clear out of the way. Then he raised the heavy pistol and aimed it at the pig’s head. He was standing about ten feet away from the target, and his hand was remarkably steady as he slowly put pressure on the trigger.
A crowd of the faithful had gathered to witness this singular event. They stared wide-eyed, huddling close to their neighbors, many covering their ears in anticipation of the earth-shattering explosion.
I could see the muscles tensing in Zizka’s hand.
When the moment came, the gun jumped as if even it was surprised by the concussive shock and the cloud of acrid smoke that engulfed the sheriff’s arm. The noise hit me like a solid blow to the chest, the same kind of jolt that caused my rude awakening on Friday morning, and the sulfurous smell of death wafted out into the street and assailed our noses and stung our eyes. Frightened babies started screaming in the nearby houses, and their mothers cursed us in the name of St. Vitus as the dogs began to howl.
Zizka’s men moved in, waving their arms to disperse the smoke, and suddenly I was pressed on from all sides as everyone regardless of rank tumbled into the shop to get a look at the splattered pig’s head. Someone stomped on my foot, but I concentrated on holding on to my purse strings as the sheriff’s men forced the crowd back into the street. Finally, Zizka had them make an opening so that the three of us could come forward and examine the pig’s head.
Rabbi Gans was the most experienced anatomist among us, so we let him go first and study the filthy creature close up. His eyes blazed with that old spark, and it felt just like when the two of us were Freethinkers back in Kraków and the spirit of the age flowed through us all: We were going to shatter superstitions and sweep away the darkness with the blazing light of observation and reason. It was a shame that he hadn’t brought along one of his glass magnifiers.
There were no other marks on the swine’s flesh besides the plain round hole in the pink, hairless hide, with a faint ring of dark particles around it, just like the girl’s wound.
Rabbi Gans cocked his eyebrow and said, “Fascinating.”
“It certainly looks like the same kind of wound,” declared Rabbi Loew.
“That doesn’t prove a thing,” said Zizka. “It just tells us that the girl might have been shot with a gun that was similar to this one.”
Suddenly he was a skeptic?
“Fair enough, Sheriff,” I said. “But you know as well as I do that every weapon leaves a unique kind of wound. A knife leaves a slit, an épée leaves a triangular puncture, and that girl had a round gunshot wound in her left side just like this one. There aren’t many people who have access to a gun like that, and it’s something a Jew would not possess. Besides, as you have so ably demonstrated, you couldn’t fire a gun like that within a furlong’s distance of the ghetto without waking up a thousand people.”
“And what does this suggest to you?” said Rabbi Loew.
“If I were to accept your premises,” said Zizka, “it would suggest that the girl was shot at some distance from where she was eventually found.”
“And then they rushed her to Federn’s shop so they could dump her there,” I said. “She hadn’t even lost all her color yet.”
“But what about the knife wound?”
“Obviously, the purpose of the knife wound was to drain some of her blood in order to create a plausible excuse for blaming it on the Jews,” said Rabbi Loew.
“But why the two different weapons?” said Zizka.
I had my own thoughts about that: “It would fit with our assumption that even these hardened hired killers couldn’t bring themselves to slit a little girl’s throat. So they shot her first, right through the heart, then they finished the job after she was dead. But they were in a hurry, and they made a mess of it.”
Not that there’s a clean way of cutting someone’s throat.
“What makes you think that they were hired?” asked Zizka. “What proof do you have?”
“None yet. Just the simple equation of an expensive gun and a piece of fine silver thread, which adds up to a wealthy person being involved in some way. And I don’t know of anyplace on earth where the wealthy need to do their own killing.”