Act of God

revolutionaries, got the name, I don’t know. They—the soldiers, I mean—they came up to Buchenwald, and I guess the guards—the Nazis—tried to make a fight of it, and the tankers just took them out, crashed through the gate. Abe, he showed me a picture of that gate somebody took for him later and sent him. There was what looked like an office over it, then a clock with a picket fence and a flag flying over that. I guess the soldiers crashed through the gate, then saw the bodies piled up inside it. The prisoners the Nazis shot beforehand. Piled up like so much firewood, Abe said. ‘Flexible firewood, Joel,’ was how he phrased it. Well, now, Abe, he’d never seen a black person in his life except in the cinema—funny, Abe never called it ‘the movies,’ always ‘the cinema,’ though you wouldn’t really hear his accent, you didn’t listen close on some words. But there came our boys through the gates, liberating the camp. And they see all these prisoners, heads shaved, ribs sticking through the tattered clothes or no clothes, hands clasped to God, giving thanks for deliverance. The soldiers were crying, these big black American kids, crying their eyes out. ‘Angels,’ Abe called them. ‘Weeping angels.’ ” Bernstein suddenly, violently, made a blubbering sound, but no tears. “Anyway, when his friend from the temple said he had this woman, needed a job, Abe just had to take one look at her, and he knew—hell, I knew—she had the job. The Black Panthers, they liberated Abe. Abe, he had to give the black woman a chance. And, turned out, she was terrific.”
    “How about Darbra?”
    Bernstein made the derisive face again. “Not a waste, but not so far from it. Could do the simple things fine, but give her something a little complicated, needed any kind of judgment, and it was a miracle, you got back what you wanted. Beverly felt the same way, maybe she told you.”
    “Why keep Darbra on, then?”
    “Abe’s side of the business, like I said. He did the hiring and the firing. He also said, ‘She’ll get better, Joel. She’ll get better.’ Only she never did, and now this.”
    “This?”
    “Not showing up and not even calling.”
    “What’s she like as a person?”
    “What, Darbra?”
    “Yes.”
    “There was something a little... off about her.”
    Past tense again. “How do you mean?”
    “Like... like milk can get, you know? Not exactly spoiled, just you open the carton and stick your nose in and you wouldn’t drink it, you could buy some more.”
    I had the same questions for Bernstein that I did for Swindell, but I also thought to save them for the end. “Can you take me over what happened the night Mr. Rivkind was killed?”
    “I already told the police all this.”
    “Sometimes it helps to hear it again fresh.”
    “I don’t know how fresh it’s going to be—what, three weeks later already?”
    “I’d still appreciate your trying.”
    Another deep sigh. “Okay. We’re open late Thursdays. We’d had some problems, kids hiding in the store, then doing some vandal shit and banging out the back door, two a.m. the cops or the fire department calling me out of bed with the news about our alarm going off. So Abe hires the big Irish—I’m sorry, no offense, it’s just that’s what Abe and I called the guy.”
    “That’s okay. Go on.”
    “Anyway, Abe and I are up here, trying to talk our way out of the recession, and Finian’s down below, walking through the place, looking for stowaways—I guess the store’s not going anywhere, they’re just ‘hideaways,’ huh?— and Beverly’s doing the dailies so we can see where we stand. I get up to go to the head—these pills I take, they don’t make me constipated, just kind of... irregular, you know?”
    “Which bathroom?”
    “Which? The men’s room, of course.”
    “I mean, the one in the corridor past the fire door?”
    “The only one we got. What’s the matter with that?”
    “Just seems kind of odd, the management using the same facilities as the customers.”
    “Abe’s idea.”
    “Abe’s?”
    “Yeah. We bought this store together, going on twenty years ago. It doesn’t matter, but you’ll see what I mean. When you looked up at the outside, the facade, you notice anything?”
    “Just that it’s a nice building.”
    “Nice? Huh, this is a Despradelle.”
    “A des-?”
    “Despradelle. French architect, came over near the turn of the century. This whole area, the Leather District, I mean, it