by M. H. Baylis
When Rescha didn’t respond, he went on. ‘Because of your disguise, you probably thought you were safe until you saw me back in Stamford Hill that afternoon. You’d seen our website, with Terry saying he was innocent. Then you saw me, and you knew then I wasn’t going to go away, I was going to keep digging for my friend. So you gave me the hotel card. You wanted me to think it all had something to do with the boys being pressured to help the Rebbe, and the families leaving, when it didn’t. And you couldn’t resist coming back again, after Toyve Walther came in your shop, upset, discussing his plans to make a fuss at the tish. So you found me and told me I should go, because you knew what I’d see. You knew what you could make me think. You did the same to me over the last few days as well. You didn’t come to my house the night before last because you needed me. You came to check whether I believed Yitzie was guilty. But you made a mistake. You stayed the night, because – you were being honest with me then – you genuinely couldn’t face being alone. And when you were upset, and frightened, and your guard was down – that was when you told me about Micah running away.’
She shook her head. ‘So why are you coming with me to Paris?’ she said quietly.
‘Come off it, Rescha. There isn’t any Paris,’ he said angrily. ‘When Yitzie changed his plea, you realised you had to come back and try something else to make sure I didn’t twig, so you came up with Paris. You haven’t got a distant cousin there, have you? You mentioned Paris because you knew I knew the place, and you trusted that if you acted all innocent and bewildered, I’d probably take the bait and come with you. Well, you were right.’
They drove on in silence for a minute or two. The cityscape became emptier, and the houses shrank against the ever-expanding sky, which seemed to reflect the marshy greyness of the nearby river Lea. They were nearing Outrage territory.
‘I was telling the truth about the trains being cancelled,’ she said.
‘And whenever you told me the truth, that’s when I doubted you. I couldn’t stop thinking about Yitzie at the tish, pulling Toyve Walther out of the way. I didn’t know why that image kept coming back to me, until you came round and talked about Micah. Because it didn’t make sense. The Walthers left the sect. So why didn’t Yitzie try to murder them? He not only didn’t try to murder them, he was friendly to Toyve Walther. Also, there was no way he could have put poison in those biscuits because he was allergic to just about everything in them. He didn’t make them. You did. You killed those children.’
‘Stop it,’ she hissed at him, her eyes filming with tears. ‘Stop it! Stop it!’
He stopped. He was angry with her, he realised, and less because of what she’d done, more because of the way she’d played him. He had to calm down, though. He had to get her to explain everything. ‘Why?’ he said, more gently. ‘Why did you do it all, Rescha?’ Deftly, her driving seemingly unaffected, she swung right onto Tottenham High Road. A street of old tops and new bottoms, Rex always thought. Old sash windows and crumbling gables on top of SuperDrug and CashInADash. A village teetering on a city.
‘Have you ever come across anyone called Cohen, Rex? Or Levin? Or Levinsky, or some name like that?’
‘A few,’ he said, not sure where this was leading.
‘They’re called those names because they have kept the same… I suppose you’d say they are religious titles… and they’ve kept them, in their families, since our people lived in the deserts. Cohens and Levites. So you see, around here, you could have a man called Cohen or Levy sitting in that McDonald’s with his computer, but he can never escape that his past is a priest, in the desert. If you are one of us, you never escape your past. It’s like… a birthmark, or… a coat you can’t take off.’
‘You never seem to take yours off.’
‘So. Maybe that’s why,’ she said, as the yellow signs pointed them onto Monument Way. It was like a motorway cutting through the middle of Tottenham: wide, empty, huge hedges obscuring whatever ugliness lay either side. ‘Kovacs was writing his book. He needed some help with learning Yiddish and he met Yitzie. At the clinic. Yitzie said some things to him, about me, about the shop, that interested him because at the time, because of his book, he was looking for Rosa Brandt. So then he was really interested. He started to come to the shop. To ask questions about my family. Father. Grandfather. Great grandfather. Where we’d come from in the Old Country. What I knew. I didn’t know that much. My grandfather and my father didn’t explain any of it to me, and it’s not like we’d got it written down or anything. I got tired of all his questions. In the end, I made Yitzie serve the first few customers every day, so I could avoid him. Kovacs started being friendly with Yitzie instead. Then I went to help on the allotments, to get out of the shop. He followed me there. Always there. Then one day, in the autumn, he phoned. Said he had something important to tell me. Asked me to come to his house. So I went.’
