Read Online Reckless Endangerment by Robert K. Tanenbaum - Free Book Online

regrettably, tempered his sympathy for the six million. He simply could not imagine walking meekly with his children into a cattle car, not while he had breath to fight.
    Besides that, as an athlete Karp was a convinced meritocrat. Could you make the shot, could you scuffle successfully under the boards—these were to him the cosmic questions. And he had found early that he had absolutely no religious interest whatever. When he thought about it at all, which was rarely, he considered it to be a kind of talent. He himself could fling a ten-inch ball unerringly through the air into a slightly larger hoop from distances up to twenty-five feet, and he could convict people of homicide. Others could talk to God and get comfort from it. His wife, for example, or his daughter, both Catholics.
    “Go outside!” Lowenstein was saying. “Go three blocks from here in any direction, and what do you find? Jamaica! Egypt! El Salvador! We are closed in by hostile goyim. Every day our people are robbed, beaten up, raped. And what do your precious authorities do? Nothing is what they do. They write up papers, and they forget. No one is ever arrested. You can see them, the cops, thinking, oh, the Jews, they got plenty, who cares! And I’m warning you, we will not tolerate it. Cursed be those who despoil Israel! And now they have started to kill us—”
    “Yeah, right, Rabbi,” Karp interrupted, “things are tough all over. It’s the city, it’s a high-crime precinct you’re in here.” He noted, with some satisfaction, that the rabbi’s eyes had widened. His mouth was still slightly open, showing yellow, uneven teeth. He was not used to being interrupted, especially when he was in full spate about the travails of the Jews.
    “Meanwhile,” Karp went on, “the reason I came over here was that Mr. Keegan asked me to report to you on the progress of the Shilkes investigation, as a courtesy. As you know by now, we have two suspects in custody, and we will charge them with murder and assault. We have substantial evidence against them, but only with respect to the crime itself. At present there’s no substantive evidence of a wider conspiracy, much less plans for a campaign against Jews generally.”
    “You believe this?” Lowenstein snapped. “You think these stupid savages thought this up themselves, that they were not brought to it by some evil intelligence?” The rabbi had a habit of leaning forward in his chair and drumming his fists on his desk in rhythm with his words. Karp hesitated momentarily. The same thought had occurred to him, but he was not about to share it with Lowenstein.
    “There’s no evidence for it,” said Karp a little lamely.
    Lowenstein swiveled his chair abruptly away from Karp and said something in Yiddish to several of the other men. They responded with sour laughter, and Karp realized that this was the first laugh he had heard since alighting from the unmarked—not, in his experience, the usual state of affairs among Jews. The rabbi swung his chair around like a tank turret and directed the muzzle of his glare toward Karp. Again the finger.
    “Listen to me—while you’re gathering this evidence, which you could trip over walking down the street if you had eyes, while you are looking, we will take care of ourselves. We are not pacifists, Mr. Karp. We have ample authority in the Talmud to protect ourselves against those who mean to harm us. Do I make myself clear?”
    “Oh, yeah, Rabbi. I should point out, however, that we’re operating under the Constitution and the statutes of the state of New York here, which may have a different interpretation of self-defense than your version of Talmudic law. We would not tolerate any attempt to take the law into your own hands, for example, by pursuing people you thought might be involved in the Shilkes murder, Arab boys, for example.”
    Karp was watching Lowenstein carefully as he said this, but the man gave no obvious sign of guilt or nervousness. The