The Warsaw Anagrams

by Richard Zimler

  Our goal: the Soviet Ukraine. We’d bribe our way over the border and head to Odessa, where we’d catch a freighter across the Black Sea to Istanbul. From there, it would be easy to get to Izmir. After our reunion with Liesel, Izzy would catch a boat to the south of France, where he’d buy forged papers. Then he’d sneak into the German-occupied territory in the north, for a rendezvous with Louis and his sons in Boulogne-Billancourt.

  I wanted to be there to see my old friend’s victory over all that had stood between himself and his dreams, but I knew by then I’d never leave Liesel again.

  I felt strong knowing we had a plan, but Izzy started to cry.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing… and everything. The relief of knowing I’ll either be dead or free – it’s too much right now.’

  I began gathering together all of the small valuables that I could sell, including the letter opener I’d stolen. Izzy sat at my desk to read through Adam’s medical file, and when he was done, he asked, ‘So why do you think Mikael let you have this?’

  I was sitting on the ground by my dresser and had just taken Hannah’s ruby earrings out of the toe of one of my socks. ‘He must have thought that his openness would convince me he had nothing to hide,’ I replied. ‘And he was right. Since Adam’s death, he has been trying to outthink me.’

  ‘And he nearly did,’ Izzy observed.

  ‘Convincing Melka to sleep with me was his master stroke. She must be deeply in love with him to have gone along with a compromising plan like that.’

  I got to my knees and slipped my hand under the mattress to take out the record book of Adam’s illnesses that Stefa had entrusted to me.

  Turning round, Izzy said, ‘While you finish getting together what you’ll need, I’ll be writing something.’

  He’d already slipped a sheet of paper in my typewriter and was obviously hatching a plot, but I didn’t question him; I had Hannah’s earrings to hide in case we needed to make an emergency bribe. I cut a small square at the centre of fifty pages of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, dropped the jewellery inside the resulting cubbyhole and slid the slender volume back into its place on my bookshelves.

  I put all the valuables I’d sell inside my old leather briefcase.

  When Izzy was finished hunting and pecking, I led him into the kitchen, where Bina was scouring the oven. She was wearing her coat and her black beret.

  ‘Give me your hand,’ I told the girl, reaching out for her.

  I put five hundred złoty in her palm. ‘Make sure you stay alive!’ I ordered her. She replied that it was too great a sum, so I shook her hard. ‘Do anything you need to do, but promise me you’ll make it out of here!’

  ‘I swear,’ she replied, starting to cry, because I was bullying her.

  Apologizing, I hugged her to me, then counted out another 500 złoty and handed them to her. ‘Give half of this to a little acrobat named Zachariah Manberg who performs outside the Femina Theatre every day at noon. But only give it to him a little at a time. Otherwise he’ll just squander it – or have it stolen by the older boys.’

  ‘And the other half, Dr Cohen?’

  ‘There’s a young woman who works in the bakery in the courtyard – Ewa. I want her to have it.’

  ‘I’ve met her. I’ll make sure she gets it.’

  ‘Good girl. Also, if you run out of funds, there are some reasonably good paintings in Stefa’s wardrobe, and first editions of psychiatry books on my shelves. Sell them on the Other Side if you can, but don’t take stupid risks. You can sell everything but Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. Leave that for me, in case I need to come back.’

  Bina nodded.

  I was left with a little more than a thousand złoty for myself, and Izzy had nearly six hundred at his workshop.

  ‘All right, let’s get going,’ I told him.

  ‘Where will you go?’ the girl asked.

  ‘We’ve one errand to run inside the ghetto, then we’ll head for the Soviet Ukraine. I don’t think I’ll be back.’

  She brought her hands over her mouth and moaned. ‘You’re… you’re leaving for good?’

  ‘Yes, it’s time.’

  ‘But we’ll see each other when we’re free, won’t we?’ she asked in a petrified voice.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, smiling. ‘I’ll come back and find you. We’ll have a reunion, right here in Stefa’s apartment. So take good care of it.’

  ‘I will. Now bend your head down, Dr Cohen,’ she requested.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Bend down.’

