And no more than the divisional superintendents, detective-superintendents, superintedents and detective-inspectors, bowler-hatted decision-makers who post a cordon around the English they speak, officer to officer. Henry couldn’t be completely sure, but he thought he heard one of them ask Wensley, “Who are the hounds?”
Who are the hounds? The question of the day. While Henry interrogated himself with it, DI Wensley spoke to Sergeant Leeson. “Throw something at their window. Give ’em a tickle.” Here was one of Henry’s people, the sergeant, down in the ranks.
Benjamin Leeson took a moment to choose pebbles heavy enough to fly the twenty yards or so and stay on target. He scraped up a handful of gravel with the same gentleness that muffled the strength he’d called upon to lift Rosie Trassjonsky, inert as a sack of pebbles, from the floor of her dead friend’s room, carry her down two flights of stairs, then past the pack of newspapermen. His boots kicked through mud and slush on his way out of the wood yard, puddles sealed with thin panes of ice splintered to shards under his heels. Dull flecks of snow caromed off gusts of wind above the empty pavements. Sidney Street had the skeletal look of a place evacuated for demolition. The sergeant found a comfortable angle, took quick aim, and splashed his handful of pebbles across the second-floor window with a strong overarm throw. The rattle of them falling back to earth and skittering over the cobblestones was the only reply from the building, the only sound anyone heard.
Before the window exploded.
Behind the shower of glass, a concussing burst from a Mauser. Fritz sent a few more rounds stuttering in a line right across Sidney Street from pavement to pavement, following the sergeant’s headlong dash for the yard where he fell backward, tripping over his heels. From where he lay, Benjamin Leeson’s cry carried upward to the gunmen and behind him to his brother officers by the twin gates. “Jack, I’m hit!” To Yoska, the narrow-faced plainclothesman who knelt over the one Fritz wounded wasn’t a man with a name, he was another target.
One who moved commandingly, got the gates pulled shut too quickly for Yoska to steady his revolver. Furious blows, bullets hammered at the entryway as Wensley knelt over Sergeant Leeson, tore back the man’s coat and shirt, and grimaced at the pooling blood.
Fritz and Yoska fired again, wild shots into the first-floor rooms in the building across the street where Fritz said he’d seen men with rifles. “Sweet dreams! Sweet dreams, darlings!” he hollered, humiliating the English tsar’s police with another Mauser burst and the laugh of a heroic lunatic. “Hear what I told them, Yoska? That’s showmanship!”
“We’re running things!” Yoska laughed along. They could appear with the suddenness of ghosts in any window. “Hurt them enough and they’ll bargain with us.”
“No bargaining. What for?”
There was no truer thing Fritz knew. In a feverish rhapsody, he thought, No politics or history here, no philosophy, no geography that isn’t a conversation between armed men. Us in here, them out there. Right where we woke up this morning, this thing that’s happening is proof of what the world is before politicians and philosophers get their hands on it. Simple. What you have, they want to take. Your food, your money, your house, your country, your manhood, your body, your life, your dead bones.
One time I saw a twelve-year-old boy standing in a brown field. Late summer, in the middle of a drought. A cow was in the field with him. The boy picked up a rock and threw it, hit the cow in her eye. She didn’t know what it was, what was wrong, she tried to shake the pain away. It nearly broke my heart to watch her. The boy went over to her, picked up the rock, took a few steps back and threw the rock again. She went down on her front legs. The boy hit her again. I couldn’t watch anymore. Jesu, the pity of it. He was older than me by five years and a stronger fighter. This house is ours. Mine. I’ll struggle for it. You come to take it from me, now you’re notified. I’m no cow in a field.
HIS SLEEP WAS so narcotic that Peter woke from it in confusion. He’d been captured and nailed into a crate. For deportation. They’d loaded the crate into the cargo hold of a ship bound for Riga. All right, then, somebody tell me who this woman is with her head tucked against my shoulder, her arm hugging me. Another prisoner? Fragments drifted back to color a picture of the night just gone. He’d left Fritz and Yoska in Sidney Street. He’d been shunted by the wind and rain from doorway to alleyway, shaking in the unstoppable cold, down turnings that led away to God knows where. At the dead end of one of these alleys, he’d crawled through a hole in a fence. He’d found a wooden shed there, with its jutting, coffin-shaped addition Peter guessed was a chicken coop. More shelter than a doorway, a better hideout than the stray tarpaulin he’d given up for the alley.
