City of Secrets (10 page)

According to the
Post,
the two prisoners were heroes, martyrs to the cause. The Irgun's handbills said the British would be pronouncing a death sentence on their own troops if they carried through with it. A life for a life.

To help overthrow their fascist Nazi British oppressors, Brand washed his car. The black showed the dust, and with the heat the trash in the trunk was beginning to stink. In the driveway, under the baleful eye of Mrs. Ohanesian, he globbed on wax and rubbed it in with a chamois mitt Pincus had lent him, until he could see his face. A day later the dust was back. At least the trunk was clean.

He drove Greeks to the Greek Colony and Americans to the American Colony and Russians to the Russian Compound. He lugged luggage and made change, sold rolls of film and counted his tips. The tourists wore him out. Where was Jesus buried? Who had the best ruins?

Just as he'd resigned himself to the grind, Asher resurfaced.

“It's your friend,” Mrs. Ohanesian said. At first Brand thought she meant Eva. She closed her door as if to give him privacy.

“This is Mr. Lipschitz,” Asher said. “I have a doctor's appointment at the British hospital tomorrow morning, and I need a ride. Can you pick me up at nine thirty?”

Brand didn't know the code, but played along. “Of course. Where are you located?”

Strauss Street was just off the Street of the Prophets, five minutes at most from the hospital, and after he'd hung up and Mrs. Ohanesian retreated to her piano, he climbed the stairs, biting the inside of his cheek, wondering what it all meant.

The intrigue only deepened the next morning when not Asher but Lipschitz was waiting for him outside the Strauss Health Center with a white bandage taped to his neck and a manila folder in one hand. As always, he was in black, and Brand smiled, picturing him in the kaftan.

Like a rabbi, he kept his hat on in the car.

“What are we doing?” Brand asked.

“I have a doctor's appointment.” He pointed to his neck.

“How is it?”

Lipschitz shrugged. “It could be worse. Go around to the emergency entrance.”

At the foot of the drive, unexpectedly, there was a checkpoint, complete with a jeep and an armored car. A pair of Tommies moved a tangle of barbed wire to let an ambulance through. Suddenly everything made sense. The prisoners were there.

“Why didn't you tell me?”

“I thought you knew.”

“How would I know?” Brand said. “Nobody tells me anything.”

“It's all right,” Lipschitz said, holding up the folder. “I've got an appointment.”

“A real one.”

“That's what I'm telling you.”

It was real, irrefutable as Brand's badge. After a cursory
once-over, the soldier gave Lipschitz back his folder and waved the barbed wire aside. Brand tried to pull in behind the ambulance, but an Arab policeman stopped him.

“Sir, I'm afraid you can't stop here.”

“I'm just dropping a patient off.”

“Please, sir. You're welcome to drop him down there. This is for emergencies only.”

“Thank you,” Brand said, nodding courteously, and moved on.

A minute later, after Lipschitz had gone in, the policeman rousted him again. They needed to keep this area clear. He was welcome to wait farther down.

“Thank you,” Brand said.

As Jossi, he'd discovered a cruel pleasure in playing the innocent. He could have pulled forward ten feet and done it again, but rolled around to the bottom of the drive where he could see both the approach and the overall layout of the doors. The drive was a gentle half circle, and one-way, so there was no checkpoint on this side. A truck going the wrong way could drive a load of explosives through the main doors without slowing.

“That would be useful,” Lipschitz said on returning, “if we wanted to blow up the hospital, which we don't.”

“We could use it as a diversion.”

“To divert every soldier in the city here.” He was sketching madly on a yellow pad, flipping pages, and didn't look up.

“I just thought I'd mention it.”

“Thank you. Now can we be quiet for a few minutes? I need to remember this.”

Eva thought it was a suicide mission. The prisoners were
bait. Did Lipschitz see them? They might not even be there. And anyway, an operation like that would be strictly Irgun. They'd only used Lipschitz because he fit the role so perfectly.

Brand wanted to say they'd used him too, with all that that implied, but really, Asher had.

She might have been right, because instead of calling a meeting, Asher disappeared again.

With nothing to occupy his time, Brand planned his own rescue mission. It would happen late at night, a small operation, quiet, an inside job. Even then the hospital was full of workers. The orderlies could be paid off or blackmailed into leaving the right doors open. A few uniforms and name tags nicked from the laundry, a tray of syringes waiting at a nurses' station. Drug the guards' coffee and switch them with the prisoners, then take the prisoners out through the morgue to a waiting hearse. By morning they'd be in Tel Aviv with Begin.

