The Last Jew (4 page)

'Jews are dangerous and influential, moving good Christians toward doubt,' the priest who had converted Bernardo had told him severely.

For centuries the Dominicans and the Franciscans had incited the lower classes -- whom they called pueblo menudo, the 'little people' -- at times whipping them into an implacable Jew-hatred. Since the mass killings in the year 1391 -- fifty thousand Jews slaughtered! -- in the only mass conversion in Jewish history hundreds of thousands had accepted Christ, some to save their lives, others to advance their careers in a Jew-hating society.

Some, like Espina, truly had taken Jesus into their hearts, but many nominal Catholics had continued in privacy to worship their God of the Old Testament, so many that in 1478 Pope Sixto IV had approved the establishment of a Holy Inquisition to ferret out and destroy backsliding Christians.

Espina had heard some Jews call conversos los Marranos, the Swine, insisting they were eternally damned and wouldn't rise again at the Final Judgment. With more charity, others called the apostates Anusim, the Forced Ones, insisting that the Lord forgave those who were coerced, understanding their need to survive.

Espina wasn't among the coerced. He had first become intrigued with Jesus as a Jewish boy, glimpsing through the open doors of the cathedral the figure on the cross that his father and others sometimes referred to as 'the hanged man.' As a young apprentice physician seeking to alleviate human suffering he responded to the suffering of Christ, his initial interest gradually ripening into burning faith and conviction, and finally into a desire for personal Christian purity, a state of grace.

Once committed, he fell in love with a godhead. He thought it a much stronger love than that of a person simply born into Christianity. The Jesus-passion of Saul of Tarsus couldn't have been more powerful than his own, unshakable and certain, more consuming than any yearning of man for woman.

He had sought and received conversion into Catholicism in his twenty-second year, one year after he had become a full-fledged physician. His family had gone into mourning, saying the Kaddish for him as though he had died. His father, Jacob Espina, who had been so full of pride and love, had passed him in the plaza without acknowledging his greeting, without a sign of recognition. At that time Jacob Espina already was in his last year of life. He had been buried for a week before Bernardo learned he was gone. Espina had offered a novena for his soul but could not resist the urge to say Kaddish for him as well, weeping alone in his bedchamber as he recited the memorial blessing without the comforting presence of the minyan.

Wealthy or successful converts were accepted by the nobility and the middle class, and many married Old Christians. Bernardo Espina himself married Estrella de Aranda, daughter of a noble family. In the first flush of family acceptance and new religious rapture he had hoped against all reason that his patients would accept him as a coreligionist, a 'completed Jew' who had accepted their Messiah, but he wasn't surprised when they continued to scorn him as a Hebrew.

The magistrates of Toledo, when Espina's father was a young man, had passed a statute: 'We declare that the so-called conversos, offspring of perverse Jewish ancestors, must be held by law to be infamous and ignominious, unfit and unworthy to hold any public office or benefice within the city of Toledo or land within its jurisdiction, or to be commissioners for oaths or notaries, or to have any authority over true Christians of the Holy Catholic Church.'

Bernardo rode past other religious communities, some scarcely larger than the Priory of the Assumption, several the size of small villages. Under the Catholic monarchy, service in the Church had become popular. Segundones, the younger sons of noble families, excluded from inheritance by the law of majorat, turned to the religious life, where their family connections assured swift advancement. The younger daughters of the same families, because of the excessive dowries demanded to marry off firstborn females, often were sent to become nuns. Churchly vocations also attracted the poorest peasants, to whom holy orders with a prebend or a benefice offered the only chance to escape the grinding poverty of serfdom.

The growing number of religious communities had led to fierce and ugly competition for financial support. The relic of Santa Ana could be the making of the Priory of the Assumption, but the prior had told Bernardo there was scheming and planning among the powerful Benedictines, the wily Franciscans, and the energetic Geronomites -- who knew how many others, all eager to wrest away ownership of the relic of the Sacred Family. Espina was uneasy lest he be caught between powerful factions and crushed as easily as Meir Toledano had been slain.

Bernardo began by attempting to recreate the youth's movements before he was killed.

The home of Helkias the silversmith was one of a group of houses built between two synagogues. The chief synagogue long since had been taken over by Holy Mother Church, and the Jews now held religious services in the Samuel ha-Levi Synagogue whose magnificence reflected a time when things had been easier for them.

The Jewish community was small enough for everyone to know who had left the faith, who pretended to have done so, and who remained a Jew. They did no business with New Christians if it could be helped. Still, four years before, a desperate Helkias had consulted the physician Espina.

His wife, Esther, a woman of good works who had been born into the Saloman family of great rabbis, had begun to waste away, and the silversmith had thought only of sustaining the mother of his three sons. Bernardo had worked hard over her, trying everything he knew, and praying to Christ for her life even as Helkias had prayed to Jehovah. But he had been unable to save Helkias's wife, may the Lord be merciful to her eternal soul.

Now he hurried past Helkias's house of misfortune without stopping, knowing that soon two friars from the Priory of the Assumption would lead a burro bearing the dead first son home to his father.

Earlier generations of Jews had raised the synagogues centuries before, obeying the ancient precept that a house of worship should be built at the highest possible point in the community. They had chosen sites at the top of lofty, sheer cliffs overlooking the Tagus River.

Bernardo's mare shied nervously, too close to the lip of the cliff.

Mother of God! he thought, pulling at the reins; then, as the horse settled, perforce Espina smiled at the irony.

'Grandmother of the Savior!' he said aloud in wonderment.

He pictured Meir ben Helkias here, waiting impatiently for the shield of darkness. He believed the youth had not been afraid of the cliffs. Bernardo remembered many a dusk when he had stood on these cliffs with his own father, Jacob Espina, searching the lowering sky for the glimmer of the first three stars that would signify the Sabbath was at an end.

