A Storm in the Blood Read online

  A Storm in the Blood

  A Storm in the Blood

  A Storm in the Blood

  A Novel

  Jon Stephen Fink

  To Lisa, from beginning to end

  Be it Russian or Pole, Lithuanian or Jew

  I care not but take it for granted,

  That the island of Britain can readily do

  With the notice: “No Alien Wanted.”

  “Will Workman,” writing in The People, 1909

  Those who live and labor in the great East End feel hot and angry at the sight of faces so un-English and the sound of speech so foreign. In face, instinct, language and character their children are aliens, and still exiles.

  —from a Whitechapel clergyman’s letter, 1906

  Who are these fiends in human shape, who do not hesitate to turn their weapons on innocent little boys and harmless women?

  —article in The Daily Mirror, 1909

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Part I

  Inhuman Criminals

  One

  IN THEIR VILLAGE, the Bermansfelt family had a reputation. Mordechai’s…

  Two

  FOR MOST OF THE NEXT DAY Rivka tore through the…

  Three

  BEHIND HIS BACK, friends and strangers alike called her escort…

  Four

  UNDER A CANALSIDE STRETCH of the Parisian sky, shadowed by…

  Five

  WITH THE PAVEMENT of Montparnasse under his boots, Peter’s tension…

  Six

  WITH THE ÉLAN of a stage magician, Charles Perelman swirled…

  Seven

  TRUE TO HIS WORD, Yoska collected Rivka at Perelman’s house…

  Eight

  WHILE RIVKA POURED COFFEE AND TEA, served plates of fried…

  Nine

  “YOU CAN BE MORE generous with him,” the voice was…

  Ten

  THE CLEAN BROWN PAPER he’d found on the pavement, blown…

  Eleven

  PETER’S UNCLE, a colonel in Tsar Nicholas’s army, had made…

  Twelve

  RIVKA COULDN’T AFFORD to be tugged off-balance, pulled backward by…

  Thirteen

  LUBA KEPT HER GAZE ON FRITZ, who stood on the…

  Fourteen

  WHERE WAS THE BEST PLACE to approach Shinebloom’s singing waitress?

  Fifteen

  UP ON THE BALLS OF HIS FEET, the Mayor shook…

  Sixteen

  WITHOUT LOOKING UP from his newspaper, the assistant stage manager…

  Seventeen

  IN CLOTHES THAT were not hers, in a part of…

  Part II

  The Crime

  Eighteen

  “FRIENDS ON EVERY SIDE,” Karl’s words, Gardstein’s guarantee in that…

  Nineteen

  RIVKA CARRIED HERSELF ON QUIET, not stealthy, but careful footsteps…

  Twenty

  THAT SCHVANTZ CHANGED HIS MIND, said meet him here, thought…

  Twenty-One

  FRITZ RIPPED THE DOOR BACK with such a burst of…

  Twenty-Two

  NOT THE FEAR of being found or found out, and…

  Twenty-Three

  TO MR. WEIL, he looked young for a police constable,…

  Twenty-Four

  BUSINESS-BRISK, the officer asked him, “Have you been working or…

  Twenty-Five

  WHAT SUBSTANCE OF HIS LIFE does a man own? His…

  Twenty-Six

  POOR NETTIE PERELMAN, rousted out of bed by her father…

  Twenty-Seven

  DO SOMETHING. When they can’t do anything else, people go.

  Twenty-Eight

  KARL’S EYES STAYED OPEN; he lacked the strength to close…

  Twenty-Nine

  STORY OF HOUNDSDITCH MURDERS.

  Part III

  The Siege

  Thirty

  TO PUSH AGAINST OPPOSITION, even when oblivion itself is the…

  Thirty-One

  RIVKA IMAGINED PETER’S VOICE in her ear—she had the feeling…

  Thirty-Two

  NOT IN HIS seven MONTHS IN ENGLAND, and never in…

  Thirty-Three

  FOR PETER, it wasn’t a week in this flat with…

  Thirty-Four

  IN HER DREAM, Rivka walked alone, in bare feet and…

  Epilogue

  TO SAY THAT NOTHING IS KNOWN about the life Peter…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Jon Stephen Fink

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  A Storm in the Blood

  PART I

  INHUMAN CRIMINALS

  A Storm in the Blood

  One

  IN THEIR VILLAGE, the Bermansfelt family had a reputation. Mordechai’s branch of the Bermansfelt line was crazy in its own way, but everyone agreed that the whole squabbling lot of them, going back generations, was crazy in the blood. And so it was that no neighbor in Sasmacken over the age of seven was surprised, one autumn midnight on the Talsen road, when events turned Mordechai Bermansfelt from a clockmaker into a condemned man and his teenage daughter Rivka into a fugitive.

