The Jerusalem Assassin

by Avraham Azrieli

  The woman’s pace was fast and decisive. She was small, enshrouded in a long, buttoned coat, a dark scarf tied around her head. Her face was covered with large sunglasses despite the weather.

  His fingers clenched the Mauser. Was she the caller, here to meet with him?

  She passed in and out of the circles of light, approaching him in a manner that removed any doubt. She was not a casual visitor to the park. She was the target.

  He tilted the weapon under his coat, the silencer aimed at the advancing figure. He scanned the park, seeing no one else. She was alone.

  The rain intensified, drowning all other sounds, blurring his vision. The lower half of her face, under the sunglasses, stood out in its whiteness. He would start with a stomach shot-fatal, but not immediately-and after questioning her, complete the job with a bullet to the head. If she implicated Christopher, it would shorten the time Lemmy would need to interrogate his traitorous assistant.

  His forefinger rested on the trigger.

  The distance between them narrowed quickly.

  He took a deep breath and stepped away from the water fountain, out of the pool of light.

  The target kept walking.

  He lowered the tip of the silencer, aligning it with her midriff.

  Her pace slowed. Did she notice his hand in the pocket, the bulging coat over the pointed gun?

  His finger began to press the trigger.

  She made a quick move that brought her purse from the side to the front. He couldn’t see her hand. Was she reaching for a gun?

  The target entered the range of a gas lamp.

  The Mauser in his hand adjusted slightly to account for the narrowing distance, lined up with her stomach. Lemmy exhaled, relaxing his muscles while his finger applied growing pressure on the trigger. At this point it became harder to press, a tiny steel bump to signal that the hammer was about to be released to knock on the pin, which would tap the base of the bullet. The exploding charge would shoot a cap of brass at high speed into her flesh. A stomach wound with this caliber would give her ten minutes of life, enough to reveal the information he needed.

  The target stopped. “Herr Horch, I presume?”

  Again, the same as on the phone, her voice unsettled him, like noticing a face on the street, reminiscent of someone he knew, like the target in Paris, who had Benjamin’s smile.

  Concentrate!

  Lemmy’s finger applied delicate force, avoiding an abrupt pull that would shift the perfect aim at her chest-

  “ The weather has turned against us, hasn’t it?” She resumed walking toward him.

  Her voice-closer, louder, clearer-hit him with shocking familiarity. It drew his gaze upward to the target’s face, his hand instinctively following the sudden movement of his eyes, shifting the Mauser sharply just as his finger completed its travel backward. The hammer sprang, the Mauser jerked against his hip, the lapel of his coat blew sideways, and the muted pop of the shot tapped on his ears.

  The woman collapsed. Her sunglasses fell off, her face suddenly visible, and Lemmy heard his own voice speak in wonder. “Tanya?”

  *

  Rabbi Gerster led Itah Orr up the stairs to Benjamin’s apartment. When Sorkeh opened the door, he said, “A guest shouldn’t bring a guest, but this friend needs a safe place to stay until after the Sabbath.”

  “Of course,” Sorkeh said. “Come in, please, welcome. We love having guests for the Sabbath.”

  The little ones, clinging to her skirt, looked up with big eyes. Even they could tell that the woman in immodest clothes and exposed hair did not belong in Neturay Karta, that something out of the ordinary was going on even though the adults were pretending otherwise.

  “ Thank you.” Entering the foyer, Itah’s gaze rested on the single photo on the wall. She approached it, squinting at the small letters. “Your son?”

  “ Yes,” he said, “that’s my Jerusalem.”

  “ A handsome soldier.”

  “ That’s nothing,” Sorkeh said. “He was much more handsome in real life. And a brilliant Talmudic scholar. But God had different plans for him. How mysterious His ways are.” She caressed her little daughter’s head.

  “ Lemmy is with God now,” Rabbi Gerster said. “Forever young.”

  Itah gave him a questioning look.

  “ I must hurry to the synagogue for evening prayers,” he said. “You’ll be fine here.”

  The two women, surrounded by the young children, went into the dining room to prepare the table for the Friday night dinner.

