It was Peter who had done this to her. His gentle attentions. His joy with her. His absence, now. The salty, clean smell of his skin clung to the blankets on the daybed. Rivka wrapped herself in them and inhaled. She took Peter’s remnant inside her, a breath of him that soothed her one second, then agitated her the next. It gave the uneasiness in her chest and empty arms a reason besides lonesome foreboding.
Rip away these wooden walls, replace them with iron ones, and she would be back inside the metal belly of the Comet wallowing across the North Sea. Strange noises had reached her there, from the ship and the sea, phantom sounds a person never hears on land. Moans from the hull, thumps on the deck, draggings and scrapings, screeches and growls let out by things invisible and unimaginable to her. Here in the flat, she knew the sounds that echoed in from the street: horse hooves, the creak and knock of a cart’s hard wheels, a door slammed shut, a shout in Yiddish answered in English, hurrying footsteps. Outside it was Friday night, the Sabbath.
YOURKA DUBOF BELIEVED that lookout was the perfect job for him. He was an observer. Hadn’t Peter said as much at the party? An eye for details. A good artist has to be an observer; that was why Karl chose an artist as his lookout. Yourka’s footsteps mixed with the straggling others in Houndsditch. His were unhurried, though, and not synagogue-bound; they rested in front of the jewelry shop long enough for him to light a cigarette. Precious little for a window shopper to see in there: empty velvet shelves, a clock in the shape of the Eiffel Tower, a single electric light burning in the office behind the display counter, the safe tucked in the corner.
How long before they could get him inside? At the earliest, it would be three or four a.m. Sunday, Yourka estimated, an early hour when they could count on thirty minutes of privacy. That was all he needed. What was Karl doing with acids and oxygen torches? The time it took, the messy violence, but nobody said, Dubof, what’s your opinion? After twenty-four hours, Karl will give up on the tunneling and burning. Watch, he’ll come to his senses and call in the fingertip artist.
It was hard for Yourka to imagine the streets much emptier than they already were. He watched the cold wind lift a sheet of newspaper and sweep it along the pavement, away from the parade of closed shops. The wind is a good thief, he thought. Yourka patrolled back to the turning into Cutler Street and cocked his ear to hear how far noise carried from the digging. At the entrance to the cul-de-sac, he could make out a remote tapping—the innocent sound of a plumber, say, repairing a sink. Closer to the flat’s front door, it became a muffled knocking, yard work in back, nothing to alarm the neighborhood, or the thieves either.
Thump-scrape. Thump-thump-scrape. One of them, Jacob or Max, was shouldering into the job of hammering through bricks and cement to break an entryway. For Karl’s welding torch? No, for Yourka, his talent. Sunday morning Karl could watch him gentle the tumblers of Mr. Harris’s safe and scoop the tsar’s gold into a bag. The revolution in miniature: muscle first, then finesse.
The revolution in miniature: muscle first, then finesse, he paused to think again. That’s the kind of subtle observation that occurs to Karl. Yourka paced to the end of the narrow street, repeating the epigram to himself, sealing it in his memory so he could make the remark later to Liesma’s boss as if he’d thought of it on the spot.
THUMP-SCRAPE. THUMP. THUMP. Jacob drove his crowbar into the wall with steep, downward strokes. In the privy’s cramped box, his swing had to be short and hard. Each jab hacked out another chip of brick and spray of mortar dust, and he felt the sharp force of every strike, an abrupt vibration that jolted the muscles in his arms, back, and neck. Body heat and the candlelight kept the shithouse hot as a kiln. One thought returned with the curl and splash of waves on the shore, stroke after stroke: Do the work.
That’s it, isn’t it? Of course it was in a toilet! Perfection! Up from the lowest, filthiest place in the civilized world, here we come to take your gold. Soldiers of the latrine! Karl must be chuckling at that. An artistic part of his plan, sheer poetry. That’s right, it was his plan; after Beron fenced the stuff, it would be Karl’s say what happens to the money. Seven shares. Send it all, that’s what I’ll tell him. Arm our friends. This should be going on all over London. Berlin. Vienna. Paris. Chicago. Fuck them. We hit and hide! In toilets. How long can they hold out against that, tell me? We can keep going for years. Until all the good men are on our side. And the rest of them are fucked.
