“The River Bic is close by, and waterways ferry crops and merchandise to market. It’s a very effective system.”
Yet her civic boosterism—if that was what it was—failed to dispel a more sinister impression. The somnolence of the town I judged deceptive. As Israel Zangwill had informed us, terrible events had taken place here not two years before, and it seemed to me the quiet that pervaded its dusty streets had taken on the surreal aspect of a dream (or nightmare, to be more precise), its residents mere zombies, as though all were still stunned by the convulsion that had occurred.
Of course, dreadful events had occurred mere weeks ago in Odessa, and the city trembled with the tension of those events, but here, with the passage of time, the convulsions had subsided into a collective stupor.
“It’s changed in the year since English and I were here,” Anna Walling commented.
“How so?”
She considered, looking about her.
“Ten months ago they were still reeling from the massacre. Burnt-out homes and ruined shops were everywhere. You could scarcely see any people on the streets amid the rubble. It was as though the survivors were hiding.”
“From shame?” I inquired.
“Hiding,” she repeated without embellishment.
“There are still Jews,” Holmes observed.
“There will always be Jews,” Mrs. Walling answered. She regarded us intently, making up her mind. “Let me introduce you to some.”
What followed next I can scarcely bring myself to write. Anna Strunsky Walling led us to the hut (it can only be termed thus) where a formerly prosperous wool merchant named Nussbaum now lived with his daughter. His once agreeable home had been burned to the ground in the pogrom. On that occasion, Rebecca, his wife of twenty-one years, had her throat cut, and their child, Rivka, now sitting before us, was violated that same night, according to her father, no fewer than six times by rampaging townsmen. She had been thirteen. The girl, in a rigid posture, gaped blindly into space, curled fists grasping the arms of the chair in which she sat, while her torso rocked imperceptibly to and fro, causing the furniture to creak rhythmically, almost as if there were a clock in the small room. Her red hair was tightly curled as well, as if clenching itself in response to what had happened. Her pale, freckled face seemed almost separate from her taut jaw, her yellowed teeth in a kind of perpetual snarl. But most disturbing were her wide, unblinking eyes, the pupils dilated beyond the promptings of the semidarkness, as if they had been dipped in belladonna. Those eyes had beheld too much, and yet now they refused to close. When I struck a vesta and passed it before them, the pupils refused to contract, or indeed follow the flame. In the aftermath of her experience, she remained catatonic, endlessly swaying. In the darkened single room, with odorous sheepskins hanging from rafters, and dust motes floating in shafts of sunlight from holes in the roof above her, I attempted a cursory examination while Mrs. Walling endeavored to explain our presence to the bereaved father and widowed husband. He responded in monosyllables that required no translation.
“Why don’t they leave?” I found myself asking. The girl’s pulse was astonishingly strong and regular.
“Jews are not allowed to travel.”
“And go where?” the wool merchant added when my question had been relayed. His own affect and presentation were little different, from a medical standpoint, than those of his child.
“How do they manage?” the detective, who had remained silent, now asked in a voice I had never heard before.
Mrs. Walling sighed. “They don’t. They exist without living.”
Sherlock Holmes, a man who seldom allowed himself to express emotion of any kind, made to lay his slender fingers gently on top of Rivka Nussbaum’s. With a whimper, her hands recoiled from his as from an electric shock or scalding iron—but her tremulous oscillations never ceased.
“She cannot bear to be touched,” the father explained.
As hard as it is to describe my own reaction to this excruciating interview, the response of the detective I found more unsettling. Judging from his pallor and twitching cheek muscles, I saw a man who had been poleaxed. Always excepting the murder of Manya Lippman, until now the Protocols of the Elders of Zion had been an abstract outrage; now Holmes had encountered its effects in the flesh. It was now plain that men who would not scruple to crush a violin were equally untroubled doing the same to human beings. Holmes had earlier theorized that crimes in the twentieth century were getting bigger. In Kishinev we were both confronted by an example of unparalleled malice.
