City of Secrets (6 page)

Asher ducked through the door. “Go.”

Brand drove.

“We should have at least three minutes.” Asher was breathing hard from running. For some reason, Brand thought it was funny.

He tried to keep a wheel on the hump but they were going
too fast. He swerved, and the stones clunked underneath them. It was quicker coming back, knowing where they were going. They rattled past the barns and made it to the main road with a minute to spare.

“Where are we going?”

“Back to the Edison.”

They took the darkened side streets, sneaking down through Zikhron Moshe toward the bus station, keeping to the speed limit. With every passing block, they were safer, just a cabbie and his fare. Instead of relief, Brand was aware of the gun under his seat.

Even in the rain, the Egged station was busy, the buses idling in their spaces, the passengers lit like fish in an aquarium.

“Time,” Asher said, holding up his watch, but so far away, with the power still out and the rain falling all around, it was impossible to tell if the bomb had gone off. Brand thought it was a cheat. After all their trouble, he wanted to hear it.

T
hey would never know what happened exactly. Supposedly the target had been CID headquarters, brimming with intelligence and weapons and possible hostages, but the operation had been called off, most likely because of the weather. The government station reported that several power facilities had been attacked. Perforce, the Haganah denied any involvement. Though he knew the substation would be under surveillance, Brand wanted to drive out to Ge'ula with a pair of field glasses and see the damage for himself, as if to prove they'd actually done it. The closest he came was taking a fare to the old-age home, glimpsing the tower—intact, as were the wires—as he passed the bare fields of the orphanage. In retrospect, the mission seemed both heroic and foolhardy, but mainly disorganized. Brand was no soldier, yet again and again
over the following days, as he tooled around town, telling stories of King Herod and the City of David, he pictured himself and Asher bumping along the stony road beside the barns in the dark, recalling the night not with honest dread but pride and a belated excitement. Crazily, he wanted to do it again.

Like bank robbers after a haul, they laid low. No meetings or phone calls, not even a coded message through Greta. Pincus didn't ask for the gun back, so Brand hid it in the crypt with the Parabellum after the whores and Tommies had finished their business. In the morning he woke, no longer condemned. He was a cabbie from Latvia named Jossi. He drove and sold film, ate his falafel for lunch sitting in the queue outside the Damascus Gate. Did he know where the Convent of the Cross was?

“You bet,” he said.

The Hall of the Last Supper?

“No sweat.”

In Jaffa a truck bomb went off outside the town hall, killing fourteen Arabs. That night the British shot a teenager pasting up handbills. Brand thought Asher would call, but stayed disciplined, keeping radio silence.

It was still Christmas. First for the Orthodox, then two weeks later the Armenians. The Peugeot reeked of incense. Even Eva was sick of it. She was tired of paying for bad black market coffee and Cyprian brandy and having to get dressed after supper and go out into the cold and rain so some pig of a bureaucrat could slobber over her. The nights she worked, she was never sober. To steel herself, she drank before she went out, then afterward drank
to forget. She never brought up her rent again, but often when she ranted against the unfairness of the world, Brand thought it was his fault.

He had some money, but nowhere near enough. She was too strong to be kept anyway. He had to be satisfied, their rare nights off, with buying her dinner and taking her to the movies. He wasn't sure if they were courting. She dressed as if she were meeting a date, coordinating the same outfit she'd worn at the Fast Hotel last Tuesday, the only difference was that now she rode up front with him. She chose the place, a gangster hangout off Queen Melisande's Way. At the Kilimanjaro Supper Club the hatcheck girls and waiters all knew her name as if she were famous, her notoriety a kind of celebrity. Invariably their table was in a dim corner behind a beaded curtain, away from the other couples. Women glared at her back as she passed, leaned in to whisper. “Aditti,” they muttered under their breath, slang for a girl who slept with the British. She was so private that he forgot she was a public scandal. He wished she would spin on her heel and slap their faces, but she kept walking as if she didn't hear. Though he knew she'd only be angry with him, like a knight, he wanted to defend her honor. Would it matter to these women that she was doing it for them?

“They have no right,” he said.

“Let's have a nice time,” she said. “Drink your drink.”

Even here her scar drew stares, as he imagined her beauty had when she was younger. Before the war, the men in the room would have envied him. Now he expected they took him
for her pimp or her gigolo. His second drink gave him the courage to make a joke of it.

“What do you care?” she asked.

