The Fifth Servant (55 page)

           
“I nominate you,” said Rabbi Gans.

           
“Do I look like a Christian to you?”

           
“Why not use the real thing?” said Meisel, indicating Anya.

           
“I don’t think she’ll be able to show her face out there for quite a while,” I said.

           
“Oh. Right.”

           
“You’re the only one who can do it,” Rabbi Loew said to me.

           
“What about Shlomo Zinger?” I said. “He’s a good actor, he knows his way around the streets, and he has a trunkful of Christian clothing—”

           
“He also drinks like a fish, in case you haven’t noticed,” said Rabbi Gans.

           
“Besides, his face is too well known,” said Rabbi Loew. “But yours isn’t.”

           
“How can you say that? Half the people in the city saw me being led around Old Town Square by an armed escort. They’d recognize me in an instant—”

           
“Not after I get finished with you,” said Anya.

           
“You know the Christian ways better than any of us,” said Rabbi Loew.

           
“Not that well.”

           
“I heard you know the Psalms in Latin,” said Rabbi Gans.

           
“Is that true?” said Meisel.

           
“Only about twenty or thirty of them.” It even sounded lame to me.

           
“You know how they think. You know how to act like one of them. You’re the only one of us who can pass for a Christian.”

           
“I—” This would have been hard enough to say under any circumstances, never mind in front of four witnesses.

           
“You what?”

           
I told Rabbi Gans to put away his pen. He hesitated a moment, then laid the quill aside.

           
“What is it, my
talmid
?” said Rabbi Loew.

           
“Rabbi…”

           
“Yes?”

           
“It was Jews.”

           
“What do you mean, it was Jews? What are you talking about?”

           
“I mean that I was raised by Jews.”

           
“But you said you lived among Christians.”

           
“Yes, that’s what I told you. But I only lived among Christians for a few months, and the rest of the time with Jews. I guess I didn’t want people to know that I’d gotten this—this way that I am—from living with people who were supposed to be such pious and respectable Jews.”

           
I couldn’t help biting off the words and spitting them out, and I felt my heart beating faster.

           
Rabbi Loew said, “It doesn’t matter what lies you had to tell to survive. There are many minor sins on the road to a great
mitsveh
. What matters is that you’re here now, and that you’re the only one capable of performing such a
mitsveh
.”

           
“Am I?”

           
Rabbi Loew drew closer to me. “Why didn’t you do something to change your living situation, if it was so unpleasant?”

           
“What did I know? I thought it was normal to live like that.”

           
“So the man you knew as your father called you a brute and you believed it. And those children in the
kheyder
said you were slow and stupid, and you believed it. But it’s not true. And you have to stop believing it.”

           
“I don’t believe any of it. I’m not a child in
kheyder
anymore.”

           
“Part of you still is,” said Rabbi Loew, and I was stunned by the undeniable truth of his words, which burnt through the fog of years in an instant. “Surely you carry scars from all that hateful treatment, but the worst scars are not visible on your skin. They are buried deep inside you, so deep that you may not even be aware of them yourself. In spite of all your accomplishments, inside you lurks a frightened child who harbors a natural desire to get back at his tormentors, even if that leads you to do things that ultimately make you fail in order to confirm your hidden belief that you don’t deserve to succeed.”

           
There was a long silence as everyone took a moment to examine their own inner souls. Did they recognize a bit of themselves in me?

           
“You still think Zinger’s the right man for the job?” said Rabbi Gans.

           
I let out a long sigh and said, “Maybe after this is over, we could all go to the New World and live among the Indians. I hear that the tribes along the Mohawk River have a non-aristocratic form of government.”

           
“But they’re heathens,” Rabbi Gans protested. “They’ve never heard the word of God.”

           
“I bet they’ve never heard of Jew badges, either.”

           
I WALKED TOWARD THE S OUTH Gate alone. All around me, Jews were preparing for the final confrontation, prying up floor planks to shore up the barricades and breaking apart furniture to stoke the fires in which our metals would be melted down and reshaped into weapons. Everything but books. Never books. For the Sages say,
When precious metals are lost, there are replacements for them. But when a Torah scholar dies, who can replace him?

           
Because we would never beat them with arms alone. We needed a diversion of some kind, something so terrifying that the Christians would forget about their all-consuming quest for Jewish gold.

           
I spun around and headed straight back to Rabbi Loew’s house, where I asked him to send someone to find Zinger and have him meet me at the whore-house on Hampasgasse in about an hour. Rabbi Loew raised an eyebrow, but he must have sensed the unleashed power of the beast raging within me because he agreed without argument.

           
Then I asked him to round up a few trustworthy men and meet me at the South Gate in ten minutes.

           
“How many do you need?” he asked.

           
“
Fifty useful men are better than two hundred who are not
,” I said, quoting the
Talmud Yerushalmi
.

           
“How about three?”

