The Lost Shtetl

by Max Gross

  It took Yankel a day of walking around the appointed neighborhood before he found what he believed was the house.

  At least, it looked very, very similar.

  There was a café situated across the street, and Yankel took a seat and watched men go in and out, with a greater gush coming after dark. Yankel felt that had to be a pretty strong sign.

  There wasn’t much else to go by. The curtains of the house were drawn. The only display of character the house exhibited was a garden in the back that was overrun with chrysanthemums, corn poppies, and crocuses.

  Yankel kept his eye on the red front door. He continued to consume coffee after coffee—to the point where his heart began to race and his head began to swim—but there was no sign of Pesha.

  He came back the next day and the day after, sitting at the café from opening until closing. She didn’t appear. And Yankel began to wonder if he had been too quick to settle on this as the right house.

  One thing he was very wary of doing, however, was entering the house without a plan. For all he knew, Kasia had put up a giant poster of him warning anyone manning the door that he was not to be allowed entry. And while (to his great relief) there were no praetorians keeping watch over the entrance, one misstep and there likely would be. He couldn’t try the same tricks he had before. There could be no shoddy disguises or half-baked escape schemes.

  He thought of paying someone off to check it out for him; offer them a couple of hundred zlotys to go in and ask for Teresa and report back. But the idea of sending yet another suitor to Pesha—even if he made it a condition of their taking the assignment that they not do anything carnally with her—sickened him. Where would he find such a character? And what would stop such an agent from bedding Pesha anyway? It didn’t matter to Yankel in the slightest that she slept with new men every day; he would not be a party to any more.

  He tried to think of a credible excuse for sending a woman to check in on her. Maybe she could pose as a long-lost relative coming for a visit? Maybe she could come bearing a parcel for special delivery? But every excuse felt contrived and inadequate. There was only ever one reason to visit a house of ill repute. They would never accept a female caller.

  And it occurred to Yankel that the media glare on Pesha might have thrown a fright into Pesha’s jailers. Anybody asking about her would probably be turned away. Who knows. She might have been moved already. Or, if she hadn’t been moved, perhaps they would do so in a few days.

  The more that Yankel thought about it, the more concerned he grew. His chance to find Pesha might have already vanished. If she was still there, he had to act quickly. “How?” he wondered. “How? How . . . ?”

  And as he thought this, he turned his head to the other side of the café and saw Ishmael Lindauer sitting quietly at a table, staring at the very same sandstone house and red door.

  It had been only a few years, but time had thickened Ishmael’s physique and grayed his hair and beard. He was dressed in a black tunic that looked unwashed. He had a cloth satchel by his legs. Most surprising of all, however, was a metal cross on black beads that was hanging against his chest, which made him look like a priest. While Yankel hadn’t known him particularly well back in the old days, he recognized the sneer on Ishmael’s face. Except for the clothing and the grayness, he was unmistakable.

  Yankel wondered if Ishmael had recognized him, too, but figured the chances were slimmer. Yankel’s beard and sidelocks were gone. As were whatever pimples dotted his adolescent face, which was the last time Ishmael would have laid eyes on him. And while the gigantic cross around his neck didn’t make Ishmael look Jewish, it did make him look like someone who had been excluded from the fashions of the day—something you could not say about Yankel, who was dressed in jeans, T-shirt, and Nike Air VaporMaxes.

  Nevertheless, Yankel was nervous enough that he asked his waitress to move him to a table out of Ishmael’s line of sight.

  So Yankel spent the day seated in the back of the café, watching Ishmael watching the cathouse.

  With increasing alarm, he tried to conceive what this swine was up to. It was obvious that Ishmael intended to do Pesha some kind of harm. Perhaps he had a ridiculous plan to carry her off once again to be his bride, in the demented way that love clouds good judgment and inspires great folly.

  It even occurred to Yankel that Ishmael was very possibly acting out the scenario that he himself had written three years earlier when he had gone to the cathouse in Warsaw in disguise, and attempted to snatch Pesha—a thought that shocked Yankel to his very core. After all, Ishmael’s disguise was merely that of an Orthodox priest instead of an old man. Yankel felt himself go limp, imagining that there was any similarity between himself and this monster.

  These and a thousand other tangled thoughts appeared in Yankel’s brain.

  When evening finally came and the café cleared out the last of its customers, Ishmael paid his bill and stood out on the street, continuing to gaze at the house. Yankel stood a block away.

  Ishmael inconspicuously leaned against the unlit side of a lamppost and waited for the street to be completely empty.

  After he was comfortable that he was alone, Ishmael moved slightly nearer to the three-story, freestanding house, and when a customer left, Ishmael watched closely who opened the door and what he could see of the interior from the street.

  But he did not approach the front door; when the customer was out of sight, Ishmael wandered into the garden in the back. Yankel cautiously followed and watched from the shadows.

  Ishmael opened his satchel and pulled out a can of black spray paint. On the back of the house he wrote, “Whore.” When he was pleased with how it looked he next wrote, “Cunt.” He looked up at the house to make sure none of its inhabitants had heard anything.

  Yankel grinned. He assumed that Ishmael Lindauer’s intentions were more nefarious than petty.

