Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

had been baffling him and the entire force for the past week.

“It is I, Tidhar,” said the newcomer.

The commandant jumped from his seat as if bitten by a tiger and hurried toward the newcomer. “Welcome!” he said, reaching out his arms to the famous detective. “Welcome!”

Danny leafed ahead.

David Tidhar sat alone in his office. The pipe dangled from his lips. It had all but gone out, but he hadn’t noticed. The stale smell of tobacco hung in the air. His mind was abuzz with speculation. Where was the missing girl? The situation was difficult. The detective did not believe in magic, but he was troubled. She was a girl without papers, without identity. He had heard she came from the ships, that she had, as they said, “smuggled the border.” If he found her, would not the British send her back to the lands of the great fiend?

“Perhaps,” he mused aloud, “it is the work of my great enemy, the Hangman of Corfu! Only such a devious mind could devise such a devilish scheme!”

He reached for his matches and absentmindedly relit his pipe. The solution was close at hand, he could feel it!

“Danny? Dinner’s ready.”

“Just a minute, Dad!”

How did the book end? He’d read it before. It was about a girl who went missing in Haifa, and the great David Tidhar was called to assist the police, coming down all the way from Tel Aviv. But the case, naturally, became more complex the more David probed, and involved a secret plan by the Yishuv leadership to smuggle in two ships full of refugees from Germany, an Arab revolt, and Nazi spies. In 1942, Danny knew, it had seemed as though Hitler was very close to achieving one goal of his war and overrunning Palestine itself. Were that to happen, Haifa and Carmel would become the last bastion of Jewish resistance. In the event, Rommel was turned back at Al Alamein, and the German invasion of Palestine never happened. In the book, however, worry remained. But what of the girl? Danny leafed to the end of the book. Surely the great David Tidhar at least had solved the puzzle!

David Tidhar shook hands with the British commandant and boarded the car that was to take him back to Tel Aviv. He had stopped the spies—just in time, it seemed, before they could communicate their vital information to the Nazi fiend!—and at the same time had assisted the Palyam to safely smuggle the refugees into Eretz Yisrael. But the commandant had no need to know that!

“David,” the commandant said, “if it weren’t for you, I believe a Nazi invasion would have been inevitable— and imminent! Thanks to you, we can continue the fight. Fight until the Germans are defeated!”

“I was only doing my job,” David Tidhar said, and he nodded to the driver. The engine started, and they were off, away from the green mountain and this old and belligerent city that was so unlike his own modern Tel Aviv. I was only doing my job, he thought, but he could find no satisfaction. The girl! It was the one case he would always, afterward, remember. His one failure.

He never did find the missing girl.

“What?” Danny said, and despite all his budding bibliophile’s instincts, he threw the book across the room.

“Danny? Are you all right in there?”

“No! Yes! I’ll be out in a minute, Dad!”

Wearily, he went to pick up the book. The letter fell from it, and he picked it up. The scent, a woman’s perfume, was still on it. “Daniel, whatever is happen, I will always love you.” Somehow, he was convinced it was from her. But what did it mean? He sighed, a sound older than his years, replaced the letter in the book, and at last went to dinner.

* * *

A week later he was at the German settlement, the old templar village that sits beneath the Baha’i gardens. He was walking along the Fighters of the Ghetto Road when he passed a large ancient-looking pine tree surrounded by fallen cones. He nearly missed it, but something, some irregularity in the color of the bark, perhaps, drew his attention suddenly, and when he approached it he found, carved in small neat letters into the flesh of the tree, a dark and old tattoo that said as if mocking him:

I WILL LEAVE YOU SIGNS, MY LOVE, IN THE MARGINS OF OUR CITY.

* * *

That day Danny decided to make the ultimate sacrifice, and as a first step got his dad to phone Great-Aunt Zsuzsi.

“You phone her!” his father said. In matters of his aunt he was not unlike Danny.

“Dad…”

“What do you want from Zsuzsi? She’s an old lady. She shouldn’t be disturbed. She needs to be left alone.”

Danny was wholeheartedly in agreement with his father on this matter. The image of a strange blond girl, however, drove him. “It’s a history project for school,” he said. “Please?”

The phone call was made, reluctantly. Danny’s father spoke briefly into the mouthpiece. He nodded, though the other party clearly couldn’t see him. He spoke into the mouthpiece again. The sun came through the window and illuminated him: no longer a young man, with pouches under his eyes and hair that had been receding steadily away from his high forehead like a crusader force being driven back from a fortress by hostile Saracens. For all that, there was still something sunny about him, though more and more often now the sun seemed submerged in the sea, just beyond the horizon. He said, “Aha. Yes. Aha,” and cradled the phone. “She wants to speak to you.”

There was nothing to it. Like a Roman gladiator who might have once entered the arena in nearby Caesarea, Danny stepped forth.

“Aunty Zsuzsi?” he said.

“Mens sana in corpore sano,” the elderly voice on the other end of the phone pronounced.

“I’m sorry?”

“A healthy mind in a healthy body,” Great Aunt Zsuzsi said. “Still no Latin? For shame. You wish to see me?”

“I have some questions, it’s for this—”

“Monday, five o’clock. Bring waffles.”

“Waffles?”

“Are you deaf as well as ignorant? Good-bye.”

The phone went dead. Danny said, “Good-bye,” into the silent phone, and thought he heard the ghostly echo of a laugh returned to him over the wire.

“What did she say?”

Danny repeated his instructions.

“Oy,” his father said, and sighed. “You better go to the shop, then.”

* * *

Stella Maris, the “Sea Star,” sits on the northern peak of Mount Carmel and commands, like the diminutive French general who once held her, extraordinary and long-reaching views. Zsuzsi’s door, up three flights of stairs, opened onto a modest yet comfortable abode, where the entire Mediterranean Sea, it seemed, was spread outside like sparkling fresh laundry.

“Shalom, Daniel! Oh, you’ve grown so much! Give your aunty a kiss!”

Danny, that tireless pursuer of the balash, or “detective,” story, knew about informers. Many times they were crucial to the plot. They were sources of secret knowledge, purveyors of hidden information, and, naturally, had to be paid.

“I brought the waffles,” he said, after being subjected to his cheeks being pinched and the inevitable, tobacco-flavored kiss. “I brought both chocolate and lemon flavor; I didn’t know which one you liked.”

“How sweet of you,” Zsuzsi said, and when she smiled it made her seem for just a moment not young but yet terribly innocent; it was the face of a good-natured baby shortly after being fed. “Please, sit down, Daniel. I’ll make some coffee.”

She disappeared into the small kitchen, and the smell of Turkish coffee was soon wafting through the room.