The Warsaw Anagrams

‘Yesterday, we didn’t know what we know now,’ I replied, and I told him what we’d learned about Mikael. When I was done, I handed him Georg’s pendant and suggested that he question Ewa if he had any doubts about our conclusions. Izzy added that he’d probably find Anna’s earrings with Rowy.

‘You boys have done good work,’ he told us. ‘And the council is grateful.’ He lit the cigarette that he’d dangled between his lips, then leaned towards us. ‘So what do you have in mind for Dr Tengmann?’

He squinted at me through his smoke.

‘Does it make any difference what I tell you?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he replied, ‘I’ll take care of him whatever you say.’

‘And take care of means exactly what?’ Izzy questioned.

‘He shall cease to cast a shadow on this earth,’ Schrei answered in a dramatic voice. Catching my glance, he added, ‘Nothing you can say will prevent that. Still, I’d like to know what you’d do in my position.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m a curious man. And I want your opinion. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone like you, Dr Cohen. You interest me.’

‘Even though I’m an assimilated Jew?’ I asked to provoke him.

‘You’re hardly assimilated now.’ Eyeing me cagily, he said, ‘Face it, Dr Cohen, you stink like a ragpicker from the most backward shtetl in Poland. And you’ll never voluntarily speak German or Polish again to anyone who isn’t Jewish. Am I right?’

‘Probably,’ I admitted.

‘You know,’ he added, an amused smile twisting his lips, ‘if you learned a little Hebrew, you could be a pretty good Yid.’

‘He is a pretty good Yid!’ countered Izzy, ready for a fight.

‘You’re right,’ Schrei replied. ‘I’m sorry. It was a bad joke.’

‘I think Stefa would want him dead,’ I told him.

‘Fine, but what do you want?’ our host insisted.

‘I want a cigarette,’ I requested, stalling.

I knew that Schrei wanted me to give him the biblical answer: an eye for an eye… That would have proved I accepted the rules of the God of the Torah. But what he didn’t understand is that I wanted to take responsibility for my revenge. I wanted that sceptre of red fire for myself.

‘Mikael Tengmann being killed won’t bring back Adam,’ I told him after he’d lit my cigarette. ‘And my sending him straight to hell wouldn’t make me happy.’

‘It won’t make me happy either,’ he confessed. ‘But I’ll still do it.’

‘You’ve a hard job,’ I told him.

‘Ah, now you’re beginning to understand,’ he replied, showing me a gratified smile.

‘You take care of Mikael, and I’ll take care of the Nazi working with him,’ I said as if we were trading stocks.

He shook my hand to complete the deal. ‘All right, but do you know who the German is?’

‘Yes.’

‘How are you going to get him?’

Izzy answered for us. ‘That depends on how well he’s guarded.’

‘Maybe you should take a few days to plan this,’ Schrei suggested. ‘If the Germans find you outside the ghetto, they’ll shoot you on the spot. And that’s if you’re lucky.’

‘I can’t wait. If I wait, I may lose my nerve,’ I told him.

‘You have money for bribes?’

‘Yes.’

‘A gun?’

Izzy patted his pocket. ‘It’s German,’ he replied, grinning at the irony.

‘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.’