Richard Zimler - The Warsaw Anagrams

‘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.’