Monday the Rabbi Took Off by Harry Kemelman Page A

side lane and suddenly found himself in a residential district of old stone houses, one or two stories high, evidently occupied largely by Chassidim. The men were beginning to come home from their shops or their study halls to prepare for the Sabbath. In open courtyards children were playing, the little boys with heads shaved except for the ringlets that hung down the sides of their faces. They all wore skullcaps, which they were hard put not to lose as they ran or kicked at a soccer ball. The little girls played by themselves to one side. games like jump rope and hopscotch. Every now and then there was the drumming of the engine of a motorcycle, curiously out of keeping with the general atmosphere, and a dark, swarthy, truculent young man, clean-shaven, but with long hair in the mod style and dressed in flashy bell-bottomed trousers supported low on the hips by a wide fancy belt, would roar by and disappear around a corner.
    The rabbi made his way through the district, uncertain of his direction but loath to ask any of the women sitting on the steps of their houses, not knowing if they would consider it improper for a strange man to address them. But finally he came out to a wide street with high modern apartment houses that looked familiar. Sure enough, at the next corner he saw by the sign that he was on Jaffa Road, which he knew ultimately led to King George Street. He was tired now and grateful when he spotted a small cafe where he could sit for a while over a cup of coffee.
    It was a pleasantly restful place, at least at that hour, with a rack of newspapers and magazines in French and German, as well as in Hebrew. Only a couple of the tiny tables were occupied, and these by individuals engrossed in their newspapers. He gave his order and then selected from the rack a copy of the afternoon paper.
    The lead story concerned the latest terrorist outrage, the explosion of a bomb in an apartment house in the Rehavia section of Jerusalem the night before. A man had been killed, a professor of agronomy at the university. Only because his wife and two children had spent the night with relatives in Haifa had they been spared his fate. The paper evidently had not had time to inquire into the victim’s background too deeply but gave a short resume of his life, the kind that is kept on file in an administration office, together with a picture taken from the same source.
    On an inside page of the paper they ran a map of the area. When the rabbi saw it. he sat up with a start. The incident had occurred only one street over from Victory Street. That must have been what had awakened him in the middle of the night – the noise of the explosion!
    A government authority admitted that it was probably the work of the CAT group – Committee for Arab Triumph – which had exploded a bomb in the marketplace in Jaffa a couple of weeks before, killing two people. In that case. CAT had called the police a few minutes prior to the explosion. On another occasion, their call had come early enough, or their device had not worked as planned, so that the police had been able to find the bomb and disarm it. This time there had been no warning call, however.
    A photograph showed the device used, a small, oblong box of black plastic that looked like a pocket radio. Indeed, on one side was a dial which, when pulled out. actuated the mechanism, exploding the charge approximately an hour later. A notice in bold type accompanied the article, explaining that anyone who came across such a device could interrupt the action and prevent the explosion by depressing the plunger. Although this would not render it harmless, it could be reactivated by reversing the process and withdrawing the plunger again – it would make it safe enough to handle.
    Most of the paper was devoted to the story, and the rabbi read it all avidly. An Army demolition expert was quoted as disparaging the device. “It is not a very powerful bomb.” he said with the objectivity of the