  In a locality that took a hard attitude toward Jews, the Bermansfelt family’s reputation for unpredictable behavior had one advantage: it shielded them by obscuring their motives beneath a fuzz of gossip. Once, a young Russian army private approached the Bermansfelts’ youngest daughter in the street. “Miss, please,” he said, a few steps in front of her, bashful in a way that hinted that things might turn nasty if shyness didn’t get him what he was after. That night, a lifetime ago, he was after fifteen-year-old Rivka. “Miss? My friends—they’re laughing at me. They say I’m a coward if I don’t talk to you. Will you stop for a minute?”

  Rivka smiled, offered him a trace of her own shyness, and kept her pretty mouth closed. She didn’t look down. She didn’t look side to side for help. This encouraged the trooper. “Please, miss, tell me your name,” he begged soulfully. From a nearby doorway, his uniformed pals egged him on with catcalls, gestures, insults to his manhood. Rivka stepped backward into the street, holding her smile. When the Russian private made a move to follow her, Rivka flashed him the flat of her hand at the end of her stiff arm. And then she started to sing.

  Her eyes playful and ferocious above a disconnected smile, she sang: “Nokh eyn tants, beyt ikh itst bay dir…Libster her, ikh bay dir shenk zhe mir nokh eyn tants mir…Ikh hob dik gezukht mayn gants lebn lang…Ists farlir ikh dikh tut mir azoy bang…Bist ge-kummen tsu shpeyt in meyn glik…Iz shoyn oys, libster her…”

  One dance more, I beg of you,

  Dearest sir, I beg you grant me

  One dance more…

  I searched for you all my life,

  Now I’m losing you and I’m so sad.

  My joy lasted only an hour.

  You came too late,

  It’s over, dearest sir…

  Balodis the grocer, who did regular business with the garrison, kept an eye on things from the doorway of his store. Now he stepped in to salvage the teenage soldier’s dignity. “Don’t get your hands dirty for nothing,” Balodis advised him in Russian. “She’s crazier than the limp prick who dribbled her out.”

  There were times when prejudice worked in the family’s favor.

  ANOTHER MEMORY of village life would survive in Rivka like an ancient catfish in murky river water: the face of Sasmacken’s local garrison commander, Colonel Y. M. Orlov, a minor aristocrat who showed genuine creativity when it came to malice and abuse. In this, he followed the proud example of Peter the Great, who had kicked the Swedes out of Latvia a hundred years before and flooded the country with Russi
an colonists. Where they couldn’t outbreed the natives, the Russians stripped them of their language, laws, and social freedoms. When the Letts objected, they were killed in their thousands, cut down in the streets, chased into freezing rivers, slung into prisons, exiled. Latvian Jews received all this, with the added benefit of not having to leave their houses.

  Normally, it was beneath the dignity of a Russian officer to pay Jews on time or the agreed price for their work. Or at all. It was a principle of authority, and Orlov was a tower of principle. Unless you could dodge his summons with an attack of hysterical blindness, the smart choice was to accept the offer that glowed like a hot coal inside it.

  Too flustered to fake blindness, Rivka’s father accepted Colonel Orlov’s commission to build him a mantel clock, in the Louis Quatorze style, as a decoration for his master bedroom. For five months, Mordechai dedicated himself to the job night and day. The finished clock married use to beauty in a stately ceremony of glass, enamel, brass, and wood. He delivered it himself, trudging miles out to the manor house for the satisfaction—the physical proof—that he had, thank God, made it to the end in one piece. His payment? That night Orlov burst in on the Bermansfelts’ dinner, swinging the clock in a burlap bag, like a litter of kittens he was going to beat to death. On the floor in front of them, he took his rifle butt to the gilded wood and the enamel face and smashed Mordechai’s work to splinters, shouting, “This pile of junk ticks so loud it even keeps the maid awake!”

