They didn’t go back to Yemin Moshe. Gideon had him drop him and Victor off in Sheikh Jarrah, an Arab neighborhood north of the city that Brand visited only to fill up on cheap gas. Fein and Yellin he let off in Rehavia, not far from the high school.
“Long live Eretz Israel,” they said.
“Long live Eretz Israel.”
Alone again, he switched on the radio, hoping to hear news from Jericho, and wasn’t surprised there was nothing. Asher himself had taught him. A clock could be set for twelve hours.
When he pulled in the drive, Mrs. Ohanesian’s lights were off. His flat was an oven, and he stayed up late, sitting at his window, sipping, going over his strange night—driving through the moonlit desert with Gideon to blow up a goat bridge. In the morning it had the feeling of a dream, until the Voice of Fighting Zion proclaimed a great victory. In a coordinated strike, fighters had destroyed a dozen bridges on the borders of their Arab neighbors, including the main rail link to Syria. Eleven members of the Stern Gang had given their lives. As with the train, Brand realized the importance of their mission only after the fact. Now he was proud, when, waiting for them to set the charges, he’d been chary, unsure why they were there, and again he reproached himself for being so cautious, as if he might change his nature.
That afternoon in Tel Aviv, the Irgun stormed a British officers’ club, absconding with five hostages. The army called curfew and cordoned off the city.
Eva said she didn’t know anything about the bridge job.
“That’s good,” she said. “Everyone’s being careful.”
“I guess,” Brand said. “I like to know what I’m doing.”
“It’s nice that you get to choose. Not like the rest of us.”
“All I’m asking for is a little warning.”
“I don’t think you’re in a position to ask for anything.”
“Don’t I know it.” Neither are you, he might have said, thanks to him.
He stayed the night, listening to her sleep, the combined heat of them making him sweat where he draped an arm over her. He’d become used to Katya visiting him here, in her rival’s bed, looked forward to it like a favorite dream. Now when she didn’t come, he had to conjure her from memory, a trick that grew harder and harder, contaminated as it was by his visions of Crow Forest, the naked dead piled like so many hog carcasses. He considered it a failure on his part that he could barely hear her voice anymore, as if he were purposely forgetting her.
In the morning the sheets smelled of perfume and he didn’t want to leave. In her housecoat, Eva made him breakfast, teasing that she was going back to sleep. The Mandate radio said the terrorists had condemned the kidnapped men to death.
“Naturally,” Brand said.
“They have to know we’re serious.”
“I think they know by now.”
“They hang our people for less.”
On that point he couldn’t argue, and yet, likely because he’d been a prisoner, he refused to accept execution as a weapon. But that was war, wasn’t it, a contest of executions? In this case he expected the threat was defensive. “I think we’re trying to set up a trade.”
“They have to know we’ll go through with it.”
“Of course.” Because even in their depleted cell, the will was there. If not Asher, then Gideon or Victor or whoever killed Lipschitz. Again, though he knew better, he had trouble imagining a Jew without mercy. Softhearted Brand, the eternal greenhorn. Why did he think his people, of all God’s tribes, were exempt?
While Tel Aviv was shut down, in Jerusalem traffic moved freely. Around the Old City the British stood watch, Airborne troops massed at checkpoints as if waiting for a signal. In the late afternoon it came, and they barricaded the gates with barbed wire and armored cars. News ricocheted through the queue. Another officer had been kidnapped, taken in broad daylight from the new city center, chloroformed and shoved in a taxi, a Panama hat stuck on his head. Immediately Brand thought of Pincus, an easy leap he later had to retract. The cab had been stolen, found abandoned in the Bukharan Quarter. The radio identified the victim as a Major H. P. Chadwick, married, the father of two. Before the evening call to prayer, the Irgun broadcast his death sentence.
