Cut Throat Dog

by Joshua Sobol

  Cut Throat Dog

  Originally published as Whiskey Ze Be-Seder by Hakibbutz Hameuchad/ Siman Kriah, Tel-Aviv, 2004

  © 2001, 2010 Joshua Sobol

  Translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu

  Worldwide translation copyright © 2010 by The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature

  English translation copyright © 2010 by The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature

  Melville House Publishing

  145 Plymouth Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  www.mhpbooks.com

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the paperback edition as follows:

  Sobol, Yehoshu’a.

  [Viski zeh be-seder. English]

  Cut throat dog / by Joshua Sobol; translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu.

  p. cm.

  I. Bilu, Dalya. II. Title.

  PJ5054.S627V5713 2010

  892.4’36—dc22

  2010025924

  eISBN: 978-1-935554-68-4

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  1

  He stands on top of a high tower and looks around. At first sight he sees the sea to the west, the mountains to the north and east, and the desert to the south. Then the tower starts to grow rapidly higher, like a bamboo cane in a nature movie. Now he can see the marina with the yachts in the Famagusta harbor, the minarets of the Damascus mosques, the dams on the Tigris and the Euphrates, and the lights of Cairo and Alexandria. The tower goes on shooting upwards and his head breaks through the clouds and the strata of air above them, which become colder and colder, until the endless icebergs of Greenland are revealed in the distance, and beyond them the frozen lakes of Canada, and here’s Lake Michigan, and the lacy lights of Chicago on a clear night, and the broad cornfields of Illinois, and the glass and metal forest of Manhattan, and the palmetto jungle of Florida, and the train of reefs stretching to Key West, and Cuba and Haiti, and further on Santo Domingo and the ring of the Caribbean islands, and what have they to do with you, those raised voices, that exhausting argument going on down there, in the office under your feet? The man hears his name thrown like a stone. The shouts are aimed at him. No doubt about it. They’re trying to reach him, to hit him. To intercept him and force him to come down to them.

  Air, air, air!

  He takes a step forward, and he’s gliding through the air. He draws in his arms spread out like wings and thrusts them out ahead, like an arrow, like a swimmer diving head first from a high diving board, his legs stretched out behind him, his head aimed at the ground, and his body gathering speed in a crazy dive. With a loud bang he breaks through the sound barrier and dives towards the newspapers announcing his mysterious death: ‘On the eve of signing the deal of the century, for no apparent reason, the advertising tycoon Hanina Regev dives to his death’—‘Was the burden of international success too much for the country boy Hanan Rogev?’ screams the headlines of the rival paper. ‘Was Hen Avihen, self-styled poet of lost identity, nothing but a versifier whose life had grown empty of content?’ ponders a think piece in the culture supplement, while in the big city’s local paper they wonder about his sexual identity as a motive for the deed: ‘Was the indefatigable swinger, celebrity and womanizer, Nino Honan, simply gay preferring to get out of the world to come out of the closet?’

  2

  It all began when he wandered the frozen streets of Manhattan in order to kill time until his meeting with Sol Lewis, director of public relations for the pharmaceutical company, and before he realized what was happening he found himself following a man in a black suit, who walked past him while he was standing in front of the display window of the big bookstore opposite Lincoln Center. It had all begun many years before, in the most bleak and terrible chase of his life, when after running for two hours over the broad plains, as he was closing in on Jonas’s murderer, he suddenly discovered, as in a nightmare, that he had set out empty-handed, and in that fraction of a second, as he bent down to pick up a stone from the hard ground of the Libyan desert which was strewn with rough pebbles, his prey slipped from sight in the dim light and disappeared behind a fold in the land, and darkness descended on the earth.

  This fraction of a second comes back to haunt him now, as the back of the man in the black suit is almost swallowed up in the dank mist creeping over the streets of Manhattan between the Christmas trees decorating the buildings with their drops of sparkling light. Before disappearing into the doorway of the Irish pub, the man turns his head, as if he senses that someone is following him, and immediately the green door closes behind him. A quick glance at his watch shows that he has half an hour before his meeting with the director of public relations. Whether he’s Jonas’s murderer or not—a shot of whiskey is exactly what he needs now, his inner voice tells him, at the same time commanding him to wait outside for a while, in order to remove any shadow of suspicion from the heart of the man in the black suit, and to enter the pub three minutes later with a limp, and not to take off the dark sunglasses he had put on to protect his eyes from the snow which had begun to fall.

  In the dim light of the pub, which is fitfully illuminated by the flickering flames of gas lamps suspended from a ceiling covered with imitation cooper tiles, he makes out the man in the black suit, who is now standing at the bar, next to a New Zealand kaka parrot in a cage, and trying to get it to join him in singing ‘Jingle Bells’, which he sings in a lyrical tenor, punctuated by the parrot’s exhortations to fuck off.