           
“That’ll have to do.”

           
Then I hurried back to the South Gate, pounded on the door, and asked to speak with Sheriff Zizka.

           
“Don’t you ever sleep, Jew?” said the guard.

           
“Just get the sheriff for me, will you?”

           
Zizka wasn’t in a great mood when he finally arrived, and his mood didn’t get any better when I handed him the list of Meisel’s Christian debtors and asked him to go talk to them for me.

           
“It’s too late now,” he said. “We’ll have to go around in the morning.”

           
“But—”

           
“I said it’s too late now. Got it?”

           
“Right, got it.”

           
“What did I tell you?” said Rabbi Gans. “You can’t trust these
noytsriyes
.”

           
“Why are these other men with you?” said Zizka.

           
“They’re here to help gather the remains of our friend.”

           
“Your friend?” said Zizka, looking over his shoulder at the inanimate heap of bloody rags lying untouched in the middle of the street. “Why?”

           
“He was a bit rough around the edges,” I said, giving a hasty, poor man’s eulogy. “But he had as much right to breathe as you or I. And now he’s gone. That’s why.”

           
I somehow managed to convince Zizka to let us through the gate to collect the pieces of the man who had been our night watchman and friend.

           
Rings of torches had been planted in the earth outside the gate, with clusters of
Judenschläger
sleeping in loose circles around them like an army gathering strength for the morrow’s battle. We gathered Acosta’s remains by the glow of their flickering torches.

           
“Here now, what are you going to do with all that?” asked the guard as we treaded past him with our grisly burden.

           
We’re going to cleanse his corpse as best we can, wrap him in a shroud, and give him a decent burial.

           
I said, “We’re going to re-attach his limbs and give him new powers so that he’ll be bigger and stronger than he ever was before.”

           
“What? You can’t do that—”

           
“Can’t we? Just watch.” And we shut and sealed the gate.

           
But no matter how smoothly things went, I had a feeling that it was going to be a long night.

CHAPTER 29

           
I KNOW I DID A variation of this stunt yesterday morning, but that was to a different audience, and besides, it’s not playing the same trick twice when you do it fifty times bigger than before.

           
“This idea of yours had better be good,” said Rabbi Ha-Kohen, since he wasn’t even supposed to be in the
same room
with a corpse, much less handle the bloody remains.

           
We laid our comrade’s shattered limbs on the floor of the shed and washed them as clean as we could with some old rags and a bucket of warm water that quickly turned pinkish-red and ice cold.

           
We wouldn’t allow Rabbi Loew to sully his hands with this task—he had to remain separate from us if this plan was going to work.

           
I spread out the tools and began cleaning the dirt from Acosta’s fingernails with a tarnished silver scraper.

           
“We need to tap into their deepest fears,” I explained, “and convince them that we can bring this soulless clay to life and make an unstoppable creature that does our bidding.”

           
Rabbi Ha-Kohen dropped his arms to his side and glared at me. “You made me go through all this for some worthless
bove mayses
?”

           
“You’re not seriously thinking about trying to create a golem, are you?” said Rabbi Gans.

           
“Not creating one. Making them
think
we’re creating one.”

           
Rabbi Ha-Kohen stared at his bloodstained hands. “You talked me into breaking a commandment for
this
?”

           
“Yes, but are you truly aware what
this
is, Rabbi?”

           
Something like doubt clouded his eyes, for once. It must have been an unfamiliar feeling for him, and at any other time I might have taken a moment to enjoy his discomfort.

           
I put it another way: “What did the Egyptians say when the Angel of Death struck down all the first-born in Egypt, and Pharaoh told Moses and Aaron to take their flocks and leave?”

           
“They said,
We are all dead
.”

           
“Right. They panic. They think they’re all going to die, and they panic. And you know what happens when people panic? They believe every rumor, no matter how outlandish, and they scatter, trampling each other as they try to escape the danger.”

           
“If they don’t try to kill us all first for being sorcerers.”

           
“There’s always that risk. But it’s time for us to make the leap.”

           
“You almost sound like
him
,” said Rabbi Ha-Kohen, referring to our dearly departed comrade-in-arms. “Besides, how gullible do you think they are? Even the
goyim
know that we can’t bring a lump of clay to life.”

           
Fortunately, the Sanhedrin
Bavli
was still fresh in my mind. So I answered, “And Rava says that if the righteous desired it, they could create a world.”

           
Rabbi Ha-Kohen had a counter-argument on the tip of his tongue, but Rabbi Loew stopped the debate before it could run its course: “I agree,” he said.

           
Rabbi Ha-Kohen waited for more.

           
“Although my
talmid
’s plan of action has its dangers, I see very few practical alternatives,” said Rabbi Loew. “And since it may well provide us with a way of holding our enemies off for a day or so, we must accept it as the
di beste fun di eser makes
.” The best of the ten plagues.