by M. H. Baylis
‘Such as?’
Dordoff led Rex over to the little greenhouses, and motioned to Rex to join him.
‘Lima beans, oca yams, peanuts, sweet potato, courgettes, cassava…’
Rex peered into the warm, musty little sheds, where trays of soil, enlivened by the odd green shoot, stood on metal bookcases. The wind rattled the glass in the frames.
‘You eat all of it?’
‘Sure. It’s easy to grow. Easy to harvest. There are tutorials all over YouTube. You have to be a bit careful preparing the cassava, but it’s all high in calories, very nutritious. And if we ever get a surplus, we sell it to the Nigerians and the Brazilians on Philip Lane.’
Rex remembered the strange-looking veg in Rescha’s shop – the speckled beans, the long, hairy yam-like things. ‘Do you sell to Rescha Schild?’
‘Kind of. She distributes it to participating members, sells it to the rest. You look surprised.’
‘I just got the impression she wasn’t very involved with your activities.’
Dordoff smiled thinly. ‘Her vegetable shop is certainly involved. We’re growing potatoes and carrots, too. Some here. Some in our other allotments down Mannock Road. Near to you. You see, the more mixed your diet, the healthier you are. And the less you rely on one crop, the less likely you are to starve.’
‘You’re very modern, aren’t you, Mr Dordoff?’ Rex asked, noting uncomfortably the reference to his address. ‘YouTube, market gardening… Transplant clinics.’
Dordoff didn’t show any surprise. ‘Life is precious. That’s not just Hasidus. It’s a central tenet of the Jewish faith. We are even commanded to break many of the other commandments if doing so will save a human life.’
‘So in some cases, even murdering someone would be okay, if it allowed someone else to live?’
‘No. No, of course not. Absolutely not!’ Dordoff laughed, incredulously. ‘Is that what you think, Mr Tracey?’
Seeing Dordoff here, in his overalls, surrounded by his vegetables, Rex realised what had perpetually bothered him about the man, and indeed, a lot of the Dukovchiner he’d met. Generally speaking, few Hasidim looked healthy: they looked as if they had bad diets, and spent too much time indoors. The Dukovchiner, by contrast, seemed to be bursting with health and strength. Was it because of their vegetables? Or their faith? Neither, he then realised, seemed to do much good for the Narpal.
‘I came here to ask about Antwerp. Specifically, to ask what were you doing there, in the city where Senticel has its main treatment centre, when Micah Walther went missing.’
‘Antwerp has a sizeable Hasidic population, Mr Tracey, including members of my own family. I was on family business.’
‘You obviously know what Senticel is, though.’
Dordoff gave a small inclination of the head.
‘But you didn’t take Micah Walther there, to undergo some medical procedure he didn’t survive?’
Dordoff shook his head, as if he couldn’t quite believe the insult he had just been dealt. He seemed about to walk off, but then changed his mind. ‘You know what Mr Tracey. There’s no reason why I should, but I’ll tell you who I sat next to on that flight to Antwerp. Or better yet, I’ll ring the person I sat next to on the flight to Antwerp and he can tell you in person.’ He had started to sound angry, though to Rex the outrage seemed a tad overdone.
He pulled a phone out of his overall pocket and dialled as he spoke. ‘His name is Meir Russberg and he works in a diamond dealership on Pelikaanstraat. We had a very interesting conversation about Rabbi Simeon of Chelyabinsk. Wait.’
Dordoff handed the phone, in loudspeaker mode, to Rex, who took it somewhat sheepishly. A voice answered: ‘Russberg.’
Rex cleared his throat. Dordoff’s co-workers had stopped work and were quietly watching. ‘Hello Mr Russberg. Did you travel on an aeroplane to Antwerp in October last year with a man called Simeon Dordoff?’
There was a pause. ‘Who are you?’ said the voice. Dordoff leant in and explained, in a mixture of English and Yiddish.
‘Aah. Yes. Yes I did.’ The voice said. ‘City Airport to A.I.A. We talked about our favourite subject. Rav Simyon of Chelyabinsk.’
Rex frowned. ‘So you have known Mr Dordoff for some time? I mean – prior to the flight?’
