Page 35 of Beehive
A portly man with more splotchy scalp than hair blinked up at me, his smile nearly as wide as his face.
“I, uh—”
The man’s eyes widened as they fell to the carving cradled like a babe in my arms.
“I have this,” I said, unwrapping my arms so he could see more of the figure. “I was hoping you could care for it better than I can. The war and all . . .”
The man’s expression flooded with sympathy. His sausage-like fingers reached up and gripped my arm. “It has been so terrible, yes? Come, let us sit. Would you like some tea? I just brewed a pot.”
Before I could respond, the man tugged, and my feet followed him through a series of hallways and galleries. He prattled on about one statue or another painting, each saved from the ravages of time and destruction.
He led me through an unmarked door nestled between two marble sarcophagi.
“Please excuse the mess. With the grand reopening, everyone is running themselves ragged.” The man waved across a pairof six-foot folding tables he apparently used as his desk. Each was so laden with papers and items that their surfaces were impossible to see. “Sit, sit. I will get our tea.”
Unsure what else to do, I lowered myself into a flimsy chair and watched as the man scurried to the far end of the room and tipped a kettle, filling two mugs with steaming liquid. The bitter aroma of freshly brewed tea made my stomach rumble.
“Might I trade you?” the man said, motioning with one of the mugs to the statue I still clutched against my chest.
“Oh, uh, yes. Of course,” I said, reluctantly exchanging the rabbi for the mug.
The man set his mug down too quickly, sloshing tea all over some of his papers. “Oh, drat. I am such a clumsy sort.”
He set the statue some distance away and scurried around the table to retrieve a towel hanging on a cabinet pull near where the kettle’stootwas dying. He returned a moment later, dabbing the spilled tea and salvaging what he could of his documents.
“Where are my manners?” he said, searching for a place to set the towel before giving up and tossing it across the room toward the cabinets. “I am Kessler Bider, one of the archivists here at the museum. And you are?”
I tried to smile but was sure it came across as more of a sneer. Coming up with an alternative name was one of the most basic forms of tradecraft; and yet, I’d been so flummoxed by Sergei’s note and my night in the alley that I’d failed to execute even that simple task. I scanned the room quickly and made up a name.
“Gerd. Gerd Lang.”
“Very good to meet you, Herr Lang—or should that be Comrade Lang? I never know what to call a person these days. It changes nearly as often as the flag.”
The man’s tone was whimsical, almost comical, as he summed up European affairs more succinctly than a trained newsman.
“Gerd will do.”
“Right. Gerd it is, then. Now, what have you brought me?” Bider settled into a chair across the table from where I sat and hefted the statue. “Oh, my. Dear me. Gerd, do you know what you have here? Or ‘who,’ I should say?”
I shrugged. “A rabbi?”
Bider’s laugh filled the office. “Yes, yes. He is a rabbi, but he is so much more. I know this piece. Yes. I know it well. It belongs to a very old synagogue . . . in Poland, I believe. Or it did before the war. Blasted thing changed everything, you know.”
“Yes, I know.” And I did.
“Of course, you do. How silly of me.” Bider’s eyes never left the statue. His fingers roamed every crevice and crease. Had I not known better, I would have thought Bider a blind man reading a most complex, three-dimensional manuscript. “This is fascinating. My, yes. How wonderful.”
“Do you know much about it?” I asked, my foot on frozen waters, unsure where to step.
Bider snatched a pair of thin, wire-rimmed spectacles off the table and resumed his inspection.
“It is Jewish, of course. The name of the piece is ‘The Keeper of Wisdom.’ The figure represents an aged rabbi with astounding knowledge, yet he continues to study and read, forever in search of deeper meaning.”
“Huh,” was all I could think to say. It just looked like an old man reading a book to me.
“This was crafted by a master in Prague in the early eighteenth century, made as a gift for the local synagogue. I am surprised it survived the Nazi occupation of Poland.”
Bider was so distracted with the piece, he failed to recognize the near-blasphemous reference to the Germanoccupationof Poland. Any good Nazi knew it wasliberation.
