City of Secrets

by Stewart O'Nan

  “The Edison Cinema,” Asher said. “Eight o’clock tomorrow.”

  “That’s fine, thanks,” Brand said, because behind her door Mrs. Ohanesian would be listening. While he was let down, he wished he could pull on his jacket and go right now, if only so he didn’t have to wait another day.

  Standing there, he weighed calling Eva, though she had to know, and decided not to. If the British were listening, he didn’t want to make it easier for them.

  When he woke, it was snowing, the Dome of the Rock just a shadow behind the swirling curtain. Had no one checked the weather?

  The schools were closed, and the souks, the city wisely staying inside. All day Brand sloshed through the empty streets, feeling eyes on him as he passed the armored cars guarding the central prison. The underground had more fighters than guns. The police training school, the various barracks. Any armory, he supposed. How many weapons would a pillbox have? Even they were fortified. In comparison, the substation was easy pickings.

  As the day faded, the wind shifted. The snow turned to freezing rain, and the fares disappeared, the tourists retreating to their hotels. Greta had nothing for him and he sat in the queue at the Jaffa Gate, reading the Post and listening to the Voice of Fighting Zion, waiting for his shift to end. Sleet ticked against the roof, crystals melted on the hood. The hillside would be impossible in this. They’d have just the one way in and out, cross-country. If they got stuck, they’d have to leave the car. Absurdly, he was worried about it as if it were his.

  Back at the garage, Pincus asked him if he could take a look at his water pump, and though Brand just wanted to go home and get ready, he hefted his toolbox from his trunk. Pincus had a tiny Fiat that could fit down the tightest alley. During the war, parts were impossible to find, and the engine was a Frankenstein. Brand hung a utility light from the hood latch and poked his head in close over the hot block, weaving to stay out of his own shadow.

  “Hoses look fine.”

  “I could tell you that,” Pincus said, leaning in beside him.

  “What’s it been doing?”

  “Nothing. You fixed it, boychik. Thank you. You can put your fancy tools away now.”

  Brand didn’t understand. Pincus had to place his hand on the open lid and shoot him a double take before Brand recognized, among his pliers and wrenches, a black, snub-nosed pistol.

  Pincus shut the lid. “I’m thinking maybe you can use it better than I can.”

  “Thank you,” Brand said, more alarmed than grateful. Was there anyone in the city who didn’t know? So often he felt like the last person in on the joke.

  The gun was loaded, a death sentence if he were stopped. He left it in the trunk on the way home, though to the Mandate it didn’t matter if it was locked up or in his hand.

  The protocol for a direct action was empty pockets. He could bring the gun, but nothing that connected him to anyone. The movement had gone to some trouble to make sure the Peugeot was a dead end. Brand thought he wouldn’t mind dying nameless. Katya had, and the rest of his family. He’d never liked Jossi anyway.

  He took only his car keys, leaving his flat open. Most likely he’d be back, but as he descended the stairs for what might be the last time, his thoughts veered to the dramatic. Mrs. Ohanesian would take his radio and the wad of pounds in the cigar box. Below his window, the old Parabellum would rust shut in its grave.

  The telephone in the hall made him want to call Eva. He should have had a last night with her, like a soldier shipping off to the front.

  Stupid. He was only going to Ge’ula. With a tip, the fare was barely six shillings.

  It was raining harder now, a spattering like frying fat surrounding him, muffling all other sounds. In the darkness he took the gun from the trunk and stuck it in his pocket, then, once the ceiling light went off, slipped it under his seat.

  There was no one on the roads, and no crowd outside the Edison, only the marquee reflected in the wet pavement: Spellbound, with Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman. He was early, and circled the block, finding a spot across the street where he could see the doors. He wasn’t sure why Asher chose so public a location, unless it was part of an alibi. What was wrong with the house in Rehavia? Again Brand felt helpless, as if the conspiracy were against him.

  Right at eight, as the carillon of the YMCA struck the hour, Asher emerged from the cinema in a trench coat, as if he’d stepped out of the film. He raised a hand, and Brand swung the cab to the curb.

  “Where to?”

  “Turn on the radio. If they say ‘Churchill’ three times, it’s off.”

