“What am I doing?”
“It’s your case, Agent,” Poremba said. He picked up a bullhorn from the backseat, handed it to her. “Go solve it.”
Special Agent Kristy Levine, who should be dead, who could be dead in less than a year, she knew that atavistically, could feel it every morning when she woke up, that she was living on bonus time, considered why she was still here. Maybe it was to learn more about her culture, maybe it was because her cancer was advancing faster than science, maybe it was that she finally understood a pillar of the faith, of her faith, words she now repeated silently to herself: It is not incumbent upon thee to complete the work; but neither are thou free to desist from it. Faithful is thine employer to pay the reward of thy labor. But know that the reward unto the righteous is not of this world.
“All right,” Kristy said. She clicked on the bullhorn. “Agents. Let’s go get these motherfuckers.”
KRISTY STOOD BEFORE RABBI DAVID COHEN’S OFFICE INSIDE TEMPLE BETH Israel. Down the hall, agents were in the Temple’s business office, boxing everything. Outside, agents had the entire Temple and funeral home staff zip-tied, including the off-duty Metro cops charged with keeping everything secure. Until they could prove every single person’s identity, no one was going anywhere. Though the synagogue had not yet opened for the day, the Jews of Summerlin had already begun to gather beyond the yellow tape. The time would come, soon, when Kristy would have each and every one of them questioned, but that morning they gawked, sipped coffee, and called everyone they knew.
Kristy tried the door. Locked. She radioed for a tactical door ram. Five minutes later, two junior agents arrived, looked at the door. “You don’t want to look for a key?” the one named Stallings said.
“No,” Kristy said.
The agents shared a look. Shrugged. “All right,” Stallings said. “Stand back, just in case.”
Kristy stepped around the corner. The two agents grasped the ram, took five steps back, and then smacked the door. The doorframe splintered, and the door swung open. The two agents pulled their guns, swept the room, stepped back out. “All clear,” Stallings said.
Kristy dismissed the agents. How many times had she sat with Rabbi Cohen in this office? Ten times? Twenty? Thirty? It seemed so much larger in those visits. She’d sit across from him at his desk, Rabbi Cohen always offering her the more comfortable sofa, but she always refused. She liked her meetings with Rabbi Cohen to feel like business, but in truth she always left feeling like she’d heard from God himself, even if she wasn’t sure she believed in God.
What she did believe in was Rabbi Cohen. Believed that he understood her. Believed that he cared about her soul. Believed that long after she was gone, he would keep her grave clean. She’d even considered asking him to care for her dog, if it came to that.
All of it a lie.
Kristy walked around the desk and sat down in Rabbi Cohen’s chair. Saw the world the way he did. Imagined herself sitting across the desk. How yearning she must have seemed. How lost. And this kind man with his words of faith and goodwill and the living hope of peace was nothing more than a hit man, a murderer, a liar.
She opened the desk drawers. A pair of shiny silver scissors. Pens. Pencils. Files. She pulled out a stack, thumbed through them. The Teen Fashion Show. The Tikvah Scholarship. Expansion plans for the assisted living facility. Private security contracts. All the things he should have.
She turned on his computer.
Password protected.
She’d get IT on that.
Beside his desk was a low bookshelf filled with knickknacks.
A porcelain figurine of three people dancing the hora.
A single teacup.
His engraved diploma from Hebrew Union College, in a glass frame, propped up on a silver stand:
TO ALL PERSONS BE IT KNOWN THAT
DAVID COHEN
HAVING COMPLETED THE PRESCRIBED STUDIES AND SATISFIED THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE, YOUR DIPLOMA HAS ACCORDINGLY BEEN ADMITTED TO THAT DEGREE WITH ALL THE RIGHTS, PRIVILEGES, AND IMMUNITIES THEREUNTO APPERTAINING.
Kristy pried the back off the frame, slid out the parchment. Ran her fingers over the embossed logo of the university . . . except it wasn’t embossed. It was flat. Neither were any of the words, in fact. She held it up to the light.
“Son of a bitch,” she muttered.
She licked her finger, rubbed the university’s golden logo . . . and smeared ink across the pages.
A fake. An ink-jet fake. Not even a decent fugazi. Just card stock and the free printer you got with the Dell desktop.
Motherfucker.
She leaned back in David’s chair. Out the window, she could see the Barer Academy playground and, in the distance, the high school, and beyond that, the Red Rock Mountains. A view of the future, the present, and the past all at once. There was a sofa and two chairs across the room, a coffee table where Rabbi Cohen kept an antique samovar and tea set, and then three walls of bookshelves. There must have been hundreds of books. Maybe a thousand. Kristy’s eyes tracked up the bookshelves from the ceiling to the floor. On top of the bookshelves were fake plants shoved into ornate vases. She’d noticed them a thousand times but never thought much of them, until today, sitting at this angle, where she could see the electrical cords running from the backs of the vases.
Kristy couldn’t reach the top shelf, so she started yanking books off the shelves—Modernity and the Jews, The Holocaust in History, The Burning Bush, A Book of Jewish Thoughts—tossing them onto the floor, one after another, until she found the cord running behind them. She pulled it down and a vase clattered to the ground. Buried inside the fake plant was a camera. And it wasn’t even particularly small—a standard Sony, the kind you could get at Lowe’s for home security. That it also had a microphone was the disturbing part.
She knocked more books off the shelves, found more cords, more cameras, more mics.
There were three paintings in the office: one behind Rabbi Cohen’s desk, one beside the window, one by the door. Kristy ripped all three off the walls, found more cameras, more mics. The whole room was bugged. Every single conversation she had in this room was recorded.
Every single conversation anyone had in this room was recorded.
Every private word, every fear, every hope was cataloged . . . somewhere.
Kristy picked up the porcelain samovar and hurled it against the wall. It exploded into pieces. She swept the entire tea set onto the floor, stomped on it until it was little more than shards, tipped over the coffee table, where she found another microphone, snapped off the legs, jerked down a bookshelf.
“Agent!” Kristy turned and saw Lee Poremba in the doorway, an open laptop in his hands. “What are you doing?”
“Every word,” Kristy said, “was a lie.” She was breathless. Covered in sweat. “Every single kindness a fucking lie.” She dropped onto the sofa. “Every word every person in this temple told that man was stolen from them. This entire room is bugged.”
“The entire synagogue is bugged, Kristy,” Poremba said. “Even the bathrooms.” He sat down beside her, handed her the laptop. “We got into their network. This is the good rabbi’s search history.”
Poremba clicked on a link and there, in full color, were pictures of Jennifer and William Cupertine and an article from the Chicago Reader.