  Heading back downstairs, Rabbi Gerster thought how good a wife Sorkeh was for Benjamin, as she would have been a good wife to Lemmy. If not for Tanya’s irresistible allure, which had drawn Lemmy away, this apartment would have passed to Lemmy, who would have filled it with his own children. How would it feel to have grandchildren, Rabbi Gerster wondered. Wonderful? Joyous? Normal? But it wasn’t meant to be, and time had taken the edge off the pain and anger. He no longer blamed Tanya. She had taken Lemmy as a substitute because she couldn’t have the man she truly loved, and when he did change his mind, it was too late. What if he had agreed immediately to leave his wife and son and this sect of misguided zealots for Tanya? What if he had dropped everything on the day of her reappearance in October 1966 and joined Tanya, the woman he truly loved?

  What if?

  A hypothetical world of dreams. In reality, by his foolish decision he had doomed his wife and son-practically sent Temimah and Lemmy to their death.

  *

  The bullet tore off her headscarf and knocked her down, but it didn’t kill her, Tanya knew, because she could still see Herr Horch. He approached her and stooped over, staring down. His next shot would be at point blank to ensure her demise. She managed to speak. “No need…for violence.”

  He knelt next to her and pressed a handkerchief to the side of her head. “Sit up,” he said. “It’ll reduce the bleeding.”

  She held his arm and sat up slowly, unsure of his intentions. Her decision to come here alone had clearly been a fatal miscalculation. But why would a respectable Swiss banker resort to shooting? It made no sense!

  “ It’s just a scrape,” he said. “You’re very lucky. I never miss.”

  “ Don’t do…anything foolish.” She closed her eyes to stop the world from spinning. “My colleagues…will come after you. They’re big…on revenge.”

  “ I know.”

  “ Why did you…shoot me?”

  “You don’t recognize me, Tanya?”

  He knew her name?

  She opened her eyes and examined the man’s face in the yellow light of the park lamp. He had a pleasant, handsome face, short, blonde hair with a few strands of gray, and blue eyes that radiated intelligence. She touched his face, her fingers feeling his wet forehead, the creases by his eyes, the strong jaw, the soft lips.

  “ You haven’t changed much,” he said.

  “ No!” She withdrew her hand from his face and tried to crawl away. “ No! ”

  He smiled, and her remaining doubts went away. It was him!

  She was cold. The world was dark and wet around her, not white like the hospital. But she had the same out-of-body feeling. “Am I dead?”

  “That’s right. We both died and went to Zurich.” He put his arms around her and pressed her shivering body against his. “Or heaven. Who the hell knows anymore?”

  Tanya was paralyzed. Her hands fell beside her body, her face buried in his coat.

  He held her. “It’s okay. It’s really me. Your little Lemmy.”

  She began to cry.

  *

  When Rabbi Gerster entered the synagogue, the men were reciting the Song of Songs, a long poem that King Solomon had written three millennia earlier. “ How beautiful you are, my betrothed, how beautiful, your eyes like doves.”

  On Friday evenings, the betrothed was the Sabbath, Solomon’s verses recited to welcome the holy day. “ Like a rose among the weeds, my beloved among the women. ”

  He f
ound Benjamin by a bookcase along the side wall, perusing a heavy volume. “I brought Itah to your apartment. She needs a place to hide. It’s my fault. I asked her to look into things that were better left undisturbed. Now some people are upset with her.”

  Behind them, the men continued reciting. “ Your curls, a thick herd of goats, skipping down the slopes of the Gilead, your teeth, like scrubbed sheep, perfectly aligned, without a blemish. ”

  “With my family?” Benjamin closed the book. “Is it safe?”

  “For now,” Rabbi Gerster said, “it is safe.”

  *

  Lemmy helped Tanya to a park bench by the water fountain. The rain had stopped, and she gazed at him through a curtain of tears. “I don’t understand.”

  “ It’s simple. I work for Elie.”

  “ But why?”

  His eyes wandered away. “Why not?”

  “You were a kid. Your whole life was ahead of you.”

  “I’ve been living my life, a great life, in fact. My mission has given me a meaningful existence-”

  “ To work for Elie Weiss is meaningful? ”

  He felt her trembling under his arm. “I was eighteen, and he offered me a chance to dedicate my life to our national survival, to fight for something I believed in.”