‘Wasn’t that a bit of a reckless thing to do? I mean – for a woman in your community?’
‘So I went to Sheyner Sheytel and I hired a wig. And in a charity shop I got a scarf, and a leather jacket. Anyway, Yitzie thought Dr Kovacs was away on one of his trips. I didn’t want to go. But I wanted to know why. You know? Why had he started to follow me everywhere? Why all the questions? So I went. And he took me down into that cellar of his, with all his books and his papers, and he showed me. We are family.’ She corrected herself. ‘We were.’
The emptiness became a snarl-up of roundabouts and traffic lights and converging arteries. Then, just as suddenly, they were in the almost rural calm of Chesnut Road, with its cottage-like houses and its wooden fences. This was where the first Outrage had taken place. Almost incredibly, it had once been a vista of belching chimneys and furnace fires. He had a feeling Rescha had brought them here deliberately. But she didn’t stop.
‘He showed me everything in his books. The terrorists who were here, down this place, they had an accomplice. His name was Kuznetz. His role was to stop them, pretend he was a hero, then take the money back to Latvia. But he didn’t. He kept it. He took it to Liverpool, and he changed his name to Kovacs, and he became a rich man. George had found it out, because in his family there was a diary, an old diary, in Latvian, and nobody knew what it said, but he’d taught himself to read it. That was what started it. He hadn’t really been interested in the robbery – he just wanted to solve a family mystery when he retired. So he started, and then he found out who he really was.’
‘So how do you fit in?’
‘Kuznetz had a family back in Latvia. Well, not a family. A girlfriend. She was called Rosa – Rosa Brandt – and she belonged to a very important family. The rabbis back then, they were like… aristocrats. Lots of money, land, servants. All marrying their sons and daughters to each other to make sure they got even more powerful. But Rosa ran away with Kuznetz the anarchist. A wilful girl!’ Rescha smiled sadly, as if she would have liked someone to describe her that way. ‘She fell in with the terrorists and got pregnant by Kuznetz. But then he vanished. And she had no choice but to go back to her family. They treated her bad, because she had a baby, and she’d brought shame on them. They married her off as quietly as they could. To a mamzer, called Feigenbaum. Maybe gave him the money to come over here and buy the shop as well, I don’t know. They didn’t have any more children. Just that one – the child who was really the child of Kuznetz. And that was my great-grandfather. Kovacs found it all out.’
With a little help from Tim, alias GoldVlad, Rex remembered. That must have been why Kovacs had seemed to lose interest in Tim’s research. Because he’d already found out where Rosa Brandt’s descendants had ended up.
‘So then when your grandfather used to say they’d been ruined by a cripple, who…?’
‘He meant Kuznetz. He had some problem because of polio. My grandfather’s mother was almost obsessed with it, how her husband’s family had been brought down. Kuznetz was her father-in-law – well, her husband’s real father anyway. She must have been very bitter.’
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br /> ‘But by the time your father was a boy, all that would have been half a century ago. They had a business, a house, they were safe in London… what did your grandfather have to be so bitter about?’
She laughed as she turned onto Park View Road, the grim municipal flatlands fenced off behind peeling railings. Hadn’t the robbers come up here, too, on a stolen milk cart?
‘You people tell your children stories about Donald Duck, or rabbits called Peter. We tell them real stories, stories about how we suffered, but kept on going. In our houses, Haman is real, Hitler is real – like Moses and Rabbi Mendel of Kotzk. Our memories aren’t long, they’re forever. And just like we keep triumphs alive, we keep all the losses, too, and the bitternesses and the sufferings. All of them. List them. Grow them… It’s… it’s just part of who we are, part of being the people with the long memory. When I was a girl I used to dream about being suffocated, you know, by all these big, heavy, musty-smelling black velvet coats and hats.’
