Some Danger Involved (10 page)

Barker spoke to the fellow who had supplied our skullcaps and ribbons the day before. He was about thirty, and clean-shaven save for a black square of dense hair from his lips to his chin. He introduced himself.

“I’m Simon Ben Loew, head of this
chevra.
So, you have returned.”

“I have. I assume these gentlemen were the closest acquaintances of Louis Pokrzywa.”

“We were,” one of them spoke up, almost querulously. “Who are you?”

“My name is Barker. I have been retained by Sir Moses and the Board of Deputies to investigate the death of your friend.”

“But you are a
goy,”
the fellow protested. “They couldn’t find one of our own to investigate?”

“I believe your race has looked down upon the office of ‘spy’ since they first arrived in Canaan. I have done work for the Board before. They were satisfied with my performance. Perhaps you feel reticent speaking about Mr. Pokrzywa around two Gentiles, but let me say that any information you withhold may be the one clue necessary to finding your fellow teacher’s killer.”

“But this is
shiva
!” the fellow persisted. “It is unseemly.”

“How unseemly?” countered Barker. “Is not the purpose of
shiva
to discuss and remember the deceased?”

“I’m being lectured on Jewish law now by a
goy,
” the student complained.

“Now, with your permission, gentlemen, I would like to ask you a few questions, and I’d prefer that my associate, Mr. Llewelyn, take notes, so that I can remember everything. Mr. Ben Loew has given us his name. May I have yours as well?”

The first was Arthur Weinberg, a student of about twenty. Levi Rosenthal was next, a very heavyset fellow. Ira Moskowitz, Pokrzywa’s roommate, came after him. Then Theodore Ben Judah, the little firebrand who had argued with Barker. Isaiah Birnbaum and Ferd Kosminski were the final two. Most had beards and wore the funereal black. It required all my wits to tell them apart and take everything down accurately.

“What sort of fellow was Louis Pokrzywa?”

“A decent sort,” Mr. Kosminski said, and they all agreed. Yes, yes, a very decent sort.

“But was he a scholar, an athlete, a zealot? What were his interests?” Barker had already received some of these answers from Zangwill, but he was keeping that a secret. Or perhaps he was testing the other teacher’s answers for their veracity.

“A scholar,” Ben Loew responded. “An excellent scholar. Better than any of us.” The others agreed, though Ben Judah looked prepared to argue the last point.

“Did he get along well with all of you?” Barker continued. “He was several years older than most.”

“No, he didn’t always get along with the rest of us. I think he thought we were frivolous at times,” Rosenthal responded.

“We made sport of him a little,” Birnbaum added. “He could be such a granny. He didn’t understand practical jokes, or a fellow’s need to relax after a hard day’s study. Off he would run to some charity or the other. He was always on some committee or joining a league.”

“Did he spend Shabbat here?”

“Yes, he did,” Moskowitz, the roommate, answered. “He’d received a box of books from a bookseller in Prague, and he went through them one by one after we got back from the synagogue.”

“He took his Sabbath meals with you?”

“He did. As soon as evening came, however, he was off like a shot.”

“Where did he go?” Barker asked. He had eased himself down on one of the little stools. I think the young scholars were fascinated by him.

“We don’t know,” Birnbaum answered.

“He didn’t always tell us where he was going,” Ben Loew admitted.

“Not that we cared,” Ben Judah continued. “I mean, why should it matter to us if he was working for the Jewish Children’s Fund tonight or the Sisters of Zion Charity Benefit tomorrow?”

“So, he could have been going anywhere,” Barker said.

This put Ben Judah’s dander up. “You’re twisting our words, Mr. Detective! If Louis said he was going somewhere, that was where he was going.”

“I understand he was invited to the homes of several young ladies in the area for dinner. Did he ever talk about any of them when he returned?”

“Oh!” Rosenthal chortled. “He was so funny when he came back from those dinners! The girls would be flashing him little signals, and the mothers simpering in his lap, and the fellow was so solemn and naive he wouldn’t know what was going on! He thought one girl had a facial tic, and it turned out she was simply winking at him! Oh, it was funny!”

