All Fall Down

by James Brabazon

  “What was it you said? ‘In God we trust, but it doesn’t hurt to have an insurance policy’?”

  He put his hands up. I tucked the matches away. He’d given me a little gold, banking on it being enough to keep me at bay. It wasn’t.

  “Please, I . . .”

  “You know her, don’t you? You know Rachel Levy. That’s why the Shabak was here. Isn’t it?”

  “The Shabak? No . . .” I moved toward him quickly, gun up, pushing his bulk against the wall with my left hand before he could finish his sentence. My shoulder flared with pain. We stared at each other. “I don’t know what you mean,” he coughed. “I swear.”

  I brought the pistol higher and placed the muzzle in front of his left eye. Then I leaned in, very close, and whispered into his ear.

  “I’m not like them, Moshe. No rules. No laws. So either you answer my questions or your little colleague will be watching mame sit shiva for his granddad.” I pinned him firmly with my left hand. “I’ve come a long way. And believe me, I’ve got nothing left to lose.” He was breathing hard, rasping cigarette-scented breath into my face. “Or maybe I should kill him instead. What do you think? You or the boy?”

  “No. Please.” He said. “You don’t understand. I can’t . . .”

  I pushed the muzzle into his eye socket. The metal split the skin by the bridge of his nose. He squealed with pain.

  “Sure, you can. You know Rachel Levy, don’t you?”

  He began to cry. I pressed the SIG farther into his eye.

  “Baaz, go and get the kid.”

  “Man, this is fucked up.”

  “Just do it.”

  Baaz stepped hesitantly away from us. I cocked the hammer of the SIG.

  “OK, stop,” Moshe begged, barely able to get the words out. “Please. Yes. Yes, I know her.”

  I pulled the barrel clear of his skull and released my left hand. He collapsed onto his hands and knees, clutching his face. Deep sobs welled up inside him.

  “And?”

  “She asked me,” he said, “to change that bill.”

  “Why? Why did she ask that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Look at me.” He kept his head low, hands on the floor. His body shook. “Look at me, God damn you.” He raised his palms in supplication. Tears and snot matted his mustache and beard. Blood pooled in his eye and dripped along the side of his nose. “Did you forge the notes?”

  “No. I swear. It was the Russians. That’s the truth. I told you the truth. I was trying to help you.”

  “A lot of people are these days. Which Russians?”

  “I don’t know which Russians. The Russians. Those notes have been around for years. I only changed the number on that bill. That’s all. I’m innocent, I swear.”

  I brought the SIG to bear in the middle of his forehead. If you threaten someone with a weapon, there are only two rules: be sure they can’t use it against you, and be sure you’re prepared to use it. There was no way Moshe was going to wrestle the SIG away from me. And, by this point, pulling the trigger was just a formality. Color and sound ebbed out of the world. My ears filled with the flat hum that comes just before a kill. My mind emptied, tethered to the bullet. Suddenly it was just me and him. Nothing, no one else existed. Of the many things Moshe might have been, innocent wasn’t on the list.

  “Why you? Why did she come to you?”

  “She bought pictures from me. Horses. Always horses. She said they reminded her of home. The man who runs Gallery 7, the bar the matches come from. Avraham Landau. He buys from me. That’s his number.”

  “And he introduced you to Rachel?”

  “Yes.” He nodded vigorously. “We talked. I talked too much about the past. She came back last month, asked me to add the number to that bill. To remove the serial number on it and add that one. I don’t know why. Please. I don’t know any more. That’s it. I swear.”

  “Say your prayers,” I said, “to your God.”

  We locked eyes.

  “Bad people,” he said. “She told me the money, that money, came from bad people—people who wanted to kill her.”

  “And that’s why the Shabak was here?”

  “No, I swear. They were never here. Never. Just Rachel. She was scared. Terrified. She said they would kill her. I gave her passports. Fake ones. So she and the old guy could get out. She was crazy. Insane. Nothing she said made any sense.”

