Some Danger Involved (11 page)

W
HEN WE HAD EACH ORDERED THE GOULASH
and coffee, I immediately set into him with questions. “So,” I asked, “what was Louis Pokrzywa really like?”

“Not to speak ill of the dead, but he was impossible!” Ira Moskowitz said between bites of goulash. “Everything came so easily to him. He could sit down and write an essay in half an hour that would have the rabbis enraptured for months, while the rest of us would cudgel our brains for days and barely make a passing grade. We used all our free time to study our textbooks. He glanced through the text once, read extra books on philosophy and literature for fun, and still had hours in the evenings for good works in the community, or to eat with pretty girls and their families. There’s another teacher here, named Zangwill; I’ve seen him work for hours on his teaching plans, carefully using his skills to bring out the best in his students. But Louis walked into the classroom every morning cold, without notes, and was brilliant. I suspect that there were plans afoot among the Board of Deputies. Certain doors would be opened to him. He could ‘write his own ticket.’ It just wasn’t fair.”

“So, you boys used to chaff him a bit,” I said, sipping a passable cup of coffee.

“Oh, we did. Who says we didn’t?” he conceded, downing his coffee before taking a large bite out of a bialy. “Did you know, he had no sense of humor? None whatsoever! You could tell him the best joke you’ve ever heard, and he would just stare at you. Either he wouldn’t get the joke, in which case you would have to explain it step by step and just why it was funny, or he would say, ‘Oh, I see, that was a joke. Very humorous.’ We had arguments about him at the
chevra.
Some of us thought he was really otherworldly, and others believed he was just putting on an act. He could be that way, you know. It wasn’t just an accident that he looked like Jesus. He cultivated it.”

“He was vain, then,” I prompted.

“No, no. Not really. A little, I suppose. Not overtly. He didn’t stand at the mirror curling his beard or anything. But he knew what effect he had on people. He dressed very carefully. Not as well as you, of course.”

For a moment, I was self-conscious of my new suit. Poor Mr. Moskowitz was in the sort of cheap clothing I had been wearing a week before. I told myself never to forget that there were thousands of fellows in London in “reduced circumstances,” as I had been.

“How was he around women?” I asked.

“Women!” he exclaimed. “That’s a good question. Let’s talk about women, by all means. You know how they are. The rabbis’ wives had their ears to the door. They had Louis’s dance card full very quickly. He gave some of the girls the vapors. One of them even fainted in his presence. I think half the girls in Aldgate set their cap at him. But you know how he was? Indifferent. Completely indifferent! My mouth watered when I heard some of the girls that were trotted out for his inspection. Yet he turned his nose up at all of them.”

“Was he the cold, analytical type?”

“No. Actually, I think he was a romantic at heart. I thought to myself, ‘Ira, when he falls, he will fall hard.’ Do you know what I believe? You’ll think me fanciful. I think he was looking for a princess. I think he saw himself as a knight in armor, in search of a damsel to save. Not that I could read his mind, of course. He didn’t confide in me. So far as I know, he didn’t confide in anyone.”

His words put me in mind of my late wife. I had to admit that the desire to play knight-errant was a very powerful motive, indeed.

Moskowitz’s fork had reached the bottom of his bowl of goulash. I ordered another cup of coffee and a strudel for him, and more coffee for myself. Then I sent the waiter along with a few shillings, to get us two cigars from a tobacconist down the street. The longer we dawdled, I thought, the more he might reveal. But instead, the conversation reversed itself.

“So, you’re a detective,” he said. “That must be an exciting sort of life.”

“More than you know,” I responded, thinking of the last few days.

“Do you have a gun?”

“I do own one, but I’m not armed at the moment.”

“Have you ever been shot at?”

“No,” I said, “but the last fellow to have this position was killed in the line of duty.”

“How terrible!” Moskowitz cried. “Your employer looks most mysterious. What happened to his eyes?”

“An old injury he sustained in the South China Sea,” I answered. For all I knew, it was correct.

“The South China Sea! And he sits there, so completely still, staring at you. I felt like a mouse in front of a cobra. I thought he was reading our minds.”

“He does have that effect on people.”

