The Frozen Rabbi (47 page)

On the night table next to a plate of divinity sprinkled with confectioners’ sugar (or was it cocaine?), Bernie spied a silver bucket containing a gallon jug of Manischewitz chilling in a niche chipped out of a king-size cube of ice. The steel pick used for the chipping was left sticking upright beside the bottle, and with a bravura gesture he leaned forward to yank it from the ice by its wooden handle. He raised the pick in front of him and heard a voice in his head pleading temporary insanity. “I can’t do it by myself,” he conceded. Then wiping his eyes, he took the tzaddik’s stiffening fingers in his left hand and folded them around his right, the one that held the instrument, which—begging Lou’s forgiveness—he plunged to the hilt into his own heart. A jolt as from a horse kicking through the skin of a drum shivered his chest, which exploded in a Pandora’s box of pain. The blood spurted out like crude oil, further blackening the mud that daubed his jacket, and he no longer knew whether or not he remained on his knees. His nerves and sinews sang like live wires, his body demanding its right to relax into oblivion, his veiled eyes to survey the road to the Other Side—which passed through such picturesque vistas. Still he fought to complete the procedure in the seconds of consciousness left to him: A decision had to be made as to which of the rabbi’s apertures was appropriate for the transference of Bernie’s own immortal soul.

He’d already said so long to himself when he perceived through his dimming sight the old man’s yet standing organ, which prompted the memory of a venerable Yiddish expression: “Er toyg nokh,” as was said of libidinous elders: He’s still good for it. This seemed providential enough, though nearly as great as his pain was his revulsion, which he dismissed as a residuum of the late Bernie Karp. Nevertheless, as he fell face-forward, holding his nose to keep his neshomah from escaping his nostrils, Bernie was relieved to recall an alternate text: “Mouth to mouth do I speak with him,” as the Lord said of Moses, whom he awarded the death by kiss.

A
t the trial the rabbi showed no remorse, nor did he demonstrate any emotion readily identifiable to the mob that thronged the courtroom. Denied bail, which he’d never requested, he was trundled out of his cell at the Shelby County jail in a standard issue orange jumpsuit that ballooned about his broomstick frame. Guards led him mincing in his shackles behind the bar and seated him at a table beside his court-appointed counsel. From this vantage he viewed the proceedings with an expression of mild amusement, the way a sleepy child gazes into an aquarium. When asked at his arraignment how he pleaded, the old man, as if offered two equally delectable morsels, seemed unable to choose, and so an obligatory plea of not guilty was submitted. Hence the trial, during which Mr. Womack, the prosecuting attorney, a bald man of impressive girth whose every gesture seemed practiced, introduced a raft of evidence—largely fabricated but passionately maintained—to the effect that young Bernard Karp was the victim of a ritual murder. The boy had been degraded and defiled, made to perform unnatural acts, then murdered sacrificially so that his blood might be utilized in further satanic ceremonies. The prosecutor drew heavily on translations of old czarist documents called protocols to support his charges, and relished describing in salacious detail the compromising situation in which the police had discovered the old man and the boy. A number of witnesses from local law enforcement who’d been at the scene of the crime were on hand to corroborate the prosecutor’s characterization of the event.

The attorney for the defense, Mr. Frizell, an oily jackleg in mismatched plaids going through motions for his minimal fee, took pains (small ones) to point out that the prosecution’s claims had been widely discredited since the Middle Ages; that in any case the blood libel—and here he seemed to contradict himself by giving credence to the very phenomenon he meant to debunk—involved gentile victims, “Jew-on-Jew crime” being virtually unheard of. But the imaginations of the jury, hand-picked for their ignorance, had already been ignited, and as the prosecution’s case also included the establishment beyond a reasonable doubt of motive and opportunity, combined with a dramatic exhibition of the murder weapon itself, the verdict was a foregone conclusion. Rabbi Ezekiel ben Zephyr, old as he was (though how old no one could say), was sentenced to life imprisonment for actions so distasteful that the judge, the Honorable Schuyler Few, made a show of spraying his mouth with antiseptic after speaking their name.

