The Zigzag Kid (24 page)

I woke up with a start to the clanking of heavy blinds. For a moment I thought it was morning already, but it was pitch-dark outside. I was still curled up in the armchair. The clock on the wall struck two. Felix and Lola Ciperola were standing by the open window, looking out, her hand on his shoulder, his arm around her waist. It was so embarrassing, I wanted to hide.

Lola pointed outside and Felix nodded. Then I heard her say she had been robbed of the sea. He pressed her shoulder comfortingly. She rested her head on his shoulder and said, “People like you exist only in fairy tales, Felix.”

“The way our world is, maybe that is only place where you can really live.”

I coughed to let them know I was awake. Lola Ciperola turned to me with a smile, a wonderful smile. It wasn't the smile of an actress anymore, it was the smile of a woman gazing at a beloved child.

Felix asked, “And if Amnon and I succeed, will you give us your scarf?”

She was still smiling at me, caressing her scarf.

“If you succeed, yes, I will give it to you.”

“Succeed at what?” I asked sleepily.

Gently, as though I were very fragile, Lola reached out and caressed the air in front of my face. I sat perfectly still, full of longing, though I didn't know why. Then she stroked my face, resting her warm palm on it from my chin to my forehead. Her skin was soft, very unlike the voice
she used in her roles. Lightly her fingers rested on my eyes, barely touching them, and then she pressed the spot between them, but I didn't hear or feel the buzzing like a hornet. I only felt my eyes grow wide at the gentleness of her touch, becoming clear and pure at last.

“Bring me back the sea I was robbed of,” said Lola.

I couldn't speak. I didn't understand. I nodded my head under her palm. I would have done anything for her.

“Tell me, Lady Ciperola,” said Felix, having thought it over a moment, “is there bulldozer around here?”

Lola Ciperola scratched her head. “A bulldozer? Yes, I think I had one …” She hurried to the refrigerator, opened it, and called from the kitchen, “Ah no … I forgot, I just threw the last one away … How silly of me!”

“Perhaps in your drawer …” muttered Felix, opening his traveling bag, rummaging through it, and pulling out a particularly hideous wig. This he put on, and soon sprouted a matching mustache (from a whole kit he kept in one of the side pockets) plus two moles on his chin. Lola took one look and hurried out of the room, returning with a tattered shirt and a pair of patched trousers, mementos from some play of hers, and a moment later Felix had transformed himself into a beggar, stooped with age and dragging his lame left leg. “How are we doing, Amnon Feuerberg? Are we too tired to go out on little job tonight?”

I was pretty tired, but I didn't want to miss anything. “Where are we going?” I asked.

“I explain everything on our way. Later we come back here for scarf, and for Lola.”

“Don't forget,” Lola cautioned, seductively swirling the scarf over his face. “I will give you my scarf in return for the sea—the sea, the whole sea, and nothing but the sea!” She was suddenly as blithe as a young girl. Her body seemed to dance of its own accord. I'd never seen her that way onstage.

“Hrrrr!” roared Felix, and winked at me. Pointing two fingers over his head, he made ready to charge at the purple scarf, and Lola gave a
whoop and jumped aside. Felix ran past and Lola knelt by her chair, flaunting the scarf in a great purple arc over her head. Felix stamped his feet and howled with laughter, until he saw the look on my face.

“Beg pardon!” he called to me, suddenly solemn. “I was only making joke! I completely forget!” He smacked his forehead.

“That's okay.”

“Is anything wrong?” asked Lola, standing up and draping the scarf around her shoulders again.

“I am so stupid …” grumbled Felix. “All I want is to see Amnon laugh, but every time I spoil it, and he gets sad instead.”

Lola didn't understand, of course. She glanced from him to me and said, “So, you two have secrets already.” She smiled. “Very nice.” She threw her arms around us both and kissed me on the forehead.

There were no photographers present, no flashing lights. It was only Lola Ciperola kissing me. Gabi would have fainted. She would have embalmed my forehead as a souvenir. Now Lola kissed Felix on the forehead and on the mouth. She kissed him with her eyes shut.

