Richard Zimler - The Warsaw Anagrams

He eyed me angrily. ‘You’re behaving miserably! We have to help.’

I sat down beside him and took off my shoes. ‘Look,’ I told him, ‘how can anyone move in? All of Stefa and Adam’s things are still here. And I won’t pack them up. I couldn’t bear to look at them.’

‘I’ll take care of that,’ he said gently. ‘We’ll put them in my workshop. Nothing will be lost.’

‘Very well. Make a copy of your key for Bina and tell her that she and her mother can move in as soon as they want.’

‘There’s a slight problem – I think she also has an uncle living with her,’ he told me warily.

I gave a little laugh at the absurdity. ‘Well, I guess one more passenger won’t make much difference.’

He embraced me gratefully.

After Izzy left, I looked into Adam’s chest of clothes, to feel my pain as deeply as I could before giving it up. Afterwards, while splashing water on my face, there was a knock on the door.

Benjamin Schrei stood on the landing. He wore a pinstriped grey suit, and shimmering on his lapel was a golden Star of David that meant: I represent authority!

I stank to high heaven, and I hadn’t shaved since Stefa’s death, but I was glad for it; I wouldn’t have wanted to be anything but a rumpled, smelly eyesore.

‘What the hell do you want?’ I demanded, tossing my towel behind me on my bed.

‘I was sorry to hear about your niece,’ he told me, taking off his hat.

‘Sure you were,’ I replied with a sneer, more than anything else because his slicked-back hair was Hollywood-perfect. Imagine a man preparing for a grievance call as if he had a date with Carole Lombard!

‘We need to talk,’ he told me, which meant, you need to listen!

‘No, I need to talk and you need to shut up!’ I retorted, gratified by the snarl in my voice. ‘You told me that Adam was the only child who’d been mutilated, but a girl named Anna had her hand cut off – and you knew it!’

‘How did you find out?’ he demanded.

‘None of your business!’ I snapped back.

‘Everything that happens in the ghetto is my business.’

‘ Oy gewalt ,’ I replied, rolling my eyes. ‘Did some Hollywood rabbi make you memorize that line for your bar mitzvah?’

‘What makes you think that I was under an obligation to tell you about Anna?’ Schrei retorted, seething. ‘Because you were once an important man? You assimilated Jews make me sick!’

So, Schrei’s playing Clark Gablewitz in the Yiddish gangster movie of his own making was all about turning the tables on the Jewish elite. Didn’t he realize that his pinstriped suit – even if tailored by a Hasidic hunchback – implied assimilation? ‘You don’t need to remind me that I’m nothing in here,’ I told him, ‘or that the man I was outside the ghetto has vanished. I’ve no illusions – the Germans will grind up my bones and make glue out of me. But I’ll tell you this, Schrei – before I’m sold for four pfennig a jar in Munich, I’m going to find out who murdered Adam! So why don’t you just save us both some time and tell me if any other kid has been killed.’

I saw from his throbbing jaw that my brutal honesty had unnerved him. ‘Look, I’ll tell you what you want to know,’ he said in a voice of restraint, ‘but only if you tell me what you’ve found out about Adam and Anna.’

‘Why should I bargain with you?’

‘Because,’ he observed, eager to prove we were playing on the same team, ‘we both need to know who killed your nephew.’

‘Why do you need to know?’ I questioned.

‘To keep order in the ghetto.’

‘Is there an order in the ghetto?’

‘There is, even if you can’t see it!’

‘So the God of Moses and Abraham isn’t the only invisible being you believe in.’

‘I’m afraid you’ve lost me.’

‘Probably because I don’t trust you.’

‘The council doesn’t pay me to be trusted.’

I laughed maliciously. ‘There you go again with your bar-mitzvah lines. So you consider yourself a martyr to the Jewish cause? Do you often dream you’re on Masada holding off the Romans, by any chance?’

‘Has anyone ever told you you’re too clever by half?’ he asked.

‘Just my wife. But I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten dumber since she died – especially over the last few months.’

‘Look,’ he said, sighing with exasperation, ‘I know you don’t like me, and I know I don’t like you, but I’ve had a hell of a day and I need to get off my feet.’

‘That’s the first thing you’ve said that makes any sense,’ I told him admiringly. I gestured for him to step inside. ‘Take the armchair,’ I told him.

He dropped down and undid his coat as if he might not move again for quite some time. I sat on my bed.

‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ he asked, taking out his cigarette tin.

‘Not if you give me one.’

He lit mine – a gentleman even to his enemies, I had to give him that. I fetched us the clay ashtray Adam had made and plonked it down on the arm of his chair.

‘Well?’ he prompted.

‘Well, what?’ I replied.

‘What have you found out about your grandnephew?’

‘For one thing, he led a double life, as you suspected. Though I haven’t found out yet where he used to cross to the Other Side. He left the ghetto on the day he was murdered to try to find coal. What else he was smuggling, I’ve no idea – probably cheese. He and his mother could live on cheese. We come from a long line of mice.’

‘And Anna?’ he asked, unamused.

‘The way this works, Mr Schrei, is you ask a question, then I ask one. That can’t be too hard for you to understand even if you’re too pooped to punch me in the face.’

He grinned, since I’d read his thoughts accurately.

‘Have any other kids been mutilated?’ I asked.

‘One, a boy – ten years old. Just three days ago.’

‘What was missing – a hand or a leg?’

‘It’s my turn, Dr Cohen,’ Schrei told me. ‘What did you learn about Anna?’

‘She had a boyfriend outside the ghetto – a Pole named Paweł Sawicki. By the way, when you found her body, were there any signs of her having put up a struggle?’

‘No.’

‘So maybe she knew whoever killed her. Or whoever betrayed her to a murderer living outside the ghetto. Maybe Adam did, too.’

‘That seems possible,’ he agreed.

‘So what was missing from the murdered boy?’ I asked.

‘The skin over his right hip – it was sliced away.’

I cringed. ‘How much skin?’

‘A lot.’ He held his hands half a foot apart. ‘Tell me about Paweł.’

‘A nice boy, by all accounts. Went to the cinema with Anna, took her on picnics. Only one problem: his mother is a Jew-hating witch who banished him to Switzerland to keep him away from Anna. So was there anything special about the skin that was taken from the boy?’

‘We can’t find anyone who knew him well enough to say. Was there anything special about Anna’s hand?’

‘Her mother didn’t think so. What was the boy’s name?’

‘Georg.’

‘And where was Georg found?’

‘Chłodna Street – in the barbed wire, just like Adam.’ Schrei smoked thoughtfully and disregarded my next question. ‘So maybe Paweł’s mother had Anna killed,’ he conjectured in a slow, cautious voice. ‘Anna knew her, so maybe she could have been lured somewhere to be murdered by her, or by someone helping her.’

‘Maybe. I mean, that’s what witches do – kill children. But I’ve no reason to believe that Anna ever met Adam, and in any case, it’s nearly impossible for me to believe that Mrs Sawicki knew anything about him, so why would she have had him murdered?’ I went to the window and gazed down into an image of Stefa lying under the Berlin Morgenpost . Schrei tossed me his next question, but I let it fall between us. ‘You know what Mrs Sawicki told me?’ I said to him. ‘That our story is over – the Jews, I mean.’