The Tottenham Outrage

by M. H. Baylis

  ‘Brain food,’ Terry said, hobbling to the table with two thick sandwiches on a plate. ‘I’m tackling Mentioned Volumes 1 and 2 today.’

  ‘Mentioned?’

  Terry shuddered as a mouthful of the super-charged coffee went down. ‘As in all the people who got mentioned in the inquest. People who tried to stop the robbers and that.’

  At first Rex didn’t understand, then he realised Terry was talking about the Outrage. It was odd that he was suddenly so interested in it. ‘Did you know Kovacs had a little archive down there?’

  Terry shook his head. ‘The deeds said the basement’s communal. But when I realised he’d set up his own little office down there I left it alone. I knew he’d only kick off about it.’

  At that moment the front gate swung open and a squinting D.S. Brenard walked into the little courtyard that was Rex’s garden. The Welshman looked uncomfortable, even more so when he saw Terry.

  ‘Oh. Well. If you’re here, you’re here.’ He stood in the hallway, rubbing the back of his neck, then followed Rex into the living room, while Terry poured another coffee in the kitchen.

  ‘The Bettelheim inquest is tomorrow,’ Brenard said.

  ‘Ah.’ Rex said. ‘Thanks.’ There was a pause. ‘Was that what you came here to tell me?’

  ‘Erm. No. I caught up with Sam Greenhill,’ Brenard said. ‘He admits he’s been to Kovacs’ house. Not the day of the murder. In October. Got himself all fired up to confront his dad, but he says he rang the wrong bell, and then Terry came out, and he scarpered.’

  There was a silence, while Terry came in from the kitchen. Rex was struck by how ridiculous they looked, all standing up in the centre of a room, three guests at a very bleak party.

  ‘What are you muttering about?’ Terry asked.

  ‘Well…’ D.S. Brenard looked like he had toothache.

  ‘Do you remember someone calling round and scarpering five months ago? A kid? In the autumn? Looked a bit like George Kovacs?’

  Terry shrugged.

  ‘Are you disputing Greenhill’s statement?’ Brenard asked.

  ‘I’m not disputing it,’ Terry said. ‘I’m saying I don’t remember. There’s all sorts knock for us. Gippos with dishcloths. God squad. I don’t remember. Five months ago?’

  ‘He gave a pretty clear and consistent account, and his Oystercard does show him making the trip. October 9th. A Wednesday.’

  Terry shrugged. The date meant nothing to him.

  ‘And not making the trip any other time?’ Rex asked.

  ‘Not making the trip any other time.’

  ‘Well there you go,’ Terry said bitterly. ‘I must have done it. See you in court.’

  ‘He’s not making any admission of guilt,’ Rex added hastily. ‘He’s upset.’

  ‘I’ll speak for me fucking self,’ Terry snarled, limping into the kitchen.

  Rex showed Brenard out and walked back into the kitchen. Suddenly Terry’s face was close – close enough to smell the bacon and the coffee. ‘What are you, my fucking nursemaid?’ Rex could feel the heat of his friend’s sudden, terrifying rage.

  ‘Tel –’

  ‘My name’s not Tel!’ he roared, shoving him across the room. Rex skidded and fell to the floor. Terry charged out into the living room like a rampaging animal. On the floor, Rex realised he was genuinely afraid. He felt a surge of relief when Terry finally hobbled out of the house, an unzipped holdall flailing over his shoulder. His friend was gone. He hoped it wasn’t forever.

  * * *

  The Walther family lived close to Seven Sisters in a place called Sanchez Dwellings. It had the cramped, crazy look of the very earliest, philanthropic attempts at flat-building, with rows of tiny front doors opening onto walkways, and black-painted iron staircases criss-crossing the whole frontage like a child’s scribbles.

  Children were the most obvious feature of the place, too. Sanchez Dwellings seemed to be occupied entirely by Hasidim and even though it was a school day, it was crawling with children. Small boys with flying earlocks were belting up and down the metal staircases while their sisters played quieter, more co-operative games in the shabby grounds. It must be painful, Rex thought, for the Walthers to have lost a child and yet stay in a building that was teeming with them. Or perhaps it was a comfort.

  His phone rang as he was climbing the stairs to the third floor. A huddle of boys stopped playing marbles and stared.

  ‘What time will you be in?’

