The Last Secret Of The Temple (27 page)

'What have we ever done to them that they should come here and tell us how to run our country? Are we not even permitted to defend ourselves now?
Meshugina!
All of them!
Meshugina!'

The old man rattled his
Yediot Ahronot
angrily, his saggy, thin-lipped mouth puckering up into a rictus of indignant fury, like a slug that has had salt poured on it.

Ben-Roi took a swig of his beer and stared at the object of the man's ire – a front-page story about a group of European peace activists who had come to Israel to protest at the three-hundred-kilometre security wall the government was erecting between Israel and the West Bank. The accompanying photograph showed an English comedian Ben-Roi had never heard of linking arms with a group of Palestinians in front of an IDF bulldozer, under the caption CELEBRITIES CONDEMN 'APARTHEID' BARRIER.

'Nazis!' cried the old man, crumpling the newspaper as if he was trying to strangle it. 'This is what they call us. See here? My brother died in Buchenwald and they call me a Nazi! Shame on them! Shame on the dirty
goyim!'

He cast the newspaper aside and slumped back in his chair, shaking his head. For a brief instant Ben-Roi thought of saying something, telling the man how he too despised these foreign do-gooders, the way they came over here to moan and condemn before scuttling back to their nice secure homes in their nice secure countries, congratulating themselves on being such wonderful, caring human beings while behind them women and children were being blown to offal by the poor old oppressed fucking Palestinians.

He said nothing, however, worried that if he started into the subject the fury would swiftly take over, filling him with a blinding, sludgy blackness so that before he knew what was happening he would be shouting and raging and banging his fists on the table, making a spectacle of himself. No, he thought, it was better just to hold his own counsel. Safer.

He reached up and grasped the menorah hanging around his neck, squeezing it, as though to try and force something back inside him, then, downing the remainder of his beer, he stood, slapped a twenty-shekel note onto the table and set off up the road to see what he could dig up about the murdered woman for that damned Egyptian.

Shabbier and less exclusive than the surrounding blocks, Ohr Ha-Chaim was a gloomy, claustrophobic street right at the top end of the Jewish Quarter, up near the Armenian sector, with a sloping paved floor worn shiny by the ceaseless slap of feet, and high houses pressing in on either side like the walls of a vice. Number forty-six was about halfway along, a dour stone building whose upper section was divided into apartments – empty washing lines drooped in slack parabolas from many of the windows – and whose basement was occupied by a cramped
yeshiva
with its own separate entrance. On arrival, Ben-Roi consulted the crumpled sheet of notepaper on which he had scribbled the details the Egyptian had given him the previous afternoon, then went up to the main door and pressed the intercom buzzer for flat four.

He could have got down here sooner – it wasn't as if he'd had a lot to do over the last twenty-four hours – but he hadn't liked the Egyptian's tone and didn't feel inclined to do him any favours. He'd actually been thinking of leaving it even longer, especially after yesterday evening when, despite the fact that Ben-Roi had specifically told him he didn't want them, the little prick had faxed over a whole spew of case notes, in the process jamming his fax machine which had beeped and squealed at him like a whining child until, in a fury of frustration, he'd ended up ripping it from its socket and throwing it across the room.

No, he didn't feel the remotest urge to be helpful. In the end, however, he'd decided he might as well get it over and done with, before Khediva or whatever the hell his name was started phoning up and badgering him, as he almost certainly would do, the pestering little cunt. So here he was.

He pressed the buzzer again, glancing down through the basement window at the rows of young Haredi men hunched over their Talmuds, their
pe'ot
dangling like spaniels' tails, their faces pale and sickly-looking behind their glasses (Jerusalem, he'd once heard, had the highest concentration of opticians of any city in the world). A slight scowl twisted his mouth – 'penguins' Galia used to call them – and, looking up again, he pressed the buzzer a third time, this one finally drawing a response.

'Shalom?'

A young woman was leaning out of a window above, her plump face framed by the traditional
shekel
wig worn by Orthodox Jewish wives. He explained who he was and why he was there.

'We've only just moved in,' said the woman. 'And the people before us were only here for a couple of years.'

'Before them?'

The woman shrugged, turning to shout something at someone behind her.

