Authors: Avner Mandelman
38
I
SPENT THE AFTERNOON
on the beach, staring at the far horizon, gearing up for what I must do. Finally, as the sun set, I rose to my feet and made my way back to Ibn Gvirol. I could not see anyone, yet I spent an hour dashing into and out of yards until I was sure there was no one behind, and so it was after eight o'clock at night when I arrived at the back of the apartment house on Ibn Gvirol, hopped over the rear fence, and crawled through the low window into the basement bomb shelter, then climbed up the stairs.
Neither Ehud nor Ruthy were home when I came in. Still at the rehearsals, probably. I did not turn on the light. As I went through the kitchen, my stomach growled--I had not eaten since lunchtime, but I did not stop to eat. Making straight for the kitchen balcony, I headed to my mother's old Singer sewing machine and pulled out from underneath the first shoe box, then the other, and took them into the bathroom.
Sitting on the edge of the bathtub, with only the thin moonlight coming in through the narrow window, I stretched the black Nomex across my knee, and, as I had done a dozen times before, I sewed the tear in one legging, then looked for others. When I found none, I stripped naked, sprinkled talcum powder between my legs and under my armpits, over my chest, and at the small of my back, and pulled on the light-absorbing black coveralls. The leggings reached to the ends of my toes, the headpiece covered my head from eyebrows to chin with only a hole for the face, like a balaclava. It fitted so well, as if I had taken it off only yesterday.
I bent over a few times, then sideways, listening for crackles and creaks. Nothing.
Fishing around in the box, I began to fill the coveralls' myriad pockets with the peculiar collection of jimmies, lock picks, and rubber fingertips that I had once been issued hundreds of years ago, in my own prehistory. As I turned around, I felt a hard tube rolling under my heel, and picked it up. For a long while I stared at a yellow neoprene pencil that had tumbled out. I pulled off its plastic cover and squeezed the clasp, and the stiff tungsten filament sprang out, nearly invisible in its thinness. When pressed against a man's chest and sprung, it made death look just like a heart attack. For a long moment I looked at the hellishly thin blade, and at the other tools, remembering the times I had used them, and what they had done to others, and to me. Then I pressed the blade back into its yellow sheath against the mirror, threw it inside the shoe box, and finished filling my pockets.
Unscrewing Ruthy's electric shaver, I pulled out its two batteries, clicked them into my waistband, and, shielding the thumb-lights with a towel, flashed both on and off a couple of times. Both worked fine. I softly pulled the window shut, to cut off the thin moonlight, and checked myself in the mirror.
My body had disappeared; only my face and hands were still visible, hovering ghostlike in space. The Nomex did not even look black: it was more an absence of color, a sort of dark nothingness, a negation of presence, like my black dreams. I recalled all the other times I had watched myself vanish, in the past; when I called upon the Other in me to appear, to do the necessary dreck for the Jews ...
Pushing the thoughts out of my mind, I jumped up and down a few times, listening for rattles. I padded a few pockets with puffs of Ruthy's cotton wool, one by one, until I could hear nothing.
Then I peeled the headpiece back, down to the collar. In the hall, in the semi-darkness, I pulled on my jeans, and one of Ehud's dark blue shirts, with the long sleeves. Finally I fished a tube of black polish from the shoe box and stuck it in my back pocket, laced on my old Pataugas canvas boots, and left.
When I returned, again entering through the bomb shelter's window before running up the unlit stairs, it was three-thirty in the morning. Ehud was seated at the kitchen table, filling a glass from a bottle of 777 and going over the script with one of my pencils. He watched me as I took off my jeans, and his dark blue shirt, saying nothing.
"How were the rehearsals?" I called to him.
"Good."
But as I began to remove my Nomex coveralls he put down his 777 glass, and the pencil. "Anything?" he said in a neutral voice.
I touched thumb to index finger, then went in to wash.
From the bedroom came a muffled call. "Is't Dada?"
Ehud said something in response. I couldn't make out what it was, and when I came out of the bathroom again, he had already turned in and closed the bedroom door behind him.
Next morning, after breakfast, I took the bus to the Dizzengoff police station.
Amzaleg was in the midst of a loud phone conversation when I entered his office.
