The Warsaw Anagrams

her the basket I’d carried upstairs.

I sat down on my bed, exhausted. Bina looked between the fresh fruit and me, beaming as if I were a messenger from God. She kissed me on each cheek, and I hugged her back, but I was still deep inside all that Irene had told me. Bina’s uncle – a short, dark, hairy man with a boxer’s build, smelling pleasantly of talc – burst into tears when he told me how grateful he was to be able to move in. Bina’s mother went down on her knees to recite a speech she’d memorized. I felt trapped by their fervent hopes for a better life, so when the girl went down to the courtyard to get my second basket of food from Professor Engal, I retreated into what had been Stefa’s room and locked the door. I’d left my list of the dead on my pillow. I stared at the names for a long time, hoping they would lift off the page and show me more of what I needed to know, but they didn’t.

CHAPTER 24

After putting some supplies for Izzy in one of the baskets that Bina had emptied, I went down to the street with the girl and she hailed me a rickshaw. She kissed me goodbye tenderly; she obviously liked having a benefactor, even if he played the Big Bad Wolf on his own small stage at times.

Izzy danced around when he saw what I’d brought him; unfortunately for me, he made the same rubbery- handed movements that he’d taught Adam as an Indian raindance.

‘Where’d you get all this?’ he asked, picking his excited fingers through the cheeses.

‘A new friend,’ I told him.

I handed him the two lemons I had in my coat pocket. He cupped them if they were the goose’s golden eggs.

While he prepared lemonade, I told him about my session with Irene, ending with how I’d come to believe that she had learned that at least two ghetto children had been murdered. ‘Izzy, I don’t know how, but she knows who’s doing this!’ I exclaimed.

He questioned me at length about my conclusions – a good thing, as it turned out, because my repeating so many details helped us come up with new possibilities and dangers.

‘Irene might even have faked her suicide attempt to convince her mother to send for you,’ he speculated.

‘I suppose it’s possible,’ I replied. ‘She told me that we can each play our part in preventing worse things from happening in the ghetto, and sending for me was her way of helping – she wants me to use her clues to catch the killer.’

Izzy and I were on our second cup of lemonade by then.

‘We’ve got to go to Krakowskie Przedmiescie and look for someone with the name Jesion,’ I told him. ‘Irene implied that he holds the key to solving these murders.’

‘But we don’t have an address and-?’

‘Tomorrow,’ I interrupted, ‘you and I are crossing to the Other Side – early.’

He was seated as his worktable. I was standing, too jittery to sit.

‘It could be a trap,’ he warned.

‘No, I don’t think so. Irene lied to me, but only because she’s terrified – and so I’d come to realize that she’d scripted some of what she told me. Whatever she knows has put her in physical danger. She couldn’t tell me any more than she did without risking not just her own life but also her mother’s – without killing her family. So she’s leaving it up to me to identify the murderer – and to do whatever has to be done.’

‘If that’s true, then you’ll never hear from her again,’ Izzy said authoritatively.

‘Why?’

‘Because she’s already told you all she could.’

‘Except that Mrs Lanik said she would wait for her husband’s next absence and then send a car for me.’

‘What if she lied, too? She might have helped her daughter plan everything. Maybe her parents aren’t in Bordeaux, after all. She might have told you that to make sure you knew that some of what Irene told you had been made up. And if her husband or ex-husband are involved in the murders in some way, it’s more likely that she’s the one who overheard what they’d done – or maybe even saw the bodies.’

While I thought that over, he cut us squares of foie gras. He put mine on a slice of bread and ate his plain because of his rickety teeth.

‘There’s more I need to tell you before we leave the ghetto,’ I told him. ‘I think that Adam, Anna and Georg were killed for the defects on their skin.’

‘Defects? What are you talking about?’ he asked.

‘Remember the birthmarks on the back of Adam’s right ankle?’

‘Of course, but what good could they be to anyone?’

I explained why I believed Rowy and a partner outside the ghetto might be responsible for identifying the children to be murdered – possibly with the help of Ziv.

‘Sorry, Erik, I don’t buy it,’ he told me, licking some foie gras off his fingers. ‘Rowy wouldn’t tell you how frightened he was of being forced again into a labour gang if that was his motivation for turning three kids over to the Nazis.’

‘He probably didn’t believe I would be any good at detective work.’

‘Pfffttt!’ he scoffed, in that Gallic way he’d picked up aboard the Bourdonnais. ‘As for Ziv, Ewa told me he runs away every time a mouse appears in the bakery.’

‘But he can think ten moves ahead at chess! He could have planned everything.’ Then a perverse possibility made me start. ‘He was jealous of Adam. My God, he wanted to remove the boy from Stefa’s life!’

‘Even if that were true, which I don’t believe, why would he kill Anna and Georg?’

‘I don’t know, but he did volunteer to help Rowy find more kids for the chorus. What if it was so he could identify children for murder?’

‘I admit that sounds suspicious, but you saw how shattered he was after Stefa’s death. Is that the kind of young man who would plan to murder children?’

‘Look, Izzy,’ I told him, irritated that he was right, ‘all I know is that after we try to find Jesion, we need to take a good look through Rowy’s apartment and Ziv’s room at the bakery. We have to turn up something incriminating. And we’ve got to work fast. We’ve no guarantee that whoever is responsible won’t have another Jewish boy or girl killed.’

Izzy gazed down into that terrible possibility, then started. ‘Erik,’ he told me, ‘what would you say if I could bring the murderer’s Jewish accomplice straight to us?’

Izzy and I moved my desk and my old Mala typewriter into Stefa’s room. We settled on the following wording for our note:

Someone has learned of our activities, and we’re in danger. I need to talk with you. We need to meet outside the ghetto as soon as possible. Introduce yourself to the guards at the corner of Leszno and Zelazna this evening, at exactly 7.30. Do not try to contact me. The guards at the gate will know to expect you. A car will be waiting outside to take you to my home.

We typed three copies and left them unsigned. We put them in envelopes but wrote no name on the outside.

Whoever had been responsible for Adam’s death would be terrified of being exposed as a murderer and would take the note seriously even if he wasn’t absolutely sure it was genuine. As for whoever was innocent, he’d likely believe that the note had been sent to him in error – since his name was not written either in the letter or on the envelope – and stay far away from the guards at Leszno and Zelazna.

I paid a boy selling armbands embroidered with the Star of David to take the letter to Ziv in the bakery, and Izzy paid an old woman selling tin cups on the sidewalk outside Mikael Tengmann’s office to hand an envelope to him.

I wanted to take a quick look at Rowy’s apartment before leaving our note. It was on the ground floor of a stately neoclassical building, with impressive columns flanking the doorway, but much of the roof had imploded and