A Storm in the Blood

by Jon Stephen Fink

  For sure, he couldn’t count on Yoska’s powers of stealth. “Watch. It’ll just take one throw,” the Limper said. He’d got the pebble in his hand and hurled it, with a sportsman’s accuracy, at the second-floor window. It hit with force enough to spin off at a skewed angle and vanish. “Betsy!” Yoska’s hoarse cry of love reached her as the nightgowned, nightcapped figure slid the window open and peeked down. “Take us in, dear.”

  At that distance, Peter couldn’t make out her face; he heard her voice, claggy with sleep, reply, “Who’s with you, Yoskele?”

  “The sooner you let me in, the sooner you’ll find out.”

  Betsy dropped the street door key to him. It missed Yoska’s head by half an inch and bounced to the curb. “I see it,” he said, grabbing Fritz’s arm to balance himself as he craned down to fetch it, and in triumph Yoska twirled the key ’round his finger by its lilac ribbon.

  “Come on, I’m cold,” Fritz said. “I smell snow.”

  A whipcrack of sleety wind stung the back of Peter’s neck—a solid enough reason to follow Yoska and Fritz through the door, he thought.

  Thirty-one

  RIVKA IMAGINED PETER’S VOICE in her ear—she had the feeling he was still close—and so by the third day, Peter’s howling absence wore itself down to a whimper. A blessing he wasn’t standing beside her to see how hiding in alleys and doorways, fighting off drunkards, lechers, and other devils, had mangled Rivka inside and out, turned her into a beggar who couldn’t beg, nameless and puny. Grainy muck stained her fingernails, gutter sludge scraped up with the potato peelings she fought over with a starving whore twice her age. Lonely necessity made Rivka selfish. She covered herself in Nina’s shawl without wondering once whether its rightful owner lay hunched and frozen to death in the same razoring wind. As Anna Southam, the Stepney Songbird, is song, Rivka Bermansfelt is want.

  The same desolate trance that wafted her back to Shinebloom’s stopped her from going any closer than the pavement across the street. From there, screened by traffic, Rivka caught brief views of the Mayor through the restaurant’s window; pudgy arms flapping, he directed waitresses and plates to and from the kitchen while he carried on energetic conversations with his customers. A man she could trust? Rely upon to feed her, hide her from the police? For dishes she broke, he let Rivka repay him with a song—and for his own safety, he sacked her after he’d heard she was in Holloway Prison. It’s possible the Mayor didn’t recognize the black-shawled woman planted in the hurly-burly of Sclater Street; he may not even have noticed her. If he did, he made no sign.

  Another man did see Rivka behind the linen stall. He stopped at Shinebloom’s, held the door halfway open, and noticed whoever and whatever was in motion behind him. Leon Beron, the heavy-bellied, astrakhan-collared broker who always made Rivka think of a badger, the one who decorated his watch chain with a £5 gold coin; Yoska traded his prizes with the Badger, trusted him that far. The gold from Houndsditch would have gone to Mr. Beron. Badly camouflaged, this badger’s reconnaissance. Rivka tugged the shawl closer around her head and face, bare cloth between her and the grim weather, then ducked away into the commotion of pedestrians.

  Lunchtime in Shinebloom’s, the political knockabout was quieter than usual. Diners shared gossip about Karl’s real murderer, the size of the haul they got away with, where he stashed the gold and gems before he died. And what reprisals from the English were on the cards. Leon Beron said to the Mayor, “More snitches and policemen than customers at the Warsaw. Somebody told them it was Karl’s regular place. This is an oasis, compared.”

  “Police haven’t visited us. Not yet,” he added, then let the matter drop. “By the way, Hannah made applesauce for the brisket today.”

  A tall, thin man came in and invited himself to Beron’s table. “Can’t get a table at the Warsaw, it’s full of Special Branch and their squealers.”

  “Steinie,” Beron’s greeting. “Order the brisket.”

  “So I figured you’d be here.”

  “Very smart. My congratulations.”

  From the next table, a voice in Russian. “They’re biding their time. Feeding their horses.”

  Steinie agreed with him. “Rifles and bayonets, after last Friday. We should build barricades. The sooner the better. You’ve got all those market stalls.”

  “Sit down,” Beron begged him. “The bayonets aren’t coming today. What did you bring me?”