'You want to talk to Mrs Weinberg,' she said, looking down again. 'At number two. She's been here for thirty years. Knows everyone. And everything.'

From her tone it was clear she thought Mrs Weinberg was an interfering old busybody. Ben-Roi thanked her and, flicking his eyes across the intercom panel, jabbed the buzzer for flat two. He had barely withdrawn his finger when the front door creaked open to reveal a tiny wizened old lady, little taller than a child, wearing a crimplene housecoat and cheap slippers, her hands bunched and twisted with arthritis.

'Mrs Weinberg?' He pulled out his ID. 'My name is Inspector Ben-Roi of the—'

She let out a little gasp, bringing a hand up to her throat. 'Oh God! What's happened? It's Samuel, isn't it? Tell me what's happened to him!'

He assured her that nothing had happened to Samuel, whoever he was; he simply wished to ask her some questions. About a woman who used to live in the flat above. For a moment she didn't seem to believe him, her chest heaving, her eyes moist with frightened tears. Gradually she calmed down and, with a motion of her hand, beckoned him into her flat, which was on the building's ground floor, to the right of the entrance hall.

'Samuel's my grandson,' she explained as they went. 'The best boy in the world. They've got him down in Gaza, God help us, on his national service. Every time I turn on the news, whenever the phone rings . . . I can't sleep for worry. He's just a
boychik,
a child. They're all just children.'

She directed him into a small living room, cramped and gloomy, with a large wooden dresser at one end and two armchairs arranged in front of an old black and white television set, on top of which sat a cage with a yellow budgerigar inside. There were photographs everywhere, and a lingering smell of something sweet and rather unpleasant – exactly what, Ben-Roi couldn't work out. Bird-shit, maybe, or cooking fat. He tried not to dwell on it. From somewhere else in the flat he could hear the babble of Israel Army Radio.

The old woman prodded him into one of the armchairs and disappeared for a moment, turning off the radio before returning with a glass of orange juice, which she handed to him. He hadn't asked for it but accepted it anyway, taking a polite sip and laying it on a small table beside his chair. She settled herself in the other chair, picked up a tangled spaghetti of blue and white wool from the floor and started to knit, the needles held almost directly in front of her face, her hands moving with surprising dexterity for one so bent and arthritic. She seemed to be making a
yarmulke,
part of its circumference already realized at the end of the twin strands of wool, and Ben-Roi smiled faintly to himself, recalling an old family story about his grandmother, his father's mother, who during the 1967 war had knitted matching red skullcaps for every man in her son's artillery company, over fifty of them, the company as a result gaining the nickname the Blazing Yarmulkes, a title which, so far as he knew, they still bore to this day.

'So, what are these questions?'

'Hmm?'

'You said you wanted to ask me some questions. About flat four.'

'Yes, of course.'

He glanced down at the sheet of notepaper he was still holding in his hand, trying to gather his thoughts.

'Is it about that Goldstein woman? Because if I said it once, I said it a hundred times – she's going to come to a bad end. Three years she was here, and when she left the whole block applauded. I remember once, it was a Friday, Shabbat for God's sake—'

'It's about someone called Hannah Schlegel,' said Ben-Roi, butting in.

The clack of the needles slowed and stopped.

'Oh.'

'The woman above said you might have known her.'

She stared at her knitting for a moment, then laid it in her lap and sat back.

'A terrible thing,' she sighed. 'Terrible thing. Murdered, you know. By Arabs. In the pyramids. In cold blood. Terrible.'

She clasped her hands together, the swollen protuberant knuckles giving them the look of some barky deformity on the side of a tree.

'Quiet lady. Kept herself to herself. Always said good morning, though. She had a . . .' She unlocked her hands and made a tapping motion on the inside of her left forearm. 'You know . . . the numbers. Auschwitz.'

The budgerigar broke into a sudden brief chorus of song, then fell silent and started pecking at its claws, head bobbing up and down like an angler's float on choppy water. Ben-Roi took another sip of his orange juice.

'The Egyptian police are reinvestigating the case,' he explained. 'They want us to get a few personal details about Mrs Schlegel. Job, family, that sort of thing. Just the basics.'

