The Fifth Servant (42 page)

           
How could he?
After the blood libel and other sorcery-related crimes, the charge that the Jews debased the currency by counterfeiting coins was the worst kind of trumped-up nonsense the Christians could throw at us, which they did periodically and with great enthusiasm. When Archduke Ferdinand tried to expel the Jews from Bohemia in the 1540s, he cited counterfeiting as one of the principal reasons. But no Jew ever believed that we actually did such things.

           
I wanted to spit in his face for justifying the lowest accusations against us.

           
“But that didn’t last,” I said.

           
“No, it was too risky.”

           
I’ll say. They’ll put you in the iron maiden for counterfeiting. Even with the spikes, it can take three days to die in one of those things if they do it right
.

           
“So you turned to something else.”

           
“Yes. Janek said he had connections to a certain merchant on the coast of the German Sea who had figured out a way of shipping rare and expensive spices up the Elbe River so that we wouldn’t have to pay import duties or taxes, and so increase our profits.”

           
“Thanks for the economics lesson. You know, short-changing the emperor is possibly the only mercantile activity that’s even
more
dangerous than counterfeiting.”

           
“That was our mistake. We should have ‘rendered unto Caesar,’ as the saying goes.”

           
“Yes, but how would you have made any money that way?”

           
“Oh, I—” He stopped.

           
And we hit another wall. Just when we were starting to get somewhere.

           
“You
what
? Something worse than what you’ve already told me? It must be pretty bad if you can’t even bring yourself to say it.”

           
A few more precious moments of my life slipped away, never to return.

           
“We’re wasting our time here,” said Rabbi Gans, making a show of leaving. “Let’s go.”

           
“Not yet,” I said, as if I had the authority to tell a learned rabbi what to do. “I still haven’t heard anything worth killing somebody for.”

           
“True, for even thieves must have some kind of honor between them, or the confederacy would fall apart,” said Rabbi Loew, borrowing a line from Halevi’s
Kuzari
.

           
Federn pulled up sharply at the word
thieves
.

           
“That’s just it,” said Federn. His chains rattled emphatically. “We agreed to split the cost of a chest of very expensive herbs, but when it came time to divide up the goods, Janek cheated me and gave me a short weight. So I got mad, and I held a grudge, but what could I do? It was only a verbal agreement, so I had no way to claim what was rightfully mine. Is that not something that a man would want revenge for?”

           
“It’s not enough to kill someone over,” I said.

           
“What do you know about these things? I—” He took another long, sweet pause. “I cannot speak of it.”

           
“You must tell us,” said Rabbi Loew, summoning his severest Day-of-Atonement voice.

           
I said, “You know, I came here to help uncover evidence of your innocence, and instead I keep uncovering evidence of your
guilt
.”

           
“We got in an argument,” said Federn. “Janek cursed me in the most hateful way, and I got crazy with anger and I told him that—”

           
“Yes, go on.”

           
“I told him he would live to regret what he had done to me.”

           
“How could you say such a foolish thing?” said Rabbi Loew. “Such curses can easily bring charges of witchcraft against the whole community.”

           
“I was enraged. I wanted to beat his skull against the pavement and instead I let my tongue take over and commit the violence for me.”

           
I knew exactly what that felt like.

           
“
Oy vey iz mir
, you really fouled things up,” said Rabbi Gans.

           
“But we can’t allow you to lose your life through a slip of the tongue,” I said. “The Talmud clearly states that
no man should be held responsible for the words he utters in anger
.”

           
Rabbi Loew eyed me closely. He could tell that I was up to something, since I had changed a crucial part of the phrase.

           
It worked. Federn looked at me hopefully, as if I had invoked a little-known legal precedent that would get him out of this barrel of pickles.

           
“But you still haven’t told me how you managed to turn a profit even when you were short-changed by your partners.”

           
He got that cagey look of the petty shop keeper double-checking to make sure that all his little money boxes are securely locked and fastened.

           
And that’s when I lost my sense of decorum.

           
“You give me that stuttering it’s-too-shameful-to-mention act one more time and I swear I’ll drown you in your own swill bucket,” I threatened. “You were clever enough to commit the sin, and you can at least be man enough to tell us what it was.”

           
It was Rabbi Loew’s turn to play the voice of reason. “More important, your wife and daughter have been seized by the Inquisition, and if you have any concern for them, you had better tell us everything.”

           
That broke through the wall of lies and prevarications. Federn gazed at his leg irons, unable to meet our eyes as he confessed in a low, quiet voice that he had “made ends meet” by selling medicinal herbs to Christians and Jews at highly inflated prices, which was forbidden by the
Shulkhan Orekh
on the grounds that it violated God’s holiness, and by the Talmud, which specifies that
for a Jew to cheat a Gentile is worse than to cheat a Jew, for in addition to breaking the moral law, it brings contempt on the Jews
.

           
The good news was that this went a long way toward clearing him of a motive for murder, but he was still a pretty big disappointment to us all.

