Tongues of Fire

by Peter Abrahams

  Rehv looked at the lights of the waiting ships. They were no closer than before.

  They began again. Sergeant Levy was very heavy. Rehv tried a modified sidestroke. They seemed to move faster.

  “Now we’re doing it,” Sergeant Levy said.

  Rehv could hardly hear him. He heard only his own grunting, the screaming, and from time to time odd sounds like a hand smacking the water with force.

  They stopped again, and turned to the lights. They were no closer.

  “I think we’ll do better if I try some swimming on my own,” Sergeant Levy said.

  “You told me you can’t swim.”

  “I was exaggerating.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “It’s true.” Sergeant Levy pushed himself free. He made some movements in the water. He didn’t sink.

  “All right,” Rehv said.

  He swam beside Sergeant Levy. He felt the cold sucking all the strength out of his body. He felt his heart beating faster to keep him warm. He didn’t even know why he was exerting all this effort. Then he remembered: Sergeant Levy.

  He heard more of those odd splashes around him. He tried the breaststroke. Something bumped him in the back. What? Something.

  “Sergeant Levy,” he called. “Still swimming?”

  “Right,” came Levy’s voice. It sounded far away. Perhaps it was the screaming.

  He swam and screamed, swam and screamed, swam and screamed. “Sergeant Levy. Still swimming?”

  “Way ahead of you,” came the big man’s reply, from very far away.

  So he swam and screamed some more.

  He felt a hand touch his shoulder. “Sergeant Levy?” he said.

  “Here’s a live one for a change.” An American voice.

  “Have you got Levy?” Rehv asked in English.

  Two sailors in white pulled him into a lifeboat. He glanced around. “You haven’t got Levy.”

  “Look how blue the bastard is,” one of them said. “Better get some blankets.”

  “There’s no time. Levy’s still out there.”

  “Sure, pal.”

  Isaac Rehv looked back at the coast. Mount Carmel burned like a funeral pyre. High above its summit tongues of fire blazed in the night. Their reflections licked toward him across the dark sea, touched him, held him, baptized his body in cold fire. In the mirrored glare he could see that Sergeant Levy was gone. Even at that moment he knew that Sergeant Levy was one of the lucky ones.

  PART ONE

  BABYLON

  CHAPTER ONE

  Slowly the sleeping pill released its grip. “Try these,” Quentin Katz had said. “You’ll sleep like the dead.” And he did every night. No nightmares, no dreams, no renewal. “You look like hell,” Katz told him one day. “Are you taking those pills?”

  “Yes.”

  “Better double the dosage.”

  He lay with his eyes closed, watching green spots jump across the salmon-colored insides of his eyelids. He heard heavy traffic grumbling in the street below. Gasoline was a dollar a gallon.

  He didn’t want to get up, fold the camp cot, and put it in the storage room. He didn’t want to turn on the coffee machine and sweep the polished pine floor. He didn’t want to see the latest exhibit: four clapboard cabins the size and shape of telephone booths, standing in a row in the center of the high-ceilinged room.

  “You like?” Quentin Katz had asked after they had carried the booths up the stairs.

  He hadn’t known what to say.

  “You go in, sit on the little bench, drop a quarter into the slot, and a projector beams a two-minute film of nothing but close-up violence. Close-up. If that’s not a real tour de force I don’t know what is.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? It’s obvious why. There are hundreds of booths like these around Times Square, but all they show is porn. The artist is making a statement.”

  “What?”

  Katz had sighed. “It’s hard to put into words, exactly. It’s conceptual art.”

  “Are they for sale?”

  “Not really. I suppose if there was an offer … Why? Do you know someone who might be interested?”

  “No.”

  “Well, don’t worry about it. We’ve got a grant from the National Arts Council to show them for six weeks.”

  Katz and his wife, Sheila Finkle, were his sponsors in America. He slept in The Loft, a gallery they owned in SoHo. To Rehv the word had always meant London.

  “They’ve got one too,” Katz had agreed. “But ours is better.” They had one child, a little boy named Joshua Katz-Finkle.

