Legends by Robert Littell Page B

would they abandon the relative safety of their vehicles. Depending on which street you were on, in some cases which sidewalk, different mafias ruled. On the streets south of Eastern Parkway off Nostrand Avenue, the Lubavitchers, solemn men in black suits and black hats, busied themselves reading the Torah in neighborhood shuls and obeying its 613 commandments while they waited for the Messiah, who was expected to turn up any day now; by the weekend at the very latest. Because the end of the world was nigh, Lubavitchers were enthusiastic about mortgages, the longer the better; but they hesitated buying anything they couldn’t immediately consume, they didn’t get involved in fights they couldn’t finish before darkness fell. One block farther down President, on Rogers Avenue, the Lubavitchers gave way to African-Americans crowded into tenements; ghetto blasters with the volume turned up drowned out the occasional shrieks of addicts who needed a hit but didn’t have the cash to pay for it. The West Indian ghetto, with its tidy streets and social clubs and block parties that had young people strolling in the gutter until dawn, began a few blocks farther south, on Empire
    Boulevard. Where the denizens of the different ghettos rubbed shoulders, tensions ran high. Everyone understood it only needed a spark to set off a conflagration.
    Martin, an outsider in all of the Crown Heights ghettos, knew enough to keep his head down and avoid looking anyone in the eye when he walked the streets. The sun was up and toasting the crispness out of the air as he made his way down Schenectady, past a large “Rent Strike” sign whitewashed onto a storefront window, past several broken shopping carts with small placards saying they were the property of Throckmorton’s Minimarket on Kingston Avenue, kindly return. His leg with the pinched nerve was starting to ache as he turned onto President, a wide residential street with trees and two-story homes on either side. He stepped off the sidewalk to make way for three Lubavitch women, one more anemic than the other, all of them wearing long skirts and kerchiefs over their shaven heads. They didn’t so much as glance in his direction but went on prattling to each other in a language Martin couldn’t identify. As he neared Kingston, he came abreast of an ambulance with a Jewish Star of David painted on the door, parked in front of a brownstone that had been converted into a synagogue; two pimply young men, with embroidered skull caps on their heads and long sideburns curling down to their jaws, sat in the front seats listening to Bob Dylan on the tape deck. . Everything from toy guns that spark To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark It’s easy to see without looking too far That not much is really sacred.
    Once across Kingston Avenue, Martin began to search for the house numbers. Two thirds of the way down the block, he found the big house that Estelle Kastner had described; a narrow flagstone walkway led to the side door with the light burning over it. He continued past the house without stopping and turned right on Brooklyn Avenue, and then right again on Union Street, all the while watching the streets for the telltale signs that he was being followed, either by someone on foot or in a car. He felt a certain nostalgia for the good old days in the boondocks when he would have had a sweeper or two trailing after him to make sure he was clean, and tidy up behind him if he wasn’t. Nowadays, he was obliged to make do with rudimentary tradecraft precautions. Streets and alleyways and intersections, the lobbies of buildings with their banks of elevators, the toilets in the backs of restaurants and the windows in the backs of the toilets that looked out on alleyways he took it all in as if his life might one day depend on remembering what he saw.
    Halfway down Union he climbed the front steps of a brownstone and stabbed at the bell. An old man in an undershirt flung open an upstairs window