  “Do you still believe it?”

  “I do. Elie’s plan is the only way to end anti-Semitism once and for all. Eradicate Jew-hating with true finality.”

  Tanya saw the conviction in his eyes, still young and idealistic, the eyes she remembered from so many years ago. Young Lemmy, the boy from Neturay Karta, the avid reader, with his endless questions, with so much passion. “But how?”

  “You remember the UN radar at Government House in East Jerusalem?”

  “ In sixty-seven? Of course. That radar would have detected our planes as they took off, and the UN would have alerted the Arabs, cost us the element of surprise, probably the whole war.”

  Lemmy smiled. “I detonated the installation right under the UN chief’s nose. But they later captured me and handed me over to the Jordanians for execution. Elie saved me, shipped me to Europe, and arranged a substitute corpse to be found on the Golan Heights with my ID tags but otherwise too mutilated for identification. Do you remember the aftermath of the Six Day War? Euphoria and a huge mess. No one knew what was going on.”

  “ But what really happened?”

  “ I assumed the life of a German boy whose parents died in a fire. Wilhelm Horch had died too, but Elie had the records altered as if Wilhelm had survived. My German was pretty good already, having grown up speaking Yiddish. Elie had an old lawyer in Munich become my guardian and send me to Lyceum Alpin St. Nicholas, a boarding school in the Alps.”

  “ It’s not a coincidence that Elie sent you there. Armande Hoffgeitz and Klaus von Koenig studied there together, became friends.”

  “ It’s a great school, fancy old buildings, great facilities, and wonderful teachers. I was supposed to be sixteen, so I stayed there for three years, made friends, and during school holidays Elie trained me.”

  “While we mourned you.”

  “You rejected me, remember? Told me I was too young for you. Sent me to live with Bira and her friends.”

  “ For your own good, yes, but-”

  “ But what? I was eighteen, alone in the world. Eighteen! ”

  Tanya sighed. “I remember how old you were. And even if you were older, you would have been no match for Elie Weiss. He’s too clever, even for me.”

  “He taught me how to blend in, how to court the right girl, how to plan ahead. It has worked like a clock. I married and joined the Hoffgeitz Bank under the tutelage of my father-in-law.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Armande Hoffgeitz is Paula’s father.”

  “Oh, no!”

  “ And we have a son. Klaus Junior.”

  “ Klaus?” A look of horror took over Tanya’s face. “This is a nightmare.”

  “ My work is very important. I’ve developed clients in the Middle East, oil-rich sheiks and so on. They give money to terrorist groups, I trace it, report to Elie, and-”

  “ I know how it works. But that’s a red herring. Elie didn’t recruit you to spy on Arab sheiks. Or to assassinate them. He recruited you with the single purpose of gaining control of the bank.”

  “ Eventually.” Lemmy shrugged. “Family relations are the only way to power in a Swiss private bank.”

  “ So Elie told you to marry a Swiss sausage to get to the cheese.”

  “ Initially it was a calculated move. But I didn’t have to pretend for long. Paula is wonderful. I’ve grown to love her very much.”

  Tanya closed her eyes. “Jerusalem Gerster loves Armande Hoffgeitz’s daughter. This is absolutely insane.”

  “Jealous?”

  “You haven’t lost your sense of humor.” She searched his eyes for a long moment. “How could you do this?”

  “What? Marry Paula?”

  “Marrying for duty is in your genes. Your father made the same mistake.”

  “ Say again?”

  Tanya made a dismissive gesture. “How could you leave Israel, leave your life, your language, your friends? How could you turn into somebody else?”

  Lemmy thought for a moment. “Elie saved my life. He offered me a great mission that will change the future of our people. And anyway, there was no one to stay for.”

  “No one?” Tanya looked at him incredulously. “Your father!”

  “Rabbi Abraham Gerster? The saint who excommunicated me, made me into a pariah, drove my mother to suicide?” Lemmy sneered. “My father was a fanatical jerk, and he hated me.”

