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Synopsis
Young, single and handsome—in a short, redheaded way—the congregation’s divorcees and unhappy wives scheme to extend Ben’s stay, preferably in their beds. Ben fends off their not unwanted advances; he harbors as many secrets as the synagogue leadership.
When Ben is mistakenly arrested for the murder of Temple Beit Joseph's beautiful administrator, he plunges into a dangerous, confusing world of mirrors where friends become foes and no one can be trusted. Ben’s investigation leads him to a decrepit cemetery, a mysterious private bank, a shofar-blowing part-Korean-Jewish cabinet-maker, a Latino gang-banger, and the ultimate in money laundering techniques. Never mind surviving a hit-and-run murder attempt and defusing a clever bomb in his living room.
You don’t have to be Jewish to be enthralled by Rabbi Ben’s audacity, inventiveness and courage. 1 is an engaging, thrilling read from start to finish.
Previously published as The Tattooed Rabbi.
About the Author
Over a career spanning 40 years, Marvin J. Wolf has written for television and authored many nonfiction works, including bestsellers Fallen Angels and Where White Men Fear To Tread. This is his first novel.
Release date: October 25, 2011
Publisher: Antenna Books, Inc.
Print pages: 358
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For Whom the Shofar Blows
Marvin J Wolf
PROLOGUE: JUNE 2007
Bored out of his mind, Barry “The Beast” Laudermilk, Major, USAF, yawned, stretching his six foot six inch, 240 pound body. A guy with more than 800 hours in F16 cockpits. A guy with three confirmed Iraqi MIG kills. A guy flying a TV screen an hour up the road from Las Vegas? No way in hell is this the path to a squadron command, he thought. No chance now of retiring with stars on his collar. Not for a guy half a world removed from the real action. Not for pushing a slow, defenseless drone around the skies. Any computer geek with an hour on Flight Simulator could do this work.
The Beast blinked and peered at one of the six big monitors before him, watching a line of Army Humvees pick its way across a trackless expanse of Iraq’s Western Desert. Three miles above, an MQ-1B Predator described lazy circles in the hot, turbulent air, transmitting data and pictures through a satellite link to Laudermilk’s cubicle at Creech Air Force Base.
The Humvees were a recon platoon moving to ambush positions near the Syrian border. After dark, they’d deploy ground radar and look for jihadi infiltrators. Laudermilk’s job was to watch their flanks, ensure that they didn’t stray into Syria, and support them with Hellfire missiles if they ran into more than they could handle.
As if anyone but a fool dogface would be running around under a desert sun with air temps upward of 130 degrees. Five more hours of this, he thought, and I can drive home and catch the Yankees-Red Sox game on TiVo.
“Sloppy Boxcar, this is Bitter Pumpkin Six, over,” said an unmistakably New York voice in Laudermilk’s ear. With a jolt, The Beast rejoined reality.
“Sloppy Boxcar, go,” Laudermilk replied.
“Is that what I think it is, up high on our Sierra Echo?”
“I’ll have a look. Wait.”
Laudermilk banked the drone until its nose camera framed the southeastern horizon—and a galloping gray-yellow wall of billowing sand. A haboob, and huge.
“Crap!”
He punched buttons on his console, and then eyed the monitor showing a weather satellite feed from 22,300 miles above the Indian Ocean. A vast ochre mass swirling northeast out of the Arabian Peninsula was heading straight for Iraq.
“Bitter Pumpkin Six, Sloppy Boxcar, over.”
“Six, go.”
“Yup, that’s a ginormous sandstorm. You got maybe three-zero to find cover.”
“Copy, a big haboob inbound.”
“Stand by, and I’ll have a look around for you.”
Laudermilk leveled the Predator, watching the nose camera feed. Three kilometers to the northwest, along the Syrian border, the narrow mouth of a wadi yawned. He zoomed the camera for a close-up.
“Bitter Pumpkin, Sloppy Boxcar.”
“Six, go.”
“Steer two-niner zero about three clicks, and find the wadi. About a click in, it angles left, then goes under a road. Stay clear of the road; that’s in Abu Kamal, Syria.”
“What do I need to know about Abu…what’s it called again?”
“Abu Kamal. Farm town—all you gotta know is that it’s full of Syrian border police and we don’t need any international incidents. Stay well clear.”
“Copy two-niner-zero degrees, three clicks, avoid the road.”
“Roger. I’ve got to get up top of that weather, so it’s adios for now. Check back on this freq when the storm clears. Hey—you from Brooklyn?”