  He didn’t want to open his eyes, but after a while his back began to hurt, so he did. The room was just the way he had seen it in his mind—the high tin ceiling, the four booths, the polished floor—everything the same, except for the man in the dark suit standing by the window. He was a slight, small-boned man with white hair, pale skin, and bright blue eyes: a Jesuit scholar with a burn scar on his left cheek the size of a rose in full bloom.

  “Good morning,” he said gently. “I envy you such deep sleep.” He spoke English but a faint Hebrew rhythm moved behind the words. “You are Isaac Rehv?”

  Rehv sat up quickly. “How did you get in here?”

  “The door was open.”

  “No it wasn’t.”

  The little man softly rubbed the raw flower on the side of his face, perhaps making sure it was still there. “Does it matter?” Rehv heard fatigue slip in round the edges of his voice. “I’m in now. I’m sorry if I’ve startled you.”

  “Who are you?”

  “You can call me Harry,” he said with a shy smile.

  Rehv stood up. He noticed the man who wanted to be called Harry looking at his body in a curious professional way, like a judge at a dog show. He supposed it was recorded under early middle-aged, muscular, slightly heavy. As he rummaged through the small pile of clothing on the floor he said, “Go away, Harry.” He put on a pair of Quentin Katz’s trousers, too big around the waist and half an inch too short, a shirt of Calvin Klein’s that Quentin Katz could no longer get into, and stuffed a worn and shapeless leather wallet bearing a faded gold Q.K. into the back pocket. He remembered a wallet with I.R. printed on one corner. Inside were a few photographs that he wished he had sometimes when he was alone.

  “Go away, Harry.” He wanted nothing to do with Harry, or spray painting the Statue of Liberty, or kidnapping men in white robes, or throwing Molotov cocktails across embassy lawns. “You seem like a nice man, but please go away.”

  “I’m with the Haganah,” Harry said, as if that settled everything.

  Rehv folded the camp cot and carried it to the storage room. “That’s why I want you to go.”

  Harry followed him through the door, perhaps because he didn’t want to raise his voice, perhaps because he didn’t like the bare white room filled with dirty white light that came in through the tall windows. Rehv felt Harry touch his arm. “I just want to talk to you. Would a cup of coffee be too much trouble?”

  Coffee was easy. Quentin Katz believed in offering visitors coffee the moment they walked through the door: “It’s good business.” In the storage room were a stove, a small espresso machine, a coffee grinder, a percolator, and tins of coffee beans from Colombia, Brazil, Kenya, and Java. Rehv kept a jar of instant on the top shelf.

  They sat on the polished pine floor drinking black coffee from ivory-colored Rosenthal cups. The dirty white light turned the bad side of Harry’s face into lunar crust. Rehv saw his hand tremble slightly as he raised the cup to his lips, and wondered how old he was.

  “It’s very good coffee, thank you,” Harry said after one sip. He placed the cup carefully on the floor and didn’t touch it again. Little concentric waves of coffee pulsed across the surface of the cup, back and forth, colliding, diminishing, dying. Rehv looked up to find bright blue eyes gazing at him thoughtfully.

  “So,” Harry said. “You’ve decided to assimilate, is that it?”

&nbs
p; “Oh shit.” Rehv waved the back of his hand at the four booths in the center of the room to show Harry how wrong he was.

  “What are those?”

  “Art.”

  “I see.” The blue eyes ran their gaze over the exhibit. Then suddenly a glitter broke through their surface, as if Harry were about to smile. He didn’t smile, but he said, “I do see. They’re the portable toilets Americans use at construction sites. What a funny idea.”

  “You should get yourself a grant.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Nothing.”

  Harry shifted slightly. He wasn’t comfortable on the floor. “I’m afraid we don’t know much about you, Mr. Rehv.”

  But you knew where to find me, Rehv thought. He said, “Why don’t you tell me what you want? It won’t be long before the owners come to open the gallery.”

  Harry inched closer on the floor. His breath smelled of mint toothpaste. “We want you to do one little job. It will be very simple, but a very big help.”

  “To what end?”

  The gentleness dropped away from Harry’s voice like a button from a fencing sword. “For the cause,” he said angrily. The good side of his face went scarlet. The bad stayed the way it was. The word Israel hung in the air unsaid. It always did.

