“Mind you, when someone sells you a used bike for six thousand bucks… ,” Manu notes, to put the price of the red in perspective.
“Six thousand!” Elias shudders.
“Well, yeah, add a battery, two tires, and a Kryptonite to the starting price, just add it up.”
“Poor Manu, she really took you to the cleaners!”
Olga points out that a swindle involving a vehicle is a common point in both their affairs, and Elias gapes at her.
“Why’re you saying that, honey? Mine is an attempted assassination. Why’re you talking about a swindle?”
“Because…” Olga begins haltingly. “Because even if I thought about it all day, I couldn’t see why those two Bedouins would want to assassinate you if they’re not terrorists and you didn’t swindle them.”
They look at each other in silence as if they weren’t madly in love anymore. As if they hadn’t committed the rest of their lives to each other, for better or for worse, before the whole newsroom. So Manu doesn’t know where to look. Extremely embarrassed, he gets up mumbling, “Excuse me, I’m going to take a piss again, must be my prostate.”
Olga takes Elias’s hand in her own. “Darling, I’m with you,” she says again. “Trust me, please. Believe in us. We’ll get out of this. We’ll find a solution.”
“But you’re talking to me like that asshole Kirzenbaum! How can you do that?”
“Let me deal with that guy,” she says. “I’m going to smash him to smithereens, I swear. I’ll knock him down and drag him out feet first. Just stop lying to me. Please, honey.”
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.”
CHAPTER 19
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.”