Visiting Professor (26 page)

Lemuel just manages to slip
The Hite Report
into a stack of books halfway up the staircase when the kitchen door swings open.

“Lemuel?”

The Rebbe, looking more Lilliputian than Lemuel remembers him, pushes through the door into the living room and snaps on the
overhead light. Hunched over like a parenthesis, his coiled sideburns dancing in agitation, his beetle brows skydiving toward
each other in anxiety, he peers up the stairs. When he speaks his voice is uncommonly hoarse, as if he has cheered too much.
But for what? Or against what?

“For hours I have been asking myself, Where could the schlimazel be?”

“Better late than never.”

“How could you do it?”

“How could I do what?”

“I thought I was your friend.”

“You are.”

“I thought you trusted me.”

“Hey, I do.”

“Then explain, if it’s within the realm, why you didn’t confide in me.”

“Confide what, for God’s sake?”

The Rebbe lowers his voice to a croaking whisper. “We sat at the same table, we shared the same bread, we drank the same Puligny
Montrachet. The least you could have done was tell me about the codes.”

Lemuel shuts his eyes. “Not you too!”

“Everybody in Backwater, also everybody outside of Backwater,
seems to know about it except me. What have I done that I’m the last to learn? Do I deserve this?”

“Who spilled you the beans?”

“A little birdie spilled me the beans. Oy, Lemuel, Lemuel, if you had taken me into your confidence, I could have saved you
a lot of
tsouris
.” The Rebbe advances onto the first step. “I still can.” He mounts another step. “Save you a lot of
tsouris
.”

Lemuel begins to massage his eyelids with his thumb and third finger. “Do not tell me you work for an intelligence agency.”

“Being a spy is like being a Messiah.”

“Do not tell me you work for the Israelis.”

“I don’t actually work for them.” The Rebbe inches higher on the staircase. “I am what they call a headhunter and I think
of as a heart-hunter. When I come up with a warm body who’s a hot prospect, I remove the enciphering instructions they gave
me from its hiding place”—the Rebbe points with his beard to a particularly high pile of books near the kitchen door—”and
send a coded picture postcard to an address in Israel. Air mail. Don’t look at me like that. I am not ashamed to be part of
the international Jewish conspiracy. The world is crawling with anti-Semites, which is to say with people who hate Jews more
than necessary. It is a matter of life or death for the pro-Semites to read their mail.”

“Why me?”

“If not you, who? I beg you, Lemuel, do not turn a deaf ear to the handwriting on the wall. A day doesn’t go by, an hour even,
when I don’t patrol the back pages of the newspaper looking for little articles that indicate the start of a new Holocaust.
You are trying not to smile at things that strike you as absurd. Your cynicism is an insult to the parents who raised you.
Read it and weep. ‘Seven hundred thousand Jews reportedly exterminated in a Polish backwater called Oswiecim.’ That was how
The New York Times
, which calls itself a newspaper of record, which prints all the news that fits, broke the story of what the Nazi bastards
were up to, it was on a back page, the crossword puzzle was more prominent, the front page was otherwise occupied with a hot
scoop on summer vacations.”

Lemuel settles down onto the carpeted step. “I can say you, Rebbe, I have had it with code books. I have had it with subtexts.”

The Rebbe sinks to his knees on the step below. “Lemuel, Lemuel, everything in life is coded. The Torah I love more than oxygen,
the
whisperings of lovers, the rantings of a rebbe, your left, right, either or, novels even, novels
especially
, they all have a subtext. If there is no subtext, the absence of a subtext is the subtext, it makes a statement, it says,
It is important for me to convince you what you see is what you get. As your former shiksa lady friend would say, get a life.
In this
meshugge
world, between the experience and the language available to describe it—ha! between joie de vivre and its exegesis—there
is an abyss. Codes, subtexts are the bridges across the abyss.”

“At this point in the spiel dudes usually tell me what is in it for me.”

“Oy, you haven’t deciphered my subtext. Nothing is what’s in it for you. If you go to Israel to help the Jews make and break
codes, you will reside in a cramped, noisy apartment in Tel Aviv, Petersburg compared will look like a paradise lost. Like
everyone else in the Holy Land you will live on bank overdrafts to make ends meet. You will vacation on a polluted seashore
crawling with snot-nosed kiddies kicking sand in your face. But you will serve Israel, and through Israel, Yah-weh.”

