The Zigzag Kid

by David Grossman

  “Your war against criminals is getting too personal,” said Gabi in the kitchen one night. “And that’s why you louse up your investigations.”

  What did she mean by getting too personal? What did he have against them personally?

  “You’re in such a rush for revenge that you end up giving yourself away.” Revenge for what? What was she talking about?

  The lookout gave a cry that sounded like an animal howl. He tripped over his feet, recovered almost instantly, sprang up, and then ran away so fast he barely touched the ground. He got past Dad without any trouble at all, dodging him like a nimble-footed soccer player. I saw Dad turn, looking heavy, angry, clumsy, hurt, waving in a fury. The buddy who had broken into the car saw what was going on and immediately fled in the opposite direction. I saw the detective in the bushes come out of hiding and spread his hands in anger and frustration. The lookout, who had slipped away from Dad, was running toward me now. A hundred meters separated us, and I knew exactly what to do. Slowly I got out of the car and walked nonchalantly toward him. I wasn’t even nervous. My body acted like a well-greased machine and did the thinking for me. I didn’t look at the boy, and he didn’t look at me: a kid like me was nothing to worry about. He was afraid only of grownup detectives. In less than a minute he had run all the way up the street and was about to pass me, I could see his eyes nearly pop, and I lunged at him just right, the way Dad had shown me so many times at the gym—I threw myself on the ground and tripped him.

  It happened in a fraction of a second. He was moving with so much momentum that when he fell he rolled into a parked car and lay there, stunned. A moment later two detectives were handcuffing him.

  “Is that Feuerberg’s kid?” said Detective Alfasi, and recognizing me, he added, “Isn’t he the mascot?”

  “What are you doing here, Nonny?” asked the second detective, the one with the beard.

  All the detectives in the district knew me.

  “I saw him running away, so I tripped him.”

  “Hey, you did great! You saved the day!”

  Dad came running over, huffing and puffing.

  “Sorry. I misjudged the distance,” he grumbled. “I jumped him too soon.”

  “Never mind, sir.”

  “Never mind, sir.”

  The two detectives busied themselves with the boy’s handcuffs so Dad wouldn’t see what was plainly written on their faces.

  “The other one got away, sir, but your son caught this kid, and he’ll help us write out a nice invitation to his friend. Right, buster?”

  The detective, whose nickname was “Blackbeard,” gave the kid a swift kick in the butt, but we all knew who it really was he wanted to kick.

  We stood there awhile longer. Dad was waiting for the forensic unit to arrive and dust the car for prints. A small crowd gathered nearby, and the detectives ordered them to move along. People were pointing at me, some of them whispering to each other. I stayed cool, walked around with my hands in my pockets, checked for FP’s, searched for any other bits of evidence that might help the investigation, did just what the situation demanded.

  The kid I’d caught was lying on the sidewalk with his hands cuffed behind his back. The streetlight shining on his face made him look like a small hunted animal. I dared not look into his eyes. His whole life was probably about to change, and I had been his doom.

  Yet his eyes were seeking mine. He squirmed on the sidewalk, trying to get a look at me. I didn’t move. Let him look. I thought I saw an expression of disdain on his face, disdain for the brat of the law. He gave me a smile, a hateful smile, but it was also a kind of bitter salute to me for having apprehended him.

  You see, that’s how we are, we professionals: we always acknowledge our opponent’s skill. It’s part of the professional code of honor. Like Felix and Dad shaking hands that time, or reaching an agreement for my sake, which strikes me as pretty incredible now, though I’m sure they did, because what if they didn’t?

  Dad said goodbye to the other detectives and we drove home in silence. It was downright embarrassing that he almost blew the whole thing and that I was the one who came to his rescue. I wanted to say it was just a coincidence, that my success had been unintentional, that a kid my age has faster reflexes, but that he was clearly much smarter and more experienced as a detective. I decided to keep quiet in the end. The worst part of it was that I was afraid he might take back what he’d said to me earlier in the car, before the bust.

