Марко Коскас - Goodbye Paris, Shalom Tel Aviv

When they get to the police station of Mitzpe Ramon, Olga hears a notification from Tag Shalom beep on her smartphone. She just has the time to see the photos on Kirzenbaum’s blog, and when she sees the headline of the article, she sighs again, this time from relief; it reads “Overwhelming Evidence.”

Then the cops confiscate their phones and put Olga and Juliette into separate rooms.

There’s a beep from Tag Shalom on Elias’s iPhone just as he’s joining Manu and Yoni at Flo 10 for their traditional Saturday noon shakshoukas with lots of walnut bread. It’s a quasi-sacred moment of the week. The three of them—sometimes more than three—meet to stuff themselves without saying a word until absolutely nothing is left on their plates and there’s no reason to put their spotless plates into the dishwasher when they’ve mopped up with the bread.

Elias gives them a vague hello, absorbed by Kirzenbaum’s blog, although he doesn’t understand that weird, abnormal, sinister image, and he has no idea Olga and Juliette are being questioned by the Mitzpe Ramon cops at the same moment. He takes a screenshot anyway and shows it to the two others. The caption of the photo claims it’s the Franco-Israeli reporter Elias Benzaquen and his accomplice, Gérard Valensi, known as Diabolo, with the car used in the crime.

“You got some pals!” Yoni says jovially.

“What is this bullshit?” Manu asks more seriously. “Who’s the fat guy?”

“No idea. It’s not the right car or the right big guy,” Elias says. “Kirzenbaum’s hounding me, but he really screwed up here.”

He immediately sends the image to Marcel and all his colleagues at the station via the WhatsApp group he set up with Olga to announce their relationship. The first bright spot since this business exploded! Finally something going his way! Finally some good news—Kirzenbaum’s monumental blunder.

“It’s a montage, right?” Yoni asks.

“Certainly,” Elias answers, squinting. Suddenly he cries out, “I got it! Olga’s the one who gave him that! I’m sure of it! She promised to fuck him up! Man, do I love you… my Olga! My honey!”

The waitress brings their shakshoukas, still bubbling hot in their metal dishes, but they don’t touch them right away as they’re concentrating on the images.

“Call her!” Manu advises feverishly.

The phone rings at least ten times before someone picks up, but it’s a man’s gruff voice answering in Hebrew. “Mitzpe Ramon police, I’m listening.”

Elias starts, but he instinctively understands that Olga’s phone is in the hands of the cops and he answers in Hebrew, “I’m sorry, I hit the wrong number,” and hangs up. Seeing the expression on his face, Manu and Yoni conclude the bright spot lasted a very short time.

Barely one minute. Just a minute of relief, a tiny little minute of good news, and here we go again into deep shit. The inexorable sequence of trouble and menace is beginning again.

“She’s with the cops,” he announces. “Manu, call Juliette, please, to check if they didn’t have an accident.” But the same gruff cop’s voice answers Manu.

“OK, they’ve been nabbed,” Elias concludes.

They don’t even touch their shakshoukas. The events are taking a very bad turn now. The affair is getting ugly and worrisome. What with dirty linen and bad luck, the noose is tightening. Elias thinks once again of the Zweig novel Beware of Pity. The title sums up the situation so well. Everything is in books , he says to himself, notably that absurd feeling of guilt that makes you throw yourself into the lion’s jaws . Going to give the Bedouins back the money he’d stolen from them—Olga certainly had good intentions. She has a good heart.

But she hasn’t read enough, Elias tells himself again. His darling is too young, too charitable. Just imagining her locked in a cell makes Elias want to scream. His Olga in the slammer! An inconceivable reality, but it is his new reality. And her parents are coming in less than a week to be officially introduced to him, my God! Will she be out when they arrive? What can he possibly say to them if she’s not released by then?

Elias doesn’t feel like a shakshouka at all now, and neither does Manu, but Yoni’s stomach is gurgling.

“Hey, it’s not Yom Kippur, y’know,” he says, soaking a big chunk of bread in the yellow of an egg while Manu and Elias are pensively staring at their bowls.

A text from Marcel comes in at that moment: I’m puzzled, the ed-in-chief prudently writes, while Danielle Godmiche ironizes, Has the white car turned red?

Despite this apparent beginning of a change in the situation at work, Elias can sense that from tomorrow on, they’ll go in for the kill when they learn Olga is in police custody in Mitzpe Ramon, far from Tel Aviv. Even their closest friends, their most faithful allies, will change sides, there’s no doubt about it. The channel’s most glamorous couple mixed up in a criminal affair—they’ll be shelved, or unemployed, both of them. To avoid this disaster, she has to be released before the next day, Sunday, when they go back to work. There’s no use for Elias’s burning millions of neurons a second to find a solution, he can’t think when he doesn’t really know what’s going on. He doesn’t have all the pieces of the puzzle, since he knows nothing of the twenty thousand shekels she extorted from Kirzenbaum. He still thinks she went to Mitzpe Ramon just with the money he got from the jeweler’s on Dizengoff. But then, what would they both be stopped for? It can’t be for possessing such a small sum. But if it’s not for that, what for? Besides, he can’t call the Mitzpe Ramon cops, not him. His implication in this business is too great. Why not Manu? Or better still, Danielle Godmiche. A journalist, that would do the trick. And no one’s better than Danielle at worming information out of the people she interviews, but with the charm of a fairy. She’d know how to get the Mitzpe Ramon cops to spill the beans without seeming to.

While they wait for her to call back, Elias and Manu let their shakshoukas get cold, while Yoni’s sopping up the last of his and beginning to eye theirs. Not that he doesn’t give a damn about Olga and Juliette, it’s just that anxiety doesn’t take away his appetite.

“Take mine,” Elias says to him, and Yoni doesn’t wait to be asked twice. He pulls Elias’s bowl across the table, and there we go, a second shakshouka. He gobbles it down as if nothing were happening.

Danielle finally calls back and confirms the bad news. Olga has been arrested, while Juliette may be released in the next few hours. Danielle also informs him that Olga was transporting twenty-seven thousand shekels in her purse and not seven thousand as he thought, and the money came from the NGO Tag Shalom .

“But the cops are waiting for the NGO to confirm they gave Olga the money before they decide what they’re going to do with her. They also suspect her of lying about your relationship,” she adds.

“Can you contact Kirzenbaum, please, Danielle?” asks Elias, with his back to the wall.

“Sure, I’ll do it right away.”

“Stop eating, Yoni! Shit!” he screams as he hangs up.

“What d’you want me to do, it’ll get cold!”

“She needs a lawyer,” Manu says.

“What’s the law on pretrial detention in Israel?”

“No idea. Call Diabolo, he must know.”

“You call him, OK? I cut off all connection with him.”

“I’ll be expecting you,” Diabolo answers.

Elias and Manu are leaving for Kerem on electric bikes, while Yoni remains at Flo 10 to finish his second shakshouka—before attacking Manu’s, no doubt. “I’ll meet you there,” he claims nonetheless.