slouch toward the office door. “Tragedy I s’pose.”
As the girl made her melancholy exit without so much as a fare-thee-well, Julius was left stranded at his desk, harried by unbidden memories. So it seemed that the Karp family’s affinity for untoward behavior had indeed leapfrogged the appliance merchant to bedevil his son. There was cold comfort in the knowledge: for the curse he had ducked all his life, in afflicting Bernie, had as good as circled back round to bite Julius in his own tush.
Autumn 2002.
He approached the New House of Enlightenment along a suburban street strewn with leaves and jackknifed squad cars flashing red lights. The tabernacle itself was surrounded by sawhorse barriers, onlookers from the neighborhood pressing against them as flak-jacketed police with bullhorns warned them to stay back. There were media vans, attendants fussing over broadcasters with perfect hair, pinning mikes the size of blood ticks to their lapels as they faced the cameras. Some enterprising children had set up a lemonade stand. The general air of expectancy seemed to Bernie, however, to have less in common with a crisis than the anticipation of a parade in which celebrities were due to appear. Maybe his own legend had preceded him and when he approached the barricades, explaining, “The rabbi is my teacher; I’m the one that discovered him,” the crowds would part and the cops wave him through. But that wasn’t likely. Besides, even if he was able to convince the authorities that he could be of assistance, they would no doubt attach such conditions that in the end he would be forced to betray the rabbi rather than rescue him. And rescue was what Bernie had in mind.
Having by now understood that his tenure as public guru had run its course, Rabbi ben Zephyr would have no choice but to accompany his onetime apprentice to some safe remove, where the holy man could again resume his original destiny as a hidden saint. But how to spirit the rebbe from the siege of the House of Enlightenment to some sanctuary beyond the reach of the law was a problem Bernie had yet to resolve, though he was confident that a solution would present itself when the time came. Meanwhile there was the more immediate problem of securing an audience with the old man in the first place. It occurred to him he might simply sidle through the police line, vault the barriers, and make a dash for the doors, but that would invite a doomed pursuit by the metro SWAT team, members of which were on hand for just such an event. And besides, Cholly Sidepocket, the rabbi’s implacable bodyguard in his mirror glasses, chinchilla coat, and matching cap, had planted himself in front of the doors with folded arms, ready to repel anyone who dared to seek entry or take a bullet in the attempt. Bernie recalled a meditation of Shlomiel ben Hayyim of Dreznitz that rendered one invisible, but the technique had unpredictable side effects. Then a third option suggested itself, and making an abrupt about-face, the boy backtracked along the street of single-story ranch houses, their raked lawns anchored by bags of leaves tilting like fat kids in a sack race.
Behind him the voice over the megaphone, calling on the occupants of the New House to “Come out and save your sorry selves from future harm,” was somewhat annulled by the bracing nip in the November air. In a block or two Bernie came to a place where the pavement was interrupted by a storm grate overarched by an inlet with cast-iron teeth, fixed into the lip of the curb like a snarl. Looking left and right, he sank to all fours and rolled his thin self between the iron teeth and the grate. He dropped some six feet into a shallow catchbasin full of sludge and standing water, stirring a swarm of drowsy mosquitoes and splashing ooze over his sneakers and jeans. From there he hauled himself into the mouth of a circular drainpipe through which, ducking his head, he proceeded at a simian stoop. It was dark in the pipe, but Bernie—veteran explorer (or so he told himself) of the obscurer reaches of the psyche—progressed with a blind assurance.
After a short incline, the tributary pipe spilled over a shelf into the storm drain proper, where he lowered himself into the deeper, broader conduit. But no sooner had he planted his feet on the sewer’s pitched bank, unhunching his spine, than he lost