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The Scepter is a noir retelling of the Biblical story of Esther, with a hint of supernatural mystery. You can find the Table of Contents here:
← Previously, in The Scepter: Part VIII: Giacomo Gardini schemed to bring down Paul Cohen.
“And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?”
-Esther 4:14
In a clamor of impotent fury, Etta made two dozen golden, crispy latkes. There was nothing to clean in the pristine flat, not even dust on the baseboards. She couldn’t scour the sink and pour all her angry confusion into scraping away grime and rust. Stomping her raging energy away in the snowy streets would involve Billy trailing after her, and his quiet company bothered her far less than it should, which frightened her. So she shredded potato flesh against sharp metal and fried it in sizzling oil.
She didn’t hear the soft knocks at the front door until the high ding of the doorbell broke into her ruminating thoughts. Flipping one of the latkes to brown the other side, she darted out of the kitchen and opened the front door.
Paul stood there, his eyes wide and haunted, too big for his thin face. His new watch shone around his wrist.
Etta wanted to drag out a tense meeting at the door, to accuse him with a silent, heavy stare. But the latkes crackled on the stove, and if she wasn’t quick she would end up with charcoal briquettes instead of food.
“Kitchen.” She caught a quick glimpse of Billy watching her, but she turned on her heel and strode back toward the stove.
Paul didn’t even seem to notice the angry stockpile of latkes. Pulling a stool from a corner, he sat staring into space while Etta slid the crisped patties onto a cooling rack and added a new batch.
“So.” She slapped a latke onto the frying pan. “‘The Prophet’?”
As though she were speaking a foreign language, Paul’s face was blank.
Etta’s temper flared, betraying her. “Were you already working for Ricky when you called me a coward?”
Shaking his head from a daze, Paul frowned. “I never called you a coward.”
“You implied it. How long have you been working for him? What do you even do for him? Why does he call you ‘The Prophet’?”
“Etta, I need to talk to you about something –”
“No, you need to answer my question.”
“You just asked three questions.”
“They’re all tied up in one question of how you – a bookkeeper who won’t even jaywalk – is so closely tied with the most powerful criminal in New York that he threw a party for you, gave you a watch that costs more than my old flat, and has his own special nickname for you.”
“He’s going to attack the synagogue.”
Etta froze, her hands hovering over the hot frying pan. She wouldn’t say What?, wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of changing the subject. Stuttering back into motion, she laid another latke in the fizzing oil. “Why does he call you ‘The Prophet’?”
“Etta –”
“You’ve been lying to me for what I can only assume must be years. If you have something to say, you can say it after you’ve answered my questions.”
Paul massaged his forehead with a noisy sigh. He looked at his thumbs, at his shoes flecked with droplets of melted snow. “Ricky’s been coming to me for advice for three years.”
Etta turned around and crossed her arms, letting the latkes sizzle behind her for a few moments. “What kind of advice?”
“All kinds of things. Business deals, gambling, whether to trust business partners.”
“Why would he ask your advice about that?”
“I –” Paul broke off, knitting his fingers together and staring at his palms. “I have – I guess you’d call them visions. Sometimes.”
“Visions?”
“I can predict things. You know how a bloodhound can track a person if they smell something with their scent? I can…see things, if I have something that belongs to that person. And sometimes even if I don’t. Sometimes they just come.”
“Sometimes what just come?”
“The visions.”
At a sudden sharp, burning smell, Etta whipped back around to the stove and flipped the scorched latkes. Her fingers were cold and clumsy, her face burning.
“I’ll see something, and it turns out later to be true,” Paul said. “It’s been happening my whole life. You remember – well, you probably don’t, you were so young – Rabbi Nowak left the village and came up the foothills to our house every week, sometimes every day. He asked me what I could see about the weather or what the authorities would do or what had happened to someone who had gone missing. He said it was a gift.”
Etta removed the last of the latkes, switched off the burner, and slowly turned to face Paul. She’d been a child and he hardly more than that when they’d crossed an ocean together, alone in the world. And the man who was everything she’d ever known – a cousin, brother, father, thin-faced and near-sighted and infuriating and kind – now he was some kind of Prophet too? Or he was delusional, mad in the most dangerous way.
But if Paul’s visions, or whatever he called them, weren’t accurate, Ricky would have dropped him in the dirt long ago. Ricky didn’t tolerate failure.
If Paul had made lucky predictions only a handful of times, Ricky never would have feted him and drunkenly toasted him, saluting Paul for saving his life – without ever saying a word about the shattered vase and the hole in her wall that he’d had workmen patch up with plaster. She could run her fingers over the seam where the wallpaper didn’t quite match, where the color was just a shade brighter because the sun hadn’t yet had time to fade it.
