City of Secrets Read online

  Brand was relieved, thinking they were done.

  “Don’t just stand there,” Eva said. “Help us roll him over.”

  When they did, Brand saw the exit wound.

  Gauze wasn’t enough. Asher plugged it as best as he could with a dishcloth, crisscrossing it with long strips of tape. The man had passed out. They sat him up to tug Asher’s undershirt over his head. Already the blood was seeping through.

  “Give me your sweater,” Asher said.

  Brand couldn’t protest, but hesitated.

  “I’ll get you another,” Asher said, and fit the man’s arms in the sleeves. It was far too big for him. “Stand him up.”

  “Where are we going with him?”

  “You’re taking him to the Belgian hospice. A doctor will meet you there.”

  “My car’s behind the synagogue.”

  “You’ll have to get it.”

  Eva made to take his place, but Asher told her to go with Brand and called the Frenchman up from downstairs. Brand would bring the car around and she would run in and let the Frenchman know it was ready.

  Outside, the darkness closed over them, a relief. In his niche, Lipschitz kept watch, squinting. They passed him as if he were invisible.

  Brand didn’t like any of it. He was nervous just being a courier. Without his sweater he was cold, and his fingers were tacky with blood. He wished he’d stayed in bed, and blamed the rain.

  In the market Eva pulled his arm around her and they walked like lovers, a transparent disguise. “I tried to call.”

  “Lipschitz said.”

  “Don’t be angry.”

  “Why should I be angry?”

  “You did well,” she said.

  “I did?”

  “You weren’t afraid. You helped.”

  “Does this happen often?”

  “It’s not the first time, if that’s what you mean.” He was quiet, and she reached up and kissed his cheek in apology. “It doesn’t happen that often.”

  “I hope not.”

  “When it does, we have to be ready.”

  He understood, even as he flinched at the collective. Like everyone in their cell, without notice she was expected to turn her place into a safe house. He would do the same, and yet, remembering her and Asher working together and himself standing there with the towel like an idiot, he was jealous. He hadn’t been brave, he’d been terrified, just as he’d been a coward at the checkpoint with the old man. In the camps he’d learned to stand and watch. It had saved his life and made him useless. If he’d come here to change, he needed to do better.

  Ahead, the alleys converged at a fountain.

  “Where behind the synagogue?” Eva asked.

  “By the baths.”

  She knew a quicker way, taking him through the flower market, the stones littered with stalks and wilted blossoms. A gated garden led to a park full of swishing cypresses whose busy shadows hid them. At its entrance they turned right through an arch, then left down a passage lined with dustbins and came out beside the baths. He expected an armored car on patrol, its spotlight sweeping the storefronts, but the street was empty.

  As he stuck the key in the lock, beyond the city walls the carillon of the YMCA chimed, striking two. He hadn’t thought it was so late.

  Eva sat in back like a passenger. There was no one until they made the turn onto her street, where a pair of headlights coming the other way flashed a challenge. The lights were too low to be an armored car, maybe a battle jeep left over from El Alamein.

  It was just another cab trying to get through. Brand backed up and let him by, then pulled even with the mouth of her alley.

  Eva leaned in close as if to pay and kissed his ear. “Be careful.”

  “You too.”

  Alone, he tried the radio. Nothing but static and, faintly, American dance music from Cairo—maracas and a snaky clarinet. That old black magic has me in its spell, that old black magic that you weave so well. Sometimes they danced to the phonograph in her sitting room, moving the table aside, and again he thought he should be asleep and warm, all of this a bad dream. He checked his mirrors as if someone might be sneaking up on him. Turning off his lights would only make him more conspicuous, so he sat with his wipers flipping, wasting gas. He watched the rain dimpling the puddles. He knew every step, every cobblestone between the street and her door, could make the walk blindfolded. They should have been back by now. Maybe the man had died. They’d still need to get rid of the body. But they could do it there, they didn’t need his car for that.

  A new song started, a tinkling piano and a boozy saxophone. If you were mine, I could be a ruler of kings. And if you were mine, I could do such wonderful things.

