The car was moving away from the crowded streets. I smelled the river.
She didn't believe me. But she was telling me many things. Many intriguing things. I could see something beyond her words that she didn't see.
She distracted me slightly from my thoughts. She found me an attractive male. I could feel this, and I could feel in her a despair that comes with the knowledge of approaching death. There was a careless passion in her, a dream it seemed, to possess me.
I was remarkably excited by it.
"Your accent?" she asked. "What is it? You're not an Israeli?"
"Look, this is trivial," I said. "I'm speaking the best English I can. I told you, I'm a spirit. I want to avenge your daughter. Do you want me to do that? This necklace, why does he say there was a necklace? Why did you ask me about the necklace?"
"Probably one of his cruel jokes," she said. "The necklace started the big fight between him and Esther a long time before. Esther had a weakness for diamonds-that was certainly true. She was always shopping in the diamond district. She loved to go there more than to the fancy jewelers.
The day she was killed, she must have taken the necklace with her. The maid said she did. He latched on to that little detail. He almost sacrificed his big theories of the terrorists killing Esther with all his talk about the necklace. But then the three men, when they were found, they didn't have the diamonds. You really killed those three men?"
"They took nothing from her," I said. "I went right after them and killed them. Your papers tell you they were stabbed in rapid succession by one of their own weapons. Look, don't believe me if that's your wish, but keep explaining to me. About Esther and Gregory. Did he have her killed? Do you think he did?"
"I know he did," she said. Her entire demeanor changed. Her face - darkened. "But I think he tripped up on the necklace. I have a suspicion that she took the necklace somewhere before she stopped at the store. And if she did that, then the necklace is in the hands of someone who knows that part of the story is a lie. But I can't get to that person."
This greatly intrigued me. I wanted to question her.
But she was distracted again by physical desire. She examined me, my hair, and my skin. Her grief for Esther was heavy inside her but it warred with a simple human need for levity.
I loved her looking at me.
When I've reached this stage, when I'm this apparently alive, humans notice the same things about me that they would have when I was a true man and walking the earth in an ordinary life that God had given me. They notice the prominent bones of my forehead, that my eyebrows are black and tend to dip in a frown even as I smile but to rise as they move towards the ends of my eyes, that I have a baby's mouth, though it's large, with a square jaw. It's a touch of the baby face with strong bones, and eyes that laugh easily.
She was powerfully drawn to these attributes, and there came again that rush of memory, of ancient people talking and saying things of the utmost importance, and someone saying, "If one has to do it, where could we find a man more beautiful! One who more resembles the god?"
The car moved faster and faster through empty streets. Other engines were quiet, and the pavements of New York were lined with thin, spindly little trees that fluttered with little leaves, almost like offerings before their lordly buildings. Stone and iron were the makings of this place. How fragile the leaves looked when the wind caught them-forlorn, tiny, and colorless.
We took on greater speed. We had come to a wide road, and I could smell more strongly the stench of the river. The sweet smell of water was barely detectable, but it made me powerfully thirsty. I'd passed over this river with Gregory but had not known thirst then. I knew it now. Thirst meant the body was really strong.
"Whoever you are," she said, "I'll tell you this. If we make it to that plane, and I think we're going to, you'll never want for anything again in your life."
"Explain about the necklace," I said gently.
"Gregory has a past, a big secret past, a past I knew nothing about and Esther stumbled on it when she bought the necklace. She bought the necklace from a Hasidic Jew who looked exactly like Gregory. And the man told her he was actually Gregory's twin."
"Yes, Nathan, of course," I said, "among the diamond merchants, a Hasid, of course."
"Nathan! You know this man?"
"Well, I don't know him, but I know the grandfather, the Rebbe, because Gregory went to him to find out what the words meant, the words Esther had said."
"What Rebbe!"
"His grandfather, Gregory's grandfather. The Rebbe's name is Avram, but they have some tide for him. Look, you said she stumbled on his past, that he had this big family in Brooklyn."
"It's a big family?" she asked.
"Yes, very big, a whole Court of Hasidim, a clan, a tribe. You don't know anything of this at all."
"Ah," she sat back. "Well, I knew it was a family. I understood that from their quarrels. But I didn't know much else about it. He and Esther quarreled. She had found out about this family. It wasn't just the brother Nathan who sold her the necklace. My God, there was this whole secret. Could he have killed her because she knew about his brother? His family?"
"One problem with it," I said.
"Which is what?"
"Why would Gregory want to keep his past secret? When I was there with him and the Rebbe, his grandfather, it was the Rebbe who begged for secrecy. Now surely the Hasidim didn't kill Esther. That's too stupid to consider."
She was overwhelmed.
The car had crossed the river and was plunging down into the hellish place of multistoried brick buildings, full of the cheap and mournful light.
She pondered, shook her head.
"Look, why were you with Gregory and this Rebbe?"
"Gregory went to him to find out the meaning of the words Esther spoke. The Rebbe knew. The Rebbe had the bones. Gregory has the bones now. I am called the Servant of the Bones. The Rebbe sold the bones to Gregory on the promise that he would never speak to his brother Nathan again, or come near the court, or expose them as connected to Gregory's childhood or his church."
"Good God!" she said. She was scrutinizing me harshly.
"Look, the Rebbe never called me to come forth. The Rebbe wanted no part of me. But he had had custody of the bones all his life from his father, from years in Poland at the end of the last century. I gathered this from listening to them. I had been asleep in the bones!"
She was speechless. "You obviously believe what you're saying," she said. "You believe it."