Arkhangel : A Novel (2020)

  ‘Bingo.’ Baaz furrowed his brow. I stubbed out the cigarette and savoured instead the momentary rush of unprofessional pleasure at having outsmarted him. ‘That, clever clogs, is the outline of the Palestinian flag.’ We walked over to it. The bolts of the metal gate to its left were secured by a small rusted padlock. The door to the right was fastened with a simple latch. ‘And I’ll bet you a hundred dollars that this,’ I said, knuckles rapping on the painted metal, ‘is the traitor’s gate.’

  Pigeons startled by the noise soared into the air and then settled on the gutter above. The men standing opposite called out to someone crossing the street further down and walked off. From inside there was nothing except the echo of my knocking in the void beyond.

  I counted to ten and banged on the door again, harder this time, smacking the steel with the heel of my palm. After a few seconds I could hear movement within, and then voices.

  ‘Rega, ani ba.’

  Another pause. Then metal on metal. The door swung open a foot.

  ‘Rosh chidesh tov.’

  We were greeted by a strong smell of turpentine, and by a thickset man with a full grey beard, and a cautious expression framed by coils of messy payot – spring-like extensions of hair tumbling past his cheeks. Five-eight, two hundred pounds – and that was a lowball. A black waistcoat strained over his belly, decorated with what looked like the remnants of his breakfast egg. His face was flushed red with whatever exertions had brought him to the door. The sum of his parts added up to a heart attack about to happen.

  A cigarette burned down almost to the stub was wedged between the fingers of his right hand. They were stained a dark, nicotine yellow. Under his left palm, the close-cropped head of a small boy, no more than four or five years old.

  ‘Max,’ I said, extending my hand. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t speak Hebrew.’

  ‘Ah, well,’ he said, ‘good first day of the month, to you!’ His accent see-sawed with a Germanic twang. He dropped the cigarette and shook my hand.

  ‘But it’s the seventeenth already,’ Baaz replied.

  ‘Rosh Chodesh Sh’vat,’ the man said, before I could apologize for Baaz’s interruption. ‘The first day of the month of Sh’vat of the year 5778.’

  ‘My, uh, colleague,’ I explained. ‘Bhavneet Singh.’

  ‘You can call me “Baaz”, though,’ Baaz piped up. ‘Everyone else does. Even my auntie. And she’s super-formal.’

  He looked at Baaz, and then back to me.

  ‘And you can call me di Farreter,’ he said with a grin. ‘Everyone does. Even my auntie. She’s even more formal. Trust me.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Baaz asked.

  ‘It’s Yiddish,’ the man said. ‘It means the Traitor.’

  Baaz stepped closer. The child backed away and then scuttled off deeper into the room behind, no doubt spooked by the bizarre goyim at his door.

  ‘My youngest grandson,’ he explained, still holding my hand, though no longer shaking it. And then, by way of proper introduction: ‘Moshe. Moshe Mendel Katz. At your service.’

  ‘It’s good to meet you, Mr Katz.’ I stepped a fraction closer; my right hand still clasped in his. ‘You were highly recommended.’

  ‘Yes, well …’ He let go of my hand and stepped back into the room behind him, opening the wide metal door enough for Baaz and I to follow. ‘Please, close it behind you. Now, where’s the switch?’

  We stood in darkness for a moment and then Moshe hit the lights. Out of the darkness emerged an extraordinary storeroom. Piled up in vertical stacks, on the floor, on shelves, in boxes and free standing in bunches of fives or tens rested dozens, hundreds of oil paintings. And above them, hanging properly, fully displayed canvases. Rembrandt. Dali. Turner. Klimt. Anything and everything. The face of Jesus beamed down from the far wall. Above us, Judith beheaded Holofernes. A white, eighteenth-century horse stood in a wide green field. I looked down. Narcissus fell into his own reflection at my feet. I guessed the room may once have been a garage. But now it resembled the overflow from the National Gallery and Hermitage combined.

  ‘Wow.’ Baaz blinked at the art around him. ‘This is totally cool.’

  We both took in the scene. It was as if an art avalanche had poured through the building and stopped at our toes. Baaz stepped towards a canvas of a burning candle and raised his hand, index finger outstretched, as if to touch it.

