“While we mourned you.”
“You rejected me, remember? Told me I was too young for you. Sent me to live with Bira and her friends.”
“ For your own good, yes, but-”
“ But what? I was eighteen, alone in the world. Eighteen! ”
Tanya sighed. “I remember how old you were. And even if you were older, you would have been no match for Elie Weiss. He’s too clever, even for me.”
“He taught me how to blend in, how to court the right girl, how to plan ahead. It has worked like a clock. I married and joined the Hoffgeitz Bank under the tutelage of my father-in-law.”
“What did you say?”
“Armande Hoffgeitz is Paula’s father.”
“Oh, no!”
“ And we have a son. Klaus Junior.”
“ Klaus?” A look of horror took over Tanya’s face. “This is a nightmare.”
“ My work is very important. I’ve developed clients in the Middle East, oil-rich sheiks and so on. They give money to terrorist groups, I trace it, report to Elie, and-”
“ I know how it works. But that’s a red herring. Elie didn’t recruit you to spy on Arab sheiks. Or to assassinate them. He recruited you with the single purpose of gaining control of the bank.”
“ Eventually.” Lemmy shrugged. “Family relations are the only way to power in a Swiss private bank.”
“ So Elie told you to marry a Swiss sausage to get to the cheese.”
“ Initially it was a calculated move. But I didn’t have to pretend for long. Paula is wonderful. I’ve grown to love her very much.”
Tanya closed her eyes. “Jerusalem Gerster loves Armande Hoffgeitz’s daughter. This is absolutely insane.”
“Jealous?”
“You haven’t lost your sense of humor.” She searched his eyes for a long moment. “How could you do this?”
“What? Marry Paula?”
“Marrying for duty is in your genes. Your father made the same mistake.”
“ Say again?”
Tanya made a dismissive gesture. “How could you leave Israel, leave your life, your language, your friends? How could you turn into somebody else?”
Lemmy thought for a moment. “Elie saved my life. He offered me a great mission that will change the future of our people. And anyway, there was no one to stay for.”
“No one?” Tanya looked at him incredulously. “Your father!”
“Rabbi Abraham Gerster? The saint who excommunicated me, made me into a pariah, drove my mother to suicide?” Lemmy sneered. “My father was a fanatical jerk, and he hated me.”
“Don’t say that.” Tanya’s voice broke. “Abraham loved you. He still does-”
“Oh please! He didn’t even bother to attend my funeral!”
“That’s what Elie told you?”
“Yes.”
“Elie lied to you.” Tanya rose from the bench. “Your father cried at your funeral. At least what we thought was your funeral.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I was there with Bira and your paratrooper buddies. And your father fell on your grave, broken up. And he’s been crying on your grave ever since, for twenty-eight years.” She paused, her hand pressed to her chest. “And I’ve been crying there too.” Her voice choked and her eyes became wet again. “I planted a few-”
“Shhh, it’s okay.” Lemmy hugged her. The rain had stopped, the clouds began to disperse, and patches of blue appeared in the darkening sky.
“You didn’t die, but you did lose your life.” Tanya blew her nose into a handkerchief. “It’s my fault. All of it. Everything that happened to you and Abraham and your poor mother, all my fault. I’m a stupid, stupid woman!”
“You’re making no sense. How could it be your fault?”
“ It goes way back, long before you were born. If you knew the real Elie Weiss, you wouldn’t follow him. He was raised to be a shoykhet, to slaughter livestock in the same village in Germany where your father grew up as the rabbi’s son. The two of them watched the SS murder their families. They spent three years in the forests, coming out only to kill Germans and steal food.”
“ And you?”
“ For me the war had started on a train ride to Dachau, where a handsome Nazi general plucked me out of the line before the gas chambers. It’s a long story, but Klaus von Koenig loved me as truly as it was possible under those circumstances. He was Himmler’s chief of finance-”
“Chief of looting.”
“Yes, he also handled the valuables they stripped from the Jews. He deposited most of the gems and jewelry with Armande Hoffgeitz, his high-school buddy.”
“But how did you connect with Elie and my father?”
“On the first night of 1945, my seventeenth birthday, I was in the car with Klaus, returning from the Swiss border. He was driving down a narrow, twisty Alpine road. They ambushed us. Your father shot Klaus.” She pointed at the Mauser, which Lemmy still held in his hand. “But I had the only proof of the deposits-a ledger that Armande Hoffgeitz had signed. Klaus had given it to me for safekeeping.” Tanya looked away at the Limmat River and the hills beyond. “That night, in the snowy Alps, while Klaus’s body was still warm, I fell in love with your father-a different love, more like a tornado that swirled both of us into its epicenter. We spent three months together. But one day Elie returned alone and told me that Abraham was dead, that a group of Germans had sprayed your father with bullets until Abraham looked like a red sieve.”
“ And you believed him?”
“ You’ve seen Elie work with his blade, so you know why I didn’t question him. That night, when he fell asleep, I ran. And ran. I gave birth to Bira a few months later in a refugee camp-”
“ Does she know?”
“ What?”
“ That her father was a Nazi general?”
Tanya smiled as if the question was a joke. “She didn’t need a father. All the other Mossad agents missed their kids, so Bira was everyone’s darling. You see, I joined the Mossad so that Elie wouldn’t find me.”
“ But he did?”
“ More than twenty years later. In sixty-six I was decorated for a successful operation, and he saw my name on a list at the prime minister’s office. It was bound to happen. Bira was already grown, serving in the IDF, and I was no longer afraid of Elie. Big mistake, as it turned out.”
Lemmy removed the handkerchief from the wound, which had stopped bleeding, and wiped the rain and tears from her cheeks. He noticed another bruise on her head, a week or two old, but didn’t ask her about it.
“ Abraham had somehow survived the Germans’ bullets. Apparently, to explain my disappearance, Elie had told Abraham that I was dead-do you see a pattern here? And my purported death so devastated your father that Elie was able to convince him to dedicate his life to serving Israel secretly. Abraham had been groomed to be a rabbi, so he infiltrated the most fundamentalist ultra-Orthodox sect in Israel, where anti-Zionist ideology was the seed of future civil war among Jews. He joined Neturay Karta in nineteen forty-six and married your mother. Having a son named after the divided city of Jerusalem added to his mystic aura, and with his charisma and brilliant mind, Abraham Gerster ascended to the leadership of the sect.”
“ I don’t believe it,” Lemmy said. “My father was sincere in his fanatical faith. What you’re saying is impossible. My father was a mole?”
“ That’s exactly what he was. Still is. Elie had recruited many other moles. That’s his expertise. Look at you!”
“No.” Lemmy stood up. “It can’t be. My father was a real tzadik. Elie told me that my father banished me, sat shivah in mourning for me, because I rejected Talmud-”
“Elie told you? Elie lied to you! And to me! He broke our deal!”