“I am still not one hundred percent sure He exists.”

The Rebbe plunks himself down next to Lemuel. “So where is it written you cannot serve God while you are searching for Him?”

“Tell me something, Asher. Do you really believe the dude exists? Come at the problem from another direction: Have you discovered
Him or invented Him?”

The Rebbe’s bulging eyes flash. He fixes Lemuel with a fierce regard. “When you see a three-piece suit, you
discover
the tailor, you don’t
invent
him. Why should it be different when you see a rose in bloom, a bird in flight, a swirling tempest of ice paralyzing the
East Coast, a footprint of chaos in the dunes of time?”

Sighing, he pulls the enormous handkerchief from the inside breast pocket of his jacket, opens it with a theatrical flourish,
mops his brow. At length he says, “I caught you on the tube tonight. Thanks to you, they nailed the serial murderer to his
cross, so to speak. You are once again a local hero.” One of his hands comes to rest on Lemuel’s forearm. “I saw you cringing
in the back of the car, I heard you say the quest for a single example of pure, unadulterated randomness is the search for
God. So what are you waiting for, Lemuel? Go for it. Do what I couldn’t bring myself to do. Make the leap.”

Lemuel squirms uncomfortably. “What leap are we talking about?”

“The leap of faith. Okay, Torah is maybe a can of worms. Was it David
who killed the goy Goliath—I’m talking 1 Samuel 16-17—or some local hero named Elhanan—I’m talking 2 Samuel 21:19. Either
or, To-rah is still the work of God and the word of God, Blessed be His holy name. The subtext, the codes, what’s written
between the lines, are His handiwork too. You and me, Lemuel, we maybe approach Torah from opposite directions, but in your
heart of hearts you are as kosher as I am. It is no accident your name means ‘devoted to God.’ “

“You put on a good show,” Lemuel says tiredly.

“Every word comes from the gut,” the Rebbe says quietly.

Suddenly aggressive, Lemuel asks, “Like what is in it for you if I sign on the dotted line?”

“Ask, ask, I am not insulted. What is in it for me is a bonus for every recruit I sign. Where do you think I get the seed
money to start a yeshiva in the heart of the heart of Brooklyn, from a goy bank?” The Rebbe manages a smile that is both lopsided
and delicate. “What is in it for me is finding grace in the eyes of Yahweh.” Rocking gently, he recites, “ ‘He brought me
forth … he delivered me, because he delighted in me.’ “ Out of habit, he coughs up his source. “I’m talking 2 Samuel 22:20.”

There is a sharp knock on the front door. Suddenly alert, the Rebbe eyes Lemuel. “You are maybe expecting someone?”

“Not.”

The Rebbe heaves himself off the step, pads through the vestibule to the front door, opens it a crack. The first thing he
sees is a shoe wedged between the door and the jamb.

From his place on the steps, Lemuel hears a muffled argument. Seconds later Mitchell and Doolittle, trailed by five FBI clones
in tight-fitting three-piece suits, push through the vestibule into the living room. Wringing his hands, the Rebbe brings
up the rear.

Mitchell spots Lemuel on the staircase. “Small world, isn’t it, sport?”

“You want to hear something hilarious,” the Rebbe broadcasts in a high-pitched voice, “these guys, who barge into a private
house without an invitation, without kissing the mezuzah on the doorpost of my gate, without wiping their feet even, these
guys with the razor-sharp creases in their trousers think I am maybe the agent of a foreign country.”

“We don’t think,” Doolittle corrects him. “We know.”

“If the Syrians turn up in Backwater,” one of the clones remarks, “can the Israelis be far behind?”

The clones spread out and begin rifling through drawers. The Rebbe grabs the sleeve of one of them. “You can’t do that.”

With a snap of his wrist, Doolittle unfurls a paper in front of the Rebbe’s face. “A circuit court judge disagrees with you.”

“
Chazak
,” the Rebbe mutters to himself. “Be strong.”

Mitchell settles onto his haunches and starts to leaf through the top book on a leaning tower at the bottom of the stairs.
“What’s with all these books?”

“I’ve collected them over the years,” the Rebbe explains. “They have the name of God in them.” He swallows hard. “It’s against
Jewish law to destroy a book containing the name of God.”

“If we have to,” Doolittle vows, “we’ll examine every book in the house.”

