Grief Street

Sister B. smiling at me.
    “Bingo! So, let’s say God’s ass is in a sling. What are Shabbatai Sevi and his cult supposed to do about it?”
    “I don’t know. What?”
    “Find a way—through the practice of evil, the only power equal to God—to perform a great tikkun olam.”
    “Sevi might have had a blasphemy problem with that.”
    “To be sure.”
    “By the way, what’s a tikkun olam?”
    “A healing of the world, for the benefit of all people. In the specific case of Sevi and his cause, it means the rectification of a shattered God.”
    “I’m getting the idea here that Sevi wanted Satan to make a house call.”
    “Well—like I said, the guy was pragmatic.”
    “Also you said he was nuts. Is it possible to be both?”
    “Maybe not. Maybe Shabbatai Sevi was only a prophet. That would explain why he died a forgotten man. We either forget our prophets or we kill them, often both.”
    “What did the prophet foresee?”
    “That holiness is impossible.”
    “So life is what—hopeless?”
    “I wouldn’t say that. What I would say is that we need to be sure of whom we can trust at the time when everything comes down on our heads. A certain kind of cop, as you Put it. A rodef shalom. That’s you, Neil.”
    And how would I explain all this to Officer Caras standing next to me with his revolver and his belt utilities clattering back into place on his hips? Officer Caras waiting for a coherent answer to a reasonable question, asked in a syna-8ue where an unholy thing had happened.
    “Mr. Glick?” I said, ignoring Caras, since I had no coherent answer for him—or for that matter, me. I placed my hand on Glick’s head. He was fevered, his hair felt like baby’s down. I slipped a finger under his jaw, feeling for a pulse, finding one. “I know you’re tired, Mr. Glick. But before you rest, can you help me with something?”
    “Rodef shalom... Rodef shalom ...”
    “Come on, Hockaday, what’s he saying?” Caras was growing impatient. So were the forensics cops, who both stood now, staring at me with my hand across the head of the ole man lying on the pew.
    “Never mind,” I said. I asked Glick, “What happened here? Tell me—in English.”
    Glick waggled a thin hand over his throat. I knelt, so he could whisper into my ear. His voice was a dead man’s cough. “Reb Paznik’s face... Och, his face! His face! Thanks be to God, you’ve come to slay the beast.”

Seven

    T he night before, King Kong Kowalski had driven his candy-apple red ’71 Buick Roadmaster (a bulky and problematical car, though one with ample front-seat gut room) from his house in Queens over to Jersey. There he attended a strictly word-of-mouth sporting event in the warehouse district of Newark.
    Now he was sitting in a storefront basement on West Thirteenth Street in Manhattan, haunches straddled over two folding chairs, tilting perilously into the ear of a corrections officer by the name of Harry Darcy. He was telling Darcy about Newark and last evening’s card of “ultimate fighting,” a type of blood struggle where ex-jocks and bar bouncers and kick-boxing refugees take the place of pit bull dogs, a sporting event where a mere ring will not do. Ultimate fight-mg, Kowalski was explaining confidentially, was performed in a thirty-foot octagonal span of chain-link fencing—without benefit of referee.
    Harry Darcy—big, middle-aged, close-cropped blond hair, a red face shot full of booze—was likewise a rabid public servant of the city of New York. Likewise, he had been induced by his superior—in this case, the warden of Rikers Island—to enroll in a sensitivity training course sanctioned by the city and state of New York. He was drinking creamed coffee from a paper cup and seemed about half-interested in what Kowalski was saying out of the side of his mouth.
    “The thing you got to love about it—” Kowalski, too, was having coffee. Also a waxed-paper bag full of custard-packed crullers. He interrupted himself to tongue sticky sugar off his fingers. “They don’t pay attention to the rules of that dead fop over in Scotland. Know what I’m saying?”
    “Marquess of Queensberry?”
    “Him, yeah.”
    Darcy’s eyes blinked heavily. He was headachy with the walking flu and queasy from last night’s whisky. All the way in from Parkchester in the Bronx, where he lived, he had had to stand up in the subway car. The only thing he had to read was The Chief, a newspaper for civil service employees. An