Feathers

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Twelve 1. Leder’s tracks vanished into thin air. From the day I saw him dragged out of the courtroom and bundled through an emergency exit into a waiting van, I rose early every morning and made straight for the pile of newspapers in my parents’ grocery. Yet I failed to find a single mention of his case. “Stop reading all that newsprint,” my mother said, worried that I might become addicted to the daily papers. “Believe me, you’re wasting your time.” For once I took her advice and decided to appease my curiosity with another visit to Uncle Tsodek, whose connections with the top brass in the police force, I thought, made him privy to all state secrets. Yet this time my uncle was ill at ease and withdrawn. He glanced nervously at Carmela and Levana, who were both perched on ladders , looking for some lost files on the upper shelves; cleared his throat once or twice; and suggested that we go out for a breath of fresh air, since he had spent the whole day in a heated room with closed windows, choking on cigarette smoke. Once outside, in the little pine woods in front of the court building, he leaned against one of the concrete barriers that bordered the Russian Compound to the north—remnants of the anti-tank defenses thrown up against an expected invasion of Jewish Jerusalem by the Arab Legion during the 1948 war—and told me that, from hints dropped by the police, he gathered that Leder was suspected of grave crimes against national security. For all he knew, said my uncle, the man might be a Russian spy, and we would do best to mind our own business and leave him to rot in the dungeons of Israeli counterintellignce. Two months passed before the curtain lifted again on Leder’s mysterious disappearance. The morning after Purim, Sergeant Fish- ler, dressed in civilian clothes, appeared in the Rachlevskis’ store, where he had been an honored guest since the day of the antireparations demonstration. When Haim’s parents, who were used to seeing their hero in full regalia, asked whether he was still wearing his masquerade costume, Fishler replied that he had resigned from the police force because of disagreements with his superiors. Ever since Gleider was made precinct captain, he went on, the force had gotten loonier by the day. The case of Leder was a good example. According to my friend Haim, who rushed over to tell me all this, Fishler related that not only had Leder been grilled day and night for a whole week without anyone suspecting from his incoherent answers that the man had a screw loose, but his revolver, which was taken from him at the time of his arrest, was kept in a safe at the station and never even sent for ballistic tests. Only when some veteran officers from Tel Aviv were assigned to the case was it discovered, as Fishler put it, that Leder “was out of his skull,” and that his pistol was hopelessly rusted and lacking a firing pin, so that even a boy playing cowboy would not have been caught dead with it. “He was a broken shell of a man,” Fishler told Haim’s parents, adding that as soon as the district psychiatrist examined him, he ordered him released from jail and transferred to a mental ward. Fishler himself only learned of this when he and the police doctor were detailed to escort Leder in an ambulance to the hospital in NesTsiyyona . All the way there, he said, Leder never stopped babbling that if only they would let him go, he would appoint him, Fishler, minister of police, the doctor minister of health, and the driver minister of transportation in the soon-to-be-declared Lynkean state. Apart from Fishler’s story, which reached me secondhand and without further corroboration, I heard no more about Leder. “He’s been swallowed up by the earth for his sins,” Ahuva Haris periodically declared , expressing her amazement at the continued disappearance of the little alms collector for the School of the Blind, while my mother nodded and agreed that he had gotten his comeuppance. Indeed, had not the two of them regularly cited him as a horrible example of the most various and at times even contradictory vices, I might have slowly forgotten him and consigned his memory to oblivion, as we so often do to those who once accompanied us...