  In the alley, shadows flew across the walls. From the darkness a figure emerged—Eva, with Asher and the Frenchman bulking behind, the man sagging between them like a drunk in Brand’s sweater. From habit Brand hopped out and ran around to get the door for them.

  “Get back in the car,” Asher ordered, pointing.

  In their rush to shove the man in, they knocked his head against the frame. He was dead weight, and they tried to prop him upright in the far corner. He toppled face-first against Brand.

  “Lay him across the seat,” Asher said, then to Brand, “Pull around to the back entrance. They’ll be waiting for you.”

  “What’s the word?”

  “There’s no word. They’re expecting you. Go.”

  This time of night the Belgian hospice was a three-minute drive, tucked behind the Muristan in the Christian Quarter. There were no checkpoints to avoid. All Brand had to do was swing up through the Armenian Quarter. He turned off the radio as if the man were any passenger and focused on the road.

  Ahead, past the shadowed colonnade of St. James Cathedral, loomed David’s tower and the imposing block of the Citadel, backlit by the floodlights at the Jaffa Gate. He was a careful driver normally. Now he guided the Peugeot through the wet streets as if it were filled with explosives, slowing for every alley, rounding off each turn.

  At David Street there was no white-gloved policeman on the little podium, no desert-colored jeep with a spotlight and machine gun mounted in back. Brand turned and eased by the darkened fish market. Beyond the broad piazza of the Muristan rose the Crusader bell tower of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre like a great black finger. Strange, Brand thought. Tomorrow he would take a dozen fares there and remember none of them.

  Behind him the Sabra groaned, making Brand glance at the mirror. The man was sprawled across the backseat at such an angle that Brand couldn’t see his face. The man moaned again as if trying to speak.

  “Almost there,” Brand said, and sped up.

  The rear of the hospice was dark. As he pulled in, the doors swung open. Instead of the doctor Asher had promised, two men with bandanas over their faces like train robbers scurried down the steps.

  Brand didn’t get out. Without a word to him, the men dragged his passenger out and shut the door, and Brand drove off, free again.

  On his way back, as he slowed for David Street, an armored car crossed in front of him, headed for the Armenian Quarter.

  “Baruch Hashem,” Brand said, signaling, and went the other way.

  Asher hadn’t given him instructions on what to do after dropping the man off, but Brand had had enough for one night. He avoided the checkpoint by taking the Jaffa Gate, and then, safely beyond the walls, passing the Zion Gate, saw that traffic was still backed up.

  At home, when he stepped out of the car, the ceiling light popped on. Across the backseat lay a wet swath of blood. He was lucky he hadn’t been stopped. He closed the door and went and fetched a pot of water and spent a half hour and two of his best rags scrubbing the upholstery, telling himself it was a paltry sacrifice. It was a miracle, really, how much blood the body could lose and still go on. He knelt and dug in the seams, getting it under his fingernails, but some must have seeped through and been absorbed by the stuffing. Though none of his passengers complai
ned, for weeks, whenever it rained, Brand could smell it.

  2

  The man was Irgun. Overnight their handbills appeared, pasted on walls and lampposts around town, taking credit for a raid on the main police station, calling in the overbearing, didactic style of Marxist propaganda for open revolution. They were terrorists, inflicting violence directly on the British military, a tactic the Haganah, to which Brand and his cell belonged, violently opposed, since it turned world opinion against their cause. Killing British soldiers wouldn’t make Britain change its immigration policy, and the crackdowns after the Irgun’s raids made it harder for the Haganah to conduct operations. Only months ago they’d tried to wipe out the Irgun and the even more hard-line Stern Gang by collaborating with the police. Now Asher was giving the man Brand’s sweater?

  “Times change,” Eva said. “We all want the same thing.”

  “All they want is our guns,” Lipschitz said.

  Asher saw combined operations as a way of gaining some control over the Irgun. No more freelancing. Every major action had to be approved beforehand.

  “You can’t keep a wolf on a leash,” Fein said.

  “You’d rather let it run wild?” Yellin asked.

