The Houseguest Read Online Free PDF

also writing urgently on a notepad.
    â€œHow much?” Spiro asked. “How much in pledges?”
    â€œA lot,” Shoemaker said, without bothering to put down the receiver. “You know what this means, don’t you?”
    â€œNo time for rhetorical questions, Richard.”
    â€œIt means a hell of a lot more ads.”
    The latest sketch was rolled out on Spiro’s desk. A man in bed with his eyes closed, and above him a panorama of men, women, and children with downcast eyes and emaciated bodies marching along a dirt road with tanks at their backs. Above it all in large, block letters: A CTION , N OT P ITY , C AN S AVE THE J EWS OF E UROPE . He picked up the drawing, carried it over to where the artist sat.
    â€œCan you do this again?” Spiro said. “Put a fire in the background. A burning synagogue behind the tanks.”
    â€œI can,” he said. “You don’t think it’ll be too much?”
    â€œI think it’ll be perfect.”
    Yes, God’s wrath could be perfect. Wrath, or a drunk trying to get warm, or a faulty fuse, or who knew what. The well-known place had burned to the ground in front of the neighborhood and people were scared. Smoldering synagogues in Germany or Austria or Rumania were one thing. But an assault like this on the Jews of Manhattan, destruction a person could see and smell and feel in the air, wondering if their own synagogue would be next. Spiro—a student of violence as much as anything else—understood the power of proximity.
    Long before this fire, long before the other fires and explosions and artillery-driven assaults he had witnessed around the world, Spiro had believed in fear. He believed in its driving, penetrating force; he believed in it as an angry spirit hanging over the heads of men; he believed in it ultimately as a truth, a germ of certitude buried deep inside every news report and rumor and scrawled letter from across the sea, hardened and blackened and impossible to banish or destroy. The Irgun reprisals that began in ’37 with the bombing of the Arab cafe was the first time he felt it, this change. Two persons killed. Five wounded. Hardy a massacre. But then Black Sunday. Attacks in Jerusalem and Haifa at once. Fifteen wounded. Seven casualties, three of them women. It was the first time they’d allowed themselves to do more than defend, to dispense with restraint. And it worked. He could feel there was a palpable change in the behavior of the British, an empirical and real change, as though they were suddenly given new clocks with a thirteenth hour on them. They were afraid of Irgun Bet. They knew the dead officers, the wives, the children; they saw the shards, smelled the cordite that hung in the air, displacing those tangy mineral odors from the hillside that normally coated the city and never sat right in Spiro’s nose.
    Now it was the Jews of Manhattan’s turn to see the fear god in the fire that took away the Free Synagogue and called on Spiro, as one of its prophets, to make sense of the horror. Who did it? Hitler? Is Hitlerhere? Are they coming? Are they coming for us? Do we stay away? Do we hide? We have services to attend. Shul. Sabbath. The Temple of Our Lord, the blessed and almighty, the sanctuary defiled, swept away on a tide of fire. Was this foretold? Is this the beginning? What is this? The phones rang on and Spiro answered them. The panicked Jews of Manhattan wanted answers.
    â€œMy grandson’s Bar Mitzvah’s next weekend,” one fellow in Brooklyn told him. “Should we stay home from temple? My daughter’s scared to go. I tell her that’s crazy, but is it? I can’t sleep at night.”
    Spiro didn’t answer right away. His desk was in what had once been a storage closet. To the outside world it gave the impression of modesty, but in truth Spiro had deposited himself there for the intimacy it afforded him with his own thoughts. He picked up a pen,