  Helpless, ashamed, unhinged, Mordechai retreated to the woodshed after Orlov thundered away on his horse. He stayed there for the rest of the night and late into the next day. After enduring the Russian’s assault, he needed solitude to remember who he was, to give him strength for the next onslaught. When he finally came inside, his wife, Rebekah, set a cup of tea on the table for him. He sipped some through a sugar cube and asked for a piece of dry toast. After another cup of tea, his family keenly silent around him at the table, Mordechai spoke. The words, like solid things, had formed in his mouth overnight. Out they tumbled: “I know what to do.”

  That was all, and Rebekah let the remark go. She was delighted that her husband wasn’t lying dead in the street or in a jail cell in Riga with his back flayed to raw strips. Her suspicious daughter, though, tried every trick she knew to get him to tell her more—to tell her what he was going to do. Mordechai answered Rivka the same way each time, by touching his finger to his lips, with a little tilt of his head and a sour frown that said, What you see—that’s what I’m doing.

  Then, one dinnertime, Mordechai wasn’t in his chair at the table. He wasn’t contemplating the cobwebs in the woodshed, either.

  The minute they knew he was gone, a cry went up and the Bermansfelts fanned out across Sasmacken. The five sons scoured the streets; Rebekah and Sara knocked on neighbors’ doors. Rivka searched farther afield, outside the town limits. She looked up into the clear cold sky, its distance and darkness threaded into the world with shadows of tree branches. Some ghostly hand must have touched her shoulder, guiding her along the dark road. It could have been Mordechai’s spirit hand reaching out to her from his hiding place.

  Rivka bunched her skirts in her determined fist and ran down the Talsen road. Half a mile from Orlov’s manor house, out of breath, she found her father hunkered by the roadside. “Papa?”

  He ducked behind the nettles and slipped down into a pool of shadows. “Ssh!”

  “If I can see you hiding there, anybody can.”

  “Shush! Watch your voice! What can you see if you’re on a horse? I could be a wild animal in here,” Mordechai whispered. He levered himself up again over the lip of the ditch. “You can help me,” he told her. “Good.” Should a father, turned by Russian barbarity from a master craftsman to a puny slave, expect anything else from blood of his blood?

  Mordechai crossed to the other side of the road, crouched behind the whitewashed nub of the Talsen milestone. The way she might calm the nerves of a crazy man on a high ledge, Rivka said, “Whatever you’re doing, Papa, it doesn’t look like a good idea.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It scares me.”

  “They don’t expect us to complain. Not in their own language.”

  As she sat and watched, her father looped a coil of thick rope around the stone and anchored it. Then, shuffling sideways, he stepped around her, letting the rope’s length sag and flatten on the road. He kicked earth over it as he crabbed backward, toward a nearby ditch.

  “If you don’t want to help me, do you mind going home? Stay out of the way.”

  “Papa, one minute you were with us in the kitchen, and the next minute—pssht, gone. For all we knew they dropped you down a hole.”

  “That’s the thing we’re facing,” he said.

  “Come back with me, will you, Papa?”

  “As usual, I’m the only one with a calm brain. Riveleh, if you’re not going home you have to hide in the ditch. Or go behind those trees.”

  “So you’ll ambush the Russian army,” Rivka said, getting the picture. “Yes, all right. Then what?”

  “Not all of them. One or two.” Mordechai picked up a rock the size of an orange and dropped it into his coat pocket.

  “One or two?”

  “If I’m lucky.”

  “Then what?”

  “God knows.”

  “I’ll tell you ‘then what,’ Papa. We’ll have to look for you all over again.” Then a dose of reality: “I’ll find you, too—in prison or the morgue.”

  “Quiet, please, darling. Here they come.”

  Her freckled fingers scraped back the edge of her shawl. She held still and listened for vibrations in the air. A rhythm of hoof-beats carried down the road. She knew that quick, potent, earth- muffled rhythm. It was how the cavalry rode. Her father leaned up to see the single horse and rider cantering toward him from the town.

