The Hope Page 15

  “Right now,” Leopold replied in saucy English, “waiting for my boss.”

  “Who is that?”

  “Sheva Leavis.”

  Barak had vaguely heard of a nimble Tel Aviv fixer by that name. “How did you get here?”

  Leopold explained that in the prison compound he had met Leavis, whose nephew had been in his mutinous platoon. Leavis was an Iraqi Jew who dealt in war surplus munitions, paid spot cash for them, and arranged to evade embargoes and ship the stuff to Israel. “He was surprised how much I knew about currencies. He took a liking to me,” said Leopold. “I was trading foreign currencies under the nose of the Germans when I was fifteen. My father brought us out of Katowice by bribing the SS, with Swiss francs that I scrounged. Well, Leavis got his nephew released, and me too, and now here I am.”

  “What about travel papers? Passport, visas, and so on?”

  Leopold crookedly grinned. “Sheva.”

  “And the army let you go?”

  “Well, I just went.” With a flourish, Leopold offered a pack of Camels.

  “No thanks. You’re a deserter, then.”

  Leopold put a flaming Zippo lighter to his cigarette. “If you say so.”

  “Come back, Blumenthal. I’ll buy your air ticket for you. Right now! Deserting is bad business.”

  An obstinate pout hardened Leopold’s face. “I’m flying with Sheva to the Philippines. American tanks are rusting out there by the hundreds. The Filipinos can’t take dollars, dollar transactions are all traced. It’s complicated, lots of currency switching.”

  The airport loudspeaker was scratchily announcing Barak’s flight to Washington. “You’ll have a hell of a problem when you come home.”

  “This is home.”

  “America? You can’t stay here. Immigration won’t let you.”

  With a knowing, condescending grin, Leopold blew a smoke ring. “Yossi likes Israel? Kol ha’kavod [all honor] to him.”

  “Not that it matters”—Barak picked up his suitcase—“but you might not be alive, and you undoubtedly wouldn’t be here, if our people hadn’t smuggled you out of Italy and then—”

  “I didn’t volunteer to come to Israel, Adon Barak, or to join your army,” Leopold broke in. “I was shipped around like a horse, and in Haifa I was drafted like a horse. I’m still a Zionist, I’ll contribute more over here. You’ll see.”

  Barak shrugged and walked off.

  “Regards to Yossi,” he called at Barak’s departing back, “and to Yael Luria.”

  Pasternak was waiting at the plane gate. “Come, come, they’re boarding. We’re in luck, our flight’s on a Constellation.”

  “What do you know about a guy named Sheva Leavis?” Barak asked, when they were settled in the roomy second-class seats of the vast aircraft.

  “Sheva? Why?” Barak described his encounter with Blumenthal. Pasternak nodded. “That’s Sheva, all right.”

  “Does he accomplish anything?”

  “For Sheva, yes. For Israel, well, I won’t say he’s done nothing. He plays his own little game and skims some cream. It all helps, I guess.”

  The roar of the swift steep takeoff broke the thread of their talk. After that Sam Pasternak spoke in low rapid Hebrew about the clandestine Constellation deal and others like it. A few American and Canadian Jews who had started life as immigrant junk peddlers were now in the scrap metal business, he explained. As the War Assets Administration sold off incalculable masses of unwanted munitions and arms-making machinery, the detritus of a finished world war, these dealers knew where the stuff was and how to obtain it at preposterously low cost.

  But they also knew about the embargo. Resale for combat use was lawbreaking, said Pasternak, and that was the real catch. These men might sympathize, but they could not risk their livelihoods and perhaps jail. So it was up to the Yishuv Jews somehow to obtain the warmaking scrap—tanks, trucks, bulk TNT, lathes for turning out rifle barrels, communication electronics, old bombers, fighters, and Constellations—without bringing down the law on the effort. Stories of recruiting aviators, communication engineers, gun designers, cryptologists, then a long lunatic account of buying an aircraft carrier and reconditioning it for sea, all in vain—Pasternak went on for hours. Through his anecdotes of dashing success and calamitous failure, ran two threads, scarlet and gold, of derring-do and money; too much scarlet, not enough gold. Uncle Harry’s ill-defined “few fellows who were helping out” Pasternak described as a small circle of businessmen committed to finding the money for almost any grotesque scheme that might put arms in Jewish hands in the Holy Land; and they were so drained at this point that Barak’s Uncle Harry had had to ask Dave Perlman to come up with ten thousand dollars.

