AHMM, June 2012

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The goldsmith tried to drown out Francesca's words with howls of protest until the sergeant-at-arms threatened to slap him across the mouth with an ironclad fist.

  The woman finally raised her eyes from the mess she had made.

  “Father Glemp.”

  “Who's he?”

  Now it was the captain's turn to laugh skeptically as Francesca turned to face Kassy and said:

  “He's the priest at St. Bogdan's Church.”

  * * * *

  A pair of the captain's men took the goldsmith in for questioning, while we followed the rest of the squadron as they marched their shackled female prisoner past the Ratusz and the flower market, toward a church at the end of a lane the Germans called the Ziegenstrasse, which was aptly named, since the closer we got to the river, the more it smelled like a wet goat.

  “How did you find us so quickly?” I asked.

  Kassy bit her lip, which she often did when she was gathering her thoughts. “Even a woman with Francesca's resources couldn't possibly expect to pass a significant amount of false coins into circulation without arousing suspicion.”

  Rabbi Loew nodded in agreement.

  “Nor was there any trafficking in false coins where you expected to find it, among the thieves and lowlifes,” she said.

  I grudgingly agreed.

  “So it followed that I needed to look for a go-between who knew something of the law and the ways of men, who was able to travel to and from different parts of the city without attracting undue attention, and who had something no one else could offer the bandits—namely, the ability to give them refuge and sanctuary. Who else but a priest could pass undetected from the poorest slums to the parlors of the rich?”

  “And of course, no one would suspect a priest,” said Rabbi Loew.

  “Not that such an accusation could ever come from my lips,” Kassy interjected. “A Hussite stranger in these lands? Absolutely not,” she added, as we arrived at the church in question.

  Its stones were blackened and pitted with dirt and moss, and its sharply angled cornices and gargoyle-shaped rainspouts gave it the appearance of a crouching bird of prey.

  The captain ordered one of his men to pound on the heavy wooden door with his halberd. When no one answered, he gave the word, and the guard used the blade of his halberd to pry open the door without too much damage to the lock.

  But I bet no one expected to be greeted by the sight of Father Glemp in his spotless white collar and fine black cassock, surrounded by a retinue of armed guards. When he saw who we were, the priest waved them off, and his personal bodyguards stood down.

  Father Glemp smiled and greeted the captain and explained that there had been a number of break-ins lately, mostly thieves looking to rob the poor box, but that some fanatical Protestants had recently dared to threaten his personal safety.

  The Polish guards cursed the fanatical Protestants, while the captain dismissed the priest's need to explain anything. He had the prisoner brought forth, and indicated that we three newcomers to the city were responsible for her arrest, and for a moment the priest looked at me the way a shipwrecked sailor looks at the blank expanse of sea around him, not fully understanding how the waves had washed all the ink off the map that was supposed to guide him to safety.

  “Ask him to show you where he keeps the gold,” said Francesca.

  “Forgive us, Father,” said the captain. “But the law says that we must act to verify—or refute—the prisoner's claims.”

  “Of course, Captain. You are only doing your duty,” said the priest, chilling me with his smile. “Come this way. We have nothing to hide.”

  He gestured for us to follow him up the nave toward the altar.

  “Then how come the vault is always locked and you're the only one who has a key?” said Francesca.

  The priest sighed, as if he were indulging the ill-bred child of a wealthy parishioner.

  “Is it such a novel concept to keep the money for the poor under lock and key?” he asked with a gleam in his eye, as if he were sharing a private joke with the captain.

  He led us down the stairs to the crypt and removed a heavy ring of keys from his waistband. He unlocked the iron grille, and had two of his men push open the massive door with a rusty metallic creak.

  “There!” Francesca said, pointing to a dented strongbox on a middle shelf. “The false coins are in there.”

  It certainly showed signs of having been opened recently, since unlike the rest of the crypt, its surface was completely free of dust. But the priest's manner was far too relaxed and accommodating to support the idea that the box contained anything incriminating.

  He opened the box and handed it over to the captain.

