The Fifth Servant (54 page)

           
“Then she should go to the rabbi,” I said. “We could even take her with us. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind—”

           
And at that moment, which required the utmost delicacy, Lazarus Fettmilch burst into the house. His dirty blond hair stuck out at all angles as if he had just stepped out of a whirlwind, and his face flushed with rage when he saw me.

           
“What are you doing here?” he demanded, clomping toward me and leaving dark puddles wherever he walked.

           
When I explained that we were here to ask him about the key to a certain lock, he told us what we could do with our locks and keys, then he threw us out. The door slammed, then we heard a heavy crash as he screamed at his wife and daughter for letting us in.

           
Anya gave me a pained look, then she told me that Havvah had anticipated her husband’s foul mood, and had given her the names of several other locksmiths in the ghetto.

           
“That’s just what we need. You’ve done a terrific job, Anya,” I told her.

           
“Then why don’t I feel terrific about it?”

           
“Because you’ve just seen the face of a lost innocence that can never be completely recovered.”

           
She stopped and faced me.

           
“What?” I asked.

           
She regarded me as if taking my full measure, and said, “So there
are
other Jews like Yankev. And I thought he was so unique.”

           
“He is unique, he’s just…”

           
“Just what?”

           
She stood with one hand on her hip, shifting her weight from one foot to the other.

           
I searched for the words, but even when I found them I couldn’t meet her eyes.
He just tried to escape from the ghetto without you
. So I looked away and said, “Just like the rest of us. He’s toiling forever toward perfection without ever achieving it.”

           
“Yes, that’s him, all right.” She clasped her hands and hugged them to her chest like any young woman dreaming of her lover.

           
“Thank you for everything,” she said, reaching out to me. I backed away abruptly.

           
“We still have a mission to complete,” I said.

           
And a grim mission it was. We passed through house holds weighed down by the iron claws of melancholy, from grimy hovels tucked away in dark passages to three-story town houses on Golden Lane, before we found a locksmith who could tell us that it would be a simple matter for any competent cracksman to pick the lock that went with the heavy key that Anya held in her hand.

           
I still didn’t see how two big men could have crept into the Janeks’ bedroom and taken their little Gerta away without waking them up. And the only possible explanation that occurred to me was that Janek must have let them in himself. But why?

           
Then Anya filled me in with the facts about Janek’s attraction to young Julie Federn and the trouble it had caused him. And I wondered if Janek had conspired with the men to use his own daughter somehow as a way of getting back at Federn.

           
But surely he never expected them to
kill
her.

           
So where did they shoot her? And how come nobody heard it? They must have taken her
somewhere
, like the other side of the river, then put her in a butcher’s cart when they got to the waterfront. Everything was coming together like the threads in a tapestry, but I was too neck-deep in it to see the patterns, and I needed to step back to get some perspective. And with a yarn this tangled, I’d have to step awfully far back to make sense of it.

           
MORDECAI M EISEL’S DINING ROOM was lined with display shelves crammed with shiny silver pitchers and trays and decanters, all so intricately carved and decorated it was hard to believe anybody ever used them. Rabbi Gans sat at the table composing the rich man’s will while Rabbi Loew stood by and acted as a witness.

           
Meisel had come to Rabbi Loew begging for help, worried that since he was childless, if he died in the next day or so without a proper will, the state would take possession of his entire fortune, which was worth more than 400,000
gildn
at the time. After giving it some thought, Rabbi Loew finally declared the situation an emergency, and announced a suspension of certain rules due to the extraordinary circumstances.

           
Gans read back the laudatory phrases that he had set down so far: “I, Mordecai Meisel, a prince among men and a pillar of the community, who feeds the poor and hungry with the choicest meats and flour, who built a hospice that serves both Christians and Jews, who helped to fund the Church of the Savior, who lent the Jews of Poznan 10,000 gulden after the great fire of 1590, who has chosen every year to give two poor girls dowries so that they might get married—”

           
“I don’t need to hear the whole
shpil
again,” said Rabbi Loew, taking Rabbi Gans’s pen and making a stiff and uncomfortable
X
at the bottom of the page. Despite the circumstances, it was that difficult for him to write a single letter on this holy day.

           
“Can you add one more item to the list?” I said, still shaking off the chill from our nighttime trek through the ghetto.

           
“What’s that?” asked Meisel.

           
“Raising the money to bail our friend Yankev ben Khayim out of jail.”

           
Anya looked up at me with the kind of admiration usually reserved for saints and other do-gooders.

           
Meisel caught the exchange and his eyebrows knotted up, but he found it in his heart to say, “Why certainly, my boy, certainly. Will five hundred dalers be enough?”

