Zero Hour

were moving toward the end of the aisle, which split to the left and right beyond a second enclosed booth. Most were thickly bearded Hasidic Jews clad in long black coats and wide black hats. Three or four wore conventional office attire like Avram himself, whose goatee was moderate and stylishly trimmed, and whose only clear outward sign of religious orthodoxy was the small yarmulke clipped to the crown of his head.

Avram started down the main aisle after them. God forbid if those men were ever in positions to judge him. They would be appalled, accuse him of falsche frumkeit—false orthodoxy — as he was excoriated for how he’d been carrying on. And his self-righteous uncles would share their condemnation, eyes bulging with blind outrage, words of scorn pouring from their mouths. But what did any of them know? They were complacent, anchored in the past. The small traders in particular. Look at their losses, the hits they’d taken in the market. They had refused to chart its trends, adjust on the move, and instead did nothing but complain. The sight- holders had been undermined by the cartel, they’d blathered. Pipelines were being choked, supplies cut, the middleman shut out.

Avram had heard the dour laments repeated many times over, listened to them blame their predicaments on currents beyond their control, pointing fingers this way and that, even at each other, as their ships took on water and went under — and their fatalistic attitudes had largely carried over to Avram’s generation. It was the same in Antwerp. In Tel Aviv. There was no helping any of them. Not while they were governed by a timid unwillingness to deviate from an outmoded, absolutist code.

That was their biggest mistake in Avram’s view… the attachment to moral and ethical definitions that no longer applied, and probably never had in reality. Morality in business was a joke. A lie of convenience, concocted by the big man to keep the little man down. Business was opportunistic, amoral. Where was the inherent virtue in scraping to survive? Since when did failure get anyone respect? Was Avram supposed to believe that every miserable wretch he’d seen patted on the back for his success had some hidden nugget of goodness in his heart? Surrender to the tug of obsolete ways, swallow the lie, and you were guaranteed to fall right on your face. There was the most ignoble sin in business. His tapping into a new wellspring of profit would kill no one.

Avram passed the second glass enclosure, an intentional step or two behind the small group of men who’d filed into the hallway branching to its right. For him its separation from the rest of the floor was clear evidence of the dividing line between moral probity and material necessity. Yet he was sure none of them — not a single one—shared his appreciation of that symbolism. Avram could only begin to imagine the quakes of scandal that would rock these halls if they somehow learned what he was doing. He’d be expelled, blackballed, his family reputation soiled with disgrace… which was why he’d have to make sure they were never obliged with that knowledge.

In the cloakroom, Avram hung his overcoat on the wall and took the velveteen pouch that contained his prayer shawl and set of phylacteries from the shelf above it. Then he went out the door and moved on toward the boxy little synagogue chapel farther down the passage.

As was usual these days, Avram saw barely the minimum ten men required by Jewish law for the commencement of services. At nine-fifteen in the morning, it was still too early for the younger sellers, a majority of whom did not even come to the bourse on a regular schedule anymore. Meanwhile the older men who still did their mingling and dealing in the hall outside were for the most part in no hurry to arrive before noon — and those who were observant could conduct their daily morning prayers in shuls closer to home.

Being a broker, Avram mused, his leanings fell somewhere in between.

Now he draped his prayer shawl over his shoulders and donned the phylacteries, or tefillin — two square leather boxes made from the hide of kosher animals, fastened to black leather straps and containing sanctified parchment scrolls inscribed with verses from the Torah. He put one on the underside of his left arm and the other on his forehead, and then quietly recited the appropriate blessings from memory.

Even as he’d begun to wind the straps around himself in the prescribed manner, Avram had made an effort to push aside the worldly thoughts with which he’d entered the chapel. A reminder of one’s dedication to God, binding body and soul to His will, the laying of phylacteries required the commandments associated with it to be fulfilled. But was it worldly to consider that the stone tablets into which Moses chiseled the law of the covenant had been made of sapphire from the top of Mount Sinai? And that, according to Rashi, the most eminent of Biblical commentators, God had given the p’solet, castoff chips of the carving, to Moses as a precious gift that would bring him and his heirs lasting wealth? The holiest of artifacts given to man had thus come with considerations of worldly value.