  But Ishmael wasn’t finished. He went into a spot in the bushes where he had apparently hidden something away—and that alone served to make the hair on the back of Yankel’s neck stand up. Ishmael had been to the house before; he had more carefully laid plans than Yankel.

  Ishmael returned from the bushes brandishing a sledgehammer and two canisters of petroleum.

  With utter conviction Ishmael smacked the sledgehammer against the cellar door. The lock broke instantly.

  Ishmael dropped the hammer, opened the cellar, picked up the petroleum and disappeared into the house so swiftly that Yankel could scarcely believe what he was seeing. He called emergency services.

  “There’s a crazy man who just broke into a house,” Yankel cried. “He might be trying to burn it down. It looks that way.” He gave the address but hung up before he could give any information about himself.

  Yankel ran into the cellar as fast as his legs could carry him and found Ishmael scattering the petroleum on the cellar floor. Ishmael froze when he saw Yankel.

  “Just what do you think you’re doing?”

  Ishmael was taken aback to hear the question in Yiddish. And he stared at Yankel for a brief moment before dispelling whatever surprise or puzzlement he might have harbored. Ishmael didn’t have time for distractions. He tossed the petroleum canister against the wall, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a book of matches.

  The look on Ishmael’s face was not wrathful or frightened. Rather, it was pleased. More than pleased—it was ecstatic. He had discovered his greater purpose, and felt joy. Having a witness to the destruction made it even better.

  Yankel charged toward Ishmael, but he was too late. Ishmael ignited the pool of oil on the floor, and in moments half the cellar was engulfed in flames.

  Yankel took off toward the staircase to the house, where he could at least sound the warning for everybody to get out—but Ishmael wasn’t about to allow that. He grabbed Yankel and savagely threw him to the floor as Yankel yelled.

  I suppose if he could kill a houseful of people with fire, Ishmael didn’t mind killing one more with his
hands. He locked his fingers around Yankel’s throat and began choking him with all of his might.

  Yankel clawed back and reached hopelessly for Ishmael’s throat.

  The smoke filling the cellar caused Ishmael to lose his grip for a moment and go into a paroxysm of coughing. As he did so, Yankel called out. But Ishmael soon recovered and fixed his hands again on Yankel’s neck.

  “You want to know what I’m doing?” Ishmael snarled at his victim. “This is what I’m doing. This is what I’m doing!”

  Just at that moment Yankel heard a loud smack.

  Ishmael’s grasp slackened, and he slumped over on top of Yankel. Yankel looked over his shoulder and saw a young woman dressed solely in scarlet bra and underwear with a lamp in her hand.

  Yankel had never seen the girl before. She was tall and slim with dirty blond hair, and she looked terrified. She had opened the cellar door a minute earlier to investigate the smoke and the cries for help and had been shocked by the roaring flames. She turned around and screamed for everybody to get out of the house, and—almost as an afterthought—grabbed the nearest instrument she could find to prevent Yankel’s strangulation. She applied one quick swing to the assailant’s head, and fled the scene.

  Alongside the other girls who were pouring out of the house engorged in flames, Yankel staggered onto the sidewalk, where he collapsed.

  He didn’t come to until the emergency workers were strapping him to a gurney. “Pesha,” Yankel murmured. “Where’s Pesha?”

  He looked into the sea of girls, all fixed on the disaster. Next to them were a fluttering of johns, all of whom had the good sense to grab their trousers before bolting out of the house.

  As he was wheeled along the street to the ambulance he saw the woman who had saved his life, who was now wrapped up in a fireman’s coat.

  “Please tell me—where’s Pesha?”

  The girl looked surprised for a moment.

  “You mean Teresa?” she said.

  Yankel nodded.

  She wasn’t entirely sure whether she should be talking about Teresa. She looked over her shoulder at the pyre raging once more before she answered.

  “Teresa ran off a few days ago.”

  22

  Denouement

  From the beginning, Yankel’s account was distrusted. When the authorities asked what had happened the night of the fire, Yankel said he was simply walking past the house when he saw what appeared to be a prowler entering the cellar. That was when he phoned emergency services.

  “Had you ever seen the man before?” Dawid Zielinski, the chief investigator, asked about the still-unnamed arsonist whose charred remains were lying on a metal slab in the morgue.

  Yankel shook his head.

  “Never.”

  The investigator felt the itch common among law enforcement officers when they discern a fabrication.

  “Were you spying on him?”

  It hadn’t occurred to Yankel to come up with a proper cover story, and he was taken aback by the question. It suggested something sneaky and nefarious about him.

  “No, not at all. I was just taking in the night air.”

  There were multiple flaws in that version of events, as truncated as it was. The cellar, in the back garden of the freestanding house, was not visible from the street. To reach it, one had to walk down a small grassy lane separating the house from its neighbors.

  Plus, Zielinski had listened to the recording of the call that came in on the night of the crime. Yankel hadn’t used the word “prowler.” He said “crazy man” who looked like he was about to burn down the house. This might have confirmed that Yankel wasn’t the perpetrator of the crime but it also proved that he was changing his story.

