As expected, the Mayor bounced over to them, wringing his hands, overflowing with apology. “Of course you can come back after things have cooled down,” he told Rivka—“soon, pray God. If anybody does, you know what can happen to a business in the district if the police want to make trouble. No charge for your meal today. You’re welcome here, both of you, both of you.” He interpreted Peter’s quiet attendance there with Rivka as a warn ing, or a gentle reminder of what the Liesma gang thinks of ex-friends.
“Do you know what you want to eat?” Peter said.
“Wednesday’s a bad day for fish. Probably the brisket.”
“Brisket.”
“You?”
“Cabbage and apples is good here. Maybe some soup. Vegetable.”
A moment or two, and Rivka said, “Did you ask him for bread and margarine?”
“He’ll bring it.”
“I’ll ask him.”
The Mayor himself served the food to them. Peter watched Rivka eat. She chewed in big bites, mouth open, a farm girl underneath. Peter ate his cabbage in fastidious, even dainty, forkfuls—and as he did, the distance across the table widened. It was a familiar feeling, a good one that saved his skin more than once. Let any affection for Rivka grow, and sure as salt is salty it would become a weight around his neck, anchoring him there, dragging him backward.
Rivka waved at someone Peter couldn’t see through the hedge of other diners. Then Yoska stood up, like a buried man shaking the earth off his legs, and Peter saw: it was Jacob Peters—still sitting at the table, slouched back in his chair—who returned Rivka’s hello with a kind of salute. Three fingers drawn downward, roughened by old scars, his thumb and forefinger stiff, in the shape of a pistol.
A Storm in the Blood
PART II
THE CRIME
Eighteen
“FRIENDS ON EVERY SIDE,” Karl’s words, Gardstein’s guarantee in that East End neighborhood. “You couldn’t be safer in Grove Street,” he added, for Peter’s further peace of mind. But Peter didn’t feel safe anymore in Fritz and Luba’s first-floor flat. Or, come to that, within ten miles of an action in the making. Where can you be safe when life and limb depends on the quick thinking of careless people, the attention of the absentminded, the comradeship of the selfish, the judgment of the fallible? Leave London, he thought. For where? Back to France? North, then. Manchester. In Manchester, he could get by. Right now staying in a safe house in London was a dangerous arrangement. There were cracks in Liesma under Karl, this Peter knew—he saw them walking, talking, eating in Shinebloom’s. At the moment, he was playing gin rummy with one of them.
“Fritz,” Peter had to prod him, “staring at it won’t turn that six of hearts into a jack.”
“It’s my go?”
“Yours.”
“How do you know I want a jack?”
Peter didn’t say, How does anybody know anything? By watching.
“I’ll throw down,” Fritz decided. But he sat still, reading the cards in his hand, his other hand stuttering toward the facedown deck.
Peter lit a cigarette. “You want me to decide for you?”
“Sorry.” He threw down a card, plucked at random, grabbed up a replacement from the deck, stuffed it in the sloppy fan of nine others he was holding.
Peter drew from the deck and folded his hand. It was the tenth or eleventh game in a row he’d won. “Glad we’re not playing for money?”
“Aren’t we?” Fritz didn’t know whether he should feel relieved. On a good day, he was a rotten card player and today wasn’t a good day. His attention wandered back and forth between the game and the back bedroom where he’d left Luba still in bed, grim, sulky, close to tears. A few hands of rummy with Peter was a good enough reason to free himself from Luba’s festering mood.
“We don’t have to play anymore if your mind’s not on it.”
“I’m distracted,” Fritz agreed.
“Talk to her.”
“Let her stew. Deal another one.” Fritz watched the fresh ten cards blow toward him like dead leaves, then swept them into the heap he gathered in his hand. Then he proposed the motion. “Karl should trust me more.”
“More than what? Or who?” Peter glanced at his cards, moved them more than he had to, gave nothing away.
“Peter, you think he trusts me? That’s what I’m asking—his opinion of me. If he thinks I’m a good man, that’s my best hope.”
“I’m sure he does,” Peter confirmed. “You picked up the three. You have to discard.”
