Pattern Crimes (28 page)

"Oh, Tola," Targov said, "this is a city built for artists. Such light! Such terrible splendor! I never dreamed...." He turned back to the Rodin, examined it again. Unable to find a single fault, he announced: "But now we have so much to do!"

The grass! The unveiling! The invitations! Relations with the press! Within the hour Rokovsky was dispatched to Haifa to meet the Japanese freighter carrying "The Righteous Martyr" in its hold. Targov, free of his aide's gray grim presence, struck off happily on his own.

He spent the day exploring the Old City, hurrying down angled scorching alleys, shoved and battered by delirious mobs. Moans and mosques, churches and wails. An endless harangue of radio music, florid curses, bargains broken, bargains struck.

Cats prowled, greedy skeletal cats. Bearded men worked iron and boys sawed aromatic wood. Arms thrust out plying him with pastries. Arabs ushered him with sweeping gestures into tiny fetid shops.

In the Church of the Holy Sepulcher he gasped.
Have I lost my mind?
The incense was so powerful it snaked down his nostrils and threatened to burn the linings of his lungs.

Pushing his way past a defecating mule, he paused before a doorway. Twisted metal and discarded rusted machinery parts poured out onto the street. He peered inside. A bare bulb hung from a wire above a decaying table. Nearly lost in the rancid gloom were four old men in soiled undershirts puffing on water pipes and playing cards.

He had a feeling about the Old City, that it was compressed, filled with rancor, held together within an angry fist. A city of secrets, robed figures, hooded haunted faces, stern nuns with bloodied knees and mad messianic eyes. At 2 P.M. on the Via Dolorosa, watching a blind man with a white cane stumble out of the Church of the Flagellation, he thought:
I walk where prophets and martyrs have trod.

He went to see the Dome of the Rock, waiting in line with the tourists. It was, he knew, the finest building in the city. A superbly tiled octagon supporting a large intricately decorated dome, it not only dominated the Temple Mount, it dominated Jerusalem.

The architecture was superb; he nearly swooned at its beauty. The rotunda was suffused with soft pastel light which entered through the stained glass windows of the clerestory and fell upon the rock. He stood at the railing beneath the cupola looking at this enormous outcropping of stone. To this place Abraham had come to sacrifice Isaac, and from it the Prophet Mohammed had leapt to heaven on his horse.

Anna looked different. In California she was bony and pale but here she glowed with health.
Was it the detective?
Targov examined him: a stocky, tanned, black-haired almost handsome man with full well-sculpted lips. He had a Roman warrior's brow, projected competence and strength. But there was something sensitive about his eyes; a seeker, Targov decided, a man on a quest. Yes, it's he who's changed her; he makes love to her properly, ignites such a fire that the heat rises even to her cheeks.

".
..so brilliant, you Jews! Relativity. Psychoanalysis. Do I dare mention Marxism?" He glanced at Anna. She shook her head and grinned. "Now you're experts on irrigation, pioneering, archaeology. You raise an army, create new armaments, and against the world's expectations proceed to win all your wars.
"

He glanced around the restaurant. It was nearly empty. When he turned back he found himself object of the detective's gaze. "Perhaps most amazing to me you have rediscovered the heroic. In an era when we're told the hero cannot exist you have hundreds—soldiers, teachers, wisemen. But for all your virtues you're still fallible." He put down his fork. "This food for instance. It's terrible." They laughed as he pushed away his plate.

"By the way," he asked the detective later, "how do I go about finding someone here?"

"Depends who you're looking for. I use the phone book myself."

"You find criminals that way? Amazing!" He looked at the detective
again
. "There
just may be a few old friends from Russia, new
arrivals. Could I find them if I wanted to?"

"Give me their names, birthdates if you know them. I'll be glad to run them down."

"I don't want to trouble you. I thought there might be a bureau."

"The Jewish Agency. Or the Ministry of Immigrants Absorption. But, believe me, it's no trouble. With the police computer—"

"Dear God, computers! I wouldn't dream...."

A quizzical spark, then, in the detective's eyes. "Actually this is a very small country. We all know each other. All you have to do is ask around."

Anna excused herself to make a phone call. Targov paid the bill, then he and the detective walked outside. There was an awkward moment as they waited in the sun staring across the ravine. The light was harsh; it hurt Targov's eyes. Olive trees, powdered with dust, stood stark and gnarled against the iridescent sky.

"Listen," Targov said, "I don't want to sound paternal but you're good for her. I see that. She's blooming here. She needed your kind of strength."

"Thank you for saying that," the detective said. "I appreciate—"

"Ah, but here she comes. She wants to show me things. You're coming with us of course?"

The detective shook his head. "I think you two should speak Russian for a while." He bent to kiss Anna, then offered Targov his hand. Again Targov noticed the quizzical searching look. "Please call if you need anything."

"Yes, I will," Targov said.

Somehow he managed to climb the Mount of Olives. She led him by his hand up a steep path of broken rocks between walls that guarded the ancient graves. He panted. In Big Sur he regularly prowled the forest but here the heat was punishing. When they reached the top he looked back across the valley at Mount Moriah bathed in golden light.

"Why?" she asked him.

He turned to her. Her eyes had caught the sun, now reminded him of the color of the Kremlin's walls.

"I thought I was finished. Then suddenly it came. My best work. Perhaps my last...."

She shook her head. "I know you, Sasha. You didn't travel eight thousand miles just to see a ribbon cut."

He studied her. She did not blink or turn away. "Yes," he admitted, "the sculpture is only part of it."

"And the rest?"

