Eight Weeks in the Summer of Victoria's Jubilee

by Bob Biderman

  But reading the letter the judge wrote to his wife, does reinforce Z’s initial instinct that if they were depending on Justice Stephen to free Lipski based on a reconsideration of the trial, they might as well call in the hangman.

  CHAPTER 44

  BACK IN HIS room, Z mulls over the events of the day. There had been, at first, a flurry of excitement in Hayward’s office. Once the starter’s pistol had been fired, and the hourglass was again turned on its end, they could see the minutes fall away with the dripping of the sand.

  But, unlike the first week, when they had been caught unawares, they had their tasks. The question was – where to focus? There were the two men – Rosenbloom and Schmuss. Investigations went forward noting their movements both after the murder and now. There was also the vial of acid labelled ‘Camphorated oil’. Could they trace the origin? And could they challenge Moore, the shopkeeper who claimed he sold nitric acid to Lipski, making him into an unreliable witness.

  ‘You already have,’ Krantz reminded them. ‘You have the statement from the ward nurse that Moore was brought straight to Lipski’s bed where a detective was standing guard. How could anyone consider that a proper identification? What more could you ask? You achieved what you wanted and it didn’t get you anywhere.’

  Then he went on: ‘You also had two locksmiths attest how easy it would be to lock a door from the outside when the key is protruding from within. You found an expert who said it would have taken at least two ounces of acid to damage Lipski’s coat and to go down the throats of both him and the woman. So what happened to the other vial? They simply found another expert who said you’d only need one. What good did it do you? They just find someone from their side to contradict any testimony you bring forth. Like Dr. Calvert at the hospital who said that Lipski’s abrasions on his elbows could only have come from a trauma similar to the one Lipski said happened to him. What does the prosecution do? They either ignore it or else find someone who says no, it didn’t happen like that – it happened like this. It’s our experts against their experts. How can you possibly win?’

  ‘Then what do you suggest?’ asked Myers.

  ‘Forget playing fact against fact or speculation against speculation. It’s not about that anyway. They don’t care if Lipski is actually guilty or innocent. They just need someone to pay for a crime they’d rather not bother about anyway. If every Jew killed another Jew, they’d be quite content. But this is messy for the Tory government and they want it cleaned up straight away. So the only chance you can win is by showing them it’s more worth their while to set him free than hang him.

  ‘And how do you suggest we do that?’ asked Greenberg, who found himself losing patience with Krantz – as he quite often did.

  ‘Either by making Lipski a cause célèbre – so much so that the Liberals take up his case as a way of bringing the government down or by handing them Schmuss and Rosenbloom with confessions from one or the other – preferably both of them.’

  ‘That’s the two Jews for one game,’ said Greenberg. ‘I don’t like it.’

  Krantz shrugged. ‘Then you’re pinning your hopes on the Pall Mall Gazette, aren’t you, Mr Greenberg?’

  After Krantz and Greenberg left, Z was alone with Myers.

  ‘I don’t like that man very much,’ said Myers of Krantz, ‘but I must admit he has a point.’

  ‘You wouldn’t give up?’ Z said, without believing that he would.

  ‘No, of course not. But both Hayward and I believe that the Pall Mall Gazette is our best hope. I can’t forgive that man Stead for what he did, but we need him.’

  So the strategy was laid. The investigation would continue and new information would, of course, be forwarded to the Home Office, but Stead would have access to all the material as further ammunition for his scattergun.

  CHAPTER 45

  DESPITE Z’S UNEASE about where the investigation was going and which direction it should go in order to gather the most compelling arguments that might possibly influence the Home Office or the judge, things began to percolate on their own. The Lipski case had catapulted itself into the heart of the ghetto like a meteor crashing into the primal waters of the East End, throwing up bits and pieces of flotsam in its wake. And Hayward’s office had become the mission central where all these bits and pieces were sent to be sifted, sorted and classified into categories of crazy, plausible or potentially important.