With the Old City and the western suburbs cut off, Brand retreated to the Damascus Gate, picking up fares at the bus station, fitting their luggage in the trunk. The buses from Nablus and Ramallah and Jericho were running, but the British were stopping everything from the west. Arabs didn’t tip, and once night had fallen, the neighborhoods north of the city were dangerous. After his dinner of falafel, he used the call box to check in with Greta. He had a pickup in Sheikh Jarrah, a Mr. Grossman.
“Yes,” Brand said. “I know him.”
It wasn’t Fein, as he’d expected, but Victor, waiting on the cobbled drive of a gated villa.
“Get out of the car,” the Frenchman said.
“Why?” Brand asked, but there was no sense protesting.
“Turn around.”
Brand stood still as a man being fitted for a suit as Victor tied a blindfold over his eyes, then covered his head with a bag-like hood.
“Duck,” Victor said, palming Brand’s skull, and folded him into the backseat.
Sightless, suffocating inside the musty hood, Brand braced himself as they rumbled down the drive and swung right. To confuse him, Victor turned into the side streets, executing a series of rights and lefts, making Brand grab the seat back. He wished he knew the area better, though soon enough they straightened out, cruising over a smooth road, speeding up, the engine laboring before Victor finally shifted to third. Brand counted the seconds as if he might re-create the directions later. The farther they went without slowing, the more convinced he was they were going north on the Nablus Road, into the desert. He was even more certain when they braked and pulled off onto the rocky shoulder. They sat like that for a minute, and then Brand heard a second engine approaching, and the telltale crunch of another car pulling in behind them, and people getting out.
The door beside Brand opened, letting in the night air. Someone took his elbow and pulled him out, bumping his head, instantly giving him a headache. He bent at the waist to keep his feet as they marched him to the other car. Even through the hood, the interior stank of clove oil, a common deodorizer around the garage, and again he thought of Pincus. The driver said nothing, just drove. Behind them Brand could hear the Peugeot, its familiar purr a comfort.
They were taking him to see Asher, he figured, or maybe the Old Man himself, flushed from Tel Aviv by the crackdown. He understood the precautions but not why he alone had been summoned, unless it had something to do with Lipschitz. Had Eva pleaded his case, as Brand asked, or turned him in? Her loyalty was unswerving, sealed with blood, while Brand’s was still unproven. This might be another test, or was that done with? They might never take the hood off, drive him into the desert and leave him there, naked, a bullet behind one ear, the Peugeot fated to be painted again, loaned to another Jossi. They’d want a public place, to send a message. But they could have done that any time. Why, the wise child in him asked, was this night different from all other nights?
They had to be almost to Ramallah. On and on they droned, making him doubt his instincts. When they veered onto another paved road without braking, he admitted he was lost and surrendered to the noise and the darkness.
Miles later, when they finally stopped, he kept quiet, hoping to identify the men’s voices as they pulled him out, but no one spoke. This time he was careful of his head. They led him away like a prisoner, one at each elbow. He swore one was wearing perfume—or, no, cologne. Maybe Edouard or Thierry, their new driver.
“Step up,” Victor, on his right, said.
A door opened, emitting a whiff of onions cooking in oil and the babbling of a radio. Inside, the house was hot, making him sweat. They crossed what he imagined was a long room—though it might have been two—and stopped. A door opened, and Victor took Brand’s wrist and placed his hand on a
banister.
“Step down,” he said, counting as they went. “… eleven, twelve.”
The basement was cooler, and humid, with a hint of mold. They turned left, paused for a door, crossed a room and paused again.
“Duck,” Victor said, and Brand did.
The door closed behind them, a metal latch falling to with a clank, recalling his grandmother’s root cellar, though the floor here was wooden. Close by, a chair scraped the boards, bumping the back of his knees. Victor pressed on his shoulder, and once Brand had sat down, pulled off the hood. Out of reflex, Brand grabbed at the blindfold.
