The curfew lifted, they were free to leave, but dawdled over their tea, as if they wouldn’t be here again. By daylight the place looked as spare as a monk’s cell, his few possessions meager. He wished he’d hung something on the walls.
“How do you live without a mirror?”
“There’s one in the bathroom.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“I already know what I look like.”
She thought he could use some curtains. He didn’t say the blinds worked fine. Before leaving, he opened the window. Below, placed like an offering on one crypt, lay a pair of khaki skivvies.
They were careful on the stairs and closing the door, making a clean getaway, and then, as he was backing up, Mrs. Ohanesian came out on the porch and stood with her arms folded, as if seeing them off. Brand waved, neighborly. Mrs. Ohanesian didn’t.
“I’d say she was fairly scandalized,” Eva said.
“She’ll get over it,” Brand said, with a bravado that surprised him. One holdup and he was turning into a gangster.
He saw her to her door in the Quarter as if it were a date. Her lunchtime client was tomorrow, so her day was free. He had to drive.
“What about tonight?” he asked.
“Are you making me an offer?”
“I guess I am.”
Thanks to the Sarafand raid, there were searches at the checkpoints, and another curfew, an excuse to stay the night, drinking cognac and stargazing from her roof garden. Pleasantly tight, he admired her thriving grape arbor and her potted geraniums and decided what he needed was a plant—an idea she liked. They’d pick something out together, something that fit him; she knew exactly where to go. The next morning they both remembered, but they had work, and put it off until the weekend—Shushan Purim, an extra day of celebration because Jerusalem, like the Persian capital, was a walled city. The streets were full of costumed revelers bringing hamantaschen and sugared almonds to friends, students with blue boxes collecting door-to-door for the National Fund. Brand and Eva joined the parade, and at the end of the night there was no question where they’d sleep. Her flat was right there, her bed a double, and no nosy landlady to watch them come and go.
Though she’d never admit it, it was she, not Mrs. Ohanesian, who was scandalized. While Eva would ultimately help him pick out a flowering Christmas cactus—their little joke—she never saw the place of honor he gave it on his night table beside his radio, and though he would have happily put up a mirror and curtains for her, there was no reason, and his room remained the same as it had been when he first moved in with just his sea bag. Sometimes at night when a Billie Holiday song came on, he remembered her being there as if it were a dream. There was the chair she sat in. Here was the pillow where she laid her head. It was futile, like trying to recall his mother’s voice or that afternoon with Katya, yet he returned to it again and again, sometimes even when he was with her, making him question his happiness.
With the sun, the tourists were back, and the days dragged, one snapshot after another. For all its marvels, Jerusalem was small. Only months ago the view from the Mount of Olives—the real-life version of his mother’s lithograph—had thrilled him. Now he leaned against a fender and blew smoke rings at the Dome of the Rock. Across the Old City, rosy in a sea of white, stood the King David. Right now the man might be sipping his coffee and looking out his window at him. Brand imagined him watching the clock all morning, counting the minutes, and then, because she was prompt, ever the professional, the delicious panic of knowing she was walking through the lobby, she was getting on the elevator, her silk lingerie slippery beneath her clothes. The man would have to duck his colleagues in the halls, draw the blinds against the light. How expensive was the room, and how did he keep it a secret from his wife? Those rolled socks and garters. Brand was at once jealous and sneeringly superior. Yet every Monday he was the one eating lunch in his car, waiting for him to finish.
According to the Post, the two prisoners were heroes, martyrs to the cause. The Irgun’s handbills said the British would be pronouncing a death sentence on their own troops if they carried through with it. A life for a life.
To help overthrow their fascist Nazi British oppressors, Brand washed his car. The black showed the dust, and with the heat the trash in the trunk was beginning to stink. In the driveway, under the baleful eye of Mrs. Ohanesian, he globbed on wax and rubbed it in with a chamois mitt Pincus had lent him, until he could see his face. A day later the dust was back. At least the trunk was clean.
