The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon (24 page)

“Has anyone else been here?” Manuel asks. “A girl?”

“No one,” the surgeon replies.

I tell Manuel, “She would have died before Solomon arrived—back on Sunday. And somehow, she must have gotten from here to my…”

“What girl?!” the
mohel
demands. “Is it Cinfa? Is she…?”

“No, she’s fine.” I take Solomon’s hands, explain about Uncle and
the purpose of our search. “So have you seen anything, anything at all—jewelry, clothing, food…?” I ask.

“Come with me,” he says in a grave voice.

The surgeon leads us past the men’s ritual pool to the dressing alcoves for women that are tiled with six-pointed shields of King David. He walks with the careful, childlike movements of a man who has been fasting for days. Even so, the echo of his footsteps in these caverns pounds like drumming. He takes us to the small dressing room in which he’s been sleeping. Manuel discards a towel that has served as Solomon’s blanket. He lifts up a linen tunic that has been scrunched into a pillow and lets it dangle freely.

“Teresa’s?” I ask.

A veil of shadow closes over Manuel’s face as he lowers his lamp. He kneels. Dark sobbing quivers across the icy sheets of tile.

“She was nude when we found her,” I whisper to Solomon. “I don’t think she would run out on the street that way if she could have helped it. So how do you…”

Manuel suddenly marches out the door and down the hallway toward the central court. I call his name in vain and follow. My echo vibrates around us like a voice disclosing secrets.

Heading east, he races down a ramp into a meditation room, then descends past long-abandoned baths and dank-smelling grottoes. Finally, we reach the room which serves as Master David’s office. Inside, we find his two turreted bookcases overturned, the bathhouse records scattered across the floor. At the far corner of the room, an oil lamp sits on its side. While Manuel inspects it, Solomon slumps to the stone floor. His chest heaves in the damp and heavy air. “My legs are tired,” he shrugs.

“We’ll get you food as soon as we leave,” I assure him.

He holds up his hand to indicate that there is no rush.

“What was this all about?” I ask Manuel.

“Trying to see which way my wife would descend when the Christians came.”

Solomon gazes around, sniffs at the air like a rabbit, leans toward the ground, then stands and raises himself up on his tiptoes like a deer straining to feed from a topmost branch. “Something foul in the air,” he grumbles. He sticks out his tongue. “Like manure.”

He’s right; there is a fiber of evil trailing through the air.

“A dead squirrel or rat,” Manuel says. “Drowned probably.”

A key of understanding turns inside me and I reply, “No, it’s no dead animal. I understand now. I’ll show you what it is back in our cellar.”

Manuel, Solomon and I descend the stairs underneath our secret trap door. The mohel huddles under the blanket I’ve given him, reaches his hand along the wall to keep from stumbling. He’s never been in our cellar before, and he asks in a curious voice, “So how long has all this been here, my boy?”

“For as long as anyone remembers,” I answer.

The prayer mat and myrtle bushes gift Solomon with the knowledge that the room has become our clandestine synagogue, and he chants, “Blessed be He who saves His temple from idolaters.”

Aunt Esther is seated at Uncle’s desk at the far end of the room, staring straight ahead into the Bleeding Mirror. She wears no headscarf, and her raggedly cut hennaed hair gives her a frightening appearance.

“Etti,” Solomon calls to her, since he loves to call everyone by their pet name.

She neither replies nor stirs. Solomon puffs out his lips, looks at me questioningly. I say, “She will not reply for now. We must give her time.”

The
mohel
nods, then sniffs at the air. “It’s this cellar that’s causing the smell,” he says. “This place stinks as if…” His words end with a gasp when he thinks of the shell of putrefying body left behind by Uncle.

I step straight to the leather tapestries from Córdoba hanging on the western wall of the cellar, just behind Esther. Scrolling one up, I lift it off its hooks and lay it on the slate floor, then do the same with the other. Manuel lights our two silver candelabrums from his oil lamp. Pressing my fingertips against the wall just under the strange
bloodstains
which end abruptly at a line of tile, I say, “If Samir or Uncle were here, we could save some time. Even one of the threshers.”

“What are you looking for?” Manuel asks.

“You’ll see,” I say. “I’ve just found out how a man—or even several men—can disappear from this room. And how a smell can be carried across space.”

I begin tapping my fist against each tile in a horizontal row just at the height of my head, from the south end of the room by our sunken bathtubs to the north, by Esther.

Solomon whispers to Manuel, “Poor boy, Master Abraham’s death has him thinking from left to right.” It’s local Jewish slang for the notion that I’ve lost all sense.

“I assure you that no gnat has flown in my ear,” I reply, making
reference
to how King Nimrod lost his mind. “I used to wonder about my uncle appearing out of nowhere all the time. Father Carlos even
suggested
at times that he was a spirit jester. But now I know how he did it. And why I was never allowed to enter the cellar without his
permission
.” I continue tapping, and when I don’t find the sound I want, move to the row below. At the fourth row down, one which crosses the wall at the height of my neck, I find what I want—the hollow reply of a tile with only a thin backing of wall.

Cinfa bounds downstairs suddenly, halts on the bottom step,
watches
me with wary eyes.

Twenty or so more taps, and I have found the outline of tiles which have a meager backing. If I am right, there should be one tile near the right or left border which jiggles when pressed. A few moments later, I have found it. Prying it free, breaking a thumbnail in the process, I toss the tile to Cinfa. Below, there is a circular iron handle on which is crudely etched the Hebrew word,
rechizah,
bathe. After a deep breath and a prayer for success, I grab it and give it a yank.

When I pull, a break in the wall becomes the edge of a door
revolving
around a central fulcrum. A room of purest darkness confronts us. Solomon joins me, squats down on his haunches like a Moslem holy man and peers inside with a curious expression. I turn to Manuel. “Give me the oil lamp—I’m going inside.”

