The Warsaw Anagrams (15 page)

‘Now get out of my apartment,’ she ordered harshly, ‘or I’ll call my husband and have you arrested. He’s an important judge, and Governor Frank is a family friend. So if you think you will ever do anything to hurt my Paweł, then you are …’

‘If Governor Frank were such a friend,’ I cut in, ‘then why did you tell me the truth about Anna? You have to know that I suspect that you might be behind her disappearance. Or is it your son who’s responsible?’

Mrs Sawicki shot me a hateful look. ‘I only told you about the girl because she means nothing to me or my son – dead or alive.’

‘I never said she was dead!’ I declared.

‘Hah!’ she sneered. ‘If you think you’ve caught me out, then you’re a fool, Mr Honec. You must suspect she’s dead or you wouldn’t be here. In any case, I can’t imagine why she means anything to the Reich Ministry of the Interior.’

‘That, Mrs Sawicki, is no concern of yours,’ I told her with poisonous calm, and before she could come up with a reply, I went to retrieve my coat and hat from the sofa.

When I returned to the foyer, it was clear from her
contemptuous
face that we had nothing more to say to each other. I nodded by way of goodbye and reached for the door handle, turning away from her. A mistake. I felt a burn near my elbow. She’d pressed something through my sweater into my skin. Stinging with pain, I swung out my arm and caught her on the mouth with the back of my hand, knocking her into the wall. Righting herself, she dropped her cigarette to the floor and crushed it out with the toe of her shoe. Reaching up to her lip, which was cut, she took some blood on to her fingertip and licked it.

Tears of shock and pain had welled in my eyes. I wiped them away roughly.

‘Now you’ll never go anywhere again without a scar from me!’ she told me, and she laughed in a triumphant burst.

Mrs Sawicki was treacherous enough to have murdered Anna, and she was obviously given to violent outbursts, but why would she have taken the girl’s hand?

Might Paweł have been so passionately in love with Anna that he gave her a precious family heirloom – a bracelet – without thinking of how angrily his mother would react? After all, Mrs Sawicki
had
become particularly defensive when I’d mentioned Anna’s jewellery. Maybe Anna had kept the gift concealed from her mother and friends. On the day she ventured out of the ghetto, she somehow sealed the clasp so that it couldn’t be taken from her without also taking her hand.

And yet with a judge for a husband, Mrs Sawicki would have found a legal way to recover any keepsake that Paweł had given Anna. She would have claimed, in fact, that the girl had stolen it. No government official would have believed Anna’s word against hers.

Furthermore, it seemed impossible that Mrs Sawicki could have had anything to do with Adam’s murder. How would she even have known of his existence?

In the lobby, I took Izzy’s arm and rushed him away, sure that we’d be in danger as long as we remained nearby. Despite myself, I’d begun to fear that Mrs Sawicki could stop my heart with a single, well-directed thought.

She was gazing down at us from her balcony as we crossed the street. And all that day she would wheel above my thoughts like a bird of prey.

We made it to Jawicki Jewellers on Spacerowa Street at just past one in the afternoon. I recognized the balding shop manager who’d sold me a floral pin for Liesel two years before, but he didn’t know me, which was a relief. Still, Mrs Sawicki had unnerved me and I fumbled Hannah’s ring when I took it out of my pocket. It crashed on to his wooden desk.

He snatched it up with an agile hand. ‘Got ya!’ he exclaimed.

‘Thanks,’ I told him.

‘You needn’t have worried,’ he observed. ‘Diamonds are a lot harder than people.’

A surprising comment. Izzy looked at me sideways, which meant
don’t let him trick you into saying anything about yourself
.

The jeweller put a loop in his eye and turned the ring to catch the diffuse winter light from his window. At length, he said, ‘I’ll give you two thousand seven hundred for it.’ His toothy smile meant that he was giving me a great deal.

‘It’s worth three times that,’ I stated for the record.

‘Not to someone in your position,’ he retorted.

The moist chill at the back of my neck was my fear that he
did
remember me – and knew I was a Jew. ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’ I demanded, figuring I might try to intimidate him.

‘You badly need cash or you wouldn’t be here.’

‘Three thousand five hundred,’ Izzy said, ‘or we go elsewhere and you lose big.’ He spoke with a Jimmy Cagney snarl to his words.