"There is a settlement to be made."

"What kind of settlement?"

He spread his arms. "What else? My life."

"So it has nothing to do with me?" she asked him later, as they sat in the backroom of a tea shop on sweltering Ben Yehuda. Outside a juggler was entertaining a small crowd. Across the pedestrian mall a seedy violinist was scratching out a rhapsody for tourists.

"Nothing. But I'm very glad to see you."

"Tell me why you've come."

He paused. "Call it redemption. A year ago on my birthday I had a dream. A man shot at me. He missed."

"Well?"

"Perhaps next time he won't. Then there'll be repercussions. Yes, I think there will."

She stared at him. "I must tell you, Sasha, I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Better that way. Listen, I'm here and I have many things to do. To see you was the most pleasant of them. You could have been my daughter. God, how I wish . . ."

Later, nervously pacing his apartment, he received Rokovsky's call.
The freighter had
been delayed three days. Meantime,
bad
news:
Irina was
on her way.

"What?"

"She's flying in day after tomorrow. There was a rambling cable at the hotel. I phoned to try and stop her, but Bianca said she'd left. She's in New York someplace, unreachable."

"Bitch!"
She'll ruin everything.

"I can't think how you can keep her out."

"All right, she wants to come, be a pest, share in the glory—fine. Meantime, I have a confidential mission and it must be accomplished before she arrives. Find Sokolov. When you locate him, and remember you're searching on your behalf not mine, call me back and give me the address. Under no circumstances, Tola, are you to go near him, or tell Irina anything, you understand? When she comes your job is to keep her away from me. Tie her up in knots."

A short silence while Rokovsky, accustomed to fulfilling unexplained requests, pondered a solution.

"Perhaps she might enjoy a trip to the Galilee," he finally said.

Everyone in the Russian Compound knew that Pattern Crimes was in disgrace. Cops who'd envied David his status as favorite son of Rafi's CID, greeted him with hypocritical commiseration, while real friends stopped him in the corridors to tell him he'd been handed a rotten deal.

One day in the men's room he over-heard himself discussed. A pair of middle-aged narcotics detectives were pounding on the coffee machine just outside the door:

"He's a terrific detective," said the first, "but he's got this complex—he's going to save us all."

"Yeah," said the second, "it's not enough for him to investigate. David has to
understand."

He watched his people carefully. Each reacted in his own way. Uri Schuster per-formed isometric exercises while gazing sullenly into space. Micha made inefficient busywork with the files while Dov braved his gloom by striding aggressively up and down the halls. Only Shoshana seemed unperturbed. She wore the preoccupied look of a detective puzzling out a baffling case.
She's onto something,
David thought. He decided to leave her alone. Whatever it
was she would play with it until she
dropped it or brought it in.

Sarah Dorfman was kind; she took Rebecca Marcus out to a concert. Then, three days after David's dismissal from the case, Rafi summoned him into his office, dispatched Sarah on an errand, then rose and closed the door.

"You're angry with me. I can tell by your expression. You think I should have fought harder on your behalf." Not true, of course, but David said nothing; his father had taught him to allow guilty-feeling people to express their guilt. "... but don't forget: that kind of loyalty has to be reciprocal. If you'd consulted me first, I'd have backed you up no matter what. But you moved in on your own, and went too far. I did the best I could for you. I'm sorry you feel betrayed."

Rafi lit his pipe, then mumbled something about having David and Anna over for dinner. But then, with no date set, the invitation hung between them awkwardly.

The next evening, when David came home, he found a strange assortment of flowers on the windowsill, bizarre epiphytic orchids with oblong ruffled pink-veined leaves.

"From Rafi," Anna explained. "He even sent the vase."

He began to leave the office early to take long walks in the city. His hope was that this exercise would work off his malaise. But these walks made him feel sorrowful. Jerusalem resisted his advances. The city remained elusive, evading his attempts to read her pattern, understand her grand design.

He started to revisit places he remembered from his youth, streets where long ago he and Gideon had walked or ridden bikes. Memories of his brother haunted him; he couldn't understand why. Then one evening he found himself just outside his father's door.

He didn't knock, simply stood outside in the gloom listening to the commotion within. A quarrel was taking place. The words were indecipherable. A woman whose voice he didn't recognize was carrying on hysterically and his father was responding with angry words.
Then
there was quiet, then whispers, then weeping again. Fascinated and embarrassed, David hurried down the stairs. In the alley he paused to stare up at the window. Then he rushed back through Me'a Shearim, past storekeepers pulling down their roller blinds, to the bright lights of Jaffa Road.

That night he told Anna about the incident. "Who could it have been? I know this sounds stupid but it never occurred to me that he still has a private life. I always think of him brooding at home alone, and then, when I catch him in an emotional scene, I wonder: Do I really understand him? Do I know anything about him? Oh, Anna, why do I feel so out of touch?"

She said she thought it was his case—that having been deprived of it so suddenly, it was impossible for him not to feel lost.

"Sure," he said, "that's why I started taking walks. But they've only made me feel worse. Things come back, bits and pieces of the past. The more I walk the more morose I get."

"Tell me."

"I've been thinking of Gideon. I suppose it's because of Ephraim Cohen and Peretz. Just this evening I had an idea—that somehow he took upon himself all the problems we should have shared. That he absorbed all the pathology in our family, took on all the abuse. And that now, because he did, I'm walking around alive."

"What pathology?"

"The thing our parents generated. The web they wove around us from which we had to struggle free."

"You think Gideon...?"

"He took it all upon himself, Anna. And by doing that he left me free to become a sane adult."