Garfield looked again at the box. It was bigger than he’d first thought. Much bigger. He started to feel uneasy.

“They’d need a thousand prayer books to fill it,” he said. His voice had gotten softer.

“So they got other books. Lumber, coats . . .”

“What books?” Garfield whispered urgently. “Who keeps coats in a basement?”

Their eyes met and went back to the window. The curtain hung, the shadows didn’t move, but now they could feel something about the room, even through the window.

Garfield clutched Tepel’s arm. “There on the drape.”

Tepel saw it too. A stain or smudge of some sort.

“What color is that?” Garfield hissed.

“The light’s terrible,” Tepel whispered.

“I see it, you see it. What color is it?”

“Gray,” Tepel croaked, and all at once he was more frightened than he’d been in Buchenwald, than he was at night now on 112th Street. He could barely talk. “So the curtain’s old and dirty. They should wash it.” He lost his balance, his elbow smacked the window, and they jumped up and stared into each other’s wide-­open eyes.

“Gotenyu,” Garfield gasped. They grabbed each other’s hands and stumbled up the path, trying not to make noise. They got past the hedge and ran up the street to the car.

Garfield drove sixty miles an hour through the shut-­up town to the New York road. He drove like a maniac, and Tepel held the dashboard and swayed back and forth. They were past Riverhead when Garfield pulled off onto a side road and Tepel took the bottle out of the glove compartment. Their hands shook as they held the bottle to their lips, their faces were ghastly pale in the moonlight.

Garfield took a deep swallow and said, “What’s in the box, Wolf?”

“I don’t know,” Tepel murmured.

“In your kishkes, you know. What’s in the box?”

Tepel answered hoarsely, “The golem.”

†††† Grandfather.

‡‡‡‡ Keeping Kosher.

2

Chapter 2

Rachel walked across the grass to Adam’s grave. Leah saw her go and started to cry. But she’d be all right for a few minutes and Rachel sat down on the cool grass and looked at the headstone with his name on it. She felt bitter when she came here. Cheated. She’d dissembled with Hawkins . . . she hated the boys in Brooklyn, she hoped they died horribly. The guards in Belzec, too. The worse, the better. Nothing could be painful enough. “Good,” she whispered at the headstone, “good.”

But she knew Adam wouldn’t feel like that. What about Willa, he’d say. What about Tom and Eric. Jacob’s my father, and I loved him; I loved them all. But they’re still in the camp, Rachel. They think the world’s Belzec. You’ve got to stop them.

She lay down flat on her stomach over the grave. He’d know how tired she was and he’d say, Roger will help you.