The Fury of Rachel Monette

by Peter Abrahams

  “Coffee, Dad?”

  “It doesn’t matter. A glass of milk maybe, two percent if you’ve got it.” She set the milk and a plate of Mrs. Dawkins’s cookies on the table. He wore a red silk tie, a white silk shirt, and a hand-tailored pinstripe suit that seemed too big for him. Once a burly man, her father had begun to shrink inside his skin.

  “Eat something, Rachie.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “You’ve got to eat. Regardless.”

  “Not now.” She said it more sharply than she had intended. They sat in silence. After a while he took from his back pocket a red silk handkerchief cut from the same material as his tie and blew his nose.

  “What do the police say?”

  “Wait for a ransom note.”

  “I meant about the—about Dan.”

  Rachel shook her head. “What difference does it make now? It’s only important if it leads to Adam.”

  Her father folded the handkerchief and replaced it in his pocket. “No rabbi would ever do a thing like that.”

  “Oh, shit, Dad.”

  “What did I say, for Christ’s sake? Rachie?”

  Rachel went to the bathroom to get away for a few minutes. She spent them in a sort of trance in front of the mirror, staring deeply into the reflection of her dark eyes. The reflected eyes stared back at hers, but neither pair was seeing anything. She jumped at a knock at the door.

  “Rachie? You all right?” said her father.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry. For whatever it was, I’m sorry.”

  “Forget it, Dad.”

  When she returned to the kitchen her father was asleep at the kitchen table, his head in his arms. Rachel turned off the light.

  In the morning Ed Joyce telephoned. He was one of those people who hold the perforated speaker against the side of the face, and Rachel could barely hear him.

  “Mrs. Monette? You get some sleep last night?”

  “No.”

  “You should. Listen, we’ve got what might be a lead on the boy. An insurance man from Putney, who was driving north on seven, says he saw a man and a boy walking through the fields behind the school, going toward the highway. He figures this was some time between twelve fifteen and twelve thirty. He’s certain that the man was not wearing a robe. He doesn’t think he had a beard either. But he only had a glance at them. Two glances really. When he looked the second time, just before he went around the corner, the man was carrying the boy. He also noticed that the man had some kind of small suitcase or attaché case. He remembers it because he thought the man was having trouble carrying the case and the boy both.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning it was hard walking in the deep snow, or maybe the boy was making it hard.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “I don’t understand you, Mrs. Monette.”

  “Does it matter whether Adam was struggling? In terms of finding him?”

  “Well, if he was a bit older resistance can be a factor. A two-sided one. It can lead to escape, or … or it might not. But at his age I don’t think it matters, no. Anyway, we have a feeling the man had a car waiting. The insurance guy thinks he saw a black car parked by the side of the road. He didn’t notice if anyone was in it. We’ve sent out a six-state bulletin on the car. It’s a little late, but you never know.” He paused, waiting for her to say something. “I’ll keep in touch, Mrs. Monette. And try to keep your line open.”

  “Mr. Joyce?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you really think a murderer would risk making ransom demands?”

  There was a silence before the chief replied, “It’s happened, Mrs. Monette. You never know.”

  When Rachel went into the kitchen to make breakfast she found Andy there scrambling eggs. He glanced at her in what she thought seemed a normal way. Everyone else was trying to peer into her soul, to measure the pain inside.

  “Garth seems better today, Rachel,” he said. “I took him for a walk. By the end of it he was even chasing squirrels.”

  “Back to his old self already?”

  “Not quite.” With a sure-handed economy of movement he chopped scallions into thin discs and stirred them in with the eggs. “But dogs don’t live very long; I guess they’ve got to telescope everything.”

  “That’s one way of looking at dog behavior.” Rachel poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down. It tasted hot and bitter. She realized she had made it the night of the party. “Sometimes people don’t live very long either,” she said.

  “I know,” Andy replied quietly. He cut four slices from a loaf of rye and put them in the toaster.

