The Fifth Servant (14 page)

CHAPTER 9

           
“WELL, THAT CERTAINLY SUCCEEDED,” I said. “It succeeded in making things
worse
.”

           
“It only appears that way,” said Rabbi Loew. “But the hand of God is working behind the curtain.”

           
“Must be a mighty thick curtain.”

           
“Don’t take it personally. They do that to everybody who’s not from the community.”

           
“Well, I’m not everybody. You must have really annoyed Rabbi Aaron with your last book.”

           
“Just be thankful that the Lord in His wisdom created only a few wise men, because if every man were as wise as those judges are, the human race would die of starvation in a few weeks.”

           
We had to step around the piles of rough-hewn stones where masons and their harried apprentices were paving the side street. The sound of their chisels rang through the air. Then the Breitgasse abruptly narrowed and we found ourselves sharing the street with a group of country folk driving their livestock to the Butchers’ Block to be slaughtered for their holiday dinner. A couple of high-class Jews wearing doublets of Bohemian brocade with silk highlights raised the hems of their cloaks and stepped gingerly over the clogged gutters.

           
But there was trouble at the East Gate. A pair of stiff-necked burghers insisted that they had urgent business to attend to in the
Old
Town
, but the guards weren’t letting anybody in or out. Sheriff’s orders, they said.

           
“Let me see the written order,” I said, trying to bluff my way past them.

           
But the guards laughed in my face. “Written order? That’s a good one!”

           
“Then let me hear it from the sheriff himself, not his underlings.”

           
The guards must have had some doubts, because they actually called the sheriff over.

           
“What is it now, Jews?” said Sheriff Zizka.

           
“We need to speak to His Majesty’s consuls,” said the rabbi.

           
“No one is allowed to leave the Jewish Town,” said Zizka.

           
“Not even to appeal to the emperor?”

           
“What did I just say?”

           
“May we at least speak to the accused’s wife?”

           
“Take the wax out of your ears, grandpa.”

           
I pushed forward. “Pardon me, Sheriff, but you’re the one who ordered us to hand over the killer, and now you won’t let us visit the shop where the crime was discovered, ask the neighbors what they saw, or examine the area for signs of what actually occurred. So maybe you can tell me how we’re supposed to solve a crime that took place outside the ghetto when we’re trapped on the inside of it?”

           
One of the burghers said, “Killer? What do you mean, killer?”

           
But when Zizka didn’t tell me to drop dead right away, I knew we had a chance.

           
“Oh, hell,” said Zizka. “All right, come on. I’ll have to escort you. Just the two of you,” he said, while his men forced the outraged burghers back onto their side of the gate with the blunt ends of their pikestaffs.

           
“You’ve got one hour,” said Zizka.

           
I started to protest.

           
“He said you got one hour, Jews,” a burly city guard breathed in my face.

           
“With four guards on you at all times,” said Zizka.

           
“Yes, sir.” The guards took up positions, two in front and two behind us, forming the official escort for a couple of unwilling ambassadors from the
Yidnshtot
.

           
Confused voices in the crowd asked:

           
“Where are you taking them?”

           
“What’s going on?”

           
The sheriff reached inside his tunic and pulled out a handwritten proclamation about the bloodcrime offense.

           
“As soon as the final copies of this proclamation receive the official seal of the city, it will be read in every public square on both sides of the river. And for those of you who can’t read Christian writing, it says that no one gets in or out till one of you produces the criminal or comes forward and confesses to the crime himself.”

           
“How soon before the announcement is made?” I asked.

           
“The criers are getting their boots on right now, Jew.”

           
“Then we’d better get moving.”

           
Zizka cocked his eyebrow at me, trying to figure out what kind of hand I was playing. But we set out on our mission.

           
Rabbi Loew said, “Now, let’s talk about the matter at hand. If we presume that Federn is not guilty, the question then becomes—”

           
Zizka said, “I understand your Jewish jargon, you know.”

           
“To je v po
ádku, pane Žižko,”
 
said the rabbi. Very well. So he began replacing the Germanic words in his speech with Hebrew wherever possible, because it was true that many of the Czech officials understood spoken Yiddish.

           
“So if Jacob Federn didn’t
hargeh
Gerta Janek, the
shayleh
is, Who did
hargeh
her? What do the
tsadikim
say? What is the one thing that makes people risk everything that really matters?”

           
“That’s an easy one.
Kesef. Gelt
. The almighty daler. And the
tsadikim
say that a man ‘will not commit a sin unless he is going to profit from it,’” I said, quoting the Bava Metziah tractate in the original Aramaic, which was also the language of Jesus.

