“And?”
Noémie Singer sighed and turned back to Martin. “She was destitute. The village was mostly deserted, after being partly destroyed during the war. People had come to the city to work. That’s why…” She stopped herself.
“That’s why?” Martin urged.
“Because of his foster mother, because of his dead wife and children. That’s why he feels it is his duty to keep the old ways alive, as they are today in Russia, as they were here long ago.”
“The old ways. How does he do that?” Martin whispered his questions through the thrumming of his mind that was as taut as a violin string repeating one refrain,
go on, go on, go on. Help me to understand.
Her gaze seemed to fall everywhere but on his face, as if she were in another place, or wanted to be. “He survives by selling odds and ends, and fixing things. He comes every Thursday.”
Martin caught his breath, remembering the rabbi’s warning. “Thursday?”
“Yes, Thursday,” she glanced at him. “Is that important?”
“No, I’m sorry,” Martin lied. “You were about to tell me how—”
“He keeps the traditions alive, yes.” She smiled to herself, as if remembering. “He comes to the kitchen and talks to me and Béatrice, tells us the stories of our people he has learned on his travels. What our true customs are. What men should do and women should do. He uses his wheel to sharpen the knives he says we must use on our special days. He remembers for us how there used to be joy and dancing when our people worshiped. And sorrow, too, of course.”
“Is that different than—”
She faced Martin with a look of defiance on her face, the same look that he had seen on Clarie’s when she told him that she must make penance. “He was too humble to enter the parlor during the shiva,” Noémie Singer said. “But when Béatrice told him that my uncle had been killed, he stood in the kitchen and showed his grief by keening and crying out loud, and by ripping apart his poor white shirt, just as they did in the old days.” She turned away to hide the emotions that trembled in her voice. “That is, before we had become so ‘civilized’ that we could not show what we felt inside.”
Martin did not know what to respond. He could not help but think of how he had hidden his tears from Clarie in order not to burden her. To do otherwise would have seemed undignified, unmanly. But Noémie Singer admired this Jacob because he did express his rawest emotions. What if Martin had torn his shirt and howled his grief and anger? Would that have made a difference? Is that what Clarie wanted?
The clock on the fireplace sounded three strokes. They both stared at the mantle, as if it had sent out a command.
“Monsieur, I think it is time for you to go,” she said as she headed toward the door and called out for the maid.
She did not offer him her hand. She kept her head down as he went past her into the doorway. When he expressed his gratitude, he got only a nod in return. After the door shut behind him, Martin paused on the steps to think about their encounter. On that fatal Sunday, Martin had seen how supercilious Singer could be when he disagreed with his wife. And, in a sense, through his duplicity, Martin had proved no better. No wonder Noémie Singer had fallen under the spell of a holy man unencumbered by the pretensions of status, the demands of position, or the veneer of modern “civilization.” A man true to the traditions that she held most dear, and to his own deepest emotions.
Martin strode away from the Singer apartment resolved to bury his remorse about the interview. People got hurt in murder investigations, even kind and innocent people like Noémie Singer. There was only one way to make amends: find the killer. By now, it should all be clear, the pieces in place. Yet this entire case was filled with dangerous, jagged edges, like a mirror under too much pressure, cracked and jutting at him from a hundred places, distorting his vision. Politics, religion, race hatred, his growing alienation from David Singer. He needed to pick his way past the demands, past the emotions, to the fragments that offered real clues. Certainly opportunity and knowledge of the victims’ movements had to be first among them. But Martin was still not sure whether the motive for the murders was hatred of the Israelites in general or some more personal animus toward Ullmann and Erlanger. He had found no reason why Hémonet would seek out these two
particular
men. Nor did it seem likely that a non-Israelite soldier, born elsewhere, had learned enough about the local Jewish community to stalk and kill two of its most prominent members. Thank God the army had no idea it was under surveillance, Martin thought, as he slumped his shoulders and pulled in his head against the stinging cold. As for the bishop, having thoroughly washed his hands of the priest and his anti-Semitic propaganda, the Monsignor was raising no objections to Hémonet’s continued imprisonment. At least Martin felt no pressure from these important quarters
yet
.
Soon he would get reports from Barzun on the soldiers and Bernheim on the defrocked priest. Either they would help to indict a suspect or eliminate one. That’s what Martin had to do too: indict or eliminate. The rabbi’s warning about Thursdays lodged in the back of Martin’s mind like an untended itch; so did Bernheim’s admonition about loss and madness. But these did not constitute a theory of the case. Martin stopped and, for an instant, thought about going to the Temple to ask Isaac Bloch about the divisions among the Jews of Nancy. Instead, he continued on toward the Palais with even more determination. There was someone to whom he could address his questions with no need for apology or explanation: the clever and very talkative Shlomo the Red Dwarf.
