An expression of anxious doubt crossed Varga’s face. It was time to let him stew.
“With your permission, Mr. Varga, I will call you tomorrow so that we can continue our conversation about the Komlós painting.”
Varga stepped around him to open the door. He held it wide. “You want, you do. But my painting? I give never!”
Amitai gave no hint of his relief, his joy, at the confirmation that indeed Varga had the painting. It was here, in this house. And it was only a matter of time before it was his.
“I’ll just leave my card.” He snapped open his silver card case.
Varga crossed his arms over his chest, making as great a show of refusing the card as Amitai had of proffering it. Amitai placed it on a small occasional table (cheap plywood veneer). He walked out the door, but though Varga was holding it open and clearly wanted Amitai to leave, he did not step sufficiently aside, and Amitai’s hip brushed against his great belly. Only then did Amitai have to fight to maintain his composure. The sensation of the man’s body against his own caused him to feel a flash of disgust, veined with fury.
The door slammed behind him, and he stood for a moment, shaking. Once he was calm he set off down the street, whistling. He had sunk the hook.
• 24 •
“HOW COULD YOU JUST stand there and listen to that? ‘Haggle with a Jew’? Fuck him! He was the one trying to fleece you!”
Natalie drained her shot glass and sputtered and coughed. Amitai handed her a napkin. They were sitting at the bar of their hotel, an American chain so generic that but for the Romanian beer on tap they might have been in a Ramada Inn in Duluth.
She was feeling frustrated because her own expedition, to the main post office, had been a failure. There were no Einhorns to be found in any of the local telephone directories. It did not come as a surprise to either of them, but the utter absence of the name had angered and depressed her.
“It’s a poker game,” Amitai said. “He tries to bluff me, I try to sandbag him.”
“A game? His grandfather most likely murdered Nina’s son, stole their house, their property. This guy is a Jew-hating pig, living in a house he knows is stolen, waking up every morning in a stolen bedroom, cooking his dinner in a stolen kitchen. He and his whole family are criminals.”
Somewhat to his surprise, Amitai found that her outrage made her even more attractive. He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed her palm.
She let it linger for an instant, then snatched it away.
“I don’t understand why you’re not angry. Have you completely lost your capacity for outrage?”
He wondered if perhaps all the years of effort he had expended mastering the difficult angles of his profession, bridling his temper, controlling his emotions, had caused those emotions finally to atrophy. As if to prove this very point, without even meaning to, he shrugged.
“I don’t even have definitive proof yet that Varga has the painting. What would you have preferred that I do? Storm inside and search the house?”
Before she could answer, her eyes widened. Amitai turned to follow her gaze out of the bar to the reception desk, where, carrying a suitcase, handing his credit card to the clerk, stood Dror Tamid.
“Christ,” Amitai said. “We have to find another hotel.”
“No. Screw him,” she said. “Hello, Dr. Tamid,” she called out in a saccharine tone. Tamid joined them at the bar, looking innocently pleased to see them. She continued, “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were following us.”
In Hebrew, Amitai said to Tamid, “I do know better, and I know you’re following me.”
“You didn’t want to be followed, then you shouldn’t have told the concierge at the Gellért where you were going. You think you’re the only person interested in Vidor Komlós?” Switching to English, Tamid turned to Natalie. “May I join you?” Without waiting for permission, he sat down on a stool beside her. “Bartender! A Coca-Cola.”
When the bartender had handed Tamid the drink, he raised his glass in Amitai’s direction. “To a genuine war hero.” Then he turned to Natalie. “Did you know that your friend was a war hero?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think he’s the type to brag about something like that.”
“Well, he should. He most absolutely should brag. Our friend Amitai won the Medal of Valor.”
Amitai fought and lost a brief battle just to let the error stand. “That is not the case.”
“But it is!”
“I won the Medal of Courage. It’s less.”
“Less what?” Natalie said.
“Just … less.”
Tamid said, “How many people in all of Israel’s history have won the Medal of Courage, Amitai Shasho? One hundred? One hundred and fifty?”
“A little over two hundred.”
Tamid laughed. “See? He knows. ‘A little over two hundred.’ Still very impressive when you consider how many Israelis have served in the defense forces over the past sixty-odd years. Ask him what he did, Natalie.”
Amitai watched her fighting her own battle, struggling with her curiosity, not wanting to oblige Tamid, out of loyalty, he hoped, to him.
“I’m sure he’ll tell me if he wants me to know.”
Tamid nodded, as if this struck him as a reasonable reply.
“Or,” he said, “you can simply look on the Internet. There is a very comprehensive website complete with English translation. It will tell you all about our Israeli war heroes, including Amitai Shasho, and then, after you have read what he did, you can be as confused as I am. We can wonder together how a man capable of such courage on behalf of his country and his people can then turn his back on them so completely.”
Amitai stood up. He dropped a bill on the table. “That’ll cover your drink, too, Tamid, plus a tip.” He said to Natalie, “He’s a notoriously lousy tipper.”
