City of Secrets (13 page)

“You've seen her.”

“I've seen her.”

“She seems to think you're following her. Why would she think that?”

“I don't know,” Brand said.

“You haven't been following her.”

“I did once, to see who she was.”

“To see who she was.” With effort, Asher twisted to look at Victor. “And who is she?”

“One of the Rothschilds.”

“What would you say if I told you she's my wife?”

Now Brand tried to act surprised.

“She's not,” Asher said, “but I have a responsibility to her and to her family that's just as great. The way I'm responsible to you and Eva and Victor. The way Lipschitz was supposed to be responsible to all of us.” He pointed to his face, nodding as if it were proof. “Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Leave her alone. She attracts enough attention as it is. Now, how much do you know about what Eva's doing at the King David?”

“Not a lot.”

“Be specific, please.”

The only thing Brand left out was the part about the socks and the closet.

“That's good. You never want to know more than you need to. Eva doesn't need to know we've talked, is that clear?”

“Yes.” Though it wasn't at all.

“I have a job for you. No one can know about it. Will you do it for me?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you.” He reached a mitt across the table for Brand to take. Each finger was taped to a tongue depressor. It felt like a paddle. “Go with Victor.”

As he rose, Asher remained seated, and Brand suspected he couldn't stand. What else had they done to him? In the darkness against the wall rested a cot, in the corner a tin pail. He was living down here like a prisoner, like Lipschitz in his booby-trapped flat.

The job was a delivery. Brand didn't have to see the bulky sack swinging between Victor and Gideon as they lugged it across the courtyard and lowered it into his trunk to know it was Major Chadwick. The Peugeot was pointed toward a high iron gate, beyond which stretched the lightless desert. Though the knowledge provided only a grim satisfaction, he'd been
right about the Nablus Road. Against all logic he was taking the major back to the city, back to the same neighborhood where the British were searching for him. He had the address, and enough gas. Seeing him off, Gideon gave him a pistol, in case anything happened. After his talk with Asher, Brand understood it wasn't for Chadwick. It was for him.

T
he next night, while he was safely home in bed, dreaming of Eva at the Edison watching a film of him and Asher's blonde, the two of them strolling the beach where his family used to holiday, smiling at some private joke, Major H. P. Chadwick worried loose the ropes binding his wrists, broke a window and escaped barefoot over the roofs of the Bukharan Quarter. By the time the police arrived, the place was empty, but that didn't matter. The Mandate celebrated their new hero while the
Post
ridiculed the hapless kidnappers. Though it was no fault of his own, and the officers from Tel Aviv were still being held elsewhere, Brand expected the failure would reflect on everyone involved. Following Asher's orders, he hadn't told Eva. Now he couldn't.

Monday he dropped her off at the King David and ate his
lunch sitting in the drive, keeping an eye out for Edouard and the blonde. How much did he know, Asher had asked, as if
he
didn't know, or didn't trust Eva.

Brand thought she was stronger than all of them. As close as they'd become the last six months, not once, drunk or sober, had she said a word about her husband. He was her secret as surely as Katya was his, her memory recalled in solitude, tended reverently, like a well-kept grave. It was all he had, sometimes all he wanted—to be with her. Without her the world was meaningless, a round of tasteless meals and restless sleep. Eva was just a substitute. She knew it as surely as Brand did, their love a brittle consolation. Together they tried to remember what life was like, and then when they succeeded, felt guilty. He still thought they should go away, except he'd done that already. Even at sea Katya had followed him, like the stars, invisible by daylight, at night everywhere. If he left now, would he feel the same about Eva?

She came out a good twenty minutes early, by herself, surprising him. Normally she brightened, finding him waiting there. Today her face was set, lips pinched, one arm trapping her purse against her ribs as she stalked to the car.

Before she said a word, she fumbled with a pack of matches and lit a cigarette. She exhaled theatrically, scowling at the curling cloud. “Why do people think they can treat me like a servant?”

“Who treats you like a servant?” Her client, he hoped.

“Everyone, everywhere I go.”

“I'm sorry.” He pulled around a dove-gray Bentley and rolled down the drive.

“They think because they pay you they can treat you any way they like.”

Brand thought it was also true of being a cabbie but held off.

“He said he had to do something important, so would I mind seeing myself out.”

“‘Important.'”

“I'd like to see his face when he realizes it was me.”

She said it with such relish that he wondered if she had feelings for the man.

She sat back, her chin tipped to one side, biting her thumbnail and glaring at the passing storefronts. It was only when she finished her cigarette and stabbed it out in the ashtray that she remembered the pendant. He watched in the mirror as she sat up and fastened it, then slid the chain between her fingers till the clasp was in back.

“You never treat me that way,” she said.

“You'd kill me in my sleep.”

“I would not. I'd wake you up first.”