"Yes! Yes!" he hollered. "Talk to all of them! I said to all of them! Everyone in the Wrestling Club! I want to know where--" He listened for a while. "Yes! The old members, too!" Then he saw me, shouted a booming "No!" into the receiver, and flung it into its cradle.
I sat down.
He snarled, "Someone burgled the Wrestling Club last night. Also Gelber's office."
"Who? Where?" I let my mouth sag. "What did they take?"
Amzaleg lumbered to his feet and closed the door. Then, so swiftly that I couldn't see him coming at me, he grabbed the front of my shirt with his beefy hand and twisted it, bringing my face down close to his.
I could smell the Gitanes nicotine on his breath, and the whiff of raw arak.
"Dada," he whispered, "if I catch you in any of these stunts in Tel Aviv--"
"Don't worry," I said. "You won't." I raised my eyebrows and pointed to the ceiling, then made spiral motion near my ear.
"It's okay now," he said, his eyes bloodshot.
Still staring into his reddened eyes, I pulled out of my pocket the folded letter I had taken from Mr. Gelber's desk the night before, when I had broken into his office.
"Gershonovitz wrote to him a week ago. It said there was a check enclosed ..." I stopped, overcome with wrath.
Amzaleg threw the letter on the table. "We knew he was being paid. But he has an alibi."
I stared at him in surprise. "You knew?"
"Sure I knew! You think I was made by a finger? What do you think I am doing here all day? Scratching my dick?"
"So what else did you know?" I threw the other note on his desk, the one I had found in Judge Menuchin's drawer, with Gershonovitz's initials.
Amzaleg scanned it briefly, then looked up. "He has an alibi, too."
"Menuchin?" I blew out my lips. "He's seventy-eight years old and fat. My father would have eaten him without salt--"
"No. Shimmel." He stared at me stonily.
I stared back at him. "Gershonovitz? You checked
him
out?"
Amzaleg got up, opened the door, and looked into the corridor. The thin policeman who had sat at the front desk walked by, carrying a Tempo bottle.
Amzaleg called after him, "Nissim, go bring me a pack of Gitanes from Berman, without filter." The steps faded.
Amzaleg returned to his desk, sat down, and picked up a thick Globus pen and began to bend it, this way and that.
I said, "So who else did you check out?"
There was a loud crack as the pen snapped in two, one sliver flying into the wall like a bullet, like mine had done in Gelber's office, a hundred years back. "Everyone he knew, I checked. Everyone!"
I nodded at him slowly, and he slowly nodded back. For a full minute we stared at each other, no longer suspicious but not yet friends; something in-between.
We remained silent for a while; we heard steps approaching. Presently the door opened and the skinny policeman came in with the cigarettes.
"Go see in the back," Amzaleg said. "Ask them if they need a hand with the whores."
The policeman edged himself out, his eyes darting from Amzaleg's face to mine.
When the door closed, Amzaleg said in a low voice, "I checked them all out, everyone, what they did that night, where they were. Everybody." He looked into my eyes. The raspiness in his voice had disappeared, and it had now become soft, mellow. For some reason it gave me gooseflesh. "Nobody tells me how to do my work, you understand?" Suddenly he stood up and roared. "Nobody! But
nobody!"
He sat down again. "Only Zussman, and his wife, and Riva's daughter. They don't have anything, no alibi."
I said, "Women could never do such--"
"Women can do anything," he said, "if they love or hate enough."
I didn't know where this came from. He was probably talking about his ex.
I waited, and presently he went on. "Also the old Arabs, the suppliers. Seddiqi, Mansour, Ayish--"
"Them?" I said, recalling the canes. "They are half dead already."
"So maybe they went with someone."
We were silent for a moment. I remembered Fauzi, and other Yaffo
shabbab
.
After a while Amzaleg said, "So you trust me all of a sudden?" A muscle twitched in his cheek, as in a wink. But the effect was not comic.
I looked away. "I ... I was here, too, in your office ... a few hours ago." For some reason I felt shame at this. "To check you out, to be sure."
I had seen the memos in his drawer, the ones from Gershonovitz, urging him not to make a fool of himself, to take care, especially now. Especially with this.
