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All That Glitters
(or, A Case of Identity) by K.j.a. Wishnia No one lies on their death bed and says, "I should have watched more television." My great Aunt Celia never saw a television until she came down from the Ecuadorian mountains in the mid-1970s. She sat in our unheated home, wrapped in her stiff woolen shawl, the room dark except for the glowing glass screen before us, as the newsreaders told us how a flooded section of highway had given way and sent a busload of cristianos plunging into a ravine. She watch silently, then cautiously leaned over to me and whispered, "Can they see us?" I tried to explain that they couldn't. "But they're looking right at us." Then one day she left the mud-walled village and followed my wayward cousins to the U.S., where she beheld many more wonders, until, after 84 summers of service, that wondrous heart stopped beating. That was three days ago, and the black-bordered card staring up at me from between the shaggy piles of white papers on my desk informs me that the funeral mass is at 2 P.M. today at Our Lady of Sorrows in Corona, followed by burial services at St. Mary's Cemetery in a neighborhood some overconfident pioneers were audacious enough to name Utopia. I'm remembering the special flavors of Aunt Celia's kitchen, especially her sopa de pollo, which had a unique taste that is still unmatched despite all my attempts to reproduce it. I'm lost in a hazy reverie of olfactory sensations when the third button on my phone starts blinking and my boss hails me from the corner office. "Fil, pick up!" "Sure, whadaya got for me, Chip?" "I'm trying to reach that customs guy in Puerto Rico and nobody in the freaking place speaks any English," Chip shouts back at me. "Sure they do. They're probably just playing with you. ¿Allo?" "¿Sí? Con quién hablo?" says the guy. I can hear metallic banging in the background, and I can just picture the guy wearing oil-stained coveralls, holding a socket wrench in his hand. I tell him that I'm calling from Davis and Brown Investigations in New York, and that we're looking for a customs agents named Wilson Ortega. "You got the wrong number," he tells me in Spanish. "This is a garage." I thank him, hang up and go tell Chip. "Must be a chop shop," he says, not realizing how many car repair shops there are in San Juan. "Just sounded like a garage to me, Chip. But you never know," I add, wondering if there's a subtle prejudice behind his response. But Chip is already punching the hold button: "Mr. Theodorakis? My Spanish-speaking investigator is with me and she says you were given the wrong number," he says, crossing the number off his heavily-scribbled legal pad with a thick pencil and waving me out of the office. I stare at the papers on my desk for a few blank moments, trying to recover the special smells of my Great Aunt's kitchen. But they are gone, dissipated by the air currents of time and responsibilities. I start going through the easy pile, mechanically putting papers in the right folders, filing reports where they belong and recycling old memos, and wondering if anyone else can hear the giant whooooshing sound as all the joy of being alive gets sucked out of me, leaving an icy whirlpool of survivor's guilt rushing through my chest. I'm thinking that in Ecuador, cats have seven lives, and here they have nine--so where I come from, even the cats have it harder--when I look up and see a man standing a few feet in front of my desk. He's in his mid-fifties, with waxy skin sagging like sallow candle drippings and heavy bags of sleeplessness hanging from his eyes. He's wearing a long, dark winter coat and a thick fedora with a trace of shiny black yarmulke showing underneath. "Miss Buscarsela?" "Yes." I don't correct him with a "Ms." "I'm Louis Koppelman. The architect. Mr. Davis said that you would help me." "Nice to meet you, Mr. Koppelman." I extend my hand towards him, where it hangs for a second, then I divert it to the seat. "Sit down and take your coat off." He looks the chair over before lowering himself into it with a tired sigh, and takes his hat off, revealing a wavy mat of black hair and a yarmulke clipped in place. "It's my mother," he says. "Wait, I need to get the details--" I say, reaching for a pad and pen. "She's dead." Two syllables that stop the clock in its tracks. "I'm sorry to hear that." "Are you? Really?" "Yes. There's no way to fill a hole like that." He can hear the ring of geniune emotion in my voice, I guess, because he stops staring into the space between us and makes eye contact. "Yes. That's it," he agrees. "A hole that will never be filled." I nod. Nothing else gets said for a few seconds. "Go on," I say. "Tell me about your problem." "All right. Her name--my mother's name--was Laura Koppelman." I write this down. "She died of cancer. It started in her throat and spread to her chest. In less than three months, she was gone. Just like that." "I bet she had a helluva good recipe for chicken soup, too." He raises an eyebrow at my non-businesslike comment. Then he