A Storm in the Blood

by Jon Stephen Fink

  As Perelman walked toward City Police headquarters, the refrain played in his ear. What’s the meaning of this? A consideration that didn’t slow his step. No clammy tide sloshed in his stomach, though he did feel a trailing presence—another Charles Perelman who walked behind him and couldn’t keep up. “Carolis Perlmanis,” who’d spat at Russian army officers and hectored the lower ranks to fight for themselves, not the decadent tsar. When he could throw rocks and run fast. Young limbs turned into an old cask of a body. Well. Agile enough to accomplish subtler things. At the door, too rushed to fish for his handkerchief, he wiped his forehead with the cuff of his coat, and then, not really aware he’d moved indoors, Perelman heard himself tell the desk sergeant that he, Charles Perelman, had found the wanted men no one could find, and he’d come to speak to the man in charge.

  “Wait over there.” The sergeant gestured with his pencil at a wooden bench by the wall.

  It’s too easy to mistake consequences for meaning. What will come out of this is that Carlusha will grow up knowing his father didn’t cower under the threat of anarchist revenge. And Deborah will know her husband’s seventy-year-old balls still swung with some heft. What treatment is coming from Detective-Inspector Wensley, the man in charge? There’s a sickish scent around deception, and no matter how used they are to smelling it on an informant, policemen let you know it stinks in their nose. Perelman, you’re in their house. They’ll punish you for this betrayal with a £500 reward…

  In the corridor on his way to DI Wensley’s office, the gray floor under Perelman’s shoes was a ribbon of ocean. As it flowed underneath him, he thought, It’s how a tall ship might feel riding a swell, if a ship had feelings.

  “I’m not here.”

  The detective-inspector asked Perelman to repeat what he’d said. When he did, Wensley replied with a nod of agreement. “Tell us”—the DI; Henry Wagner, there to help with Perelman’s Russian Yiddish; the constable penciling notes—“how you knew where they were.”

  A hinted accusation. Perelman sat stiff-backed in his chair. He didn’t look at Henry Wagner when he answered, forced to rely upon another man to represent him honestly. “She came to my house today. Betsy Gershon. ‘Help me, help me.’ Frightened.”

  “Gershaw?” the constable asked without looking up.

  Wensley ignored him. “Afraid of the men?” he said to Perelman.

  “Especially Fritz.”

  “Sokoloff, he’s there with Fritz too?”

  “Both of them.”

  “What about Piatkow? The Painter? Is he in there?”

  Perelman took a sip from the cup of tea they’d brought for him, the only one on the table. “He was with Fritz and Yoska an hour ago.”

  “He’s the worst of the lot,” Wensley said.

  The constable thought the remark was directed to him. “Yes, sir. Murdering scum, is all.”

  “They’re relying on me. I arranged them a room. They don’t want to stay in Sidney Street.”

  “Oh? Why’s that?”

  Perelman answered in English, as if the fact was staring them in the face, “Police will find them.”

  “Quite,” Wensley allowed, with a dryness that passed for drollery. “How much time have we got?”

  “Fritz wants to go tonight. Then he wants tomorrow. Yoska wants to stay with Betsy, unless Fritz goes. Tonight. Tomorrow. Probably tomorrow,” Perelman obliged. “They’re moving across to Nelson Street. One at a time.”

  “These men are brawlers,” Wensley thought aloud. Then he asked Perelman to give an opinion. “Are Svaars and Sokoloff as excitable as their friend?” The question stymied Perelman, so the detective-inspector simplified it. “Did you see any guns?”

  “Mausers.”

  “How many?”

  “Fritz and Yoska, two pistols, definite. Maybe Yoska’s wasn’t a Mauser. I don’t know this gun, that gun.”

  “Piatkow is armed, too?”

  “The Painter…Well, him,” Perelman retreated. “I don’t know him so good.”