Amitai went right into the bathroom as soon as they reached their room. He filled the tub as hot as he could bear and sank in until just his head and the knobs of his bent knees were above the surface. He soaked for a while, using his toes to turn on the hot tap as the water cooled. When he got out, his skin was burnished to a ruddy sheen. The towel was thin and small, he could barely close it around his waist, and there was no robe. He dried himself as best he could and came out into the room, naked.
Natalie sat with her laptop open in her lap. As he appeared, she read aloud, “ ‘During Operation Accountability, Lieutenant Amitai Shasho, serving as platoon commander in the Golani Infantry Brigade, took part in fighting against Hezbollah terrorists outside the Lebanese village of Yater. While out on an ambush, Lieutenant Amitai Shasho’s platoon came under mortar and rocket attack, and casualties were sustained. Working under heavy enemy fire, Lieutenant Amitai Shasho organized the evacuation of the platoon, and dragged two wounded soldiers to safety, one of whom survived. During this evacuation, Lieutenant Amitai Shasho sustained serious injuries to his leg and shoulder. With his actions, Lieutenant Amitai Shasho demonstrated resourcefulness, courage, presence of mind, brotherhood of arms, and exemplary dedication to his mission. For this act, he was awarded the Medal of Courage.’ ”
“It’s not true,” he said.
“Really? It didn’t happen?”
“It happened. But …” His voice trailed off.
“But what?”
He shrugged. “They give you the medal to make you proud. To convince you that it was worth it.”
“And it wasn’t?”
He stood, naked, in the middle of the room, and shivered.
“Come here,” she said, patting the bed beside her.
He sat down on the edge.
“Tell me what happened. What’s an ambush?”
“Just, you know. Lying in the dirt. Waiting for terrorists. Or the people they call terrorists. If it’s you who’s in the foreign country, and the people you’re waiting for arguably have more of a right to be there than you do, who’s the terrorist?”
She would not let he
rself be distracted by questions of whether Israel was justified in its invasion of Lebanon. Instead she said, “You were attacked.”
“Yes, we came under fire.”
It had begun as it always had. They marched to the ambush site, set up their missile launchers and thermal cameras, added bullet feeds to their machine guns, and unrolled the mattresses on which they would lie for the hours of their shift, staring into the night, mining the slop in their treat bags for Gummi bears and soggy wafer cookies, things that could be eaten silently so as not to give away their location. Then the dull thunk of missiles being launched, earthshaking explosions. Mortars and rockets.
“And you saved your men?”
“I ordered a retreat.”
He knew if they stayed they would all be killed, so he led his men through Katyusha fire, blinded by flashes of light so bright they blanched his vision for days. Dust and dirt flew at his face, sealed shut his eyes.
“And you had to carry two of them?”
“I didn’t carry them.”
“But that’s what it says.”
“I helped them walk. It wasn’t a big deal.”
Like inchworms, they’d crept. Or like lovers, he and Lior belly to belly, his leg thrown across Miki’s hips. He’d grab Lior’s vest with both hands, heave him forward a few inches, then reach back with his right arm, and haul Miki up. Miki’s right arm hung useless, but he could scramble with his legs. Lior’s legs, however, were left behind in the hollow created by the mortar blast. They humped along, six inches at a time, for minutes or hours, for Amitai’s whole life.
“One of them died,” she said.
“Yes.”
The blood pumped from Lior’s stumps despite the tourniquets Amitai had tied, and by the time they reached the medics Amitai’s uniform was soaked black from the waist down.
Two medics hovered over Miki, binding his arm and loading him up on a stretcher. Two more crouched next to Lior and then left him alone while they probed Amitai’s body looking for wounds.
“Are you injured?” one of the medics asked.
“Lior’s injured. His legs were blown off, in case you didn’t notice.”
The medic took a pair of scissors and sliced open the leg of Amitai’s pants, exposing his torn-up thigh, white fat and red flesh and very little brown skin. The medic slammed a pressure bandage across the wound, then did the same to the hole in Amitai’s shoulder. Amitai winced at the pain he was only now aware of. He looked away, to where Lior lay, blood no longer oozing from the tourniquet-tied stumps.
“I’m trying to understand,” Natalie said. “Why does this make you so angry? Because one of your men died?”
“Yes.”
“But you did everything you could. I mean, obviously. Or they wouldn’t have given you a medal.”
He’d forced the medics to take him to the rest of his men, who were collapsed in a pile, hanging on to one another while this one vomited, that one wept. He’d counted them over and over, like a mother duck with her ducklings, rubbing his hand over their heads and down their limbs, making sure they were whole, consoling himself with having at least saved them.
And then his commander, snarling through the radio. He’d been ordered to hold fast, hadn’t he heard? Over the open transmitter, yes, he’d replied, but Hezbollah listened to their transmissions. Everyone knew that anything said over the open transmitter was bullshit. He lay there, on the stretcher, listening to his commander shout that he’d be court-martialed, that his command would be terminated, his soldiers turned over to another, braver officer who wouldn’t retreat when ordered to hold fast, who would let all of them die, if that was the order given by the command.
Would the bond to his country, to the people whom he was supposed to consider his own, have ruptured if it weren’t already frayed? Would he have felt so betrayed had he not grown up on Kibbutz Hakotzer, if he had not sought in the army what had been missing from his childhood, a community in which to belong, a sense of loyalty and identity?