Fritz threw down the card he’d just added to his hand. “I want to help him with his ‘dance’”—he spoke the word softly, with a glance over his shoulder—“in Houndsditch. Did he talk to you about it?”
“I’m not in it this time. What could he get from me?”
Fritz sluggishly raised and lowered his shoulders. “He’s a genius, I think. Karl’s a real brainstormer. He’s a master, in my opinion.”
Peter folded his hand for the eleventh or twelfth time. “Sorry, my friend.”
The loss doubled him inward, this jittery man with the booming voice he usually failed to keep a lid on, his wide, square back hunched forward, all his nervousness packed inside it. “You’re a master too. At cards.”
“If there’s something you can say to help it, you should go say it to her,” Peter said. “Pinch the fuse.”
Fritz nodded, sighed. “Deal one more.”
“In my experience, if you ignore it,” Peter said, dabbing ash from his cigarette, “it gets worse.”
Fritz grinned. His mouth refused to do anything else. “I go in there, I want to be out here playing rummy. I don’t know what I want. Not so strong up here”—he tapped his forehead—“in my belfry. Not like before.”
“Before Luba?”
“Her? No!”
Fritz pushed himself to his feet without explaining what “before” he meant, and strayed back to his bedroom. Peter heard him say Luba’s name and tilt the door half-closed. Do what you can. Uncomfortable thoughts nagged at Peter. He thought about Rivka. What could he do? Try to talk her out of whatever it was that Nina and Karl had talked her into doing for them.
Luba’s mood fouled the shut-in air of the back bedroom. She’d kept it up, this “persecution” of Fritz, for two days, without an obvious reason. “Worse than the Russian secret police”—that’s what he told her before tramping off to play cards in the other room. “You’re worse than the okhrana.”
Luba had uncovered the pistol when she was looking for a place to store Fritz’s clean undershirt. It wasn’t there the day before, sandwiched between his second pair of socks and the two boat tickets to Australia. Luba convinced herself that Fritz had bought one of those tickets for her, even if it was in an envelope with his wife’s name written on it.
Her lover was a married man; his wife waited for him in Russia; all this she knew from the start. Now she’d found out something that wasn’t so clear-cut. What was this gentle man doing with a gun? So Luba stayed in bed, under the blanket, pillow over her head, on into the afternoon.
Fritz’s weight on the edge of the mattress rolled her a little toward him, unavoidably. She pulled the pillow aside. “You were gone a long time,” she said.
“He’s a good card-player. It took me six hands to win one.”
Luba propped herself on her elbows, brought her need closer to him, in her relaxed mouth and unrested eyes. He gave her the same steady look he gave a hand of shuffled cards, trying hard to read some order and pattern into the uncrackable combinations dealt to him. “Do you want to kiss me?” she said, helping him.
“I like kissing you. I thought you didn’t like it anymore.”
“Kiss me, then.”
Fritz twirled his hands, a speechless complaint: You say one thing and mean the opposite.
Until the begging in her eyes seeped downward into her voice. “Kiss me, will you, Fritz, please—please, don’t you want to?”
He plunged into Luba and she s
pread under him like a bath of warm water. Frantic fingers, hers, his, peeled back Fritz’s clothes down to the porridge whiteness of his skin. His passive flesh made Luba want to bite it, tear at it with her fingernails, to bring warm redness to the surface. Fury whirled inside them both. Luba slapped at him and Fritz bore down with his bulky strength; he locked her arms, bit her cheek when she bit his, he thrashed around on top of her, the blind throes of a landed fish. Limbs pounded the bed, which squealed underneath them, a noise hard to separate from the human gasps, sighs, and dying whines, easily heard through the wall, not so easy to tell if it was love play or a fistfight going on in there. A mercy, Peter thought, it was over in a hurry.
In the aftermath—rather than afterglow—they were separate again. Luba kept her face turned away from Fritz, who sat up and twirled his hands, speechless again. “Wasn’t that what you wanted?” She nodded her head. “What’s wrong, then? Look at me. Luba.”