nods. "Yes, she put something special in it. I always thought it was the fresh dill, but I can't get it to come out the same way, not like hers--" He stops as if one more word will crack open the thin layer of ice damming up his tears. I feel a surge of wetness rise to the rims of my eyes, as well. I'm the one who finds my voice first. "So--um--what can I do for you as a private investigator?" "Where do I start? My mother gave everything to us. And we're a big family. There's me, my three brothers and two sisters. She never worked a day outside the home when we were kids. Very traditional. But after we went to college and the girls got married off, she decided to go out and get a job. Something that, you know, she enjoyed doing. With a lot of of stylish people coming and going. So she took a job in the fur trade, then after six months she switched to the jewelry business. She worked a long time for the same establishment." "How many years?" I ask. "Eighteen years. They gave her a pair of diamond earrings and a gold necklace as a retirement present." "Wish I had a boss like that." "No, you don't. He was also a chain-smoker who refused to ventilate the place properly." Ah. I think I see where this is going. "So you want us to find evidence suggesting that unhealthy work conditions contributed to her demise--" He eyes me coldly as I slip into unfeeling bureaucratese. I correct myself: "That second-hand smoke may have caused her death." "Yes. It won't bring her back. But..." "I understand. Where did she work?" "Czernowitz Jewellers. In the diamond district. You know, West Forty-seventh Street?" "Yes, I've heard of it." Chip wants me to hop the subway into Manhattan right away, but I don't feel like beating the bricks along West 47th Street in this chilly weather. "Too freaking bad," is his answer. "Why me? Why don't you send Mitchell or Hrabowski?" "Because you're the one with the Jewish boyfriend." "So that makes me an expert on the diamond trade?" "Get dispensation from the Pope and do it," comes the order. Five minutes later I'm calling Dr. Stanley "my Jewish boyfriend" Wrenchowski at L.I.J. Hospital and asking him what I have to do to pass for an upper middle class Orthodox housewife. "Well, first of all, I wouldn't go all the way to Orthodox, Fil. You better stick with Conservative." "Why?" "Because I don't think you could pull off Orthodox." "I'm not going there for a ritual bath, Stan, I'm just going to have a look at the place. What's the matter? Don't you trust my role-playing skills?" "Okay, okay. You're a master of disguise. But if you're going to try to pass as Orthodox, remember--you can't touch any male over thirteen. Or sing. Or show your hair." "Why not?" "Because it's erotic." "Oh yeah, my hair's so charged with erotic power the hairband hasn't been made that can contain its frizziness." "Stop. You're making me hard." "Stan, this is not a good time. Just help me out here. What's a good name for a Jewish gal?" "With your coloring, you should try for something Sephardic. How about Hadassah?" "Hadassah?" "Sure. Senator Weinberg's wife is named Hadassah." "What's her sister's name? American Jewish Congress?" Whoever said April is the cruellest month never did January in New York. The harsh, Arctic-fed wind kicks up dirt and shredded plastic bags as I, in the person of Hadassah Cardozo, make my way along the sparkling storefronts of the diamond district deep in the canyons below Rockefeller Center. All that glitter cuts through the cold air, refracting the midwinter sun into a thousand laser-like darts of rainbow-colored light. Since modern anthropologists have convincingly demonstrated that all humans, from Iceland to Tasmania, originally came from Africa, you've got to ask yourself--why on earth did we leave? A nice African savannah sounds pretty good right about now, especially after watching the high-fashioned ladies stepping out of double-parked limos and strutting around in clothes so shiny and asymmetrical and useless they look like they were designed by Edith Head's brother, Dick. This season's fashion statement seems to be: We'll go to our lonely deaths--but looking really sharp. I pass the lone antiquarian bookstore on a block dedicated to diamonds, with the 24-hour picture frame shop on the second floor. Screw the company, I'm doing some window shopping. That's what they get for sending me out here on a day like this. Looking at the high-priced hardcovers in the store window reminds me of a case a few months ago where I had to punk out a sleazy book dealer who was passing off forged goods as mint condition rarities. Let me just say, as a public service, that you should be very suspicious of anyone who tells you that they have a signed first edition of Kafka's The Trial. I move on, strolling past a window display that's got to cost a million dollars a foot. Yard after yard of diamond-studded Stars of David, menorahs, heart-shaped pendants, medallions, eye-in-the-palm fertility and Chai symbols, even a humidity monitor in the corner to make sure all that ice stays nice and fresh. As I watch all these