Safekeeping (17 page)

Avi stood before Adam, shaking his head. “Sorry. I even found a map from 1946 showing who lived in what tent and house, and no Dagmar.”

Adam got to his feet. “Thanks.”

“Did you want to stay for lunch? You're welcome to have a bite in the dining hall.”

“No, no. I have to go.”

Adam rushed to get off the religious kibbutz, holding Golda in his arms so she wouldn't slow them down with her incessant sniffing.

“Bye,” he said to the woman in the guardhouse, just as he had said “Bye, Mrs. Weisberg!” as he left the jewelry store that third time, that last time, as if nothing had happened.

Adam put Golda down and plodded back up the hill toward Sadot Hadar. Again the little dog ran ahead with her tail up. When he had followed this road from the bus stop, it had been twilight. Now the sun was high, the shadows short, the tall grass where the horses fed washed out by the bright light, like an old photograph. In the distance Mount Carmel loomed behind a haze.

This was the problem: a month after the jeweler agreed to keep the brooch for him, he was still drinking. He just couldn't stand being in the apartment without being drunk, and sometimes even then he couldn't bear it. He blew a lot of money on hotels and often followed people he met in bars back to their places. A couple of times he even slept in Penn Station like a bona fide bum. If it had been warm enough, he would have camped on park benches. The morning he went back to the jeweler for the last time, he had awoken on a mattress on a floor in Inwood.

The dump belonged to some kids he'd met the night before at the Aztec, the dive bar one block down on Essex. How he got to talking with them or how they got from the Lower East Side all the way uptown, he didn't know; all he knew was that the kids came from Wisconsin or some state like that to live out one of those dreams that drew people to his city—stand-up comedy or stockbroking—and that one of the guys had a pistol his dad gave him for his twenty-first birthday. While they were tweaking, the kid had been naïve enough to show the vintage gun to him, a total stranger.

Adam sat up on the mattress and looked at the black pistol still sitting on the coffee table, then at the two noobs sleeping, one on the couch, the other on a second mattress, both too wasted to be disturbed by the sun streaming through the curtainless bay window. Last night he'd squandered a hundred and fifty bucks on beer and his share of the eight ball. Not only hadn't he saved a dime since he spoke with the jeweler, he'd spent half of the four grand. It was a vicious circle: he was never going to save the money for the brooch unless he got his act together, and he was never going to get his act together until he'd done something right with the
brooch. And any minute, the chance to get the brooch back might be gone forever. He'd been as naïve as the blond Midwesterner, believing for even a second that the jeweler would keep the brooch for him. For no profit? The guy was in the business of buying and selling estate jewelry. That's what he did. For all he knew, Mr. Weisberg might have sold the brooch already.

Within ten minutes, Adam was straphanging on the A train, crammed among the morning rush-hour passengers, the pistol under his leather jacket, stuffed into the back of his Levi's.

“I didn't expect to see you again so soon,” said Mr. Weisberg when Adam came through the store's chiming door. “I've got a lot to tell you. Just let me finish up with these nice people, and we'll talk.”

Adam was caught off guard by the young couple browsing wedding bands. He figured at this hour the jeweler would have been alone. He scanned for a camera. There didn't seem to be one, but just in case he backed into a corner. What in the hell could the jeweler have to tell him? That he'd already sold it? If the brooch was gone, he didn't know what he was going to do. He leaned on the mirrored wall and watched the jeweler tell the prospective groom, “That looks perfect on you.”

“I don't know.” The man considered his hand. “I was looking for something flatter.”

“What do you mean? It's flat! You want flatter than that? Let me get a calculator. I'll make you a good deal. And if you both get a ring, I can make you an even better deal. You know . . .” Mr. Weisberg smiled and pointed at the young woman. “She's going to need one too.”

Adam grimaced while the yarmulked jeweler punched numbers into a small calculator. No wonder people thought we were money hungry. Who wanted “a deal” on their wedding band? The jeweler didn't have a sentimental bone in his body. He was a two-bit salesman, and he had been right not to trust him. He better still have that brooch.

