SAM SHOOK OUT HIS HANDS, as if he’d just washed them, and stepped over the threshold. His fingers ended in thick black claws, long as a bear’s.
“Isser Jacobs,” he said. “I want my knife back and I want the book. I know it’s here—I can smell it.”
Sorel-Isser had forgotten the knife. It was tucked into their belt. Remembering, they pulled it from the sheath. Before they could make another move, Adela picked up the pamphlet from the floor and tossed it to Sam.
“We don’t have your book,” she said. “That’s a fake.”
Rather than open it to check the pages, as the others had done, he held it up and shook it. Then he held it to his nose and sniffed, frowning. Though he looked the same as always, he held himself differently, as if at any moment he might leap forward. Sorel-Isser gripped the handle of the eagle-claw knife more tightly as Sam opened the book at last and read one of the psalms.
“Clever,” he said, an echo of Kalman earlier, and tucked the pamphlet away in his back pocket. When he turned his gaze on them, Sorel-Isser saw what was strange about his face—he still had the dark, white-less eyes of the great black dog. “Where is it, then?”
Sorel-Isser met his eyes and stood their ground. “Who are you?”
Adela glanced between them, confused. “He’s not the angel?”
“Not that angel,” said Sam. “There were three parties to the bargain with the first Esroger Rebbe—the rebbe, Dumiel, and Kaftziel. Dumiel is my sister, the demon Agrat. And I am the other Angel of Death. My sister’s been hiding you, Isserke, hasn’t she? You’re going to take the book to her, and she’ll grant you a wish, is it? I can’t let you do that.”
“We don’t have it,” Sorel-Isser repeated, glancing around at Kalman. “I hid it before I talked to Kalman Senderovich, but I don’t remember where. I don’t remember anything from the day I died. Was it you that killed me?”
“Me?” Sam looked almost offended. “Why would I do that? You were no business of mine until you were dead already.”
“But you’re working together.” Sorel-Isser pointed to Sam and Kalman with the knife, one after the other. “I found the note in your bag. You’re one of his messengers.”
Sam shook his head. Kalman said, “I don’t know him. He isn’t working for me.”
“I found that note with one of the men I killed for you in Esrog,” said Sam. “One of those city uniformed gentiles. What was he called?” He glanced at the ceiling, as if he could see the name written there. “Borysko.”
“There’s a Borysko in the city guard,” said Kalman. Sam’s arrival had seemed to drain him of all remaining energy, and he now sat slumped against the kitchen table. “A young man. He collects the taxes sometimes. He takes bribes. Ostap introduced me to him. Please, Sarah and Israel. Believe that I wanted the best for you. I won’t stop you now. Whatever you want to do—just do it.”
“Wait,” said Adela. She was reaching out a hand to Sorel-Isser, and another to Sam, though neither had made any move. “Wait. No one do anything. Everyone wants the book—fine. Everyone is willing to kill to get it or die to protect it. Before you do that, let’s talk.”
“I wasn’t planning to kill anyone,” said Sam. “Isserke’s already dead. He’s mine already. He has no right to keep hiding. That body belongs to Alter.”
“Alter doesn’t mind sharing,” said Sorel. “And you said you don’t want Agrat to have the book, didn’t you? Well, we’re not planning to hand it over to her, either. Isn’t that right? Right. She wants to break the rebbe’s protection. Isser didn’t trust her. I don’t trust her, either. She was too nice to me.”
Sam glanced at Kalman, but the older man had put his head in his hands, almost as if he were praying. He seemed to have made his last contribution to the discussion.
“All right,” said Sam reluctantly. “Then we agree. You can give back my knife.”
“We’re not giving you anything if you’re planning to steal Isser’s soul,” said Adela.
Sam threw up his hands in a gesture of exasperation that was all human, an echo of the cheerful peddler. Was it a disguise? Or just another facet of the same person? “It isn’t stealing! It belongs to me. But fine, I’ve waited this long. You can stay until your business is concluded, how’s that for a bargain?”
Sorel didn’t want to mistrust him. After all, he had been helping. He’d run off the men who wanted to kill her and Isser, the first day in Esrog. Although he could have done it in a less terrifying manner.
