The Fury of Rachel Monette

by Peter Abrahams

  “Jesus Christ,” Dorschug said. “We don’t have time for all this pussyfooting, Major. With all due respect. We’ve got to start knocking heads.”

  “You fool!” Rachel shouted. “You could knock my head right off my shoulders and it wouldn’t make any difference. I can’t tell you what you want because I don’t know. You’ve made a mistake.”

  Dorschug cracked her across the face with the back of his hand. He cocked it for a second blow but Grunberg said, “No,” in a tone that stopped him. He should have spoken sooner. The damage was done. Her whole head throbbed in pain with each beat of her heart. She could barely keep from crying out. The two men watched her, waiting.

  “Do you think she’s going to puke again?” Dorschug asked. Grunberg ignored him.

  Rachel tried to think. She had a tired aching brain but it was still willing. The trouble was she had nothing to work with. It probably would not have mattered even if she had. All she wanted was to talk to Calvi.

  “I’ll make a deal.”

  “No deals,” Dorschug said.

  “Go ahead,” Grunberg told her. “We’ll listen.”

  Dorschug stood up and faced Grunberg. “Absolutely not. No deals with terrorists.”

  Grunberg sat very still, looking up at him from under his heavy, hanging eyebrows. He spoke mildly. “In the end it is we whose lives are at stake, not you. We will deal.” Dorschug strode out of the room and slammed the door. “He won’t go far,” Grunberg said, more to himself than to Rachel: “His job is to spy on me.” He sighed. “All right. Talk.”

  “I want to put my skirt on.”

  “After. Talk.” He didn’t seem interested in her legs anyway. Only her eyes.

  “I’ll tell you everything I know on one condition: that I get one hour alone with Calvi tomorrow. No matter what happens.”

  “Agreed.”

  “How do I know you’ll keep your word?”

  “How do I know you will tell me everything?”

  “Because you can keep beating me on the head until I do. I haven’t got the same privilege.”

  “Then you will have to trust me.” He said it without irony.

  “All right. But it’s not going to help you at all.”

  “We shall see.”

  And she told him a story that began one afternoon when she found her husband in his study with a letter opener in his chest. A story about a blond man in her basement, a well in the desert, and a man named Victor Mendel. By the time she finished darkness was beginning to lift. The first silvery fingers of dawn had slipped under the dome of the sky on the eastern horizon. Not once did Grunberg take his eyes off her face. He seemed to be drinking in every word.

  Silence. He leaned back in his chair. “I take it back,” he said coldly. “You are very good. Far from an amateur.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Very good,” Grunberg repeated. “That is easily the most inventive cover story I have ever heard. Lovely detail. The difficulty is, it would take days to discover if any of it is true. And we don’t have days. We have a few hours.” He stood up. “You stall very cleverly, Rachel Monette. I suppose you can be proud that you’ve done your job well.” He turned to the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “There is nothing more I can do here.”

  “And what about me?”

  “I told you that at the beginning.” He opened the door.

  “What about my hour with Calvi?”

  Grunberg opened his mouth. A harsh ragged sound seemed to tear itself from his throat. His laugh, she realized.

  “But I told you the truth, you God-damned bastard. I want that hour.”

  “Prove it’s the truth.” His voice was almost a whisper. He closed the door. She heard his footsteps in the hall. She looked at the door. It stayed closed. Her eyes went to the table, the tape recorder, her skirt.

  “Grunberg,” she shouted. “Come back. Grunberg. Grunberg.”

  The door opened. The dark eyes looked in. “Grunberg,” she said, trying to control the excitement in her tone: “Where is the guidebook?”

  “Guidebook?”

  “Yes. I can prove everything with the guidebook. I had a cassette recorder inside. I taped the whole conversation with Calvi.”

  Grunberg crossed the floor in a moment. His hands darted through the things on the table. No guidebook. He picked up a telephone, dialed, spoke rapidly in Hebrew, listened. Whatever he was told made him angry. His back stiffened and his tone turned to ice. He hung up.

  “Well?”

  “We wait. At least someone remembers seeing it.” He spoke with contempt.

  “Do I have to be strapped into the chair?”

