Magic Words Read online

  Julius Meyer and Standing Bear in an undated photograph.

  GERALD KOLPAN

  PEGASUS BOOKS

  NEW YORK

  For Kate and Ned

  PREFACE

  RYLAND NORCROSS KNEW THAT IF HE WAS LATE AGAIN FOR the midday meal, his father would have his hide.

  The week before, he had been tardy due to a post-school game of mumblety-peg and Daddy had taken a stick to him. It was a halfhearted beating; performed mostly for the benefit of his mother, who held all family gatherings to be sacred, particularly the noon meal. “A chicken,” she always said, “is an impatient bird. She gets angry if you keep her waiting, especially if I’ve dressed her up.”

  As Ryland flew through Hanscom Park he calculated the interval between the first toll of the bell at the Third Congregationalist Church and the sound of his initial footstep on his front steps. He shuddered at the sum.

  The boy poured it on. He jumped to the seat of a bench, clambered over the top of its backrest and landed hard on the park’s cinder path. He cut across lawns and swung around trees and raced through the central gazebo where, a mere ten days before, he had heard the great Sousa band. Through a stand of dogwood only just begun to bud, he could see the twin gables of Jimmy Withers’s house and his own chimney well beyond it. His only hope now was that the oven had been slow on the biscuits, or his father’s late arrival due to a transaction at the feed store or a chance encounter with a crony.

  The Third Congregationalist had reached its fifth peal as Ryland’s right foot caught something too soft for stone, but too hard for earth. He fell to the ground midway between where the ashes of the path met the scissored edge of the greensward. His shoulder hit first, then his left hand. The impact knocked out most of his wind.

  The sight of a staring brown eye, open and dead level with his own, took the rest.

  Ryland scrambled to his feet and doubled over, fighting for breath. He knew this eye and the body to which it belonged. He had seen them nearly every day of his twelve years.

  In life, they had belonged to a man who sold his family their piano and had seen to its safe delivery; a kind man who would playfully pull Rylands’ hat down over his eyes and give him penny candy for free; a storyteller who had regaled him with tales of Sitting Bull and Spotted Tail from back in the days when such men were still nightmares on horseback.

  Ryland crouched down and shook the man twice.

  “Mr. Julius? Mr. Julius, wake up!”

  Mr. Julius remained still. Standing again, the boy began to stagger toward home. As the wind returned to his lungs, he ran even faster than before.

  His father would know what to do. Daddy had known the dead man ever since he was eight and Julius not more than thirteen; he had always referred to him respectfully as a “white Jew,” someone who could be trusted around your money or your wife without cheating you out of either. He loved to recount how Mr. Julius cheerfully put up with his boyhood shenanigans—letting him browse the dime novels even when he was certain he hadn’t so much as a penny. After he married, wasn’t it Julius who extended him credit even though his brother had refused? And when it was discovered that the “guaranteed” fireback he had received from Boston was of inferior iron, hadn’t he refunded every cent to Daddy? Mr. Julius wasn’t old; he had never seemed sick. In fact, he was known for an electric energy that ran from morning until night. How could he be dead in the middle of the day?

  When the boy reached home, he bounded up the steps two at a time. His father listened carefully as he explained the cause of his lateness.

  “All right, son,” Lemuel Norcross said, “you’ve had a fright, for sure. Lie down on the daybed here until you get your breath back. I’ll fetch the proper authority.”

  Lemuel mounted his horse and went in search of Constable E. Seymour Palmer. At the police station, the deputy informed him that the boss was across the street at Gaita’s in the process of a haircut. Lemuel walked to the shop and repeated the grisly tale between strokes of Gaita’s straight razor.

  “Well, then,” the constable said, as the barber dusted his fat neck, “we’ll go have a look-see. But this better not be another prank. I still got glue in my gun from the last one.”

  Lemuel and Palmer left the shop and crossed the square into the park. As they rounded one of the new street lamps, they could clearly see both the body and Ryland, who had returned, as he said, “to guard the remains.” Soon they were all standing over what had been in life Mr. Julius Meyer: late of the Indian Wigwam Trading Post and the Meyer furniture and cigar stores, agent for the Provident Life Assurance Company, founding member of the Standard Club and Temple Beth Israel, and friend to red and white, Jew and Gentile, Negro and Chinaman.

