“So there was no workman called last night?”
“Where are you getting your information?” asked the blonde in a too-pleasant voice.
“The small thin man on the cane two doors down from Mrs. Feldberg. He says he saw a man coming out of her room.”
The taut lines that had stiffened the blonde’s round face relaxed. She smiled. “Oh, Duncan! I should’ve known. He says he’s an insomniac but he really falls asleep and has vivid dreams that he thinks are real. You should hear some of them! Well, I think you already did.”
On her way back upstairs Rebecca asked herself why Feldberg would dress up and come late at night to do something he could easily have managed on a regular visit. If he wanted to make sure Chana didn’t tell anyone what she knew, he could’ve visited legitimately during the day and if she happened to have a stroke — well, she was fragile and no one would have been surprised. Maybe he was a perfectionist and wanted to be certain no one connected him to her deterioration. Or maybe the hefty blonde was right and the old man couldn’t tell a dream from the real thing.
When she got back to the room, Nesha was standing at the window. She approached Chana, getting close enough to search for petechiae, tiny broken blood vessels around the eyes that occurred with strangling or choking. There were none. There were no bruises visible on her upper body, no signs of a struggle. She looked at Chana’s hands. No broken nails. Nothing beneath them, like maybe a killer’s skin. Yet Rebecca had an uncomfortable feeling about this. It was too convenient. If her husband had entered her room to silence her, would she have resisted?
“What are you looking for?” Nesha asked.
“I don’t know.”
He stepped over to a cardboard box near the table. Bending over, he picked out one of the rag dolls Chana had sewn. “I thought I’d have another chance to talk to her. This is all that’s left of her,” he said.
Rebecca approached. Someone had unceremoniously dumped the dozen or so dolls into the box on the floor. She took them out and lined them up on the tabletop. A crude uneven lot fashioned from coarse grey cotton, their faces a few stitches of yarn. All but one wore slapdash striped skirts and trousers. The exception was dressed in a little black jacket with matching pants and cap. Three of the dolls’ heads were sheathed in red gauze: the uniformed one, and two prisoners. The last time she had visited, Chana had made a fuss about Rebecca picking them up. But now that she could examine the three of them closely, she wondered if they mattered at all.
“What do you suppose this means?” she said to Nesha. “These three who have red gauze covering their faces.”
He took the uniformed doll from her and turned it over in his hand. That was when she took note of the irregular grey object sewn onto the end of its arm. Last time she had seen it, she’d assumed it to be a gun. That went along with the uniform. Her father’s words echoed in her ear: “assume” makes an ass out of “u” and “me.”
“It isn’t a gun,” she said out loud.
Nesha held the tiny grey appendage away from the doll’s body. Up close she saw the fingers sewn around in wobbly grey thread.
“It’s the Hand,” she said breathlessly.
“The Hand!” he said.
“The silver hand from the camp. In the guard’s room.”
They both stared at the doll. “Creepy,” he said.
“These dolls represent something,” she said. “Only three have red faces. One officer and two prisoners, one male, one female. The officer is the SS guard in her letter. What if she was the female and the young orthodox boy was the male?”
“Why are their faces red?” he said.
“When I was here before, she called the dolls kinder. But then when I tried to hold one of these, she shouted “Nisht kinder!” You know, maybe it just means innocent. She said in her letter, children are the innocents. Maybe these three are not. Red is for blood. They’re guilty of something.”
“That makes sense for the SS and even her, considering she felt responsible for the boy’s death. But the boy, himself. She wouldn’t consider him guilty of anything.”
“There’s another thing,” she said.
“If the guard has the hand, that means the boy’s dead already.”
“So who’s the third doll?”
“What about Vogel?” she said.
“The guy in the fish store?”
“He’s involved in Feldberg’s business. From both ends. He’s supplying fish to the club and he’s selling a painting he has no business owning. And we know they were in the camp together.” She dug the catalogue card with Vogel’s home address out of her purse. “And I know where to find him.”
Before they left, Nesha approached Chana’s bed. “You should’ve seen them when they were young. Knock-outs, both of them. Shiny brown hair, trim figures, stylish, always stylish. And full of energy. I followed them around when they came to our house that time. I was just a pisher. They were like movie stars.”
He stroked the pale downy hair, bent forward, and whispered something in her ear. He pressed his lips to her forehead, then stepped away.
chapter thirty-three
Rebecca once again got behind the wheel of Nesha’s rented Olds. Night had fallen and brought with it a brisk clear sky whose stars were invisible above the canopy of street lamps. Nesha stared out the windshield as she pulled out of the parking lot and drove down Bathurst Street to Wilson Avenue. She turned west. Murky fields ranged on both sides, the landing area for a military airport somewhere in the distance. Here some stars winked out of the high black sky.
One of the stars up there had Iris’ name. A ray of hope. Rebecca had reached the hospital again, this time from a pay phone at the nursing home. Martha said Iris had opened first one eye, then the other. The doctor was optimistic.
Past Dufferin Street an endless series of strip plazas lined Wilson Avenue. Metal signs loomed in shadow above Italian restaurants, dress shops, and fabric stores set back from cracked asphalt parking lots. She turned north at Keele Street where a ragtag of small family stores and houses had been erected with no obvious plan, before the building code separated commercial from residential and some Einstein realized it was cheaper to build queues of stores joined at the hip. An architecturally interesting old church stood on a corner, but in the company of frame houses the government had constructed after the war for soldiers returning from duty.
She found the street she was looking for and turned left. The neighbourhood became very suburban with hills of lawns and chain-link fences. Vogel’s house sat on a corner across from the backyards of two other houses whose fronts faced away. The third corner was an empty lot. High cedar hedges lined his driveway. Very private.
Lights were on inside though the curtains were drawn across the front window. The brick house was modest in width but deep, with a garage attached near the back. They climbed what seemed an inordinate number of concrete stairs leading up to the small porch. She knocked, Nesha standing behind her.
The door opened sooner than she expected and Vogel greeted her with an unsurprised smile. “Ah, Doctor, how nice to see you again. I hope you’ve come to look at my collection.”
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