“They found them around the body of Maria Gonzalez?”
“They didn’t find them around bodies at all,” David said. “That’s the point, you see. There’s no way to know if they’re connected. There’s no way to know if they’re important at all.”
“If what are important at all?”
David Goldman hesitated, looking as if he’d dearly like to go back to his discussion of the homeless. Then he plunged his hands into the pockets of his jacket and came up with a double handful of dreidels. Dreidels, Gregor thought, blinking in astonishment. Ordinary wooden dreidels. He watched in disbelief as David Goldman looked through the piles and singled out two he apparently liked better than the rest.
“There they are,” he said. “The strange ones.”
“Strange ones,” Gregor repeated. “Rabbi Goldman, those are dreidels. You can buy them on any street corner in Philadelphia at this time of year.”
“In New York, too,” David Goldman said. “But you can’t buy them like these two. Look.” David grabbed a third dreidel from the pile and began to turn it slowly. “Nūn, gīmel, hē, shīn,” he recited. “That’s for Nes gadol hay ah sham. ‘A great miracle occurred there.’ The miracle of the oil, you know.”
“All right,” Gregor said.
“Now look at these.” David grabbed one of the two he had pushed out front. “Nūn, gīmel, hē, pē. Nes gadol hayah poh. ‘A great miracle occurred here.’”
“I don’t understand,” Gregor said.
“Here,” David Goldman insisted. “Here. In Israel. These two are Israeli dreidels.”
“Israeli dreidels?”
“Shelley found the first one in the carpet on the stage at the studio in New York, before Maria Gonzalez’s body was found but after she was dead, I’m sure, since I think the police said she’d died hours before. Anyway, it was just there, and Shelley picked it up and looked it over and thought it was defective. Then she gave it to Lotte.”
“And Lotte knew what it was,” Gregor said. “Because Lotte had lived in Israel.”
“Well, a lot of people who haven’t lived in Israel would know what it was,” David said. “It’s not a state secret. It would depend on how tied into the community they were, or their parents were. Shelley came from a rather heavily assimilationist family.”
“Lotte didn’t tell the New York police about this dreidel? And Ms. Feldstein didn’t either?”
“There was nothing to tell. I mean, it was getting to be the time of year. There are dreidels all over the place, especially in New York.”
“But this one?”
“Well, plenty of people who work for Lotte’s show have been to Israel. And Itzaak Blechmann lived in Israel after he left the Soviet union .”
“What about the second one?” Gregor asked.
David Goldman poured himself more coffee and nodded vigorously. “It was the second one that stuck in Lotte’s mind,” he said, “because if there were two there should have been three, you see.”
“No,” Gregor said.
“I’ll get there. Lotte found the second one in her temporary office yesterday after the police had left. She says she almost didn’t realize what it was, because by now there really are dreidels all over the place and they’re small and they just go wandering away—I live in a house with children, Mr. Demarkian, I can attest to the fact that they wander away—so she almost didn’t look at it. And then she did.”
“And it was one of these Israeli dreidels.”
“With the pē, yes, and not the shīn.”
“And there should have been three?”
“You can see why she didn’t tell the police about it,” David Goldman said. “It was in her office. There wasn’t anything about the death of Max that was connected to a dreidel. What could she have told the police even if it had occurred to her. Why would it have occurred to her?”
“I don’t know,” Gregor admitted.
“I’ll tell you now, I don’t see why it would be significant, either,” David Goldman said, “but when you were talking to us yesterday, you and that police detective—”
“John Jackman.”
“You both said we should bring up anything at all that we found strange. And here this is. Lotte thought the dreidels belonged to Itzaak, but he says they don’t. He says he didn’t bring anything of that kind to the United States at all. And I think he might be telling me truth.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s very religious,” David Goldman said. “He isn’t the kind of person who would use even something as religiously insignificant as a dreidel as a souvenir. If he wanted to bring a souvenir from Israel, he would have brought an Israel flag or one of those snowballs with the parliament building in it.”