Wednesday, December 12
S
HLOMO DID TALK, ADDING FUEL
to one of Martin’s theories, while other aspects of the investigation remained in frustrating, low-burning latency. The Jewish lieutenant Bernheim had spoken of had left the regiment, eliminating one possible source of information on the army; and Barzun had just begun his surveillance of off-duty officers. Liébeault could not come until that afternoon to examine Hémonet, who had gone into a state of semi-delirium. And so, on Wednesday morning, there was Shlomo.
Arriving with Jacquette, who had found him begging on a busy street corner, the dwarf entered Martin’s chambers with the air of a performer invited for an encore. He once again declined to climb up on a chair, choosing instead to rove “the stage” in front of Martin’s desk as he answered the judge’s and inspector’s questions. It did not escape Martin’s notice that the dwarf took ample opportunity to sidle over to the potbelly stove where he warmed his hands, and his back, and even, once or twice, lifted a thinly shod foot up toward the fire. The man was cold, hungry and poor.
That is why Martin held his impatience in check as he listened to labyrinthine commentaries on every subject from the orthodoxy (or lack thereof) of the Grand Rabbi’s sermons to the role of the Tsar (possibly or not) in the suppression of the Jewish people.
Unfortunately, there was much about Jacob the Wanderer which did not fall under the aegis of Shlomo’s vast and eclectic knowledge. He knew the tinker as an eccentric, an outsider who, because of his youth in France and manhood in Russia, did not really seem to fit in anywhere. Yet this Jacob had an overweening desire to preach his ideas on tradition and religion, thus irritating many of his fellows.
“And you didn’t agree with these ideas?” Martin asked.
“Agree, disagree. Who likes to be told what to do, over and over again by the same mouth? How could he expect to make us what we can no longer be?” Shlomo pleaded, opening his arms as wide as they could go.
Whether Jacob said the same things to the rich as he did to the poor, Shlomo could not know. He had seen less and less of the tinker in the last few months, but he did think that Jacob usually came to town on Thursdays.
“Does he stay in town to worship at the Temple on Fridays?” Martin asked.
Shlomo shook his head. He didn’t think so.
“What about your shul?” This was Jacquette.
Shlomo shrugged. “Only once or twice. Long ago.”
“Why?” Martin interjected. “Didn’t you ask why he didn’t join you? Where does he worship?”
“Ahh.” Shlomo raised both of his gigantic hands to heaven. “I forgot. This is why. He said he had to go home to worship with his mother, the widow who took him in when he was a child. She is alone and sick. That is what he said. A devoted son he is.”
If that is the case, Martin thought, why did the tinker choose to stay in or come back to Nancy the very weekend that Ullmann’s body lay in a field? “And you don’t know where this mother lives?” Martin pressed his fingers against his tired eyes, praying that the dwarf would come out with something useful.
“Lives. Barely.” An ironic opinion, not a fact, delivered by the dwarf who would not dream of keeping his opinions, or his wit, to himself.
Still, Martin calculated with a sigh, if she had been a widow long before the war, which took place twenty-four years ago, she
must
be very old indeed.
“Her name?” Even as the words came out of his mouth, Martin knew he was going around in empty circles. It was becoming apparent that neither Shlomo nor his friends knew much about the Wanderer except that he was holy—or crazy.
“All right,” Martin leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “I think that is enough for now.” He reached in his pocket and drew out a five-franc note, which he nudged over to his inspector. Out of the corner of his eyes, Martin saw how hungrily the dwarf watched the transaction.
That’s when Martin got the inspiration to ask his last question. “When did this Jacob tell you about his sick and lonely stepmother? How long ago?”
“Months ago. In the summer. The last time I saw him. He was worried. She must be very cold now.”
Or dead
. Martin made sure not to move a muscle on his face. He did not want this thought to register in front of his witness. If it were true, he had to think through all the implications. “Thank you, Monsieur Shlomo. You must understand that your value to us depends on your discretion,” Martin said, with little real hope that the dwarf could keep his mouth shut. “And now you can wait in the hall.”
Shlomo bobbed and bowed his way out of the room, never turning his back on his benefactors, fawning and thanking them for their kindnesses, Their Eminences. All the while, Martin wondered,
Where does a man like Shlomo the Red Dwarf end up? Or old Abraham? Or Jacob the Wanderer, for that matter?
It was a relief to see the door finally close, to get down to business.
“Well, what do you think?” Martin asked Jacquette.
“Your idea that the tinker might be a suspect is plausible,” Jacquette remarked as he settled into the chair in front of Martin’s desk and lovingly licked the tip of a Blue Jockey before lighting up.
Martin leaned forward. “Certainly he’s as good a suspect as the priest or the tanner or some unknown soldier.”
