Ritual Murder (13 page)

“By no chance.”

“Funny thing—” Jurnet rubbed his chin. “You came into the cathedral for some notes and didn't get them. She came in for some slides, and didn't get them either. What do you make of that?”

“I don't make anything of it,” Mosh Epperstein said. “I'm not the Philip Marlowe look-alike around here.” He stuck a bony hand into the back pocket of his jeans, and brought out a battered cigarette, two-thirds smoked. “Mind if I smoke?”

“Go ahead.”

“Got a match?”

Jurnet opened a drawer and found a book of matches, which he tossed across the desk. He watched as the young man drew on the butt, the tight-drawn features under the frizzy black hair relaxing as he did so. All at once the detective's eyes widened in angry astonishment. He snatched the joint from between the archaeology student's lips.

“Of all the bloody nerve!”

Mosh Epperstein, mocking, “I asked, didn't I?”

The second pot of coffee was strong and scalding. Jurnet drank two cups.

Rabbi Schnellman asked, “Do you have to keep him in custody?”

“For crying out loud! We found another ten reefers on him,
and
a tin with traces of snow. He's got a solicitor if he wants to apply for bail. Lighting some grass right under the nose of the police officer interviewing him!” Jurnet calmed down and demanded, “Why? That's the question. Was he half-stoned already and didn't realize what he was doing? Were the questions getting too near the bone, or has he reasons for thinking he's safer locked up in a cell than out free on the streets? Not custody, but sanctuary. What or who is he afraid of?”

“You could have asked him.”

Jurnet shook his head.

“I didn't trust myself to.”

“You mean, because he's Jewish?” The other nodded. “But surely, in your chapel-going days, you didn't favour Baptists above Christians of other denominations?”

“I don't mean playing favourites—quite the opposite. I was leaning so bloody far backwards to avoid any suspicion of it, I couldn't be sure any more I was doing my job properly.” Jurnet moved Taleh's head gently aside, got up, and moved restlessly about the room. “God, I
know
I'm not doing my job properly. There's a kid dead, and all I want is to get away from the side issues, back to the fundamentals—the body, the dick, the murderer, just the three of us getting cosily acquainted, not the re-run of an old movie that got itself an Oscar back in 1144. Just one solitary kid, not a massacre.”

The Rabbi said, “One
is
a massacre.” He looked towards the patch of night sky visible through the window. “Who could conceive a star if nobody had ever seen one? But once you've seen one of them, what's a galaxy? One comprehends all, which is why we are never more in tune with the Almighty than when we recite the
Sh'ma
, the declaration of His Oneness. All other numbers are an illusion, a mathematical confidence trick.”

“There you go,” Jurnet objected. “Turning Arthur Cossey back into a symbol again.”

“No. The reverse. I'm turning the symbol back into Arthur Cossey.”

The telephone rang. Leo Schnellman looked at his visitor.

“Anybody know you're here?” The detective shook his head. The Rabbi lifted the receiver. “Yes—yes—when? I see—are they—? Yes—” To Jurnet, the words were uncommunicative; but the changes in the Rabbi's expression had him waiting impatiently for the call to come to an end.

“Not necessary,” said the Rabbi into the telephone. “I have transport. Detective-Inspector Jurnet is with me. We'll come at once.”

He replaced the receiver, and announced quietly, “I won't be a minute. I have to get some clothes on.”

At the door, he threw over his shoulder, almost casually, “Seems there's somebody in town likes old movies.”

Lise's Patisserie was in Shire Street, a winding thoroughfare which the Angleby planners, for once repressing their urge to tear down and replace with something in reinforced concrete, had turned into the most delightful pedestrian precinct in the country. During the day the narrow roadway, paved over and set about with seats and shrubbery, resounded to the rat-tat of footsteps and the hum of conversation. It was a pleasant place to shop, to linger, to meet one's friends.

And the pleasantest place to meet one's friends was the pastry shop and café run by the Weisingers.

