Reed Coleman - Little Easter

“How good are you with the Torah?”

“That is the oddist question I’ve been asked today,” he smiled back, self-conscously adjusting his skullcap. “I’m fair. Why?”

“I’m a freelance writer and I’m researching a story on the flight of European Jews to Palestine after the war.” Hey, it wasn’t a total lie. I was a writer and I figured my approach would hook him. “Anyway, two sources of mine have mentioned a little girl who escaped from Auschwitz and made it to Palestine entirely on her own. Unfortunately, they can’t remember her name exactly and I can’t print the story without confirmation.”

“It sounds quite amazing,” Cohen admitted, his eyes as wide as silver dollars, “but what does my familiarity with the Torah have to do with any of this?”

“Patience, Doc. Patience.” We both laughed at my inadvertent pun. “I’m getting to that. One of my sources swears she had a strange name, something biblical, something like Andrella. I don’t know. I guess I’m just grasping at straws now.”

Cohen started pacing, scratching at his hairless chin and rubbing the back of his neck. “Andrella, Andrella,” he mouthed over and over, “Andrella.” He stopped pacing: “Sorry, Mr. Klein. I’m drawing a blank, but I can check up on it and get back to you.”

“Thanks, Doc, I’d really appreciate that.” We shook hands. “And thanks for patching me up.”

He told me it was no trouble at all, suggested that I come see him in a week and gave me something for the pain we both knew I was going to have. He warned me to take it easy and apologized for his coming up with zero on the girl’s name. He assured me he’d get my number off the hospital report and that he’d call if his sources could deliver a name. He shook my hand and shook his head. Dr. Cohen didn’t like not knowing answers. This was going to eat at him.

A butterball of a nurse in old-fashioned whites, a silly hat and elastic hose with enough tensile strength to support a small office building cleaned me up a bit, helped put me back together and gave me half a roll of Certs for my breath. I winked at her. She liked that. She escorted me to the exit at no extra charge. From here to the car I would have to fly solo.

“Mr. Klein!” Dr. Cohen came sprinting after me, one hand holding his yarmulke against the wind. “Mr. Klein!” I stopped to let him catch me and to catch my breath. “I don’t know if it’s the name you’re looking for,” he was gasping for air himself. “Too much time trying to keep everyone else in shape,” the young doctor held his heart.

“The name, Doc,” I put him back on course.

“Could it have been Azrael?” he wondered sheepishly, as if regretting the speaking of those words aloud.

“I guess it could’ve been. It’s odd. It’s biblical-sounding,” I was non-committal and just this side of unenthusiastic. The fact was, I didn’t know.

“No,” he kicked disappointedly at the ground, “it wouldn’t be that. I don’t even know why I suggested it.”

“Educate me, Doc. Why wouldn’t it have been her name?”

“Azrael, Mr. Klein, is the angel of death. Would any parent name his or her child after the angel of death?”

“In this world, who knows?” I threw up my hands and almost collapsed in pain. “But I suppose you’re right, Doc. Nice try, anyway. Thanks.”

He left me without a farewell, walking back to the hospital like the Mighty Casey walking back to the dugout after the third strike. Doctor Cohen was a little less familiar with failure than myself. That was good for him.

Once folded in, I sat in the driver’s seat for a few minutes thinking about the angel of death. I thought about the angel’s trail I’d been following lately, about the stiff in the dump and the little drowned girl with the stolen name. I thought about the dead woman in orange make-up and mink. And, I thought, if her name wasn’t Azrael, God, it should have been.

“You look like shit,” Kate Barnum noted before I had both of my legs through the door of the scavenged old whaling ship.

“The best part is, I get to feel worse than I look,” I winked, easing myself into her age-shredded sofa. “Got a beer to wash down my pain killers with?”

“Sure.” She ambled barefoot into the kitchen and reappeared holding a glass mug smeared with fingerprints on the outside and full of unnamed beer within. “How’d it happen? And don’t tell me you fell into an uncovered washing machine.”

“Nah. If that happened, I’d be dead. Can’t swim a stroke.” I got guilty quiet thinking about a little girl floating face down in Ponsichatchi Creek. Sometimes it’s not funny. What you think about, I mean.

Barnum mistook my change of expression for bad beer. “The beer sour?”

“No. Just everything else.”

She lit a butt and nuzzled up next to me, her free hand falling carelessly onto my chest. I nearly passed out when it landed.

“Ribs,” I coughed out.

“Sorry. Christ, you really are in bad shape. I thought the black eyes were just a fashion statement!” the reporter snickered nervously. “You must be getting close. Someone warn you off?”

“Yeah.”

“Who?”

“Next question.” I sat up again, breathing as normally as a man could with a hundred yards of tape around his middle.

“MacClough, huh.” Barnum lit up the room with her self-satisfaction.

“You are good.”

“I didn’t get to where I was by being dull-witted, Klein.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, “but how’d ya get to where you are now?”

“Next question.” It was her turn to look like a swallow of bad beer. We were even.

“Do you still have access to the Times morgue?” I wondered.

“Not officially. Why?”

“You’re not Jewish, Barnum, so stop answering my questions with questions. Yes or no?”

“Yes,” she acquiesced.

“Go back twenty-five years and work-”

“Twenty-five years!”

“And work forward,” I continued. “You’re lookin’ for a mob trial in which a woman turns state’s evidence and then goes underground.”

Kate pulled a bottle of house brand bourbon out from under the kidney-shaped coffee table and took a warm-up swallow. When she was warmed up, she took another.

“You want to give me any details or am I going to have to stay in the morgue for twenty years just looking?” she queried with as much enthusiasm as a pig for a ham sandwich.

“Don’t get so excited. One thing is you won’t have to look that far forward. The envelope is twenty-five to twenty years ago. It’s the only time frame that fits. Secondly, I’m pretty sure the woman’s name was Azrael.” I wasn’t certain at all, but I was getting pretty comfortable with lying. “Might’ve been a nickname. I don’t know.”

“Azrael?”

I spelled it for her.

“Not much to go on,” she yawned and took another swig. The cheap stuff was tasting like Wild Turkey by now.

“It’s enough.” I tamped out her cigarette to underline by two words.

“Let’s fuck, Klein,” she changed gears and subjects and removed her sweatshirt.

“Christ,” I laughed uncomfortably, “I wish you’d just get to the point.” I don’t know what it is exactly. Maybe men are unnerved by women who not only think like they do, but who give voice to their thoughts. “Sorry,” I ran a fingernail along the tape ridges about my ribs. “Besides, you play too rough.”

“Just come with me, baby,” she helped me out of my seat, her left nipple brushing my cheek. “I’ll do all the work.”

And she did. Most of it, anyway.

Now we were just lying there, sleepless and lonely on her smoky sheets in the dark; the absence of love robbing the room of breathable air. Even before she could finish taking what I had to give, I could feel the emptiness creep in the window like poison gas. In the absence of love, consummation is the cruelest part of desire. Barely able to make out her shape in the blackness and gas, I wondered if she’d simply gotten used to it. I never have.