“Where’s it lead?” he asks.

“We shall see. But for now, just give me the lamp.”

He hands it to me. We can see ahead into a stone corridor. “I’ll
follow
you,” he says.

Solomon pats me on the shoulder. “I’ll stay here. And you, Cinfa,” he nods up at my sister, “why don’t you fetch me some matzah and water? A glass of kosher wine, too! And the softest, sweetest pillow you can find!”

We slip behind Manuel’s lamp into the darkness as Cinfa dashes upstairs. The dank hallway ahead smells of cold stone and solitude. It narrows as the ceiling lowers until we are tucked into a crawlspace. We make our way like moles. After about twenty feet, when our limits
flow outward and upward, we stand. A limestone door sprouts a rusted iron handle, also circular and also etched with the word,
rechizah.
Manuel tugs it open around its fulcrum. A humid wind rises against us. I lift our lamp. Blue and green tiles shimmer back at us. Countless papers are scattered across the floor. We are in the chazan’s office in the bathhouse.

After Manuel and Solomon have headed for their respective homes, I go to my mother, armed now with the assurance that the killer was no sorcerer but simply a clever thresher. She is in our store, scrubbing the floor on her hands and knees by the light of a slender candle. I tell her what we’ve found. “Did you know about the secret exit?” I ask.

She puts down her brush and kneels. “Before you were born,” she begins, “when the New Christians of this city were Jews, and your father was trying to establish…”

I close my eyes because it seems she is opening the title page to another endless story about my father and his struggles to develop a profitable business. She senses my irritation, snaps, “Our cellar was part of the
micvah!
It’s where our granite tubs came from.”

“How come you never told me?”

She turns away as if burdened with my presence. Her jaw muscles throb in anger. “You think that you have a right to know everything? Life doesn’t work like that, no matter what my brother may have told you.”

I stare at her with contempt even as I know she’s right.

“Maybe he thought you knew and that he didn’t have to discuss it,” she adds in a conciliatory tone, picking up her brush. “Anyway, it wasn’t important.” The little wave of dismissal she gives me connotes
exhaustion
. She looks down suddenly, frowns; a pimply brown toad has hopped out from a hiding place. “What do you suppose he wants?” she asks.

“Food…a fly. To survive. Just leave him be.”

“Leave him be? An unclean thing like this? One of the ten plagues of Passover?! Sent by God to punish the Egyptians who held us as slaves. In my house?!”

Mother seems to be ricocheting between somnambulism and a kind of vibrant lunacy. As she grabs her broom, I try to bring her back to more important matters and say, “I always thought he must have hid in the
genizah
with the books. How he loved their touch and smell!”

“Who?” she asks, and she furrows her eyebrows like I’m crazy.

I suddenly feel as if I could slap her. She lifts aside one of the unhinged doors to the store and sweeps the poor toad flying onto Temple Street.

“Can’t you please…” I begin. But there is no point. Her very
presence
seems to sap my energy. She stares dreamily into the sky. The dazed toad wobbles upright. Roseta drops from out of nowhere, creeps stealthily forward, claws poised. “No you don’t!” I say. I jump outside and sweep the toad into my hand, drop it into my pouch. I await Mother’s protests against filth. But silver clouds rolling in from the west have transfixed her; night, like everything else, has reminded her of Judah.

I drop the toad in the fields upriver, wash my hands, nibble a matzah, then head back to our house to check on Farid. A sliver of
crescent
moon has risen over the horizon, and a story forms as I watch its halo: Manuel’s wife is bathing in the
micvah
,
hears the shrieks of New Christians being butchered on the street above. Racing through the maze of pools and alcoves, she reaches a cold wall of stars inside the chazan’s office. Are the connecting doors open? Is my uncle, too, in the bathhouse, cleansing for prayer? Or does she scream as the torchlit Christians descend? Perhaps Uncle hears her, opens the secret door, crawls into the bathhouse and pulls her to safety.

Together, my master and the girl wait in our cellar for an end to Lisbon’s madness. But the killers—a thresher and a blackmailer—come first. After they summon death to our home, they slip through the secret entrance to the bathhouse. One of them caresses the door closed, leaves the streak of blood from his fingertips behind, creeps through the tunnel to safety.

Farid is seated in the kitchen when I come inside. His face is etched with pale struggle. I know I should rush to him, but my own strength is eclipsed by despair. “Should you be up?” I signal from the doorway.

My friend nods, indicates with heavy gestures, “I found my house empty. You have not heard from my father, have you?” His arms dangle white, as if angels are already dressing him for…

“No. I’ve asked around. No one’s seen him. In the early morning I’ll go looking for him. Things have quieted enough so that…”

“A note came for you,” he signals, holding up a scroll. “Actually, for your uncle.”

I rip open the seal. It’s from Senhora Tamara, a used book seller in Little Jerusalem with whom we had frequent dealings. It reads:

I feel as if I have hooked a great fish for Sabbath: the
storybook
from
Egypt
is code for Uncle’s missing Haggadah! I have been informed that the killer has made a careless move. And now that I know how he escaped… It seems that a balance in the Upper Realms is now being weighted in my favor.

And yet, even before my discoveries have had their chance to fill my lungs with the fresh air of hope, Farid enchains me once again to despair; after I read him Senhora Tamara’s note with my hands, he
signals
, “Another obstacle presents itself before us. I crept down to the cellar to try to find you when the note came and saw the secret door in the wall. I know what you think. But the killer didn’t leave that way.”

“What?!”

“Go there. Look for blood. You will see that there are stains before the passageway narrows. As if the killer were feeling his way along the walls. But all such marks end before one is forced to crawl. The killer did not pass through. He turned back for the cellar.”