My anger frightened me.
As the crowd passed, I spotted a tall figure whose cheek bulged with a thick pad of bandages. I skidded to a stop and tugged down the brim of my cap to conceal my face. Grigori’s gaze scrolled over me in disinterest, and why wouldn’t it? Wearing my tzitzis tucked into my pants and a newsboy cap instead of a yarmulke, I was indistinguishable from those in the crowd.
That was the awful irony of it all. He targeted us because he could see us, but the moment I took away identifying clothing, I became invisible.
But you can’t hide what you are, I thought, falling into step behind him. Not anymore.
Everything that was rotten inside him, I would drag into the light. Although it might be the death of me, I couldn’t turn away from this. I was done doing that. I would never turn away from anything again.
My father’s death had been meaningless, and the violence in this world was meaningless, too. But that did not make my life meaningless. I refused to believe that my fate was already written for me, even before the Day of Atonement.
Life was not some never-ending tragedy. Just as for every bitter herb there was sweet charoset, hope and joy persisted alongside suffering. And even someone like me had the ability to change things.
Grigori vanished into a fray of tourists, and I followed after him. Elbows and shoulders butted and shoved me. I raised one arm in front of me to ward them off and put the other in my pocket to make sure the gun was still there. My fingertips stroked the handle. Six bullets.
I could’ve tried taking Grigori down from afar, but I was afraid of hurting innocent bystanders. Besides, I needed to be absolutely sure. I needed him to look me in the face and tell me, Yes, it was me all along. Because once there was an admission of guilt, a murder became an execution.
I broke through a tangle of bodies and searched for Grigori. Farther down the path, he walked at a leisurely pace, as self-assured and confident as a wolf prowling its territory. And wasn’t that what this place was—a hunting ground? A haunting ground?
Ahead, he turned off the path and entered through the double doors of a massive building whose four corners were adorned with decorative cupolas. One great tower rose from the center of the roof, crested with an American flag that billowed in the wind.
The sign near the entrance read Cold Storage. Cold Storage, like somewhere a corpse would be put to keep it from rotting.
As I reached the doors, a figure rushed from the darkness within the building. I reached for the gun in reflex, nearly drawing it before it occurred to me that Grigori was not one meter tall. The little girl ran past giggling, followed by a boy of similar age. I watched them disappear down the path, my hand resting on the butt of the revolver, my mouth dry. A little girl in a yellow dress, oh God, I had nearly shot a little girl who couldn’t be any older than my sisters back home.
I took a deep breath and pinched the back of my hand, twisting the skin until my eyes watered.
Focus. I dug my nails in, wishing to bruise myself. Just focus.
Gradually, my heartbeat slowed. After my breath returned to a steadier rhythm, I stepped inside.
The first floor consisted of one vast room. True to its name, this building exhibited ice machines and refrigerators, machines I had only read about until now. Hulking things of metal, enamel, and glass, the steam-powered machinery filled the room with a rhythmic hum, like the stomach processing its food.
The Cold Storage building wasn’t nearly as alluring as the Court of Honor or the midway. As I walked up and down the rows of machines, I didn’t pass a soul.
In the larger refrigerated chambers, hooks impaled butterflied swine and cattle rimed with frost, their pale ribs gleaming in the shallow light. Looking at them indirectly, I could almost mistake their forms as human.
I withdrew the revolver from my pocket once I was certain I was alone. Fully loaded, it was heavier than I expected it to be. I didn’t want to hold the trigger, afraid I might pull it in sudden reflex, so I rested my finger on the trigger guard.
Up and down the aisles. Over the hum of machinery, I could hardly hear my own footsteps. If someone was creeping up behind me, I would never know it.
I glanced over my shoulder just to be sure. No sign of him.
At the other end of the hall, I reached a staircase. Pausing on the first step, I looked back down the hall, as empty as it had been when I first entered. I had no choice but to go up.
I edged up the stairs one at a time, holding my breath as if the sound might drown out his footsteps. My hands were trembling, but I didn’t try to pinch myself this time. It would only make more bruises.
Chasya. Silently, I tested my mother’s name on my tongue, tried to commit its shape and sound to memory. Then I took another step and whispered my sisters’ names. Gittel. Rivka.
The more I sounded out their names, the more they sounded like prayers. Maybe it wouldn’t be saying Kaddish for the dead that protected me from the Angel of Death but reciting the names of the living.
At last, I made it to the landing. As with the level below, the second story was all one room. The sunken floor was inlaid with massive slabs of ice that had been smoothed into a seamless surface. Ghostly, curving tracks swept over the rink like the flights of birds.
I recognized those tracks from the many winters in Piatra Neamţ where I had stumbled out onto the frozen pond with a neighbor friend, dull blades tied to the bottoms of our shoes. The last time we had done it together was when I was eleven, and the year after that, he went out on the ice alone. That was the year all our parents’ warnings about thin ice and frigid water became true.
Although the ice rink was surely too shallow to drown anybody, as I proceeded deeper into the room, I felt as though I was centimeters away from crashing through the floor. I kept to the solid walkway that stretched along the rink, separated by narrow pillars.
