All Fall Down

by James Brabazon

“It’s on Hevrat Mishnayot,” he said. “Like I said. Between Hevrat Shas Street and Ein Ya’akov Street. That’s not how Ezra pronounced it, though. He also said it was a side street.”

  “Yeah, I know where it is, but what’s on Hevrat Mishnayot? Are we looking for a house, a business, a shop or what?”

  A few hours before, I’d been a fraction of a millimeter away from killing him. Now he was leading me across a city he’d never set foot in—a one-eyed king in a foreign land with a single blind subject. I had no choice but to go with it, with him, if I wanted to do anything other than stare out to sea at the hotel.

  “I don’t know,” he said. Anticipating my exasperation, he added quickly, “He didn’t say, OK? It’s on a junction. With another street. Through the traitor’s gate.”

  “The what?”

  He shrugged. “That’s what he said. ‘Through the traitor’s gate.’”

  I stopped walking and put my hand on his shoulder. “Is there anything else?” He looked at me blankly. “Did Ezra say anything else to you? Anything at all?”

  He shook his head.

  We kept walking.

  Whatever kind of “traitor” we were going to meet, the fact that Ezra hadn’t wanted the Israeli authorities—at least not the internal security team that had been put on our case—to know he’d introduced us would be significant. Either his source wasn’t legit as far as the Shabak was concerned, or he was trying to protect Talia from blowback.

  My reading of the meeting—interrogation, frankly—I’d had in Rachel’s office was that I’d been given carte blanche in my search for their missing scientist. They knew I was there for her, and they’d done nothing to stop me. We were on the same side in that respect, after all—and no one gives a pistol to an assassin unless they’re prepared for him to use it.

  There would be limits, though. Step off the path and the consequences would be unpredictable. Contractor, consultant, mercenary: whatever Ezra called himself, I’d never known whom he really worked for. My best guess was military intelligence and the Mossad. And despite his faith in Talia, if the Mossad and the Shabak got on as well with each other in the Holy Land as MI6 and MI5 did back in Blighty, then Baaz and I would end up being the filling for a shit sandwich faster than you could say “secret military tribunal,” should we piss anyone off in Israel, apart from each other.

  We headed northwest up Mea She’arim Street amid a stream of traditionally dressed Orthodox, past barred shop fronts and badly parked delivery trucks. The apartment buildings above were shabby, unloved. Everywhere walls fluttered with fly-posters printed in Hebrew, and roofs bristled with scaffolding. Most of the buildings either were being renovated or looked like they ought to be. Wrought iron balconies peeling ancient paint overhung the street; many were sealed off with plastic sheeting from the rooms inside. It was a couple of degrees cooler than on the coast, and bright white cotton candy clouds piled up on the horizon. I was glad of the jacket Baaz had bought me in France.

  I was glad, too, that the road signs were in English and Arabic as well as in Hebrew. Even though I’d memorized our route from a satellite image of the quarter that Baaz and I had recced that morning using a VPN on his laptop, the visual check of the street names was reassuring. We turned left onto HaRav Shmuel Salant Street and then, at a huge and what looked like newly built synagogue on the corner, wheeled off north again up an alley that disgorged us both at the sharp elbow of a junction thirty meters off the main drag. We kept walking. I kept my head down and told Baaz to do the same. A hundred meters or so farther on I swung us left down Hevrat Mishnayot.

  It was an unkempt backstreet, lined with parked cars and graffiti-stained walls, and a dozen or so metal doors leading into buildings and passageways. Dead ahead a huge stone building loomed up—two massive stories high and fifteen meters wide, with stone arches supporting a tier of impressive, ornate windows. It dwarfed the low-rise stone and stucco boxes that opened up into a sort of plaza in front of it. On either side the road divided. Baaz and I looked around, perplexed. If this was Ezra’s idea of a joke, I struggled to see the funny side.

  “And he didn’t say anything else?” Baaz shook his head. “Sure? I mean, really sure?”

  The whole “traitor’s gate” revelation had come completely out of the blue. I shuddered to think what else Baaz had forgotten to mention. He rolled his eyes at me as if I were being unreasonable by asking again.

  “Sure.”