  “Don’t say that.” Tanya’s voice broke. “Abraham loved you. He still does-”

  “Oh please! He didn’t even bother to attend my funeral!”

  “That’s what Elie told you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Elie lied to you.” Tanya rose from the bench. “Your father cried at your funeral. At least what we thought was your funeral.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I was there with Bira and your paratrooper buddies. And your father fell on your grave, broken up. And he’s been crying on your grave ever since, for twenty-eight years.” She paused, her hand pressed to her chest. “And I’ve been crying there too.” Her voice choked and her eyes became wet again. “I planted a few-”

  “Shhh, it’s okay.” Lemmy hugged her. The rain had stopped, the clouds began to disperse, and patches of blue appeared in the darkening sky.

  “You didn’t die, but you did lose your life.” Tanya blew her nose into a handkerchief. “It’s my fault. All of it. Everything that happened to you and Abraham and your poor mother, all my fault. I’m a stupid, stupid woman!”

  “You’re making no sense. How could it be your fault?”

  “ It goes way back, long before you were born. If you knew the real Elie Weiss, you wouldn’t follow him. He was raised to be a shoykhet, to slaughter livestock in the same village in Germany where your father grew up as the rabbi’s son. The two of them watched the SS murder their families. They spent three years in the forests, coming out only to kill Germans and steal food.”

  “ And you?”

  “ For me the war had started on a train ride to Dachau, where a handsome Nazi general plucked me out of the line before the gas chambers. It’s a long story, but Klaus von Koenig loved me as truly as it was possible under those circumstances. He was Himmler’s chief of finance-”

  “Chief of looting.”

  “Yes, he also handled the valuables they stripped from the Jews. He deposited most of the gems and jewelry with Armande Hoffgeitz, his high-school buddy.”

  “But how did you connect with Elie and my father?”

  “On the first night of 1945, my seventeenth birthday, I was in the car with Klaus, returning from the Swiss border. He was driving down a narrow, twisty Alpine road. They ambushed us. Your father shot Klaus.” She pointed at the Mauser, wh
ich Lemmy still held in his hand. “But I had the only proof of the deposits-a ledger that Armande Hoffgeitz had signed. Klaus had given it to me for safekeeping.” Tanya looked away at the Limmat River and the hills beyond. “That night, in the snowy Alps, while Klaus’s body was still warm, I fell in love with your father-a different love, more like a tornado that swirled both of us into its epicenter. We spent three months together. But one day Elie returned alone and told me that Abraham was dead, that a group of Germans had sprayed your father with bullets until Abraham looked like a red sieve.”

  “ And you believed him?”

  “ You’ve seen Elie work with his blade, so you know why I didn’t question him. That night, when he fell asleep, I ran. And ran. I gave birth to Bira a few months later in a refugee camp-”

  “ Does she know?”

  “ What?”

  “ That her father was a Nazi general?”

  Tanya smiled as if the question was a joke. “She didn’t need a father. All the other Mossad agents missed their kids, so Bira was everyone’s darling. You see, I joined the Mossad so that Elie wouldn’t find me.”

  “ But he did?”

  “ More than twenty years later. In sixty-six I was decorated for a successful operation, and he saw my name on a list at the prime minister’s office. It was bound to happen. Bira was already grown, serving in the IDF, and I was no longer afraid of Elie. Big mistake, as it turned out.”

  Lemmy removed the handkerchief from the wound, which had stopped bleeding, and wiped the rain and tears from her cheeks. He noticed another bruise on her head, a week or two old, but didn’t ask her about it.

  “ Abraham had somehow survived the Germans’ bullets. Apparently, to explain my disappearance, Elie had told Abraham that I was dead-do you see a pattern here? And my purported death so devastated your father that Elie was able to convince him to dedicate his life to serving Israel secretly. Abraham had been groomed to be a rabbi, so he infiltrated the most fundamentalist ultra-Orthodox sect in Israel, where anti-Zionist ideology was the seed of future civil war among Jews. He joined Neturay Karta in nineteen forty-six and married your mother. Having a son named after the divided city of Jerusalem added to his mystic aura, and with his charisma and brilliant mind, Abraham Gerster ascended to the leadership of the sect.”