He drove Greeks to the Greek Colony and Americans to the American Colony and Russians to the Russian Compound. He lugged luggage and made change, sold rolls of film and counted his tips. The tourists wore him out. Where was Jesus buried? Who had the best ruins?
Just as he’d resigned himself to the grind, Asher resurfaced.
“It’s your friend,” Mrs. Ohanesian said. At first Brand thought she meant Eva. She closed her door as if to give him privacy.
“This is Mr. Lipschitz,” Asher said. “I have a doctor’s appointment at the British hospital tomorrow morning, and I need a ride. Can you pick me up at nine thirty?”
Brand didn’t know the code, but played along. “Of course. Where are you located?”
Strauss Street was just off the Street of the Prophets, five minutes at most from the hospital, and after he’d hung up and Mrs. Ohanesian retreated to her piano, he climbed the stairs, biting the inside of his cheek, wondering what it all meant.
The intrigue only deepened the next morning when not Asher but Lipschitz was waiting for him outside the Strauss Health Center with a white bandage taped to his neck and a manila folder in one hand. As always, he was in black, and Brand smiled, picturing him in the kaftan.
Like a rabbi, he kept his hat on in the car.
“What are we doing?” Brand asked.
“I have a doctor’s appointment.” He pointed to his neck.
“How is it?”
Lipschitz shrugged. “It could be worse. Go around to the emergency entrance.”
At the foot of the drive, unexpectedly, there was a checkpoint, complete with a jeep and an armored car. A pair of Tommies moved a tangle of barbed wire to let an ambulance through. Suddenly everything made sense. The prisoners were there.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I thought you knew.”
“How would I know?” Brand said. “Nobody tells me anything.”
“It’s all right,” Lipschitz said, holding up the folder. “I’ve got an appointment.”
“A real one.”
“That’s what I’m telling you.”
It was real, irrefutable as Brand’s badge. After a cursory once-over, the soldier gave Lipschitz back his folder and waved the barbed wire aside. Brand tried to pull in behind the ambulance, but an Arab policeman stopped him.
“Sir, I’m afraid you can’t stop here.”
“I’m just dropping a patient off.”
“Please, sir. You’re welcome to drop him down there. This is for emergencies only.”
“Thank you,” Brand said, nodding courteously, and moved on.
A minute later, after Lipschitz had gone in, the policeman rousted him again. They needed to keep this area clear. He was welcome to wait farther down.
“Thank you,” Brand said.
As Jossi, he’d discovered a cruel pleasure in playing the innocent. He could have pulled forward ten feet and done it again, but rolled around to the bottom of the drive where he could see both the approach and the overall layout of the doors. The drive was a gentle half circle, and one-way, so there was no checkpoint on this side. A truck going the wrong way could drive a load of explosives through the main doors without slowing.
“That would be useful,” Lipschitz said on returning, “if we wanted to blow up the hospital, which we don’t.”
“We could use it as a diversion.”
“To divert every soldier in the city here.” He was sketching madly on a yellow pad, flippin
g pages, and didn’t look up.
“I just thought I’d mention it.”
“Thank you. Now can we be quiet for a few minutes? I need to remember this.”
Eva thought it was a suicide mission. The prisoners were bait. Did Lipschitz see them? They might not even be there. And anyway, an operation like that would be strictly Irgun. They’d only used Lipschitz because he fit the role so perfectly.
Brand wanted to say they’d used him too, with all that that implied, but really, Asher had.
She might have been right, because instead of calling a meeting, Asher disappeared again.
With nothing to occupy his time, Brand planned his own rescue mission. It would happen late at night, a small operation, quiet, an inside job. Even then the hospital was full of workers. The orderlies could be paid off or blackmailed into leaving the right doors open. A few uniforms and name tags nicked from the laundry, a tray of syringes waiting at a nurses’ station. Drug the guards’ coffee and switch them with the prisoners, then take the prisoners out through the morgue to a waiting hearse. By morning they’d be in Tel Aviv with Begin.
