The Brooch of Ivan the Terrible
Dedication: To my Terrific Trio: Sharon
Stewart, ArLynn Hammond, Anna Adams
A Shamus Levene Mystery
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Detective Chai Levene |
Shamus Chai Levene was eating his lunch, watching a line of belly-heavy one-hump dromedary camels march in line through the seemingly limitless dark of an Arabian desert. They seemed thoughtful as they traveled, as though they were contemplating the millions of steps involved; but gave little thought to the eerie lack of light or to the journey ahead. It was nighttime in the photograph. The moon dared aim a sliver of light at the dark caravan, barely illuminating the blackness. Two men sauntered behind the beasts. These were the herders, wrapped snugly in their traditional white thobe robes with white scarves around their heads, like night ghosts. The life-quenching sun had long moved its intense heat across that arid land and was now bestowing its unbearable heat upon the cold, uncaring Atlantic. The camels were dark blobs upon the shifting wilderness of sand. Except for an occasional animal belch and herder song, nothing disturbed the sound of wind on sand.
The train of men and
animals moved with laconic motion, their destination somewhere at the end of
the 23,500 mile sandbox of red, white and brown desert that ended abruptly at
the peninsula where the thirsty Gulf of Suez waited to drown it.
Shamus Levene closed the book Abundant Life of Arabian Deserts and took another bite of his pastrami sandwich. He felt the tang
of spicy mustard as it enlivened his eager tongue and worked its way down his
mouth onto his plate. He wiped it away with one of the many napkins from his
castaway deli lunch bags that cluttered the small kitchen. Levene often ate
over the maps of Europe that spread across his table and his bed, while
perusing them with a magnifying glass. Bits of corned beef oil mostly obscured
the town of Leipzig. The Polish city of Lodz was somewhat colored with orange
smears that led north to Germany, and the lovely blue Baltic Sea had little
green pickle residents in its lovely blue waters. Levene seemed oblivious to
these additions. Deep in thought, he washed the food down with a couple of hamentashen and a
slurp of sugary coffee.
He was still hungry. He
stared at the balcony outside his window and let himself imagine those camel
humps were actual pounds of corned beef and pastrami – long lines of Jewish
camels loaded with the delicious Roumanian delicacies that both Ashkenaz and
Sephardic Jews crave - he remembered savoring them while finding a Turkish
prince his long lost family of royal Khazars – hot reddish beef already brined,
partially dried, seasoned, smoked and steamed. Suddenly, other dusty herders
arrive, austere, businesslike, dedicated to their precious load. They tap
impatiently the patellas of their camels, which slowly bend to the master’s
will. Once upon their knees, slaves appear magically from their Middle East
bazaars to unload, slice and wrap in half pound packages these luscious gifts
for Levene’s always eager mouth. Off to the side in cartons are ready loaves of
Jewish rye, pumpernickel and Jewish challah, along
with boxes of horseradish, mustard, and other traditional trims of the
signature sandwich from God’s Yiddishe heaven, Blessed be He.
Oy vey, if only
my balcony were large enough to hold such a bounty, Levene sighed, I would
never leave this room!
Levene was a serious but
gentle man who owned a wide girth and large appetite for the deliciously
dangerous food that typified modern Jewish comfort meals. His heart was open to
the poor and needy of the world, but its canals were increasingly lined with
plaque. His mother used to chide him about bringing strangers home for chicken
soup and bagels shmeared with cream cheese and challenge them to eat more than
he did.
Chai Levene, was a happy
Jewish man who believed in life and the living; who also remembered his
parents’ grief when their family members in Ukraine were ambushed and executed
during the Holocaust in Kiev and Belarus. How to find those left behind in war,
in turmoil of change? He became well-schooled in European popular and arcane
history. He contributed to various journals of professional merit. As a young
man he received research scholarships. He was proud of a doctorate in Middle
Eastern studies, another from a Hebrew university, and in his youth had
traveled widely but prudently, investigating every library, relishing his
discoveries of foreign names and places. His accumulation of professional
certificates was carefully framed and shown to clients when they came to him
with their kvetshing, their tsuris and anxieties
about their loved ones, seemingly lost in the world. Levene’s various stamped,
embossed certificates gave them a soothing hope of eventual reunion. He solved
most of his many cases through a combination of stamina, needle-like focus,
countless hours of research and very little exercise.
