Raisins and Almonds

out.

Phryne sat down, careful of her stockings on the scratchy wooden chair. Simon supplied her with a cup and one of the Kaplans poured her some thin tea. Phryne did not look for milk or sugar. She opened her cigarette case and offered the company a gasper.

They all accepted.

'I've been hearing about Zionism,' she began.

'From Simon?' asked David Kaplan incredulously. 'You've been hearing about Zionism from Simon? You've been hearing about Zionism from Simon?'

'Why not?' asked Phryne. 'Doesn't he know about it?'

'Simon is a theorist,' scoffed Solly Kaplan.

'And you're not?' Phryne decided that this was going to be one of those robust debates and returned the ball briskly.

'We are for Practical Zionism. These governments— they will not listen to us. The best argument is force,' snarled Isaac Cohen.

'Force? Hasn't enough blood been shed? Besides, the armies of Zion, whoever heard of such a thing? Jews do not fight,' objected Simon.

'No, we just die,' snapped Abraham Kaplan. 'What do you mean, Jews do not fight? Have we not been in armies? Have we not won the Croix de Guerre and the Iron Cross and the Victoria Cross?'

'Not all at once. There will always be brave men. But you are not talking about a country, with a government and an army and borders on a map. We have no country,' said Simon.

'We should take one, then.' Isaac Cohen was thin and his liquid eyes seemed designed for love-making, not war.

'You are still of the opinion that we should declare war on the Arabs and take the land?' asked Simon.

'I am. And if we reach the medicine of metals, we shall win a country of our own where no Jew need cower.'

'That's the lapis philosophorum,' said Phryne, who recalled the phrase. 'You're talking about finding the universal solvent.'

Five pairs of eyes looked at her. She looked back.

'What do you know of such matters?' asked Solly Kaplan.

''Tis a stone and not',' quoted Phryne with Ben Jonson. ''A stone; a spirit, a soul, and a body. If you coagulate it, it is coagulated. If you make it flie, it flieth.''

Silence fell. Finally Isaac Cohen asked, 'Simon, who is she?'

'She's The Honourable Miss Phryne Fisher. She's a student of the Great Art. She's my lover,' replied Simon, allowing them to choose which definition they pleased.

'She is a Zionist?' demanded Abe, incredulously.

'She's a friend to Zionism. And she saved Rabbi Elijah from being tormented by some children.'

'She knows the rabbi?' asked Solly.

'Certainly,' said Phryne. She did not like being discussed while she was present in this way. 'He gave me a vision. Beware of the dark, he said, dark tunnels under the ground. 'There is murder under the ground, death and weeping; greed caused it'. That's what he said.'

The others exchanged glances.

'Now there is this,' said Phryne, laying her cards on the table. 'Shimeon Ben Mikhael is dead, murdered, in the bookshop. He was a friend of yours, wasn't he?'

'Poor Shimeon,' murmured Solly, lowering his eyes.

'And Miss Lee is taken for his murder and is in jail and unless I come up with something, she will hang. And she didn't do it, did she? You know how Simon Michaels died.'

'No!' Isaac Cohen leapt to his feet. 'We don't know. All night we talked about it, and accused each other, and we don't know. You have to believe it, lady. We liked him, we mourn him, we will say kaddish for him, such a miesse meshina, an ugly fate ...'

'All right, you don't know how he died or who killed him, but you know something, that is plain. I want you to help me. I will go over there and you can talk about it. I will not insult you by offering a reward, but you know that Mr Abrahams is rich and he will not be unappreciative. I want to know what you and that difficult old man have been doing. I want to know what causes Yossi to burn his landlady's table with chemical experiments. You can't really be expecting to find the philosopher's stone, not in this day and age. I don't believe it. I want to know what you are doing. If it does not bear on my investigation, I don't have to tell anyone, and I won't.'

Phryne walked away across the empty hall as the argument bloomed behind her. Voices were raised. Phryne could not understand Yiddish, which was probably what they were speaking.

Phryne felt alien and isolated. As Solly leapt to his feet to pound the table, the gawky boy Louis opened a violin case, tucked the instrument under his chin, and began to play.

Not a popular tune but Bach. Not a Jewish song, but the Ave Maria. His skill was partly constrained by the cheap instrument, but each note was perfect, full and round. Phryne, who had been about to go into Drummond Street out of the sound of the quarrel, sat down. Louis did not see her or notice her appreciation. His eyes were shut. His strong fingers shifted and pinned each note to its pitch. It was not the over-emotional rendering expected of a boy, a sob in every string, but a mature performance good enough for the Albert Hall.

He completed the work, sighed, then opened his eyes, propped his score open at Violin Concerto in A Minor: allegro assai and began to play phrases, trying them one way and then another.

'Bach is difficult,' offered Phryne, wanting to hear Louis' voice.

'Nah,' said the boy, as if he was speaking to himself. His accent was pure Carlton. 'Bach's controlled. It's the wild ones that are crook for me. Tchaikowsky. The Brahmns gypsy dances. Ravel's flamin' Bolero. Bach's simple,' he said, and tried the phrase again, now faster, now slower.

He was a pleasure to listen to, so Phryne listened.

Louis had worked his way through the whole of the Violin Concerto in A and was well into the Concerto for Two Violins and Strings in D Minor when Phryne heard the ordinarily placid Simon shout 'Zoll zein shah!'

This brought almost instant silence.

'Enough!' He pounded the table in turn, so that one of the cups dropped and smashed. 'Make up your minds! Either we tell the lady or we don't! I can't stand any more of this endless arguing, round and round and round in circles!'

'We tell her some,' decided David Kaplan. 'And we apologize for the noise.'

Phryne came back to her place at the table, crunching over fragments of thick white china. David Kaplan took her hand and kissed it.

'You like Louis' playing, eh? He's good? He lives in a room with his father and he can't play there. He's auditioning for the orchestra as soon as he's old enough.'

'He's a mazik, that Louis. He'll go far,' opined Phryne, who had had a Yiddish lesson from Mrs Abrahams. She was pleased with the goggle she elicited from the students.

'We study the Torah, lady. With Rabbi Elijah. And the Holy Kabala. There are ways of reading the Torah, you see, different ways.'

'Notarikon, Temurah and Gematria,' said Phryne, composedly.

'Er ... yes. Temurah is about anagrams, words spelt backwards or scrambled. Notarikon relates to the abbreviation of Hebrew words, you see, we do not have vowels. Gematria is about numbers turned into letters, and letters to numbers. It is the perfect way to hide a code, say, or a string of figures. The Book of Splendour tells us that we must look always for hidden meanings, the emanations of the Divine, what the Christians call Thrones, Dominations and Powers. So when we got interested in alchemy, Yossi here was reading Paracelsus and he began looking under the surface of the experiments in the Occulta Philosophica, and ...'

Solly Kaplan took up the tale. 'Paracelsus was the first great chemist, as well as an alchemist. He knew how to transmute mercury, for instance, into oxide and back into metal. He had a recipe for the philosopher's stone, so we tried it, and we got nowhere, Miss, as you would expect. Then Yossi began to work on glues and ...'