The strudel arrived, and the poor scholar tucked in. It felt good to buy him lunch. I supposed he ate well only on feast days. I sipped my coffee and lit up the cigar.

“Cyrus Barker. I’ve seen his advertisements in
The Times.
He must be doing well for himself.”

“Quite well. He has a big office hard by Scotland Yard, and a home in Newington with an oriental garden. And a Jewish butler.”

“A Jewish butler!” Moskowitz thumped the table and laughed. “I love it! Leave it to Sir Moses to hire the best!”

I handed him the cigar. He held it in his hands like a holy relic. I watched as he drew it slowly under his nose, then brought it to his lips and lit it with a vesta. The Jewish scholar closed his eyes and drew in the smoke.

“Paradise,” he said.

“Let’s get back to Louis Pokrzywa, if you don’t mind. He certainly had a lot of charities.”

“He did that. He often tried to talk us into helping with this or that one. Not to give money, of course, but time. He was very free with our time. Much of the responsibility fell on my shoulders or Israel’s—that is, the Mr. Zangwill I was telling you about. But we explained to him that we didn’t have his gifts. We needed time to study or to prepare lessons. Oh, the face he made! He looked like Jesus after he’d just been kissed by…John? Jude? I forget the fellow’s name. I’m not up on Christianity.”

“Judas,” I told him.

“The very man. Anyway, he’d get the long face and mope, and tell us he’d volunteered our help, and how the children would be so disappointed, and well, of course, we’d break down and give him all our study time. Then I’d be vexed by the next Friday when I did poorly on an exam and he received a first.”

“Had he done that lately?”

Moskowitz thought. “No, come to think of it, he hadn’t. Perhaps he saw that we were beginning to avoid him.”

“Was there any change in his behavior over the past month or so?”

“Your employer asked a question similar to that. This is a marvelous cigar, by the way. I don’t know. I thought he seemed a bit more…reluctant to talk about where he was going. It was always, ‘I’m going out, Ira. I shall be late getting back.’ Perhaps he had realized that I didn’t give a damn what charity he was going to that night.”

“Anything else?”

“I wouldn’t want to make something of nothing. He seemed a little…distracted. When I first met him, his journal was very important to him. I thought he believed that future generations would be reading his collected journals and gaining great insight. Lately, he seemed to lose interest. I doubt he wrote in it more than once a week.”

“Fascinating,” I said. We’d been gone close to an hour now. “Was there ever anything to suggest that he might be going somewhere or seeing someone clandestinely?”

“Clandestinely? Louis? Doubtful. Why would he do anything clandestine? A scandal might harm his big plans for the future.”

“Why, indeed? We should get back. My associate is expecting me.” I pulled the large wallet from my jacket pocket and paid the bill. Moskowitz’s eyes opened when he saw the size and thickness of the wallet.

“Business must be good,” he commented. We walked back, still smoking our cigars.

“Oh, yes, the Barker Agency is the top agency in London,” I said. Actually, I had no idea if that was true, but it sounded good.

“I didn’t realize that being a detective was so lucrative.”

“We in the business prefer to be called ‘private enquiry agents.’ ”

“My apologies, Mr. Private Enquiry Agent.”

“Apologies accepted.”

As we came down the street, Racket’s cab came toward us, with Barker inside. I shook hands with Ira Moskowitz and hopped aboard, leaving him awestruck at our extravagance. I looked over at Barker, who had a contented look on his face, like a cat that had gotten into the clotted cream. Obviously, his search of the rooms had yielded something.

“Ho’s?” I asked.

“Certainly.”

Barker sucked the last of his noodles up under that huge brush of a mustache and set the bowl down on the rugged table in front of him. I sat and watched him between half-closed lids. Now he would take a last sip of tea and wipe his mouth before reaching for the pouch he’d been dying to open all morning.

I waited until he’d gotten his traveling pipe stoked. “I presume you discovered something.”

Barker shook his head. “You first.”

I was to be the opening act, and he the grand finale. I gave him word for word an account of our meal conversation, or as close to one as I could. I’d never had to recount an entire conversation before. I was hoping I hadn’t made any mistakes, or left any big questions unasked. Barker sat in stony silence as I gave him my narrative, the only animation being the smoke coming from the bowl of his pipe and the corner of his mouth. As I finished, I was on pins and needles, as they say, hoping for a good word. He puffed on for a moment or two. I wondered if he’d fallen asleep.