The light made him blink. A bare bulb hung above a cheap sheet-metal desk. Across from him sat Asher, except his hair was jet-black rather than gray, most strikingly his eyebrows. His cheeks, as in Brand’s vision of his grandmother, were dirty, stained the brown of shoe polish, as if he were trying to pass for a Yemeni. Only as Brand’s eyes grew used to the light did he see the coloring wasn’t a disguise but from bruising, the skin turned the caramel of apples gone bad. Asher’s face was swollen, his left eye shut, his forehead, nose and chin livid with purple scabs. His hands were splinted, bandaged into mitts.
“It looks worse than it is.” He even sounded different, his lips barely moving, and Brand saw his jaw was wired shut. “Sorry about the extra security measures. Obviously we have a problem.”
“I understand.”
“Do you?” Asher studied him as if he were guarding a secret. Victor stood behind him, a silent bodyguard.
“I do,” Brand said. So it was about Lipschitz. About him.
Asher patted a mitt against the table and looked to the ceiling, as if chasing a stray thought. “Do you know a woman named Emilie de Rothschild?”
Brand feared the surprise on his face was a giveaway. “I don’t know her, but I’ve heard of her.”
“You’ve seen her.”
“I’ve seen her.”
“She seems to think you’re following her. Why would she think that?”
“I don’t know,” Brand said.
“You haven’t been following her.”
“I did once, to see who she was.”
“To see who she was.” With effort, Asher twisted to look at Victor. “And who is she?”
“One of the Rothschilds.”
“What would you say if I told you she’s my wife?”
Now Brand tried to act surprised.
“She’s not,” Asher said, “but I have a responsibility to her and to her family that’s just as great. The way I’m responsible to you and Eva and Victor. The way Lipschitz was supposed to be responsible to all of us.” He pointed to his face, nodding as if it were proof. “Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Leave her alone. She attracts enough attention as it is. Now, how much do you know about what Eva’s doing at the King David?”
“Not a lot.”
“Be specific, please.”
The only thing Brand left out was the part about the socks and the closet.
“That’s good. You never want to know more than you need to. Eva doesn’t need to know we’ve talked, is that clear?”
“Yes.” Though it wasn’t at all.
“I have a job for you. No one can know about it. Will you do it for me?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you.” He reached a mitt across the table for Brand to take. Each finger was taped to a tongue depressor. It felt like a paddle. “Go with Victor.”
As he rose, Asher remained seated, and Brand suspected he couldn’t stand. What else had they done to him? In the darkness against the wall rested a cot, in the corner a tin pail. He was living down here like a prisoner, like Lipschitz in his booby-trapped flat.
The job was a delivery. Brand didn’t have to see the bulky sack swinging between Victor and Gideon as they lugged it across the courtyard and lowered it into his trunk to know it was Major Chadwick. The Peugeot was pointed toward a high iron gate, beyond which stretched the lightless desert. Though the knowledge provided only a grim satisfaction, he’d been right about the Nablus Road. Against all logic he was taking the major back to the city, back to the same neighborhood where the British were searching for him. He had the address, and enough gas. Seeing him off, Gideon gave him a pistol, in case anything happened. After his talk with Asher, Brand understood it wasn’t for Chadwick. It was for him.
9
The next night, while he was safely home in bed, dreaming of Eva at the Edison watching a film of him and Asher’s blonde, the two of them strolling the beach where his family used to holiday, smiling at some private joke, Major H. P. Chadwick worried loose the ropes binding his wrists, broke a window and escaped barefoot over the roofs of the Bukharan Quarter. By the time the police arrived, the place was empty, but that didn’t matter. The Mandate celebrated their new hero while the Post ridiculed the hapless kidnappers. Though it was no fault of his own, and the officers from Tel Aviv were still being held elsewhere, Brand expected the failure would reflect on everyone involved. Following Asher’s orders, he hadn’t told Eva. Now he couldn’t.
Monday he dropped her off at the King David and ate his lunch sitting in the drive, keeping an eye out for Edouard and the blonde. How much did he know, Asher had asked, as if he didn’t know, or didn’t trust Eva.