Lipschitz had been drawing floor plans. Hallways and doctors’ offices, the placement of elevators. As Brand hauled fares around town, he imagined himself creeping up a stairwell with a Sten. Behind him, silent as assassins, came Lipschitz and Fein and Yellin in black greasepaint, dressed like the Free French. Brand recognized the absurdity of the scene, something from a war movie. Neither did it escape him that in his daydreams he was Asher.
That Sunday he saw the blonde again, leaving a brunch fund-raiser for the Rockefeller Museum on the arm of an American air force colonel who helped her into the Daimler, tipped the valet and then took the wheel. He was strapping and blond, with the same well-fed aura of health and privilege. At a distance they might have been brother and sister. Could she be American? He’d figured her for a blue blood, an equestrian and adventuress, not some industrialist’s daughter. He was two back in the queue and hemmed in by a line of mounted policemen so he couldn’t follow them. On the steps, under a white muslin canopy erected to hold off the sun, the Rockefeller’s benefactors waited in formal dress. Most had their own limousines, and by the time the valet waved for him, the Daimler was long gone.
By chance his passengers were Americans, an older couple Brand at first thought were doddering but soon realized had simply drunk too much. The valet helped the woman get her leg in and closed the door, then came around and gave Brand the address: the Palace Hotel, next to the American consulate. They didn’t look like they were from the diplomatic corps.
“My God,” the man said, “I thought we’d never get out of there.”
“It’s not my fault,” the woman said. “Kitty said it would be fun.”
“Fun,” the man said, as if it were a curse.
“I liked those olives.”
“They were good,” he admitted. “And the little cheese things.”
“The canapés. I still don’t know what we’re doing for dinner.”
“I’m not hungry at all.”
“You will be.”
“Ask the driver.”
“Yes, ma’am?” Jossi said.
“We’re looking for someplace nice to eat, something local, not too expensive.”
Pincus had taught him to send Americans to Fink’s. They seemed pleased with the recommendation.
“Excuse me,” Jossi said. “You are American?”
“Yes,” the man said, interested.
“At the museum there was an American officer. We were betting, my friend and I. The lady he was with, I say she is a famous movie star. Blonde, like Veronica Lake.”
“A movie star? I don’t think so.”
“He means the Rothschild girl,” the woman said. “Tall, thin? She married the baron’s son. You know, the one with the funny eye.”
“She’s not famous,” the man said.
“Sorry,” the woman said. “I hope you didn’t bet much.”
“Thank you,” Jossi said.
It was no secret that the Rothschilds were connected to the Jewish Agency, and the Jewish Agency to the Haganah. The mystery was why she was with Asher. Maybe, as with Brand, he was her contact.
“She’s very pretty,” Eva said. “And Asher can be very charming.”
Brand wanted to think Asher wouldn’t let his feelings affect his judgment, but why should he, of all men, be exempt? If Brand were strictly following protocol, he wouldn’t have said anything to Eva. He couldn’t go to Asher either. From the first time he saw the blonde, he thought putting a name to her would ease his mind. Now he realized how great a complication she might be. The name was too large, like a secret too big to keep, and he was stuck with it.
Monday he waited at the King David, half expecting to see the Daimler. Spying behind his Post, he memorized the various approaches to the Secretariat, and later made a detailed sketch for Asher. It was like the hospital. While the south wing was heavily fortified, the main part of the hotel was wide open. Why bother with guards and barbed wire when you could walk through the front doors?
Tuesday they went to the Edison to see Brief Encounter. It played to a full house, and while Eva fell for the love story, Brand was distracted by the red exit signs on either side of the screen. At any moment someone could break through, shooting, and there was nowhere to run.
The next morning he took a team of Danish geologists from the train station to the potash works, driving across the blinding desert, then the steep descent to the Dead Sea, the hills of Moab rising ash-gray out of the haze. It was a relief to be away from the city, and while the scientists had their meeting he walked the shore, skipping rocks, gulls winging overhead. On watch, those long nights, bound for Oran or Gibraltar, he’d lost himself in the vast, starry darkness, the tip of his cigarette a planet illuminating a strange hand that moved when he willed it. The waves here were tame, folding over themselves in the shallows without sound, and the scale less grand, but the sense that he was in the presence of the elemental was the same, and soothing. He wondered what night would be like.