  I did. And then that astonishing girl gripped my shoulders and kissed me on my brow as if I were her child setting out for his first day of school.

  I’d put on my good suit so that I’d look like an elderly gentleman out for a leisurely stroll. At Izzy’s workshop, he, too, changed into his best clothes and put on his Borsalino. Then he counted his stash of złoty and grabbed his gold watch. I reminded him to take a lemon along. He took two. He slid his photographs from the Bourdonnais under his coat.

  ‘I need to say goodbye to Róźa,’ he told me.

  I waited outside his apartment. When he returned to me, his face was flushed.

  I hailed a rickshaw. I had to decide now where to go: Mikael’s office or the Jewish Council.

  ‘Where to?’ the driver asked.

  ‘Just a minute,’ I told him. ‘I still don’t think I can kill Mikael,’ I confessed to Izzy.

  ‘Then let me do it,’ he requested.

  ‘It’s not your war,’ I told him.

  ‘Erik, I loved Adam too!’

  ‘Still, you should go to Louis guiltless.’

  ‘Me, guiltless?’ He grabbed my arm hard. ‘Have you heard anything I’ve told you about my life?’

  I took his free hand and kissed it. A strange gesture, but this was not a day like any other, and a quarrel with him could have ruined all our plans.

  Izzy understood. ‘Sorry,’ he told me.

  I turned round to face the driver. ‘Take us to the Jewish Council’s headquarters,’ I told him.

  Benjamin Schrei was in an office he shared with two other men. He rushed to greet us, smiling his million-dollar Gablewitz smile, and introduced us to his colleagues, who brought us desk chairs.

  We sat down opposite our host. Four wilted, fire-coloured tulips sat in a turquoise vase on his desk between us.

  ‘You might try watering them,’ Izzy told him in his bantering way.

  Schrei slicked back his gleaming hair and sighed. ‘They were doing great till this morning. You should have come yesterday. It’s your timing that’s bad.’

  ‘Yesterday, we didn’t know what we know now,’ I replied, and I told him what we’d learned about Mikael. When I was done, I handed him Georg’s pendant and suggested that he question Ewa if he had any doubts about our conclusions. Izzy added that he’d probably find Anna’s earrings with Rowy.

  ‘You boys have done good work,’ he told us. ‘And the council is grateful.’ He lit the cigarette that he’d dangled between his lips, then leaned towards us. ‘So what do you have in mind for Dr Tengmann?’

  He squinted at me through his smoke.

  ‘Does it make any difference what I tell you?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he replied, ‘I’ll take care of him whatever you say.’

  ‘And take care of means exactly what?’ Izzy questioned.

  ‘He shall cease to cast a shadow on this earth,’ Schrei answered in a dramatic voice. Catching my glance, he added, ‘Nothing you can say will prevent that. Still, I’d like to know what you’d do in my position.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m a curious man. And I want your opinion. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone like you, Dr Cohen. You interest me.’

  ‘Even though I’m an assimilated Jew?’ I asked to provoke him.

  ‘You’re hardly assimilated now.’ Eyeing me cagily, he said, ‘Face it, Dr Cohen, you stink like a ragpicker from the most backward sh
tetl in Poland. And you’ll never voluntarily speak German or Polish again to anyone who isn’t Jewish. Am I right?’

  ‘Probably,’ I admitted.

  ‘You know,’ he added, an amused smile twisting his lips, ‘if you learned a little Hebrew, you could be a pretty good Yid.’

  ‘He is a pretty good Yid!’ countered Izzy, ready for a fight.

  ‘You’re right,’ Schrei replied. ‘I’m sorry. It was a bad joke.’

  ‘I think Stefa would want him dead,’ I told him.

  ‘Fine, but what do you want?’ our host insisted.

  ‘I want a cigarette,’ I requested, stalling.

  I knew that Schrei wanted me to give him the biblical answer: an eye for an eye… That would have proved I accepted the rules of the God of the Torah. But what he didn’t understand is that I wanted to take responsibility for my revenge. I wanted that sceptre of red fire for myself.

