Legends

In the kitchenette, the kettle began to shriek. The rabbi leaped to turn off the gas and set about preparing tea. He returned moments later carrying the kettle and four china cups, which he put on the bridge table next to the memorial candle. Leaning over the table the better to see what he was doing, Ben Zion slipped Lipton tea bags into the four cups and filled the first one with boiling water. When Martin waved it away, he took the cup himself and sank onto one of the folding chairs, his knees apart, his feet flat on the floor and tapping impatiently. Martin scraped over another chair and sat down facing him.

“Why would someone like Samat, who needed to visit houses of ill repute to satisfy his lusts, marry a religious woman whom he had never met?”

“Am I inside Samat’s head to know the answer?” The rabbi blew noisily across the cup, then touched his lips to the tea to test the temperature. Deciding it was too hot to drink, he set it down on the table. “He was a strange bird, this Samat. I am Ya’ara’s rabbi. In the Jewish religion we don’t confess to our spiritual leaders the way Catholics do. But we confide in them. I believed Ya’ara when she said that Samat never touched her on her wedding night, or after. He never slept in the marriage bed. For all I know she may still be a virgin. When Samat was living under the same roof with her, she was absolutely convinced something was wrong with her. I tried to persuade her that the something that was wrong was wrong with him. I tried to persuade him, too.”

“Did you succeed?”

The rabbi shook his head cheerlessly. “To use an old Yiddish expression, I never got to first base with Samat.”

“What was he doing here?”

“Hiding.”

“From what? From whom?”

The rabbi tried his tea again. This time he managed to sip at it. “What am I, a reader of minds? How would I know, from what, from whom? Look, coming to live in one of these Jewish settlements in the middle of all these Arabs is a little like joining the French foreign legion: When you sign on the dotted line, nobody asks to see your curriculum vitae, we’re just glad to have your warm body. What I do know is that Samat went to the Kiryat Arba security officer and asked for a weapon. He said it was to protect his wife if the Hamas terrorists ever attacked.”

“Did he get the weapon?”

The rabbi nodded. “Anybody living in a settlement who can see what he’s shooting at can get a weapon.” Ben Zion remembered another detail. “Samat evidently had an endless supply of money. He paid for everything he bought with cash—an upscale split-level house on the side of Kiryat Arba where you get to enjoy the sunsets, a brand new Japanese car with air conditioning. He never played pinochle with the boys, he never accompanied Ya’ara to the synagogue, even on the high holy days, though it didn’t go unnoticed that she always left an envelope stuffed with cash in the charity box. Admit it, Mr. American detective, I’ll bet you don’t know that shamus is a Yiddish word.”

“I thought it was Irish.”

“Irish!” The rabbi slapped a palm against one of his knees. “The shamus was the synagogue beetle, which was the sobriquet for the member of the congregation who took care of the synagogue.” Ben Zion shook his head in puzzlement. “How, I ask you, is it possible to detect an AWOL husband if you can’t detect the origin of the word shamus?”

The sudden arrival of Ya’ara and Stella saved Martin from having to account for this lapse in his education; it also provided him with his first good look at Samat’s wife. She was a short, overweight woman with a teenager’s pudgy face and a matronly body endowed with an ample bosom that put a strain on the buttons of her blouse; Martin feared that one of them would pop at any moment. In the space between the buttons he caught a glimpse of the pink fabric of a heavy brassiere. She wore an ankle-length skirt popular with Lubavitch women and a round flat-brimmed felt hat that she nervously twisted on her head, as if she were trying to find the front. The little patches of skin on her body that Martin could see were chalk white from lack of being exposed to sun light. Her cheeks were streaked with traces of tears. Stella, dry eyed, wore the ghost of a smile fixed on her lips that Martin had noticed the day she turned up at his pool parlor.