  A motley queue of people wandered into Hayward’s office, night and day. Among others, the rabbi of the Hambro Synagogue came forward to tell of his conversation with the man Harris Dywein who had testified at Lipski’s trial that he had found the vial containing the murderous acid under the dead woman’s bed. Dywein, the rabbi said, later told him that he had actually found the empty poison bottle on the table and as he was afraid the blame might be attached to the husband of the murdered woman, he placed it in his pocket and then, when Lipski was discovered, he took the bottle from his pocket and placed it underneath the bed.

  The Pall Mall Gazette ran the story with great fanfare: ‘…it is indisputable that this fresh evidence also gives a new aspect to one of the crucial points of the case!’ Though they didn’t indicate what inferences its readership should actually have made from this new information, the message was clear – questions abound! Can the government truly say that Lipski’s guilt is beyond all reasonable doubt?

  But, just as Krantz had predicted, the Home Office threw each and every testimony, statement or unearthed piece of evidence back, claiming that upon investigation they were either implausible, unverified, or unfounded.

  Z tries to attend the daily meetings at Hayward’s office – one in the morning, one in the late afternoon – as often as he can. Hayward, himself, is commuting back and forth from the south coast where his family is on holiday. Myers is always there – sometimes Greenberg, sometimes Krantz, sometimes Maggie. Depending on the current news – which can shift ten times an hour – there is always something going on, a frisson of excitement or a deathly pall. But there is also renewed energy and Z suspects that he and the others are feeding off that electricity which sparks and crackles like one of those new fangled generating plants which will soon be lighting up the world.

  Once he asks Greenberg, ‘Would it have been different if Schmuss and Rosenbloom weren’t Jews?’

  ‘It would have been different but it would have been even more complicated,’ Greenberg replies. ‘Think about what would have been the response if the Jewish community had been seen to be protecting a guilty Jew by implicating two innocent Christians!’

  But to Z it makes no sense at all. If Lipski is innocent and his story is true, it follows that Rosenbloom and Schmuss are guilty. And it didn’t matter whether they were Jewish, Christian or Hindu.

  That evening he goes over the casebook he was keeping. Nothing incriminating had been found about Rosenbloom. His landlord claimed that Rosenbloom had been a quiet, sober and inoffensive tenant over the ten months he lived there. Even Sarah Katz, the sister of Lipski’s fiancée, whose husband had hired both Lipski and Rosenbloom almost a year before and had taught them both the stick making business – even she had given Rosenbloom a sterling reference, saying that she and her husband had taken him back into their employ just a week after the murder.

  Then how curious, Z thinks, that Mark Katz, her husband, had stated publicly he thought Lipski to be innocent and would certainly give him his job back again if he ever saw freedom. Z rubs his chin and tries to consider the implications. The wife says she’d hire one, the husband says the other. Would they have them both work side by side having accused each other of murder? He wonders if Sarah Katz was perhaps trying to protect her sister, Kate Lyons, who had been engaged to Lipski for some months prior. Hayward told him that Kate Lyons had visited Lipski once in prison but no more was seen of her since then. What had been their relationship, he wonders? Z, of course, had seen it many t
imes before – the marriage of convenience set up between a likely greener and an eligible woman who might not have been that eligible to the native born.

  Yes, he thinks, Sarah Katz most likely was trying to protect her sister by severing whatever links, however tenuous, still remained between the two. And he makes a mental note to use this unhappy character – this downmarket bride who is left in matrimonial limbo when her intended is no longer a family asset – in one of his stories about the ghetto.

  But Schmuss, he thinks, is a pickle from a different barrel altogether. There were those who came to testify that Schmuss was in desperate need of money. So why did he leave Lipski’s workshop after only ten or fifteen minutes when there was obviously work to be had? And how did he get the money to go to Birmingham just a week after the murder?

  Others had contacted Hayward to inform him that one of the four Russian locksmiths who were supposed to have met Schmuss the morning of the murder – a man called Totakoski – had been heard to say, ‘If I had stated the truth at the police court two people would be locked up and Lipski would get off free.’