  “Got it.”

  With the weather, the signal phased in and out, and Brand had to strain to hear the announcer, going on about the Ten Lost Tribes. Long before Lord Balfour, the Lord God promised His people both banks of the Jordan. Kol Hamagen was an arm of the Haganah, which was an arm of the Workers’ Party, and while, after the camps, Brand considered himself apolitical, it bothered him when socialists based their arguments on scripture.

  In the backseat Asher was unwrapping a package. “All they had was dynamite.” He sounded unhappy about it, which made Brand unhappy.

  “It’s dry, right?”

  “I’m sure it’s fine, I’d just rather not take any chances.”

  It was too late for that, Brand thought, checking his mirror to see if they were being followed. No, they were the only ones foolish enough to be out in the monsoon.

  As they splashed along Mea Shearim Street, skirting the Hasidic neighborhood, the streetlights showing them the road flickered and dimmed. The whole line flared once, twice, then died. Simultaneously, the radio cut out as if the transmitter had been hit, leaving only the shuttling of the wipers. Beyond his headlights, the night was as black as the middle of the ocean.

  Brand’s first thought was that the Irgun had knocked out the main power station, relieving them of their mission. More likely it was a blackout brought on by the storm, annoying but temporary. He focused on the road, expecting the lights to snap on at any second, revealing a hidden jeep or police car lying in wait, except as they burrowed deeper into the suburbs, there was nothing. He could get Amman and Damascus on the radio but not the government station, and he thought, with the hard pragmatism of a partisan, that it would be a good night to blow the antenna.

  “You brought a torch?” Asher asked.

  “I brought everything you told me to.” Meaning the bolt cutters and tin snips and rubber gloves. They were ready for any contingency, though he no longer felt like doing it at all. On a night like tonight, he should be at Eva’s, keeping warm.

  A gust pushed the car and he pulled it back into the lane.

  “How’s the wind?” Asher asked.

  “Bad.”

  They were into Zikhron Moshe now, cruising past the skimpy business district, the unfinished streets of Ge’ula somewhere off to their right. In the hills beyond, the Arab villages were dark year-round, their houses lit by cooking fires and candles and the rare kerosene lamp, as in the last century. The wadis would be running high and muddy, the ravine flooded. Churchill, Churchill, Churchill, Brand wished, but they kept on. In back Asher flicked a lighter, the flash startling Brand like a shot.

  “I think we’ll be all right,” Asher said.

  The Zion Blumenfeld Orphanage was just past Zikhron Moshe, a sprawling farm complex dedicated to raising the displaced children of the war in a pastoral utopia. Here, packed into dormitories like laagers ringing a rustic stone temple, refugees from the bloody capitals of Warsaw and Prague and Vienna learned how to nurse calves and pluck chickens. Brand slowed well before the main entrance of the campus and turned down an unpaved road owned by the power company. The road ran along a fence line behind a row of barns. Trucks had dug deep ruts, leaving a hump in the middle Brand had to keep one wheel on so the Peugeot didn’t get hung up. Its rear slipped in the mud, and they slid sideways, their headlights sweeping the sky. He tried to go slowly, but rocks still knocked against the undercarriage. He could
imagine one cracking his oil pan, stranding them. They’d have to use the bomb on the car and walk home.

  They left the protection of the barns and set out across open space. He imagined how they must look from the road, the only lights for miles. The patrols would have to know they didn’t belong there. If it wasn’t raining, he could have turned his lights off and navigated by the stars. Instead, he kept a wheel on the hump and aimed straight ahead.

  “We should be seeing it in a minute,” Asher said.

  He was trying to be calm, Brand thought, talking just to talk. Where else would it be?

  Once, in the harbor at Marseilles, a launch he was on lost its engine in heavy swells. It was June, and the sea was too cold to survive for more than a few minutes. Each time the launch dropped into a trough, it took on more water. The first mate had the cowling of the engine off, frantically yanking the cord. Brand could see the shore, maybe a kilometer away. In perfect weather, with a friendly current, he might swim for it, but that day he knew he’d never make it. After living through the camps, he was about to be killed by a fouled spark plug, and sitting there soaked and shivering, he reviewed his life and accepted his fate. The same strange peace overcame him now. He was glad he loved Eva, and he was proud to fight for Eretz Israel. If he should die tonight, he regretted nothing.