  I lit a cigarette and looked around.

  The main entrance to the large building was framed by an archway three times my height. Above it, the only sign indicating what the purpose of the building might be had been obliterated with black spray paint. It looked like a synagogue, maybe, or a religious school—though it could just as easily have been an apartment block. Two young men in smart black hats chatted on the corner opposite. Long skeins of white wool dangled from their shirts, hanging down their thighs. Laundry strung out on the balconies above rippled in the breeze.

  But of anything that could have been a traitor’s gate, there was no obvious indication.

  “These jokers love their spray paint. Shame you can’t read Hebrew,” Baaz said. “All this graffiti might mean something.”

  He had a point. I tried and failed to read the slogans daubed on practically every flat surface and marveled at how anyone had managed to get up high enough to deface the upper story.

  “Like, what does that mean?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “You see there? On the far left-hand wall, on the other side of the main entrance.”

  I followed Baaz’s gaze. Stenciled on the yellow stone wall between a metal gate and a wooden door were the black outlines of an oblong divided into three horizontal stripes. On the left-hand side a triangle cut into the middle stripe. There was no color, no tagline, no explanation—but the meaning was clear.

  “Bingo.” Baaz furrowed his brow. I stubbed out the cigarette and savored instead the momentary rush of unprofessional pleasure at having outsmarted him. “That, clever clogs, is the outline of the Palestinian flag.” We walked over to it. The bolts of the metal gate to its left were secured by a small rusted padlock. The door to the right was fastened with a simple latch. “And I’ll bet you a hundred dollars that this,” I said, knuckles rapping on the painted metal, “is the traitor’s gate.”

  Pigeons startled by the noise soared into the air and then settled on the gutter above. The men standing opposite called out to someone crossing the street farther down and walked off. From inside there was nothing except the echo of my knocking in the void beyond.

  I counted to ten and banged on the door again, harder this time, smacking the steel with the heel of my palm. After a few seconds I could hear movement within, and then voices.

  “Rega, ani ba.”

  Another pause. Then metal on metal. The door swung open a foot.

  “Rosh chodesh tov.”

  We were greeted by a strong smell of turpentine, and by a thickset man with a full gray beard and a cautious expression framed by coils of messy payot—springlike locks of hair tumbling past his cheeks. Five-eight, two hundred pounds—and that was a lowball. A black waistcoat strained over his belly, decorated with what looked like the remnants of his breakfast egg. His face was flushed red with whatever exertions had brought him to the door. The sum of his parts added up to a heart attack about to happen.

  A cigarette burned down almost to the stub was wedged between the fingers of his right hand. They were stained a dark nicotine yellow. Under his left palm, the close-cropped head of a small boy, no more than four or five years old.

  “Max,” I said, extending my hand. “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Hebrew.”

  “Ah, well,” he said, “good first day of the month to you!” His accent seesawed with a Germanic twang. He dropped the cigarette and shook my hand.

  “But it’s the seventeent
h already,” Baaz replied.

  “Rosh Chodesh Sh’vat,” the man said, before I could apologize for Baaz’s interruption. “The first day of the month of Sh’vat of the year 5778.”

  “My, uh, colleague,” I explained. “Bhavneet Singh.”

  “You can call me Baaz, though,” Baaz piped up. “Everyone else does. Even my auntie. And she’s super formal.”

  He looked at Baaz, and then back to me.

  “And you can call me di Farreter,” he said with a grin. “Everyone does. Even my auntie. She’s even more formal. Trust me.”

  “What does that mean?” Baaz asked.

  “It’s Yiddish,” the man said. “It means the Traitor.”

  Baaz stepped closer. The child backed away and then scuttled off deeper into the room behind, no doubt spooked by the bizarre goyim at his door.

  “My youngest grandson,” he explained, still holding my hand, though no longer shaking it. And then, by way of proper introduction: “Moshe. Moshe Mendel Katz. At your service.”

  “It’s good to meet you, Mr. Katz.” I stepped a fraction closer, my right hand still clasped in his. “You were highly recommended.”

  “Yes, well . . .” He let go of my hand and stepped back into the room behind him, opening the wide metal door enough for Baaz and me to follow. “Please close it behind you. Now, where’s the switch?”