“But he got along well with women, did he not? I mean, perhaps even better than with men?”

“A number of the committees and charities he was a member of were mostly made up of women,” Ben Loew answered. “He got along with them. He once told me they ‘got things done.’ ”

“Were there any particular women he saw more than others? Did he see any of them more than once, or have one as a friend?”

The young fellows looked uncomfortable, as Zangwill had earlier.

“Rabbi Mocatta’s daughter spoke with him, sometimes,” Kosminski said cautiously. “He went to dinner at their house occasionally. I got the impression that the two of them were merely friends.”

“Did any of you see him after the Shabbat was over? On the street, perhaps?”

Nobody had.

“So no one saw him after he ‘was off like a shot,’ until his body was found. Do you think he had some sort of appointment or rendezvous?”

“If he did,” Ben Judah said, “he was certainly very cool about the whole thing.”

“And when did you notice he was missing? When did you start to worry about him?”

“I noticed about ten thirty that he was gone overlong,” Ira Moskowitz said. “But last year, he directed a Purim play and rehearsals sometimes went on until eleven thirty. By midnight, we certainly began to worry.”

“Did you look for him?” Barker asked.

“We couldn’t,” Birnbaum volunteered. “If we went in search of him in the middle of the night, we would wake Mrs. Silverman. And if she knew Louis was gone after midnight, she might think ill of him and toss him out. We didn’t want him to lose his rooms just because he was late. He’d been here for over two years.”

“So what did you do?”

“What could we do?” Ben Judah countered. “We went to bed. We didn’t believe he could get himself into a real scrape. Certainly, we couldn’t predict that something like this would happen to him.”

Barker sat for a moment or two without speaking. Then he tried a different tack. “Would you say he was an ambitious fellow?”

“Oh, yes,” Moskowitz said. “He was always talking about ‘getting on.’ I think he wanted to be another prime minister, like Disraeli. He lamented to me once that he was too old to attend Oxford or Cambridge.”

“You talk about ambition like it is a bad thing,” Ben Judah sputtered. “He was studying to be a rabbi. He would have made a great one, like Maimonides. He had good motives. He was a real
mensch.”

“I’m not attempting to besmirch Mr. Pokrzywa’s memory,” Barker said. “I’m trying to get at the truth. Can any of you fellows think of anything Louis Pokrzywa had done recently that seemed out of the ordinary, for him at least?”

“He canceled an appointment last week,” Rosenthal said, finally. “He was going to tutor me, but not ten minutes before we were to begin, he came up all apologies and said he couldn’t do it, that he had to go somewhere. He didn’t say where.”

Ben Judah spoke up reluctantly. “I suppose if we’re discussing things out of the ordinary, I saw Louis talking with a woman I didn’t recognize in Petticoat Lane a couple of weeks ago.”

“Could you describe her?”

“Rather pretty, a Choote, I think. That is, a Dutch Jew, by the look of her.”

“Did they go off together?”

“How should I know? I saw Pokrzywa every day. I couldn’t care less who he spoke to. One minute they were there, then they were gone.”

“And this was on market day, you say? Two weeks ago?”

“Yes. Sunday. Midafternoon.”

Barker bowed. “Thank you for your time, gentlemen. We’ll intrude upon your mourning no longer.”

Outside in the hallway, Barker stood a moment, still in his stockinged feet, and pulled on his lower lip in thought.

“What are you thinking?” I asked.

“I’m thinking that, collectively, men are only slightly more observant than mollusks. For insight, we must talk to a woman.”

Instead of putting on our shoes, Barker and I padded down the hallway to the landlady’s private rooms.

I
F BARKER WAS THINKING HE’D GET ON BETTER
with the landlady, he was mistaken. She was a cantankerous-looking woman in her early sixties, wearing the shiny black dress common to matrons and widows. Her hair was pulled back so severely, it would have won approval from the Spanish Inquisition as a method of torture. I could see why, on that fateful night, the gentlemen who were her boarders had decided not to disturb her. When Barker introduced himself, she even had the audacity to demand what I myself had always feared to ask.

