Fly Has a Hundred Eyes A, page 8
“Tried to sell me an Iron Age decanter. Said he found it when he was plowing fields near his village.”
“You didn’t buy it.”
“It wasn’t from Samaria. Rim and neck were wrong. More a Judean type. Still… You think it’s a fake?”
“Or stolen.”
“From Kharub?”
“Maybe. I couldn’t swear to it.”
The clock whirred as if it took in a breath. Soft chimes carefully struck twelve o’clock. Lily finished the tea and handed the glass to Judah.
Avi glanced at the clock. “We have to leave.”
Judah set the glass on the counter. “You sure it’s safe?”
“I’ll be all right,” Lily said and stood up.
“I have an appointment. At Part’s,” Avi said. “We’ll be fine.”
* * *
They headed for the New City through narrow alleys redolent with garbage, where armies of cats stalked and perched on the lids of cans, ready to pounce on their prey. Iridescent pigeons pecked at melon seeds and detritus scattered around the edge of oily puddles the same color as the birds.
“Wild life in the city,” Avi said. “Years ago the British brought cats here to control the rats. And now look.” He skirted a discarded melon rind. “I could never live in a city.”
They continued up the hill toward Zion Circus, passing machine shops, skirting grimy pools of grease, passing a Hebrew sign painted on the wall between two doors.
“Holy place. Forbidden to urinate here,” Avi read. “You see, even that is forbidden.” He smiled at the sign and the faint dark rivulets trickling along the wall below it.
“You know what happened back in the twenties?” he asked. “The Brits built a public toilet near Zion Circus. They were miffed when the Arab mayor refused to commit public urination for the opening ceremony. Told him they do it in France. He said he didn’t have to go, he went before he left his house.”
“Ever seen a photo in the Illustrated London Times of the Lord Mayor of London in full regalia,” Lily asked, “using a public latrine in Picadilly Circus?”
“No.”
“Neither have I,” Lily said, and was surprised that she had almost forgotten the rifle pointed in her direction and the stone chip from the building that had flown past her cheek.
At the sidewalk outside of Patt’s, Avi pulled a canvas chair away from one of the small wooden tables. “We can sit out here and watch the world go by. Sooner or later, everyone comes to the Street of the Prophets.” He gestured up and down the empty street. “It’s like Times Square.”
The only other person on the street was a woman who hurried out of the little grocery at the corner, weighted down with full shopping bags balanced from each hand.
A waiter stepped outside, wiping his hands on a towel.
“Cheese sandwich?” Avi asked Lily.
She nodded.
“Two. And orange juice twice,” he said to the waiter. He turned to Lily. “You don’t want the coffee. It will dissolve your teeth.”
The waiter continued wiping his hands on the towel. “The shipment of rimmonim you brought this morning from the kibbutz?” he said to Avi. “Some of them were rotten.”
Avi pushed away from the table. “The pomegranates? Maybe the whole crop is spoiled. I better go see.”
He entered the shop and disappeared through a door in the back of the bakery. Lily waited for a while in the shade of the locust trees, watching occasional passersby. An old man wearing threadbare, faded clothes shuffled along on the other side of the street, hugging buildings, tilting his face to the sun as though he were blind. A ButiGaz truck stacked with cylinders of butane for kitchen stoves rumbled by.
Lily fidgeted in her seat and wondered what was keeping Avi. A boy carrying a soccer ball ran down the street. A pale young woman in a long-sleeved dress pushed a child in a carriage.
Finally, Lily left the table and opened the door of the cafe to the yeasty aroma of bread and pastries fresh from the ovens, the bitter smell of boiled coffee, the clatter of dishes on small marble tables where people leaned toward each other and murmured in quiet voices. She walked past them to the back of the room where Avi had gone through the door. She turned the knob.
The door was locked.
TEN
Lily knocked. She heard movement behind the door and knocked again.
