Liederman cleared a pile of papers off a chair. His thumb and forefinger were stained with nicotine.
'I'm honored. But you should have warned me. I'd have straightened things up and bought some beer.'
David inspected the room again. 'Tell me what you've got here? And what you're trying to find out?'
Liederman was cautious at first, perhaps afraid David would find him Holocaust-obsessed. But soon he revealed the dimensions of his archive: a vast collection of Polish newspapers from the years 1938 to 1944, in Polish and Yiddish, as well as mimeographed underground newsletters and other circulated tracts produced after the Yiddish papers were closed down. It was an archive that documented the destruction of Polish Jewry, the core collection inherited from his father, then supplemented by years of methodical attendance at estate sales, and purchases made at flea markets and in secondhand stores.
'So what are you seeking in all this?'
'I read through it looking for an answer.'
'An answer to what?'
'To how it could have happened, how this culture, so bittersweet, so vibrant and alive, was so suddenly and utterly destroyed. But of course I know how that happened. The historians have explained it very well.' Liederman paused. 'Perhaps I read through it just to feel the loss. Perhaps,' he added, 'just to feel.'
'Listen, Moshe-there's something I'd like you to do. I can't promise it'll be useful, but it's possible it could prevent another tragedy. You told me you're good at following and that you like to look under every stone.'
Liederman smiled. 'I like that more than anything.'
'In that case,' David said, 'you may enjoy this very much. I want you to follow a certain Shin Bet officer. His name is Ephraim Cohen…'
'Shoshana, remember that little scrapbook you put together for Amit, the one with all the men who'd been on TV panel shows? I want you to make up another one for her, this time of 'scary-looking' guys with beards.'
Uri lived North of Jerusalem on Le'a Goldberg Street in the suburb of Neve Ya'acov. David drove out there on Saturday afternoon, spent twenty minutes searching out the address, and then, when he finally found the Schuster's first-floor apartment, came face to face for the first time with Uri's wife.
'You must be Captain Bar-Lev,' she said. She was a stout broadly built woman with gleeful twinkling eyes. 'Uri's down there.' She pointed to the basement stairs.
He made his way to the cellar, then followed a corridor that led past storage and utility rooms. He passed a laundry room, smelled the dry hot air of the driers, the aroma of detergent, and the sweat of people waiting for their wash. He was about to return to Mrs. Schuster for more detailed directions, when he heard sounds of panting and then a harrowing groan.
'Uri?'
He moved toward the sounds, found himself in the doorway of a windowless low-ceilinged room. The bare concrete walls were dank. Uri, wearing a sleeveless singlet, was working out with a set of ancient barbells. There were beads of sweat on his hairy shoulders, and, when he recognized David, a sudden expression of distress, as if he were embarrassed at being caught doing something so stupid as lifting weights.
As they talked Uri mopped himself with a towel.
'I want you to find the van.'
'That's impossible. They got rid of it.'
'Cleaned it up, painted it, altered the registration, hid it away. But junked it? No. That's too rich even for them.'
'How am I going to…?'
'Auto paint shops. Repair shops. Gas stations. They have to maintain the vehicle. And this isn't New York- there aren't that many fancy American vans around. I brought the pictures Dov took of the four goons and the girl.' He handed them to Uri.
'Well, with these it's different, David. Yeah. Maybe…'
'When you find it don't move in, just let me know.'
'No criticism intended, David,' Rafi said. 'But aren't you putting an awful lot of your case into the hands of a six-year-old child?'
'She's almost seven.'
'Be serious.'
'Okay, Rafi, if it weren't for Amit we wouldn't know about Gati or be able to place four of our victims at the accident scene. If I really thought she was going to be our star witness at a trial, then, sure, I admit she couldn't possibly support the case. But I don't think of her that way. For me she's a source, very reliable up to now, who just might lead me to another one of the three guys who were in that van. When I finally find out who they are, then I'll know what this case is all about. And then, maybe, I'll be able to figure out a way to break it open and bring in the bastards who think it's okay to kill some 'wild cards' so they can make suckers out of stupid cops.'
'Was Gideon really so vulnerable?' Anna asked. 'From the way you've described him I've gotten an impression of a kind of icy prince.'
'Sure, he was that, but underneath he was troubled. When I listened to Dr. Blumenthal I felt sick at heart. I wished we'd been closer. I wished he'd trusted me. But the way things are here I can understand why he didn't think he could.'
'Yosef's gay.'
'Yosef's an artist. When he does his reserve duty he gives concerts at military bases. Pilots are different. And Israel is different too. We're just starting to acknowledge life-styles that are taken for granted in the States. To live openly as a homosexual here is to accept the fact that generally one is going to be reviled.'
'Would you have helped him, David?'
'I like to think so.' Sorrowfully David shook his head. 'On his own terms he was in a terrible kind of bind.'
'So he committed suicide.'
'At that time, in his particular state of torment, he must have felt that was his only way. Ephraim wanted him to do something and threatened that if he didn't he'd be exposed-grounded and disgraced.'
'But wasn't that a bluff? Ephraim was involved too. Worse, he was married. Seems to me he would have been even more disgraced.'
'That's logical, Anna. But this wasn't a poker game in which Gideon was coolly sizing Ephraim up. The issue wasn't whether Ephraim would follow through on his threat. My father put his finger on it: It was the betrayal implicit in the threat itself. The thing you have to remember about these Shin Bet creeps is that almost all their operations are based on manipulation. They're trained to find a person's weakness and then exploit it. Ephraim, who'd known Gideon since boyhood, must have thought he knew all his weaknesses: his fear of exposure, and of being shamed before our mother, and his self-hatred on account of being attracted to men. The one weakness that perhaps he didn't know about was Gideon's extreme sensitivity to the slightest hint of personal betrayal. So here he was threatened with betrayal by one of his closest, oldest friends, a man moreover with whom he may have been in love and with whom he was physically involved. What could he do? Yield to Ephraim's blackmail and perform the illegal mission? Or kill himself because he couldn't perform it, and couldn't face the threatened consequences? In an extreme emotional crisis situation like that, the question of whether Ephraim was bluffing would have been almost irrelevant.'
'But, David, what was the illegal mission?'
'That,' he said, 'is what I'm going to find out.'
THE UNVEILING
Here was Sergei, living free and retired in this gorgeous sun-struck city, behaving like a bored old pensioner in Minsk. He rarely ventured out, and, on the few occasions that he did, it was to buy a Russian language newspaper and take it to a drab suburban park. There he'd read it, leave it on his bench, then walk back to his hideous housing block. He did not look around, gaze at buildings, absorb the beauty, breathe deeply of the air.
Targov spent three days following him. When it became too tedious he turned the job over to Rokovsky.
'Listen,' Targov told him, 'this is a little man who lives a little life. Not one who dreams up vast schemes to