  “Yes.”

  Without speaking a word to each other, they waited. Rachel’s head hurt. She felt the sweat in her armpits, between her legs. She could smell it. And his sweat. She smelled that too.

  A knock at the door. A thick-set woman entered, hair rumpled, eyes puffy from sleep. She wore faded jeans and a T-shirt; in her hand she had the guidebook. At first Rachel did not recognize her. Then she did: hours before the same hand had swung a nightstick.

  Grunberg did not take it from her at once. He stared at her instead, until she lowered her eyes and mumbled something faint and apologetic in Hebrew. Grunberg opened the book so she could see the cassette recorder inside.

  “Speaking of amateurs,” Rachel said. She couldn’t help herself. The policewoman went out. Dorschug came in.

  “Got something?”

  “Perhaps,” Grunberg said. He pressed the play button. They listened. Rachel talked. Calvi talked. Rachel talked. Grunberg touched a button. He talked. Dorschug talked. If she closed her eyes the pain in her head wasn’t as bad. She closed them. They all talked. Calvi had the best voice. Then she. Grunberg. And Dorschug.

  Somewhere a man began to chant. Other men joined him, some nearer, some farther, singing the same chant. They sounded peevish and bored, all except one who sang beautifully. Then it was over. Calvi talked. Grunberg talked. The other man talked. She talked.

  Someone untied the straps. She felt a bite on her arm, near the triceps. A deep bite, but nothing at all compared to what she felt in her head. Up in the air, sagging in someone’s arms. Lying full length on her back.

  Full length. On her back on the playroom floor, the baby Adam an airplane high above. Coming in for a landing. Kiss. Take off. Kiss.

  “Okay. Now what? Pull him in? Stop the speech?”

  “And turn him into a political martyr? No. He makes a speech. A different one.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Certainly. Now we know what they know. Why not play the same game?”

  “So who took hubby out? Them?

  “Or him. It doesn’t make much difference.”

  “And the kid?”

  And the kid? And the kid? But there was no answer. Kiss. Take off into the night.

  31

  First the sun touched her feet. Slowly it spread its warmth up her legs to her body and finally her face, until she lay wrapped in a cocoon of golden down. A man was speaking. His words were incomprehensible but she knew the voice. She had heard it before, one afternoon sitting on a bench. A stone bench in Jerusalem.

  Rachel opened her eyes. She was lying on a couch beneath the only window in a small plain office. The rich sunlight pouring through the window made the office look as mean as it was. Like many offices it was more easily endured on rainy days. In the center of the floor two straight-back wooden chairs facing a steel one formed an awkward little group: makeshift stage props of a third-rate theatrical company. The man kept speaking.

  Rachel stood. The action set off a banging in her head that made her gasp aloud. After a few moments it became less intense: sure that his presence was felt right from the beginning the banger withdrew to the background. Rachel stripped off her underpants, shirt and brassiere and found fresh clothing in her suitcase, open on the rectangular table. She put on clean white corduroy slacks and a navy blu
e silk shirt, but she didn’t feel any fresher. She opened the door and went into the hall.

  Sergeant Levy was waiting for her, seated on a wobbly card-table chair. A transistor radio lay in his hand like a black egg lost in a nest that was far too big. The voice came from the radio. Simon Calvi. He was speaking in Hebrew.

  “What is he saying?” Rachel’s tongue felt thick and clumsy; she tasted vomit. A confusion of wispy memories of the night gone by floated through her mind.

  With old-fashioned courtesy Sergeant Levy got to his feet. The chair squeaked and stood a little taller. “Do you feel better, I hope?”

  Better than when—after the hit on the head but before the slap on the face? After the drugging but before the rotting in jail? “Tell me what he is saying.”

  Sergeant Levy looked disappointed at the tone she was taking, but he put the radio close to his ear. Rachel sensed a large crowd, listening quietly. Very quietly. “He says that all Jews must stand together in a dangerous world.” She listened to Calvi’s voice. He may have been saying it, but he wasn’t backing it up with any enthusiasm. She said so.

