She stared at him coldly.
“I won’t even dignify that with an answer.”
“Humor me. Dignify it.”
She spoke through tight lips.
“What we do after we’re married as husband and wife in our own place is no one’s business but our own. But this wasn’t the same situation—”
“All you had to do was wake me up in a couple of hours and tell me to leave. Nothing happened. No one would have been the wiser.”
“We’re not children sneaking behind the backs of our parents, Peter. I had nothing to hide by letting you stay here. I just wanted Rav Schulman to know that.”
“What other things do you tell the great rabbi about me?”
She became furious.
“Nothing.”
“After all, he must have a hotline to God—”
“Every single Jew has a hotline to Hashem, anytime they want. All they have to do is open up a siddur and say tehillim. Rabbi Schulman is respected because he is a tzaddik and a talmid hacham—a pious and learned man—and not because he’s of divine descent. We don’t have popes, remember?”
“Well, some Jews obviously believe they’re more worthy—”
He was interrupted by the phone.
“Don’t answer it!” he ordered.
“This is still my house,” Rina retorted angrily. “I can answer my phone, thank you.” She jerked up the receiver, said hello, then wordlessly held out the receiver to him. He took it, and as he listened, his face became etched in pain. He said that he’d be right down and hung up.
“Bad news?” she asked anxiously.
“Do I ever get good news?” he answered caustically.
Something had deepened his horrible mood, hurting him. “What’s happened?” Rina asked.
“One of my informants, a sixteen-year-old girl who looks like my daughter, is in the hospital, beaten to a bloody pulp. Indirectly it was my fault. She was feeding me information, and when the case began to get complicated, I told her to back off. She didn’t listen, and I think someone got to her. Now she’s hanging on by a thread and I’m pissed off.”
“Peter, you can’t be responsible—”
“Don’t give me your pep rally routine. Life is not sugar and spice. Life sucks. This place sucks. I hate it. I hate the holier-than-thou attitude around here. I hate the self-righteousness! I hate the our-way-is-right-and-your-way-is-wrong pigheadedness. The goddam absolutes. You can believe in your little rules and rituals, but let me tell you something, in the real world there’s no blacks and white—only goddam muddy grays!”
He picked up a cup from her kitchen table and flung it across the room. He’d always had a good arm and a crackerjack aim. The brass had given up trying to lull him over to SWAT. It hit her wedding picture smack in the center, shattered the glass, knocked it to the floor.
She stared at the blank spot on the wall, then looked at Decker, holding back tears.
“How long have you wanted to do that?”
“A long time.”
“I know you’ve been under terrible stress, Peter, and I’m trying to be understanding—”
“Rina the angel. Or is it Rina the martyr taking abuse from her friends who don’t at all approve of her big, dumb goy—”
“Stop it, Peter!”
“You want to tell them something interesting, Rina? The next time they razz you about me being a shaigetz, you tell them I’m Jewish. That’ll shut them up.”
She stared at him blankly.
“It’s true, you know,” he said. “I’m Jewish, Rina. Just like you.”
“I don’t understand—”
“I’m adopted. My biological parents were Jewish. Understand now?”
She couldn’t answer him.
“I’ve known about it since I was eighteen,” he went on. “I knew I was technically Jewish the first time I stepped foot on the grounds here.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I had my reasons.”
Tears welled up in her eyes.
“How could you keep that from me? Didn’t you trust me?”
“It wasn’t a matter of trust. I didn’t tell you because I wanted to find out what being your kind of Jew is like, so I could either accept it or reject it. You know what, Rina? I reject it! I reject all your phony baloney customs and laws because they were made by rabbis who dwelt in ivory towers and never had to deal with the day-by-day crap of living. Like Schulman. Give him a month on the streets, seeing the garbage I see, putting up with scum and mud and shit that fills you up until your eyes turn brown. Give him one month of it and I guarantee you, the man’s ironclad faith will be cleaved as wide as the Red Sea.”
He tried to stare her down, but she held his gaze with rage burning in her eyes. He’d never seen her like that.
“You’re so far off base, Peter, you’re not even in the ballpark,” she said. “Rav Schulman was in Auschwitz for three years. He lost his entire family. His wife was made sterile by Nazi butchery. His children were executed in front of his eyes—shot in the head. He was forced to dig their graves with his bare hands.”
Decker continued to look at her, but his eyes were no longer confrontational. A sour taste filled his mouth, a putrid stench clogged his nostrils. He felt nauseated. Lowering his head, he swallowed back a dry heave and walked to the door.
“I’m not a saint, Rina,” he said quietly. “And I don’t want to live with one, either.”
Her skull was a headdress of bandages, and what showed of her face was raw and ripped and poked with plastic tubing. Her eyes were closed when Decker walked in, so he pulled up a chair at her bedside. A cockpit of panels and dials monitored her vital signs. Green fluorescent lines jumped about on a screen and he heard beeps at irregular intervals. Techno-medicine. Decker wondered if any of it really helped in the long run.
Noticing her damp forehead, he took a tissue and dabbed the sweaty skin gently. She opened her eyes.
“Hi, Kiki,” he said softly.
Her lips turned upward. Her mouth tried to form a word, but instead she coughed feebly.
“Don’t talk. You’ll have plenty of time to talk.” She nodded.
“Go to sleep.”
Again she nodded. Her eyes closed and moments later she drifted off.
Decker walked outside the room and lit up. Immediately, two nurses and an orderly told him there was no smoking. He extinguished the cigarette.
A young woman approached him—a hooker who was trying to hide it. Her skirt was of modest length, but too tight. Her blouse was buttoned up to her neck but was still sheer enough to see her bare breasts and nipples. Her crimson-nailed feet were stuffed into open-toed sandals with fuck-me heels. She was long-limbed, with a horsy face—big teeth, thick lips, and large hard eyes saturated with hate.
“Are you the cop friend of Kiki’s?” she asked. Her voice was low and breathy. In the dark it would have been sexy.
“Who are you?” Decker asked flatly.
“I’m Lilah, a friend of Kiki’s. Like her best friend.”
Like her lover, he thought. The protective posture,