The fax chatters and spits out another affidavit. Lenox reaches for it with one hand while his pinky finger remains in the atlas, blindly probing for the estimated location of Israel.
I HAVEN’T seen Dad since my grandfather’s funeral.
That is what the missing man’s son said.
And it hasn’t occurred to the fucking Israelis to tell him this until now?! What were they thinking? Are they trying to manipulate an American detective the way they maneuver the whole world? Lenox refuses to be their pawn. He’ll close the case and be done with it. They can go find their lost son themselves.
He hurls the atlas onto the windowsill. The drops outside tremble from the impact, but quickly resume their course.
Fuck you, Isra—
HE SIPS his Jack Daniels and slowly calms down.
Orphanhood.
The javelin that slowly slices, scalping away the last remaining trace of childhood.
Here is a logical explanation: the Israeli is removing his grieving self from his familiar environment. He is going far away, somewhere where he will not be consoled, where no one will sympathize and pat his shoulder and utter clichés about having to be strong and how the show must go on.
Lenox’s grandmother said: The dead are always following you. Indians are excellent trackers in their next lives, too.
He corrected her: in their deaths.
He had cultivated his characteristic expression when he was a child, and it really was a very effective way to disguise intent. Lenox even insulted his grandmother under the guise of politeness. Folklore is a business for old ladies on the reservation, not for a citizen of the New World. We’ve crossed into the next millennium, and despite all the fanciful prophecies of doom, the world continues to suffer the usual calamities. The same endless bickering. Always us against them. Yawn.
And the world record goes to the Israelis. Addicted to their tedious quarrel. They and their neighbors were offered a chance to put down their weapons, but they missed it.
Fuck them all.
Before the police arrived, the missing man’s son assumed his father had shut himself away in his home for the duration of the bereavement period. The discovery that he had left the country without observing the custom of shiva horrified him. He found it hard to believe that his father could trample Jewish tradition so crudely. He accused the police detective of provocation, and the poor man had to swear on his children’s lives that the father had really left Israel the night after the funeral. The son made a point of noting how sacred he himself held the customs, and talked emotionally of how he had gathered his friends from the yeshiva in Jerusalem to say prayers for his late grandfather’s soul.
If a person dies without leaving enough relatives, the newly religious grandson explained to the secular investigators, people could be paid to say Kaddish over him.
Lenox scatters question marks over the document: shiva, Kaddish—terms vaguely familiar to any New Yorker, but what is their significance for members of the map-stain nation?
The son had called his father a few times after the funeral, but naïvely assumed he had disconnected his phone for the mourning period. As a rule, they did not speak often. Ever since he became a ba’al teshuva.
The Israelis haven’t bothered to explain this term either, and Lennox circles it.
He’s given up on Jackie Brendel. What is that Jewish woman afraid of? That he’ll plunder her precious faith? Why would anyone want to join up with the Jews anyway? Chosen people my ass.
At that very moment, a note is slipped under the door. Simon T. Lenox is in no rush to pick it up, feeling tired and troubled by his bladder.
Dear Inspector Lenox,
All Jews are responsible for one another.
Yours,
Jackie Winona Brendel
He sits there pondering, rolling the bottle between his hands without taking a drink.
Does this mean they have some sort of fraternity? Or has Israel become a closed enclave where no stranger can set foot? What is it about this map-stain nation that has it ruffling feathers all over the world for more than half a century? Other states barely get a mention on the evening news, even when they are the sites of massacres. Maybe the Jews themselves are not yet accustomed to having their own sovereign entity, and they’re still trying to lodge it in the world’s consciousness.
Lenox puts off a trip to the bathroom. His bladder is ringing false alarms anyway.
THE SON felt that his father wanted to be left alone at the cemetery, and he recalled watching him hunch over the grave, his pants cuffs getting dirty.
There is nothing odd about that. Every person has his or her own way of saying good-bye.
The missing man placed small stones on the dry clods of earth while his son stood nearby, hidden from view, watching as his father demonstratively removed his yarmulke and put it in his pocket. The last of the mourners had left and the son lingered, swallowed his pride, and approached his father. He wanted to get through to him.
Dad, he who does not obey the ancient laws will be punished.
Stop reciting slogans, son, the man replied. Look at us. I’m the older one—running ahead, and you, the younger one—you’re going in the opposite direction.
Unable to avoid a graveside argument, the son declared that the Jewish faith was eternal and had no backwards or forwards.
Something seems to be clearing in Lenox’s mind.
The father said: I feel sorry for you, my child.
Child. As if he had not been through his own journey of learning.
The missing man dug through his pockets. For a moment the son hoped his father had changed his mind and was looking for his yarmulke, but instead he pulled out a crumpled piece of rolled-up paper and said: This is our property. Granddad left us an inheritance.
When he held out the paper, the son turned his back. Now he regrets that, he told the investigator. At the time he thought it was blasphemous to speak of an inheritance at the newly dug grave. Desecration of the dead.
He could still hear the echo of the body sliding into the grave.
Lenox reads this over and over again, to make sure there is no mistake. The body—into the grave? But where was the coffin?
Dear Ms. Brendel,
Why not, “All humans are responsible for one another”?
Yours,
S. T. L.
LENOX THINKS back to the only Jewish funeral he ever attended, at the elegant funeral home on the Upper West Side. The commissioner himself eulogized the deceased—a senior fraud investigator who died of a heart attack in the middle of the second act at a Broadway show. He enumerated the man’s virtues in great detail, elevating his stature to sublime levels, while the mourners shifted uncomfortably in their seats facing the coffin.
Lenox represented the unit. Wearing his smart suit, the one that always hangs in his room for court appearances, he placed a wreath of red carnations, ordered specially, on the dais. He noticed the dissonance immediately, and later learned that Jews do not bring flowers to a funeral. He felt misled. To relieve the boredom of the eulogies, he stared at the coffin and considered its composition: restrained elegance, no superfluous copper or velvet adornments. Fine oak. The decay would take years.
He was relieved to find the coffin closed. He would not have to stand over the dead man’s face, and his breath and droplets of saliva would not descend with the coffin into the earth as a promissory note, a reminder that Lenox too would one day arrive in that