Lying in the filth of the torn-up Lebanese hillside, he had felt it break with a palpable snap. Not his leg, but his heart.
“The medal doesn’t mean anything,” Amitai said. And indeed when he had been notified that he would not be court-martialed but celebrated, rewarded with a silhouette of swords and olive branches fashioned from dull gray nickel and attached to a red ribbon, he had felt nothing. He was in America by then and had not even bothered to return for the ceremony. His father had accepted it in his place.
“Well, it meant something to the man you saved.”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
“Okay.” Her voice trembled, and he was conscious only then that he had shouted.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “This is just because of Tamid. I’m angry that Tamid told you the story, and I’m angry that he’s here in Oradea. He’s making things very difficult for me. He made me upset, but now I’m calm again. Let’s stop talking about this.” His voice began racing, and though he tried, he could not slow down. “We need to consider our next step with Varga. I’ll approach him again tomorrow. Perhaps Tamid’s presence will end up being to our benefit. Tamid will threaten Varga with a lawsuit, and then, when I renew my offer, I’ll seem like a savior.”
But she was not so easily distracted. “Help me understand why this makes you so upset. I want to understand.”
How could he explain what it felt like to be so disconnected, so lost? He grabbed her in his arms and pressed his face into the hollow of her neck, and she held him, softly stroking his back. He thought for a moment that he might cry, but instead he tugged her underwear down her legs and pushed inside her. She did not resist or even seem surprised, and he wondered how badly it would screw up his life if he were to love this girl.
• 25 •
ALL AMITAI’S EXPERIENCE TOLD him that if Varga had the painting and wanted to sell it, the man would have phoned by now. But it was already five o’clock. He and Natalie had spent the day lying on the bed in their tomato-red hotel room in Oradea, the tomato-red bedspread crumpled beneath them, staring at Amitai’s cell phone. It might have been a stone. It was the most inert object in the universe.
“He isn’t going to call, is he?” she said at last.
For as long as Amitai had been in the business of Holocaust reclamation, his priority had been the minimization of risk. He would pursue objects of acknowledged value or of potential value soberly assessed, engage in negotiations in a way that might veer at times toward the uncomfortable but never became rancorous, and disengage at the first hint of disputation or squabbling. Moreover, he was willing, always, to walk away. The broker who had no personal stake in the outcome of the negotiation was the likeliest to be satisfied.
By every rule of his trade as he had always conducted it, therefore, assessing the situation with an eye jaundiced from experience, the wisest course was to pack up and return to Budapest. From every angle, as he considered the job, he saw only the possibility of failure if not disaster. Varga was an unpleasant man, and though Amitai had dealt with his type before, there was always the risk that he would carry out his threats to call the police. Worse, it was possible that the painting would turn out to be something much less than it appeared to be in the photograph or that, regardless of its merit, it would fail to catch the fancy of those collectors willing to pay hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars for a Max Ernst, even if Komlós had been an unacknowledged influence on him.
But the greatest risk of all was that Amitai was so involved, so enmeshed, so personally committed to this search, that he hated the idea of walking away.
He wanted desperately to succeed. He feared that after all that had happened between them last night, if they left now and went back to Budapest, Natalie would lose faith in him, and what was between them would be over. He desperately wanted to feed her illusory hope as he fed his own. But he could not.
“No,” he said. “He isn’t going to call.”
�
��So what should we do?”
“Fold our tent,” he said. “Go back to Budapest.”
“Amitai, no! Not without knowing. We have to at least try to find out if Varga has the painting. We can’t just—”
“Fail? Sure we can. This is the nature of my business. When I fail, nothing is gained or lost. It just stays as it was before. Anyway, it won’t be a total failure. We’ll go back to Budapest and find an Einhorn heir for you to return the necklace to. You can do what your grandfather asked. We can accomplish that at least.”
“No,” Natalie said. “We owe it to Nina Einhorn and to Vidor Komlós to at least try to get the painting back. Otherwise, they died for nothing.”
“They did die for nothing.”
“Yes. Of course you’re right. But we can salvage something. For Komlós, at least. We can restore his reputation, the one Varga’s grandfather stole from him.”
Even though he wanted her to think he was a kind of magician who could find what was lost, restore what had been stolen, right what had been wronged—even though he wanted her to love him—he could not let this pass.
“Komlós’s reputation is worth nothing to Komlós, Natalie. His name, his legacy, they don’t even mean anything to Jill Gillette, his supposed relative. She had never heard of the man before I found her and told her there might be a little money to be made. That’s what this is about, not finding lost paintings or salvaging stolen reputations. Money.”
“I don’t believe that. And I don’t believe you believe it, either. You’re not fooling me, Amitai. You say it’s all about business, but I can see how much you care. You want to find it as much as I do. You want to right this wrong.”
“You know this.”
“Yes. And I know something else. You’ve fallen in love with me.”
It caught him off guard, but he didn’t show it. He was too skilled a negotiator for that.
“Just for the sake of argument,” he said. “Say that all of this is true.”
Love and Treasure Page 23
