Will Thomas: Some Danger Involved

"Thank you, sir. That's terrible, what happened to the Jews."

"Yes, England has much to answer for. During those missing three and a half centuries, Marlowe wrote The Jew of Malta and Shakespeare his Merchant of Venice. The first is vitriolic, but then Marlowe always was a waspish fellow. Shakespeare's play is, on the other hand, brilliant. Have you ever seen it staged?"

"No, sir," I gasped, "but I've read the play."

"Step lively, lad. You're lagging. Where was I? Oh, yes, three hundred fifty years. Of all people, it was the Puritan, Oliver Cromwell, who restored the Jews to England in 1656, at the request of Rabbi Israel, a man not unlike our own Sir Moses. The first synagogue, Bevis Marks, opened in 1701. It was a Sephardic synagogue, Spanish and Portuguese, but the German and Dutch Ashkenazim followed almost immediately. Since then they've been emancipated and have prospered for the most part. The Jewish leaders, led by Sir Moses, formed the Board of Deputies in 1863 to protect all Jews. Which brings us to the present and, not coincidentally, to the Lane. Good heavens, lad, are you all right?"

"Fine, sir," I said, putting my hands on my knees. "Just a bit winded."

"First a cold, and now this? We need to get you in better shape, put you on beef tea until we can build you up. Welcome to Petticoat Lane, Thomas."

We'd turned east at Lombard from Saint Swithen, and come down Fenchurch Street into Aldgate High Street, crossing half of the City's royal mile. We now stood not a stone's throw from Whitechapel, facing Middlesex Street, the Lane's more prosaic name. This was the heart of the Jewish ghetto, where the east end of the City gave way to a strip of land known as Spitalfields. On the map, the street changes names several times, but it is all the Lane on Sunday, including the various alleyways and gated courts that back into it.

The scene before us was like a football skirmish. It was as if half of London had been compressed into one street. People stood elbow to elbow like sardines in a tin, and any space underneath was packed full of children. Makeshift booths were set up, with every inch of space filled with used clothing. Handkerchiefs, ties, and hosiery were tacked to the rickety wooden supports and fluttered in the chill March breeze. The articles for which the street earned its sobriquet hung on low-slung clotheslines overhead. Portable racks of shirts and overcoats lined both sides of the street, and the more permanent merchants had signs in Hebrew and English together. Shoes dangled by their laces from upper-story windows, and hawkers called down to the crowd to use the stair. In front of a shop, which proudly boasted that it had been in this location since 1705, sat a fellow fresh off the boat from Moravia or somewhere, selling his few pitiful possessions from a handkerchief on the street.

"Good heavens!" I cried. "How ever do we get in?"

"It's quite simple," my companion said, insinuating his elbow between two men standing back to back. "We push."

The din was appalling. Every hawker in London was here, yelling "Who'll buy?" "Better as new!" and "Hi! Hi!" Sailors walked arm in arm with handsome-looking young Jewesses, children with white pinafores and red cheeks scuttled about like mice, and East End matrons in their long shawls sailed through the crowd with the grace and dignity of clipper ships. Here a man offered gold and watches in the same singsong voice in which he had offered prayers to his God the day before, and there an old crone sold vestas and warmed herself from a pail full of coal embers. One could buy any article of clothing here, from a gypsy's silk scarf to a guardsman's bearskin busby. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I think every vendor in the street noticed my new clothing.

"Oy, there! Give you a good price on that there suit!"

"Pardon, young fella! I'll 'schange that suit and give you the difference!"

"Very dapper young gentleman, we have here! I can get you a more comf-table-like pair o' boots cheap!"

"Just ignore them, lad," Barker ordered, pulling me through the crowd.

"Why aren't they bothering you?" I asked. "You're dressed as well as I."

"They know better."

I looked at the faces of the crowd. Most looked like average Londoners, and a few like music-hall versions of Jews, but now and then I saw true Semitic faces: Russian Jews with babushka scarves or fur-trimmed hats, old men who would have looked at home in bazaars in Damascus or Casablanca, and bright-eyed children with black curls and earrings, looking as if they'd just fallen off a gypsy caravan.

"Mind your wallet," Barker continued. "This is a knucker's paradise."

I tapped my back pocket. My wallet had no money save the five-pound note of Barker's, but it contained a few things important to me, so I held on to it. I hadn't heard the word "knucker" since prison. Where had Barker picked up the word?

"What are we looking for?" I shouted over the noise.

"The telegraph pole they hung him on!" Barker growled back, pointing to the wires overhead.

"How do we know which one it is?"

"Poole will have stationed a peeler underneath, to keep people from climbing it! Evidence, you know!"

We pushed on, and I do mean pushed. It was like being a drone in a beehive, everyone speaking at once, everyone slowly working toward his or her own destination. Barker seemed to have little problem moving through the crowd, but someone plucked at my sleeve every moment or two.

"Aha!" he said, after a few minutes. "I spy a blue helmet in the crowd about a hundred yards ahead."

A merchant more determined than the rest had attached himself to my sleeve and was telling me in rapturous terms all about the goods and services he had to offer a fine gentleman like myself. It was flattering to be addressed in such terms, considering I was less than a week away from being a homeless idler, but Barker was pulling away again. So, with one hand I separated him from my arm, then planted the other full in his bearded face and pushed. He gave up and sent me on my way with several curses in Hebrew, before latching on to another fellow almost immediately.

Finally, we reached the center of the Lane, where a burly constable guarded an ordinary-looking telegraph pole. The coroner, Vandeleur, must have been right in his assumption that Pokrzywa had been killed somewhere else. There was almost no blood to be found, just a few rusty stains on the pavement by the pole. It was no secret among the Jews what had happened here, and they vented their displeasure at the terrible event and the presence of the law by spitting on the pavement, though none would dare spit near the constable. He looked like he could tear your head off and use it for rugby drills, were he so inclined. He also looked so inclined.

"I'm Barker," my employer told the constable. "Inspector Poole sent me to view the scene of the crime."

"Yes, sir," the constable responded, tugging at the brim of his helmet.

"Has anything been disturbed?"

"Nothing really to disturb, sir. There's no soil here to leave impressions of feet and such. Just cobbles and paving stones."

"Was any blood found in the Lane beyond these few spots?"

"Only at the entrance to the High Street, sir, and that was probably from the Leadenhall meat market."

"Was there any indication of a wheeled cart having been used? A dogcart or barrow?"

"Well, sir, the fog had deposited a heavy mist on the road, and there were already a coupla' dozen barrows here when we arrived, so it's hard to say."

"So, nothing. These fellows covered their tracks well." He stepped back and surveyed the telegraph pole, making a slow circle around it.

"Were the street empty, I'd climb this thing, or have you do it, Thomas. But we'd attract too much of an audience, I suppose." He contented himself with circling the pole, like a lion that had trapped a pygmy in a tree. He pointed upward.