of people not usually associated with one another, thanks to their common enemy in the form of a tall Jew running freely through their territory.
The woman must have paused for breath, then she started screaming again, only this time transforming her inarticulate shrieks into hateful words that cursed the Jews for their eternal evil. Faces—bleary, wide-eyed, and curious—filled the windows on both sides of the street.
The rats scattered in my path, leaving thin traces of blood with their tails. I kicked some of the vile creatures out of the way, stepped over the melting footprints in the frost, and pushed past a couple of onlookers standing frozen to the spot at the threshold to the store.
I recognized the hysterical woman as the same one from before with the dark blue kerchief on her head. She must have been in the middle of doing her morning errands. Carrots and flowered herbs spilled from her basket as she flailed her arms like a broken windmill, threatening red-hot irons and worse for the perpetrators of this crime against Christendom, while the terrified proprietress begged her to stop her infernal wailing.
On the floor between them lay the body of a blond girl, maybe seven years old, her shift torn and bloody, her face waxing pale in death. I checked the impulse to kneel close and touch her, just to make sure, to see if there was any warmth left in the poor creature. But I couldn’t do it in front of an hysterical Christian witness. No point in making a move like that.
I’ve seen a lot of people get hurt in my time, so I noticed that most of the blood on the girl’s nightshirt was drying to a rusty brown, but some splotches of dull red looked quite a bit fresher. It looked like she had lost a lot of blood, but there wasn’t that much on the floor around her, as if she had bled out somewhere else before being deposited here.
Ill-tempered foot soldiers pushed me aside to get a look.
“What’s all the f—?”
“Oh, good God—!”
“Christ!”
I looked around the shop. The stock was mixed. Bolts of coarse linen filled the lower shelves, fine fabrics sat safely on the shelves near the ceiling, and jars of apothecary’s herbs and powders stood behind the central counter. Crates of exotic feathers left little room to move around.
The women of the night joined the outcry.
“Let us have a look, you slobs.”
“Yeah, shove over.”
“Sweet Jesus—!”
Now the walls were quaking. I almost expected to see them split open to the sky, but it was only two sets of hurried footsteps tramping down the stairs outside.
A couple of the mercenaries roughed up a worried-looking Jew as he squeezed between them into the store, then they groped and cursed at a young woman who must have been his daughter as she passed between their burly shoulders.
The man had well-trimmed fingernails and streaks of gray in his hair and beard.
He said, “What’s going on, Freyde?” But one look at what was on the floor and he turned a sickly shade of gray.
His daughter’s hand flew to her mouth, and it looked like she was going to puke, but she held it back.
“What took you so long?” his wife said.
“I was in the middle of the Sh’ma. And Julie was—”
“You’re the owner?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Jacob, do something,” his wife said.
He was going to need more than a Sh’ma to get out of this. Jacob took a step forward.
“Keep away from the girl!” the Christian woman screamed.
Jacob held out his hands and begged her to calm down. A mercenary with dark circles under his eyes told him to keep his filthy hands off good Christian women.
I had to alert the rabbinical authorities, but I couldn’t leave the shop keeper’s family alone with these trained killers. They may have been tired and hung-over, but they were waking up fast, and I’d need more miracles than the Maccabees to take them on by myself. There wasn’t enough room, for one thing.
Jacob looked at me for support. “Any prayer for this kind of situation?”
Now everyone was looking at me.
All eyes fell on my Jew badge.
The soldier with the dark circles unsheathed his sword. Two more brawny fighters followed his prompt. The bald one drew a short stabbing sword out of his belt, the one with a scar over his left eye, a spiked mace. They spoke as if acting out a scene they had rehearsed and played out many times over the years.
“You’ll pay for this, Jew.”
“I’ll