Avi’s voice, strained and apprehensive called out “Who is it?” He opened the door a crack and looked through the narrow opening still secured by a chain bolt. “Oh, it’s you.” He hesitated. “Sorry I left. Emergency.”
“A shipment of over-ripe pomegranates?” Lily looked past him into the back room, unfurnished except for a sink and towel roller in the corner.
What was so secret about a shipment of pomegranates from a kibbutz? Pomegranates—rimmonim. There’s another meaning, Lily remembered.
Hand grenades.
Ora stood in the middle of the room, in the same baggy maternity dress, this time loose around the waist.
“Ora gave birth to an unhealthy brace of hand grenades, didn’t she?” Lily said.
Avi flushed. “Who told you that?”
Ora twittered.
“You did,” Lily said. “Just a little while ago. The waiter said something about a shipment of pomegranates, rimmonim—hand grenades in Hebrew. That’s what you and Ora brought to Patt’s this morning.”
Ora giggled, sending the ripples of loose fabric from the dress surging around her middle like the tide.
Rafi, his hands white with flour, emerged into view, coming up from below. He stopped on the stairs.
“Are there flour bins in the basement?” Lily waited for a confirming titter from Ora. “Is that where you hide them?”
Rafi moved to the sink to wipe his hands. “Get her out of here,” he said in a low voice.
“She’s all right, Rafi. You told me…”
“I’ll take care of it.” Rafi reached for the towel and looked Lily over speculatively. “We’ll go for a walk.” He started for the door.
Lily heard the lock click behind them as they went back through the cafe and into the street.
They strolled under the trees, not looking at each other, brushing leaves out of the gutter with their shoes.
“Where are we going?” Lily asked.
“I don’t know.” He walked slowly, looking down at his feet, his hands in his pockets. “I’m just a tourist here.”
“Sure you are.”
They turned the corner at Rothschild Hospital and continued on toward Ethiopia Street.
“What are you really doing here?” Lily asked.
“Not much to tell. My name is Ralph Landon. I’m an orthopedic surgeon from Chicago, here for a few months to demonstrate new trauma procedures at Strauss Hospital.”
“I’ll bet.”
“A tourist. Here for a couple of months.”
Lily watched him as they sauntered up Ethiopia Street in the quiet of the siesta. “You want the grand tour,” she asked, “or the intimate one of back streets that tourists never see?”
“Intimate is always better.”
She smiled. He took his hands out of his pockets and smiled back.
“Over there,” she waved toward a building on the other side of the road, “is the former home of the American School. Before they built the one in East Jerusalem.”
“That where you live? The American School?”
“Where do you live?”
“I rent a bed-sitting room with board and laundry in Katamon, for eight pounds a month.”
“You’re overpaying. You can get a whole apartment for five pounds a month.”
Lily pointed to a house next door to the black-domed Ethiopian Church. A guard in a white uniform stood at the door. “Haile Selassie, the Lion of Judah, Emperor of Abbysinia, descendant of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, lives right there, in the Abbysinian Palace.”
“In parts of Chicago,” he said, “the South Side, some people think he’s the new Messiah. A new religion, Ras Tafarians. We used to get called to the South Side sometimes to fix up knife wounds when I was a resident at Michael Reese. That’s when I found out.”
“You really are a doctor, aren’t you?”
“I told you.”
“You said Ora was your wife.”
“I don’t always tell the truth.”
“You honestly work at Strauss Hospital?”
Rafi nodded and kept walking, slower, his hands in his pockets, brushing his shoe along a pile of leaves on the curb, scattering them into the roadway.
“I like the quiet this time of day,” Lily said.
They strolled along the street, the only sounds their own footsteps, the crickets, and leaves stirring in the afternoon breeze.
“But that’s not the real reason you’re here, to teach trauma techniques,” Lily said. “You’re smuggling arms.”
“Where’d you get that idea?”
Lily shook her head. “I caught you white-handed. Why the alias?”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’d have to take lessons in stupidity to miss what you’re doing.”
“I don’t have an alias. Just simpler to use a Hebrew name. Raphael.”
