City of Secrets (16 page)

The Voice of Fighting Zion broadcast a running tally: fifteen Jews and twenty-six British. The Mandate radio said there were also forty-one Arabs, two Armenians and a Greek, not including the missing. The official response was a dance of propaganda. The Jewish Agency condemned the Irgun as terrorists.
Begin blamed the British for not heeding their warnings and evacuating the hotel. The British claimed there were none. To Brand it didn't matter. He was done with the war.

The next morning Eva's name was plastered all over the Jaffa Road, along with an Avidor he'd never heard of, and he thought it was a cheat. It should have been him, just as he should have been with Katya in Crow Forest, the two of them inseparable even in death.

That afternoon he visited Eva's flat a last time, borrowing the key from Mrs. Sokolov. He climbed the stairs, the treads squeaking under his feet. Nothing had been touched. There was the cognac bottle on her little table, the phonograph and the records he'd bought for her, in the sink their glasses from that night. He had the urge to clean the place or take something—the cognac, or her pillow, smelling of her perfume. Instead he locked the door behind him and wound his way back through the alleys.

He expected Asher to contact him, to explain. A phone call, a coded note setting up a meeting. All he wanted to do was talk. After waiting several days to make sure he wasn't being followed, he loaded his pistol and drove out the Nablus Road to the safe house. The iron gate was chained, the windows dark, as if no one lived there. It was a kind of cowardice he would never understand, though he was guilty of it himself. How did you kill and still call yourself righteous? How did you live when you let the people you loved die? As desperately as he wanted to forget, he needed even more dearly to remember. Katya and Eva, his mother and father and Giggi, Lipschitz and
Koppelman. He owed them a debt, and promised from now on to live as honestly as possible.

He ditched the gun in the desert, flinging the bullets to the wind like stones. Neither soldier nor prisoner, he was free. In his cigar box he had over three hundred pounds. That night while the city slept, he left an envelope for Mrs. Ohanesian and took the road to the coast, parked the car by the docks and shipped out on a freighter bound for Marseilles. His name was Brand, and he could fix
anything.

The larger conflict that sets in motion and provides the frame for the action of this novel—the law that makes Brand an illegal—is the issue of Jewish immigration to Palestine. On the release of the White Paper of 1939, Zionists worldwide decried the new British quotas (75,000 Jews total over the next five years) as too low. As the Nazis' systematic persecution of Jews grew into outright genocide, for many European Jews the impossibility of securing a visa to Palestine became a death sentence, yet the British refused to budge. The circumstances surrounding the British naval blockade of Palestine (as well as the refusal of the United States to accept large numbers of European Jews during the war, or survivors afterward) and the triumphs and tragedies of the Aliyah Bet ships that ran the blockade are well documented in many contemporary and modern novels and histories, including Leon Uris's famous
Exodus
and Tom Segev's excellent
One Palestine, Complete
.

In researching the brief period of combined underground operations involving the Haganah, the Irgun and the Stern Gang against the British Mandate, I'm indebted to dozens of books, including, significantly, Menachem Begin's
The Revolt,
Daniel Spicehandler's
Let My Right Hand Wither,
Zipporah Porath's
Letters from Jerusalem,
J. Bowyer Bell's
Terror Out of Zion,
Larry Collins and Dominique LaPierre's
O Jerusalem!,
Arthur Koestler's
Thieves in the Night,
J. C. Hurewitz's
The Struggle for Palestine,
R. Dare Wilson's
Cordon and Search: With the Sixth
Airborne Division in Palestine,
Eric Cline's
Jerusalem Besieged,
Nicholas Bethell's
The Palestine Triangle
and Samuel Katz's
Days of Fire
.

Readers can find a more detailed account of the bombing of the King David Hotel and its immediate human and long-range political consequences in
By Blood & Fire
by Thurston Clarke.

For their rich bodies of work, especially their writing having to do with the Jerusalem of that era, I'd like to thank S. Y. Agnon, Yehuda Amichai, Aharon Appelfeld, Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua.

Deepest thanks to my early readers: Tom Bernardo, Paul Cody, Lamar Herrin, Stephen King, Michael Koryta, Dennis Lehane, Trudy O'Nan, Lowry Pei, Mason Radkoff, Susan Straight, Luis and Cindy Urrea, and Sung J. Woo. Special thanks to Diana Scheide for vintage images of Jerusalem, and to Debby Waldman for her help with the last draft stages of the manuscript. And, as always, grateful thanks to David Gernert and Paul
Slovak.

Looking for more?
Visit Penguin.com for more about this author and a complete list of their books.
Discover your next great read!