The Fifth Servant (46 page)

           
“I’d say, they promised me the moon and the stars, but I ended up with
bubkes
.”

           
An unlikely tinkle of laughter spilled from her mouth and brightened the gray air around me.

           
“What’s so funny?” I asked, but she waved me off. “Come on, tell me. I could use a good laugh.”

           
She drew a breath and held it long enough to smother the ticklish urge, then she let it out and told me, “
Bobkes
is our word for a goat’s turd.”

           
“Then I guess the two words must be related.”

           
The guards lost interest. Anya and I managed to find a few other words that our mother tongues had in common, words like
nudnik
,
tshaynik
, and
pupik
, then she lowered her voice, and as casually as if she were commenting about the weather, she asked me, “Do you believe that you can be mysteriously drawn to somebody you’ve only just met?”

           
“Sure. They say it happens when you meet someone whose essence was formed next to yours inside the massive cloud of primordial energy that preceded the creation of man.”

           
“Who says that?”

           
“One of the Kabbalists. I don’t remember which one—”

           
“So you mean, that person is like your heavenly soul mate?”

           
“I suppose you could put it that way—”

           
“And what happens if you get separated from your soul mate?”

           
“Then I’d say you have your work cut out for you. It’s like digging for buried treasure. The Talmud says you have to go out and find it, since the treasure isn’t going to come looking for you.”

           
“So this famous Talmud offers the same old
seek and ye shall find
that I get from the Sunday sermons?”

           
She looked a little disappointed.

           
“Well, it’s a little more active than that. It’s also a lot easier when you have the right tools. And you have the right tools in abundance.”

           
“How do you mean?”

           
“Do you really need me to explain it?”

           
“I guess I do.”

           
“Fine, fine. We have a saying,
Eyn hor fun a meydls kop shlept shtarker fun tsen oksn.
” One hair from a girl’s head pulls stronger than ten oxen.

           
“Meaning—?”

           
“Meaning love can move mountains.”

           
“Who said anything about love?”

           
She was pretending that she wasn’t involved in something, but she couldn’t control the flush of pink rising to her face.

           
She asked, “And do the rabbis have a saying about women like me?”

           
The rabbis had plenty to say about women like her, but I just chose the good ones: “They say that even the daughter of your enemy can be righteous, and that the righteous of all nations have a share in the World-to-Come. Didn’t the priests teach you that Pharaoh’s own daughter defied his wishes and saved Moses from the river even though she
knew
that he was one of the Hebrews’ children?”

           
“Yes, but I haven’t thought about that sermon in a
long
time. But where is it written that these acts of kindness and charity outweigh the rest of the commandments?”

           
She sounded just like a yeshiva student preparing for an oral argument before the
beys din
, and her earnest level of commitment brought me back to the days when the world was still a wide road spanning infinite horizons, and anything was possible.

           
“It’s in the Jerusalem Talmud,” I said, with the sweet sting of pain for a world long past reverberating like a dying echo in my head. “At the beginning of tractate Peah.”

           
“And what the Talmud says is law, right?”

           
“Well, yes and no.”

           
I could tell she wasn’t satisfied with
that
answer.

           
“It depends.”

           
“It
depends
?”

           
“The Talmud encourages us to look at every side of an issue, every detail, no matter how trivial, because the work of finding a satisfactory answer is never done.”

           
“But how do you enforce a rabbinic opinion if it’s not enshrined in law?”

           
“We don’t.”

           
“Then what do you do?”

           
“We learn to live with conflicting opinions.”

           
Something you folks should learn to do
.

           
But the moment finally seemed right, and I probably wasn’t going to get another chance like this. So I lowered my voice to a whisper and asked her to talk to the wives of some municipal guards to see if they had heard anything about Janek’s shady dealings with Jacob Federn. When she told me that Kromy was her neighbor, I had to keep from shouting,
Which house?

           
“It’s time to put that little theory of yours to the test,” said Zizka, as our rag-tag procession arrived at the butcher shop.

           
Had he been listening?
If so, he had more than enough evidence to hand Anya over to the Inquisition for harboring un-Catholic thoughts. But I was getting the feeling that he wasn’t the type to turn in a fellow dissenter from the Roman Church.

           
Anya broke away and ran inside to explain the situation to her father. But old Cervenka still looked bewildered as she grabbed an apron, gave him a peck on the cheek, and disappeared through the back door of the shop. She returned in a moment carry ing the pig’s head in an enameled metal tray, and set it down on the counter.

           
Zizka’s men finally arrived, carry ing armfuls of weapons of various sizes. The sheriff cleared a space on the counter and spread the weapons out, looking each one over and eliminating the most unlikely prospects, explaining his rationale as he went down the line.

           
“A rifled arquebus like this one takes a lot of skill, but in the right hands, it will discharge a ball that can penetrate the thickest armor. And the long barrel makes it more accurate over long ranges, but I can’t see a kidnapper concealing this thing under his cloak.”