White-painted, with a green-and-white sunblind curving out from the fascia, Lise's Patisserie promised no more than it delivered. Whether, on sunny days, consumed at tables and chairs set out in the street, or, in less clement weather, eaten within, the Weisingers' apfelstrudel and Sachertorte surpassed anything to be found in Vienna, even in the days when Vienna
was
Vienna. The coffee was wonderful; a rack of the day's papers was there for the reading; at a white-painted baby grand embowered in potted palms a delicately nurtured lady dispensed the melodies of her prime. The waitresses in their colourful dirndls were obliging, the prices were reasonable, and the Weisingers themselves were the best value of all.

They were a small couple, Lise plump and vivacious, Karl quieter. Angleby natives tended to boast about the Weisingers to visitors to the city, and take them to the Patisserie the way they took them to see the castle and the cathedral. It was invariably these visitors who commented on Karl's hands, immaculate in white cotton gloves, or who, in summer, when Lise wore short-sleeved blouses, remarked upon the number tattooed on her left arm.

Then, with voices kept low out of regard for their hosts' susceptibilities, but with that relish inseparable from having a shocking story to tell, the outlanders would be told that Karl, whose piano playing in the '30s had delighted musical Europe, was, like his wife, a survivor of Auschwitz, where the camp doctors, full of a scientific curiosity as to what made pianists tick, had reduced his hands to talons. According to some versions, Lise, who before the war had already begun to make a name for herself as a singer of
lieder
, had found him after the liberation dying in a ditch by the roadside, unwilling to be rescued maimed as he was; had nursed him back to health and self-respect, and to a love which more than compensated for all that he had lost … Though there were others who dismissed this as sentimental nonsense, declaring that the two had suffered enough to be spared the further humiliation of being reduced to characters out of a story in a women's magazine.

Whatever the truth of it, from Auschwitz to Angleby was a long journey: from piano and
lieder
to apfelstrudel and mandelkuchen even longer. True, Lise had never sung a note since the day camp was liberated, and Karl could no longer play the piano, which was a tragedy. Yet look how things turn out! It was Karl who, notwithstanding his hands, made all those wonderful cakes. He had discovered in himself another form of genius, one which, in different circumstances, would have lain unknown and unused: and who—fingers quartering the plate for the last delicious crumb—were mere mortals to say it may not have been all for the best.?

“I am furious with myself!” Karl Weisinger greeted the two arrivals. He looked smart, even foppish, in a foulard dressing-gown with cravat to match. On his hands were gloves dazzling in their whiteness. “Why on earth did I ask the police-constable to telephone? At this hour of the night! Unpardonable!”

Leo Sehnellman put up an admonitory hand.

“Please! I'm grateful. People so seldom permit me the delusion of thinking I can be of help.”

Tieless, braces hanging, his black trilby grey with Taleh's hairs, he looked an unlikely candidate for ministering angel. But at the sight of him Lise Weisinger smiled for the first time since, in their flat above the shop, they had been awakened by the noise of the brick crashing through the plate-glass window below.

“No delusion, Rabbi,” she said. “To see the face of a friend at such a time—there could be no help greater.”

“Oh yes, there could! And Detective-Inspector Jurnet is here to provide it.”

Karl Weisinger shook hands with a Continental formality. Jurnet, who knew the couple's history, and had, in Miriam's company, several times patronized their establishment, was pleasantly surprised at their composure. He could only surmise that, after all that had happened to them already, a brick through a window was not all that much.

The husband looked at Jurnet's face, and remarked, “If I may say so, the Detective-Inspector looks as if he could do with a little help himself.”

Jurnet grinned.

“Not any longer. I've been visiting the Rabbi.”

“Ah! Leo is a source of strength to us all. You were in the affair in the Close? We saw it on the News. And I suppose—” taking in the mess of glass, the display stands and the candy boxes scattered about the tiled floor, where, among the devastation it had created, lay a raw, red brick—“this is a continuation of the same event?”

“Too soon to jump to conclusions,” said Jurnet, who had jumped to them already. “PC Hubbard here tells me he's already taken down particulars, so I won't harrow you with going over it all again. Tomorrow, when you've got over the shock, we'll have a proper talk. Just one thing—after the crash, did you hear anything? Someone running away, or maybe more than one? Footsteps sound loud at night.”

The man shook his head.

“We go to bed early, because we must be up early for the baking, and so we were deep asleep. Lise takes a pill—”

Lise Weisinger observed, in a matter-of-fact way, “It is difficult, is it not, when you have just woken up, to know what is reality and what is still the dream?”

