LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER FIFTEEN

      Friday, 4.10pm, Crown Heights, Brooklyn His first reaction was confusion. He got off the subway at Sterling Street and walked straight into what looked to him like a black neighbourhood: Ebony, Vibe and Black Hair on sale at the newsstand, murals on every other wall, knots of young black men standing around in baggy combat clothes.

      But once he crossed New York Avenue, he felt his pulse quicken with a reporter's sense that he was getting nearer to the story. Signs appeared in Hebrew. Some of the words were written in English characters, though their meaning was no less opaque. Chazak V'Ematz! promised one, enigmatically. Another word appeared several times, on bumper stickers, on fly posters, even on notices collared to lampposts, like flyers seeking lost cats. Will soon learned to recognize the word, though he had no idea how to pronounce it: Moshiach.

      Next he passed a black man the size of a large refrigerator, with a little girl in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Will's confusion returned. He was now on Empire Boulevard, noticing Indian restaurants and vans decked out in the national flag of Trinidad and Tobago. Was he in the Hassidic neighbourhood or wasn't he?

      He turned off, into residential streets. The houses were large brownstones or made of a firm, red brick, as if once, in a long-ago Brooklyn, they had been positively posh. Each had a few steps up to the front door, which sat alongside a porch. In other American homes, Will guessed, these porches might feature a swing chair, perhaps a few lanterns, certainly a pumpkin at Hallowe'en and very often, the Stars and Stripes. In Crown Heights they looked mainly unused, though even here Will spotted that word again – Moshiach – on window stickers, and once on a yellow flag with the image of a crown, which Will took to be some kind of local symbol.

      Directly above each porch, one storey up, was a veranda, complete with wooden balustrade. Will thought of Beth, held behind one of these front doors: his legs suddenly tensed with the urge to run up the stairs of each house and knock down door after door, until he had found his wife.

      Coming towards him was a group of teenage girls in long skirts, pushing strollers. Behind them were perhaps a dozen, maybe more, children. Will could not tell if these girls were older sisters or exceptionally young mothers. They looked like no women he had ever seen before, certainly not in New York. They seemed to be from a different era, the 1950s perhaps or the reign of Queen Victoria. No flesh was exposed, the sleeves of their white, prim blouses covered their arms; their skirts fell to their ankles. And their hair: the older women seemed to wear it in a preternaturally neat bob, one that barely moved in the wind.

      Will did not look too hard; he did not want anyone to think he was staring. Besides, he no longer needed confirmation. This was Hassidic Crown Heights, all right. As he walked, he honed his cover story. He would say he was a writer for New York magazine doing a piece for its new ‘Slice of the Apple’ slot, in which outsiders wrote dispatches from different segments of New York's wonderfully diverse community, blah, blah. He would pose as the safari-suit explorer, sent to note down the curious ways of the natives.

      And this was certainly an alien landscape. Will searched desperately for something that might give him a handle – an office perhaps, where he might discover who ran this place. Maybe he could explain what had happened and they would help him. He just needed a foothold, something in this strange place he at least understood.