by M. H. Baylis
‘So it was a complicated job?’
‘Not really.’ Tim opened the folder and gave it to Rex. ‘Most of it was straightforward ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ stuff.’
Rex looked at the pages in front of him. They seemed to be copies of some old census or register, written in a tiny, sloping, old-fashioned hand.
‘He had you tracing his family?’
‘He got in touch initially because he wanted to know about people who’d been suspected of involvement with a Latvian terrorist group between 1905 and 1909 or so. I said I could help him. But as I say, there just wasn’t anything. The records weren’t there. So I got back to him about a month or so later and told him and he said, all right, something different then – tell me about this woman.’ He tapped the pages in the file. ‘Rosa Brandt. She was from a very well-off Jewish family in Riga. More of a dynasty, really. All the men were important rabbis, married to the daughters of other important rabbis, stretching back hundreds of years. Kovacs wanted me to find out what happened to her.’
‘Did he say why?’
‘Dunno. A relative maybe? It wasn’t very interesting.’
‘I’m guessing she married an important rabbi, and had lots of little important rabbis?’
‘Well, that was the only odd bit. She married a grocer…’ He rummaged through the folder. ‘Immanuel Feigenbaum. They emigrated to Whitechapel in London in January 1911.’
‘So for some reason, instead of being married off to an illustrious rabbi, she married a grocer and moved.’
‘Yup. They had at least one kid…’ he shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I sent him all the records but they didn’t seem very interesting. I got the impression he thought that, too, because that was when he started trying to talk the price down. As you know.’
‘I know your response to it.’
Tim blinked. ‘Look. I’m really ashamed of what I wrote. But you don’t expect your old tutor to skank you, do you?’
‘I wanted to ask you about that. How come he knew you already, but you hooked up on that anarchist forum?’
Tim reddened. ‘He didn’t remember me. I doubt he’d have approached me if he had.’
‘You didn’t get on?’
‘He tutored me for two years, before he retired. Made my life an absolute misery. Lots of people’s lives. Honestly, a tutorial with him was like, I don’t know, being interviewed by the Stasi or something. He was really demanding, mega-critical… And nasty with it. Shouty. He’d had all these heart attacks, so when you were getting it in the neck, you were always thinking was he going to pop his clogs. Hoping, I’m afraid, quite a lot of the time.’
‘I guess you weren’t fond of him then.’
‘More like, no but yeah,’ Tim said. ‘I mean – he made me into a historian. If I’d had someone softer, I might not be here doing research. I mean, I’m dyslexic, so lots of people just assume I’m thick and don’t bother with me. He wasn’t like that. He kept on at me, all the time. So I do respect him, in a way. Respected him. I kept wanting to tell him, you know, when we were messaging over the research, like, do you know who I am? That kid you used rip to shreds – do you know where he is now? I kind of liked him not knowing, though.’
He caught a hint of something in Tim’s eyes then – pride, and also a kind of steeliness. Something that came, perhaps, from being the tubby boy in the tiny village school, Tim who was teased for reading slowly. He was angry. But no killer.
‘And you really have no idea why he wanted to know about this Brandt woman?’
‘No idea. As I say, I think he just lost interest. When I told him I’d found the shop he didn’t even acknowledge it.’
‘The shop?’
‘The Feigenbaums sort of disappeared off the record for a while. That’s normal – there were shiploads arriving into the East End every day. After I’d tracked them to Whitechapel it took me quite a long time to find what happened next. A few months of enquiries anyway – all over the summer. Kovacs seemed to be getting impatient at first, like he really wanted to know. Then I guess he lost interest. When I told him what I’d finally found out – must have been September, I think – he didn’t reply for about two weeks, and then he started trying to talk the price down. That’s when we stated slagging each other off on Black Flag.’
‘And what did you find out?’ Rex asked, struggling to sound patient.
‘Feigenbaum was dirt poor. But somehow, maybe because of his wife’s family or something like that, he managed to buy a grocer’s shop. In Stamford Hill. I tracked it down. It’s still there.’