“By the authority vested in me by the state of Tennessee,” pronounced Judge Few, “I hereby sentence you the accused, Ezeekyul ben Zefire, to be confined to the state correctional facility at Brushy Mountain for the remainder of your natural life, with no recourse to parole.” Later on, in response to criticism of his failure to impose the death penalty, the judge maintained that a slow death in prison was a crueller fate than the gas chamber, which for the rabbi’s people might be interpreted as a type of a martyrdom. Still, there were those who detected a tincture of mercy.

The trial lasted only a week, in the course of which the media circus was unrelenting. The austere, oak-paneled courtroom was packed every day to capacity, the bailiffs hard pressed to silence a crowd sometimes as unruly as spectators at a bearbaiting. Meanwhile the press had a field day parsing every nuance of the case, the conservative papers weighing in with a vengeance in favor of the rabbi’s execution (some of the yellower journals even suggesting the resurrection of a time-honored tradition involving lampposts and trees), while the liberal press, which had no local representation, derided the kangaroo atmosphere of the courtroom and deplored the rabbi’s demonization, at the same time conceding that the accused might in fact be a demon. Nobody really questioned the old imposter’s guilt. Though most of his followers distanced themselves from their leader after the murder, a steadfast few helped fill the pews and carried placards outside the courthouse reading
FREE
RABBI
BEN
ZEPHYR
. Frequently interviewed by reporters, they mouthed the kind of gnomic catchphrases that lent substance to the belief that they were under some type of mind control.

The Family Karp were in daily attendance, a bench behind the attorneys’ tables having been reserved for them throughout each phase of the trial. They sat, Julius and Yetta, stiffly during the proceedings, their faces gone slack from the effort of trying to sustain the proper balance of outrage and grief. Still in shock from the turn of events that had taken their only son in so terrible and untimely a fashion, they were nearly as crushed—God forgive them—by the rabbi’s spectacular fall from grace. It was an attitude that neither could admit to the other. But while they tried their best on principle to abhor the old man, glaring daggers at the kippah—raffish as the dented cup of a black brassiere—that rode the back of his head, they fell short of invoking the rancor they sought. Despite the volumes of affection she expressed for her boy and her guilt over all the occasions she’d failed to declare it, Mrs. Karp confided to her husband in a moment of weakness that “the rabbi must have had his reasons”; and while he pretended he couldn’t believe his ears, to his shame Julius secretly concurred. Their daughter, Madeline, was also present for a time, summoned from her career as artist’s model to the funeral of her brother. A nuisance in life, her little brother had proved an even greater posthumous embarrassment owing to the public manner of his demise. But the girl nevertheless dutifully attended the funeral and stayed on for the commencement of the trial, even consenting to pose in all her pneumatic shapeliness for the newspaper photographers. After a few days, however, she became disgusted with her parents’ inability to muster sufficient loathing for the defendant, and told them as much. When they responded that she should bite her tongue about things she didn’t understand, she called them gross, and as the entire courtroom turned to watch her oscillating departure, sashayed again out of their lives.

Arrayed in a Zorroesque outfit complete with piratical headscarf that constituted her widow’s weeds, Lou Ella Tuohy was there as well for every stage of the court case, sometimes with and sometimes without her baby sister of indeterminate age. She bagged school to attend and called in sick at the video store—whose hands-off proprietor told her not to worry; he would institute an honor system until she returned. Throughout the arguments and counterarguments, Lou sat in the gallery among reporters and curiosity seekers, snapping her gum and wondering exactly what had happened to shatter her world. Having never before seen the rabbi in person, she was intrigued despite herself by his benign appearance. A wizened old gargoyle with drooling eyes and yellow beard, sunken cheeks shot through with broken capillaries like purple spider webs, he nevertheless seemed possessed of a dormant vitality. Though stunned beyond apprehension by the ghastliness of what he had allegedly done, Lou—like the Karps, whom she’d thus far avoided—was unable to hate him with the fervency she felt he deserved. Her purpose was to mourn Bernie Karp with all her might, to miss him to the point of obliterating herself, but whenever she looked at the pacific old perp in chains, she was incapable of believing that Bernie was actually gone. This was identical to the feeling she’d had when viewing his cosmetically enhanced likeness in its open casket on the eve of his burial. So-called evidence aside (the evidence being patently a crock), she could conceive of no reason why a doddering holy man should want to murder her boyfriend. Would he even have had the wherewithal? What occurred at the New House on that calamitous November afternoon remained a mystery; the trial resolved nothing, and when the verdict was read and the rabbi hustled off toward his detention, it was
his
presence that she found herself missing, while she asked Bernie’s forgiveness for her wicked inconstancy of heart.