“Why are you wearing those glasses indoors? What’s wrong with your eyes?”

Barker’s more expressive eyebrow, the left one, curled itself into an arch above his spectacles. “An infirmity, madam,” he said, “brought on by an injury.” His fingers stole to the scar which bisected his right brow. “We’d like to ask you a few questions and to see the late Mr. Pokrzywa’s rooms, with your permission.”

“Do you have proof that you are who you claim to be?” the woman demanded. In response, Barker presented her with his business card.

“Don’t you have a badge or something?”

“We are private enquiry agents, madam, not constables.”

Mrs. Silverman gave him a grunt. She weighed no more than a hundred pounds in her full ensemble, but she seemed a formidable match for my employer under the circumstances. Reluctantly, she opened the door and allowed us into her own rooms. The furniture was much like that of the sitting room. The air was so dead and still inside the room, one would have thought it hadn’t been aired since Lord Melbourne’s day. I was beginning to become a convert to Barker’s ideas concerning air circulation and the body, although Mrs. Silverman didn’t look like she’d be keeling over dead any time soon.

She sat down on the edge of a chair, and we followed her lead. The padded chair I sat in was so stuffed with horsehair, I might as well have been on the actual horse. She picked up a pair of knitting needles and began to knit.

“You have questions?” she prompted.

“Yes, madam. May I ask what sort of boarder Mr. Pokrzywa had been?”

“He was the best kind. He paid on time. He asked almost nothing of me. He was not wasteful like Mr. Birnbaum, messy like Mr. Moskowitz, gluttonous like Mr. Rosenthal, or constantly complaining like Mr. Ben Judah. My only reservation against him was his large collection of books, which tended to attract cockroaches, and he was able to remedy that by powdering his shelves with boric acid. I do have my doubts about the floorboards under his bookcase, however. Books can be quite heavy, you know.”

“Did he keep regular hours?”

“No, he did not. But he peppered me with so many explanations of this charity group and that charity group that I finally gave him leave to go about his business without regaling me. That fellow needed a wife to keep him home nights. That’s what got him killed.”

“I don’t doubt it for a minute,” Barker said. I could see he was trying to be conciliatory to Mrs. Silverman, but if I saw it, so did she. Had she been a cat, the fur on her back would have stood on end.

“Had he been regular in his irregularity, then? Out most nights?”

“That boy had a fund of energy like I’ve never seen. He lived on five hours’ sleep. He worked during the day, attended classes in the evening, then was out doing charity work until late. Many is the night I’ve come upstairs at two in the morning—I’m a restless old woman, and creaks in this old, settling house disturb me—to find light under his door. I warned him reading would undermine his health, and I was right. Tell me I am right!”

We were both quick to agree.

“I suppose he had no time for lady friends.”

“Time he could have made, gentlemen,” she said, with what passed for a chuckle. “They certainly would have made time for him.”

“Did Mr. Pokrzywa ever break an appointment with you, especially in recent months?”

“No, he did not. He was polite to his landlady, unlike the rest here.”

“Were there any deviations in his schedule lately?”

“Only that his work seemed to increase. Before he would come home a few nights a week at eight thirty or nine. Now he was out until almost ten at least.”

“So, all in all, Louis Pokrzywa was a satisfactory boarder,” Barker concluded.

“If that counts for anything,” she said. “Mr. Barker, I’m an old widow woman who never had any children. The young men who live here are the closest thing to offspring I will ever have. I know my boys. Some of them go out to the pubs and drink; some attempt to consort with women of easy virtue. Several of them have the Jew’s weakness: gambling. Some have even worse vices. But I tell you the truth, Mr. Barker, a man can get killed just as easily working too hard as he can playing too hard.”

“Thank you for the advice, Mrs. Silverman,” Barker said. “May we see his room?”

“There are no locks on these doors. The room he shared with Ira Moskowitz was number five, up on the first floor.”

We made our adieus and climbed the stairwell. The first floor once held a large ballroom and sitting room, but they had been converted into bachelor flats, requiring added doors in the hall. We came up to number five and walked in.

