City of Secrets Page 3

  What kept him from leaving? There was a whole queue of taxis down the street. She could just as easily take one of them instead of wasting his time. He made nothing chauffeuring her around, hated it.

  As he pointlessly sharpened his argument, a grand Daimler from before the war pulled up, a car Brand associated with the German High Command, a particularly perverse affront here, though no one else seemed to notice. The doorman hurried to free its occupants. The blonde who ducked out and unfolded herself was slim and long-limbed as a ballerina, carrying a sequined clutch purse. The man behind her, silver-haired, in tails, complete with kid gloves as if they were attending the opera, was Asher.

  Brand had never seen him in anything but khakis and a rough work shirt, his sleeves rolled to his elbows. He’d just assumed Asher was like himself, a tradesman of some kind, a mason or plumber, practical, good with his hands. Now, in the immaculate suit of a diplomat, there was something unnatural about him. Brand stared as if he were seeing a doppelgänger.

  Without a glance in Brand’s direction, Asher offered the woman his arm and ushered her inside.

  Brand’s first thought was that he’d stumbled into an operation. The Irgun were famous for their disguises, using Ben Yehuda Street tailors to copy British uniforms. The accursed car might be a message, rigged with TNT, Asher and the blonde agent packing Mausers. A Christmas party was the perfect setup for an assassination. Shots, then panic, an escape route through the kitchen, another car waiting out back.

  He wondered if Eva knew and hadn’t told him, if right now she was holding a deputy minister at gunpoint upstairs, the appointment a ruse.

  He started the car. Any second he expected gunfire, the windows exploding in a spray of glass.

  The Daimler tooled off and another limousine took its place, delivering another couple, older, the wife white-haired and stick-thin, the man rotund and red-faced, some sort of bureaucrat, though, Brand conceded with a scowl, they might be Irgun as well. For all he knew it could be the Irgun Christmas party.

  After they’d disappeared, the doorman held the door open an extra moment and out came Eva. She turned to find him right where he said he’d be and smiled. Reliable Brand.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I ran into an old friend.”

  “Did you see Asher?”

  She looked puzzled, as if she’d missed something.

  “He just walked in.”

  “What’s he doing here?”

  “He was dressed for the big party. Any idea who it’s for?”

  “I can go back in and check.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “Ask him.” She pointed to the doorman.

  Brand pulled forward and casually leaned across the seat. He made as if he were asking on her behalf.

  The man poked his head in the window to address her. While he looked Arab, to Brand’s surprise, like the soldier the other night, he spoke perfect Hebrew. “Every year the hospital has a party for the orphans. It’s very nice.”

  “Thank you,” Eva said, and then, when they were clear, “Hadassah Hospital.”

  “Maybe he works there.”

  “Or at the orphanage.”

  “He seemed to know what to do the other night.”

  “You think he’s a doctor?”

  “You know him better than I do.”

  “He’s your contact,” she said, “not mine.”

  “You’ve known him longer.” Another surprise. Who was hers—Fein, maybe? Yellin? Lipschitz joined around the same time he did. Maybe it was someone from before, someone he’d never met. She didn’t like to talk about her past, and he was afraid to guess at it. He didn’t like to think about her present.

  “I know he’s married.”

  “Because of the ring?”

  “Because of how he acts.”

  “You can tell that.”

  “That’s easy.”

  “What else can you tell?”

  “About him?”

  “About anyone.”

  “I can tell when someone doesn’t like women.”

  “Does he like women?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do I like women?”

  “Maybe too much.”

  “Maybe,” he admitted.

  “I told you,” she said, fishing the pendant from her purse and sitting upright to fasten the clasp. “My grandmother had the sight.”

  What do you see for us? Brand was tempted to ask, but didn’t want to know the future either.

  “What do you know about Yellin?” he asked.

  “What do I know about you?”

  “Too much, actually.”

  “Don’t worry about Yellin. If you have to worry about someone, worry about yourself.”

  He did. It was what he was trying to stop doing.

