“Miller? I thought he was a TV host.”
“That one was a psychoanalyst first.”
“An office worker or a psychoanalyst?” Marcel asks, confused.
The blonde gives him a sympathetic smile. Elias draws closer to her, leaving the ongoing conversation completely. But while he slips gently closer to her, Marcel keeps questioning him. A seduction maneuver, involuntary but totally successful, because the recruiter follows Elias like a shadow, standing just behind him, taking notes.
“My name’s Olga,” the pretty blonde says.
“You Ukrainian, or what?” Elias asks.
“No, no, my mother’s the Ukrainian. But I grew up in Chambéry.”
“When’d you get to Israel?”
“Two months ago. I started on a horse-racing channel in Paris, and they offered me an internship, so here I am.”
“You interested in a trial job as a reporter at the Gaza border?” the recruiter asks, taking advantage of a pause in the conversation between the two turtledoves.
“Paying how much?”
“Eight thousand.”
“I’m not risking my life for eight thousand bricks a month,” Elias answers without turning around.
“We can go up to nine thousand if the trial is successful,” adds Marcel.
“OK for ten thou’,” Elias answers. “You draw up the contract, OK?”
A miraculous catch, this job interview, as Elias has killed two birds with one stone: a job and dinner the same evening with the miraculous Olga. Employed and in love! Really in love. Love at first sight, all the way. Only problem, he doesn’t have a cent in his pocket and his credit card’s maxed out. So on the way, he goes up to Manu’s to borrow three hundred shekels. Knock knock knock. Manu motions Juliette to get into her hideout in the wardrobe closet, and Juliette obeys, slipping on the tile floor. It’s really a pain, having to hide a girl in your own apartment.
Finally, Manu opens the door and says he would rather lend his friend five hundred shekels. It would be dumb to be too stingy when you’re paying the check, right? It would be a little uncomfortable with his new conquest. For Elias really looks like he’s in love! But he talks loudly, cries out that he loves her already, and Manu makes big gestures for him to lower his voice because Juliette must be able to hear everything.
Once Elias has left, Manu goes to get Juliette in her hiding place. He’s extremely embarrassed, hoping she didn’t hear anything or at least didn’t understand exactly what Elias said.
“I’m sorry,” she says as she gets out of the wardrobe. “If it’s really too unpleasant for you, I can leave.”
Oh, good, Manu tells himself, sounds like she didn’t hear a thing. “No, no, just a lot of problems,” he answers.
“See?” she says, biting her lips. “I’m just a weight on everybody. I’m one person too many on this earth.” Tears are beginning to flow from her eyes again. “From the cradle on, I’ve been in the way, born out of wedlock.”
“Stop it,” says Manu, hugging her. “I’m very glad you’re here.”
“Darling,” Diabolo says to Scarlett, using English, “you’ve been living at my place for twenty-four hours. You’re going to be in the Guinness, I’m telling you!” Even if she doesn’t catch the exact meaning of each word, she gets the strong impression she’s reached the limits of her stay in Kerem.
“Well, hire me on, I’m Israeli after all. I can be useful,” she answers in English, without emotion.
“OK, you want to do soccer?”
“OK by me. I want four thousand shekels a month,” she demands.
And just to get rid of her, Diabolo agrees. His purse strings loosen more every day, but Diabolo remains optimistic. He’s betting on a thousand subscriptions the very first year of his wire service. He expects a good hundred or so from French-speaking media, including national TV channels. And without going into detail, with the English version that’s going to air soon, Israel Breaking News should also get the North American clientele and balance its books. Then, fortune or failure—we’ll see…
CHAPTER 6
Despite the coolness of the evening, Elias takes Olga to the balcony of the Hotel Montefiore. It has only two tables, and they’re reserved months in advance. The brokers from Ramat Gan would sell their mothers to dine there with a girl. With its white tablecloths and silver settings, it’s not the Israeli style at all, and even in Tel Aviv’s trendy restaurants, it’s not so common. Even the heaters set into console tables that cast the couples in a slightly pink glow are designed by fairy fingers. Everything is exquisitely refined. No chick could resist so many attentions. You’re on the street but slightly above it and at the same time in an inaccessible ivory tower.
How did Elias manage to get one of two tables that same night? Who knows? At any rate, he put on a white Emile Lafaurie shirt, while Olga’s wearing a pleated black skirt that goes down to the knees and lets you guess the graceful length of her legs. But she could put on a potato sack and she’d still be divinely pretty. As she already has two inches on Elias, she took it easy on the heels, wearing elegant plaited pumps, almost flat.
While he looks at her with a loving eye, he can’t help wondering about the hidden resources women have when it comes to clothes. Olga must make eight thousand shekels a month max at H24, and she dresses like a princess twice a day! But she’s not the only one. Juliette has the wardrobe of a diva, too, despite her wretched pay as an assistant at the museum in Jeru. In fact, all women have closets full, Elias tells himself. He always comes back to the famous Imelda Marcos, the Philippine dictator’s widow, with her twelve hundred pairs of shoes. Or was it twelve thousand? Corrupt and venal as she was, there is nothing strange about her having a four-hundred-square-yard closet. But why that abundance with women who’re basically broke? Collateral damage or compensation for penis envy? Who knows, Mose?
After dinner, two possibilities: either he brings her back to his pad on Levinsky Street and it’s over, or he walks her back and tries to embed himself in her place. Olga lives at the corner of Yerushalaim and Salameh, at the edge of Yafo, an ordinary-looking building, butter-yellow facade and green shutters, except there’s a pool on the roof. She told him this at dinner, and it’s the kind of thing that makes Elias happy: it reinforces his idea that this country is both an antifatalist and anti-Puritan utopia. A pool on the roof in a country this dry, that takes some doing! Believing in your star with a direct challenge to climate theory. In those moments, the sacrifice Elias made in coming to live here when he could have made five thousand euros a month at Saint-Gobain seems totally justified.
But Olga makes him hang around for three days before granting him a first night at her place, as her grandmother was squatting in her bedroom during that time. A week later, Elias leaves his hole in the wall for an apartment at five thousand shekels a month, just across the street, still on Levinsky Street, on the eighth floor of a new high-rise. Diabolo lends him the deposit, practically without shilly-shallying. In those moments, his jaw goes up in a funny way, almost to his eyebrows, sort of like Popeye, and that means one thing: stop taking me for your banker, guys! On the other hand, he came to Tel Aviv with as much cash as the sand on Hilton Beach, and he doesn’t mind people knowing it. He has no idea how to be discreet, Diabolo. Nor how to keep a low profile. Maybe he doesn’t know the famous local joke: How do you become a millionaire in Israel? By being a millionaire when you get here.
And let’s not forget, it’s a country with communist origins, and like all such countries, it swung right into unbridled capitalism. With no second thoughts about it. But it’s still a very small country, no bigger than three French départements, with barely eight and a half million inhabitants, and there aren’t that many areas where you can make big bread. Number one: tech. Tied with real estate, which is flaming up like a crêpe suzette. Even in Florentin, you find prices per square foot worthy of London. Now Diabolo is investing in the worst nag in the race: a quasi-activist press agency to try to squeeze out AFP, the big French news agency always ready to knock the State of Israel. But instead of starting small, he sees big right away. Crazy office space, insane hires.