He nodded without surprise or rancor. "I figured." Then he stretched; first the palms, then the wrists, the shoulders, finally the mouth, the cheeks. Like a large gray cat. Again, the effect was far from comic.
"Come here," he said. "I'll show you some pictures. You think you can look?"
His thick fingers were already riffling through the inside flap of one of the files on his desk.
I tried to speak but no voice came. I nodded.
Without looking into my eyes he began to hand the photos to me, one by one, speaking in a low monotone as he pointed with his thumb at details.
The photographs were of an astonishingly high quality and resolution, like those taken by a high-flying reconnaissance jet, or by an Intel patrolman with a miniature Hasselblad. Every detail showed crisp and sharp.
"That's how the boxes fell, see?" Amzaleg's beefy thumb swept the glossy surface. "From right to left, in one direction, then they stayed. See here? Looks like he pulled them down himself, trying to--to keep from falling, or something."
I nodded, dumbly.
The photograph showed a mound of shoe boxes, looking like some gun emplacement that had been leveled with a plastic charge. Two boxes had spilled their contents--children's rubber boots with felt lining. Another box had opened, empty. To the left of the picture a pale palm showed, the fingers curled--
The photograph was snatched away.
Something cold and rounded was pushed into my hand; a glass of water. I drank half of it and put it down. Amzaleg pulled the glass toward him and drank down the other half, then wiped his mouth in a short, violent motion.
He looked at me with mute inquiry.
I nodded.
Another glossy photograph materialized before my eyes. Amzaleg went on in the same low monotone. "See here? No sign of smear, or pulling, or anything, just a lot of--splatter, here." His thick thumb obscured the leftmost part of the photograph, pointing to a dark stain on the floor, in front of the inclined bench. I tried to push his thumb aside, and for a second saw a mottled wrist with the familiar Omega watch; then Amzaleg slid his thumb back.
"No," he said. "Believe me. No."
The photograph disappeared, and another flipped out of the deck.
"The cash register, nothing was taken as far as we could see."
"It was open, when you found it?"
"Yes ... How much did he usually keep there?"
"I don't know ... a few hundred shekels, three, four hundred, something like that." It was hazy in my mind. "Sometimes six hundred, maybe." I wiped my forehead.
Amzaleg said, "That was when? In 1970? When you left?"
I understood his drift. There had been some inflation since then.
Amzaleg said, "We found seven thousand shekels there." Then he added, "That's almost three thousand dollars."
"How much?" I stared at him. "And they didn't touch it?"
"No."
I said, "Where's it now?"
Amzaleg gave me a steely look. "In the safe--don't worry, you'll get it back."
"No, I want to see it now, smell it, what do I know?"
He eyed me narrowly. "All right." He got up, twirled the safe's combination, and pulled out a brown envelope. He slid a sheaf of bills out of it, in hundreds and fifties, clasped with a rubber band. "It sat just like this on the floor."
I sniffed at the bills. There was a faint smell of something, some odor I ought to have recognized.
"Anything?" Amzaleg looked at me aslant.
I shook my head. "I don't know."
I should know this smell. I really should ...
Amzaleg waited, then pointed to the last photograph. "Anything you see missing?"
Automatically I scanned the photograph with my eye-corners stretched wide, as I had been taught. "I don't know."
The little heap of money lay on the floor in the midst of the usual assortment of junk my father kept in his cash box: rubber bands, a bottle of pills, the two black books of accounts--
I said, "Where is his inhaler, for his asthma?"
"It was in his pocket."
Another photograph flashed by, and for a brief second I glimpsed a pale face, the dead eyes staring upward with anguish so profound, so unearthly, that I felt a blunt fist slam at my heart.
Just as quickly the picture was gone.
"Sorry." Amzaleg's right palm hovered above my wrist, hesitated, and withdrew. A moment passed.
"I'm okay," I said.
After a while I asked, "Any fingerprints elsewhere? On the door? Anywhere?" I was surprised to hear my voice, so normal, so clear.
Amzaleg's face darkened with blood. "Shit in yogurt. The guy we sent to clear the floor? The donkey cleaned everything, with a loofah." He looked into my eyes with an effort. "The door, too."
I said nothing.
"It happens," Amzaleg said in a voice a trifle too loud.
"Yes." I wiped my neck. "Sure."