  Sergeant Levy beamed down at her, delighted that she was catching on. Perhaps they could still be friends. “No, he is not very happy. He is saying what the Major told him to say. He is a clever fellow. The Major,” he added, in case there was any ambiguity.

  The almost bovine self-satisfaction in his tone gave Rachel a jolt: she realized then that her hand was being taken away; others were playing the cards she had gathered, and they would play them toward ends of their own. Calvi was slipping away. “I want you to take me to the rally,” she said.

  The expression on Sergeant Levy’s face spoke of the limits to friendship. “I don’t think it is possible.”

  “Why not? Am I still being held here?”

  “No, no, no.” The idea shocked him. “The Major says that you are a great friend of the state of Israel. He thinks you will be given a medal.”

  “Good. This friend of Israel wants to go to the rally.”

  Sergeant Levy bit his lower lip. “The Major thought you would prefer to rest here until he returned.” To keep her out of the way, to have the field to himself. But she had an hour coming to her. An hour alone with Calvi.

  “That just shows how little he knows me. Where is he?”

  “At the rally,” Sergeant Levy said resignedly.

  “Let’s go.”

  Sergeant Levy drove her to the university in a green Fiat which seemed to constrict his movements like a too-tight suit. Rachel saw soldiers everywhere—in twos and threes on street corners, parked in jeeps by the roadside, standing beside a tank in a green park. They had grenades hanging from their belts, rifles or submachine guns slung over their shoulders, steel helmets on their heads.

  “All that for a public speech?” she asked.

  “For war,” Sergeant Levy said.

  He turned on the radio. An operatic tenor was singing a dramatic aria. Sergeant Levy slapped the steering wheel in sheer delight: “‘Nessun Dorma.’ My favorite, favorite aria.” He listened carefully. “And that is Pavarotti, of course. I love him.” The song ended on a passionate crescendo with the singer crying something that sounded to Rachel like “finch adore.” He repeated it three times to get the idea across, throwing at least five ringing notes into the last “adore” alone. Completely forgetting the traffic Sergeant Levy closed his eyes in ecstasy. Then he shook his head like a man emerging from a trance, breathed deeply, and turned the dial.

  Simon Calvi’s voice came through the little speaker, subdued and weary. And something else: tense? afraid? The shoddiness of the speaker, or Calvi’s self-control prevented her from knowing what it was. The crowd, she noticed, had grown noisier. She could hear pockets of grumbling, muted more by their distance from the microphone than by any reticence of the grumblers. Rachel had trained her ear for detail like that. None of it interested Sergeant Levy. Under his breath he was singing “finch adore” over and over. He didn’t hit a note.

  They drove up a long winding hill. At the top a line of soldiers stood across the road. They had stopped an emaciated little man who was sitting on a donkey even less well nourished than he. The man pulled some tattered papers from inside his stained shirt and handed them to the officer in command. Sergeant Levy honked the horn. The officer whirled around, his features turning angry. Then he saw Sergeant Levy in the driver’s seat and his features in ragged order assumed a respectful expression. The soldiers parted and Sergeant Levy drove through. He didn’t need to show any papers. They all knew who he was.

  Rachel glanced back. The officer had recovered his angry look before it faded entirely. He made an imperious gesture and the skinny man slid down off the donkey’s back. He turned his gaze inward where there was no one to take offense.

  Ahead lay the rolling lawns of a broad campus. The modern white buildings were arranged in the simple geometric patterns of someone’s master plan. They caught the sun’s glare and bounced it right back. Rachel liked her universities old and musty. If, she thought suddenly, she liked them at all. She peered for a moment into a muddy future.

  Sergeant Levy parked behind a large L-shaped building which, with another L-shaped building, bracketed a row of I-shaped ones in between. He led Rachel across the lot toward the entrance. Two soldiers stood by the door, submachine guns in their hands. An officer sat in a chair nearby, tanning his face and smoking a pipe.

  “Hello, Pinchas,” he said to Sergeant Levy. Sergeant Levy nodded. One of the soldiers held the door open for them. They climbed three flights of stairs. Rachel heard Calvi’s voice, like an echo across a canyon. It seemed to come at her through the walls, growing louder as they went up.