If this was a moment when she might open him up, she could be Obliging Luba—why not? She showed Fritz her unsmiling face. He was the one begging now. He asked her again what was wrong.
“You don’t tell me the truth,” Luba told him fearlessly.
Insulted, practically dumbfounded: “Always! I always tell you—”
“Uh!” she cut in. “Here comes another lie.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I know, Fritz, I do know. I’ve got two eyes in my head and they both work.” She took those heavy-lidded dark blue lanterns off of Fritz and aimed them at the low dresser at the foot of the bed.
“What is it?” agitated now, baited. “You want to start a fight about my wife? No. Why? What lie did I tell you? Judith told you I was married our first time together. When did I say different?”
Luba sprang. She sat up, let the blanket fall from her. “Where do you get your money, Fritz?”
“You don’t have to worry about it,” the flat reply.
“How do you make money?”
“I told you ten times.”
“Never. Where?” Luba prodded his arm. “Tell me again.”
“Locksmith,” he said.
“A locksmith who doesn’t go to work. You never have a job!” She thought of the bits of jewelry he brought her now and then, romantic little presents, some Belgian lace, dinners at Shinebloom’s.
“I hear your brothers talking. They don’t like me because I’m not a Jew. They don’t know anything. Less than you know.”
“Don’t you talk about them. They’re in business, Fritz! My brothers know how men earn a living every day.”
“Yes? Do they know how much a locksmith makes on a job? Do you? How much?”
“More than nothing.”
“Much more! Enough to live for a while.”
“Then why do I have to pay our rent? And without a key of my own to the front door!”
“You don’t pay. I pay.”
“Liar! Three times out of my pocket, seven shillings and six pence, three weeks I paid! You can’t even tell the truth to yourself.”
“Be quiet.”
“Not about this.”
“About what? You’re crazy, Luba. Let go of me.”
“No.”
Fritz yanked his arm from her and pulled his shirt on. “Craziness. Go back to sleep. Wake up different.”
“What do you do? Where do you go?” Luba’s strength held through the soggy trembling in her throat. “I don’t know what you do!”
“Good. You don’t have to worry. Me neither.” Buttoning his trousers, buttoning up the argument. He tilted his head to listen to men’s voices in the other room. Peter talking with Karl. Then he felt Luba’s small hand on his arm again.
“We live as husband and wife,” she said softly. “I know something. I saw what you keep in there.”
Fritz moved to the dresser drawer, pushed by an instinct for self-protection. He opened it and with relief he saw his Browning pistol right where he’d left it. “Did you touch anything? The bullets?” Luba shook her head. “This is none of your business.” He glanced out the window. “This place,” he said. “There are crooks around here. Street robbers. A man can’t go outside unprotected.” Fritz twitched away from her, eager to be part of the conversation in the other room. “I’m good to you,” he said. As he stepped away, he caught a glimpse of Luba covering herself with the blanket. “I’ll come back in a minute. I have to say hello to Karl.”
A sincere smile from Karl could be as promising as any from a chorus girl. Fritz found Peter playing solitaire, Karl quietly restless. “Karl,” he said with a boyish wave. He shuffled over, eyebrows raised. “Luba,” he said in a hushed voice. “She’s, you know how, she—”
“Giving Fritz his marching orders,” Peter finished Fritz’s apology.
“You’re wrong, Peter.” Fritz took the teasing seriously. “She needed handling.”
“Trouble’s settled now?” Karl asked him.
“No trouble.”
Peter anted, “Just a lot of noise.”
“Noise.” Fritz shrugged it off. “Yoska says you’ve got a thing going.”
“You want to help?” Karl said in Lettish.
“Anything,” Fritz answered in the same language. “Whatever I can. It’s an action?”
Peter heard the fractured, unreliable soul shuffle under Fritz’s eagerness, just as Karl did, but if it worried Karl, he didn’t show it. “We need some equipment. Malatesta is organizing it for us.”
“What kind?”
“Also some money.”
“From Malatesta?”
“How much cash do you have, Fritz?”
“Some. A little.”
“We need a hundred rubles. It’s for Malatesta. You have to meet him in Islington, his workshop. All right?”
