Water to Burn

  “Right.” His voice dropped nearly to a whisper. “Kefitzat haderach. So, what do we have?” His voice returned to normal. “He goes through one of the gates, and his doppelgänger comes back out?”

  “That’s the line I’m working on.”

  “So the doppelgänger’s the one who died in the whorehouse.” Ari nodded as if agreeing with himself. “And now for some reason the real Reb Ezekiel—well, they’re both real, aren’t they? I should say, the Reb Ezekiel I knew and loathed comes back out of wherever he’s been. Let’s see. I was eleven when the other one died. I’m thirty now. Took him long enough to return, I must say. Why, I wonder?”

  “Why or how, I do not know.” I smiled. “Yet. I’m hoping the police can find him. If not, maybe I can. I’d like to meet this Stein guy. Possible?”

  “Very. I have his contact information with me. Hang on a minute.” Ari took his cell phone out of his shirt pocket. “I’ll just ring him and see what he says.”

  Stein answered his phone immediately. Ari said something in Hebrew, then grinned. I could just hear a man’s voice answering in the same language. He sounded on the edge of laughter, glad to hear from an old friend. After a few exchanges, though, they switched to English. At that point I did my best to stop eavesdropping. They kept the phone call short, anyway, and arranged for the three of us to get together for dinner that evening.

  “A question,” Ari said after he’d clicked off. “Do you think Reb Ezekiel is part of the coven?”

  “No, but I don’t think he isn’t, either. I need to know why he’s turned up. It might have something to do with you and Itzak Stein being in the same town. There’s a weird karmic gravity that operates on these things, or you could call it a critical mass. You two might be attracting him, but that’s only a metaphor. Don’t take it literally.”

  Ari’s eyes went glazed, as they so often did when I was trying to explain the psychic truths of the universe.

  “There are other possibilities, too.” I stopped trying. “His appearance could be a random coincidence, or it could be a true synchronicity, or he could be involved with our Brother Belial. I need to know which.”

  “Very well. That makes sense, as much as any of this ever does.”

  For our meeting, I wore a black dinner suit of satin-backed crepe and a teal silk blouse, accented with the pin Ari had given me. Itzak Stein had made reservations at a Cajun place on upper Fillmore Street, because it had private booths left over from the 1930s, with real mahogany walls that ran up nearly to the ceiling and a narrow doorway opening out to the main dining room of the restaurant. As long as we talked in a quiet tone of voice, no one was going to overhear us.

  Just in case, though, Ari took a little black box that looked like a light meter out of an inner pocket of his sport coat. He passed it along the walls to check for bugs while Stein laughed at him. He was about Ari’s age, Itzak, a stocky fellow with curly brown hair and brown eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, not unattractive and not good-looking, either, except when he smiled. He had a great smile.

  “Some things never change,” Itzak said to me. “Good old Ari, as suspicious as always!” He grinned at Ari, who sat down with his back firmly to the booth’s back wall, opposite the door. “I’m not surprised you ended up a cop.” Itzak glanced at me. “Did you know that Ari was an M.P. in the army?”

  “Military police?” I said. “No, but I’m not surprised.”

  “I wasn’t, either,” Itzak grinned, then looked Ari’s way. “Interpol and you, a marriage made in heaven.”

  Ari forced out a small smile that signaled he was used to this line of teasing. “And I’m not surprised you ended up working with computers,” Ari said. “You were always divorced from reality.”

  “One up to you! I’m afraid I am. I like life better that way. Reality generally sucks.”

  The waiter appeared, and Itzak ordered an amazing number of oysters for the table’s appetizers.

  “I see you’re not keeping kosher,” Ari remarked.

  “Are you?” Itzak said. “Huh, that’d be a cold day in hell.”

  They shared a grin. Itzak ordered a cocktail for himself, though Ari stuck with mineral water, as did I. I halfexpected Itzak to tease Ari about it, but he seemed resigned. We all studied the menu in silence. I finally found a dish I could eat if I dumped the potatoes onto Ari’s plate and scraped the fancy sauce off the chicken.

  “The desserts here are really good,” Itzak said to me.