He struck the thought away as he was wont to do with any disturbing memory of his Jewish past.

He saw the wisdom of Helkias having used a lone fifteen-year-old to deliver the reliquary. An armed guard would have announced to the world of banditry that here was treasure. A boy bearing an innocuous bundle through the night would have had a better chance.

But it had not been a good enough chance, as Espina had seen.

He dismounted and led the horse onto the cliff trail. Just over the edge was a stone hut built long ago by Roman soldiers; from it, they had thrown condemned prisoners to their deaths. Far below, the river wound in innocent beauty between the cliffs and an opposing granite hill. Boys growing up in Toledo shunned this place at night, claiming it was possible to hear the wailing of the dead.

He walked his horse down the cliff trail until the sheer drop became a manageable slope; then he turned off and followed a path down and down, to the water's edge. The Alcántara Bridge wasn't for him, nor would it have been for Meir ben Helkias. A short distance downstream Bernardo came to the shallows where the boy would have crossed, and he remounted the mare. On the opposite bank he found the path that went toward the Priory of the Assumption. A short distance away there was rich and fertile agricultural land but here the soil was poor and sere, good only for limited grazing. Presently he heard the sounds of sheep and came upon a large flock cropping the short grass, tended by an old man he knew, Diego Diaz. The shepherd had a sprawling family almost as large as his flock, and Espina had treated a number of his relatives.

'A good afternoon, Señor Bernardo.'

'A good afternoon, Señor Diego; Espina said, and dismounted. He allowed the horse to crop grass with the sheep, and he spent a few minutes passing the time of day with the shepherd. Then, 'Diego, do you know a boy named Meir, son of Helkias the Jew?'

'Yes, señor. Nephew of Aron Toledano the cheese maker, that boy?'

'Yes. When did you see him, the last time?'

'Yesterday eve, early. He was abroad delivering cheeses for his uncle, and for but one sueldo he sold me a goat cheese that was my meal this morning. Such cheese, I wish he had given me two.'

He glanced at Espina. 'Why do you seek him? Has he done something bad, that one?'

'No. Not at all.'

'I thought not, he is not a bad young shit, that young Jew.'

'Were others abroad hereabouts last night?' Espina asked, and the shepherd told him that not long after the boy's departure a pair of horsemen had passed, almost riding him down but unhailed and unhailing.

'Two, you say?' He knew he could depend on the old man to be accurate. The shepherd would have watched them closely, happy to see armed night riders go away without stopping to take a lamb or two.

'The moon was high. I saw a man-at-arms, a knight surely, for he wore fine mail. And a priest or a monk, I did not note the color of his robe.' He hesitated. 'The priest had a saint's face.'

'Which saint did he resemble?'

'No saint in particular,' the shepherd said, annoyed. 'I mean to express that he had a beautiful face touched by God. Features that were holy,' he said, and crossed himself.

Diego grunted, and ran to direct his dog toward four sheep moving away from the flock.

Curious, Bernardo thought. A face touched by God? He collected his horse and mounted. 'Be with Christ, Señor Diaz.'

The man shot him a sardonic glance. 'Christ be with you, Señor Espina,' he said.

A short distance beyond the hard-browsing sheep the earth became richer and fatter. Bernardo rode through vineyards and several fields. In the field adjacent to the priory's olive grove he stopped and dismounted, tying the horse's reins to a bush.

The grass was flattened and crushed by hooves. The number of horses seen by the shepherd, two, seemed to fit the amount of disorder.

Somebody had learned of the silversmith's commission. They knew Helkias had been nearing the end of his work, and they would have watched his house for signs of just such a delivery.

Here was the confrontation.

Meir's cries would not have been heard. The olive grove that was rented by the priory was in uninhabited open country, a stout walk from the religious community.

Blood. Here the boy received the cut in his side from one of their lances.

Along this grass-flattened swathe, down which Bernardo slowly walked, the horsemen had run Meir ben Helkias before their mounts like a quarried fox, inflicting the wounds on his back.

Here they had taken his leather bag and its contents. Nearby, covered with ants, were two pale cheeses of the type described by Diego -- the young bearer's excuse for being abroad. One of the cheeses was intact, one had been broken and ground, as by a great hoof.

From here they brought the youth off the trail, into the added cover of the olive trees. And one or both of them took him.

Finally, his throat was slit.

Bernardo felt light-headed and faint.

He was not so distant from Jewish boyhood that he had forgotten the fear, the apprehension of armed strangers, the knowledge of terror because so much evil had gone before. Nor so distant from Jewish manhood that he did not feel these things still.

For a long moment, in his mind he became the boy. Hearing them. Smelling them. Sensing the giant, ominous shapes of the night, the huge horses moving at him, coming at him in the blackness.

The cruel thrusting of sharp blades. The rape.

Physician again, Bernardo wavered under the sinking sun and turned blindly toward the mare, escaping. He didn't believe he would hear the soul of Meir ben Helkias screaming, but he had little desire to be in this place when the next darkness came.
 

4

The Questioning

Espina realized quickly that he could glean only a small and finite amount of information about the murder of the Jewish boy and the theft of the ciborium. Almost everything he knew had come from his examination of the body, his discussion with the old shepherd, and his inspection of the site of the crimes. The most evident fact that faced him, after a week of fruitlessly going about the town asking questions, was that he had been neglecting his patients, and he threw himself into the safe and comforting daily work of his practice.

Nine days after he had been summoned to the Priory of the Assumption, he decided to go to Padre Sebastián that afternoon. He would tell the priest what little he had been able to learn, and that would be the end of his involvement in this matter.