  “I’ve had enough of hopeless causes.” Rehv was surprised to feel himself becoming angry too. “Blowing up buildings won’t turn back time.”

  “It worked for them.”

  “There’s no comparison and you know it.”

  “And it worked for us before that,” Harry added more quietly. “I know. I was there.”

  “In the forties?” He didn’t look as old as that.

  “This is the second Haganah for me,” Harry said.

  Rehv wanted to tell him that it was Hitler who had given Israel to them, that they had bought it with six million lives; that the Americans hated them, the American Jews hated them, the Russians hated them, the oil companies hated them, the Arabs for some reason still hated them; that the reason Harry and his friends kept fighting was not because there was hope but because if they stopped there would be nothing to do but blow their brains out, the way a few refugees did every day—you could read about them in the back pages of the newspaper. Instead he stood up and said: “I’m sorry, Harry. The answer is no.”

  Harry didn’t look at him. “Very well,” he said. Rehv held out his hand to help him rise, but Harry ignored it. Rehv heard his bones crack as he slowly got to his feet. “I’m sorry too,” he said, slightly short of breath. He walked to the door and paused with his hand on the knob. “It was about a man named Fahoum.”

  “I’ve never heard of him.”

  Harry spoke without turning. “Abu Fahoum. He led the Palestinian commandos during the attack on Mount Carmel.”

  Rehv did not speak. Harry still stood facing the door. Someone knocked lightly on it. Harry turned the knob. A man’s head, no, a boy’s, with pimples and a yarmulke, poked into the room.

  “Mr. Nissim. Are you all right? I thought I heard you at the door.”

  “I’m fine. Wait outside.” Harry closed the door and turned around.

  “What do you want me to do?” Rehv said. He had trouble forcing the words through the narrowness of his throat.

  “You work at a restaurant called La Basquaise?” Rehv nodded. “Abu Fahoum will dine there tonight. We want him to sit at a certain table.”

  “I don’t seat people. I’m only a waiter, not the maître d’.”

  Harry smiled, this time with his mouth as well as his eyes. “That’s a problem I think we can solve.” The smile made him seem even younger. It lent a little life to the side of his face that was crust.

  From the tall windows high above, Issac Rehv watched Harry and the boy cross the street. The boy helped Harry into the passenger seat of a low-priced Honda-General Motors product. Then he took the wheel and pulled into traffic without looking. A taxi honked and swerved. The car headed uptown.

  “A certain table,” Harry had said. Long after the car was out of sight Rehv stood at the window, seeing nothing; hearing the soft Israeli voice repeat the number of the table: “Twenty-three.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Sixty blocks. Isaac Rehv walked to work as he always did. A cold winter drizzle settled over the city like a punishment, shutting out the sky, color, and sun. Men hurried by scowling, women hugging themselves, their made-up faces garish in the gray light. Rehv kept his eye on the store windows, watching their evolution from jumbles of crude crafts and mass-produced junk to reverently lit shrines for suede suitcases. He left Fifth Avenue for the quiet side street where La Basquaise offered its old-world hospitality every night except Monday to anyone who could afford to shop within a ten block radius.

  Rehv passed under the soft pink awning that hung over the sidewalk like a lure and went in by the staff entrance. Pascal, co-owner and chef, was waiting for him in the small waiters’ changing room. He wore le gros bonnet as he did every second he was in the restaurant, and since he was always first to arrive and last to leave no one ever saw him without it. It was to him what De Gaulle’s nose had been to De Gaulle: not a symbol to others but the true source of all his power. On New Year’s Eve the year before one of the waiters had jokingly knocked it off. He was fired on the spot.

  Pascal was agitated. “Finally! Where have you been?”

  “I’m not late,” Rehv said. He shook off his nylon jacket and hung it in a locker.

  “No no no non non. I know how to tell time. Don’t be so touchy.” He darted across the cramped room like an angry hen, turned, darted back, and sat heavily on a stool. “Quel catastrophe!” he cried, then buried his hands and said it again, sepulchrally.

  Rehv pulled his woollen sweater over his head, folded it, and laid it on the shelf in the locker. He hung his shirt on a hanger and his pants on a hook. He heard Pascal’s barely audible groan. The next one would be only slightly louder.

