Brooklyn Noir Read Online Free PDF

it. The printer, however, was a company known as the printing house for Szebed, and I said to myself, of course it would be Szebed, who else, but I was also disappointed. The motivation behind Szebed’s publication of such a pamphlet was too obvious, too facile to be interesting, and I wished for a more complicated community with more difficult cases, obscure motivations, a case that required mental agility, intricacies I could take pride in unraveling. It was use of the mind that had attracted me to detective work in the first place.
    Reb Yidel rang up my copy but remained unusually silent.
    Know what this is all about? I asked casually, as if my interest were entirely benign.
    He shrugged, a careful man with a business and family to protect, and an example to me, who was also a business and family man, who could also benefit from caution. But it was precisely such caution that the perpetrators counted on to help them get away with their crime. They knew that few, if any, among us would risk antagonizing a powerful congregation with fat fingers that reached everywhere.
    Any truths? I pressed on.
    Who knows? he shrugged. I was pretty sure he knew, and waited.
    There’s a kernel of truth in every lie, he quoted.
    And who is credited with writing the pamphlet? I asked as harmlessly as I could manage.
    It is believed to be the work of Reb Shloimele, Szebed’s school administrator, Reb Yidel answered neutrally.
    The same Reb Shloimele who is also brother-in-law to the Dobrover? I asked, knowing the answer.
    Reb Yidel nodded, but declined to say more. I slapped a five-dollar bill down on the counter and left without waiting for the change. Here finally was a detail to ponder, a motivation to unravel.
     
     
    At my desk I thumbed through the cheaply printed pamphlet. There were accusations of corruption in the Dobrover kosher seal. Discrepancies were cited. A box of nonkosher gelatin, pure pig
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, was discovered in the kitchen at Reismann’s bakery. The egg powder used in Horowitz-Margareten matzohs came in unmarked industrial-size boxes. And the pizzafalafel stores in Borough Park, also known to be under the Dobrover seal, were inspected no more than once a month. How much could go wrong in the twenty-nine days between inspections? the writer asked rhetorically, then concluded that for a kosher seal, Dobrov’s stamp stank of non-kosher.
    I turned to the next chapter. So far, this was the kind of gossip you hear and dismiss regularly. What wouldn’t Szebed do to annex Dobrov’s lucrative kosher-seal business?
    The next chapter attacked the Dobrover’s intimate way with his disciples, their secretive, late-night gatherings and celebrations, accused him of messianic aspirations, and ended with the warning that the dangerous makings of the next false messiah were right here in our midst. This too I’d heard previously and considered hearsay. Besides, the days of messianic upheaval and dangers, dependent as they were on seventeenth-century superstitions and ignorance, were long past. We were living in a world in which every yekel and shmekel could read the news, had Internet access. The information super-highway, to use the words of a smart but foolish president, has arrived in our little community in Williamsburg too.
    These allegations were followed by an interview with a former disciple in which a discerning reader would quickly recognize that the words had been placed in the mouth of the unwary young man. There were incriminating quotes from a Dobrover son and daughter, who, the pamphleteer pointed out as further evidence of criminality, had turned against their own father. The final chapter featured the court arguments that led to excommunication. From this, a facile argument for divorce followed, since the wife of an excommunicated man would suffer unnecessarily from her husband’s exclusion.
    I closed the book in wonder. In the standard course, such a series of events—going from initial suspicions to allegations