I looked on, under, and around the cot. Nothing but bare mattress and dirty floor.
"What is it?" the lanky man asked, and grunted when I told him. "Probably lost them during the skirmish."
That seemed improbable. The cigarettes and wallet were in separate pockets. One of them might have fallen out. But both?
All four of my cellmates swore they had not seen my lost possessions. "We were here together the whole time," the stout man said. "If any of us had tried to steal from you, the others would have seen him."
Which left another possibility. But not one I could do anything about.
The lanky man offered me a cigarette and lit it for me. Then I and the others exchanged names and places of birth and residence. The two smokers had been born in Poland. A third man in Slovakia. The fourth in Estonia. All but the Estonian had come to the Land of Israel before the war. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the Estonian had joined the partisans and endured four years of harsh fighting. All four had lost most if not all of their families in the Holocaust. Just like I had.
They hailed from all corners of Israel. From Rehovot in the south to Nahariya in the north. The one from Slovakia lived in a kibbutz in the Negev. Another a stone's throw away in Jerusalem.
"I can't believe they would do this," the kibbutznik said, and made it clear that by they he meant the government when he cursed Ben-Gurion and a few of the ministers by name.
"What did you expect?" the lanky man said. "Ben-Gurion has always tried to curry favor with the gentiles. Been doing it for years. That's why he called us terrorists when we fought against the British."
"You were in the Irgun?" I asked him.
"Lehi. We and the Irgun drove the British out of here, you know. With very little help from Hagannah and Ben-Gurion. He always thought that by being nice and docile, the gentiles would simply bequeath us a country. It's not surprising he would be willing to take money from Germany. The man has no morals."
"We won't be getting any money," the man from Rehovot said. "The Germans will never pay, no matter what promises they make. Just like they did after the previous war. Ben-Gurion is a fool."
The Rehovot man had been in the Irgun, and he and the lanky man began exchanging stories of ever greater daring from their days of resistance to the British, stories that seemed to grow ever more fantastical with the passing minutes.
They ran out of wild tales after a while, and the conversation returned to the matter of Ben-Gurion's perfidiousness. But it didn't last long. Guards came and removed the two Poles and the Slovakian to another cell. I and the Estonian stayed. His Hebrew was bad, and he was not the talkative type anyway. We were spared the awkwardness of silence when a guard shouted, "Lights out!" and we settled in our cots to sleep.
3
A little before noon the next day, a guard escorted me to a stuffy interrogation room with depressing gray walls and no windows.
"Wait here," he said, depositing me in a wooden chair before a metal table. On the other side stood another chair, this one slightly taller. Maybe it was an interrogation trick, designed to make the suspect feel smaller than the interrogator. Or maybe the police, low on budget like Israel in general, used whatever furniture it could lay its hands on.
I did not have to wait too long. Twenty, twenty-five minutes at the outside. Then the door opened, and inside strode a police inspector trailing the scent of cologne.
He was medium height and trim, with close-cropped rigid black hair that had started thinning, making the top of his head look like an overburdened pincushion. He had an austere face: narrow, with a humorless mouth and a nose like a dagger blade. His uniform had been meticulously pressed, the crease in his trousers as sharp as his nose. A no-nonsense expression molded his features into a disciplinarian cast. He sat in the other chair and did not waste time on pleasantries.
"I'm Inspector Kulaski. You're Adam Lapid?"
He didn't look at me when he said this. Rather, his eyes were directed at the wallet he'd placed on the table. My wallet. The one I'd noticed was missing the previous night. The one I'd guessed was in the hands of the police. The one from which he now extracted my identification papers. He glanced at them as though seeing them for the first time, then flicked his eyes at my face. They were knowing eyes, the sort some interrogators learn to cultivate. The kind of eyes guilty men wilt before.
"Yes," I said. "That's me."
"Your address?"
I told him, and he jotted it down in a small notebook and set his pen beside it. I noticed that the inspector's nails were clipped very short.
"You know why you're here?" he asked.
"In this room?"
"In this jail."
"I took part in the anti-reparations demonstration yesterday."
"That's not the reason. Thousands of citizens took part in that demonstration. Nearly all of them spent the night at home. You're here because you assaulted a police officer. You broke his nose and knocked him unconscious. He had to be hospitalized."
"I was trying to help him."
He arched a thin eyebrow. "You thought his teeth were crooked and were trying to straighten them for him? You knocked three of them out, you know."
"That wasn't me," I said, and told him about the man who had punched the fallen policeman and how I had made him stop.
Kulaski's lips twitched in the weary amusement of a man who had heard it all before. "That's a nice story. Only it doesn't fit the facts. Another officer saw you in the act."
"Is he the cop who kicked me in the head?"
"He's the one who arrested you. How he did it is immaterial."
"He made a mistake."
"He saw you with his own eyes."
"The wounded cop was lying on the ground, bleeding. I crouched next to him to see what his condition was. The policeman who arrested me must have thought I was the one who hit his colleague."
Kulaski gave me a look that suggested he was actually considering my version of events. After a moment, he said, "But that wasn't you, you say. You actually scared that guy away, didn't you? You saved that policeman from greater harm." The inspector's tone was studiously neutral. He was good. A worthy interrogator knows that sometimes you need to show the suspect that you might end up buying his story. It will loosen his lips and likely lead him to incriminate himself further.
"That's right," I said.
Kulaski picked up his pen and held it poised over his notebook. More acting. "You can describe the assailant, then?"
"Can't the wounded policeman describe him?"
"His memory is a bit hazy, what with being hit numerous times in the head. So, can you describe the assailant or not?"
I could. In detail, in fact. A sketch artist would have been able to paint an accurate portrait of him based on my recollection. Accurate enough that the man would be easily identifiable and at high risk of being brought up on serious charges.
"No," I said. "I'm afraid not." For I did not wish for that man to be tried and imprisoned. In all likelihood, he was a good man. A regular citizen driven mad by memories of his dead loved ones and his deep shock at the possibility of negotiations with Germany. Just like I had been.
Kulaski leaned back, tilting his head a tick to the left. He regarded me with what looked like genuine puzzlement. I knew well the reason for it. I had surprised him. He had expected me to deliver a made-up description of a nonexistent assailant. To attempt to send the police on a wild-goose chase. He would have written everything down, pretending to believe me and encouraging me to be as specific as possible. Then he would have questioned me repeatedly on my description until I had stumbled, forgotten what lies I had told him and uttered some inconsistency. Once I did, he would have used that slip to hammer me as a liar, make me see the futility of further denial, and extract a confession out of me. Not that he needed one with a policeman bearing witness to my guilt, but nothing beat a confession.