Cafe Nevo (24 page)

But not this time. This time he reached out and whipped the gun across Gordon's face. His nose cracked, and blood gushed out over his pale belly in two red streams, like firemen's suspenders. The woman gagged.

“Forget that asshole,” Coby said disgustedly. “Wifey here will tell us. What's your name, darling?”

“Liora. But I don't know the combination. I'd tell you if I did.”

“If you don't know it, you must have it written down somewhere. Now where could you have hidden it?” Suddenly he twitched off the sheet, revealing a
zaftig
body in a pink satin negligee. The woman crossed her arms over her chest in a hopeless attempt to hide her plump breasts. “Oh, sweet, sweet Liora,” cried Coby in delight, “you have plenty of hiding places! This is going to take some serious searching. Hey, man,” he called to Yaki, who was ogling the woman, “want to give me a hand?”

“Get away from my wife!”

“Give it to them, Pinny, give them the goddamn combination,
please!”

“Liora, mon amour!” said Coby.

With an inchoate cry of rage Gordon attacked Arik, grappling for the gun. But Arik was ready; tossing the gun across Liora to Yaki he hammered Gordon with his fists. Out of shape, hampered and shamed by his near-nakedness, the fat man was no match. When Gordon was subdued, Arik turned on Coby and Yaki with eyes so hot his stocking smoldered.

“What the hell's the matter with you,” he growled. “What are you, animals?”

They looked up in astonishment.

“Not in front of her husband,” Arik raged. “Take her outside.”

Whooping, they fell upon the woman and half dragged, half carried her out of the room. Arik followed as far as the doorway, where he could watch both man and wife. He winced sympathetically when Liora screamed, and shrugged apologetically at Gordon.

Gordon's face was bright red with the effort of keeping silent. He moaned through tightly closed lips each time his wife cried out.

Arik was intrigued. His work had taught him that where there is serious resistance there is something to hide. Gordon believed that his wife was being assaulted, and yet he was silent; therefore, either Gordon had a silent-alarm setup and expected help momentarily, or something in the safe was worth more to him than his wife. That
something
was not likely to be money, for the cash in that safe could not be more than a fraction of Gordon's wealth, which was in land and numbered Swiss accounts; whereas if his wife divorced him over this night's piece of work, as well she might, he would lose half his kingdom. Surely a rational man in his position would comply now, then comb the land to find the thieves.

Minutes ticked by. Liora's screams had changed to steady sobbing and the grunts of ecstasy from the men had grown ragged and quizzical. Arik was wondering what to do next when suddenly Gordon's face disintegrated; he threw up his hands with a loud cry and screwed his mouth into a grimace, as if trying to prevent the words that issued forth. “Stop them, stop them, goddamn you. I'm opening the safe!” He hobbled over to the safe with as much dignity as his naked paunch and dimpled thighs would support. At the wall he faced Arik.

“Tell them to leave my wife alone.”

“Let's get it open before we break their hearts, shall we?”

Gordon glared but bent over the safe and opened it without further ado. Blocking Arik's view of the gaping safe with his bulk, he demanded: “Call them off
now.”

Smiling, Arik pushed Gordon ahead of him into the living room. Liora sat upon a sofa, dressed in her nightgown, one arm held behind her back by a disinterested Coby. Her breast heaved attractively as she wept into a delicate lace handkerchief. Yaki stood at a window overlooking the garden.

Gordon stared at his wife, disbelief and fury playing across his face. “They didn't hurt you?”

“They
did
,” she answered tearfully. “This one twisted my wrist, and the other one stepped on my foot!” As her husband advanced on her, she shrank back into Coby. “What are you looking at me like that for? Would you rather they'd raped me?”

“You'll wish they had, when I get through with you,” he muttered. “Jezebel!” Arik spun him into a chair and covered both with the gun, while Coby and Yaki returned to the bedroom.

“My God, there must be fifteen, twenty thousand bucks here,” Coby crowed. “We'll be able to—”

“Shut up!” Arik said.

Silence thereafter, broken by the rustle of paper and Gordon's hoarse breath. The land broker sat rigidly at the edge of his seat, his eyes glued to Arik's, his concentration on the bedroom sounds so intense he seemed to be toting his losses.

Liora stared fixedly at her husband, her lips moving silently. Arik thought she was praying until she said aloud, “Ten minutes.”

“What?” he asked politely, when Gordon ignored her.

She spoke to her husband. “It took you ten minutes. You thought they were raping me and yet you waited ten minutes before you—”

“Shut up,” growled Pincas.

“Why is this happening to us?”

“Why do bad things happen to good people?” Arik put in helpfully. “And you
are
good people, aren't you, Pinny? Contributions to the arts, charity committees, and all that, right? Never mind where you got your money.”

“There's something else,” Coby called from the bedroom.

Pincas Gordon jumped up. “That's nothing for you,” he told Arik earnestly. “They're just personal papers.”

“Take them!” Arik ordered, his eyes on Gordon's face.

“No! They're personal. You have no right.... They're no good to you.” He was on his feet, advancing.

“Stop right there.”

“You said if I opened the safe you'd take the money and get out—you promised! Keep to your plan and you just might get away with this. Take those papers and I'll hunt you down and crush you like roaches; I swear to God you won't live to spend the money.”

“Comrade Gordon, calm yourself. We'll be gone soon, and then you can beat your wife or call the cops or do whatever you like. Don't worry,
Pinny
, if they really are no use to us, I'll mail your papers back to you myself.”

“NO!”