“Hell, yes. You know Bensonhurst?”
“Believe it! Grew up in Canarsie.”
“Small world. Thanks, Canarsie.”
“Good luck, Bensonhurst. Out.”
In the right front seat of his Humvee, Platoon Sergeant Scott MacPherson, in headset and helmet, reached down to the radio and flipped over to platoon frequency.
“This is Six Actual. Big sandstorm inbound. We’re moving to cover on azimuth two-niner-zero. Roger in turn, and join up on my flanks, over.”
“Roger One, over.”
“Roger Two, over.”
“Roger Three, over.”
“Roger Four, two-niner
zero and moving.”
The five vehicles turned, spread out abreast and bumped across the broken, rock-strewn desert floor as fast as MacPherson thought was safe. After about ten minutes, as they approached the base of a sandstone ridge, the wadi mouth opened before them.
“Bitter Pumpkin, let’s slow it down. Let some air out of those tires.”
MacPherson watched the gauge as PFC Paul Franklyn, his driver, flipped a switch and bled pressure from all four tires simultaneously.
“That’s good, Frankie. Right there.”
One by one, MacPherson in the lead, the vehicles entered the wadi, negotiating a sandy floor cut with shallow gullies.
Five minutes in, the walls rose and closed to little more than the width of two vehicles. The wadi angled left. Ahead, MacPherson saw the silhouette of a suspension bridge. That had to be the road that Canarsie, the Predator pilot, had warned him about.
“Hold it right here.”
MacPherson jumped out, feeling the approaching storm, the charged air, the acrid taste and smell of ozone evoking a memory of his grandfather’s old Lionel electric train.
Tall and lean, with skin the color of a mocha frappuccino, MacPherson was thirty, young to be a platoon sergeant with more than twelve years’ service. He gestured with his arms for his men to dismount and gather around him.
“Listen up. In ten minutes, give or take, this bitch is all over us. The wadi walls should help with the wind, but sand is gonna blow into everything. If you gotta pee, take a dump, smoke, eat something, now’s the time. Bring the water cans and MREs inside, get out of your web gear, get comfortable, then back in the vehicles and button up. Goggles and face scarves. Kill your radios and save the batteries. And easy on the water. It’s gonna last all day. We might could even be here for days.
“Do it.”
The men scurried around under MacPherson’s gaze. He watched Torres, one of his best men, climb atop a Humvee bumper to grab a water can lashed to the roof.
“Sergeant Mac! There’s a cave up there,” called Torres, pointing to the wadi wall.
“Don’t see it.”
“Gotta come up here with me, Sarge.”
MacPherson leapt onto a bumper. Scanning the sandstone, he saw a dark slit.
“Got it. You looking for privacy so you can—”
“Could be some of them hajjis hiding in there.”
MacPherson looked at the bridge. Torres was right. A cave like that was the perfect place for a border crosser to hole up during the heat of a desert day.
“Okay, Torres, get up there and look. Sergeant Jonas, go with him,” MacPherson added,
pointing to a short, thin, buck sergeant. “Side arms and flashlights.”
Minutes later, Jonas appeared on a ledge above and whistled. “No hajjis, Sarge, but you gonna wanna see this!”
MacPherson turned to his troops. “Everybody in the vehicles and button up—now! I’m going up. Frankie, let us know when we gotta get out.”
“Roger that, Sergeant Mac.”
By the time MacPherson had climbed the wadi wall to the cave’s mouth, he could see the storm front, well within rifle shot and greedily eating the horizon. A hot breeze, building by the minute, stung his face and hands with grit scented like exotic incense. Little eddies of swirling sand materialized to dance down the wadi, then vanished.
MacPherson’s throat went sandpaper dry. His eyes itched.
Jonas handed him a flashlight and pointed into the cave. “All the way back.”
Bent almost double, MacPherson pushed into the darkness, his light playing across the cave floor to a pair of mummified corpses smiling though blackened teeth, one smaller and clad in the remains of a dress. Nearby were blackened lumps of dried leather—maybe water bags, he thought—and an old-fashioned suitcase. Mac knelt to open it: clothing, books with Spanish titles, a big, rectangular object wrapped in waxed fabric. Mac grabbed a leather pouch that crumbled at his touch, its contents tumbling into the suitcase. His flashlight beam caught the sheen of metal. He reached down—
A cacophony of Humvee horns sounded from below.
The cave filled with talcum-fine dust.
“Sergeant Mac, we gotta go now!” Jonas yelled.
