“Very good,” said Nachum with a smile. “Now, Rosen, let’s fill you in on what you missed. As soon as you fell asleep, I told these two they had better sit down, that I knew what they were up to, and that if they explained some of the finer points of this case to me, I would spare them the trouble of having to search the apartment for the menorah they came here to retrieve.”

I followed Nachum’s eyes and saw he was gazing into the glowing flames. “So,” he said at last to the thinner technician, “tell me what you put inside our empty menorah cups when you two came this morning to ostensibly check our building’s heating system?”

The thinner technician mumbled something that sounded, to my untrained ear, like the combination of a magical spell and the word Benadryl.

“Ah!” Nachum gave a pleased sort of sigh. “I should have guessed as much. That’s the technical term, Rosen, but, colloquially, it’s called ‘devil’s foot root’ — a very rare and very potent plant found in the Negev, whose sleep-inducing properties are activated only when the plant is burned. Remember last bein hazmanim, Rosen, when I had those Bedouins teach me the art of footprint-tracing in desert sand? My guide wanted to sell me a piece of that plant in exchange for my earpods. I declined. Anyway, a small amount of it, as we have all just observed, thanks to you, Rosen, will lull a person into a peaceful, painless nap. Too large an amount, and, well, let’s just say you wouldn’t be around to podcast about it.”

Nachum handed me a notepad and a pen. “Speaking of, shall we start from the beginning, for my colleague’s sake? I’m sure he’ll want to write this all up.”

Yosef gave an enthusiastic nod of his curly black head. Chaim just looked on meekly.

“So it all begins,” Nachum said, “with Zecharya’s menorahs, specifically the Maoz Tzur collection.”

“That’s right,” Yosef took up the thread. “I was on probation at the time, spending most of my day in Zecharya’s workshop and doing community service when he mentioned an idea for his last big project: four menorot, one for each of the four exiles, inscribed with a word from its stanza in Maoz Tzur. The design of each menorah would also be inspired by its stanza: stones and water for the ‘Even bimtzulah’ of the Egyptian exile; a grapevine motif for the ‘Yein ra’al’ of the Babylonian exile; Haman’s cypress tree from the Persian exile; and—”

“Shoshanim for the Greek exile,” Nachum cut in. “It was when I saw that word inscribed on this menorah” — he wheeled himself over to the bookshelves in the corner and pulled down Myron’s boxed menorah from behind a stack of seforim — “that I knew you two would be treating us to a visit. Tell us more about the Maoz Tzur project, Yosef.”

“Well, I had seen Zecharya get into his projects before,” Yosef said, “but this — this was something new. Night and day, night and day — the Maoz Tzur collection consumed him. ‘Maybe you should get some rest? Maybe you should stop to eat something?’ I begged him. I was starting to worry about his health. He wasn’t so strong anymore, you understand. Chaim was worried, too.” The other technician jerked his head ever so slightly in acknowledgment. “But Zecharya could be very stubborn. ‘Yosef,’ he said to me, ‘I need to finish this, and when it’s done, I want you to put it on public display on Chanukah. Pirsuma nisa. All four together — I do not want the collection broken up. I do not want it to be sold.’ This coming from the man who never wanted any attention for his work, who hid from the public eye.”

“How remarkable,” interjected Nachum, “that he spoke already then as if he would not be around.”

Yosef waved away the remark with a big, hairy arm. “The man knew he was going to pass away when he finished. I have no doubt about it. He called the project his last one. The fact that he wanted it on display is enough of a proof. By the time he was working on the fourth menorah — he always talked to himself or prayed while he worked — I could hear him speaking to Miriam… his wife, you understand, who had passed away two years before. And he kept telling her he would see her soon. The man knew, you understand?”

At Nachum’s nod, Yosef continued: “The day before he died, he finally finished it. ‘Yosef,’ he calls me over. I was so happy to finally see him sitting on that bench of his. ‘There’s a fifth menorah, and it’s just for you.’ ” Nachum and I watched as Yosef withdrew the smallest menorah I had ever seen from his pocket. It was nicked and chipped, but I could still make out the word Hayeshuah. “‘Remember,’ Zecharya says to me, ‘you have a Jewish soul. You’re a holy spark. Remember that. Don’t ever forget.’ ” Yosef showed the menorah to Nachum, handling it like a breathing little chick. “Do you know what this menorah means to me? Do you know where this menorah has been?” Yosef shook the menorah over his head like kapparos on Erev Yom Kippur. “It’s been in dark alleyways! It’s been in prison! And when I finally got out, it was in my pocket when I met my wife. Zecharya never gave up on me, you understand.” His voice cracked a little. “And not only me. I’m just one of the many Zecharya saved.”

