“It’s always a good question,” Milo said. “It’s the answers that stink. Did he ever mention any family or friends?”

“No. The only time he got even remotely personal was toward the end of his… Must have been early September. He came into my office to deliver some books, and after he put them down he kept hanging around. I didn’t even notice at first- I was up to my elbows in something. Finally I realized he was still there and glanced up. He looked nervous. Upset about something. I asked him what was on his mind. He started talking about some pictures he’d come across while cataloguing- dead babies out of the crematoria, Mengele’s experiments. He was really affected. Sometimes it just hits you, out of the clear blue- even after you’ve seen thousands of other pictures, one will set you off. I encouraged him to talk, get it all out. Let him go on about why, if there was a God, He could let those things happen. Why did terrible things happen to good people? Why couldn’t people be kind to one another? Why were people always betraying one another-brutalizing one another?

“When he was through I told him those were questions humanity had been asking itself since the beginning of time. That I had no answers, but the fact that he was asking them showed he was one cut above the crowd- had some depth to him. The wisdom to question. That the key to making the world a better place was to constantly question, never accept the brutality. Then he said something strange. He said Jewish people question all the time. Jewish people are deep. He said it almost with a longing in his voice- a reverence. I said thanks for the compliment, but we Jews don’t have a monopoly on either suffering or insight. That we’d swallowed more than our share of persecution, and that kind of thing did tend to lead to introspection, but that when you got down to it, Jews were like everyone else- good and bad, some deep, some shallow. He listened and got this strange smile on his face, kind of sad, kind of dreamy. As if he were thinking about something else. Then he turned to me and asked me if I’d like him better if he were Jewish.

“That really threw me. I said I liked him just fine the way he was. But he wouldn’t let go of it, wanted to know how I’d feel if he were Jewish. I told him we could always use another bright penny in the tribe- was he thinking of converting? And he just gave me another strange smile and said I should be flexible in my criteria. Then he left. We never talked about it again.”

“What did he mean, ‘criteria’?”

“The only thing I can think of was that he was considering a Reform or Conservative conversion. I’m Orthodox- he knew that- and the Orthodox have more stringent criteria, so maybe he was asking for my approval, asking me to be flexible in my criteria for conversion. It was a strange conversation, Milo. I made a mental note to follow up on it, try to get to know him better. But with the workload it just never happened. Right after that, he stopped showing up. For a while I wondered if I’d said the wrong thing, failed him in some way.”

She stopped, laced her hands. Opened a desk drawer, pulled out a pack of cigarettes, lit one, and blew out smoke.

“So much for quitting. My first all week. Talking about this isn’t good for my willpower. Since I got your message I’ve been wondering if there was something he was asking from me that I didn’t give. Some way I could have-”

“Come on, Judy,” said Milo. “Dead-end thinking.”

She held the cigarette at arm’s length. “Yes, I know.”

Milo took it and ground it out in an ashtray.

She said, “Been talking to my husband?”

“It’s my job,” he said. “Protect and serve. Got a few more questions for you. Hate groups. Anything new on the local scene?”

“Not particularly, just the usual fringies. Maybe a slight upswing in incidents that seems to be related to the situation in Israel- a lot of the printed material we’ve been seeing lately has been emphasizing anti-Zionist rhetoric: Jews are oppressors. Stand up for Palestinian rights. A new hook for them since the U.N. passed the Zionism-is-racism thing. Basically a way for them to sanitize their message. And some of the funding for the worst anti-Semitic literature is coming from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Syria, so I’m sure that’s got something to do with it.”

“Who’d be breaking into houses and painting anti-Semitic slogans on the walls?”

“That sounds kind of adolescent,” she said. “Why? Are you getting a lot of that? If you are, we should know about it.”

“Just one incident. At the place Ike used to live and the apartment next door. His landlady was Jewish and the next-door neighbor’s a rabbi, so it probably has nothing to do with Ike.”

“Milo,” she said, “you don’t think he was killed because of his work here?”

“Nothing points to that, Judy.”

“But you’re not ruling it out. You’re here because you have at least some suspicion he might have been killed because of his race.”

“No, Judy,” he said, “I’m a long way from that.”

“Kennedy,” I said softly.

It was the first time I’d spoken since we entered the room. Both of them stared at me.

“Yeah,” said Milo. “There is something else. Along with the anti-Semitic stuff, they wrote, Remember John Kennedy! That make any sense to you?”

“Could,” she said, “depending on which John Kennedy you’re talking about.”

“What do you mean?”

“If they scrawled “John F. Kennedy that wouldn’t make much sense. But there was another John Kennedy. Confederate veteran. Lived in Pulaski, Tennessee, and started a social club for other Confederate veterans called the Ku Klux Klan.”

I said, “Punks who know history?”

Milo didn’t say anything.

We left, taking along the carton of books Ike Novato had checked out.

I said, “What do you think?”

Milo said, “Who the hell knows?”

“Seems to me it’s starting to smell more like politics than drugs. Both Novato and Gruenberg have a strong interest in Nazis. Both get killed. Someone breaks into their apartment and paints racist slogans.”

Milo frowned, rubbed his face. Then his beeper went off.

I said, “Want me to find a phone?”

“Nah, I’ll call from your place.”

He did and put down the phone. “Gotta go, fresh d.b. Don’t worry- nothing to do with Nazis. Paraplegic in a rest home on Palm- looks like natural causes.”

“How come the D-Three goes out on something like that?”

“One of the attendants pulled my guy aside and told him the paraplegic had been pretty healthy the day before- and this wasn’t the first funny death they’d had there. Place was full of health code violations, patients getting beaten, sitting in their own shit, not getting their medicine. Owner of the home is politically connected. My guy got nervous. Wanted to know procedure. Procedure is I go out there and play nursemaid.”

He walked to the door. “Got any plans for tonight?”

“Nothing.”

He pointed at the carton of books. “Got time for some reading?”

“Sure.”

“There’s a lot of stuff there. You might wanna check first for notes in margins, underlining, that kind of thing. Barring that, maybe a trend in the kind of books he chose- a subpattern, something more specific than just an interest in Nazis. Depending on how complicated it gets over in Palms, I’ll try to get back tonight, see if you’ve come up with anything.”

“Am I being graded?”

“Nah, it’s pass/fail. Just like real life.”