well-to-do Jewish men servicing the top one percent of society's economic ladder, an uncomfortable thought edges its way into my psyche. I know that this is an unrepresentative sample, but the way they all look to me, with their long curly black beards and their white shirts, black pants, black vests and black yarmulkes, dressed in the uniform of perpetual mourning for their exile from the Promised Land, I can't help thinking that they all look like escapees from the Museum of Ethnic Stereotypes. Economically powerful, weirdly-dressed Jews, big noses and all, as if drawn from some Nazi-era propaganda posters. Of course, the stereotype of the latino as a slick-haired, leather-jacketed, switchblade-toting vato from East L.A. is alive and well in reality and on TV, but nobody ever dedicated a nation's total resources to annihilating us. I guess I shouldn't complain. When put in that perspective, things are good. There are no hordes of Cossacks swarming across eastern Suffolk County, burning houses and raping women as they head towards the city, but--ach--troubles we have enough, I think to myself as I start to get into character. I've got a pinhole-lens video camera concealed in a pager at waist level. I'd rather work with eye-level video, which gives me a lot more control over what gets recorded. Belt-buckle-mounted units tend to give you a shaky, silkworm's-eye-view of things, but the eyeglass and tieclip units were signed out on priority cases and I have to be back in Queens by 2 PM. I activate the recording unit, tell the wind what day and time it is, pass three more glistening storefronts and push open the cold metal door to Czernowitz Jewellers. I don't need a portable air sampler to tell me the place is full of carcinogens. The elderly man behind the counter has a three-inch cigar parked in his mouth and a patch of ash spotting his black vest. The ashtray on the glass counter overflows with dead butts like a lifeboat full of shipwrecked survivors, and a thick curtain of blue-gray smoke hangs a foot below the low ceiling, its shadowy wisps hungrily clawing for my tender air sacs. Otherwise, the layout is as sterile as a suburban doctor's office--and actually, a blood pressure monitor wouldn't be a bad idea in here. The old guy's silk-embroidered shirt barely engulfs the wiggling fat of his arms as he strains, bending slightly to lift a tray of sparkling diamond rings from the thigh-level shelf in the primary display case. He gently places the tray in front of two well-dressed women, and turns to cough up something far less glamorous into a plastic-lined wastebasket on the floor. I aim the camera at the scene for a few minutes while the two women discuss the aesthetic merits of beryl versus amethyst accents. A group of out-of-towners come in and gape at the wall-to-wall tinsel. They want to look at the low-end silver chains and pendants with tiny diamond inlays. Three of them leave before the man behind the counter turns to me, his face jovial and open. "How may I help you?" "Thanks, I'm just looking. Besides, you're busy." "Busy? I'm busy in diamonds like Picasso was busy with paint. Maybe some nice earrings?" he says, turning back to the two women, but they're not ready to make the leap. Some homies in dark North Face jackets wander in to check out the goods, smiling at the brightly-cut facets. They get the same courteous treatment I got. It's time to go. I've got enough tape of this guy smoking and coughing up boogers to help make my client's case. I'm about to leave, when I realize that it's not enough to show this guy chomping on the end of a dead stogie. This is about a woman's life. I want to see how soon he lights another. He's got his own version of a Wall of Fame going in the narrow space between two upright display cases. There are some interesting discoveries among them, like Lisa Kudrow and Goldie Hawn, for instance. But Moshe Dayan is Jewish? Who knew? "See ya later, Pops," says one of the homies, as they bounce out the door, and the tourists see their chance to bail and grab it. "Come back soon," the old man calls after them. "Looking is free." He turns to me again. Time to try out my rudimentary Yiddish. "Vos makht ir, reb Czernovitz?" "Men hot parnose," he says. "Business could be better, and you speak with a German accent, chaverte." "Oh, really? Well, that's because my parents spoke Ladino. I'm only just learning Yiddish from my boyfriend." Brilliant save. Applause from the back bench. "Well, he's obviously Americanized," he declares, accurately. "But you are Mr. Czernowitz?" I repeat for the benefit of the tape. "Dos bin ikh," he says, spreading his hands a little. "And this boyfriend of yours? Is he ready for a diamond ring yet?" I smile and avert my eyes. "Ahh," he says, happily chalking up another point on an invisible tradesman's chart. "I can always tell." I look across the wide, bustling street and catch a glimpse of the 24-hour frame shop in a store window. "When was the last time you needed a picture framed at three A.M.?" I say to myself as much as to him. "This is the city that