  “There’s a pylon,” Asher said.

  When Brand had cased the substation with Lipschitz, they’d been too far away to gauge the tower’s real size. Close up, it rose like an oil derrick. At the top, giant insulators jutted from its frame like raised arms. The concrete pad at the base was several meters thick. A stick of dynamite would do nothing.

  The substation was more approachable, the spindly array reminding him of Ge’ula’s skeletal houses. He killed the lights and turned the car around, kept it running.

  Now that they were here, they had to act fast. There was no talk. They knew what they had to do.

  Only the wires around the top of the fence were electrified. While Brand hunched in the rain, chopping at the lock with the bolt cutters, Asher sat in the dry backseat, fitting the fuse into the blasting cap by the light of the torch. If he made a mistake now, Brand would hear it.

  He was done first, and hopped back in the driver’s seat.

  Asher cracked the door an inch, thumbed the wheel of his lighter and set the flame to the fuse. It sizzled, and he pushed through the door into the rain.

  Brand put the car in gear and waited with the door open. He wasn’t sure if Asher had purposely left the torch on. The beam picked out the seams of the backseat, making him recall the Sabra.

  Asher ducked through the door. “Go.”

  Brand drove.

  “We should have at least three minutes.” Asher was breathing hard from running. For some reason, Brand thought it was funny.

  He tried to keep a wheel on the hump but they were going too fast. He swerved, and the stones clunked underneath them. It was quicker coming back, knowing where they were going. They rattled past the barns and made it to the main road with a minute to spare.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Back to the Edison.”

  They took the darkened side streets, sneaking down through Zikhron Moshe toward the bus station, keeping to the speed limit. With every passing block, they were safer, just a cabbie and his fare. Instead of relief, Brand was aware of the gun under his seat.

  Even in the rain, the Egged station was busy, the buses idling in their spaces, the passengers lit like fish in an aquarium.

  “Time,” Asher said, holding up his watch, but so far away, with the power still out and the rain falling all around, it was impossible to tell if the bomb had gone off. Brand thought it was a cheat. After all their trouble, he wanted to hear it.

  4

  They would never know what happened exactly. Supposedly the target had been CID headquarters, brimming with intelligence and weapons and possible hostages, but the operation had been called off, most likely because of the weather. The government station reported that several power facilities had been attacked. Perforce, the Haganah denied any involvement. Though he knew the substation would be under surveillance, Brand wanted to drive out to Ge’ula with a pair of field glasses and see the damage for himself, as if to prove they’d actually done it. The closest he came was taking a fare to the old-age home, glimpsing the tower—intact, as were the wires—as he passed the bare fields of the orphanage. In retrospect, the mission seemed both heroic and foolhardy, but mainly disorganized. Brand was no soldier, yet again and again over the following days, as he tooled around town, telling stories of King Herod and the City of David, he pictured himself and Asher bumping along the stony road beside the barns in the dark, recalling the night not with honest dread but pride and a belated excitement. Crazily, he wanted to do it again.

  Like bank robbers after a haul, they laid low. No meetings or phone calls, not even a coded message through Greta. Pincus didn’t ask for the gun back, so Brand hid it in the crypt with the Parabellum after the whores and Tommies had finished their business. In the morning he woke, no longer condemned. He was a cabbie from Latvia named Jossi. He drove and sold film, ate his falafel for lunch sitting in the queue outside the Damascus Gate. Did he know where the Convent of the Cross was?

  “You bet,” he said.

  The Hall of the Last Supper?

  “No sweat.”

  In Jaffa a truck bomb went off outside the town hall, killing fourteen Arabs. That night the British shot a teenager pasting up handbills. Brand thought Asher would call, but stayed disciplined, keeping radio silence.

  It was still Christmas. First for the Orthodox, then two weeks later the Armenians. The Peugeot reeked of incense. Even Eva was sick of it. She was tired of paying for bad black market coffee and Cyprian brandy and having to get dressed after supper and go out into the cold and rain so some pig of a bureaucrat could slobber over her. The nights she worked, she was never sober. To steel herself, she drank before she went out, then afterward drank to forget. She never brought up her rent again, but often when she ranted against the unfairness of the world, Brand thought it was his fault.