The room we entered had been split even further. There was an invisible line bisecting it. One side was neat as a pin, and the other such a mass of clothing, papers, sheets, and textbooks as to be merely one large pile. From Mrs. Silverman’s description of Ira Moskowitz, I knew which side belonged to the late teacher. On his neat desk was an open box containing the books Pokrzywa had received on the last night of his life. To our left was a wall full of books, but there were too many to look at just now. We concentrated on the box. To a bibliophile, there is but one thing better than a box of new books, and that is a box of old ones.

Barker lifted them out and glanced at each spine before putting them down on the desk in a stack. “Immanuel Kant…Schopenhauer…Goethe, all in German. Tolstoy’s
Anna Karenina
in Russian. Maimonides in Yiddish. A biography of Rabbi Ben Loew in Polish. And, look here! An English-Dutch dictionary.”

“Five languages! He was well read,” I said.

“He was, indeed. I believe I’ll make an offer to the
chevra
on the entire collection.”

“Do you have enough room on your shelves?”

“Does a bibliophile ever have enough room on his shelves? The answer is obvious: get more shelves.” He turned to the wall of books. “What have we here? Philosophy; general Jewish studies. Kabala…”

“What is this Kabala thing? That’s the second time I’ve heard of it.”

Barker looked solemn for a second, and he even put a hand on my shoulder. “Hebrew magic and mysticism. There are some roads even I won’t pursue. Look, here’s something you don’t find on most Jewish shelves: the Holy Bible.”

“Yes,” I added, “right next to the Koran.”

“Don’t be cynical, Thomas.”

“What else is there?” I asked.

“World literature, Greek classics, some recent books…”

“Yes, it looks like Pokrzywa had been studying the Oxford Movement.”

“You shall certainly have those if I acquire the collection. I don’t read modern literature.”

We went through the drawers of the desk, examining the detritus of a man’s life, the residue of his hopes, dreams, and aspirations. I thought again of that poor fellow I’d seen on the slab in the morgue, and of how close I had come to the same state. One minute you’re a living sentient being, and the next you’re but a collection of items in a drawer or, in my case, a pasteboard suitcase.

In the bottom drawer of the desk, Barker found a jumble of filled notebooks. Louis Pokrzywa had kept a journal, of all things. What luck! We began going through them, beginning with the most recent.

“Three months old. Look for his latest.”

I searched around the desk and found it under a textbook. We had overlooked it when we searched the first time, thinking it was further study notes. Barker began going through it. He pulled his own notebook from his pocket and took notes in it with a little silver pencil. I wandered about the room, looking for…well, looking for anything. And I found it.

“Good Lord!”

“Mr. Llewelyn, please refrain from using the Lord’s name in vain. What have you found?”

“It is a picture of Louis Pokrzyra, sir, or rather, of the entire
chevra.
Louis is on the end.”

The framed photograph was on the wall on Ira Moskowitz’s side of the room. The entire assembly downstairs was here, as well as Israel Zangwill, Louis Pokrzywa, and a few others. Barker hopped onto the mountain of clothes and papers that formed Moskowitz’s bed, and snatched the picture off the wall. It was the first time for us to see the man in life, instead of gray and battered and mottled.

He was more handsome than I had expected. His lashes were long and his eyes dark, and his nose was well formed, almost aristocratic. The mustache and beard were fine, and the side-whiskers feathery. He wore a dark suit with a soft-collared shirt and a velvet tie. He looked soulful, like a Pre-Raphaelite version of Christ. He had a dreamy, abstract look in his eye. I could see why every daughter and mother in Whitechapel was courting him, and why most of the men here didn’t care much for him.

“I must have this photograph,” Barker said. “Llewelyn, go downstairs and ask Mr. Moskowitz if we might borrow it for a day or two.”

“Yes, sir,” I responded, and clattered down the stairs. I found the group of men downstairs singing some sad, Jewish song, their eyes shut. I couldn’t very well barge into the middle of their prayers. I waited an interminable amount of time, all of five minutes. Finally, Ben Loew finished the little service and looked up.

“You needed something?” he asked.

“Just to speak with Mr. Moskowitz.”