“Felix has no friends,” I remembered him saying, “except for one woman.” And they hadn't seen each other for ten years, the ten years he had apparently spent in prison. Lola Ciperola was that woman, his only friend. Things were beginning to come together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, only the connections remained mysterious, and more frightening than the puzzle itself.

“Wonderful!” cheered Felix. “Amnon and Felix will now set off to bring you back your sea! What hour of morning does her ladyship rise?”

“I tell the press I never open my eyes before ten, but that's only for effect,” Lola purred. “The truth is, I'm awake by five. Old people like me don't sleep very much.”

Neither do young people like me, I thought, and hiding behind an armchair, I took off the blouse and skirt and changed back into my normal clothes.

Felix threw me a look of astonishment. “What if someone sees you like this?”

“It'll be easier for me to run wearing pants and my own sandals.”

He thought a moment and shrugged his shoulders. It was okay. Then he turned to Lola. “At six o'clock tomorrow morning Amnon and Felix will bring your sea back. Now turn off lights and go to sleep.”

“Don't you order me around!” she retorted in her queenly voice. “I happen to have big plans for tonight while you two are off on your escapade.”

She walked us to the door and blew us kisses.

We emerged on a cold, dark street. The trees rustled softly. The moon was pearly white and almost full. I thought of all the people I knew who were sleeping just then. The ordinary people, the amateurs, were dreaming peacefully in their beds while I walked down a darkened street with Felix Glick, the fabled criminal.

“Here's what we do.” Felix stopped me. “I walk first. You walk fifty paces behind me. If there is hitch, policemen come or something, then whoosh, you run and hide. Then go back to Lola's house. Don't wait for me in street!”

“But where are we going?”

“We go to sea. There is problem there. We look on beach for bulldozer. It's easy. You come, you do it, good day, thank you very much, and shalom.”

“But wait a minute, I don't understand: what's the problem?”

“Later. I explain to you later! Now we must to go!”

And he vanished—even before his “hi-deh”—into the darkness.

But only to reappear farther down the street, I don't quite know how. Did he run there? Or fly? Suddenly he was on the corner, limping slowly along, dragging his leg.

I followed cautiously, staying a fixed distance behind him. I glanced furtively around to make sure no one was tailing me. It was kind of strange, following someone who wanted me to follow him, while at the same time keeping a lookout in case someone was following me.

I walked as quietly as I could, feeling nervous. Maybe the police were already on my tail. I tried to think like them: they were searching for an old man and a boy who had jumped off a train. I wondered if they'd figured out yet that the hijacker was Felix Glick. It would be typical of them to take an interminable amount of time putting a composite to
gether and comparing it with the mug shots of known criminals, and only later to recover the distinguishing ear of wheat Felix had deliberately left on board the locomotive.

But he had shown his real driver's license to the pimply-faced policeman.

And had stolen his watch.

Only to amuse me?

No, it wasn't only that. With Felix, nothing was “only” anything. There was another, deeper motive.

But what was it? Why had he let the policeman see his real name?

So he would suspect something and try to remember the old man's name.

I could just imagine the guy scratching his pimply forehead. The name Felix Glick sounds vaguely familiar, but he can't quite place it. After all, he was only a kid playing cops and robbers when Felix went to prison. So he waits an hour, finishes his shift, goes home to his pregnant wife and tells her what the old man said about children changing your life. Then he asks her if she's seen his watch around by any chance. He's almost sure he had it on before the meeting with the old guy and his pigtailed granddaughter. Again he tries to recollect where he might have come across the name Felix Glick. Could he have seen it written somewhere, perhaps in print? He becomes irritable and impatient, tells his wife he'll be home soon, and drives to the precinct. Maybe he left the watch in his locker. But the watch isn't there. He steps into the office of a certain captain, who's been on the force so long he can remember things that happened twenty years before. Someone from Dad's generation. “Uhm, tell me something,” he asks the older policeman, “does the name Felix Glick ring a bell?”

And the case explodes in a huge display of fireworks and a great machine is set in motion.