  It was Susan, her tone abrupt and urgent. ‘In time for conference,’ Rex said defensively. ‘I haven’t forgotten.’

  ‘That’s comforting,’ Susan said, and hung up. As Rex put his phone away, he realised the little boys were mimicking him, holding their fists against their ears. He was, he guessed, a complete alien in their midst.

  He’d rung ahead and asked if he could call in. Even so, he felt a little nervous as he knocked on the Walther family’s front door. Toyve seemed happy to see him, though, guiding him through a hallway packed with bikes and kids’ scooters to a messy, rather stuffy little living room that faced the back. There was no TV, but otherwise it seemed that a Hasidic household looked much like that of any other low-income family with a lot of kids. There were shoes and school-books everywhere, and the place smelled comfortably of fabric conditioner and frying.

  Toyve, the man of the house, was evidently preparing to leave for work, but he insisted that Rex sit down on the huge, sagging, wine-coloured sofa that dominated the room.

  ‘You will be the first guest to sit on it,’ he said, self-consciously.

  ‘You just bought it?’

  ‘A donation from Beit Chesed. It arrived this morning.’

  Toyve’s wife, a sturdy, almost Arab-looking girl appeared in the kitchen doorway. ‘It’s a bribe.’

  ‘From who?’

  ‘It’s too big,’ was all she’d add, before handing a fat, happy baby to her husband and going off to make tea.

  Toyve sat opposite Rex on a folding chair and jiggled the child on his knee as they waited for the tea. His red-stained face crumpled with pleasure every time the baby laughed. He looked very different from the raging bull Rex had seen at the tish.

  ‘I don’t want to upset you but I need to ask some questions about Micah.’

  Toyve nodded, glancing at a picture of the boy on the wall. ‘It’s okay,’ he said, in a high voice with a very faint Germanic accent. ‘We want to talk about him. It’s the silence that makes us angry. As you noticed.’

  ‘Is that all you were angry about?’

  ‘Some people are silent because they know nothing. Some people are silent because they know something. That’s what I am angry about. And anger is bitul Torah, Mr Tracey. It means, taking time away from the Law.’

  ‘What people are keeping silent? The Rebbe?’

  Toyve made a face. ‘You know what the Maggid of Voydislav said?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t,’ Rex said.

  Toyve smiled, revealing large, grey teeth. ‘When there is a weak King, then there is a strong Servant.’

  ‘Simmy Dordoff?’

  Toyve nodded as his wife came back in with the tea. She took the baby from her husband and stayed in the doorway.

  Rex sipped the tea, which came in a little glass with a handle. It was good: black and strong, with a thick slice of lemon in it. ‘So what does Dordoff know?’

  Toyve’s wife murmured something to him. In response, the man reached up and stroked her hand. For a moment, Rex might as well have been non-existent as the family gazed at one another, bound together by a very obvious, very deep kind of love. Rex looked away, but not because it embarrassed him. It hurt him.

  ‘A few months before Micah disappeared, they asked the boys to come forward to give some blood for the Rebbe. Just boys.’

  ‘A blood transfusion?’

  Toyve shook his head. ‘Not blood, I think. They wanted somebody to give…’ There was another short, whispered conference with his wife. ‘Bone marrow. Yes. A speci
al treatment in Antwerp – they thought it could make him well. Well, not make him well, but maybe… make him stay alive longer. It had to be an exact match, they said, but I don’t know what they were matching.’

  ‘So Micah gave blood?’

  ‘Micah gave his blood – just to be tested. And then a few weeks passed, and it was his fourteenth birthday. He was our eldest. Is our eldest.’ Toyve paused and smiled. ‘We gave him the Rashbam’s Commentary on the Bava Batra. Have you read that?’ He cleared his throat. ‘Then Dordoff came here to tell us – Micah’s blood was a match. I mean – I guess he had the right kind of… whatever it was. So they sent him for more tests.’

  ‘He went to Antwerp?’

  ‘No. First here. A private place – in St. Albans. But this wasn’t like giving blood. They were taking… taking small pieces of bone from inside his arms and his legs. Very painful. After he went two times, they said they wanted him to go to Antwerp, but Micah said he couldn’t do it any more. I tried to argue. I told him about the Ilui of Kotzk, you know, and the pain he endured to become a great Talmud scholar, but Micah…’

  ‘It was too much for him,’ Toyve’s wife suddenly interjected in a low, husky voice. ‘Have you got children?’