Even before the trial, at the farcical funeral, Lou had failed to summon what she assumed was the appropriate degree of grief. Bernie’s burial had taken place on a rainy morning in a treeless cemetery whose tombstones appeared to be marching lemminglike downhill toward the Interstate. Due to their proximity to the highway and the rain drumming the striped marquee, the small group of mourners huddled amid a crush of monuments caught only snatches of the rabbi’s graveside eulogy. That was no great loss, since the rabbi from Congregation Felix Frankfurter had clearly not done his homework where the dead boy was concerned. He began predictably enough, his face severe beneath a snap-brim fedora, hands thrust into the pockets of his Burberry coat, by asserting that “the Lord has a plan,” then seemed at a loss to say precisely what that plan might be. Swerving unexpectedly from convention, he began to speculate with an astonishing lack of compassion that “the boy must have been guilty of grievous sins in a past life to have been struck down so prematurely in this one.” Those mourners who had bothered to follow his words—among them the quack psychologist and a few teachers from Tishimingo High, plus some parents who’d twisted the arms of their offspring who remembered the Karp kid (if at all) only for his narcolepsy—exchanged discomforted glances. They avoided making eye contact with the boy’s family, who cupped their ears to hear what they thought they must surely have misunderstood. For the rabbi, changing tacks again, suggested that in any case young Bernard was well out of it “since this world is essentially God’s bedpan.…” Were they witnessing the man’s sudden loss of faith, or mind? In the event, as if having concluded that his voice had been hijacked by another, he clapped a hand over his mouth and remained silent. His thunderstruck expression was captured for all time by press photographers, who’d been standing by for every Bernie-related incident since the murder.

On what turned out to be the penultimate day of the trial the lawyer Frizell had called the rabbi himself to the witness stand. He’d previously summoned a parade of the rabbi’s bochers (as they liked to call themselves) as character witnesses, though their loose-screw testimonies only helped to cement the prosecution’s case. A rogues’ gallery of real estate brokers, Hadassah ladies, auto mechanics, massage therapists, and soccer moms, they failed to impress the jury with their attempts to explain Rabbi ben Zephyr’s theology of God as fun, and succeeded only in digging a deeper hole for the defense. Thus, in an act of desperation coupled with a perverse desire to steal a march on his shyster colleague, Mr. Frizell had Rabbi Eliezer hauled into the dock. In presenting his case, the attorney had downplayed the apocryphal tales surrounding the rabbi’s origins, especially the one about his having been frozen for a century or more, but try as he might (and his efforts were never more than nominal) he’d yet to make a case for the old man as solid citizen. Here was his chance. It didn’t help, though, that Eliezer’s undocumented status compounded his unpopularity, and furthermore, once the rabbi was sworn in, his counsel seemed not to know how to question him, as even with regard to his name the old hoaxer was circumspect.

“For the record, you are Rabbi Ezekiel ben Zephyr, sometimes known as the Boy-bitcher Prodigy?”

“In a manner of speakink.”

The lawyer thought it best to let it go. “And would you please tell the court in your own words what transpired between yourself and the deceased on the afternoon of November fourteenth?”

Said the rabbi, amiably, “That’s the sixty-four-dollar question.”

By then Mr. Frizell had understood his error: He should at the very least have coached his client regarding the content of his testimony beforehand. The lawyer smoothed his greasy salt-and-pepper hair (most of the salt being dandruff) with his hands, wiped his palms on his pants, and silently wished he’d left well enough alone. But now there was no turning back. “So would you mind telling the jury in your own words what occurred on the afternoon in question?”

“Well,” the rabbi furrowed his brow, then seemed to brighten, his scratchy voice like a fiddle strung with electrical cord, “the last thing I remember, I was doing with Cosette and her mama a popular old-timey technique which by the received tradition is known as Manipulation of the Godhead—”