A Palestine Affair Read online

  “Oh God, I’m terribly sorry.”

  He turned away embarrassed while Joyce finished tugging up her skirt. He had glimpsed the top of her thighs and the triangle of her black pubic hair.

  “My fault, I shouldn’t have told you to come in.”

  Kirsch tried to collect himself.

  “Mrs. Bloomberg?”

  She nodded.

  “Robert Kirsch. Is this terribly inconvenient? I could come back.”

  Joyce straightened her skirt and blinked against the flood of light that poured round Kirsch’s long, narrow frame and through the door.

  “You’re from the police?”

  “Well, yes, I am the police.”

  Kirsch, with a mixture of excitement and disappointment, had recognized Joyce. Her gray hair, tied back when he had run into her, hung loose on her shoulders now, and he couldn’t mistake her blanched, appealing, heart-shaped face and striking gray-green eyes.

  “Well come in, I suppose.”

  He had to dip his head to pass under the lintel. There were clothes and shoes all over the thin counterpane. One trunk, its contents no doubt packed away, had been placed at the foot of the bed, but another, with its lid open and almost empty, stood at the side. A few of Bloomberg’s canvases were propped in a corner of the room. There seemed to be only one chair.

  “Please,” Kirsch said. “I’ll stand.”

  Joyce pushed aside a pile of blouses, sat on a corner of the bed and gestured Kirsch toward the chair.

  “This must have been a dreadful experience for you,” he said.

  “Pretty bad, but I’ll survive.”

  Her American accent had an English inflection, which he suspected that she might be affecting.

  “Would you mind very much?” Kirsch produced a small notebook from the pocket of his tunic.

  “I’ve already answered a lot of questions.”

  “Yes, I know, but the first people out here—how should I say this without appearing disloyal? Well, those Special Constables are not the most competent note takers.”

  “I don’t know what I can add. It happened so fast. He grabbed on to Mark and then there was blood everywhere.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “He was groaning. There was a terrible gurgling sound in his throat.”

  “But you couldn’t make out anything that he might have said?”

  Joyce thought for a moment. The dying man in the garden froze in her memory and all that she could recollect was her own scream.

  “It was an awful confusion,” she said. “For a moment, you know, I thought it was Mark who had been stabbed.”

  Kirsch looked directly at her. “Perhaps,” he said, “we can go outside and you can show me exactly where you were standing?”

  They stood in a patch of butter-blond weeds listening to the buzz and toil of invisible insects. Kirsch paced the garden, then knelt and crawled from the gap in the hedge toward the area that had been flattened by De Groot and Bloomberg’s death hug. He took some notes, then snapped his book shut and smiled at Joyce.

  “We’ve met before, you know.”

  Joyce gave him a quizzical look.

  “In England?”

  Kirsch laughed.

  “In New York?”

  “No, no. Here, a couple of days ago, in town. You asked me for directions. Actually, it was the same day that you had your unfortunate experience.”

  “There was someone far more unfortunate than me out here.”

  Kirsch, Joyce thought, looked momentarily like a scolded schoolboy and then he compounded the picture by fiddling with the folds on his white knee socks.

  “Outside the post office.”

  Out of politeness Joyce smiled back at Kirsch; she had no recollection of their encounter.

  “Well, you’ve been fantastically helpful.”

  “Have I?”

  “And I was wondering when I might be able to find . . .”

  “Mark?”

  “Yes.”

  “He was supposed to be here an hour ago.”

  “Yes, I’d been given the impression . . . I mean I believe he left the governor’s office . . .” Kirsch’s voice trailed away.

  “He rarely shows up when you expect him.”

  “Quite.”

  Was there a note of bitterness in her voice? Kirsch wasn’t sure.

  “Well,” he said, “it’s time for me to be leaving.”

  “I’m sorry that I can’t offer you anything. We’re really not settled in yet.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Kirsch replied.

  He hesitated a moment and she noticed him staring at her hair.