  “We occasionally receive false coins in the collection plates,” Father Glemp admitted. “Perhaps the parishioners themselves are unaware of their provenance. In any case, we were about to do our civic duty and turn the coins in to the proper authorities, but there are so many responsibilities in this parish, so many hungry mouths to feed, so many poor souls who need a sympathetic ear, that I'm afraid I have let these languish here a bit longer than I should have.”

  “You don't have to explain your actions to me, Father. I understand completely,” said the captain, handing off the strongbox to one of his underlings.

  Despite the irons on her wrists, Francesca broke free from her captors and yanked a thick gray sheet off a workbench, revealing an array of tools for grinding, filing, and melting down metals.

  “What about these, then?” she said, her eyes blazing as a couple of pikemen dragged her away from the bench. “Open those sacks, and you'll see what I'm talking about.”

  The captain eyed the sacks under the bench, then his gaze shifted to the priest, who bowed slightly and gestured toward the sacks, as if to say, be my guest.

  The captain nodded, and two of his men strode forward and dragged a couple of sacks out from under the bench and sliced them open. They were filled to the brim with luxurious objects—brass candelabras, silver tankards, and what I could have sworn was a solid gold monstrance for holding the most sacred object in a Catholic church—the blessed wafer of Holy Communion.

  “For the poor,” offered the priest. “Friends of the church salvaged most of these items from the houses that were damaged in the great fire, but nobody ever came forward to claim them. A few of these trinkets were unearthed when the von Lembergs added a room to their house, and one kind soul donated a battered pair of silver drinking cups he found while digging a privy. We were planning to melt them down to remove the impurities and make it easier to transport the precious metals to the weighing house.”

  “Of course, Father.”

  “Is there anything else I can help you with?”

  “No, I believe you've given us all we need.”

  “You're just going to let him go?” said Francesca. “He runs the whole cursed business! I'm just his servant. Sometimes his washerwoman, too, and believe me, I could tell you things. And he only pays me a lousy ten zlotys a year.”

  In other words, less than a third of my meager wages.

  The priest mumbled something about how untrustworthy and dishonest some servants can be, and the captain mumbled something about how true that was.

  Francesca practically leapt through the air and tried to claw Father Glemp's eyes out, but the guards had put up with enough of her outbursts, so they wrapped a thick chain around her waist, pulled it tight, and cuffed her hands to it. Then they gagged her and carried her kicking and squirming up the stairs of the crypt to the sacred space above. But somehow she managed to spit out the gag and yell something about how Father Glemp had sentenced her father to eighteen years as a galley slave.

  The pikemen balled up the gag and stuffed it deep into her mouth until she could barely breathe, while the priest explained in that long-suffering manner of his that Francesca's father had indeed worked for him at one point, but when he found the old man clipping the edges off the coins from the collection pla
te, he had turned him over to the proper authorities—and it was they who had sentenced the villain to eighteen years in the galleys.

  “Yet you continued to employ his daughter,” said the captain, admiringly.

  The priest made an expansive gesture. “Charity is boundless.”

  The captain nodded his understanding.

  Nobody took much notice as Kassy scooped up a sample of the silvery powder from the workbench and slipped it into a small leather pouch.

  Everyone was watching Francesca as her body writhed and contorted and her face became inflamed with rage. But her words, whatever they were, went unheard.

  I stood there speechless as the sounds of her struggle echoed about the vaulted nave, then died.

  “Such a brilliant mind,” said Kassy, lowering her eyes.

  “A brilliant mind who shamelessly misused her gifts,” said Rabbi Loew. “And brought nothing but dishonor to her family.”

  “It's no fun being publicly gagged either, I can assure you,” she replied.

  Kassy was unusually silent as we left the church and made our way back to Zydowska Street.

