Tongues of Fire (3 page)

“Go away, Harry.” He wanted nothing to do with Harry, or spray painting the Statue of Liberty, or kidnapping men in white robes, or throwing Molotov cocktails across embassy lawns. “You seem like a nice man, but please go away.”

“I'm with the Haganah,” Harry said, as if that settled everything.

Rehv folded the camp cot and carried it to the storage room. “That's why I want you to go.”

Harry followed him through the door, perhaps because he didn't want to raise his voice, perhaps because he didn't like the bare white room filled with dirty white light that came in through the tall windows. Rehv felt Harry touch his arm. “I just want to talk to you. Would a cup of coffee be too much trouble?”

Coffee was easy. Quentin Katz believed in offering visitors coffee the moment they walked through the door: “It's good business.” In the storage room were a stove, a small espresso machine, a coffee grinder, a percolator, and tins of coffee beans from Colombia, Brazil, Kenya, and Java. Rehv kept a jar of instant on the top shelf.

They sat on the polished pine floor drinking black coffee from ivory-colored Rosenthal cups. The dirty white light turned the bad side of Harry's face into lunar crust. Rehv saw his hand tremble slightly as he raised the cup to his lips, and wondered how old he was.

“It's very good coffee, thank you,” Harry said after one sip. He placed the cup carefully on the floor and didn't touch it again. Little concentric waves of coffee pulsed across the surface of the cup, back and forth, colliding, diminishing, dying. Rehv looked up to find bright blue eyes gazing at him thoughtfully.

“So,” Harry said. “You've decided to assimilate, is that it?”

“Oh shit.” Rehv waved the back of his hand at the four booths in the center of the room to show Harry how wrong he was.

“What are those?”

“Art.”

“I see.” The blue eyes ran their gaze over the exhibit. Then suddenly a glitter broke through their surface, as if Harry were about to smile. He didn't smile, but he said, “I do see. They're the portable toilets Americans use at construction sites. What a funny idea.”

“You should get yourself a grant.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Nothing.”

Harry shifted slightly. He wasn't comfortable on the floor. “I'm afraid we don't know much about you, Mr. Rehv.”

But you knew where to find me, Rehv thought. He said, “Why don't you tell me what you want? It won't be long before the owners come to open the gallery.”

Harry inched closer on the floor. His breath smelled of mint toothpaste. “We want you to do one little job. It will be very simple, but a very big help.”

“To what end?”

The gentleness dropped away from Harry's voice like a button from a fencing sword. “For the cause,” he said angrily. The good side of his face went scarlet. The bad stayed the way it was. The word
Israel
hung in the air unsaid. It always did.

“I've had enough of hopeless causes.” Rehv was surprised to feel himself becoming angry too. “Blowing up buildings won't turn back time.”

“It worked for them.”

“There's no comparison and you know it.”

“And it worked for us before that,” Harry added more quietly. “I know. I was there.”

“In the forties?” He didn't look as old as that.

“This is the second Haganah for me,” Harry said.

Rehv wanted to tell him that it was Hitler who had given Israel to them, that they had bought it with six million lives; that the Americans hated them, the American Jews hated them, the Russians hated them, the oil companies hated them, the Arabs for some reason still hated them; that the reason Harry and his friends kept fighting was not because there was hope but because if they stopped there would be nothing to do but blow their brains out, the way a few refugees did every day—you could read about them in the back pages of the newspaper. Instead he stood up and said: “I'm sorry, Harry. The answer is no.”

Harry didn't look at him. “Very well,” he said. Rehv held out his hand to help him rise, but Harry ignored it. Rehv heard his bones crack as he slowly got to his feet. “I'm sorry too,” he said, slightly short of breath. He walked to the door and paused with his hand on the knob. “It was about a man named Fahoum.”

“I've never heard of him.”

Harry spoke without turning. “Abu Fahoum. He led the Palestinian commandos during the attack on Mount Carmel.”

Rehv did not speak. Harry still stood facing the door. Someone knocked lightly on it. Harry turned the knob. A man's head, no, a boy's, with pimples and a yarmulke, poked into the room.

“Mr. Nissim. Are you all right? I thought I heard you at the door.”

