Ghosts

Today, though—being Christmas and Hanukkah both—Meyer felt the possibilities for violence in the company of O’Brien were perhaps tilted eighty-twenty in their favor. The odds soared to ninety-ten when they caught the Smoke Rise squeal. Smoke Rise was the most elegant community within the boundaries of the Eight-Seven, almost a township unto itself, with houses ranging in the $200,000 to $300,000 class, most of them commanding splendid views of the River Harb. Moreover, the squeal was a 10-21—a “Burglary Past”—which meant the thief had done his song and dance and then got off the stage to a less than tumultuous applause. There was no danger of anyone shooting at O’Brien—or of O’Brien shooting back—because the man was nowhere on the premises when they arrived.

Many of the streets in Smoke Rise were named regally—Victoria Circle, Elizabeth Lane, Albert Way, Henry Drive—giving the community a royal tone it neither needed nor desired. The builder, however, taking no chances that his area might be confused with some of the seedier sections on this side of town, had named the streets himself when subdividing the tract. When he ran out of Normandys, Plantaganets, Lancasters, Yorks, Tudors, Oranges, and Hanovers, he switched over to Windsors. And when he ran out of royalty, he hit upon names like Westminster and Salisbury and Winchester (which he abandoned because it sounded too much like a rifle) and Stonehenge. The entire place had an absolutely British tone to it. Many of the houses even looked as if they’d have been right at home on some moor in Cornwall.

The burglary had taken place on Coronation Drive, just around the corner from Buckingham Way. The house was a multigabled, multiturreted stone and leaded-glass wonder that rose on the bank of the river like the queen’s summer palace. The man who lived inside the house had earned his fortune as a junk dealer when it was still possible to amass great deals of cash without having to give 70 percent of it to Uncle. He still spoke with a distinct Calm’s Point accent, his “deses” and “doses” falling like blasphemies in the vaulted living room with its cathedral ceiling. His family—a wife and two sons—were dressed in their holiday finery. They had left the house at a quarter to 11:00, to deliver some Christmas gifts up the street, and had arrived home at 12:30 to find the place ransacked. They had called the police at once.

“What’d he take, Mr. Feinberg?” Meyer asked.

“Everything,” Feinberg said. “He musta backed a truck in the driveway. The stereo’s gone, and the TV, and my wife’s furs and jewelry, and all my cameras from the upstairs closet. Not to mention all the presents that were under the tree. Son of a bitch took everything.”

In one corner of the living room was a mammoth Christmas tree that must have taken a crew of four to erect and decorate. Meyer did not find the tree strange in a Jewish home. He had struggled with the concept of celebrating Christmas together with the Gentiles ever since his own children were born and had finally succumbed when they were respectively nine, eight, and six. His first compromise had been a wooden orange crate decorated with crepe paper to resemble a chimney. From there he had progressed to a small live spruce complete with a burlapped ball of earth, which he told the children was a Hanukkah bush. He had strained his back planting the damn tree in the backyard after Christmas and the very next year had bought a chopped-down pine from the charitable organization selling them in the empty lot on the corner. He did not feel any less Jewish for having a decorated Christmas tree in his home. As with many Gentiles, the holiday for him was one of spirit rather than religion. If anything on earth could bring people together for the briefest tick of time, Meyer was all for it.

Some of his Jewish friends told him he was a closet goy. He told them he was also a closet Jew. It was Meyer’s belief that Israel was not the homeland, but a foreign country. He was dedicated to the concept that Israel must survive and, in fact, endure—but there was never any question in his mind that he was first an American, next a Jew, and never an Israeli. He knew that Israel had accepted within its besieged boundaries homeless Jews from all over the world—but he never forgot that America was accepting homeless Jews long before Israel was even a dream. So yes, he had given money to plant trees in Israel. And yes, he hated with all the passion in his soul the acts of terrorism against that tiny nation. And yes, he longed to see those biblical places he knew of only from the days of his youth, when he was going to heder six days a week and was, in fact, the most brilliant Hebrew student in the class. He was pleased that Christmas and Hanukkah fell on the same day this year. He suspected in his heart of hearts, anyway, that all religious holidays had been agrarian holidays centuries ago; it was no accident that Easter and Passover came so close together each year and sometimes—as with this celebration—fell on exactly the same day. Lou Moscowitz, who was a detective/2nd on the squad, told Meyer he was no longer a real Jew. Meyer Meyer was a real Jew with every fiber of his being. He was just his own kind of real Jew.

The burglar had indeed done a lovely number in the Feinberg house. As the detectives went through it, itemizing the stolen goods, they discovered that many more items had been taken than Feinberg had originally surmised. The premise that the burglar had backed a truck into the driveway now seemed entirely plausible. He had even stolen the boys’ bicycles from the garage and had taken the younger boy’s prize collection of Queen albums. The loss of the albums seemed to distress the kid more than the loss of his new movie camera, a Christmas gift he had left under the tree after opening it. The family’s original outrage at the theft was giving way to a numbed sense of loss that had nothing whatever to do with the value of the goods. Someone had been inside this house. An unwelcome intruder had entered and pillaged, and the most valuable thing he’d stolen was the family’s sense of inviolate privacy. Since the detectives lacked any real knowledge of whether the burglar had been armed with either explosives or a deadly weapon, the crime seemed to be third-degree burglary: “Knowingly entering or remaining unlawfully in a building with intent to commit a crime therein.” But the criminal law language was hardly adequate to define the crime that had been committed against the Feinbergs. They would none of them forget this day as long as they lived. For years to come they would tell about the man who had come into their house on Christmas Day, the same day as Hanukkah that year—and of what had happened to the two detectives ten minutes after they left the scene of the crime.

Meyer and O’Brien’s attention might not have been captured by the moving van had this not been Christmas Day. The van was parked on a side street some fifteen blocks from the Feinberg house and indeed well outside the stone walls that circumscribed the Smoke Rise development. The left rear tire of the van, the one away from the snowbanked curb, was flat. A man wearing a brown leather jacket and a blue woolen watch cap was changing the tire. A tire iron and a lug wrench were on the partially scraped pavement beside him. When they saw the van, neither Meyer nor O’Brien said a word to each other about a moving company working on Christmas Day. They had no need to. Meyer, who was driving, pulled the unmarked sedan into the curb behind the van. Both men got out of the car, one from each side of it. The pavement was still slippery with patches of hardened snow the plows had missed. Their breaths feathered from their mouths as they approached the man lifting the spare tire into place.

“Need any help?” Meyer asked.

“No, I’m fine,” the man said. He was in his late twenties, Meyer guessed, a white man with a rather pale complexion that seemed almost chalky against the darkness of his eyes and the black mustache under his nose. The lettering on the side of the truck read CULBERTSON MOVING AND TRUCKING COMPANY. The license plate was a commercial plate from the next state.