Yom Kippur Murder (11 page)

I thanked him, gave him my phone number, and left, wondering whether he had done this just to get rid of me. Whether he had or not, the Zilman story was the most interesting one I had heard to date.

Mordechai Zilman was a short man with a white beard that covered the knot of his tie. It didn’t cover the gold chain across his vest from which dangled what I took to be a Phi Beta Kappa key. When we were seated in his living room, he instructed his wife to bring fruit, which proved to be a godsend. It was two o’clock and I hadn’t had lunch yet.

“So you want to hear about Herskovitz and the sacred text,” Mr. Zilman said when the fruit bowl had been placed in front of me with napkins, a glass plate, and a little knife.

“I want to hear anything that might suggest a reason why he was killed.”

“I can’t tell you why he was killed. I can tell you why he was hated.”

“Please,” I said, reaching for an apple.

“In the last months before Nathan Herskovitz went the way of his brethren in Europe, he became a broker of human life. If you could pay for it, he could get you a document so perfect, it would make the real one look fake. He could make a German into a Frenchman, a young man into an older one,
a clerk into a supervisor. So people got to freedom, and Nathan Herskovitz got rich.”

There was a pompous ring to what he said, and I found myself resenting his tone. I
liked
Nathan, and I sensed I wasn’t hearing the most unbiased report of his prewar activities.

“What happened to all the money?” I asked.

“I’m not his banker,” Zilman snapped. “Maybe it’s in Switzerland. Maybe he left it with someone he considered a friend only to find in 1945 that the Jews had no friends.”

“How was he able to accomplish these miracles, Mr. Zilman?”

“As I said, he was a broker. He did nothing himself. He found people to do the work. There are forgers who are very good at their trade. As it turns out, Herskovitz had defended one once and got him off with a light sentence. That was the man who made the documents.”

“That’s probably where the money went then,” I said.

Zilman stared at me for a good half minute. It was clear he wasn’t used to being contradicted. He turned to his wife, who sat timidly on a dining chair just outside the living room. “Some water,” he said, and she stood and disappeared into the kitchen.

I wondered how many decades this little woman had put up with this diminutive tyrant.

“Like other people whose main interest in life is money,” Zilman continued as his wife brought a tray with two glasses and a blue glass bottle that produced fizzy water when she squeezed a gadget on top, “Herskovitz took better care of his possessions than he did of his family. He was a collector of rare editions. How many he had, I don’t know, but surely a substantial number. To lose them would be a catastrophe for the literate world, and to leave them behind was to lose them. So he gave them away.”

“To whom?” I asked. I sipped the seltzer and felt it go right up my nose and into my head. For a moment I thought I might sneeze and destroy Zilman’s concentration.

“He gave a book to everyone he provided an escape for.”

“Were they to keep the books till Nathan showed up in America?”

“The books were gifts.”

“Gifts,” I repeated.

“Anyone who saved a book could keep it.”

I felt a surge of affection for Nathan. “Do you have yours?” I asked.

I got another stare. I guess this little man must have gotten a lot of mileage out of staring during his lifetime—perhaps that’s how he kept his wife in line—but I found him almost comical.

“Nathan Herskovitz did not assist me or my family in any way,” he said, one hand moving to touch the gold key that hung from the chain.

He dropped his hand, set his shoulders, and continued. “But you see, he didn’t mean it. It was only a ruse to get these poor fleeing people to carry out his collection.”

“You mean he claimed the books after the war?”

Zilman gave me an acid smile. “I only know for certain about one book. That book was worth the entire collection. It was a fifteenth-century Jewish prayer book, an incunabulum, if you know the term. Even before the war it was worth thousands. Today it might bring half a million. A book like that should not be in the hands of a private individual; it should be in a library, where people can look at it and scholars can study it.” He touched the Phi Beta Kappa key again so that I would know who the scholar in the room was. “The book had been given to Karl Henry Black—that was the Americanization of his name, of course.”

Of course, I thought, wondering if he disliked me as much as I disliked him.