‘Of course! He is married to the niece of my cousin’s husband, and we were in the yeshiva together for a year as boys. In Gateshead. I was making a joke, you see. At the yeshiva there was one topic we especially did not enjoy, and it was the vision of Rav Simyon of Chelyabinsk. Ha!’
Rex asked his final question, knowing full well what the answer would be.
‘Simmy was alone. Until he bumped into me at the departure gate, that is…’
He handed the phone back to Dordoff. ‘But the Rebbe is having treatment in Antwerp, isn’t he?’
‘I don’t have to discuss that with you,’ Dordoff said, turning his back.
Rex might have left it that, if his bus back to Wood Green to pick up a camera hadn’t been diverted and he hadn’t chanced to find himself outside the premises of KumarKabs. On the pavement the assorted drivers – an exclusively Turkish and Somali crew – had arrayed themselves on stools and boxes, amidst a scattering of sunflower seeds and fag-ash. They didn’t look busy – a good time to make enquiries.
He felt more or less sure Dordoff was telling him the truth. It was really only a twitch, a tiny, possibly paranoid vibration on his radar that made him wonder whether the whole phone conversation had just been a little too convenient.
After all, this Russberg was a relative of sorts – and relatives were, generally speaking, more ready to lie than friends or strangers. And Dordoff had said some words to the man in Yiddish.
Vik Kumar was a thin balding man with thick, overhanging eyebrows, and a famously forbidding manner. In addition to the cab firm, he owned a row of shops off White Hart Lane, a restaurant, and a small block of flats. He was forever receiving awards from the Haringey Chamber of Commerce, but neither they, nor his growing fortune, seemed to make him any happier.
Over the years Kumar’s mood seemed to have rubbed off on his drivers, who had themselves become renowned for their unwillingness to converse with their fares. Many customers, of course, favoured Vik’s cab-firm for exactly that reason.
Since the night Rex had seen Vik at the tish, and apparently enjoying himself, he’d wondered several times what could have brought this noted local mogul into the orbit of the Dukovchiner Hasidim. He had a hunch, though – and it was a hunch strengthened by the fact that Vik and many of his drivers were today sporting dark suits and ties.
‘Do you drive a lot of those Hasidic Jewish guys about, Vik?’ Rex asked, as he went into the office.
Vik looked up. ‘Why?’
‘I saw you at that celebration of theirs the other night on Bruce Grove.’
‘We’re doing the cars for the funeral this afternoon,’ Vik confirmed, spitting a wad of khat into the bin at his feet.
‘Ever take them to the airport?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Do you remember taking anyone to City Airport in October last year?’
Vik chuckled sardonically, displaying green, khat-stained teeth and tongue.
‘All right – silly question,’ Rex admitted. ‘But could you maybe check your logs and see if anyone did a fare from Stamford Hill to City in October?’
Vik squinted at him, then spat again. ‘You joined the Old Bill now?’
‘Yeah, Vik, they fast-tracked me. I’ve joined the brand new Mini-cab Driver Persecution Unit.’
That earned a vague smile from Vik, who rummaged on some shelves under his desk and produced a greasy, cloth-backed book with assorted Post-its fluttering off it like wings. The man said nothing as he flipped through it. Rex looked around. The plywood-panelled walls, the Spurs Calendar, the smell of fags and deodorant reminded him of the places he’d had his hair cut as a little boy. Suddenly, without looking up, Vik bellowed, ‘Jock!’
&nb
sp; Jock turned out to be a huge-eyed Somali whose suit and shirt billowed around a coat-hanger body. He had the look of an eleven-year-old in September, during his first days at secondary school.
‘Says here you took one of those Jewish guys to City Airport on October 12th. That was your first day here wasn’t it?’
Jock nodded. Vik made a gesture towards Rex, as if to say, be my guest, he’s all yours.
‘I just wondered if he was alone?’ Rex asked.
Jock looked at Rex eagerly but blankly, not understanding.
‘DID HE HAVE ANYONE WITH HIM?’ shouted Vik, who’d learnt a thing or two about communicating with foreigners.
Jock nodded vigorously. ‘Yes, yes. With him, yes.’
‘Fuck. They just say yes because they think that’s the answer you want,’ Vik complained, rolling his eyes. He took a deep breath and addressed the driver again. ‘Are you – ARE YOU JUST SAYING THAT OR DID HE REALLY HAVE SOMEONE ELSE WITH HIM? ONE PASSENGER OR TWO PASSENGER?’