  Wensley’s fingers tapped a little rhythm on the table, helping him tabulate Perelman’s information. “If I were those men I’d be eager to get out. Desperate. So…” In the mixed company of police and civilian, he left the next thought unspoken. “What else can you tell us about the arrangements at Number 100?” Fingers clasped, Wensley sat back and absorbed his informant’s description of the narrow staircase, the second-floor room, his observation of other residents in the building, which rooms they occupied, whether any of them spoke English. Wensley’s attention and brisk handshake communicated an unmistakable impression to Charles Perelman: in that hour, man to man, they’d forged a pact.

  He met Wensley’s directness with a clubbable helping of his own. “How soon before I can come back for the reward money?”

  “First we have to catch them.”

  “Soon, then.”

  “Apply for it, Mr. Perelman. I’ll support your application.”

  One thing Perelman didn’t stop to doubt: his visit to the City Police had tipped a mechanism into motion. He carried that private knowledge with him through the foyer where he passed the desk sergeant with a courtly, almost military, salute. He’d given the spinning world a little push, sped events on their way. For the pleasure of it. There’s your what’s-the-meaning-of-this. He felt the blood in his arteries flowing clean and strong, his legs lightly carrying his weight, his stomach as relaxed as a cat on a sunny windowsill and hungry for a large supper—brisket and potatoes, applesauce and lockshen pudding. Perelman followed his feet toward Brick Lane, the Warsaw’s menu floating in front of him.

  The difference in temperature between the radiator heat of Wensley’s office and the glassy slice of January air outside brought out a ridge of sweat on his forehead. He reached into his coat pocket for a handkerchief and his fingers brushed the folded edge of Fritz’s letter. Back Perelman marched to hand over this bonus to the man in charge.

  Ignorant of the important business Perelman finished with DI Wensley only a few minutes before, the desk sergeant welcomed him with a tight frown as if the old Jewish gentleman had wandered in to report his pocket watch stolen. “Mr. Wensley can’t be interrupted at the minute.”

  Perelman showed him the letter. “For him. Important. You know?”

  “Give it here, I’ll see he gets it.”

  Before the sergeant could take it from him, Perelman slid the letter back into his pocket. “No. I must.”

  “Suit yourself. Wait over there.”

  Not ushered in—the bench again. Five minutes. Ten. After a quarter of an hour, other chores took the sergeant away from his post, leaving a constable in charge. Perelman was still sitting there when he returned, a fact the policeman barely registered. The detective-inspector probably hadn’t found a moment to mention to the sergeant (among other colleagues) that Charles Perelman had come to the police at risk to his own safety to offer them fresh intelligence about the most dangerous fugitives in London. Critical information, rare enough for him to be treated like a dignitary, even rewarded. He presented the envelope to the sergeant again and pointed to the foreign address. “Fritz give it to me,” he pressed.

  “DI Wensley’s still busy. I just passed his office. He’s speaking on the telephone. I expect him to be awhile. Either you can leave that envelope with me or sit down where you were and wait.”

  Perelman let the sergeant sweep Fritz’s letter an arm’s length along the desk where the plump, pig-eyed constable glanced at it. “From me. Charles Perelman. You tell him,” he said, against the grain of what it meant: it didn’t mean anything.

  FRITZ GRUNTED HIS thanks. “You’re generous,” he said as Peter vacated the chair next to the stove.

  “I’m warm enough,” Peter answered, lit a cigarette, and stood in a corner of the next room, where the night’s chill seeped in through the wall. In the sharper air he’d stay awake and outlast Fritz, who drowsily finished cleaning his pistol in the fat warmth of the kitchen. At one in the morning
, Yoska had bowed out of their nightcap argument (this one over the superior recipe for pickling herring—Polish or Russian) to huddle with Betsy on a mattress in the storeroom. A few minutes before two o’clock, sleep finally pushed Fritz under, gun in hand.