After his meeting with Asher, he was even more keenly aware of everything he didn't know. He couldn't quiz her on their mission at the King David, and remained alert for clues. Blackmail or reconnaissance, they were making a sustained effort. From what she'd let slip, he expected the payoff would be worth the sacrifice. He hoped so, and soon. He'd come to hate Mondays.

As always, she wanted him to stay, as if, having sold part of herself, she was lonely. He parked and followed her up the stairs, thinking he'd have one cognac. Her flat was hot, and she hadn't
eaten lunch. They lay down on her couch, dozing, the sun etching bright panes on the sheer curtains, no sound but the trilling sparrows, and for a moment, holding her, picturing the girl she'd been running through the harvest orchards, he wanted to save her. Was that love? Later he would beg Katya's forgiveness for entertaining the idea, but for an instant he was convinced, despite all the sorrows of the world, that they could be happy.

At five thirty the sirens blew curfew. By six, anyone left on the streets was subject to arrest, though in practice the police detained only Jews. In protest the students jammed Zion Square, tearing up their papers, the khamsin spawning whirlwinds of confetti. The British rolled up buses, and when those were full, stake trucks with wire cages. It was a show. They could detain only so many. Next week they'd release them and do it again.

For the students, being arrested was a piece of theater. They all knew what to say.

“Name,” the booking officer asked.

“A rightful citizen of Eretz Israel.”

“Address.”

“City of David, Land of Avraham.”

All week Brand tried to stay away from both the new and old cities, but there were checkpoints everywhere. Thursday afternoon, while he ducked through the suburbs, the Irgun released two of the Tel Aviv hostages, dropping off a pair of coffins in the middle of Trumpeldor Street. The hinged lids opened and the officers emerged like the risen dead, wobbly from sedatives, pound notes stuffed in their shirt pockets to cover wear and tear
on their uniforms. The radio made it clear. The other three would die if the British refused to commute their sentences.

In the Alaska, the rumor was that a crackdown was coming. Two of the waiters had left for Morocco, a euphemism for disappearing into the kibbutzim. As Brand ate his
Jaegerschnitzel,
he noted several booths usually reserved for regulars were empty.

“Slow night,” he said, paying his bill.

“Rabbits,” Willi said. “They hear a noise, they go running.”

“Not you.”

“Where am I going to go? I'm here.”

Friday night, when Mrs. Ohanesian's phone rang and she called him downstairs, Brand remembered Willi's philosophy.

“This is Mr. Grossman,” Fein said. “There's been a change of plans. I have to cancel my pickup for tomorrow morning.”

There was no pickup for tomorrow morning. “I'm sorry. I hope everything's all right.”

“Thank you, no. At the last minute some unexpected guests have decided they want to drop by, so tomorrow's no good.”

“Would you like it for another day?”

“No, I just thought I should let you know. Now I need to go tidy up. They're supposed to be here early, and everything needs to be put away.”

“I understand,” Brand said. “Good luck.”

His first urge was to run, grab Eva and head for Jaffa, only she was like Willi. Even if Brand managed to get through the checkpoints, she'd never go. He needed some of her stubbornness, some of her outrage. Like so many of his pricklier traits, he'd lost them in the camps, had become a model prisoner,
waiting for his bowl of thin soup, waiting for the day to end. The same patience that saved him made him no better than a penned animal. Rabbits, Willi said, and he was right. If Brand had a rabbit hole, he'd vanish down it, like those waiters taking off for Morocco, leaving the police an empty room. They were coming for him, Fein had warned, except he wasn't telling Brand to run. He was telling him to get ready.

He wondered if Eva knew. She had to, yet he was tempted to call Mrs. Sokolov, and then when he did, Eva wasn't there.

“Who shall I say called?”

Mr. Grossman, he was going to say, when there was no reason. “Jossi.”

“Oh, hello, Jossi. She's doing some last-minute shopping. You know we're having company tomorrow.”

“I heard. Do you have anything special planned?”

“No, we'll just be here and see how things go. I think that's the best plan.”

It wasn't the answer he wanted. He saw Asher's face, soft as a rotten apple, and thought of Koppelman.

“Good luck,” he said.

“Good luck to you too, Jossi. I'll tell her you called.”

He didn't need to dig through his things. He'd been careful all along, from habit, as if his flat being searched were inevitable. He didn't trust his cigar box to the crypt. He wrapped Eva's note and half of the money in oilcloth, tiptoed downstairs and, by moonlight, stopping every few turns of the shovel to make sure it was just the cuckoo, buried the bundle under a mound of dead flowers behind the caretaker's shed.

In the driveway the Peugeot shone. When he turned the key, he pictured Mrs. Ohanesian cocking her head toward the noise like her budgie. There were spots in front of the other boardinghouses, but he didn't want the police to see the car at all, and to be safe moved it to a quiet side street below David's Tomb, checking all four doors before climbing back up the hill.