  As the fog thickened about our ankles, Rabbi Loew shared his observations with us, his authoritative voice echoing through the empty streets as if he were pronouncing judgment in a court of law: “The thirst for gold often turns brother against brother. But when a man gives to charity, that piece of gold becomes a sacred object in the eyes of God, since it is destined to help heal the sick, or feed the widows and orphans in the poorhouse. And so it follows that anyone who dares to deprive the needy of such a holy treasure should be tried and punished in the same manner as a man who has committed murder.”

  But Kassy wasn't listening. She was absorbed in a sort of standing-on-one-foot analysis of the metallic powder she had collected, taking a pinch of the stuff from the pouch and rubbing it between her fingers, feeling its texture, then bringing a tiny bit to her nose and carefully sniffing at it. Then she wet a finger and rubbed the powder around some more, and smelled that, recoiling. She stopped to wash her hands in a public fountain.

  “Well, what do you make of it?” I asked.

  “The only explanation that makes sense,” she said, “is that the man we know as Reb Schildsberg and a number of unknown accomplices were indeed working together in an unholy alliance to manufacture and distribute false coins using high quality materials—the same metals that are used in the Paracelsian tinctures and love potions and such like. But you and I know that no amount of gold will ever satisfy the limitless greed of a certain class of criminal, and someone working in that church's crypt began experimenting with cheaper materials, including arsenic, as far as I can tell without further study, and no doubt a number of other dangerous metals. The priest may be guilty of many crimes, but he may not have been aware that one of his servants was also using the materials to brew various potions.”

  “So Reb Schildsberg, or whatever his real name was, drained the cup of his own free will, thinking it was his usual love potion,” I said. “But the metals in it were debased, and it killed him.”

  Kassy nodded, but Rabbi Loew was more philosophical: “I doubt that we will ever know the full answer. The human heart is capable of atrocities that lie well beyond our comprehension. Even modern science has its limits. Hasn't the great Kopernicus himself admitted that his theories do not explain everything? Teach thy tongue to say ‘I do not know,’ and thou shalt progress, as Rambam put it.”

  Kassy's brow furrowed as she asked for further explanation. So I told her that unlike the monolithic and intolerant textual practices of the Church hierarchy, the Talmud teaches us that there are many ways of interpreting a text, even a sacred one. We will never agree on the full meaning of a difficult passage of Scripture, since “the Torah has seventy faces,” as Rabbi Akiva taught, which does not mean that there are literally seventy ways of interpreting those passages, but rather that there are as many interpretations as there are Jews.

  This discussion continued until we returned to Jew Street, where a sizable welcoming committee had turned out to greet us. The Jews of Poznanhad heard about our heroic efforts to clear an innocent woman's name and bring the true murderer of one of their own, the honorable Reb Schildsberg, to justice. And I became conscious of a number of matronly women appraising me with their hungry eyes and nodding with approval.

  Kassy said, “I'm going back to my room to continue my examination of these powders. Want to come and watch?”

  A group of chattering women blocked my path and besieged me with promises of lucrative love matches with their daughters.

  Kassy was still waiting for my answer, and the way she stood there, so headstrong and defiant, her emerald green eyes fixed on me, transformed her into the living embodiment of the heroine whom we celebrate on this day, a righteous foreign woman who leaves her pagan ways behind and braves all manner of hardships to join the man whom God alone has chosen for her.

  “You do me much honor, dear ladies, for which I am grateful,” I told the excited group of women. “But for the moment, I am committed solely to the pursuit of mystical exploration.”

  And even as I spoke those words, a half-forgotten passage from the Zohar flashed through my mind, a profoundly mystical passage plumbing the depths of our souls and the riddle of our frailties, which suggests that our feelings shape our perception of the world around us, and that all human sensory experience is relative. And in that moment I knew that it was true.

  Because I offered Kassy my arm, and we marched off together, neither one leading the other, into the gray and foggy night. And as we drew near her street, which reeked from one end to the other of the foul odor of the tanneries, I swear that it smelled like the finest perfume.

  Copyright © 2012 Kenneth Wishnia

  * * * *

  Author's note: Thanks to Professors Robert Goldenberg and Robert Hoberman for their technical advice on traditional Jewish practices, to my father Arnold Wishnia for vetting the chemistry, and to SCCC students Aaron Bryant, Eric Ellsworth, James Giffen, Brian Ratkus and Alexa Wintenberger for their comments on an early draft of this story.