After endeavoring to extend our condolences to Nussbaum—and how pitiful and insufficient our mumbled words sounded in our own ears—we left the pathetic residence of the wool merchant and his ruined daughter, wincing at the daylight as we, as if fleeing a dream, returned to a reassuringly familiar sunlit world. The detective shook himself in an apparent effort to escape the effects of our visit. I knew him well enough by this time to know that such efforts would prove futile. Though he liked to present himself to the public as a reasoning machine, nothing more, I knew at present he was seething. We both were.
“Where can we obtain a copy of Bessarabets?” he asked in the same eerily strangled voice.
Mrs. Walling pointed to an impressive stone building, constructed in the late second empire style. I might have mistaken it for a substantial train station or opera house, save that I knew this part of the Russian empire possessed neither.
“What on earth is that?”
“Kogan’s pharmacy and general store. Much of it was destroyed in the pogrom, but now it is back in operation. They should have local newspapers.”
Her prediction proved accurate, and we shortly thereafter found ourselves silently consuming a very sweet tea in a shop down the street, where Anna Walling, at Holmes’s insistence, once again donned her glasses and translated the broadsheet from front to back.
There were only six pages, and as she read, Holmes’s brows knit in consternation.
“That is all?” he said, frowning, when she had closed the paper. “Farm news, crop yields, animal obituaries, and a weather almanac?”
She removed her glasses.
“I have read you everything except market prices. Should I—?”
Sherlock Holmes shook his head, reaching for the paper, which he examined minutely, going so far as to view portions of it through his pocket magnifying glass. Unable to read Russian, he only succeeded in smudging his hands with inferior ink.
“You’re certain this is the same periodical that ran the Protocols?”
“Quite certain,” she answered a trifle frostily. “This is their usual fare, but anti-Semitic tirades are regular features, typically inserted among the rest.”
Holmes reopened the paper and searched for the masthead, then refolded it and handed it back. “Who is the publisher?”
She replaced her glasses and squinted at the small Cyrillic typeface. “His name is Pavel Krushenev.” She sat back. “I seem to recall he’s well known in Kishinev. Something of a local personality.”
“Pavel Krushenev,” the detective repeated, looking about him. At such times, when his wheels were turning, he bore an uncanny resemblance to his brother. “What we need,” he proclaimed finally, “is a drink.”
“We’ve just had tea,” Anna Walling protested.
“Holmes means a drink,” I explained. “What is the local specialty?”
She laughed at this. “Colonel Morcar, you must be joking. In this part of the world there is only one drink. It is made from potatoes.”
“And where might one sample this elixir?” Holmes asked.
She puzzled briefly over this; then her countenance assumed an expression of amusement.
“Do you wish a goyische or yidische establishment?”
The detective pondered the question.
“Goyische.” Then, as an afterthought, “Will they admit you?”
She smiled. “Everywhere.”
* * *
Ruminsky
’s pab, or taverna, when we entered it, was a large, smoke-filled, low-ceilinged affair, crowded with peasantry, all in a semi-intoxicated state, the result of the potent vodka they consumed in astonishing quantities, whose fumes, mingled with perspiration, permeated and characterized the foetid air. Originally and perhaps optimistically called Pushkin’s, the place bore as much resemblance to an English pub as a horse-drawn carriage to a motorcar. In contrast to the somnambulant behavior of the citizens by day, night and drink had released their inhibitions, unleashing a boisterous bonhomie, accompanied by a pleasant-sounding instrument whose twanging I confess I enjoyed more than Sarasate’s violin. Mrs. Walling informed us it was called a balalaika. She was by no means the only woman in the place. A sudden shriek, succeeded by high-pitched giggles and peals of laughter, emanated from the far reaches of the room, assuring us of others’ presence, though I knew without seeing them, none compared to our interpreter.