Lipschitz had been drawing floor plans. Hallways and doctors' offices, the placement of elevators. As Brand hauled fares around town, he imagined himself creeping up a stairwell with a Sten. Behind him, silent as assassins, came Lipschitz and Fein and Yellin in black greasepaint, dressed like the Free French. Brand recognized the absurdity of the scene, something from a war movie. Neither did it escape him that in his daydreams he was Asher.

That Sunday he saw the blonde again, leaving a brunch fund-raiser for the Rockefeller Museum on the arm of an American air force colonel who helped her into the Daimler, tipped the valet and then took the wheel. He was strapping and blond,
with the same well-fed aura of health and privilege. At a distance they might have been brother and sister. Could she be American? He'd figured her for a blue blood, an equestrian and adventuress, not some industrialist's daughter. He was two back in the queue and hemmed in by a line of mounted policemen so he couldn't follow them. On the steps, under a white muslin canopy erected to hold off the sun, the Rockefeller's benefactors waited in formal dress. Most had their own limousines, and by the time the valet waved for him, the Daimler was long gone.

By chance his passengers were Americans, an older couple Brand at first thought were doddering but soon realized had simply drunk too much. The valet helped the woman get her leg in and closed the door, then came around and gave Brand the address: the Palace Hotel, next to the American consulate. They didn't look like they were from the diplomatic corps.

“My God,” the man said, “I thought we'd never get out of there.”

“It's not my fault,” the woman said. “Kitty said it would be fun.”

“Fun,” the man said, as if it were a curse.

“I liked those olives.”

“They were good,” he admitted. “And the little cheese things.”

“The canapés. I still don't know what we're doing for dinner.”

“I'm not hungry at all.”

“You will be.”

“Ask the driver.”

“Yes, ma'am?” Jossi said.

“We're looking for someplace nice to eat, something local, not too expensive.”

Pincus had taught him to send Americans to Fink's. They seemed pleased with the recommendation.

“Excuse me,” Jossi said. “You are American?”

“Yes,” the man said, interested.

“At the museum there was an American officer. We were betting, my friend and I. The lady he was with, I say she is a famous movie star. Blonde, like Veronica Lake.”

“A movie star? I don't think so.”

“He means the Rothschild girl,” the woman said. “Tall, thin? She married the baron's son. You know, the one with the funny eye.”

“She's not famous,” the man said.

“Sorry,” the woman said. “I hope you didn't bet much.”

“Thank you,” Jossi said.

It was no secret that the Rothschilds were connected to the Jewish Agency, and the Jewish Agency to the Haganah. The mystery was why she was with Asher. Maybe, as with Brand, he was her contact.

“She's very pretty,” Eva said. “And Asher can be very charming.”

Brand wanted to think Asher wouldn't let his feelings affect his judgment, but why should he, of all men, be exempt? If Brand were strictly following protocol, he wouldn't have said anything to Eva. He couldn't go to Asher either. From the first time he saw the blonde, he thought putting a name to her would ease his mind. Now he realized how great a complication she
might be. The name was too large, like a secret too big to keep, and he was stuck with it.

Monday he waited at the King David, half expecting to see the Daimler. Spying behind his
Post,
he memorized the various approaches to the Secretariat, and later made a detailed sketch for Asher. It was like the hospital. While the south wing was heavily fortified, the main part of the hotel was wide open. Why bother with guards and barbed wire when you could walk through the front doors?

Tuesday they went to the Edison to see
Brief Encounter
. It played to a full house, and while Eva fell for the love story, Brand was distracted by the red exit signs on either side of the screen. At any moment someone could break through, shooting, and there was nowhere to run.

The next morning he took a team of Danish geologists from the train station to the potash works, driving across the blinding desert, then the steep descent to the Dead Sea, the hills of Moab rising ash-gray out of the haze. It was a relief to be away from the city, and while the scientists had their meeting he walked the shore, skipping rocks, gulls winging overhead. On watch, those long nights, bound for Oran or Gibraltar, he'd lost himself in the vast, starry darkness, the tip of his cigarette a planet illuminating a strange hand that moved when he willed it. The waves here were tame, folding over themselves in the shallows without sound, and the scale less grand, but the sense that he was in the presence of the elemental was the same, and soothing. He wondered what night would be like.