  ‘Mikael Tengmann being killed won’t bring back Adam,’ I told him after he’d lit my cigarette. ‘And my sending him straight to hell wouldn’t make me happy.’

  ‘It won’t make me happy either,’ he confessed. ‘But I’ll still do it.’

  ‘You’ve a hard job,’ I told him.

  ‘Ah, now you’re beginning to understand,’ he replied, showing me a gratified smile.

  ‘You take care of Mikael, and I’ll take care of the Nazi working with him,’ I said as if we were trading stocks.

  He shook my hand to complete the deal. ‘All right, but do you know who the German is?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How are you going to get him?’

  Izzy answered for us. ‘That depends on how well he’s guarded.’

  ‘Maybe you should take a few days to plan this,’ Schrei suggested. ‘If the Germans find you outside the ghetto, they’ll shoot you on the spot. And that’s if you’re lucky.’

  ‘I can’t wait. If I wait, I may lose my nerve,’ I told him.

  ‘You have money for bribes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A gun?’

  Izzy patted his pocket. ‘It’s German,’ he replied, grinning at the irony.

  ‘Then I’ll let you boys get on your way.’ He handed me his tin of cigarettes. ‘Take this for good luck,’ he told me, standing up.

  He accompanied us to the door. We shook hands again, and then he leaned in and embraced me, whispering in my ear, ‘Shoot quickly and don’t ask him why he killed Adam. No answer he gives you will give you peace, and the delay will just increase the likelihood of your being caught. When you get back out to the street, don’t run. It’ll attract attention.’

  Good advice – one murderer to another – and it was flattering that he presumed that Izzy and I could still run. But I still had to know why Adam’s leg had been worth stealing.

  The border crossing at the back of the rickshaw workshop had been bricked up by the Jewish Council, which was under increasing pressure from the German authorities to curb smuggling. So we went to the women’s clothing factory that led to Maciej’s garage. We paid our toll to the head seamstress and crawled again through that tunnel of pressured darkness into the next world. Happily, Maciej heard our banging and let us out.

  ‘You again – the angry Jew!’ he said to Izzy, beaming, and they shook hands like cousins. ‘Take off your armbands,’ he reminded us.

  We handed them to him, and Maciej added them to the collection in his office.

  Maciej escorted us to the door, looked both ways to make sure the street was free of policemen, then summoned us out.

  Krakowskie Przedmiescie was crowded with workers and shoppers. Owing to the freezing rain that had just begun to fall, it was a confusion of umbrellas battling for airspace. We bought a big blue one that would rule the street.

  In front of the Bristol Hotel was a group of German soldiers standing around a tank, but we didn’t detour around them or decay into our miserable ghetto shuffle; the murder drawing us forward had freed us from any fear of misfortune.

  Can it be that criminals walk easier through their days and nights than the rest of us?

  After passing Warsaw University, we spotted what we were looking for on the east side of the street: ‘E. Jesion – Butcher.’

  A little way back, guarding the west, were the twin pinnacles of the Church of the Holy Cross.

  We looked in the shop window from twenty paces away. A red-faced butcher in a white apron, with wire-rimmed spectacles circling his puffy eyes, was working at a marble counter, cutting thick ribbons of fat off a side of pork and tossing them into a tin pail. He was big and broad. His flat-topped haircut – and the moustache hyphening his thick top lip – made him look as though he’d stepped off a Grosz etching.

  Was this the brute who had taken Adam from us?

  The anger that rose inside me was like a strangling wind – leaving no room for anything but the need to have Jesion’s future in my hands.

  He looked up and noticed us, then cut away more fat. When he glanced back at me again, I knew he was wondering why a stranger would gaze at him so intently. Guilt had made him observant – and quick to fear the worst.

  Izzy sensed what was on my mind. ‘Erik, he’ll know where Lanik’s office is,’ he said. ‘We can’t kill him before we find out where it is.’

  ‘I know. I was just thinking that the perfect crime is one you wouldn’t mind being arrested for.’