‘Two passenger,’ said Jock. ‘I know, because ask if Daddy.’
‘What do you mean?’ Rex asked.
Jock held up long, twiggy fingers as he illustrated his point: first one, then another. ‘Man. Boy. Two passengers. So I ask if Daddy. Says no. Boy says no. Want my Daddy. Crying boy.’
* * *
We met at dawn on Saturday by the High Cross. Three Jews with their prayer books on a Sabbath morn – nothing odd about that. Something odd about Elephant, though, those matching catkins on his brow waggling up and down constantly, a thin, maddening little smile on his puss whenever he looks at me. A man who knows, and wants others to know he knows, only not know themselves. I begin to wonder if you could build Kropotkin’s perfect beehive, when it might contain such wasps.
I cannot fault him on his planning, though. Military. Clever, the choice of the day. Half the police at the station will be on duty up in the city for the Lord Mayor’s Parade. And many of the rest will find their big policeman’s boots drawn away towards the White Hart Lane area, where the Tottenham Hotspur Foot-ball Club are playing a morning match because of the worsening smog.
Also – extra money at Schnurrman’s. Bonuses paid out on the last Saturday of the month. Could be two hundred coming from the bank. A fortune.
The factory’s fired up by the time we meet: awful stink just hangs there in the fog. We talk it all through, smoking to ward off the damp creeping cold, switching to Yiddish when English people come by, to English when we see Jews. Not many of either on this dark, savage morning. I tell of my plans for making it back to Riga: Felixstowe, not Tilbury, on Danish papers to Lubeck, maybe German for the final leg, if I can get them. Elephant listens throughout. That smile. Begging to have it wiped off him by my five friends.
I’ll own to it, though. There is something liberating about the act we are about to commit. Something swooping and soaring, and nature-defying. Like when we were boys on the dunes, and we’d put our coats up above our heads in a gale to feel the wind picking us right off our feet. You feel it feathery and light right up your arse, and in the twitching tip of your cock. The promise of violence, gunfire, striking out, explosions, mayhem. We all felt it. Smirking, hinting Elephant. Twitching, spot-picking Torch. Soon, we who had been in chains would be flying.
We split up. I am George Smith, after all, heading from my lodgings to my place of work when I see the commotion and do what any decent citizen of the borough would do. But I don’t want to go back to the house. Don’t want to see anyone until it’s done with.
I have to be coming south down the High Road when it happens. Need to be seen making that journey, so I stay up around the High Cross. The cold is too much, though. If I stay two hours on the streets, I won’t be doing any heroics, I reckon, I’ll just be dead. Nowhere open at this time. Nowhere I can sit.
Then it strikes me to go in a prayer-house. Can’t go in the grand new synagogue because of course there’s a shomer outside, demanding to see your subscription book is all up to date. Remember the old shomer joke they tell now from Shanghai to Cape Town: Okay sonny, you can go in and find your daddy. But don’t let me catch you praying.
So I follow two swinging-locked little bony Hasid boys to one of their assemblies. Not a shul, a shtib. A room. So much noise in there, with them jumping up and down and singing and flinging their curls back and forth like pendulums – no one notices the terrorist at the back. No fire in there, but hot bodies and candles make it better than the street.
I recognise words and lines from my past. The Aramaic. Yikum purkon min shemayo. May Deliverance arise from Heaven. Amen to that. I can’t find the ecstasy these fellows seem to be enveloped in. Enough to bring back memories, though. Mama’s face as I limped home, discharged from the Navy. You’re going to Riga to work on a newspaper? What is a newspaper? Left in anger. Next time I went back, everyone gone. House burned down. Soldiers took my sisters away, to do what soldiers do to people’s sisters. Mother, grandfather, five other Jewish families – run through with sabres. Outside the beer shop I meet cross-eyed Osip. He tells me, oh yes my dog still pulls at the leash and tries to go over to that plot. To lick the earth where all the blood spilled. So I kicked cross-eyed Osip’s fucking cross-eyed dog with my good leg and fell in the street, and they all came out of the beer shop and kicked me – kicked me out of the village for good.