Back in the city, he tried to recall the feeling, but it was gone,
replaced by life and the Babel of traffic. On the Jaffa Road the cafés were packed. Barclays Bank had installed new blastproof shutters over its windows. At every intersection he saw the possibility of disaster, and then, when it came, he wasn't ready.

As always, Eva was right. The hospital was a trap. An Irgun team tried to go in disguised as electricians. They never got past the checkpoint. The driver managed to turn around, but the truck hung up on a curb, and the gunner in the jeep blew out its tires. The driver died. Three others were in custody. The next day there were no gloating handbills, only the Mandate radio lauding the army. That night, in the searches that followed, they picked up Lipschitz.

A
fter a long evening of Carmel wine and cognac, Brand and Eva were dead asleep when there was a rapping at the door. It was past two, and reflexively he thought it was the police. They could go out the kitchen window and across the rooftops. His car was parked beside the Hurva.

“Stay here,” she said, pulling on her robe. “It's probably just Mrs. Sokolov.”

He kept still under the covers, listening as she unlocked the door. As she'd predicted, the voice was her landlady's, too soft for him to make out their conversation.

In a minute she returned, clicking on the bedside lamp.

“You have to go.”

“Now?”

“Now.”

The police had Asher. To be safe they needed to break contact and go to ground for a while.

“I'm sorry,” Eva said.

Stunned, Brand sat on the edge of the bed, pulling on his socks. Asher. It had to be a mistake. He couldn't imagine the cell without him. “What about Monday?”

“I'll call a taxi.”

“Ask for Pincus. He's a friend.”

He never suspected Mrs. Sokolov was one of them, and again he marveled at the reach of the underground. Who knew to call her?

He kept that in mind the next day as he drove, appraising the Canadian couple and the Uruguayan cleric and his secretary as if they might be spies. Taking the New Gate and sneaking through the linked courtyards of the Christian Quarter, he expected, any second, a gun to the back of his head. Instead, they tipped generously and blessed him. At home, his window open to the night, he waited for the low dieseling of an armored car and the rumble of jackboots on the stairs, the door cracking, but there was only Mrs. Ohanesian poking at Mozart, her budgie's irritating whistle.

When the Russians had first detained him, dragging him from his usual coffee shop, they wanted the names of everyone in the neighborhood who belonged to the army. Though it was common knowledge, Brand resisted, relenting only when they threatened his family. Knowing his own weakness, he ascribed it to Lipschitz—unfairly, perhaps. While Brand daydreamed of breaking into the hospital, Lipschitz had actually done it.

Asher. He still couldn't believe it.

Every instinct told him to flee. In an hour he could be in Jaffa. His merchant seaman's papers were up-to-date. The docks worked round the clock. By morning he could be steaming for Lisbon or Port Said, leaving simple Jossi behind.

Without Eva, his days took the same shape. He woke, he drove, the perfect weather mocking him. Palm Sunday was almost upon them, and Pesach after that, the pageantry of Passion Week. The hotels were brimming with pilgrims. For lunch he ate falafel from his favorite vendor by the Damascus Gate, then a late dinner at the Alaska, finishing the night at his little table, sitting in the dark, nursing two fingers of scotch while the radio played. His cigar box was so stuffed with tips the lid wouldn't close. Now that he had money, he had no one to spend it on.

He worked the weekend, and on Monday gave Pincus a note for her—untraceable, he hoped. At noon he was in the Kidron Valley, taking an Argentinean family to the Gihon Spring, and couldn't swing by the King David. For Brand, the hardest part of her dates was when she came back to the car, babbling at him, happy to have his ear after being with a stranger. Now he thought he should be there to listen to her, as if he were shirking his duty.

The note Pincus returned with was unsigned as well, on plain paper. Her penmanship was surprisingly elegant, reminding him of his mother's:
I'm wearing your necklace
.
Be careful
.
I'll see you soon
.

“How is she?”

Pincus shrugged as if he had no opinion. “She looked good.”

“Thank you for taking her.” Brand tried to give him a pound, but Pincus fended it off. If he knew her as The Widow, he was too polite to say so, for which Brand was grateful. He didn't need to be told he was a fool.