  Now the argument turned into a wrenching tug-of-war. Rivka sank her heels into the spongy earth of the ditch bank and leaned back, using her weight to pull the rope out of her father’s hands. Mordechai, caught and struggling, a fish on a line, hissed at her to let go and move out of the way. If her hands could work as quickly as her brain, she still had precious seconds to get her father away from there with no one the wiser. Rivka ran to the milestone and pulled at the knotted rope knuckled around it. She scrabbled at the granite for a handhold. Her fingernails tore; the rope might as well have been carved into the rock. Still seconds, still…

  Rivka stepped into the road before the thought to do it formed in her head, waving her shawl as a warning. She walked forward, in front of the rope, away from her father’s hideout.

  Maybe the rider was drunk, or maybe he took the figure waving at him in the road for the shadow of windblown branches as he galloped past. In the same moment that Rivka jumped to safety, Mordechai sprang his trap. The rope snapped up from the ground and caught the animal knee-high, snagged its forelegs, and tipped him over, headfirst.

  The big chestnut Don rolled to its feet; the Russian officer did not. He lay on his stomach, blood trickling out of a gash in his forehead. Rivka and Mordechai stood over him. “Don’t let him see you, Papa. Go home!” She daubed the wound with the sleeve of her dress.

  “Did I kill him?”

  “Thank God, no. He’s waking up. Will you go?”

  Mordechai paced in a small circle, momentarily off-course in a wilderness of his own. The Russian had enough strength in him to raise the upper part of his body. He sat splay-legged in the middle of the road. A faint sign of relief flickered across his face, scratched and bruised as it was, when he realized he wasn’t there alone. “What a tumble I took. Is Kolya hurt very bad?”

  “Your horse?” Rivka asked, one eye on her father, purging the shakiness from her voice.

  “Kolya,” he nodded. “His hoof needs a shoe.”

  “Kolya’s fine. He’s by the tree, behind you. See him?” She brushed more of the sweat, dirt, and blood out of his eyes.

&nb
sp; “He’s grazing?” Rivka supported his shoulders as the Russian arched his neck to look. “Kolya’s like me. Eating, always eating.”

  But the Russian couldn’t focus very well on his horse or the tree. And he didn’t see the rock that flashed white-gray when Mordechai pitched it at his head. That spasm of violence shook a yelp out of Rivka and a groan from the Russian, who collapsed sideways on the ground. “What…?” he said to no one, to himself, smearing wet blood out of his eyes with his tunic sleeve. “What happened to me?” He unholstered his revolver, but his aim was wild. The first shot went up into the trees. His second bullet hit the ground an inch from Mordechai’s shoes, splashing chips of rock into the air.

  Rivka was sure the noise of gunfire could travel on the night air all the way to Sasmacken. “Run,” she begged her father, pulling at his arm, dragging him backward away from there.

  The rest of the Russian’s troop must have been only two minutes behind on the Talsen road. In a blink, they were there: four riders, five, Rivka couldn’t count how many, circling them, shouting questions—and answers too. “What are you doing out here?” “What’s your name?” “Your name, cunt!” “You’re a terrorist.” “Is that what you are?” “Who’s the slut?” “Where do you live?” “I know him. That’s the Jew clockmaker…” “Didn’t Colonel Orlov finish with you?” “…from Sasmacken.”

  At the center of a carousel of hooves and boots, flanks and faces, whipping tails, jangling reins, Mordechai snapped out of his trance. He grabbed Rivka’s shoulders and hugged her close to him. His whisper had desperation in it, and sudden strength. “Get away from here.”

  “Not by myself.”

  “Do what I’m telling you. Don’t go home—you have to get to Talsen. It’ll be all right. Go to Jankel. He’ll know what to do for you.” Then, to the riders, his arms waving above his head, Mordechai announced, “Yes, yes! I’m Bermansfelt! You and your monkey colonel can go crap in your hats!”

  Rivka felt a shove in her back, and she stumbled through a gap that curtained shut behind her as the whole gang of them fell upon her father. Then she ran. Into the ditch and along it, across the corner of a field, to the pine woods beyond. Two soldiers on horseback chased her, shouting to each other, maddened, laughing, firing their guns up, down, sideways. Wild shots smashed the branches and tree trunks on every side. Charging through the tangled shadows, they couldn’t see what they were shooting at.