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witness.

CHAPTER 13
    T he dybbuk’s Saturday-morning bar mitzvah struck Freddie as an untranslated page of the Bible. He hardly understood a word being said in the synagogue. So this was the ancient language Moses had spoken. It sounded heavy with Old Testament cobwebs. Mercifully, the ceremony took less than an hour.
    A minyan of bearded Jews hung aroundhim while he stood at the open scroll of the Torah. The dybbuk began to read his appointed text. Freddie moved his lips so that he might appear to be talking. For the first time, he felt like one of his own wooden dummies.
    Freddie had bought a dark suit for the occasion. Now he’d put the yarmulke on his head, and a prayer shawl over his shoulders. He looked neither left nor right. He was an imposter. He looked down.
    He felt profoundly disappointed for the dybbuk. Where were his parents? His sisters? His little brother? His aunts and uncles and cousins to make it a celebration? Freddie was his only family and friend.
    Finally the dybbuk gave a sort of curtain speech. It was brief.
    â€œNow that I am a man, I will conduct myself as a mensch,” he said to the congregation of strangers. “While a child I saw enough blood to overflow the Red Sea. I saw Germans set Jewish beards like yours on fire, and laugh. I hid in sewers. Now I will wish peaceful lives for you all. But not for the Nazis. Not for SS Colonel Gerhard Junker-Strupp. It will be his turn to hide in the sewers.”
    Him again, Freddie thought. The child killer. Avrom Amos’s own murderer.
    The dybbuk fell silent. The ceremony was finished. Freddie didn’t have to be told. He could head for the heavy synagogue doors.
    â€œMazel tov!” came a happy fireworks of voices.
    â€œWhat does that shout mean?” Freddie asked, once they were out on the sidewalk.
    â€œCongratulations.”
    â€œThen, mazel tov , now that you are officially a man. With that unfinished business wrapped up, I suppose you’ll pack and head for the clouds, or wherever you came from.”
    â€œI’m not finished. Now I can deal with the SS child butcher.”
    Freddie whistled for a taxi. “You can’t be serious. That German officer was probably killed in the war.”
    â€œNot him.”
    â€œWhy did you wait so long to start searching?”
    â€œDo you think I’ve been twiddling my thumbs since the war? There’s no school for dybbuks, you know, to teach us shlemiels all the tricks. It took me a year to track him to Warsaw and another year plus to find his footprints in Berlin. That’s when SS Officer Junker-Strupp disappeared.”
    â€œVanished?”
    â€œSlipped out of Germany, like other war criminals.”
    â€œTo South America?”
    â€œI think he’s still in Europe. How cunning he was to get himself tattooed! On his forearm.”
    Said Freddie, “Not numbers!”
    â€œYes, numbers. Like a concentration-camp survivor. Who would look for him among Jews?”
    â€œNazi cunning,” Freddie muttered.
    â€œBut I’m cunning, too.”
    â€œI have noticed.”
    â€œI tracked down the German corporal who tattooed him. I got the number. I will track down the counterfeit Jew with J117722 on his right wrist.”
    â€œAnd then what?”
    â€œI will kill him,” said the dybbuk.
    The taxi blew its horn at a child racing across the street. The dybbuk didn’t mutter another word. But once they swung aroundthe Arc de Triomphe, Freddie said, “That’s crazy.”
    â€œDid I say it wasn’t?”
    â€œHow do you think you can kill him? You haven’t enough substance to lift a knife or pull a trigger.”
    â€œTrue. But there is a way.”
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œYou can pull the trigger for me.”
    Freddie leaned forward and told the taxi driver to stop, surprising a flutter of pigeons. “This is where I get out,” Freddie said, and threw open the door.
    â€œWait.