resentment of Tom had spilled over to Michele, and their relationship had always been strained. The old man was a proud Jew, and only in the past couple of years had Tom come to understand some of that passion. As he lost the drive for nearly everything in life, he remembered more and more what Abiram had taught him in those years before he turned twenty-five.
When they were still speaking.
He stared at the grave.
A lumpkin shrieked in the distance.
The first time he’d come the marker had not been here. Alle had done well with its creation. Tall and substantial, much like the man beneath. He bent down and studied its reliefs, running his fingers across the two elegant letters at the top.
He noticed art at the bottom.
A pitcher, tipped, as if pouring.
More of his early training came to mind.
A felled tree marked those who died young. Books evidenced a learned person. A saw and plane meant craftsman.
Pitchers symbolized that the deceased had been a Levite.
He’d never known that about his father.
According to the Bible, Levites were descendants of the tribe of Levi, the third of Jacob’s twelve sons. Both Moses and Aaron had been Levites. They sang psalms at services during the time of the First and Second Temples and physically maintained those sanctuaries. The Torah specifically commanded that Levites should protect the Temple for the people of Israel. Their usefulness, though, essentially ended when the Temples were destroyed. Because one of their assigned duties had been to cleanse the rabbi’s hands before the service, the pitcher had evolved into their symbol. He knew that Jews still considered themselves divided into three groups. Cohanim, the priestly caste. Levi’im, the Levites. And the Israelim, everyone else. Observances and laws specific to Cohanim and Levi’im were still practiced. Levites existed in synagogues, though their role was little more than honorific.
Was that why the symbol was here?
A recognition of Abiram’s service?
He glanced at his mother’s
He’d attended her funeral, and Abiram had been customarily silent toward him. He’d stood right here a year later when the stone was raised but again played no part in its creation. A menorah adorned hers, symbolic of a righteous woman.
And that she’d been.
He heard a sound and turned.
A car eased to where he’d parked a couple of hundred feet away. A small sedan with tinted windows.
No one emerged.
Had Zachariah Simon followed him here?
The drive from his father’s house was only a short few miles, and no one had been behind him.
Yet someone was here.
He faced the intruder and called out, “What do you want?”
No reply.
“I said, what do you want?”
Silence.
With the courage of a man who’d not planned on even being alive at this moment he started forward.
The car wheeled from the graveled lot.
He watched as it drove away.
What in the world?
He turned back to the grave and thought of Alle.
“What in God’s name have you done, old man?”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
BENE HATED SPANISH TOWN. THOUGH FOR THREE HUNDRED years it had served as Jamaica’s capital, an architectural delight perched on the west bank of the Rio Cobre, it had evolved into a hard- edged, gang-infested urban center of nearly 200,000 impoverished people. He rarely visited since his business interests lay either to the east in Kingston, or into the mountains, or across the north shore. He was born and raised just outside Spanish Town, in a tough neighborhood his family had controlled until his father made the mistake of killing an American drug agent. The United States demanded justice, the Jamaican government finally obliged, but his father had the good sense to die in jail. His mother took his death hard. Since he was an only child —medically, she could have no more—she made him promise that he’d never follow in those footsteps. His mother