* * *
Rex sipped a can of Coke as he walked back down Langerhans Road. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d gone into Get-It-In or any of the other comparable shops in the locality and not emerged with a can of Polish lager. But he’d come off the train feeling strangely trembly, and somewhere through the fog of codeine and pain and hangover, he sensed his body telling him it wanted something very specific.
Some people’s bodies were always telling them things. His wife had regularly claimed hers told her it needed salted peanuts. For the first time Rex believed that might have been true. His body had definitely wanted sugar. And the minute he provided it, it felt better.
He went round the back of Terry’s house to peer in through the basement window. He was about to shout a cheery greeting, then saw that Lawrence was on his own, picking up sheaves of paper scattered all over the floor. Rex climbed in through the window and asked what had happened.
‘Terry had a bit of a…’ Lawrence said. ‘Well, I don’t know quite how to put it.’
Rex surveyed the scene. Kovacs’ carefully labelled document boxes had been up-ended or thrown across the room. The floor was covered in notes, some of them typed, many scribbled on strange triangles of brown greaseproof paper. A wooden chair lay smashed in the corner.
‘I think my youngest would call it a total thermonuclear meltdown,’ Lawrence said, placing another sheaf of recovered notelets on the table.
‘Where is he now?’
‘Upstairs. The catalyst was that – thing on the wall over there.’ He motioned to the hook that had skewered Rex when he’d been there with Kovacs’ son. ‘He kept walking into it and jabbing himself in the back, and in the end, he just… sort of lost it.’
‘It’s had me before now,’ Rex said, going over and touching the needlessly sharp, malevolent point.
‘Me too,’ Lawrence said. ‘And judging by that patch on the floor, it’s got someone really badly at some point.’
Rex looked down. It was true. In amongst the papers, there was a rusty brown blood-stain in the shape of Cyprus. He wondered how long it had been there.
‘I don’t blame him. It must have been horrible for him all these years, knowing you’re sitting on this time-bomb, just waiting for something else to stop working.’
Rex frowned. ‘Terry already knew he had M.S.?’
‘He’s had it for over a decade. It’s the relapse-remission kind, apparently, but I doubt that was much consolation when his leg stopped working in the cell.’
‘It’s not my leg,’ said Terry’s voice from the top of the stairs. ‘It’s these bastard shooting pains up my back and neck.’ He picked his way slowly down the stairs. Rex went across to help but Terry waved him away. ‘Fuck off,’ he said, but gently, as he came into the room.
‘Sorry,’ he said to Lawrence. ‘I wish you hadn’t seen that.’
Lawrence acknowledged this with a brief, vague gesture then went back to tidying up the room. Rex felt an urge to do the same thing, but then thought that would only make Terry feel even more awkward.
‘Did you manage to find anything useful before you did your impression of a cyclone?’
Terry smiled faintly. ‘We did, actually. Don’t know what it means, but…’
Lawrence straightened up again putting a few more papers into the lidless box.
‘The… storm didn’t hit this one. He seems to have been trying to find someone.’
‘Let me guess. A family called Feigenbaum, who came to Stamford Hill in 1911?’
Lawrence and Terry exchanged a puzzled look. ‘No, actually,’ Lawrence replied. He pushed the box over to Rex. There were electoral roll searches, photocopies of birth certificates and wedding licenses, press cuttings, correspondence. But he knew what Lawrence meant him to see. A page cut from an old edition of their own newspaper. A picture of a boy, gap-toothed, cheerful. Micah Walther.
* * *
On Sunday mornings, much of North London had a hangover. Or if it didn’t have a hangover, it was pretending to have one, by not getting out of bed, or looking slightly unwell, or doing everything at a snail’s pace. The one proud exception to this rule seemed to be Stamford Hill, whose bright-eyed, well-rested residents had stepped straight through the sacred curtains of the Sabbath into their full working week. There was a long, excitable queue outside the baker’s. At the street corners, hat brims bowed and raised in conversation. In the covered shopping arcade, a gang of coffee-skinned Yemeni Jews unpacked dates and avocados from crates filled with straw.
Even at ‘Vegetables’ there seemed to be some business going on: an old, stooped, bird-like lady was filling a tartan shopping trolley with spinach while a boy in an embossed apron went through a long list with Yitzie Schild at the counter. When Rex walked through the door the customers seemed to conclude their business in a hurry, and left.
