Grief Street

aggrieved parties went their separate fist-shaking ways. The cabby was calm as a corpse as he braked to a stop in front of us.
    I opened the back door of the taxi for Glick to slide in ahead of me. As I started to climb in behind him, there was a tap on my shoulder. I turned.
    “Say there, Detective—I couldn’t help hearing what the caretaker told you...” This was the voice of one of the forensics cops, the one who had been crawling around the carpet, picking through the fiber nap with tweezers. He was a buttery guy in a machine-wash and tumble-dry tan suit. “About the rabbi’s face, I mean.”
    “What about his face?”
    “It’s gone—missing. Just like the caretaker says. Only the old guy didn’t elaborate. Well, not in the usual way.”
    “You have some useful elaboration?”
    “What’s your interest?”
    “Personal.”
    The buttery guy shrugged in a friendly way. He seemed helpful. He told me his name was Bilkiss. I told him mine again. Also I told him that Marv Paznik was a friend, but I left out the part about the AA connection.
    “Whoever did your buddy the rabbi,” Bilkiss explained, ‘here’s how it plays: first he jabs him three times quick in the chest. Pop goes the heart. Pop-pop go the lungs. Happened so quick the rabbi never had air to holler.”
    “Then?”
    “It’s probably true nobody saw it happen. No mystery about the results, though. The rabbi’s face was skinned clean off the skull. I’m not talking a scalp job like in a cowboy-and-Indian flick. This killer—what these old folks are calling a shadow—he made a deep incision sideways across the crown of the head, then he sliced down the sides and under the chin. After that he just tore off the face, like it was sealing wax on a head of cheese.”
    “Sounds almost surgical. Like this shadow knew exactly what he was doing.”
    “He knows from scalpels all right.”
    “Any weapons recovered?”
    “No.”
    The cabby tapped his horn. Time to go.
    “Thanks, Bilkiss.”

    I have affection for Glick, and for my elders in general, but I can live without ever having to see the old guy eat again.
    His apartment was two stifling rooms on the airshaft side of a loft building. The place smelled of soiled laundry and bad breath. And kasha, which besides matzoh and ice cream was the only thing Glick ate at home. So I boiled water and made him a bowl of kasha. Half of it wound up dribbled all over his shirt. When he finished the mush and put down his spoon, his face wore a bad-dog look that said, Okay—so I know I made a revolting mess for you, but I don’t know how I did it exactly, and I don’t know where I stand on the issue of giving a crap.
    So I helped him out of his wet shirt. Then I sponged off his bad-dog chin and put him to bed.
    “That Hebrew word you said?” I asked, covering him with a light blanket.
    “Rodef shalom?”
    “No, the other one. Starts with a B.”
    “Bá’al zbub. The beast is here.” The way Glick said this, it was like a whisper in a cemetery. “The same as Beelzebub.
    It means lord of the flies. It’s the name of Satan.”
    Then old Glick fell into sleep as quick as a child flattened by a day at the seashore. His belly full and his imaginings now duly relayed to me, he snored contentedly, white fingers laced atop his chest as if waiting for a nosegay of lilies. I left him resting in peace and walked back uptown along Broadway.
    Satan?
    Besides this from Glick, I had the troubling thought of my own future dotage: old, sagging, slobbering Neil Hockaday making a revolting mess for poor Ruby to clean up.

    I stopped feeling sorry for myself when I hit Forty-second Street and caught the eye of an acquaintance of mine by the name of Pauly Kerwin. He is a scrawny old carnival orphan with round, beaten-in features on a salmon pink face, and the forever sweet and wind-tossed look of a genuine old-fashioned skell. Pauly is a midget.
    Anybody who calls him a “little person” should—and these are Pauly’s own words—drop dead with flies on his face. When I last saw him—the other week it was, when he was wearing the same hostile paper sign around his neck he was wearing now—Pauly explained his sentiments on height: “When they called us midgets, at least there was a place for us to live that we could afford. Outside of carnivals, I’m talking, right here in Times Square. But now we’re evicted *n the name of progress and fresh money. Now we’re a bunch of short refugees in a war on