  ‘Not that one,’ Moshe cautioned him, urgently. And then, more relaxed, ‘It’s not dry yet.’ Baaz dropped his hand and stared at it intently. I stared at Moshe, reappraising him. It wasn’t egg on his waistcoat. It was yellow paint. And whether this was a shop or a studio, it most certainly wasn’t legit.

  ‘I didn’t think all this was allowed,’ I said, waving my hand at the walls, ‘for the Haredim. Don’t you have laws about painting people?’ I racked my brain to no effect, trying to remember which of the Ten Commandments it violated.

  ‘We do, and it isn’t. Although, actually, the one that caught your friend’s eye is permissible.’

  ‘You,’ Baaz asked, incredulously, ‘painted all these?’ Moshe dipped his head in humble agreement. ‘They’re beautiful,’ Baaz continued, wide-eyed in admiration. ‘But why do they call you “the Traitor”?’

  ‘Well,’ chuckled Moshe, ‘the Haredim call me a “traitor” because I paint pictures of people; the Israelis, because I’m not a Zionist; our militants, because I don’t support the Palestinians; the Defence Forces, because I didn’t enlist; my family, because I smoke too much; my rabbi, well, my rabbi for a lot of reasons.’

  Baaz turned back to the picture.

  ‘I didn’t just mean painting the pictures,’ I said, taking the packet of Marlboros out of my jacket pocket. I shook two filter-tipped sticks clear and offered him a smoke. He thanked me and plucked one out. I did the same. He lit his and handed me the matches. ‘I meant the forgery, too. “Thou shalt not steal”, right?’

  Baaz coughed. Moshe inhaled deeply to make sure the tobacco had caught and looked at me carefully. From around one of the piles of pictures the young boy reappeared, craning his neck to get a better look at us.

  ‘Max,’ Moshe said, exhaling the smoke between us as he spoke. ‘“Max” is a good name. I like the name “Max”.’ He looked over at Baaz. ‘“Baaz” is also good. But “Max”,’ he continued, looking at me again, ‘is a strong name.’ I smiled at him. He smiled back. I kept looking at him, but didn’t speak. ‘You said,’ he resumed, filling the silence between us, ‘that I was highly recommended. That is very kind. May I ask, who it was that recommended me?’

  ‘A mutual friend,’ I said. He raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips as if to say, So what? I kept smiling. ‘Ezra sent us,’ I continued. ‘Ezra Black.’

  ‘Ah. So …’ His face settled and he turned towards the boy. ‘Binyomen,’ he said softly, ‘geyn tsu zen mame.’ The boy darted behind a rack of gilt frames. Seconds later his feet clumped up the stairs that rose from the rear right-hand corner of the studio towards his unseen mother. ‘My apprentice,’ he whispered. ‘He’s closer to me than my own shadow.’ Once he was sure the boy was out of earshot, he continued. ‘These,’ he said, looking around, ‘are not forgeries. They are interpretations. But I do not think that you are interested in my paintings, are you, Mr …?’

  ‘Just “Max” is fine. And on the contrary,’ I said, ‘there’s a picture I’d like you to, uh, interpret for me.’ Baaz cleared his throat. ‘For us,’ I corrected myself.

  ‘I see. That’s most …’ he paused. ‘Tell me, who is the painting of?’ I dragged on the Marlboro and looked over at Baaz. Baaz stared at us, drumming the air with his fingers. ‘One of Ezra’s friends, perhaps?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You could say that. It’s a portrait,’ I gripped the cigarette between my teeth, took out the hundred-dollar bill and handed it to Moshe, ‘of Benjamin Franklin.’

  He took the bill and looked at it, his eyes darting between me and the money.

  ‘A good man,’ he sai
d, ‘by all accounts.’ And then, turning the note over, ‘But not, I think, an angel.’

  I rubbed my face with my hands. It was past midday and I hadn’t eaten. We’d been perched on two wooden stools in a small, stuffy space above the storeroom-cum-gallery with growing leg cramp and decreasing expectations. I probed the wounds in my shoulder and thigh with my forefinger to distract myself. They hurt – and the dressing on my collarbone was leaking. At least the scratches I’d picked up on the beach in Kent had scabbed over, though the wire cut on my hands from the night run across the Mayo countryside to Doc’s bled when I picked at it.

  As soon as Moshe had gone to work, Baaz had slipped into trance-like reflection. When I’d asked him what he was thinking about, he’d replied, ‘Factoring primes.’

