‘You know Jaśmin?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know her personally,’ Irene replied, ‘but she has been holding clandestine meetings since December – telling anyone who will listen to her about the wretched conditions in the ghetto. She’s been heroic, I think. A week ago, I went to a meeting for foreigners living here – Mama took me. Jaśmin held up a note she’d received from your niece after her son’s death, and she told the audience what had happened to him – and how you were suffering. After her talk, I started thinking that you might agree to help me.’
A patient’s last words are often what they’ve been waiting to tell you since the beginning – which meant that Irene needed to make it clear to me that she was aware that Adam had been murdered. And that she’d wanted to talk to me since learning that.
‘There’s one other thing I should have told you,’ she added. ‘In my dream, the big man who ends up with the yellow flowers we’ve picked… I know his name. I know it because the man in the hat calls out to him when he’s walking towards the cottage. It’s Jesion.’
‘And do you think his name is important?’ I asked.
‘I have a feeling it is. Sometimes it seems the key to everything.’
Irene remained in her room, though she refrained from locking the door, which seemed a hopeful sign. I paused on the gallery to measure her closing words to me against my own interest in names, and to consider, too, what she’d told me about Jaśmin, but Mrs Lanik, rushing up the staircase, drew my attention. She carried her horn-rim glasses in one hand and a book in the other. In the yearning of her eyes, I saw she feared the worst.
‘Is Irene all right?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I told her, ‘we had a good talk. And, most importantly, she has promised not to hurt herself while we work together.’
‘Thank you for that, Dr Cohen. What else did she tell you?’
‘She fears she is in danger.’
‘What kind of danger?’
‘As I’m sure you know, she has adjusted poorly to her new surroundings. She feels threatened. If I were you, I’d do everything in your power to make her feel loved and cared for. And protected. Even if it means going away with her for a time. Maybe even to France – to Nantes.’
Mrs Lanik looked puzzled. ‘Why Nantes?’
‘Because of your parents.’
‘My parents? But they live in Bordeaux,’ she corrected me.
‘I must have misunderstood,’ I replied, wondering why Irene would have lied to me.
I was also astonished by her capabilities as an actress. How much else had she told me that wasn’t true?
‘Yes, I’ve been thinking of taking a trip with Irene,’ Mrs Lanik told me. ‘Dr Cohen, thank you.’ She grasped both my hands. ‘I’m forever in your debt.’
‘I only hope I’ve helped a little with whatever is troubling her,’ I replied, and as I said that I realized the real reason I’d stayed with Irene: she had needed to be heard, and my willingness to listen to her – to allow even the silence between us to speak to me – was part of a world of solidarity the Nazis wanted to destroy. By staying, I was fighting for all I’d once believed in. And I was asserting my right to live as the man I wanted to be.
‘I’d like for you to see her again as soon as possible,’ Mrs Lanik told me, ‘but my husband is coming back tomorrow. I’ll get word to you when I know he’s going away again. Is that all right?’
‘Yes, of course.’
She escorted me down the stairs. She had two wicker baskets of food waiting for me on the antique wooden table by the front door.
‘I managed to get you fourteen lemons,’ she told me, smiling happily.
Dispersed among red apples, the lemons were beautiful – a composition worthy of Cézanne.
‘You’ll never know how grateful I am for your help,’ I told her.
‘I only hope I’ve chosen well for you,’ she replied, and she handed me an envelope. ‘Here is your two hundred złoty.’
‘Thank you. And one last thing – I’d like to keep your daughter’s pills. She says you have them. If they are in the house, she might somehow find them.’
‘Yes, you’re right.’
While Mrs Lanik was gone, I put my pipe tobacco and two lemons in my coat pocket for safekeeping and examined the eggs, butter, cheese and ham. She’d even put in tins of Russian caviar and French foie gras. She handed me the pills as soon as she returned. I was in luck – Veronal, my tranquillizer of choice.
As I stashed them in my pocket, my relief made me close my eyes with gratitude. The Nazis have lost control of me, I thought – being able to summon death at any time was a guarantee I’d needed since I first saw Adam in the Pinkiert’s cart. Ten pills would be all I’d need, and the end would be painless.