He knew he should throw the note away or, better, burn it. He fit it in his cigar box, another treasure, and wondered what she'd done with his.

Tuesday was the eve of Pesach. By noon traffic had thinned as if the city were under curfew. Only the Arab buses were running. The streets of Mea Shearim and Mekor Baruch were deserted, the shops along the Jaffa Road closed. On Princess Mary Avenue a line of housewives waited on the sidewalk outside the one open grocer's, hoping he wouldn't run out of lamb shanks and horseradish.

Brand remembered his mother's endless preparations. She began cleaning weeks in advance, going through the house room by room, hunting down every crumb of chametz. When he and Giggi were little, she'd hide five pieces of bread for each of them so they could help. He took pride in finding his first until, one spring when he was six or seven, his mother came to him at bedtime and said it might be nice if he let his sister find hers first, and Brand understood that he'd been thoughtless. His joy poisoned, he turned dutiful, tagging after her with his own dust rag, rubbing at schmutz. When she finished a room, it was off-limits for eating. She did the kitchen last, on her hands and knees, digging in the cracks between the floorboards with toothpicks, which his logical father—and Brand, his father's
son—thought was going too far. The Udelsons were proper. His grandfather could perform the ceremony with the feather and the spoon and it would never be clean enough for his grandmother. The tears his mother shed making everything perfect for them. Even before they arrived, her failure was apparent. She didn't like their seder plate, which they'd received as a wedding present. There was the wine stain the dry cleaners could never get out of her good lace tablecloth, and now the kugel was ruined. She apologized, inconsolably angry, waiting for his grandmother to point out the obvious. “What a lovely table,” his grandmother said. His grandfather wore the kittel, since his father wouldn't. It was a yearly ritual, the three generations gathered beneath the golden battlements of the lithograph, celebrating their freedom from Egypt and the mysterious bondage of family. After such pains, to think it had all been swept away, burnt to cinders like the chametz, Brand himself the last remaining crumb.

Even Zion Square was empty, the students sent home for recess, Café Europa shuttered against the Shomrei Shabbat, fanatic Hasidim who tossed rocks through windows of businesses that didn't respect the Sabbath.

Baruch Hashem, there were always the tourists. Outside Herod's Gate, among the stooped water vendors and strutting pigeons, an American couple in matching sunglasses held a folding map between them, pointing in opposite directions. Brand swooped down on them like a hawk. It was their first day. Of course he knew where the Church of the Ascension was. He wouldn't recommend walking in this heat.

“Why is everything closed?” the husband asked when they were moving, leaning in close behind him.

Why is this night different from all other nights?
For years, until Giggi could read, he was entrusted with the four questions, his grandfather comically drawing out the answers, making them wait before they could hide the afikoman and then find it later to claim their prize.

He adopted the couple, treating them to the best views from the Mount of Olives and all seven gates, selling them two rolls of film. When he dropped them at their hotel, the man shook his hand. If Jossi was ever in Boston, he should look them up. Brand imagined them showing him the town, the harbor lights and nightclubs, the dancehalls and neon boulevards he knew from the movies.

He'd never go. He was just lonely. It had only been four days since he'd spoken to her.

The Alaska would be closed, so he quit early and looped back to Princess Mary Avenue. The grocer's was still open. Brand parked and joined the line like a long-suffering husband sent on an errand. That there was wine left he counted a miracle.

In his room he prepared the feast. Thanks to the blackouts, he had candles. The one by his bedside was just a nub, and he chose two new ones. Instead of his mother's sterling silver candlesticks, used solely for this purpose, sharing the walnut hutch the rest of the year with her good crystal, he fit the candles into beer bottles and placed them on his bare table. It had been his mother's job to light the candles, then Giggi's, when she was
old enough, and as he scratched a match against the side of the box and bent to touch the wavering flame to the wick, he saw his sister—ten or eleven, in her best Sabbath dress, her blond braids crowning her head like a milkmaid—circling their table, folding napkins and setting out the wineglasses, an extra goblet in the middle for Elijah. Though he was only one tonight, Brand did the same, as if he were drinking with the prophet.

After sundown, he took the pillow from his bed and tucked it behind him on his chair so he could recline as he told the story.