CHAPTER 1
A boy of about four or five opened the door. Freckles danced across his cheeks, shrouded in coppery curls. Ben caught his breath, recalling his own childhood photos; the resemblance was striking.
“Mom is busy,” said the boy, slowly and distinctly, trying hard to be grown up.
The child of a single parent, Rabbi Ben Maimon thought. Too much responsibility for his age. He smiled at the boy. “Please close the door, and then go get her. I’ll wait here.”
The boy ran off, leaving the door open. Ben turned to look up the street, taking in new cars at the curbs and manicured lawns behind them. He’d known this corner of the San Fernando Valley only as terra incognita, a spot on a map. Now he saw that it was a prosperous, upper-middle-class community.
He looked at the doorpost and frowned. No klaf, the tiny scroll of parchment, usually encased in a more-or-less ornate container, or mezuzah, upon which was inscribed the instruction from Deuteronomy, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. …Write them on the door frames of your houses and on your gates.”
Such scrolls had been displayed on Jewish houses at least back to the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls and probably long before; Ben had never seen a Jewish home without one. And although he hadn’t expected to find one, neither had he expected the contrary. But maybe this wasn’t the person he was looking for.
“Can I help you?” said a pleasant female voice, and Ben turned to find a petite, pretty woman in her late twenties, barefoot in jeans and an oversized man’s dress shirt, sleeves rolled above the elbow. Her skin was fair with a burst of freckles, and the long hair pinned atop her head was the burnt orange of copper wire, perhaps a half shade lighter than his own.
“Hello—” Ben began, stopping because the woman had gasped audibly and taken an involuntary step backward. She forced a smile, peering at him for a long moment, taking in his red hair, the piercing blue eyes that matched her own, his slim, athletic carriage, expensive, stylish clothing—a nice-looking man in his late thirties, a bit on the short side.
“Sorry. It’s just that you reminded me of someone.”
“Was that someone your father?”
The woman blanched. “How did you know that?” she whispered.
“Was your father’s name Mark Thompson Glass?”
Again, she emitted the gasping sound.
“No! I mean, yes, it was. Who are you?”
“I’m not sure, but I could be your brother.”
She cocked her head, regarding him. It was exactly the involuntary gesture that Ben made while thinking.
“And I’m pretty sure I don’t have an adult brother.”
“Until this minute, I was pretty sure you didn’t have one, either. And now, I think, maybe you do.”
She frowned, uncertain. “What’s your name?”
“The name on my birth certificate is Mark Thompson Glass.”
“This is soooo creepy. You can come in, but I warn you, I have a black belt in taekwondo—fourth dan. Don’t try anything funny.”
Ben threw back his head and laughed.
“Why is that funny?”
“Because I, too, wear the dan—sixth degree.”
The woman wrinkled her face. Too much information, coming too fast. She needed time to make sense of things.
Ben followed her inside, noting the big corrugated boxes stacked along one wall.
“Moving out?”
“Moving in. This was my father’s house—had it rented out. He died a year ago last April, and when his estate cleared probate—did you know that he died?”
“I came across his tombstone at Shabbat Tamid, the cemetery in Burbank.”
Ben failed to mention that a few days earlier he’d been kidnapped, and then almost buried in that cemetery. Buried alive.
“Show me some I.D.”
Ben took out his wallet and handed her his Massachusetts driver’s license.
“You really are Mark Thompson Glass!”
“Everyone calls me Ben.”
“Ben?”
“My Hebrew name is Moshe Benyamin. I’ve been called Ben all my life.”
“I’m Marcia Bender.”
“And your son?”
“Actually, Mort is my brother. He’s almost six.”
Ben looked interested, waited for Marcia to continue.
“Look, Mr. Glass, you might be my brother. Or not. You seem like a nice enough man, but I don’t know anything about you. What do you do? Why are you here?”
“I’m here because, until about a month ago, I believed, as my mother and grandparents told me, that my father died when I was a baby, in an overseas plane crash—”
Again, Marcia gasped. She looked at Ben, measuring him.
“That’s not funny. Who sent you? What do you want?”
Ben shook his head. “Obviously, I said something that upset you. I’m sorry for that, but I’m not sure what it was.”
“My husband’s plane disappeared over Afghanistan. They never found the wreckage, much less the crew.”
“I’m very sorry for your loss. Military?”
“It’s been two years. I’ve missed him every day.”
Ben blinked away a real tear as he made a mental note that Marcia had ducked his question.
Marcia lifted her chin. “Tell me why you’re here.”
