The Jerusalem Assassin (31 page)

“It’s not a coincidence that Elie sent you there. Armande Hoffgeitz and Klaus von Koenig studied there together, became friends.”

“It’s a great school, fancy old buildings, great facilities, and wonderful teachers. I was supposed to be sixteen, so I stayed there for three years, made friends, and during school holidays Elie trained me.”

“While we mourned you.”

“You rejected me, remember? Told me I was too young for you. Sent me to live with Bira and her friends.”

“For your own good, yes, but—”

“But what? I was eighteen, alone in the world.
Eighteen!
”

Tanya sighed. “I remember how old you were. And even if you were older, you would have been no match for Elie Weiss. He’s too clever, even for me.”

“He taught me how to blend in, how to court the right girl, how to plan ahead. It has worked like a clock. I married and joined the Hoffgeitz Bank under the tutelage of my father-in-law.”

“What did you say?”

“Armande Hoffgeitz is Paula’s father.”

“Oh, no!”

“And we have a son. Klaus Junior.”

“Klaus?” A look of horror took over Tanya’s face. “This is a nightmare.”

“My work is very important. I’ve developed clients in the Middle East, oil-rich sheiks and so on. They give money to terrorist groups, I trace it, report to Elie, and—”

“I know how it works. But that’s a red herring. Elie didn’t recruit you to spy on Arab sheiks. Or to assassinate them. He recruited you with the single purpose of gaining control of the bank.”

“Eventually.” Lemmy shrugged. “Family relations are the only way to power in a Swiss private bank.”

“So Elie told you to marry a Swiss sausage to get to the cheese.”

“Initially it was a calculated move. But I didn’t have to pretend for long. Paula is wonderful. I’ve grown to love her very much.”

Tanya closed her eyes. “Jerusalem Gerster loves Armande Hoffgeitz’s daughter. This is absolutely insane.”

“Jealous?”

“You haven’t lost your sense of humor.” She searched his eyes for a long moment. “How could you do this?”

“What? Marry Paula?”

“Marrying for duty is in your genes. Your father made the same mistake.”

“Say again?”

Tanya made a dismissive gesture. “How could you leave Israel, leave your life, your language, your friends? How could you turn into somebody else?”

Lemmy thought for a moment. “Elie saved my life. He offered me a great mission that will change the future of our people. And anyway, there was no one to stay for.”

“No one?” Tanya looked at him incredulously. “Your father!”

“Rabbi Abraham Gerster? The saint who excommunicated me, made me into a pariah, drove my mother to suicide?” Lemmy sneered. “My father was a fanatical jerk, and he hated me.”

“Don’t say that.” Tanya’s voice broke. “Abraham loved you. He still does—”

“Oh please! He didn’t even bother to attend my funeral!”

“That’s what Elie told you?”

“Yes.”

“Elie lied to you.” Tanya rose from the bench. “Your father cried at your funeral. At least what we thought was your funeral.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I was there with Bira and your paratrooper buddies. And your father fell on your grave, broken up. And he’s been crying on your grave ever since, for twenty-eight years.” She paused, her hand pressed to her chest. “And I’ve been crying there too.” Her voice choked and her eyes became wet again. “I planted a few—”

“Shhh, it’s okay.” Lemmy hugged her. The rain had stopped, the clouds began to disperse, and patches of blue appeared in the darkening sky.

“You didn’t die, but you did lose your life.” Tanya blew her nose into a handkerchief. “It’s my fault. All of it. Everything that happened to you and Abraham and your poor mother, all my fault. I’m a stupid, stupid woman!”

“You’re making no sense. How could it be your fault?”

“It goes way back, long before you were born. If you knew the real Elie Weiss, you wouldn’t follow him. He was raised to be a
shoykhet
, to slaughter livestock in the same village in Germany where your father grew up as the rabbi’s son. The two of them watched the SS murder their families. They spent three years in the forests, coming out only to kill Germans and steal food.”

“And you?”

“For me the war had started on a train ride to Dachau, where a handsome Nazi general plucked me out of the line before the gas chambers. It’s a long story, but Klaus von Koenig loved me as truly as it was possible under those circumstances. He was Himmler’s chief of finance—”

“Chief of looting.”

“Yes, he also handled the valuables they stripped from the Jews. He deposited most of the gems and jewelry with Armande Hoffgeitz, his high-school buddy.”

