Write me a Letter

she was appreciating a tall tumbler of something refreshing as well. Frank reported that all was quiet at his end. I said, ”Likewise.”
    Shortly thereafter, back up at the house again, I was standing near the band watching the dancing and sipping a brandy and ginger ale without the brandy when the little rabbi popped up beside me.
    ”Aaron tells me you are a private detective, Mr. Daniel,” he said. ”Hmm, interesting. I never met anyone in your line of work before.”
    ”Can’t say I’ve met many rabbis, either,” I remarked. ”Is it true that to be Jewish your mother has to be Jewish, not your father? That always seemed a little strange to me.”
    ”A lot of our laws seem strange at first,” he said, ”until you know the thinking behind them. Then it is highly possible they may still seem strange, of course. But in this case, the logic is clear enough. While it is not always possible to tell who the father of a particular child is, it’s usually highly obvious who the mother is.”
    I laughed. He peered innocently up at me through his bifocals.
    ” ‘Daniel,’ ” he said reflectively. ”You have the same name as one of our greatest prophets, as you no doubt know.”
    ”No, I didn’t,” I admitted. ”Was that the same Daniel who I heard had all kinds of problems with some lions once somewhere?”
    ”In Babylon,” he said, nodding.
    ”Yeah, well,” I said. ‘Always was a lively town, Babylon, especially on Homecoming Week.”
    He smiled, then waved to Mrs. Rabbi, who came sedately fox-trotting by with Yoav.
    I looked around to make sure Evonne wasn’t within hearing distance, i.e., a nautical mile. ”Rabbi, can I ask you something?”
    ”Why not?”
    ”Did you ever meet a Nazi?”
    ”Yes,” he said. ”I did.”
    ”When?”
    ”This morning.” I stared at him.
    ”What was he doing?”
    ”He was scrubbing off a swastika someone had sprayed on the door to our temple. He shows up every time there’s been vandalism, with his bucket and Vim and paint remover and whatever, rolls up his sleeves, and goes to work.”
    ”How do you know he was a Nazi?”
    ”He told me,” the rabbi said. ”The time I took him out a cup of coffee. ‘Why are you doing this?’ I asked him. ‘Because I was a Nazi,’ he said. More than likely he was SS as well.”
    ”And why is that, Rabbi?”
    ”They were the only ones with the money and the resources and the organization to be able to leave Germany before the end,” he explained patiently. ”Of course, they had the most reason to leave, as well, as it was estimated they were responsible for something like ninety-five percent of all the atrocities.”
    ”And where’d they go? South America?”
    ”South America,” he agreed. ”Uruguay. Argentina alone gave them seven thousand blank passports. South Africa.”
    ”Here?” I asked uneasily.
    ”In Mr. Allan Ryan’s book, he estimates ten thousand came here. Naturally, they’d all be trembling old men now in their middle seventies, like me.” He took off his skullcap, looked at it, gave it a little shake, then put it on again. ”Not a particularly cheerful subject for such a festive occasion, if I may say so, Mr. Daniel. Have you some particular interest in the subject? A professional one, perhaps?”
    ”I sure as fuck hope not,” I said, but under my breath. To the diminutive rabbi I merely repeated what I had told Mr. Aaron Lubinski, that a passing interest, nothing more, had been aroused by Nathan’s library.
    ”Oh, yeah,” I said, snapping my fingers. ”I know what I did want to ask you about. Did you ever happen to come across those rabbi mysteries? Monday the Rabbi Slept Late, Tuesday he did something else and Wednesday I can’t remember what?”
    ”Indeed I did,” he said, nodding. ”I have the whole series. My son, the well-known comedian, sends me one every time I have a birthday. He thinks he’s shocking me.”
    ”So what do you do?”
    ”I pretend to be deeply shocked,” he said. ”Who am I not to give my only son what he wants most?” He went off to rejoin Mrs. Rabbi, who was beckoning energetically to him from a nearby table, one of two that had been left in place when the rest were dismantled to provide space for cutting the rug. I went off, rather hastily, to put the merest splash of booze in my ginger ale.
    It was a little after eleven when the party started running down; some of the more elderly of the guests had already left, as had some of the ones with