Mr. Weisberg turned the calculator around to show the couple the discounted price. When the woman said they were going to continue looking elsewhere, the jeweler shrugged and replied okay in a way that suggested they were wasting their time.

When the door closed behind the couple, the jeweler turned to Adam. “The brooch is in my office. We'll talk in back.”

Adam exhaled. He still had it. He was both relieved and nervous. The jeweler never would've taken him into the back room if he weren't a Jewish
kid whose great-grandmother died in Buchenwald. The jeweler called for someone to watch the front, and an elderly woman, presumably Mrs. Weisberg, shuffled out of the back in a wig too thick and black for her pale shriveled face. She touched the mezuzah, kissed her fingers. Adam smiled at her, and she returned a look that left no room for misunderstanding how unimpressed she was. Adam realized that he hadn't showered or changed his clothes in days.

“Come, come.” The jeweler squeezed past his wife, the space behind the counter too narrow and the jeweler's belly too big for them to pass each other comfortably.

Mr. Weisberg also touched the mezuzah as he passed into the back office, which reminded Adam of
Barney Miller
, one of the shows his mother used to watch from her bed: drab green walls, papers piled on a metal desk, a word processor collecting dust on a filing cabinet. The room's only splash of color was a stylized, almost cartoonish painting of Jerusalem in a brass frame.

“Sit down. Sit.” The jeweler gestured at the visitor's chair.

Adam took the seat in front of the desk and checked that the back of his leather jacket concealed the gun.

“So, you're here to buy back the brooch?” Mr. Weisberg turned the knob on one of the three safes stacked in the corner.

“Yes.” Adam barely got the word out.

“Good, good. I have so much to tell you, Benjamin. It's as I suspected. This isn't any vintage brooch. No, it's even more valuable than I could have imagined. Infinitely.”

“Oh, yeah?” Adam shifted in his seat. Heart pounding in his head, he moved his hand back, readying to grab the pistol. “It's worth more than the twenty grand?”

The jeweler carried the faded blue felt bag, the one that had been in Zayde's shoebox, to his desk. He pulled out his chair, sat down. “Don't worry, I'll sell it back to you for the twenty, like I promised. I'm a man of my word. But before I do, Benjamin, I'm hoping to convince you of something. I have some very important things to tell you about this brooch.”

Adam's hand remained tense, trembling, by his hip.

The jeweler pushed up his glasses. “Listen, Benjamin. I'll tell you up front what I'm hoping. I'm hoping after I tell you everything I know about this brooch, why it's so special, you and your family will be convinced that the right thing to do would be to loan it to a museum, preferably the
Jewish Museum, but maybe the Met. That's what I was going to do if you never came back for it. To be frank, I doubted you would. Tell me, Benjamin, do you have any idea how your family came to have this brooch?”

The sea of rubble. A city turned to rubble? A house?

“No.” Adam shook his head. Realizing he wasn't going to make a move until he'd heard about the brooch, he relaxed his hand, brought it back in front of him. “Why? What's the big deal?”

“What's the big deal?” Mr. Weisberg emptied the felt bag onto a black velvet display box and picked up the brooch. Head tilted back, a small appreciative smile on his face, he peered at it through the bottom half of his lenses. “This brooch was made in the thirteen hundreds, that's the big deal. It's almost seven hundred years old!”

Adam couldn't wrap his mind around that much time. Their apartment building was a hundred and twenty years old, and the city had been poised to designate it a historical landmark before the Mexican restaurant downstairs knocked out the old storefront to put up a flat glass window.

“How do you know it's that old?”