never sleeps," he says with an upbeat intonation that's strictly for the tourist trade. "Except for us, right?" I look at him. "You mean closing early for shabbes?" "Of course, shabbes. And Erev Tu B'Shevat." Erev Tu B'Shevat. Yes, this is a test. Christ, I know all of the big ones--Pesach, Sukkoth, Rosh Hashanah and the rest--but Erev Tu B'Shevat? What the heck is that? "Right," I say, blankly. He's all smiles. Then he lights another cheroot and--bingo--I get my money shot. "What's Erev Tu B'Shevat?" "The eve of Tu B'Shevat," Stan says. "Right. What's Tu B'Shevat?" "I have no freaking idea." We're driving through the part of Queens that's nothing but power plants and cemeteries. "Some source for all things Jewish you turned out to be," I say. "Give me a break, Fil. You know my parents raised me on classic routines from the comedy team of Marx and Engels. That diamond district We Are The Chosen People thing is about as far from my edge of the Jewish universe as you can get. We're not all one type." "I know that." "You know where people get that idea from?" I'm about to say, Sure, anti-semitic propaganda-- "It's all Captain Kirk's fault." "Come on, Stan. Every trekkie knows that Kirk and Spock are Jewish." "Look, I know you're a fan, but you've got to admit that your beloved Star Trek has been projecting subtle racial stereotypes for years. Think about it. All those alien species that have one defining trait--you know, the Vulcans are all logical and unemotional, the Ferengi are all profit-driven wheeler-dealers--" "I see what you mean. They all have one identifying racial characteristic." "Like there's no gay Klingons who aren't into that whole warrior thing. Anyway, it's just that guys like that jeweller are much more visible than I am--" "Watch the traffic cones." "I see them. I mean, as far as I'm concerned, Jesus was a radical socialist rabbi from upper Judea who challenged the system and died for his beliefs. It wouldn't be the first time it's happened. But you guys had to go spreading His word across the whole damn continent." "It pays to advertise." "It sure does. I mean, how come you always have all these weirdos claiming to be Jesus--Charles Manson, David Koresh--but nobody ever claims to be Moses? That's because he was too human, he made real mistakes. He killed a man in anger and ran away because he couldn't face the consequences. Then he tried to back out of his obligations to the Lord. He even pissed off his family by marrying a dark-skinned Kushite woman." "So you're saying that the image of Jesus as perfect actually makes it easier for false prophets to convince gullible people that they're Him." "It's not so weird, Fil. You know how criminals think: The punishment's the same for stealing a couple thousand dollars as it is for stealing a couple million, so you might as well go for the big money. And that's how you become Americanized." "By stealing a few million dollars?" "By buying into our system." He swerves into the left lane to pass a shiny red sports car that is inexplicably refusing to exceed the speed limit. "And bowing before the altar of mammon like this schmuck is doing," he says, jerking a thumb at the scarlet-enameled prize. "You mean worshiping money." "Yeah. Consumerism is our established religion, and if you don't buy into it, they chuck you out of the temple." We exit the highway and play dodge-the-pedestrian on the winding streets of Jamaica so I can drop the video gear off at the office and get myself a gold star for it. When I come back to the car, Stan's double-parked, putting on a tie in the rearview mirror. He wraps the wide end around the narrow one, making four complete circuits. "My homage to the glorious House of Windsor," he admits. "Yeah, how many families have a knot named after them?" The spotlights high above illuminate the silver wine cup in the priest's hand, making it glow like liquid fire as he holds the wafer above the chalice and says a prayer for the departed soul of my great Aunt Cecia Espinoza. I see all the faces, hug all the cousins. Then we get back on the highway and head east in silence. The first piece of land you encounter upon leaving Utopia is a cemetery, then a golf course, then another cemetery. The ground is so cold and hard they had to use a backhoe to open up our mother earth. Treadmarks score her grass-and-dirt-covered arms. "We are gathered here..." The ritual rhythms of the words drone on and on, seeming to stop for a moment because there is an amazing sunset--unmatchable yellow-white brilliance at the center of a wash of orange splishing the trees and gilding each bare branch like in some wine commercial or movie where the second unit spent a week setting up a shot like this, but no one in the picture even notices or comments on it. Well, we sure notice it. And in a few moments, it's gone. This moment has passed, but it lives on in us. "...beloved mother, cherished aunt..." Within seconds the sun fades to a bright yellow disk, as if God had taken a big hole punch and poked a hole through the sky to let in a bit of heavenly light and then, in