Ruminsky himself proved an almost predictably Falstaffian personage, whose bald scalp was compensated by a white beard of considerable dimensions, within whose tendrils I detected what I took to be bits of food. This Father Christmas did not question or remark upon our unusual trio; a beautiful woman was its own justification in his eyes, that and the fact that our kopeks were genuine. He bit one to assure himself of this. Since supplementing our apparel at the souks in Odessa, we no longer quite stood out as foreigners. Mrs. Walling, in particular, blended in, wearing Uzbek peasant attire of a white blouse with red stitching and a colourful woolen shawl.
Vodka was new to Holmes. I had experienced the drink years before in Afghanistan, but we were both surprised by its strength.
“What is this?” he inquired, indicating a yellow ceramic pot on our table.
“Ground pepper,” our guide explained. “Some take it in their drink. Go easy,” Mrs. Walling cautioned, “or you’ll be under the table before you know it.”
I noticed with moody fascination, as the evening progressed, that the drink seemed to have no effect on her whatever.
Flourishing our copy of Bessarabets, Holmes put a question to her. “Can you ask our host if he is acquainted with Pavel Krushenev?”
After the briefest hesitation, she nodded. When Ruminsky next returned to top up our glasses—(I had begun discreetly tipping the contents of mine down the leg of my chair where it mercifully mingled on the wide floorboards with scraps of black bread and other debris)—she posed his query.
“Krushenev?” He shook his head. “That character. Always stirring up trouble about the Yids.”
“You know him,” his attractive guest pursued, smiling. There seemed no question in Ruminsky’s mind his interlocutor was a Jewess, comparatively well-to-do in addition to radiant. He deferred to her accordingly, if grudgingly. Or was he perhaps intimidated by the presence of Holmes and myself?
“Not so much,” the publican finally admitted. “I don’t read, devushka,* but I know he’s always in trouble, that one.” He gestured to our copy of Bessarabets. “He went broke, you know, had to sell the paper—but still he is the publisher and still lives above the print shop and writes most of the pieces himself, they say.” He shook his head as if in wonder at this feat of legal legerdemain. “Za vashe zdrovye!”
“Za vashe zdrovye!” we chorused in return, having heard the shouted toast exchanged for the past hour.
Without bothering to ask, Ruminsky refilled our glasses.
“What sort of trouble?” Anna Walling inquired, tossing back her drink as readily as he had replenished it.
“It grows late.” The man grew uneasy, his manner less jovial.
Holmes reassured him by silently lining up several additional kopeks on the table, like pawns on a chessboard.
Shrugging unhappily, Saint Nicholas scooped them up.
“It was a long time ago,” he began plaintively. “That boy, what was his name? Mikhail something, I can’t think now. Wait, Rybachenko—, that was it! Mikhail Rybachenko. The constables found him with his head bashed in, and Krushenev got everyone worked up the Yids did it—called it Jew sacrifice or something. Blood libel! That was it! Next thing you know we’re all at each other’s throats—and then it turns out Igor Ivanovich was the killer. The lad’s own cousin! For his share of the estate!” He shook his head once more. “I’m glad I can’t read. All that news that made us wild and it turns out it wasn’t true. These days how can we know what’s true? Someone tried to kill him a while back.” He gestured again to the newspaper, evidently referring to the publisher. “Probably a Yid. You couldn’t blame him. We—many died,” he amended. “Now he keeps Vladimir—that big Cossack—with him all the time, and his own chef! Worries about being poisoned. That’s the rumor, anyway. Coming!”
He fled, pretending to answer a summons from the bar.
“Notice with what dexterity he rationalizes his part in the massacre,” Holmes commented sourly. “It was ‘a long time ago.’ He was the victim of false information. Well done, Mrs. Walling,” he added. “May I offer you a cigarette?”
“In Russia women do not smoke. Certainly not in public.”
“Very like home,” I mumbled through a haze of vodka. The decoction had released feelings of self-pity, loneliness, and longing for my sweet girl.
Holmes, his face flushed with the effects of the drink, took deliberate and elaborate care, lighting a cigarette of his own and blowing graceful smoke to join the blue haze of the room. His face now looked unfamiliar to me. Drink had transformed either his features or my vision. He sneezed, his eyes watering.
