City of Secrets Read online

  Were they still Haganah? He’d have to ask Asher. And what about Victor’s friend the Sabra?

  Victor went on, laying out the operation as if ticking off a list. Case the target, set the charges, blow them on schedule and get out without being seen. They would be provided with materials—meaning, Brand supposed, explosives. The Frenchman seemed bored and impatient, letting his sentences trail off, as if working with them was beneath him. He would be their sole contact, no one else. He would speak only with Asher. If things went wrong, he would break off all communications, did they understand? They would be on their own.

  Instead of questioning him, the rest of the cell listened, rapt, as if this was their destiny. There was no discussion, no doubts voiced aloud, or only later, when Fein and Yellin would have their usual kaffeeklatsch debate. For now they had their orders.

  3

  Naturally he was tasked with transporting the bomb. The law was clear, and strict, trumped up and bent against them from the very beginning of the struggle. Possession of a weapon that might be used to kill agents of the Mandate carried a penalty of death by hanging. Though he’d fired it only once, during training, the long-barreled, antique Parabellum he’d swaddled in oilcloth and hidden in a looted crypt below his window qualified, as did participating in a conspiracy against the Crown, and the even vaguer associating with known terrorists. He’d been condemned to death before. It wasn’t the worst thing in the world.

  He was more afraid of blowing himself up, or others. He didn’t know what compound they’d be using, how stable it would be, and as he cruised along the Street of the Prophets, he saw the sidewalks and bus stops of the commercial district lined with innocent victims. With every pothole he bumped over, he imagined the blast lifting the rear of the Peugeot off the ground and flipping it on its roof, jagged shrapnel felling pedestrians and smashing windows in a deadly radius.

  “Don’t worry,” Asher said, “the stuff’s harmless without a blasting cap,” as if he had experience, and again Brand didn’t know him. When the time came, Asher would show him how it all worked. It was a good skill to have, Asher said, as if they were talking about arc welding. Brand thought he’d be more comfortable with the idea if he’d fought in the war, a failing that ate at him daily. How many people had he killed by not fighting? How many in his barracks had he helped save? Not Koppelman, he reminded himself. That was the past. While he vowed he would never forget the dead, this was his war now.

  As Victor promised, the substation was out of the way. Ge’ula was in the foothills and still under construction, framing crews busy throwing up cookie-cutter bungalows to claim the land. Asher sent Brand and Lipschitz to survey the area. The development sat on a treeless plateau, bald mountains looming over a grid of roughed-out streets. It was a bitter day, the blue Jerusalem sky a trick as they rocked past the skeletal shells with the heater blasting. When Brand spied the power lines festooned against a hillside, he stopped the car and they stepped out into the wind. Hammering echoed around them like gunfire. They walked the plots like prospective buyers, examining the painted stakes marking the properties. Beyond the last empty tract, the land dropped off sharply, giving on a wide ravine the lines swooped through. The slopes opposite were stitched with goat tracks. Brand couldn’t see what they would eat.

  “The land of milk and honey,” he said.

  “The goats like it well enough.”

  Lipschitz squinted into the light. Casually, in the neat hand of a draftsman—an engineer, or maybe an artist, Brand thought—he was sketching a map on a pad of graph paper, noting the position of each stanchion. The lines dipped south, following the contour of the land, and there, across a dry wadi, in the middle of open scrub, stood the substation, its fence topped with three strands of electrified wire. A pair of tire tracks ran cross-country toward the orphanage and its ring of outbuildings. A mile west the British maintained a base, the Schneller Barracks, including gas tanks and an ammo dump.

  There were only the two approaches—down the ravine or across the flat. Brand didn’t like either of them.

  “Which way’s easier, you think?”

  “You mean which is worse.”

  “In the dark.”

  “We’ll have the moon to go by.”

  “Half moon,” Brand said. “Plus it might rain.”

  “If it rains, we get wet.”

