The Untervelt Private Investigators

A Mystical Mystery

Editor’s Note: An excerpt from Suzanne Reisman’s novel-on-submission about a private investigation agency specializing in cases involving the Jewish supernatural. —David Michael Slater

Andrea Klein walked into my office like all potential clients do—unsteady gait, wringing hands, eyes darting everywhere and nowhere. In other words, she was nervous as fuck. And why shouldn’t she be? No one with a normal request came to talk to Underworld Private Investigators, Inc., the detective agency I ran with my grandparents.

I rose from my soft leather chair. It was a pretentious piece of furniture, but once we had enough business to warrant a dedicated office space in the rent-controlled apartment we shared on the Upper West Side of New York, Zeyde had insisted I needed it.

“It gives you the gravity,” he said in his Yiddish-accented English. “The clients what are coming will respect you more right away.”

“You mean gravitas,” I said.

He nodded. “This too.”

Personally, I preferred underwhelming people at first. If they didn’t expect much to begin with, it was harder to disappoint them if I failed to resolve what the regular world would regard as their unusual cases. Which, incidentally, I had yet to do, but no one could maintain a one hundred percent success rate forever. Maybe this client would be my first unsolved case.

“I’m Yael Tsoyberer,” I told the woman and gestured to a dark green upholstered chair in front of my oversized mahogany desk. (Another pretentious touch à la Zeyde: “It has the gravity, not like that Ickea drek what you like so much.”) In the early days of the business, I offered to shake hands, but due to the types of cases we specialized in, most of our clients were ultra-Orthodox men who found us through Bubbe’s and Zeyde’s (sadly dwindling) network of Holocaust survivors. These men were forbidden to touch strange women, so after a few awkward incidents, I abandoned that nicety.

“Thanks,” the woman whispered as she heaved herself into the creaky chair. She smiled, although her lips trembled.

“What can I do for you, Ms. Klein?” I asked. She wasn’t my usual religious client. Her light brown hair was natural and uncovered, although she only sported an engagement ring, which could explain the lack of wig or kerchief. She wore jeans and a puffy coat, which she shrugged off, revealing a large build. Her green eyes were troubled.

“My zeyde told me you help people in circumstances like mine,” she said in a hoarse voice. Tears formed but didn’t spill out. “My fiancé has been missing for six weeks. The police are useless, and the other private detective agency I hired won’t follow the—” she paused to take a deep breath before finishing the thought—“the evidence they uncovered.”

“Would you like some water?” I asked.

“Yes, please.”

Like a crazy woman, Bubbe burst into the room with a glass of water. I hated when she hovered outside the office, waiting for her moment, but it happened every time. Between the furniture selections and the intrusiveness, it was hard running a detective agency with my grandparents, but I needed their expertise. “Drink, drink, bubbeleh,” she crooned, patting Ms. Klein’s shoulder.

Ms. Klein’s hand shook as she raised the glass to her lightly painted pink lips.

“If the other agency can’t help you,” I asked, leaning forward, “why do you think Underworld Private Investigators can?”

Ms. Klein closed her eyes. “I feel insane saying this, but I don’t know what else to do. Based on a witness account collected by the other private detective, my zeyde is sure that my fiancé was kidnapped by a demon. Possibly a sireni. ”

“In English, you would say ‘mermaid,’” Zeyde muttered as he limped into the narrow room, which was now getting crowded.

“But the witness,” Ms. Klein told him, “they said she walked on land after she jumped out of the Hudson River. And she didn’t sing at all. So, maybe not a mermaid.” Tears streamed down her face, streaking her makeup. She opened her gold Gucci purse, pulled out a tissue, and dabbed her eyes. “Please help me. I just want my Brian back.”

“Why don’t you start from the beginning?” I suggested.

Long story short, Andrea Klein and Brian Schwartz lived together in a condo in the area of the Upper West Side along the Hudson River developed by Donald Trump, also known (in my mind, anyway) as Trumpbergville. They’d been engaged for a year, and the wedding was set for June. They were both corporate lawyers who observed Shabbat, Andrea more strictly than Brian. On a chilly Friday six weeks ago, just before the sun set and the Sabbath began, Brian decided to end a stressful work week with a run in the park along the river. He dressed in running tights, shorts, a long-sleeved shirt, a fleece hat, and gloves. He shoved his phone, a photo ID, and a credit card into a pocket (“just in case,” he told her), something he usually didn’t do right before Shabbat. He kissed Andrea’s cheek and said he’d be back in thirty minutes. She hadn’t seen him since.

Given no sign of foul play, the police figured he got cold feet about the wedding and vamoosed. The detective agency Andrea hired rustled up a witness, though, a homeless man who said he saw a fat tall woman with light brown hair and glowing green eyes emerge from the Hudson, snatch a jogger, and drag him back into the river. His description vaguely resembled Andrea, who, the PI assumed, he saw searching for her fiancé later that night. He concluded that the guy was probably out of his mind on drugs.

“Did you have anything to do with Brian’s disappearance?” I asked in a bored tone. Because I had to ask.

“No!” she cried, eyes flashing and hands balled into fists. “I love him!”

“It’s okay,” Bubbe said, stroking her arm like she was settling a riled-up puppy. “Your zeyde was right to send you here. We will get him back from the river demon.”

I pulled a lock of grey hair behind my ear and quoted her our prices. When she agreed, I slipped on my reading glasses, drew up a contract, and handed her the printout. She skimmed the papers, signed them, and gave me her credit card.

“We’ll be in touch, Ms. Klein,” I said.

“Please, call me Andrea,” she replied.

