“The longer you make us wait, the worse we have to assume your actions were,” said Rabbi Gans, playing up his part nicely.
“Listen Jacob, I know what you’re going through,” I said. “I’ve been in some pretty tight spots myself. I’m sure you didn’t want it to turn out this way. You only wanted to provide for your family the best way you knew how. You just didn’t get a chance to put things right before all this happened.”
“Yes, that’s it exactly,” said Federn.
“So tell me about it.”
Federn’s eyes flitted from me to the rabbis.
“Don’t look at them, look at me,” I said.
But Rabbi Loew said, “When the Israelites came to the wilderness of Sin between Elim and Sinai, the Holy One, Blessed is He, sent us the manna from heaven. And on the sixth day, He sent us a double portion for Shabbes. Do you know what this means, Jacob? It means that even when a man has no money for challah and wine, he must prepare for Shabbes as best he can, and have faith that God will provide for him.”
Federn said nothing.
I gave him one more noodge. “Look, it’s going to come out anyway. But if you talk to us now, maybe we can keep everyone from hearing the news from the wrong people. Isn’t that what you want?”
Maybe it was the redemptive qualities of the bread of affliction—the dry, unleavened bread that he could barely swallow—or the fact that Pesach is also called the Festival of Freedom, that fragile ideal that he was particularly receptive to at the moment, but Jacob Federn finally started talking.
“We started out by clipping dalers,” he said.
I tried not to show any reaction.
“Janek knew a couple of metalworkers who would melt down the shavings and mold them into coins,” he said.
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?”