“My mother died when I was twelve. I was raised by my grandparents. And until about a month ago, I knew nothing about my father. Not even what he looked like. Then quite by chance, a couple of Burbank police detectives I’d met read me excerpts from the rap sheet of one Mark Thompson Glass. And that was because I have the same name.”
“Rap sheet? What are you talking about?”
“His arrest record. My father, and I think yours, was a career swindler who used a variety of aliases to rip off thousands of people from coast to coast. He was arrested many times but never convicted.”
“Maybe your father was a crook, but my father was a very successful investor and real-estate developer. He wasn’t a con man.”
“If you say so. In any event, when I found his tombstone, I suspected that whoever had buried him, perhaps his family might live in this area. In the Valley. And if that was true, if he had a family, then I might have a sibling or two that I never knew about. I found this address in an old phone book. The phone number didn’t belong to my father anymore, so I came out to have a look around and see if, maybe, the present occupants of the house might know anything about him or his family.”
“So that’s it?”
“Yes.”
“I took care of his funeral. And don’t you even think about laying claim to his estate
unless you can provide a DNA sample proving that he was your father. Which I doubt you’ll be willing to submit.”
Ben’s stomach did flip-flops. I shouldn’t have come, he told himself. He looked at Marcia. “We should both get DNA tests. But I don’t want his money. I don’t want anything from him or from you. I just wanted—” He paused. “This was a mistake. I’m sorry that I bothered you.” Ben turned toward the door.
“Wait! You never told me what you do for a living.”
“I’m a rabbi.”
“Really? A rabbi? Where’s your temple? Massachusetts?”
Ben’s iPhone rang, and he pulled it from his belt and eyed the screen. “I have to take this. It’s my doctor.”
“Okay, but you’re staying for dinner, right?”
CHAPTER 2
Bert Epstein, M.D., PhD, hung up the phone and sighed, absent-mindedly looking through his window at the sandstone chimneys and weathered red brick of the Harvard campus.
Short, bulky, his bulging forehead rising into a mop of unruly dark curls, at thirty-nine Epstein was approaching the apex of his career. Among the world’s leading authorities on viruses, he sought to understand the multitude of issues these mysterious microscopic life forms raised while having their parasitic ways with humans.
Sometimes, however, he thought that viruses were easier to understand than humans. Today was one of those times. Barbara, his wife, adored Ben. She had asked him to call Ben and tell him something that he knew to be a lie. She had promised that no harm would come to Ben, but that she couldn’t tell him anything more except that there were some things in life more important than family and friendship. Epstein was both Ben’s close friend and his personal physician. So what he had asked him to do—and what he had just told Ben—caused him, not for the first time, to ponder the meaning of friendship, and the ethical complexities of competing loyalties.
***
Ben got out of a cab at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 93rd Street, paid the driver, and looked around. It was a sunny, hot Manhattan day in early summer, and he paused to take in the blossoming splendor of Central Park and the dark waters of the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir, familiar ground. He’d grown up a few miles away, across the East River, in Brooklyn, and in his early twenties, he had spent four years at JTS, the Jewish Theological Seminary, twenty blocks north and on the other side of the park. Somewhere around here, he recalled, was the white stone mansion that housed The Jewish Museum.
Pulling a slip of paper from his shirt pocket, he checked the address, and then made his way down the sidewalk. The address was oh-so-posh Fifth Avenue, but the building faced 93rd Street. Ben rounded the corner and went down the sidewalk until he came to the entrance. Inside was a locked foyer, the walls on either side lined with buttons and brass nameplates. He rang the one under Dr. Dana Emanuel’s name.
Bert Epstein had been unusually mysterious. All he’d said was that he’d made an appointment for him with a certain Dr. Dana Emanuel that could not be rescheduled, and it was vital that he arrive on time.
A little worried, Ben had asked his friend to tell him why Dr. Emanuel was seeing him, but all Epstein would say was that it was important. “Don’t worry; you’re not going to die. At least, no time soon,” he’d added.
So Ben had caught the red-eye from Burbank back home to Cambridge, slept a few hours and early this morning boarded an Amtrak coach at Boston’s South Station. He got off at Penn Station in Midtown, caught a cab, and here he was.
A tinny woman’s voice issued from a hidden speaker above his head. “Dr. Emanuel’s office. Who is calling?”
“This is Rabbi Ben Maimon.”
“Straight ahead through the door, then take the staircase down.”
