THEY FOUND ADELA sitting on the steps up to Isser’s room, reading one of the books in German that had been scattered by the searchers.
“His tfillin case is missing,” she said. “You two didn’t see it, did you? It’s embroidered with foxes, two foxes holding a scroll.”
Sorel shook her head and looked at Sam. He shrugged.
“I didn’t think to look for them,” he said. “He didn’t strike me as one who prays daily.”
“He’s not,” Adela agreed. “But they were his father’s, and his mother made the case—may their memories be a blessing. Did you speak to anyone at the print shop?”
Again, they shook their heads. Adela sighed, as if to say I have to do everything myself. “We should at least ask them if they know who broke in. Come on.”
The print shop was quiet, not closed but conducting business discreetly for the Christian sabbath. An older man with a beard and spectacles was checking over the presses while a couple of apprentices with short sidelocks cleaned type at a table under the window. The old man gave the three a suspicious look as they walked in the room. He came out from between the presses to greet them, but he had a piece of metal in his hand, some piece of the machines that he held casually, as if by chance, but kept in their sight. The apprentices paused with their cleaning rags in hand, staring.
“You need something?” the printer asked, eyeing each of them in turn. Sorel checked her pocket for her knife and then wondered if that made her look more suspicious.
“We’re looking for Isser Jacobs,” said Adela.
The old man tightened his grip on the metal rod. Adela and Sam both held up their hands immediately, Sorel following their example a second later.
“What do you want him for?” said the printer, glaring. He wasn’t a particularly big man, an older Jew who would look right at home behind a volume of Mishnah in the bet midrash, but his eyes were fierce. Sorel heard the apprentices shifting in their seats and glanced around to see them tensed, ready to leap up.
“We don’t want any trouble,” said Sam coolly.
“You’d better not,” said the old man. “We’ve had enough of it already. You with that apostate bastard Yoshke? I’ve nothing more to say to him.”
Yoshke again. “We’re not with him,” said Sorel. “We don’t like him either.”
At that the old man, and his apprentices, relaxed a little, but he didn’t put down his cudgel. “What, then?”
“We’re trying to figure out who’s been making trouble for Isser,” said Adela. “Someone trashed his rooms, and they’ve taken some things—a book.”
“I don’t know about that,” said the printer. “All we know is no one’s seen Isser since, what?”
He looked around at his apprentices, who exchanged looks.
“At least last Shabbat,” one of them said.
“He was going to meet Shulem-Yontif,” said the other. “He told me. You know Isser, only comes to minyan when he wants something. We were leaving after prayers and he said he’d see me in the morning, he was off to the river. But he never showed up.”
“What did he want at minyan?” Adela asked. “We’re trying to find out what happened. We think he’s tangled up in something bad.”
The apprentices and the printer all looked at each other again, a knowing look.
“Everyone knows Isser’s trouble, missy,” said the printer. “You’d do better to keep out of it, yourself.”
Adela crossed her arms over her chest, planting her feet in a stubborn posture as if she expected him to try to push her out of his shop. Sorel unconsciously mirrored her. “That doesn’t answer my question.”
“What did he want at minyan?” said the apprentice who’d seen Isser last, while shrugging elaborately. “Talk, talk, talk. I don’t know. It was Shacharit, I was half asleep.”
“Well, who else goes to minyan to talk?” Sorel demanded. “Yoshke? You don’t look like you’d be with the Hasidim.”
The boy shook his head. “Nah. I think God would strike Yoshke down if he tried to touch a siddur. I don’t know, some old man.” He glanced at the printer and grinned. “Not as old as my father.”
“And who else was in the minyan?” said Sam. “Maybe they know who it was.”
“You’re thinking someone from the paper trades’ shul jumped Isser in an alley?” the printer said, and shook his head. “No. We work together.”
“There was someone last Shabbat,” said the other apprentice, who’d been quiet until now. “Some out-of-towner, wasn’t it?”