“You’re a bookkeeper,” she said, flinging words out in a rush. “You work in an office. You don’t even have enough imagination to change your brand of toothpaste. Now you’re telling me that criminals pay you to have visions of who’s trying to kill them or which horse is going to win or what their girlfriend –”
Etta stopped, a question stabbing like an ice-pick in her mind. “Why did he kill Verna Dooley?”
“No one said he killed her. She may have skipped town – she was supposed to skip town –”
“Was it you?”
“I didn’t do anything to her.”
“Did you tell Ricky something about her?” Etta’s breath was coming hard and short, her head beginning to ache.
“She was working with Siegel behind his back. I didn’t know it was Siegel at the time, but –”
“Who’s Siegel?”
“What do you mean ‘Who’s Siegel’? Bugsy Siegel. You know – Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, heads of the Jewish Mob? The Bugs and Meyer Mob?”
“Excuse me for not knowing more criminals, but the last time I brought up Ricky’s business deals he punched a hole in the wall next to my face. I haven’t exactly been taking notes on the names of all his friends.”
The faint color drained from Paul’s skin, and the wide-eyed, stricken look on his face was worse than his condescension. “Etta –”
“So Verna was conspiring against him with a rival group,” Etta said, throwing the words between them before Paul could go on about being remorseful or enraged or whatever useless emotions would make him feel better. “And – what? You saw it in a dream and told the most dangerous man in New York about it?”
Etta wanted to throw something. She wanted to smash her own hole in the wall. She wanted to shatter a window. But her fists weren’t battering rams like Ricky’s. Instead she dug her fingernails into her palms, bewildered rage thrumming in her skin. “At best you’re delusional and at worst you’re using Ricky as your own personal hitman.”
“What?”
Etta hated the shock on his face. How did he dare to act as though he had a right to be hurt?
“No, Etta,” Paul said. “The visions are real, I swear. They’re accurate; they always have been –”
“How can you say you didn’t do anything to her?” Furious at the catch in her voice, Etta threw herself through the kitchen door and into the sitting room, which glowed with a blood-red sunset sheen.
“Just listen for a minute. You’ve met Giacomo Gardini.” Paul rushed into the sitting room after her. “Somehow he got Ricky to believe that Lansky and Siegel are running an operation out of the synagogue, that they’re the ones behind Thornton and DiGiuli’s plot. Gardini convinced Ricky to go after the synagogue in the middle of Shabbat, when lots of people will be there –”
“And you know this how? Your visions?” Etta hissed. “Or your criminal friends?”
“Both. But that’s not the point.”
“Oh, that’s not the point. The fact that you’ve been lying to me for years and smoking cigars with criminals –”
“I don’t like cigars, you know that.”
“The fact that you’ve been lying to me and getting people killed and accepting gold watches from criminals –”
“It’s an Oystersteel backing.”
“Would you please,” Etta snapped, “let me finish a sentence.”
Paul folded his hands in front of himself, his mouth closed.
“All of that,” Etta said, “the fact that you’ve been lying to me and consorting with criminals and getting people killed – that’s not the point?”
Reaching for her shoulders, Paul stepped closer to her, but Etta moved away, striding to the window. Paul dropped his hands back to his sides. “No. The point is that Ricky’s going to get a lot of people hurt. Gardini convinced him to make an example of the synagogue to warn off anybody else who might try to push into his territory. Innocent bystanders – families, kids, old women – are going to get hurt, maybe killed, if Ricky goes through with it.”
Her arms crossed, Etta leaned her shoulder against the ice-cold windowpane laced with wind-bitten frost.
The synagogue, with its rose window, its arches and columns and the chandelier that hung like a bouquet of enormous flowers. She’d never loved the building with the same intensity as Paul, but she did miss, sometimes, walking through those doors and being absorbed into the crowd and painted strawberry red when she walked through the beams of the stained-glass windows. In the years when she and Paul had been hungry, dirty, hollowed out to bones and skin and yawning, wary eyes, that synagogue had been the one beautiful thing in their lives.
“If I show up and say all of this to Ricky,” Etta said, her voice quiet, the window-chill leeching through her skin, “it’s very possible you might never see me again.”
“But you haven’t done anything to betray him. It’s not like Verna –”
“He destroyed this entire room and called me a lying whore because I tried to warn him about an assassination. If I tell him that his second-in-command is manipulating him and I start meddling in his business, I’ll disappear and you’ll never find my body. You talk to him. He seems to like you, enough to give you a fancy watch, at least.”
Paul shifted his weight and slipped his hands into his pockets. “Not for long, I think.”
“Why?”