“About fifteen years ago Professor Black decided to retire. Academics are not the best-paid people in the world, and Black needed a nest egg to see him through his retirement. He decided to put the book up for sale through an auction house.”

“Did you teach with Professor Black?” I asked, starting
to get a feel for the source of his obviously secondhand story.

“I did.” He paused to drink some seltzer. “I must tell you that before he did this, for many years Herskovitz had bothered him about the book, asking for it, threatening him, sometimes confronting him in the street as he went to and from work. Now, when the auction house announced the book would be up for sale, Herskovitz came in with the lawyers.”

“To prevent the sale?”

“Presumably to prevent the sale, to challenge Black’s right to own it, to disrupt Black’s life as much as possible. I felt Black should have gone to court. He could have found enough witnesses to swear that Herskovitz gave the books away that no jury would have doubted him. But the judge halted the auction, and Black got nervous. He withdrew the book, and Herskovitz apparently then dropped the case.”

“Then Professor Black still has it,” I said.

“If only that were true.” Zilman glanced at his wife, nodded to his empty glass, and waited till she refilled it.

My ire was really building. I couldn’t imagine treating a servant the way he was treating her.

“On the day Professor Black took back the book from the auction house, he was found dead in the street.”

“Murdered?” I said, my voice echoing my shock.

“Dead of a heart attack.”

“And the book?”

“Gone.”

“He may have died, and someone passing by picked up the package,” I suggested.

“Then where is it?” Zilman countered. “A person who steals does so for money. Sooner or later the book finds its way into the hands of someone who knows what it is. Herskovitz took it, Herskovitz hid it. Maybe his children have it.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. I couldn’t imagine Nina doing her father a favor, and I wasn’t sure Mitchell’s relationship
with Nathan had been strong enough that Nathan would have trusted him with something so valuable. Still, it was worth a couple of phone calls. “You didn’t know Nathan Herskovitz, did you, Mr. Zilman?”

“Never.”

“How did you happen to be at his funeral?”

“There was nothing in his life to celebrate, but his death brought a measure of justice. I went to celebrate justice.”

I found this man so tiresome, I was ready to thank him for my apple and get up and leave, but I thought I ought to ask a few questions about the Black family. “Did you stay in touch with Professor Black’s family after his death?” I asked.

“Not actively.”

I had no idea what he meant, but I thought it would be purposeless to pursue it. “I wonder if someone in the family killed Nathan for the book.” I just stated it, hoping he would pick up on it.

“I wouldn’t blame them. Imagine how you would feel if your life savings suddenly disappeared, just at the time when you began to need it.”

“If they killed him for the book, they didn’t find it,” I said. “The apartment wasn’t searched.”

“Surely you wouldn’t seriously accuse a member of an academic family with so heinous a crime.”

“I’m not accusing anyone yet. I’m looking for reasons why someone would kill a kind old man who never hurt anyone and who couldn’t defend himself.” I said it to anger him, and I succeeded. I could see him restraining himself.

“I told you the story not to place blame on the Black family but to give you an insight into a man’s character. A person who becomes rich by brokering lives, who gives gifts and takes them back, is a man who cannot be trusted, a man who may well have antagonized other men to the point of uncontrollable anger.”

I thanked him for his help and got him to part with the
address of Black’s widow. Then I went to Mrs. Zilman and thanked her for her hospitality. She glowed with happiness. I hoped Zilman wouldn’t take it out on her afterward.

I needed some food fast, and I got it on Broadway. The Zilmans lived on West End Avenue, the north-south street one block west of Broadway in the Eighties. When I finished my cheeseburger, I set out for the Greenspan address, which was about a dozen blocks south of where I was. I walked along Riverside Drive, admiring the view of the park and the river and New Jersey beyond. Fall had not yet made its colorful strike, but here and there a tree was losing its green.

I was so involved in my admiration of nature that I went right by the Greenspan building and had to turn back. A woman’s voice answered the bell, and I was buzzed in.