  On the way back to the Old City they passed police headquarters, fortified by a double cordon of barbed wire. An armored car sat in front like the Sphinx, its main gun leveled at traffic. The façade bore the scars of the raid, the stone cratered and pocked from small arms, licks of soot crowning the blown-out windows. The Irgun had tossed satchel charges through the front doors and gone in firing. Brand had to remind himself that he was part of them now, and, in an unsettling way, they were part of him.

  There was a long line at the Jaffa Gate, mobs of pilgrims streaming between the stopped cars and tour buses, flocking to the Christian Quarter for midnight services. The streets would be clogged with candlelight processions, and Brand swung down to the Zion Gate—only slightly better. As the pilgrims shuffled past, to keep their balance a few braced a hand against the Peugeot, gently rocking it. He’d have to wax it again.

  “I used to love Christmas when I was little,” Eva said.

  “I always hated it,” Brand said.

  “Why?”

  His reasons were so typical he just shrugged. “Why did you love it?”

  “My grandmother on my father’s side was Russian Orthodox. She made him get a tree for us so we could decorate it. She made little cakes with icing for my brother and me.”

  “Is this the one with the sight?”

  “No, the other one. Christmas morning they’d come over and we’d eat her cakes and open presents. I remember one year I got ice skates and spent the whole afternoon showing off for everyone. When I took them off, my feet were covered with blisters. I loved those skates.”

  She’d never mentioned a brother before, and though she didn’t say his name, he felt privileged, as if she were sharing a secret, giving him a glimpse of the girl she’d been. What could he reciprocate with?

  “For my birthday once I got a submarine you put baking soda in so it zipped around underwater in the bathtub like a real one. When the ice was gone I took it down to the river with a friend of mine to see if it would work there.”

  “What happened?”

  “It went down and never came up again. I guess I didn’t use enough baking soda.”

  “I can just see you watching for it to come up.”

  “I really thought it would. It always had before.”

  “Poor Jossi. Life is disappointing.”

  “I don’t think I was too upset about it.”

  “No?”

  “There was always something else to do.”

  He told her about the railroad bridge he and his friends used to dive off, and she told him about her grandfather’s apple orchard where she and her brother and her best friend Anya played hide-and-seek. He was picturing her in pigtails, climbing a tree, when ahead of them, all at once, as if an accident had been cleared, traffic moved. At the checkpoint the soldiers had given up searching every vehicle, and when they spotted his badge they waved him through.

  Inside the gate, he turned for her neighborhood, leaving the sea of pilgrims behind. Except for a stray cat stalking along one wall, the Street of the Jews was deserted.

  “Why don’t you park?” she said. “There’s a spot right there.”

  He offered the feeblest protest: “I don’t know
.”

  “You’re not going to find a better one tonight.”

  It was unfair of her to paint his position in those terms, though no doubt true.

  “You’re probably right,” he said, and pulled up. Before coming to Jerusalem, at best he’d been an average parallel parker. Now he could back into the tightest space with one hand. With enough practice, he thought, you could get used to anything.

  In the alley, out of habit, he looked for the lamp in her window, but it was dark, the niche of the tinsmith empty.

  She put the kettle on for tea, scrubbed the makeup from her face and changed into her flannel housecoat and slippers, an outfit at once dowdy and intimate. Though he could never be certain, he wanted to think he was seeing the real Eva, if not his, precisely, then, like the girl with the new ice skates, one unknown to the rest of the world. For all its confusion, love divined the truth. At bottom the heart was honest. Questioned long enough, it gave up its secrets, no matter how complicated or painful. Privately it was useless to deny them, a conclusion he came to later, when she was asleep and he was turning over the problem of Asher. His own problem was the opposite, Brand thought, but just as puzzling. With Eva, if fleetingly, he knew exactly who he was.