“It will take days,” the Rebbe says hopefully.

“Time,” Mitchell announces, shaking a book by its spine, “is what we have on our hands.”

Doolittle motions for the agents to start searching the books piled against the walls. Mitchell looks up at Lemuel. ‘Join
the movers and shakers, sport. Tell us where he’s hiding the incriminating evidence.” He dangles a book upside down by its
spine and jiggles it. “You haven’t forgotten who the good guys are, have you? Show us whose side you’re on.”

Halfway up the steps, Lemuel is trembling like a leaf in a tempest. In his mind’s eye, dear God, if only it had been another
one of his fictions, he hears a voice whisper in his ear: “You want to show Comrade Stalin whose side you’re on, don’t you,
sonny? Tell us where your father hides his code book.”

He hears his answer spiral up from his lost childhood. “What is a code book?”

Cowering in a corner, he watches, spellbound, as one of the faceless men slits open his parents’ mattress with a bread knife
and starts to gut it. Two others tear clothing out of the armoire and pass it to a third man, who cuts away the linings from
his mother’s coats and dresses before flinging the garments onto a heap in a corner.

“Be strong,” his father calls across the room. “There is nothing for them to find.”

One of the faceless men looks Lemuel’s father in the eye. “Talking while the flat is being searched is not permitted,” he
says coldly. Lemuel’s father lowers his gaze.

When the armoire is empty, the faceless men begin to dismantle it, stacking the pieces against a wall. Lemuel feels bile mount
to his mouth, starts toward the kitchen to spit it into the sink. Someone grabs his arm.

“Let him go,” his mother pleads. “He is only six.”

When Lemuel slips back into the bedroom, the faceless men are lifting the back of the armoire away from the frame. One of
them notices a loose flap of wallpaper above the floorboards. He squats, peels the paper away from the plasterboard, reaches
into a crack and comes out with a book. Lemuel’s father glances quickly at the boy, who is barely able to breathe.

The agent in charge leafs through the pages, which are dog-eared and full of underlined words and phrases. “It is in English,”
he notes. He reads an underlined phrase aloud. “ ‘Stretching abdominal muscles in this manner fifteen minutes a day …’ “ He
turns to the title page. “ ‘
The Royal Canadian Air Force Exercise Manual
.’ “ He looks up. “This is clearly a code book, used for enciphering and deciphering secret messages,” he announces. He adds
the book to the letters and photograph albums in a barrel with the words
EVIDENCE
and
THIS SIDE UP
stenciled on the wood.

Lemuel’s father shakes his head in frustration. “You don’t understand. I brought the book back from the Great War. A Canadian
pilot I liberated from a prisoner-of-war camp gave it to me. I shared the book with my son, Lemuel. I use it for exercises.
He uses it to study English.”

“If the book had not been hidden in the wall, your story might ring true,” says the agent in charge.

Lemuel’s mother whispers urgently to Lemuel’s father, who says, “We made the mistake of telling the boy that English books
were not permitted. When he saw you searching the living room, he must have crawled under the armoire and hidden it in the
wall so he could continue his study of English.” His father smiles tensely across the room at the boy. “
The Royal Canadian Air Force Exercise Manual
is his most prized possession.”

Suddenly everyone in the room is staring at Lemuel, who is cowering in the corner. “Is it true you study English from this
book?” one of the faceless men demands.

Lemuel, trembling like a leaf, shakes his head. Choking on sobs
that block his respiration, he whimpers over and over, again and again, “It was not me who hid the code book.”

Lemuel’s mother begins to weep. The back of his father’s hand brushes against the back of his mother’s hand. “With your permission,”
his father tells the faceless men, “I will collect my toilet articles in the bathroom.”

“It is my book!” Lemuel hears himself blurt out—dear God, he has been wandering in a wilderness for forty years, but better
late than never.

Suddenly everyone in the house is staring at Lemuel. “What book are we talking about, sport?” Mitchell asks.

Lemuel pulls the hollowed-out
Hite Report
from the pile of books and offers it to Mitchell. Doolittle and Mitchell exchange triumphant glances. The Rebbe starts to
climb the stairs, but one of the clones bars the way. Mitchell takes the book, opens it, touches the vials and paper satchels
inside with a fingertip.

“It’s a drug stash,” he decides, clearly surprised.