Cafe Nevo (34 page)

He had reckoned on Khalil's fury but, despite the evidence, had persisted in regarding the man as impotent; this led him to overlook his own vulnerability. A serious error, and one that needed to be rectified, Caspi decided. He had brought a clean gun with him, in case of emergency, but even as he put his car into gear he realized that it was too late. The police would be there already; the Shin Beth and the press would soon follow. It was too late now to do anything but carry out his original plan.

But when he thought of Khalil's stricken face, mourning his car as if it were a child, Caspi's panic subsided. A soothing contempt stole over him. Khalil had the will but not the intelligence to pinpoint Caspi's Achilles' heel. That Caspi truly loved Daniel, would kill for him, would die for him, was a secret known only to himself; no one else believed he gave a fig for his family. In his eagerness to tear out Caspi's heart, Khalil would certainly assume that it beat in Caspi's body.

 

 

 

Chapter Twenty-One

 

“David's coming,” Ilana said.

“David? Your... ?”

She nodded.

“Oh, Ilana. Does that mean you've decided to go ahead with it?”

“Decided?” Ilana said, laughing. “By default, perhaps. I kept postponing and postponing a decision, and last night, I know it's impossible, but last night I could swear I felt it move.

“After that,” she said, “I couldn't possibly... Even if I just imagined it, I couldn't. So you see, I'm stuck.” She didn't look stuck, though. She looked triumphant, like a child who's just pinned the tail squarely on the donkey's rump.

Vered said, “I'm so happy for you,” and her smile momentarily eased the lines of tension etched on her face. “It's the right thing,” she said.

Ilana was observant, but needn't have been, for even a blind woman (or a sighted man) could have seen the trouble on Vered's face. She leaned forward. “Is there any way I can help you? There must be. Tell me how.”

Vered's eyes filled with grateful tears, which she blinked back. She shook her head.

“Have you decided what to do?”

Vered laughed helplessly. Even if she wanted to explain, it was impossible. The problem of her pregnancy had been utterly subsumed by another more urgent problem: Caspi. In her desperation she had this week consulted those organizations designed to help women like herself, who were trapped by the state's archaic divorce laws. But their legalistic remedies took no account of Caspi's devastating anger, and their tactics relied on attrition, which would take more time than Vered thought she had.

They all asked if Caspi ever beat her. She told the truth: he never had. They advised her to remain in the home and try to get him to move out. She laughed. One young woman had looked very grave then and suggested a shelter for battered women. “But I'm not a battered wife,” Vered had retorted indignantly.

“Not physically,” the young woman gently replied, “but brutality takes other forms as well. Your husband sounds like a dangerous man.”

Vered knew the shelters. The women who ran them were all friends or acquaintances of hers. Appearing as a supplicant on their doorsteps would be an unbearable humiliation, fatal to her pride; the scandal when it got abroad, and the pity of her colleagues, would be insupportable.

She was afraid of Caspi. She was also afraid
for
him if she left. He would go to the devil. She oughtn't to care, but she did. It was a no-win situation, a classic double bind that left her paralyzed.

 

Emmanuel Yehoshua Sternholz sat shamelessly nearby, pretending to nap, with a newspaper spread over his face to protect him from importunate customers and flies. Nevo on this hot Tuesday afternoon was full of the latter pests but almost free of the former. Mr. Jacobovitz dozed upright on a bar stool. An overhead fan drowned out most of the women's conversation. Sternholz inched closer.

Vered, that inveterate smoker, had not lit one cigarette since she came in. Sternholz was almost confirmed in his diagnosis, despite the fool's denial when he confronted her with it. It was enough to drive a poor waiter mad. How in God's name was he supposed to get people out of trouble if they didn't confide in him? Those who should didn't, and those who shouldn't did. He wasn't a magician; though, by the look of her, he suspected it would take a magician, or at least a sympathetic doctor, to get Vered out of the mess she was in.

 

“I have a plan,” Ilana said.

“Yes?” Vered said politely.

“You need to get away for a while, to sit and think quietly without interruption.” Ilana chose her words carefully. Caspi had not yet been mentioned between them. She did not know what Vered knew or suspected about the bombing, but there were lines on her face that had not been there two weeks ago. “Take Daniel, and both of you come stay with me,” Ilana said.

Vered looked at her in amazement. “You have no idea what you're suggesting.”

“I think I do. Vered, my building has twenty-four-hour security. No
one
can get in, without our permission.”

Vered closed her eyes. Turgidly, as if half asleep, she said, “I thought of going to my mother.”

“But you haven't gone.”

“No.”

“Have you told her?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“It would just hurt her without helping me.”

“But she must see that something is wrong.”

Vered raised her face. Two red patches glowed on her cheeks. “Jemima and I don't talk very much,” she said.

Ilana thought of her own mother and sighed. Then she said, “I know Jemima. She's obviously a very strong-willed woman, but I found her sympathetic.” Vered snorted. “I suspect that she might be more helpful than you think. But as far as staying with her... I know Jemima's house. It's a lovely home, but I would feel terribly exposed, up there alone on the cliff.” As Vered looked at her in perplexity, she added briskly, “I think you would feel better in my place. There's plenty of room. You could stay until you decided what to do, or—Vered, are you listening to me?”

Vered said vaguely, “It sounds a little far-fetched.”

“You haven't even heard half of it. After our last meeting, I had an idea, a fantasy, really, about the two of us deciding to have our babies and going through with it together, helping each other.” Ilana paused. Vered was silent. “I guess you think it's a dumb idea,” she mumbled.

“It's a lovely idea,” Vered said in a gentle, sad voice, as if she knew it would never happen.