‘Your bodyguard?’ the jeweller asked me, smirking. His
comment
was meant to put Izzy in his place, since he wasn’t quite five foot four even on his best day.

‘As a matter of fact, I’ve been his bodyguard for sixty years,’ my old friend replied.

And then he took a gun out of his coat pocket.

‘Shit!’ the jeweller exclaimed, jumping up from his stool.

‘What in God’s name are you doing?’ I whisper-screamed at Izzy.

‘Protecting us,’ he replied calmly.

‘Don’t shoot me!’ the man pleaded. Taking a step back, he held up both his hands as if to stop an onrushing carriage.

The pistol was bulky and black – and stunningly dangerous. ‘Does it work?’ I asked.

‘You bet,’ Izzy told me happily. ‘It’s German, and I just cleaned it the other day.’ He jiggled it: ‘Very sensitive – might even go off accidentally …’ Here, he targeted his vengeful eyes on the jeweller – ‘and kill the rudest person in the room. Now who do you think that might be?’

‘There’s … there’s no need for violence,’ the man assured him in a trembling voice.

‘Glad we agree,’ Izzy replied. He kissed the barrel of the gun, then held the tip to his ear, pretending to listen closely. ‘Right, you got it, baby,’ he said, as if he were a hitman speaking to his girlfriend. He slipped the pistol into his coat pocket. ‘Marlene wants to know if we get our three thousand?’ he asked. ‘She’s concerned. And when she’s concerned, it’s best to pay attention. You got that?’

‘I understand. I’ll give you … two thousand nine hundred.’

The jeweller still wanted to bargain? This was craziness! Izzy caught my glance and raised his shoulders to prompt my reply. I could see he was looking forward to bragging about his performance.

‘It’s a deal,’ I said.

‘It’ll take me at least an hour to get the money,’ the jeweller told us. ‘Come back at two-thirty.’

‘Why in God’s name did you bring a gun?’ I asked Izzy as we hurried away. I was stomping over the cobbles, worried that
someone
had seen his weapon through the shop window.

‘You should be thanking me,’ he remarked contentedly. ‘I’ve cured your paso doble!’

I scowled at him, which made him flap his hand at me as if I was being a pest. ‘Look, Erik, ‘Did you really think I was going to venture into a city run by anti-Semitic cavemen with just Yiddish curses to defend us? Sorry, but I ain’t that
meshugene
.’

‘Where’d you get it anyway?’ I asked, conceding his point.

‘It was Papa’s. It’s an 1896 Model 2 Bergman – five millimetre.’ Whispering, he said, ‘Feels damn good in my hand. Maybe I was born to be a gunslinger!’

‘Do you really know how to use it?’

‘Erik, it doesn’t require a doctorate from the Sorbonne,’ he replied, snorting. ‘It takes a five-round clip – couldn’t be easier. Besides, you learn a lot about a pistol when you take it apart and give it a cleaning. It’s a lot simpler to put back together than a Swiss cuckoo clock, I can tell you that!’ He took my arm. ‘I thought it was a good touch my kissing the pistol – and calling it Marlene. Nobody would think a Jew would do that.’

As we walked down Spacerowa Street, Izzy and I debated whether the jeweller would keep up his end of our bargain. We could easily believe that his greed would win out over his anger – and whatever suspicions he had about us – but we also knew he might simply pick up the phone and call the police. So we decided to keep watch on his shop from a fabric store down the street. We chose that particular locale because Izzy was eager to buy a few yards of tweed for a warm pair of winter trousers.

If no police showed up, we’d go back to get our money at 2.30.

I wanted to wash the burn on my arm with cold water, and the shop owner was kind enough to let me use the sink in his loo, where I inspected the damage. Mrs Sawicki was right – there’d be a scar. My skin was throbbing. Splashing water on it did little good.

Back at my post by the front door, I discovered that the coast was still clear. As the minutes clicked past, I began to believe that I’d been needlessly apprehensive. Hope that one has chanced upon the road back to the way things used to be is apparently a strong desire in those who’ve been locked outside their previous lives.

Izzy was looking at different herringbone patterns on the counter, delighted with his range of options. The mystery of Anna’s connection to Adam was still nagging at me, and after a couple of minutes I went to him.

‘Imagine you’re fourteen years old,’ I whispered. ‘You’re in trouble, and you need your boyfriend’s help, but he’s in Switzerland and his mother has just treated you like an insect. You can’t talk to your parents, because you’re a prisoner in their home. So where do you go?’

