‘I… I think I understand now,’ the boy told me, but in so unsteady a voice that I looked at him. He sat down on the edge of his bed, gently, as if afraid to make any noise. ‘God, what an idiot I’ve been, Dr Cohen.’
That comment surprised me. Fixing my gaze, he said, ‘I should have known. I’ve played this all wrong.’
‘What should you have known?’
‘What you’re looking for is behind there,’ he said gloomily, pointing to his photograph of Lasker.
Ziv was crying again – and silently. He was an excellent actor, but I already knew that.
One of the bakery workers must have summoned Ewa. She began pounding at the door and yelling my name.
‘Go away!’ I shouted back. Turning to Izzy, I said, ‘Hold the gun on him.’
Taped to the back of the photograph was a white envelope. I ripped it away. Out of it spilled a slender gold chain holding a small enamel medallion of the Virgin Mary.
I would have expected a surge of righteousness or rage on finding the man who had betrayed Adam; instead, holding Georg’s pendant gave me a sense of having been moved around Warsaw by a will that was not my own.
I leaned back against the wall and took a deep breath. My mouth was metallic tasting, as if I’d swallowed rust.
Ewa was still banging at the door and calling out to me. The noise and heat pressed down on me. I hated Ziv for making me kill him.
‘It’s not mine, I swear,’ the young man told me, shaking his hands wildly. ‘You have to believe me!’
‘I know whose it is!’ I hollered. ‘It belongs to a boy named Georg – a street juggler. You remember him, I’m sure.’
‘I don’t,’ he replied, moaning. ‘I discovered the pendant in my room two days ago.’
‘Who left it here?’ Izzy demanded.
Ziv faced him and joined his hands together. ‘I don’t know. I asked everyone in the bakery about the pendant, but no one had lost it. You can ask them. Ask Ewa! I decided to keep it until someone claimed it.’
‘Is that the best story you can come up with?’ Izzy demanded.
‘What did you get in return for Adam?’ I asked.
Ziv looked helplessly between me and Izzy. Finding no sympathy in our faces, he gazed down and squeezed his head between his hands as if to hold his thoughts inside. His skilful performance only enraged me further.
‘What did you get for my nephew?’ I demanded again.
‘I didn’t hurt Adam! Oh God, I’d never have hurt him! Stefa loved him more than anything.’
‘Give me the gun,’ I told Izzy. He handed it to me. I pointed it at Ziv’s head. ‘Tell me the truth!’ I ordered.
‘Let me think!’ the young man pleaded. ‘Dr Cohen, now that I know I’ve been set up, I can figure this out. I’m good at figuring things out. You know I am!’
I put the barrel of the gun up to his temple. ‘This is no game, you little bastard! Who have you been working with outside the ghetto?’
‘I don’t know anyone outside the ghetto,’ he insisted, and he reached for my arm to implore me, but I batted it away.
A key turned in the door. Ewa opened it and faced me. ‘If you hurt Ziv, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.’
‘I have no rest of my life,’ I replied.
‘Still, you should be pointing that gun at me, not him.’
CHAPTER 26
‘After Papa and I moved into the ghetto, we had difficulties getting insulin for Helena,’ Ewa told me and Izzy. Seated next to Ziv, she was rubbing his hand to calm him – and to give herself the strength to tell me what she knew. Her lips were trembling, and she couldn’t look at me. She kept gazing off; she would have preferred to be anywhere but where she was.
‘And it became more expensive, too,’ she continued. ‘We were getting desperate, but in early January Papa told me that his German supplier had promised to get him insulin for almost nothing. All we had to do was find him Jewish children to photograph. Papa’s friend was a medical researcher who’d just moved to Warsaw – a German doctor my father had known in Zurich. He told Papa he had theories about the Jews involving their skin, but I never found out exactly what he meant.’
Ewa – the quietest among us – was opening the final door of this mystery.
‘Did your father mention this man’s name?’ I asked.
‘I’ve tried to remember. I think I must have heard it.’
‘It has to be either Rolf Lanik or Werner Koch. Think, Ewa.’
‘Those names, they seem close, but… Could it have been Kalin… or maybe Klein?’
Ewa gazed at me questioningly, but I closed my eyes – out of gratitude, because I suddenly realized why a string had been put in Adam’s mouth and a piece of gauze in Georg’s hand. And how they identified the murderer. Though I still didn’t know who had given me those clues. Might Irene or her mother have been brilliant enough to leave them behind?
Knowing who the murderer was also made me understand why his helper inside the ghetto hadn’t been persuaded by our note to go to the Leszno Street gate.
Yet it was then that a first regret pierced my excitement: if only I’d figured out earlier that the
‘Are you all right, Dr Cohen?’ Ewa asked me, and Izzy reached for my shoulder.
‘Yes, I’m fine. Go on.’
‘The researcher friend of my father’s wanted to photograph skin defects, particularly on children,’ Ewa continued. ‘We were both so relieved to have his help! So when Papa examined Anna and noticed a blemish on her hand, he told her to go to an address outside the ghetto, where she’d receive a hundred and fifty zloty for letting a doctor there photograph her. Papa didn’t know that she’d be killed.’ Ewa held my gaze. ‘He didn’t know. He swore to me he didn’t.’
‘I believe you,’ I told her, but I didn’t believe her father.
‘Anna told Papa she was going to sneak out of the ghetto anyway, so it seemed all right,’ Ewa continued. ‘He only began to think that something bad might have happened to her when she didn’t show up for her abortion. Later, he learned from her parents that she’d been murdered.’
I faced Izzy. ‘After Anna was turned away by Mrs Sawicki, she must have gone to the address Mikael had given her.’
‘She risked everything because she needed money to pay back her friends,’ he observed regretfully.
‘Papa confronted his photographer friend,’ Ewa continued, ‘but he swore that he hadn’t hurt Anna – that she must have been murdered after being photographed at his office and receiving her payment. Papa was sure he was telling the truth. Then Rowy chose Adam for the chorus, and my father noticed his birthmarks at his check-up – though I didn’t know that then. Apparently, Papa visited backstage at a rehearsal one afternoon, and he told Adam that if he ever left the ghetto he should go to have his leg photographed because he’d get a hundred and fifty zloty.’
That made sense; Adam would have trusted Mikael because of the horseradish the physician had given him.
‘With all that money,’ I told Ewa, ‘Adam must have thought he’d be able to buy enough coal to keep Gloria warm till spring.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ she told me, and she began to cry.
I felt nothing for her; her tears were too late to do any good. ‘What was the address?’ I asked her impatiently.
She wiped her eyes. ‘I’m not sure. Somewhere on Krakowskie Przedmiescie.’
Izzy looked at me knowingly. ‘We have to find Jesion,’ he told me.
