Festival of Deaths(107)
The stakeout that had been organized in the hope of catching Ricky Calverness and Ted Gressom in the act of committing vandalism at the B’nai Shalom Synagogue had been set up inside the synagogue. As the two uniformed officers in charge of freezing their butts told Gregor and John Jackman—after Gregor and John Jackman had been foisted on them by the chief of police, forget what they thought about it—there really wasn’t any place else in the neighborhood to hide. They couldn’t park an unmarked car somewhere and just wait. This was an act that was supposed to take place outside. Ricky and Ted might be jerks, but the officers had to assume that they were not such monumental jerks as to fail to check if the cars parked around their crime scene were occupied or not. Then, too, there was the safety factor. Saying that this was not a good neighborhood was putting it mildly. One out of every three buildings on this block was abandoned. An abandoned building could sometimes be very good news for a stakeout. Cops could go into one and set up all kinds of fancy equipment as well as themselves, and nobody would ever be the wiser. People used to neighborhoods like this one don’t expect abandoned buildings to actually be unoccupied. There are hordes of junkies and homeless people who want to use the space. The two uniformed officers had checked out the abandoned building across the street from the B’nai Shalom Synagogue and come to a hasty but well-founded conclusion: If they tried to set up in that place, the whole neighborhood would know they were there in three minutes, and they would never come out alive. This was not a neighborhood that looked kindly on the presence of cops.
B’nai Shalom Synagogue was an Orthodox synagogue, the last vestige of what had once been one of the most thriving Jewish communities in Philadelphia. Now the neighborhood belonged to nobody—black or white, rich or poor, Christian or Jew, European or Asian or Hispanic. For all the apocalyptic pictures painted in the press and in the kind of murder mystery of which Bennis did not approve, Gregor had never seen poor neighborhoods as breeding places of nothing but pathologies. They were simply residential areas for people who needed more money, and since quite a few of the greatest men on earth had had no money at all, he wasn’t about to dismiss the residents of Harlem or Watts as being no damn good at all. The real problem, for Gregor, came in places like this, places that weren’t really places anymore at all. He wasn’t sure what they were, besides dangerous. Being in them after dark made him feel as if he were standing in the Garden of Eden, listening to the serpent creep.
Because B’nai Shalom Synagogue was an Orthodox synagogue, there were none of the bright Hanukkah decorations Gregor had seen not only on Cavanaugh Street but on synagogue lawns in other parts of town. There was just the plain brownstone facade of the place, looking dignified and old in the cold and dark. The uniformed policemen had taken up positions on either side of the front doors. For this one night, the doors had been left unlocked. The uniformed policemen were able to see out because they were standing next to tall thin windows that flanked the doors. In keeping with the best Jewish practice, these windows were not adorned with pictures in any way whatsoever. They were, however, stained glass. They were glass stained just dark enough so that nobody from the outside looking in could tell that anybody was standing beside them.
Gregor and John Jackman were supposed to stay out of the way on the second floor, looking out through a great round window that blossomed over this disintegrating street with all the startling exuberance of a meteor shower. Gregor wondered what it looked like in the daylight, or lit up from behind. It had been designed for celebration and display. Now it was dark and still magnificent, but muted. Everything here was muted.
Gregor and John Jackman got to the site at two minutes to eight. It was close enough to the possible take-off time to make the uniformed men nervous. Neither Gregor nor John was interested in doing a song and dance about rank, although John would have been allowed to. They did what the uniformed men told them and climbed the stairs to the second floor. Then they lay down and put their heads up to look through the bottom-most petals of the scalloped window. Neither of them had any idea if they could be seen from the outside if they were standing up. It was better not to take any chances.
The floor under the window was dusty. John Jackman brushed a matted ball of gray off the front of his suit and muttered,
“If they were that good, we wouldn’t be here.”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “But you wouldn’t want to ruin everything just by giving them a chance to get lucky.”
“If we’d done what I wanted us to do, we wouldn’t have to worry about giving them a chance to be lucky. We’d be tucked in at the Ararat, eating dinner.”