He closed his eyes to consider my question. ‘I’m not sure, let me think about it,’ he finally replied. A couple of minutes later, after he’d picked out the fabric he wanted, he called me over and said, ‘Erik, Anna would have gone back to the one person who’d treated her well – Mikael Tengmann.’

‘That’s what I figured,’ I replied, ‘except that Mikael’s nurse told me she was never at his office. But let’s assume he did see her, and that she wanted to talk to him again, where would she have gone to see him?’

‘At his home.’

‘No, I don’t think so – his office is in his home.’

A half a minute or so later, when I peeked out the door, a Gestapo officer was standing outside Jawicki’s, about fifty paces away. He was putting on black leather gloves. Parked next to him was a black Mercedes.

I realized we’d been fools not to simply leave this part of town and offer Hannah’s ring to another jeweller. We were colossal amateurs at this life of subterfuge.

‘Is there a back door that leads to some other street?’ I asked the owner, who was ringing up Izzy’s purchase.

He frowned at me, and I could see he thought that we were up to no good.

Grinning in what I hoped was a charming way, I told him I’d spotted someone I owed money to walking down the street; a stupid lie, but what could I say?

He told me there was only the front door, so I made Izzy pay quickly and then steered him there. ‘The Gestapo are on to us,’ I whispered. ‘When we get outside, don’t look towards Jawicki’s. Just walk slowly to the right.’

Stepping on to the sidewalk, we heard no screams or whistles, but after twenty or so paces, when I looked back to see what was happening, the Gestapo officer had his gun drawn and was staring at me; the jeweller must have told him what we looked like. My turning round had only confirmed that we were the suspects he was after.

I must have groaned or given away my panic in some other way; Izzy looked back.

‘We’re fucked!’ he whispered.

‘We’ve got to run!’ I told him.

We took off west on Szucha Street and made it to Rakowiecka before Izzy’s arthritis made him double over. Panting, he pushed me off. ‘Get going!’ he ordered. ‘I’ll shoot the Nazi when he gets close.’

I felt as if everything I’d ever lived for were turning slowly around this one moment, but I wasn’t about to let Izzy sacrifice himself for me.

‘I’m too tired to run,’ I replied. ‘You’re stuck with me.’

By now, the Gestapo officer had turned the corner – no more than sixty yards from us. He was in good shape, and young. A sense of doom pounded in my chest.

‘Erik!’

Izzy had stumbled forward into the doorway of an apartment house and was waving me towards him.

I joined him in the dark hallway. My throat felt as if it had been scraped with a rasp. The burn on my arm was aching.

‘You think he saw us come in here?’ Izzy asked in a whisper.

‘Probably. And anyway, people on the street noticed and will denounce us. Come on,’ I said, grabbing his arm, ‘let’s get out of here!’

We pushed through the rear door into the courtyard, which had been dug up to make a garden, though winter had starved it to a barren tangle of skeletal vines and brambles. A strongly built, middle-aged woman in a dark headscarf, plaid overcoat and frumpy woollen slippers was bent over in the far corner, pulling out metal stakes around which clung the withered tendrils of dead sweet peas. Behind her, the remains of tomato plants tortured by the wind and cold crumpled against a rusted trellis. The woman’s torn gloves dangled from the rim of her lopsided wooden barrow, which looked like a relic from the Iron Age.

Today, in my mind, I see her as though she were symbolic of all the women who bear misery with lips sealed to silence.

She looked up at Izzy and me, staring at my armband.

‘We mean no harm,’ I assured her in Polish.

She picked up her spade, but not in a threatening way. She stood with it, her posture rigid, as though she were posing for a portrait. I threw down my armband. ‘We’re not Nazis,’ I told her, opening my hands. ‘We’re in the Resistance and we’re in trouble.’

The woman’s face showed the indifference of stone. After leaning her spade against her barrow, she bent over, pulled out another stake and tossed it with a harsh clang into the pile she’d made.

Izzy and I were still gasping for breath. To be sixty-seven years old in the Polish winter is to know the limits of the body.

‘Thank God we didn’t go far away from Jawicki’s,’ Izzy told me.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘If we’d come back only when we were supposed to, the Mercedes would have been hidden around the corner. We’d have never known that that son-of-a-bitch called the Gestapo until it was too late.’