           
It was about three feet long. He picked up another, larger weapon.

           
“Spanish matchlock. Heavy weapon, fires bullets weighing ten to a pound that would unhorse a knight on a charging steed at forty paces. But too unwieldy for anything besides battlefield use. Hardly practical for our purposes.”

           
He was certainly in his element. He picked up another weapon and set it aside immediately.

           
“Double wheel-lock. Too expensive and unreliable.”

           
He separated three short-barreled pistols from the remaining weapons. He selected one and recognized its style in an instant.

           
“Italian-made,” he said, laying that one aside.

           
He took a bit longer examining the next one, paying particular attention to the fluted wheel and cocking mechanism.

           
“There are some technical peculiarities which suggest that this one was made by French gunsmiths,” he said, putting it down. He was left with one pistol about two feet long with a heavy butt.

           
“Here we go,” he said. “German-made. Plain barrel without ornamentation, such as an ordinary soldier might use. Some wear on the grooves, but it should do nicely.”

           
He and his men began the intricate process of loading the pistol with ball and wadding and powder and whatnot, tamping it down, then winding up the spring-lock mechanism. I didn’t know much about this kind of gun, but the spring-lock must have been very strong, because even Zizka, with his huge hands, was straining to get the tension right. When he was done, he let the cock down into the priming pan.

           
“What does your Torah have to say about the correct way to fire a pistol at a pig’s head?”

           
“The Torah is silent on the matter,” said Rabbi Loew. His quiet dignity did not invite a retort.

           
Zizka shrugged, and told Anya and her father to clear out of the way. Then he raised the heavy pistol and aimed it at the pig’s head. He was standing about ten feet away from the target, and his hand was remarkably steady as he slowly put pressure on the trigger.

           
A crowd of the faithful had gathered to witness this singular event. They stared wide-eyed, huddling close to their neighbors, many covering their ears in anticipation of the earth-shattering explosion.

           
I could see the muscles tensing in Zizka’s hand.

           
When the moment came, the gun jumped as if even it was surprised by the concussive shock and the cloud of acrid smoke that engulfed the sheriff’s arm. The noise hit me like a solid blow to the chest, the same kind of jolt that caused my rude awakening on Friday morning, and the sulfurous smell of death wafted out into the street and assailed our noses and stung our eyes. Frightened babies started screaming in the nearby houses, and their mothers cursed us in the name of St. Vitus as the dogs began to howl.

           
Zizka’s men moved in, waving their arms to disperse the smoke, and suddenly I was pressed on from all sides as everyone regardless of rank tumbled into the shop to get a look at the splattered pig’s head. Someone stomped on my foot, but I concentrated on holding on to my purse strings as the sheriff’s men forced the crowd back into the street. Finally, Zizka had them make an opening so that the three of us could come forward and examine the pig’s head.

           
Rabbi Gans was the most experienced anatomist among us, so we let him go first and study the filthy creature close up. His eyes blazed with that old spark, and it felt just like when the two of us were Freethinkers back in Kraków and the spirit of the age flowed through us all: We were going to shatter superstitions and sweep away the darkness with the blazing light of observation and reason. It was a shame that he hadn’t brought along one of his glass magnifiers.

           
There were no other marks on the swine’s flesh besides the plain round hole in the pink, hairless hide, with a faint ring of dark particles around it, just like the girl’s wound.

           
Rabbi Gans cocked his eyebrow and said, “Fascinating.”

           
“It certainly looks like the same kind of wound,” declared Rabbi Loew.

           
“That doesn’t prove a thing,” said Zizka. “It just tells us that the girl
might
have been shot with a gun that was similar to this one.”

           
Suddenly he was a skeptic?

           
“Fair enough, Sheriff,” I said. “But you know as well as I do that every weapon leaves a unique kind of wound. A knife leaves a slit, an épée leaves a triangular puncture, and that girl had a round gunshot wound in her left side just like this one. There aren’t many people who have access to a gun like that, and it’s something a Jew would not possess. Besides, as you have so ably demonstrated, you couldn’t fire a gun like that within a furlong’s distance of the ghetto without waking up a thousand people.”

           
“And what does this suggest to you?” said Rabbi Loew.

           
“If I were to accept your premises,” said Zizka, “it would suggest that the girl was shot at some distance from where she was eventually found.”

           
“And then they rushed her to Federn’s shop so they could dump her there,” I said. “She hadn’t even lost all her color yet.”

           
“But what about the knife wound?”

           
“Obviously, the purpose of the knife wound was to drain some of her blood in order to create a plausible excuse for blaming it on the Jews,” said Rabbi Loew.

           
“But why the two different weapons?” said Zizka.

           
I had my own thoughts about that: “It would fit with our assumption that even these hardened hired killers couldn’t bring themselves to slit a little girl’s throat. So they shot her first, right through the heart, then they finished the job after she was dead. But they were in a hurry, and they made a mess of it.”