Mr. Greenspan made a joke about my frequent visits, but I sensed he was glad to have the company. The woman who had opened the door brought us cups of hot chocolate when I had sat down, and Hillel Greenspan’s face lit up in a way Mordechai Zilman’s had never learned to.

“I have a lot of questions,” I said after sipping my chocolate.

“I have a lot of answers,” the old man responded.

“Did Nathan help you leave Europe before the war?”

“Nathan got for me and my wife identification papers so good, the Gestapo couldn’t make better. You want to see them?”

“You still have them?”

“I have everything. What isn’t back there is up here.” He tapped his temple, stood nimbly, and left the living room, his cane thumping along. From the other room I could hear him humming. He returned quickly and handed me an envelope.

The photograph on the first document was of a young man with a resemblance to this old one, but not a clear match. The name was Herbert Genscher, and after the address, there were numbers that I took to be his height and weight in the metric system. There was also a long word that was probably his supposed profession. A raised seal gave it the look of authenticity that the military would so prize.

“Beautiful?” he said.

“It looks excellent.” Of course, I had no idea what a real one would look like, but it didn’t matter.

The other document in the envelope was for a woman with the same last name and a maiden name that I couldn’t make out.

“Were they expensive?” I asked.

“Every week the price went up.”

“Did Nathan make much on the transaction?”

“Nathan made nothing. He was a go-between, that’s all.”

“Between you and the forger?”

“With the forger and with the transport. He got a car, a truck, a hay wagon, whatever he could find, whoever he could bribe.”

“Did he give you a book?”

“Who have you been talking to?”

“Mr. Zilman.”

“You talked to Zilman?”

“A little while ago.”

“What could Zilman tell you that I couldn’t?”

“Mr. Greenspan, I’m just trying to find out whether someone who knew Nathan might have killed him.”

“And you think Zilman did it?”

“I don’t think Zilman did it. I don’t know who did it. But Zilman told me an interesting story about a book.”

“Zilman is a fool.” He set his mouth and shook his head.

“Tell me about the books, Mr. Greenspan.”

“What can I tell you? Books are sacred. Nathan had a collection of very valuable, very rare books. He gave them away to save them. Better they should survive in other people’s hands than remain in his and die. He would say, ‘Here,
take it. A book like this belongs to the world, not to you or me.’ ”

“What about Professor Black’s book?”

He shook his head again and wagged his finger at me. “Never think that a piece of the whole is the whole, young lady. If Nathan gave away a thousand books, it doesn’t mean he gave away a thousand and one.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Did you know Black?”

“No.”

“Of course not. You’re too young. Black was a second-rate scholar who got a good job when he came to New York because he had friends. In Europe he was nothing. Zilman is the kind of fool that Black could impress. Black was single when he left Europe. He was the perfect person to escort a woman and children. Nathan knew the time had come to leave. He knew he should go, too, but there was still work, people he had promised to help. He thought, a few days more and he would leave himself. A man on the run alone can take more chances. But for his family, time had run out.

“Black agreed to accompany Nathan’s wife and babies, to look after them till Nathan joined them. But not out of charity. Black was not a charitable man. He wanted payment. They struck a bargain, and Nathan gave him the book.”

“And he wasn’t able to save them,” I said.

“Wasn’t
able
?” the old man nearly shouted. “He never came for them. He got on the truck himself and went to the border. He left them to die, a young woman and two beautiful children.”

I could feel my skin prickling. I could imagine them waiting for the truck that never came, sitting, packed, with two sleeping children through a dark night, realizing finally at dawn that they had been had, betrayed, that there was no escape. If the story was true, it explained easily why Nathan had hounded Black for the rest of his life. But it didn’t explain everything.

“How do you know this, Mr. Greenspan?” I asked.

“How do I know? You think I make up a story like this?
I know because my friend Nathan told me. I know because I knew all the people.”

“Mr. Zilman said the book was put up for auction many years ago and withdrawn when Nathan went into court.”

“Correct.”

“Why didn’t Nathan pursue the case? Didn’t he want the book back?”