“But how did you connect with Elie and my father?”

“On the first night of 1945, my seventeenth birthday, I was in the car with Klaus, returning from the Swiss border. He was driving down a narrow, twisty Alpine road. They ambushed us. Your father shot Klaus.” She pointed at the Mauser, which Lemmy still held in his hand. “But I had the only proof of the deposits—a ledger that Armande Hoffgeitz had signed. Klaus had given it to me for safekeeping.” Tanya looked away at the Limmat River and the hills beyond. “That night, in the snowy Alps, while Klaus’s body was still warm, I fell in love with your father—a different love, more like a tornado that swirled both of us into its epicenter. We spent three months together. But one day Elie returned alone and told me that Abraham was dead, that a group of Germans had sprayed your father with bullets until Abraham looked like a red sieve.”

“And you believed him?”

“You’ve seen Elie work with his blade, so you know why I didn’t question him. That night, when he fell asleep, I ran. And ran. I gave birth to Bira a few months later in a refugee camp—”

“Does she know?”

“What?”

“That her father was a Nazi general?”

Tanya smiled as if the question was a joke. “She didn’t need a father. All the other Mossad agents missed their kids, so Bira was everyone’s darling. You see, I joined the Mossad so that Elie wouldn’t find me.”

“But he did?”

“More than twenty years later. In sixty-six I was decorated for a successful operation, and he saw my name on a list at the prime minister’s office. It was bound to happen. Bira was already grown, serving in the IDF, and I was no longer afraid of Elie. Big mistake, as it turned out.”

Lemmy removed the handkerchief from the wound, which had stopped bleeding, and wiped the rain and tears from her cheeks. He noticed another bruise on her head, a week or two old, but didn’t ask her about it.

“Abraham had somehow survived the Germans’ bullets. Apparently, to explain my disappearance, Elie had told Abraham that I was dead—do you see a pattern here? And my purported death so devastated your father that Elie was able to convince him to dedicate his life to serving Israel secretly. Abraham had been groomed to be a rabbi, so he infiltrated the most fundamentalist ultra-Orthodox sect in Israel, where anti-Zionist ideology was the seed of future civil war among Jews. He joined Neturay Karta in nineteen forty-six and married your mother. Having a son named after the divided city of Jerusalem added to his mystic aura, and with his charisma and brilliant mind, Abraham Gerster ascended to the leadership of the sect.”

“I don’t believe it,” Lemmy said. “My father was sincere in his fanatical faith. What you’re saying is impossible. My father was a mole?”

“That’s exactly what he was. Still is. Elie had recruited many other moles. That’s his expertise. Look at you!”

“No.” Lemmy stood up. “It can’t be. My father was a real
tzadik
. Elie told me that my father banished me, sat shivah in mourning for me, because I rejected Talmud—”

“Elie told you? Elie
lied
to you! And to me! He broke our deal!”

“What deal?”

“In sixty-seven, I gave him Klaus’s bank ledger in exchange for him ordering your father to let you leave Neturay Karta and become a normal Israeli.” She bent over, as if about to be sick. “I made a deal with the devil. And I got my just reward.
Hell!
”

He helped her sit up. “I don’t understand.”

Tanya sighed. “When Elie found me, he told me Abraham was alive in Jerusalem. I came to your apartment—”

“I remember that Sabbath.”

“Yes. It was on a Sabbath. I begged him to leave Neturay Karta, to shave his beard and payos, and return to me. It was nineteen sixty-seven, and we were still young, not even forty. We could still have a life together. But he refused. Your father was committed to his mission, feared that without him the sect would engage in fundamentalist violence. And he felt a duty to your mother and to you. I was devastated. And angry. So I—”

“Seduced his son?”

“It wasn’t a rational process,” Tanya said. “You looked exactly the way Abraham had looked back in nineteen forty-five. For me it was like going back in time, a chance to reunite with a young Abraham through you. I convinced myself I was doing you a favor, saving you from the ultra-Orthodox prison he had confined you to. And I succeeded! You saw the outside world and embraced it, and Elie got Klaus’s ledger and instructed Abraham to let you leave the sect.”

“Let me leave? He banished me in the synagogue, in front of the whole sect! They almost lynched me!”

“Your father had no choice but to publicly excommunicate you. It was necessary for his credibility in the sect. And you did fine, joining the army, becoming a healthy, happy Israeli paratrooper. I was so proud of you. But then—”

“I died heroically?”