‘What about my German escorts?’ I asked Mrs Lanik. I didn’t see them anywhere.
‘Already in their car, waiting for you.’ Smiling broadly, as people do who’ve been crying and are thankful for the help they’ve received, she said in French, ‘And I’ve told them in no uncertain terms to keep their mouths shut and their hands off your food!’
The Germans were in the front seat. I got in the back, next to my picnic baskets.
As we took off, the Nazi comedian turned and pointed his gun at my face, vibrating with rage. ‘I might just make a bloody hole where that Jewish nose is!’ he threatened. ‘All I’d have to tell my superiors is that you tried to escape.’
His words sounded practised, which made them less believable. Still, I didn’t dare reply. I looked out my window instead, fingering the coins in my pocket, and after a few seconds he turned away and we started off. He said nothing more to me on the drive back home.
In my mind, I went over what Irene had told me, and all her revelations – whether fictional or real – now seemed to point to the man in the hat who took flowers from Irene and two other children.
Though there may be more than two, the girl had told me.
The distant white blanket of winter sky, the crack of ice beneath the wheels of our car, the ticklish wool of my scarf… All that I saw and felt vanished suddenly, because it was at that moment I realized that Irene had created her dream to fit what she knew about the murders inside the ghetto!
She’d intended for me to find out she’d been lying about Nantes or some other small detail, because she was eager for me to understand that her testimony had been carefully scripted.
Two children had vanished from the meadow; she was talking about Adam and Anna!
Except that Irene could not have learned about Anna’s murder from Jaśmin.
Was it possible that she had witnessed Jewish children being murdered? Maybe she had overheard the killer talking about them. Then, when Jaśmin spoke about me, Irene understood that my nephew was one of the kids who’d vanished.
She’d wanted to identify the killer to me, but couldn’t, which probably meant she was afraid of being murdered herself. By whom? Her stepfather? Maybe the man named Jesion.
Or perhaps even by her real father.
Bina, her mother and her uncle Freddi were waiting for me at home. ‘I’ve brought food,’ I told the girl, handing her the basket I’d carried upstairs.
I sat down on my bed, exhausted. Bina looked between the fresh fruit and me, beaming as if I were a messenger from God. She kissed me on each cheek, and I hugged her back, but I was still deep inside all that Irene had told me. Bina’s uncle – a short, dark, hairy man with a boxer’s build, smelling pleasantly of talc – burst into tears when he told me how grateful he was to be able to move in. Bina’s mother went down on her knees to recite a speech she’d memorized. I felt trapped by their fervent hopes for a better life, so when the girl went down to the courtyard to get my second basket of food from Professor Engal, I retreated into what had been Stefa’s room and locked the door. I’d left my list of the dead on my pillow. I stared at the names for a long time, hoping they would lift off the page and show me more of what I needed to know, but they didn’t.
CHAPTER 24
After putting some supplies for Izzy in one of the baskets that Bina had emptied, I went down to the street with the girl and she hailed me a rickshaw. She kissed me goodbye tenderly; she obviously liked having a benefactor, even if he played the Big Bad Wolf on his own small stage at times.
Izzy danced around when he saw what I’d brought him; unfortunately for me, he made the same rubbery-handed movements that he’d taught Adam as an Indian raindance.
‘Where’d you get all this?’ he asked, picking his excited fingers through the cheeses.
‘A new friend,’ I told him.
I handed him the two lemons I had in my coat pocket. He cupped them if they were the goose’s golden eggs.
While he prepared lemonade, I told him about my session with Irene, ending with how I’d come to believe that she had learned that at least two ghetto children had been murdered. ‘Izzy, I don’t know how, but she knows who’s doing this!’ I exclaimed.
He questioned me at length about my conclusions – a good thing, as it turned out, because my repeating so many details helped us come up with new possibilities and dangers.
‘Irene might even have faked her suicide attempt to convince her mother to send for you,’ he speculated.