Across the room, tables had been set up for comfortable seating. A man in dark clothes sat at the table nearest to me.
Grigori?
I advanced forward cautiously, concealing the pistol under my coat. After several paces, I stopped.
A dark puddle spread beneath the security guard. Blood dripped, dripped, thin hairlike strands that trickled to the floor. There was a second smile under his chin, fresh and oozing.
49
Behind me, the door banged shut. The latch fell into place with an audible click. I turned.
Grigori shed his dark overcoat. Underneath, he wore common clothes—a buttoned shirt, a cravat, and a waistcoat draped with a silver chain and fob—and uncommon adornments. On his belt hung a neatly wound whip and a niello sheath for the dagger in his hand.
“I thought it would be better this way,” Grigori said, striding forward. He sheathed the knife, took the whip from his belt. His fingers flexed around the leather grip, probably itching to give me a cut to match the one I’d dealt across his face. “For us to talk alone.”
As Grigori took several more steps, my finger shifted to the trigger.
“Did they find him yet? That boy you were with?” In the frigid air, his breath hung suspended like dragon’s smoke. “He came back to the show last night, after it had closed. He tried to find me. What he didn’t expect was that there would be two of us.”
I waited until he had made it another three meters, close enough for me to get a clear shot at him, before I leveled the revolver hidden in my coat.
“Don’t move!” The command came from my mouth as abrupt and jarring as shattered glass. It was my voice this time, but the words still felt like they belonged to Yakov. I had spoken in Russian, not Yiddish. “Don’t come any closer.”
His eyes narrowed and his feet locked in place. “Ah. I see. So, that’s what you were hiding.”
“All those boys. My friends. You killed them. You killed all of them.”
“Is that why you have come here? T
o avenge them?”
“Why did you do it?” All of a sudden, I needed to hear it. I needed for him to explain the meaning behind it all, the pogroms, the massacres, the burnings that pursued us through the centuries like a dybbuk we’d never be able to tear ourselves free from. “Why do you hate us so much? What have we ever done to you?”
“You are impious and transgressing.” He was six meters away now. “You are the murderers of God.”
His words scalded me, left my cheeks burning hot. I had a dismaying feeling of being eight again, eight and lost in the wrong part of town, harried by farmers’ sons. My rage and indignation were the same now as they had been then: how could I refute my role in a crime that had happened nearly 1900 years before I was born, if it had even happened at all?
“How—how could you...” I choked on what to say. “How could you possibly believe that? We’re people. We’re just like you.”
Four meters.
“No,” he said. “You are an infestation.”
His words caught me in a stranglehold. I felt thrown under a limelight, reduced to a role I had never wanted but that I had been born to play. Half a myth and half a human being. In his eyes, that was all I was, a stage actor, a cutout, Shylock and Fagin and Judas all rolled into one.
“You’re wrong,” I growled.
I might have been his perfect enemy, but I would not be his perfect victim.
“Back in Kiev, the others outcast me for what I did,” Grigori said, prowling closer. “They had grown fat and comfortable in their dachas, behind their gates and closed doors. Their eyes were blind. They couldn’t see that the true power comes when you’re on horseback, in the rat dens, and can do anything to the Jews. And why not? You muddy the blood of the proud Russian people. You invade our towns like vermin, and that is what you are. No, you are not people. You are roaches.”
My eyes stung. He said it like it was so simple, like this was the natural way of things. Like we deserved it.
And all those people he had killed, he had never even known them.
“The only way to get rid of an infestation is to prevent it from spreading. Burn it out. The Jewesses can be impregnated with proper Slavic offspring and will be purified after the first few generations, but the males are disease carriers. Worthless. Their only purpose is to die.”
“You bastard. You don’t know anything.” I wanted to laugh. I wanted to weep. The joke was on him. If my father had been Christian, it would have made no difference.
Three meters away and edging closer.
Everything that had happened before this—the ship, the chevra kadisha, the grief and anger—it all felt like preparation for this single moment. Like this was the reason I had survived so long, the reason my parents had given me my name. So I could kill him.
My fingers tightened around the revolver’s grip. This was how it must be. There was no other option. I pulled the trigger.
Silence.
The blood drained from my face. Impossible.
I tried again. Nothing happened, not even when I gave a third pull of the trigger.
Grigori smiled.
“Ah.” He took another step closer, flexing the whip in his hand. Testing it. He was close enough to make a lunge for me if he wanted to. “You haven’t been keeping track of your bullets.”
The whip leaped forward. I jumped back, felt it cut the air above my head. The light glinted off a piece of metal embedded in the leather tip, a shard to slash and disfigure.
Barely had I caught my balance before he bolted forward, the whip raised once again. I swiveled around and fled across the ice, toward the door at the other side. Please, let it be a second exit.
I yanked open the door. Not locked, thank God. It led to a staircase, but one that winded upward to the level above. No time to waste. I raced up the stairs two at a time, praying that there would be a door above, a solid one that I could lock tight and hunker down behind. Or a weapon to bash his skull in.
I reached the top of the stairs, which led into an open loft. No windows or doorways. Ahead, a sea of darkness broken by vague geometrical shapes. A labyrinth of crates and barrels.