“Right.” The other apprentice’s eyes lit up. “Nice boots, he had.”
“Light hair,” said his companion. Sorel didn’t think they were brothers—they didn’t look alike—but they clearly worked well together. She felt a stab of jealousy at their easy friendship.
“Light hair with a beard,” said the talkative one, and both laughed. “Well, who doesn’t have a beard?”
Neither of them, and neither Sam nor Sorel—but it was a fair point.
“Someone might know what he was in town for,” said the printer reluctantly. He clearly didn’t like the idea of bringing Isser’s trouble to his brother artisans, but Sorel thought he also wanted the three of them out of his shop—and perhaps out of this conversation with his son. “We didn’t talk business on Shabbat, of course. But someone might have brought him because he was talking business with them when it wasn’t Shabbat. Try Shimen the papermaker. His shop’s two streets that way, on the river.”
He pointed with his improvised cudgel.
“Before we go,” said Adela, “you don’t have any of Isser’s books, do you? He didn’t leave any in the shop?”
The printer sighed and looked over at his son again.
“What kind of books?” said the son, with a credible lack of shiftiness.
“Any,” said Adela. “Can I see?”
“We’ve got a little library.” The boy got up, dropping his cleaning rag on top of his friend’s, and beckoned them to follow. The library was in a back room that also served as a kitchen, with a door that opened into the alley. It was just a single shelf, an odd collection of mostly battered secular texts in Russian, with a few Yiddish pamphlets.
“Are these all censor-approved?” Adela asked.
“Of course!” said the printer’s apprentice. “Otherwise, it wouldn’t be legal to have them, would it?”
He winked at her.
“You’re the translator, aren’t you?” he added, before she could ask anything else. “Isser told me it was a girl. Secretly, of course. Here, I’ll show you.”
He went to the other side of the room and lifted the lid off the kindling bin by the stove. There was a box tucked into the kindling, which he opened to show them a stack of more Yiddish pamphlets—Sorel thought she recognized one of them as the one Sam had shown her to prove he was liable for the same criminal activities as Isser.
“Can I take a look?” Adela asked, already reaching for the box.
“It’s just politics in there,” said the apprentice, though he handed it to her anyway. “If you’re his translator I’m sure you’ve already seen them.”
Adela flipped through the pamphlets without responding. Evidently she didn’t find anything. She looked up at Sam and Sorel and shook her head as she tucked them back in their box.
“Mottel!” the printer shouted from the front of the shop.
“That’s time for me to get back to work,” said the apprentice. He put the box back in amongst the kindling, scattered a few bits of bark over it, and shut the bin. “You remember where Shimen the papermaker is?”
“We’ll find him,” said Sam, although Sorel had in fact already forgotten the directions.
“Thank you,” said Adela.
Mottel gave her another wink. Was he flirting? Sorel sighed inwardly. Poor Adela, she couldn’t talk to anyone without them reminding her she was a woman. It must be such tedium to be pretty.
The printer stood in the door, cudgel still in hand, watching them until they turned off his street. Sorel could feel his eyes on the back of her neck.
“I think he knows something more than he told us,” she said after the third time she looked back to find him still glaring.
“He does,” Sam agreed. “But maybe Shimen the papermaker knows even more.”
“Or Shulem-Yontif,” said Adela. “Did you catch that, Alter? He said Isser went to see Shulem-Yontif and never came back.”
“Shulem-Yontif couldn’t kill somebody,” Sorel objected. It wasn’t that she wanted to defend her fiancé, so much. She just couldn’t imagine it. He’d been sobbing in pieces just because she—her double, whom he had scarcely spoken to—was dead. And Isser had been his friend. If Shulem-Yontif had been involved in Isser’s death, his soul would have fled his body.
“Maybe, maybe not,” said Adela. “Maybe he was the bait in a trap.”
Sorel didn’t have any argument against that.