           
“We might be able to bribe our way into the stock house with that, but I don’t know how far it’ll go toward getting us back
out
again. Everything is so much more expensive in this town, including the price of a man’s freedom.”

           
“You’re right. We’d better make it a thousand.”

           
We all thanked Meisel for his generosity, especially Rabbi Gans, who had the gift of eloquence in such things.

           
“There is one other matter, Reb Meisel,” I said.

           
“Yes?” said the mayor, facing me with an open smile, as if he expected me to add a few choice pearls of my own to the long string of compliments.

           
“I need the names of your biggest debtors.”

           
If he was disappointed, he didn’t show it. No wonder he was such a successful merchant.

           
“Jews or Christians?” he said.

           
Damn
. I had been trying not to think about the possibility of broader Jewish involvement in this affair. Time was running short, and I couldn’t afford to waste another minute of my most precious resource chasing down dead ends. I had to concentrate on the most likely scenarios, which certainly sounded like a good plan—
but which were the most likely scenarios?

           
“Both, I guess.”

           
Meisel started to recite the names off the top of his head, and there were so many that I had to ask him to start over so Rabbi Gans could write them all down for me.

           
“Is all this writing really necessary?” said Rabbi Gans.

           
“I’m afraid so,” I said. “And be sure to make separate lists for the Jews and Christians.”

           
“What are you going to do with the list of Christian names?” said Meisel.

           
“I’m going to give them to the sheriff.”

           
“And you think that will do any good?”

           
“It might or it might not.”

           
That left a hole in the conversation big enough to drive a team of oxen through, until Rabbi Gans said, “Then we’ll just have to believe that it might.”

           
“Yes, exactly,” I said, trying to sound convincing.

           
Meisel started with the Jews first, and Rabbi Gans copied down all the names in a single column:

           
B. Shtastny

           
I. Rabinowitz

           
M. Vinchevsky

           
L. Finkelstein

           
M. Pacovsky

           
J. Stein

           
F. Weiler

           
E. Bavli

           
K. Halpern

           
Rabbi Loew closed his eyes as if the mere sight of the list was too much for him, then he reopened them and said that a few of the names belonged to the people who had left the shul in protest during his sermon.

           
My ears filled with silence for a few seconds, and I thought of the Arab saying,
Better a thousand enemies outside the gates than one enemy inside the gates
.

           
“Now let’s get on with the list of Christian debtors,” I said.

           
“Should we include
keyser
Rudolf in the list?” asked Rabbi Gans, as we gathered around him. “I didn’t think so,” he said, answering his own question.

           
The list of Christians ran slightly longer:

           
L. Mutz

           
K. Obuvník

           
E. Feuermann

           
M. Dietrichstein

           
J. Kopecky

           
P. Grubner

           
A. Straka

           
J. Fenstermacher

           
L. Belickis

           
S. Jacobus

           
A. Hesse

           
P. Bleisch

           
L. Kompert

           
T. Wolff

           
None of the names meant anything to me, but Anya peered over my shoulder, put her finger on the fifth name and said, “Janoš Kopecky the butcher? How much does he owe you?”

           
“Around five thousand dalers,” said Meisel.

           
“Why would a butcher need that kind of money?” I asked.

           
Meisel said, “Kopecky may have started out as a butcher, but he always had plans to expand into other areas. So he borrowed the money to build a new slaughter house outside the city.”

           
“A slaughter house that makes deliveries every morning,” said Anya. “By boat and horse cart.”

           
A bright spot must have lit up in the middle of my brain, and I saw it all at once.

           
Anya read the look on my face and knew exactly what I was thinking. “The meat shipments come from the other side of the river,” she said.

           
I turned to Meisel. “Then I’m going to need a couple more dalers.”

           
THERE IS A PASSAGE IN
Melokhim Beys
, the Second Book of Kings, in which four lepers sit outside the gates of Samaria, a city abandoned to war and famine, and discuss their fate. Simply put, if they go to the enemy camp and beg for food, they will probably die, but if they stay where they are, they will
surely
die. So they decide they have nothing to lose and head for the camp of the Aramaeans.

           
And for the first time, I understood their situation completely. Maybe it was the spirit of my recently fallen comrade speaking through me, but I couldn’t stand around any longer and just wait for the Christians to come and get us. We had to go out there and learn what we could about the routes of the daily shipments of meat from Kopecky’s slaughter house.

           
I said, “We have to divide up the names on this list and question every one of these Jews
to night
. And then, one of us has to sneak out of the ghetto sometime before daybreak and go to the waterfront disguised as a Christian.”