Garfield took Hawkins’s hand and held it tight. “I want you should do something for me,” he said. He felt Hawkins’s reaction in his hand and laughed.

“I want you should get me the Hershey bars, that’s all, boych. A box of Hershey bars every couple months, and maybe bring them yourself . . .” He paused, then said, “I come from a good family. My brother’s a rabbi. Not just a rabbi, but a good man. A holy man. I myself wanted to be a chazen . . . that’s the man who sings in the shul. But the war came and they took us to the camps. Chaim they sent to Theresienstadt. No picnic, sure. But they sent me to Auschwitz.” Hawkins looked dow­n. The big, dark man shifted against the wall, the room was quiet, then Garfield said, “If you arrest a kid in Harlem whose father beat him, whose mother starved him, whose friends take dope and hit old ladies on the head for their welfare money, and he does the same and you believe he must be punished, you still don’t hate him?”

“No,” Hawkins said, “I don’t hate him.”

“Even if the old lady dies . . . you see the scars his daddy left on his poor skinny back and the sick blank look in his eyes—and you don’t hate him, do you?”

“I don’t hate him,” Hawkins said again.

Garfield said softly, “Nu, they gassed my father, my mother, my sister. They pulled my teeth out and every day for five years I thought I was going to die.”

Garfield was convicted, his appeals failed, and he was sent to Ossining. Every sixth Sunday Hawkins brought Garfield a box of Hershey bars.

“Nu, what favor?” Garfield asked excitedly. “Ask me anything. Anything. Only I can’t drive you home,” he said, and laughed.

“I need help. Your brother’s help.”

Garfield was stunned. “My brother?”

“You said your brother was a rabbi, a holy man.”

“So he is. Most holy. But what do you want with a holy rabbi from the ass end of Riverdale?”

Hawkins thought of his old friend Pinchik for the first time in years. Funny, bitter Eli Pinchik who’d left Brooklyn and gone to Riverdale to find civilization.

Hawkins said, “I need a cabalist.”

Garfield looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. “My brother isn’t a cabalist. I don’t even think he believes in God. But that’s between us.” Garfield’s eyes were bright. “What do you want with a cabalist?”

Hawkins told him Relkin’s story and Garfield was enchanted. “How many did they kill?” he asked.

Hawkins didn’t answer and Garfield grabbed his arm. “How many Krauts did they kill?”

“A lot. Twenty. Thirty.”