  “What, exactly”—I placed the tip of the barrel against the frown lines between his eyes—“was she saying?”

  “Please, Max. Please. They’ll kill me.”

  “So will I.” I adjusted my grip on the SIG. “Keep talking.”

  “She told me that . . .”

  His shoulders slumped; his hands fell by his sides. He didn’t seem to be able to get the words out. He was as frightened of telling me what she’d said as he was of having a gun in his face. Time was running out. I lowered the pistol.

  “That what, Moshe?”

  “That she had looked upon the Destroyer.”

  “Who?” Baaz asked, incredulous.

  I turned my head to look at him. He’d stopped walking toward the stairs once Moshe had started talking and was staring at both of us. He was in shock, overwhelmed by the violence, the weirdness of what was happening.

  “The Destroyer,” Moshe said. “The one Ha’Shem sent to kill the enemies of Israel.”

  “You mean,” I said slowly, “she told you that she had seen Death?”

  “Yes,” he replied, wiping the blood out of his eye, “that is exactly what I mean.”

  “And she used that word? The ‘Destroyer’?”

  “No,” he said. “She used a Hebrew name, the folk name, from the Zohar. It means ‘the Helper of . . . Ha’Shem.’”

  “All right,” I said, tucking the SIG back into my jeans, “and what folk name is that?”

  He looked up at me. Tears and blood streamed from his eyes.

  “Azrael,” he said. “The archangel.”

  26

  She was your girlfriend, wasn’t she?”

  I looked into the dregs of my beer and then up at Baaz. We were back on the terrace of the Lemon Tree hotel in Tel Aviv. He was sitting upright, hands outstretched, like a puppy waiting for a treat.

  “Not exactly.”

  “I knew it. And we’re trying to save her.”

  “No, Baaz. I’m trying to save her.”

  He started to drum his fingers lightly on the table.

  “You keep asking me what the number on that banknote means, like it has to mean something, like if it does mean something then you’ll be able to help her. Right?”

  “Right.” I put the glass to my lips and swallowed the last mouthful of Goldstar. “And, by the way, you said it meant something, not me.”

  “OK, true. But this brute force business is bloody stressful. Do you want me to help you find a shortcut or are you going to point your gun at everyone we meet?”

  “Pretty much. But sure, knock yourself out.”

  “All right, but there’s no I in ‘team.’ If you want me to help, then you have to level with me.”

  “I have to what?”

  “Level with me. You want to solve the equation? Then we have to balance it first. And I can’t do the bloody sums if I don’t know the bloody numbers.”

  “But you do know the numbers.” I looked around for the waiter, impatient for another beer. “You said you couldn’t forget them if you tried.” I held up a single finger to the barman mixing a cocktail on the other side of the French windows. He nodded and I turned back to Baaz.

  “Not the numbers numbers,” he said. “I mean everything. You, her, the secret mission. That’s the real equation.”

  “Baaz, you’re in enough trouble as it is. The more you know”—I paused as the waiter ap
peared with a small dish of roasted almonds—“the worse it’s going to get.”

  “Who led you to the Traitor? Who bought you your bloody plane ride, anyway?” His voice was rising, scratchy and emotional. “Just a kid, am I? A stupid kid you had to save in the catacombs, who’s got in the way ever since? I don’t think so.” His fingers fell still. And—unlike during his other outbursts—his eyes were dry and looking directly into mine. “So, what do you want to do?” he continued. “Sit on your arse and drink beer all day or do some bloody work?”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “You’ve earned that.”

  And he had. The catacombs had been a bloodbath. In the space of three days I’d saved his life, tried to lose him, tried to kill him and then co-opted him. And in return he’d saved me in Paris, put everything at risk by following me to Israel and applied himself with more success than I’d had to working out the possible meanings of the hundred-dollar bill. I’d taken him half into my confidence and my conscience—unsure whether he was an asset or a liability, a mate or a mark.