Thus the Case of the Kidnapped Fiancé officially opened. I still marvel at how run-of-the-mill our first meeting was. Obviously, I couldn’t have known it would all go wrong.

“It could to be a sireni,” Zeyde said after Andrea departed. We’d moved from the cramped office into the living room. Near the entry to the kitchen at one end of the room, the dining room table was covered with a lace tablecloth protected by a clear plastic cover. A forty-inch flat-screen TV stood on a small glass stand across from the gold brocade couch. The rest of the walls were lined with cheap wood bookcases sagging under the weight of hundreds of books of every size, shape, and color. Framed black-and-white family photos were crammed into various spaces on the shelves around the books. Bubbe and Zeyde standing solemnly beside my then thirteen-year-old dad at his bar mitzvah; Zeyde in a powder blue tux with a ruffled white shirt standing beside Bubbe in a red-and-white-checked-gown; my dad in a tux that matched Zeyde’s and thick black mutton chops smiling; and my bespectacled middle-aged parents beaming behind me as I read the Torah at my bat mitzvah. Enough weak March sunlight poured in through the north-facing windows for me to see dust motes dancing in the air. I sprawled out on the couch next to Bubbe.

“It’s not what a sireni,” she said. “Those don’t to exist.”

Zeyde went to one of the overflowing bookshelves and pulled out a large tome with faded gold Hebrew letters on the spine. Before the war, he had been a Talmud chacham, a scholar of Jewish law who studied Torah all day with the support of the community. He married when he was seventeen. His wife was barely sixteen then, and a mother of three before she was twenty. When the war broke out in Poland, Zeyde was yanked from his yeshiva and conscripted into the army. He was captured almost immediately by the Soviets on the Eastern Front and sent to a gulag. Years later, when he returned to Warsaw to find his family, he heard that his wife and children were shot to death one sunny afternoon by a laughing Gestapo agent as they walked down Nowolipki Street in the ghetto. After that, Zeyde stopped believing in God, but he couldn’t erase his years of learning.

He flipped frantically through pages of Hebrew, but stopped abruptly and stabbed his long finger on a yellowed page. “Aha!” he shouted, then translated as he read: “Rashi’s commentary on the Talmud says, ‘The dolfinin reproduce like men. What are dolfinin? Rav Yehudah said, ‘The people of the sea.’ Rabbi Avraham ben Shmuel Gedalyah explains, ‘This is the person of the sea, which has its upper half in the form of a woman and sings constantly.’”

Bubbe rolled her beady brown eyes. “Everyone knows that Rashi, bless his memory, was confused. He was talking the dolphins, but what did they understand of the dolphins in his day? He didn’t know this animal exists, so he has what an explanation for a mammal in the sea. We shouldn’t waste time on the fantasies. It was a demon double, come to take Andrea’s fiancé to the demon kingdom for her own groom.”

Unlike Zeyde, Bubbe had not grown up steeped in religious observance. Her parents were secular scholars of Yiddish culture. They traveled throughout Warsaw’s neighborhoods and the Polish countryside collecting Jewish folktales and songs to be studied and preserved at the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut in Vilnius. When the Nazis established the Warsaw ghetto, her parents sent her to live in the forest and fight with the partisans. They stayed behind to help preserve Jewish life and culture however they could. She stopped hearing from them through the underground in late July of 1942, not long after the first deportation to Treblinka extermination camp occurred. Before the war, she dated many young men, vowing never to settle down. But having all of one’s family and most friends murdered can make a person lonely. As her survivor friends said at their wedding: Hitler iz geven zeyer shadkhn—Hitler was your matchmaker.

“You are insulting Rashi?” Zeyde snapped, his face reddening.

“You are denying the facts in front of the face?” Bubbe snapped back.

“Bubbe is probably right,” I interjected before the yelling began. “If the woman from the river was walking on two legs and not singing, she’s probably a demon.” Zeyde gave me a dirty look, but Bubbe beamed, revealing her gold-capped front tooth. “But,” I added, “we need to investigate every option before we know for sure. You both know that. We’ll look for the homeless man first thing tomorrow.”

Now Bubbe glared at me and Zeyde smiled, showing gleaming white dentures. I sighed. This case was going to kill me. Although to be fair, I thought that of every case. Yet here I still lived.

Suzanne Reisman spent her formative years in a comfortable house across from the Edens Expressway in the Chicago suburbs but now lives in Manhattan with her husband, her teddy bear, and the ghost of her 13 lb. pet rabbit. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the New School and won the 2010 New School Chapbook contest for nonfiction. She is the author of four novel manuscripts, two of which were longlisted for the Bath Novel Award, Caledonia Novel Award, and Blue Pencil Agency First Novel Prize. She is delighted to be represented by Maria Napolitano at KT Literary

What five tiny delights lift your spirits and make you happy?

• Running on a sunny 45-degree morning in NYC's Central Park and seeing my clouds of breath form in the air.

• Savoring the sauces and spices of Ottolenghi takeaway in London.

• Curling up on my purple sofa and reading.

• Hearing my nephew (my sister's kid) hang out with my nieces (my brother-in-law's kids) laughing together.

• Seeing rainbows in Volcanoes National Park.

What five tiny JEWISH delights lift your spirits and make you happy?

• Learning new Jewish folklore from around the world.

• Lighting my grandparents' (may their memory be a blessing) Chanukiah to bring light into the darkness.

• Eating freshly made sweet gefilte fish.

• Wear my tallis embroidered in blue with flowers and birds and the names of our foremothers.

• Placing an orange and a golem on the Seder plate at Pesach.