  “I had influenza,” she said, “during the epidemic. I was lucky to pull through. While I was sick all my hair fell out, when it grew back in it was white. But look”—she tossed her head as if shaking out the memory of her illness—“what do you want me to tell Mark?”

  “Perhaps he could give me a ring.”

  Kirsch wrote down his number and handed it to her.

  He had started to walk away when she called after him. Kirsch turned around.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t hear what you said.”

  “I asked what you’re doing here. Why did you come to Jerusalem, to Palestine?”

  Kirsch smiled. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Lots of reasons, none of them good ones, I’m sure.”

  She seemed satisfied with this response.

  “And who do you think did this terrible thing?”

  “I suppose it’s my job to find out.”

  “And have you discovered anything?”

  “We’ve only just begun the investigation.”

  He wanted to give her information that might impress her with a sense of his authority and competence, but all he had was his knowledge of the letters that De Groot had sent to England, and on that subject his lips were sealed.

  “I see,” she said. “And aren’t you at all interested in why I’m here?”

  Kirsch was about to say “your husband” but he knew that women didn’t like to hear that anymore. The war had changed everything. Even his mother, formerly a paragon of compliance, had begun to balk at some of Kirsch’s father’s more egregious demands: she wouldn’t roll his socks into a ball anymore before putting them away.

  “I don’t know why you’re here,” Kirsch said, “but I’m glad that you are.”

  He thought he saw her smile, but he turned quickly away, as if to erase what he had said.

  After Kirsch had left, Joyce went back into the cottage, poured herself a finger of brandy, and curled up in the chair. She sat with her feet up on the bed. There was no doubt that Mark had abandoned her, in his head if not at home or in bed. The signs of coming disaster hadn’t been hard to read: there was the failure of his last show, after which he had become depressed, the death of his mother and his subsequent rejection of sympathy or consolation. He had sat alone at the kitchen table in Vera’s old flat sifting through a pile of her tattered clothes, then covering his head with one of her scarves as if it were a prayer shawl. Joyce had tried to encircle him with her arms but he had stuck out his elbows to keep her at bay. He preferred to cry alone.

  And if he was gone, what did that mean for her? She refused to play the weepy, forsaken wife: her mother in the apartment on Riverside Drive after Joyce’s father had left with “that woman,” shutting down her life, inconsolable, playing at widowhood with the black streaming Hudson as backdrop to her melodrama, desperately hoping that Joyce, at eighteen, would take up the slack of her exorbitant loneliness. Well, she wouldn’t do it for her mother, and she wouldn’t have it for herself.

  Joyce took a sip of brandy, shivered and roused herself. She stepped outside into a cloud of butterflies that twisted in the air above the plants like windblown confetti. The dead man’s face floated through the trees and held her in his gaze. She stared right back until it moved on.

  She hoped that Leo’s representative wouldn’t take too long to get
in touch with her. Despite everything that had happened, more than enough for one week, she was eager to begin.

  6.

  Once inside the Old City walls Bloomberg quickly found a café, sat down, and ordered coffee and a small bottle of arak. The activity in the square before him—a predictable beggar, his long hair tangled, pursuing a group of tourists; two bearded men haggling over grocery prices in a whirl of argument and insult; a young boy carting a great basket of red peppers—was a corrective to loneliness. When they were in France his friend Jacob Rosen had spoken and written endlessly, wistfully, about Jerusalem. Stuck in the stinking trenches, waiting for the shells that might split any of their heads open, Jacob, stub of a pencil in his hand, had dreamed into his poems a Jerusalem he had never visited. Bloomberg wondered if perhaps he was here because of Jacob: bringing the dead home, taking the ghost on a tour of the market. If he was anything like the Jew he should have been Bloomberg would go down to the Wailing Wall and say a prayer for Jacob, then add another for his mother.

