Richard Zimler - The Warsaw Anagrams

‘Maybe I let something slip at Stefa’s funeral,’ Izzy observed apologetically.

‘It could just as easily have been me,’ I told him. ‘And just before we came here, your father brought me a note – a threat that he said he’d received. The note said that if he ever revealed anything about the murderer, he’d never see Helena again. That was part of his plan to shift the blame. He even implied that he was being followed by the same man who had tried to shoot me.’

‘I don’t understand,’ she replied. ‘Who was the note from?’

‘He led us to believe that it was from Rowy, but it wasn’t. Your father wrote it himself.’ I turned to Ziv. ‘Once he realized I suspected you as well as Rowy, he cleverly revealed that you’d told him you needed extra money to send to your mother outside the Łodz´ ghetto. He let that slip as though he didn’t understand the implication. The perfect touch was letting Izzy and me jump to the obvious conclusion about you.’

‘So you thought I needed a lot of extra cash,’ Ziv observed.

‘Yes, and that you had a contact outside the ghetto helping you get it to your mother.’

‘Which is why we came here,’ Izzy told him. ‘To search for evidence of who you were working with outside the ghetto.’

‘But my mother died a month before I came to Warsaw,’ the boy insisted, as if righting an injustice. ‘I never told Dr Tengmann that she was alive. I promise.’

‘So she’s not hiding in Łodź?’

‘If she had found a place to hide, why wouldn’t I be with her? Or at least be hiding elsewhere in Łodź, where I could be nearer to her.’

‘But can you prove she’s dead?’ I challenged him.

‘Why would I have to?’

‘Because if Ewa hadn’t told me the truth, it would have been your word against her father’s. I would have believed him, and you, Ziv… you’d be dead.’

The boy gazed down and smiled fleetingly, as if in admiration of Mikael’s strategy. Looking up, he said excitedly, ‘You sent me that note, didn’t you, Dr Cohen? You wanted me to go to the Leszno Street gate!’

‘Yes, we were trying to trap the killer, but no one showed up.’

‘So Ewa’s father must have known that your note was a trick, but how?’

‘Because he knew that the German he was working with wasn’t in Warsaw and couldn’t have sent him that note.’ I turned to Izzy. ‘He knew that Lanik was out of town. They must have found a way to communicate with each other fairly regularly. Maybe Mikael has access to a working phone.’ To Ewa, I said, ‘Your father must have had someone leave Georg’s pendant here secretly. He knew that when Izzy and I came here, we’d be sure to find the evidence we were looking for. He improvises well.’

‘If that’s true, then who left it here?’ the young woman asked.

‘Your father must have had a copy made of the key to the bakery and could have paid a streetkid to leave the pendant under Ziv’s door.’

‘But it wasn’t left under my door,’ Ziv told me. ‘I found it under my pillow. It had to be someone with the key to my bedroom, or a person I let in.’ His eyes opened wide with astonishment. ‘It must have been one of my chess students.’

‘Are you teaching anyone who knows Ewa’s father?’

‘That woman who came for her first lesson two days ago – Karina.’

‘Who’s Karina?’ I asked.

Ewa replied for Ziv. ‘She and my father… They’ve been seeing each other since late November.’

Izzy understood before me. ‘Describe Karina,’ he requested of Ewa.

‘Pretty, in her fifties, with silver hair and…’

‘Enough!’ I said, angry at myself; I didn’t need to hear more; Melka – whose real name I now knew – had told Mikael who my suspects were. I had to give her credit; she’d convinced me that she was hardly paying attention to all that I’d revealed to her after we’d shared her bed.

Mikael had used my vanity against me. He must have even told her to offer me a sugar crystal for my tea. He was a coldly observant and resourceful man.

‘We’ve got to go,’ I told Izzy.

Ewa jumped up and reached for my arm. ‘What’ll you do to my father?’ she asked, terrified.

Could I kill Mikael? I wasn’t sure. So Izzy and I spoke instead of how we’d murder Lanik. He sat on Stefa’s bed, curled over his angry ideas, and I stood by the window, cooler, but also more perverse – Mr Hyde creeping through the underbrush of his mind.

We decided we’d go to Lanik’s office and shoot him there if he was unprotected. If he had soldiers or guards with him, we’d wait until he left for lunch.

I wanted to strip him, as he’d stripped Adam, and make him beg for his life while kneeling in the filth of a Warsaw backstreet, have him weep for all the springtimes of Germany he’d never see. I wanted a hungry-for-vengeance crowd of Poles to learn what a wrinkled, shivering coward he was minus his uniform, gun and guards, and without his beloved, dog-eared copy of Mein Kampf in his hands, justifying his murder of the most defenceless among us.

And once he was dead?

Izzy and I would flee across the river for the suburb of Praga; Jaśmin Makinska lived near the tram depot on Street. We would either stay with her or, if she could, she would drive us to Lwów, where we’d hide out in a rooming house or small hotel for as long as it took to sell my remaining jewellery. We didn’t have Christian identity papers, but a couple of hundred złoty stuffed in an innkeeper’s pocket would win us his grudging silence for a few days.

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.