“I'm fine. Wait outside.” Harry closed the door and turned around.

“What do you want me to do?” Rehv said. He had trouble forcing the words through the narrowness of his throat.

“You work at a restaurant called La Basquaise?” Rehv nodded. “Abu Fahoum will dine there tonight. We want him to sit at a certain table.”

“I don't seat people. I'm only a waiter, not the maître d'.”

Harry smiled, this time with his mouth as well as his eyes. “That's a problem I think we can solve.” The smile made him seem even younger. It lent a little life to the side of his face that was crust.

From the tall windows high above, Issac Rehv watched Harry and the boy cross the street. The boy helped Harry into the passenger seat of a low-priced Honda-General Motors product. Then he took the wheel and pulled into traffic without looking. A taxi honked and swerved. The car headed uptown.

“A certain table,” Harry had said. Long after the car was out of sight Rehv stood at the window, seeing nothing; hearing the soft Israeli voice repeat the number of the table: “Twenty-three.”

CHAPTER TWO

Sixty blocks. Isaac Rehv walked to work as he always did. A cold winter drizzle settled over the city like a punishment, shutting out the sky, color, and sun. Men hurried by scowling, women hugging themselves, their made-up faces garish in the gray light. Rehv kept his eye on the store windows, watching their evolution from jumbles of crude crafts and mass-produced junk to reverently lit shrines for suede suitcases. He left Fifth Avenue for the quiet side street where La Basquaise offered its old-world hospitality every night except Monday to anyone who could afford to shop within a ten block radius.

Rehv passed under the soft pink awning that hung over the sidewalk like a lure and went in by the staff entrance. Pascal, co-owner and chef, was waiting for him in the small waiters' changing room. He wore
le gros bonnet
as he did every second he was in the restaurant, and since he was always first to arrive and last to leave no one ever saw him without it. It was to him what De Gaulle's nose had been to De Gaulle: not a symbol to others but the true source of all his power. On New Year's Eve the year before one of the waiters had jokingly knocked it off. He was fired on the spot.

Pascal was agitated. “Finally! Where have you been?”

“I'm not late,” Rehv said. He shook off his nylon jacket and hung it in a locker.

“No no no non non. I know how to tell time. Don't be so touchy.” He darted across the cramped room like an angry hen, turned, darted back, and sat heavily on a stool. “Quel catastrophe!” he cried, then buried his hands and said it again, sepulchrally.

Rehv pulled his woollen sweater over his head, folded it, and laid it on the shelf in the locker. He hung his shirt on a hanger and his pants on a hook. He heard Pascal's barely audible groan. The next one would be only slightly louder.

Rehv sighed. “What's wrong?”

Pascal was on his feet. “What's wrong? Just like that. So … so tranquille. So John Wayne. Well my friend, I'll tell you.” He closed in. Rehv smelled garlic, red wine, vinegar, thyme, and basil. “It's Armande.” Armande was Pascal's partner and maître d'. “He isn't coming in tonight. He has never missed a night. In six years. Jamais. And tonight he isn't coming in. Is not, cannot, come—he called me from the hospital.”

Rehv bent down to unlace his shoes. He didn't want Pascal to see his face. “Is he sick?”

Pascal bent down with him. “Sick? It's worse than that. He has to stay overnight for observation. He's puking in the toilet!”

“Was it something he ate?”

“Idiot.” Pascal pronounced it the French way. “What do you think? Something went in the other way?” Pascal's eyes widened. “Merde.” He sat on the stool. “You're probably right. What a whore he is, that fucking Armande.” He buried his face in his hands. Rehv waited for him to say “Quel catastrophe.” Instead he suddenly looked up in alarm and said, “Tonight, of all nights.”

“What's special about tonight?”

Pascal's thin lips curled contemptuously. “Ha.” He rose to his feet, strode from the room, and slammed the door. He reopened it with a crash, stood in the doorway like a gunslinger, and pointed his finger at Rehv. “Tonight you're the maître d'. That's what's special about tonight.”

There was really no one else. Rehv was the only waiter who spoke French, and although most of the waiters were Italian, the only one Pascal thought of as European.

“Do I get a raise?” Rehv asked.