“You said you don’t always tell the truth.”
“And you believed me?” He stopped walking and faced her. “I’m getting hungry. How about you? There’s a new cafe on Chancellor Road, across from the hospital.”
They turned left on Chancellor Road, their footsteps echoing in the silence. In front of the cafe, they sat at a table under an umbrella and waited in the eerie hush of the siesta.
A car was pulled up on the sidewalk in front of an arched doorway; bits of torn gray paper scudded among the leaves on the pavement and eddied in the wind.
A beggar sat cross-legged next to the steps of the Health Center across the road, his eyes closed, an open book across his lap, an engraved copper begging bowl next to his knee.
Rafi went into the cafe, emerging after a few minutes with two bottles of orange soda. “We have to make do with this. ‘Geschlossen zwicben Zwie und Vier fur Schlafstunde.” Closed between two and four for the siesta.“
Lily took a sip of the soda. “What are you doing here really?” she asked.
“I told you. Demonstrating techniques for treating traumas at the hospital.”
“Just working at a hospital? Every fourth man in Jerusalem is a doctor,” she told him. “Taxi drivers and hod carriers are doctors. They don’t need one more doctor in Jerusalem. You’re here to smuggle arms.”
“What makes you think that?”
“The sherut for one thing. And today at Patt’s.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Why would a doctor take chances like that?”
Rafi shifted in his chair. He looked down at the table and took a sip from the soda bottle. “That reminds me of a story,” he said. “Moishe and Chaim…”
“Were on the road from Minsk to Pinsk?”
Rafi shook his head. “No. This time they were on the high seas in a leaky boat. In a storm. The boat was pitching and tossing, pitching and tossing.” Rafi rocked back and forth like the tide, his hands and forearms rising and falling. “Moishe cried, ”Help! Help! The ship is sinking! The ship is sinking!“ And Chaim answered, ”So why are you worried? Is it your ship?“”
Lily sat quietly for a moment, not smiling, her arms crossed over her chest.
“You were supposed to laugh,” Rafi said.
“Why were they in a leaky boat?”
“It was the only one they had.”
She leaned forward and touched his arm. “You have to be careful. Penalties are getting more severe. They sentence people to death for smuggling arms now.”
“I am careful. Besides, they always seem to commute the sentence.”
He took another swallow of soda, tapped his foot and looked toward the beggar asleep at the steps of the Health Center. “What would you like to do now? We could go tea dancing at Cafe Europa. Or to the Edison and watch a movie. Walter Huston is enlarging the British Empire in Rhodes of Africa this week. We can spit shells from sunflower seeds onto the floor the whole afternoon. Or we could go to a salon—a genuine salon—at an artist’s house.”
“I have to meet someone for dinner at six o’clock.”
“The salon it is,” he said and tilted the soda bottle to finish it. “We’ll drop in and leave after an hour, like important people.”
“I’ve never been to a salon. What do people do?”
“Sit around in a circle and take turns talking about themselves.”
“Does anyone reveal a guilty secret?”
He shook his head. “They come to flex their egos. They say, ”I won this prize; I invented that; I wrote that.“ It’s edifying.”
“Sounds boring.”
“It is. High society in Jerusalem. For visiting dignitaries like us.” He stood up. “Leave the bottle on the table.”
“Where is the salon?”
“A little way from here. Kalman House. He’s an opthamologist. Runs an eye clinic out of his house. She’s an artist and has her studio there. They hold open house every Thursday afternoon.”
“How do you know them?”
“From the hospital.” Rafi looked at his watch. “If we walk slowly, we won’t arrive too early.”
They strolled in the direction of Zion Circus. In a small alley with steps that led down a steep incline, the sensuous smell of roasting nuts drifted toward them from a shop built into the stairway.
“Someday I’ll buy you a bag of pistachios,” Rafi said.
“I’d rather have rubies.”
Dissonant sounds of muezzins’ calls for prayer wafted toward them from loudspeakers on a multitude of minarets near the Old City.
