HS02 - Days of Atonement (33 page)

‘Lieutenant Mutiez will be responsible for handling them,’ Lavedrine shot back.

‘This is a murder investigation,’ Mutiez added. ‘Remember that fact. If there is any suggestion of pilfering, you will find yourselves lashed to a gun carriage and dragged in shame before the ranks.’

Lavedrine and I exchanged looks.

‘Send a runner to look for us if anything of interest comes to light, Henri,’ he said.

‘Where will you be, sir?’

‘A fair question,’ Lavedrine said with a smile. ‘Where will we be, Stiffeniis?’

‘Judenstrasse,’ I replied.

We lingered for five minutes, watching them get down to work. ‘The evidence should be moved away from here, I think,’ I said to Lavedrine. I was thinking of Professor Kant’s laboratory near the castle of Königsberg. ‘Somewhere that is clean, dry, and cold. A place which is safe and secret, where you and I may examine the remains without being lynched by another mob.’

Lavedrine nodded. ‘I’ll speak to Mutiez.’

A few minutes later, still trying to clean the worst of the dirt from our clothes, we moved towards the door.

‘Is it her body, do you think?’ Lavedrine asked uncertainly.

If he were asking me to confirm or deny the possibility, I refused to help him. He would probably have belittled my reasoning. The total devastation of that corpse, and the cruel death that the woman had died, were enough to convince me. I recognised the same crushing annihilation that had overtaken them all. One by one. Her husband had been hounded to his death. Her children had been mercilessly slaughtered. The mystery of how that woman had died was perplexing, but in the details only. Had she been murdered there, or somewhere else? Had she been raped, then left, stumbling about in the dark, accidentally bringing those barrels cascading down upon
her head? Or had her lifeless shell been taken there by someone who knew that the warehouse was deserted, and believed that it would long remain so?

‘If it is her corpse, we are no closer to finding the killer,’ I replied, stepping out into the daylight. ‘He will be accused of four murders, rather than three. But we have to catch him first.’

 24 

D
USK WAS FALLING
as we began to climb the hill in the direction of the ghetto.

Our Judenstrasse is a winding, narrow street near the top of Nogatsstrasse which falls away towards the west, trailing out into the flat countryside in the direction of the Berlin road.

If a man needed carpets, kitchen utensils, pots and pans, or knives and forks, someone in Judenstrasse would provide them at a reasonable price. There was nothing, except the name, to distinguish it from any other street in the oldest part of Lotingen, and it was frequented as much by Gentiles (so they called us) as it was by Israelites (as we called them)—in a word, a Gentile was a customer, and a Son of Israel was a trader, and they got on well enough.

Indeed, Gentiles were oftentimes obliged to go there, for services were offered in our Judenstrasse that could be found nowhere else in town. If a man had money to invest, the only place to make contact with an agent who would expedite the movement of money against shares was Judenstrasse. Coffee was a movable commodity, but all of it passed through Holland. Russian hardwoods were equally profitable, but who in Lotingen would know the name, address or language of the man in St Petersburg who happened to administer the trade? And who could invest in English cotton with men who spoke only English, if it were not for Jews who spoke Yiddish between themselves? Of course, Napoleon and his Continental System had severely restricted the possibilities for investment, but the Jews knew ways to get around the prohibition and the English naval blockades. And if you had to go to Vilnius in the East, or Transylvania in the South, and needed coin of those places, who else but a Jewish money-teller would have some ready and waiting in his coffers?

All this was Judenstrasse with its coffee shops and cluttered emporia, its kosher butchers and taverns. But as we turned into the street and walked the first fifty yards, I realised that much had changed with the coming of the
French. I had had no reason to go there in more than a year. Many Jews had been forced to abandon the larger cities in Prussia out of fear, I had heard, and had made their way to smaller, safer towns, such as Lotingen. Our Judenstrasse was neither long nor wide, and it had always been busy, but not uncomfortably so. Now, the street was packed, and it grew increasingly difficult to push our way through the crowd.

All at once, we were forced to pull up short in front of a gate.

A large gate made of iron, which had not been there before.

Armed soldiers were standing guard in front of it. During my absence in Kamenetz, a high wooden paling had been erected across the street, beyond which the milling crowd inside the ghetto seemed suddenly wild and agitated. This mêlée was caused by the fact that the soldiers, who were members of the Lotingen Palisaders, had presented arms with a loud clash, slamming their rifle butts to the ground at the approach of the local magistrate.

‘Herr Procurator,’ the corporal in charge saluted. ‘Do you mean to go inside, sir? We have orders to let no one out.’

‘It would be better if we entered alone,’ Lavedrine suggested. ‘If the people in there intend us any harm, four members of the local militia can do nothing to stop them. If the soldiers come in with us, they may provoke a riot. Word will soon get out that we have entered the ghetto. The town will think that we are taking the accusations very seriously. That was what Dittersdorf intended, was it not? An investigation inside the Jewish quarter.’

Lavedrine had put it in a nutshell. The greatest fear of the authorities, French or Prussian, was not prompted by what the Jews might have done. They were afraid of what the people of Lotingen might still sink to. So long as indiscriminate mud-slinging against the inhabitants of the ghetto continued in the papers without a sign of a visible response, there was a danger of a full-blown attack against the Jews.

‘Wait here,’ I said to the militia-men.

I was filled with doubts as I gave the order. Entering alone might produce the opposite of the desired effect. The people might think that we had gone inside to arrest the killer of the Gottewald children. If any man came out with us, he would be lynched on the spot.