“Because I'm neither.”

“That's right, you're pure.”

He was ready to leave as soon as he finished eating. She insisted on coffee and dessert, lingering over a refill as the place gradually emptied. Once the other customers had left, the maître d' Edouard came by their table to pay his respects.

“Miss Eva.” He bowed in the continental manner and kissed her hand. It wasn't merely that she was a regular. His deference was deep-seated, verging on adoration. Every time he chatted her up, Brand was convinced he knew Victor and Asher, their conversation rife with hidden meaning. He hardly said a word to Brand, only hello and goodbye, as if they had no business.

“Why don't you like him?” Eva asked.

“Because of the way he looks at you.”

“He's French.” She shrugged, innocent. “Edouard's an old friend. He was a friend when I didn't have friends.”

New himself, Brand understood her perfectly, and still he worried. Everyone they met seemed to know her better than he did.

In the Edison, safely hidden in the dark, he could relax. Like a moony schoolboy, he held her hand, stole glances at her, rapt. She seemed happiest in the cinema, pointing out background details and the director's camera tricks, gripping his arm at moments of suspense. She loved Ingrid Bergman, her great soft face filling the screen.

“No one pouts like Bergman,” she said, as if they were colleagues.

Bergman, Vivien Leigh, Gene Tierney—she became all the stars. On the way home she played her favorite lines, and he could imagine the actress she'd been. He wanted to kill whoever had ruined her face.

In bed, as she slept, he imagined Katya hovering in a corner of the room, an angel watching over him. She knew him to be sentimental at heart, despite his Swedish cynicism, inherited, like his green eyes, from his father, a lover of sunsets and protector of the weak. What would she think of him now, and what could he say to her?

After he was released, he'd taken the train out through the leafy countryside to Crow Forest the same way they'd been marched in the snow, but the ground had been dug up by the Russians, the bodies carted away in dump trucks and tipped into secret graves with the German dead, a second desecration. He walked the turned earth, searching for a scrap of cloth, a button, the steel frames from a pair of eyeglasses, any clue as to what had happened there. It was May, and the first shoots of grass had sprung up, fringing the mounds with green. All around, weeds and thistles grew knee-high, thriving reminders of the relentless business of life. He stood in the clearing, looking at the trees on all sides reaching for the sun, the birds flitting from branch to branch, calling to one another, and knew he had to leave. He found a smooth egg of a stone, knelt and placed it in the soft grass. A week later he signed on the
Eastern Star
. From the stern he watched the steeples of Riga dwindle as
the ship steamed up the Daugava for the open sea. If he had a home now, this was it.

He hadn't heard from Asher in weeks. Some mornings, waking early and driving the empty streets, Brand could believe this quiet routine was his life, everything else a mad dream. And then one afternoon, dropping off a couple of tight-lipped RAF colonels at the English Sports Club, he rolled up the drive to find the blonde from the Eden looking lithe in a riding ensemble, her hair pulled back in a neat chignon, climbing into the driver's seat of the Daimler as a valet held the door.

The club was south of the city, by the train station. The quickest route back was Julian's Way through the German Colony, which now, after the war, was mainly British. He watched the Daimler glide down the drive and turn left as he expected while the colonels compared handfuls of change. The taller haltingly counted out three hundred mils into Brand's palm—a minimal tip.

“Cheers,” Brand said, and sped off.

Julian's Way would take her up between the YMCA and the King David and into the main business district at the Jaffa Road. This time of day the only traffic was a stray patrol and a few cabs bringing passengers from the two o'clock train. The Daimler was hard to miss, and by the Montefiore Windmill he had it in sight. A long touring car the gray of sharkskin, polished, like his Peugeot, to a wet gleam, it made him think of Rommel and goose-stepping parades.

Brand was hoping she would lead him somewhere or to something he could connect to Asher. As they sped along, climbing
the rise of Mount Zion, he stayed three cars back, not wanting to spook her. As if she'd spotted him, as the Y's Jesus Tower rose ahead of them to the left, without signaling she braked and turned right into the King David.

While the rest of the hotel was open to the public, the Mandate rented the entire south wing for its more sensitive offices. An obvious target, the Secretariat had a separate entrance ringed by barbed wire. A pair of armed Tommies waited at a guardhouse, checking every visitor. The last time he'd dropped off a fare there—a soft-spoken undersecretary of agriculture—they'd opened the man's suitcases as if he might be one of the Stern Gang. As Brand shot past and the Daimler rolled up the main drive, the blonde gave the soldiers a wave as if she were a regular.

