Tepel looked at his friend.

“It killed a family on Long Island and some boys in Brooklyn.”

“Were they Jews?” Tepel asked.

Garfield jumped up and Tepel did, too, still holding the bottle.

“I’m sorry,” Tepel said, “I know I shouldn’t feel like that. I don’t feel like that. But I do. You do. Everybody does. So I ask, that’s all.”

Garfield took the bottle, drank, and handed it back. “No,” he said, “no Jews.”

“It won’t.”

“Kill Jews?”

“It’s not supposed to.”

Garfield laughed explosively, spraying brandy in Tepel’s face; Tepel wiped it off.

“Who’s supposed to kill Jews?” Garfield asked. They both laughed, and passed the bottle again. Suddenly Tepel grabbed the bottle, put it in the drawer, and shut the drawer.

“This is nuts. You’re drunk or crazy,” he told Garfield.

“Listen, two young people came to me today. They told me there’s a golem on Long Island. They told me it’s killed boys in Brooklyn and Nazis in Belzec. They told me Rabbi Jacob Levy—you know who Jacob Levy is— built it. They told me it’s gotten out of hand. Guards in Belzec, okay. The men who killed your son, maybe. But a mother and two children in a little town near the sea? That’s crazy. That’s . . .” Garfield searched for the right word but since Theresienstadt, words like evil or bad or wrong could never be used again. “Not nice,” he said finally. Tepel looked at him in amazement, and they laughed again, wildly this time, clutching each other. Tepel opened the drawer and took out the bottle, and they drank some more.

Tepel thought.

“Okay,” he said after a while, “there’s a golem on Long Island . . . so what?”

“They want it killed.”

Tepel asked, “Who are they, and why should we go around killing golems for them?”

Garfield told him; and all the time he talked, Tepel nodded. His fine white hair floating around his head like an aura.

“You can do it . . . I mean one can do it,” Tepel said, “but first you have to know if they’re nuts, and how do we find that out?”

Garfield told Tepel about the basement window with the night light, about the box and the flowered curtain.

“Did you see the wooden box and the flowered curtain?”

Garfield shook his head.

“We’ll go look.”

Garfield looked at his watch. “It’s after six and Laurel’s an hour and a half from here.”

“So it’ll be dark when we get there. You said there’s a light.” Tepel held the bottle protectively.

“How’ll we get there?” Garfield asked.

“Drive,” Tepel said.

“I hate to drive.”

“Nu,” Tepel said, “how did you get from Riverdale to Forty-­seventh Street?”

“Drove.”