The Fifth Servant (45 page)

           
Zizka followed our dialogue closely without interrupting us once.

           
We asked Anya to undo the rest of the buttons, which she did. Then she gently pulled back the nightshirt as far as it would go, exposing the bruises on the girl’s chest, mostly purple and reddish welts that she must have gotten at the hands of her murderers. But there were some other odd shadows on her skin as well.

           
“Could you bring that candle a little closer?” I said.

           
Anya twisted a candle from its socket in the standing candelabra and held it over the girl’s chest.

           
“Hold it down here,” I said, indicating the right side of the girl’s chest.

           
She brought the candle closer, bathing the area in light and bringing out the details of several faded brown welts and a couple of faint greenish-yellow ones.

           
“No wonder they didn’t want us to look at her,” I said.

           
“What?”

           
“This girl bears marks from at least three separate beatings over the last couple of weeks.”

           
“How can you be so sure?” said Zizka.

           
“Believe me, Sheriff, I know the difference between fresh and old bruises.”

           
“Then we need to examine her much more thoroughly,” said Rabbi Loew.

           
“Absolutely not,” said Zizka.

           
“Just above the waist,” I offered. “As part of the investigation.”

           
Zizka stared at the marks indelibly recorded on the girl’s skin as clearly as if they had been inscribed in the court register and sealed with wax.

           
“Just as a fool is not aware of being oppressed, the flesh of a corpse does not feel the knife,”
said Rabbi Loew, citing a particularly appropriate—and cynical—bit of Talmudic wisdom.

           
Zizka finally conceded, but the girl’s nightdress wouldn’t open any wider at the top. The sheriff deliberated for a moment, then unsheathed his dagger and brought it close. His blade hovered over the girl’s dress as if he could already hear the merchants hawking pieces of this holy relic for a price, before he cut through the thin fabric, including the places that were stiffened with dried blood, as delicately as if he were bisecting a butterfly’s wing, and laid the cloth out on the tabletop. When he repeated this process on the girl’s left side, the fabric fell away, revealing a blackened half-inch hole between her sixth and seventh ribs.

           
Street-hardened men sucked their breath in through their teeth.

           
“What infernal wound is this?” said Zizka, pulling away and giving us the evil eye.

           
“Perhaps we could better answer your question after we examine it,” said Rabbi Loew.

           
“No! You stay away from her!”

           
“Use your head, Sheriff,” I said. “Why would we practically
beg
you to expose the area if we were responsible for that wound?”

           
“To divert suspicion from yourselves, of course.”

           
“I have to admit, that
would
be pretty clever of us. But I could think of much better ways of doing it.”

           
“I bet you could.”

           
Zizka wasn’t about to yield ground in front of his people. I suppose I wouldn’t either, if I were in his shoes. But did he really believe everything he was saying, or was it just for show? He seemed like too much of a realist not to be swayed by evidence that he could plainly see with his own eyes, even if it went against the received wisdom of his countrymen.

           
But that still left us in a tough spot, unless I could find a few sympathetic faces in the crowd and convince them to help us get past the gang of credulous cretins blocking the door, which was the only way out of the room that didn’t involve hurling a chair through a couple of square feet of stained glass.

           
So once again, I put all my hopes in the magic of words.

           
“If I remember correctly, Pliny the Elder tells us in his
Historia Naturalis
that death occurs only when the tide is ebbing. What time was the high tide yesterday?”

           
A crusty old boatman who knew the ways of the riverfront answered that the high tide was at about two hours after midnight by the Christian clock, or what we would call the eighth hour after sunset by our reckoning.

           
“That puts the time of death sometime between the second hour after midnight and her discovery about four hours later. But we would need to examine the body to confirm this.”

           
There were a few stirrings from the groundlings, then some voices in the crowd called for the sheriff to allow it, as their morbid fascination with our grisly endeavor temporarily overcame their desire to see us punished.

           
Zizka finally grabbed the candle from Anya and bent down to examine the mysterious wound himself. But he didn’t stop me from pressing in close beside him so I could get a good look at it, too.

           
It was unlike any sword or pike wound I’d ever seen—deep, round, and hollow in the center, as if a giant bloodworm had bored straight through her chest. Traces of dark particulate matter formed a ring around its edges. Under different circumstances, my first move would have been to probe the wound carefully to get a sense of its depth, but obviously that was impossible.

           
I certainly never expected Zizka to tell me truthfully what was on his mind, but that’s just what he did. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that was a bullet hole.”

           
“A bullet hole? From what kind of gun?”

           
“Looks like we’ll have to search the ghetto and find out.”

           
“Come on, Sheriff, your men would have found it during yesterday’s search—”

           
“I wouldn’t be too sure about that.”

