your experience of David?”

“A great person,” she said. “I know my dad was hoping I’d go for him, and I thought he was very sweet, and cute in a boyish kind of way, but there wasn’t any chemistry. But I really admire what he’s doing. Some guys my age are so directionless, they can barely find their way to class.”

“Where do you study?”

“Tufts. I’m doing a master’s in urban planning and heritage conservation.”

“Great city for it.”

“Yes. The thing about David,” Sandy said, “is he needs a little more balance in life. His idea of a perfect evening would be a few hours of studying followed by a few more hours of it.”

“And yours?”

“Could be anything. A ball game, as long as it’s not freezing. A concert, a play, a walk. Brunch in the north end. The beach in the summer. It’s not that I don’t read or study-I do, but even the Talmud says there’s a time for study and a time for action.”

“The rabbi’s daughter heard from.”

“I only quote that because it’s one of Dad’s favourites. When he wanted me to play outside as a kid, that’s the one he’d throw at me.”

“There’s my drink!” Rabbi Ed called from the doorway.

“Sorry, Dad, it was just sitting there.”

“I thought maybe I was starting to forget things. So? We set? Let’s have Shabbos dinner.”

It began, as it must, with candles. Sandy put simple white ones in two polished silver candlesticks, then covered her head with a white lace cloth. Rabbi Ed handed me a yarmulke from some long ago bar mitzvah, the inscription inside too faded to read. Sandy lit a match and held it until its flame became regular. She took each candle out, melted its bottom and replaced it, secured by wax. She shook that match out, lit another and looked at her father. He lowered the lights. She lit each candle, shook the match out, then covered her eyes with her other hand, leaving the fingers slightly apart so she could see the candlelight through the gaps. I held my palm out and watched my fingertips glow red in the flame.

She sang the blessing in a reverent alto, letting it resonate in her chest and ring in her head. We followed in lower tones. Rabbi Ed lifted a pewter kiddush cup and sang the brief blessing over wine. Then Sandy handed me a bread knife. There was a braided challah on a wooden cutting board on the table. I took the knife and surprised them with a reasonably melodious Hamotzi over the bread.

“The boy has upbringing,” Rabbi Ed said.

Sandy said “Good Shabbos” to her father and kissed him on the cheek. He wrapped his arms around her and gathered her close and planted a warm wet one on the top of her head.

“Good Shabbos.”

He reached across to take my hand. Then Sandy and I shook hands for the second time. She leaned in and gave me the lightest kiss on the cheek. I breathed in her scent as I returned the kiss.

We were in a small dining room off the kitchen with a harvest table and unyielding wooden chairs with slotted backs. There was a hutch filled with gold-rimmed china and another crammed with Seder plates, menorahs, more candlesticks and kiddush cups. Rabbi Ed saw me looking at it and said, “You spend enough years as a rabbi, you could open a gift shop. Everyone who goes to Israel brings me back something, as if I don’t have enough already.”

We had soup and roast chicken and polenta grilled with a bruschetta topping. Fortunately, Sandy and I were able to subsist on a quarter chicken each, as Rabbi Ed helped himself to a half. It was probably what he ate when it was just him and his daughter. The food was good and the wine, unlike the more syrupy kosher concoctions, was a fine Cabernet from Napa.

We talked about the similarities between Boston and Toronto, big liberal cities that were medical and academic hubs. We noted the significant rivalries in three sports-not that the Leafs or Jays had done anything recently to rival the success of the Red Sox and Bruins, never mind the Patriots and Celtics. We talked about Israel, as Jews inevitably do, and about the rising tide of anti-Semitism in France, Sweden and other countries with unassimilated, assertive Muslim populations. We talked about how Sandy did a degree in literature-“after which I was offered my pick of jobs, Barnes or Noble”-then got into urban planning, which she thought would satisfy both her academic ambitions and her activist nature. “There’s so much history in Boston to preserve,” she said. “Is there a lot in Toronto?”

“No. We had too many fires for that.”

We talked about everything but the night David vanished.

When the coffee came and the honey cake had been cut, I told the Lerners they had a lovely home and thanked them for welcoming me into it.

They both murmured that it had been their pleasure.

“How long have you lived here?”

“My late wife, Hannah, and I bought this house thirty years ago. Shana was born here. I’ve actually lived in Brookline since I was a boy,” the rabbi said. “My parents were part of the great Jewish flight of the sixties.”

“From where?”

“Back then, if you were Jewish and you weren’t in the suburbs, you were in Dorchester and Mattapan, along Blue Hill Avenue. That’s where my parents grew up.”

