PAVLIKOV, THE GENTILE SMUGGLER, could be found in a tavern called the Hound’s Head, but only after dark. He slept during the day, like a vampire. They would have to wait to talk to him. In the meantime Yoshke needed to make arrangements and couldn’t have Sorel and her friends tagging after him like ducklings. To get rid of them, he sent them to the Gravediggers’ Synagogue, in a nearby courtyard, which was a slumped and crooked little building with a set of steep stairs leading to a women’s gallery that Yoshke promised would be entirely empty and a fine place for hiding. Sorel got the sense that he knew from experience and wondered what sorts of insidious business she’d missed by only ever attending shul when she had to.
The Gravediggers’ Synagogue smelled of damp earth, as if the work of those who’d funded its construction had followed them to their services. No one was there except for a little old man who sat on an armchair by the Ark, fast asleep. Adela started up the stairs to the women’s gallery and stopped when she realized Sorel wasn’t following.
“There won’t be any women up there, you know,” she said sardonically. “They’re all at home, serving the second meal.”
“Right,” said Sorel. She made herself take a step forward, ignoring the little anxious instinct that suggested an angel might strike the veils from her companions’ eyes as soon as they saw her in a feminine context. Although there was hardly anything identifiably feminine about the little gallery. It was quite dark, being above the lamps that hung on the walls of the men’s section, and there were a few boxes stacked up against the wall as if the gallery were used for storage. Sam curled up on a bench and went immediately to sleep, leaving Sorel and Adela sitting as comfortably as they could in the cramped space, Adela leafing idly through a Yiddish prayerbook.
“You went to a secular school?” Sorel asked, when the silence got too awkward for her. “A Russian school?”
She stopped herself before adding with boys? Because she was quite sure Adela would laugh at that.
“That’s right,” said Adela. “My mother saw that I liked reading, so I’d be the one to make the most of it. She was distantly related to the famous Genius of Vilna, my mother.”
“We’re related, then,” said Sorel. “So is my father. But he never sent me to any goyish school.”
Adela looked her over. “You’ve got clean hands. Your father is rich?”
Sorel felt her cheeks warming. What else could be seen so clearly? “He is. But I ran away from him.”
“And your mother?”
“Dead, may she rest in peace.”
“You learned Hebrew?” Adela asked.
“Some,” said Sorel, feeling cagy. She knew plenty of boys suffered through years of cheder without really learning anything, but she still felt self-conscious about her lack of mishnah. She’d learned German instead. But Isser knew German, didn’t he? She’d seen German books in his room. “Isser went to the school with you?”
“That hasid Yoshke mentioned,” Adela said, frowning into the distance. “I wonder if it’s him—there was a hasid’s son, a wealthy one, and they paid for Isser to be sent in his place, so the goyish learning wouldn’t poison him. If I could remember his name, we could find him. I think I’d recognize him if I saw him. If this Pavlikov doesn’t know anything, we can try at the rebbe’s court.”
“I don’t think you’ll find out much there,” said Sorel. “They don’t like talking to women.”
Adela rolled her eyes. “I am aware of that, thank you, Alter.”
“Right. Just, they’ll really notice you.”
“That’s why I said if Pavlikov doesn’t know anything.”
Adela’s exasperation made Sorel shut her mouth. She wished Isser would whisper advice in her ear for talking to Adela, but he was nowhere to be found. The presence she’d felt early in the morning was gone now. He could at least have saved her from looking foolish in front of his friend.
Discouraged, she picked up another of the Yiddish prayer books and pretended she was reading.
THE SUN WAS ANGLED LOW and all three of them were dozing when Sam suddenly sat up, startling Sorel.
“What is it?” she asked. He had a look on his face like he’d heard some kind of alarm, but she couldn’t hear anything.
“Something’s happening in the street,” he said, getting up. Adela put her book away and followed him to the stairs, where they both paused to listen. Sorel, feeling left out, went to the window and looked out to see that there was indeed something happening in the street: a gaggle of men in black coats were having what looked like a heated discussion while a few children and women hung by, the way people always did when there was a story to collect.
“We’d better see,” said Adela, already starting down the stairs. Sorel checked that her knife was in her pocket and followed.
On the steps of the shul, Sam was already asking what had happened.
“They found someone in the river!” said a cheder-age child in bare feet.
“Not someone,” corrected his companion with shoes but no hat. “They found something.”
One of the women spoke up. “It’s a murder!”
“No, no, no. It’s only that it could be a murder.”
“Who actually saw what happened?” said Sam, cutting through the discussion. Everyone pointed. In the center of the flock of black coats, there was a peasant holding something sodden. If you glanced briefly, you might have thought it was a body, albeit a small one.
Sorel and Adela elbowed their way closer, Sam on their heels. Sorel had forgotten about Isser for the moment. She was trying to get a better look to see if the peasant were holding what she thought he was. It was a heavy bundle of fabric, dark as blood with the river water.
Her wedding dress.
