Raisins and Almonds

7 should know?' demanded Mrs Katz. She stood up, shedding stockings, rubbing her mistreated wrists. 7 should understand? I am about to cook a few fish cakes for my lunch, I just lay them in the pan, and suddenly there they are, screaming at me, where is the paper? I tell them what are you doing in my house, is this Russia, anyway, what paper, I don't know nothing about no paper. Then they grab me—see, what bruises!—and tie me here, and then I hear such noises, everything they must be turning over, breaking, stealing, and then the tall one comes back, says, nothing there, and they're gone, I hear the door slam, leaving the pan on the stove which they should have known would burn, I sit here, I struggle, the house it will burn down, Maxie when he comes home will find nothing but smoking ruin, I can't get free because they tie me so tight, oy, bandits, gonifs, what have they taken?'

'I don't know,' said Dot. 'We'd better call the police.'

'No!' Mrs Katz seized Dot's sleeve, a surprisingly strong grip for those reddened claws. 'No, please, lady, not the police. Anyway,' she demanded, 'thank you for rescuing me, don't think I'm not grateful, wonderful you should come in nick of time, but, Miss, who are you?'

'My name is Dorothy Williams,' replied Dot, rather relieved to be able to declare herself. 'I came because you were in the bookshop the other day, just before the young man died there.'

'I was?' asked Mrs Katz evasively. Dot nodded.

'Your hat was there,' she said. 'I saw it in the hall. It's a very distinctive hat.'

'Is good, yes?' said Mrs Katz, giving up her attempt to avoid admitting that she had been in Miss Lee's shop. 'I like it. Max says it is too big, but I don't like the sun. Max says I look like mushroom. He's got no style. Oy, Maxie, what will Max say about this? And my good fish cakes is all burned. Miss, do you know what those gonifs wanted? Do you know what this is all about?'

'No,' admitted Dot. 'Not really. But I'm sure that Miss Fisher will. Why won't you let me call the police, Mrs Katz?'

'We're in new country,' muttered Mrs Katz. 'We don't want no trouble. No old country trouble.'

'Old country? What do you mean?'

Mrs Katz shut up like an oyster. Dot considered her. She was perhaps fifty, dressed in an art silk dress with rather too many brooches. Her hair was dyed an unconvincing shade of gold and she was made up with pancake and lipstick but the effect was oddly attractive and innocent, as though a child had amused itself with her mother's cosmetics. Her wrist bore a heavy gold bracelet and there were small gold rings in her ears. Robbery had not been the motive for this incursion into a respectable Carlton household.

'Perhaps I can give you a hand with the tidying up,' Dot offered, giving up on the police.

'No, no, you put the kettle on if you will be so kind, we'll have some tea, how can I explain to Max what happened, maybe he'll understand, he's got a better kopf than me, he'll be home by three, oy, what a terrible thing ...'

Mrs Katz pottered off into the parlour and Dot put the kettle on and then followed. She found her hostess on her knees, picking up the sad fragments of what had been a fine plate, red and blue china embossed with gold.

'With me I brought it,' she said, breaking into tears. 'Such a long way I brought it.'

Dot realized then that Mrs Katz had not cried during her ordeal. She had courage, or perhaps felt that she had no reason to fear the robbers. But now she was weeping desolately. Her make-up was being eroded into runnels by her tears and Dot offered her a handkerchief.

'Perhaps it can be mended,' said Dot.

'No, it's kaput,' said Mrs Katz. But she gathered up the pieces nonetheless. She and Dot stood the furniture up again and they surveyed the room. Books had been emptied out of a bookcase, shaken and flung down. A small table and two easy chairs had been upturned and the springs were now showing in the chairs where the undersides had been ripped.

'They were looking for something,' said Dot.

