Richard Zimler - The Warsaw Anagrams

She lit another cigarette as I confirmed what she said. Her contemptuous stare gave me an exaggerated sense of being nowhere close to where I wanted to be. I had the feeling the world was speaking to me, but at a pitch so high that I couldn’t hear the message. I handed her back her son’s letter, though, like Anna, I wasn’t convinced that everything was as it seemed.

‘Now get out of my apartment,’ she ordered harshly, ‘or I’ll call my husband and have you arrested. He’s an important judge, and Governor Frank is a family friend. So if you think you will ever do anything to hurt my Paweł, then you are…’

‘If Governor Frank were such a friend,’ I cut in, ‘then why did you tell me the truth about Anna? You have to know that I suspect that you might be behind her disappearance. Or is it your son who’s responsible?’

Mrs Sawicki shot me a hateful look. ‘I only told you about the girl because she means nothing to me or my son – dead or alive.’

‘I never said she was dead!’ I declared.

‘Hah!’ she sneered. ‘If you think you’ve caught me out, then you’re a fool, Mr Honec. You must suspect she’s dead or you wouldn’t be here. In any case, I can’t imagine why she means anything to the Reich Ministry of the Interior.’

‘That, Mrs Sawicki, is no concern of yours,’ I told her with poisonous calm, and before she could come up with a reply, I went to retrieve my coat and hat from the sofa.

When I returned to the foyer, it was clear from her contemptuous face that we had nothing more to say to each other. I nodded by way of goodbye and reached for the door handle, turning away from her. A mistake. I felt a burn near my elbow. She’d pressed something through my sweater into my skin. Stinging with pain, I swung out my arm and caught her on the mouth with the back of my hand, knocking her into the wall. Righting herself, she dropped her cigarette to the floor and crushed it out with the toe of her shoe. Reaching up to her lip, which was cut, she took some blood on to her fingertip and licked it.

Tears of shock and pain had welled in my eyes. I wiped them away roughly.

‘Now you’ll never go anywhere again without a scar from me!’ she told me, and she laughed in a triumphant burst.

Mrs Sawicki was treacherous enough to have murdered Anna, and she was obviously given to violent outbursts, but why would she have taken the girl’s hand?

Might Paweł have been so passionately in love with Anna that he gave her a precious family heirloom – a bracelet – without thinking of how angrily his mother would react? After all, Mrs Sawicki had become particularly defensive when I’d mentioned Anna’s jewellery. Maybe Anna had kept the gift concealed from her mother and friends. On the day she ventured out of the ghetto, she somehow sealed the clasp so that it couldn’t be taken from her without also taking her hand.

And yet with a judge for a husband, Mrs Sawicki would have found a legal way to recover any keepsake that Paweł had given Anna. She would have claimed, in fact, that the girl had stolen it. No government official would have believed Anna’s word against hers.

Furthermore, it seemed impossible that Mrs Sawicki could have had anything to do with Adam’s murder. How would she even have known of his existence?

In the lobby, I took Izzy’s arm and rushed him away, sure that we’d be in danger as long as we remained nearby. Despite myself, I’d begun to fear that Mrs Sawicki could stop my heart with a single, well-directed thought.

She was gazing down at us from her balcony as we crossed the street. And all that day she would wheel above my thoughts like a bird of prey.

We made it to Jawicki Jewellers on Spacerowa Street at just past one in the afternoon. I recognized the balding shop manager who’d sold me a floral pin for Liesel two years before, but he didn’t know me, which was a relief. Still, Mrs Sawicki had unnerved me and I fumbled Hannah’s ring when I took it out of my pocket. It crashed on to his wooden desk.

He snatched it up with an agile hand. ‘Got ya!’ he exclaimed.

‘Thanks,’ I told him.

‘You needn’t have worried,’ he observed. ‘Diamonds are a lot harder than people.’

A surprising comment. Izzy looked at me sideways, which meant don’t let him trick you into saying anything about yourself .

The jeweller put a loop in his eye and turned the ring to catch the diffuse winter light from his window. At length, he said, ‘I’ll give you two thousand seven hundred for it.’ His toothy smile meant that he was giving me a great deal.

‘It’s worth three times that,’ I stated for the record.

‘Not to someone in your position,’ he retorted.

The moist chill at the back of my neck was my fear that he did remember me – and knew I was a Jew. ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’ I demanded, figuring I might try to intimidate him.

‘You badly need cash or you wouldn’t be here.’

‘Three thousand five hundred,’ Izzy said, ‘or we go elsewhere and you lose big.’ He spoke with a Jimmy Cagney snarl to his words.

‘Your bodyguard?’ the jeweller asked me, smirking. His comment was meant to put Izzy in his place, since he wasn’t quite five foot four even on his best day.

‘As a matter of fact, I’ve been his bodyguard for sixty years,’ my old friend replied.

And then he took a gun out of his coat pocket.

‘Shit!’ the jeweller exclaimed, jumping up from his stool.

‘What in God’s name are you doing?’ I whisper-screamed at Izzy.

‘Protecting us,’ he replied calmly.

‘Don’t shoot me!’ the man pleaded. Taking a step back, he held up both his hands as if to stop an onrushing carriage.

The pistol was bulky and black – and stunningly dangerous. ‘Does it work?’ I asked.

‘You bet,’ Izzy told me happily. ‘It’s German, and I just cleaned it the other day.’ He jiggled it: ‘Very sensitive – might even go off accidentally…’ Here, he targeted his vengeful eyes on the jeweller – ‘and kill the rudest person in the room. Now who do you think that might be?’

‘There’s… there’s no need for violence,’ the man assured him in a trembling voice.

‘Glad we agree,’ Izzy replied. He kissed the barrel of the gun, then held the tip to his ear, pretending to listen closely. ‘Right, you got it, baby,’ he said, as if he were a hitman speaking to his girlfriend. He slipped the pistol into his coat pocket. ‘Marlene wants to know if we get our three thousand?’ he asked. ‘She’s concerned. And when she’s concerned, it’s best to pay attention. You got that?’

‘I understand. I’ll give you… two thousand nine hundred.’

The jeweller still wanted to bargain? This was craziness! Izzy caught my glance and raised his shoulders to prompt my reply. I could see he was looking forward to bragging about his performance.

‘It’s a deal,’ I said.

‘It’ll take me at least an hour to get the money,’ the jeweller told us. ‘Come back at two-thirty.’

‘Why in God’s name did you bring a gun?’ I asked Izzy as we hurried away. I was stomping over the cobbles, worried that someone had seen his weapon through the shop window.

‘You should be thanking me,’ he remarked contentedly. ‘I’ve cured your paso doble!’

I scowled at him, which made him flap his hand at me as if I was being a pest. ‘Look, Erik, ‘Did you really think I was going to venture into a city run by anti-Semitic cavemen with just Yiddish curses to defend us? Sorry, but I ain’t that meshugene .’

‘Where’d you get it anyway?’ I asked, conceding his point.

‘It was Papa’s. It’s an 1896 Model 2 Bergman – five millimetre.’ Whispering, he said, ‘Feels damn good in my hand. Maybe I was born to be a gunslinger!’