“We have to ask the rebbe,” one of the black coats said, at her shoulder. “The rebbe will know if it’s permissible to start a search before the end of Shabbat.”
“We don’t have time! The rebbe isn’t even in town. He’s at his son’s father-in-law’s house. If someone is drowned in the river, we have to find them before it’s too late.”
The argument was going in circles.
Sam said, “Could you ask the gentiles to search the river instead?”
All of this conversation was going on in Yiddish. The peasant holding the gown looked very lost. Sorel moved closer to him, heart pounding in her mouth, and spoke to him in Russian. “What is that you’ve found?”
“It’s a girl’s dress,” he said. “I thought it looked like it would be a Jewess, so I brought it here—I was looking for Mendel the gravedigger, I know him; he goes to this synagogue and he’s the only Jew I know.”
He shook out the gown to show her and she flinched away from it, involuntarily. It looked so heavy.
“Isn’t it a wedding dress?” someone said in Yiddish.
Someone else was saying, in Sorel’s other ear, “If it’s a Jewish girl that’s drowned, we can’t leave her for the goyim to find.”
“But if it’s a Christian girl it can’t be us that finds her! Things are bad enough already! Didn’t you hear there were gentile men found murdered behind the Great Synagogue the other day? Torn to pieces by a werewolf!”
“So? Who ever heard of a Jewish werewolf? And it can’t have anything to do with this.”
Sorel was becoming exasperated and also wanted to get away from this crowd before anyone noticed she and the dress were sized for one another. She grabbed it out of the peasant’s hand and turned over the collar. “It’s a Jewish girl’s dress, you meshuggeners!” she shouted. “Look, someone’s sewn a bracha in it.”
Immediately everyone needed to take a look at her nurse’s careful needlework. The patch with the bracha, which Sorel had found so embarrassing when she first saw it, its evidence of arthritic fingers’ wasted efforts—now it seemed to shine with inner light, as if it were a patch from the gown of the Sabbath Queen herself.
“It is a bracha,” Sam agreed. The dress was now in his hands: Sorel hadn’t even felt him take it amidst all the pushing and shoving. The peasant was looking lost again. “It is a bracha for Soreh bas Kalman.”
She hadn’t bothered to read it. Why had her nurse put her name? They must be the only words the woman knew in the Holy Language!
Now everyone was talking at once.
“The rebbe’s daughter-in-law?”
“But she’s supposed to be at her father’s house, celebrating her wedding!”
“The rebbe’s daughter-in-law has been murdered!”
Sorel grabbed Sam by an elbow and looked around for Adela. The dress had passed back into the hands of the black-coated Hasidim, who, having realized the urgency of a missing girl now that the girl meant something to the rebbe, now wanted to urgently search the river. Adela had gone back to stand on the steps of the shul to escape the crowd, and Sorel dragged Sam over to her.
“It’s nothing to do with Isser,” she said. “We should get out of here.”
“Did they say a girl had gone in the river?” asked Adela.
“That’s what they think, anyway,” said Sorel. “But no one’s seen a girl in the river, so who knows. We need to wait here for Yoshke, don’t we? We needn’t bother with it.”
“It would be terrible luck if something happened to the rebbe’s daughter-in-law,” said Sam. “God forbid she should be drowned, or anyone drowned.”
“It’s terrible luck for us if we get involved in any more trouble,” said Sorel. They could not go searching for her own body drowned in the river. Someone, eventually, would remember what Kalman’s daughter looked like.
“They were looking for a missing girl before,” Sam mused. “Weren’t they? At the Great Synagogue, weren’t the Hasidim looking for a girl?”
“That can’t be right,” said Sorel shortly. “Not if it’s the rebbe’s daughter-in-law. She’s not missing, she’s at her wedding.”
Sam was still gazing thoughtfully after the crowd of searchers, who were headed for the river, or else for Mendel the gravedigger’s house to get him to talk to his poor baffled peasant friend. The sun had slipped below the rooftops and the group seemed to melt into the shadows of the narrow street.
Sorel jostled Sam by the elbow, drawing his gaze away.
“We are waiting for Yoshke,” she said. “Don’t get distracted!”
“We should be careful of Yoshke, by the way,” said Adela. “I’m not sure I trust him.”
Sorel huffed out an irritable breath. “Now she tells us!”
“I just think, keynehore, there is more going on in Esrog than I realized,” said Sam.
THE HOUND’S HEAD was uphill in a gentile neighborhood, a part of Esrog Sorel had never been in before. Most of the Jewish neighborhood was run-down, aside from a few streets in the proximity of the Great Synagogue. Conversely most of the gentile neighborhoods were decent, but this was the exception to the rule, a street paved mainly in mud and garbage, with the buildings slumping to one side as if at any moment they might give up and slide down the hill toward the river. The Hound’s Head itself could be seen from afar because it had the most lights of any building on the street—most shops had already closed their shutters for the Christian sabbath tomorrow—and there was a spill of men outside it, smoking and talking in loud voices, with a couple of ragged dogs at their feet begging for God knew what.