'Something small,' agreed Mrs Katz, drying her eyes. 'Ai, such a silly woman I am, to cry over a plate when we are all alive, but my mother it belonged to. Apart from her Sabbath silver it was all I could bring ... but the silver is still here,' she said with relief, setting up a beautiful nine-branched candlestick on the mantel and counting out spoons and forks into their wrappings of tissue. Dot shook out and refolded a much-darned white damask tablecloth and Mrs Katz replaced it in a wooden chest with the silver and the candlestick.

'It is a Menorah,' she said unexpectedly to Dot. 'We are Jews.'

'Yes,' agreed Dot, re-shelving books. Mrs Katz appeared to be waiting for her to say something. 'That's what this case is about,' she added. 'Mr Abrahams asked Miss Phryne to look into the murder in the bookshop.'

'Abrahams asked her? Benjamin Abrahams? And she agreed?'

'Yes, she's a detective,' said Dot, and blushed slightly. Detective never seemed like a really respectable profession to Dot and she still wasn't entirely used to it.

'Mr Abrahams, he is respected man,' commented Mrs Katz, after a pause. 'Abrahams is a mensch, that's what Max says. See, this—I am glad this is not broken. This belonged to my grandfather, who made such things.'

She turned a brass key, and then lifted the lid of a small, intricately carved wooden box. It began to play a Strauss waltz, very tinkly and pretty, and in the box a small clockwork bird opened and closed its beak. Dot exclaimed, delighted, and Mrs Katz smiled.

'Such a pretty thing. Now we have a look at the other rooms, and then tea, yes?'

When they came to examine the front room, they found it in the same schemozzl as the parlour. It took the two of them to heave the mattress back onto the spring base and to remake the bed. Everything in the room had been roughly and hastily searched. All the drawers from a bureau had been torn out and emptied and turned over, then tossed onto the heap of bedding. But nothing had been taken, not even Mr Katz's best watch, which had been hidden in between the mattress and the base.

The other room contained some furniture which was in the process of being mended. It smelt strongly of wood glue. Even here all the pieces of a large bedstead had been moved, and some of the glued joints had been broken.

It took Dot and Mrs Katz an hour to put everything to rights, and by the end of it they were friends.

'You see,' explained Mrs Katz over another cup of straw-coloured tea flavoured with lemon, 'I thought it old country matter because they were speaking Yiddish. 'Find it,' they say many times. There were two of them, dark men, young, one taller than other, and they were angry. But me they never told for what they were looking, just a paper. What paper, maybe your Miss Fisher knows. But they don't found it here.'

'Why not?' asked Dot.

'Why not?' Mrs Katz cried. 'Because here it was never hidden.'

'Have you ever seen them before, Mrs Katz?'

'That I can't answer, it was sudden, I didn't see them too good, but no, I don't think so.'

'In the bookshop, Mrs Katz, what did you see in the bookshop?'

'I don't see nothing, I went there, the lady is very nice, my Max wants a book of maps, we talk for a while about an atlas, I never hear the word before. Then I go home. That's all.'

'Did anyone else come in while you were there?'

'Two young men, maybe they work at the market. They wait while the lady talks to me about the atlas— what a word, I'll never learn all the English words.'

'Was there anyone there when you came in?'

'Just a man with a box. The lady signs a paper and gives it to him and he goes away. I never hear him speak, even.'

'Can you describe him?'

'A drayman or a carter,' Mrs Katz shrugged fluidly. 'Strong, in overalls, gloves, a cap pulled down over his eyes. But wait ...' she sipped more tea, thinking hard. 'There was something about him, maybe. No, nothing,' she decided.

'Tell me,' urged Dot.

'It's nothing, just that I thought he walk wrong for a labourer. Men like that, even when they're not young, they walk like they own the world, you know.' Mrs Katz got up and mimed the shoulder-heavy walk of a muscular man, hands lightly clenched by his sides. She looked strangely convincing and for a moment Dot could see the standover man she was mimicking. 'Like gorilla, nu? Or gunfighter. This one, he was different. Like he was shy, no,