The old woman raised her thin, pale eyebrows and resumed her knitting, the needles working slower than before, the woollen circle of the
yarmulke
imperceptibly spreading beneath her fingertips like some strange blooming algae.

'I didn't know her well,' she said. 'It wasn't like we were friends. Just said hello occasionally. She liked to keep herself to herself. Most of the time you'd hardly have known she was there. Not like that Mrs Goldstein. You always knew
she
was there. The noises you used to hear!
Oy vey!'

She wrinkled her face in disgust. Ben-Roi patted his pockets, trying to find a pen, realizing after a moment that he'd forgotten to bring one. There was a biro sitting in a glass vase on the dresser, but he didn't like to ask for it, worried it might make him look unprofessional. Fuck it, he thought, I'll just scribble some notes when I get back to the station.

'She was already here when we arrived,' the old woman was saying. 'That was 1969. We came up from Tel Aviv, me and Teddy. August 1969. He'd always wanted to live here. Me, I wasn't so sure. When I first saw the place I thought
klog iz mir!
What are we doing in a dump like this? Rubble everywhere from the Arabs, half the buildings fallen down. Now, of course, I wouldn't live anywhere else. That's him, over there.' She raised her needles, indicating a photo on the middle shelf of the dresser – a short, plump man wearing a trilby and a
tallit,
standing in front of the Western Wall. 'Forty years we were married. Not like today's kids. Forty years. How I miss him!'

She raised a wrist and dabbed at her eyes. Ben-Roi stared at the floor, embarrassed.

'Anyway, she was already here then. When we arrived. Moved in right after the liberation, apparently.'

Ben-Roi shifted in his chair.

'Before that?'

The old woman shrugged, squinting down at her knitting. 'I seem to remember her mentioning she lived up by Mea Sharim, but I can't be sure. She was from France originally. Before the war. She used to use French words, you know, talking to herself, when she came down the stairs.'

'And you say she was in Auschwitz.'

'Well, that's what old Dr Tauber told me. You know, Dr Tauber, from number sixteen.'

Ben-Roi didn't know at all, but said nothing.

'I saw her tattoo a couple of times, so I knew she'd been in the camps. She never mentioned it herself. Very private. But then one day I was talking to Dr Tauber – lovely man, passed away, what, four, five years ago, God rest his soul – and he said "You know that lady who lives above you, Mrs Schlegel," and I said "Yes", and he said, "Guess what?" – he was like that, you know, good at telling a story, building it up – "Guess what?" he said. "We came over together on the same boat. In 1946. From Europe." The British tried to turn them back at Haifa, apparently, but they jumped into the sea and swam ashore. Over a mile it was. At night. And then twenty years later they end up living in the same street! What a coincidence!'

There was an echo of thudding feet from the flat above, as if someone was running around. The old woman looked up at the ceiling.

'And this Dr Tauber told you she was in Auschwitz?'

'Hmm?'

'Hannah Schlegel.'

For a moment she looked confused, then realized what he was talking about.

'Oh, yes, yes. He said they got talking on the boat. I told you they came over on the same boat, didn't I? Two weeks they were on it. Six hundred of them. Squashed in like sardines. Can you imagine? To survive the camps and then have to go through that! She was pretty, he said. Very young and very pretty. Tough. Hardened. The brother didn't say a word for the whole journey, apparently. Just sat there staring at the sea. Traumatized.'

Ben-Roi didn't recall the Egyptian detective mentioning any brother. He chewed his lip for a moment, then, pushing his pride to one side, stood up, crossed to the dresser and took the pen from the vase, raising his eyebrows at Mrs Weinberg as if to say 'Do you mind?' She was lost in her own thoughts and didn't even seem to notice that he'd moved from his chair.

'Poor things,' she was saying. 'Couldn't have been much more than fifteen or sixteen. To have been put through something like that. What is this world, I ask you? What is this world that things like that should happen to a child? To anyone?'

Ben-Roi crossed back to his chair and sat down again, scribbling the biro on his palm to get the ink moving.

'Is he still alive?' he asked. 'The brother?'

The old woman shrugged. 'According to Dr Tauber he was . . . you know. . .' She lifted a hand and tapped the side of her head, the gesture conveying disturbance, madness. 'And what do you expect? Cut open like that, injected, like some sort of animal.'