But Avram wasn’t a theologian. Bent to his prayers before the Arc, he didn’t know whether to oust those thoughts from his mind or ponder them. And yet he wouldn’t deny they were there, along with his desire to reconcile his constant fear of Heaven and equally constant hunger for the material.

As with the rest of the goals he’d dared to reach for, Avram was determined to find a way to get everything he wanted, and then live with himself as well as he could.

* * *

Malisse would have preferred to start with Plan B and move on from there. Not just today, but on every assignment he accepted. Hurried or unhurried, he saw his plan of first resort as nothing more than a necessary stage-setting prelude, a rough draft of a work in progress — and with fair cause. Nine times out of ten, Plan A was either deficient or a complete waste. Over the course of his four years as a private investigator, and his twelve prior to that with the Belgian Secret Service, he’d found out that no matter how much thought and effort one put into it, how assured one felt of its perfection, there would be unforseen impediments, pitfalls that found the feet, mistakes looming around the bend that would be revealed only when stumbled upon and confronted. So strongly did Malisse feel about his creed that he had preached it relentlessly and zealously to the young, inexperienced agents who’d fallen under his tutelage in the Surete de L’Etat. And always he’d been asked by some callow recruits: If Plan A is a kink in the system, predetermined to go awry, why not skip it altogether, put one’s best leg forward, and launch an operation with the honed backup contingency? To which he would point out the question’s obvious logical flaw. Things must start at the beginning. The elimination of Plan A would simply move Plan B up in order of commencement, hence virtually damning it to failure by turning it into Plan A, Plan C into the new Plan B, and so forth. The wheel turned as it would.

In plotting his investigations, Malisse took a Darwinistic approach; in teaching students how to correctly go about them, his method was Socratic. Would it have been better if the lung arose before the gill? he’d sometimes asked to elicit discourse from the lads. Certainly it was the more efficient breathing organ. But how would the first amphibian have fared had not fish preceded it on evolution’s ladder? What could it have done, poor creature, but drown in the salty darkness of some primeval sea? On that sequential glitch, that missed link, as it were, the genesis of terrestrial life would have been brought to a full stop. The frog, the snake, the rodent and higher mammals, none would have ever come into existence. Mankind would have been an undreamt dream. And so it was with the investigative probe: It must proceed in orderly stages or else was destined to falter and fizzle.

Malisse’s small minority of sharp-witted, committed freshmen had taken this lesson to heart and remained splendid and miserably underpaid field operatives throughout their careers; the greater percentage of them, scoffing mediocrities, had gotten promotions to comfortable desk jobs in the Surete’s bureaucratic hierarchy.

To each man, his own rewards, Malisse supposed.

Now he sat by himself in the Starbucks cafe on West 47th Street off Sixth Avenue, drinking a Caramel Macchiato, dipping and taking an occasional bite of his chocolate eclair, and observing the street outside the window with characteristic diligence, inferior as this spot might be. The beverage had nicely warmed his insides while no doubt further eating away at the already eroded lining of his duodenum, aggravating his peptic ulcers — benign despite their burning pain, his doctors had assured — with its high concentration of sugary syrup and caffeine. But it was nine-thirty in the morning, and Malisse’s insatiable sweet tooth awoke when he did at the crack of dawn, as did his craving for tobacco. The latter remained unassuaged, since smokers in America, and this city in particular, were not only stigmatized by their habit, but heavily taxed and penalized, a legal harassment that left them with nowhere to have a cigarette except the streets and, presumably, their own toilets. Saloons, too, were off limits… what was the point of ordering a cocktail, he wondered, if not to delight in puffing a Gitanes or Dunhill between swallows? Malisse didn’t understand — was he not right now in the celebrated land of the free? He’d even had to settle for a nonsmoking room at his hotel, all others having been occupied. Thank heaven for the consolation of his hot beverage, and the eclair, which was his self-prescribed method of soaking up some of its acids.