“It’s three-thirty,” Lily said. “Siesta’s over.”
“That’s how you tell time?”
“Muslims are called to prayer five times a day—when they wake up just before first light, in mid-morning, at noon before the mid-day meal, at the end of the siesta, at sun-down, and before they go to sleep. Like a factory whistle. Tells you the time, even though you don’t work in the mill.”
People appeared in the streets; shopkeepers unlocked their doors. Ancient cars gasped along the road; motorbikes squealed between sputtering trucks and careened around horse-drawn wagons.
A man in a black felt fedora brushed against Lily, knocking his briefcase against her leg as he hurried past.
From somewhere near the Old City, hoarse shouts drifted toward them, faint and indistinguishable at first, then growing in intensity, punctuated with cries and shrieks. Lily stopped and grabbed Rafi’s hand. Not another riot, another bomb, another lifeless face like Dr. Stern’s. Rafi pressed her hand for a moment, then put his arm around her waist.
Around them, traffic slowed, people stood silent with harried faces animated by fear. Lily waited, anticipating horror, waited for the sound of gunfire, the jolt of an explosion, the howl of sirens through the streets.
ELEVEN
The hairdresser, ready to open his shop, left the shutters half-closed; the greengrocer, carrying a box of apricots, halted on the sidewalk. Traffic on the road barely moved. A man on a motor bike lingered at the corner, one foot on the ground, the bike canted against his leg, his head tilted toward the Old City. All waited, listening in mute fellowship for echoes from the Old City.
The man in the black fedora knelt on the sidewalk, opened his briefcase and took out a gun that glinted blue-black in the sun. He thrust it into his belt, catching it in the fringes of a prayer-vest that dangled beneath his shirt. A tall man behind him peered over the rim of his sunglasses and backed away. A woman glanced at the gun, smiled at her friend and raised an eyebrow.
Noises from the Old City abated. Fear dissipated; shoulders that had been hunched relaxed. People still waited until the street filled with familiar sounds—mothers calling to children, taxis honking, buses coughing their way through the streets—and then turned away from each other. They walked around the man in the fedora, their eyes straight ahead.
Rafi let out a long breath. “Well, that certainly got my adrenals flowing.”
Lily noticed that her fingers were still shaking. “The man in the fedora…”
“He wasn’t Hagganah,” Rafi said.
“How do you know?”
Rafi put his hands in his pockets. “What were you going to say about the man in the fedora?”
“He could be arrested for carrying arms,” Lily said after a while.
Rafi kept walking, kicking at imaginary pebbles with the toes of his shoes. “Not if he’s a supernumerary.” He didn’t look up.
“Supernumeraries carry spears. At the opera.”
“British police recruit locals, Arabs and Jews, as reserves.” He took his hands out of his pockets. “Call them supernumeraries.”
“What kind of gun was it?”
“A Luger.”
“The Brits issue German weapons?”
“Probably his own.”
“Are they expensive?” Lily asked.
“Forty, fifty dollars.” Rafi reached for her arm. “You want one?”
“Where would a fellah get the money?”
“A fellah? What makes you ask that?”
“It said in the paper that the police tracked Eastbourne’s attackers to an Arab village and found a Luger hidden in a wall.”
“Maybe he stole it?” Rafi shrugged. “Got it from the Mufti?”
“I think it’s odd, that’s all. They didn’t arrest the man, or question him, just let him go when he said he didn’t put it there…” Her voice trailed off.
They strolled in silence, Rafi’s fingers still lightly on her elbow. She could feel the warmth from his body, and was surprised at how comfortable she was with it.
After awhile, he pointed down the road to a house where green shutters stood open on the upstairs balconies and white curtains fluttered softly in the afternoon breeze. “Kalman’s is over there, the big house with the awnings, near the corner.”
Rafi rang the bell. The sound echoed inside the house, and penetrated through the tall arched windows. Footsteps clattered on a stone floor.