‘Keep your hands in view,’ Lavedrine warned me, as one of the soldiers stepped forward and turned a key to let us through. ‘They must not think we are armed, or bent on doing them any harm.’

Before the gate was halfway open, a cry went up, many voices shouting out in strange tongues that I did not recognise, and an ululating chorus of high-pitched female voices assaulted our ears. The crowd fell back, scattering this way and that, fanning out before the opening gate, making space
like ants that feared being crushed underfoot. As the hubbub swelled, an old man emerged from the crowd. He shouted something in their tongue, and the noise inside the ghetto began to dwindle, then die away.

This man, his face a wrinkled target of concentric rings, stretched out his hands, and placed them on the vertical bars, pressing his forehead hard up against the metal.

‘Have you come to murder us?’ he asked quietly.

Lavedrine placed his own hands above the old man’s. They could have been friends meeting by accident at a garden gate.

‘My name is Colonel Lavedrine,’ the Frenchman said, in a relaxed, colloquial manner. ‘I am French. You know the laws of France, sir. All men are equal. No man is a slave. No man is better than any other man, except in what he does. The Jews are men with rights, like all the rest in French law. We make no distinctions.’ He turned to me. ‘This is Procurator Stiffeniis,’ he said. ‘He is the Magistrate of Lotingen. He can go wherever he wishes. This town belongs to him. He can call for the police if he needs them. He asks no man for permission. But . . .’

He paused for a moment, and the old man nodded, as if encouraging him to continue. ‘We do not wish to force our way inside without your consent,’ he said. ‘We will not enter, if that is what you prefer. But three children have been murdered in town. Their mother has disappeared. Those people out there’—he nodded over his shoulder—‘believe that the Jews are responsible. If you have nothing to hide, sir, let us enter.’

I was impressed by his composure. Not a word or a gesture was wasted.

‘Nothing will happen,’ I promised, trying to sound equally reassuring, but a tumult of voices began to drown out mine.

I glanced over my shoulder. A large crowd was gathering at our backs, pressing forward, edging closer, but never too close to the armed soldiers. The windows of the street outside the ghetto were filled with screaming Prussians, egging on the mob to do its worst. Inside, terror was written on the faces craning out of the windows all along Judenstrasse.

Suddenly, a warning shot rang out.

Silence fell like a blanket on the street. It was smouldering, hate-filled, menacing. One shout, one object thrown on either side of the gate, and the militia would shoot to kill.

‘They want Jewish blood,’ Lavedrine murmured. ‘We must enter, or fight our way back. Tell the guardsmen to hold the gate.’

Some signal might have passed. Lavedrine pushed, the old man pulled. We ran in, the soldiers ran in behind us, and the heavy gate crashed closed.

‘It was meant to keep them in,’ Lavedrine muttered. ‘Now, it will keep their enemies out. What strange times we live in!’

Beyond the gate, the mob began to howl again. I felt as though we had run away from jackals, only to step inside a lion’s cage. But the way the Jews retreated before us,
we
might have been the lions.

‘Hold your guard here,’ I shouted to the corporal.

I looked around, wondering whether this alien place could rightly be called Prussia. The panic we had caused outside the gate was mirrored inside the ghetto. There was a wild babble of voices, a sudden scattering as people ran away. But that old man did not flinch. He might have been turned to basalt.

‘We are looking for a man named Aaron Jacob,’ I whispered, leaning closer to his ear. ‘It is not our intention to arrest him, or to harm anyone else. We are here to protect you all from false accusations.’

The Jewish elder stared at me intently. He must have wondered whether I represented salvation, as I promised, or the levelling arm of Caesar.

‘I will take you to him,’ he said to me in refined German, slipping his hand protectively under my arm, as if I were a child. ‘If you carry Aaron off, it will mean death for the children of our community. Bear that in mind. He is
Baal Shem
. The only man who knows how to cure them.’

Ten or twelve men—each one wearing a skullcap or striped mantle on his head—formed around us like a protective phalanx. We turned as a mass and began to walk down Judenstrasse. The place seemed to grow darker, more forbidding, as if we were entering the tunnel of a mine. I raised my eyes from the damp, muddy cobbles, and looked up. The roofs of the houses, three or four floors high, let in light, but not very much. On the upper floors, grey faces stared down at us, only to pull back quickly as they caught my eye. Not a word was heard, not a shout, or a whisper. Those houses might have been inhabited by ghosts.

‘Is Aaron Jacob a
médecin
?’ Lavedrine asked.

The leader nodded, turning into a side-street that was narrower than the one we had just left. This cul-de-sac ended in a dark walled-in courtyard. In the centre stood a large rusty anvil, like a forgotten image of the Golden Calf. It was impossible to guess what went on in that place.

We stopped before a worm-eaten door. Our leader raised his hand and knocked. A moment later, he spoke to a woman who opened the door a crack.

‘Aaron is waiting for you,’ he said. He waved his hand, as if inviting us to enter, but neither he, nor any of the other men, made to follow us.

‘After you,’ Lavedrine quipped.

I stepped inside the dwelling.

The room was larger than I expected. On one side stood a vast chimneypiece, where two or three logs were smouldering. A large black pot hung
from a fire-iron. It was covered with a stiff sheet of grease-stained canvas. Above the fire, on the mantle-shelf were three red-clay jars of a sort we use in Prussia for convenient evacuation of the bladder during the night, more commonly known as piss-pots. Each jar was covered with a lid, but what surprised me more was the fact that each one had been scrupulously marked with a written note in Jewish script, indicating the contents at which I had guessed.