  Another of the Russian locksmiths – Emil Barsook – who had just been released from prison where he had served a short sentence for petty theft, claimed that Schmuss had told him on the morning of the murder he had a woman and when Barsook asked him what sort of woman she was, Schmuss replied, ‘You don’t want to know all about that, she is gone.’ Barsook told Hayward, ‘When I heard that Lipski said two greeners had killed the woman, I believed Schmuss and Simon had done it.’

  In the end, Z closes the casebook and throws up his hands. So much of this information was based on rumour and innuendo and one thing always seems to cancel out another. So where is the boundary between truth and lies? And what can one make of evidence that comes from people who have hidden loyalties or simply want to protect what little they have in their meagre lives?

  Of course, the Pall Mall Gazette used each of these new revelations to full effect – working them into a daily story that lent yet more doubt to the safety of Lipski’s conviction. But, Z thinks, it is one thing to cast doubt and quite another to prove the negative – that Lipski wasn’t a murderer.

  There was one piece of evidence Z feels could possibly be the key to a successful appeal. If they found a witness ready to swear that Lipski wasn’t at the Batty Street house during the time of the murder, it would go a long way toward proving his innocence. Lipski, himself, had stated he was at the Portobello Market that fateful morning to purchase a sponge for varnishing his sticks. Could they track down the sponge seller?

  Sponges – Z knew all about them from stories he wrote; they were precious as diamonds or mean as dirt. Shipped up from the great mart of Smyrna, they could cost, wholesale, as little as 6d a pound or as much as 21 shillings, depending on the quality. The good stuff went to the finest homes, the rough and gritty sponges were cut up into pieces that grew small and smaller as the chain of resellers grew long. In the end there were the greeners – the foreign Jews just off the boat looking for something cheap to buy and light to transport. They buy a piece of sponge for a penny and then cut it into four or maybe eight or, if they think they can sell them, maybe even sixteen, to be used by someone like Lipski who couldn’t afford more than a farthing’s worth and just needed something to brush a quick coat of lacquer onto a wooden stick.

  They came and they went these itinerant Jews with baskets strapped around their necks. They all looked old and bearded even if they weren’t. And on any given day there were tens if not hundreds of them plying their trade. Here today and tomorrow, who knew? Today they sold sponges, tomorrow oranges, the next day wooden clothes pegs. They sold what they could buy, when they could buy it, as long as it was going for a song and light enough to carry.

  So looking for a bearded Jew who sold a sponge to Lipski eight weeks prior, who would also remember him out of the hundred fresh-faced, boyish men who wanted a piece of a sponge to wipe the nib of their pen or to clean the smudge from their spectacles was not the easiest of tasks. And even if they found this protean man, who probably spoke not a word of English, would he be brave enough to come forward and challenge the authorities who wanted nothing better than to see him back in Tsarist Russia?

  Z spends a precious day trying to track down the mysterious sponge seller to no avail. But that night the demons once again emerge as Z is tossing in his bed. He is somewhere strange and yet familiar. At first he recognises nothing and is fearful he is lost. But the sounds and smells and tastes that linger on his tongue, all his senses tell him that he knows this place well and he is in the midst of Portobello Road searching for the mysterious seller of sponges.

  In his dream, the street is filled with great bearded men in long black coats and wide brimmed hats who all wear baskets strapped around their neck that dangle and dance as if keeping time to a dirge. As he pushes his way through the densely packed crowd, he hears the street cry, ‘Sponges! Sponges! Here are sponges!’ But each bearded man in a long black coat who turns round to face him has something different in his basket – fruit or seashells or lumps of coal. Yet he continues to hear the cry in the distance – ‘Sponges! Sponges! Here are sponges!’ Frantically he pushes his way forward. The bearded men now are like crazy Russian dolls and as he turns each one around, they glare at him with wild eyes and grimace and shout at him in Yiddish. Desperately fighting his way through this scrum of maniacal demons (for this is how he sees them), he hears the call of ‘Sponges! Sponges!’ getting closer and closer till finally there is only one bearded, black coated man before him. And putting his hand on the man’s shoulder he turns him round, ever so slowly, and sees a basket full of beautiful, beautiful sponges strapped over his shoulder. And looking up into the sponge seller’s eyes he sees something very peaceful, very calm. And the man who sells sponges looks at him and smiles the way only a father can smile and says, in Yiddish, ‘Israel, my son, at last I’ve found you!’