  “I’ll have a bite of Ari’s,” I said, “when the time comes.”

  “What’s this? He’s starving you? How cheap is he?”

  Ari opened his mouth to object, but the waiter reappeared. We ordered. I waited till he’d left again to open the subject that really interested me.

  “Tell us more about your sighting of Reb Ezekiel,” I said. “What made you call the consulate and report it?”

  “My parents.” Itzak paused for a smile. “I called them first thing, and Dad insisted I should tell someone official. So I called the consulate to see if they could find Ari for me. We’d lost touch over the last couple of years, but he was the absolutely only person I could think of who might be ‘official’ and interested, too.”

  “So,” I said, “you knew he works for Interpol?”

  “Oh, yeah, we send e-mail now and then.” Itzak grinned at Ari. “I don’t know why you periodically drop off the face of the earth.”

  “Simple laziness,” Ari said. “I apologize.”

  “Anyway,” Itzak went on. “I told the receptionist she could contact him through Interpol, but she didn’t seem to get anything I said. Especially she did not know why I thought this data point was important. So I hung up, but lo! a higher-up called me back about ten minutes later. He understood, all right, and told me he’d get the information into the right hands.”

  “I know who that was, yes,” Ari put in. “Good move.”

  Oysters appeared, and the drinks. The waiter retreated once again. I ignored the oysters, raw and slimy as they were, but the two men scarfed them right up.

  “So, anyway,” Itzak continued, “another reason I chose this place. I first saw the old bastard not far from here, down at Fillmore and Geary. He was panhandling, it looked like. At first, I didn’t believe it could possibly be him. So by the time I decided to talk to him, the bus had arrived, and he got on it and sped off.”

  “Heading which way?” I said.

  “In.” Itzak glanced at Ari. “That means, toward downtown, where there are social services abounding.”

  I made a mental note to ask Father Keith if someone answering Zeke’s description had ever shown up at St. Anthony’s Dining Room, the Franciscan mission to the homeless. “Can you give us a description?” I asked. “I want to see if it matches up with something a police officer told me.”

  “Sure. About five eight, skinny, shaggy gray hair, and long peyes.” He glanced my way. “Peyes are what the unenlightened call ‘sidelocks.’”

  “Ah,” I said. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Mr. Secular here won’t have told you, probably.” Itzak grinned at me. “But back to the rebbe, he was wearing torn-up black clothing, except for a Giants cap that looked new—”

  “That’s plenty. Thanks.”

  Itzak paused to devour the last oyster, then continued his story. He’d seen Reb Zeke twice more downtown, once near the bank offices where he worked.

  “I hailed him that last time,” Itzak finished up. “He screamed and ran, nearly dashed into traffic to get away. I don’t know why. I can’t see how he could have recognized me. The last time he saw me I was maybe ten years old.”

  “It’s more likely he ran because he didn’t recognize you,” Ari said, “than because he did.”

  “Yeah, I bet you’re right.” Itzak looked my way. “So you’re interested in all this, too? Don’t tell me you’re another cop!”

  I rummaged in my bag and brought out my cross-agency government ID. Itzak groaned as he handed it back. br />
  “I should have known,” he said. “Obviously, you guys were meant for each other. Although, with a name like Nola O’Grady, you can’t be Jewish.”

  “Nope,” I said. “I think he forgives me, though.”

  “A thousand times over,” Ari said. “Other than that one major flaw, she’s perfect.”

  Itzak and I laughed, Ari smiled, but I kicked Ari under the table, though not hard. He kept smiling as if he’d felt nothing. The waiter trotted in with the main courses, and a busboy materialized as well with a pitcher of ice water. While the men ate and I nibbled, I asked the occasional question. Since Itzak and his parents had a decently close relationship, he’d heard bits and pieces of information about life in the kibbutz as the adults had seen it.

  “May I ask you where they live now?” I said. “I’d like to debrief them.”

  “In upstate New York. But they’re talking about coming out for a visit sometime this summer. If you’re still interested, they’d probably be willing to sit down and talk.”

  “They don’t mind unburdening themselves, then.”