  A double shot of Bushmills, he requests in a Southern Italian accent.

  A double shot of Bush what? asks the barman in the kind of Israeli accent you can only get rid of with the help of laborious exercises, such as he himself performed when learning to speak Arabic, English, Italian, French and German in a variety of strong regional accents.

  Bushmills, Bushmills he told you, the man in the black suit, who was already seated at the bar, rebuked the barman. It’s the bottle standing ex
actly underneath the muscatel.

  I’m new to the business, the barman apologizes and looks for the metal double shot measuring cup.

  You can see that from two miles away, the man in the black suit crushes him, and explains to the stranger in his unique velvety tenor: I had to show him the muscatel bottle too. If somebody asked for a ‘Rusty Nail’ he’d probably give him a rusty nail, and I don’t want to even imagine what would happen if anyone ordered a ‘Scotch Horse’s Neck’.

  What’s a ‘Scotch Horse’s Neck’? inquires the apprentice barman with Israeli naivete.

  It isn’t a steak from a horse’s neck, the man in the black suit says nastily. It’s whiskey with vermouth, so you’ll know next time.

  Far from accurate, the stranger with the melodious Southern Italian accent corrects him, channeling his desire to smash the guy’s face to a pulp into a series of precise instructions which he conveys to the barman with great sweetness:

  Take a twist of lemon peel, stretch it from the rim to the bottom of the glass, add ice. Now take two measures of Scotch, two measures of French vermouth, two measures of Italian vermouth, two drops of angostura, mix, pour it into the glass, and fill it up with ginger ale.

  You’re wasting your time, says the man in the black suit contemptuously. This guy comes from a place where they boil sweet fish balls minced with white bread in water and serve it up as food fit for human beings.

  What do you say, marvels the man with the Italian accent, there are human beings who actually eat the stuff?

  There are, says the man in the black suit, if you can call creatures who eat this dog food human. As long as they’re over there it’s no skin off my nose. But lately there are too many of them in this city.

  What’s your profession? The man with the Italian accent asks the barman.

  I studied film, says the barman. I write scripts.

  Great, says the Italian, here’s the beginning of a movie script for you. Two strangers and a novice barman, who is a beginning scriptwriter, meet by chance in an Irish pub.

  And what happens next? asks the barman.

  Ah! The Italian smiles, that’s your problem.

  Beginnings are always easy, says the barman.

  Right, beginnings are easy and endings are hard, agrees the man with the Italian accent, but the beginning-scriptwriter-barman sees that he is not the object of the speaker’s interest, but the man in the black suit. And indeed, the Italian removes his dark glasses, and his eyes wander in a strange, unfocused way round the dimly lit pub, and the barman-scriptwriter notes to himself that the man is apparently almost blind. Now the blind man’s eyes grope over the man in the black suit’s face and fasten onto it like two laser beams reaching far into space and time. To the barman it looks as if the almost blind man is examining the man in the black suit like an entomologist contemplating an insect whose name he is straining to bring up from the recesses of his memory, as if he has already seen it once upon a time, as if he is making an effort to remember when and where he met this man before, if indeed he ever did. And while he is busy going through the archives of the mug-shots of his memory, the other addresses him in a hostile tone, and his velvety tenor is jagged as a knife:

  Do you know me from somewhere?

  No, the Italian makes haste to reassure the man in the black suit, whose message of suppressed violence is very clear under the velvet glove of his voice.

  You’re staring at me! whispers the man in the black suit in the voice of an Indian cobra a split second before it strikes.

  My eyesight is very poor, the Italian apologizes. I only see patches of light, I can’t make out facial features.

  The man’s blind, the barman hurries to relieve the tension.

  A blind and bleeding soldier, the blind Italian introduces himself with an exaggerated smile.

  Now you have to put on an act of searching for the glass, he says to himself, and imagines darkness and sends a groping hand cautiously in search of the whiskey glass, which the cunning barman-scriptwriter sets a little distance away from him on the bar. The backs of his fingers touch it first, and then his hand opens and takes hold of it under the eyes of the man in the black suit, mesmerized by the blind act. The hand brings the rim of the glass to the nose, and the nostrils breathe in the fumes of the triple distilled whiskey.

  Sorry, the man in the black suit apologizes, I didn’t notice you were blind.

  Not completely, he says with an ingratiating smile, I see patches of light and shade. I can see your silhouette. But I can hardly distinguish between your face and your suit.

  And he brings his face close to the jacket of the man’s elegant suit and puts out a hesitant hand:

  May I? Touching complements what remains of my vision.

  Go ahead, the owner of the black suit presents the fabric of his jacket to the fingers of the visually impaired soldier, who notes an unmistakable fact: the man is looking at him with intent curiosity, as if he too is trying to clarify to himself who this blind man reminds him of, or where he knows him from.