  Either his footsteps rattled the stillness or it was some excitement in a dream that shook Fritz. Drooped forward at the little square table, his head resting on the ledge made by his crossed arms, he twisted left and right to shake free of some discomfort but didn’t open his eyes. Peter watched Fritz for any sign of waking and with the door to the landing open he bent around toward the storeroom. No sound from there but Yoska’s muffled snoring. How does Betsy sleep through such a racket? A pillow over her head, her blanket on top, her affection for him on top of that…

  Peter took the first flight of stairs slowly, two at a time, with a firm grip of the banister that tilted down through narrow shadows. At each landing, past each tenant’s door, he moved on the balls of his feet. A child on tiptoes outside his father’s bedroom. Not a sneak thief, I’m no burglar. Yoska manages it. With his clump of a foot and whale’s body. Pay attention…to the tin he felt his boot send skittering down the hallway. Peter stopped dead, crouched down.

  They stayed asleep or in their beds, whoever lived in the ground-floor flat. Tucked safe. No ghosts or bad men stalking your house. So hush, babies, in your cots, sleep…Wind as brittle as frost sifted in around the door to the yard at the back. The doorknob stuck halfway through its rotation, and when Peter forced it, the complaint it let out cracked through him like a gunshot. Hush, my babies.

  Then he stood drenched in dark air.

  Dozens of windows looked down on the courtyard in the four-story square, at this dead hour all of them blind. The passageway that stretched a hundred feet in both directions, fogged in thicker darkness at each end, marked the border of Peter’s self-reliance. Across it he was tethered to Perelman’s word that Rivka was in the Pavilion Theatre where he said she was, and it was Perelman’s glad duty to protect her. And with her—or because of her—Peter. Under Perelman’s protection. No credo but the tether between two men. Somewhere in the street, a horse whinnied and scuffed at the cobbles with a restless hoof. A wheel creaked on a freezing axle. Poorest of the poor. For no reason except the one that chained him to the anchor of a woman’s heart, Peter sprinted into the wind-shredded, sleet-spiked dark. It parted ahead of him and closed behind him; he drew it around him as he ran.

  Unblanketed in the vile cold, the horse lurched forward, tried to shift his flank into the wind, furiously jangled his bridle, and kicked at the closed wooden wagon harnessed to him. A bedevilment to the gelding and no shield against the weather for the detectives sitting inside. “Where’s our gloves, then?”

  “They don’t care if our fingers drop off from frostbite.”

  “I care.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant. Most considerate.”

  “Two of you, and you two, Hawkins Street. You others, you’re with me. We’re going into Number 102.”

  “Indoors. Splendid.”

  “Pity the other buggers.” The two hundred policemen soaked by the wet snow as they fanned out through Hawkins Street and Richardson Street, Lindley Street and Sidney Street, who ringed the Stepney square to bottle in any foreign desperadoes until first light, when more guns would arrive. “Those anarchist buggers, too.”

  Thirty-four

  IN HER DREAM, Rivka walked alone, in bare feet and nightgown, along the Talsen road. High daylight washed farmland and forest at her back, but everything in front of her lay swamped in night. From this reach of darkness, her father emerged with his unmistakable knee-sprung gait, smiling at Rivka, much older than he should be, white-haired and loonily unaware of the danger just seconds away from overtaking him. A mob of men, some on foot, others in motorcars, hurried down the dirt road behind him. In the places where moonlight splintered the shadows, Rivka saw who they were: English policemen. Next thing, a tumbling wave of uniforms, truncheons, guns, and machinery curled over Mordechai, fell on him, and dragged him under.

  Barehanded, Rivka dived into the swirling disaster to fight off—not policemen, they were gone, but a swarm of insects. A thick chaos of them blinded her, thousands of tiny wings and soft bodies matted in her hair. As fast as her fingers combed out mashed, sticky black strings of them, more attacked her face and head, flew into her mouth and ears. Furiously, she raked her scalp, spun around, shocked, gasping, because the sticky black strings she pulled out were clumps of her hair. They collected at Rivka’s feet and mixed with the litter of damp straw there. She’d brought a broom with her to sweep the stone floor clean.

  The cubicle she stood in could be part of a stable block or laundry. In the past, it might have had some unremarkable use, but Rivka knew it to be her father’s jail cell. He was gone. The authorities had sent for her, to clean it, to prepare it for its next guest. Her first job was the sheet. Like the straw, the stone floor and wooden walls, it was damp and crusted with human filth. It waited for her in the middle of the stall, loosely bunched at both ends, the length of a man. For a second she thought it was Mordechai’s corpse she’d been summoned to wash and clear away, but his bedding was all that was left of him.