  Brand agreed with all of them. It was too late anyway.

  The truce was followed by a lull, as if, having joined forces, the different factions couldn’t agree on what to do next. It was the holiday season, and Brand was busy shuttling tourists to Bethlehem. His fellow drivers Pincus and Scheib let him in on a little scheme. A few of them chipped in to buy cases of film from a Rumanian wholesaler and sold rolls to their passengers at a markup. Brand, seen around the garage as a humorless greenhorn, acted scandalized but came up with his stake.

  “I should feel bad,” Pincus said, “corrupting an innocent like this.”

  “Nu, what?” Scheib said. “He’s a grown man.”

  Smugly, like someone with a dire secret, Brand played along, letting them make fun of him. Privately he thought they couldn’t mean it. That anyone who lived through the camps could be innocent had to be a joke.

  And yet Pincus was right. While, like everyone, Brand had had dealings with the black market, he’d never been part of it. For the price, he shouldn’t have been surprised the film was expired. He was a bad liar and a terrible profiteer, constantly aware that he was taking advantage of his fares. It was just film, not bullets or penicillin, but when they haggled with him, invariably, out of guilt or the need to be liked, he gave in. Only the Americans paid full price, a habit for which he was grateful, and soon he sold only to them.

  “Will you take our picture?” they asked, standing by Absalom’s Tomb or the Damascus Gate.

  “Say cheese,” Brand said.

  Finally he had some money. The first thing he bought was a new sweater, the thickest he could find, a navy cable-knit made for skiers, decorated with snowflakes. The second was a radio so he could fall asleep to music.

  For Eva he wanted to buy roses and jewelry and perfume. Her clients gave her gifts—nylons and Swiss chocolates were favorites—so why couldn’t he? They would end up fighting, he knew, but, flush for the first time since before the war, he couldn’t resist the grand gesture. After several visits to the tinker’s bazaar, dithering over the hammered silver bracelets and rings laid out on silk squares, he settled on an amber pendant the Yemeni dealer claimed was good luck.

  “Is for someone very special,” the dealer asked.

  “Yes,” Brand confessed.

  “She is already lucky.”

  Since it was expected, apologetically, in his own inept way, Brand argued the man down a few shillings.

  “Blessings be upon your house,” the dealer said.

  “And upon yours,” Brand said, returning the bow.

  He planned the evening like an action, checking the weather forecast against the calendar. He would surprise her with it on the full moon. To soften her up he bought champagne, the one gift she couldn’t refuse, and the new Benny Goodman record. They would dance, and after, sprawled on the couch, laughing and half drunk, he would magically produce the pendant and offer it like a declaration. She would lift up her hair in back so he could fasten the clasp, and he would kiss her there. For days, as he drove the tourists up the Mount of Olives to watch the sunset, he pictured the moment when she would turn around and give him that crooked smile he’d come to love.

  He could also see her throwing it at him, tearily beating his chest with her fists. Hadn’t she specifically told him not to do this? Did he understand nothing?

  So he was puzzled when, after the first half of his plan worked perfectly, instead of gratitude or histrionics, she accepted the pendant from him grimly, thanked him and set it aside.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Don’t you like it?”

  “You shouldn’t waste your money on me.”

  “I don’t have anyone else to waste it on.”

  “That’s the problem.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t be stupid,” she said. “You know why.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Are you going to pay for my apartment?”

  The question was unfair, sprung on him so bluntly. He resisted saying she could live with him. He didn’t dare suggest he move in with her, and so had no answer.

  “Don’t be like that,” she said, mimicking his pout. “Can’t we just have a nice time?”

  He wanted to take the pendant and leave, but where would he go? He agreed with her and drained his champagne.

  “Come on,” she said, taking his hand, “let’s dance.”

  She spent the rest of the evening trying to cheer him up, letting him put the pendant on her and then wearing it to bed, and though he played along, Brand wouldn’t be consoled. In the candlelight, her whispered urgings mocked him. It was all false, and long after she’d fallen asleep he lay beside her, contemplating her soft face and the monstrous scar. He would never know the woman she’d been, the bride and lively young wife. When had he become so sentimental? She was an insult to Katya’s memory. He was just lonely, marooned in a foreign city. It was no excuse, and he resolved never to fool himself again.

