by Jason Fields
A sermon had brewed up in front of Aaron, and he steeled himself invisibly to weather the storm.
“Coming to the cities. Dressing as the goyim do, eating as they do! Even marrying their women, if the men marry at all! Turning to Karl Marx for their salvation, rather than the Torah and the rabbis who have always led them.
“This judgment comes as no surprise! It is the inevitable fruit of our actions!”
Aaron knew this was the time to shut up, to sit still, but it was simply impossible for him.
“And what about your followers?” he asked, acidly. “Those who eat and dress just the way you like them to? If this is God’s judgment, why are they dying, too? And they are dying. I see the bodies of the Haredim, same as everyone else. I see them stumble and limp and starve. Is that a fair judgment?”
The rabbi was back to his calmly contemplative form.
“It is God’s judgment.”
Aaron breathed deeply.
“May I smoke, rabbi?”
“Only if you’re willing to share,” the rabbi said. He raised the corners of his lips.
Aaron handed the old man a cigarette and then leaned in closely over the desk to light it. He stole a glance at the notebook. He couldn’t make out any words, though there was something about the binding that caught his eye.
“Lev was a good man,” the rabbi said reflectively. “I don’t know why someone would kill him.”
He exhaled smoke that was the same color as his beard.
“There was no one in the congregation who had anything against him?”
“He wasn’t here long enough for anyone to develop a grudge, I don’t think. Besides, most of his time with us was spent in study or prayer. Neither is much of a way to make enemies,” the rabbi said.
Aaron offered a slim smile.
“Back to the food. Do you know anything else about how he was able to get it?”
“I didn’t want to know. And he didn’t want me to know. I think he believed it would protect us somehow.”
“Nothing else?”
“Well, he once suggested I could offer a prayer for his partner, if I wanted to,” the rabbi said.
“Gersh?”
“I think that was the name.”
Right back where I started, Aaron thought to himself.
Having finished his cigarette, Aaron carefully snuffed out the butt. He made a habit of saving the ends in order to roll them together when he ran out of fresh cigarettes. He pushed his seat back a little, causing a squeak he wished he hadn’t, and stood, reaching his hand across to the holy man.
“Thank you, rabbi, for your time,” Aaron said. “I may have to come back with more questions.”
“You are welcome. And what Jew doesn’t have questions?”
Aaron couldn’t help chuckling, as he was meant to.
The rabbi saw him out to the street and bid farewell. No tea had ever been offered.
Aaron walked without direction for a while, not noticing the more purposeful small feet that followed him.
Chapter 11
Aaron wandered slowly away from the stables and mortuaries, into the dying heart of the Jewish District. As he walked, he sifted through his conversation with the larger-than-life rabbi, trying to find some kernel of information that would count as progress in the case.
It wasn’t likely that his conflicted soul had bashed the young policeman’s head in. But knowing that Berson had struggled with his conscience helped Aaron to build a picture of the victim in his mind. Even if it wasn’t immediately helpful, he hoped the image might help him recognize clues later on.
It was also interesting to see what kind of group Berson had involved himself with. The rabbi had made an impression Aaron was unlikely to forget any time soon. He might look like a kindly grandfather, but there was no mistaking his zealotry. Aaron guessed unquestioning loyalty would have been one of Rabbi Levinsohn’s chief demands from his flock.
Did he also demand tribute? Is that how Berson had gotten himself involved in smuggling in the first place? The rabbi had made it sound as if it were the other way round, that Berson had already had a small piece of the action.
Aaron stumbled on a cobblestone, which forced back into his immediate surroundings. He discovered that his feet had dragged him toward one of the half-dozen official checkpoints between the ghetto and the world. Six men representing three nations stood around the small hut and pinioned barrier arm.
Two Jewish policemen huddled close together, their special armbands and other symbols of office marking them out. Two Poles, members of the Blue Police created by the Nazis, were clearly trying to ingratiate themselves with the final two, who wore the gray of the all-conquering Reich.
Aaron knew them all for what they were: tumblers in the lock that kept the door to the pantry closed. It was a lock easily picked with skeleton keys cut from gold. The Germans required the lion’s share, two-thirds of the bribe. Poles took two-thirds of what remained, leaving the Jewish Police with a crust, payable occasionally in literal form.
Surely, if Berson had stood guard here, he would have taken his share when a load of goods came through. From what his rabbi had said, it sounded as if he cared more about charity than cash, but what does anyone tell his rabbi?
Aaron turned away from the checkpoint before he caused the guards to perk up. A proper destination finally suggested itself. It was time to take a closer — sober — look at Berson’s body, Aaron decided.
He was no kind of forensic expert, but over the course of a dozen murder investigations, he’d developed a keen eye. He wished that eye had not been quite so blurry when he stumbled upon Berson the morning before.
Aaron paused for a moment and tried to put himself back at the scene. No fresh details came to mind. Maybe having the body in front of him would help bring back a clearer picture, Aaron thought. He turned his feet toward the cellar where the body was hidden.
As he walked, he tuned out his surroundings. He’d already seen his daily ration of suffering. He lost himself in thoughts of Yelena and an imaginary sun-swept plain where no menace could be seen or felt.
