Nachum Sparks, the yeshivish private eye

Chapter 1

A Shuk Surprise

“So did you let her win?” Nachum asked, by way of greeting.
He was holding an esrog up to the sun. In his other hand, he held a magnifying glass.
“I beg your pardon,” I said with perfect innocence.
“Your date,” he repeated, not looking up from the green grooves of the esrog. “Did you let her win the game?”
“What do you mean?” I said, though I knew exactly what he meant.
“It’s nice to see you varying things a bit, Rosen. Let’s see, your last three dates were hotel lobbies.” He turned the esrog around. “Granted, there was that exciting JClay date in late August, but you haven’t gone bowling in at least four months.”
“I’m glad to see you’re keeping such close tabs on my dating life, Sparks,” I replied. “Very healthy behavior in a roommate. Very normal dynamic between us, wouldn’t you say?” Nachum smiled and brought the esrog closer to his nose so his eyes were obscured, but I could guess the mischief I’d see in them.
My date that morning had been a dud. (I sincerely hope I am either engaged or married by this time next year, but if not, important note to self: Do not agree to go on a date the morning after Yom Kippur.) Perhaps it was the post-fast weakness, but conversation got off to an awkward start when we met in front of the bowling alley; it limped along as we switched into bowling shoes; it all but died after my date accidentally dropped her bowling ball on my toe toward the end of our first game, and try as I might, Hatzalah paramedic that I am notwithstanding, there was little I could do to resuscitate it.
“What gave it away?” I wondered aloud, checking to see if a wayward receipt was poking out of my pocket. “How did you work your magic this time?”
“Not magic, Rosen. Deduction. Facts.”
“Which facts?”
“Fact number one: You left the apartment this morning with your laces tied in a surgeon’s knot, yet you arrived here now with your laces in a bunny knot. I infer from this that you have taken your shoes off since I have last seen you, and that you have put them back on more hastily than when you first put them on this morning, likely because you were also working hard to make conversation as you tied them the second time.”
I hoped Nachum couldn’t see the warmth in my cheeks.
“Fact number two,” he continued, “your right hand. Your dominant hand. I observe that there are red rings in the folds of the skin on three — and only three — of the fingers: the thumb, middle, and ring fingers. Now, tell me, Rosen, which item does a hand hold to produce markings on those three fingers and those fingers alone? Could it be anything but a bowling ball? Finally, there is the fact of you limping off the bus, which I can tell was caused by a fresh injury to your toe from a round, heavy object. You are too adept a bowler to drop a ball, so I can infer that whatever amazing qualities your date possesses, bowling is not one of them. I also know you are too much of a mensch to beat her by a landslide, so the only question that remains is whether you won by a small, dignified margin or let her win completely.”
“When you describe it that way, Nachum,” I exclaimed, “it all sounds practically obvious.”
“Alas, all is obvious when you have the right facts in front of you.”
“But I never see the facts in the first place.”
“That’s because you only see, Rosen, while I observe. And I observe that this gorgeous esrog is absolutely passul.” He put it back into its case with a sigh. “Onward.”
“Rosen,” Nachum suddenly whispered to me from behind a big box of lulavim, “Come here.”
I moved closer. “Turn around,” he commanded in hushed tones. “Do you see that man standing there by the aravos?”
“Yes.”
“Stop staring. Just look casually.”
“Okay, I’m looking at him casually.”
“Anything strange that you notice? I’ve been here for over an hour and every time I move to a new table, he moves closer. He’s following us.”
I wished I could dismiss Nachum as being delusional, but as listeners of our podcast know all too well, these are exactly the sort of happenings that have become part of my life ever since I moved into the dirah with Nachum Sparks.
“He’s undercover,” Nachum said.
“Come on, Nachum. What makes you say so? He looks like a nice Mercaz Harav guy. He’s got the peyos, the kippah srugah, the socks with sandals—”
“And white tzitzis?”
“Yeah, so?”
“Shouldn’t he be wearing techeiles?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he has a different mesorah. That doesn’t make him an undercover agent.”
“But he’s also been standing there for ten minutes looking at his packaged aravos with a jeweler’s loupe. No one checks aravos like that. Don’t even try to tell me there’s a mesorah for it.”