Coby and Yaki walked side by side out of the bedroom, grinning broadly. Coby carried a bulging cloth satchel slung over his shoulder. The moment Arik's eyes flickered toward the satchel, Pincas Gordon took two steps and hurled himself onto the man he had marked as ringleader. They fell with a crash that shook the house. The gun slithered across the floor, but Gordon ignored it Grabbing the stocking's slack, he yanked it upward to reveal Arik's startled face. Gordon stared, then turned away, covering his eyes. “Oh my God.”

“Holy shit,” Yaki hissed. “What do we do now?”

“I can't see a thing without my glasses!” Pincas Gordon scampered on all fours toward his wife, clutched her legs, and buried his head in her lap. “I don't know you,” he puled. “I didn't see you. Go away. Leave us alone.”

“He recognized you,” Coby murmured to Arik.

“Tie them and let's go,” Arik said. He made no further attempt to hide his face.

 

The city slumbered audibly, snoring buses rumbling through the streets. Arik sent the money away with Coby but kept back the folder that had been in the safe. A glance at its contents had relieved him of the fear that the police would be called in; any attempt Gordon made to recover the evidence would have to be extra-legal.

Arik dared not return to his apartment until he had stashed the file safely, which could not be done until morning, so for the rest of the night he roamed the cloistered, mysterious alleys of Neve Zedek in a silence broken only by the yowling of cats in heat. At first gleaming he sat on a door stoop and thoroughly and systematically read through the papers in the stolen file. It took an hour, with crosschecking. When he was done, he replaced the documents in the folder and the folder beneath his arm, and resumed walking northward, through the maze of small factories, print shops, outlets, and wholesalers south of Shalom Tower.

In a tiny hole-in-the-wall workers' café he ate an omelette and drank his mud in the company of a dozen work-bound men, printers' helpers and factory hands, who were arguing about Meir Kahane. One, a man with a thick Iraqi accent, said Kahane was the first politician with balls since Golda Meir, at which a burly man in a mesh tee shirt jumped up and said, “That's an insult to Sharon!” —whereupon the Iraqi answered, “No, man, no offense intended. Sharon's got guts, and his heart's in the right place; he's just too tied up in Likud politics. Kahane's the man to get things done.”

“He's a fascist,” said the proprietress of the café, a granite woman of Sternholzian bent. “He wants to be the Mussolini of the Jews.”

“So what if he's a fascist?” said the Iraqi. “Do you want a Jewish state, or Arab, that's the question.”

“The question is,” Arik put in, “do you want a state that
we
control, or do you want our lives run by Kahane and his goon squads?”

Silence. Everyone stared at the stranger who, though unshaven and dressed in worn jeans and a torn tee shirt, stank of privilege.
He
could not conceivably work in the quarter, though he might be the prodigal son of one of their bosses.

The man who had defended Arik Sharon stood with arms akimbo. “I know what your problem is,” the burly man told Arik. “You're pissed because you're not drawing your cut anymore. It's your type—”

Arik leaned forward, hands on the table. “What type is that?”

“The type that lived off the fat of the land while we sweated to feed our families. We were the niggers of this country, till Begin got in. Let me tell you something, boy. You and your kind have had your day.” He sent a chair crashing in illustration. “Your type are finished here. We're running this country now, and we're running it our way. And if you don't like it, you can go to America.” Arik rose lazily, and the other man took a step forward. They measured one another.

The Iraqi said to his friend, “Cool it. I know this guy.”

“You know this pinko Arab-loving creep?”

“Yeah, I know him. He's okay. He was my brother's commander in the army.”

He whispered something to the big man, who answered, “I don't give a shit who he is. That just proves my point.” He turned to Arik. “What gets you is, you're losing control, you know it, and there ain't a goddamn thing you can do about it.” But he sat down, relinquishing the present fight.

When you get right down to it, Arik thought, he's right. Without another word he paid his bill and returned to the street, the folder warm against his skin.

After wandering aimlessly a little longer, he found himself in front of Café Nevo. The door was open, but the tables were not yet set out. Sternholz dozed in a chair beside the bar.

Suddenly feeling his fatigue, Arik went in and poured himself some coffee. He dropped money in the till and sat down next to Sternholz.

He found the old man's snoring restful, companionable. Sternholz sounded like the deep, distant roll of thunder in the mountains or a train, running on a circular track. Wearily Arik thought about hopping aboard, but he knew that if he tried, the old man would be up instantly to repel him, jabbing away with his stoking shovel. It struck him suddenly how fervently Sternholz tried to expel Nevo's patrons, and how rarely he succeeded. He was always telling customers, “Go home, get a job, get out of here.” Sometimes they went, but they never stayed away. Whatever changes, growth, or petrification took place in their outside lives, they kept on coming back, as if Nevo were their spawning or their burial ground.

Just then Mr. Jacobovitz, the busboy, stepped off a number five bus and stumbled to his knees on the pavement. A young woman hurried over to help, but the old man, after waving her off irritably, got up, brushed off his suit, and limped over to Nevo. With a glance and a sniff at Sternholz, Mr. Jacobovitz began noisily and laboriously moving chairs and tables out to the pavement, one by one.

A man sat down in one of the pavement tables, facing the street. Arik nudged the waiter. “Sternholz! Hey, Sternholz!”

The waiter stirred. He opened his eyes to Arik's face and groaned. “Go home and shave.”

“Good morning to you, too. Look what just sat down.”

Sternholz peered outside, squinting against the light. “I don't believe it.”

“Could be the harbinger of a whole new clientele.”

“He doesn't want service. They won't even drink the water here. It must be the heat.”

“No, he's looking for girls.”

“Wouldn't surprise me. But not in my café.” Muttering to himself, Sternholz hobbled over to the Hassid, who wore a striped caftan and a broad-rimmed fur
shtreimel.
The man's chin hung down almost to his chest, and his black hat was pulled down over that part of his face not covered by a long red beard. “You want something, Rabbi? You want I should call somebody?”