A Palestine Affair

by Jonathan Wilson

  Kirsch stood and came around to the front of his desk. He noticed that Joyce was wearing a thin silver ankle bracelet. She looked altogether too well groomed and happy—quite a contrast to when he had seen her on Sunday night. She was a woman, it seemed, with an exceptional capacity for recovery. The ugly thought crossed his mind that she had spent the previous night in bed with Frumkin, and then the early part of this morning grooming herself in the luxurious bathroom at his hotel.

  “I’d better come over to your place and take a look around.”

  “Oh, no need for that, I’ve cleaned everything up.”

  Kirsch sighed. “Did you find anything when you cleaned up? Something left behind?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  “If you don’t mind my saying so, you don’t seem very disturbed by this.”

  “Should I be? I mean compared to the Big Day what’s a little breaking and entering?”

  Kirsch felt increasingly angry with her. “Did it occur to you that the two events may be connected, or that you may be in danger?”

  Was he trying to scare her? Even as he spoke Kirsch felt ridiculous. How could the two events be connected when the murderer, as he well knew, was halfway through the Transjordan desert? Still, Joyce couldn’t be aware of that.

  “I mean, had you even locked your door when you went out?”

  “I doubt it. We have absolutely nothing worth stealing. Apart from the paintings, of course.”

  He wished she would stop saying “we.” “And you found nothing new there when you cleaned up?”

  “I thought we’d already been through this?”

  “Did you see my note?”

  Joyce paused a moment and furrowed her brow. “Your note? I don’t think so . . . no.”

  Kirsch’s face fell.

  “Of course I saw your note!”

  She was laughing again. “But really, Robert, you miss me that much? I must be better in bed than I ever imagined.”

  Kirsch blushed, and looked toward the door of his office. It was definitely closed. He had never known a woman who spoke like this.

  “You found nothing then,” he muttered, “apart from my note.”

  Joyce stood. She moved close and kissed him on the lips.

  “I want you to drive me out to Cremisan.”

  “To the monastery?”

  “Exactly.”

  “When?”

  “At the weekend.”

  “And until then? I won’t see you?”

  “Robert! I’m filming!” Her voice was teasing, but he didn’t mind.

  “You shouldn’t stay in that cottage.”

  “And where should I stay? With you? Hardly proper, old chap.”

  The phony upper-class English accent in which she had delivered the phrase was off. Joyce sounded as if she were Welsh; Americans always got it wrong, he thought.

  Joyce moved toward the door.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll buy a guard dog, or you can send that obnoxious detective round again and have him stand sentry.”

  Kirsch looked at her quizzically.

  “What detective?”

  “The one you sent by to check up on Mark and me. He lay on the bed—don’t look so shocked, I wasn’t in it—and asked questions.”

  “I didn’t send anyone.”

  Joyce shrugged. “I’m late,” she said. “I have places to go and people to see. Saturday morning? Ten o’clock. Okay?”

  “Wait a minute, this man, what did he look like? What did he say his name was?”

  “Not bad-looking at all. Nice eyes, dark skin, and he was, I would say, a local Jew. He had a bit of a lisp.”

  “Black wavy hair and a bit stocky?”

  “Yes. Robert, I’m leaving.”

  “Yes,” Kirsch responded distractedly. “Go ahead.”

  Kirsch returned to his desk and removed a blank sheet of paper from the top drawer. He felt in his tunic pocket for the pencil that he always carried, but came up instead with the police tunic button that he had picked up in Joyce’s garden. He heard himself asking her: “Did you find anything when you cleaned up?” and her reply, “Nothing at all.” He stared at the button then put it back in his pocket. He stood up, put his hand to his mouth in order to remove the print of Joyce’s lipstick, then opened the door to his office. The corridor was empty; its cracked yellow walls were covered in condensation, as if the building itself were sweating in the khamsin.

  “Has anyone seen Harlap?” Kirsch yelled.

  There was no reply. Kirsch walked down to the main office. The room was strangely quiet. Usually it was crowded with supplicants— relatives of the petty thieves who had been picked up that day, and complainers about one thing or another: reporting your neighbor for minor violations was a territorial pastime. On most mornings you couldn’t hear yourself over the noise, but since Cartwright’s death a stale, somber air had predominated. The local criminals seemed to have decided to lie low for a few days. No one wants to be around policemen when one of their own has recently been shot.