  At the next table an old man in a red tarboosh was cleaning a pile of coins. He dipped cotton wool in olive oil, then rubbed the soaking wads over the coins. Bloomberg found him too picturesque to be true. Ignoring him as a subject he took out a small pad from a pocket on his tunic, broke a stick of charcoal and began to draw, in an accumulation of swiftly defined circles, a pile of watermelons on a nearby cart. He picked up a small chunk of moist bread that had fallen from someone’s plate and began to use it as an eraser. He worked on a number of drawings, all of objects, until the square in front of him had emptied out. He looked up and saw the polar star glinting above the horizon. Two women passed, carrying brown earthenware jugs toward a pump farther down the street. They worked the handle strenuously, but to no effect. Eventually they managed to secure a thin liquid trickle for a minute or two. Bloomberg had heard that there was a diminished supply of water in the cisterns.

  Bloomberg rose to leave, feeling irritated and frustrated. This was his last day of freedom and he had wasted half of it chatting to the upper classes. In the morning, equally boring, he would have to make the acquaintance of the pioneer socialists of the Jewish Women Workers Farm.

  He should go home now. He had left Joyce alone too long, especially after what had happened. But what he had told Ross was true, he was the one who had been terrified for hours after the murder, trembling inside while Joyce calmly scrubbed the blood off his body.

  A crowd of small boys, barefoot in shabby djellabas, glued themselves to him as he walked back toward the Damascus Gate. They tugged at his shirtsleeves and shoved their grimy palms in his face. He pressed a few piastres into one of the outstretched hands, shrugged off his charges, and increased his pace.

  He passed through the gate, skirting the grain sheds and a line of parked tourist cars. He felt too tired to walk but was without money for a taxi. He started up the hill toward the nearest bus stop, then felt himself illuminated from behind by a pair of headlights that held him in their gaze while the car that owned them crawled behind him. Bloomberg turned. It was the same fawn-colored Bentley that had brought him here. The car drew alongside him and halted. The window rolled down and Ross’s face appeared.

  “Oh, good. I thought it was you. Can we give you a ride?”

  Bloomberg wanted to decline but his legs ached and Joyce was waiting.

  He settled next to Ross on the backseat.

  “Have you been working?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fascinating place, don’t you think? Endlessly stimulating.”

  “I haven’t had much time.”

  “No, of course not.”

  They left the poorly lit city streets behind, then turned toward Abu Tor, and without Bloomberg’s having issued an instruction, headed in the direction of his home. Ross rolled down his window; a reek of burnt camel dung penetrated the car.

  “Now, please don’t take what I’m about to say amiss, but I was wondering. Your lack of studio space. Since you left today it occurred to me—the roof of my house, there’s a covered, shaded area, altogether a large area. Ideal, really. View of the whole city. Stunning. No pressure, of course—paint what you like. I’m not trying . . .”

  “It’s kind of you, but I don’t know when I’ll have the time.”

  “Oh anytime, night or day, makes no difference. You won’t disturb us, and I’d be terribly interested to see what you do.”

  “Well, I’ll certainly think about it.”

  They sat in silence. Ross peered into the night. Oil lamps burned in the windows of scattered houses along the way. After a ten-minute ride they came to a stop.

  “Now here we are, I believe.”

  Bloomberg got out and wished Ross good night.

  “Perhaps you’ll change your mind. Come anyway, see the view.”

  Bloomberg stood until the taillights of Ross’s car had disappeared. Then he walked off the road and pissed in a grove of eucalyptus trees. A stray goat crossed in front of him, the rusty bell around its neck emitting a string of dull chimes. Bloomberg crossed in front of the window of his house. Joyce had thrown a lace cloth over the bedside lamp; she was reading in the chair. When he tapped gently on the window she looked up immediately, not startled at all, he thought, but as if she was expecting someone. When she saw that it was Bloomberg she quickly closed her book.

  7.

  Kirsch walked up toward Ross’s house, where he imagined the party was already in full swing. He was late because he had sat at his desk for two hours after everyone else had left, sifting the meager evidence that his men had managed to accumulate in the vicinity of the probable site of the murder: a few bloody ribbons of cloth, sketches of indecipherable markings in the dust where the struggle had taken place, descriptions of stripped bushes and a broken path down the hillside that seemed to indicate the direction in which the attacker had fled, but no weapon and no eyewitness. It would take an informer to set things going.