  When he finally slept, he dreamed of the bleeding man, not in her bed but in his backseat, reaching for him as they drove through the Old City, trying to warn him of something, but when the man leaned in close, trying to speak, instead of words, out flew a gout of hot blood, drenching Brand’s shirt, shocking him awake. He was naked and sweating. Beside him, Eva slept.

  He wondered if the man had died. Asher never said, and there was no one he could ask.

  In the morning as he was leaving, she thanked him for the pendant, as if to apologize for last night. From then on she wore it—to placate him, he thought—taking it off only for appointments, confusing him further. Instead of reassuring him, seeing her fish it from her purse and fasten it in the backseat as they curled down the drive of the Semiramis or the Mediterranean or the King David Hotel made him picture her naked in their bright, vacuumed rooms, and he gripped the steering wheel and fixed his eyes on the road.

  At least he had money. He finished the arak and bought himself a bottle of Johnnie Walker. Now when he couldn’t sleep, instead of his keys he reached for a glass. It was safer to stay home, with the extra patrols. In Cairo the bands played all night, the dial a warm orange glow in the dark. Kiss me once, and kiss me twice, and kiss me once again. Sick with pride, he stood at his cold window, looking out over the rocky graveyard and the black mass of the Church of the Dormition blotting out the Zion Gate and wondered if she was alone. Not once had she been to his room. In the small hours, the phone in the downstairs hall rang and rang. He listened for Mrs. Ohanesian to answer it, hoping it was her.

  Days he still drove her. She didn’t have to ask for him anymore. Greta the dispatcher knew. It was a joke around the garage. Brand the lady-killer. Brand the pimp.

  Slovenly at home, Eva had a whole wardrobe of smart clothes for dates, picking through them with
a critical eye as if choosing the right costume for a role. In public she wore an arsenal of hats with a netted veil that didn’t quite hide her scar, a tease. In the backseat she opened her compact, lifted the veil and touched up her lipstick, drawing on a smile. The pendant rode her breastbone, the gold chain taut against her skin.

  “How do I look?” she asked.

  Expensive, Brand wanted to say. Cheap. Heartless.

  “You look beautiful.”

  “You always say that.”

  “Because it’s true.”

  “It can’t always be true.”

  “Yes it can,” Brand said.

  “Stop, you’re going to make me sick.”

  Brand’s response, as always, was silence.

  “Now you’re not talking to me?”

  With the influx of tourists, it was a busy season for her as well, her evenings booked solid. Christmas Eve he dropped her at the Eden Hotel and camped at the Café Alaska on the Jaffa Road, killing time drinking coffee and eating Apfelstrudel and reading about the war crimes trials in his old hometown paper from last week, his eye on the clock.

  The Alaska was the province of a certain class of Mitteleuropean émigré now mostly extinct in its natural habitat. With its crystal chandeliers and polished brass samovars and marble-topped tables full of threadbare scholars playing chess and arguing politics, it belonged to Vienna or some other fashionable capital brimming with art and theater rather than gloomy Jerusalem, surrounded by nothing but rocks and Arabs. Like the kibbutzniks playing at being peasants, the Alaska’s denizens clung to roles Brand, having survived the war, thought long obsolete. Yet there he was, reading last week’s paper, fretting over the fate of a city that had murdered everyone he loved. He had his booth. The coffee was real, and the strudel wasn’t bad either.

  The Eden was just as fantastic, a dream from a bygone, triumphal era, out of scale, oblivious to human suffering. He was early to pick her up and sat at the curb with the motor off. There was a gala under way. One after another, gleaming limousines rolled up and disgorged couples in evening wear, the doorman salaaming as if they were royalty. British, most likely. Gentile, certainly, though he noticed some Indians and Africans and a pair of Arabs in Western dress. She was late now, and with every new arrival he grew more impatient.