Inside, the crust of bird droppings on the floor didn’t surprise him; what surprised him was that he could see it. A ragged spill of light spread from a wood fire in the middle of the shack where somebody had squared a few bricks together to make a pit. The haven of another street tramp. Too weak to fight anybody for it, or to drag himself outside again to face the freezing unknown streets, Peter sat down to wait for its owner to come back.
Two potatoes and an onion baked in a pan of ashes. Famished as he was, Peter left them alone, as a token of his harmlessness. His integrity. He was in someone’s home. The coffin-shaped structure turned out to be an enclosed bedroom; inside, a quilt lay scrambled atop straw-cushioned bedding. On a narrow shelf, a row of homely belongings—pewter jug, china bowl and plate, teacup, spoon, fork, and knife. The planks of the wall were sealed (and by the look of them held together) with strips of newspaper pasted in neat vertical rows. For many minutes, Peter kept his eye on the flap of felt and tar paper draped across the entrance. When a gloved hand lifted a corner of it, he got to his feet—or tried to. Bright pain flashed in his ankle and seated him again.
“Lor’, look at you! A man!”
Lor’, look at you! A woman! Peter might have answered, if he’d been sharp enough for farce.
Not a flicker of fear in her. She set down the armload of strangely dry firewood and apologized to Peter for not being in when he’d arrived. “Since I was by the bucket I stopped for a piss,” she added. “It kept up for a great while.”
Her name was Roma. She didn’t ask Peter his name or anything else about him—his troubles, his human connections, the mysterious coincidences that brought him in from the night. Whatever she needed to know about her visitor was somehow obvious to her. Roma’s one-sided chatter made things easier. Her girlish voice came lisping from a mouth that was missing half a dozen teeth. The bundle of her hair that Peter could see (most of it she’d twisted under a headscarf) was colored with henna. Judging by her rough hands, and the stiff shuffle that moved her from the fire to the shelf, then over to Peter, she might have been his mother’s age. She handed him the plate and served him one of the potatoes from the end of a carving knife.
“I won’t hurt you,” he said.
“No, ’course you won’t.” Roma skewered the other potato for herself, took a bite, and leaned across Peter’s legs. From the wall above her bed, she took down a crucifix to show him the guarantor of her protection. “I pray to ’im twice a day. Three times today.” Guarantor of tonight’s expected unexpected happiness.
It was long in coming, Peter heard. Roma’s bad-luck bloodline was Didicai, she told him—gypsy—and in 1887 she’d made the mistake of marrying an Englishman, who gambled away the horses and wagon passed down to them with song and ceremony by her Romany family. The scrap of ground under her shack, like the row house at the end of the cinder path, belonged to her absconded husband’s family. “You live for the good souls. It betters ’em an’ betters you,” Roma concluded, as though reciting a learned lesson to an angel of the Lord. Then she asked Peter, “How’d you hurt your foot?”
Another blade of pain seared his ankle when he slid it toward the firelight. “I can’t remember. Twisted it. Not broken.”
“I’ll give you medicine for it.”
A fragrance of
rosemary and lavender and herbs Peter couldn’t name enveloped him from the steam-warmed cloth Roma used for a bandage. Enveloped by the warmth, the earthy perfume, the unsought kindness, he let himself fall asleep.
He awoke snagged in Roma’s unconscious embrace, lost in the morning. A V-shaped crack across the crystal of his pocket watch, its stationary second hand and the other hands stopped at 3:35, told Peter what time he’d probably hurt his ankle, but not the present hour.
He whispered thank-you and good-bye to Roma, and gave her a soft push, but they didn’t budge her. She snuggled deeper under his neck, tightened her hug. Then he felt the wetness of her mouth on his collar, again on his neck, his chin. Her stagnant breath clouded his nostrils; her face dipped to kiss Peter’s throat as her sleepy hips rocked against his leg, happy prisoner of a dream. Roma tried to climb onto him. Peter gripped both of her arms and twisted her down to the floor.
“Are you awake or asleep?”
“Awake,” she said, drowsy, crawling back to him, eyes and mouth half-open.
“Good-bye, good-bye.” He looked around. “My jacket. What did you do with it?”