  The wind was picking up. I pulled my jacket tighter across my shoulders. Out to sea the sun was slipping into the Med. On the terrace it was time for a potentially lethal dose of truth. When my beer arrived, I ordered a double Johnnie Walker Black chaser.

  I was going to need it.

  * * *

  —

  AN HOUR LATER Baaz knew everything except my real, Irish, name. I’d been careful with my parents’ details, too. But apart from that he knew more about me than anyone alive, except Rachel and, just maybe, Commander Frank Knight.

  “This information,” I concluded with the same warning I’d begun with, “is a death sentence. Best-case scenario when we get out of this—if we get out of it—you’ll be given a new identity, a new life. Money, sure . . . But no more trips to see your auntie in London. No visiting your dad doing time in Chandigarh. No more trips to Chandigarh, period. Worst-case scenario, and I’ve been burned, permanently disconnected by London? That doesn’t bear thinking about. You understand?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I understand.” He wrinkled his nose and picked up my glass of Johnnie Walker and sniffed the whisky. “But what I don’t understand is how you can drink this rubbish.” He grimaced. “It’s disgusting.”

  “You and Commander Knight might get on, after all,” I said. “Which is a terrifying prospect.”

  I sat back in the chair, drained from unburdening myself, exhausted at the scale of the investigation ahead. Baaz, by comparison, was giddy, enthused with his newfound responsibilities. His mind was working overtime. His eyes flitted left and right, but no longer settled on mine. His fingers drummed the air again.

  “There are,” he said at last, staring out at the darkened sea, “three variables we need to assign values to.”

  “That sounds optimistic.”

  “Variables,” he said, emphatically, “not unknowns. If we can assign a value to the variables, we can calculate the unknowns.” I raised my eyebrows. “OK,” he conceded, “probably calculate them.”

  “Go on, then.”

  “Well,” he said, “you need to know who released your passport photograph.”

  “First of all,” I corrected him, “we need to know. We’re a team now, remember? And second, that’s not a variable. I already told you, no one but Frank Knight could have done that. So the question isn’t who did it, but why Frank did it.”

  “No,” he said. “That’s not correct. You assume he did it, but you discount the possibility of unknown factors that might mean he didn’t.”

  “Baaz, if this is going to work—between us, I mean—you’re just going to have to accept that there are some things I know that you don’t. And one thing I know is that no one except Frank Knight could have connected that passport photograph to my name.”

  “Totally—”

  “Thank you,” I said, cutting him off.

  “—incorrect. It wouldn’t be an unknown if you knew it, would it? Total contradiction in terms. You said all that stuff—the photos, the passports—is stored online, at the passport office?”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  “Yes but, no but. If it’s online, some tricky bugger will find it somehow. Trust me,” he said, smiling. “I know.”

  “OK, let’s leave that one, shall we? What next?”

  “Arkhangel. Totally crucial.”

  “We agree on that, at least.”

  “So tell me . . .”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “Would you have kept the note if it hadn’t had that word written on it?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “Not ‘guess not.’ Of course not. It was completely crazy. There you are in this random cottage, and then shabash! You find something totally personal. It’s like Benjamin Franklin bloody speaks to you. Directly.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s how it felt. But . . . it’s the wrong Arkhangel, isn’t it? An actual angel, not the village. That’s what Moshe was telling us.”

  In truth I’d been trying not to think about some of what Moshe had told us, or what to make of it. Looking upon the Destroying Angel was not where I’d been expecting the interrogation to go. No matter which way I cut it, the most likely of all conclusions—and the worst—was that Moshe was right and Rachel had gone insane. The closer I got to her, the further she slipped away. I tried hard to block the image as it assembled in my head, but to no avail. There she was, lying in a crimson pool of her own blood. She’d been on the edge of madness then, as her arteries pumped the life out of her. I’d been crazy, too—running, only running. Stupid, scared Max. Losing his lover and then his mother. And here I was, losing Rachel all over again.