  “While you and I were fighting the battle of the roads,” Pasternak said, “the wildest business was going on overseas. Ben Gurion knew there would be war once the State was declared. He wanted weaponry procured and piled up outside, so that the minute the British pulled out the stuff would pour in. He hoped he’d get some of it, at least, in time to fight off the invaders.”

  “And so he did,” said Barak.

  “Well, barely. Now we’ve got the airlift from Czechoslovakia, a more solid basis for supplies. That’s why”—he rapped his knuckles against the fuselage—“we need a Constellation! And we’ll get it.”

  “When?”

  “That depends on Christian Cunningham. Doesn’t this thing ride smoothly? Like a dream, hah? Ten tons at a crack, Zev, ten tons!”

  9

  The Terrible Tiger

  Pasternak sat in his underwear, smoking a cigarette by an open window which offered a fine view of Pennsylvania Avenue clear down to the Capitol dome, gleaming white in the afternoon sun. The wheezing air conditioner in another window was not perceptibly cooling the narrow bedroom in the Willard Hotel. Enter Barak, in a seersucker suit, straw hat, white shirt, and red tie, carrying a box.

  “Look at you! Yankee Doodle!”

  “I wasn’t going to wear this foolish masquerade”—Barak brandished the box—“to your friend Cunningham’s house. If it wasn’t government property I’d burn it. When do we go?”

  “I’ll get dressed.” Pasternak walked around him. “Not a bad fit. Tight in the shoulders.”

  “Best I could find to walk out of the shop in. Very cheap.”

  “America is cheap. They’ve got everything, and no war damage.”

  The rented car was approaching the Memorial Bridge when Barak said, “Let’s stop here.” Pasternak halted and parked. Barak climbed the steps of the memorial, contemplated the giant seated Lincoln for several minutes, and returned. “To be an American,” he said somberly, “must be something wonderful.”

  “Most of them don’t know it.” Pasternak started the car.

  Barak shook his head. “They know. Maybe they don’t talk about it.”

  On the other bank of the Potomac they drove for a while through leafy roads and lanes, then down a narrow winding dirt road to a gravelled circular driveway before a brick house with a small white wooden porch. Pasternak rang a chiming doorbell. From inside a cupola overhead a startling voice hollowly asked, “Who’s there?”

  “Sam Pasternak and friend.”

  “Who is Sam Pasternak? And how do I know you’re him?” Faint mischief in the cracking tones.

  “We ate octopus together in Genoa, Chris, and you got sick as a dog.”

  A sepulchral chuckle. The door buzzed and opened. A pretty black maidservant said, “Good evening. This way, please.”

  A lean angular man rose to greet them in a long room facing the river, where a large rosewood grand piano dominated old-fashioned furniture. He had thick graying hair, heavy horn-rimmed glasses, and prominent bony jaws, and despite the heat he wore a gray three-piece suit, with a gold watch chain across the vest. “Drat that octopus, Sam, it darn near finished me.” Like the voice from the cupola, he spoke in deep tones that faintly cracked.

  “Chris, this is Zev Barak.”

  “Hello t
here.” Strong handshake with a cold dry hand. “The sun’s over the yardarm, gentlemen, what do you say to mint juleps? The lady of the house doesn’t drink, so come along.”

  On a curving brick terrace that offered a broad vista of the Potomac and a distant glimpse of the Washington Monument and the Capitol, they settled down in wrought-iron chairs at a glass-top table. The maid brought frosted pewter mugs rimmed with green mint leaves, and set out bowls of pretzels and peanuts. “Watch out, Zev,” Pasternak said. “If you’ve never had a mint julep, it can put you under.”

  “You Israeli fellows have no head for strong drink,” said Cunningham, sipping. “American Jews, now, drink even with a man, by and large. It’s interesting.” He peered at Barak. “Zev Barak. What’s your real name?” Barak blinked at him. With a thin smile Cunningham persisted. “Does that question offend you?”

  “No, but that’s my name. I was born Wolfgang Berkowitz, if that’s what you mean.”