  Rex shook his head.

  ‘When you do, you’ll see. You can’t let them hurt. You would let yourself hurt. So we said, okay, you don’t have to go any more.’

  When you do. Because everyone in this woman’s world had kids. Except Rescha and Yitzie Schild.

  ‘So we told Dordoff that Micah wasn’t happy to go on,’ her husband said. ‘And he was quite….’

  ‘Angry?’ Rex knew he’d spoken out of turn, and instantly regretted it. It hadn’t unduly influenced Toyve Walther, though, because he just shook his head slightly.

  ‘Not angry. Annoyed. He kept following Micah – catching up with him after school, at the kollel where he was studying, at the shtib when he was praying, trying to persuade him. And then one day, that was it. Micah was gone.’ He cleared his throat.

  ‘And Dordoff wasn’t around when Micah went missing,’ added Toyve’s wife, her tone becoming more agitated. ‘He was in Antwerp. He even admits he was in Antwerp.’ Toyve reached up and patted her arm.

  ‘So you think…’ Rex prompted.

  ‘He knows something.’

  ‘But did the Rebbe have the treatment?’

  Toyve shrugged. ‘He’s still alive.’

  ‘So… you must…’ Rex stopped himself, remembering the sage words of his first editor. Victor Eastwood of the Lincoln Daily Despatch, with his hairy tweed jacket and his permanent smell of TCP. A small-town genius. Don’t tell people how they feel. Ask them. ‘How does that make you feel towards the Rebbe?’

  ‘Sometimes I wish him dead. Then I remember that that won’t bring Micah back. But it’s hard… You know, you are told to love your Rebbe, but… I’ve started to pray somewhere else now.’

  ‘Is that what the bribe is for?’ Rex asked, patting the sofa. ‘To stop you from leaving?’

  Toyve closed his eyes and gave a small, internal, mirthless chuckle – the gesture you make when someone is a long, long way from the truth. ‘Nobody is bribing us, Mr Tracey. Nobody.’

  Toyve’s wife abruptly handed the baby back in order to withdraw to the kitchen, and from the vigour with which pots suddenly began to be washed and put away, Rex guessed he’d upset this family enough. He still had questions, though.

  ‘Did you tell all this to George Kovacs?’

  Toyve frowned. ‘George…? Ah. Dr Kovacs. How do you know about that?’

  Rex didn’t answer, but how noticed Mrs Walther had returned to the doorway.

  ‘He came to ask us some questions. But not about Micah. About Anshel Walther.’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘An ancestor of mine. I didn’t know about this, but Dr Kovacs said that he got a reward for trying to stop some robbers a hundred years ago.’

  Rex caught the sigh before it left him. Kovacs hadn’t been interested in Micah. Just the family. For his book. ‘The Tottenham Outrage.’

  ‘Yes. He didn’t collect it. The reward, I mean. Kovacs was very interested to know why. I couldn’t really help except to tell some stories from my grandmother.’

  ‘They used to say that Anshel was a naughty boy,’ said Mrs Walther, with a smile. ‘Went to prison a few times. So maybe he didn’t pick up his reward because he was doing something wicked.’

  ‘Or he only stopped the robbery because he was somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be.’

  Rex nodded. ‘Did Kovacs say why he was so interested?’

  Toyve shrugged. ‘He was writing a book, wasn’t he?’

  Rex stood up, thanked them for the tea, tickled the baby and left.

  As he was picking his way through the children at the bottom of the staircase, Toyve Walther caught up with him.

  ‘I am late for to work,’ he said. ‘Also, because you started to talk about Dr Kovacs, I forgot to say something. After a while, when everybody stopped looking for Micah, Dordoff began to ask Eytan.’

  ‘Who’s Eytan?’

  ‘Eytan Bettelheim, Yaakov and Chaya’s son. He was the same age as Micah. They wanted him to go for the tests, same as Micah did. He went for some. Yaakov, his father, told me the tests gave him an infection in the bone. I told them about the pressure Dordoff had put on our boy and… I worry maybe I made them too afraid, and that’s why they were going to leave.’

  Rex thanked him. He asked if he could ask one more question. Toyve said he didn’t mind.

  ‘Have you ever thought about leaving? Coming to…’ He didn’t know how to put it. ‘My world?’