Yoshke led Sorel, Sam, and Adela around the back to the stable-yard and from there up an outdoor staircase to the second floor. Sorel immediately distrusted the situation. She didn’t like not having a readily available exit. When she glanced at Sam, his face indicated that he was thinking on the same lines as her; his hands were half-clenched, halfway to a fist. Adela just looked stubborn and angry.
Yoshke took them down a hallway that stank of tobacco and knocked on the door of a room. “Guests for Mister Pavlikov!” he called out. His Russian was quite good; it was the first real sign of an education Sorel had seen in him.
Someone opened the door and let them into a smoky, brightly lit room that smelled of men and alcohol. Sorel curled her hand around the knife in her pocket and stepped subconsciously closer to Adela. Sam was reassuringly solid at her back.
The room was full of gamblers, a large group around a central table and others crammed around smaller tables in every corner. Nearly everyone was smoking, and they were also drinking and eating pickles and they looked as if they had been doing so for quite some time. Their faces were all red, and some of them looked teary-eyed, either because they were drunk or because they were losing money, probably both. Many of them were wearing shiny cuff links that contrasted with the threadbare fabric of their suits.
Sorel had read as many Russian novels as she could, and so she had images of such places in her head, but the prickle of romance that one felt when Pushkin described it was entirely absent when one was actually standing in the room, being stared at by a bunch of young gentile men in flashy jackets. At the same time, she felt a prickle of familiarity. She had been somewhere like this before—she was sure of it. But she didn’t like it. She had not wanted to be there, she thought. The feeling was fleeting, elusive, like accidentally touching a bruise she hadn’t known was there. It was gone as soon as she tried to examine it more closely.
“You didn’t tell us you were bringing Queen Esther,” said the young man who sat at the head of the large table. He was a bit older than Yoshke or Sorel, in his twenties, but he had the same mustache as Yoshke, and the same slicked-back hair. She thought perhaps this was the model Yoshke meant to emulate. It looked better on Yoshke, truth be told. The gentile was blond with nearly no eyebrows and a mustache too light to really give shape to his face. He looked to Sorel like a nocturnal creature that had crawled from under a fallen log.
She didn’t like how he was looking at Adela, either.
“Christian girls have nothing on a real Jewess,” he was saying. “Yoshke told me he had business associates who needed to talk to me! But this is a princess! Come, have a seat. Make room for her, you trolls!”
The wave of his hand sent a couple of the gamblers slouching reluctantly to a corner. Adela sat without taking the angry look off her face, and Sorel sat next to her so that if anyone tried to touch either of them, he’d get a knife in the face. Yoshke, despite there not being enough room on the bench for three, squeezed himself in next to Sorel, while Sam kept standing behind them, quiet as a golem.
“You’re Pavlikov?” Adela said. “I’m looking for Isser Jacobs.”
Pavlikov blinked and kept blinking for what struck Sorel as an excessive amount of time. She could almost see him arranging a story in his head. “Isser Jacobs? Oh, don’t let’s talk about that little mosquito. Surely, you’re not his sister?”
“I am,” said Adela. She took no time to blink and consider, she simply said it. Sorel felt a stir of affection that wasn’t entirely hers—a flash of a memory, Adela defending her on a muddy street, the two of them holding hands.
Isser?
He didn’t respond, but she could feel him. He was there again. What was keeping him? She could use his help. Surely he’d know what questions to ask Pavlikov to get answers.
“I’m looking for him,” said Adela. “He hasn’t been home. I heard you know everything that goes on in Esrog.”
“Well,” said Pavlikov. “Isn’t that flattering. I may know a thing or two, but I’m not in the habit of giving away secrets to just anyone—you understand.”
Sorel saw where Yoshke got his attitude from. It wasn’t any more charming the second time around. “Do you give away secrets to people who beat you at cards?” she asked brashly.
“Alter,” said Sam, in a low warning voice.
“Who’s this?” said Pavlikov, speaking to Yoshke. “Isser’s brother? His rabbi?”
“You couldn’t expect a girl to come alone, could you?” said Sorel. “Of course she brought help. Don’t be stupid.”
“Alter,” said Sam again.
“You look like a man who knows how to make bets,” said Sorel, looking Pavlikov in the face. “So go on, bet me that I can’t beat you at a hand. If I win, tell us all you know about Isser. If you win, we’ll just stop bothering you.”
“If I win, I’d like a kiss from the Queen of Persia,” said Pavlikov.
Sorel was opening her mouth to make a counteroffer when Adela said “Done” and slapped the table. Their audience of sodden gentiles applauded and broke out in delighted laughter.
Sam leaned down to whisper in Sorel’s ear. “Are you even any good at cards?”
She had no reason to think so, but Isser, her yetzer-hara, was fully awake now. She could feel him sitting in her skin, looking out through her eyes. She could also feel his indignation. She was being reckless, and he didn’t like it.
What kind of mess have you put us in now? he said in her ear. Then, out loud, in her own voice: “I’m very good.”