I put the barrel of the gun up to his temple. ‘This is no game, you little bastard! Who have you been working with outside the ghetto?’
‘I don’t know anyone outside the ghetto,’ he insisted, and he reached for my arm to implore me, but I batted it away.
A key turned in the door. Ewa opened it and faced me. ‘If you hurt Ziv, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.’
‘I have no rest of my life,’ I replied.
‘Still, you should be pointing that gun at me, not him.’
‘After Papa and I moved into the ghetto, we had difficulties getting insulin for Helena,’ Ewa told me and Izzy. Seated next to Ziv, she was rubbing his hand to calm him – and to give herself the strength to tell me what she knew. Her lips were trembling, and she couldn’t look at me. She kept gazing off; she would have preferred to be anywhere but where she was.
‘And it became more expensive, too,’ she continued. ‘We were getting desperate, but in early January Papa told me that his German supplier had promised to get him insulin for almost nothing. All we had to do was find him Jewish children to photograph. Papa’s friend was a medical researcher who’d just moved to Warsaw – a German doctor my father had known in Zurich. He told Papa he had theories about the Jews involving their skin, but I never found out exactly what he meant.’
Ewa – the quietest among us – was opening the final door of this mystery.
‘Did your father mention this man’s name?’ I asked.
‘I’ve tried to remember. I think I must have heard it.’
‘It has to be either Rolf Lanik or Werner Koch. Think, Ewa.’
‘Those names, they seem close, but… Could it have been Kalin… or maybe Klein?’
Ewa gazed at me questioningly, but I closed my eyes – out of gratitude, because I suddenly realized why a string had been put in Adam’s mouth and a piece of gauze in Georg’s hand. And how they identified the murderer. Though I still didn’t know who had given me those clues. Might Irene or her mother have been brilliant enough to leave them behind?
Knowing who the murderer was also made me understand why his helper inside the ghetto hadn’t been persuaded by our note to go to the Leszno Street gate.
Yet it was then that a first regret pierced my excitement: if only I’d figured out earlier that the
‘Are you all right, Dr Cohen?’ Ewa asked me, and Izzy reached for my shoulder.
‘Yes, I’m fine. Go on.’
‘The researcher friend of my father’s wanted to photograph skin defects, particularly on children,’ Ewa continued. ‘We were both so relieved to have his help! So when Papa examined Anna and noticed a blemish on her hand, he told her to go to an address outside the ghetto, where she’d receive a hundred and fifty złoty for letting a doctor there photograph her. Papa didn’t know that she’d be killed.’ Ewa held my gaze. ‘He didn’t know. He swore to me he didn’t.’
‘I believe you,’ I told her, but I didn’t believe her father.
‘Anna told Papa she was going to sneak out of the ghetto anyway, so it seemed all right,’ Ewa continued. ‘He only began to think that something bad might have happened to her when she didn’t show up for her abortion. Later, he learned from her parents that she’d been murdered.’
I faced Izzy. ‘After Anna was turned away by Mrs Sawicki, she must have gone to the address Mikael had given her.’
‘She risked everything because she needed money to pay back her friends,’ he observed regretfully.
‘Papa confronted his photographer friend,’ Ewa continued, ‘but he swore that he hadn’t hurt Anna – that she must have been murdered after being photographed at his office and receiving her payment. Papa was sure he was telling the truth. Then Rowy chose Adam for the chorus, and my father noticed his birthmarks at his check-up – though I didn’t know that then. Apparently, Papa visited backstage at a rehearsal one afternoon, and he told Adam that if he ever left the ghetto he should go to have his leg photographed because he’d get a hundred and fifty złoty.’
That made sense; Adam would have trusted Mikael because of the horseradish the physician had given him.
‘With all that money,’ I told Ewa, ‘Adam must have thought he’d be able to buy enough coal to keep Gloria warm till spring.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ she told me, and she began to cry.
I felt nothing for her; her tears were too late to do any good. ‘What was the address?’ I asked her impatiently.
She wiped her eyes. ‘I’m not sure. Somewhere on Krakowskie Przedmieście.’
Izzy looked at me knowingly. ‘We have to find Jesion,’ he told me.
Ziv put his arm over Ewa’s shoulder, which only made her tear up again.
‘Please go on, Ewa,’ I pleaded. ‘Every moment we wait puts another life at risk.’