“Maybe he thinks they’re hadasim.”
Nachum gave me a look that basically said “that just might be the stupidest thing I ever heard in my life.”
“Rosen, what do the schools in America do to you guys?” he chided. “It’s like they teach your brains how not to think. Anyway, I’m sure we’re being followed, and the only question is why and by whom. Let’s split up to get him off of our backs. Run through back streets and in and out of random stores and meet me in seven minutes in Uri’s Pizza.”
It’s a good thing we still hadn’t found our daled minim yet because I’m sure my pitom would not have survived the next seven minutes of mad-dash, zig-zag running through pre-Succos Geula. The pain in my toe was excruciating.
Panting and out of breath, I arrived at our designated destination. A minute later Nachum staggered in, too.
“I hope we lost him,” Nachum said between gasps for air, hunched over with his hands on his hips.
“That was crazy.”
“Yeah,” said Nachum, still breathing heavily.
“Let’s get iced coffee,” I suggested.
We got on line behind a group of yeshivah guys. Suddenly, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around and there was the man with the sandals and white tzitzis.
He put a black envelope in my hand and dashed out of the store.
“It’s him! Let’s chase after him,” Nachum yelled.
“We’ll lose our spot in line,” I pointed out sensibly, but Nachum was off. I debated whether to follow him or keep our spot, but before I could decide, he was back. “It’s no use. He’s gone,” Nachum declared. “Let’s see the letter.”
Nachum and I took our seats at a table, and Nachum held up the letter to the light. “Two sets of fingerprints, so our man in sandals is just the delivery man. His boss is a man of power, precision, with a penchant for old-fashioned drama, judging by the weight of the envelope and the way it’s been sealed with hot wax.” Nachum rubbed his finger across the envelope; the sparkle in his eyes — absent for so many months — was finally back. “I’d guess there’s a clipping inside. The lightness of the paper would suggest it’s from one of those neighborhood ad circulars.”
I watched as he carefully opened the envelope and withdrew its contents.
“What is it?” I asked. It looked like… a Meuhedet ad? From the backside, I could see the outline of a syringe and the familiar orange font of our local kupat cholim.
Nachum looked down at the paper; suddenly, his face had the crestfallen look of a child whose scoop of ice cream just slid from the cone to the floor.
He turned it over so I could read the ad’s slogan: Al tikach et hasikun — kach et hachisun.” (Translation: Don’t take the risk; take the vaccine.) Beneath it, in an elegant script, were the words, handwritten in ink — “Don’t forget to take your flu shot. Please and thank you.”
“Myron,” Nachum said, shaking his head from side to side in disbelief. “I don’t even know what to say anymore.”
Myron is Nachum’s older brother. I think the best way to describe him would be to say that he makes Nachum seem perfectly normal.
“Why?” Nachum cried, crumpling the ad and then ripping it to shreds. “Why can’t he just send a text reminder? Why does everything always have to be a production?” Our table was covered in white confetti.
“Like, it’s cool you work for the Mossad. Do you have to show off by sending an undercover agent every time you have something to say to me? There’s something called a phone. There’s something called email. And it’s October! Who gets flu shots this early?” Nachum squished the paper shreds into a ball.
Nachum and Myron, now in their late twenties, were teenagers when their father, an Oxford professor, brought their family of four from England to Israel for a sabbatical year. Their parents were killed in a terrorist attack, leaving the two brothers orphaned. Though Myron followed his father into the dati-leumi community, Nachum had found his place in the chareidi world. Both brothers, though, had made a name for themselves as premier crime-solvers, which I always suspected might have something to do with the crime that had destroyed their childhood.
“So much for this case,” Nachum said, tossing the paper ball into the garbage angrily. “And it seemed so promising.”
I guess you could say it isn’t easy being Jerusalem’s most famous detective.
Word of Nachum’s crime-solving skills began to spread about two years ago when he caught the thief who stole the Admor of Yerushalayim’s legendary Kiddush cup, known to bring extraordinary brachah to all who drink from it. But when I started podcasting about his exploits last year, his popularity exploded. It was getting to the point that I could take my seat on a random Egged bus only to hear my own voice playing from the earpods of my seatmate. You would think all of this would bring Nachum deep satisfaction, but, alas, you would be wrong.