  He woke at dawn to the call to prayer, a mournful wailing across the rooftops, inescapable. The muezzins were never on the same schedule, so that their keening seemed to echo from minaret to minaret, an insistent round. Eva didn’t like mornings and kept her bedroom dark, her one window shuttered, a gap letting in a finger of light that drew a bright line across Brand’s discarded pants. She slept on her back with her mouth slightly open, soughing, the chain of the pendant disappearing beneath the covers. He didn’t want to leave her, but it would be a busy day on the Bethlehem Road. Each trip down was worth a pound, plus whatever film he sold. The sooner he got going, the more he’d make.

  He kissed her cheek and she muttered and rolled away, burying her face.

  “Merry Christmas,” he said.

  “You’re waking me up.”

  “Aren’t you going to make me some of your grandmother’s cakes?”

  “It’s too early. You need powdered sugar.”

  “I have to go.”

  “No.” Blindly she groped a hand behind her to keep him there.

  “I’m sorry.” He kissed it and folded it closed, patted the curve of her hip. “Go back to sleep.”

  “I’ll make them tonight if you buy the sugar.”

  “It’s a deal.” He wasn’t sure where he would find it, but all morning, surrounded by the white, alien desert, driving through the dust plumes of his fellow cabbies, he was happy, knowing she wasn’t working that night.

  Bethlehem was a madhouse. The grotto of the Church of the Nativity was a smoky hole where pilgrims from around the world stood in line to kneel and kiss the ground where Jesus was supposed to have been born, the spot marked with an ornate silver star. Only in Rome had he seen believers weep so freely. Some were overcome, fainting dead away, their cameras clattering to the marble floor. Others had fits, shaking and breaking into tongues. As with the Haredim and the yeshiva boys in their sidecurls madly davening at the Western Wall, or the shirtless flagellants scourging themselves bloody along the Via Dolorosa, such base displays embarrassed Brand. He’d never been seized by the spirit. As a child, to please his mother, he’d dutifully gone to shul and studied Torah with the other boys. His family was modern, like their neighbors, their congregation guided by a worldly minyan of lawyers and merchants and insurance agents. Even then Brand had been skeptical, his faith considered and intellectual, based on history and genealogy rather than any deep emotion. After his bar mitzvah he still celebrated the holidays with his family, but, like his father, an accountant and an eminently reasonable man, he no longer kept the Sabbath, and during the war stopped believing altogether. Now he found that kind of hysterical adoration not merely distasteful but baffling. As much as he’d tried to lose himself, he would never do it that way.

  Only a handful of the pilgrims were ecstatic. Most were simple tourists, there to document their trip to the Holy Land for the folks back home and disappointed at the wax museum shabbiness of it all. He’d quickly picked up the tidbits they wanted to hear, pointing out the altar of the Magi and the manger with its swaddled doll of a Messiah, relating the story of the original crib, now silver-plated and preserved in St. Mary’s basilica like a priceless family heirloom. He encouraged them to take pictures—safer and more personal than the postcards the pickpockets hawked outside—leading them up the tower of the Greek monastery with its distant view of the Dead Sea and stopping on the drive back so they could pose in front of the grotto where, that night so long ago, shepherds kept watch over their flocks. Sometimes, at the very end of the tour, saying goodbye, they asked Brand if they could take a picture with him. They shook his hand and tipped him, said they’d recommend him to their friends, and if that never happened, Brand appreciated the sentiment. He thanked them and wished them a pleasant stay in Eretz Israel, never once complaining about the peanut shells and sticky drips of lemonade they left in his backseat.

  Christmas was an easy day to make money. All told, Brand pocketed close to twenty pounds and made it back to the garage before five—plenty of time to find her sugar, he thought.

  He expected the stores on King George Avenue to be closed, being British, but was surprised to find the Jewish strip along Princess Mary shuttered as well. The owners of the Lebanese grocery in Mamilla Road had taken advantage of the holiday, and the Turkish bakery next to the French consulate. Who knew there were so many Gentiles in the city?

  He thought he might find it at the spice market, and went from stall to stall, hounded by a pack of urchins grabbing at his pockets, demanding baksheesh. He reached the end of the arcade where the coffee souk started, the aroma from the steaming samovars distracting him, when, with the shock of the obvious, he thought: the Alaska.