Pascal laughed like Lady Macbeth. “No one gets a raise. Not as long as I'm wearing this.” He tapped
le gros bonnet
, reached for the door to slam it again, missed, and spun off toward the kitchen.

Isaac Rehv dressed for his night's work in black pants, white shirt, black bow tie, and short green jacket: the kind of outfit a minor performer in a bullfight might wear. He checked himself in the mirror. He was always surprised at how young he appeared. No gray hair, a solid chin, a strong brow. Only when he looked closely, especially into the dark brown eyes that didn't quite come to life, did he see a man as old as he felt.

Rehv walked along the shabby corridor, as rich in smells as a bloodhound's world, and into the kitchen. Behind clouds of steam that rose from copper pots, men with knives worked urgently, turning dead animals and uprooted vegetables into mousses and braises, fricassees and daubes.

“Mais non.” Pascal, half hidden by hanging black frying pans, was looking at him in horror. “Dressed like this? What can you be thinking?” He parted the frying pans and burst across the room. “Armande wears a dinner suit. What are you trying to do to me?”

“Don't worry. No one will notice.”

Pascal went rigid. “Souche! Those assholes notice everything.”

“That's too bad. I don't own a dinner suit.”

“Ha. I see your game. You're still trying to squeeze a raise out of me.” Pascal's tone jumped an octave. “Never. Go out there stark raving naked. I don't care.” He caught sight of a yellow sauce warming on the stove, jabbed his finger into it, tasted. A death cry rose from his throat. Rehv walked off: He wanted to read the evening's guest list. As he opened the door that led to the dining room he heard Pascal scream: “I want hollandaise, not lemonade.” Something heavy crashed in the sink. No one took any notice.

Backstage, the kitchen, was Pascal's territory. The stage itself, the dining room, was all Armande's. The idea had been his: the blue shutters on the walls, the suggestion of leaded windows, the pastel mountain scenery in the distance. It was a clever trompe l'oeil that made the customers feel they were sitting in a lodge in the Pyrenees. They loved it. They paid for it.

By six o'clock everything was ready. Thick lavender tablecloths were laid on the forty tables, white china, Scandinavian cutlery, and long-stemmed wineglasses were in place. At six-fifteen Rehv heard the front door open and a few muffled words from the coat checkroom.

Smiling, he went forward, the words
Bon soir
on his lips. They remained unspoken. Standing self-consciously in the hall was the pimply boy who had blurted Harry's real name.

Rehv felt relief spread through his body. Something had gone wrong. They had sent the boy to tell him it was all off.

The boy cleared his throat. “Reservations for Jones,” he said in a high voice, without looking Rehv in the eye. For the first time Rehv noticed the young woman at the boy's side. She was pale and very thin. She wore a baggy sweater and an unfashionably short skirt and carried a large purse. “For dinner,” the boy explained, perhaps sensing Rehv's hesitation. He was wearing a cheap dark suit and a white shirt with a frayed collar. At least he had left his yarmulke behind.

“Please follow me,” Rehv said, and led them into the dining room. He gestured toward the tables. “Where would you like to sit?”

The boy glanced around quickly. Rehv guessed he was trying to match the actual room to a diagram he had been shown. The young woman pointed. “There,” she said. “That looks nice.” Her voice sounded confident, deeper than the boy's, but her Israeli accent was unmistakable.

“Certainly, madam,” Rehv said. He took them to the table she had indicated, a small corner banquette that commanded a good view of the whole room. Number sixteen. It was one of the most popular tables. It had a particularly good view of table twenty-three, a round table set about twelve feet away in the slightly sunken area Armande had filled with plants and called Le Jardin.

When they were seated, Rehv handed them the large elegantly printed cartes. “Something from the bar?”

“No thank you,” the woman replied.

“Water please,” the boy said.

“Any special kind, sir?”

The boy flushed, as though Rehv had insulted him.

“From the tap, please,” the woman said.

Rehv nodded. “Bon appétit.” He left them to study the menu. He hoped they could understand it. Much more than that, he hoped they had come in a very minor supporting role. He looked back at them as he went to greet some more customers. Instead of the menus they were studying table twenty-three.