  The plain could flood and Lipschitz would stay bone-dry. Only Brand and Asher were going this far. The rest would hang back and watch the roads, relaying coded information to the underground radio by phone. The Bukharan Quarter was just north of Ge’ula, Zikhron Moshe just south of the orphanage. Once they slipped into the backstreets, the British couldn’t block all their escape routes. With a timer, they’d have a good head start.

  “Those towers would be easy,” Lipschitz said.

  “You’d have to get the other side too. You get the station, you get both at once.”

  “So we’re knocking out power to the orphanage.”

  “And the barracks. What else is south of here?”

  “There’s the hospital and the old-age home, that’s all I can think of.”

  Only a local would know the old-age home, and Brand wondered if Lipschitz, with his black gabardine jacket and Polish accent, was from the mostly Ashkenazi Zikhron Moshe. He was younger than Brand, in his twenties, and pudgy, so he’d missed the camps. Unmarried. From his pallor and well-tended nails, he worked indoors. With his lank black hair, round face and shiny cheeks, he reminded Brand of Peter Lorre. Brand had known him only a month yet was trusting him with his life.

  “Are there any pillboxes?” Brand asked, meaning the small, concrete-block kiosks the police had recently introduced to harass them.

  “They’re all to the north. It’s got to be the barracks.”

  He hoped that wasn’t their target. There were too many troops. “There must be something else.”

  “The reservoir’s farther out.”

  “I don’t think they’d hit the reservoir.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  Barclays Bank, the central prison, the tax office. It was impossible not to speculate, and on the drive back, every police station and post office seemed a possibility. They weren’t knocking out the power for nothing.

  “We have enough blackouts as it is,” Eva agreed. She’d heard from a girlfriend that the target might be RAF headquarters, across from the Damascus Gate.

  Brand had dropped off fares there, and had once taken a carload of bubbly secretaries to the train station, one of whom had shared the front seat and given him an American cigarette.

  He wasn’t ruthless enough. He had to remember, this was the same RAF that refused to bomb the German rail lines to the camps, the same RAF that tracked the Aliyah Bet ships making for Haifa. He had to remember who his people were.

  “I’m worried it might snow,” Eva said.

  “It doesn’t snow here.”

  “It was cold enough today.”

  “I’m sure they’ll take that into account,” Brand said. “Actually it might help us.”

  “How?”

  “They’ll have fewer patrols out.”

  “I think you’re being hopeful.”

  “I try,” he said.

  “Either that or you’re an idiot.”

  “Also possible.”

  They drank and danced, the table shoved aside, and then in the middle of a song she lifted the needle from the record and took him by the hand. In her room, with the shutters closed and the lamp turned low, he could pretend the rest of the world didn’t exist. Only this was real, and this, and this. It was a sweet lie, and so brief. In the morning she wept behind the bathroom door and his head hurt from the cognac. He understood her too well. What would Katya think of the man he’d become? The problem, he thought, was that he was still alive.

  He wasn’t weak enough to kill himself, but wasn’t strong enough to stop wanting to. There was always the question of what to do with his old life, memory s
eething inside him like a disease. Not only his sorrow, but the guard stomping on Koppelman’s face, the dog shaking the child, the wheels of the train slicing the idiot Gypsy boy in two—atrocities so commonplace that no one wanted to hear them. Everything he’d witnessed was his now, indelible yet unspeakable. His best chance was to forget, and so he kept on, letting the meaningless present distract him.

  He was becoming a great liar. All day, as Jossi, he joked with his passengers, the Italian and French and Turks alike, while the buildings around them crumbled. Whenever he picked up a Tommy on leave, he was sure he was smiling too much, and felt the crazy urge to blurt out their plans. That would solve all his problems.

  Maybe it would snow and they would call it off. Maybe the Peugeot would blow a gasket and they’d have to find someone else. And then, other times, he imagined dynamiting the gates and guard towers around the ghetto of Riga, setting everyone free. Was this so different?

  Fein wished they knew the overall scope of the operation.

  “I wish the filthy Arabs would go away,” Yellin said, “but that’s not going to happen either.”