  I hadn’t thought of that incident for a whole year. I didn’t even discuss it with Micah. I just wanted to forget that terrible silence in the car. Neither Dad nor I had ever referred to it again. And Gabi, who learned what happened from the report she typed, also kept mum about it. It was only tonight that it all came back. The vicious smile on the kid. Maybe he’d grinned at me that way to show his contempt for brats. Maybe he’d sensed something about me even then.

  But what did Gabi mean when she said his war against criminals was getting too personal? What did they ever do to him to make him fight like that? Why did he want revenge?

  To tell the truth, I was beginning to understand. I’d guessed the answers already, but I forced myself to be cautious. Not to draw hasty conclusions. And I posed my questions in a systematic way, according to protocol, questions which had been buzzing around unasked all my life: Who was behind his personal war against criminals? Had they harmed him? If so, how? Did they kill someone he knew? Was it because they killed her that he was fighting this war? By now I’d forgotten I was running away and that I had to be careful. I went on muttering my questions, moving my lips, unconcerned about anyone noticing. But why did they kill her? Was it something she’d done to them? Maybe they killed her to punish Dad. And who was the killer? And did the punishment stop after her death? Or would they now try to get at somebody else who was close to him?

  Maybe that was why he had trained me from such an early age to keep my eyes open, to suspect everything and everyone. But maybe I wasn’t professional enough in my suspicions. Take Felix, jogging ahead of me there, for example, what did he have to do with any of this? Did he and Dad really shake hands and come to an agreement for my sake? And why did I feel so drawn to him and want to stay, in spite of my fears; maybe it was time to run away and save myself …

  By now I was trudging along, scared and depressed, moving forward, though I felt a constant backward tug. As if I’d been allowed a glimpse at something kids my age aren’t supposed to see. At Dad, standing in the dark, with his muscles and the bulging veins in his neck, gritting his teeth and fighting crime. He had to protect the world from the villain with a thousand faces, but mainly he was protecting me, preparing me for the eternal battle. Alone and forlorn, he waged a war against the entire world of crime, never asking anyone’s help, never compromising.

  There, I was running again.

  19

  Riders of the Sands

  And suddenly I could feel the sea. It assaulted me with its wet smell and the clash of the waves. The sea! I had been away only a few short hours and already I longed to be there again. I loved the sea (as I said before), and I was as good a swimmer as any kid in Tel Aviv, even though I came from Jerusalem. I was forever trying to persuade Gabi to take me to the beach in Tel Aviv, and she would laugh at the way I started trembling with excitement even before we got there, like a fish running away from its Jerusalem aquarium, about to return to its natural home.

  Poor Gabi would sit in an uneasy chair wearing her black dress and a white plastic noseguard, with suntan lotion smeared all over her body, even on her pocketbook. She looked like a ghost on the rollicking beach, she who loathed the sea and feared the sun, and was sorely tormented by the pretty girls passing by in their bikinis. Hither and thither her head would bounce between the twin paddles of grief and envy. “I’m the only person I know who gets seasick on the beach,” she would grumble whenever a young girl wiggled by. “The Good Lord brought me to this world in order to set the upper limit of human sufferi
ng.”

  Dad didn’t much like going to the beach, either. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen him in the water (he can’t swim, as I found out by chance one day when I was ten). But Gabi, for whom it was sheer agony, saw how happy I was in the waves and consented to take me to Tel Aviv at least once a month. That was our special fun day or, rather, my special fun day. I don’t imagine Gabi derived much pleasure from those outings, though she didn’t miss even one in five years, from the time I was eight: having hard-boiled herself on the sand, she would spend a couple of hours on her aching feet across the street from Lola Ciperola’s, all without a grumble. From there we’d go to a restaurant where she would wolf down her food and then calculate on a paper napkin how many calories were hiding like stowaways in the harmless steaks and French-fried potatoes, which were not that fattening per se … and sometimes, after a few voracious bites, she would lean back and tap the rolls of fat over her stomach, murmuring, “Uh uh uh, Gabi, very bad for the ‘roll call.’ ”

  From the restaurant we would take a bus to our last, exciting destination: the chocolate factory on the outskirts of Ramat Gan. This was something else she and I had solemnly sworn to keep secret, our own sweet secret, and heaven help us if Dad ever found out how she was corrupting me.