Felix wanted the police to know he was the one. He always enjoyed an escape more with somebody in pursuit. He needed a little danger to spice things up. I watched him admiringly as he limped up the street, looking quite pathetic. What an actor. Dad had certainly known what he was doing. There were things only a criminal like Felix could teach
me, and tests I could undergo only in a situation involving real-life danger. Maybe the only way for me to become the best detective in the world was to learn such things, like how it feels to be alone in the dead of night on your way to commit a crime with the police after you and nothing to rely on but your instincts, your cunning, and your courage.

Dad could count on me, I knew. My whole life he'd been priming me for a night like this, I suddenly realized. It was all part of the training, preparation for the work of a detective and the struggle to survive. For example, we'd be walking to the grocery store together, talking about this or that, when suddenly he'd say, “You see this street,” and right away I recognized that special tone of voice. “For eight people out of ten it's just a place where they shop, meet friends, and catch the bus, but the remaining two have an altogether different agenda. One of them is the criminal; the other is you, the detective.” (Meekly I stood up a little straighter.) “The criminal sees hiding places, pockets to pick, open handbags, loose locks, and, above all, you, Nonny, the plainclothesman; you, on the other hand, survey the street and ignore the innocent citizens, who interest you about as much as your grandmother's shopping list.” (Here a vision of Grandma Tsitka mounted on a broomstick, ignoring the innocent citizens, flitted past my eyes.) “What you see is a kid with darting eyes or a couple of dubious-looking characters pressing up against an old lady in the bus line, or someone hurrying by with a suspicious package in his hand. No one else exists for you! The war you're waging is with them!”

I loved to walk down the street with Dad. It filled me with a sense of responsibility to nod at passing classmates and continue on my way, afraid of being distracted from my duty. Sometimes my heart went out to those ordinary people, the eight out of ten innocent ones going about their business without any inkling of the dangers lurking around them, or of the duel of wits taking place over their heads. They may have been older than me chronologically, but when I walked down the street with Dad, I felt like their father.

I'm running too fast, getting too close to Felix. Uh-oh. See how tense I am. Can't let anybody notice that. Can't let anybody see I'm on duty. Me, I'm just some kid hurrying home late. It's a good thing I'm wearing
my own clothes. A girl alone at such an hour would draw a lot more attention. Besides, it feels good to be a real boy again.

Not that it was so terrible being that girl. I was beginning to get used to her.

Where's Felix? I've lost him. There he is.

A dog is barking at him, a scraggly pooch in somebody's yard. Not good. He'll attract too much notice. Felix limps quickly away. But other dogs start barking, too, indoors and out. A curtain flutters on the second floor. Maybe someone is peeking out to see what's going on. Felix says dogs always pick on him. I myself have been bitten at least ten times. Even the most well-behaved dogs start going crazy when I walk by. I've even been attacked by a Seeing Eye dog!

Okay, let's go. Never mind. The whole city's barking at us. My feet start running of their own accord. As if someone's calling, beckoning: Come to me … maybe because I feel so lonely now, away from Felix, away from Dad, and overhead the big white face in the moon has changed expression, and I go forward. But where? To whom?

Zohara surges up within me. She was very beautiful. A tough cookie. How old would she be if she were alive today? Thirty-eight. Like the mothers of most of the kids in my class. What would my life have been like with her? We wouldn't have had Gabi, but I would have had a mother. Not that I feel I missed anything. I've done just fine through the years. There are only a few small details I'd like to find out, so I can wind up the investigation I began today.

The dogs calmed down. A hush fell over the slumbering city. I was a panther, fierce and silent. A creature of the night. Children fast asleep in their houses never dreamed what a boy their age could do.

A little outlaw. A little law unto himself.

Just thinking of it gives me the chills.

At the end of the week was my bar mitzvah. The entire police force would be on hand. And Dad promised to give me my promotion then. We had this deal. Over the years I'd made sergeant second-class, and this Sabbath I'd be promoted to first sergeant! We would go through the usual ceremony, with me drinking a whole glass of beer like a man, and him pinning on my insignia. About time, too. A year and a
half had gone by since my last promotion, because of that cow business.