Rex swallowed. He felt chilled. ‘So… You hated Kovacs because of the fate his great-grandfather had inadvertently dealt out to your great-grandfather?’
She flashed him a contemptuous look. ‘Are you so stupid?
They were near the tip. The seagulls were everywhere. And there was a gypsy family, delightedly pushing a shopping trolley away, stuffed with electrical goods and part of a bed.
‘Rescha. Can we stop?’
She didn’t seem to have heard him. ‘Kovacs thought it was all very funny. He thought there was something funny about it – that he’d ended up like he was, free-wheeling, he called it, plenty of money, nice life, just down the road from me. Who was the opposite. The magical roulette wheel of history, he said.’
Rex could imagine that conversation taking place. And he could imagine how it would make anyone’s blood boil. Even if they didn’t know what a roulette wheel was.
‘So you decided to poison him?’
‘No. I didn’t. He said he’d changed, from the sort of man he used to be, because of his heart attacks. He wanted to make amends. He called it tikkun olam. It means –’
‘– repairing the world.’
‘He was sarcastic about a lot of things. But I believed he was serious about that, about doing something, to mend things, make some good. And he had plenty of money. We had none. And Yitzie was too ill at that time even to help in the shop, and our old van was breaking down all the time. I said – okay. Do your healing. So he bought us this van.’
Rex nodded. It made sense. Kovacs’ wife had mentioned his fits of generosity. The spiffy van, so smart and cool and utterly out of place outside Rescha’s shop.
‘I should have stopped there, but then the council put up the business rates, and I asked him for a loan and he said it was okay, it was a gift. Then we needed some rewiring done in the shop, and he was happy to help. I don’t know why. It just… the best I can say is that it really seemed to amuse him. Perhaps it was the power. I didn’t like it, but I needed the money. Then in December, just before Hanukah, we got a shock. A terrible shock. See, we took out a mortgage on the house and the business, years ago, an endowment mortgage. It came to an end and they said we owed them eighteen thousand pounds. I didn’t understand how that could happen – for years we’d made all the payments on time. But Kovacs explained it. He said he would help. But this time, I had to give something back.’
‘What could you give?’ he asked. Her look told him just how stupid his question was. This wasn’t anything to do with history, but something far, far older. Lust.
‘He said it would be just once. But you know what he did? He waited until I had… done it for him.’ She shuddered. ‘And when I came downstairs, and I was dressed again, he had an envelope waiting on his desk. It was half. Half the money. He said he had enjoyed it so much he wanted to make sure there’d be a next time. I went back upstairs to be sick. That’s where I got the idea.’
‘Of killing him?’
‘Poisoning him. I made myself once, with the cassava, not preparing it properly. Dordoff showed me how to do it right. He told me: be careful, people can die if you get it wrong.’
They’d turned onto Watermead Way now, skirting the marshes before crossing them. He heard a siren in the distance and felt reassured. He hoped they were being pursued eastwards, like the robbers had been.
‘But I didn’t try that way first off. I didn’t believe it would work.’
‘So what did you try?’
She sighed. ‘Years ago, I had a miscarriage. A baby was all I wanted. You see goyishe girls with them all the time, two, three babies and they don’t even want them. But it turned out I couldn’t even have that. I took some poison from Yitzie, this kind of white powder he used for cleaning gold. He stopped me. I promised him I’d never do it again and I gave it back to him. But I didn’t. I mean, I kept some. I was sure I’d want to do it again, and I’d read it was very quick.’
‘Cyanide?’
She nodded. ‘But he’d found out where I put it. I put it in that hole – behind our bed. And he took that, too. I don’t know when. Might have been years ago. All I know is, when I went to get it, to do something about Kovacs, it wasn’t there.’
‘Because Yitzie was protecting you, wasn’t he? He was always protecting you.’
