Servant of the Bones (31 page)

“Rebbe, don’t you understand? They want to find who killed her—not that trash with the ice picks who stole her necklace, but those who put them up to it, those who knew the value of the jewels!”

Once again, the necklace. I saw no necklace then and I saw none in my memory now. There had been no necklace around her throat. They had taken nothing from her. What was this diversion of the necklace?

If only I knew these men better. I couldn’t tell for sure when Gregory lied.

The voice of Gregory grew lower, colder, less conciliatory. He straightened his shoulders.

“Now let me speak plainly, Rebbe,” he said. “I have always, at your behest kept our secret, my secret, our secret—that the founder of the Temple of the Mind was the grandson of the Rebbe of this Court of the Hasidim!” His voice rose now as if he couldn’t quiet it. “For your sake,” he said, “I’ve kept this secret! For Nathan’s sake. For the sake of the Court. For the sake of those who loved my mother and father and
remembered them. I have kept this secret for you and for them!”

He paused, the tone of accusation hanging there sharply, the old man waiting, too wise to break the silence.

“Because you begged me,” said Gregory, “I kept the secret. Because my brother begged me. And because I love my brother. And in my own way, Rebbe, I love you. I kept the secret so that you might not have the disgrace in your own eyes, and so that the cameras would not come poking in your windows, the reporters would not come crowding your stoop to demand of you how was it possible that out of your Torah and your Talmud and your Kabbalah came Gregory Belkin, the Messiah of the Temple of the Mind, whose voice is heard from the city of Lima to the towns of Nova Scotia, from Edinburgh to Zaire. How did your ritual, your prayer, your quaint black clothing, your black hats, your crazy dancing, your bowing and hollering—how did all of that loose upon the world the famous and immensely successful Gregory Belkin and the Temple of the Mind? For your sake, I kept quiet.”

Silence. The old man was sunk in silence, unforgiving, and filled with contempt.

I was as confused as ever. Nothing drew me to either man, not hate or love, nothing drew me to anything but the remembered eyes and voice of the dead girl.

Again, it was the younger man who spoke.

“Once in your entire life, you came to me of your own will,” Gregory said. “You crossed the great bridge that divides my world from yours, as you call it. You came to me in my offices to beg me not to disclose my background! To keep it a secret, no matter how many reporters questioned me, no matter how they pried.”

The old man didn’t answer.

“It would have benefited me to let the world know, Rebbe. How could it not have benefited me to say that I had come from such strong and observant roots! But long before you ever made your request of me, I buried my past with you. I covered it over with lies and fabrications so as to protect you! So that you would not be disgraced. You and my beloved
Nathan, for whom I pray every night of my life. I did that, and I continue to do it…for you.”

He paused as if his anger had the better of him. I was mesmerized by both of them and the tale that unfolded.

“But as God is my witness, Rebbe,” Gregory said, “and I do dare to speak of him in my Temple as you do in your yeshiva, let me tell you this. She said those words when she died! Now you know it was none of your black-clad saints clapping their hands and singing on Shabbes who killed Esther! It wasn’t my doe-eyed brother who killed Esther. It was not a Hasid who killed Esther. When the Nazis shot my mother and my father, neither raised a hand to stop the arm or the gun, is that not so?”

The old man, perplexed and torn, actually nodded in agreement, as if they had moved far beyond then own mutual hatred now.

“But,” said Gregory, and he held up the check in his left hand, “if you don’t tell me the meaning of those words, Rebbe, and I do remember them, then I shall tell the police where I once heard them. That it was here in this house, among the Hasidim whom Gregory Belkin, the man of mystery, the Founder of the Temple of the Mind, was actually born!”

I was dumbfounded. I waited. I didn’t dare to take my eyes off the old man. Still he held out.

Gregory sighed. He shrugged. He walked a pace and turned and looked to Heaven and then dropped his hand. “I will tell them, ‘Yes, sir, I’ve heard those words. Yes, once I heard them. At my grandfather’s knee, and yes, he is living, and you must go to him to find out what they mean.’ I’ll tell them—I’ll send them to you and you can explain the meaning of those words to them.”