“What happened to it?”

“Social engineering. One of those great projects that have a noble objective and disastrous outcome.”

“What was the objective?”

“To help the African-American community gain more opportunities in education and home ownership. Certain areas of Upper Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan, especially the ones that had been working-class Jewish for decades, were red-lined, as the saying went, by twenty-two Boston banks, and loans for houses there were made available to African-Africans. Twenty-five hundred moved in. Whatever the state’s intentions, it didn’t unfold the way they hoped. It was more like the recent credit crisis, where people had homes but not enough income to run them. The neighbourhoods declined, the Jews who could afford to move moved, and Brookline is now the centre of Jewish life instead of Blue Hill Avenue. A three-mile stretch that had been Jewish since 1910 declined from vibrancy and prosperity to-I don’t even have the words for it.”

“Those pictures in your study-the ribbon cuttings, groundbreakings, cheques-are those all from Brookline?”

“The groundbreaking was: that was for the new wing of the synagogue, where the school and seniors’ centre are now. The ribbon cutting, I think, was the Holocaust Centre. That’s downtown.”

“And the cheque presentation?”

“You know about the Vilna Shul?”

“No.”

“At one time-”

“I know this one,” Shana said. “I’ll get the dishes started.” Even though she had introduced herself to me as Sandy, I couldn’t help thinking of her as Shana now. She stacked our plates and carried them out to the kitchen. I heard water begin to run.

The rabbi said, “At one time, there were fifty little shtiebels in Beacon Hill. You know what shtiebels are?”

“Yes. Little synagogues. Learning centres.”

“Exactly. How many are left? None. Not a single one. The Vilna Shul was the last and it closed more than twenty-five years ago-as a functioning synagogue. But it was restored and reopened as a Jewish cultural centre. I was chair of the fundraising committee so they stuck me in the picture.”

“And the guy giving you the cheque?”

“He’s the congressman for that district. Marc McConnell. He’s very passionate about urban renewal, so the centre was right up his alley.”

“I see.” An idea started to tingle near the edge of my instinct. It came with a slight shiver. “So what is this project you mentioned at lunch? The thing you’re doing next. What is that?”

“As I was saying, there is no longer a functioning synagogue in that area that can serve people who work around the state capitol. I want to start one. Something small, of course. A little shtiebel like there used to be dotting every street. A place where people, men and women, can come and pray in the morning, put on tefillin, start the day right. It doesn’t have to be big. I don’t want big. I got so tired of running a congregation the size of Adath Israel. The politics and the gripes and the collections and the events, none of it related to teaching, learning, the actual discussion and revelation of Torah as it relates to us today. I didn’t want it anymore. I’m sure there’s every type of rumour out there-he resigned because of this or that-but the simple truth is I gave twenty-five years of my life to Adath Israel. I figure I have at least twenty more to give and I want to give them downtown. I’m thinking of calling it Shul on the Hill.”

Shana, coming in to get more dishes, groaned at the pun.

“How can you go wrong with Beatles humour?” he protested, winking at me. “It’s the right generation for it. No, I’m kidding,” he said. “The proposed name is Beth Aaron, after Aaron Lopez, not the first Jew in Boston, but the first allowed to live openly without renouncing his religion.”

“Mr. McConnell helping out again?”

“From your mouth to God’s ear. There are always funds to be raised, and zoning issues to be sorted out.”

“Does he know David Fine?”

“The congressman? I couldn’t see how. David isn’t part of that fundraising committee or anything. He isn’t a joiner. Although I believe he’ll join the new shul. When he comes back.”

“David was trying to contact him before he vanished.”

“The congressman? Why?”

“I have no idea. I’m going to ask him tomorrow.”

“Marc is seeing you?”

“He’s appearing at some museum event, where Jenn and I will happen to be. Rabbi, have you thought about what I asked you at lunch?”

“About breaking confidentiality? I thought about it a great deal. Tell you what, let’s take our wine to the study.”

There was a dark green leather couch against the wall opposite his work area. He pointed me there and settled into the black chair behind the desk. “Tell me a little about your work, Jonah. What you do and how you do it.”

“People come to us with problems they haven’t been able to solve by traditional means. The justice system has failed them. The police have reached a dead end.”

“Give me an example.”

“Is this a test?”

“I don’t need to test you, Jonah, I think I already know the kind of man you are. But Jews love specifics, we love to delve. So humour me.”