“A bargain,” she agreed. “But I’ll keep this knife, for now. You can help us, and we’ll help you. But if you’re planning some kind of trick, we won’t give it back, and you can see which of us finds the book faster.”
Sam spat in his palm and held it out to them. When they hesitated, eyeing the long claws, he took his hand back, wiped it on his trousers, and offered it again—this time, a soft, human hand, with nails bitten short.
Sorel-Isser took it, and Adela clasped her hand over theirs.
“Now we have to talk to Ostap,” said Isser.
THEY LEFT KALMAN in the kitchen, already succumbing again to the spell of sleep that Sam had cast over the rest of the household, even the shiva guests. Ostap—Sorel had never paid him much attention, but this was the gentile stable-boy whose coat she was wearing. He slept in the tack room.
When they arrived, he was wide awake, dressed and standing in the stable doors with a hunting rifle over his shoulder, glancing around like a guardsman on patrol, but too afraid to enter the house from where he’d heard the barking of the giant dog.
Ostap had not slept, in fact, in days. He had been waiting for word from his brother, Borysko, to say that all was well in the city, and Borysko had found the magic book which Isser, that bastard, had stolen from Reb Kalman.
Word from Borysko had never come, and in his dreams Ostap was hunted by a great black dog. Its presence seemed to follow him into the waking world, watching from over his shoulder, but always disappearing when he turned his head.
The conclusion the stable-boy had reached was that Isser Jacobs was a witch, and that by turning him over to the city guard, Ostap had called down a curse on his own head. Now the dog had come to Reb Kalman’s estate, and he was sure it had eaten Reb Kalman. He’d seen a light in the old man’s window, and then the light had gone out, and the barking had stopped.
Ostap was waiting to die.
This was how Sorel-Isser and Adela found him when they went out into the courtyard, where the rising sun was just beginning to burn away the mist from the river. He cocked the rifle at them, but he had not expected death to come wearing his own clothes. That was what stopped him, for a second, from firing. And in that moment, he saw Isser, looking out from behind Sorel’s face.
“How are you back?” he demanded. “Borysko said he was sure he’d killed you! All this time I’ve been shitting myself, thinking Reb Kalman would find out that it was my fault, and you’re not even dead?”
“Borysko’s dead,” said Sorel-Isser. Adela grabbed their arm, as if to drag them out of the way. Ostap took a step back, his arm shaking. If he fired the gun, the shot would go wild.
“You killed him?”
Isser stepped forward. Sorel could have stopped him, but there was something exhilarating about ignoring their fear, pretending to be the monster Ostap thought they were. As if by simply ignoring the possibility of a bullet, they could make themselves bulletproof. “What did you do with my body, Ostap? Where did you leave me?”
“Stop! Don’t come any closer. I didn’t kill you. It was Borysko. I didn’t tell him to kill you! I didn’t think he was going to kill you.” The tip of the rifle dipped, and he corrected it. “Reb Kalman said to bring you back. I told Borysko. I said, we have to find out where you’ve hidden that magic book. Reb Kalman would have made us rich. I’d never have to shovel another load of manure, not ever. I’d get the good jobs. Like the jobs you’d always get, you ungrateful dog! All that Reb Kalman’s done for you, and you turn around and bring your bastard witchcraft into his house. He’s a good Jew, Reb Kalman. He keeps his promises. But you wouldn’t talk. I told you Borysko knew you’d been smuggling; I told you I saw you with that old witch in the Jews’ graveyard. I know all your secrets! Everything you’ve done. What’s one more secret, to save your life?”
He was shouting, scarcely seeing them in front of his face. Sorel-Isser stumbled back as a sudden pain stabbed them under their ribs, a memory of Ostap’s horrified face. Borysko, his older brother, holding Ostap’s knife, shoving Isser to the ground, and Ostap screaming.
“Where’s the book?” Sorel-Isser gasped. “Just tell me where it is, and you’re forgiven. I don’t want to kill you.”