  Brand trusted them because they were older and kvetched about everything like a long-married couple—like his uncles—but what better cover for informants? Had Asher been their contact, or whoever it was that had recruited Eva?

  “I have no idea,” Eva said, though, knowing her, he could see she was holding back.

  “What?”

  “You really shouldn’t be asking me that.”

  “Who else am I going to ask?”

  “I’m serious, Jossi. It’s better not to know.”

  “I won’t tell anyone, I promise.”

  “You don’t know that,” she said, as if he’d hurt her, and he wondered what exactly had happened with her husband. He wanted to say he’d never leave her, but feared that would only make it worse.

  The operation was everything now. They still had no date, but late Wednesday afternoon when he checked in with Greta from the call box at the Jaffa Gate, she gave him a pickup in Rehavia with a familiar address.

  Asher was waiting on the porch with a black leather valise and a deep blue suit that might have belonged to a banker. In the backseat he kept the valise in his lap, his arms crossed over it as if it were filled with cash.

  “Where are we going?”

  “The high school,” Asher said, as if Brand would know where it was. “Take a left after the Jewish Agency.”

  The quickest route was up King George. In the mirror, Asher watched the storefronts slide by, hooking back one cuff with a finger to check his watch like a stockbroker late for an appointment. Beside his perfect impersonation, Brand’s own seemed crude, his bulky sweater a botched attempt at a costume—the greenhorn from Riga. He pictured the blonde from the limousine taking Asher’s arm, and the smile she gave him. Was she his wife or was it just a disguise? He thought of Eva and himself. How much of their love was an act?

  Like Rehavia, the high school was recent, and bland, a concrete box in the unadorned style of the last decade. School was finished for the day; only a few cars dotted the lot. Asher had him park behind a Plymouth, hiding the Peugeot from the road, and they walked to the nearest set of doors. Asher knocked, and as they waited, Brand glanced at the valise and noted, just below the handle, a gold set of initials: NJW.

  Nathan Joshua Weinberg.

  Nahum Jacob Wertz.

  If, in fact, it was his. Like the house, probably not.

  The custodian who let them in seemed to know Asher, and again Brand marveled at the reach of the underground. The hallway was dark and quiet, muted daylight filtering in from the classrooms. At the end they pushed through a pair of fire doors guarding a stairwell. Brand expected they’d head down to the safety of the basement, but Asher led him up to the third floor, where he produced a single key from his jacket and entered a classroom. Beside the blackboard hung the periodic table. One wall was lined with glass cabinets ranked with flasks and beakers.

  “What better place,” Asher said, turning on the lights.

  At the head of the room stood a long altar of a table with a sink at one end and several gas jets for demonstrations. Like a teacher, Asher hung up his suit jacket and rolled up his sleeves, opened the valise and began setting out its contents: a large dry cell battery, an alarm clock, a coil of black-coated wire, a coil of copper wire, a pair of tin snips, an awl, a screwdriver, some pliers, two jelly jars full of nuts and bolts, an oblong of a gray, clay-like compound wrapped like a fish in butcher paper, a tool like a conductor’s ticket punch, and what appeared to be a stick of dynamite.

  “Dynamite?” Brand guessed.

  “And this is TNT. You’re going to learn the difference between the two. Go ahead, you can touch it.”

  Brand gingerly picked up the stick and set it back down. It was surprisingly light, like a dry branch.

  “Don’t be afraid of it. You can drop it on the ground and set it on fire and it won’t go off. Without a primary charge of some kind, it’s harmless.”

  Brand, a fan of Hollywood Westerns in his youth, had assumed all you needed was a match.

  “This,” Asher said, gently setting a silver tube the size of a fountain pen on the counter, “is what you need to be afraid of.”

  It was a blasting cap. One end of the tube was open to receive a fuse, the other packed with a small charge. Asher cut a short length of black-coated wire from the coil and picked up the ticket punch.