“All right. Last fall, a woman lost her daughter to suicide and didn’t know why. The police and coroner had closed the case. We reopened it and found out she had been murdered.”

“As well as who did it?”

“Yes.”

“And the girl’s mother found peace in that?”

“More than she’d had before.”

“I see. Is your work ever violent?”

“It can be.”

“Can be or has been?”

“Has been.”

“You feel justified in whatever part you played.”

“Yes.”

“Said without hesitation. Can I ask something that might be deeply personal, Jonah?”

“Yes.” I knew what it was going to be; I just waited for it.

“Have you ever taken a life?”

Bingo.

“I have, Rabbi. Three times.”

His bushy eyebrows lowered over his eyes, whose warm twinkle seemed to dim. “Three is more than I imagined. Are you willing to provide details?”

I regretted all three deaths but I wasn’t ashamed of any of them. “The first one, I was in my twenties. I was in the Israeli army and my sergeant was attacked in an alley. A man was stabbing him and I shot him.”

“With intent to kill or disarm?”

“I had an M-16 and I fired three-round bursts into him until he dropped. So I’d say I had intent to kill.”

“And the sergeant?”

“He died anyway.”

“I’m sorry. For both your sergeant and the man who attacked him. What about the other two?”

“One was straight self-defence. The other … if there is such a thing as pre-emptive self-defence, then that’s what that was.”

“How so?”

“A man tried to kill me and failed and ended up critically injured. I knew he’d have me killed if he survived so I made sure he didn’t.”

“If you hadn’t, would he have died anyway?”

“I don’t know. Probably. But I couldn’t take that chance.”

“This one bothers you more than the other two.”

It did. I even dreamed about it sometimes, always in weird watery settings totally unlike the shallow, rocky part of the Don River where Stefano di Pietra died. I’d be diving in great reefs teeming with fish and he’d swim past in his fine grey suit, or I’d be canoeing through a calm Muskoka lake and my paddle would hit his head. He’d turn up in a restaurant aquarium, next to lobsters whose claws were pegged shut.

“Do you know the story of Abner?” Rabbi Ed asked. “From the Book of Samuel?”

“No.”

“When King Saul died, David was anointed King of Judea in Hebron. But a second faction formed under Abner, whose father was Saul’s general. Abner installed one of Saul’s sons in Gilead and called him king of a separate territory called Israel.”

“Two Jews, two factions,” I said. “Go figure.”

“Hey, it could have been three. So a skirmish broke out between Judeans, led by Joab, and Israelites, led by Abner. Abner’s men were routed and fled. Joab’s brother Asahel followed him and wouldn’t give up the pursuit, even though Abner kept stopping to turn and warn him off. But Asahel was single-minded. Samuel says he would look neither left nor right, veer neither left nor right, he’d only keep straight after Abner. Fast. When Abner saw that Asahel wouldn’t give up, they fought and Abner slew him. What follows is actually a pivotal point in our history, Jonah. Because now Joab and his men chase after Abner but when they catch him, Abner convinces Joab to spare his life. He explains-get this-that Asahel left him no choice by refusing to break off his pursuit. The first known case of justifiable homicide. A crucial legal precedent. But there’s more: Despite his anger over Asahel’s death, Joab not only spared Abner but declared peace with Israel. In your mind, Jonah, would this man in the river have continued to pursue you like Asahel, veering neither left nor right?”

“Yes. He’d had at least six people killed by the time he died, including his own brothers and two innocent civilians.”

“A very evil man then. So some homicides, we know, are justifiable, Jonah. Which means?”

“Yes?”

He smiled and said, “It means enough about you. We can talk about David now.”

If his questions had been a test, had I passed?

“Some things that he and I talked about can be shared.”

“Great.”

“He came to me last year, while I was still at Adath Israel, to enlist my support on a project. As you know, there is a great shortage of organs for transplant in the United States. I don’t know how it is in Canada, but very few people here sign their donor cards.”

“I don’t think it’s much better at home.”

“It’s even more true among the Jewish community, sadly, especially the Orthodox. There is great doubt and debate among them as to whether it falls within Halacha, the Jewish way, because we believe we are not supposed to change in any way the body Hashem gave us. It’s why the Orthodox oppose autopsies, and why their women wear clip-ons instead of piercing their ears. It’s why we don’t get tattoos. So if you won’t pierce an ear, or get a little tattoo on your tuchus, how can you cut open a body and take out its organs? How can you take the corneas? What if sight is needed in the afterlife? And on it goes. David saw first-hand how acute the shortage was and it bothered him. He wanted to drum up rabbinical support for donation. He knew how connected I am in that community so he came to me for help.”

