Festival of Deaths(40)

“You know what somebody should invent?” he asked Ira. “A gadget that would hang up a phone in the bedroom while you were talking in the kitchen. If you know what I mean.”

“What anti-Semitic organization?”

Gregor got his kettle off the stove and filled it with water. He put it back on the stove and turned on the heat.

“Let me get my notes here,” he told Ira. “You’ve got to understand, I’m giving you all this third hand. I haven’t talked to the rabbi whose synagogue was involved. Not yet, anyway.”

“Who have you talked to?”

“Another rabbi. Man name of David Goldman. He—”

“The David Goldman whose sister has that sex show?”

“You know him?” Gregor was surprised.

“I don’t know him personally,” Ira said, “but I know of him. He used to be all over the place down here before the Wall fell. He used to sponsor people who wanted to immigrate from the Soviet union  .”

“I think he still does,” Gregor said. “In a way, that’s who I came in contact with him. He sponsored the man who’s now my parish priest.”

“Funny. I thought he made a point of sponsoring Jews.”

“Maybe he just makes a point of sponsoring people who have been persecuted for their religion. Whatever. I’ve talked to Rabbi Goldman, but I haven’t talked to the rabbi whose synagogue was involved, so take what I’ve got with that in mind. Oh, and I checked into the police reports. They’re useless.”

“They often are.” Ira Ballard sighed. “Christ, Gregor, what are you going to do? The cops have fifteen murders a week to solve and some asshole to chase who gets his kicks driving by apartment buildings and spraying their windows with machine gun fire, they don’t have a lot of time left over for spray paint. In spite of the fact that a little preventive medicine—”

“Ira.”

“Never mind,” Ira said. “Shoot.”

The kettle was shooting steam and wailing in a high-pitched whistle that threatened to turn into a shriek. Gregor dumped a teaspoon of instant coffee in the bottom on a mug and poured water over it. The instant coffee was freeze-dried, and it foamed.

“The incident happened on the twenty-third of November at Temple Beth-El in Philadelphia proper, meaning not on the Main Line,” Gregor said. “I’m sorry. You probably didn’t need to be told that. Around here it’s sometimes necessary. Temple Beth-El is the cornerstone of an Hasidic neighborhood, there’s been trouble up there before—”

“With this same sort of thing?”

“Nothing so focused,” Gregor said. “Nothing religious, certainly. A few smashed windows. A few overturned trash cans. That kind of thing.”

“That kind of thing can be everything or nothing.”

“Yes. I know. On the twenty-third, though, the attack was focused. Sometime in the night, the entire street facade of Temple Beth-El was sprayed over in phosphorescent paint. With the usual kind of thing. A lot of obscenities. ‘Go back to Israel’ with ‘Israel’ misspelled. ‘Hitler was right.’ That kind of thing.”

“Any signature?”

“Definitely. ‘White Knights, Defenders of Race and Faith.’”

“Mmm,” Ira said.

“The police did try all the usual things,” Gregor told him. “Nobody in the neighborhood had seen anything. Nobody had heard anything, either—”

“That could be fear,” Ira put in quickly. “Sometimes, if the neighborhood is heavily populated by people who have immigrated from countries where there is a lot of officially sanctioned anti-Semitism, people are afraid to talk. They think the police are in collusion with the people who are tormenting them.”

“Well, fear or ignorance, it doesn’t matter now,” Gregor said. “Nobody was willing to admit seeing or hearing anything. The rabbi at Temple Beth-El was working late in his office that night. His office is on the first floor, directly across the street from the synagogue’s front door. He worked until midnight and then he went to bed. So whatever happened had to have happened after midnight.”

“If we were dealing with anything but an Hasidic neighborhood, I’d want to put it later than that,” Ira agreed. “Was there any precipitating incident that you know of?”

“What do you mean, a precipitating incident?”

“It could be anything at all,” Ira said. “It could be really remote. We had a bunch of these guys in Oakland, went on a spray-paint rampage after that Israeli guy won the Nobel in medicine last year.”