Yitzie gazed open-mouthed at him across the counter. Rex could hear a clock ticking and the rasp of the big man’s breath. Clearly he wasn’t going to speak first.
‘Does the name Feigenbaum mean anything to you, Mr Schild?
Yitzie adjusted his skullcap and blinked. There was a long pause, while Rex perused the long, dirt-filled crack tracing the shape of a river across the tiled wall behind. ‘Fig tree,’ Yitzie said finally.
A cute answer. But then Rex had suspected for some time that Yitzie wasn’t as spaced-out as he looked. ‘Was it your mother’s name, by any chance?’
‘Her name was Schild.’ Rex made a face, but the man went on. ‘I am not playing a trick with you. She had the same name as my father before she married. And after.’ He shrugged. ‘It can happen.’
‘So…’
‘Feigenbaum was my wife’s name,’ he blurted out. ‘Rescha’s name.’
So it was Rescha’s family who had come from Latvia to this shop. Rosa Brandt, daughter of a distinguished line of grand rabbis, had ended up married to a man called Feigenbaum in a poky Stamford Hill grocer’s. Was that also the kind of thing that could happen? Or was it unusual enough to arouse the interest of a historian like Dr Kovacs?
Rex looked into the man’s pale, watery eyes. ‘Did Dr Kovacs ask a lot of questions about her family?’
He moved the skullcap to one side of his head. ‘Some.’
‘Did you like him?’
‘He came into the shop every morning. Early, every morning, just as we opened. Bought some fruit, some cookies. And he talked to me. So I talked to him.’
‘Every morning since when? A long time?’
The skullcap moved back, high up on the crown of Yitzie’s head. ‘Not such. A year, something like that. I met him before that at the Healthy Heart Clinic,’ he added, confirming what Rescha had said. ‘He was learning Yiddish. He wanted to practice. So we talked. Just this and that. About my shop. My wife.’
‘And Rescha’s family?’
‘Sometimes, some little things he wanted to know. Rescha said he asks too many questions, he doesn’t like us, he’s just studying us. I said if that was true, how come he gave me his keys to look out for his house when he went away?’
‘Where did he go?’
The skullcap went to the other side of Yitzie’s head. ‘Liverpool. About a month ago.’ Yitzie patted his breast pocket slowly and proudly. ‘Before that, Riga. Australia, America… A very great traveller,’ he said, as if somehow he shared in the glory of Dr Kovacs’ trips abroad. ‘He asked me to make sure the heating went on in his house. And sometimes, I went when he was there’.
‘To talk Yiddish?’
‘To talk Yiddish, and to fix things. I know how a lot of machines work. You see?’
Rex did see. Or thought he saw. The realisation that Kovacs’ attention had passed for friendship in Yitzie’s eyes made him feel immeasurably sad. In front of him was someone so lonely that they regarded switching Dr Kovacs’ heating on as a kind of an honour. But what had Kovacs wanted from him? Just Yiddish practice? More information on Rescha? Or something else? Rex remembered the boy’s photograph in Kovacs’ box file.
‘Did he ever mention Micah Walther?’
Yitzie looked surprised by the question. ‘No. Why would he?’
‘Did you ever see a black man at Dr Kovacs’ house?’ Rex went on, ignoring the man’s question.
Yitzie’s eyes widened. ‘Once or twice. One time, I fixed the record player and he was arriving as I was leaving. And he called once when George was away. Rang the doorbell, and when I answered the door, he said the record player was good now. Then he just walked away.’
‘The record player was good now,’ Rex repeated, thinking aloud. ‘Do you mend other things for people?’
Yitzie said nothing.
‘What about the man at the tish? The man who gave you a bag?’
The skullcap moved again, orbiting Yitzie’s damp scalp like a planet around a sun.
‘Okay, have it your way,’ Rex said, moving to the door. ‘I won’t pester you any more, Yitzie. I’ll just make one phone call.’
He hadn’t specified ‘to the police’, or ‘to the council’ or ‘to the tax-man’, because he didn’t know which, if any of them, would be remotely interested in Yitzie and his bags. The significant thing was Yitzie’s reaction. The big man barrelled around the counter so fast Rex almost thought he was going to be thumped. Instead, Yitzie turned the shop sign round, locked the door and pointed, panting slightly, towards a strip curtain at the back.
