The Warsaw Anagrams

between his teeth. Holding my breath, I pulled at it but it wouldn’t budge.

I couldn’t risk breaking his jaw or scarring his lips. I covered Adam’s face and asked Schmul how long it would take for the boy’s body to become malleable again.

‘Up to three days,’ he replied.

Stefa was more religious than I was and would never wait that long to bury Adam, which created a dilemma. ‘I need for you to get a message to a friend right away,’ I told the undertaker, handing him all the zloty I had left in my pocket, which he refused, saying I’d given him enough. I told him where to find Izzy and what to say to him.

Stefa might appear at any moment, so as Schmul headed off, I turned my attention back to Adam. I could find no bloodstains on his belly, chest, or behind, which was another indication that whoever disfigured him had let the boy’s blood coagulate before starting his work. Yet the murderer or his assistant hadn’t waited very long, for if he had, the capillaries on Adam’s chest wouldn’t have released any blood at all on being pressed and no bruises would have been visible.

Of course, it was possible that Adam had been mutilated right after being killed and had bled profusely but had been carefully washed afterwards. Yet it seemed unlikely that anyone would spend so much time cleaning a Jewish boy soon to be discarded.

A right-handed man – larger than me – who worked as fast as possible because he disliked what he had been made to do or feared being caught.

By now, the vodka was starting to turn my thoughts to mist, so I eased my head back on to the flagstones. And amidst the ceaseless flow of clouds, I saw that Adam’s murder had taken away my terror of death; nothing worse could ever happen to me.

Izzy and Schmul helped me up when they arrived.

‘Any sign of Stefa?’ I asked.

‘None,’ Izzy replied. ‘You want me to check on her?’

‘No, don’t go. If she hasn’t come down yet, it’s because Ewa managed to convince her to try to get some sleep.’

When I told Izzy what I wanted him to do, he shook his head and held up a hand between us like a shield. ‘I’m sorry, Erik, I can’t – it’s impossible.’

‘Please, look at what they’ve done to Adam. We need to find out what happened.’

After I pulled the blanket off the boy, Izzy reached behind him for the stability of a wall that wasn’t there and nearly tumbled over. We looked at each other across fifty years of friendship; two old men realizing there were no words in any language to describe a loss – and crime – like this.

I held him while he cried. The way he shook pushed me deeply into the past.

He brought me into the present again by standing back from me and wiping his eyes. ‘Erik, I don’t think I can touch him,’ he told me.

‘Please, Izzy, it has to be someone who loved him. I can’t let anyone else do this.’

He lifted his hands to explain himself, then lowered them, hopeless.

‘No one else will be as careful as you,’ I told him. ‘I need you more than I’ve ever needed anyone.’

Sitting on the ground, he took a tiny pair of tweezers from the small leather case he’d brought with him, then turned to me. ‘For pity’s sake, Erik, don’t watch me.’

Schmul and I waited in the hallway of Stefa’s building. Izzy soon came to us with a two-inch length of white string pinched in his fingers. It bore no traces of blood.

‘Any idea where it’s from?’ he asked, dropping it into my palm.

‘None.’

‘How do you suppose it ended up in Adam’s mouth?’

‘Maybe whoever killed him put it there to tell us something about himself,’ I theorized. ‘A kind of calling card.’

‘You think a Nazi is challenging us to find him?’

‘Maybe. Though it’s just possible that Adam managed to secretly put the string in his mouth – knowing it could somehow identify who did this. He was a smart boy.’

Schmul had overheard us. ‘But Dr Cohen,’ he said, ‘what about his leg? What does that mean?’

‘That? That means whoever did this is not like you or me,’ I replied, ‘or anyone we’ve ever met.’

Stefa and Ewa came to the courtyard a few minutes later, carrying towels, soap and a bucket of hot water. My niece’s eyes were so red that they might have been bleeding.

‘I’ll go to Pinkiert’s and organize everything,’ I assured her. ‘But first tell me if you were able to find out anything at 1 Leszno Street.’

‘I don’t understand,’ she replied.

‘At the place where Adam may have crossed over. Had anyone seen him?’

‘No.’

I left for Pinkiert’s headquarters, which were next to the Jewish Council building on Grzybowska Street, and scheduled a funeral for the next morning at 11 a.m. At 1 Leszno Street, Abram Piotrowicz invited me into his apartment and repeated to me what he’d told Stefa at dawn: the guard, Grylek Baer, hadn’t seen Adam the day before.

‘Then I’ll need a list of secret border crossings,’ I told Abram.

‘Grylek will help. I’ll have someone bring the list to you this afternoon.’

‘And ask him if he knows who hired Adam to smuggle out an ermine jacket.’

I managed to speak to all of Adam’s neighbourhood friends that afternoon. Wolfi swore that he knew of only the Leszno Street crossing, but Sarah, Felicia and Feivel were able to give me the locations of four other places where my nephew might have snuck out. The little mop-haired boy wrung his hands like an adult when we spoke, and through his tears of misery, he bravely confessed that Adam had twice accompanied him ‘overseas’, which made me realize that my nephew had led a double life. Speaking to me with his stunned mother standing behind him, Feivel explained that they’d wanted to steal food, but their nerve abandoned them at the last minute and all they managed to get were handouts of bread and jam from shopkeepers. I kissed the top of his head to reassure him that I wasn’t angry. Still, the mind can be cruel; I wished that he’d died instead of my nephew.

I showed a photograph of Adam to the guard on Krochmalna Street where he and Feivel had passed through to the Other Side, and though he remembered my nephew, he hadn’t seen him in weeks. At the other crossings, no one recognized the boy. I received only one lead: at the last place I tried, the cellar of a dingy restaurant, a tough- looking teenaged smuggler named Marcel suggested I make enquiries at a warehouse on Ogrodowa Street where a tunnel leading to the sewer system had been dug. ‘The passageway is so cramped that only kids can squeeze through,’ he noted. ‘Try to speak to the owner, Sandor Gora.’

I remembered the time Adam came home stinking and thought I now knew why.

As I neared my destination, four youths standing on the roof of an apartment house on the Christian side of the ghetto wall began calling me names and throwing stones at me. Only a moment after I started to run, I took a blow on my shoulder that brought me down to one knee.

The hooligans shouted – laughing – that I made too easy a target. Luckily, nothing seemed to be broken, and my anger gave me strength. Getting to my feet, I rushed on with my coat shielding my head until a woman coming the other way was hit. Shrieking, she toppled sideways, crashing on the pavement.

‘Die, Jew-bitch!’ one of the louts yelled at her in Polish.

Kneeling, I took out my handkerchief and staunched the blood spilling from a deep gash below her ear. A fist- sized chunk of cement lay beside her. She was dazed from the impact. Getting her breath, moaning, she said, ‘I think my collar bone is broken.’

Polish meteorites continued crashing around us. I held my coat over the woman’s face. ‘Can you stand?’ I asked, wanting to lead her closer to the wall, where we couldn’t be hit.

‘No.’

‘I’ll get you to a doctor,’ I assured her, and to test her mind, I asked her what year it was.