  One afternoon a month, at four o’clock on the dot, Gabi and I would embark on a tour of the factory. We were well-nigh guests of honor there after, five years, sometimes the only guests, in fact, as we traipsed along after our sleepy guide, lapping up her description of how chocolate is made: the grinding of the cocoa beans, the melting of the butter, the stirring of the thick, creamy liquid in a vat …

  The guide, a peculiar woman, was skinny as a pretzel stick. Everything about her betrayed an inborn antagonism to life’s pleasures in general, and to chocolate in particular, yet she went about her job as obediently as a machine. She never varied her recitation, always told the same two jokes, and never thought to ask what had compelled us to trail after her once a month. On one occasion only had she departed from the regular route. We had been the only visitors that time, and when we got to the hall where the wrappers go on the chocolate bars, she turned to us and said, “Excuse me, but since you’ve been here before, would you mind skipping this part of the tour today? I have an important appointment at a quarter to five.”

  Gabi and I exchanged a look of shock: the packaging hall was one of the highlights of the tour! It was like visiting a dressing room before the actors go onstage!

  Gabi narrowed her eyes and asked contentiously, “With whom? A man?”

  “No,” answered the guide, “with the doctor.”

  “Well, that’s okay, then,” Gabi forgave her, “but only this once.”

  And here let me pause a moment to make something clear: there are certain people in this world who are too coarse and vulgar and lacking in artistic flair to appreciate such a tour. Some who are quite fond of chocolate are interested solely in the finished product. In solid results.

  Gabi and I, however, were entranced by the process itself: the pipes, the vats, the forklifts for moving sacks of cocoa beans, the giant drums where the beans were roasted before grinding, the great funnels through which the magical liquescence was poured, the shining beauty of a slab of chocolate before it is divided into bars and covered modestly, tantalizingly, first in shiny silver foil, then in a brightly colored wrapper—how lovely to behold are the cycles of life!

  Forgive me for getting so carried away. I am aware of the ghastly possibility that among the readers of this book there may be one or two who are impervious to the charms of chocolate. Such people do exist in this world, and we must accept them with good grace as instances of a phenomenon that is not scientifically explainable. I even know one boy, without mentioning any names, who has since earliest childhood preferred salty foods to sweet. Seriously: he has a real craving for pretzels and potato chips and things. I must say I find his preference strange. In this respect, I fear we come from different branches of humanity.

  Now, the salty branch, as everyone knows, is practical, devastatingly logical and decisive, leery of fantasy and deferential to fact. I have heard talk about hideous rites observed by their councils somewhere in the hills of Sodom which consist of immersing whole bars of chocolate in the Dead Sea! Too horrible, but then it’s common knowledge that the faculties become impaired after years of grinding salt.

  I, on the other hand, sometimes believe that (cherry-flavored) chocolate syrup runs through my veins. Whenever I have an important lunch date with some seeming adult, I know in my heart that the meal and conversation are the dues I will have to pay in order to get to dessert.

  And when it comes, oh boy!

  Chatting nonchalantly, I slide in a mouthful of chocolate mousse, or “sweet dreams” cake, or a little swan éclair, or creamy Himalaya snow peak … and my companions across the table never dream that somewhere in this mild-mannered fellow’s memory lurk two figures: a child with short blond hair and a big woman in a slimming black dress, unabashedly slurping and smacking their lips and smearing themselves in a transport of bliss …

  And here I beg to digress again and take advantage of this rare moment of sweet intimacy between writer and reader in order to disclose my final earthly request and spiritual testament:

  To be buried in a chocolate coffin.

  Let the earth be sweet.

