City of Secrets Read online

  Farther down the train, Asher held his pistol to the engineer’s temple. After the briefest of negotiations, the door of the mail car slid open. Lipschitz covered the guards as they threw their Thompsons out and clambered down. Once he’d collected their weapons and everyone was on the ground, Asher climbed inside.

  As they waited for the charge to go off, the faint burring of an engine reached them. Fein and Yellin looked to Brand with concern. It reverberated all around them, swelling, a thrumming like another train, growing louder and louder. It wasn’t possible—Asher would have checked the schedule—and then Fein pointed to the sky. A plane. It took Brand a few seconds to find the dark cross, high up: not a Spitfire sent to strafe them but a fat transport droning for the coast.

  The fireman swabbed his forehead, and Yellin kicked his foot.

  Inside his keffiyeh Brand was sweating, his hot breath caught in the cloth. He watched the rear door of the second coach, stealing glances at the windows. Having picked up his share of passengers from the station, he’d wager there were soldiers onboard, possibly armed. As he searched the windows for a flash of army khaki or RAF blue, a woman’s face stopped him, at once strange and familiar, the striking cheekbones and straight nose of an heiress, bright hair tucked under a beret. With the glare, he thought it might be a trick of the light, but on second look he wasn’t mistaken. Though he’d seen her only twice, both times in a kind of costume, he knew her the way he knew Victor or Gideon, indelibly. Peering out at him with the hauteur of Garbo was the blonde from the Eden Hotel.

  He was trying to decide if she was Asher’s plant when the mail car exploded, sending broken boards pinwheeling skyward, peppering the hostages with debris. He saw Lipschitz drop his gun and grab his throat with both hands, stagger sideways a few steps and fall to his knees.

  Brand ran over and picked up the Sten, pointing it at the engineer and the guards, who were sitting up, bleeding from a dozen cuts, their uniforms torn. Flaming paper snowed down around them.

  “Lie down!” Brand threatened, and they did. “Hands on your head!”

  A splinter the size of a steak knife stuck from Lipschitz’s neck. He’d lost his glasses and his keffiyeh had unraveled, giving away the masquerade. He looked at Brand without recognition.

  “Can you hear me?”

  Lipschitz nodded, as if afraid to speak.

  Brand pried his fingers apart. Where the splinter entered, it was no thicker than a pencil. Brand gripped it tight and yanked. He was ready for a gush of blood, but only a little welled up, overflowing the hole. It had missed the jugular. He stanched the wound with the keffiyeh and made Lipschitz hold it in place.

  “I can’t see,” Lipschitz said.

  His glasses were intact, a few feet away. Brand hooked them over his ears. Lipschitz looked around, dazed, as if he were just waking up.

  “Go back to the truck,” Brand ordered, then had to steer him in the right direction, pointing at Fein to take him.

  Something must have gone wrong with the charge. One wall of the car was gone, and part of the roof, giving Brand a view of steamer trunks and packing cases and shipping crates piled like a child’s building blocks. With all the smoke he didn’t see Asher, and, backing around, keeping the gun trained on the hostages, made his way up the berm. The floor was at eye level, and, like the crates, badly splintered. He could see only the rear of the safe, a lacquered black box taller than he was. From inside came a busy rustling, like someone stuffing a mattress with leaves.

  “Are you all right?” he called.

  “I’m all right,” Asher called.

  Brand still didn’t see him. He sidled around to the other side of the hole for a better look, all the while eyeing the hostages. The door of the safe was open.

  “Do you need help?”

  Asher peered around the door. He was still wearing his keffiyeh. “Here.”

  He slid a canvas bag across the floor to Brand, then followed, carrying another over his shoulder. Miraculously, he was untouched, his kaftan pristine.

  “Where’s Lipschitz?”

  “He had a splinter.” Brand nudged the gun at the hostages. “What do we do with them?”

  “Leave them. Come on.”