  I’d let him get on with it.

  All the while that Moshe examined the banknote, he fed me with escapades from his past. Perhaps Ezra had contacted him. Maybe he’d called Ezra. Either way, he had decided to trust me, and to talk. Maybe he didn’t get to speak English very often in Mea She’arim. Maybe Ezra had given him a green light to gab. Whatever the case, once he started talking, he couldn’t stop: what started as a trickle ended up as a flood.

  Painting, it turned out, was merely a profitable sideline for the Traitor. Moshe Mendel Katz’s real vocation was money – specifically, the mass production of fake paper notes. In 1995, between the First and Second Intifadas, he told us, he’d been arrested, and then co-opted, by the secret services to help them pump an ocean of forged cash into the pockets and vaults of Israel’s Arab neighbours. If he cut the plates, the Israeli government would cut him a deal. So, he did – and Special Forces smuggled them across the border, where they were installed in printing presses hidden in a network of caves north of Beirut. The operation was fronted by the Bulgarian mafia and run out of Tel Aviv.

  Moshe never said as much, but it wasn’t hard to guess how he and Ezra first met. And the Bulgarian connection might have been coincidental, but in a world as small as ours I doubted it. Seconds before he’d been shot, Lukov had told me that ‘even the fucking Lebanese’ were interested in the Arkhangel note. Maybe that was code. Maybe the gunmen wearing keffiyehs by the bakery were the Israelis. Indeed, Talia had all but confirmed it.

  Whatever questions there were about what had just gone down in Paris, the results of Moshe’s Middle Eastern enterprise were certain. So successful were his 1988-series bills – his plates had printed nearly a billion dollars’ worth – that they didn’t just destabilize the Lebanese economy, they became a global pariah. Once finally detected, they were shunned worldwide by corner exchange kiosks and central banks alike. But by then, of course, it was too late for anyone who’d bought them to give them back. The following year – Moshe recounted while he ran a chemical test on the ink on our note – the Federal Reserve had entirely redesigned the hundred-dollar bill.

  ‘Because of me, Benjamin Franklin got a facelift. And the best of all?’ he whispered. ‘Iran got the blame.’

  As far as a crook’s curriculum vitae went, it was spectacular. I reckoned it must have been, all told, one of the most successful asymmetric attacks carried out before the internet weaponized the misplaced brilliance of boys like Baaz.

  Moshe had left us with his history and a fresh glass of tea ‘to check his files’. Baaz and I held on to the banknote. An hour later, Moshe reappeared. Cheeks flushed. Breath short. Brow moist. Whatever he’d discovered – or confirmed – had made him hurry to tell us. Baaz came to from his maths meditation. I sat up straight.

  ‘Well?’ I asked.

  ‘It is absolutely genuine,’ Moshe declared. ‘And one hundred per cent fake news.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ It was Baaz who replied, but he spoke for both of us. ‘How can it be a genuine fake? It has to be one thing or the other.’

  ‘Well, yes …’ Moshe ran his right hand across his forehead and drew up his own stool to the work bench where Baaz and I had sat waiting for the verdict, ‘and no. It’s both things at the same time.’

  While he lit one of his own cigarettes, I finished the last mouthful of tea from my glass – long since stewed.

  ‘You were right,’ he said, speaking to Baaz, who smoothed the note out between us. ‘The letters printed at either end of the serial number are inconsistent with the serial numbers of the bills known to be in circulation. So, in this respect, you could say that the note is a fake. It looks like … How to explain this?’ He rested the cigarette in the ashtray and scratched his beard. ‘An impossible note. But many bills get printed that are never meant to be circulated. Don’t forget, you can put whatever numbers and letters you like on any plate – whether you work for the Bureau of Engraving’ – he touched his chest lightly with fingertips of his right hand – ‘or not.’

  ‘But in every other respect the bill is genuine?’ I asked.

  ‘OK, there is always a margin of error. That, I admit. The tools I have, the software, the microscope … This old man’s eyes! They are good, but I am not the Fed. If I was, I would photograph this bill and blow it up the size of a house and crawl across it on my hands and knees looking for clues. That’s what they do. Really! Crazy, no?’

  ‘How wide is the margin of error? How sure are you?’