I could see my roommate dabbing at the corner of his eye with his shirt cuff. [Editor’s note: I don’t want to ruin his image or anything, but beneath Nachum’s outer persona as a stiff-lipped, litvishe detective, the man is a total softie.]

Yosef put the menorah back in his pocket. “But then Benny, Zecharya’s agent, insisted that he was going to sell the menorahs,” Yosef continued. “It’s bad enough that he steals the rest of Zecharya’s workshop, but I’ve made a promise to a dying man about the Maoz Tzur collection. So I do two things. First, I go in when Benny’s out of the shop and use a trick I learned in my criminal days — I put a little tracking chip on the bottom of the base of each of the four menorahs, so I can know where they end up. Second, I ask Chaim for help. At first, he turns me down. He says he doesn’t want to get involved in bad things. ‘But this isn’t a bad thing,’ I say. ‘It’s kibbud av.’ Finally, he agrees, and that’s when we came up with the idea of stealing the menorahs back to display them as Zecharya wanted. Of course, I can pick a lock with my eyes closed — no problem — but how are we going to walk into a Jerusalem apartment or shul and just walk out with someone’s menorah?”

“So you decided to use the very item you needed to steal as an asset,” Nachum said, sounding impressed. “Aryeh, kindly jot down the following: When faced with a serial crime, a good detective looks first for the common denominators between crime scenes. The common denominator here, besides the sleepiness of the victims, was the presence of a burning menorah. That’s when I hit on the idea that the substance burning was what was lulling the victims to sleep.”

Yosef was smiling broadly now.

“And then I asked myself how the oil in these menorahs could have been tampered with? What other common denominator existed between these three thefts?” Nachum paused here for dramatic effect. “The answer, of course, was the presence of someone who is both visible and invisible — the type of person whose visit garners only a footnote in a client’s retelling of his day. You’ll recall, Rosen, that Benny mentioned in passing that gas technicians came on Monday morning, the day of his theft. Isaac Coopersmith also noted that maintenance workers had come earlier in the day. And last Thursday, when I was looking out on the mirpesset and guiding you through Sruly’s Tipat Chalav appointment, I noticed a gas truck arrive at the Shtilerman’s shtibel. So it occurred to me that you two came before the theft in the guise of technicians and — somewhere between your smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee with milk, and pretending to actually do gas work — you surreptitiously slipped a couple of drops of Chaim’s carefully concocted devil-root solution into the menorah’s cups. Since the solution is clear, a few drops would not be easily noticed by the naked eye. When the menorahs’ owners filled their seemingly empty cups with oil and lit them, they could never have imagined that they were activating a powerful drug which would put them to sleep for exactly thirty minutes. That gave you two enough time to abscond with your coveted Karsh menorahs without causing your victims any harmful or persistent side effects.”

Yosef was looking positively gleeful now; Chaim looked like he was going to throw up on the table.

“The only glitch,” Nachum carried on, “was the location of the fourth menorah, which moved, exactly one week ago, from my brother Myron’s apartment in Arnona to our apartment by drone. I always knew Myron liked to collect valuable Judaica, and something as hard to obtain as a Karsh menorah would be especially attractive to him.”

“Yes,” affirmed Yosef, “we had to scramble to shift gears when my tracker showed that the menorah moved. The Shtilerman gas job we did on Thursday, since the heist was planned for the first night of Chanukah and we could fill the cups with the solution in advance. But the other jobs had to be done the day of the theft, or we would send people to sleep on the wrong night. When the menorah moved on the Thursday before Chanukah, we had to quickly schedule a maintenance call for your building. Thankfully, your landlady was very responsive, but the earliest slot she could give us was this morning. I had hoped we could pull off four consecutive thefts so we could display the menorahs for the maximum number of days, but Chaim assured me that his father would forgive us for being one day off.”

“And even before you had the menorahs in your possession,” my roommate added, “you anonymously sent personal pictures you had taken of them to the Jerusalem Post.”