Brand thought she was stronger than all of them. As close as they’d become the last six months, not once, drunk or sober, had she said a word about her husband. He was her secret as surely as Katya was his, her memory recalled in solitude, tended reverently, like a well-kept grave. It was all he had, sometimes all he wanted—to be with her. Without her the world was meaningless, a round of tasteless meals and restless sleep. Eva was just a substitute. She knew it as surely as Brand did, their love a brittle consolation. Together they tried to remember what life was like, and then when they succeeded, felt guilty. He still thought they should go away, except he’d done that already. Even at sea Katya had followed him, like the stars, invisible by daylight, at night everywhere. If he left now, would he feel the same about Eva?
She came out a good twenty minutes early, by herself, surprising him. Normally she brightened, finding him waiting there. Today her face was set, lips pinched, one arm trapping her purse against her ribs as she stalked to the car.
Before she said a word, she fumbled with a pack of matches and lit a cigarette. She exhaled theatrically, scowling at the curling cloud. “Why do people think they can treat me like a servant?”
“Who treats you like a servant?” Her client, he hoped.
“Everyone, everywhere I go.”
“I’m sorry.” He pulled around a dove-gray Bentley and rolled down the drive.
“They think because they pay you they can treat you any way they like.”
Brand thought it was also true of being a cabbie but held off.
“He said he had to do something important, so would I mind seeing myself out.”
“‘Important.’”
“I’d like to see his face when he realizes it was me.”
She said it with such relish that he wondered if she had feelings for the man.
She sat back, her chin tipped to one side, biting her thumbnail and glaring at the passing storefronts. It was only when she finished her cigarette and stabbed it out in the ashtray that she remembered the pendant. He watched in the mirror as she sat up and fastened it, then slid the chain between her fingers till the clasp was in back.
“You never treat me that way,” she said.
“You’d kill me in my sleep.”
“I would not. I’d wake you up first.”
After his meeting with Asher, he was even more keenly aware of everything he didn’t know. He couldn’t quiz her on their mission at the King David, and remained alert for clues. Blackmail or reconnaissance, they were making a sustained effort. From what she’d let slip, he expected the payoff would be worth the sacrifice. He hoped so, and soon. He’d come to hate Mondays.
As always, she wanted hi
m to stay, as if, having sold part of herself, she was lonely. He parked and followed her up the stairs, thinking he’d have one cognac. Her flat was hot, and she hadn’t eaten lunch. They lay down on her couch, dozing, the sun etching bright panes on the sheer curtains, no sound but the trilling sparrows, and for a moment, holding her, picturing the girl she’d been running through the harvest orchards, he wanted to save her. Was that love? Later he would beg Katya’s forgiveness for entertaining the idea, but for an instant he was convinced, despite all the sorrows of the world, that they could be happy.
At five thirty the sirens blew curfew. By six, anyone left on the streets was subject to arrest, though in practice the police detained only Jews. In protest the students jammed Zion Square, tearing up their papers, the khamsin spawning whirlwinds of confetti. The British rolled up buses, and when those were full, stake trucks with wire cages. It was a show. They could detain only so many. Next week they’d release them and do it again.
For the students, being arrested was a piece of theater. They all knew what to say.
“Name,” the booking officer asked.
“A rightful citizen of Eretz Israel.”
“Address.”
“City of David, Land of Avraham.”
All week Brand tried to stay away from both the new and old cities, but there were checkpoints everywhere. Thursday afternoon, while he ducked through the suburbs, the Irgun released two of the Tel Aviv hostages, dropping off a pair of coffins in the middle of Trumpeldor Street. The hinged lids opened and the officers emerged like the risen dead, wobbly from sedatives, pound notes stuffed in their shirt pockets to cover wear and tear on their uniforms. The radio made it clear. The other three would die if the British refused to commute their sentences.
In the Alaska, the rumor was that a crackdown was coming. Two of the waiters had left for Morocco, a euphemism for disappearing into the kibbutzim. As Brand ate his Jaegerschnitzel, he noted several booths usually reserved for regulars were empty.
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