The Fifth Servant (44 page)

           
“What are you saying?” said Zizka, catching up with us.

           
Rabbi Loew explained, “What you Christians think of as the human soul is actually made up of several different elements. Although the young girl’s eternal soul, which we call the
neshamah
, has already returned to the Creator, her
ruakh
, or spirit, will cling forever to the mortal remains that housed her in life, and the active spirit of her
nefesh
will float between the two, mourning the body for seven days while drifting back and forth between the girl’s home and her final resting place. Some say this lasts a whole year. In any case, it is with the
nefesh
that we might be able to communicate during this period, although I need to warn you that it takes a tremendous effort for the dead to speak to us.”

           
“I would imagine so,” said Zizka. “But what if her spirit won’t speak to a Jew?”

           
“Then she may choose to speak to us through other means.”

           
We were coming up on The Blue Pike, a public house packed with laborers and artisans who had finished work for the day. They bubbled out into the street, and I greedily eyed their sweaty steins of Bohemian lager.

           
Zizka asked what we hoped to learn from seeing the girl’s body.

           
Rabbi Loew said, “It is not a matter of merely seeing the girl. Anybody can
see
her. Even wild animals are observant of their surroundings. But only men like us, Sheriff Zizka, are capable of combining our observations with the wisdom and understanding needed to determine if the child met with some accident, or slipped and fell on a knife, or if some other blameless tragedy occurred. And so we may learn many things from what the body tells us, and also from what it doesn’t tell us.”

           
“I don’t need any more riddles today, Rabbi. How can you learn anything from what it
doesn’t
tell you?”

           
“You know the tale of Jonah and the whale, don’t you?” said Rabbi Loew.

           
“Every little schoolboy knows that one,” Zizka growled.

           
“But have you studied it closely? Ah, I didn’t think so. For in the Book of Jonah, the prophet says that when the people of Nineveh repented of their sins, they covered themselves in sackcloth and ashes. But what, you may ask, were the terrible sins that aroused the wrath of God? The Bible doesn’t tell us. However, since the text does
not
say that the Ninevites went around smashing their idols—idolatry being one of the very worst sins in the eyes of God—we may deduce from this that they were
not
idol-worshippers, which is why the Holy One, blessed is He, gave them a chance to repent.”

           
Zizka slowly dropped his street-fighting attitude. It took him a while to shift from the flinty lawman who spent much of his time breaking up drunken brawls to the rational being capable of analyzing a complex problem like this one, but I believe I saw a slight softening of the sheriff’s hardness.

           
He said, “You mean, if they had smashed idols, the Bible would have mentioned it?”

           
“That’s it precisely,” said Rabbi Loew.

           
Rabbi Gans said, “They say that Rabbi Simeon could tell whether a man was a Jew, a Christian, or a Moslem from the way he played at chess.”

           
“Well, this isn’t a bloody chess game, Rabbi,” said Zizka, as we reached the main entrance to the Old Town Hall.

           
We were shown into a large room built in the style of the last century, with a high ceiling, exposed beams, and four tall windows casting the dull shadows of four identical Christian crosses across the floor. The gilded arch over the doorway culminated in an elaborate seal of the city—three towers in a row behind a stone wall topped by a pair of lions holding a helmet and a crown, all done in polished hammered metal.

           
A long table occupied the middle of the room, draped with a crisp white sheet that outlined the shape of a young child.

           
Two sentinels stood guard over the body.

           
The sheriff gave a nod, and one of the guardsmen yanked the sheet off with alarming swiftness, exposing the tiny, broken body to our prying gazes. The girl’s eyes had not been fully sealed by the sleep of death, and a sliver of dull white showed between her eyelids like a hard piece of eggshell. Her lips were blue and bloodless, and her nightdress was still encrusted with reddish-brown stains that testified to the full horror of her fate.

           
“Doesn’t look like she ‘fell on a knife,’” said the sheriff.

           
Some of the mystics will tell you that there is no such thing as death, that all matter and form are illusory, and that this world is merely the antechamber to the World-to-Come. But even so, it is better not to have children than to bury them, because if the order of this world means anything at all, it’s that your children are supposed to outlive you. By a day, even by an hour, your children are supposed to outlive you.

           
These thoughts were interrupted by the sound of insistent pounding.

           
Rabbi Loew began by asking the spirit of the girl to forgive us in the presence of these many witnesses for any wrong that we might commit in the course of our examination. But he was also keenly aware that there’s nothing worse than losing a child, no matter how chosen your people are or which day of the week you call the Sabbath, because he suddenly began to recite the prayer for the dead.

           
“May His great Name be exalted and sanctified.”

           
Rabbi Gans and I joined him in saying, “Amen.”

           
Angry voices echoed through the hallway behind us.

           
“May He who makes peace in the heavens bring peace to us all.”

           
We all said, “Amen,” and took three steps forward.

           
“You better stay away from her!”

           
An unruly mob was filling the doorway.

           
“Good Lord, who let them in here?” asked Zizka.