So I’m not much good with grief. What was Missus Cutter to me? I was relieved when Leah ran upstairs to her room, leaving me and Parks together. ‘Tell her I’ll postpone my trip to Bradford,’ he says, ‘To help with arrangements.’
‘She doesn’t need help,’ said I. ‘She has her auntie. And me.’
His eyes narrowed and his cheeks pinked up prettily but he didn’t say anything. Just went out, slammed the door, like my sisters used to do in a girl’s rage.
I only went to a synagogue once or twice before, but I was sure their rites had a clear end to them. A point when everyone stood up and nodded to one another and left. But these Hasids just carried on at it. One chant ends, another begins. No wonder they’re so thin, I thought; they spend their whole days like this, meeting God so violently.
I nearly believed again myself when Rosa said those words to me outside the printers that night. Believe a lot in words, of course, Jews. God spoke creation into being. Rabbi Loeb spoke words over his clay golem, and turned it into the scourge of Prague. Those Hasids follow some man, a sort of a witch, whose power came from knowing the names of God, and uttering them. And what power there is, what unlocking power there is in a girl calling an ugly man beautiful.
Like she’d uttered an incantation over me. She untwisted me. I wasn’t the man with the two mismatched legs, I was the man I’d been before: sailor, man you’d think twice about, man you’d try catch the eye of. She grew me, that girl, and in the time we had together, I grew her: taught her to see, to look, to question, to be angry.
So full of memories, I nearly missed my time to leave. Hurrying out of the shtib, I resolved to myself – I would find her. Go back to Riga, do whatever it took.
Walked slowly down the High Street on the railway side, opposite the turning to the rubber works, feeling faint and trembling, sweeping either side of me for police or followers, near gagging with the factory egg-smell. Still a lot of the normal Saturday folk have not come out, stallholders and strollers and beggars and pickpockets and tarts, all of them staying in their berths out of the fog and the cold, so I have a clear view a long away ahead. I can see the grey cap and the blue cap of Elephant and Torch, outside the photographer’s.
They’re just staring over the road to the factory. All the time I look at them, that’s the only place the pair of stew-pots look. You’re standing outside a shop, I want to scream. One of you at least, look in the fucking window! They might as well hold up a placard like those Votes For Women women do: We’re About To Do The Factory.
I take out my watch. Twenty to ten. Listen for a car engine, but there’s nothing. Stomach coiling up now, like rope
on the quay. I’m close enough now to see a little way up Chesnut Road and to the gates of the factory. Schnurrman himself has come out, peering round anxiously in his fur-collar coat, checking the gold watch in his waistcoat pocket.
I have an absurd thought. What if some other cell has been at work for months, planning this in tandem, and they’re robbing the car up the road, outside the bank, this very minute? Almost makes me smile.
Then I hear the engine. The car is coming. Elephant and Torch hear it too. Schnurrman, heavy shoulders relaxing, trots back inside his tower. Quick for a fatty, I think. The car swings in. Elephant and Torch cross the road.
There’s a barber who of a Friday papers half his window with the Yiddish news, so the devout can see without exactly reading and the poor can learn without paying. I linger there for a minute, like I’m reading about the Tsar’s ban on music in Russian cinemas, when I’m really looking at the reflection of events on the other side of the road. Then I realise. I’m George fucking Smith. I don’t read Yiddish newspapers.
I hear the car engine stop. I cross the road. I hear a car door open. A shout. Two shouts. I hobble into Chesnut Road, towards the factory gates. A stout woman from the corner greengrocer’s is doing the same.
They’re rolling on the ground in the gateway like schoolboys – Elephant, Torch, and a clerk with a heavy case. The clerk calls out. A driver gets out of the car with difficulty, and Elephant shoots right at him. The bullet hits his coat, but glances off it. Button maybe. A lucky coat.
They’ve got the bag off the clerk, and I can see Elephant whipping the money out, ready. I’m about to do my bit when a policeman’s whistle sounds. ‘Stop! Police!’ A copper comes running down the road. Torch points right at the man and fires at his chest. The copper jumps back, dead, instantly. As his helmet rolls off I see it’s the lad they call Old Bill. PC Tyler. They’ll hang us all twice for that.
All the planning gone out with the bilge-water. These men are maniacs, I think. Shooting unarmed men. Shooting a big, honest, stupid country lad like PC Tyler.