  The Mayor sympathized. “Your usual nonsense, Lev,” he told the Russian.

  Lev paid no attention. “They’ll plan something. They’ve got all the time in the world. Then they’ll ride down on us like a typhoon, same as at home.”

  “Usual nonsense.”

  “What Gardstein did—”

  “Did to them, to England,” someone said.

  “—is their excuse for a pogrom.”

  “Three bogies got killed,” Steinie reminded them with a show of three fingers. “For sure they’ll come down here. Any place it’s easy to find us.” He put to the Mayor: “Why’s it nonsense, a pogrom in Brick Lane?”

  “The innocent with the guilty…” one of Lev’s friends began.

  A contribution winged in from another table. “They won’t start it in Brick Lane. Jubilee Street first. They’ll burn down Rocker’s club to make a point. Then they’ll come to us.”

  “Brick Lane runs straight down. Easy for horses,” Steinie said.

  “You think Englanders want to burn down their own city?” The Mayor’s parting shot.

  “Sure! To take it away from us!” said Lev.

  “Police or no,” Beron said, “I’m going back to the Warsaw. At least informers talk quiet.” He didn’t budge, though, and repeated his first question to Steinie.

  Steinie finally sat down. “I’ll have something beautiful for you in a couple of weeks. Special. You’ll have to be careful with it, break it up.”

  Beron leaned in close, to wonder, “In the newspaper it says they didn’t get to the safe. Did Gardstein bring something out?”

  Steinie’s reply was no reply. He turned around to the Russians, pointed at the Mayor, and joked, “He doesn’t think Brick Lane is a shtetl.”

  The coarse laughing didn’t annoy Beron so much; neither did the debate simmering around him about the strategy and methods the police would employ in the coming attack. The voices he heard weren’t Social Democrats or Anarchists, Latvian Nationalists or Syndicalists, Communists, Christian Socialists, Individualists or Social-Revolutionaries. Most of them Jews, like him. He said to Steinie, “Whatever they want to do, it’s going to be bad for everybody.”

  TWO NIGHTS AGO, she slept on the frigid ground behind a pile of ash and kitchen slops, and the night before she didn’t sleep through a single hour. Wherever she stopped walking to rest her feet, Rivka attracted men who pestered her with an offering in each hand—coins clutched in one, cock in the other. On her third morning dumbly tramping the back streets of Whitechapel and Stepney, when the next turning led her past the Pavilion Theatre, Rivka got her first piece of good luck. The blistered dark green stage door was unlocked.

  She slipped into the building and found a place to conceal herself among the props and costumes, where she slept like a dead thing until early evening. The chatter of performers and stagehands jarred Rivka awake in time for her to clear out of there and stumble across other nooks, unlit, unvisited, above and beneath the stage. The secret was to choose the right moment to move. After the curtain came down on the final encore, shoeless, quiet as smoke, she sneaked back upstairs to rebuild her nest of drapery and tweed coats. For another two days, her luck held.

  The fate that Rivka feared was stalking her had already netted two of the Sisterhood. Fortunately for her nerves, she didn’t know that Rosie was under arrest, and Luba too. Days before, Luba’s brothers chased her down and marched their delinquent, pregnant sister to the police. First to Jack and Nathan, then to DI Thompson, Luba confessed her affair with one of the anarchists behind the Houndsditch crimes. Both
women were spilling what they could—names, descriptions, addresses—and if Rivka had known how the odds were shrinking out there, she wouldn’t have risked being seen in the street, much less gambled her freedom by stealing food off market barrows.

  Revolution? Social justice? Revenge? Any need outside of Rivka’s body—and she felt the ghostly pain of Peter’s absence cold as an amputated limb—simply disappeared from the world. Today she found shelter, and today she stole food she could eat without cooking. A bread roll, a piece of fruit, a handful of boiled sweets. Rivka had real talent as a thief. Her grab was as quick as her eye, her eye as quick as the judgment to take a thing or pass it up; in a snap, the prize was gone under the hem of her shawl. What did people see if they looked at Rivka? Flawless calm. No guilt or fear heated her cheeks; she didn’t abscond. Rivka watched herself. What do they see? A woman strolling past, who has no reason to hurry, another one like us—you can see it in her, our morality and motives, our bland innocence.