She carried on, ignoring him. ‘I remembered about cassavas instead. And I went to the library, and looked it up on the computer and I saw that Dordoff had told me the truth. There was poison in them, right there, if you didn’t know what do with them.’
‘Or if you did.’
She nodded. ‘And Kovacs was such a fussy man. He always came in first – first customer of the day. And I watched him – he always took the same bag of rugelach… cookies, they are, from the same place in the pile.’
‘Weren’t you worried that it would be traced straight back to your cookies?’
‘The symptoms are just like a heart attack. And he’d already had three.’
‘So almost everything Yitzie told the police was true, wasn’t it? He didn’t make the biscuits, but he was serving in the shop before his appointment at the hospital…’
‘I didn’t mean for it to happen like it did. But those… bastards at the mortgage company phoned. And while I was on the telephone at the back, a customer came in and Yitzie served them. I thought it was Kovacs, that it had all gone to plan but then Kovacs came in, and I saw the cookies had gone.’
‘So you realised the Bettelheim kids had taken the poisoned bag?’
‘Yitzie told me they’d been in. I tried to run after them, but they’d disappeared.’
‘And Kovacs understood?’
‘He saw the way I behaved. And he’d seen the Bettelheim children coming out of the shop. Later, he called me.’
‘Because he’d seen what had happened at the park…’ Rex remembered the way Kovacs had visibly paled, and run away. Perhaps he’d guessed that this had been an attempt on his own life.
‘He was calm on the phone. Said we needed to talk.’
‘I remember the phone call. You didn’t come back in the shop.’
‘I got my… outfit, and I went straight round there. He was in his basement. He said he’d decided to terminate our… arrangement. He was going to tell the police. I begged him and begged him. I promised that he could do whatever he wanted to me, anything he liked, if he didn’t tell. He let me believe it. I mean – he said he would think about it, just to get me to leave and then, at the door, he said he’d changed his mind. He shut the door on me. I went out the main door, and I saw… a kind of kitchen knife just in the soil under the bushes. It seemed to be there just for me. It was the answer. The only answer. So I picked it up and I went back inside but he’d gone back up into his flat. So I tapped. Tapped sort of softly on his door, so maybe he would think it was somebody else now – like your neighbour. And when he answered, I stuck it into him. I left him alive, though,’ she added. ‘I ran to the bus station and I called 999, and I said I’d seen something… A d
isturbance. I tried to change my voice, and I said I lived in the road, but afterwards… I was sure they would know it was me. I thought they would pick me up straight away.’
‘But you went back the next day. I saw you. Why did you do that?’
‘I couldn’t find the scarf I’d worn the day before. It was such a hot day, so I’d taken it off and put it in the jacket pocket. I thought it might have fallen out in the basement, or worse still, inside his flat. So I had to go back. I knew you could get into the basement through the window on the garden side. And I found it. I was so relieved I found it, I put it on and then – that black man came in, same as me, through the window. He was raving at me, calling me a thief and… he pushed me into that hook. If I’d had the leather jacket on I’d have been all right, but it was so stiff – I left it on the floor to get through the window. And I cut my back badly. It was bleeding a lot. I managed to climb back out, then I grabbed the jacket and just ran. But he came after me, that man.’
‘And the reason the police believed Yitzie is because he told them more or less the truth. Except, it was you, not him.’
‘He worked out most of it. When I came back from… seeing Kovacs, the shop was closed. He said he’d gone to see the Rebbe about something. But later, he told me he’d tried to follow me. Tried to follow me, but couldn’t keep up, because of his heart. He’d seen the way I ran after the Bettelheim children, and that had started him wondering what was going on.’
‘So he confronted you?’
‘Not at first. He went to bed. He stayed in his bed for most of that week, except to talk to the police when they came. Then he went to the tish. And on the Sunday, after you’d gone, then he sat at the table and he asked me what I’d done. So I told him.’
‘And he hit you?’
‘He said nothing. Did nothing. He just turned away. Barely spoke to me again until the police came on Purim. And then he looked at me before he opened the door, and he said, ‘I did it, Rescha. Not you. I did it.’