           
Some minor official squirmed to the front of the crowd and proclaimed, “The people’s desire to observe these proceedings shall not be denied.”

           
Right. He probably remembered the
last
time the people brought their outrage to the Town Hall.

           
Rabbi Loew tried to assure the present company that it is forbidden to disrespect a corpse, and that any Jew who even comes in contact with one must be purified with the ashes of a red heifer on the third and seventh day, a very expensive and mystifying procedure even to this day, but nobody was listening.

           
“And I said you better not touch her!” someone yelled.

           
Zizka emptied his lungs calling for silence.

           
When he had everyone’s attention, he said, “The emperor has given them his permission to examine the body. But they are not permitted to touch her. They may not even touch her clothes.”

           
That
wasn’t in the decree.

           
“How are we supposed to do this without even touching her clothes?” I asked.

           
Then a woman’s voice cut through the din.

           
“Why don’t you let
me
touch her?”

           
All heads turned toward a tall woman with long dark braids pushing to the front of the crowd. It was Meisel’s Shabbes maid, Anya. The death threats shrunk to low hisses and murmurs, and the room became eerily quiet as she stepped forward.

           
It made sense that a butcher’s daughter wouldn’t be terribly squeamish about handling bloody flesh, but I didn’t know where she got the courage to stand in the middle of the room like that with all eyes upon her.

           
How did she find us?
Presumably, word had spread rather quickly about the city guards escorting three foolhardy Jews through the center of the Old Town. But what ever the reason, she was a godsend, because a Christian like her is not susceptible to the ritual uncleanliness imparted by a corpse, nor could she transfer it to us through any form of contact.

           
“What do you say to this?” asked Zizka. “Will you allow this woman to assist you in your examination?”

           
“Why shouldn’t we accept her offer?” said Rabbi Loew. “Women can be quite practical at times.”

           
He was probably just trying to put the crowd at ease by expressing some kind of common sentiment that made us appear more human in their eyes.

           
“All right, all right, just get on with it,” said Zizka.

           
“First of all, you’re going to need more light,” said Anya, reaching for a standing candelabra over by the wall. A guard seized it from her and planted it near the head of the table so roughly that one of the candles tumbled to the floor. Anya stepped on the flame and put it out. Then she picked up the candle, touched its smoking wick to another candle’s flame, and fit it back into its socket.

           
Who else among those present would have known that the Jews cannot handle fire on Shabbes? Surely this young woman’s place in Heaven was assured.

           
“Now, let’s see what this speechless little girl can tell us,” said Rabbi Loew. Then, barely above a whisper, he asked me, “What was her name again?”

           
“Gerta,” I said. As if I could ever forget the name that roused me shivering from my bed on
Erev Shabbes
.

           
“Don’t worry, Gerta,” he said tenderly to the pale corpse. “We won’t harm you. Do you hear me, Gerta? We won’t even touch you. Your hair won’t even tremble from our breath.”

           
The cluster of curious faces in the doorway bobbled around as the forces behind them jostled for a better view. Rabbi Loew waved his fingers, beckoning Anya to come closer.

           
Like it or not, we had an audience closely scrutinizing every move we made, every gesture, every utterance. But Rabbi Loew knew how to hold an audience as well as any preacher in the kingdom.

           
He took a moment to address them. “My friends, you all know me to be a righteous man who spends his days delving beneath the outer garments of the Torah to uncover the truths that lie there. So you understand that we should have no trouble applying this process to the far flimsier garments with which ordinary men clothe their lies.”

           
There was movement among the gaping mouths in the doorway, and some heads began to nod.

           
In hushed tones, Rabbi Loew instructed Anya to undo the top button of the girl’s shift. Anya did as he requested, then she spread the fabric apart, revealing the long, jagged gash running across the victim’s neck.

           
A shiver of revulsion rippled through the crowd so palpably that a bit of it went rolling through me as well.

           
I leaned in to get a closer look at this gory trench cutting through the girl’s soft flesh like the deep red line dividing the land of the living from the land of the dead.

           
“Very strong and savage,” said Rabbi Loew. “And yet, oddly hesitant. They appear to have made several tries.”

           
“Not the easiest way to get it done,” said Anya.

           
We waited for her to expand on this, but she seemed a bit uncomfortable with her public role as the expert on butchery.

           
“Please explain what you think that means, no matter how unpleasant it may be,” I said, stepping closer to her side.

           
“It means that whoever did this may have been as savage as the rabbi said, but he wasn’t very good with a short-bladed knife.”

           
“And what can be deduced from this?” Rabbi Loew asked us.

           
We conferred in low but audible voices, because we actually wanted the people to hear what we were saying. We even incorporated Anya’s observations in our responses, and concluded that the men we wanted were most likely a couple of experienced mercenaries, old hands in the murder-for-hire trade, but that the specific manner of death was new to them.

           
Why?
Because they had never needed to extract a couple of pints of blood from their victim.

           
And where was the victim’s missing blood?
We had every reason to fear that it had been collected in order to be used against us, probably with the intention of planting it at Federn’s shop or somewhere else inside the ghetto.