  It wouldn’t be luck if it didn’t run out, and Rivka’s deserted her because of a runaway carrot. From the landing above, she listened for the clunk of the stage door and the clack of its bolt. Clunk-clack, she was locked in for a second night, so Rivka could breathe easy and make up her bed behind the magician’s cabinet. She tipped the wardrobe-room door closed behind her without noticing the uneaten leftover from her supper fall out of her pocket and wedge itself between door and door frame.

  Footsteps on the stairs stopped at the landing. An electric light switched off, then on again; Rivka heard the footsteps reach the door. “A carrot, for God’s sake,” Harry the manager complained. “They treat it like a pigsty.” More topsy-turvy inside, a spilled cup of water, curtain and costumes on the floor, the human shape underneath them. “Who’s there?” He saw Rivka’s face and said her name.

  “You remember me.”

  “Peter?” Harry half-called, half-inquired.

  “He’s not here. I don’t know where he is.”

  “They’re saying he’s mixed up in that Houndsditch business.”

  “He wasn’t.”

  “You know for sure?”

  “For sure.”

  “He was with you?”

  “No.”

  Rivka’s certainty unsettled Harry. “The woman the police want,” he said, opening his satchel, retrieving his copy of the Evening News. “Is it you? They put in a description.”

  She took the newspaper from him and tried to make out the damning words. “It could be me.”

  “It could be.”

  “Yes,” Rivka told him. “Why are they looking for Peter? He didn’t go there. He didn’t do anything against the law.”

  “Not last Friday, maybe.” Harry knelt to bring his face level with Rivka’s. “Did Max let you in here?”

  “Nobody did. I got in.”

  “What a way to live,” he said and shook his head. “Your name’s on the playbill. See?” With his thumb, he underlined the name Anna Southam the Stepney Songbird.

  “Peter told me. It’s a beautiful name.”

  “Your name. Look at the date. Week of the twelfth. Anybody asks me I’ll tell him Friday night you were singing at the Pavilion.”

  “No. I can’t. I’ll go.”

  “Where?”

  “If they look for me here, you’ll get trouble from the police.”

  “So you’ll go where?”

  “To Peter. Where he is.”

  “He wants to know you’re someplace safe. Am I right? Good. All right.” Harry nodded with her; they were in agreement. “I can even arrange a hot bath. All the comforts.”

  He carted the tin bath from the storeroom. The coal stove in his office heated the bathwater. Harry took the curtain Rivka used for a mattress and strung it across the room to trap the heat long enough for Rivka to wash herself. On the other side of the curtain, Harry stood guard. “Do you know any of Peter’s friends?”

  “You’re his friend.”

  “His patron! Still, he doesn’t talk to me. In the Pavilion, about painting my scenery, he talks my ear off. But what goes on outside?” Harry puffed his cheeks and shook his head. “Where could he go?”

  “Somewhere with Yoska and Fritz.”

  “Fritz.” Harry placed the name. “The shaky actor, with the sword.”

  Fritz hovered in her mind, stiffly declaiming his lines as Gamba, the Russian policeman. “The police tortured him. I heard him talk about it. When they got him in Russia. Or back home, in…” Rivka’s whole body shivered, bathwater lapped out of the tub; she wept as if Fritz’s memory of prison was hers too. “They tore his fingernails off.”

  “I won’t tell anybody you’re here.” Harry coupled his promise to a caution. “But I won’t go out looking for Peter, either.”

  WRECKAGE STRETCHED AHEAD of Nina as far as she could see; its trail reached behind her from Houndsditch to the very threshold of her rented room. Curled against the wall, she burrowed under stale-smelling pillows and blankets, where, unforgotten, Karl moaned inside her own moan: “Why did you leave me?” All of us on the stairs in the smoky frenzy, explosions and shouting. Didn’t Karl put himself between Nina and the bullets? It was no accident. Why did you leave me? Max Smoller’s blood clot of a jealous heart, hungry for the attention Karl saved for Nina, lover-comrade, who had his confidence, devotion, protection. Max was gunning for another prize. Why did you leave me? To bring a doctor, who refused me to my face. The dying body on the bed, you know, it wasn’t Karl anymore. Not you! To stay was no comfort for either of us. Only for Rosie. Is that why?

