Grief Street

like that ever since the rabbi got the business,” a uniform told me. The nameplate under his badge read R. CARAS. “He’s been gibbering like that since just after midnight, over and over.”
    “It’s not gibber,” I said. “It’s Hebrew.”
    “Whatever. Nobody got nothing out of the geezer. Somebody says he’s the caretaker around here.” Caras raised a blue serge arm and pointed up the aisle cutting through the center of the temple sanctuary. A couple of plainclothes officers were crawling on their hands and knees between the altar and a front pew roped off in yellow crime scene tape. “See—everybody’s gone except the forensics boys. The detectives from Central Homicide, they took down all the statements they could. I’m on security post, to keep out the gawkers and the lawyers. Also I’m waiting on the geezer to fall over.”
    “I know him,” I said. “If you don’t mind. I’m going to help him.”
    I started up the aisle. One of the forensics cops lifted his head and grunted at me suspiciously. I held up my gold shield, the one I carry on a chain around my neck inside of whatever I’m wearing. Also I pointed to my navy blue Yankees baseball cap and said, “Color of the day.” The forensics cop grunted again and resumed with his tweezers, picking through the tightly fibered altar carpet—the parts not soaked in blood anyway. I sidled through a row of pews and turned up a side aisle toward the old man at the wall.
    “Mr. Glick?”
    He kept on chanting, oblivious of me. His voice was dry and soft, like a tired hand scratching against a screen door.
    I put my hand to his shoulder. “Come on, Mr. Glick.” He made no response, so I tugged at him. The old man tilted backward and collapsed against me, as thin and weightless as brooms falling out of a closet. He trembled. I turned him around so he could see my face.
    “You...?” His dry throat closed, it was all he could say for the moment.
    “Neil Hockaday. You remember, Mr. Glick. I was here last week, talking with the rabbi.” I took the old man by the elbow and steered him to a pew. “Come on now, let’s sit down.”
    Glick settled on the edge of a pew. I asked if he would like some water. He motioned—yes—with a papery white hand full of blue veins.
    “Rodef shalom," he said, looking up at me. There was delirium in his disappearing voice, relief in his flinty face. He nodded his head. His eyes fluttered with exhaustion. He started chanting again, even as I managed to arrange him so that he was lying out flat on the pew. His knees cracked.
    Rodef shalom... Rodef shalom... Rodef shalom ...”
    Officer Caras galloped up the side aisle. I knew this without turning around for a look. I knew from the sound of Patrolman’s gear jouncing on his belt: revolver, flashlight, whistle, leather-bound violations book. When he reached "le’ he asked, “You make out anything your gibbering Duddy says?”
    Last week—there in the synagogue, in the rabbi’s study, after my friend and I had finished soup kitchen duty, pouring minestrone into a few hundred cardboard cartons and wrapping up as many sandwiches in waxed paper—Marvin Paznii told me I was a rodef shalom. A pursuer of peace in a troubled, violent world.
    Marv thought it was a big deal how I was the only cop serving as a volunteer at the soup kitchen he had started up in an old candy store on Ninth Avenue. An Irish Catholic cop at that. I reminded him more than once that in the religious sense the soup kitchen was nonpartisan. Also that volunteer work was a chore I got stuck with on account of my AA sponsor, Father Declan Byrne, who was very big on volunteerism. He thought it would be good for me to serve the public without a gun for a change, just like he thought it was good for him to be running the Holy Cross dead table on top of his priestly duties. So I had to go along, which I did not consider a big deal. But which Marv did, like I said. Whenever I turned up for soup kitchen duty, for instance, he had me walk back to the synagogue with him afterward for lunch.
    Food was not the main thing. Glick, the temple caretaker, would call out for Kosher Chinese. When it came he would dish it up for us in the study so that Marv and I could have a meal “like a couple of gentlemen,” as old Glick put it. During lunch, but especially afterward, Marv would talk about whatever was on his mind. Which for me was the main thing, because the late Rabbi Marvin Paznik was one of the best