You think we should execute them? Round up the bastards and shoot them against a wall? Thump. Thump. They call us barbarians. We’ll show the world how civilized we are. Arrest our enemies, yes. Confiscate their property, yes. Then be generous in victory. We’ll educate them. Bring them to a place, an arena, and one by one return the tools of their trade. To a judge, his gavel. To a professor, his textbook. A priest, his censer. A banker, his fountain pen. Give them a fresh chance to use their tools for the benefit of the people. Use them to beat each other to death, two by two, in public, around the clock. Let it take years. That’s the right way to fuck them. Without wasting a single one of the people’s bullets. Contend with us and see what happens.
Closer. Closer. With each slam of the crowbar, we’re a fraction of a fraction of an inch closer—one less chip of brickwork between us and their gold. This work makes it our gold. Honest work; it satisfies me. George Gardstein’s plan in motion. That’s why they call it an action. The motion of it is here, in my arms and back: I’m the motion. I slam the point of this crowbar into the brick and what used to be a wall is a hole we can climb through. He says it’s sixty feet to the safe. Through the storeroom, then a door, then another wall, then the safe. Then and then and then and then. Do the work.
Thump. Thump-scrape. Thump. Fuck them.
RIVKA APPEARED DOWNSTAIRS (for no good reason, it crossed Max’s mind). When he looked up, she thought he was squinting at the teapot she was carrying, but he was looking at her.
“You come down for hot water?” he said, not so friendly.
“Tea’s gone. Sorry, I don’t know what to do with…” She opened the lid to show him the dregs inside.
Max tapped his wrench on the edge of the sink. “We don’t have to leave it clean.”
“What’s that, a clock?”
The mechanism fit in the palm of Max’s hand. He wiped its brass threads with a rag. “Regulator.”
“What’s it for?” While Max decided how or whether to answer her, Rivka studied the slim black cylinders that leaned against the sink. “You put it on one of those?”
“Tells me how much gas is left.”
“For burning.”
“That’s right.”
“How long does it burn?”
Max turned back to his work. “About forty-five minutes.”
“Is it long enough?” No reply. “Who’s going to use it, you or Jacob?”
“All right, I get it. It’s boring for you,” he said sharply, “up there by yourself. Just you and your pot of tea.”
“No more tea,” she whispered. Then, “I’m sitting like a lump.”
“That’s the job you got from Karl: you sit upstairs till we finish, lump or no lump.” Uneasiness tightened Max’s throat. “Go next door, then. Sit with Karl and Nina.”
“No, you’re right. He said stay here.”
“We aren’t in the army. They won’t mind—go sit next door,” he recommended. “It’s better.”
Minutes later, Rivka sat sharing a late-night supper with the Gardsteins, as (for some misbegotten, daughterly reason) she thought of them tonight. Boiled eggs, black rye bread, sardines, paté, jam, noodle kugel. Nina poured dark tea into glasses, set each glass on its saucer, a sugar cube on the side, Russian-style. “Let’s say it’s an early breakfast,” Karl said.
“Twelve hours early, thirteen, fourteen,” Nina said. Then, for Rivka’s benefit: “He’s a championship sleeper.”
Without fuss, he slid his Mauser from the table and holstered it inside his overcoat. “For your breakfasts I always get out of
bed.” A meal like this, in a quiet home with Nina, tucked indoors beside the heat of a fire with the night-cold and street-cold shut out by secure wooden shutters—this is peace.
The peacefulness of kinship, Rivka would have told him, because the throb she felt rise and fall in her chest carried her home to Sasmacken. So, all right, they were only a few years older than Rivka, but Nina’s spry taunts and goads were Mama’s; Karl’s beleaguered, sighing, everlasting patience belonged to Papa; and for Rivka it was as easy as drifting into sleep to relax into the illusion of this family life. Banished from her first home to find her second.