“Wait. Stay with me. In my bed. Lay back down. Look…” With one frantic hand, Roma shook out the jacket she’d folded to pillow his head; with the other, she fumbled along the shelf to get hold of a small tin box. “You can have money.”
Peter lifted himself on his good ankle and lunged forward on his bandaged one. He swiped Roma’s tar-paper door out of his way; instead of stopping to clamber through the gap in the fence, he fell against it and shouldered the rotten pales apart. As he walked the length of the alley and met the street to mix into its unremarkable business, Peter reminded himself to mask his limp. A few supple paces made him realize that his ankle pained him less. Was it a few hours of rest or the healing power of her gypsy remedy? Whichever he decided to believe.
TEN THOUSAND PEDESTRIAN ERRANDS threaded through Spitalfields. Peter slipped in among them as neatly as a swimmer arcs under a swell. On business that would mark him out if it were unhidden. He passed by in the market, as noticeable to strangers as any other stranger, a man down on his luck, looking for a tailor to sew the ripped collar of his jacket and a cobbler to mend the heel of his boot and a watchmaker to repair his pocket watch. Unremarkable business. Follow this track along the stations of an unmemorable day, ten thousand of them; follow the trail of those days into an untroubled life.
A porter pushes a hand-truck. A merchant unrolls a bolt of cloth. A customer buys two bags of salt. Peter could do any of those things, and after a hundred repetitions or a hundred thousand reach the bottom of an uncomplicated existence sustained by the grace of a philosophy good for nothing better than to pilot you safely on to the next errand: Hope for No Great Change.
At the market’s exit, a clock on a cast-iron stanchion told Peter the time was 9:45, more than two hours before Perelman’s “arrangements” (with Harry? the local constabulary?) opened a way back to Rivka at the Pavilion Theatre. At the next corner, Peter recognized the turning into Cheshire Street. Harry’s theater was behind him, the same as Sidney Street. People fluttered past him, excited faces, rushing steps, men, women, and children fired up by a rumor of some spectacle. Fritz and Yoska—what else? Last night, praise God in the highest, Peter had had the good sense to obey his instincts and get out. Good or bad, their fate was their judgment.
The relief of being in the free air lasted as long as it took Peter to step off the curb and walk into Sclater Street. He’d gambled on finding a haven till noon in Shinebloom’s restaurant; instead, he was gripped by the fear that encircles a young child in a blind dark room, cold, trapped, asphyxiating in a tank of rising water. Under the words MURDER OF POLICE OFFICERS, and in larger, bolder lettering £500 REWARD, Peter saw two photographs of himself.
In Germany I’m a German. In Marseille I’m a Frenchman. In Paris, or here, with Jews all around me I’m a Jew…Peter remembered what he’d said to Rivka outside Shinebloom’s, his stomach shuddering, his future in the smell of her hair, the smell of her hair an anchor chain around his neck. Five hundred pounds the price on his attachment to Rivka. Also a few shillings for the hangman’s rope.
He left the wanted poster, his stomach shuddering again, bent over the brink. Here. Outside Shinebloom’s door—the reality of it, not the memory—the Mayor calmly invited Peter to come in off the street. “I wasn’t sure it was you,” he said, loosely circling his own face with a finger, remarking the change to Peter’s. “Your beard.”
“Gave it to the razor.”
“It’s good. From here I wasn’t sure it was you. You look—”
“I look like a vagrant,” Peter said. “Do I smell?”
The Mayor sniffed Peter’s jacket. “Onions. Not so bad.” He offered his hand. “Come inside.”
For a small man, the Mayor’s grip was bone-crunching and harsh. The handshake he gave Peter was the kind a father gives a son miraculously returned home, a solemn pumping of the arm before the lovable neck is embraced and the weeping starts. His thick fingers worked Peter’s hand until their warmth turned humid. To hold off any face-kissing and neck-hugging, Peter took a step into the restaurant. In a blink, the Mayor had a grip of Peter’s right wrist, and with a darting move he snatched his left one. Then he shoved Peter against the doorjamb. The Mayor was short, but he was compact and muscular; he handled himself like a wrestler. Legs braced, he twisted from the waist and dug his shoulder into Peter’s chest, winded him, pinned him hard to the door.