another few moments, it slips below the horizon, flat as a gold-rimmed dinner plate. And the dying light strikes the ribbed clouds drifting in with a pastel rose, like a celestial washboard. The roads are jammed, but nobody is actually getting anywhere yet. My family has come from as far as Florida and Ecuador, and I haven't seen some of them in a long time. On Christmas eve in Cuenca, Ecuador, when we all used to live there, we'd fill a whole church by ourselves. Now our motorcade is crawling through rush-hour traffic, and I can't wait to talk to them all at my cousin Rosalie's place. Stan reaches over and turns on the radio. "Mi khamokha baylim, Adonai? Mi khamokha nedar bakodesh--" Ah, New York, where you can get Jewish liturgy on WQXR on Friday evenings, live from Temple Emanu-El in Manhattan. "It gets dark so quickly this time of year," I observe. "Oh? You ready to start talking again?" "Yeah." "Good. 'Cause I was getting tired of staring into the blackness of death all by myself here." "Sorry. Is it that bad? Am I being that difficult?" "You tell me. Am I going to fit in at this thing?" "You'll be fine." "Because let me tell you, I've been to those Italian weddings where the bridesmaids are all chewing gum, smoking, and drinking long-neck beers with the other hand. And that's during the ceremony. You should see them at the party." "Don't worry, we stopped subjecting outsiders to the cruel bloodletting rites several years ago." "Ki sheyshet yamim asah Adonai Et ha'shamayim v'et ha'erets--" "This is a nice area," I say. "Yeah, I just love passing through a neighborhood where people are throwing out stuff that's better than what we have in our apartment." "Uvayom hashvi'i, uvayom hashvi'i, Shabbes vayi-nafash." "What is this, Stan? The antidote to all those hymns?" "Let's just say that I'm not one of those people who associates the Gregorian Chants of medieval Christianity with boundless benevolence." "Okay, bad example." "Yeah, let's pick another century." I stare out the window as we crawl onto the Long Island Expressway. We're doing about ten miles an hour when our headlights sweep past a sign that says: Ooh, now I'm psyched. I fully expect to see an exotic dancer picking up litter in full bowtie-and-beefcake regalia. So where the hell is he? My cousin Rosalie's apartment on Woodside Avenue has an unobstructed view of both the LIRR tracks and the elevated Number 7 train, and it was never meant to hold this many people. The Mendez cousins on my father's side are over by the food, the little ones with their straight black mop tops and wooden-bowl haircuts, the adults having gone to great length to thicken and tease up their "Jivaro" hair. My cousin Ruthie is here with her crew, representing for the Espinozas and waiting for the night to begin. My Aunt Estrella--Ruthie's mom and the new matriarch of my mother's side of the family--comes around offering slabs of Ecuadorian cheese laid out on a tray like dotless dominoes and tiny oblong coffin lids. "Cómete algo, Mena," she insists, leading us to the food-covered table of plenty. "Por supuesto. Gracias, tía." "What is that stuff?" Stan whispers. "Looks like fried chicken, fried rice and fried yuca," I tell him. "We were trying to think of a way to fry the salad, too, but the lettuce kept dissolving." I spot my cousin Lucas over by the guacamole, busily chatting up his sister-in-law's kid sister, Paloma, and turn to avoid eye contact with the black sheep of the family. I know it's a cliché, but what else are you going to call a guy who steals from his own sisters, including Rosalie, a divorced mom with three kids? Every family's got one, right? "Where is Uncle Mateo?" I ask. "They wouldn't give him a visa," says Aunt Estrella. "Wouldn't give him a visa? He's seventy-two years old! What do they think he's going to do, take jobs away from geriatric Americans?" "I told him to call you," she says. "I told him you know how to fix things on a computer." "I can use one to write him a letter of support for the INS, if that's what you mean, but I couldn't hack into their files and get away with it." "What's this world coming to?" she laments. "Pretty soon you'll be able to get pictures of people having sex on your computer!" "Uh, you already can--" "Yes, I ask you, what's this world coming to?" she says, shaking her head and walking away. I follow her into the bedroom to comfort her as best I can. We sit on the polyester bedspread, and I tell her how my teenage daughter, Antonia, is doing, and that, on the subject of computers, she once knew more about PCs than I did. I still remember her tiny four-year-old hands manipulating the mouse better than I could at the time. I don't tell her how Antonia's starting to prefer Stan's Reform temple to my church just because they have cushions on the seats, or how some of the white kids try to torment her by calling her "Pocahontas." "It's okay to cry, tía." "There used to be eight of us," she says. "I know..." "Including your mother, God rest her soul." "Yes. She was so young..." "Todo depende de Dios." It all depends on God. "Sí. Es