The Fifth Servant (47 page)

           
Not that there’s a clean way of cutting someone’s throat.

           
“What makes you think that they were hired?” asked Zizka. “What proof do you have?”

           
“None yet. Just the simple equation of an expensive gun and a piece of fine silver thread, which adds up to a wealthy person being involved in some way. And I don’t know of anyplace on earth where the wealthy need to do their own killing.”

           
A couple of the guards actually seemed to nod in agreement with me.

           
“Silver thread? What silver thread?” said Zizka.

           
“The emperor himself witnessed the discovery,” said Rabbi Gans, and he began describing our visit to Emperor Rudolf’s cabinet of wonders.

           
“Why are you so intent on pursuing this?” said Zizka.

           
“You mean, besides averting a communal disaster?” I said.

           
Rabbi Loew looked at the wounded pig’s head, then back at the sheriff. He said, “Because someone has already cheated that poor girl once, and we would be cheating her a second time if we didn’t seek out the cause of her death.”

           
The townspeople trembled at the thought, and for a moment Hussite and Catholic were united in their mutual fear of vengeful spirits.

           
Rabbi Loew explained that anyone who cheats the living can still ask for forgiveness and make it up to the injured party, but anyone who cheats the dead can never be forgiven.

           
But Zizka wasn’t listening. His eyes had taken on that faraway look of a man who has gone to a place deep inside himself, a place where convictions crumble under pressure and are reforged into enduring proofs that must be weighed on a just and true balance. And the scales were tipping.

           
“I must admit that it could have happened in the way that you describe it,” said Zizka. “But we must—what was that word you used?
Investigate
. We must
investigate
more.”

           
Eyes widened. I could almost hear the men and women thinking,
Did he just take their side?

           
Then tongues began to wag. But it was a smaller percentage than I expected, so maybe we were actually making some converts among the folk.

           
Maybe we had a chance after all.

           
I told Zizka that if he really wanted to be a hero to his people, he should start looking for two men who came tearing through the streets early Friday morning from the direction of the waterfront in a butcher’s cart filled with enough goods to conceal a sackful of rats and a dead body.

           
“To conceal
what
?”

           
“You heard me right the first time.”

           
“I was afraid of that.”

           
“Because if our reasoning is correct, there are a couple of cold-blooded murderers at large on the Christian side of town.”

           
“More like a couple of hundred,” Zizka muttered. “Why are you telling me all this?”

           
“We have a saying, Sheriff:
If there’s a fire at your neighbor’s house, you
,
too
,
are in danger
. It just depends on which way the wind is blowing.”

           
The sheriff nodded as if he genuinely believed what I was saying. He told us that bargeloads of meat were transported every morning from the big slaughterhouses on the other side of the river. Then he gave the order to bring us back to the ghetto and make sure that we stayed there this time. For our own protection, he said.

           
The guards eagerly complied, corralling us and shoving us forward through the crowd.

           
In all the confusion, Anya suddenly appeared by my side and slipped something into my hand. The guards looked to Zizka, but he turned a blind eye to it, so they just shoved her out of the way with a few choice curses about blood and honor. As we were led down the street and the crowd began to disperse, I opened my fist and saw what she had given me. It was a folded slip of paper, and scrawled on the outside in Yiddish script were the words,
To be opened in the event of my death
.

CHAPTER 25

           
ANYA’S HEART WAS RACING, and her fingers tingled with a strange numbness, forcing her to concentrate as she fed the chunks of raw pork into the grinder.

           
Her mother collected the ground meat in a metal dish and added it to the contents of a large wooden mixing bowl.

           
Anya flipped the last slice of pork onto the cutting board with a wet slap, and carved it into strips. She felt a drop of cold sweat run trickling down the hollow of her back.

           
When all the meat was ground up, Anya switched over to grinding up the fennel seeds and other spices while her mother washed the vegetables.

           
Jirzhina said that the smell of the spices always reminded her of the time Anya was a little girl and she ate a whole jar of spiced peppers when her daddy was supposed to be watching her.

           
“I know, Mama. You’ve told me,” said Anya. She let the familiar feel of slicing vegetables slip over her tired muscles like a well-worn blanket, a comfortable routine that meant that somehow, life was going on and all things were still possible.

           
“We used to keep you in a vegetable crate under the counter when you were only a few months old,” said Jirzhina with a sigh, the same sigh she always made whenever she talked about bygone days. “And as soon as you learned how to walk, you figured out how to open the cash drawer and you threw all the money into the street.”

           
“I guess the beggars were very happy that day,” said Anya.

           
“On other days, too. You acted like the coins didn’t belong in the store.”

