smuggling?’
‘I don’t see how he could have been. The Germans transferred him to the ghetto just two weeks ago. The only people he knew here were my mother and me.’
Professor Engal and another man carried Freddi’s body to the courtyard. Bina’s mother went with them to watch over her brother. The girl had wanted to accompany her, but her mother had said, ‘There are some things I need to tell your uncle alone.’
I saw such disappointment in Bina’s eyes that I steered her back to bed and covered her with a blanket. ‘Lie there, and I’ll make us some nettle tea,’ I told her.
First, however, I went to the front door. The lock was intact, which meant that both shots I’d heard had been fired at Freddi. Yet I’d only seen one wound; the killer must have missed on his first attempt, which meant he probably wasn’t a professional.
More importantly, he must have used a key to get in. Only Ewa and Izzy – and now Bina – had copies.
When we were seated together with our tea, Bina promised me that she had kept the key in her pocket since receiving it from Izzy and had not lent it to anyone. After I assured her that I believed her, she began to talk about her uncle in a frail, unsteady voice, as though pulling back details from out of the distant past. She told me that he had written a script for Conrad Veidt and had met with the actor at the Adlon Hotel in Berlin in the spring of 1939 to discuss changes.
She needed me to understand that her uncle had been on his way to becoming a famous screenwriter – and that he was irreplaceable.
We owe uniqueness to our dead at the very least, of course.
‘Uncle Freddi had promised to write a part for me when I was older,’ she told me.
‘So you want to be an actress?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I wanted to be a dancer before we came here. But it made Uncle Freddi so happy to think of us together in Berlin that I didn’t want to spoil his fun.’
I could see from the way Bina gazed off that she would write an entire future for her uncle over the next weeks and months. Another movie never to be made.
While I went to the window to see what was happening in the courtyard, Bina walked purposefully into to the kitchen and came back with a pot full of soapy water and a brush.
‘Oh no you don’t!’ I told her. ‘You have to rest!’
‘No, I have to clean up,’ she replied, and she got on her knees to begin scrubbing the bloodstains off the floor. Soon she was in tears again, so I lifted her to her feet, led her back to bed and instructed her to sleep. Now and then she would open her eyes to make sure I was still sitting with her. ‘I’m right here,’ I’d whisper.
When she drifted off, I began lightly caressing her hair. I learned the smoothness of her neck and the shadowed curves of her cheeks. I learned the way her chest would rise once, then once again before easing back down, as though she were overcoming her own resistance to life.
And once I’d learned these things, I walked away.
I took a rickshaw to Izzy’s workshop just after eight in the morning. He came to the door in his winter coat, but with his pyjamas on underneath. Reading in my face that I’d had a bad night, he reached out for my arm. ‘What’s happened?’ he asked, leading me inside.
When I explained about Freddi, he went pale. I sat him down at his worktable, where he’d been drinking coffee out of a bowl. ‘And no one else was hurt?’ he asked.
‘No. Listen, did you ever give Stefa’s apartment key to anyone?’
‘Of course not,’ he replied defensively. ‘I just made the one copy for Bina.’
‘Then Ewa must have given out our key. Or Stefa did.’
‘How do you know that?’
I sat down next to him and took a quick sip of his coffee, but it was too weak to do me any good. ‘The lock on the door wasn’t shot. Freddi’s killer let himself in.’
‘Someone might have taken it from Ewa just long enough to have a copy made,’ Izzy speculated. ‘Ziv works with her and could have easily done that. So maybe you were right about him. Maybe he fled Lodz to get away from the police or something.’
‘Except that Mikael could also have gotten it from Ewa. Though he let me see Adam’s medical file, which I don’t think he’d have done if he were involved in the murders.’
‘Poor Freddi,’ Izzy sighed. ‘He must have made some bad enemies really quickly.’
‘Freddi? This has nothing to do with him! The bullet in his chest was meant for me.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘Only you and I knew that Bina’s family moved in yesterday. Though…’ Remembering the talk I’d had with Rowy the previous afternoon, I cut my sentence short.
‘What is it?’ Izzy questioned.
‘Listen to my thinking and tell me if I’m right. The murderer outside the ghetto and his Jewish accomplice must have thought I was still living alone. One of them came to put a bullet in me, or, more likely, sent someone else. Whoever it was panicked when he saw two women and a man in the room. It was dark, and he assumed the man was me. His first shot missed, which may mean he wasn’t a trained killer. We’ll probably find the bullet lodged in the wall somewhere. In any case, his trying to get me out of the way means that our note convinced Mikael, Rowy or Ziv that we were on to him.’
‘So you think that whoever sent a killer knew that what we wrote was made up – and that it hadn’t been sent by his accomplice outside the ghetto?’
‘Yes, though I have no idea how. In any case, since he knew the note wasn’t genuine, he also knew that I had to have sent it.’
‘I don’t follow you.’
‘Because I’m the only one who’s been investigating Adam’s murder! It could only have been me. But listen, Izzy, this also means that Rowy can’t be guilty.’
‘Why?’
‘Because while I was with him yesterday afternoon, he warned me that the Jewish Council would make me take on tenants, and I told him Bina and her family had already moved in – and that I was living in Stefa’s room. If he sent a killer, he would have told him to walk through the main room into the bedroom – that I’d be sleeping there.’
‘Unless the killer panicked and didn’t follow Rowy’s instructions. You said yourself he might not be a professional.’
‘True, but after he took down Freddi, he’d have come for me in the bedroom.’
‘Which makes Ziv our main suspect. We have to figure out how he could have known our note was a trap.’
Izzy and I tossed unlikely speculations between us, dissatisfied and irritable, until there was a knock at the door. He retrieved his gun from his tool chest. When he motioned for me to hide, I slipped behind the curtain that concealed his lavatory.
‘Who is it?’ Izzy called through the door.
I didn’t catch the reply, but I heard the creak of the door opening.
‘Put your hands over your head and take off your overcoat!’ Izzy ordered our visitor.
‘I’m afraid I can’t take off anything with my hands in the air,’ the man retorted in an amused tone.
I recognized his voice immediately and came out of hiding. Izzy had his gun pointed at Mikael, who rolled his eyes as if this were a badly written scene in a Yiddish farce.
‘How about telling your zealous friend to put his weapon down before someone gets hurt?’ he asked me.
‘He might have a gun,’ Izzy reminded me.
‘Are you crazy?’ said Mikael, shaking his head, and he lowered his arms with a sigh.
‘Just take off your overcoat and toss it down,’ I told him. ‘I need to search your pockets.’
‘Erik, I’m here to help you!’ he declared.
‘Just humour me.’
He let his shoulders slump as if we were exhausting him, but he had realized by now we were serious and did as I requested. Finding no knife or gun, I laid his overcoat on Izzy’s worktable. Then I went to Mikael and confirmed