“Someone's mistress,” Eva guessed. “Or someone's wild daughter. Maybe both.”

“Why would she be with Asher?”

“He's using her for access.”

“Why her?”

“Apparently she can get in anywhere.”

It made sense, yet the idea, being incomplete, unsettled Brand. Shipboard, the captain let the crew know where they were going, and what the seas would be like. There wasn't another crew hidden belowdecks with a destination of their own.

According to protocol, he couldn't ask Asher, just as he couldn't discuss the truck bomb in Jaffa with anyone.

After her third glass of brandy, Eva would talk. Like an interrogator, he listened for the littlest slip.

“You weren't here for the riots. They killed hundreds of us. They broke down doors and cut children's throats. It's like they went mad.”

“These weren't the same Arabs,” he said.

“We're not the same Jews. That's the point. We won't sit around and be killed anymore. That's what they have to understand. We'll fight.”

“I think they understand that now.”

“You have to remind them, otherwise they'll go back to their old ways.”

Like him, Brand thought. The New Jew, they called the Sabras. The other night he'd felt like one. Now he wasn't sure. His own philosophy was closer to the Jewish Agency's—nonviolent resistance—though they directly supported the Haganah, who'd ditched their policy of self-restraint when they joined with the Irgun and the Stern Gang, this after calling them dissidents and terrorists and helping the British hunt them down. Brand didn't understand how they were all one now, only that he was part of them. On one count Eva was right. While he didn't agree with her on the means of the revolution, he did admit that what happened to his family was his fault. Too late, he was no longer afraid to die.

“You're Irgun,” he said.

“We all are.”

“From the beginning.”

“Now.”

“What about then?”

“We don't believe in fighting our brothers and sisters.” She sounded like Asher.

“So before then.”

“We were still Haganah. We're still Haganah.”

“And Asher?”

“Asher's Asher.”

“What does that mean?”

“Asher's his own man. He likes you, you know. He doesn't like everyone.”

“I know. I like him too.” The Widow, he called you. But that would start a different argument, one he'd lose.

“You don't trust him.”

“I trusted him the other night.”

“Touché,” she said, toasting Brand. “It's me you don't trust. You know, every night I could cut your throat.”

“You mean while you're sleeping and I'm listening to you snore. That's how you'll surprise me.”

“Exactly. You'll have no idea until it's over.”

“That's how I'd prefer it.”

It seemed to be his gift, making her laugh, though in this case he was serious.

Christmas was finally over. The dead season was upon them, the trains from Jaffa running empty. It wasn't worth sitting in the station queue. He followed Pincus and Scheib's advice, sticking to the better hotels, laying for rich Americans, even if it meant the occasional search. Against his instincts, he strewed old rags and oilcans and crumpled lunch bags about his trunk to confuse the dogs. There was nothing in the compartment, only the promise of contraband—enough to hold him. At every checkpoint he practiced his English accent.
“What's all this then, eh?” Clever Jossi, everybody's friend. That he wasn't making any money was annoying but ultimately meant nothing. Eventually Asher would call, and Brand's other life would begin again.

When the call finally came, it wasn't from Asher but Fein, throwing off not just Brand but Mrs. Ohanesian, who frowned at the mysterious voice as if Brand should have prepared her. It was Thursday evening. He'd been at Eva's every night that week, yet somehow they knew he was home. He'd forgotten: there were watchers everywhere.

The meeting was in Mekor Baruch, not far from the old-age home. Brand drove Eva and Lipschitz, a mismatched couple, parking on a street lined with scabby sycamores and squat apartment blocks. Here the luckier children of the war swarmed the dusty alleys, playing commando with branches and seed balls, hollering to one another in Polish mixed with Yiddish. Above, their mothers hung boiled laundry from the fire escapes like dull bunting. The coded address Fein had given Brand led to the building most likely to host a secret meeting, a drab Ashkenazi synagogue beside a butcher shop with headless chickens in the window for Sabbath dinner. Before he opened the door, he had a hunch it might be a trap. Why had Fein called? Had something happened to Asher?

Inside, Brand wasn't sure where to go. For a taxi driver, he had no sense of direction. As always, he thought the basement would be the safest place. As if she'd been there before, Eva took the stairs straight to the second floor.