  “You stick the fuse in all the way, then crimp the tube around it to keep it in place. The danger is, if you crimp it too close to the charge, it can go off. You just want to do the very end like this.” He clamped the jaws of the crimper around the tube. “These things can be tricky. To be safe you want to hold it behind you and down, so if it goes off it gets your ass instead of your face.”

  He held it there a second as if he was going to squeeze it, and Brand braced for an explosion.

  “We don’t want to put the fuse in until we’re ready to use it, so let’s put this back. Just the end. In the old days, miners used to crimp them with their teeth, and every once in a while, boom. Look at the dynamite. See the hole there? That’s for the blasting cap. Now this fuse I cut is way too short. Normally you want at least two feet. Safety fuse burns around thirty seconds a foot, sometimes a little longer or shorter depending on the weather. You don’t want to go more than six feet, it’s not practical. Anything longer than three minutes, you want to use an electrical charge, which is easier to use but harder to get. All of this stuff is hard to get, so we don’t waste anything.”

  As Asher fixed wires to the dry cell and the alarm clock, Brand watched, frowning, trying to remember everything. Crimp the end, hold it behind you and below the waist, thirty seconds a foot, no more than six feet. Not knowing the difference between dynamite and TNT, he was sure he would blow his hand off on his first try.

  “Where did you learn all this?”

  “In the old days we had actual training. Now everything’s rush-rush. Here, make yourself useful and wind this up.”

  He showed Brand how to rig a timer and how to booby-trap a door, how to poke a knot down the neck of a Molotov cocktail so the rag wouldn’t come out when you threw it. The nuts and bolts were shrapnel for homemade grenades. Again and again they went back to the blasting cap and crimping the fuse, fitting it into the TNT, until Brand was convinced this was how they were doing the substation. Asher kept checking his watch, and after a last demonstration on pressure mines, began packing everything into the valise.

  “Any questions?”

  “So, what’s the difference between dynamite and TNT?”

  “Ah, you were listening. TNT is more stable, more powerful and works when it’s wet. Which is why it’s always preferable over dynamite, and why it costs more.”

  “Is that what we’re using?”

  “We don’t know yet. It would be nice.”

  Asher pulled on his jacket and locked the door behind them. Teacher or doc
tor, businessman or electrician, he had a heartening confidence. His accent was Slavic, maybe Czech, yet he showed no sign of having been in the camps. Now that Brand had him alone, he wanted to ask him what he’d done during the war. Instead, he thanked him for the lesson.

  “It’s good,” Asher said. “Everyone should know these things.”

  Brand thought Asher was downplaying both his generosity and the singularity of the subject matter until Eva asked if they’d gone to the high school.

  “Did he tell you about the miners?” She bit down on an imaginary blasting cap. “He loves to scare people with that old wives’ tale.”

  Before this, Brand had taken his going along as Asher’s backup as confirmation that he was second in command. Now he realized that—as always—it was because he had the car. Eva, Fein and Yellin, possibly even Lipschitz knew how to set off a bomb. Why was he always surprised to discover he was wrong? By now he thought he should be used to it.

  As Eva had forecast, the snow came, falling overnight, softening the graves beneath his window, topping the city walls like frosting. The tourists were thrilled, snapping away at the domes and the olive groves, and all day he was busy. The Peugeot’s wheels spun in the slush. It reminded him of Riga and his grandmother’s warm kitchen, the tiled niche beside her oven where he drank hot cocoa after playing outside, the feeling returning to his cheeks. Back in his flat he kept his sweater on and turned up his Primus stove as high as it would go, nipping at his Johnnie Walker, and still he was freezing. Below, Mrs. Ohanesian picked at the Moonlight Sonata, trying the opening bars over and over, her budgerigar chittering like a critic, until, mercifully, she conceded defeat.

  He thought the snow would be gone the next morning, but it lingered, further postponing the operation. The longer they waited, Brand reasoned, the more dangerous it would be, with so many people knowing at least a piece of the plan. He’d begun to hope it would be canceled altogether when, late that night as he was listening to Trieste under the covers, the phone rang downstairs and Mrs. Ohanesian hollered for him.