  For twenty-four hours his office had been remarkably quiet, and then, suddenly, all hell had broken loose: phone calls, a summons to the high commissioner’s office, “very serious matter” . . . “city now a tinderbox” . . . “terribly sensitive situation” . . . “slaying of an important figure, could lead to God knows what.” Kirsch had returned to his office to find Ross waiting for him, although Ross, as usual, hardly seemed to give a damn—spent half a hour describing his latest architectural project and the party he’d cooked up for tonight. Even De Groot’s letters to Ramsay MacDonald didn’t seem to interest him that much. “Prime minister has all kinds of supplicants. You don’t imagine he was actually going to see the chap, do you? Marked absence of replies in your little folder.” But despite Ross’s own nonchalance he had managed to get out a “Pressure’s on, old chap,” just as he was leaving. Kirsch’s bloody luck.

  Kirsch rang the doorbell. He could smell the rich sweet odor of snail flowers emanating from a hidden spot among the heliotrope and flowering cactus. A butler opened the door and then Kirsch was inside, moving among the throng. All the Jerusalem grandees were there—the mufti, the kadi, judges and lawyers, both Jewish and Arab, and, of course, a number of British officers. Ross had persuaded some nervous Tommy to sing, and with the accompaniment of a single violinist, the stocky, freckled teenager was warbling the latest sentimental hit from London.

  Kirsch moved quickly through the crowd, scanning for the face he hoped to see. After five minutes he was out on the spacious terrace. He looked down into the garden and in the light reflected from the rooms of the house saw Joyce wandering alone under the pepper trees. Her hair was twisted into a tight knot on top of her head. He called to her but as he did so her husband appeared from the shadows and placed his hand on her shoulder. Kirsch watched her turn toward Bloomberg and lean her head into his shoulder. It looked to Kirsch like a hopeless gesture, but maybe he wanted to see it that way. Bloomberg, only an inch or so taller than his wife, stood stiffly and spoke to her.

  “Any progress, Robert?” I
t was Ross. He was at Kirsch’s side and looking down in the same direction, toward the painter and his wife.

  “Not much, I’m afraid, sir.”

  “Puzzling.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I mean, what the hell was De Groot doing all dressed up like an Arab?”

  “They’re comfortable clothes in this weather, sir.”

  Kirsch knew it was an idiotic thing to say as soon as he had opened his mouth.

  “Witnesses?”

  “What you see, sir.”

  Kirsch nodded in the direction of the Bloombergs.

  “You’ve spoken with them, of course.”

  “Only the wife, sir. I’m seeing Bloomberg tomorrow, I hope. He was unavailable yesterday. Disappeared somewhere.”

  “Painting in the desert, I believe.”

  Kirsch felt a wave of irritation but refrained from asking why Ross hadn’t forwarded this information earlier.

  “Zionists are damned happy, of course,” Ross continued. “De Groot was a thorn in their side. They detest all those Agudat people. Not hard to see why. De Groot and his people have the Zionists down as dangerous blasphemers, defiling the Holy Land.”

  Ross offered a tight smile.

  “But listen, those letters, maybe I was a little hasty. Perhaps you should speak to someone in London?”

  “I have, sir.”

  “Oh, really. Well done. Anything amiss? So what was our victim up to? He was certainly aiming high. Chat with the PM and another with Sir Miles. Ever since Weizmann got his foot in the door every Mediterranean with a beef wants to give our chaps an earful.”

  “It seems the original letters never arrived, sir. Nobody knew anything about them. You seemed to think he wouldn’t have got an audience if they had.”

  “Yes, although it depends what he’d come to say, I suppose. I suspect it must have been something that he didn’t want me to hear. I’m relying on you to find out what that might have been, Robert. No stone unturned, eh? Even if it means treading on some toes.”

  “Absolutely, sir.”

  “Bit of a hurry-up, let’s get hold of this killer, nip things in the bud.”