If the judge doesn’t release her at the next hearing, he’ll have no other option than to admit everything, make a confession, and take sole responsibility for his acts. He keeps thinking about how to get ready for that grim outcome, and it’s hard. He’d never imagined that his aliyah would result in a criminal record, but anything can happen in Israel. He swindled two poor guys and sent them to jail; it can’t stay like that. He’s a lover, and they’re criminals, OK. But still. It seems their police records are already pretty long, also OK. All the same, he’s the one who swindled them, and they’re the victims. They might have slit his throat, but he was lucky and got away. He must give something back for that luck, not be just lucky but lucky and just. Since Olga’s attempt to put a little justice back into this business failed, that must not have been the right solution.
Another question: How can he admit his offence without involving Diabolo? Jérémie Azencot advised him to be patient and wait until Olga’s next hearing before deciding what he’d tell the cops, but that wait is getting too long. Too stressful, as well.
His phone rings as he’s walking into a very noisy bar on Nahalat Binyamin Street with its back to the Shuk market. A call from France. Olga’s father is worried; he hasn’t heard from her for three days, and “that never happens.” Elias tells him Olga lost her phone when she was on assignment in the Territories, but she’ll get a chip in a couple of days, and she’ll call back then.
“But where is she now, right now, at this moment?”
“She’s asleep,” Elias answers without losing his cool. “She’s working early, that’s why she goes to bed early. She has to be up at five…”
“Wake her up, please.”
“No, I can’t do that, first of all I’m outside, and…”
“What’re you doing outside at this time of night?”
“Nothing,” Elias answers, taken aback, before adding, “I’m going back home… I promise, I’ll leave a note for her to call you on my phone when she gets up.”
Olga’s father finally hangs up, not at all convinced, and Elias can see him landing in Tel Aviv at the end of the week to find that his daughter is in police custody. A nightmare. He’d rather be six feet under than live through something like that.
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!”
CHAPTER 28
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?”