  The bag was heavy, jostling against his back as they ran. It was farther than he remembered. Passing the coaches, he felt the blonde watching them. Eva probably had them in her binoculars. Everywhere, observers. Fein and Yellin covered them, then retreated.

  Lipschitz was sitting in the truck, listening to the radio. There’d been no word. Brand jammed the shift in gear and aimed for the highway, leaving behind the wheelbarrows and shovels. The bags sat at Asher’s feet. They hadn’t fired a shot, only blown up a railcar on His Majesty’s Service.

  The temptation was to gun it, but Brand was careful, aware of Fein and Yellin in back.

  “Thank you,” Lipschitz said when they were on the main road. “I thought I was going to die.”

  “I thought you were too.”

  “What happened?” Asher asked, and Lipschitz told him, making it sound like Brand had rescued him.

  “You saved us,” Asher said.

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “You did,” Lipschitz said.

  Back at the kibbutz, Fein and Yellin agreed, Brand was the hero.

  “You should have seen him,” Fein told Eva as she swabbed off their makeup.

  “I did,” she said.

  The take was twenty-eight thousand pounds. It barely fit in the compartment. Asher would stay behind and get rid of the truck. He saw them off in the shed, leaning in the window of the Peugeot as he had that morning.

  “Well done, everyone. Jossi, good job.” He squeezed Brand’s arm and stood back.

  Later, going over the day with Eva asleep beside him, it was that moment he returned to, not his decision to leave his post and help Lipschitz. That had been a reflex. Anyone would have done the same, except the Brand who claimed to be Koppelman’s friend and then let him die. The camps had made him selfish and doubtful. To have someone think well of him now was uncomfortable, because he knew the truth. He’d come to Jerusalem to change, to reclaim himself. Like Eva giving him her babushka, Asher squeezing his arm gave him hope. After being an animal for so long, he didn’t think he’d ever be a man again, but if they believed in him, maybe it was possible.

  The other memory he revisited was picking up the Sten and ordering the hostages to lie down on the ground. Hands on your head, he’d said, as if it came naturally. As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he knew where they’d come from. He barked it, more threat than command. The familiar intonation shocked him, like a pet phrase of his mother’s bubbling up, and behind the machine gun, as now, in bed, remembering, Brand cringed. Coincidence or not, it seemed wrong that at his most heroic he sounded exactly like Nosey.

  6

  He thought they’d proved themselves with the train job, yet for weeks Asher had nothing for them. Radio silence, Radio Cairo. Winter was over, the desert beginning to bloom. The cemetery smelled of jasmine and lavender. Brand put away his sweater and left his window open all day. Instead of going out on missions, he drove the Peugeot and listened to the news as other cells attacked the power station and the central prison and, one night when he was only a few streets over so that he ended up getting stuck at a roadblock, the Palestine Broadcasting Service on Queen Melisande’s Way, taking heavy casualties. He was at once enraged at the waste and jealous of their daring.

  Having survived everything that had gone wrong on the train job and come away with the loot, he now saw it as a great success. He’d forgotten how he felt hearing the plane that might have been a Spitfire (it wasn’t), and watching Lipschitz clutch his neck and pitch forward as if he’d been killed (he hadn’t). He knew nothing of the PBS operation except rumors passed around the queue, but with the pride of the newly triumphant he was certain they could have done better.

  Eva had a new lunchtime client at the King David. He was a minister of business
affairs, a Jew, and married, an easy mark. A strange case, Eva said. Very carefully he hung up his tie and jacket and slacks, fit his socks and sock garters into his shoes and shut the closet door, as if to protect them, yet the entire time he wore his undershirt and shorts. Lately she had a habit of denigrating her clients—out of loyalty, Brand supposed. He wished she wouldn’t say anything. He already pictured too much.