“Why not?” Ilana stared insistently into her eyes. “You've got to make some decisions. You can't seem to do it at home. My suggestion is a perfectly good, practical first step.”

Vered did not speak for five minutes. Then she said, “What about David?”

“He's coming for just a few days. A week from Wednesday he'll be gone. You could move in then.”

Just then, loud voices from the pavement heralded the entrance of Caspi and his entourage.

 

Sternholz hustled over, waving his white apron like a farmer's wife shooing hens. “Get out, get out,” he shouted, “I told you I don't want you here.”

Caspi was at the vanguard of his little band of merry men and women. One arm was around the waist of his current flame, an American girl named Judy, who had been kind enough to supply his alibi for the night of the bombing; the other he slung around Sternholz's shoulders, to the old man's evident disgust. “Sternholz, old friend, you are too harsh. Even if I had played that little trick on the
Arabush, which
I did not” —he winked broadly—” the punishment does not fit the crime. Am I to be exiled forever from the one vale of peace in my otherwise turbulent existence? Cannot a man, hounded by the police day and night, persecuted by the press, find a moment's refuge in his own café?”

As he spoke he bore forward, drawing the others in his wake, until he reached his usual table, front and center. He noticed Vered sitting with Ilana and blew a kiss.

“You're a bum,” said the waiter. “I don't want you here.” He snatched away the chair that Caspi was about to sit on, but Caspi took another.

“You do me wrong,” he cried, hand on heart. “You have tried, convicted, and sentenced me to exile for a crime with which I have not even been charged. Is that fair, I ask you?” He appealed to the café at large. “What possible reason could I have for wishing Khalil harm?”

“Everyone knows you did it,” Sternholz said angrily.

“Everyone does me too much credit. Unhappily, I am innocent.” Caspi smirked. “Pure as a virgin, innocent as my sainted wife.”

“Let's go,” Ilana murmured, but Vered sat on, still and heavy as stone.

“I'm actually sorry for the poor bugger,” said Caspi. “The guy's got this inflated image; but he can't write worth shit and he knows it. All he's got is his fancy car, and then one fine night someone comes along and blows that to smithereens. I tell you I really pity the poor bastard; in fact,” he said, “I felt so sorry for him that at great trouble and expense I personally went out and bought him a present.”

“A present,” tittered his sycophantic chorus. “Generous Caspi, what did you get him?”

“A donkey,” he said triumphantly, “and I sent a note with it. ‘Dear Khalil, So sorry to hear of your most recent disappointment. Please accept this small gift as an accurate token of my esteem. I hope that it will enable you to return to the roots which nourish your work. Yours in brotherhood, Peter Caspi.'“

The silence that followed was broken only by the senseless giggling of Caspi's girl, whose Hebrew was rudimentary. Two of Caspi's satellites, a man and a girl, broke orbit and spun away to a table far from Caspi's. Others turned away in shame. Sternholz sucked in his breath, saddened to the marrow of his bones; he was beyond indignation.

Ilana took her friend's arm and led her out of Nevo.

 

A man sitting in the outer lobby of the King David Towers jumped to his feet as Ilana entered. The well-built young man in blue overalls was no one she knew, so Ilana smiled politely and walked by. As the doorman opened the inner door for her, he murmured, “That fellow's been waiting for you.”

She looked again. The man stepped forward. “Don't you know me, Ilana?”

She knew the voice, though it had deepened; it took her a moment longer to recognize his face. “Oh my God,” she cried, “Hezi!” She reached up to embrace her brother.

 

He sat upright on a love seat, knees together and elbows in, as if afraid of breaking something. When Ilana came in from the kitchen carrying a tray, he leapt up to take it from her. “You shouldn't be carrying that,” he scolded.

Ilana sank into a chair. “You know.”

“I stopped by the house the day after you were there. Papa told me.” He twisted the cap off a beer and started to put it to his lips, then changed his mind and poured it into a glass.

“That was a month ago.”

He centered the glass on a coaster and looked up to meet her waiting eyes. “When you left home, Mama made us promise never to see you again. It wasn't hard to keep my promise. Mama never stopped grieving, and I never forgave you.”

“Mama knew what she was doing, wanting sons,” Ilana muttered.

“You broke her heart.”

“Her heart was broken before I came along. But if that's the way you feel, why did you come?”

“Because of what he told me. About the baby, and about the money, too.”

“What money?”

“The money you kept sending, even though no one ever acknowledged it or thanked you. The money that put Josh and Avi through college and got me started in my business. Ilana,” he said urgently, “we didn't know. If anything, we thought that Mama must have accepted German reparation money, but no one liked to ask. If we'd known it was you, we'd either have refused the money or come to thank you, I'm not sure which, but we wouldn't have taken it and kept away. I felt sick thinking what you must have thought of us all these years.”

“I knew she wouldn't tell you. I was glad she accepted the money. It was no hardship for me, and it gave me at least the illusion of being still a part of your lives.” Ilana could not stop staring at his hands. When they were children, they used to press their palms together, to see whose hands were biggest. Hers still were when she left. Now one of his was large enough to encompass both of hers.

“Tell me about yourself, Hezi. What work do you do?”

“I'm a carpenter,” he said. “I've got my own shop in Haifa, and three workers. I do okay. Nothing like this, though.” He looked about in awe.

“What did you expect, a pink bordello?” She laughed when he blushed. “Are you married?”

“Yeah, two kids.” He handed her his wallet, open to the photo section. As she bent her head over the pictures, Hezi smiled at the golden head. A forgotten image of the past arose: he saw Ilana bent over a book, reading
Treasure Island
to the boys. They were so dark, and she so fair, they called her their Snow White.