el único." Then she gets off the bed and hobbles over to the dresser, where she has set up a makeshift shrine to her sister with two candles on either side of a yellowing photo of Aunt Celia when she was a strong, handsome woman, back in the 1950s. She opens a big box of kitchen matches and takes out a thick wooden match. Fingers shaking, she strikes twice before getting a spark, then raises the sputtering flame to light the twin candles. She blows out the match, lays it aside smoking and covers her eyes with her palms. I draw near, ready to put my hands on her shoulders to steady her, when her palms fall away from her dry eyes and she turns to go, leaving the candles lit. Stan steps aside to let her pass. "Has she ever done that before?" he asks. "Done what?" "Lit a pair of candles on Friday night." "Oh. I guess so. I haven't lived with the Espinozas since I was a kid." "Well, it's just that that's a Jewish ritual, lighting the shabbes candles." "What do you mean?" "I mean--well, it depends. Is she doing it because it's your aunt's wake, or does she do this every Friday night?" "I guess I remember her doing it back in the old days, now that I think of it. But she never made a big deal out of it or anything." "Hmm." "Hmm--what?" "Have you ever heard of the Marranos?" "The word sounds familiar. What about it? Give it to me straight, doctor." "Okay." He leans against the vanity, his back to the mirror, and addresses me as if I were a group of med students. "In 1492, the same year everyone else celebrates as a year of discovery, Ferdinand and Isabella gave the Jews in Spain three choices: convert, be expelled from the country, or die. A lot of them converted and started going to mass every Sunday, while secretly continuing to practice their religion. They were known as crypto-Jews, or Marranos. A bunch of them emigrated to South America seeking a little freedom from religious persecution--fat chance--and where, over the centuries, they forgot who they were." "Wait a minute. You're saying I'm Jewish?" "Well, part-Jewish, anyway. Where do you think you got that frizzy hair from? Your cousins on your dad's side all have that straight Inca hair." "I always thought it was a bit of Black Africa in the blood, by way of the Caribbean coastline." "That, too, yeah. I've met your extended family in Guayaquil. Damn, Filomena--you embody the Diaspora all by yourself." "Hot damn. Open the Champagne." "But I've got to tell you, Espinoza is just Spanish for Spinoza, and as philosophers go, he was as Jewish as they come." "Yo, Fil, Koppelman's lawyer called to say the video's not enough to demonstrate liability for his client's cancer," Chip tells me. "I need you to go back and get an air sample." "Could be a problem with that. Most air samplers are tripod-mounted canisters that need to run for a few days, and the smaller ones are designed to indicate the presence of volatile organics, not passive cigarette smoke. Unless you want me to dress up as a cleaning woman and go in there with the sampler disguised as a vacuum cleaner--" "We could probably sneak you onto the custodial staff at Bloomingdale's, but not a tiny shop like that." He scratches his chin. "So now what?" "We could try tracking down some of the former employees of Czernowitz Jewellers and find out if any of them have developed similar symptoms." He snaps his fingers and shoots his index at me: "Get right on it." "You want me to have his lawyer subpoena the employment records?" "Naah. That'd only put him wise to our game plan, and he'd shred the stuff before we ever saw it. We need the goods on this guy by Monday. You better head back to Forty-seventh Street and get me some answers the old-fashioned way." "I can't. It's Saturday." He looks at me. "All the shops are owned by Orthodox Jews. They're closed on Saturday." "They open Sunday?" "Yeah, but--" I don't like where this is going. "So do it tomorrow." I open my mouth to protest. "Half day," he says, walking back to his office. Great. Working on both Sabbaths. If I'm really Catholic and part-Jewish, then I'm sure getting the worst of both worlds here. But if Chip's going to make me log the hours, I'm going to do some investigating for myself. First I need to get some business out of the way. I make some calls trying to dig up character witnesses for a harmless old loon who was dragged in by the cops after he downed a fifth of Rumplemintz and tried to hijack the Eighth Avenue local to Cuba. In the current climate, fear of terrorism could inflate that into a federal crime, and we're trying to get it dropped to a simple case of drunk and disorderly. Then I call Aunt Estrella, who tells me that the women in the family have been lighting candles on Friday night for as long as she can remember, but she doesn't know how the tradition got started, or anything else about it. I call the rest of my relatives on the Espinoza side, with the same results. I spend over an hour investigating my own genealogy on the Internet, trying to find out who I really am and what I'm made of, with no luck. Did I really expect to find reliable or