“It's too bad!” Jurnet burst out, carried away by his imaginings of what might be the dreams of people with a past like the Weisingers. “That of all the people in the city, this had to happen to you.”

“Of all the Jews in the city, you mean?” Karl Weisinger shrugged his shoulders. “It is of no significance. In a matter of this kind, you understand, all Jews are the same Jew.”

There was no answer to that, and Jurnet attempted none. Lise exclaimed, “It could have been worse! Nobody has been hurt. What is a bit of broken glass, after all? Now, I am going to make a nice cup of coffee—” (Jurnet, who had already drunk three mugsful at the Rabbi's, contrived nevertheless to look suitably expectant) “—and then we shall all feel better. Karl, fetch some of the streusel kuchen, and make sure there is a table and some chairs with no pieces of glass.”

“Are we permitted to tidy up?” her husband asked Jurnet.

“Don't touch the brick. Being so porous, they're not much use for prints as a rule, but you never know. I'll send a man round first thing. And somebody'll be coming to relieve PC Hubbard—”

Lise Weisinger, bringing cups and saucers from the kitchen behind the shop, put down the tray. It was the first time Jurnet had seen fear in her face.

“You think they may come back?”

“Nothing like that,” the detective hastened to reassure her. “It's the broken glass, and that hole in the window. Somebody passing might get themselves cut, or some yobbo with a bit too much beer inside him decide to help along the good work. Tomorrow I can let you have some names. We keep a list at Headquarters of firms that do this kind of work at short notice—”

Karl Weisinger inquired with polite interest, “To mend the broken window, Inspector, or the broken dream?”

Jurnet stared, and stammered, “I beg your pardon?”

One of the white-gloved hands was raised in smiling admonition. “Please! It is we, the dreamers, who should be asking pardon of you for being so much trouble, for forgetting that the essence of a dream—its geometrical proof, as you might say—is that, sooner or later, one wakes up.” With a crunch of glass underfoot, the man crossed to his wife's side and put a loving arm round her plump shoulders. “Lise and I, we have been very happy here in England. The English people have been very good to us. But now the dream is ended.”

“Just because a couple of louts—” Jurnet began in protest. The other cut him short.

“You really think that is all it is, you with your hurt face from today's doing in the Close? You with the murderer of that poor child still to find?” Karl Weisinger shook his head. “No, my dear Detective-Inspector, do not deceive yourself, and do not ask us to deceive ourselves either. Nothing is changed. The evil that was there still flourishes; a weed which, cut down, merely reappears in another place. It is all beginning again, just as it began all those years ago. And we are no longer young, Lise and I.” Turning to Leo Schnellman, “You must forgive us, my dear Leo, for feeling that we really cannot face it a second time.”

Braces dangling, the Rabbi still contrived to look like an Old Testament prophet as he demanded sternly, “What kind of foolish talk is this? If fear excused self-murder Jews would have vanished from the face of the earth centuries ago.”

“You are mistaken.” Karl Weisinger shook his head again. His grasp round his wife's shoulders tightened. “We are not afraid. Fear is a positive emotion. It does not kill. It reminds you how wonderful it is simply to draw breath. Do you think that, in Auschwitz, we could have borne the agony of awaking to another day and another day if, unbearable as each day was, it was yet more bearable than the only alternative?” With a smile of great sweetness, “To be beyond fear is to be beyond hope, and alas, my dear friend, the truth of it is that tonight we are beyond hope. Tired.” In a voice so low as to be barely audible, “Tired unto death.”

But at that his wife pulled herself free, her bosom heaving, her eyes shining with love and impatience.

“Pay no attention to him, Rabbi! Who does he think he is, that the world must change to suit his convenience? Nothing is changed, the fool says, as if all our years together have no meaning! As if, given the choice all over again, I shouldn't choose Auschwitz with Karl rather than Buckingham Palace without him!
The dream is broken!
” she repeated scornfully. “Who needs dreams so long as we have each other?” Unmindful of spectators, Lise Weisinger embraced her husband with a passion that aroused in Jurnet feelings of loneliness and longing. “And now,
Liebchen
, the kuchen. You are keeping our guests waiting!”