  The birth-marked man looked upwards and sniffed the air. ‘If we left, we would have to move away, and then if Micah came back, how would he find us? His room is here. His clothes…’ The dignified man rubbed his nose, evidently trying to ward off tears. ‘We have to believe that he is alive.’ He looked at Rex. ‘Is that a good… what would you call it… a good… line for your newspaper?’

  ‘I’m glad you told me,’ Rex said. ‘But I won’t be putting it in any newspapers.’

  Walther nodded. ‘I didn’t think you were going to ask me that question. I thought you were going to ask me the question all the goyim and the freie yidn ask me. How can you still believe in God?’

  ‘And what do you say to them?’

  ‘You don’t remember what Rabbi Reuven of Vitebsk said, when the soldiers mocked him after the death of his wife?’

  Rex shook his head. Toyve seemed to live in a world of scripture and mediaeval rabbis, and to assume everyone else did, too. Then again, perhaps everyone else did, around here.

  ‘He said: God gave me sorrows. He also gave me shoulders.’

  As Rex left the grounds of Sanchez House he saw a dirty white van slowly driving away. It had a design of a paint-pot and brush on the side and some Hebrew letters – Rex recognised the ornate crown-like letters again. He also recognised, leaning out of the passenger side, and watching him impassively, the figure of Simmy Dordoff.

  * * *

  A day she stays at her aunt’s in Highgate. A day and a night and back on Friday morning. ‘Oh my auntie’s got sick now,’ she says. ‘And she doesn’t want me to catch it. So I shall just have to stay back here with you, Mr Smith.’

  I can smell lies like only a liar can, like the old sailors knew when the wind was about to change. Long before I joined the Leesma, I had a nose for them. The over-long explanation. The too-fervent assurance. The detail too many. They have a smell. It is the smell of an onion gone bad in a forgotten corner of a ship’s galley where the rats piss and the cook flicks his toenail clippings.

  Remember that lisping old dame of an orderly in the infirmary, where I’d lain, soaked in my piss and sweat for weeks while the polio twisted me up like a love-letter in a flame. ‘I’ve seen the mark of the covenant in your flesh, sir. Couldn’t help but see it, sir. But don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone.’

 
My cock he wouldn’t. Two days out of my sick-bed, the Under-Lieutenant has me in on my sticks. Squid, was what he reminded me of, with his long head and his tiny spectacles and his tentacle hair. ‘You’ll be aware, Midshipman Kuznetz, that persons of the Hebrew faith are barred from service in the Holy and Imperial Russian Navy.’ Service ended. Pension denied. You can keep your boots. Except one of them doesn’t fit you now, cripple.

  I didn’t mind the girl lying so much. Nice to have someone in the house anyway. Friday was my free day this week, so I helped her take down the net curtains and haul the washtub out of the yard. It felt how being a married couple might have.

  We found a bee as we took the curtains away. Alive, just. A bee, abroad in January – bad omen, the old fools in my village would say. Leah wanted to kill it, but I stayed her hand. First time I’d ever touched her skin.

  Remembered when I first touched Rosa’s. Grabbed her in the dark outside the printer’s. She screamed, but I wouldn’t let go. Why are you following me? Just remember how cold it was, thick snow falling into the wells of all the thousands of frozen footprints, but there was still this little bead of sweat or tears going right down to the end of her little nose. I-I-I saw you talk. To the Porters’ Association. And then to the sail-makers. And then the soldiers. But they wouldn’t let me in there. I know your name. I’m just a girl. I’m nothing, I’m no one. And she started crying.

  ‘And I’m just a cripple,’ I said. ‘Pleased to meet you, No one.’

  And she looked at me, all earnest, as earnest as only a young woman can be and she said, ‘I think you are beautiful.’

  Took me right away, that touch did, and when I came back, Leah was staring at me.

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘Bees have more wit than man, so you leave him be,’ I said.

  ‘Leave the bee be?’ she goes. ‘What do you mean anyways, Mr Smith?’

  So I tells her, that brilliant, beautiful passage from Proudhon about the hive. Perfect illustration of a harmonious society without division or tension, each contributing its skills and its strength towards the benefit of the whole, without coercion, fear or force. And if tiny insects can create a living machine of such perfection, imagine what beauties, what earthly paradises men could effect.