“Yeah…yeah, I do. I…admire them although I’m aware of their faults. That’s why this is all so screwed up.”

“What’s screwed up?”

“Me. I’ll tell you my part in the mess, but that’s as far as I’ll take it. I’m not a rat, I don’t name names.”

“So there are others?”

“I didn’t say that. For your purposes, I was the sole perpetrator.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“That’s my story. Should I go on?”

“I’m still here,” Decker said. The boy didn’t seem to know how to start. Decker helped him out. “Why did you vandalize the synagogue?”

“That’s a good question. I have nothing against Jews.” He looked away. “It has more to do with my personal problems. I’ve always been obsessive-compulsive, and I’m not just throwing out psych terms. I’ve always had weird rituals. Some of them I’ve outgrown. But some…I can’t help it. We don’t have to go into specifics, but my obsessions are relevant because once I get a thought into my head, I can’t let go. And that’s the problem. I have these dreams…more like fantasies because I’m awake when I think about them. It has to do with my Jewish grandfather—Isaac Golding. Well, it turns out that he wasn’t Jewish. Matter of fact, I think he was a Nazi.”

Decker kept his face flat. “Isaac’s a strange name for a Nazi.”

“That’s because it wasn’t a real name. I found this all out about six months ago. Remember I told you the honors civics assignment?”

“The family tree. Dr. Ramparts.”

“Yeah. Exactly. It’s a semester project. Dr. Ramparts wants it done in detail and correctly. So I’ve been working on this for a while, mostly getting oral history down from my parents because all my grandparents are dead. But then I figure I should do paper research for the sake of completion. So I started going through trunks of old documents that my dad has buried in the attic.”

“An attic?” Decker asked.

“Yeah. I know that’s weird for L.A. homes. But like I said, we have a big home.”

“I didn’t mean to interrupt you. Go on. You’re digging through old documents.”

“Yeah, right. I think my dad didn’t even know about the shit. It was given to him after his mother died.” Ernesto hesitated, then drank some water. “Anyway, my grandfather supposedly escaped the Nazis and moved to Argentina in 1937. Except old papers showed me that Grandpa’s account was off by ten years. From what I could tell, Grandpa actually came to South America in 1946 or 1947 under the name of Yitzchak Golding. Yitzchak is Isaac in Hebrew. I guess I don’t have to tell you that.”

Decker nodded. Yitzchak was the name of Rina’s late husband—the father of his stepsons.