‘I suppose it’s possible,’ I replied. ‘She told me that we can each play our part in preventing worse things from happening in the ghetto, and sending for me was her way of helping – she wants me to use her clues to catch the killer.’
Izzy and I were on our second cup of lemonade by then.
‘We’ve got to go to Krakowskie Przedmieście and look for someone with the name Jesion,’ I told him. ‘Irene implied that he holds the key to solving these murders.’
‘But we don’t have an address and-?’
‘Tomorrow,’ I interrupted, ‘you and I are crossing to the Other Side – early.’
He was seated as his worktable. I was standing, too jittery to sit.
‘It could be a trap,’ he warned.
‘No, I don’t think so. Irene lied to me, but only because she’s terrified – and so I’d come to realize that she’d scripted some of what she told me. Whatever she knows has put her in physical danger. She couldn’t tell me any more than she did without risking not just her own life but also her mother’s – without killing her family. So she’s leaving it up to me to identify the murderer – and to do whatever has to be done.’
‘If that’s true, then you’ll never hear from her again,’ Izzy said authoritatively.
‘Why?’
‘Because she’s already told you all she could.’
‘Except that Mrs Lanik said she would wait for her husband’s next absence and then send a car for me.’
‘What if she lied, too? She might have helped her daughter plan everything. Maybe her parents aren’t in Bordeaux, after all. She might have told you that to make sure you knew that some of what Irene told you had been made up. And if her husband or ex-husband are involved in the murders in some way, it’s more likely that she’s the one who overheard what they’d done – or maybe even saw the bodies.’
While I thought that over, he cut us squares of foie gras. He put mine on a slice of bread and ate his plain because of his rickety teeth.
‘There’s more I need to tell you before we leave the ghetto,’ I told him. ‘I think that Adam, Anna and Georg were killed for the defects on their skin.’
‘Defects? What are you talking about?’ he asked.
‘Remember the birthmarks on the back of Adam’s right ankle?’
‘Of course, but what good could they be to anyone?’
I explained why I believed Rowy and a partner outside the ghetto might be responsible for identifying the children to be murdered – possibly with the help of Ziv.
‘Sorry, Erik, I don’t buy it,’ he told me, licking some foie gras off his fingers. ‘Rowy wouldn’t tell you how frightened he was of being forced again into a labour gang if that was his motivation for turning three kids over to the Nazis.’
‘He probably didn’t believe I would be any good at detective work.’
‘Pfffttt!’ he scoffed, in that Gallic way he’d picked up aboard the Bourdonnais. ‘As for Ziv, Ewa told me he runs away every time a mouse appears in the bakery.’
‘But he can think ten moves ahead at chess! He could have planned everything.’ Then a perverse possibility made me start. ‘He was jealous of Adam. My God, he wanted to remove the boy from Stefa’s life!’
‘Even if that were true, which I don’t believe, why would he kill Anna and Georg?’
‘I don’t know, but he did volunteer to help Rowy find more kids for the chorus. What if it was so he could identify children for murder?’
‘I admit that sounds suspicious, but you saw how shattered he was after Stefa’s death. Is that the kind of young man who would plan to murder children?’
‘Look, Izzy,’ I told him, irritated that he was right, ‘all I know is that after we try to find Jesion, we need to take a good look through Rowy’s apartment and Ziv’s room at the bakery. We have to turn up something incriminating. And we’ve got to work fast. We’ve no guarantee that whoever is responsible won’t have another Jewish boy or girl killed.’
Izzy gazed down into that terrible possibility, then started. ‘Erik,’ he told me, ‘what would you say if I could bring the murderer’s Jewish accomplice straight to us?’
Izzy and I moved my desk and my old Mała typewriter into Stefa’s room. We settled on the following wording for our note:
Someone has learned of our activities, and we’re in danger. I need to talk with you. We need to meet outside the ghetto as soon as possible. Introduce yourself to the guards at the corner of Leszno and Żelazna this evening, at exactly 7.30. Do not try to contact me. The guards at the gate will know to expect you. A car will be waiting outside to take you to my home.