  “Where’s Harlap?” Kirsch asked again.

  The desk sergeant, Mallory, looked up from a ledger in which he had been completing the morning reports. He blotted the page, then snapped the book shut as if he were the model of efficiency.

  “He’s down at the Jaffa Gate, sir. On detail for that Metropolis Film Corporation.”

  “Oh, is he?”

  “Is he supposed to be somewhere else, sir?”

  Kirsch shook his head.

  “Did you know that the walls that they’re storming weren’t even bloody well there when Titus destroyed the Second Temple?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Oh, never mind.”

  “If Harlap comes in, tell him I’m looking for him.”

  “Right, sir.”

  Kirsch made toward the door.

  “And where shall I tell him you are?”

  Kirsch paused a moment.

  “Forget it, Mallory. Don’t say anything. I’ll find him before he finds me.”

  But Kirsch didn’t find Harlap, neither that morning nor for the rest of the week. According to Mallory, the sergeant had phoned the station on Wednesday shortly after Kirsch had left to look for him. He’d told Mallory that Frumkin didn’t need the police after all, filming was canceled for the day on account of an impending dust storm, and he, Harlap, was taking a few days off that he had coming. He was going to visit his mother in Haifa, she’d been admitted to the government hospital with some kind of breathing problem. The doctors thought . . . But Kirsch hadn’t been interested in what the doctors had thought. There were far more pressing concerns. What on earth had Harlap been doing over at the Bloombergs poking around and asking questions? Was Ross up to something behind Kirsch’s back? What the hell was going on?

  For the rest of the week Kirsch tried, without much success, to conceal his confusion and apprehension. At the station he was snappish and petty; at home, isolate and inflamed with an ugly combination of guilt and envy. It was a physical sensation: alone at his kitchen table trying to read, he would think of Saud and his face would begin to burn, think of Joyce and the sensation would be repeated. He would get up, go to the sink, and splash cold water over his head. Of Bloomberg there was no word. Meanwhile, Frumkin’s film crew, so he’d heard, had moved to a location site north of Tel Aviv. Joyce must have gone with them. Wherever she was, she wasn’t at home. Ignoring her request to wait until the weekend, he had visited her cottage each evening. The window shutters were closed, and when he beat on the door no one answered. On Friday night, arriving shortly before sunset after a day spent doing virtually nothing, which, in Kirsch’s present state of high nervousness seemed to exhaust him more than activity, he slumped into a wicker chair that Bloomberg had left in the garden. He watched the shadows deepen and lengthen. The declining sun shed its luster over the Bloombergs’ overgrown garden, tinting the trodden green path with violet specks and turning the gray gate silver. Unbidden, the ghost of
Kirsch’s brother Marcus entered through the gate and sauntered down the path, hands in the pockets of his white trousers, straw boater angled jauntily on his head, as if he were setting off for a picnic on the river: only Marcus’s shirt was buttoned to the neck and Kirsch knew the tightness was intended to hide the mortal wound in his chest. Marcus was singing “April Showers,” affecting Al Jolson’s voice and pretending not to notice his younger brother staring at him from the garden chair. “So if it’s raining, have no regrets—because it isn’t raining, you know, it’s raining vi-o-lets.” Kirsch almost joined in with Marcus on the chorus, but it seemed inappropriate somehow to duet with the dead. The song ended and Kirsch woke with a shiver and a start. And suddenly he remembered that buttons had been missing from Harlap’s tunic on the day that the sergeant had brought in Saud, and wasn’t it possible that the button in Kirsch’s pocket, the one that he’d picked up at the end of this very garden, had come from the same tunic? Harlap had certainly been up at Bloomberg’s cottage; Joyce had described both him and his visit. But perhaps he had also shown up here before? Was it De Groot, fighting for his life, who had grabbed at Harlap’s shirt? It seemed unlikely, but it wasn’t impossible. That old rabbi, Sonnenfeld, had tried to tell Kirsch that the murderer was a Zionist and not the Arab boy, but Kirsch hadn’t taken him seriously. And the letters. Somebody knew that De Groot was on his way to London and perhaps that same somebody wanted to prevent him from going. Kirsch had been a fool. Saud had presented himself so obviously as the culprit that Kirsch had stopped pursuing other avenues. He had known, because it had been instilled in him since the beginning of his stay in Palestine, that the politics of the place led plenty of Arabs to hate Jews and vice versa; but it hadn’t really penetrated, although there was no rational reason why it shouldn’t have, that, in ways that transcended the personal, Jews might hate each other enough to kill. His soul had been armed against such thinking, almost since birth. But if Harlap was involved in the murder of De Groot, for what precise reason, and to what end? And was it possible that Kirsch was imagining connections where there were none (the button!) in a pathetic attempt at selfjustification: to blame Harlap and deflect his own responsibility for Saud’s escape? And where did all this place the boy? Whatever the answers, the situation was dangerous. Whoever had shot Cartwright was still out there, Harlap was missing, and Joyce, Kirsch was sure, although he didn’t know quite why, needed immediate protection.

