I had first met her in October 1948, two years and three months ago. I arrived in Israel from Europe in September 1947 with a small stash of foreign currency—money I’d taken from Nazis I’d killed in the aftermath of the Second World War as revenge for the death of my family in Auschwitz—and I was told that she could exchange it for me.
She never asked me where the money I brought her came from, and I never inquired as to what she did with it after I gave it to her. I sometimes wondered how she got into this business, and I imagined that she either had a relative or a business partner in Europe to whom she sent the foreign banknotes. In truth, I didn’t much care. I knew very little about her and thought she knew almost nothing about me. She never asked me any personal questions, maintaining a strictly professional attitude, and I never volunteered any information about myself. But apparently she knew more about me than I had believed. Otherwise, she would not have offered to hire me to retrieve her money.
And it had to be me, or someone like me, because the sort of business she and I conducted—the same business she’d conducted with this Nathan Frankel—was against the law. I had never declared any of the foreign money I had brought with me to Israel, and I highly doubted she was paying any taxes on the income she derived from her money changing. Tova Wasserman could not go to the police. She had to go outside the law for restitution.
I said, “Is there any chance that this was an innocent mistake on Frankel’s part? That he thought the money he brought you was genuine?”
She shook her head resolutely. “None. When I learned the money was fake, I ran his visit through my mind. Every second of it. He played me from the moment he walked in. A real charmer that one is, a sweet talker. Full of compliments, all of them said with the straightest of faces. He didn’t look it, but he was working hard at getting on my good side the whole time he was here. He knew what to say to get me to trust him. He made a fool out of me.”
She said all this through gritted teeth, and I got the sense that as much as she hated being swindled out of money, it was the humiliation of being duped that hurt her the most.
“I need you to understand something,” I said. “I may need to get rough with him. I need to know that you’re okay with that.”
Mrs. Wasserman said nothing for a few seconds. Then slowly, as if awakening from hibernation, her thin lips twitched, then started to stretch, then gradually curved upward into a smile that went well with the cold that was seeping in through the windows.
“Adam,” she said, using my given name for the first time in our acquaintance and still smiling her cruel, frosty smile, “not only am I okay with it, I hope very much that you hurt him badly.”
I looked at her for a long moment and did not like what I saw. There was a predatory edge to the curl of her lips, a bloodthirsty shine to her sharp, brilliant white teeth. Above the smile, her eyes had narrowed to slits of blue steel. The way her face was set reminded me of people I long wanted to forget and knew I never would. Camp guards in uniforms and high boots, with cruel eyes and vicious grins, with a gaping black hole where their heart and conscience and morality should have been. People without pity or mercy, who relished causing pain and death.
I laid the thirty extra liras she had given me on the table beside the plate of cookies and said, “Find someone else. I’m not interested.”
Mrs. Wasserman’s icy smile melted off her face. Her eyes turned bigger than I had ever seen them.
“What? Why?”
“Because I’m not in the beating-people-up business. It seems to me like what you’re really after is for Nathan Frankel to get a broken arm or a busted kneecap. That’s not what I do.”
“But you said—”
“I said it may come to that, but it’s not certain. If I manage to persuade him to give back what he stole from you, no violence would be necessary. Understand?”
Mrs. Wasserman’s eyes contracted back to their normal size. She gave me a long, piercing look. “Is this about money? Would it change your mind if I gave you, say, twenty liras more?”
“No,” I said flatly. “It would not.”
Mrs. Wasserman pursed her lips, making her mouth look like an old, wrinkly apple. She was still giving me that penetrating look and was giving no indication as to what conclusions she reached.
“Very well,” she said at length. “Find Frankel. Get my money back. That’s the important thing. If you end up doing more, well—” her smile reappeared, sending the living room temperature plummeting “—make sure you tell me about it. In detail.”
4
Before I left her apartment, Mrs. Wasserman forced four more cookies on me. Out on the street, I stopped beside a trash can, meaning to throw them away, but halted with my hand poised over the mouth of the can. The number tattooed on my left forearm itched and I found myself unable to uncurl my fingers and let the cookies drop. Eating them would give me no pleasure, but they were still food. And I could not throw away food.
With a sigh of exasperation, I shoved the rock-hard cookies in the side pocket of my coat and stomped south on Ben Yehuda Street. It had rained that morning for two hours straight, and the sidewalks and road were slick and wet. People walked about encased in coats or heavy jackets, furled umbrellas at the ready. The air smelled clean and fresh and damp. The trees lining the street were naked of leaves and had been turned a darker shade of brown by the rain. The cold was persistent, with sharp teeth that tried to gnaw through my clothes.
Feeble sunlight slanted down like an afterthought, and the white stone buildings of Tel Aviv looked gray. The city had been founded just forty-two years earlier, but on that January day it seemed older, worn out.
Starting south, I liberated a cigarette from the pack I carried in my pocket. The wind had not abated, so I ducked into a doorway to light up. The smoke warmed me up some, but I could have done with an extra layer of clothing.
As I smoked, the image of Mrs. Wasserman smiling her icy smile popped up in my head. My skin crawled and I wondered whether I had made a mistake in taking this assignment on. By the time I’d smoked my cigarette down to a nub and flicked the remains into the street, I’d convinced myself that I hadn’t. True, Mrs. Wasserman was much too keen on tasting Nathan Frankel’s blood, but she’d seemed to accept it when I told her I would only resort to violence if I had to. And it was also true that she had been wronged and deserved to get her money back. Besides, if I turned her down, she would simply find someone else to take my place, and that someone was unlikely to have my scruples. Indeed, he might turn out to be similar to those men Mrs. Wasserman’s smile reminded me of—a person who found pleasure in hurting others.
And there was the question of money. I had some socked away, but it wasn’t as if I were rolling in it. Paying assignments did not come to me often. I tried hard not to decline those that did.
My mind made up, I caught a bus that ferried me all the way to Carmelit Street, then walked a block north to Daniel Street. Mrs. Wasserman had given me the exact address of Zalman Alphon’s store and I found it without trouble, tucked between an insurance agency and a bicycle repair shop.
It was a small square space, with shelves on either side and a counter at the back. The sort of setup that invited petty theft, as it was easy to step inside, grab some pencils or staples off a shelf, and make your escape before the proprietor had time to react. But the layout made sense if where Alphon kept his most lucrative merchandise was not on the shelves but in the back of the shop.
Behind the counter was a closed door and, recalling what Mrs. Wasserman had told me about Alphon’s involvement in the black market, I guessed it opened on where he kept his illicit goods. Ever since 1949, when the government enacted the rationing system, hundreds of citizens had become black-market vendors, selling anything that was restricted—meat, fish, butter, eggs, coffee, cooking oil, and even non-edible items such as quality soap. The government tried to crack down on the black market, but it was fighting a losing battle. Too many people were involved in it—as sellers or buyers or both—and among them were politicians, policemen, and the elite of society. Many black-market vendors were small-business owners such as Zalman Alphon, and some of them made more money selling contraband than they did with their legitimate enterprises.