The moral center of Malamud's The Fixer

The evidence mounts against Yakov Bok, the fixer (a better term might be the handy-man or the repair man) in Bernard Malamud's The Fixer - as the eponymous fixer stands accused of a killing a Russian boy to drain his blood for Jewish ritual use. The ferociously anti-Semitic investigators take as evidence reports that some kids saw a jar of blood in Yakov's apartment (he'd bought a jar of strawberry jam), that he had been trying to bake matzoh (he bought a pound of flour and baked some bread that didn't rise), that he'd threatened the life of some kids who'd trespassed on the property he was guarding (he chased them off for throwing rocks) - but none of these explanations matter - he knows nobody's interested in listening to him, they just want to foment anti-Semitism and hatred (to distract Russians from the misery of their lives. But there's one potentially sympathetic character, one of the investigators, Bibikov, who seems at times to realize the absurdity of the charges and who actually pokes around trying to get at the truth: they bring Yakov to the home of the murdered boy's mother to look for evidence, and it's obvious to everyone that she's totally racist and unstable - her son was missing for 6 days before she reported it - and that there were many possible antagonists in her life and in her neighborhood who may well have murdered the boy. The only question is, does Bibikov have the courage and the moral tenacity to speak up for Yakov when and if he can prove Yakov's innocence? He is playing it close to the vest - hasn't really said a kind word to Yakov - and he tends to diappear from the scene before the daily investigations are completed: his behavior will, no doubt, become the moral center of the novel, the tragedy almost seems to center on him, more than on Yakov.