Unexpected music brought him back to the gray streets. He was only a few blocks from the blasted basement where the body lay, but the pure sound of a violin stopped him flat. He looked around for the source.
A cello joined the violin and then a viola. Others were as transfixed as he was, but Aaron could see no one on the street with an instrument. It wasn’t until he followed the eyes of the crowd to a tenement roof that he saw the three musicians. They were dressed as if for Warsaw’s finest concert hall. No stains marred their white shirts or bowties, their coats were immaculately brushed.
The men played something lively, even cheerful. The bright music battled the dreary landscape. And won.
Aaron couldn’t identify the piece. He knew nothing about music. He couldn’t identify the musicians, either, but a young woman who held the hand of a younger man, loudly whispered that the trio had performed for Jozef Pilsudski himself!
Presumably prior to his death, Aaron thought. Before the war he never would’ve imagined missing the country’s strongman. Now, he looks pretty good.
It was not the first impromptu concert that Aaron had heard since being confined in the ghetto, but it was the most lovely. Aaron admired the trio’s defiance of reality, their desire to create beauty instead of accepting horror.
He turned away after a few minutes, long before the others around him. Aaron understood the urge to stay, even if he didn’t share it. Free entertainment was hard to find and any diversion was welcome here. Plays and even movies were sometimes available, but they cost money.
The crush thinned once again as Aaron neared the abandoned building and its half-collapsed basement with Berson tucked inside. Aaron spun around 360 degrees, hoping to catch out anyone who might have been watching him. He saw nothing, but it was an odd nothing. Staring and listening revealed only more nothing.
It must be paranoia, he told himself, tho
ugh he didn’t believe it.
Perhaps another trip around the block?
He decided it couldn’t hurt, but in the end it didn’t help, either. He found himself again staring down into the hole in the crumbled cement, no wiser than he’d been before his stroll. He took the broken steps down, one at a time.
Aaron hadn’t brought a lantern, and he hadn’t seen a flashlight for quite some time. Instead, he saw Berson’s body in flashes as he struck one match after another. Blood on the head, the clothing hard in patches where the blood had frozen. The face of a young man, the expression on it meaningless.
It was impossible to lift the head and keep a match alight, so Aaron settled for probing the wound with his fingers.
His examination added little to what he’d seen the morning before. He felt shattered bone piercing frozen gray matter and bits of scalp that hung loose from the wound. It had been a very hard blow indeed, and from behind. But the gash had nothing else to say to Aaron, who, though no medical expert, was a veteran of blows to the head.
He was running short of matches but what he had to do next would work just as well by feel. He began his search of the rest of the body at Berson’s hands, carefully coaxing open the fingers of the left and being disappointed when a telling clue failed to fall from the dead man’s grasp. The other hand was open and equally empty.
Berson’s coat was gone, taken by one of the policemen who had found him, but his pants and the pockets in his stained wool sweater remained. Aaron got no joy from reaching into them, feeling the hard skin of the frozen man under his fingers, but it had to be done.
The sweater contained a handkerchief that itself contained nothing else. The pants, on the other hand, held both a wallet and a folded piece of paper. There was no way to read the note or examine the contents of the wallet in the dim basement, so Aaron put them aside and began a more intimate search of Berson’s body, tracing his arms, torso, pelvis and legs. Nothing else presented itself.
Aaron decided his work in the makeshift morgue was done, and that it was time to leave Berson to his uneasy rest.
Back aboveground, Aaron found a sheltered doorway to examine his prizes.
First the wallet. It was of surprisingly good quality, considering the condition of the rest of Berson’s clothing. The leather was somewhat worn, yes, but it had been quite expensive when purchased. Unfortunately, the contents failed to live up to the wrapper.
Identification, a few zloty, a ration card, a photograph of an older woman — likely his mother, Aaron decided. Not anything that even vaguely resembled a clue, let alone evidence. It was what Aaron had expected, but certainly less than he’d hoped for.
Carefully re-packing the wallet’s contents — minus the zloty, which Berson certainly didn’t need — Aaron turned to the scrap of paper. It had been folded in quarters and was wrinkled and dog-eared as well. The edges were ragged along one side.
The words on it were crabbed and hard to read, with the ink heavy and splotchy, as if the writer had failed to blot it properly before folding the note. Perhaps he had been in a hurry?
Aaron stared for a while and eventually turned toward the sun to see if brighter illumination would help him to puzzle out the words. And it did, if only to the extent of revealing that the note wasn’t in Polish, but German. After minutes of wrinkling his brow and squinting his eyes, he was able to pull out a few individual words, but not enough to make sense of what was in front of him.
Aaron decided that he would have to show the note to someone who read German more fluently — and maybe had better eyes. There were plenty of candidates. He was trapped along with some of the best-educated people in Eastern Europe, and besides, many people had dealt with the Volksdeutsche — the diaspora of German-speaking people — all their lives.
The translator had to be someone he trusted, or at least someone who owed him a favor. If the note contained anything germane to the case, Aaron would have to be able to rely on the man’s discretion.