Shamus Levene, the world’s only Jewish genealogical
detective, was tallish and wide. He was a stooped shouldered sixty year old,
this from a lifelong habit of analyzing ancestry . His wide black mustache
framed ample lips. His thick black hair always needed cutting. Lately he’d
taken to banding it behind his neck, like his deli buddy, Chinese Wong. His
heavy midnight-black beard was, of late, deeply intermixed with grey tufts.
Levene resembled an Orthodox Jew walking the streets of Israel, but he was not
a member of any synagogue. In place of the wide brimmed black hat and payot (sidelocks) that are signature pieces on a Hasidic Jew, Levene
wore a jaunty black leather cap under which his brows arched in curiosity and
his nose twitched. Ah, his nose, a compass on the map of his face; a Semitic
marker sporting wide dark nares (nostrils). Levene’s nose was a cone of discovery, an
investigative prow, a detector of mankind’s most precious bounty – mispochah. It was his sleuth.
Then the hat, or was it a
cap, one that could rightly be called a fedora. It did not sport a brim, nor
did it look like the jockey caps seen on youth wandering the streets of his
city. No, Levene's special cap was made of shiny cowhide in a classic six-panel
poufy design. It had a nylon lining, an expandable inside hat band and a wide
visor. It sat high and firm upon his head like a wide button mushroom,
pinpointed at its summit. The visor's length kept his cheeks and nose dry in
rain and shielded his sensitive skin in sunlight. He wore his cap everywhere
outside. It defined him, set him apart from the milieu like a name or perhaps a
badge. it mutely informed his world: I am singular, unique. His
"look" was signature.
Shamus Levene had never married. He always claimed the opportunity never
came to his door, but in truth he had never met a woman he wanted to spend many
hours with, let alone a lifetime. He enjoyed the company of women but was shy
and self-conscious in their presence. He was long resigned to the solitary and
lonely life of a scholar separated from his past by the demands upon his time
and genius and the capriciousness of adversarial fate. Dedicated wholly to his
work, Levene’s only deep regret was that in his search for his own family’s
relatives who had passed away, he had failed to achieve success. After years of
searching the world for the lost souls of others, he wanted most to connect
with his own dead, those Russian, Ukrainian, Polish and Czechoslovakian Jews
who lived and loved while Levene waited in some filmy pre-time for his earthly
sojourn. Where were their footprints? In all his travel and research, Shᾱmus Chai Levene could not link one lineage to another or even to
connect his second generations together. He was an orphan, a wandering
Jew.
Why
doesn't Ha Shem give me the mazel to find my own people? A wife, too, to help
with the work, to favor me with knishes? What small time would that take for He
Who Knows All?
Levene arose with a heavy
sigh and opened the sliding door that marked off his dining area, exposing a
small enclosed sitting room. From his apartment #18 on the 9th and top floor of
his building, Levene could see little of the street below, but he had a view of
the busy midtown park across the busy boulevard and he would sometimes bring
his deli lunch of pastrami, pickles, potato salad and coleslaw there to read
his archeological and genealogical journals and contemplate his professional
burden: to find the Jewish dead and discarded, to identify them as family of
his clients and, if possible, to help close the wounds that time and loss had
caused.
To be fair, he also agreed, when pressured, to search for lost or
disavowed gentiles, but these cases were few, because most of gentile origin
had not suffered at the hands of conquering nations and kings in past
centuries; they had not been threatened with death unless converted and had not
purposely shortened and/or Americanized their European names to hide or
disguise their Jewish heritage. These gentile folk would have more success on Ancestry.com,
Levene advised them.
It was now a Saturday in mid-May. Levene received a new call
from a member of the only Jewish congregation in town. The man wanted to locate
his long-lost relative. He came rabbi-recommended. The rabbi said the visitor
seemed desperate for the kind of help Levene was famous for.
