Avraham Azrieli - The Jerusalem Assassin

“Looking for the bathroom,” he said.

“That would be the little room with a toilet bowl. Down the hallway.”

Later in the morning, they congregated in the kitchen. A young man with dark, curly hair and brooding eyes joined them.

“ Gideon?” Elie glared at him. “Why are you here?”

“ Same reason you’re here.”

Agent Cohen entered the kitchen, all smiles. “Here are your administrative detention papers.” He tossed the documents in front of Elie, Itah, and Rabbi Gerster. The forms appeared genuine, with Ministry of Defense stamps and signatures at the bottom, authorizing Shin Bet to hold them without further proceedings and without a lawyer for up to ninety days.

The grandmotherly housekeeper cooked eggs to each person’s liking, which they ate with slices of grainy bread and bowls of Israeli salad.

“ Almost as good as the King David Hotel,” Agent Cohen said as he poured olive oil on his salad.

“ You’re playing with fire,” Elie said. A nurse had come in earlier and fitted him with a portable oxygen tank. A transparent plastic tube was held under his nose with a rubber strip that circled his head. “What has Freckles told you?”

“ Question is, what has he told you? ” Agent Cohen laughed and bit into a chunk of bread.

Rabbi Gerster wiped his lips and sat back in the chair. He had a hunch that the mutual antipathy between Elie and Shin Bet somehow involved Lemmy, but how? He sighed. Despite the bright light from the floor-to-ceiling windows and the endless span of the glistening blue Mediterranean, he was in the dark.

*

The synagogue was full of Neturay Karta men engaged in afternoon prayers. Lemmy’s blue baseball hat and windbreaker stood out among the homogeneous black coats and hats. His clean-shaven face felt bare among the uniformly bearded men.

He sat in the rear and hoped that they would take him for another curious tourist who had wandered into the Meah Shearim neighborhood for its narrow alleys, old stone houses, and quaint inhabitants.

When the prayers ended, the men went back to studying. They swayed over open books of Talmud, arguing with each other, puffing on cigarettes. He felt a swell of longing, drawn to join them, even for a few minutes of reliving his youth. Their immersion in the study of Talmud was unlike any other scholarly endeavor-reciting, discussing, pondering, and debating every word and every subtlety in the sages’ conflicting positions on every subject imaginable. Like their ancestors over countless generations, the men of Neturay Karta dedicated their lives to the study of Talmud as the ultimate way to glorify the Creator. At eighteen, Lemmy had broken away from the long chain of tradition. Until now, he had never doubted that decision.

But here, as the old synagogue enveloped him in the smells and sounds of his boyhood, with the palpable warmth and sense of purpose, with the joy of intellectual fencing in the worship of Adonai, the one God who had chosen us to receive His word, Lemmy was struck by an overwhelming sense of loss, as if all the years of his adult life had been wasted away from his true destiny- from his true self!

With great mental effort, Lemmy shunned those nostalgic misgivings and focused his mind on the task at hand. One of these men was Benjamin-not the young and cheerful youth he remembered, but an older Benjamin, a man of forty-six with dark eyes and a laughter that was likely less explosive, yet still contagious.

Lemmy got up and paced along the book-lined side wall in order to better see their faces. Some of the men resembled what he imagined Benjamin would look like, but up close, none of them turned out to be his childhood friend and study-companion. Lemmy walked down the other side, examining more bearded faces, none of them Benjamin’s.

Disappointment descended on him. Why had Father yelled Benjamin’s name? Had Benjamin left Neturay Karta? Perhaps one of these men knew where Benjamin Mashash lived now?

Before he could ask, someone pounded on the lectern three times. Lemmy realized the lecture of the day was about to begin. He returned to the bench in the rear.

Rabbi Gerster’s daily lectures had been the main event of each day of study, exposing novel, complex interpretations that none of the men had managed to reach independently. Superior intellect had long been the engine of rabbinical leadership, perhaps because Jews had lived in exile for two thousand years, lacking a political structure in which ambition alone could float a meritless man up to leadership. For Orthodox Jews, Talmudic scholarship had always been the sole criteria for prominence. And in the Neturay Karta of Lemmy’s youth, his father, Rabbi Abraham Gerster, had reigned supreme with his incisive mind and powers of persuasion.

One of the men stepped up onto the dais and stood by the lectern, his eyes on the open book in front of him. “Two men grip a prayer shawl. Each one claims full ownership.” His voice was soft and pleasant, intoning the words. He swayed back and forth, playing with his spiraling payos. “Talmud says that each one must take an oath that he owns at least half of the prayer shawl and shall accordingly receive one-half.”

Lemmy raised his hand. “You call this justice?”

Many of the men turned their heads to see who spoke.

“One of them must be lying,” he continued. “To split the prayer shawl between them means that the honest owner loses half. Is that fair?”

A man in a front bench responded, “These are not the original owners. They found the shawl in the street.”

“Even then,” Lemmy said, “the dispute is factual, not legal. One of them was the first to find it, and he’s deprived of half of his new property while the other one walks away with plunder.”

The man at the podium caressed his salt-and-pepper beard. “Plunder is not the issue here. These two are honest disputants. Each one believes he was the first to notice and grab the prayer shawl. Now-”

“So Talmud avoids the real issue,” Lemmy said.

A murmur swept through the rows of men.

“ What if one is lying? The honest one loses half to a thief.”

Another man said, “Rabbi Sumchus and Rabbi Yossi discuss a similar scenario, with a banker who took deposits from two men. One deposited two hundred shekels, and the other only one hundred. When they came to collect, both claimed to have deposited the larger amount, and the banker couldn’t remember. Rabbi Sumchus rules that each takes one hundred shekels, and the disputed one hundred remains until one of them admits that he had lied or until the Messiah comes and decides. But Rabbi Yossi says that neither should get anything so that the liar would lose his first one hundred shekels. Otherwise, there’s no deterrence to lying.”

“Okay,” Lemmy said, “both Rabbi Yossi and Rabbi Sumchus agree that the disputed one hundred shekels should be held, not split, correct?” He swayed in the manner of a Talmudic scholar. “So why are we cutting the prayer shawl in half?”

“No one’s cutting it,” yelled another man from the opposite end of synagogue, “we split the value, not the thing itself!”

The rabbi on the dais closed his book and descended the three steps. He walked down the middle aisle toward the stranger in the back.

Lemmy stood up.

The rabbi stopped abruptly a few rows away and blinked, shook his head, opened his mouth to speak, but couldn’t utter a word.

“ Shalom, Benjamin.”

“ Oy! ” Rabbi Benjamin Mashash pressed his hands to his chest as if experiencing a sharp stab of pain. “ Oy! Oy! Oy! ”

*

Rabbi Gerster was determined to find out what was really going on. He would not grope in the dark while his son, who had just come back from the dead, could unwittingly get entangled in a scheme to assassinate-or to pretend to assassinate-the prime minister! Squeezing Elie Weiss for information was pointless, even risky, with Elie’s proclivity for sudden violence. But Agent Cohen seemed cocky enough to be susceptible to goading. Perhaps he would say something revealing.