  The beginning scriptwriter-barman looks at them through the gleaming glass he is holding as he polishes it to a high shine, and sees a picture that ignites his imagination: two strangers permitting themselves the kind of intimacy that exists only between co-conspirators about to carry out a prearranged plan together. More and more the pair look to him like a dangerous hit team seconds before an act of violence. To be on the safe side he moves a little to the right, so as to be within reach of the black C-Z pistol lying under the counter with a bullet in its barrel.

  Fine cashmere, pronounces the blind soldier, rolling the ‘r’ in a heavy Sicilian accent.

  You understand something about fabrics, says the owner of the black suit admiringly.

  Syracusians are well known for their sharp senses, he embarks on a fishing expedition, but since the guy doesn’t take the bait he tries another direction:

  I’ve been looking for a suit like that for years, he announces.

  Is that so? The owner of the black suit says in surprise, Did you ever see a suit like this before?

  A few years ago I was in some place in Scotland. They had cashmere suits there but there was a problem with the trousers. One of my legs is a little shorter than the other.

  Were you born like that?

  I was hurt in an accident. They removed a piece of the bone.

  Now the barman-scriptwriter is sure the two men are exchanging loaded messages, and he pricks up his ears so as not to miss a word.

  That place in Scotland, the man in the black suit presses a point in the code, do you remember where it was exactly?

  Yes, it was a big commercial center on the high road, between villages, says the blind man.

  Did they make whiskey there too?

  Whiskey with a brown color, almost like Macallan, but very soft and friendly.

  Auchentoshen? suggests the man in the black suit.

  No, says the blind man, even though the place, as far as I remember, isn’t far from Dunbartonshire. It’s on the A-9, about eight or nine miles North of Pitlochry, or St Andrews.…

  Bruar?

  That’s it! The blind man leaps on the fateful code word: Bruar! Is the suit from there?

  Yes and no, says the owner of the suit: there’s a store here that imports these suits from over there.

  Here in Manhattan? The blind man exclaims, barely able to conceal his excitement.

  When you go out of the pub, the cashmere man directs him, turn right, walk to the corner, turn right again, and go into the third store from the corner. Go to the men’s department and ask for Winnie. She’ll take care of you.

  Thank you, says the blind man, thank you very much. He finishes off the rest of the Bushmills, puts the glass down carefully on the counter, and holds out his hand to the owner of the cashmere suit. When the latter shakes his hand, he notes that he has a rapid pulse rate, an unhealthy heart and a defective blood supply. The man is quick-tempered and impatient, but on the whole a
short-distance runner, he sums up to himself and starts to limp out of the pub, but at the last moment he changes his mind. He stops and asks the barman for directions to the toilet. The barman offers to lead him there, but he declines the offer politely and firmly:

  No, thanks, I have to get along alone in the world. Just give me exact directions.

  The barman gives him instructions including directions, distances, and the number of steps to be descended, and the bleeding soldier sets out with measured steps and disappears down the stairs.

  What a guy, says the barman admiringly, trying to get a lead into the labyrinth of this close and mysterious relationship. He wonders what war the man was wounded in.

  But the man in the cashmere suit refuses to volunteer any information. On the other hand, as soon as they hear the toilet door slam shut, he makes haste to get hold of the person called ‘Winnie’ on his cell phone and inform her of the imminent arrival of a purblind Italian customer with a limp, worth investing in. Give him a good time, like you know how, and get what you can out of him.

  Then he leaves a crumpled ten dollar bill on the bar and hurries out without waiting for change or saying goodbye.

  At the same time, in the toilet, the blind-Italian impersonator takes out his cell phone and punches a number. He’s on hold, merde, he curses in French. He hangs up and decides to wait half a minute and try again. But suddenly the cell phone vibrates in his hand. He looks at the display. Yadanuga is getting back to him. He touches the green button and takes the call.

  Hello, Shakespeare, says Yadanuga’s warm baritone from the other side of the world, you called me?

  Tell me, Yadanuga, he whispers, can you imagine Adonas’s mug without a beard?

  Whose mug? Yadanuga can’t make out what his friend is saying.

  Tino the Syrian, nu, the one we called Tino Rossi because of his egg-yolk tenor, says Shakespeare.

  Are you talking about Adonas the maniac who murdered Jonas? asks Yadanuga.

  Yes, says Shakespeare, I think I’ve tracked him down here in Manhattan.

  For God’s sake! Shakespeare! protests Yadanuga. What are you getting into?!

  I’m sure it’s him, says Shakespeare. The trouble is he’s shaved off his beard. But judging by the walk and the voice it’s him. Shut your eyes, turn on your visual imagination, and describe his face to me without the beard. How do you see his cheekbones and chin?