  But the word meant something. Azrael. I could see it, hear it, in an endless loop of almost-familiarity. The sound, the feeling of it, danced on the edge of my consciousness: a face in the crowd, a childhood memory—real but unreachable.

  “Max?”

  “Uh, sorry. What was that?”

  “Cyrillic. It’s written in Russian. In Cyrillic.” He paused, as if summoning up the courage to say something.

  “Go on. Spit it out. What is it?”

  “Does Rachel speak Russian?”

  “No, at least not when I knew her. Her father couldn’t speak it, either. His parents refused to teach him.”

  “Exactly!” he said, triumphant. “You see, it doesn’t have to mean one thing or the other. It can mean both at the same time. Totally quantum. Tell me,” he said, “your mother and this Dr. Levy, Rachel’s father . . .”

  “Easy, sunshine.” I fixed him with a stern look.

  “No! No . . . It’s just, well . . . Would it”—he chose his words more carefully—“have meant anything to him? The place where your mother was born, that is.”

  I looked out to sea. I saw my mother at home, laying her hand lightly on Doc’s arm. During my father’s long absences they would sit together, side by side in the gathering Wicklow dusk, saying little, sharing a drink. And then, out of nowhere, that peal of laughter, light and bright and full of joy, bringing her to life.

  “Yes,” I said. “I think it would.”

  “OK. So, let’s assume Rachel wrote it on the banknote. Maybe not insane, after all, then, hmm?” He left that idea and moved on, aware enough, at least, of the effect of his questioning on my mood. “That just leaves Moshe,” he said. “He was right about the money.”

  “What about the money?”

  “About what it’s being used for. Its purpose. Not just your note, though. You said there was more money?”

  “Uh-huh. A lot more.”

  In the 1980s, the Lebanese plates had printed over a billion dollars of forged fiat. Frank Knight would have known that, and most likely used the size of Moshe’s run to calculate the numbers he’d quoted in Doherty’s Pub. If the Israelis had printed that quantity of fakes then, ther
e was no reason to doubt that the Russians could do the same—or more—now.

  “OK, so we follow it. That’s what they say, isn’t it? ‘Follow the money.’ It’s so Hollywood, huna? Who do you think will play me in the movie?” Baaz burst out laughing.

  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph. What did I do to deserve this?”

  “Heaven knows, but right now you’re guilty of starving a poor Punjabi boy half to death. I could eat a horse.” Then he looked worried, and added, “If I wasn’t a vegetarian, of course.”

  Baaz was right. I was hungry again, too. I stood up to fetch a menu, and looked out across the city for a moment, considering what he’d said. It seemed to me there were far more than the three variables he had lit upon. Chief among them was whether Frank Knight had known that it was Rachel’s colleague Amos Stein, and not Chappie Connor, waiting for me in the cottage. And finding out what Stein was doing there in the first place didn’t seem likely while I was stuck in the Middle East.

  “I’d give my kingdom for a bloody horse, never mind eating one,” I said under my breath. “Anything to get out of here.”

  And then a window opened in my mind, and through it I looked back into the Traitor’s studio. And then another, through which I saw Rachel’s office. The images began to run together. Doc patching my shoulder, me turning a quick circle around the corpse in the cottage. There it was. Mane flowing, nostrils flaring, the pale mare galloping across the Irish countryside. There they were.

  “That’s it!” I said out loud. “Baaz, that’s fucking it!”

  “That’s what?” He looked nervous—worried, probably, that I was about to do something violent or unpredictable.

  “Go and get your laptop. We’re going to do some bloody work sitting on our arses.”

  * * *

  —

  “OK, WHAT ARE we looking for?”

  Baaz sat poised over his screen, veggie burger in one hand, fruit juice in the other. Although it was chilly on the terrace, it made a good office. I’d ordered a steak and another Scotch.

  “Title deeds. Is there any way you can see who owns the cottage in Donegal?”