  “While we were out I saw Tom Dawkins. Garth tried to bite him, by the way. Evidently someone, it must have been someone who was at the party, called the FBI man and told him about the conversation that night. The guy actually went to Dawkins’s house and questioned him about it. Dawkins told him that improper French syntax constituted justification for assault perhaps, but not for murder. Dawkins was livid. Apparently the FBI man wanted to take him to the station until Joyce intervened.”

  “That’s funny,” Rachel said. Some other time she might have laughed. But all the same, something in Andy’s tone prevented the story from upsetting her.

  Jack Bernstein entered the kitchen. Bruised circles had settled under his eyes and thin strands of hair hung over his ears, exposing the hairlessness on top.

  “I just spoke to the office,” he said. “I used the car phone to keep the house one free. I’ve got to go back to the city. There’s no getting out of it.” He waited for Rachel to say it was all right. She didn’t. “I’ll be back for the funeral,” he added, stepping forward to embrace her. She thought he was going to cry again, but Andy’s presence restrained him.

  “When is it going to be?” he asked. “I don’t know much about these things.” He meant as they are handled in non-Jewish families.

  “I haven’t thought about it,” Rachel said. “I’ll let you know.”

  “Hadn’t you better notify his folks?” Andy asked.

  “Dan was brought up by an aunt in Boston. His mother’s dead and his father lives somewhere in the south of France. I don’t think Dan has—Dan saw him in the last twenty years.”

  “Still,” said her father, “it’s the right thing to do.”

  Rachel agreed. Her father kissed her and simultaneously pressed something into her hand: a folded stack of hundred-dollar bills.

  “I don’t need this.” She looked at him and saw how much he wanted her to have it. “Goodbye, Dad,” she said. He nodded his head at Andy and went away.

  Rachel climbed the stairs to the study. It looked the way it always did. Books were on shelves, files were in cabinets, and no bodies were on the floor. Rachel opened one of the desk drawers and removed Dan’s address book. Beside it lay an old snapshot of her undergraduate self about to throw a snowball and laughing with pleasure.

  In the address book she found the entry she was searching for and copied it on a clean sheet of paper: Xavier Monette, rue de St. Jean-Baptiste, Orange, France. She lifted the telephone receiver and dialed Western Union.

  5

  There had not been a night in forty years when Simon Calvi slept more than five or six hours. In his youth he remembered sleeping until nine or ten o’clock; had he even on a Sunday sometimes lain in bed till noon? But that was forty years ago, and since then there had been armies and ghettos, a great war and a migration, a little war, and another and another. Israelis have no time to waste, not even in bed.

  Calvi slipped quietly from the sheets, leaving Gisela undisturbed. All her friends on the kibbutz called her Sooki, she told him, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. It was a pet’s name, and not an especially good one. Anyway, she had no friends, none that he had seen in the two months since they had met. She seemed to cut her ties to the kibbutz when she moved in with him.

  Gently Calvi brushed aside the blond hair that had spilled across her face during the
night. It was a face which bore little resemblance to the one she wore awake. They could almost have belonged to two different people. In sleep it was heavy and inert; it required wakeful energy to make it younger, and transform the excess flesh into something sensual. But in its peacefulness he preferred it. She slept deeply: she was German, not Israeli.

  In the bathroom Calvi washed what needed washing: a splash of cold water in each armpit, one to the groin. It had nothing to do with any Spartan sense of self-denial—the water heater was broken. He soaped the cold damp skin, then rinsed until his feet felt how wet the floor was. The sink, a small target, had captured little of the deluge. That many of the hairs he saw in it were white still surprised him, but in the mirror his muscular chest and broad shoulders were reassuring. Some people went gray prematurely. It didn’t mean anything.