accurate records dating back 500 years in cyberspace? Time to go to a real source. "This explains why some kids didn't talk to me, and the dirty looks we got even in my home town. They knew something was different about us. Why didn't anybody tell me? What does it mean?" "It means they almost succeeded in erasing your history," the rabbi answers. Rabbi Kushner is a healthy fifty-five, with a closely-trimmed beard and a few gray hairs to show his age and wisdom. He's Reform, of course. "And it all comes down to frizzy hair?" "This generation doesn't do it as much anymore, but the struggle for assimilation used to include nose jobs, ironing your hair, losing the accent and changing your name from Weinstein to Winston." "And all those cut-off parts are probably waiting for us when we get to heaven." "I wouldn't know about that," he says, with a good-natured smile. I look around his office at the diplomas, awards, and commemorative plaques, many in parallel text English and Hebrew, including two terra cotta tablets of the Ten Commandments hanging above his Macintosh computer. My turn to joke: "'Thou shalt not kill?' Oh. Why didn't anyone tell me? Too bad you guys aren't authorized to hear confessions." He chuckles. "Actually, I've got my own confession to make." "What's that?" He checks his watch, and leans forward. "Just between us, I used to envy the Catholic sacrament of penance. The idea that by openly confessing your sins and saying a few quick penitential prayers you could walk away free and clear was very appealing to me as a young man." "Don't Jews have a similar ritual during the High Holy Days?" "Sure, once a year. Our Catholic brethren perform that service any day of the week." "Redemption-on-demand: that's our specialty, all right." "But I once heard Rabbi Fishman at Temple Beth Sholom give a sermon about how for Jews, the idea of sin and redemption is a lot more complicated than it is for most Christians." "Imagine that. What a shocker." "He said our souls are like diamonds, and sin is like a scratch on the diamond. You can't erase it and go back to a pristine state. But you can take that scratch and turn it into something else, make a pretty pattern out of it, something that isn't an obvious flaw. More of a reminder that you can redesign yourself and resolve to do better in the future. But you can never wipe the flaws in the diamond completely clean." "You know, I really feel an affinity for that way of thinking," I say, nodding. "Welcome to the wonderful world of moral ambiguity." "Just one more question, Rabbi." "Sure." "What the heck is Tu B'Shevat?" It's bright and chilly on this strange Sunday, the streets eerily quiet, and I'm out here staring at Menorah-shaped pendants, wondering if I should be wearing one--at least one day a week, anyway--instead of my cross of Ecuadorian gold. But it's time to get down to business. I've been asking around the diamond shops, figuring that it's a small enough enclave, and that people probably have a pretty good idea who's been working for who. I walk into the ninth place so far today, ready to flash my private investigator's license and lay out the scam that I am trying to trace a distant relative about a matter regarding an inheritance--which is kind of true, in a twisted way. But for some reason I keep being drawn to the menorah-shaped pendants. "See something you like?" says the man behind the counter. He's young and pale, with a black beard and sidelocks. "Yes, I really like the Tree of Life motif, the ones with the seven branches symbolizing the days of creation." He examines me from head to foot. I'm not Hadassah Cardozo today. "Yes, that is a popular one," he says tonelessly. I lean over for a closer look at them, marvelling at the undulating bark and the divinely intermingling branches. As good an image as any of God's creation. I kneel down to look at the array of golden trees on the bottom shelf. Then I see a pint-sized metal box with a tiny indicator screen behind the display. It's not a humidity meter. "Is that a motion detector?" I ask. "No, it's a Motown detector. It can detect Motown music within a five hundred-yard radius." It takes a second, then a giggle bubbles up my throat like a can of soda that somebody shook before opening. "What's the matter, you didn't think I had a sense of humor?" he says. "No. I would never think that." His dark eyes roll up to the ceiling. "Well, maybe a little--" I admit. "It's just slow on Sundays. I get bored with the same old routine." "Seriously?" "Seriously." "Okay. So what's with the box?" His eyes flit from wall to wall. I've got a sudden urge to reach for the bug spray. "Hey, you said it was a slow day. Come on, tell me." "Well, some people say it's an urban legend," he begins. "About some gold that was stolen from a hospital upstate back in the mid-thirties, and it never turned up." I wait a moment. "So what about it?" "Well, some people say it did turn up, in Buffalo, mostly in high school class rings during the nineteen forties." Another moment. "And?" "And--well--the thieves didn't know. If you're not