“What kind?”

“We held a series of discussions with all the Orthodox rabbis in New England, one of them on Skype, if you want a laugh. We decided that to save a life was, if you’re old enough to remember the first Star Trek, the prime directive. It came above all other considerations and was therefore within Halacha.”

“That’s great. Has it helped?”

“It’s early days. Too early to tell if we’re having any statistical impact. But we had these made up and we’re giving them out at our shuls. In my case, my former shul. And I’ll promote it from my future pulpit.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a wallet thick with currency, receipts, credit cards and more. He slid from one pocket a laminated blue card that said, “Halachic Orthodox Organ Donors.” Under that was his signature and a paragraph saying he was donating any and all organs needed and that it was within the Jewish tradition and endorsed by the Rabbinical Council of New England.

“Hood,” Ed said. “That was David’s idea. He had no standing on the rabbinic side, but he gave a lot to get this going and came up with the idea of the donor card. He looks shy and bookish but he is tougher than people think when he thinks he is right. Which he generally is.”

“Is he tough enough for what he’s into now?”

“We don’t know what he’s into.”

“Are you sure?”

The Rabbi sipped the last of his wine and stood. “I’m afraid there’s nothing more I can tell you, Jonah. Anything else he might have told me as his rabbi, I think will have to remain confidential. If getting more information was the only reason you came to dinner, you may have to go home disappointed.”

“It wasn’t and I won’t. May I propose a compromise?”

“How does one compromise confidentiality?”

“Anything he told you while you were his rabbi is between you and him,” I said.

“Then where is the wiggle room?”

“Because you were no longer his rabbi the night he vanished. You had already resigned from the shul by then.”

He started to say one thing, stopped himself, started again and came up with, “What do you mean?” It was enough to tell me there was more.

“We’ve interviewed new witnesses,” I said, “and we’ve pieced together what happened to David.”

“That’s great!” There was a reason the rabbi had left theatre school. He wasn’t a good enough actor to sell that one.

“On his way home that night, two men tried to abduct him.”

“No!”

“They worked for an Irish gangster named Sean Daggett.”

“Have the police arrested him? Or these other men?”

“The other two are dead, Rabbi. They were shot to death last night.”

Now his face fell for real, no acting involved. “What!”

“I just found out. By accident, maybe by the hand of God, David was able to get away from them that night. He ran down Summit Path all the way to Beacon and was lucky to catch a trolley that was just pulling out. The driver confirmed it. Once David was safely away, he could have gone anywhere, but he got off at the very next stop. Washington Square. Right where you told me to get off. Now that was kind of risky for him to do. Those hoods were cruising around looking for him. So he had to have had somewhere in mind. Someone close by who would let him in.”

Shana came in from the kitchen then. “Dad, are you okay? I thought I heard something.”

“It’s about David,” I said. “I know he was here the night he disappeared.”

She looked away from me to her father, then at the floor. I liked the fact that she didn’t try to tell any lies.

“About seven-thirty,” I said, “maybe a few minutes after, he showed up at your door, out of breath, frightened. Now if you don’t want to tell me what he said, fine. I’ll find out anyway. I figured out this part fast enough. But at least confirm he got away. That he was unharmed. You couldn’t give his parents a greater gift than that.”

Rabbi Ed looked at his daughter and they made eye contact. Then he looked back at me and said, “Yes. For his parents, I can do that. He came here like you said. We were just cleaning up from dinner. I had never seen him like that. If I didn’t know him better, I would have thought he was having some kind of psychotic episode.”

“What about?”

“He didn’t tell us.”

“He wouldn’t,” Shana said.

“Right. He said it was for our own protection. All he wanted was a place to stay the night. But he made us swear not to say anything about seeing him, not even to his parents. He said that was for their protection too.”

“He didn’t say where he was going?”

“No,” Rabbi Ed said. “When I woke up in the morning he was gone.”

I looked at Sandy.

She said, “I woke up later.” It didn’t have the ring of truth.

“Did he have money?”

“About forty dollars,” Ed said. “I had a bit of cash that I gave him, about a hundred and twenty.”

“I gave him another eighty,” Shana said. “I had just gone to the bank machine.”

“So he had two hundred and forty dollars, no car, no clothes.”

“I gave him a coat when he left.”

“I thought you were asleep.”

“The night before, I meant. He told us he was going to leave early in the morning, so I made sure he had it before he went to bed.”

Okay, now she was bust-out lying.