The Jerusalem Assassin (42 page)

Rabbi Gerster felt naked without his black coat and hat, without the long beard and dangling payos. For decades, throughout his adult life, whenever he entered a public place, people recognized him, bowed their heads in respect, and made way for him. But as he entered the La Regence Grill, the only glances he attracted came from two middle-aged women, who smiled at him, and from a single man in a pink jacket, who looked up from his soup and winked. It took Rabbi Gerster a moment to comprehend that his new appearance was attracting a different type of attention, the type drawn by a handsome, mature man who radiated confidence and authority.

Elie ordered a cup of chicken soup. Itah and Rabbi Gerster ordered steak dinners.

Before the food arrived, a stout young man joined their table. His face was infested with the dotted pigmentation that had earned him his nickname. He was dressed inadequately in worn sandals, khaki shorts, and a white T-shirt that bore a quote from the prophet Isaiah: Your detractors and destroyers shall emerge from within you.
The knitted skullcap sat askew on his head, jauntily contrasting with the nervous twitch of his mouth. At first glance, he seemed like a beggar who had slipped through the lobby to hit on gullible tourists before the maître d’ threw him out.

Elie looked up from his soup. “You’re early.”

“Am I?” Freckles glanced over his shoulder.
“Three minutes,” Elie said. “How uncharacteristic of you.”

“Trying to get better at my job, you know?” He laughed nervously. “Ready to go?”

“Hungry, Freckles?” Itah nudged the basket of fresh rolls toward him.

He creased his eyes. “Do I know you?”

Itah pulled off the headscarf.

“Oh, God!” He stood, then sat back down, looked left and right. “No cameras, right?”

Itah laughed. “Not today. Hush hush. Like spies. You ever heard of Kim Philby?”

Freckles looked at Rabbi Gerster, and his eyes widened. “God, have mercy!”

“Amen.” Rabbi Gerster’s hand instinctively reached to touch his beard, which was gone. He realized that Elie had tricked them by summoning his agent to take him somewhere else. “How’s business going for you? Money coming in steadily?”

“What’s going on here?” Freckles got up again, glanced at the door. “I don’t like this!”

“Sit down.” Elie said it quietly, but the tone was icy. “You all know each other?”

“Freckles has been a great source,” Itah said. “I’ve earned many kudos for my reports on ILOT. But lately I’ve come to doubt him a bit.”

Elie’s little black eyes focused on her. “Why?”

“Hold on.” Rabbi Gerster noticed that Freckles kept looking toward the entrance to the restaurant. “I think we should—”

“I had a little peek,” Itah said, “at his bank account. Regular deposits of French francs in cash, but also a monthly paycheck from Shin Bet, plus medical and pension. Did you know about that?”

“It’s a trap,” Rabbi Gerster said, rising.

Elie didn’t answer Itah’s question, but his hand landed on the rabbi’s toothed steak knife, rose unhurriedly, and stuck the knife’s point under Freckles’ chin, penetrating the skin, and pulled him closer. “Is that true? Do you work for Shin Bet?”

Freckles couldn’t nod, and opening his mouth was also impossible. Only his lips moved when he squeaked, “I can…explain.”

Rabbi Gerster grabbed Itah’s arm. “We’re leaving!”

Several of the patrons suddenly rose, including the man in the pink jacket, and surrounded their table.

“Step back,” Elie said, “or I’ll puncture his brain.”

A man in a blue jacket jogged across the restaurant to the table, his hand held up. “Good drill, fellows. Excellent practice!”

“Agent Cohen.” Rising slowly, Elie kept Freckles’ chin impaled on the steak knife. “Call off your men and have a car ready for us outside.”

“Let him go.” The Shin Bet officer spoke too quietly for the other patrons to hear. “We can discuss our differences elsewhere.”

“I think not.” Elie headed for the door with Freckles.

Rabbi Gerster was determined not to allow Jewish blood to be spilled. “We’re outnumbered. Let’s live to fight another day.”

“Follow me,” Elie said, leading Freckles with the knife.

The rabbi saw Itah raise her eyebrows in a manner of someone accepting defeat. They had made a mistake not telling Elie about the Shin Bet salary Freckles was earning, and Elie had kept from them the fact that he had summoned Freckles to the hotel. Now the game was over.

