Several of the patrons suddenly rose, including the man in the pink jacket, and surrounded their table.
“ Step back,” Elie said, “or I’ll puncture his brain.”
A man in a blue jacket jogged across the restaurant to the table, his hand held up. “Good drill, fellows. Excellent practice!”
“ Agent Cohen.” Rising slowly, Elie kept Freckles’ chin impaled on the steak knife. “Call off your men and have a car ready for us outside.”
“ Let him go.” The Shin Bet officer spoke too quietly for the other patrons to hear. “We can discuss our differences elsewhere.”
“ I think not.” Elie headed for the door with Freckles.
Rabbi Gerster was determined not to allow Jewish blood to be spilled. “We’re outnumbered. Let’s live to fight another day.”
“ Follow me,” Elie said, leading Freckles with the knife.
The rabbi saw Itah raise her eyebrows in a manner of someone accepting defeat. They had made a mistake not telling Elie about the Shin Bet salary Freckles was earning, and Elie had kept from them the fact that he had summoned Freckles to the hotel. Now the game was over.
Rabbi Gerster could have pulled down Elie’s hand to release the hapless Freckles, but the young man’s double- crossing irritated the rabbi enough to make him choose a less-pleasant method. He swung his arm and hit Freckles on the forehead with the back of his hand. The agent’s head flew backward, his face turned to the ceiling, and his chin tore off from Elie’s knife. The strike’s momentum caused him to fall backward, where he stayed sprawled on the carpet, too shocked to move.
Removing the knife from Elie’s hand, the rabbi flipped it in the air and offered it to Agent Cohen with the handle first.
“ Thank you.” Agent Cohen clapped. “Great show!”
The other Shin Bet agents joined the clapping.
“ It’s only a drill,” Agent Cohen said to the shocked patrons as his agents steered the group to the door. “Thanks for your patience. Enjoy your dinner!”
The clapping proved contagious, and the thirty or so patrons joined in, visibly relieved.
*
Wearing a burgundy windbreaker and a baseball hat, his overnight bag hanging from his shoulder, Lemmy approached the entrance to the King David Hotel. He had to go without the sunglasses, which would have raised suspicion at this hour. The two Subaru sedans were still there, and several idle men in civilian clothes stood along the driveway. He felt like a criminal entering a well-policed compound.
The tall doors were propped open to allow fresh evening air into the lobby. As he stepped closer, a large group was coming out, a tight circle surrounding an inner core of-he assumed-dignitaries that merited VIP protection. He stepped aside as the group emerged. Behind him, car engines came to life.
In the center of the group, one man was taller than the others, his thick mane of gray hair brushed back from a handsome face. He sensed Lemmy’s gaze, glanced, and stopped in his tracks, causing the whole group to come to an awkward halt, bumping into each other.
It took a moment for Lemmy to recognize the blue, wise eyes.
Father!
Lemmy was stunned, not only by seeing his father for the first time in almost three decades, but by the loss of his rabbinical manifestations. Yet years of honing his self-control in a life of clandestine survival kept Lemmy from expressing any emotions while his mind absorbed all the details within his field of vision: Elie, much shorter than the rest, looked frail. A woman, about fifty, wore a headscarf and an anxious expression. The men with the guns were alert, professional, focused on their three prisoners.
Lemmy reached into his pocket to draw the Beretta he had taken from the security man at Hadassah, but his father gave a quick shake of the head, turned in the other direction, and bellowed in the familiar baritone that Lemmy remembered so well: “Benjamin! Benjamin!”
Everyone turned in that direction. The agent in charge-blue jacket, thin lips, and rusty hair-recovered quickly and ordered them into the cars. A moment later they drove off.
“What a bunch of showoff girls,” one of the bellmen said. “These guys think the world should stop for them.”
“Come on,” his colleague said, “they have to be ready if someone attacks a bigwig.” He noticed Lemmy standing there. “Welcome to the King David Hotel.” He reached for his shoulder bag.
“I’m fine,” Lemmy said. But he wasn’t. His hands shook and his knees threatened to buckle. His father’s eyes had been surprised, but not shocked, as if he had expected to see his dead son show up alive. And his coolheaded diversion had prevented disaster. But had his father yelled “Benjamin!” only as a diversion, or also as a directive to go to Benjamin in Neturay Karta?
He entered the lobby and bumped into a chubby young man in sandals and shorts, who picked up his blue skullcap, which had fallen to the marble floor, and pressed it to his head. His freckled, sweaty face turned up to Lemmy for a second, and he sprinted to the exit, pausing to check that the circular driveway was vacant before running out into the night.
*
“ What was that about?” Itah’s lips were warm on Rabbi Gerster’s ear. “Did you see Benjamin near the hotel? On the street?”
He shook his head.
“Then why did you yell his name?”
The rabbi smiled.
Agent Cohen, who sat next to the driver up front, glanced over his shoulder. “No more tricks, guys. We could be less polite, if you get my drift.”
“Same here,” Elie said. He was sitting by the window, looking out.
The Shin Bet officer sneered. “And I was told you’re a dangerous man. Ha! ” He faced forward and switched on the radio, filling the car with fast-paced Hebrew music.
Itah squeezed Rabbi Gerster’s knee.
He leaned closer and whispered in her ear. “When we were leaving the hotel lobby, did you see the guy with the baseball hat?”
She nodded.
“That was Lemmy.”
Itah jerked backward as if he had hit her. She mouthed, No!
Rabbi Gerster nodded and whispered, “My son!” And before he knew what was happening to him, his face crumbled, and hard, painful sobs burst from his chest. Itah put her arms around him, and he cried, rocking back and forth, consumed by joy and relief and by a terrible fear that this encounter, this brief, wordless eye-contact with Lemmy, would turn out to be the end, rather than a new beginning.
*
Tuesday, October 31, 1995
Lemmy checked out of the King David Hotel in the morning. He left the rented Fiat at the YMCA and walked through the streets of Jerusalem, which bore little resemblance to the divided city of his childhood.
He crossed the point where the border had once cut an arbitrary north-south line and saw none of the bullet- scarred, half-ruined buildings that had abutted the no-man’s land. Through the Jaffa Gate, which had been in Jordanian territory the last time he saw it, Lemmy entered the Arab Quarter of the Old City. He followed the market alleys, finding himself in the revived Jewish Quarter, home not only to Talmudic yeshivas and bearded scholars, but to artists’ studios and galleries. Stone-built residences had been restored to original antiquity with meticulous details. Fenced-off archeological digs reached down through layers of sediment, unearthing physical remnants all the way back to King David’s empire. Looking down into one of the deep holes, Lemmy could see the layers of Jewish life, each era settled atop the previous era, century after century, accumulated on this mountaintop citadel.
Reaching the vast plaza in front of the Wailing Wall, he found a marble bench all the way to the side. Religious and secular Jews, foreign tourists, and men in uniform stood at the wall shoulder to shoulder. The giant cubical