  “What does Zev Barak mean in Hebrew? I know you people tend to take on Hebrew names in Palestine.”

  Barak replied with good humor, “Zev means wolf.” Pasternak had warned him that Christian Cunningham was an odd man with odd manners. “Short for Wolfgang, you might say.”

  “I see,” Cunningham nodded. “And Barak, short for Berkowitz.”

  “Well, yes, but it’s a common name in Israel. It means lightning.”

  “Lightning Wolf. Not bad! Could be almost American Indian.” He turned to Pasternak. “Is your friend a lightning wolf?”

  “Zev is okay.” Pasternak was drinking his julep. After one taste of the powerful stuff, Barak was only pretending.

  “It’s interesting,” said Cunningham. “In America Jews change their names to seem less Jewish. You people tend to Hebraize your names and make yourself more Jewish. Now why is that?”

  “Getting away from Europe, I suppose,” said Pasternak, “in one direction or the other.”

  “Aha!” For the first time Cunningham smiled widely, showing cigarette-stained even teeth. “Well said. Not the whole answer, but interesting. And here’s the lady of the house.”

  A thin girl of twelve or so in a tennis dress ran lightly onto the patio. “I beat him, father. He’s fifteen, and a blowhard, and I won two sets.” She stopped on seeing the Israelis. With a touch of shyness yet cheerily she said, “Hello, I’m Emily.”

  “Dinner at seven-thirty, Emily, with Mr. Pasternak and Mr. Barak.”

  She smiled at them and was gone. Cunningham’s whole manner changed. His eyes drooped half-shut, he hooked thumbs in the gold watch chain, and he sank in his chair. The voice sharpened. “Sam, I think the Constellation thing will be all right from our embassy end. After dinner we’ll have to see a chap who lives nearby, for half an hour or so.”

  “Okay, Chris.”

  “As for the Panama people we can help you somewhat, but that’ll be mostly up to you.”

  “We’re prepared for that.”

  Straightening in his seat, Cunningham reverted to his acerb social vein. “While we’re gone the lady of the house will have to entertain Mr. Wolf Lightning.”

  “An agreeable prospect,” Barak said.

  “You’ll find her articulate, if a little silly. Her mother’s in England, you see, visiting our son at Oxford. If I were a Jew,” Cunningham turned to Pasternak, after a long sip of his julep, “I’d certainly want to remove myself as far from Europe as possible. Especially from Russia. ‘From the north will the evil come,’” he quoted Jeremiah. “Russia has been your misfortune. Hitler is your bugbear, but he went to school in Russia, you know.”

  Pasternak nodded. Barak said, “I’m not sure I understand that.”

  With evident relish for a fresh audience, Cunningham thrust a long bony finger at him. “From the pales and the pogroms of the czars, Mr. Wolf Lightning, Adolf Hitler learned that western liberalism was all bosh. That he could treat the Jews as subhuman without any international trouble, just some futile squeaks and finger-pointing. From Lenin he learned the use of concentration camps and totalitarian terror. From Stalin he learned that vast massacres could be covered up and baldly denied, and the world wouldn’t give a tinker’s damn.”

  Cunningham paused to empty his pewter mug with a toss. “Hitler’s only innovation was to import all those horrors from the depths of Slav darkness into the light of Middle Europe. That Hitler turned on his teachers is a great irony of history. A still greater irony is that we saved Russia from Hitler with Lend-Lease—Russia, the one mortal menace on the planet to our country. Will you gentlemen join me in another julep?” The Israelis eyed each other, and both declined. Cunningham refilled his glass from a tinkling jug and went on about the iniquity and the menace of the Soviet Union.

  Pasternak had warned Barak, too, of Cunningham’s obsession with the evil nature of the Russians. As sunset reddened the river, the intelligence man held forth to Barak on this theme. Christianity had come too late to Russia, he said, a full thousand years after Christ, and then only in a corrupted form via Byzantium. It had never quite reached the Tartar heart of the Slavs, but had left them a dangerous schizophrenic mass, half savage conquerors, half milksop idealists, the savage side inexorably emerging and dominating their society and their politics.