“How do I know? Well, I had my suspicions straightaway. I've been in the jewelry business since I was thirteen years old, Benjamin, and my family, the Weisbergs, have been jewelers, maybe not as long as some, but since at least 1656, when the Jews were kicked out of Lithuania, so I know a little bit about jewelry. As soon as you brought this in I knew we were dealing with something from the Middle Ages. But just to be sure I took it to the jewelry historian at the Cloisters, and oh, you should have seen his face! I thought he wasn't going to give it back! I'm sure you know, Benjamin, that during the Middle Ages, Jews couldn't own property, that we were banned from all the professions except moneylending and gem cutting, but either way, we dealt with jewels, right? I'm sure you know all that. But what you probably don't know is that although the Jews made jewelry, we couldn't wear it. Sumptuary laws forbade us from wearing nice clothes. We couldn't look better than the goyim, right? But this brooch, this magnificent brooch, was made for a Jew. This wasn't the main thing that impressed the historian at the Cloisters, but I . . . I was moved by that. That someone would make something so magnificent that could never be worn in public.”

“How do you know it was made for a Jew?”

“Benjamin, did you even look at the brooch?” Mr. Weisberg turned it over in his hands and pointed with his thick pinky finger at an engraving on the
back. “Look what's inscribed here:
B'ahava
. At first I thought, well, maybe your grandfather had this inscribed for your grandmother, but the historian ran tests, and it can be dated by the patina and debris deep inside the engraving. It was inscribed seven hundred years ago to a Jew named Anna. ‘To my dear Anna, with love.' This Anna, Benjamin, could have been your great-great-great-great-I-don't-know-how-many-greats-grandmother.”

If this Anna was his great-great-who-knew-how-many-greats-grandmother, then he hadn't only betrayed his grandfather, but seven hundred years of his ancestors. How many generations was that? Forty? Fifty? Seven hundred years of the brooch getting passed down, all for him to sell it to get some money to pay off a fuckhead named Bones?

The jeweler, having turned the brooch back around, now pointed with his pinky at one of the little jester heads. “I was also moved by these little pomegranates, this nod to the Holy Land. I mean, think about it. The goldsmith who made this brooch, probably in some cold, miserable city in Eastern Europe, most likely had never even seen a pomegranate in real life, and yet there he was, fifteen hundred years after the Jews were expelled from the Holy Land, still putting pomegranates on his brooch, like a little wish. You know, these stylized pomegranates look exactly like the ones on the ancient shekel. Exactly. It's unbelievable.”

The jeweler appeared pensive, affected; Adam wished he would just stop already.

“No.” The jeweler polished the sapphire with a chamois. “I didn't need some lab results to tell me this brooch was special. You see, this pearl, Benjamin, this was my first clue. The pearls are fastened with a pin through them. That's a medieval technique. And then the gemstones, they're all in their natural shapes. They aren't cut to be symmetrical in size, or faceted to better reflect the light. Nobody would have done that after the seventeenth century. The goldsmith obviously didn't have the know-how, the tools. And this . . . you see the way the stones are held into their beds by a thin string of gold across them? Like little seat belts? I've never actually seen that, only read about it in books. The historian said the quatrefoil style of the brooch was popular in the thirteenth century, but they only know that because of images in manuscripts and tapestries. This brooch, this brooch, he said, is one of only two surviving examples. Two! In the world, Benjamin! I can't tell you how much the Cloisters wanted this brooch. He
was willing to pay a lot for it, let me tell you. He said it could be the most prized piece in the treasury.”

The office door creaked. Adam hurried to sit up and make sure his jacket still covered the gun. What if he'd lost his chance to be alone with the jeweler? He should have made his move already.

Mr. Weisberg looked toward the door. “What is it, Miri?”

Then again, wouldn't it have seemed suspicious to the wife if he'd gone into the back office with her husband and then come right out again? Adam realized the wife was a real problem. How was he going to stop the jeweler from screaming at her to call the police? He hadn't thought about that. He had expected the jeweler to be alone in the store.

“What's taking so long?” Adam heard her ask.

The jeweler gestured at Adam. “This is Benjamin, the brooch boy.”

Adam forced himself to turn around. Mrs. Weisberg stood in the doorway, hand resting on the knob.