“Enough,” said the old man. “You’re a fool, you always were!” He sighed heavily, and then more in contemplation than consciously, he said, “Esther said those words? Men heard her?”

“Her attendants thought she was looking at a man outside the window, a man with long black hair! That’s a secret the
police keep in their files, but the others saw him and they saw her look at him, and this man, Rebbe, he wept for her! He wept!”

It was I who trembled!

“Shut up. Stop. Don’t…”

Gregory gave a soft laugh of nudging mockery. He stepped back, turning this way and that again, without ever lifting his eyes to see me, though his eyes might, in a better light, have passed over my shoes. He turned back to the Rebbe.

“I never thought to accuse you, any of you, of killing her!” said Gregory. “Such a thought never came to me, though where have I ever heard such words before except from your tongue! And I walk in your door and you accuse me of killing my stepdaughter! Why would I do such a thing? I come here out of respect for her dying words!”

The old man said very calmly, “I believe you. The poor child spoke those words. The papers told of strange words. I believe you. But I also know you killed your daughter. You had it done.”

Gregory’s arms tensed as do the arms of men who are about to strike others, but he couldn’t and wouldn’t strike the Rebbe. That would never happen with these two men, I knew. But Gregory was at the end of his tether, and the zaddik was certain of Gregory’s guilt.

So was I. But what reason did I have for it? No more than the zaddik, perhaps.

I tried to peer into their souls, for surely they could boast of souls, the two of them, they were flesh and blood. I tried to look, as any human might look, as any ghost might plumb the depths of the soul of the living. I bent my head forward just a little as if the rhythm of their breathing would tell me, as if the beat of the heart would give away the secret.
Gregory, did you kill her?

Did the old man ask the younger man the same thing? He leant forward in the light of his dusty bulb; his eyes were crinkled and bright.

He looked at Gregory again, and as he did so, quite by accident, and quite for certain, he saw
me
.

His eyes shifted very slowly and naturally from his grandson, to me.

He saw a man standing where I stood. He saw a young man with long curling dark hair and dark eyes. He saw a man of good height and good strength, very young, in fact, so young that some might have thought him still a boy. He saw
me
. He saw Azriel.

I smiled but only a little, like a man about to speak, not to mock. I let him see the white of my teeth. I confided to his secret gaze that I had no fear of him. Like him, I stood, with a full beard and in black silk, a kaftan or long coat. Like him and one of his own.

And though I didn’t know why or how I knew, I did know that I was one of his own, more surely than I was kin to the Huckster Prophet before him.

A surge of strength passed through me, as if the old man had laid his hands on the bones and howled for me! So it often happens, when seen, I grow strong. I was almost as strong in those moments as I am now.

The old man gave no signal to Gregory of what he had seen. He gave no signal to me. He sat still. The drift of his eyes over the room seemed natural and to settle on nothing, in particular, and to have no emotion, except the dim veil of sorrow.

He stared at me again, in the veiled way that Gregory would never notice. He held fast to me in perfect quiet.

Louder came the rush of pulse inside me, tighter the perfect shell of my body closed its pores. I could feel that he saw me and he found me beautiful! Young and beautiful! I felt the silk I wore, the weight of my hair.

Ah, you see me, Rebbe, you hear me
. I spoke without moving my tongue.

He didn’t answer me. He stared at me as a man stares in thought. But he had heard. He was no fake preacher, but a true zaddik and he had heard my little prayer.

But the younger man, thoroughly deceived and with his back to me, talked again in English:

“Rebbe, did you tell anyone else the old story? Did Esther
by chance ever come here seeking to know who you were, and maybe you—”

“Don’t be such a fool, Gregory,” the old man said. He looked away from me for the moment. Then back at me as he went on. “I did not know your stepdaughter,” he said. “She never came here. Neither has your wife. You know this.” He sighed, staring at me as if he feared to take his eyes away.

“Is it a tale of the Hasidim or the Lubavitch?” asked Gregory. “Something one of the Misnagdim might have told Esther—”

“No.”

We stared at one another. The old man, alive, and the young spirit, robust, growing ever more vivid, and strong.

“Rebbe, who else…?”