  Palmer squatted down beside the body.

  It had fallen on its left side, the arm tucked under the torso. Beneath the head lay a circle of crimson that had soaked into the path cinders, forming a sort of halo. Even in such an unusual posture, the clothing looked amazingly unrumpled, but this was typical of the spirit now departed. Nobody knew Mr. Julius Meyer to ever have a crease where he didn’t want one; at least not when he was dressed as a white man.

  “Looks like he’s been shot,” Lemuel said.

  “I reckon,” said the constable.

  Palmer pulled at the curly hair. The side of the head closest to the ground now lay exposed for detective work.

  “Bullet in the temple. Shirt’s red, too. Help me turn him over.”

  Palmer and Lemuel took hold of Julius’s striped gabardine jacket and pulled. It struck the constable that he had never felt a fabric so smooth or fine. Not on a man, anyway. As the body rolled to the right, they saw the Colt revolver gripped in its left hand.

  “Yep. He’s been blasted here, too: one to the chest. You ever know Julius to go armed?”

  “Not since the Wigwam days. I don’t understand it. Sure, there’s kike-haters here, but most of them is cowards, inbred to a double row of teeth. If any of them have the gumption to kill Julius, they don’t have enough to do it in broad daylight. And I don’t care if he had his Sunday clothes on. He’d have fought. Ask any old Indian.”

  Palmer rose from his crouch and spat away from the corpse and the wind.

  “Well, we better work fast,” Palmer said. “Jews’ll want him planted by tomorrow—day after, latest. Ryland!”

  The boy jumped.

  “Ryland, I want you to run like hell for Doctor Ball. If he’s not there, look for him. Check Marty’s or The Smiling Irishman. Don’t get Watkins. Last time we had a case like this he charged the county a hundred dollars and I caught hell. Just find Doc Ball and tell him we got a situation here.” Ryland nodded quickly and took off.

  When the Evening World-Herald reported on the incident two days later, many of Omaha’s citizens concluded that Ball must have been even more drunk than usual at the time of his investigation. The headline read:

  JULIUS MEYER ENDS HIS OWN LIFE BY PISTOL ROUTE Lying beside a bench in Hanscom Park, a bullet hole in his left temple and another in his left breast, a revolver clenched in his left hand, the body of Julius Meyer, president of the Metropolitan Club and a resident of Omaha for over forty years, was found at 11:58 Monday forenoon.

  The story went on to detail Julius’s recent bout of depression, brought on by a battle with ptomaine poisoning. It speculated on the state of his finances now that he had closed the various businesses he had run with his older brother, Max. It even hypothesized that perhaps his lifelong bachelorhood had left him with the kind of emptiness reserved only for those unblessed by children.

  Still, years went by before the chatter finally abated. Why would the man whom the children of the city called “Uncle” want for the attentions of the young? How ill could he have been, having just take
n a brisk walk that ended two miles from his door?

  And considering that the report stated that either wound could have been fatal, how could Julius Meyer have killed himself twice: a mean feat for any man, even if one accepted as gospel the witchcraft of the Jews.

  1

  FROM THE COLD FOREDECK OF THE Balaclava, ALEXANDER Herrmann observed that it would take a magician of stellar reputation to escape the humanity strangling the Philadelphia Lazaretto.

  He had been told there were such crowds at the processing station at Castle Garden. But that was in New York; anywhere one went, the landscape was choked with people. They packed the theatres, filled the parks, and lived eight and ten to a room. At the old fort where the immigrants were processed, queues were so long and quarters so close that fisticuffs would originate among husbands and fathers angered at the proximity of strange men to their wives and daughters.

  He had expected Philadelphia’s immigrant entry point to be different than this, and in some ways it was. Rather than a forbidding old military installation, the Lazaretto was bucolic—a series of structures in the colonial style set in hundreds of acres of farmland and decorated with manicured lawns. Its site on the Delaware River spoke more of a country estate than a quarantine station; its weathervanes and cupolas would not have been out of place at a university in the Old Dominion.