  “No, probably because they left early on, before Fearless Leader’s great disappearance. Do you know about that?”

  “Zeke’s month in the country?” I said.

  He laughed. “Yeah, just that. When Ari’s mother left, it hit everyone hard. She was one of the inner circle, after all, privy to the old boy’s secrets and all that.”

  Ari looked up from his blackened catfish. “She was?”

  “You didn’t know?” I said.

  “She never talks about those years, not to me anyway.” Ari paused for a swallow of water. “Except she did apologize to me once, for staying so long and subjecting me to the place. I told her she needn’t apologize. I understood how much it meant to her. She couldn’t have foreseen how it would all turn out.”

  Ari’s mother began to sound like someone I should know.

  “Makes sense,” Itzak said. “My folks call their stint on the kibbutz their romance with Israel, the whole idea of Israel.” He looked my way. “A lot of American Jews go through that.”

  “I take it you don’t share the feeling,” I said.

  “No.” Itzak considered for a moment. “I’m a typical Re-form guy, go to temple on the big holidays and when I feel I need to remember what I am.”

  “I have Catholic relatives who do the same with church,” I said.

  He grinned at me. “Yeah, I bet.”

  “You belong to a congregation?” Ari said to him. “I’m surprised. I can’t stand the thought of going to temple after all of Reb Ezekiel’s claptrap.”

  “It was claptrap, yeah. Not Judaism, Ari, but bullshit. That’s why I can’t reject the ceremonies and the observances wholesale. He was a raving lunatic, and what he taught us had nothing to do with the Torah.”

  “Well, there you have a point. Maybe two.”

  “What I’m wondering,” I said, “is why you both hate Reb Zeke so much. Still, I mean, after all these years. Did he beat you or something?”

  “No way!” Itzak said. “Our mothers would never have put up with that.”

  “I don’t know if I’d say I hate him,” Ari said. “But he disrupted my parents’ lives and mine.” He nodded at Itzak. “It was even worse for you.”

  “’Fraid so,” Itzak said. “I was just old enough to be aware we were moving when my folks sold up everything and moved to Israel. When we came back, they were broke and depressed. It took them a couple of years to get back on their feet. That’s probably what I can’t forgive the rebbe for—the disruption, like Ari called it.”

  I nodded. I could understand that.

  “It wasn’t so bad, really, when we were all believers,” Itzak continued. “I liked learning to shoot, and Ari here was incredible at it. A natural sure shot, I think the term is.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “I’ve seen him in action.”

  I felt cold, remembering. Ari raised an eyebrow in my direction. I managed to smile, but I laid down my fork.

  “Too spicy for you?” Itzak said with a nod at my plate.

  “Oh, no,” I said. “I’m just not very hungry. But go on, this is fascinating, hearing about your lives.”

  “The work wasn’t bad, either, for the children,” Ari said. “Tzaki and I took care of the goats.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Tzaki’s the nickname for Itzak.”

  “Right,” Ari said. “I’m regressing, I suppose. But they’re surprisingly intelligent, goats. I got to be rather fond of them.”

  “So I’ve heard,” I said. “It’s funny, but I’ve never thought of you as a farm boy before.”

  “Only for those first few years.” Ari suddenly smiled. “Tzaki, do you know what I remember as the best part of the day?”

  “Let me guess,” Itzak said. “Blowing away targets with six different kinds of rifle?”

  “No, not that! The showers at the end of the day.” Ari turned to me. “After school, you’d do your chores and have your weapons practice and all that, and it was hot. It was a good kind of heat, Nola, a dry heat, but still, you’d be sweaty and covered with dust, a layer of mud, really.”

  “Right!” Itzak broke in. “And then you had a shower, cool water just pouring down.”

  For a few minutes they ate in silence, as if in tribute to the glory of being clean at the end of a hard day. I found myself remembering how Kathleen and I used to whine about having to clear the table and load the dishwasher after my mother and Maureen had cooked the dinner. Little did we know how good we had it!

  “But anyway,” I said, “something must have left scars.”