“Ira, go speak with the fellow.”

I got permission to borrow the photograph for a day or so and went back upstairs. Barker was still seated at the desk going over the journals. He was doing that off-key whistling he does sometimes, when he is on to something.

He glanced up at me. “Would you care to try a little detective work of your own?” he asked.

“Alone? Is it too soon? I mean, of course, I’ll give it a try. What is it you wish me to do?”

“See if you can pry Moskowitz away, and take him out to the Bucharest. Ask him some questions. Open him up, lad.”

“But what do I say? What do I ask?”

“Ask him, ‘What was Louis really like?’ See if that gets you anywhere. Remember everything. You won’t be able to write it down.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, doubtfully. “I’ll do it.” I took a step or two toward the door before turning back. “I’m sorry, sir, but shall I use the retainer money? It’s all I have.”

Barker pulled a large wallet of brown leather from his pocket. He opened it, looked in, hesitated for a moment, then tossed the entire wallet at me. It slapped against my chest and I caught it. I didn’t open it in his presence. I wouldn’t dare. But even as I shoved it into my own pocket, I could tell that it was stuffed with bills.

So, in a little over five seconds, I had become the wealthy young detective, interviewing a witness on his own. I felt distinctly jaunty, in my elegant new clothes, and I would have sauntered down the stairs like an aristocrat were I not still in my stockinged feet. I reached the bottom and came around the corner, into the sitting room. The prayer session had ended, and the men inside looked rather bored. The
shiva
goes on for days, and one may run out of wonderful things to say about the deceased within hours, possibly within minutes.

“Mr. Moskowitz, may I see you a moment again?” I asked, in a professional manner.

He got up off of his stool almost eagerly. I spoke to him in the hall.

“Needless to say, I’m no expert on Jewish funeral custom,” I told him, “but do you think it possible that I might take you down the street to the Bucharest for a bialy and coffee, where we can discuss the case? You must have a wealth of insight into Mr. Pokrzywa’s character and history, given your close daily proximity to him.”

“Well, I don’t know,” the fellow said. “One doesn’t usually leave during the
shiva.”

“I understand those who cannot get out of work return when they can,” I said.

“That is true.”

“Is a man’s murder not more important than work?”

“Of course! But, still…”

“Have you eaten?”

“No,” he said. “Mrs. Silverman will be setting a cold table in an hour or so.”

“Let me stand you lunch at the Bucharest Café,” I said, figuring that Barker would not mind the expense. “They make a fine moussaka. And their goulash is excellent.”

“I’ve only ever had their coffee and bialies,” he admitted. He was not a teacher like Pokrzywa and Zangwill. A glance at his side of the room had told me that not only was he messy, he was also less affluent. Perhaps he attended the school on some sort of scholarship.

“I’ve also heard good things about their almond torte and strudel,” I went on.

“Strudel!” he repeated dreamily.

“Of course, if you can’t come, you can’t come,” I said, twisting the knife. “Some other time, perhaps.”

“No, wait!” He laid a hand on my arm. “I’m sure I can get out of it. At least, I hope I can.”

He went back into the room while I carefully put on and laced my new leather pumps. My outfit today included a pair of gray kid leather gaiters with mother-of-pearl buttons. I pulled a handkerchief from my pocket and wiped the road dust from the mirrorlike patent leather, feeling like the Prince of Wales himself.

Ira Moskowitz dashed around the corner. “I can go for an hour,” he said, thrusting his feet into a pair of disgraceful sprung elastic boots. I seized my stick, a thin wand of black wood with a maple ball on top which I had liberated from the hall stand that morning, and used it to usher the scholar out the door.

I set a brisk pace as we headed down Wilkes Road. Moskowitz clapped his hands and threw them in the air in total freedom.

“I’m so glad to be out of there!” he cried. He was a funny fellow, an inch or two taller than I, with a doughy body, and kinky, wild hair that defied any comb. He wore spectacles atop a large nose, and his jovial face grew only a scanty beard. If Pokrzywa set the pace for scholarship in the
chevra,
I had a good idea who brought up the rear.