The Emperor of Lies by Steve Sem-Sandberg

streets.
    Fabian Zajtman had died just before the war. They found him lying sprawled across his workbench, almost as if the thunder had turned back in anger to smite the chisel and plane from his hand. There were many orthodox Jews around Gnieźnieńska Street who spat on the ground and said it was an abomination for a Jew to devote his time to idols as that Zajtman had done.
    Then the Germans came; the wire surrounding the ghetto ran just outside Zajtman’s wooden huts and Mrs Herszkowicz, die Hauswärtin as she was now called, had the chestnut felled and split for firewood. She also had both Zajtman’s sheds sawn up.
    Now I’ve got enough wood to see me through the war and even longer , she boasted.
    In Gnieźnieńska Street, people got used to the hole in the sky where the chestnut had once stood, but Adam couldn’t stop thinking about the tree and the thunder. Where would the thunder go now there was no chestnut to rest in? There were no trees in the ghetto. Adam imagined the thunder circling aimlessly, getting wilder and wilder in all its din. There was no relief from the perpetual crashing anywhere, no way out. On this side of the wire there was only one route to freedom, as Zawadzki had proved: it went upwards , though hatches and windows that didn’t exist or that one was forced to invent in order to get through.
    Adam Rzepin stood with his parcel on a treeless plot of land not far from the tailor’s at 12 Jakuba and waited for the ‘very important person’ to show up.
    The first person to put in an appearance was a very young man, wearing a hat and a suit, and an elegant, light-coloured gabardine raincoat that made Adam think of the American gangster films they used to show at the Bajka cinema before the war. The man could have been standing on a street corner anywhere in Europe if it had not been for the two others following him like a shadow. Two rugged men: they looked like politsayen , though they had no caps or armbands.
    Have you got the goods? asked the man in the light-coloured raincoat.
    Adam nodded.
    Only then did a fourth person step forward.
    Adam Rzepin asked himself afterwards how it could be that he had immediately known the fourth man to be a German officer. The new arrival was dressed in civilian clothes, but the uniform he wore when on duty was still evident in the watchful way his whole body followed when he turned his head or looked to the side.
    The man in the gabardine addressed him as Mr Stromberg. That meant he must be Kriminaloberassistent Stromberg, one of the most notorious police commanders in the whole ghetto. Stromberg was a Volksdeutscher , one of the Germans who had been living a settled life in Łódź long before the Nazis came.
    Stromberg had a permanent smile on his face; but he moved as if wading through sewage. Stromberg did not as much as glance at Adam, just turned to the young man in the gabardine mac and repeated in his vaguely sing-song Polish:
    Has he got the money?
    And when his question elicited a confirming nod, Herr Kriminaloberassistent Stromberg finally seemed to relax inside his civilian clothes.
    Adam interpreted this to mean that the moment had come to hand over his parcel; he gave it to the raincoat who passed it in turn to Stromberg, who immediately started tugging and ripping the paper like an impatient child at Hanukkah. A few moments later, he was holding a shiny gold link between his fingers. The raincoat hurriedly gestured to Adam, beseeching him to turn his back, the way you turn your back on a woman so as not to embarrass her as she gets dressed; then he swiftly thrust a ten-mark note into the palm of Adam’s hand.
    Then they were both gone – the young Jew in the gabardine raincoat and the German police chief. Only the two guards remained, their hands threateningly at their hips, as if to assure themselves that Adam was not following the other men.
    It was several months before Adam discovered the identity of the man in the raincoat who had sold