           
They mixed all the ingredients in the bowl until their hands were coated with globules of congealing pork fat, then they stuffed the skins with the prodigious portions of meat that made Cervenka’s sausages known throughout the quarter as a sign of God’s plenty, and the perfect way to celebrate His resurrection on Easter Day.

           
Anya and her mother carried the trays of fresh sausages into the shop, where Benesh was chatting with a couple of men in mud-spattered breeches. One of the men smiled at her. He had a broken tooth, and he stared at the sausages the way all the penniless wayfarers did, with a certain emptiness in his eyes.

           
“That was quite a show you put on before with that pig,” he said, and suddenly he got the bright idea of reminding everyone about the time some butchers drove a herd of pigs from the docks all the way through Jew Town and what a terrific joke it had been. The two men laughed heartily, and they clearly expected Anya to laugh along with them. She smiled faintly.

           
“Don’t worry about her,” Jirzhina explained. “She’s lovesick.”

           
Oohs
and
aahs
followed as predictably as night follows day and regret follows indulgence.

           
“I’ve got to go now, Mama,” said Anya, heading back inside to wash the pork fat off her hands. She slipped more than a dozen sausages into a burlap sack to take with her as gifts—or more accurately, bribes. Then she packed a few other things she might need as well.

           
“Are you going to meet Janoshik and see the pageants in Old Town Square?” Jirzhina asked.

           
“Um…yes.”

           
Anya didn’t like having to lie to her mother. But she
was
heading to Old Town Square, eventually, and if the pageants happened to be passing through at the moment she was there, she would surely see them, so it was only half of a lie, really. But she had several other stops to make first.

           
“It sounded like he had something special planned for you,” Jirzhina hinted.

           
But Anya was already on her way out the door.

           
The two men watched her go, as Benesh told them, “You can say what you want about the Jews, but no Jew ever stole anything from me.”

           
The man with the broken tooth turned it into a joke about how Cervenka’s famous pork sausages could be sold as magical charms to keep the Jews away.

           
Everything is a joke to such men
, thought Anya. They could afford to joke. They didn’t know what it was like to scurry around like a mouse in a house full of cats, expecting to be pounced on at any moment, which is exactly how she had felt ever since she handed that note to the Jewish
shammes
in front of a crowd of witnesses.

           
She wondered what all those Hebrew scribblings meant. She knew it was something important by the way Marie Janek had slipped the note to her without her husband’s knowledge, saying that Janek kept it around “just in case.” Anya only hoped the Jews could tell her what it all meant.

           
The first stop on her list was right next door.

           
The Kromys were arguing, as usual.

           
Ivana Kromy was a big woman who usually gave as good as she got from her thick-headed husband. But only what the Germans called a real
Hausdrache
, a house-dragon, could have held her own against him all the time.

           
Kromy was contending that it is God’s will that the husband be the head of the wife, and that her first duty is obedience.

           
She answered by swinging a soup ladle at him, but he deflected it and smacked her so hard it made her eyes water. Her pale face looked like a ball of wet dough, with veiny red splotches providing the only color in the crevices around her nose and cheeks. Their six-year-old boy Hanuš jumped in and pummeled his father with his tiny fists. But Kromy swatted the boy away and took a stout switch down from the wall. The boy shrank back, knocking over a sack of turnips, which only made his father angrier. Kromy called the boy a worthless piece of garbage who would never amount to anything, just like his brother.

           
He emptied the dregs of a bucket of beer into a tankard and drained it. Then he wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and finally noticed Anya standing in the doorway.

           
“Well, what do you want?” he said.

           
Anya had come expecting to find Ivana alone, since Kromy was supposed to be on duty at this hour. She had planned to act as if she were dropping by to catch up on the latest gossip in order to find out what the guard’s wife knew about Janek’s involvement with Federn, but Kromy’s presence changed all that.

           
“I brought you some
klobása
for Easter Day,” she said, reaching into her sack and holding out her peace offering of half a dozen fat sausages.

           
“Give them here,” said Kromy, snatching the string of sausages from her. He inspected them closely, smiled with approval, then ordered Ivana to fry them up for dinner. “I’m going to be hungry when I get back. There’s some trouble at the South Gate to the
Židovské M
sto
.”

           
“What kind of trouble?” asked Anya.

           
“Didn’t you hear?” said Kromy, grinning as if he were enjoying her distress. “They arrested some more Jews for killing that girl.”

           
“But I thought they already had that shop keeper in custody—”

           
“You know as well as I do that there’s no such thing as
one
guilty Jew,” Kromy said, looking her over the same way he did the sausages.