TWENTY-FOUR

I undressed and showered. The shower wasn’t so much to rinse away the sweat and grime, but to wash off the remnants of the people with whom I’d shared the day. It’s no wonder that good cops sometimes turn to the darkness. When you spend more time with the worst people imaginable than with your family, it rubs off on you. You can’t go down into the sewer and not come up smelling like shit yourself. If I could have scrubbed out the linings of my lungs, I would have. I remembered talking with Mr. Roth about the camps, about how he said the worst part of it all was the breathing.

“Yes, there was smoke,” he said, “lots of smoke and the stink of burning flesh and hair, but it wasn’t all smoke. There was ashes too, Mr. Moe, ashes of the dead falling like snow. You could not help but breathe it in. You would wonder sometimes, who it was you were breathing in. It was better not to dwell on it. If you would dwell on such things, it was all a man could do not to rip his own chest open or to throw himself onto the electrified fence. It was better to think of the small things like surviving.”

Only a man like Mr. Roth, a man who came out the other end of Auschwitz, could call surviving a small thing. But I don’t suppose all the scholarship and study by those who didn’t live through it could make sense of it. I never judged things Mr. Roth told me about his experiences in the camps. Who was I to judge, after all? And some truths can’t be argued.

I had seen three more hate-mailing scumbags that day, but my heart wasn’t in it. My lies were unconvincing and I barely listened to the answers to my questions. There was just something about Jorge Delgado that sang to me. He lit me up like a neon Christmas tree and I couldn’t say why exactly. Maybe it was that he wasn’t simply another run-of-the-mill misogynist or misanthrope. He wasn’t the typical griper or whiner. He didn’t feel sorry for himself or wronged by the world. He wasn’t a narcissist. No, he was something much more dangerous: a believer, a believer with a bad temper. But it wasn’t Delgado I was thinking about when I got out of the shower.

Still damp, I stood naked, staring at myself in the mirror and saw for the first time what I had become. I was thin and pale. I could see something in my future, brief as it might be, that I could never have imagined: frailty, my arms and legs as easy to snap as dried twigs. For the first time in my life I felt old. I didn’t want to think about the implications of old, especially if this was as old as I would ever get. I found self-pity especially unattractive. It’s what I hated about the people I’d spent my day with, but there I was, feeling cheated somehow. I turned away. As my Bubbeh used to tell me, “It is one thing to say oy vey—oh, woe—and something else to say oy vey iz mir—oh, woe is me.”

The phone interrupted my sad reverie. In a moot gesture, I wrapped the towel around my waist and rushed to answer. I wouldn’t have cared if it was a phone scammer calling. I just needed to speak to someone, anyone to help pull me out of the hole I’d been digging for myself.

“Hey, Moe.” It was Nick Roussis.

“Nick! Glad you called.” And I was. “What’s up?”

“Like I said I would the other night, I been keepin’ my eyes and ears open.”

I was confused. “Huh?”

“About the murder, you know? I said I would listen and I also sent out some feelers.”

“Then I take it you heard something.”

“You always was pretty smart that way, Moe. There’s no gettin’ anything by you.”

“I didn’t know Greeks were big on sarcasm.”

“Sure, it’s like democracy, we invented it.”

“Okay, Socrates, what did you hear?”

“You busy tonight?”

“I guess I am now,” I said.

“Come by the Grotto around eight. There’s somebody I think you should talk to.”

“Okay, as long as you don’t make me eat that shitty pizza.”

“Moe, you don’t show up, I’ll have pies delivered to your house for a week.”

“Now that’s a threat that scares me. I’ll be there at eight. Thanks, Nicky.”

“See you then.”

I hung up and was pretty curious about who it was Nicky wanted me to talk to. Sometimes I thought I would live as long as I was still curious. I bet a lot of cats had that same thought as they breathed their dying breaths.