  * * * *

  Glossary:

  Ganef: Thief.

  Gehenem: Hell.

  Keynehore: No evil eye.

  Malekhamoves: Angel of Death.

  Paskudnyak: (Slavic) scoundrel.

  Rambam: Acronym for Rabbi Moyshe (Moses) Ben Maimon (1135- i1204), known for his rationalist approach to Scripture.

  Shul: Synagogue.

  Shvues: The holiday that occurs 7 weeks after Passover, celebrating the giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai.

  Zohar: One of the major works of Jewish mysticism, written and compiled by Moses de Leon (Spain, late 13th century), and first published in Mantua (1558-60) and Cremona (1559-60).

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Fiction: LAST SUPPER

  by Jane K. Cleland

  * * * *

  Art by Tim Foley

  * * * *

  I pinched myself real hard the way my used-to-be best friend, Jackie, taught me, and it worked, just like always—I stopped crying.

  The police tape was still up. For three days now, walking from the corner where the Chappaqua Middle School bus dropped me off to the Morrisons’ house, I'd run past the spot where Tommy Jennings's body had been found, not wanting to see anything, not wanting to know. Today, even though my throat tightened and my mouth dried up, I paused to look.

  Yellow and black crime-scene tape, just like you see in the movies, stretched around six orange cones positioned along the sidewalk from the hedge to the curb. Other than that there were no signs that a murdered man had laid there. No blood. No trampled flowers. No tire marks from a quick getaway. Nothing. Maybe that's why the police say Tommy had been killed somewhere else and his body dumped here. I sighed, then sighed again, then shuffled off toward the house, the place I lived now, the place I was supposed to call home.

  Halfway up the walk, I he
ard a car and turned around. A black Caddy rolled to a stop just beyond the marked-off area. Burt Raleigh, co-owner of the restaurant where'd I'd fussed around last summer helping him and Tommy, his business partner, figure out how to use a graphics program to create their daily menus, was behind the wheel. He got out and stood for a moment, staring at the grassy area inside the police tape. Burt was short and round and bald, and he looked upset. His eyes never left the ground. He was frowning.

  “Hi, Burt,” I called, heading back in his direction. “Are you okay?”

  He looked around as if he wasn't sure where the voice came from. When he saw me, his brow smoothed out a little.

  “Hi, Laney,” he said, giving my shoulders a friendly squeeze. “I just came to try to be close to Tommy, you know? It's a silly idea. I was here yesterday, too, just walking around. I even went to where his car was found, over at Seven Bridges Road. It's so empty there. No one around. Just woods.” He looked away, as if he were embarrassed. “I get no sense of him at all. None.”

  “It's so hard,” I said just for something to say.

  “Yeah, well, anyway . . . I'm sorry it's been so long since I've seen you, Laney. You look great—as beautiful as your mom, you know? You doing all right for real?”

  “Thanks, Burt. I'm doing fine. I mean, the pain . . . I guess it never goes away, not completely, but over time—” I broke off. Mr. Adams, my grief counselor, said that just because someone asks a question doesn't mean I have to answer it. “I'm fine. So . . . I'll get to see you a lot if I can help out with the menus again this summer.”

  Burt shook his head. “I'd say yes in a minute, Laney, but it looks like today's the restaurant's last day.”

  “What?”

  “I don't have the heart for it without Tommy. He was the frontman, greeting the guests, overseeing service . . . Without him. . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “I can't believe it,” I managed. “It's only been two days.”

  “I know.” He sighed. “It's a hard decision. We've owned the restaurant for almost twenty-six years, Laney. That's a heck of a good run, but I'm thinking that now is the time to move on—why not? We've had offers to buy the place for years. I'm close to retirement age . . . it's almost three years since my wife passed on . . . maybe I'll move to Vegas—you know how much I like it there.”