We typed three copies and left them unsigned. We put them in envelopes but wrote no name on the outside.
Whoever had been responsible for Adam’s death would be terrified of being exposed as a murderer and would take the note seriously even if he wasn’t absolutely sure it was genuine. As for whoever was innocent, he’d likely believe that the note had been sent to him in error – since his name was not written either in the letter or on the envelope – and stay far away from the guards at Leszno and Żelazna.
I paid a boy selling armbands embroidered with the Star of David to take the letter to Ziv in the bakery, and Izzy paid an old woman selling tin cups on the sidewalk outside Mikael Tengmann’s office to hand an envelope to him.
I wanted to take a quick look at Rowy’s apartment before leaving our note. It was on the ground floor of a stately neoclassical building, with impressive columns flanking the doorway, but much of the roof had imploded and was patched with wooden planks and burlap.
Luckily, I found the young man at home, practising the slow movement of what sounded like a Mozart concerto. His warm, full tone seemed to give form to my sense of abandonment. I could not bear it for more than a moment and knocked.
Rowy welcomed me warmly and put his violin back in its velvet-lined case. I told him I’d had some good fortune and handed him the caviar Mrs Lanik had given me – the price of putting him at ease. He insisted on opening the can right away, and on toasting some challah to eat with it. I sat at his worktable, which was piled high with musical scores. Next to me a rusted bicycle was leaning against a wooden dresser – Izzy and I would start by searching there.
A pink sheet hung from the ceiling halfway back, hiding the only window from view.
‘A young couple with a toddler moved in a few weeks ago,’ Rowy explained.
It was cold in the apartment, so he put more sawdust in his oven. Over our snack, we got to talking about the cramped conditions in the ghetto, and Rowy warned me that the Jewish Council had begun forcing residents with spare rooms to accept Jews who had arrived recently from the provinces. Waving off his concern, I said, ‘
Izzy already told me. A girl I know named Bina just moved in with her mother and uncle.’
‘Three extra people – it must be hell,’ he said, and from the way he looked at me, I knew he meant more than sharing my home with strangers.
I couldn’t discuss my inner life with a man I didn’t trust, so I made believe I’d failed to understand his implication. ‘I’ll be fine living in Stefa’s room,’ I assured him.
On saying goodbye, he embraced me. I went stiff, but then kissed his cheek to throw off his suspicions. After leaving, I waited a half-hour, then slid our note under his door and fled.
*
By then, it was just after five in the afternoon. Izzy had suggested the Leszno Street gate because there was a small café run by an acquaintance of ours nearby, and from there we could see everyone entering or exiting the ghetto. We met there at 5.30. We took a table by the window. We kept the brims of our hats low on our foreheads to be less recognizable.
At seven, we went outside to make sure we didn’t miss any passers-by. I turned up my collar and stood with my back to the street to keep my face hidden, blocking Izzy from view at the same time. Whenever anyone approached, he would glance around my shoulder to see who it was.
We stood that way until fifteen minutes to eight. The coming curfew had emptied the street by then. A Jewish policeman told us we’d better make our way home.
We dragged ourselves off; we’d failed to trap Rowy, Ziv or Mikael.
Could the murderer’s accomplice inside the ghetto be someone we’d never even considered?
Izzy and I agreed to meet the next morning at his workshop to settle on another plan. In my brief conversation with Rowy, he’d mentioned that he’d given a copy of his apartment key to Ewa, and I intended to make up a reason for her to lend it to me.
At home, Bina handed me my dinner: a silvery perch lying on a bed of leeks sautéed in schmaltz. I hadn’t seen so beautiful a meal since the Before Time and told her so. The girl took off her apron and sat with me at the kitchen table, watching me eat with the pleased smile of a chef who’s appreciated. After a time, she moved her hands to her lap, wishing to speak her heart but afraid that I’d yell at her. Caressing her cheek, I said, ‘Listen, Bina, you’re a wonderful girl, but don’t grow attached to me.’
The Warsaw Anagrams Page 22