trained, you have no idea what you're dealing with." Shorter moment. "So what were they dealing with? And don't say 'well' again." "Wel--I mean, that it wasn't an ordinary shipment of gold. It was a box of radium-tipped needles for surgical use. You know, for treating cancer." "Did they do that back in the thirties?" "I guess so. Anyway, the thing is that the gold is supposed to be radioactive. So some especially-cautious jewelry shop owners like to keep a Geiger counter around, just in case a bit of it ever comes back to bite us." "You mean that thing's on right now?" "Yes, ma'am." "Has it ever picked up anything?" "Not on my shift." "I see. Thanks." "Don't mention it." And I walk out of there, my mind aswirl. I make some calls. By miracle, I find the right people. My friend Gina at the EPA is spending this glorious Sunday morning at home with her two toddlers. She shares some frantic working-mother moments with me, then connects me to a medical caseworker, who calls another caseworker, who hooks me up with a woman who has just survived a piece of radioactive gold jewelry. "It's no legend," she says. "I lost two fingers on account of that ring. The tumor's going to be active on my corpse. Come on over, I'll show it to you." "No, I've got to do something else right now." I hear that Herodotus bemoaned the invention of iron, seeing nothing in the shimmering, molten metal but a way to make swords and arrowheads that much deadlier. As with any invention, the opportunities for charity and depravity exist side by side. Take radium needles, for example. Needles are supposed to inoculate you against diseases by giving you a small, ineffective dose of the nasty things so that you can build up your immunity to them. But what if you get infected with the disease of money fever? Because we've all been inoculated with various strains of that old sickness, and we all know that some people will get addicted to that golden needle and catch a serious case of the fever. Lou Koppelman said it started in his mother's throat. I head back to the crime scene and wait until Mr. Czernowitz is alone. Then I walk in and ask him, "So how was your Tu b'Shevat?" "Fine," he says. "And yours--?" He glances up at me, registers a Spanish face, starts to go back to his jewels, then his eyes meet mine. I tell him, "You know, I just learned that means the 'fifteenth of Shevat.' Kind of an Israeli Arbor Day--you know, thanking God for the successful regeneration of patches of desert by planting green fields and forests. You're supposed to celebrate by eating almonds and dates and other delicacies from Israel. I love the way every Jewish holiday ultimately revolves around food." He eyes me the way a groundskeeper watches a cloudy sky. "But you prefer to smoke," I say. And the clouds are darkening. "I've been smoking for fifty-one years and it hasn't killed me yet," he says, with a stale chuckle. "No, but it sure clouded your thinking." His eyes narrow, the lids shielding the whites. "What are you talking about?" "I'm talking about radioactive jewelry, Mr. Czernowitz. Specifically, the radioactive necklace that you gave to Laura Koppelman." There's a microsecond of genuine shock, probably a defensive reflex, then the shell hardens and he says, "Get out of my store or I'll call the cops." "Good. Then we can all go out to Cedar Grove Cemetery and dig up the corpse and hold a Geiger counter up to it. It's not going anywhere--that stuff has a half-life of sixteen hundred years. Hell, I bet we could get a reading right through six feet of clay." "I said get out--!" "Look, you're not fooling me, Mr. Czernowitz. I just have the nasty habit of blurting out the truth when nobody wants to hear it. I must have gotten it from my mother." The arc of his anger fizzles and his face and shoulders collapse. They don't always crumble this easily, believe me. "You knew," I say. Yes, he knew. And that's not the worst part. He tells me that he owed her a huge retirement and a piece of the business. And that it was cheaper this way. He asks me if he'll have to go to a federal prison. I tell him, "No, that's where they send all the crooked corporate accountants. They send all the small-time dirtbags to the state pen." It's a lonely place where greed lives, and I don't like it here. I want to go home to my daughter and my boyfriend and feel human for an hour, luxuriating in their warm touches, and convince my child not to waste her life watching television. My job is investigating other people's screw-ups, but I suspect that I'll never learn much about my own predecessors, and what strands of DNA were knitted together to make me, or discover precisely how hatred sliced away at my people, and how we managed to dodge the blade at every turn. As the cops take Mr. Czernowitz on the perp walk down 47th Street, I turn to walk away, and someone in the crowd asks, "Who was that? What did he do?" What did he do? He switched gods, baby. He became Americanized. He betrayed his people. And it comes to me, like a line I've heard on a million TV shows. "He was one mighty scratched diamond." |