Avraham Azrieli - The Jerusalem Assassin

“ Oh. I’m sorry. Please.”

“ Unless you have company,” Lemmy said. “I don’t want to intrude.”

Christopher shut the door and showed him into a living room. “I’m between girlfriends right now.”

“ Good.” Lemmy drew his Mauser and aimed it at Christopher’s chest. He removed the beer bottle from his hand and took a gulp. “Nice and cold.”

The expression on Christopher’s face barely changed. He obviously had strong nerves and good training. “Is this a real pistol?”

Lemmy sat on an armchair. “Toy guns have a red plastic tip at the end of the muzzle. And no silencer. But you already know that.”

“ Herr Horch, is this some kind of a test?”

“ A test?”

“ To see if I’m prepared for a bank robbery?”

“ You’re good,” Lemmy said. “You’re stalling for time, trying to figure out what I’m after and how you can retrieve your own weapon and reach parity here. Correct?”

“Weapon?” Christopher laughed. “You can’t be serious. This is a joke, right?”

In response, Lemmy shifted his aim and pressed the trigger. The bullet hit the TV behind Christopher, blasting the screen.

“God!” Christopher jumped sideways. t="0What’s wrong with you?”

“ Pull down your pants.”

“ What? ”

“Show it to me!”

Christopher hesitated.

Lemmy lowered the tip of the silencer until it pointed at Christopher’s crotch.

“ Don’t shoot!” Christopher unbuckled his belt and lowered his pants and underwear. Along his circumcised penis was a tattoo of a black swastika and the letters SS.

“Regards from Kibbutz Gesher.” Lemmy aimed the Mauser with both hands. “Tell me the truth or I will shoot it off.”

His face red, his smile gone, Christopher pulled up his pants. Without asking permission, he sat down on the carpet. “My father did it. He was much older than my mother, served as an SS officer during the war. He was angry that she had allowed the doctor to circumcise me-there was an infection around my penis, and the doctor said it would help. Dad took me to an SS reunion in Munich when I was five or six. They got me drunk and had me tattooed.”

“How touching,” Lemmy said. “Father-son bonding. Only that I don’t believe you. Tell me who you work for, unless you want to die tonight.”

“I work for Elie Weiss,” Christopher said. “Who else?”

“Don’t lie!”

“I’m not lying. I didn’t know his real identity when he first showed up, after my dad was killed in a ski accident.”

Lemmy’s curiosity was piqued. Paula’s young brother had also died in a ski accident. “What kind of an accident?”

“ When I was fourteen, we went on vacation to Unterstmatt in the Black Forest. My father didn’t return to the lodge after dark. A rescue team found him in a crevasse off the slopes. The pathologist said that a sharp icicle penetrated his throat and punctured his brain. It had melted long before he was discovered, but the stab wound fit a long icicle. A freak accident, really.”

The freakish part was that the exact same thing had happened to Klaus V.K. Hoffgeitz a few years earlier in Chamonix, a great distance from Unterstmatt!

“ Go on,” Lemmy said, struggling to control his voice.

“ My father owned a factory, making chemicals for pest control and agriculture. After he died, the accountants told my mother that the business was bankrupt. We had nothing. Then a miracle happened. A little man with black eyes and a long nose visited us.”

“ Elie?”

“ He introduced himself as Untersturmfuhrer Rupert Danzig, an underling of my father from the good old days of the SS. He offered secret help from a charity fund run by a group of veterans. The money started coming, enough to support my mother and send me to Lyceum Alpin St. Nicholas.”

“ Elie is a master in long-term planning.”

“ And in the summers I attended paramilitary youth camps to learn shooting and field work.”

“ Same with me,” Lemmy said, “fifteen years ahead of you.”

“ When I graduated, Herr Danzig encouraged me to go to Israel for a summer. He said I must learn from the Jewish people about building a new life from nothing, a new nation from the ashes, putting all energies into constructive work, and so on. But I had a little thing with one of the girls in the kibbutz, she saw my tattoo, and all hell broke loose.”

“ They kicked you out.”

“ Right. Herr Danzig picked me up, and we drove to Jerusalem. We sat on a bench near the Wailing Wall, and he told me the truth. His real name was Elie Weiss, a Jew, a Holocaust survivor. He invited me to work for SOD, to prevent another Holocaust. I had nothing waiting for me in Europe. My mother had died the previous summer, and I didn’t know any of my relatives, who had disliked my father and kept away from us. Also, the opportunity to serve the Jewish people was a chance to make up for what my father and his generation of Germans had done.”

“ You decided to work for a man who had lied to you and your mother?”

“ When I learned his real identity, I realized that Elie must have extorted money from my father and others like him, threatening them with exposure. But I don’t blame him. I’ve done my research. My father served at Treblinka. He killed countless innocent people. The SS motto was Loyal, Valiant, Obedient. It should have been Loot, Victimize, Obliterate.” Christopher’s voice rose in anger. “My father was a mass murderer. A monster!”

Lemmy secured the safety on the Mauser and holstered it under his coat.

“ You believe me now?”

“ It fits. Elie helped you get an MBA, intern in New York, and time your application to the Hoffgeitz Bank just when he told me to hire an assistant. But why?”

“ To watch your back. There’s a lot riding on you. Elie said that you are the key to the future safety and security of the Jewish people.”

“ That’s all?” Lemmy stood up and buttoned his coat. “I’m just a middle-aged banker trying to survive the most confusing set of circumstances.

Christopher laughed.

“ Anything else you want to share with me?”

“ I’m the keeper of all SOD files-Elie’s personal records, list of active and sleeper agents, files of former Nazis who pay Elie regularly to stay alive, and charts of tentative targets for Counter Final Solution. It’s all kept on the bank’s computer, encrypted, of course.”

“ What’s the password?”

“ JERUSALEM 1967.”

“ I should have guessed.” Lemmy gestured downward. “That’s some tattoo. Dating must be complicated.”

“ It’s not so bad.” Christopher grinned. “I tell them I’m too shy to fool around with the lights on.”

“ Do they buy it?”

“ Oh, yes. Girls find shyness very endearing.”

*

Saturday, October 28, 1995

“ I’ll be gone for a few days.” Lemmy pulled away from Paula. “When I come back, I’ll tell you everything, and you’ll decide if you want me to stay.”

“ Very funny.”

“ I’m serious.” He got out from under the covers and sat at the edge of the bed. “There are things I’ve kept from you.”

“ I know.”

“ Do you?”

Paula caressed his hand. “You spoke a foreign language in your sleep last night. It scared me to death. I thought there was a stranger in the room.”

Despite the ominous implications, Lemmy burst out laughing, and Paula followed suit. When they calmed down, she threw a pillow at him.

He caught it. “Are you still scared?”

“ Of you?”

“ Yes.”

“ Are you nuts? I know how much you love me.” She lifted her pinky. “I got you wrapped around this one like a slinky.”

He leaned over and kissed her lips. “But there are secrets-”