“Sure, Karl. That’s what you want me for?”
Karl heard Fritz’s disappointment, flicked it into the air. “No, no. Can you collect these things from him—oxygen tanks, some rubber hose—and pay him ten pounds?” Into Fritz’s nodding Yes, yes, Karl went on, “And then do something else.” He unfolded a scrap of paper and showed Fritz the address on it. “Rent this place for us. Flat 9, Exchange Buildings. It’s in Houndsditch. You can find it all right?”
“Houndsditch, sure.”
“You have to use your own money. Only a few shillings. Five or six, that’s all.”
“Six shillings,” Fritz repeated, another item of inventory. “What is it? A safe?” Fritz caught the insider’s glance Peter traded with Karl and concluded, “Who’s your locksmith?”
“What do we need a locksmith for? With a cutting torch.”
“In case something goes wrong with it,” Fritz suggested.
“We’ll have Yourka Dubof with us.”
“Yourka, with the young fingers.”
“I want you for the second team. If we’re still working after thirty-six hours. Yes? That’s three weights on your back.”
Fritz soberly recited the duties he’d accepted. “Get the cylinders from Malatesta, rent the flat, wait thirty-six hours. Good. All right, Karl. Yes. When?”
“Three weeks from Friday. Between you and me, if we’re out of that place by Saturday night I’ll light a candle in St. Basil’s.”
Peter’s game of solitaire played out. “I’ll sing Sanctus Agnus Dei in the choir,” he said.
Karl ignored the skepticism. “Luba’s here usually, isn’t she?” he asked Fritz. “Saturdays? Sundays?”
“I can send her away. She can go to her brother’s.”
“No, she’s usually here, she should be here. She’s here?”
“Today, yes.”
Karl called her name. Then Fritz did the same, adding, “Bring the watches from the box. All of them.” Luba slumped into the room, barefoot, loosely dressed, hair unpinned. She handed over three gold watches to Fritz. “Where’s the other one?”
“Mine?” she said.
“It’s not yours, I gave it to you. Go get it.”
&n
bsp; When she brought back the small rose-gold pocket watch, engraved with a cottage on one side and a bluebird in flight on the other, Fritz gestured for her to show it to Karl. As he examined it, Fritz said, “Yoska can talk three or four pounds out of Beron.” Karl handed it back to Fritz, who promised Luba, “You’ll get it back.”
Innocence mixed with crookedness. Fritz probably believes what he told her, Peter thought. No serious change. Everything serene, life as normal. There’s safety for you—the appearance of normality, safety in remaining undiscovered, disappearing beneath the surface by mirroring the surface. Peter didn’t ask his friend how Rivka fit into the Houndsditch plan. Three weeks: enough time, with the right kind of dedication, to dig that out for himself.
Nineteen
RIVKA CARRIED HERSELF ON QUIET, not stealthy, but careful footsteps along the front hallway toward the living-room door. A song from the ancient days of childhood chirped in her mind’s ear, a Lettish folk song about a rowboat stroking away from the calm harbor on its first voyage into the open sea. Mid-afternoon, Rivka expected the room to be fireless and vacant; she saw Perelman before he saw her, and would have ducked back into the hallway if he hadn’t glanced up from his newspaper.
Apology for the intrusion, finger aimed at the black marble clock on the mantelshelf, she said, “It’s so late.”
Perelman boyishly kicked his heels in front of the coal fire that fought back the chill from the window onto the street. “Where are you going on such a rotten day?”
“To an appointment,” Rivka said.
“For work?”
“Yes, I hope.”
“Good, very good. Where?”
“And visiting a friend,” thinking quickly, speaking calmly.
“You need something warm inside you,” he said, “before you go out in that mucky weather. Do you have time for some tea?”
Trapped here, twenty minutes to wait. “One cup. Thank you, yes.”
“Deborah brought English tea cakes home yesterday. You be the lady,” swiveling the teapot handle Rivka’s way, “I’ll be the lord.” She refilled his teacup and poured her own. He served her a freshly warmed tea cake from a tray above the fire, and with mild interest asked Rivka how far she had to travel to her appointment.
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