Everything came off.
Then she goes and fuck-you's him.
Unreal.
But that's what he got for improvising, deviating from the plan.
Trying to be casual-that never worked.
The important thing was structure. Following the rules. Keeping everything clean.
He'd gone home that night and punished himself for stepping out of bounds.
Using one of the little dancing beauties-the smallest bistoury-he'd incised a series of curved discipline cuts in the firm white skin of his inner thighs. Close to the scrotum-don't slip, ha, ha, or there'll be a major endocrine adjustment.
Cut, cut, dance, dance, crosses with bent ends. Rotated. One on each thigh. The crosses had seeped blood; he'd tasted it, bitter and metallic, poisoned by failure.
There, that'll show you, filthy boy.
Stupid sand-nigger whore.
A delay, but no big deal. The schedule could be fouled if the goal was kept sacred.
Project Untermensch. He heard children laughing. All these inferior slimefucks-it made his head hurt, filled his skull with a terrible roar. He hid his face behind the paper, concentrated on making the noise go away by thinking of his little beauties asleep in their velvet bed, so shiny and clean, extensions of his will, techno-perfection.
Structure was the answer. Keeping in step.
Goose step.
Dance, dance.
Moshe Kagan seemed amused rather than offended. He sat with Daniel in the living room of his home, a cheaply built four-room cube on a raised foundation, no different from any of the others in the Gvura settlement.
One corner of the room was filled with boxes of clothes.
On the wall behind Kagan was a framed poster featuring miniature oval portraits of great sages. Next to it hung a water-color of the Western Wall as it had been before '67-no sunlit expanse of plaza; the prayer space narrowed by a war wall and shadowed by jerry-built Arab houses. Daniel remembered coming upon it like that, after making his way through dead bodies and hailstorms of sniper fire. How demeaned the last remnant of the Temple had looked, rubble and rotting garbage piled up behind the wall, the Jordanians trying to bury the last reminder of three thousand years of Jewish presence in Jerusalem.
Underneath the watercolor was a hand-printed banner featuring the blue clenched-fist logo of the Gvura party and the legend: TO FORGET IS TO die. To the left of the banner was a glass-doored bookcase containing the twenty volumes of the Talmud, a Mikra'ot Gedolot Pentateuch with full rabbinic commentary, megillot, kabbalistic treaties, the Code of Jewish Law. Leaning against the case were an Uzi and an assault rifle.
An angry red sun Irad set itself resolutely in the sky and the drive down the Hebron Road had been hot and lonely. The unpaved turnoff to Beit Gvura anticipated Hebron by seven kilometers, a twisting and dusty climb, hell on the Escort's tires. Upon arrival, Daniel had passed through a guarded checkpoint, endured the hostile stares of a gauntlet of husky Gvura men before being escorted to Kagan's front door.
Lots of muscle, plenty of firearms on display, but the leader himself was something else: mid-fifties, small, fragile-looking, and cheerful, with a grizzled beard the color of scotch whisky and drooping blue eyes. His cheeks were hollow, his hair thinning, and he wore a large black velvet kipah that covered most of his head. His clothes were simple and spotless-white shirt, black trousers, black oxfords-and bagged on him, as if he'd just lost weight. But Daniel had never seen him any heavier, either in photos or onstage at rallies.
Kagan took a green apple out of the bowl on the coffee table that separated him from Daniel and rubbed it between his palms. He offered the bowl to the detective and, when Daniel declined, made the blessing over fruit and bit in. As he chewed, knotty lumps rose and fell in his jaw. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, revealing thin forearms, sunburnt on top, fish-belly white on the inner side. Still banded, Daniel noticed, with the strap marks of the morning phylacteries.
'A terrible thing,' he said, in perfect Hebrew. 'Arab girls getting cut up.'
'I appreciate your taking the time to talk to me about it, Rabbi.'
Kagan's amusement spread into a smile. He ate half the apple before speaking.
'Terrible,' he repeated. 'The loss of any human life is tragic. We are all created in God's image.'
Daniel felt he was being mocked. 'I've heard you refer to Arabs as subhuman.'
Kagan dismissed the comment with a wave of his hand. 'Rhetoric. Hitting the ass across the face in order to get his attention-that's an old American joke.'
'I see.'
'Of course if they choose to reduce themselves to animals by acting in a subhuman manner, I have no compunction about pointing in out.'
Kagan chewed the apple down to the core, bit into the core, and finished it too. When only the stem was left, he pulled it out of his mouth and twirled it between his fingertips. 'Sharavi,' he said. 'Old Yemenite name. Are you de-scended from Mori Shalom Sharavi?'
'Yes.'
'No hesitation, eh? I believe you. The Yemenites have the best yikhus, the finest lineage of any of us. Your nusakh of prayer is closest to the original, the way Jews davened before the Babylonian exile. What rginyan do you