I proceeded blindly through the crowded space, patting the space around me, grasping at edges. Anything might lie ahead. A dead end. A trapdoor that would send me crashing to ground level thirty meters below.
After about nine meters, I reached a wall of boxes filled with wood wool. Nothing useful inside. Too small to hide in.
The stairs groaned as he ascended them. I wished I had something huge and heavy I could hurl down at him. I pressed my body against the crates and tried to make scenery of myself, fumbling with the revolver. There had to be a way to get it to work.
“My older brother served in the tsar’s personal guard.” Grigori stepped into the room. “Twelve years ago, on a cold March morning, a bomb went off when he was escorting the tsar to the Winter Palace. My brother was crippled. His leg was gone. Turned into mincemeat. All because you reprehensible Jews got it in your mind to kill the tsar.”
In March of 1881, I had been back in Romania. I had been just a child. That was the year that pogroms had spread across the Russian Empire, the year my father and mother had realized our time in Europe was limited.
“He didn’t live long, but he was in pain the rest of his life,” Grigori said as I freed the revolver’s cylinder. “He died because of your lust for power and control.”
He was not talking about me. He was talking about his idea of me: the radical Jew, the conniving Jew, the greedy and ambitious Jew who would kill a king for a taste of power. Yakov had given Grigori the name of a dragon, but he was not the monster in this tale. I was.
“Something needed to be done. So, I went out hunting. I came across some Jews on the road and had my fun with them, but I soon grew bored of petty beatings. A few broken bones and missing teeth were nothing like what my brother experienced in his final days. It was sunset by the time I arrived in the village. There was one of your temples there, an eyesore of rotten wood, stacked haphazardly, without taste or culture.”
A trace of sulfur filled my nostrils as he lit a match. He was close.
“There must have been an evening service. Have you ever seen a living person set alight? The hair goes up like a torch and the skin bubbles. The eyes melt.”
Though Grigori’s voice was receding, the glow of his match grew brighter. The scent of sulfur became acrid and choking. Smoke.
“There was a boy. He couldn’t have been older than six. He escaped from the blaze and collapsed in the dirt, wounded but alive. I rode up to him, thinking I should put him out of his misery. And that was when he spoke to me. He told me what I truly was inside. The dragon.”
He paused, and something crashed to the floor nearby. The echo of splintering wood made me flinch and nearly drop the revolver.
“And that was when it came to me like a beautiful revelation. It was an epiphany. At that moment, looking into his eyes, I knew my purpose in life. My destiny. To rid the world of you. To become God’s flaming sword.”
I pressed on the cartridges just to be certain they were secure, making sure that the hole nearest to the barrel was loaded. As I shifted the cylinder back into place, another light appeared on the other side of the room. For a terrifying moment, I expected a second figure to emerge from the darkness—Yakov striding forward, cloaked in the same flames that had scarred him. Then the wave of heat hit me, and I realized what Grigori was doing.
He was starting fires.
50
Flames crawled up the walls, casting off billowing black smoke and crackling whips of sparks. My eyes stung from the heat. Choking for breath, I pressed my shirt over my mouth and nose and eased away from the second glow. I crouched low, knowing that if I rose to my full height, Grigori would see me.
A hollow thud came to my right. I swiveled around and lifted the revo
lver. The gun quivered in my hand, following the dark, shifting patterns of the smoke. Not him, just the crash of a burning crate. I had to take my finger off the trigger to avoid firing off a shot, afraid the flash of the muzzle would alert Grigori to my location.
As I retreated back the way I had come, the floor’s heat radiated through my shoes. The floorboards had been treated with varnish or paint, which bubbled in the fire’s heat and turned as sticky as flypaper. Any hotter, and my shoes’ gutta-percha soles might melt to the floor.
The smoke filled my head, muddled my thoughts. I couldn’t conceal my coughing, could hardly even breathe. Forget about staying hidden. If I stayed here any longer, I’d die. Gagging on the vapors, I threw myself forward blindly, batting away the sparks that landed on my skin.
Ahead, I could barely discern a square of light through the shifting smoke. It had to be the door! Several steps from the landing, the whip caught me around the ankle and dragged me off balance. I landed on my hands and knees, hard enough to bruise. The revolver flew from my hands and skittered across the floorboards.
I rolled over and reached for the whip. Just as my fingers closed around the braided leather cord, Grigori landed atop me. He slammed me back into the floor, all ninety kilos of him boring down on me.
I grappled against his gouging fingers, his hot breath fanning against my cheeks. My injured shoulder screamed in pain. He reeked of mildew and horse sweat. Savage growls erupted from deep inside his throat.
He had one of my arms trapped beneath his knee, but with the other, I reached out, desperately searching for the dropped revolver. It suddenly occurred to me why it hadn’t worked. I hadn’t cocked back the hammer like Frankie had shown me.
My fingertips stroked metal. I tried to pick up the gun, but instead only managed to push it farther out of reach.
Before I could try again, Grigori’s hands closed around my throat. His grip was clammy but mercilessly tight, cutting off all airflow.
The City Beautiful Page 33