  Nina went on talking to herself in a waking dream, out of bed now, on her knees on the floor with a knife, brown paper and string, and a scrabbled pyramid of her valuables. “I left there before they went in to do the robbery,” she repeated a dozen times, rehearsing the words until they came out of her mouth as the convincing truth.

  The parcel looked anonymous enough not to need hiding, but Nina buried it first in a dresser drawer. Which was too obvious. Next she slid it under the washstand, where it was too visibly out of place. Then she abandoned that task for a more important one. Off came her jacket and white blouse, off came her skirt. Dust in the washbasin grayed the painted rose at the bottom and darkened under the first splash of spirit vinegar. The acid odor burned Nina’s nostrils, teared her eyes. Like a farm girl tugs and squeezes the udder of a cow, she tugged at handfuls of her hair to milk the black dye from it. Her fingers were painted with it, trickles of the melting color smudged her face, collected around her eyes.

  The knock on her door was really a courtesy, an announcement that took for granted Nina’s permission to come in. Especially since her landlord, Isaac Gordon, had a plate of food for her, cooked by his daughter. “Polly’s worried about you, Nina. We don’t see you eat. In a day or two you’re going to starve to death.” One look at the wild-haired, sunken-eyed, miserable mess hunched over the washstand gave Isaac the feeling Nina was much closer to death than that.

  “My stomach’s no good,” she said, and stopped what she was doing. The strength that was holding her up drained out of her legs and Nina crumpled to the floor. Her hands covered her face; it looked to Isaac, through her fingers, as if she were crying black tears. “He was my best friend.”

  “What can you do with this? You can’t bring him back.” Isaac set the plate on the floor next to Nina. “Will you eat?”

  “He cared for me. Without him I’d be dead.” Her hands went limp. “Without him I am dead.”

  “No, no. Don’t punish yourself.”

  Nina grabbed the brown paper package from under the washstand. “Keep this for me. Tell Polly to hide it under her bed.”

  “Is it valuable?”

  “It’s everything. All of my…” she trailed off.

  “Are you going away again?”

  “I don’t know. I think so. If I do.”

  A clammy mist of awareness crept over Isaac. Days of gossip in the neighborhood, the talk he had with every shopkeeper, every
edition of the newspaper he read carried a description of the woman seen with the murderers escaping from Houndsditch. Carefully, he said to Nina, “The one who passed away—he wasn’t your friend in the countryside?”

  Nina floated back to her bed. Her reply wasn’t to Isaac. “It would’ve been better if he’d shot me.”

  REST AND FOOD cleared Rivka’s thoughts. With Peter hiding God knows where, in God knows what shape, her own safety felt worthless, almost an act of greed. Hour by hour, kindness by kindness, the sanctuary Harry made for her in his office wedged more distance between Rivka and any chance of seeing Peter’s face again. When Harry ferried a hot meal to his “princess in the tower,” she worried about Peter going hungry; in her bed behind Harry’s desk and a locked door, she lay awake, electrified by visions of Peter hunched in the chill and wet filth of an open yard or derelict building, on the run, human prey in the sights of strangers who took the fever hidden inside him for fanaticism.

  To them, his largeness was the largeness of a glacier; no one except Rivka knew how Peter’s warmth waited to be finagled out of him, chased, found. He’d try to hold you at a distance with stiff lectures about the realities of combat and crime, tactics of escape; he’d give you examples of his superhuman realism and run off without leaving a trace, burrow deep, bow to the necessity of severing all human ties and force you to accept that we don’t live in a magic world where a man and a woman remain knotted to each other with fiery strands of love. Rivka knew different.

  In less than a day, exhaustion and gratitude drained out of her and Rivka was left possessed by the need to find Peter. At an early hour, before sunup, she raided the wardrobe room and dressed herself from the rack of costumes. A clean white blouse, dark jacket and dress, a black silk-trimmed hat to cover her hair, Nina’s unfancy shawl—who’d recognize Rivka Bermansfelt under all of that? In a race to Peter’s hiding place, she was one up on the police: these were her people. They spoke her language. In East End streets, she wasn’t a stranger anymore. More than that, Rivka had a place to start her detective work. Did she know anyone who could name the men in Peter’s circle better than Charles Perelman?