  He had some money, but nowhere near enough. She was too strong to be kept anyway. He had to be satisfied, their rare nights off, with buying her dinner and taking her to the movies. He wasn’t sure if they were courting. She dressed as if she were meeting a date, coordinating the same outfit she’d worn at the Fast Hotel last Tuesday, the only difference was that now she rode up front with him. She chose the place, a gangster hangout off Queen Melisande’s Way. At the Kilimanjaro Supper Club the hatcheck girls and waiters all knew her name as if she were famous, her notoriety a kind of celebrity. Invariably their table was in a dim corner behind a beaded curtain, away from the other couples. Women glared at her back as she passed, leaned in to whisper. “Aditti,” they muttered under their breath, slang for a girl who slept with the British. She was so private that he forgot she was a public scandal. He wished she would spin on her heel and slap their faces, but she kept walking as if she didn’t hear. Though he knew she’d only be angry with him, like a knight, he wanted to defend her honor. Would it matter to these women that she was doing it for them?

  “They have no right,” he said.

  “Let’s have a nice time,” she said. “Drink your drink.”

  Even here her scar drew stares, as he imagined her beauty had when she was younger. Before the war, the men in the room would have envied him. Now he expected they took him for her pimp or her gigolo. His second drink gave him the courage to make a joke of it.

  “What do you care?” she asked.

  “Because I’m neither.”

  “That’s right, you’re pure.”

  He was ready to leave as soon as he finished eating. She insisted on coffee and dessert, lingering over a refill as the place gradually emptied. Once the other customers had left, the maître d’ Edouard came by their table to pay his respects.

  “Miss Eva.” He bowed in the continen
tal manner and kissed her hand. It wasn’t merely that she was a regular. His deference was deep-seated, verging on adoration. Every time he chatted her up, Brand was convinced he knew Victor and Asher, their conversation rife with hidden meaning. He hardly said a word to Brand, only hello and goodbye, as if they had no business.

  “Why don’t you like him?” Eva asked.

  “Because of the way he looks at you.”

  “He’s French.” She shrugged, innocent. “Edouard’s an old friend. He was a friend when I didn’t have friends.”

  New himself, Brand understood her perfectly, and still he worried. Everyone they met seemed to know her better than he did.

  In the Edison, safely hidden in the dark, he could relax. Like a moony schoolboy, he held her hand, stole glances at her, rapt. She seemed happiest in the cinema, pointing out background details and the director’s camera tricks, gripping his arm at moments of suspense. She loved Ingrid Bergman, her great soft face filling the screen.

  “No one pouts like Bergman,” she said, as if they were colleagues.

  Bergman, Vivien Leigh, Gene Tierney—she became all the stars. On the way home she played her favorite lines, and he could imagine the actress she’d been. He wanted to kill whoever had ruined her face.

  In bed, as she slept, he imagined Katya hovering in a corner of the room, an angel watching over him. She knew him to be sentimental at heart, despite his Swedish cynicism, inherited, like his green eyes, from his father, a lover of sunsets and protector of the weak. What would she think of him now, and what could he say to her?

  After he was released, he’d taken the train out through the leafy countryside to Crow Forest the same way they’d been marched in the snow, but the ground had been dug up by the Russians, the bodies carted away in dump trucks and tipped into secret graves with the German dead, a second desecration. He walked the turned earth, searching for a scrap of cloth, a button, the steel frames from a pair of eyeglasses, any clue as to what had happened there. It was May, and the first shoots of grass had sprung up, fringing the mounds with green. All around, weeds and thistles grew knee-high, thriving reminders of the relentless business of life. He stood in the clearing, looking at the trees on all sides reaching for the sun, the birds flitting from branch to branch, calling to one another, and knew he had to leave. He found a smooth egg of a stone, knelt and placed it in the soft grass. A week later he signed on the Eastern Star. From the stern he watched the steeples of Riga dwindle as the ship steamed up the Daugava for the open sea. If he had a home now, this was it.