“The Case of the Speckled Hand,” whose solution ingeniously hinged on Nachum’s discovery of a rare snake poison at the scene of the crime, bought him about a week of contentment. (Lasting far longer was the snake we had adopted for research purposes for the case, which, much to my chagrin, was still living with us in our dirah.) And it was only several days after his dazzling resolution of a complicated art theft in a Har Nof apartment building (“The Case of the Eleventh Hour,” which I have recorded but still need to upload) that he complained to me about the need for a new case to crack.
In truth, the cases were coming left and right to our inbox; that was not the problem. Rather, it was the nature of the cases. First, there was the email about “The Case of the Missing Bifocals,” which we later discovered was sent by our upstairs neighbor and landlady Mrs. Sarah Pessin. Next, the cheder boy wrote in about the “Case of the Stolen Homework.” (Hint: he never did it in the first place.) Far, far worse was the ordeal involving “The Case of the Elusive Man,” which I will detail, in brief, below.
I myself had urged Nachum to take up the case after we received an email containing a very compelling narrative from a family in Ramat Beit Shemesh whose house was being haunted by a dancing chassan in a kittel and white tie. The chassan’s shadow could be discerned every night from all windows in their home — but never in the glare of sunlight. The story had all the trappings of a Sherlock Holmes tale; I knew Nachum wouldn’t be able to resist it. So I schlepped him all the way to Ramat Beit Shemesh by bus. We arrived, and the father asked me to wait in the study while he ushered Nachum into an inner room, in which I was able to see a young woman sitting at the table, her arms folded, behind a plate of cookies.
Well, to make a terrible story short, the email had been a ruse to get Nachum out on a date with his daughter, who, it turns out, was an avid fan of our podcast and was convinced that Nachum was her bashert. The father apologized profusely for his prevarication, explaining that the email about the “case of the elusive man” was not completely false — it was, in fact, a metaphor for his daughter’s dating life as of late. He also wanted us to know that he was actually a very nice and normal guy — it was just that desperation over his daughter’s shidduchim had driven him to these extreme measures.
“You’ll understand things better when you have a daughter in shidduchim one day,” he told me, as we stood awkwardly in his study while Nachum and his daughter conversed in the other room.
Here I’ll pause to relay the heroism of my friend: He did not storm out of the house as I might have done, but thanked the girl for her interest, explained that he was on a dating break (Editor’s note: He has been on break for several years now), and proceeded to ask her what she was looking for so that he could try to think of someone else for her.
When he returned to our dirah that day, he promptly sent the father several shayach résumés. (Nachum’s encyclopedic knowledge of Jewish family trees, keen understanding of human nature, and exposure to all sorts of Jews through his crime-solving has made him quite the successful shadchan; he jokes that he will do it full-time in his old age, when declining faculties force him to retire from his detective work.)
All this — the contents of their conversation, the sent résumés — I learned only later because as soon as we walked out of that unhaunted house in Ramat Beit Shemesh, Nachum began to give me the silent treatment. I apologized for wasting his time and getting him into that awkward mess, but my apologies did nothing; he would not so much as utter a word to me in response. Only after several days of stony silence did I succeed in convincing my roommate that for someone who had completed Shas three times and solved upward of 100 criminal cases as part of his own detective agency, he was acting with the maturity of a six-year-old.
Now, thankfully, we were again on speaking terms, not that Nachum was exactly a joy to converse with as of late: My friend was a man who thrived on a stimulating case. It was to his mind what food is to the body; without a case toward which he could direct his prodigious intellect, he became sluggish — a marked and, frankly, alarming departure from his typical self.
His “fogs,” as I would call them, followed a very familiar pattern: First, he would snooze his neitz alarm — that was my first tip-off. Then when he came home from the later minyan, he would sit — Indian-style — in the tattered armchair in our living room and drink an entire kumkum’s worth of Costa coffee while listening to mussar vaadim on shviras hamiddos.
Elul came and brought with it a trickle of promising cases, but none that piqued Nachum’s interest.
“There are cases,” he said looking glumly over the emails I had printed out from prospective clients, “and then there are cases with character.”
Little did we know that a case with more character than we ever could have imagined was about to unfold.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1081)