           
“What Jew could possibly get away with carry ing a weapon of this kind?” I said. “You people haven’t even let us carry
swords
for a couple of hundred years.”

           
“And it’s a good thing, too,” said one of the guards.

           
“Because that law’s easy to enforce,” said Zizka. “You can’t hide a sword. But you could easily conceal a short-barreled German wheel-lock pistol.”

           
“You’re saying this wound was caused by a German-made weapon?”

           
“I’m saying it’s
possible
.”

           
“Well, then I guess you’re right. There’s only one way to find out.”

           
“What’s that?”

           
“Find a German wheel-lock pistol and fire it into the body of a suitable substitute—say, a thief cut down from the gibbet—then compare the two wounds.”

           
“It’ll be Judgment Day in Hell before I let you mutilate a Christian corpse in so barbaric a fashion.”

           
“I agree that it’s barbaric, but saving a life supersedes the prohibitions in the Bible.”

           
“But it
doesn’t
supersede the prohibitions in the Carolinian Law Code, which you have
repeatedly
reminded me—”

           
Suddenly Anya spoke up: “Why don’t you test it out on the pig’s head we’ve got in our shop? It’s still fresh—”

           
“What on earth are you talking about?” said the sheriff.

           
“My daddy always said that a pig wounds just like a man.”

           
“But we can’t even
touch
the carcass of a pig,” I protested. I moved closer to her and confided, “I’d be unclean until I took a ritual bath, and I don’t know when I’m supposed to fit that in because the rest of my day is looking pretty full right now.”

           
“Well, then, I’ll just have to touch it for you,” said Anya.

           
Someone send a call up to God and ask Him if one of His angels is missing.

           
“This is madness,” said Zizka.

           
“No, the bloodcrime accusations are madness,” I said. “This is our best chance so far this week to dispel the baseless rumors with a physically verifiable fact.”

           
Zizka paced up and down like a caged tiger who still remembers the taste of freedom, ignoring the kibitzing from the spectators, until he finally decided to send one of his men to fetch a variety of pistols from the municipal armory and bring them to Cervenka’s butcher shop.

           
Rabbi Loew asked for a basin of water for us to wash our hands in.

           
“What—
now
?” asked Zizka.

           
“Yes, now.”

           
“Why do you Jews need to wash your hands so often?” said Zizka.

           
“It is customary after viewing a body or a burial,” said Rabbi Loew.

           
But several of those present clearly saw it as further proof that the Jews practice sorcery.

           
OUR STRANGE PROCESSION ADVANCED ACROSS the Old Town Square, attracting a dozen or more curious souls as if it were growing a long human tail. Some of the newcomers were probably just tagging along, hoping to catch a glimpse of some genuine Jewish magic before the scourge was eradicated once and for all by the righteous emissaries of the Church of the living God, or simply to have a story to tell their grandkids.

           
But remarkably, I did not see hate in all of their eyes this time.

           
We followed the sheriff as he led us through the square, until we passed directly in front of the public pillory. Whether he did this as part of his rounds or simply to intimidate us once more with the spectacle of all those rebellious women chained to the pillory posts, I can’t say. Either way, it was an effective demonstration, because some of them were writhing and gesturing madly at us while fending off wet chunks of horse manure, much to the delight and merriment of the spectators. But the other women stood by and stoically accepted their punishment, with every feature but their sorry eyes obscured by the grotesque masks.

           
Anya averted her eyes from the disturbing sight. Then after waiting long enough for it to seem accidental, she fell into step beside me and asked me how I came to know so much about the ways of Christians.

           
“By living among them, the same as you.”

           
“And you were able to get along?”

           
“Most of the time.”

           
A couple of guards glared at her, but she deflected their steel-eyed glances by assuming the role of a disinterested interpreter inquiring about Yiddish vocabulary.

           
“Tell me, Jew, how do you say
brother
in your language?”

           
“We say
bruder
.”

           
“So it’s just like German. And what about
sister
?”

           
“
Shvester
. But I wouldn’t go around saying that it’s ‘just like’ German.”

           
“And how do you say
war
?”

           
“
Milkhome
.”

           
“Now
that’s
different. Is it Hebrew?”

           
“Yes, but you could also say
krig
if you really wanted to.”

           
“Which
is
just like German. What about
peace
?”

           
“Sholem
. What’s your word for it?”

           
“
Mír
.”

           
“Oh. Same as in Russian.”

           
“Yes. And how do you say that something’s cheap, or not of much value?”

           
“You mean, in the sense of poor quality?”

           
“No, I mean in the sense of someone making promises they don’t intend to keep, and leaving you empty-handed.”