“Right,” said Yosef, “because—”

“Because your motive was never the menorahs’ monetary value,” Nachum proclaimed. “Had that been the case, you would have done your best to make it as hard as possible for the stolen menorahs to be identified. But since you had the rather unique motive of pirsuma nisa, with the end goal being a display of the four menorahs together, all publicity was good publicity for you. Indeed, you sent the photos in at 9:02 a.m. this past Sunday, hours before the first theft, and that little detail — you’ll indulge my analogy here — was the singular little flame that illuminated the way through the darkness of this complicated case.” My hand raced furiously to commit those last lines to writing. “And now that you have all four,” Nachum wheeled himself over to Myron’s menorah and handed Yosef the box, “you can display them together this Chanukah. Your pictures in the Jerusalem Post have certainly drummed up interest. Though I often complain to Rosen that the quality of crime has gone precipitously down in recent years,” Nachum sighed, “you two have bucked the trend. Your thefts themselves accomplished as much as any advertising campaign would have. I commend you on a job well done and I suggest talking to Isaac about staging the exhibit at the Israel Museum.”

“What about Benny?” Yosef asked.

“What about him?” returned Nachum.

“Don’t you think he might try—?”

“To give you a hard time? He won’t,” Nachum said decisively. “I think one phone call from me explaining some of the potential legal consequences of his handling of Zecharya’s estate… and you can be sure that he won’t interfere. And as for replacing the menorahs you have stolen, something I’m sure you two have thought of” — here Chaim’s face was nodding far more energetically than Yosef’s — “I suggest you two ask Isaac to give the owners each a menorah from the Israel Museum’s existing collections, in exchange for so graciously agreeing to permanently loan their Karsh menorahs to the exhibit.

“Am I forgetting any other untied threads? No? Well, that settles things,” said Nachum, with the kind of satisfied dusting of his palms that other bochurim do when they’ve finished a good bowl of cholent.

“So that’s it?” Chaim cried out suddenly. “You won’t turn us in to the police? I never should have done it! It was a terrible mistake! It would kill my wife if my name was caught up in some sort of…. If I went to jail, my family would… please, please have mercy on us.” His head was in his hands, and his thin body shook from his deep sobs.

Nachum stemmed the tide of his outburst with a raised hand. “I have no intention of telling any of this to the police. I love Eliad dearly and I try to help him when I can, but to borrow the words of a well-known detective I admire, I am not retained by the police to supply their deficiencies. I will simply tell Eliad that the matter has been dealt with, and that I am gifting him and his family with tickets to the first-ever Zecharya Karsh exhibit at the Israel Museum this Chanukah.”

“We are indebted to you, Nachum,” said Yosef. “I’m sorry I dragged you into this, Chaim, and I’m glad to have repented from my old ways, but I confess that there’s a part of me that’s sad it’s all over. There’s something about pulling off a good crime… it has such a unique sort of…” he paused, grasping for the word.

“Thrill,” my roommate supplied empathetically. “But you’ll find it in other places, Yosef, if you look hard enough. I would suggest starting with a daf Gemara.”

Sunday, December 21st, the 7th day of Chanukah

S

unday was a momentous day, both because Nachum got his casts off in the morning and because we had plans to see the Maoz Tzur exhibit at the Israel Museum that afternoon. Advertisements for the Zecharya Karsh Maoz Tzur collection had sprouted up almost overnight all across the city, including on the cover of the Jerusalem Post, and it didn’t take long for tickets to get sold out: It seemed no one wanted to pass up the opportunity to glimpse the work of a genius who had worked so hard to hide from the public eye in his lifetime.

“Are you sure you don’t want to take your date here?” Nachum asked as we were getting ready to leave the dirah. “Isaac gave me an extra ticket for the Sunday slot, and I promise I’ll leave you two alone.”

“I’m sure,” I said mildly, but what I was thinking was that Nachum was dreaming if he thought I would go on a date with him in the room. (It was bad enough that he could deduce all of the details of my dates when he wasn’t actually there to observe the play-by-play.)

After the exhibit, we came home, lit the Zos Chanukah candles, and then followed the music upstairs to the Pessins’ apartment for our building Chanukah party.

The first thing I heard above the music when we walked through the door was the high-pitched screaming of one of the Gershonowitz girls.

“Zeh! Lo! Fair!” Her foot stomped on the floor with each word. I followed her accusatory finger to the middle of the room, where her older brother, Yehuda, was sitting Indian-style beside a giant mound of Chanukah gelt, a serenely triumphant look on his face. “It’s not my fault I keep spinning gimmels,” he was telling his mother with raised shoulders. “Nachum taught me how to.”

“Can’t we play something else?” another Gershonowitz girl demanded. “It’s not fun playing dreidel with Yehuda. He always wins.”