Before Ben could reply, the buzzer sounded, and he hurried through the door into a spotless chamber with gray marble floors. To his right was an elevator, and to his left an open door leading to stairs.
The stairs ended two flights down at a door with faded gold lettering: Dana Emanuel, M.D. Inside, Ben found a Spartan waiting room: two chairs, an empty magazine rack and a water cooler. As the door closed behind him, another opened to his right. He turned to find an attractive, middle-aged woman in a stylish business suit.
“Rabbi Ben Maimon?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Dana,” she said, pronouncing it “Dan-nah.” She sounded more London than New York, but she was not from London, Ben was certain. Probably an Israeli, he thought. And if she was Dr. Emanuel, then he was a cocker spaniel.
Ben said, “Pleased to meet you, Doctor Emanuel.”
“This way, please.”
Ben followed her down a short corridor and into an office with a desk and a pair of overstuffed chairs.
In each chair sat a muscular, dark-haired young man clad, uncomfortably, in business attire. Both rose to their feet.
“I’m sorry,” said the woman. “But it can’t be helped. You’ll understand everything in
a minute. Please don’t be alarmed, but these men are going to search you.”
Ben took a step back. “What the hell is going on?”
The two men got to their feet. One spoke in Hebrew.
“Don’t get excited. There’s no reason to be afraid.”
Emanuel smiled. “Really, it’s all right. I’m sorry for the deception. Bert Epstein is my cousin. You can trust me.”
Ben pulled out a cell phone. “I’ll just call Bert—”
The man nearest Ben snatched the phone away.
Emanuel said, “Give it back, please. There’s no cell reception in this basement.”
Smiling, the man handed Ben’s phone back.
Emanuel said, “Rabbi, please, you must trust me.”
Ben said, “Bert’s parents were both Holocaust survivors. They lost their entire families, everyone. Bert is an only child and has no uncles or aunts. No cousins. So who are you, and why should I trust such a bad liar?”
Emanuel smiled. “Actually, I’m his wife’s cousin. Barbara Epstein’s father is my mother’s older brother.”
Ben grimaced. “Maybe. But the only licensed M.D. in the city named Dana—’Day-na’ not ‘Dan-nah’—Emanuel is almost seventy, a hematologist and adjunct professor at Weill Cornell.”
“You have to trust—”
Ben shoved her aside and sprinted through the door, turning down the corridor and then into the outer office.
Two more dark, muscular men barred his way. One leveled a pistol at him. Ben recognized it as a Jericho 941, standard Israeli Defense Forces issue. Therefore, he realized, the man must belong to Aman, Israeli Military Intelligence. He relaxed, no longer afraid of being abducted. Probably a case of mistaken identity, he told himself. Or perhaps they thought he might know something that he didn’t.
“Turn around, please,” said the gunman, in pleasant, matter-of-fact Hebrew.
Ben raised his hands and turned, facing the wall.
As the second man approached Ben, the first moved to the side, keeping the Jericho leveled at Ben’s chest. The door opened, and the two men from the inner office entered. One blocked the door leading to the corridor; the other remained in the doorway.
Quickly and efficiently, Ben was patted down and the contents of his pockets examined, then returned.
The guns disappeared.
“Please come with me,” said the woman who was not Dr. Epstein.
One of the Aman men opened the outer office door, and another went through into the corridor, glanced around, then moved into a dark space below the staircase, where he tugged open a steel door that lay flush with the floor, to reveal a steep stairway. Taking a small flashlight from his pocket, the guard descended. After a moment, a light came on below. Trailed by the woman and the other guards, Ben descended into a claustrophobic space that soon became a tunnel sloping downward into darkness.
“Dr. Emanuel is visiting his family in Israel,” explained the woman as they
moved down the tunnel. “About ninety years ago, during Prohibition, his grandfather, a bootlegger, bought this building and had a tunnel dug.”
“An escape route?”
“Perhaps more to move product and customers in and out without attracting attention to this building.”
The floor leveled, and the man leading the way came to a door secured by a huge, ancient brass padlock. He produced a key, unlocked the padlock and stood aside as the others passed. He closed the door behind him and locked it from the far side.
The party moved in silence through a warm, damp, low-ceilinged basement with thick, low-hanging pipes. Soon they came to an elevator.
As though in response to a signal, the elevator door opened to reveal a tall, heavy man with a full head of white hair. He smiled at Ben.
“Shalom, Rabbi Ben Maimon, and welcome to the Jewish Museum of New York,” said Yossi Bar Tzvi, president of the State of Israel. ...
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