“Well done, Mr. Llewelyn,” he pronounced, finally. I let out my breath all at once. “Sending the waiter for cigars to prolong the interview was a nice touch.”

“Thank you, sir. Had you any reason to suspect that he’d have so many opinions?”

“I did,” Barker responded. “First of all, people are always reticent about discussing a fellow’s faults after his funeral. It’s speaking ill of the dead. But, if you get one fellow alone, you might get your blade in him and pry him open like a razor clam. I chose Mr. Moskowitz because he was Pokrzywa’s roommate and would have spoken to him most often, but also because he was messy. Have you ever noticed that a messy person is often the most talkative? I fancy if the situation had been reversed, and you were speaking to Mr. Pokrzywa about the late Mr. Moskowitz, it would have been a lesson in frustration.”

I took a sip of the flavorless tea in front of me and glanced about. The room seemed its usual mix of clandestine conspirators. Not only had I become a “regular,” but I was now involved in one of those secret conversations that Ho’s was famous for, or rather, infamous. Who knows, perhaps some fellow in the room was here for the first time, noticing the small, diffident chap talking to the stone gargoyle in the smoky spectacles.

“So how did you get on with Mr. Pokrzywa’s bookcase?” I asked. “Did you make them an offer for the books?”

“I did. They are carefully considering the offer. Louis Pokrzywa was a particularly intelligent and well-ordered man, until recent months. Something set him on his ear. As you said, his personal journal dwindled off after several years of daily entries. The entries were very instructive. Louis really did want to be a prime minister like Disraeli. He hoped to rise to a position in Parliament and convince the government to sponsor a return of the Jews to Palestine. He wanted no restriction against the Jews ever again. In fact, he agreed with Disraeli, who wrote in his political novel,
Sybil,
that the Jews were not genetically inferior, as the eugenicists insist, but actually superior.”

“How so?” I asked.

“It’s been years since I’ve read Disraeli’s work, but let me see if I can put it plainly. Let’s take a nation of people, the Irish, for example. Now, conquer their homeland, and disperse them across every inhabited continent. Scatter them among hundreds of different indigenous peoples. Let them be despised and persecuted, and even periodically slaughtered. Do so for almost two thousand years. Do you suppose, at the end of that time, you would find the average Irishman just as you find him today, with his rusty hair, his brogue, his love of life and good ale, his veneration of the saints, et cetera? Or would he have long ago been subsumed into the general population, leaving the memory of a strange race known as the Hibernians only a footnote in the history books?”

“I see what you mean,” I conceded.

“There was a very interesting page I came upon. Just an entry in his journal, among the others. Louis was pondering whether the coming Messiah would know he was the Messiah. He wondered how high he could go, to what heights he could aspire.”

“Are you telling me Pokrzywa wondered if
he
was the coming Messiah?” I gasped.

“Not outright, but it was implied.”

“And the looking like Jesus Christ?”

“Was all a part of it. I suppose he could not help looking like he did. He didn’t grow a beard to look like Christ, only to follow Jewish custom. But looking so much like him affected him in some ways, I believe. It contributed to his grandiose plans.”

“Can one be obsessed with Christ and not be a Christian?” I said aloud.

“Well, of course, you saw the New Testament in his room. I even found a book of our own Reverend Spurgeon’s sermons. But there were also a half dozen books written by Jewish scholars giving their reasons why Jesus could not have been the Messiah. He was studying them. So, I would have said that, no, he was not a Christian, except for one thing.”

Barker reached into his cavernous pockets and pulled out a fold of paper. I took it from his hand. It was a church bulletin from the First Messianic Church of Poplar, dated the ninth of March, not two weeks ago.

“Where did you get this?” I asked.

“It was in the Bible.”

“First Messianic Church of Poplar,” I said. “It’s no denomination I’ve ever heard of.”

“It is a church for Jews that have converted to Christianity.”

I sat up in my chair. “Really?”

“Yes, though it was not something he would have spoken about with his friends or rabbis, or put down in journals that didn’t have a lock or key.”