“Gardini and I aren’t exactly on friendly terms,” Paul said, his foot drawing anxious, listless circles on the floorboards. “And I heard something this afternoon, through the grapevine.”
“Oh, bootleggers and murderers have a grapevine now? So homey and cozy of them.”
“Gardini’s sowing seeds to make it look like I’m pally with Lansky and Siegel. If Ricky puts any stock in what Gardini says, which he does, then I won’t be in his good graces for long.”
Pushing herself away from the window, Etta wrapped her arms around herself and paced up and down the gleaming floor of her apartment. Every muscle in her body wanted to flee to her room and slam the door in Paul’s face, to lie down in bed and put her head under the covers and pretend that she’d never heard of Ricky Melchiorre.
“If you sit by,” Paul said, his voice low, “if you don’t say anything to Ricky and you let this happen, you’ll be fine for a while. But this world catches up to everyone eventually. The synagogue and the people in it will rebuild; we always do. But the lives of everyone Ricky hurts will be not just on his soul but yours.” Paul’s voice dropped to hardly above a whisper. “Like Verna Dooley’s on mine.”
Etta paused her pacing and looked at Paul, at his shoulders curling inward, withering and weary. The sunset had faded from scarlet to deep purple, casting dark shadows under his eyes. In all the years since they’d fled mountains for tenements, Paul had never shed his restless hunger. He’d seemed so grown-up to her all those years ago, but he’d been a child still himself, years away from adulthood, as he waited tables far into the night and ate a little less so that she wouldn’t go hungry.
“Even if the road that brought you here was messy and crooked and full of thorns,” Paul said, “it might be that you wound up here, just as you are, for such a time as this.”
Not moving, barely breathing, Etta stood facing the window to the hurried city and the twilight shroud lowering over its roofs and spires. She’d trampled everything she’d been told a woman should be, had followed her fear and hunger and greed into a cave where a prowling, slavering lion crouched in the shadows. For being too inquisitive, too meddlesome, too difficult, she could end up in the river or wherever Ricky disposed of inconvenient corpses.
But if she spoke and he listened –
There was no one else, not a single other person, who was in a position to whisper into the ear of the king of Manhattan, to speak for the people who crowded under the rose window and cherished it and all it encompassed as their one beautiful thing.
The stories that hovered like hazy giants in her childhood memory were full of messy, troublesome women who were in the right place at the right time, who against all odds brought their people out of danger.
Etta’s lungs were tight, and her shallow breaths couldn’t fill them. Gasping in a quick breath, she said without looking at Paul, “Can I have one day?”
Night was not the time to walk the streets of Manhattan, moving between puddles of orange light on the long route to the Lower East Side. But Etta made the walk, her head bent and hands in her pockets, as Billy followed a few steps behind.
The wind had nails that scraped her nose raw and watered her eyes. On another night the dark alleys and hunched-shoulder figures moving through them would have frightened her, but now she hardly noticed them. She had a destination, and her thoughts flailed in a tangle, sure of nothing except that she had to get there.
The air slowly took on a different smell – night-damp and ice and dirty snow-slush and old cooking grease and soiled laundry and car exhaust. Etta pushed closer and closer to the docks, and the scent of fish and foamy, oil-spotted water snaked toward her.
When at last she found it, the old synagogue was shut tight and dark. Even the gate on the short wrought-iron fence around it was locked. If she were Paul, she would have known the rabbi by name, could have knocked on his door, and the rabbi would have unlocked the synagogue for a few minutes. Paul could have sat inside beneath the moonlit windows. But the rabbi wouldn’t open the synagogue doors after hours for a messy, troublesome woman wearing Ricky Melchiorre’s pearls.
Even when it was cold and silent, the old synagogue never felt empty. Perhaps she could be heard from outside.
Etta laid her hand on a post of the waist-high fence, then hoisted herself up. Billy started forward, but before he could reach her she swung first one leg, then the other, over the sharp points, climbing back down the other side like a ladder.
Backing up, Billy stayed on the sidewalk, hands in his pockets. A lookout.
Etta walked step by step up to the wooden doors and the round windows carved like portals above them. Putting her hands against the wood, she bowed her head and leaned forward until her forehead touched the ice-cold door.
The synagogue was dark and locked and silent, but it wasn’t empty.
Down on the steps beneath the rose window, Etta stayed until the old wood warmed to her touch and her lungs eased finally into a deep breath.
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> Innocent bystanders – families, kids, old women
Here in Pittsburgh I think somberly about Tree of Life.
This was perfect. If there's one moment from Esther that has to be in an adaptation it's That Line, and you worked it in perfectly. And Etta praying at the synagogue....oh, man. Right in the feels, as they say. Right in the feels.