Rabbi Gerster could have pulled down Elie’s hand to release the hapless Freckles, but the young man’s double-crossing irritated the rabbi enough to make him choose a less-pleasant method. He swung his arm and hit Freckles on the forehead with the back of his hand. The agent’s head flew backward, his face turned to the ceiling, and his chin tore off from Elie’s knife. The strike’s momentum caused him to fall backward, where he stayed sprawled on the carpet, too shocked to move.

Removing the knife from Elie’s hand, the rabbi flipped it in the air and offered it to Agent Cohen with the handle first.

“Thank you.” Agent Cohen clapped. “Great show!”

The other Shin Bet agents joined the clapping.

“It’s only a drill,” Agent Cohen said to the shocked patrons as his agents steered the group to the door. “Thanks for your patience. Enjoy your dinner!”

The clapping proved contagious, and the thirty or so patrons joined in, visibly relieved.

*

Wearing a burgundy windbreaker and a baseball hat, his overnight bag hanging from his shoulder, Lemmy approached the entrance to the King David Hotel. He had to go without the sunglasses, which would have raised suspicion at this hour. The two Subaru sedans were still there, and several idle men in civilian clothes stood along the driveway. He felt like a criminal entering a well-policed compound.

The tall doors were propped open to allow fresh evening air into the lobby. As he stepped closer, a large group was coming out, a tight circle surrounding an inner core of—he assumed—dignitaries that merited VIP protection. He stepped aside as the group emerged. Behind him, car engines came to life.

In the center of the group, one man was taller than the others, his thick mane of gray hair brushed back from a handsome face. He sensed Lemmy’s gaze, glanced, and stopped in his tracks, causing the whole group to come to an awkward halt, bumping into each other.

It took a moment for Lemmy to recognize the blue, wise eyes.

Father!

Lemmy was stunned, not only by seeing his father for the first time in almost three decades, but by the loss of his rabbinical manifestations. Yet years of honing his self-control in a life of clandestine survival kept Lemmy from expressing any emotions while his mind absorbed all the details within his field of vision: Elie, much shorter than the rest, looked frail. A woman, about fifty, wore a headscarf and an anxious expression. The men with the guns were alert, professional, focused on their three prisoners.

Lemmy reached into his pocket to draw the Beretta he had taken from the security man at Hadassah, but his father gave a quick shake of the head, turned in the other direction, and bellowed in the familiar baritone that Lemmy remembered so well: “Benjamin! Benjamin!”

Everyone turned in that direction. The agent in charge—blue jacket, thin lips, and rusty hair—recovered quickly and ordered them into the cars. A moment later they drove off.

“What a bunch of showoff girls,” one of the bellmen said. “These guys think the world should stop for them.”

“Come on,” his colleague said, “they have to be ready if someone attacks a bigwig.” He noticed Lemmy standing there. “Welcome to the King David Hotel.” He reached for his shoulder bag.

“I’m fine,” Lemmy said. But he wasn’t. His hands shook and his knees threatened to buckle. His father’s eyes had been surprised, but not shocked, as if he had expected to see his dead son show up alive. And his coolheaded diversion had prevented disaster. But had his father yelled “Benjamin!” only as a diversion, or also as a directive to go to Benjamin in Neturay Karta?

He entered the lobby and bumped into a chubby young man in sandals and shorts, who picked up his blue skullcap, which had fallen to the marble floor, and pressed it to his head. His freckled, sweaty face turned up to Lemmy for a second, and he sprinted to the exit, pausing to check that the circular driveway was vacant before running out into the night.

*

“What was that about?” Itah’s lips were warm on Rabbi Gerster’s ear. “Did you see Benjamin near the hotel? On the street?”

He shook his head.

“Then why did you yell his name?”

The rabbi smiled.

Agent Cohen, who sat next to the driver up front, glanced over his shoulder. “No more tricks, guys. We could be less polite, if you get my drift.”

“Same here,” Elie said. He was sitting by the window, looking out.

The Shin Bet officer sneered. “And I was told you’re a dangerous man.
Ha!
” He faced forward and switched on the radio, filling the car with fast-paced Hebrew music.

Itah squeezed Rabbi Gerster’s knee.

He leaned closer and whispered in her ear. “When we were leaving the hotel lobby, did you see the guy with the baseball hat?”

She nodded.

“That was Lemmy.”

Itah jerked backward as if he had hit her. She mouthed,
No!