  They were open, and had some. Would they sell it to him? He didn’t know how much she needed, and erred on the side of caution, asking for a whole pound. The price seemed high, but Brand gratefully handed the money over to Willi the manager.

  “Merry Christmas,” Brand told everyone as he was leaving, happy as Scrooge the morning after.

  On his way to her place, with the sack on the passenger seat, he felt pleased with himself, like a husband hieing home from work with both a paycheck and the missing ingredient for dinner. It was dusk and pilgrims were swarming the Zion Gate, the floodlights adding an operatic touch, as if they were onstage for a crowd scene. There was no police bus, just the armored cars and the same Tommies with dogs. Brand pictured the soldier dumping the old man’s scarves in the mud and thought of putting the sugar in the glove compartment but feared it would look suspicious. As the line moved up, he got his papers ready, and then, when it was his turn, the soldier with the perfect Hebrew wrote down his badge number and waved him through.

  “Merry Christmas,” Brand said. “Tosser.”

  In the Quarter he grabbed the first spot he saw and headed back through the web of alleys behind the Hurva. Her window was dark, and rather than celebrate the fact, irrationally he imagined she wasn’t there—that she’d called another cab to take her to a last-minute assignation with a UN official the Jewish Agency hoped to blackmail. Climbing her stairs with the sack, he was prepared to knock on her door and stand there like the fool he promised he wouldn’t be anymore, and then, as he reached the landing, as if walking into a bakery, he was greeted by the sweet, yeasty smell of fried dough.

  Inside, the air was warm and cloying with cooking oil. He expected her to be happy about the sugar, but she didn’t move to take it from him. She seemed cross, as if he’d done something wrong. As if she’d reconsidered.

  “Did you talk to Asher?” she asked.

  When would he have talked to him? “No.”

  “Did you talk to anyone today?”

  “I was working. What happened?”

  “Asher’s ca
lled a meeting for tomorrow.”

  There was no need to ask what it meant, and he set the sugar down on the table. “When?”

  Noon, when they could use the excuse of the lunch hour.

  “Where?”

  “He’ll let us know in the morning.”

  The endless precautions, at once frustrating and necessary. Brand thought the location could either be a clue to who Asher was or a feint. As with the Talmud, everything had meaning. Nothing was done by chance. The hard part was interpreting it correctly, a skill Brand knew he lacked.

  She made the icing and decorated the little cakes, but the news left the two of them tentative and subdued, as if it might be their last night together. In bed, with the paraffin lamp just a jewel-like blue flame on her night table tinting her skin, he had to quash the urge to make promises.

  “We should go to sleep,” she said.

  “We should.”

  “My mother used to say morning will be here soon enough.”

  “She’s right,” Brand said, and though it took hours, ultimately she was.

  The meeting was out in the western suburbs, at a borrowed villa on a quiet street in Rehavia. They gathered around the absent family’s bare dinner table. On one wall hung the same dull reproduction of Millet’s The Gleaners that decorated his grandmother’s parlor. The entire cell was there, plus a special guest, the redheaded Frenchman, seated next to Asher, who introduced him as Victor. Asher didn’t have to say Victor was a member of the Irgun, or what his rank was, merely gave him the floor.

  In support of a wider action by combined forces, they were going to bomb an electrical substation in Ge’ula, a newer development northwest of the city. “Salvation,” the name meant, a heavy burden for a suburb. The Frenchman made it sound easy. The substation was fenced but not fortified, and remote, tucked behind the Blumenfeld orphanage, away from the main roads.

  Brand glanced at Eva, who nodded as if following along. It made sense that their first action would be in Asher’s backyard. Brand suspected it was a diversion, and a minor one if the Irgun trusted them to do it. Maybe it was a test. The Irgun were known to make new recruits sign a loyalty oath in blood, pledging to fight to the death rather than be captured. Rumor had it they were issued cyanide pills, a contingency Brand would have appreciated during the war, but now seemed too late.