  “What are you doing in Lodz?” the detective asked. “I thought you said you live in Krakow.”

  Yankel nodded.

  “Just visiting for a few days,” Yankel said. “I had never been to Lodz before.”

  “Who were you visiting?”

  “Nobody,” Yankel said. “I was here by myself. Just a holiday.”

  A good lawman will keep his most damning critique to himself until it becomes necessary or useful. But this was veering into absurdity. Zielinski practically felt that his intelligence was being insulted.

  “Mr. Lewinkopf,” the detective began, “you’re telling me that you just happened to pick Lodz to visit. And you happened to go by the house that had been inhabited by Teresa Mularz—the woman who came from the same town as you did. And you happened to be there when this nut decides to burn the place down.”

  Until that moment, the detectives hadn’t uttered Pesha’s name or pseudonym in Yankel’s presence. Nor had they suggested (even obliquely) that they knew who Yankel was and where he came from. But their skills with Google, apparently, outshone his. Yankel reddened, embarrassed by his obvious prevarications.

  “Do you think we’re stupid?” Zielinski finally thundered. “You expect us to believe that bullshit?”

  Yankel’s chin merely sank into his chest and his eyes darted away. “Yes,” Yankel finally croaked. “I agree—it sounds fishy.” But he refused to alter the details of his story.

  I suppose Yankel clung to the notion that he could still find Pesha once he was released from the hospital. Letting the authorities in on his designs would only insert an obstacle in his path. Therefore, he could only offer new information parsimoniously.

  This had the unintended effect of making the detectives wonder if Yankel’s call to emergency services hadn’t been contrived. Maybe he was the arsonist and the dead man was his victim. Maybe all his seeming idiocy had been an act.

  But that didn’t make sense either. If the call was intended as an alibi it was made prematurely. Receiving the call when they did prevented the worst from happening. Plus, none of Yankel’s fingerprints had been on the canisters of petroleum or any of the other pieces of evidence that survived the fire. The dead man’s fingerprints were everywhere.

  Finally, Marta, the girl in the red underwear who had saved Yankel’s life (and everybody else’s in the house that night), confirmed the most important parts of Yankel’s story: The dead man had been trying to strangle Yankel. Yankel had been the one calling out, trying to alert everybody to the immediate jeopardy. He was as much a hero as she was. Almost.

  Marta was much more lucid and helpful than Yankel. While she couldn’t say who this demented arsonist was (thanks to his all-black getup and a metal cross recovered around his neck, it was believed the perpetrator might be a priest), she wasn’t at all shy about offering up her opinion.

  “It’s pretty obvious that this psycho saw Teresa on the news,” Marta stated, sensibly.

  That was more or less the working theory among the detectives. The case had all the hallmarks of a perpetrator seething with hostility to women and ambivalence about sex. The brothel’s notoriety would have made it a prime target for someone with mental and sexual afflictions. The priest part was a somewhat beguiling element—but then, you saw something new every day in their line of work.

  The other serious alternative was that the crime was the handiwork of a Jew hater. Or a Kreskol hater. (The terms had largely become conflated in recent weeks.) Either way, the connection with Teresa Mularz was unmistakable.

  “Why did Ms. Mularz flee?” Zielinski asked Marta.

  “I don’t know if she liked the life,” Marta said, sipping from a paper cup of coffee she had been offered. “And she didn’t get along with anybody in the house. Maybe with the spotlight on all of us she figured nobody could try too hard to stop her from leaving.”

  This interested the detective.

  “Was she living in the house involuntarily?”

  Marta shrugged.

  “A girl’s gotta eat.”

  Marta proceeded to tell the detective how the house had braced itself for disaster when the news report came out and a media scrum formed on their doorstep. The housemother called all the girls together and said that nobody should text or email
or call about the topic of Teresa until the storm had passed. Nobody. There would be consequences for anyone who didn’t listen. She sent out for food and toiletries and refused permission for anybody to leave the house or receive customers.

  The girl whom the fuss was all about remained as silent as she had been throughout her tenure. Nervous-seeming, yes, but she kept her thoughts to herself.

  The morning after the cameras left, Teresa’s room was empty. She hadn’t escaped through the front door—rather, it looked like she managed to lower herself from a second-floor window in the wee hours of the morning. Whether she had taken money or provisions to look after herself was anyone’s guess.

  “Oh, she’s prepared,” Marta postured. “I never saw her spend a penny on herself in the three years she lived here. I think she was saving up for the right moment.”

  “Saving for what?” the detective asked. “Where do you think she went?”

  “I haven’t the foggiest idea.”

  The detective jotted down a note.

  “Did she have any troublesome customers?”

  True, Teresa was extremely popular among the clientele, and that always carried with it the possibility of danger. Some men couldn’t get enough and would ask for her again and again. But you had to give Teresa credit for refusing to dole out false hope. There were no counterfeit whimpers, or kisses, or winks—everything was strictly business. She usually didn’t even look the men in the eye. It got to the point where the housemother took Teresa aside and told her that if she was a little warmer she could make much better tips. But this coldness proved extremely useful at preventing fixations from taking hold.