  Alexander began counting the ships. There were two in front of the Balaclava and eight behind, each one dutifully waiting its turn for a chance at a rickety berth. At the starboard dock, a giant iron-hulled barquentine disgorged hundreds of steerage passengers chattering in a dozen languages. The varieties of speech aside, Alexander was amazed at how much each immigrant resembled another: the same frayed dark suits and bowler hats, the same wrinkled notes pinned to each coat, scrawled with the name of a relative or local committeeman. The women and children came wrapped in whatever would serve against the late November chill, their long skirts and trousers encircled at the hems with filth from below decks. Even the dead were indistinguishable. From a hatch on the far port side, he could see men in stained white coats removing linen-wrapped bodies from the hold; the freedom they had sought in America would now have to be provided by God, not Lincoln.

  Alexander had just turned from the sights of the shoreline when the arguing began.

  He didn’t understand the words, but he knew they were in Russian. At first, two voices seemed involved, then three, then the shouting blended with the general cacophony of the Lazaretto—a few more foreign souls attempting to make a point at the tops of their lungs. As he rushed toward the din, Alexander began to recognize one of the voices. It was thin and young, but with a fierce tone and a sarcastic edge that he could well discern through the chatter. Gaining the quarterdeck, Alexander pushed his way through a small crowd that had gathered around three quarrelling boys. Two of them were steerage rats from Moscow or Rostov or Odessa.

  The third was his younger cousin.

  He was smaller than his two antagonists and as dark as they were fair; but to listen to their raised cries was to believe that they had all grown up in the same town, perhaps even in the same street. His vowels were their vowels, his consonants identical. He was guttural where they were; and when they squeezed the letter “y” in the manner of the steppes, he choked it harder, bringing an arrogance to the dispute that required no translation.

  Alexander stepped forward and stood beside his cousin. He raised his walking stick.

  “What are they on about?” he asked in their native German.

  “They saw my curly hair and the pretty clothes you bought me and called me a Jew. They threatened to pull down my britches to prove it.”

  “They’re putting the gangway down, Julius. Let’s just get out of here.”

  “No! No, leave me alone, Alex. You’ll ruin everything. I’ve got them confused. I’ve told them I’m Russian, too.”

  “I don’t care. Your brother told me to bring you to this country alive.”

  Perhaps it was the hurried Deutsch, or the sweat on Alexander’s brow, but the larger Russian, the one with red eyes, smiled and called out to Julius. He reached into a drooping pocket and produced a short fish blade, tossing it from hand to hand.

  “What is he saying?” Alex asked.

  “He says if I’m not circumcised now, I soon will be.”

  Laughing, the Russian waved the blade in the direction of the smaller boy’s groin as his companion circled toward Alexander’s back.

  “Julius,” cried Alexander, “tell them they are right. Tell them we are Jews.”

  Julius opened his mouth to protest but his cousin cuffed him on the ear.

  “Tell them!”

  The curly-headed boy did as ordered. To Alexander’s ears, his Russian seemed even more perfect than before.

  “Now tell them what they’ve always heard is true. That we are all of us demons, and if they don’t leave us alone, we will bring hell down upon them.”

  “What?”

  “God damn you, tell them!”

  The boy obeyed, which enraged Red Eyes even more. His lieutenant, whose grin revealed teeth more green than the river, moved to grasp Alexander from behind. Julius leaped up on a barrel, sidestepping the knife and taunting the Russian about the uncertainty of his origins.

  Alexander feinted in time to avoid Green Teeth’s arms and grabbed the boy by his wretched coat. Spinning around twice, he flung him to the deck. With a bellow of rage, the Russian jumped to his feet in time to see Alexander reach into his breast pocket as if to retrieve a weapon.

  As Green Teeth charged him, Alexander crossed his elbows to form an inverted “V,” and knit his fingers together. Then he spread them apart, fanning them wide like a deck of cards.