  With a winding motion, Rivka folded it over her forearms. Through the half-opened door, she could see the new prisoner waiting for her to leave. He was clothed in a sheet, which he gripped tightly against the cold. His head was bowed, and, she saw, wounded, cracked into three pieces crudely held together with loops of twine. The raw, unknit edges of bone sawed against each other. “I’m finished,” Rivka said to him, eager to be gone. Peter didn’t reply or seem to recognize her. As she passed him in the doorway he begged, with a defeated heave, “They won’t give me a light for my cigarette.”

  Rivka startled herself awake. A taste of brine dissolved on her tongue as she came to. The shocking sight of Peter’s broken skull was the lone scrap of the dream that followed her back to her bed in Harry’s office. That and a grim mood—the shadow of the certainty that she lived in a world arranged by troubled men, men wronged by other men and governments and empires of men. It was a true thing. It woould’nt change; this she had learned in London.

  Dread hardened into a premonition. Cold iron stairs, cold stone stairs, then the stinging chill of the pavement outside, numbed Rivka’s bare feet. Under the gray gloom and threat of snow, she picked through the rubbish blown around the Pavilion’s stage door for a message from Charles Perelman, frightened by the chance that she’d missed finding one, if he’d left it, last night. By looking in the wrong place. By looking too late, after the wind scattered it into the street or the rain chewed it to pulp. Empty-handed in the humming stillness, Rivka turned back at the mouth of the alley to stand inside the door and abide.

  NO NEED FOR any philosophic discussion of the subject; as men, Frederick Wensley and Henry Wagner agreed that good order in the world is fragile, even unnatural. At best, they’d say, it’s a waning truce between belligerents compelled by their own moral purpose, the ones who can muster enough virile strength to demonstrate it. We net wild beasts and stake them to the ground. It’s what civilized men need to do to keep from being brought down themselves. Today’s seething menace occupies the front room on the second floor of No. 100 Sidney Street, E1. DI Wensley would meet it as a practical clash, not a political one; anarchy to a policeman is what an inferno is to the fire brigade.

  Under orders, Henry Wagner helped in the chicanery, sharpened the threats, magnified the authority, used his Yiddish persua siveness to empty the building of its good citizens. Betsy Gershon had to be tricked into coming downstairs, and then hauled next door, and then browbeaten for half an hour before she gave what sounded like an honest report of the fugitives she harbored in her room. Neither the detective-inspector nor his interpreter completely trusted Betsy’s word. In the open gates of the wood yard across from No. 100, Henry stood watching for any movement in the upstairs windows. Was it one gunman in there? Two? Three? B
eside him, by the gate, Wensley also stared upward at the tenement, its windows, its attic roof, and then, a brief blink, further above into the answerless sky.

  Henry recognized in the officer’s face the passing of cogitation into decision. The Weasel had finished measuring his opponents’ tactical advantages and vulnerabilities, and turning aside from Henry set himself on a course. “That’s all we’ll need from you, Mr. Wagner,” he said over his shoulder with deliberate courtesy. “Thank you for helping with your people.”

  “Rikhtik, mayn folk,” he replied to Wensley’s back, though his words were lost in the wind. The Jews, did he mean? The Russians, the Poles? Foreigners? Right. The interpreter’s people. A remark came echoing home to Henry, in Charles Perelman’s voice, from that sodden quarter of an hour he’d wasted tapping the old conniver for information outside Bevis Marks. Where Rabbi Perelman attempted to educate him. “You’re standing in the middle of a bridge.” Though he, Perelman, was no more Henry’s people than the frightened, mulish occupants of No. 100 he’d spent the last hour talking out of their beds and rooms; and no more than the local gawkers collecting behind the line of policemen, the nuisance of Cockneys and Jews shouldering each other aside for a better view; and no more than the bullheaded imbeciles inside the building, too stupid to guess they were surrounded or too crazed to worry.