  Kirsch ran to the gate, kick-started his motorbike and raced toward the center of the city, heading for the Allenby Hotel on Jaffa Road. He had to find out exactly where Frumkin had taken his film crew. As he approached his destination Kirsch was obliged to follow a traffic diversion. The roads were blocked in the approaches to the Orthodox quarter of Mea She’arim. The Jewish Sabbath had commenced at sunset and the streets were thronged with kaftaned fur-hatted Hasidim making their way to prayers. In one particular spot, just beyond the Orthodox precincts, a dense crowd had formed and Kirsch revved the engine of his bike in order to attempt a passage. He remembered Ross telling him—it must have been during his first week in the city—that, whatever the reason for their formation, “crowds are not good in Jerusalem and should never be allowed to gather.” Kirsch dismounted from his bike and pushed his way into the middle of a mass of shouting, gesticulating individuals. Once there, in a lacuna at the heart of the mob, Kirsch found a young Arab taxi driver earnestly claiming his fare.

  “What’s going on here?” Kirsch asked. “You realize you’re blocking the whole road?”

  “I bring him all the way from Jaffa! Forty miles! Now he tells me he can’t pay.”

  The culprit was a tall, thin stick of a man, bearded, pasty-faced and, by dint of the expression on his face, without a trace of remorse for the petty crime that he had apparently perpetrated.

  “He will pay him. He will pay him!” someone shouted very close to Kirsch’s ear. “But not today. Let him come late tomorrow night, or better on Sunday morning.”

  “What’s wrong with right now?” Kirsch asked the interloper. “Or are you suggesting that our friend here drive back to Jaffa then return to get his money on Sunday morning?”

  Kirsch’s words were quickly translated into Yiddish and received by way of reply several shocked looks and one or two shrugs, as if to ask, “And why not?”

  The night sky had darkened considerably and where a moment ago only three stars were visible, now there were thousands. Little by little, in small waves of coherence that rolled in over the hubbub of noisy en-treatment and dissent, Kirsch learned the essence of the problem. The Arab driver and his passenger had set out in good time from Jaffa that afternoon. But there had been endless delays and just as they reached Jerusalem the sun had set, the Sabbath had begun and no sort of financial transaction could take place. Thus, there was no real refusal to pay, only the genuine desire, as already articulated, to postpone payment. Why the Arab driver failed to see the propriety of his passenger’s situation was a mystery, it seemed, to everyone save Kirsch and the driver.

  The driver, who seemed a little dazed by now, had decided to take the weight off his feet and sit in the middle of the street. Clearly, like Kirsch, he understood little Hebrew or Yiddish, and no one in the vicinity, it seemed, knew Arabic. The swirl of translation into a butchered English that everyone might understand was beginning to exhaust all the parties. Kirsch too felt like sitting down, or better still, lying down. He had already spent half an hour on this absurd incident. It wasn’t a hostile environment. In fact, to Kirsch’s surprise—perhaps it was the aura of the sacred hour—everyone, noisy as they were, appeared even-tempered and well-meaning toward the driver, but a resolution, simple though it appeared it must be, had thus far eluded him. Joyce, he needed to remember, was his priority, but the implacable crowd had him stitched up and hemmed in.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, I’ll pay,” he yelled finally in a voice strong with gratitude for the inspiration. “And you”—he pointed at the passenger—“you’ll come along on Sunday morning to the police station and you’ll pay me back.”