  We stood in darkness for a moment, and then Moshe hit the lights. Out of the darkness emerged an extraordinary storeroom. Piled up in vertical stacks, on the floor, on shelves, in boxes and freestanding in bunches of fives or tens rested dozens, hundreds, of oil paintings. And above them, hanging properly, fully displayed canvases. Rembrandt. Dalí. Turner. Klimt. Anything and everything. The face of Jesus beamed down from the far wall. Above us, Judith beheaded Holofernes. A white eighteenth-century horse stood in a wide green field. I looked down. Narcissus fell into his own reflection at my feet. I guessed the room may once have been a garage. But now it resembled the overflow from the National Gallery and Hermitage combined.

  “Wow.” Baaz blinked at the art around him. “This is totally cool.”

  We both took in the scene. It was as if an art avalanche had poured through the building and stopped at our toes. Baaz stepped toward a canvas of a burning candle and raised his hand, index finger outstretched, as if to touch it.

  “Not that one,” Moshe cautioned him urgently. And then, more relaxed, “It’s not dry yet.” Baaz dropped his hand and stared at it intently. I stared at Moshe, reappraising him. It wasn’t egg on his waistcoat. It was yellow paint. And whether this was a shop or a studio, it most certainly wasn’t legit.

  “I didn’t think all this was allowed,” I said, waving my hand at the walls, “for the Haredim. Don’t you have laws about painting people?” I racked my brain to no effect, trying to remember which of the Ten Commandments it violated.

  “We do, and it isn’t. Although, actually, the one that caught your friend’s eye is permissible.”

  “You,” Baaz asked, incredulously, “painted all these?” Moshe dipped his head in humble agreement. “They’re beautiful,” Baaz continued, wide-eyed in admiration. “But why do they call you the Traitor?”

  “Well,” said Moshe, chuckling, “the Haredim call me a traitor because I paint pictures of people; the Israelis, because I’m not a Zionist; our militants, because I don’t support the Palestinians; the Defense Forces, because I didn’t enlist; my family, because I smoke too much; my rabbi, well, my rabbi for a lot of reasons.”

  Baaz turned back to the picture.

  “I didn’t just mean painting the pictures,” I said, taking the packet of Marlboros out of my jacket pocket. I shook two filter-tipped sticks clear and offered him a smoke. He thanked me and plucked one out. I did the same. He lit his and handed me the matches. “I meant the forgery, too. ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ right?”

  Baaz coughed. Moshe inhaled deeply to make sure the tobacco had caught and looked at me carefully. From around one of the piles of pictures the young boy reappeared, craning his neck to get a better look at us.

  “Max,” Moshe said, exhaling the smoke between us as he spoke. “‘Max’ is a good name. I like the name ‘Max.’” He looked over at Baaz. “‘Baaz’ is also good. But ‘Max,’” he continued, looking at me again, “is a strong name.” I smiled at him. He smiled back. I kept looking at him but didn’t speak. “You said,” he resumed, filling the silence between us, “that I was highly recommended. That is very kind. May I ask who it was that recommended me?”

  “A mutual friend,” I said. He raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips as if to say, So what? I kept smiling. “Ezra sent us,” I continued. “Ezra Black.”

  “Ah. So . . .” His face settled and he turned toward the boy. “Binyomen,” he said softly, “geyn tsu zen mame.” The boy darted behind a rack of gilt frames. Seconds later his feet clumped up the stairs that rose from the rear right-hand corner of the studio toward his unseen mother. “My apprentice,” he whispered. “He’s closer to me than my own shadow.” Once he was sure the boy was out of earshot, he continued. “These,” he said, looking around, “are not forgeries. They are interpretations. But I do not think that you are interested in my paintings, are you, Mr. . . . ?”

  “Just Max is fine. And on the contrary,” I said, “there’s a picture I’d like you to, uh, interpret for me.” Baaz cleared his throat. “For us,” I corrected myself.

  “I see. That’s most . . .” He paused. “Tell me, who is the painting of?” I dragged on the Marlboro and looked over at Baaz. Baaz stared at us, drumming the air with his fingers. “One of Ezra’s friends, perhaps?”