  Waiting for her, he noted the comings and goings of the Secretariat. The hotel had three restaurants and two bars, and lunch was a busy time. The clerks and stenographers and switchboard operators brought their own, filling the wicker chairs on the rear terrace and the benches of the rose garden, eating sandwiches and leftovers off their laps, but the main dining room and the grill room and the Arab Lounge were elaborately decorated stages where power brokers from Tripoli to Teheran met on neutral ground to finalize deals over pink gins and bloody filets. Brand knew them by their cars. Here, among the high command’s armored Humbers and the tycoons’ sleek limousines, the blonde’s Daimler wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. The drive was lined with majestic prewar Bugattis and brand-new Rolls bought with oil money. He’d seen Montgomery’s former second in command and King Faisal of Iraq walking hand in hand like lovers, heads bowed, discussing the business of empire, and Clark Gable stopping on his way to India, and the great Heifetz, come to play a benefit for the Jewish National Fund. Once, as Brand was reading the Post, the high commissioner had crossed not three feet in front of his bumper. Like the waiters and cigarette girls at the Kilimanjaro, the doormen and valets all knew Eva, and soon the Peugeot. All they had to do was fill the trunk with TNT, set a timer and slip out the back.

  There were targets everywhere, yawning opportunities. The military courts, the YMCA, the train station. Instead, he gave his unsuspecting fares the tour of the seven gates and pointed them toward the orange juice stand owned by Scheib’s cousin.

  With their share of the money, he and Eva could have gone anywhere and started over.

  “I had to fight to get here,” she said. “I have to fight to stay here. Why would I give up now?”

  They had no say anyway. The money went to Tel Aviv in a load of potash. Brand knew she was right, but sometimes, sitting in the queue outside the King David, he daydreamed of a place in the woods like his grandfather’s dacha, with a stone hearth and a thatch-roofed shed in the garden where he could cobble together birdhouses. Sentimental Brand, heir to the Romantics, lover of fireflies and white nights. Why did he suddenly want to blow everything up?

  Others were. The radar station near Caesarea, where the Eastern Star had docked. The oil depot outside of Tulkarm. Eighteen RAF planes at three separate airfields. Alone in the Peugeot, Brand listened to the damage reports from these operations with undisguised envy, as if he’d thought of them first.

  Eva celebrated the bombings but hated the curfews that inevitably followed. Like Mrs. Ohanesian, she complained about hoarders, meanwhile squirreling away enough food, cigarettes and cognac to hole up for a month. Brand didn’t keep much in his flat, and once was stranded with nothing to eat but sardines and old soda crackers. The bombings also meant he was stopped more often, the car searched more thoroughly, but then for several weeks things were quiet, and the Tommies jotted down his badge number and waved him through.

  Jerusalem in the spring. The walls of the Old City weren’t golden but the color of ripe wheat. Beards of hyssop grew from the seams, dotted with tiny white flowers. The sky reminded Brand of the Baltic in summer, its blue endlessness, making sandcastles on the beach with Giggi, gathering driftwood for that night’s fire as if it were a game. With the weather, it was hard to remember they were at war. In Rehavia the almond trees were blooming. The cafés moved their tables outside, and in the evenings Zion Square was full of students. Brand took Eva to see Caesar and Cleopatra, which made her weep, and Confidential Agent, which made her laugh. She loved Vivien Leigh. Bacall wasn’t an actress, anyone could see she was a model from the way she held her head. Back at Eva’s flat they had a nightcap under the stars in her little roof garden, Benny Goodman tootling from the other room, and slept with the windows open. In the middle of a dream, walking the streets of Riga, he woke to a mournful baying—a lonely dog, he thought, and then it was joined by another, and another, an entire pack. Outside the Dung Gate, in the Valley of Hinnom, the jackals were hunting.

  One night they were coming back after seeing And Then There Were None when the curfew siren wound up, blaring its soaring warning. Along Agrippas Street, people scurried as if it were an air raid. Brand tried the radio, but there was nothing. By the time they reached the Zion Gate, the checkpoint would be in effect, and rather than run the risk, he proposed they stay at his place.

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “Won’t your landlady be scandalized?”