‘Come.’
Rex followed his large rear-end up a short, dingy flight of stairs, lined with wooden vegetable crates and egg-boxes. At the top was a landing, also dimly lit. Its yellowing dado walls were adorned with tracts and solitary Hebrew words etched and burned and stitched into pieces of wood and tapestry. Wheezing, Yitzie led him through a door, and up a further wooden staircase into a little workshop in the roof. It had a sour reek that almost made his eyes water. It reminded Rex of his mother polishing horse-brasses at the local pub.
‘Give your ring,’ Yitzie grunted, motioning towards Rex’s hand. Not entirely coincidentally, Rex was wearing his wedding ring that day, pricked into observance by another call from the nuns. A little taken aback, he pulled it obediently off his finger. Yitzie rolled it round and peered at it.
‘A Chester assay mark. 1909. From your family?’
‘My wife and I bought our rings second hand.’ He watched as Yitzie padded over to the workbench with the ring. ‘What are you doing with it?’
‘See.’
Rex watched as Yitzie dropped his wedding ring into an aluminium bowl that was, via a Heath Robinson arrangement of crocodile clips and wires, connected to a power-supply. Whistling through his teeth, Yitzie added scoops of a fine-grained powder to the bowl, followed by a glug of clear fluid from a canister, and finally what was unmistakeably a lacing of maple syrup.
‘Is this a joke?’
Ignoring him, Yitzie stirred the mixture with plastic tongs and switched the power supply on. It buzzed loudly, and he twiddled with a dial until the sound went away. A smell rose up, another one Rex remembered from long ago: hot metal and grease, the whiff of train-sets.
‘I clean things,’ Yitzie said, as a timer ticked away. ‘In here, I have everything for cleaning gold and silver, diamonds, rubies…’ He ran a proprietorial hand around the shelves. The place was like an alchemist’s workshop. Butter of Antimony. Karo Syrup. NH3. ‘The man you saw was giving me these. Wanted me to make them good for his wife’
s 50th birthday.’
He pointed to a rack hung with an assortment of necklaces and bracelets.
‘We are not so different, you see. There are men who love their wives.’
Surprised by the comment, Rex looked directly at him and their eyes met. Yitzie blushed. The timer pinged off, and with obvious relief Yitzie fetched Rex’s ring out of the pot and laid it on a wad of white cotton wool. To Rex’s eyes it didn’t look any different.
‘So if this is all you do, why did you run away when I saw you at the tish?’
‘I worked at a jeweller’s until I got sick. So I tried to set up…’ He paused for breath. Yitzie wasn’t mentally slow, Rex realised, just not a well man. ‘I tried to set up my own workshop here, but the Council said no. Too much of dangerous chemicals. No license.’
‘So you did it anyway.’
‘I am very careful,’ Yitzie replied. ‘I got so many allergies these days. Most things set me off. But these materials here… They don’t do anything to me.’ He sprayed something onto the ring, wrapped it in the wad of cotton wool and scrunched it up in a massive fist for a few seconds before handing it delicately to Rex like a sweetmeat. The ring was very bright now, brighter even than when he’d first bought it with Sybille. It felt like putting on a different ring.
‘It’s how I knew Yaakov Bettelheim. And Toyve Walther – Micah’s father. We all worked together in this business.’
‘In Hatton Garden?’
Yitzie shook his head. ‘Yaakov went to work there at the end but before it was a place in Homerton. That’s where we were – me, Yaakov Bettelheim, Toyve Walther.’
Rex remembered the red-faced man at the tish, screaming at the young Rebbe. Being held by Yitzie. And the file in Kovacs’ basement.
‘Why was Toyve so upset at the tish?’
Yitzie paused, visibly thinking. ‘Angry over his boy.’
‘Angry with Simmy Dordoff?’
‘Just – angry. Angry because his boy is gone. It is hard to lose a child.’ The big man fiddled with his skullcap. ‘I told him when Rescha served him in the morning, don’t go to the tish. It won’t do you any good.’