           
After Federn’s words had settled like dust in the crypt, Rabbi Loew broke the stillness and said that this illustrated the truth of Rabbi Assi’s teachings—that the evil inclination begins as a spider’s thread, but ends up as thick as a cart rope. For whoever is envious of his neighbor’s goods will soon find himself giving false testimony against his neighbor, and so on up the ladder until eventually he is driven to steal from him and finally, to shed his blood.

           
Federn sat there looking stunned, while I tried to figure out where this new trail might lead. At least one or two of the municipal guards must have known about this illegal arrangement, and that fellow Kromy struck me as a real
gabenfresser
, a gift-gobbler, our word for a corrupt official with a sideline in petty bribery, and just the kind of man who had the necessary skills and motivation to carry out a high-stakes murder-and-extortion scheme. And I knew just the woman to talk to him, if only I could get a message to her.

           
But—
Good Lord
—how was I supposed to get her a message when I wasn’t allowed to write? Oh, the hell with it. The Torah teaches us to put life before the commandments. (With three exceptions, and I wasn’t planning on committing idolatry, adultery, or murder anytime soon.)

           
“One more question,” I said. “How many people owe you money?”

           
“Ha! Half the neighborhood.”

           
“But who owes you the most? Or is the most difficult to collect from?”

           
“I’d have to check my ledger.”

           
Good luck
.
How are you at reading smoke signals?

           
“Nobody in particular comes to mind?” I asked.

           
“Not really. The amounts were so trivial.”

           
Of course they were. A man like Federn couldn’t afford to let anybody run up a huge debt that he couldn’t collect on. Only a handful of merchants in the Jewish Town could manage that. But as far as I knew, only one of them had petitioned the emperor with a special request for protection.

           
“It’s time to go,” I said. “If erasing an old debt was the motive, we’ve been talking to the wrong man.”

           
“SO WHAT ARE YOUR PLANS NOW?” asked Rabbi Gans.

           
“We still have to free Reb Federn in spite of what he’s done,” I said.

           
Rabbi Loew quizzed me: “What does the Mishnah say on the subject of man’s freedom?”

           
“
The only free man is the one who studies Torah
.”

           
“Correct.”

           
“And the meaning in this context—?”

           
Rabbi Loew held up his hand to silence me as the emperor’s attendant presented us with a copy of the royal decree, signed and sealed, permitting us to examine the young victim’s body
without touching it
. Then the attendant escorted us to the nearest gate, in the shadow of a massive square tower with a pointed roof and one tiny window peering out of its blank stone face. It was called the Black Tower, a name that fully conveyed the spirit of the place, for it stood atop a dark passageway connecting two gated arches. A strong breeze was blowing up the hillside, raising the hems of our cloaks and scattering dirt in our faces. We blustered through this windy tunnel and stepped out into the light, where it was still breezy, but quite a bit warmer.

           
A patch of green was splashed with shiny gobs of butter-yellow flowers blooming by the wayside. I slowed down for a moment, taken with the astounding natural beauty of the flowers, amazed at the simple miracle of nature going about its course without regard for the plight of humanity, and at how such rejuvenation could flourish in the middle of all this chaos.

           
It’s a well-worn saying, but it’s true: You don’t appreciate life until you look death in the face.

           
When you look around on a spring day like this and see flower buds sprouting, you realize that every moment of life is a precious miracle. Just the fact that we’re here to see and smell the first flowers of spring is a blessed miracle.

           
“Come along now,” said Rabbi Loew, tugging at my sleeve. “The day is short, the labor is much, the workers are sluggish, the reward is great, and the Master is impatient.”

           
The Pirkey Avos again, as relevant as ever.

           
“Yes, Rabbi.”

           
But from where I stood on this high place above the rain-gorged river, the taste of nectar in the wind and the marvelous sight of the mother of cities nourishing her children briefly filled me with a sublime poetic urge to embrace the bustling world around me.

           
“At least we’re breathing the air of freedom, unlike our brother Jacob,” I said.

           
“Do you honestly believe that?” said Rabbi Loew, his voice rising. It sounded like Our Master and Teacher was challenging my assumptions again.

           
So I said, “What I mean is that before all this happened, he was already living in a prison of his own making, and perhaps now that he is being forced to confront his errors, he will be able to free his mind from the Evil Inclination, and his body and soul will follow.”

           
“Let me explain something to you,” he said. “As long as we are subjects of the imperial crown, and of the mercantile system that reduces all that is human to a commodity to be bought and sold in the open market, none of us is any freer than a forgotten prisoner living out his days in the darkest cell.”

           
“Metaphorically speaking, you mean—”

           
“Not in the least. We all saw quite clearly today that the emperor is in no way inherently superior to other men. And if any man is capable of being emperor, that means that the imperial state is not a divine creation at all, but a human creation, full of human flaws. And therefore our only hope is that some day, when humanity has left its ignominious childhood behind, the monarchical state will wither away, since one of its primary goals is to place unnatural restrictions on the freedom of men like us.”