“Yes, but the motives: ‘they are playing an organ in the Temple,
which is against the old ways
; the rabbi gives sermons in French,
which is against the old ways
; they don’t allow us to sing and shout when we are filled with love for the Almighty,
which is against the old ways
.’ The dwarf is probably right that some of the immigrants resent the tophats who go to the Temple for looking down on them. Still,” Jacquette shook his head. He took a long drag from his cigarette and blew a cloud of smoke, as if to indicate how vaporous these motives seemed to him. “I’d like something closer to home, some slight, some passion, something more personal. Or an anarchist.” He ended with a chastened smile. He had already reported to Martin that Ehud the Anarchist had turned out to be a toothless wonder with one feeble-minded disciple.
“But the only connection we’ve found between the two victims
is
the Temple, the Consistory.”
Jacquette puffed out his cheeks and nodded a reluctant concession.
Martin sat back and rubbed his aching neck. “I think we are looking for someone who is fanatical or mad or both. This Jacob could fill the bill.”
“So might our little Shlomo out there.”
“Mad, perhaps, but not fanatical,” Martin retorted, and sighed. If he could not convince his inspector, how was he going to convince anyone else? He boosted his weary body out of the chair and began to pace. Jacquette had not been witness to Singer’s contemptuous scorn for the old peddler. He had not seen the light in Noémie Singer’s eyes when she talked about him, nor heard the trembling in her voice as she described the way the “holy man” rent his garments in grief when told her uncle had been killed. Martin had reported these incidents to his inspector, of course, but he had not described how deeply they had affected him. To express those feelings, revealing what should best be left between a man and his wife, seemed too intimate, almost like a betrayal of Singer. Or himself.
Martin could only imagine how devastated Noémie Singer would be if it turned out that Jacob’s emotional outburst had not been an authentic expression of sympathy and grief, but a measure of his guilt. Another jagged edge in the distorted mirror of the case.
Martin gave his inspector, who was thoroughly enjoying his Blue Jockey, a light pat on the shoulder as he passed by and began to think out loud.
“He might be trying to get to the women of the men he hates and to influence their children through them. And not succeeding, or succeeding with only a few of the wives, he becomes frustrated or even desperate.” Martin took in a breath before adding, “Perhaps the ‘old ways’ are all he has left. This Jacob feels that the only thing which sustained him through all his tragedies, all that he had lost, is his faith, and that the rich Israelites of Nancy are destroying it.”
There, he had said it. Faith sustains. But what happens when faith becomes distorted, unyielding, intolerant? Martin winced as he tried to banish an image of Clarie with Madeleine from his mind’s eye. “After all,” he continued, if only to hear the sound of his voice making his case, “men have killed and wars have been fought over such matters.” Martin paused. Or was it only Christians who killed over such things? The Crusades, the heretics, the witch-burnings. Maybe he was barking up the wrong tree, again. He shook his head. He was not about to express his doubts to Jacquette. Not yet.
“Well, if we’re talking about fanatics, what about our defrocked priest?” Jacquette said, then stretched out his legs and yawned. “We haven’t found any evidence that he ever left Laneuveville, but….”
“We should have a report on Hémonet tomorrow,” Martin said. Things were moving too slowly. “In the meantime, we’ve got to make sure that people are protected.” He stepped back to his desk, invigorated by being able to pursue at least one effort about which he had no doubts. “I know your men have been stretched thin, but we must make sure that they are watching the homes of the other Consistory members, the rabbi and Singer. And I want the tinker followed as soon as he is spotted. So have them out in full force tomorrow, Thursday.”
“Yes, sir!”
Martin searched Jacquette’s face to see if he was being mocked. His inspector was smiling impishly, holding his cigarette between his front teeth. This is what Jacquette liked, Martin knew, action, progress, anything that moved forward.
“And I’ll have to talk to Singer,” Martin said as he slumped down into his chair.
Jacquette’s smile evaporated and his lower lip drooped so precipitously that Martin feared he was about to lose his cigarette. The inspector masterfully rescued it before asking why.
“He’s asked to be kept informed, and he’s offered to help.” What Martin did not say was,
because he is my friend.
“Are you going to talk to Didier too?”
Martin shook his head. Definitely not. He’d inform the supercilious prosecutor only when he was absolutely sure.
“Then why Singer?” Jacquette asked. “You yourself said that he wants the case to go a certain way. Won’t he just argue and try to convince you that you’re wrong? I’d wait until we had a chance to grill the tinker.”
Martin surveyed the piles on his desk. He had plenty to do. The dossier for the case would include all the interviews with the anti-Israelites of Nancy as well as reports on the immigrant community. “All right, let’s keep our heads down until we have a chance to talk to this Jacob,” he said quietly. “I’ll bury myself in these papers and send Charpentier to the Prefecture to see if he can find a surveyor who knows something about abandoned or near-abandoned villages. Hopefully someone can come up with a map, in case we have to chase the tinker down.”
Jacquette stood up to leave. “And should I give our friend out there a nice warm cell and good meal? I hear it might snow again tonight.”
Martin smiled as they shook hands. They both knew how much the dwarf liked to talk. “Good idea. Let’s keep him under lock and key until Friday,” Martin agreed.
Until Friday
. Only forty-eight hours. If only it would be over by then.