  How marvellous the Americans were when it came to the science of razor blades, he thought. For hundreds of years the field had been dormant, caught in the grip of a dark age. Suddenly new designs were in the drugstores every week. The one Calvi used this morning to remove his dark beard was particularly ingenious. It did its cutting with two parallel steel blades, mounted in a piece of plastic that was shaped like a prop from a film about the twenty-third century. This two-blade configuration worked very cleverly. The first blade made a neat incision in the skin; the second handled the flaying. Why did he bother with this rite? Even on a good day it was only a matter of hours before the persistent little hairs sprouted once more through the skin and cast his jaw in shadow.

  February mornings in Jerusalem can be raw, but Calvi loved the little walled garden that lay behind his villa in the old suburb of Rehavia, and unless it was raining he drank his coffee there, and read the papers.

  Because the villa sat on a gentle slope he had a view of the Old City to the east. Until recently it had been an unobstructed view, but now, like growths that were somehow sterile and malignant at the same time, modern towers eclipsed segments of the old limestone town. If the apartment blocks had stood there when David first came he would have turned away and we wouldn’t be in this mess, Calvi thought.

  But his garden was serene. He had a grapevine creeping over the end wall, he had dark brown irises growing by the villa, he had a comfortable chaise longue to recline in while he read. He also had his picture on the third page of the Jerusalem Post.

  It was not a bad photograph. It showed him on his feet in the Knesset, right hand in the air, forefinger extended, head thrust forward: pugnacious. Whatever point he was making did not amuse his colleagues. The ones seated near him in the photograph stared straight ahead, their mouths set.

  An accompanying editorial took a similar position: THE SEPHARDIC MOVEMENT: THE ENEMY WITHIN? “No one,” it went on to say, “questions for a moment the integrity or the commitment to Israel of Simon Calvi, one of the leading spokesmen for the Sephardic and Oriental Jews since the fifties. And few quarrel with his argument that the Ashkenazim, or European Jews, have long enjoyed an economic ascendancy over the Sephardim. There are serious social and economic problems here which must be dealt with and are being dealt with, if at a speed too slow for men like Mr. Calvi. But, to say, as he has been recently saying, that it is government policy to keep the Sephardim in a state of second-class citizenship is to ignore two decades of government attempts to establish equality. And to bandy about terms like cultural genocide and Sephardi Power is to drive a wedge into the heart of Israel.

  “Negotiations are under way to determine our borders, at a moment in history when the Arabs have never been stronger. Do they need Mr. Calvi to make them stronger still?

  “Mr. Calvi said yesterday in the Knesset that an Israel which is middle eastern in behavior and outlook may have more success in negotiating with the Arabs than an Israel that acts like a western nation. Has he forgotten already what his own life was like in the mellahs of Morocco? In Morocco he was a Jew, a second-class person often living in fear. In Israel he is a citizen enjoying the full protection of the law. Yes, many of his fellow Moroccan Jews are poor, but there is opportunity here. Does not Mr. Calvi himself sit in the Knesset?”

  Simon Calvi sipped the sweet black coffee. One success cancels a thousand wasted lives. He had read an article in an American magazine about something called the black man in a Cadillac syndrome. It was an argument that only the haves found convincing. Calvi knew that his followers couldn’t be bought with someone else’s Cadillac. The Post editorial preached to the converted. His troubles would come from other sources.

  The complaining squeaks of a rusting bicycle made Calvi look up from the newspaper. The height of his garden wall hid the bicycle itself, but not the head of the approaching rider—his speech writer, executive assistant, and friend, Moses Cohn. Somehow in the soft but very clear golden light of the early Jerusalem morning Moses Cohn’s face seemed much closer than it really was, as if Calvi had the aid of a telephoto lens. He knew that Cohn must still be almost a block away, and yet he fancied he could see the details of the thin face, the strong straight nose, the russet hair, the strong tendons which underlay the taut cheeks, the incisive mouth, the intelligent blue eyes. Perhaps this heightened visual sense was brought on by a subconscious reaction to the editorial, Calvi thought. But when Cohn had pulled the bicycle through the old iron gate and sat down Calvi saw that there was more to it. The image itself was radiating an overabundance of visual data—of color, of tension, even of violence, Calvi thought. He could see it in the flushed spots on the pale skin, and the movements of the wiry neck.