Back in the city, he tried to recall the feeling, but it was gone, replaced by life and the Babel of traffic. On the Jaffa Road the cafés were packed. Barclays Bank had installed new blastproof shutters over its windows. At every intersection he saw the possibility of disaster, and then, when it came, he wasn’t ready.
As always, Eva was right. The hospital was a trap. An Irgun team tried to go in disguised as electricians. They never got past the checkpoint. The driver managed to turn around, but the truck hung up on a curb, and the gunner in the jeep blew out its tires. The driver died. Three others were in custody. The next day there were no gloating handbills, only the Mandate radio lauding the army. That night, in the searches that followed, they picked up Lipschitz.
7
After a long evening of Carmel wine and cognac, Brand and Eva were dead asleep when there was a rapping at the door. It was past two, and reflexively he thought it was the police. They could go out the kitchen window and across the rooftops. His car was parked beside the Hurva.
“Stay here,” she said, pulling on her robe. “It’s probably just Mrs. Sokolov.”
He kept still under the covers, listening as she unlocked the door. As she’d predicted, the voice was her landlady’s, too soft for him to make out their conversation.
In a minute she returned, clicking on the bedside lamp.
“You have to go.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
The police had Asher. To be safe they needed to break contact and go to ground for a while.
“I’m sorry,” Eva said.
Stunned, Brand sat on the edge of the bed, pulling on his socks. Asher. It had to be a mistake. He couldn’t imagine the cell without him. “What about Monday?”
“I’ll call a taxi.”
“Ask for Pincus. He’s a friend.”
He never suspected Mrs. Sokolov was one of them, and again he marveled at
the reach of the underground. Who knew to call her?
He kept that in mind the next day as he drove, appraising the Canadian couple and the Uruguayan cleric and his secretary as if they might be spies. Taking the New Gate and sneaking through the linked courtyards of the Christian Quarter, he expected, any second, a gun to the back of his head. Instead, they tipped generously and blessed him. At home, his window open to the night, he waited for the low dieseling of an armored car and the rumble of jackboots on the stairs, the door cracking, but there was only Mrs. Ohanesian poking at Mozart, her budgie’s irritating whistle.
When the Russians had first detained him, dragging him from his usual coffee shop, they wanted the names of everyone in the neighborhood who belonged to the army. Though it was common knowledge, Brand resisted, relenting only when they threatened his family. Knowing his own weakness, he ascribed it to Lipschitz—unfairly, perhaps. While Brand daydreamed of breaking into the hospital, Lipschitz had actually done it.
Asher. He still couldn’t believe it.
Every instinct told him to flee. In an hour he could be in Jaffa. His merchant seaman’s papers were up-to-date. The docks worked round the clock. By morning he could be steaming for Lisbon or Port Said, leaving simple Jossi behind.
Without Eva, his days took the same shape. He woke, he drove, the perfect weather mocking him. Palm Sunday was almost upon them, and Pesach after that, the pageantry of Passion Week. The hotels were brimming with pilgrims. For lunch he ate falafel from his favorite vendor by the Damascus Gate, then a late dinner at the Alaska, finishing the night at his little table, sitting in the dark, nursing two fingers of scotch while the radio played. His cigar box was so stuffed with tips the lid wouldn’t close. Now that he had money, he had no one to spend it on.
He worked the weekend, and on Monday gave Pincus a note for her—untraceable, he hoped. At noon he was in the Kidron Valley, taking an Argentinean family to the Gihon Spring, and couldn’t swing by the King David. For Brand, the hardest part of her dates was when she came back to the car, babbling at him, happy to have his ear after being with a stranger. Now he thought he should be there to listen to her, as if he were shirking his duty.
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