“But you’re supposed to do the dreidel activity until 8:45.” Mrs. Pessin was jabbing with a pen at a page in her floral notebook, the red of her face clashing with the pink of her glasses. “The balloon artist doesn’t come until 8:45. That’s the plan. That’s what we’re doing. You kids better figure out a way to play dreidel together nicely.”

“Uh-oh, Nachum, look what you did,” I said to my roommate, feeling rather smug. “Thanks to your quality chug instruction, you’ve ruined the programming for Mrs. Pessin’s Chanukah party.”

“I’ll be right back,” was all Nachum said with a look of fierce determination on his face as he limped his way out of the room. He returned carrying the box of Nachum Sparks Chanukah merchandise we had just received from an enterprising fan. (The “C-H-U-M” and “S-P-A-R” in his name had little lit candles over them and the items all read, “A Nachum Sparks Chanukah”).

Suddenly, in a loud, ringing voice, my roommate announced “Mishetofeis tofeis,” as he threw a pair of Nachum Sparks socks down on the floor. Immediately, there was a flurry of little people jumping over each other to try to retrieve them, the night’s dreidel drama apparently all but forgotten. (Editor’s Note: Mishetofeis is a particularly complex and civilized Israeli contact sport in which the object of the game is to push competitors out of the way to grab a thrown item.) I watched in awe as the kids tackled each other to become the proud owners of the socks, a onesie, two notepads, a hat, and several coloring books.

Leaving Nachum holding Sruly Gershonowitz in one arm and throwing a Nachum Sparks scarf down with the other, I went to pile my plate with latkes. When I returned, all of the merchandise had been distributed and, with Mrs. Pessin watching approvingly from behind the buffet, the kids were waiting patiently in a line in front of Nachum to have their items autographed. I noticed Sruly was now wearing a “Nachum Sparks Chanukah” beanie that made his tiny ears stick out like an elf.

“This is the best Chanukah party ever,” I heard one of Mrs. Pessin’s grandchildren say to the other.

“No one broke any bones playing?” I asked Nachum between bites of crispy, shredded potatoes.

“No, and it’s a Chanukah miracle,” my roommate replied, as he scribbled out his name on Kayla Gershonowitz’s coloring book. “Hand me a latke, will you?”

“Get one yourself,” I said. “You can walk now, remember?”

“Fine,” said Nachum. “I’ll get more for both of us. Remember, we have to fuel up for tonight’s all-nighter.”

Nachum stood up to go, but four-year-old Kayla Gershonowitz was still waiting by his feet.

“Can I help you?” Nachum asked.

The girl looked down at her shoes and mumbled something.

“What was that?”

“Can you?” — her voice was a barely perceptible squeak — “can you please also autograph this page for my best friend? Her name’s Bella.” From his nearly six feet of height, Nachum leaned down all the way to her eye level.

“There’s one important clue I’ll need from you first: Do you think she would want her name outside of the color-by-number flower or inside one of the petals?”

Inside one of the petals, as it turned out.

After Nachum finished playing celebrity, a role I could tell he quite enjoyed, I followed him to the buffet.

“There’s one part of this case I still don’t understand,” I said. “I don’t get why Myron sent you that menorah, Nachum. Was it just by chance that he gave it away right before it was about to be stolen?”

“One can never truly hope to understand the convoluted thought processes of my older brother. Maybe he knew about the planned heists, and thought I needed some stimulation, being stuck in the apartment all day? Maybe he wanted to kick the case my way so he knew it would be handled well? Either way, take it from someone who grew up with him: Always be on high alert around Myron, but especially” — he paused for emphasis — “when he seems to be doing something nice for you.”

I can’t say I made it through the entire all-nighter, but somehow, I managed to stay up by the light of Nachum’s giant bulbs for most of our chazarah of Seder Nashim. When I did drift off, I dreamed peacefully of those little dots of light sprinkled across the Jerusalem cityscape.

Tuesday arrived, and I couldn’t believe we were already packing up the menorahs to bring them down to the machsan. (Fortunately, I managed to convince Nachum that I should be the one to climb the ladder and put them away this time.)

“It will be a whole year before we get to see the Chanukah lights again,” I lamented to Nachum as I smoothed a piece of tape over the box labeled 670.

“That’s true, Rosen,” Nachum said, handing me another piece of tape. “But you heard Zecharya Karsh. Every Jewish neshamah is a holy spark. You might need to wait a year before you see the candles burn, but you can see the sparks shining bright any time you go out on the mirpesset and watch the holy residents of this beautiful city go about their day.”

The End

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1091)