  First I saw the bulldozer, then I saw Felix. I caught sight of him before he ever noticed me. He emerged from a nearby alley just as I arrived at the beach. Limping like a beggar, he glanced around a few times with the air of a fisherman casting his net and taking everything in with his eyes … He certainly knew how to look, too: because when ordinary, innocent folks try to see what’s behind them, they usually glance over their left shoulder. That’s how it is. Try it and see. Which is why when a good detective is tailing a suspect, he hangs back to the right to avoid being spotted. Felix knew this, of course, and occasionally glanced to the right as well, thereby spying me in the shadows.

  I guess he wasn’t certain it was me walking behind him. All of a sudden he vanished. I couldn’t see where. It was almost as though he had been swallowed by the sand, had faded into the darkness. That’s what they used to say about him at the precinct—that he was as elusive as water: policemen and detectives by the hundreds, believing they had at last succeeded in nabbing him, would open their hands and find he had slipped through their fingers again.

  Except for the one who clenched him so tightly that when he opened his fist, Felix Glick was still there.

  I waited. Where was he? I hesitated a moment, then softly whistled “Your Eyes Shine.” I saw something moving in the dunes, slithering like a snake between shadow and moonlight, and a moment later a faint whistle responded. That was the signal we seemed to have decided on without prior arrangement.

  We approached each other through the darkness. “There,” I said, pointing at the bulldozer nearby.

  “That dinosaur,” spat Felix. I couldn’t tell whether he meant that the bulldozer was old or that it looked like a prehistoric animal.

  It was small and sturdy, with a yellow shovel as big as its frame, upraised.

  We were standing in a wide ditch scooped out of the sand, where apparently the foundations of a building would soon be laid. I still had no idea what we had come there for. We paced around in silence, surveying the area. There was a wooden fence around the ditch and a heap of iron rails next to a hacksaw. There was a little guard shack nearby, but no light was shining through the cracks.

  We drew closer. It seemed to me that Felix was sniffing rather than looking.

  “There’s someone inside.” He signaled with his finger. “Sleeping.”

  “How do you know?” I whispered.

  “There was campfire here.” He pointed at a small ring of embers. “Only one cup of coffee.”

  “Excellent, Holmes,” said Gabi inside my head. “And how do you know he’s sleeping?”

  “I don’t know, I just hope so,�
�� whispered Felix in reply. “Who am I, prophet Elijah?” We walked around the shack. There were no windows. This seemed to please Felix quite a lot. He gave me the thumbs-up. Now he began to search all around. He found a wooden beam and measured it against the door of the shack. Tiptoeing like a cat in a mouse’s nightmare, he approached the door. A moment’s silence, and then suddenly he forced the beam under the handle, turning the shack into a jail.

  “Quick,” he called, and I heard the power come into his voice the way it did in times of danger, and start to gurgle like a motor.

  Felix hopped up on the bulldozer as though it were the back of a horse. He groped about and found two large nails and a pair of pliers. I couldn’t figure out what he was doing. It seemed that the person in the shack had woken up and was stomping around inside. Felix twisted the two nails together with the pliers. He made a little metal fork and inserted it into the double hole behind the driver’s seat. The silence continued. I didn’t know what to expect.

  All at once the silence was shattered. Felix turned the improvised key and the bulldozer began to roar. The noise was terrible. No one in the city of Tel Aviv could sleep through this din, I thought. Felix jumped up on the seat and beckoned me to join him; I took a leap and—

  He pulled the hand brake and released it; the bulldozer gave a jolt. To and fro we pitched, as though mounted on a camel that was rising off its knees. Felix tried pulling the two big levers in front of him, pressed down on the pedals with his feet, saw that it worked, and began to drive. The bulldozer obeyed at once, as though it could sense his authority. As we rolled past the shack, a dim light seemed to be shining through the cracks. I saw the door handle jiggling up and down. The guard was trying to get out. The door was jammed with the beam, though. He started pounding on it with his fists.

  When you make a mistake, kid, you have to pay. That’s the law of survival. Now go back to sleep.