  “No,” Brand said, though Mrs. Ohanesian was scandalized by jazz and strange voices on the phone.

  “I’ve been wondering why you never let me see it. It can’t be that bad.”

  “It’s a room. There’s not much to it.”

  “I bet it’s spotless.”

  “Hardly.” While it was clean, he was afraid she would see it as bare, the lair of a sad bachelor.

  When they pulled in, Mrs. Ohanesian’s bay window was lit. They would just have to brazen it out—another operation they hadn’t planned for. On the porch Brand gently opened the door and let Eva go up first, shielding her from behind, but there was no disguising their footsteps, and once they were in his room she was directly below them. He was sure he would hear about it soon enough.

  Eva stopped just inside the door, as if waiting for him. Rather than turn on the naked ceiling bulb and expose his empty walls, he shuffled to the head of his bed and groped for the radio, the music and soft orange light of the dial filling the room. She went to the open window and looked down over the cemetery. Even with the curfew there would be some couples, and he closed the window as if against a breeze.

  “Tea or scotch?”

  “Tea, please. It’s very cozy.”

  “I told you it wasn’t much.” He lit the Primus stove and offered her his one chair. The song they were playing was lush with strings and a low, smoky clarinet. A sad Billie Holiday rasped. Yesterdays. Yesterdays. Days I knew as happy, sweet, sequestered days. Eva had taken to wearing her hair like Veronica Lake, a dark curtain hiding one side of her face, and the lighting was kind. This is what she must have looked like, and before he could banish the thought, she leaned in and kissed him deeply, staying close after they broke.

  “I don’t usually go to men’s rooms.”

  “No?”

  “No. They come to me. I like your room. It’s like you.”

  “How’s that?”

  “It’s honest.”

  He wasn’t sure that was true, or what she was trying to imply by it, but her lips were nearly touching his ear, her warm breath tickling his neck, and he knew better than to argue. She kissed him and twisted around to turn off the stove, which was fine with him. He didn’t want tea anyway.

  Katya would come to him later, not as an angel but a memory—a day on the same beach he and Giggi went to every summer as children, a family vacation, the two of them lying there, letting the sun melt into their skin as the waves broke and foamed, the undertow dragging back pebbles. At the end of the day there was no need to speak. They threw their towels over their shoulders and walked back hand in hand to the cottage, where the swollen doors wouldn’t close, so that, though they were married, they had to wait till the whole house was asleep to make love. Like Giggi on the beach, the memory had come unbidden. To Brand the meaning was unclear. Those effortless hours lying beside her might have been the happiest of his life. What was this, then? The problem, as always, was that he was still alive.

  In the morning they learned the reason for the curfew. Thirty Irgun fighters dressed as soldiers stole an army truck, finessed their way onto the main base at Sarafand and filled it with weapons from the armory before
the British realized what was happening. The Irgun managed to escape with the truck, but in the gun battle two of them were badly hurt. Two female first-aid workers were driving them to a safe house in Tel Aviv when an armored car stopped them. The four were charged with crimes against the state. The men would certainly get the death penalty.

  Neither of them recognized the names, but they wouldn’t. He’d have to see their photos in the Post.

  For once Brand wasn’t jealous. It might have happened to him, driving Gideon. It might have been him instead of Koppelman. He’d come to understand: so much of life was luck.

  “You know they won’t let them do it,” Eva said.

  “How will they stop it?”

  “I don’t know, but they will. The Old Man will figure something out.”

  She meant the Irgun’s mastermind, Begin, fighting the revolution from a garden apartment in Tel Aviv. Too important to risk firing a weapon, he arranged arms deals with the Czechs and ordered assassinations, his young wife smuggling out his instructions in a baby carriage. He’d survived hunting season, when the Haganah and the British had joined forces. Now, for better or worse, he was their leader. Eva was right. His code was simple, lifted from scripture. An eye for an eye—a price the civilized British weren’t willing to pay.