  ‘No one’s going to capture us,’ he assured me, and he told me what he had in mind for Jesion. It seemed like a good plan.

  As we stepped inside, the butcher looked up with a forced smile. In Polish he asked, ‘What can I get for you gentlemen this morning?’

  I put my briefcase and folded umbrella down in the corner and looked around quickly. There was a door at the back. It must have led to his storage room.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ the man asked us, sensing trouble.

  ‘Are you Mr Jesion?’ Izzy questioned.

  ‘That’s me all right,’ he replied, doing his best to sound jovial.

  I locked the door with a firm click. ‘We’ve got a gun,’ I told the butcher. ‘So drop your knife.’

  ‘What? I don’t understand.’

  Izzy took out his pistol. ‘Drop your knife to the floor,’ he ordered, ‘or I’ll put a bullet in your head.’

  I stepped around the counter to watch Jesion’s movements. When he tossed away the blade, it made a metallic clang on the tile floor.

  ‘I’m going to step through the door at the back to make sure no one is there,’ I told the butcher, ‘and then you’re going to follow me in. You understand?’

  ‘If it’s money you want,’ he replied, ‘just take it.’

  I pushed open the door and entered a dark, chilly room, nearly bumping into a goat’s carcass hanging bug-eyed from an iron hook in the ceiling. I recoiled in horror. The smell of blood packed my nostrils.

  I tugged on a cord attached to a bare bulb behind me. At the back, on a square marble table, were two other goats, not yet skinned. A vision of Adam lying beside them and stripped of his clothes made me avert my eyes.

  ‘All right, send him in,’ I called through the door.

  Jesion stepped inside, followed by Izzy, who kept his gun pointed at the butcher’s chest.

  ‘Are you… are you one of the kids’ grandfathers?’ Jesion asked fearfully.

  ‘So you’ve guessed,’ I told him.

  He cleaned his fingers on his apron. ‘Well, you hardly look like robbers.’

  ‘He was my grandnephew,’ I explained.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The boy with the birthmarks on his ankle.’

  Jesion raised a hand to his face and took off his glasses, wiping his eyes. He showed me a desolate look. ‘What was his name?’

  ‘Adam,’ I told him.

  ‘Adam,’ he repeated to himself, listening keenly to the sound it made. ‘Did you get his body back?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you’ve given him a proper burial?’


  ‘I’m not sure. We’ve been waiting for the ground to thaw. Listen, Jesion,’ I said, ‘you seem awfully calm for a man with a gun pointed at his heart.’

  ‘In a way, I’ve been hoping you’d come. I can’t stand any more of this. I think all the time about what I might have to cut from another kid. It’s too much.’

  ‘How do you kill them? There are no marks on…’

  ‘Me, kill them? It’s not like that!’ He shook his head. ‘When the kids are brought to me, they’re already dead – brenen zol er!’

  His Yiddish was mis-pronounced. I wasn’t sure I’d heard right. ‘What did you say?’ I asked.

  Jesion cursed the murderer again.

  ‘How in God’s name do you know Yiddish?’ Izzy questioned.

  ‘My mother is Jewish, though she changed her name when she was a young woman to hide her background.’ He started undoing the cord of his apron. ‘I only ever spoke Yiddish when I stayed with my grandparents. I’m rusty.’

  ‘Is it Lanik you want to burn in hell?’ I asked.

  His face brightened. ‘You did it! You must have figured out the clues I left!’

  ‘So you were the one who put the string in Adam’s mouth and the gauze in Georg’s fist?’

  ‘Yes. I had to think of something to stop more children from being murdered. When did you understand what my clues meant?’

  ‘Only today. You were incredibly clever.’

  ‘I couldn’t risk anything obvious,’ Jesion replied, taking off his apron and folding it neatly, ‘but I’d heard that the Jews inside the ghetto were working in anagrams these days, so I thought that someone in the Jewish police might just turn linka into Lanik and Flor into Rolf. And that they might be able to stop the bastard. Only a Jew would know both Polish and German well enough to understand that linka was string and Flor was gauze, so I felt that the right person would figure out Lanik’s whole name.’