“Don’t ask.”

So that’s how it was. The Jews were into God for a lot. It was the old protection racket. Take care of them in return for a price. And from the way Rabbi Wiseman was talking, He soaked them plenty. I got into a cab and made it over to Danny’s Billiards on Tenth Avenue. The manager was a slimy little guy I didn’t like.

“Chicago Phil here?”

“Who wants to know?”

I grabbed him by the lapels and took some skin at the same time.

“What, punk?”

“In the back,” he said, with a change of attitude.

Chicago Phil. Forger, bank robber, strong-arm man, and avowed atheist.

“The guy never existed, Kaiser. This is the straight dope. It’s a big hype. There’s no Mr. Big. It’s a syndicate. Mostly Sicilian. It’s international. But there is no actual head. Except maybe the Pope.”

“I want to meet the Pope.”

“It can be arranged,” he said, winking.

“Does the name Claire Rosensweig mean anything to you?”

“No.”

“Heather Butkiss?”

“Oh, wait a minute. Sure. She’s that peroxide job with the bazooms from Radcliffe.”

“Radcliffe? She told me Vassar.”

“Well, she’s lying. She’s a teacher at Radcliffe. She was mixed up with a philosopher for a while.”

“Pantheist?”

“No. Empiricist, as I remember. Bad guy. Completely rejected Hegel or any dialectical methodology.”

“One of those.”

“Yeah. He used to be a drummer with a jazz trio. Then he got hooked on Logical Positivism. When that didn’t work, he tried Pragmatism. Last I heard he stole a lot of money to take a course in Schopenhauer at Columbia. The mob would like to find him-or get their hands on his textbooks so they can resell them.”

“Thanks, Phil.”

“Take it from me, Kaiser. There’s no one out there. It’s a void. I couldn’t pass all those bad checks or screw society the way I do if for one second I was able to recognize any authentic sense of Being. The universe is strictly phenomenological. Nothing’s eternal. It’s all meaningless.”

“Who won the fifth at Aqueduct?”

“Santa Baby.”

I had a beer at O’Rourke’s and tried to add it all up, but it made no sense at all. Socrates was a suicide- or so they said. Christ was murdered. Nietzsche went nuts. If there was someone out there, He sure as hell didn’t want anybody to know it. And why was Claire Rosensweig lying about Vassar? Could Descartes have been right? Was the universe dualistic? Or did Kant hit it on the head when he postulated the existence of God on moral grounds?

That night I had dinner with Claire. Ten minutes after the check came, we were in the sack and, brother, you can have your Western thought. She went through the kind of gymnastics that would have won first prize in the Tia Juana Olympics. After, she lay on the pillow next to me, her long blond hair sprawling. Our naked bodies still intertwined. I was smoking and staring at the ceiling.

“Claire, what if Kierkegaard’s right?”

“You mean?”

“If you can never really know. Only have faith.”

“That’s absurd.”

“Don’t be so rational.”

“Nobody’s being rational, Kaiser.” She lit a cigarette. “Just don’t get ontological. Not now. I couldn’t bear it if you were ontological with me.”

She was upset. I leaned over and kissed her, and the phone rang. She got it.

“It’s for you.”

The voice on the other end was Sergeant Reed of Homicide.

“You still looking for God?”

“Yeah.”

“An all-powerful Being? Great Oneness, Creator of the Universe? First Cause of All Things?”

“That’s right.”

“Somebody with that description just showed up at the morgue. You better get down here right away.”

It was Him all right, and from the looks of Him it was a professional job.

“He was dead when they brought Him in.”

“Where’d you find Him?”

“A warehouse on Delancey Street.”

“Any clues?”

“It’s the work of an existentialist. We’re sure of that.”

“How can you tell?”

“Haphazard way how it was done. Doesn’t seem to be any system followed. Impulse.”

“A crime of passion?”

“You got it. Which means you’re a suspect, Kaiser.”

“Why me?”

“Everybody down at headquarters knows how you feel about Jaspers.”

“That doesn’t make me a killer.”

“Not yet, but you’re a suspect.”

Outside on the street I sucked air into my lungs and tried to clear my head. I took a cab over to Newark and got out and walked a block to Giordino’s Italian Restaurant. There, at a back table, was His Holiness. It was the Pope, all right. Sitting with two guys I had seen in half a dozen police line-ups.

“Sit down,” he said, looking up from his fettucine. He held out a ring. I gave him my toothiest smile, but didn’t kiss it. It bothered him and I was glad. Point for me.

“Would you like some fettucine?”

“No thanks, Holiness. But you go ahead.”

“Nothing? Not even a salad?”

“I just ate.”

“Suit yourself, but they make a great Roquefort dressing here. Not like at the Vatican, where you can’t get a decent meal.”

“I’ll come right to the point, Pontiff. I’m looking for God.”

“You came to the right person.”

“Then He does exist?” They all found this very amusing and laughed. The hood next to me said, “Oh, that’s funny. Bright boy wants to know if He exists.”

I shifted my chair to get comfortable and brought the leg down on his little toe. “Sorry.” But he was steaming.

“Sure He exists, Lupowitz, but I’m the only one that communicates with him. He speaks only through me.”

“Why you, pal?”

“Because I got the red suit.”

“This get-up?”

“Don’t knock it. Every morning I rise, put on this red suit, and suddenly I’m a big cheese. It’s all in the suit. I mean, face it, if I went around in slacks and a sports jacket, I couldn’t get arrested religion-wise.”

“Then it’s a hype. There’s no God.”

“I don’t know. But what’s the difference? The money’s good.”

“You ever worry the laundry won’t get your red suit back on time and you’ll be like the rest of us?”

“I use the special one-day service. I figure it’s worth the extra few cents to be safe.”

“Name Claire Rosensweig mean anything to you?”

“Sure. She’s in the science department at Bryn Mawr.”

“Science, you say? Thanks.”

“For what?”

“The answer, Pontiff.” I grabbed a cab and shot over the George Washington Bridge. On the way I stopped at my office and did some fast checking. Driving to Claire’s apartment, I put the pieces together, and for the first time they fit. When I got there she was in a diaphanous peignoir and something seemed to be troubling her.

“God is dead. The police were here. They’re looking for you. They think an existentialist did it.”

“No, sugar. It was you.”

“What? Don’t make jokes, Kaiser.”

“It was you that did it.”

“What are you saying?”

“You, baby. Not Heather Butkiss or Claire Rosensweig, but Doctor Ellen Shepherd.”

“How did you know my name?”

“Professor of physics at Bryn Mawr. The youngest one ever to head a department there. At the midwinter Hop you get stuck on a jazz musician who’s heavily into philosophy. He’s married, but that doesn’t stop you. A couple of nights in the hay and it feels like love. But it doesn’t work out because something comes between you. God. Y’see, sugar, he believed, or wanted to, but you, with your pretty little scientific mind, had to have absolute certainty.”

“No, Kaiser, I swear.”

“So you pretend to study philosophy because that gives you a chance to eliminate certain obstacles. You get rid of Socrates easy enough, but Descartes takes over, so you use Spinoza to get rid of Descartes, but when Kant doesn’t come through you have to get rid of him too.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“You made mincemeat out of Leibnitz, but that wasn’t good enough for you because you knew if anybody believed Pascal you were dead, so he had to be gotten rid of too, but that’s where you made your mistake because you trusted Martin Buber. Except, sugar, he was soft. He believed in God, so you had to get rid of God yourself.”