“Watson, you still have the Webley?”
This sudden change of topic gave me pause. I blinked in an effort to regain my senses.
“Yes, if it’s not been taken from our rooms.”
“And the bullets, I assume.”
“Mr. Altmont, what are you suggesting?” Anna Walling remained sober.
“I think a visit to the publisher of Bessarabets may be in order.”
Had I been sober, it might have occurred to me to caution “Manchester” in my friend’s ear, but in my present condition, the proposition seemed eminently sensible.
Our rooms, as it happened, remained untouched. Having stumbled back to our lodgings from Ruminsky’s in the cool night air, my heart was slightly clearer. I mean to say, head. Several vigorous shakes of my boot succeeded in disgorging my revolver.
Anna Walling’s eyes widened at the sight.
“Dr. Watso—Colonel Morcar, what are you doing?”
“Boys will be boys,” I returned, unrolling a pair of dark brown socks and spilling out a half dozen bullets, which I shakily managed to insert in the six empty chambers of the cylinder.
“Watson, are you ready?”
“Wait. Wait!” Anna Walling rushed to the door and stood before it, arms outspread, barring our way. “What on earth do you think you are doing?”
“Quite ready, Holmes.”
“No. No!” Mrs. Walling cried. “We didn’t come here to kill the man. In God’s name, I’m a pacifist!! Do you hear me? A pacifist!”
“Time is short, Mrs. Walling. If we are to prevent more pogroms, we are compelled to take extraordinary measures and take them quickly.”
She stiffened, her back pressed against the door.
“The first man to raise a fist is the man who has run out of ideas!” It sounded as if she were quoting something, but before I could ask what, Holmes responded.
“I have an idea,” he protested mildly, but to no avail. Her panic was now in full flood.
“No! Not this! It’s the vodka talking.”
“No. It’s only me.” He moved forward.
“If you do this, it is all over between—”
“And I need your help,” Holmes hastily interposed with a sharp glance in my direction. “We must speak with Mr. Krushenev. And he must be made to answer.”
This served to somewhat stem her alarm.
“Do you promise—?”
“I need your help,” the other repeated. �
��Please come now.”
Gently, one might say tenderly, he edged her from the door and held it open. We followed him out.
There were few lights in the streets of Kishinev, and by this hour the few oil lamps boasted by homes in this vicinity had long since been extinguished.
My companion was unperturbed. “What is the one building whose lights always burn far into the night?” He answered his own question. “A newspaper!”
It didn’t take long in this small place to locate a larger building, through the lighted lower-story windows of which we could see two compositors throwing letters into wooden page “fronts” almost faster than the eye could follow. I was surprised to find a woman loading the “make ready” forms. As it happens, I was not unfamiliar with such places. My years of chronicling Holmes’s exploits for the Strand magazine had found me inside pressrooms on more than one occasion, arguing about my copy with intransigent editors. The Bessarabets press looked to be fifty years out of date but appeared nonetheless well maintained. It did boast rollers but was still hand cranked. When I reflected these letters were in fact Cyrillic and being loaded backward into the bargain, I could not help but admire the skill of these clever typesetting fellows, so at ease in a language that was entirely bewildering to me. The fact that the text they were so adroitly loading was just as likely to be filled with hateful bile and shameless falsehoods did not occur to me at the time. Compositors do not look different than other people.
The clattering of the lead type, audible from where we stood, made it unlikely our presence outside could be heard. Treading gingerly, Holmes motioned us to follow and led us around the building’s exterior. There was an impressive entrance, above which large gilt wooden lettering proclaimed (I am assuming here) the name Bessarabets. Holmes eschewed this portal and continued his tour of inspection, discovering in the narrow lane behind the building—really more an alley—a smaller point of access.
Gently he prodded the narrow door, which appeared at first to be bolted. This would prove a setback, but he tried again, pressing more firmly now, and discovered the thing was merely warped and gave way with a mild squeak of protest.
The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols Page 14