Apart from the single question he asked Rivka about Max and Jacob’s progress, Karl devoted himself to enjoyment of the food and the companionship of two doting women. For the mastermind of a jewel robbery, which he was many shaky hours if not days from bringing off, Karl seemed unburdened. Passive as a passenger on a train. The great machine has hauled itself away from the station, with you inside it; you are a captive of its velocity, a parcel of its momentum now, traveling in its direction to its destination, nothing for you to do but stay in your seat and ride along…
“By color,” Nina insisted. The subject of tonight’s squabble was how to judge when to pour the first cup of tea from a fresh pot.
“No, by minutes,” Karl repeated for the third or fourth time. “Color isn’t science, it’s art.”
“Brewing a pot of tea isn’t science, either.”
“Five minutes in Petersburg is five minutes here. Your tea will taste exactly the same.”
“China tea or Indian?”
They’d kept the merrily brittle to-and-fro going for longer than Rivka thought possible; she suspected that the performance was staged at least in part for her entertainment, especially when Karl appealed to her for a deciding vote.
“She’ll tell you color,” Nina said.
“Why don’t you close your mouth and listen to what Rivka says.” Karl didn’t want to listen, either, but to grumble. “Rivka, you know how Nina acts. She has to disagree with me on every point.”
Rivka raised a neutral hand, and the lunacy ended in stalemate. Karl softly hummed a song from the other night; underneath it, the muffled pounding continued at the back of the flat, almost keeping time. “That’s Jacob’s bashing,” Karl said. “You can tell.”
Nina listened for a second. “It’s Max.”
“You can tell by the style. Jacob’s a locomotive—oomph, oomph, oomph. Smoller, he’s—” Karl curled his hands into paws and imitated a mole scraping through the dirt.
“It’s Max.”
“Who is it?” Karl asked Rivka. “Jacob or Max?”
The plates rattled out of Nina’s hands back onto the table. “You can’t ask her! She was just down there. She knows who’s digging.”
Karl frisked his pockets for coins. “It’s Jacob. Want to bet me?”
“I’ll write you my IOU,” Nina said. “It’s Max digging.”
All three listened again. And, along with the pounding down below, heard footsteps approaching the back door. The door opened, the footsteps paused, and in a soft voice someone inquired, “Hello?”
Karl waited a second to reply. “Max?”
With a weak grin, Max answered the laughter and applause they gave him when he entered the room. “What’s funny?” From his waistband, he freed his Browning revolver, then—perhaps as a courtesy—placed it on the mantel. “Any food left? I need something in my belly before I work.”
FOR TWO FRIGHTENED WOMEN in another Exchange Buildings flat, one door along from Family Gardstein, the nighttime hours of phantom hammering, thumps, scrapes, comings and goings chilled into a mystery that drove spikes of ice into their stomachs. The innocent explanations they settled on at seven o’clock had by ten o’clock become fears so crude and tormenting that Miss Weil and her maid, Miss Chard, stood clutching each other for comfort and safety by the front door, poised to make a nightgowned run for it if an attacker should break in through the back door.
Mr. Weil’s key rattling the lock downstairs gave their hearts another jolt. The man of the house didn’t even get a chance to take off his hat and coat; the sight of his friendly bearded face uncorked the women’s nightmares. “Listen,” his sister said. “You hear those noises?”
“Noises?”
Finger to her lips, she hushed him. “You hear it? Down.”
“Down? Where?”
“In the back,” said Miss Chard.
Miss Weil shushed her. Mr. Weil concentrated on the silence. No, they weren’t crazy, he heard the noises too. Thump. Thump-scrape. “What is it?”
“We don’t know, sir. Deliveries, or…”
Miss Weil babbled over Miss Chard, “I don’t know! It’s something.”
“…something, somebody, we don’t know who…”
“Stock deliveries, we thought maybe. But it’s nighttime.”
“It’s Friday night, sir.”
“It’s not a delivery,” Mr. Weil said. “I just locked up. I’m the last one.”
“Then we thought furniture movers.”
“You said furniture, I said builders,” Miss Weil agreed with Miss Chard.
Thump. Thump. Thump-scrape.
Strange, definitely strange. Mr. Weil said, “There’s nobody outside. That’s not furniture. Could be building work.”
