Invisible City (Rebekah Roberts #1)(23)

“Is everything okay?”

“I have something I’d like to show you. I know it’s the weekend, but you may be able to use it for an article.”

“Okay…,” I say. He is not with Aviva. But he could be; he will be. Maybe. If I am patient.

“Would you like me to pick you up?” he asks.

I give him my address and he says he will be there in thirty minutes.

“If you have one, wear a long skirt,” he says. “It will help to fit in.”

After I hang up, I go into the bathroom and lean over the toilet. Something wants to come up, but it isn’t food. I gag, tears forming in my eyes. I flush, and fling cold water on my face.

“Was that work?” asks Tony when I come back out.

“That was Saul.”

“Does he have a scoop?”

Iris is dumping her purse and her coat on the table. “Who’s Saul?”

“Saul is a cop,” I say. “He helped me out on the stakeout last night. He knew my mom.”

“Really.” Iris looks sideways at Tony.

“I told him.”

“Oh good,” says Iris, coming to sit on the opposite side of the futon from Tony. I am still standing.

“Saul is a detective and he’s Orthodox and he was called to help the police translate when they notified the family of the scrap yard woman that she was dead,” says Tony.

Iris looks at me. “And you just … ran into him?”

“He recognized me. He said I looked just like her.”

“Jesus,” says Iris.

“I know.”

“This is strange, right?” Iris asks. “Or am I just negative because I’m hungover?”

“Borough Park is like a small town,” says Tony. “There are thousands of Jews, but there are far fewer families. He could have known her.”

“Oh, he knew her,” I say, thinking about the way he was staring at me. “Anyway, apparently he’s got some information for me. On the story.”

I dress and tell Iris not to worry. Tony walks me downstairs. Saul’s Chevy Malibu is idling outside the door. Tony gives me a hug and says he’ll call me later. I open the car door and slide into the seat beside Saul.

“Thank you for coming,” says Saul. He’s wearing the same thing he was last night, a cheap white button-down shirt, and a coat and pants that are both black but not quite the same hue. He looks like he hasn’t slept, though I probably do, too.

“How are you?” I ask.

“I read your story.”

I want to say it’s not really my story, that I didn’t write it. But before I do, it occurs to me that whether or not I actually put the words together, my name is on it—and thus I am responsible for it. Or I should have been. “It was short.”

“Will you write another article?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t usually get to make that decision.”

We drive in silence for a few minutes. Just as I am about to ask where we’re going, Saul speaks.

“My supervisors do not know I’ve contacted you,” he says. “I have some information you can use to write a story—maybe many stories—about Rivka Mendelssohn. But you cannot use my name in print. I am a police official with knowledge of the investigation.”

This is not what I expected him to say. But I suppose it makes sense that we establish the rules of our interaction early. Yes, he is the man who provided the first morsel of actual information about my mother I’d been given in, oh, twenty years, but he is also a cop and I am a reporter.

I’ve used anonymous sources before. In my Section 8 fire series, I kept the secretary at the landlord’s office completely out of the story, even though she was the one who confirmed to me that she had seen him give his teenage nephews seventy-five dollars each to install the smoke detectors and failed to check their work. In school my professors warned against allowing people to go off the record or remain anonymous. Once someone is off the record, it’s hard to get them to go back on, they said. And anonymity undermines trust between the reader and the newspaper. Reporters don’t take a formal oath to do no harm or follow a set of ethical guidelines while performing our job—actually we don’t take any kind of oath, or test, at all. I had a professor who thought journalists should have to be licensed, like lawyers and accountants. Then, he said, we’d get more respect. I’m actually not against the idea at all, but it doesn’t matter, because it’s not going to happen. And who would we be swearing to do no harm to? Our source? Our reader? Our editor? Ourselves?

“That works,” I say.

“It is very important that we find who killed Rivka Mendelssohn. If the newspaper keeps writing about her, it might help.”

“Really?” Usually cops say the opposite. “What makes you think that?”

“Well, to begin with, Aron Mendelssohn has not been questioned. You always bring the husband in. Always. And he hasn’t been in. Which could mean a couple things, but what I think it means is that he has exerted pressure.”

“Pressure?”

“The precinct has to deal with this community delicately.”

“Why?”

“They give money, for one thing. And they vote in blocks. There is an informal agreement that the ultra-Orthodox are mostly law-abiding and can police themselves.…”