“No one,” said the old man, fixing me steadily as I fixed him. “What you remember is true and your brother was far from hearing, and your aunt Rivka is dead. No one could have told Esther.”

Only now he looked away from me, and up at Gregory.

“It’s a cursed thing you speak of,” he said. “It’s a demon, a thing that can be summoned by powerful magic and do evil things.”

And his eyes returned to me, though the young man remained intent on him.

“Then other Jews know these stories. Nathan knows…”

“No, no one. Look, don’t take me for an idiot. Don’t you think I know you asked far and wide among the other Jews? You called this court and that, and you called the professors of the universities. I know your ways. You’re too clever. You have telephones in every room of your life. You came here as the last resort.”

The younger man nodded. “You’re right. I thought it would be common knowledge. I made my inquiries. So have the authorities. But it isn’t common knowledge. And so I am here.”

Gregory bent his head to the side, and thrust the folded bank draft at the Rebbe.

This gave the old man one second to gesture to me, one
second, merely to make the little gesture with his right index finger of Hide or Stay Quiet. It came with a swift negation with the eyes and the smallest move of his head. Yet it was no command, and no threat. It was something closer to a prayer.

Then I heard him.
Don’t reveal yourself, spirit.

Very well, old man, for the time being, as you request
.

Gregory—his back to me still—opened the check. “Explain the thing to me, Rebbe. Tell me what it is and if you still have it. What you told Rivka, you said it wasn’t an easy thing to destroy.”

The old man looked up at Gregory again, trusting me apparently to keep my place.

“Maybe I’ll tell you all you want to know,” said the old man. “Maybe I will deliver it into your hands, what you speak of. But not for that sum. We have more than plenty. You have to give us what matters to us.”

Gregory was much excited. “How much, Rebbe!” he said. “You speak as if you still have this thing.”

“I do,” said the old man. “I have it.”

I was astonished, but not surprised.

“I want it!” said Gregory fiercely, so fiercely that I feared he had overplayed his hand. “Name your price!”

The old man considered. His eyes fixed me again and then drifted past me, and I could see the color brighten in his withered face, and I could see his hands move restlessly. Slowly he let his eyes fasten on me and me alone.

For one precious second, as we gazed at one another, all the past threatened to become visible. I saw centuries beyond Samuel. I think I saw a glimmer of Zurvan. I think I saw the procession itself. I glimpsed the figure of a golden god smiling at me, and I felt terror, terror to know and to be as men are, with memory and in pain.

If this did not stop in me, I would know such agony that I would howl, like a dog, howl as the driver had howled when he saw the fallen body of Esther, I would howl forever. The wind would come. The wind would take me with all its other lost and howling souls. When I’d struck down the evil
Mameluk master in Cairo, the wind had come for me, and I had fought through it to oblivion.

Stay alive, Azriel. The past will wait. The pain can wait. The wind will wait. The wind can wait forever. Stay alive in this place. Know this.

I am here, old man
.

Calmly, he regarded me, unmarked by his grandson. He spoke now without taking his eyes off me, though Gregory bent to listen to his words:

“Go there, behind me and in the back of these books,” he said in English, “and open the cabinet you see there. Inside you’ll see a cloth. Lift it. And bring the thing that is beneath it. It is heavy, but you can carry it. You are strong enough.”

I gasped. I heard it myself, and I felt my heart crying. The bones were here! Right here.

Gregory hesitated for one moment, perhaps not accustomed to taking orders, or even doing the smallest things for himself. I don’t know. But then he sped into action. He hurried behind the bookcase at the old man’s back.

I heard the creak of wood, and I smelled the cedar and the incense again. I heard the snap of metal latches. I felt myself rise on the balls of my feet, and then sink down again to a firm stance.

The old man and I stared at one another without pause. I stepped free of the bookcase completely so that he might see me in my long coat that was like his, and he showed only the tiniest fear for an instant, then urged me, with a polite nod of his head, to please return to my hiding place.

I did.

Behind him, out of sight, Gregory fumbled and cursed.

“Move the books,” said the Rebbe. “Move them out of the way, all of them,” said the old man as he looked at me, as if he held me in check with his eyes. “Do you see it now?”