  “That national split personality emerges equally in Tolstoy and in Dostoyevsky. It’s the only way to understand such far-apart tortured geniuses, Major Barak, only way to relate them, nationally and rationally, to each other. That split is in their music. In their architecture. In their art. Ever see Repin’s painting of Ivan the Terrible with his eldest son dying at his feet, after Ivan smashed in his skull with a gold-headed cane? Ivan’s face, the son’s face? There’s your whole story, in one gory image.”

  “Dinner is served,” said the maid at the French doors.

  The girl, dressed in plain gray, was on her dignity in her mother’s chair at the foot of the table, saying little, ringing for the maid to give her sotto voce orders, and quietly urging on the guests second helpings of the vichyssoise, broiled chicken, and sherbet. Barak and Pasternak ate in silence and exchanged glances as Cunningham frankly laid out the prevailing American intelligence estimate of Israel. The Jewish military successes were being sized up, he cautioned them, as a surprising and on the whole negative development. The Arabs would never accept the Zionists in their midst, not for generations. If defeated again and again, they would vent their frustration on the western powers by turning to the Russians for support. That could upset the entire power balance in the Middle East. Hostile Arab governments could nationalize western oil assets, and even close out British and American strategic bases in the region. As for the Israelis, said Cunningham, his colleagues tended to think of them as an unyielding aggressive lot, hungry for expansion. Worst of all, from the standpoint of American national interest, they were said to be mostly socialist or downright Marxist. Full of Russian Jews, Israel was being armed by Czechoslovakia with Soviet-controlled munitions. A pro-Soviet political stand in Israel was entirely possible.

  “That’s moonshine,” said Pasternak. “We know the Russians. Our founders fled from Russia to create Israel.”

  “Of course, but it’s the task of intelligence to put the worst case. I lose patience, I must say, with the short sight of my colleagues. When I worked in the FBI years ago, before the war, I played some part in exposing the Soviet Union’s spy rings. Yet from 1941 to 1945, we poured Lend-Lease to that bone-deep enemy of ours. Now mind you”—Cunningham waved his sherbet spoon at them for emphasis—“Lend-Lease was sound. Hitler had to be smashed. But the total switchover to loving the Russians, Hollywoodizing them, we will live to regret for a hundred years. It was a colossal four-year security disaster. My view is that Israel can develop into our strategic bastion in the Middle East. At the OSS I had superiors who listened to me, however skeptically, and some of them are now in the CIA.”

  “Well, that’s reassuring,” blurted Barak.

  “Not necessarily. Much depends on your Mr. Ben
Gurion. One is told that you have his ear, Major Barak, so let me be blunt.” Cunningham talked straight at him, and Barak began to understand why Sam Pasternak had brought him here, and why Cunningham had received him. “Your Prime Minister is a formidable personality, but his real test is now at hand. He has to change fast from revolutionary to statesman. All those years of Zionist political infighting have made him rough, hard, small-minded, and obstinate. His rhetoric shows his Russian origins, the hammer and sickle are all over it. Does Ben Gurion believe in God?”

  This sudden shot, with a piercing direct look, gravelled Barak. Pasternak was watching him with a tart smile, and the quiet girl too stared at him. “Well, the religious faction in our country gives him a big pain, that I know.”

  “That isn’t what I asked.” Cunningham sank lower in his chair. “The return of the Jews to the Holy Land is an anomaly of history. In the long view Ben Gurion’s either an instrument of Providence at the start of a vast new beginning in world affairs, or he’s a trivial person, an insignificant passing accident of time and chance. In that case so is your country, probably.”

  Barak said, “He isn’t religious in the least. He’ll eat anything, and he doesn’t observe the holidays, none of that.”

  “Again, that’s not what I asked.”

  Barak shrugged, and after a moment Cunningham went on, “Are you religious?”

  “You’re a grand host, Mr. Cunningham, and I’ve been fascinated listening to you, but that’s really none of your business.”

  Christian Cunningham straightened in his chair and burst out laughing. “Everything is the business of an intelligence man. Sam, we have to go. Emily, give some more coffee to Mr. Wolf Lightning, and try not to bore him.”

  The girl said when they had gone, “Would you like more coffee?”

  “Please.”

  “Brandy?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “In Israel, do you have fireflies?”

  “Fireflies? I’ve never seen fireflies. We have glowworms.”