           
“Yes. The love of money can poison people’s souls and drive them to commit horrifying acts. Only one other thing makes people go so completely
meshuge
.”

           
I knew that one, too:
“Yodah.”

           
To know intimately, as in
Breyshis
4.1: “Adam
yodah
’d his wife Eve.”

           
“Was there any sign of it?”

           
“I couldn’t tell. Not in front of all those Christians, Rabbi.”

           
“So we may be dealing with the crime of
yodah
, and the innocent
nareh
was left in a Jewish shop to make the proprietor look like the guilty one.”

           
“It’s possible, but if I needed to get rid of a body quickly in this town, you’ll excuse me for saying so, I’d just dump it in the river. This was too well planned for that. The girl had to be concealed, the lock had to be picked—somebody went to a lot of trouble, and it’s more likely that it was a business rival with an old grudge or someone else who’d profit from ruining Federn by implicating him in the bloodcrime.”

           
“Maybe, maybe not. We don’t have any evidence yet.”

           
The sky was grim and gray.

           
Freyde Federn sat in her family’s shop, under heavy guard, staring blankly out at the world like a soldier after a long day on the battlefield. She hadn’t bothered to relight the lantern, even though the wick had burnt down. But at least she hadn’t been arrested yet.

           
Zizka led the way into the store. I inspected the threshold, but of course heavy foot traffic and rising temperatures had erased all traces of the outsized boot prints I had seen before.

           
The floor was still covered with bloodstains, plainly visible to all, and dried to a rusty brown.

           
Rabbi Loew tried to console her. “Have faith, Freyde, we’ll get you out of this.”

           
“How?” she asked. “I’m surrounded by armed guards who keep glaring at me and stroking their weapons.”

           
I said, “They may have the advantage of weapons and superior numbers, but you have something better than that—a pair of professional Midrash scholars on your side.”

           
I wasn’t just kidding around, since the root word of
midrash
means to inquire or investigate.

           
I asked about Federn’s business rivals. Was anyone jealous of him? Greedy? Did some partnership go sour? Was he—I stopped myself from asking about their marital relations. It was too early in the investigation to put her through that.

           
She said no to everything. Federn wasn’t a scholar like we were. He had little time for Torah studies because he spent most of his time running the shop, and she didn’t know anything about his possible dealings on the side.

           
“Did your husband leave your home at any time before I knocked on the shutters this morning and called you to shul?”

           
“No, he hadn’t stepped out yet.”

           
“You’re sure?”

           
“He was still in his nightshirt, Mr. Shammes. Believe me. He was in no hurry to face the day.”

           
I wondered if there was another reason that Federn was in no mood to face the day besides the cold winter morning, but I believed her. So those boot prints going into the shop must have belonged to the men who brought the girl’s body here. The prints were fresh, which meant that just before I made my early morning rounds, someone carry ing the lifeless corpse, evidently still warm and bleeding, waited for his accomplice to open the lock, then tossed the child’s body inside. Since my own desire to bring a child into the world had ended with the premature expulsion from Reyzl’s womb of a couple of blood-soaked kidney beans on a twisted cord, I couldn’t imagine the heart cold and unfeeling enough to do that to someone’s little girl. They must have had a dark reason indeed, and I was determined to bring it to light, no matter whose reputation was shattered or what damage followed in its wake.

           
“Courage, Freyde,” said Rabbi Loew. “God will show us the way.”

           
The municipal guards stood on the pavement outside the shop, their round metal helmets aligned in a series of distorted reflections of Freyde’s moment of agony. My eyes dropped to the dark bloodstains on the floor.

           
I needed to sound calm and reassuring, but my voice seemed a bit out of practice. “Listen to me, Mrs. Federn. Whoever did this thinks he’s got us beaten. He’s probably out there right now, laughing at us.”

           
Freyde cast a quick glance outside, as if she might spot a pair of red-rimmed eyes floating in a cloud of foul-smelling smoke.

           
I leaned in closer. “But if we can light a fire under him and make him sweat a little, maybe he’ll get nervous and make a mistake.”

           
“That sounds wonderful, Mr. Shammes. But how does a bearded Jew make a
goy
nervous?”

           
“A wise old rabbi once told me that for certain people
it’s not what is, it’s what they happen to believe.
They already think we’re powerful magicians. We might as well use it against them,” I said, straightening up and walking over to the spot where the girl’s body had lain, clearly outlined in her own blood.

           
The guards turned around to watch. Zizka warned me not to touch the bloodstains.

           
I said, “I have no intention of touching any of your precious blood, since there’s a much easier way to solve this riddle.”