Like his grandfather, he blessed the wine. As a child he hadn't listened, and his Kiddush was makeshift. After a taste of sweetness, he had to walk down the hall to the bathroom to wash his hands, then came back and started on the seder plate. Here was the parsley dipped in salt water to remember the tears of the people, the egg and the lamb shank, the bitter herbs. He broke the middle matzoh and asked himself the four questions, for years his only real Hebrew, the sacred language diligently memorized, indelible yet rote, never fully taken to heart. Like his father, bored by the pomp and pace of the ceremony, he was a skeptic, leery of any outward show, except even then, in his rational lack of faith, he felt guilty. Now he could see he wasn't the wicked child, as he'd sometimes thought, or as he suspected later, the simple one, but, like his father, the one who didn't know how to ask. Proud Brand. Why did he think he knew more than God?

He dipped a finger in his wine and spilled a drop on the
table for each of the ten plagues. As children they thrilled at the rain of blood, the frogs and lice and flies. This was their favorite part, God's messy retribution on their persecutors, even as Grandfather Udelson reminded them that no one should take pleasure in the sufferings of God's creatures. The lesson seemed even truer now, after the camps, as did the idea that in every generation each of them needed to realize they'd been delivered from Egypt, and for the first time, sitting there in the shifting candlelight, recalling all he'd lost, Brand understood there was a reason he'd been spared.

The meal itself wasn't worthy of his mother, but he ate the matzoh ball soup and roast chicken and fruit compote gratefully, wishing Eva were there to share it with him. He thought of Asher and Lipschitz in detention, and their families at home. In the camps, when there was no food, the devout celebrated with the word. Brand in his disillusion abstained, an evasion he regretted now. He wished he were a better Jew. This was a start.

For Giggi he'd hidden the afikoman behind his radio. At home, for finding it, their grandfather gave them each a shiny silver five-lats coin which his mother insisted they put in the bank. Now Brand didn't need a prize. He could recall only a few lines of the psalms, and said their everyday grace, still intact after all these years. He filled Elijah's cup and opened the door for him, then sat back down as if to wait.

“Next year in Jerusalem,” Brand said, and drank to the dead and to the future.

A cuckoo had built a nest in the cemetery. As if in rebuttal,
it started up its monotonous call. Outside his window, beyond the darkened crypts and the Church of the Dormition, the wall by the Zion Gate glowed a lurid honey-gold in the floodlights. With the holiday, the British were on high alert. Eva had made it clear they should have no contact, yet, as if he'd had a vision, Brand wanted to go and tell her what had happened. This was what he'd come to Jerusalem to find, a new purpose, and as he washed his dishes in the bathroom sink, moved by his revelation, he thought recklessly of proposing to her.

By morning his wits had returned. She was no believer, and might be angry with him for asking too much of her. He'd confused religion and emotion, the universal and the personal. With no one to confide in, the excitement he'd felt seemed private and suspect, the product of alcohol, nostalgia and loneliness—except he
had
been delivered out of this last Egypt, along with a million and a half others, and the fact that he was here, now, among thousands of them, wasn't luck or chance but history. He was free. What he did now was up to him, so while he didn't run out and join the nearest temple, he felt renewed, and when, Maundy Thursday, Fein called to say their young friend was out of the hospital, Brand saw it as a sign.

“He's not well enough to visit,” Fein said. “He needs rest.”

“Is it all right if I give him a call?”

“I'd wait. He may be contagious.”

“I'm glad he's feeling better.”

“So are we,” Fein said.

He thought of sending Pincus to her flat with a message, but
knew he was being stupid. When had he become so impatient? For years all he'd done was wait.

It was Passion Week, and the Old City was choked with processions. Gentiles of every sect traced Christ's steps along the Via Dolorosa, stopping at the numbered Stations of the Cross to take pictures of the reenactors and buy mementos from the Moslem shopkeepers. Brand made a killing selling film and running people up the Mount of Olives. Time moved faster when he was busy, and like an actual cabbie he was grateful for the crowds.

Easter Sunday the draw was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. He was second in the queue at the Jaffa Gate when he noticed an Arab at the head of the line give his spot to the couple behind him so he could ride with Brand. He was short and pale, in a black kaftan and keffiyeh, ducking behind the couple as if to hide. Among the pilgrims clutching olivewood crosses and the tourists draped with cameras he was conspicuous, and as soon as Brand pulled up and saw the glasses and piggy cheeks he knew who was beneath this hapless disguise.

Brand flashed on driving right past him, but Lipschitz grabbed the door handle and let himself in.