  When they came to the third floor they walked down an airy well-lit corridor. Two more soldiers stood in front of a heavy dark paneled door. A highly polished brass plaque on the door had writing on it, in Hebrew and English. President of the University, it said in English. The soldiers stepped aside. Very gently Sergeant Levy turned the knob and pushed the door open. Rachel followed him in. A soldier closed the door behind her.

  They were in a large bright room, furnished mainly with books which packed the shelves from floor to ceiling. The furniture, a big desk, a couch, a few swivel chairs, had been pushed against the walls. A soldier stood in a corner by the door. His fingers moved restlessly on the stock of his rifle, but his face was inert. On the couch sat a man wearing jeans and a sweat shirt that seemed too big for him. He was the kind of man who usually would take care to comb his thin sandy hair over his bald spot, but not today. He turned as he heard them enter. He lifted a ginger-colored eyebrow at Sergeant Levy, but there was nothing in Dorschug’s expression to show that he had ever laid eyes on Rachel before.

  On the far side of the room two tall glass doors opened onto a narrow balcony. Seated on the thick red Persian carpet, out of line of sight of anyone on the ground outside, was Major Grunberg. He sat cross-legged, his back to the room. On the floor beside him lay Rachel’s cassette recorder and a long black pistol. He held a dozen or more typewritten sheets of paper in his hands, and his eyes followed the text line by line.

  On the balcony, a few feet in front of Grunberg, and also with his back to the room, stood Simon Calvi. He wore a very expensive-looking suit which fit his broad shoulders perfectly. It was a fine charcoal worsted; as Rachel came slowly forward she could see in the bright sunlight the thin red stripe running through it.

  Calvi was speaking into a battery of microphones, some attached to the wrought-iron guardrail, others on floor stands. Two voices, one electronic, the other unaided, filled the room. They were not quite in unison. Rachel thought of the mighty Oz, hiding behind a curtain while he operated the machinery that made him a wizard.

  Simon Calvi had no curtain. All he had was a sheaf of papers in his right hand. He and Grunberg seemed to be turning the pages at the same time. As he spoke Calvi seldom lifted his eyes from the text.

  Rachel stopped just behind Grunb
erg. Over his shoulder she saw that the pages bore the sword and olive-branch symbol of the Israeli army. She raised her eyes and looked beyond Calvi at the crowd below: a field of dark faces stretching to the other L-shaped building a few hundred yards away. Those nearby were sitting; farther back they stood. She heard muttering, some of it puzzled, some irritated, some angry. His head bowed, Calvi did not appear to notice.

  Suddenly Grunberg became aware of someone standing over him. He twisted his head, saw Rachel and impatiently waved her back. Although it was the kind of gesture Rachel hated, she complied.

  But before she did she looked down, right into his sunken eyes, and said, “I want my hour,” in a quiet, but very clear voice.

  32

  The crowd. Second-class Jews from dark-skin backwaters: Yemen, Syria, Kurdistan, Algeria, Morocco. They arrived in Israel timid but hopeful; grew dissatisfied; died angry. To ease their dissatisfaction he tried to give them better jobs, better housing. To soothe their anger he gave them pride.

  Sometimes it was simple. He could call them to a rally on the grounds of the university. Here at the seat of learning was the unspoken message, you belong as much as your Ashkenazi bosses. So they came, to feel for a few hours the pride in their veins, to demonstrate their strength. And more and more to hear him say that the future lay in the east, and in eastern ways.

  But Simon Calvi wasn’t saying it today. Instead, in a soft, almost diffident voice he murmured of patience and common enemies and long-term solutions. They did not want to hear it; he had never disappointed them before. Why now? He felt their frustration grow as he spoke. It rose up from the campus with their body heat, up to the balcony where he stood.

  You don’t like this speech? he thought. It’s not mine. It’s the unaided effort of Major Grunberg, typed with his own two hands. You find it bland? So do I. But the major sold it to me with the help of a short audio presentation. He’s a very persuasive fellow.

  I had another one, somewhat stronger. My friend Moses Cohn, who couldn’t be with us today, wrote that one for me. He writes very good speeches, but the one he prepared for today was just part of a little joke I was playing on him.