Марко Коскас - Goodbye Paris, Shalom Tel Aviv

He orders a glass of Merlot and drinks it slowly, without looking at the crowd around him. However, like everywhere in Tel Aviv, there are lots of pretty girls in the bar, bunches of girls, bands of girls, mountains of girls. There’s even one he doesn’t notice eying him greedily, despite her Wonderbra cleavage and vermilion lipstick that makes a kind of bulb full of glowworms. Then she moves closer, but it takes her putting her hand on his thigh for him to realize she’s there. She asks him to have sex with her, but her bass voice betrays her. A transvestite! Or rather transsexual, in fact, but a genuine one, with delicate wrists and a subtly thick-lipped mouth drawn with a fine pen, you might say. A miracle of plastic surgery. A prodigy of transmutation. Honestly, imitating nature to that extent takes talent!

“Three hundred to suck you off, five hundred with a shower,” she suggests directly.

“You still have your dick?” Elias asks.

“Are you kidding? First of all, I never had one!” the trans claims. “Hardly a micropenis.”

“What about your operation? When was it?”

“You from the Mossad or what?”

“Not at all, we’re just talking.”

“Me, I’m working. Ciao!”

Ordinarily, Elias would follow her or drag her off somewhere no one could see them—preferably a parking lot, a building site, or the lobby of a building, because he loves to put his head upside down with this kind of mutant. But now, he lets her go off. It seems everything has become very serious. No more joking around. And then that clandestine relationship with Juliette! Sticky like bike grease. Besides, exactly what does he want, since he hasn’t wanted her for a long time? Admit I’m crazy , Elias says to himself. And why don’t I write all that, instead of barhopping around like an asshole? Why don’t I plunge into my novel instead of taking notes that never end? As long as I was hungry, I had the strength to write, even simple notes. Now that I can eat my fill, I’ve dried out. Get back to feeling an empty belly.

A text in Hebrew goes gling! on his cell. The cops on Dizengoff Avenue want to see him “for an affair concerning you.” But what affair? He wakes up Jérémie Azencot for advice.

“Go there!” the lawyer says firmly.

“Right away?”

“As soon as possible!”

They walk back home arm in arm, taking Pines Street, then Shabazi, and finally up Shlush Street to Derech Yafo, the artery that separates the bourgeois-bohemian Neve Tzedek from the truly bohemian Florentin. Crossing Derech Yafo, they come upon Abarbanel Street, very badly lit at this end, with its buildings in Jerusalem stone and rusted iron hardly emerging from the shadow. It always makes Manu think of Palestine under the British mandate, before the State of Israel existed.

“It’s really like a photo of 1948 Palestine here,” he says to Juliette. “I love it.”

“You always say that every time we get here,” Juliette points out, as if they are already an old couple.

“I would have so liked to be twenty back then, join Haganah or Irgun, fire a gun…”

“What do you think he wants from me, exactly?” Juliette asks.

“I really don’t know,” Manu says distractedly. “Maybe just to screw you from time to time.”

Deep in a daydream about times gone by, he doesn’t realize how much this hurts her. But it does hurt Juliette. A lot. Almost as much as Elias’s brusque departure from Diabolo’s at the beginning of the evening. She’s only his sex toy, she thinks. A hole. An object. And that revives her urge to stab him in the back. Twenty times, in fact.

“Excuse me, Jul,” Manu says, almost immediately making up his carelessness by hugging her. “I was dreaming.”

“No problem,” says Juliette, wounded to the core.

“The surveillance tapes show you had a, let’s say, personal relationship with Mrs. Elkaïm, will you confirm that?” the officer in the Dizengoff police station asks him.

“Yes—that is, personal, no, just sexual,” Elias says.

“Outside of the jewelry store, did you happen to meet her?”

“Oh no, no, never,” he says defensively. “It happened like that, just once and that’s all.”

“According to the surveillance camera, you give her cash.”

“She’s the one who asked me for cash,” Elias claims.

“To pay for a jewel?”

“Yes, yes.”

“OK,” the officer says. “But on another tape, we see her giving you money. For what reason?”

“She gave me my money back for the jewel, that’s all.”

“So you saw each other twice?”

“Yes, twice, that’s right.”

“Why did she give you the money back?”

“The jewel was for a person who didn’t want to be… well, let’s say go to bed with me anymore, that’s why, who didn’t love me anymore.”

“Who?”

“My girlfriend at the time.”

“Who’s that?” the cop asks.

“Her name is Olga Picard.”

“You’re not together anymore?”

“No, we’re not,” Elias says, using the piece of information Juliette gave him: Olga told the Mitzpe Ramon police that they were only coworkers.

“Can you give me her number?”

“You’re not going to tell her I screwed the jeweler, at least?”

“No, no, I just want to check you’re no longer together.”

“What importance could that have for your investigation?”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” the officer answers as he gets up.

“OK,” Elias says resignedly, and he gives him Olga’s number.

“Wait for me right there, I’ll be back.”

Elias remains alone in the room, wondering how he’s going to loosen this new vise, get out of this new, inexorable downward spiral. Even those two little quick lays in the jewelry store come back to smack him in the face. It proves nothing is harmless in his life anymore, everything is connected, and it’s all conspiring against him.

He’s being dogged by bad luck. When you screw an old woman, you don’t wonder if you’re being filmed! You fuck and forget. How could he imagine she’d be held up by a masked man with a French accent and the cops would look through the surveillance tapes? You’d think he’s jinxed! Finding himself suspected of a second crime when he’s not even out of the first one.

While he’s not afraid of being accused of a holdup for any length of time—although you never know!—he’s still afraid the investigation will make the connection between the jewel, Olga’s detention, and the swindle he’s really guilty of. The cop who’s questioning him will certainly try to reach Olga. He’s going to light upon his colleagues in Mitzpe Ramon, and then it’s curtains for the kid. But the worst is Olga’s going to learn he screwed the old jeweler lady, on top of everything else. It’ll probably be all over between them. Romance, great plans, the love of his life, all thrown into the gutter. On the other hand, she’s so in love, so madly in love with him. So committed, on his side, and so ready to risk anything to get him off. Maybe she’ll understand that’s the way the man she loves is made, but he’s the one she loves. The bad luck that’s hounding him can also give a woman the desire to be his companion through hard times, fight for him to her last breath. There must be Greek tragedies built on this kind of fatal destiny. Greek bastards who destroyed the first temple in Jerusalem, thinks Elias immediately. Well, not exactly destroyed but worse still: disfigured, perverted, demonized by building a gymnasium just beneath it, so their cult of the body and their fucking ephebes could triumph over the people of the book.

The officer comes back into the room a few minutes later and sits down behind the desk again to announce that he was unable to reach Olga as her phone went to voice mail. Elias breathes an imperceptible sigh of relief. The Mitzpe Ramon cops must have turned off his darling’s smartphone, so the cops in Tel Aviv can’t learn Olga is in the hands of their colleagues to the south. Yet.