“I don’t know where it is,” said Ostap. He shut his eyes for a moment, took a deep breath. Steadied his hand. “And if I did, I wouldn’t tell you. You killed Borysko? Then go to hell.”
Adela yanked Sorel-Isser to the side just as Ostap pulled the trigger. The black dog leapt over their heads, slamming into the stable-boy and knocking him backward to the ground. They hit one of the horse stalls with a crash, breaking through the planks and sending all the horses to screaming. The gun fired again, wild, as it spun out of Ostap’s hand. Adela leapt forward before Sorel-Isser could get to their feet, grabbed the gun, and retreated. Sam had Ostap by the collar and was shaking him like a rat.
“Stop it,” said Sorel-Isser. “You’re going to kill him.”
Sam dropped the boy in a heap and pressed one giant paw down on his chest. Ostap, covering his head with his arms, laid still and didn’t try to move. Sam growled, low, the sound seeming to fill the whole world. Even Sorel-Isser felt the urge to run from it.
“Where did you leave my body?” they asked again. “This is the last chance you get. Show us, or we’ll let him tear your throat out.”
THEY HAD NOT BEEN FAR from Isser’s body all along. A wrong turn in the forest, and Sorel could have stumbled on it, in her panicked flight from her wedding or on her way back to Kalman’s estate with Adela. Ostap led them along a woodcutters’ trail that cut due north from Kalman’s toward Esrog, a shortcut to the Jewish Quarter and the taverns on the western side of the river along the smugglers’ road. The route that Isser took to visit Kalman’s estate in secret, without anyone knowing when he went in or out of the city. A route Sorel could have taken, had she known about it, and gotten to Esrog twice as quickly.
Just off the track, not far south of the river, there was a big old tree, straddling a rocky outcrop so that its roots created a hollow space. And here, when Ostap dragged aside a hasty screen of branches, was Isser’s grave.
They had not really buried him. Panicked, Ostap had run from the scene, and his brother had chased him down to retrieve him. They’d come back half-hoping Isser would still be breathing, but he wasn’t. He’d stared at them in accusation, with his blank dead eyes, until Ostap pulled his cap down over his face to hide it.
He was tucked into the hollow, curled up, almost like he was sleeping. But they didn’t have to look closely to know that he wasn’t. One of his limp hands was visible, discolored and swollen, and the smell of old blood hung in the air as heavy as a wet wool blanket.
Sorel-Isser stood staring at the hand for a long moment, then turned away to be sick in the brambles. Ostap stood hollow-eyed and frozen. Adela, braver, crept forward, one sleeve over her nose and mouth, to take a closer look.
“We have to move him,” she said, voice shaking. “If we’re going to—to search his pockets. Or anything. We have to move him.”
“We’ll have to move him to bury him,” said Sam.
“He didn’t have it,” said Ostap. “Borysko checked. He said it must be back in the city. Hid it in his room, or something. But when Reb Kalman sent people to look there, it wasn’t. And we couldn’t tell him we’d found Isser and killed him. He’d have turned us in, had us hanged. He couldn’t know. I’m sorry,” he added, in a tone of desperation. “By God, I never meant it to happen. Why did you have to be stubborn?”
Sorel-Isser wiped their mouth and tried to swallow. Sorel said, We’ve already seen our own dead face one time. How bad can it be?
But neither of them believed it.
“Ach, let me do it,” said Sam, at last. “Shut your eyes, kinderlech.”
None of them wanted to look. Adela took Sorel-Isser’s hand and leaned on their shoulder. Ostap slumped against a tree, staring into the distance like a man condemned. And Sam searched Isser’s pockets.
All he came up with was a scrap of paper with a note in Yiddish. Ostap and Borysko hadn’t bothered with it because they couldn’t read it and they’d been in a hurry. It didn’t say much anyway. Just: Adela. Talk to Old Rukhele.
“Rukhele the klogerin,” said Sorel-Isser, when Sam read it aloud. “She’s the one who told me what the book is. She lives in the river bottom and begs around the Gravediggers’ Shul. I buy her a hot meal, sometimes.”
“The old witch,” grumbled Ostap.