  “It was what happened after,” Itzak said, “once we returned to normal life, or that’s how I think of it, anyway, normal American life in my case, normal Israeli life in Ari’s. The other kids thought we were weird, and you know how kids treat someone they think is weird. We learned real fast to keep our mouths shut about where we’d been.”

  “Not fast enough in my case,” Ari said. “I ended up expelled from the first school my father put me in.”

  “For what?” I said.

  “Fighting.”

  “So, what else would it be for Ari?” Itzak said. “I was too much of a coward to hit first. I only hit in self-defense, and so the teachers cut me some slack.”

  The waiters returned and began to clear. Itzak ordered dessert for all of us, including a bourbon-laced pudding that looked as if it contained two days’ worth of calories. The men dug in. I had a bite of each kind and left the rest to them.

  “So, anyway,” Itzak said after some minutes. “It took me a long time to come to terms with my charming childhood years.”

  “I can see why,” I said.

  “And coming to terms with the formalities of Judaism was part of that.” Itzak glanced at Ari. “I take it you never have.”

  Ari shrugged and looked sour.

  “But, you see,” Itzak waved a fork at him, “you don’t have my problem, because you’re Israeli. You can be as secular as all hell, and it doesn’t matter. I’m an American first and a Jew second, and sometimes the Jewish part threatens to fade away. Temple’s important to me.”

  Ari said nothing, but he nodded, thinking it over.

  “You’re a hard-core sabra,” Itzak went on. “Or more than that, even. You were raised to die for Israel.”

  “True,” Ari said. “And someday I will, I suppose.”

  The blood in my body threatened to freeze. No, I wanted to scream. No way, not if I can help it, no, no, and no. My reaction shocked me so badly that I tried to keep it to myself, but since Itzak looked stricken, he must have noticed. He fumbled around and made a weak joke, while Ari calmly went on eating pecan pie. Itzak came up with a better joke, and I managed to laugh, which changed the mood back to pleasant for the remainder of the meal.

  We drove back home through traffic sparse enough to let me mull over the things Stein had told us. That Reb Zeke had kept an inner circle intrigued me. This talk
of secret knowledge opened a line of investigation that I wanted to pursue. When we stopped for a red light, I glanced Ari’s way.

  “One thing that really interested me,” I said, “is the news that your mother ranked high in the organization. I’d love to find out if she knew things Reb Zeke kept from the others. Your agency’s report mentioned that she lives in London. Do you think I could videoconference with her?”

  Ari couldn’t have looked more horrified if he’d found Cthulhu floating in our bathtub.

  “You don’t want me to talk with your mother,” I said.

  “Nothing of the sort.” He paused to compose himself. “But she’s already been interviewed, several times, in fact, for the report you have.”

  The light changed, and I let the matter drop. The Agency had other operatives in London. They could get the information I wanted more easily than I could pry it out of Ari.

  When we went to bed, Ari fell asleep right away, but I lay awake for a long time, listening to the voices of the night. They only come to me sometimes, these voices, the muffled sounds of people talking in a distant room. I’ve heard them ever since I was a teenager, though at first I thought they meant that I was crazy or going that way. Eventually, I learned to stop worrying and start listening. Sometimes I hear music, too, but not like those songs that play inside your head, earworms some people call them. No, this music I hear outside my head, as it were, though it plays softly, and the songs have muddled words.

  Once I realized what being an O’Grady means, I saw that the voices and the music were usually instances of the IOI procedure, images that objectify the odd bits of insight and intuitions that every person collects throughout a day, though few know they’re doing it. Every now and then, though, the voices replay memories. A couple of times, I’ve heard my parents fighting in that mysterious other room. Despite what my mother wanted everyone to believe, their marriage was no paradise.

  That night, something different came along. The voices spoke to me about buried treasure, Spanish gold and Inca silver, and emeralds the size of robins’ eggs, torn out of the earth but buried there again, somewhere close, somewhere just out of human reach. I heard waves washing up on sandy beaches or muttering on graveled ones. The waves were searching for treasure, too, but not eagerly, unlike all the human beings who’d dreamed of treasure for centuries. Uncover it and be rid of it, they seemed to say.