  His hands burst into flame.

  The fire was blue at its base and smelled of lamp oil. The light March wind bent the fire forward over Alexander’s fingers and into the face of Green Teeth. The boy recoiled with an oath and ran for the nearest hatch. Alexander turned, whirling on one foot toward his enemy’s companion. Red Eyes collapsed to the deck in terror, begging mercy from the demon in the fine suit. With a sleek flourish, Alexander raised both arms above his head as if to administer the coup de grace, but instead rotated each wrist with a snap, instantly extinguishing the flames.

  Through his smoking hands, Alexander stared down at the frightened Russian and pointed toward the gangway. He uttered a single word in English. He had learned it from cowboy novels.

  “Git.”

  The boy ran for the quarterdeck, hot on the heels of Green Teeth, who now stood remonstrating with a Lazaretto official. The Russian pantomimed fire and put his fingers to his forehead to indicate the horns of Lucifer. By the time his friend reached him, two large sailors had taken Red Eyes into custody. As if he were on fire, Green Teeth made for the Balaclava’s starboard bulwark and hurled himself over her side. He bounced off one of the ship’s newly tied lines, nearly crushing a rat using it as his road ashore. He plunged beneath the river’s surface and bobbed back up with a repeated cry that sounded to Alexander like “choff.”

  “Russian for ‘devil,’” Julius said.

  He snorted into his nose and made for the foredeck. With a sigh, Alexander followed him through a forward hatch, around a course of deck chairs and past a line of customs inspectors holding pencils and tablets. He turned right at the Captain’s Mess and bowed his head to avoid scraping it on the ceiling of the dank passageway. When he arrived at the small stateroom they had shared, he grabbed his cousin by the shoulders.

  “This is madness,” Alexander said, slamming the door behind them with his foot. “Just because you can speak like they do is no reason to goad them. The next time I might not be close by—and then some other pigs will slice your throat and count you as another victory for Jesus and the Czar.”

  Julius glared at his cousin. He shook off Alexander’s hands and walked toward his narrow, unmade bunk.

  “But you are always close by, Alex—ever-present, like G
od. Guttenu, the way you hover about me, He’s your only competition. Except God doesn’t get his miracles by mail order, does he? ‘The Hands of Mephistopheles,’ I believe the trick is called. Two pounds, ten plus post from Mr. Cantor’s in London.”

  Alexander grabbed a brush and comb from the overhead cupboard and angrily stuffed them into his suitcase.

  “If it weren’t for that two pounds, ten, they would be picking a fish blade out of your ribcage. It’s bad enough I’ve spent the past ten days watching you argue with Russians in Russian, Serbs in Serbian and with every German on board. Believe it or not, dear cousin, babysitting you isn’t my primary mission in life.”

  “No, Alex, your primary mission in life is to play lackey for your brother. Rabbits from hats! Sawing women in half! Artists at work, God save you.”

  Alexander turned away from his cousin. He reached into a small chest of drawers and began to remove his shirts and collars. He gently placed each one in a leather suitcase plastered with travel labels: New York, Paris, Istanbul.

  “Julius, this word game you play with people—it squanders your gift.”

  The younger boy smiled. As if to mock Alexander, he switched from German to English: perfect, unaccented, and sufficiently sprinkled with the sort of idiomatic phrases that only one born in its homeland could know.

  “Don’t lecture me about gifts, Alex. You and that charlatan brother of yours sell lies for a living. You wave your wands and scare the yokels—and they swallow it like flies eating shit.”

  “That’s what they pay for,” Alexander said, closing the suitcase. “We agree to lie well and they agree to believe us. But Julius, when you deny that you’re a Jew …”

  “Did anyone in your America ever grab you by your earlocks? Did anyone ever pull your prayer shawl down or throw your black hat into the gutter? In your America you looked like everyone else. In Bromberg being a Jew never got me anything but a beating. No more, Alex. No more yeshiva bocher taking the back alleys to avoid the krauts and polacks. I’m in your America now. I’ll tell them I’m a schwartze if it keeps me in one piece—and I’ll do it in any language.”