  “Coffee?” Calvi asked. Long ago he had learned patience. He poured some into his own cup and handed it to Cohn. Cohn drank some, put the cup on the grass, and pinched the bridge of his nose, hard; the kind of pinch that drives out demons. He looked at Calvi in an odd way, almost, Calvi thought, as if he were trying to see him totally anew, as if they hadn’t known each other for twenty years.

  “Do you know a man named Grunberg?” Cohn asked finally.

  “I don’t think so. Why?”

  “Major Grunberg.”

  Calvi waited. A fat red-eyed pigeon landed heavily in the garden and began to peck among the flowers, its head, neck, and breast pumping in a grotesque modern dance.

  “He’s with Army Intelligence. So he told me about an hour ago. Very efficient fellow. Managed to enter the apartment without waking any of us. No need to worry about the knock at the door. Just wait for the tap on the shoulder while you’re sleeping.” His fury had knotted the sinewy muscles in his forearms. “To get away from that sort of barbarity is why I came here.” The Hebrew gutturals tore at his throat.

  “What did he want?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, what did he say, Moses?” Calvi asked, more aggressively than he had intended. It was the wrong way to get information from Moses Cohn. Cohn made that very point by suddenly noticing that the pant legs of his old gray flannels were still rolled up for bicycling. Giving the matter all his attention he carefully rolled them down, smoothed out the wrinkles and gave each leg a quick shake. He’d been bullied once already, he wouldn’t allow it again.

  “Maybe he dropped a few hints, at least.” Calvi was a politician after all and knew how to give ground.

  Cohn allowed a little smile to move across his face, like a ray of light, but when it had passed he looked worried.

  “He asked a lot of questions about you.”

  “What kind of questions?”

  “Questions,” Cohn snapped. He was very angry. “How long I had known you. How we got together. That sort of thing. He sat right there on the bed, with Sarah and me still in it, under the covers. It was humiliating: worse than being taken into the back room.”

  Calvi knew the comparison was not accidental. The British had interrogated Cohn twice during the dying days of the mandate. The little man was a member of the Irgun and could have told them a lot. But he didn’t. Perhaps it was more humiliating when it came from one of your own.

  “So?”
Calvi prodded.

  “So I told Grunberg how we got together. What is there to hide?”

  “What did you say exactly?”

  Cohn made an impatient gesture. “That I was working on the settlement program for new immigrants. That you were an immigrant with a bit of money who was interested in politics. What kind of politics, Grunberg wanted to know. I didn’t understand what he meant. So he read me something from an interview you gave in the late fifties: you said that immigrants should be assimilated into a western life-style as soon as possible. Do you see? Then he asked me about the rally in Tel Aviv last month. Did you really say that the Oriental Jews have more in common with Arabs than they do with the European Jews? Did you really say that the survival of Israel lies to the east, not the west? So, what are you getting at, I asked him. It’s a matter of public record. He agreed. It’s public record.”

  In the sky a cold west wind was pushing a dark cover of cloud over the city. The sunlight shone on the leading edge of the cloud like a gold vein in a coal mine. Calvi blew on his fingertips. It was going to snow.

  “He wanted to know if I agreed with everything you said.”

  Calvi looked up sharply. Cohn returned the look.

  “I told him yes, so don’t get nervous.”

  “It’s not a question of that. Why should he know about our internal business, that’s all I’m saying.”

  Cohn looked thoughtful. “Why indeed?”

  Calvi reached inside his shirt pocket for one of the fat short cigars he liked to smoke. He was trying to cut down to two a day, one after lunch, one after dinner. But he felt like one now. He struck a cardboard match and said around the cigar:

  “Was that all?”

  “Almost. He asked a few questions about your life in Morocco. I told him I know little about it. It’s true.”

  “How little?”

  “You come from Fez. You lived in the mellah. Your ancestors came from Spain. You left Morocco after the war. So did two hundred thousand others.”