  And then Z wakes up, gets out of bed, goes to the basin, fills up a bowl and splashes his face repeatedly with brackish water.

  CHAPTER 46

  HAYWARD HAD JUST returned from one of his visits to see Lipski at Newgate Prison and was giving his report to an afternoon session of the rump committee for Lipski’s defence.

  ‘I told him the week was going very fast but that there were many who were now supporting his appeal. He appeared quite cheerful despite his condition and when I commented on his disposition, he told me that the Lord would not forsake him as he had done nothing wrong.”

  ‘Does he realise that commutation still might mean life imprisonment?’ asked Myers.

  ‘I’ve told him that, of course,’ Hayward replied.

  ‘How did he respond?’ asked Krantz.

  ‘When the good reverend translated my words to the poor fellow, he simply smiled and said he’d rather die.’

  ‘Who was translating for you?’ asked Z.

  ‘The rabbi who ministers to Lipski now. A very important man in your community, I’m told. His name is Singer. Do you know him?’

  Yes, Z knew him quite well. Master of Jews College, London; minister at one of the wealthiest congregations in the city, Singer was a pillar of the Anglo-Jewish community.

  ‘I’m surprised it’s fallen to him,’ said Z.

  ‘I’m not,’ said Krantz, who was just getting up to leave.

  ‘Reverend Singer takes his ministrations quite seriously,’ said Hayward. ‘He’s been spending a good deal of time with Lipski reading over passages in the Old Testament, he tells me. I hadn’t realised what a deeply religious man Lipski was …’

  ‘Rabbi Singer isn’t so bad,’ Z said to Krantz a while later. ‘He’s taken a strong position on maintaining unlimited Jewish immigration unlike some of the Guardians who would rather see it curtailed.’

  ‘There’s an article Singer has recently published in the Chronicle,’ Krantz replied. ‘It m
ight be worth your while reading it.’

  Z stopped by the Jewish Record later that day to speak with Mordecai and, in passing, asked him about the article Krantz had mentioned. Mordecai, of course, had a copy which he happily lent to Z.

  Then Z made arrangements to visit Simeon Singer.

  CHAPTER 47

  SIMEON SINGER WAS seated at his great oaken desk, half hidden by a tower of books, his head bent myopically in studious demeanour – a position Z knew well – squintingly focused on a document he may have written himself (or wished to have done). Around the periphery of the desk was built a disordered wall of papers and tomes of various shapes and ages, perhaps as protection or defence or simply an outcropping of ceaseless rabbinical vigour. Behind him hung a picture in a gilded frame of the Ruthenian Alps painted in the romantic style of Casper Friedrich or Joseph Koch. The walls on either side were lined with leather-bound volumes and plaques and portraits of ancient sages – Maimonides, Rashi, and Judah Halevy amongst others – along with a great and glowering image of Queen Victoria.

  Rev Singer wiped his eyes with a small piece of cloth he pulled from his waistcoat pocket and replaced in a mechanical gesture that appeared to be a product of endless habit. Then, putting his spectacles back where they belonged, he looked at Z (with clearer vision, perhaps) and said, ‘How good it is to see you again! Please, sit down! Sit down! We’ve known each other far too long to go through tiresome formalities.’

  Z took one of the plain wooden chairs at the side of the desk, moved it so his gangly legs could hang free without hindrance, and, before sitting down, thanked Rev Singer in language both floral and contrite for seeing him on such short notice – a ritual Z knew was required despite the rabbi’s insistence on dispensing with ceremony. (For as much as Z hated –in fact, despised – pretence, he was well aware of the small compromises necessary to lubricate social interaction in a world that gloried in hierarchies.)