Invisible City (Rebekah Roberts #1)(70)

I call Larry’s cell to tell him about my meeting last night.

“I’ve got today’s story,” I say. “Last night I met with the woman who prepared Rivka Mendelssohn’s body for burial. The same woman also prepared her daughter’s body.”

“Her daughter?”

“She had a daughter, an infant, who died last year. My source is a woman whose family owns the funeral home. She prepares Jewish women for burial. She says they both had massive head trauma. She says both were homicides.”

“You’ve got her name?”

“Yes,” I say. “And her notes.”

“Autopsy?”

“No. She said it’s against Jewish law to cut open the body. But she made notes from what she saw. And there are pictures.”

“Great work,” says Larry. “Give me the name, I’ll run her background.”

I do, and we agree to meet at the office to look at the reports. When I get in, Larry is sitting at the same computer that I wrote my story on last night. I pull up a chair and show him the reports. I also fill him in on what Malka and Sara told me about Leiby Bronner and the rabbi. Mike comes over to get an update. We tell him what we have.

“Okay,” he says, “I’m going to the meeting with exclusive postmortem reports on crane lady and her infant daughter. We need official comment on all this. Where are police on crane lady’s killer? Do they think she was killed at the yard or just dumped there? What did they know about the baby? Did they know? Do they think the two are connected?”

“I can work that,” says Larry. “I’m gonna try to get someone at the M.E.’s office to look at these, too.”

“Great. So, Rebekah, you’re back in Borough Park. We really need a picture of the baby.” I flash to the dead girl’s face. Alive. He means we need a picture of her alive. “You’ve spoken to the sister-in-law? Maybe you can get one from her.”

I tell him I’ll try. Larry and I leave together; we both get on the N headed downtown.

“Saul Katz is at the courthouse in Brooklyn,” Larry tells me after we sit down. The Caribbean island of St. Lucia has purchased advertising throughout the entire subway car. All around me are color photos of pristine beaches: white sand and blue water. “He’s got a bail hearing this afternoon. My guess is that the judge will let him out.”

“What about Leiby Bronner? Do they have an explanation for why he was never charged for that?”

“I’m waiting on that. They know I know. I need to get the Bronner family’s number from the library.”

Larry transfers to the R at Union Square, and I continue on, into Brooklyn, aboveground and back below. I get off at New Utrecht, just a block from the building that I first saw Aron Mendelssohn come out of. I walk over, and as I lean in to peek into the ground-floor window, the door in the building beside 5510 opens and a haggard, dumpy-looking woman dressed in black pulls open the door with her foot, struggling to squeeze a double-wide stroller outside. Three other small children run in front of her; boys with sidecurls, girls in matching skirts. I hold open the door to try to help her and glance up the narrow stairs where she came from. There are six different buzzers in the doorway. How do they all fit in what must be a tiny apartment? My mother was not from a wealthy family like the Mendelssohns; my grandfather managed a livery cab company. My father told me that he mostly employed Jewish immigrants, many of them from Russia, and that the Kagans assisted the families in their transition to American life. Little Aviva showed the Russian girls how to ride the bus to school; she read with them, gave them her old skirts and sweaters and winter coats. My father said that Aviva first got the idea that not every Jew in the world followed the same strict laws of living as her family did from the immigrant girls. He said they were confused about the rules governing stocking thickness, and about not being able to sing in public. Once my mother got it in her mind that maybe God wasn’t the one making the rules, as Suri had said, it all turned into bullshit. And the fact that her life was built on bullshit—and that nobody else saw the truth—made her angry.

But here on the main drag in Borough Park, and in houses and apartments as far as I can see, there are thousands of men and women for whom, ostensibly, none of it is bullshit. It is God’s will, as natural as breathing, as common as writing a rent check. It is the foundation of life. The meaning, the reason, the tools. It is how sorrow and disappointment and frustration are overcome. Do these things and you will know God. Do these things and he will reward your devotion. The ridicule of the outside world is meaningless. But inside the fold, in the family, in the home, doubt is a cancer. A blooming menace; poison.

I’m standing on the corner of Fifty-ninth Street when I see Miriam. She emerges from a corner deli with her head down. She lights a cigarette and then starts walking quickly down New Utrecht toward the Mendelssohn home. I have to jog to catch up with her.

“Miriam,” I say, when I am two paces behind. “Excuse me, Miriam?”

She turns sharply, her eyes wide.

“We cannot talk here,” says Miriam. “Come.” She resumes her pace. I follow, two blocks and then a left, and another block and a right. She stays ahead of me, sucking on her cigarette. Across the street from the house, she stops.

“They do not know I have gone,” she says. “We are sitting shiva and we cannot leave the house. Aron and the children are in the living room on their chairs and I went to lie down in my room. But it is too much in that house. There are too many children. Do you understand? I had to get out. My brother. He expects me to be their mother. But I am not their mother. Do you understand?”