Rabbi Gerster nodded and whispered, “My son!” And before he knew what was happening to him, his face crumbled, and hard, painful sobs burst from his chest. Itah put her arms around him, and he cried, rocking back and forth, consumed by joy and relief and by a terrible fear that this encounter, this brief, wordless eye-contact with Lemmy, would turn out to be the end, rather than a new beginning.

*

Tuesday, October 31, 1995

Lemmy checked out of the King David Hotel in the morning. He left the rented Fiat at the YMCA and walked through the streets of Jerusalem, which bore little resemblance to the divided city of his childhood.

He crossed the point where the border had once cut an arbitrary north-south line and saw none of the bullet-scarred, half-ruined buildings that had abutted the no-man’s land. Through the Jaffa Gate, which had been in Jordanian territory the last time he saw it, Lemmy entered the Arab Quarter of the Old City. He followed the market alleys, finding himself in the revived Jewish Quarter, home not only to Talmudic yeshivas and bearded scholars, but to artists’ studios and galleries. Stone-built residences had been restored to original antiquity with meticulous details. Fenced-off archeological digs reached down through layers of sediment, unearthing physical remnants all the way back to King David’s empire. Looking down into one of the deep holes, Lemmy could see the layers of Jewish life, each era settled atop the previous era, century after century, accumulated on this mountaintop citadel.

Reaching the vast plaza in front of the Wailing Wall, he found a marble bench all the way to the side. Religious and secular Jews, foreign tourists, and men in uniform stood at the wall shoulder to shoulder. The giant cubical stones piled up to immense height. The physical enormity and the weight of history gave the Wailing Wall an intangible spiritual aura. Lemmy thought of that early morning on June 5, 1967, when he had driven by this place, an eighteen-year-old IDF paratrooper, disguised in UN uniform, deep inside Jordanian East Jerusalem, tasked with blowing up the UN radar on Antenna Hill moments before every Israeli fighter jet took off for synchronized bombing raids against all of Egypt’s airfields.

Only now, as he sat here in view of the Wailing Wall, in the center of Israel’s modern capital, Lemmy realized that his own life’s meaning really came down to that sunny morning twenty-eight years ago, which had changed Jewish history and saved his people from a second Holocaust at the hands of the Arab armies that were prepared to destroy tiny Israel with the best Soviet weaponry. The realization put things in perspective for Lemmy. Yes, he must expose the reason behind Shin Bet’s illegal activities in Europe and protect Paula and Klaus Junior from the consequences of his secret life. But the current challenges were not beyond reach, considering what he had managed to achieve by age eighteen and the clandestine skills he had developed since then.

A notepad and a jar of pencils drew his attention. He tore off a piece of paper and scribbled: For Tanya’s recovery. He didn’t even know whether she was still alive, but he folded the note and stuck it in a crack between two stones. The wall was cooler than he expected, and he rested his forehead against it, closing his eyes. He thought of Tanya lying on the cobblestones in Amsterdam, looking up at him with eyes that were surprisingly peaceful. And he remembered her looking up at him almost three decades earlier, her black hair spread on a white pillow in the old house by the Jordanian border, her eyes not peaceful but burning with passion.

A man tapped Lemmy on the shoulder, startling him. “Are you Jewish?”

“Excuse me?”

He gestured at a group of black hats nearby. “We only have nine. We need one more to complete the minyan quorum for prayer.”

“Oh.”

“So? Are you Jewish?”

After a brief hesitation, Lemmy nodded. “Yes. I am a Jew.” He accepted the prayer book and joined them in reciting the Hebrew words.

*

The previous night, the Shin Bet agents had brought the three of them to a top-floor apartment in Tel Aviv with enough bedrooms for everyone. It was quiet and peaceful, but Rabbi Gerster’s mind was stormy and he couldn’t sleep. He kept seeing Lemmy’s face—a grown man, yet so familiar. Had he understood that he must seek Benjamin in the old neighborhood? Would Benjamin keep his cool and know what to do?

At dawn Rabbi Gerster tiptoed to the front door and tried the handle. It was locked. A female voice came from a hidden speaker. “Can I help you?”

“Looking for the bathroom,” he said.

“That would be the little room with a toilet bowl. Down the hallway.”

Later in the morning, they congregated in the kitchen. A young man with dark, curly hair and brooding eyes joined them.