  ‘In this case,’ he said, ‘let us say that I am sure.’ He smoothed his beard and picked up the bill. ‘Why? Because I have seen this note before.’ I went to speak, but he held his hand up. ‘No! Not this one. But its twin. Exactly the same printing. Same series. Different numbers. And without, uh, “Arkhangel” written on the back, of course.’

  ‘Where?’ I asked him. ‘Where did you see it?’

  ‘Here,’ he replied. ‘Hundreds of them were found by our Special Forces, also in Lebanon,’ he explained. ‘During a raid. This time Israel got the blame, though. But it wasn’t us. It was, how do you say … quid pro quo. Our mutual friend asked me to look at them. Interpret them, as you would say.’

  ‘OK,’ I nodded. ‘But if you didn’t forge them, who did? The Iranians?’

  ‘No.’ He handed the note back to me and retrieved his cigarette from the ashtray. ‘The Russians, of course.’

  He smoked his cigarette and we all considered what he’d said in silence. I lit another Marlboro and tucked the packet and matches back into my jacket.

  Then he added: ‘But you must pay attention to what I am saying. It is genuine. It is not a forgery. This is important. We interpreters, we like to add a signature, a deliberate error, a stamp – something that proves it was us, and proves it’s not real. The plates I cut in ninety-five? The ones I told you about? I ran the O in United States Of America under the edge of the border that runs around the note so the top of it is hidden. That’s not correct. The O should be complete. That is a forgery.’

  ‘But why would you do that?’ Baaz piped up indignantly. ‘Why ruin something so … perfect?’ Then he added, excitedly, ‘Is it because only God is perfect? Is that why?’

  Moshe burst out laughing.

  ‘I’m not a Muslim rug weaver! No, we do it for the thrill of it. If an expert, a banker, passes a note I’ve forged with a deliberate error, then the victory is even sweeter. And anyway, printing a perfect dollar note is suicide. Economies would collapse. Presidents would fall. The Americans couldn’t let it stand. And the Arabs,’ he drew his index finger across his throat, ‘the Arabs would hang you for it. No. No one would do it, could do it, unless they were protected. Otherwise not even your archangel could save you. And this note,’ he waved the bill with a theatrical flourish, ‘is perfect.’

  ‘But you were protected,’ I replied.

  ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘I was. And now?’ He shrugged. ‘The Haredim pray for all Jews. But not all Israel prays for us. In God we trust. But it doesn’t hurt to have an insurance policy.’

  ‘But,’ I tried to find the words to crystallize his assessment, ‘how can the Russians print genuine US hundred-dollar bills? How is that not automatically a forgery?’


  ‘Because,’ Baaz cut in, ‘they used plates from the Federal Reserve. That’s how they did it, isn’t it?’

  Moshe nodded.

  ‘Your apprentice is very good. Very good indeed. Yes, this is exactly how they did it. With genuine plates.’

  I narrowed my eyes at Baaz and took a mouthful of smoke down into my lungs.

  ‘So, let me get this straight. This note was printed by the Russians on a US Federal Reserve plate, with a deliberately invalid serial number?’

  ‘Yes,’ Moshe nodded. ‘A deliberately uncirculated number.’

  ‘So, the Russians are working with the Americans?’

  ‘No,’ Moshe shook his head. I breathed out hard and rocked back in my chair. ‘Look,’ he explained, patiently, ‘the CIA took plates to Afghanistan. They were used to print money for the Mujahedin. The Russians captured them. The same in Syria with the Syrian Democratic Forces, and probably with the Kurds in Iraq. The Americans, they are very consistent. The Russians, too.’

  ‘The provenance?’ I asked. ‘Can you, could anyone, say where these notes originated?’

  Moshe shook his head again.

  ‘All you can be certain of,’ he concluded, ‘is that whatever route he has taken, your Mr Franklin here has been on an incredible journey.’ He stubbed his cigarette out and leaned towards us. Baaz and I leaned in, too. ‘But I think you already know,’ he said, cocking his head to one side, ‘that the real question is not where the bill was printed, but what it was printed for.’

  25

  ‘What now?’

  Baaz and I stood at the south-east entrance to Mea She’arim, hands in our pockets.

  ‘Food,’ I said. ‘I’m starving. The Old City is that way.’ Baaz looked doubtful. ‘You’ll like it. Trust me.’