“Help over here! Somebody help!” the Mayor shouted into the street as Peter twisted himself half-free. “Peter the Painter! It’s Piatkow, the anarchist!”
A grandmother, head-shawled and gowned for a funeral, trotted in to cane Peter with her walking stick. Frail blows skidded off the side of his head. One hand loose, he grabbed the stick and swung it across his body. The silver handle crushed the Mayor’s nose, yet he clung on, sputtering blood. “Somebody help!” Peter coshed him and broke free. He brandished the bloody stick as he ran, in what direction he didn’t know, out of the district.
“RIFLES OVER THERE.” Fritz tipped his Mauser’s long muzzle against the window frame, at the upper floor of the brewery beyond. “Shotguns in those windows.” The muzzle slid an inch to the side, pointed at the building directly across Sidney Street. “Something in the doors too. That’s how I’d do it.”
“Write your plan on a piece of paper. I’ll take it over to them.” Yoska straightened his bad leg as far as he could and lowered himself to the floor next to Fritz. “What—you don’t think I’d come back?”
A tolerant sigh. “I’m saying it’s an obvious strategy.”
“To make us come out?” Nothing, not even tolerance from Fritz, who turned his head away. With a nudge to Fritz’s shoulder, Yoska apologized for his own slowness. “Fritz, you’ve got the right idea. Figure their tactics. They want to scare us with all the guns they’ve got.”
“They don’t want us to surrender.” Fritz angled a look at the brewery. No movement, nothing to see, but his breath was short and he felt dryness in his mouth. Then he saw the long double barrel of a shotgun dip into the light from a shop doorway below. He crawled back from the window and tilted his head to get Yoska to do the same.
Yoska leaned forward to see for himself. He grinned. “They can’t hit us with one of those.”
His grin twitched at the corners of his mouth; he reminded Fritz of a weightlifter quivering under a barbell he was no longer strong enough to hold. He reached over and patted Yoska’s back to steady him.
His grin sank. “Damn Peter,” Yoska said.
“He surprised you?” Now Fritz was the one wearing the plaster smile. “Peter always looks out for himself. I’m his friend and I never know what he’s thinking.”
“He doesn’t talk. Or, when he does, he doesn’t say anything clear.”
“It sounds like he means something else, even when he doesn’t.” Arms crooked on his knees, Fritz recalled, “‘Ign
ore her—she’ll get worse.’ That’s what Peter advised me about Luba!”
“Another runner.”
In silence, Fritz agreed. Then he said, “Peter doesn’t know how else to be.”
“Anyway, he’s a good fighter.”
“Listen, Yoska. The way things are, we wouldn’t be better off if Peter was in this room.”
“Another gun…”
“We’re together. This is our action. Yes?”
After a second’s rumination, nodding his dark head, Yoska said, “What happens to you happens to me.” A loud crack of a rifle shot made him twitch toward the window. “Missed. They’re just showing us.”
Fritz knew different. “Did he say one word to you last night?”
“About going? No. Oh,” Yoska remembered. “He said I should shave off my mustache.” He presented his face to the light. “How does it look?”
“Pale.”
“Shows off more of my rotten skin.”
Another rifle shot. Another miss. Fritz checked his Mauser’s clip. “From that brewery. I told you.”
The noise of cheers outside at the end of the street tempted Yoska to peep over the windowsill. He saw mounted police and a police cordon, seven or eight constables with their arms linked, capes flapping in the snowy wind, holding back a hundred-strong crowd of sightseers. To protect them from the terrorist assassins. “Is that the uprising, you think?” Yoska joked sourly.
Another rifle shot. On the roof above them, a chimney pot shattered, blown apart by a perfectly aimed high-caliber round. “Found us,” Fritz said, and dived for the floor.
A hailstorm of bullets pelted through the second-floor window, opened jagged holes in the furniture, the walls, exploded dishes in the kitchen, porcelain ornaments on the table, sent shrapnel spinning through the air. Flat on the carpet, Yoska followed Fritz out the door and down the stairs.
From the landing outside the first-floor room, Yoska saw Fritz kneeling at the blown-in window, squeezing off shots one- two-three into the brewery, one-two-three toward the wood yard. “Go down! Down!” Fritz shouted to him, pointing toward the ground floor.
A Storm in the Blood Page 29