  Kirsch reached for the leather purse in his pocket, but producing the money, while it brought a cluck of satisfaction from the driver, simultaneously elicited a gasp of horror from his passenger.

  “No no no.” Someone had hold of Kirsch’s wrist. “A goy, a goy, it has to be a goy.”

  “Let go!” Kirsch stared down the speaker, and to his own astonishment found himself enunciating, “I am a goy. Understand? C. of E., if you must know. Now let me give this poor fellow his money and we can all be on our way.”

  Kirsch at this moment did not a care a jot if the Jews in the crowd believed him. And cared even less that he was violating the Hasid’s yearning for a pure Gentile surrogate to do his business. All he wanted was a path to run his motorbike through the crowd. And then, as he was about to hand the three silver twenty-piastre coins into the outstretched hand of the driver from Jaffa, he spotted Harlap skirting the fringe of the crowd.

  “Hey!” Kirsch yelled. “Stop right there.”

  Harlap turned, caught Kirsch’s eye, and broke into a run.

  Kirsch let the coins fall to the ground. He pushed his way violently through the circle of men that surrounded him and sprinted up Jaffa Road following in the direction that Harlap had taken. Outside the gates of the Municipal Hospital Kirsch halted, sweating and out of breath. He had lost his quarry. He walked slowly back to where he had left his motorbike. The haggling crowd had vanished. Someone had wheeled Kirsch’s bike off the road and propped it against a corner wall. There were two dark mounds of garbage at the foot of the stone, and the smell of filth and the general air of shabbiness combined with Kirsch’s physical exhaustion to send him slumping to the ground. He sat with his back against the front wheel of the bike, his breath coming in short bursts, certain of only one thing, that thus far he had got almost everything wrong.

  25.

  Bloomberg woke in the middle of the night to find the muzzle of a rifle
sticking into his chest.

  “Get up! get up!” Salaman screamed, and gave Bloomberg a hefty kick in the side. Bloomberg let out a yell and rolled over. Salaman snapped his fingers and spat in Bloomberg’s face.

  “Up!”

  “What the hell’s going on?”

  Bloomberg stood clutching his side. Salaman prodded the gun in his back and forced him out of the tent.

  A small fire burned inside a circle of stones. In its orange light Bloomberg saw Rachman, bound and gagged, sitting cross-legged. Twenty yards away two of the other men crouched stabbing at something on the ground, grunting and yelling as they did so. For a moment Bloomberg froze: he was sure it was the boy being sliced under those murderous rips, but then Salaman shoved him facedown and Bloomberg, spitting a mouthful of sand, scrambled forward to see that the victim was only an old khaki tunic, standard government issue.

  With one heave Salaman tumbled Bloomberg’s large canvas hold-all from the lead camel and unceremoniously dumped out the artist’s supplies: brushes, paint tubes, cans of oil and turpentine. A second large bag soon followed. Salaman spilled most of its contents onto the sand: tins of meat, jam, milk and biscuits, and a small spirit stove, which was the only thing that he deemed worth taking. He called Mustafa over and together they bundled Rachman into the place on the camel’s back vacated by the bags. Shortly after, Mustafa emerged proudly from Bloomberg’s tent, where he had acquired a watch and an oil lamp, and then they were done. The big prizes, Bloomberg sensed, were the camels themselves.

  In addition to his scattered supplies, they left him the fire, the skinniest horse, and a flagon of water. Bloomberg, still clutching his bruised side as the camels and their riders disappeared into the night, felt oddly grateful to his attackers. Wasn’t being stripped bare what he was aiming for? Lear on the heath. You fuck people up, you get what you deserve. The stars hung above him in vast random clusters, as if God were a Hatton Garden diamond merchant rolling his stock onto black velvet bedding for Bloomberg’s personal appraisal. But before he had time to collect his grand philosophic thoughts the boy appeared, from out of nowhere it seemed. The desert night was chill and Saud shivered.