Aaron knew just such a man, and he knew where to find him at this hour of the day — at a soup kitchen for writers, founded by the guild for the betterment of its members.
Everyone who could afford it — few — contributed what they could to put ingredients into one another’s soup bowls. Most of those who could afford to pay in were men and women who wrote either the cheerful propaganda of the official newspaper of the ghetto, Gazeta Zydowska, or those who still occasionally published in scholarly journals in the West.
While Aaron wasn’t a writer, he figured his role as the primary supplier to the kitchen entitled him to entry and perhaps a bowl in addition to his friend’s help.
Aaron turned into the breeze and began to walk again. He was tired. There had been little sleep the night before and every minute he was awake, Aaron felt the weight of Berson’s body pressing down on him.
It seemed farcical to be looking for a killer in a graveyard — to seek justice for one murder among thousands. After all, no one would ever pay for the hundreds killed at Breslaw Hospital the day before.
Soon Aaron had to stop and rub his brow with a cold hand. He could feel a sick headache building, but knew there was no time for it.
A 12-year-old boy peddling a bicycle rickshaw spotted Aaron’s distress and decided to take advantage of it for at least a few groczy.
“Hey,” the boy called. “You look like you could use a lift.”
Aaron wasn’t too proud to take it. He climbed on the front of the makeshift vehicle and told the boy to head to the main street. He relaxed his neck muscles and pulled his hat over his eyes to ease the pain caused by the dim light of the Polish winter. The headache was building and the rickshaw’s rocky ride was no help with the nausea that came along with it. On any other day, Aaron would have taken to his bed and stayed there until the pain passed. Today that wasn’t possible.
“Stop at the nearest druggist,” Aaron told the boy.
While true medicines were scare and dear in the ghetto, patent solutions could be found on every corner. These home brews sometimes did exactly what the proprietor said they would. Sometimes they did nothing. Sometimes they were dangerous.
Aaron doubted any concoction’s side effects could be as bad as the headache he had already. And if whatever he took killed him, so be it. Aaron doubted the headache would be able to follow him into death’s realm.
The boy stopped at a storefront that had the traditional strange bottles in occult shapes and shades in the window. Admixtures and alchemy. Potions and placebos.
“Do you want me to wait?” the boy asked.
“I think I can walk the rest of the way from here.”
The boy looked disappointed, but Aaron decided he had reached the day’s limit on charity. He gave the driver a few zloty and told him to scram.
A bell jangled cheerfully as Aaron walked into the store. He found it a pleasant reminder of better days and full shelves, but the store itself was, unfortunately, a more accurate reflection of the times. There was little for sale, and what there was had been made in the ghetto out of God knew what. The wrappers around cough drops, candies and medicines alike had been labeled by hand or been badly printed by presses using the lowest quality ink and paper. Still, each wrapper was an attempt at normal life, and as cynical as Aaron was, the naiveté touched him.
“Can I help you, sir?” asked a surprisingly pudgy man who had appeared behind the counter.
“Headache,” Aaron said.
“Bad one?”
Aaron glared in lieu of an answer.
“There’s not much, as I’m sure you know. Even the bandages aren’t bandages. They’re just old clothes that couldn’t be patched together again,” the pharmacist said.
Aaron, truly, sincerely, could not have possibly cared any less.
“I do have something that I make here. It’s aspirin, more or less. It’s not very expensive.”
Aaron reached for his wallet.
“Unfortunately, it’s also a little uneven in its effect,
” the pharmacist continued. “Some people have been very pleased … ”
He left that hanging.
Finally, Aaron took the bait.
“You suggest something else?”
“It’s a little expensive, but there’s no doubt it works.”
“Yeah?” Aaron said, starting to get angry at how long the pitch was taking.
“I’ve managed to get my hands on some morphine,” the plump man said slyly. “Would you be interested?”
Aaron had been given the drug before to treat his headaches. Even when the pain hadn’t disappeared entirely, it had retreated an indefinite distance. He was tempted.
“How much?”
The pharmacist named a price that was enough to feed a family of four for a month — on real rations, not sawdust and rotten beets.
“How do I know it’s real?” Aaron asked. He had the money in his pocket.
The man ducked below his counter, returning with a small, sealed box bearing the label of the Bayer pharmaceutical company.
“Check the labels and seals for yourself,” the pharmacist offered.
Aaron did so, but remained unconvinced. If it was profitable to smuggle drugs into the district, it was far more profitable to fake them and reuse boxes from the real thing.
So, it was a gamble, and an expensive one.
But the headache was somehow getting worse.
“Give me the entire box at that price, and one shot right now and we have a deal,” Aaron said.
More haggling, but shortly Aaron had his coat on his lap and the sleeve of his shirt rolled up. When the druggist opened the box, Aaron saw ampules that were properly filled, which boosted his confidence. The druggist prepared a syringe and needle. Aaron waited to feel the prick and the relief it would bring.
It was quick. So quick.
A cool wave broke over him, a release. His eyes closed. He rolled his shoulders and made to stand.
Then something hit him just below the neck, rocking him forward. His eyes flew open.