  Rehv sighed. “What’s wrong?”

  Pascal was on his feet. “What’s wrong? Just like that. So … so tranquille. So John Wayne. Well my friend, I’ll tell you.” He closed in. Rehv smelled garlic, red wine, vinegar, thyme, and basil. “It’s Armande.” Armande was Pascal’s partner and maître d’. “He isn’t coming in tonight. He has never missed a night. In six years. Jamais. And tonight he isn’t coming in. Is not, cannot, come—he called me from the hospital.”

  Rehv bent down to unlace his shoes. He didn’t want Pascal to see his face. “Is he sick?”

  Pascal bent down with him. “Sick? It’s worse than that. He has to stay overnight for observation. He’s puking in the toilet!”

  “Was it something he ate?”

  “Idiot.” Pascal pronounced it the French way. “What do you think? Something went in the other way?” Pascal’s eyes widened. “Merde.” He sat on the stool. “You’re probably right. What a whore he is, that fucking Armande.” He buried his face in his hands. Rehv waited for him to say “Quel catastrophe.” Instead he suddenly looked up in alarm and said, “Tonight, of all nights.”

  “What’s special about tonight?”

  Pascal’s thin lips curled contemptuously. “Ha.” He rose to his feet, strode from the room, and slammed the door. He reopened it with a crash, stood in the doorway like a gunslinger, and pointed his finger at Rehv. “Tonight you’re the maître d’. That’s what’s special about tonight.”

  There was really no one else. Rehv was the only waiter who spoke French, and although most of the waiters were Italian, the only one Pascal thought of as European.

  “Do I get a raise?” Rehv asked.

  Pascal laughed like Lady Macbeth. “No one gets a raise. Not as long as I’m wearing this.” He tapped le gros bonnet, reached for the door to slam it again, missed, and spun off toward the kitchen.

  Isaac Rehv dressed for his night’s work in black pants, white shirt, black bow tie, and short green jacket: the kind of outfit a minor performer in a bullfight might wear. He checked himself
in the mirror. He was always surprised at how young he appeared. No gray hair, a solid chin, a strong brow. Only when he looked closely, especially into the dark brown eyes that didn’t quite come to life, did he see a man as old as he felt.

  Rehv walked along the shabby corridor, as rich in smells as a bloodhound’s world, and into the kitchen. Behind clouds of steam that rose from copper pots, men with knives worked urgently, turning dead animals and uprooted vegetables into mousses and braises, fricassees and daubes.

  “Mais non.” Pascal, half hidden by hanging black frying pans, was looking at him in horror. “Dressed like this? What can you be thinking?” He parted the frying pans and burst across the room. “Armande wears a dinner suit. What are you trying to do to me?”

  “Don’t worry. No one will notice.”

  Pascal went rigid. “Souche! Those assholes notice everything.”

  “That’s too bad. I don’t own a dinner suit.”

  “Ha. I see your game. You’re still trying to squeeze a raise out of me.” Pascal’s tone jumped an octave. “Never. Go out there stark raving naked. I don’t care.” He caught sight of a yellow sauce warming on the stove, jabbed his finger into it, tasted. A death cry rose from his throat. Rehv walked off: He wanted to read the evening’s guest list. As he opened the door that led to the dining room he heard Pascal scream: “I want hollandaise, not lemonade.” Something heavy crashed in the sink. No one took any notice.

  Backstage, the kitchen, was Pascal’s territory. The stage itself, the dining room, was all Armande’s. The idea had been his: the blue shutters on the walls, the suggestion of leaded windows, the pastel mountain scenery in the distance. It was a clever trompe l’oeil that made the customers feel they were sitting in a lodge in the Pyrenees. They loved it. They paid for it.

  By six o’clock everything was ready. Thick lavender tablecloths were laid on the forty tables, white china, Scandinavian cutlery, and long-stemmed wineglasses were in place. At six-fifteen Rehv heard the front door open and a few muffled words from the coat checkroom.

  Smiling, he went forward, the words Bon soir on his lips. They remained unspoken. Standing self-consciously in the hall was the pimply boy who had blurted Harry’s real name.