Марко Коскас - Goodbye Paris, Shalom Tel Aviv

Where does she get chutzpah like that? A girl of twenty-five, a reporter for only six months, and not even! Suddenly Elias no longer looks at her with the same lover’s eyes. She no longer makes him think of the Jew in Proust with “a slight mind” but a blonde with a very sharp mind; cutting, in fact, an extremely special intelligence—very feminine, intuitive, and practical, but capable of putting things together.

They go up to her place, and Elias finally breaks down and confesses. He tells her the whole story in detail, minus the quickie with the jeweler on Dizengoff Avenue. Anyway, what importance can it have, a lay in a moment of melancholy? In his eyes, it doesn’t count any more than if he had just held the door open for the lady, except that Olga wants them to go there together to get a reimbursement for the jewel. For her, it’s essential to recover that money, even if it means getting less than what Elias paid for it. And above all, give it back to the family of the two Bedouins for the lawyer’s fees they’re going to need.

“Might as well confess to the cops,” Elias answers without losing his calm.

“Yes, that’s true,” Olga finally admits. “But we do have to give them back that money one way or another. That’s the starting point, I’m sure of it.”

“Not before this business is over.”

“Yes, before! And then a piece of jewelry worth twenty thousand shekels at Elkaïm’s for a new immigrant with your salary—it’s suspicious. Suppose they search your place…”

“They won’t!”

“How d’you know?”

Elias finally manages to return to the jeweler’s alone. While the jeweler is all smiles and honey when she sees him come in and excitedly locks the door and deactivates the alarm to drag him into the back, already lifting her skirt, she sends him packing when he asks her to reimburse the jewel.

“You here to screw me or bug me?”

“You’ve got to understand, I messed up, and I need money,” says Elias in Hebrew, trying to cajole her.

“Buzz off, or I’ll ring the alarm!”

“Look, you can still—”

“I’m counting to three.” And Elias drops it. All he needs is for her to call the cops.

“I’ll give you five thousand shekels for it, not one more,” she says.

“Go to hell!”

“You’d rather I ring the alarm?”

“So go ahead,” he answers bravely.

“OK, I’ll give you seven thousand,” she says, provided he humps her.

This time Elias accepts, knowing he’ll have to dig deep in his mental resources to get a hard-on again with this old sow. So he says, “OK, raise your skirt,” but she actually lifts it above her waist, revealing her whitish, wrinkled thighs. Still, he manages to stuff it into her for two to three minutes, thinking of Sandy with her mouth full of salad, Juliette in her little sarong, this one, that one, even a certain Miss World 1999 in a special Christmas issue of Playboy , and finally he walks out with a stack of crunchy two-hundred-shekel bills in his pocket.

Then he gets an alarmed text from Olga, informing him that Kirzenbaum has published an article in English on his blog. Elias connects right away. He’s aghast to discover a story titled “Terrorist Attack or Racket?” illustrated by a photo of himself taken from Facebook. Everything is related quite exactly, including the mechanism of the swindle, but the pro-Palestinian blogger still knows nothing about Diabolo, except that he is, it seems, “a sinister-looking obese man.”

Ever since Elias confessed the whole affair to her, Olga is in a state she’s never known before. Boys do crazy things for her, sure. There were others. Lots, even. She’s so pretty! But now there’s a veritable tragedy, and she is the cause. With frightful repercussions for lots of people. But Olga is aware that if there’s any chance of saving Elias and their relationship, she’ll have to discredit Kirzenbaum. She just has to get into the skin of the kind of woman she is not, a Mata Hari or a simple sexy teaser who can lure an enemy of the male sex into a trap. She also knows she’s on the wrong side of the truth, and that torments her. But she’s made her choice: between Elias and the truth, she’s choosing Elias: Elias over justice, Elias over truth, Elias over everything. The complete opposite of what she was taught in journalism school. But do you learn to deal with torment like this in the course of those studies? With falling head over heels in love like she is?

During this time, the atmosphere of the H24 newsroom has become electric. All the computers are connected to Kirzenbaum’s blog, and when Elias comes in around three, Marcel takes him aside in a locked office, where the megadirector and the gigadirector of the channel are waiting for him.

“Tell us what happened,” Marcel asks him. “We can’t have a journalist in our editorial offices who’s in trouble with the law.”

“But I’m not in trouble with the law,” Elias answers. “I was the victim of an attempted murder, and on the pretext that a blogger on Tag Shalom voices a doubt, there you go! You accuse me of I don’t even know what, exactly. My own employer… that’s pretty far out! After wanting to turn me into a hero instead of defending me… at least admit I’m the one who didn’t want to exploit the event, whereas you wanted to make a whole megillah out of it!”

“Yes, OK,” the gigadirector admits, “but did you or did you not sell the channel’s car to those poor Bedouins and then take it back?”

“Never in my life!”

“Isn’t a very fat man one of your friends?”

“More than one, even. So what?”

“Well, because according to the article, a big fat man is the one who stole their car in the middle of the night.”

“There’s the proof it’s not me!”

“Yes, but according to the paper,” the megadirector insists, “he could be your accomplice.”

“Insinuations!”

“In any case, for the moment,” Marcel announces, “you can’t work as a journalist anymore.”

“That’s revolting!”

“You’ll go into production,” the gigadirector announces. “You know enough about technique, right? So one week of training and then you’re in charge there. Until we get to the bottom of this business.”

They have an appointment in one of the twin cafés in front of the Habima Theater, but Olga is so nervous that at the last moment she can’t remember if it’s the one to the right or the left. She’s sorry she didn’t ask him to meet at the Café Français, instead of this place, the best spot in Tel Aviv to miss each other when you’re going to have a drink with someone whose face you don’t even know and you detest in advance. So she sits down at random on the terrace of the one to the left facing the theater. Kirzenbaum appears a little later in a shapeless jacket, extremely annoyed, saying no, it was the one to the right where they were supposed to meet, and it’s not very nice not to give a damn about the agreed-upon spot. This negotiation’s off to a good start! But then she senses she’s making an impression on him, with her clingy little gray silk suit and her beautiful blonde hair loose on her shoulders. He’s impossible to describe. Medium height, medium-long hair, nearsighted, age uncertain, toneless voice…

“Can I see?” he asks without waiting, and Olga puts the thing under his eyes. “Where’d you get this photo?” he asks distrustfully.

“That, I won’t tell you until we agree on a price.”

“What price?”

“Fifty thousand shekels,” Olga says coldly.

“You’re kidding!”

“Exclusive rights, of course.”

“Still!”

“Take it or leave it.”