“Who does building work on shabbas?”
“Irishmen?” he suggested.
“Oh no, sir, I don’t think so,” Miss Chard said. “Not at night.”
“Nobody’s Irish next door.”
“What are they?” Mr. Weil asked his sister.
Miss Chard said, “They look like you, sir. And they talk to each other in Jew.”
Miss Weil, even more bedeviled, “Who does building work on shabbas?”
Good thing he was still wearing his hat and warm coat. “Stay here,” Mr. Weil told them. “I’ll get to the bottom of it.”
“Not by yourself.” Though Miss Weil didn’t intend her prudence to stop him.
“Go back inside. I’ll get a policeman.”
Twenty-three
TO MR. WEIL, he looked young for a police constable, with slight shoulders holding up his brass-buttoned tunic. Its collar, he noticed, floated loosely around the PC’s neck. Not enough meat on him to support the towering authority of the law. If this is the one I’ve found, thought Mr. Weil, that’s my luck, and his. The policeman he’d stopped just near the corner in Houndsditch listened with nods of concern and tried his best to separate useful information from the looping melody of Mr. Weil’s foreign accent.
“My sister is very scared. Can you help me, Constable?”
That plea came through clear enough. PC Piper couldn’t think what he’d accomplish by telling a distressed citizen that, despite the fact that he was walking this City beat alone, he was still a probationer. So, demonstrably in command of procedure, he took out his pocket notebook, made a note of Mr. Weil’s name, and asked him, “Can you take me to the place you heard these noises?”
“Our flat, the other flat, right behind here. It’s why she’s worried.” He stopped in front of No. 119, the dark doorway of Mr. Harris’s jewelry shop.
Piper rattled the spear-topped iron gate that spanned the shop’s entryway, then leaned in for a look through the window. Empty shelves, empty counter, an office beyond, a constant light burning above the stout safe in back. Still and undisturbed.
“Can you hear? That building noise? We don’t know what it is, that hammering. But who builds on shabbas?”
“Sorry—can you let me listen, please?” Piper heard the wind buffeting the mouth of Cutler Street. “Round there, your flat?”
“By the corner, yes. Next door to us. You’ll hear it.”
“Would you mind waiting here for me? Just in front of the shop, sir, all right?”
A stiff, unhappy smile from Mr. Weil, an abrupt wave of the hand. “Number 11,” he said to the constable. “Those new neighbors.”
AT THE FIRS
T TAP of the knock, Rivka saw the men’s relaxed mood slip from their faces and from the room. Karl and Max made her think of startled cats who stiffen, shrink themselves into their eyes and ears, reflexes quickened, balanced on the verge of a jump. From her chair by the fireplace, Rivka had a view of the dimly lit lobby between the stairs and front door, but no longer of Karl. She heard the voice of a stranger, an Englishman.
“Is the missus in?”
Karl replied, “She’s gone out.”
Rivka teased Nina with raised eyebrows and whispered to her, “A gentleman for you.”
Nothing from Nina gave Rivka permission, or heart, to joke any more about the situation, or to speak one more word.
They heard the Englishman say, “Right, then. I’ll call back.”
For safety, in control of himself, Karl kept his voice low. “Stay in the bedroom for now,” he said to Nina and Rivka. Then he retrieved his Mauser from the floor, holstered it in his long coat, pulled his coat on. Max checked his Browning’s chamber and quietly followed the others upstairs.
Karl’s gentlemanly style didn’t help PC Piper’s uneasiness. He paced back toward Houndsditch; if anything, more nervous than when he’d left there, not content at all that he’d disguised his bolt-from-the-blue investigation from the foreigner in No. 11. Is the missus in? Oh, that was sure to put any criminal off the scent. Done is done, he decided.
Up the narrow length of Cutler Street, in the gaslight haze and patchy shadows, Piper saw a figure who was not Mr. Weil. He didn’t risk calling out (do you shout at a rabbit you want to trap?), didn’t hasten his step, only watched as the man retreated as if he were attached to the opposite end of a steel rod pushing him away at the same speed Piper approached.
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