“But then Elie played the same old trick!” She took his hands. “All those years, you were alive. I can’t believe it. How could you do this?”

“What choice did I have? Under my circumstances, Elie’s offer was enticing.”

“You’re right.” Tanya’s voice broke. “It’s my fault. I caused this to happen.”

“Don’t blame yourself for my decision to serve—”

“You were a pawn!” Tanya stood, her voice suddenly filled with anger. “The three of us—Abraham, me, and Elie—we each had our own designs on you, young Jerusalem Gerster. We each had our own selfish agenda, cloaked in good intentions, to guard little Lemmy against the other two.”

“But I made my own decision to read the books you gave me, to pursue you, to make love to you, to leave Neturay Karta—all were my choices! Mine alone!”

“Please, don’t yell.” She saw his anger and understood it. How could he accept that his life had been manipulated by three Holocaust survivors locked in a twisted triangle of love, hate, and misguided patriotism? How could he admit that he had paid so dearly for the sins of others?

“I chose to join Elie, and I don’t regret it.”

“It wasn’t an informed choice. You were a naive adolescent. We played with your life. Your father intended to shelter you from reality, keep you in the sect, groom you to Talmudic stardom, but his selfish agenda was to install you as leader so he could become free from a life of lies. And me? I wanted to protect you from Neturay Karta’s fanatical ideology, to set you free, to save you from a future of ignorance and enslavement to the tyranny of religious oppression, but my selfish agenda was to lure you into my orbit, to possess you because I couldn’t have your father. And Elie’s stated goal was to give you an opportunity to serve the nation heroically in a role that required a German-looking, bright youth to be planted as a mole in Switzerland, to chase the biggest Nazi loot, which in turn would be used for his grand scheme of
Counter Final Solution
. But Elie could have recruited someone else. His selfish motivation was to punish Abraham and me for loving each other, to separate us forever by guilt and grief, and he succeeded. I should have warned you about Elie. I can see it now so clearly, how he manipulated all of us!”

“I don’t think you understand how incredible Elie’s plan is. I’ve dedicated my life to its success, and we are very close to launching it.”

“Nonsense. Elie is finished.”

“Don’t underestimate him again.”

“That devil! He’s a fanatic, dedicated to revenge, not to healing and building. Do you really believe anti-Semitism could be eradicated through mass murder?”

“Who’s talking about mass murder? Our network of agents will conduct surgical assassinations of individuals—not only active terrorists and their sponsors, but anyone who perpetuates anti-Jew hatred, who instigates hostility toward Israel, who is like a cancerous tumor that would metastasize and spread unless excised with a slash of our scalpel. Imagine how history would have turned out if Hitler was eliminated in nineteen thirty-three? Or if Pope Urban II was dispatched to meet his savior before he called up the first crusade? Or if Ferdinand and Isabella died before they expelled the Jews from Spain? Or if the Roman emperor—”

“So you’ll kill politicians and clergy. How about academics? Writers? Filmmakers? Cartoonists?”

“Their venom could be as deadly as an explosive belt. Eliminating them will save many Jewish lives. It’s justifiable self-defense.”

“Arbitrary execution without judicial process? That’s murder!”

“We’ll set up our own secret judicial process. Elie is right. The goal justifies all means. The very fate of the Jewish people is at stake.” Lemmy shrugged. “Our personal feelings and sacrifices are irrelevant.”

Tanya dropped his hands as if they had become too hot. “Then you too are a fanatic!”

*

“Excuse me.” Elie Weiss removed the plastic oxygen mask from his face. “What day is it?” He knew the answer, but the young guard seemed gullible enough to play the role Elie had planned for him.

“It’s Friday.” He pointed at the window, where the sun was setting. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Friday?” Elie looked at the glowing view. “Then Sabbath will begin soon.”

The guard nodded. Outside the door, the nurses were chattering at their station, and patients’ relatives paced up and down the corridor. Elie had his own ICU room. A closed-circuit camera was monitored outside his door by two guards in three shifts of eight hours. Elie had engaged them in casual conversations, building rapport. They were not Shin Bet agents but students, who worked part-time in security after having finished their mandatory IDF service in combat units. They didn’t know who he was, and their instructions were to keep him in isolation. He was not allowed to use the phone, and only medical personnel entered his room.