  “Yes,” I said. “You could say that. It’s a portrait”—I gripped the cigarette between my teeth, took out the hundred-dollar bill and handed it to Moshe—“of Benjamin Franklin.”

  He took the bill and looked at it, his eyes darting between me and the money.

  “A good man,” he said, “by all accounts.” And then, turning the note over, “But not, I think, an angel.”

  * * *

  —

  I RUBBED MY face with my hands. It was past midday and I hadn’t eaten. We’d been perched on two wooden stools in a small, stuffy space above the storeroom-cum-gallery with growing leg cramps and decreasing expectations. I probed the wounds in my shoulder and thigh with my forefinger to distract myself. They hurt, and the dressing on my collarbone was leaking. At least the scratches I’d picked up on the beach in Kent had scabbed over, though the wire cuts on my hands from the night run across the Mayo countryside to Doc’s bled when I picked at them.

  As soon as Moshe had gone to work, Baaz had slipped into trancelike reflection. When I’d asked him what he was thinking about, he’d replied, “Factoring primes.”

  I’d let him get on with it.

  All the while that Moshe examined the banknote, he fed me with escapades from his past. Perhaps Ezra had contacted him. Maybe he’d called Ezra. Either way, he had decided to trust me, and to talk. Maybe he didn’t get to speak English very often in Mea She’arim. Maybe Ezra had given him a green light to gab. Whatever the case, once he started talking, he couldn’t stop: what started as a trickle ended up as a flood.

  Painting, it turned out, was merely a profitable sideline for the Traitor. Moshe Mendel Katz’s real vocation was money—specifically, the mass production of fake paper notes. In 1995, between the First and Second Intifadas, he told us, he’d been arrested, and then co-opted, by the secret services to help them pump an ocean of forged cash into the pockets and vaults of Israel’s Arab neighbors. If he cut the plates, the Israeli government would cut him a deal. So he did—and Special Forces smuggled them across the border, where they were installed in printing presses hidden in a network of caves north of Beirut. The operation was fronted by the Bulgarian mafia and run out of Tel Aviv.

  Moshe never said as much, but it wasn’t hard to gue
ss how he and Ezra first met. And the Bulgarian connection might have been coincidental, but in a world as small as ours I doubted it. Seconds before he’d been shot, Lukov had told me that “even the fucking Lebanese” were interested in the Arkhangel note. Maybe that was code. Maybe the gunmen wearing kaffiyehs by the bakery were the Israelis. Indeed, Talia had all but confirmed it.

  Whatever questions there were about what had just gone down in Paris, the results of Moshe’s Middle Eastern enterprise were certain. So successful were his 1988-series bills—his plates had printed nearly a billion dollars’ worth—they didn’t just destabilize the Lebanese economy; they became a global pariah. Once finally detected, they were shunned worldwide by corner exchange kiosks and central banks alike. But by then, of course, it was too late for anyone who’d bought them to give them back. The following year—Moshe recounted while he ran a chemical test on the ink on our note—the Federal Reserve had entirely redesigned the hundred-dollar bill.

  “Because of me, Benjamin Franklin got a face-lift. And the best of all?” he whispered. “Iran got the blame.”

  As far as a crook’s curriculum vitae went, it was spectacular. I reckoned it must have been, all told, one of the most successful asymmetric attacks carried out before the Internet weaponized the misplaced brilliance of boys like Baaz.

  * * *

  —

  MOSHE HAD LEFT us with his history and a fresh glass of tea to check his “files.” Baaz and I held on to the banknote. An hour later, Moshe reappeared. Cheeks flushed. Breath short. Brow moist. Whatever he’d discovered—or confirmed—had made him hurry to tell us. Baaz came to from his math meditation. I sat up straight.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “It is absolutely genuine,” Moshe declared. “And one hundred percent fake news.”

  “I don’t understand.” It was Baaz who replied, but he spoke for both of us. “How can it be a genuine fake? It has to be one thing or the other.”

  “Well, yes . . .” Moshe ran his right hand across his forehead and drew up his own stool to the workbench where Baaz and I had sat, waiting for the verdict. “And no. It’s both things at the same time.”