Still he wanted to run, even if there was nowhere to go. After eluding them for so long, surrendering seemed a mistake. He'd never been tortured, or never professionally, only Nosey kicking at him as they fell out for roll call, forcing him to lie facedown in the snow, a daily, pointless torment. He wasn't like Asher or Koppelman, he was like Lipschitz. He might tell them everything, betraying Eva. He didn't know where any of the rest lived. He suspected Asher had set it up that way, his careful plans ruined by Brand falling for her.

In the morning he woke with the sun. Before he could wash, the radio told him the British had shut down the main phone exchanges and begun rounding up suspects. They'd had to fight their way into Kibbutz Yagur. There were reports of casualties.

Fein had been right about the operation but wrong about the scale. Tel Aviv was under a total curfew, an extra affront on the Sabbath. Here they'd cordoned the western neighborhoods and raided the headquarters of the Jewish Agency, whose leadership was under arrest. It was a baffling shift in tactics. Instead of going after the Irgun and the Stern Gang, they were targeting the Haganah, a strategy Brand thought idiotic. They might as well try to arrest the whole country. Strangely, the idea gave him hope, as if he were no longer alone.

He dressed, expecting the doorbell to ring at any second. His bed was made, the dishes put away, everything in its place, like a cell ready for inspection. It was the end of the month, so he left an envelope with his rent propped against the radio. He watered the cactus, and though there was no chance of rain, lowered the window so it was open just an inch, then sat down at his table and waited. After a while he got up and lit his Primus stove to make coffee. He was sipping it, looking out over the stony slopes of the cemetery at the Zion Gate, when from the front of the house came the low grumble of a diesel and the squeal of brakes.

How long he'd imagined this. That first time, in Riga, they'd grabbed him on the street. A car pulled up, and he hadn't had time to run. Now he was surprised at how calm he was, how resigned. The jump from his window was no more than fifteen feet. He could hide out in the crypt, a gun in each fist like a Wild West desperado.

Downstairs there was a rapping at the door. He could hear Mrs. Ohanesian saying something, and the burr of a man's voice. Rather than wait for them, he gathered himself and crossed the room. One hand on the knob, he gave the flat a last look, as if he'd never be back, then opened the door.

“Stop where you are,” a policeman at the foot of the stairs called, pointing.

Brand raised his hands.

Mrs. Ohanesian touched her heart as if stricken. “What is going on here?”

“This man is under arrest.”

“What has he done?”

“It's all right,” Brand said, suddenly proud of her. She was more upset than he was.

The policeman was accompanied by an Airborne soldier in a bright red beret. Poppies, they were called, notorious for their bar brawls and overzealous searches. The staircase was narrow, and the two advanced on Brand warily, as if he might resist. He held out his wrists to be handcuffed, but the policeman just took his arm.

The policeman went through Brand's pockets, glancing at his papers, confiscating them.

“I left the rent on the table,” Brand told Mrs. Ohanesian as they hauled him off.

“Be quiet,” the Poppy said, bending back Brand's hand so it felt like his fingers might snap, making him gasp.

“You're hurting him!” she protested, and followed them out onto the porch.

Brand struggled in their grasp, and the Poppy twisted his hand again, buckling his knees. Brand swore.

“I told you to shut up.”

“Stop it!” Mrs. Ohanesian screamed.

In the street a convoy idled, a jeep and a police van escorting a sand-colored bus with wire mesh windows from which a dozen prisoners watched. Brand recalled the old Arab with his box of scarves, the beseeching look he'd given him. Brand didn't want anyone's pity. He wanted to jerk his arm free and shatter the soldier's nose, and would have if they weren't holding him. He planted his heels as they dragged him toward the
open door, leaned back, deadweight, knowing he was only making it worse for himself. The prisoners clamored behind the wire, showering down curses. “Nazi bastards!”

The Poppy clamped a hand around Brand's ear and twisted. The pain made everything else secondary. It took all of Brand's strength not to faint. Before he could recover, they shoved him onto the bus and the doors folded closed. As he lay across the stairwell, covered in dust, his ear throbbing hotly, the prisoners gave him a round of applause he saw as mocking.

A man with a freshly split lip reached down from his seat to help him up. “Shabbat Shalom.”

Peaceful Sabbath. A comedian.

“Shabbat Shalom,” Brand said, brushing himself off.

As they pulled out, a squad of Poppies was crossing the yard for the porch, and while they wouldn't find anything, he wanted to apologize to Mrs. Ohanesian. He hadn't meant to make a scene.

The bus was less than half full, and smelled of burnt motor oil and sweat. He expected to see Fein or Yellin among his fellow passengers, but they were strangers—all of them men, several in rabbinical black, wearing prayer shawls and
kippot
. Some were white-haired, some just boys. All together, they resembled a modest minyan or a Torah class more than a secret army.