“Kaplan,” Isla murmurs, eyeing the sign. “Is that not what Evans’s companions railed against in their pamphlets?”
“Toy stores?”
“Immigration.”
I frown over at her.
“The owners are Russian Jewish immigrants,” she says.
I’m about to ask whether she knows them. Then it clicks. The store name. Yes, if pressed, I could probably identify Kaplan as a Jewish surname, but that means nothing to me. You certainly can’t presume that anyone with a Jewish surname is an immigrant. Or you can’t if you’re in twenty-first-century Vancouver.
So I ask a different question: “How do you know they’re Russian?”
“I misspoke,” she says. “They could be from surrounding Slavic countries. They also may not be recent immigrants. I have a friend whose grandfather fled Russia after the execution of Gregory the Fifth. As she says, he escaped one kind of persecution to discover another, but at least this one seemed fifty percent less likely to get him killed. The point is that this is an established business operating under an openly foreign name, and thus it may have attracted the attention of Archie Evans’s friends.”
I frown at the shop. “I’m surprised it’s open, this being the Sabbath.”
Her brows rise. “It is not Sunday, Catriona.”
“For Jews, the Sabbath is Saturday.”
A look passes over her face, almost a sadness. “Ah. I did not know that. My friend never shared much on her faith. It marked her as different, I fear, even with me. Closing on a Saturday would mark them as different.” She nods toward the shop. “So they do not. And Saturdays can be quite busy. Some of the local factories have begun allowing their workers to leave midafternoon, to enjoy an extended week-ending with their families.”
“Not in the era of two-day weekends yet, are we.”
“Hmm?”
I shake my head. “Nothing. As for the shop being on Evans’s list, we know the group is anti-immigration. We know he was selling information on their activities to someone. If this place was a target, that might be what he was selling.”
I pass over the list. “Any of these others close by?”
“The last one is a block over.”
“Let’s take a look.”