Gila was sitting in a chair, smoking, still in her uniform, slumped like a child in the beige blouse and black skirt, black nylons. Instead of looking at him, she closed her eyes and exhaled.
“Yosha took my shift,” she said. “I need the money, but it’s okay. What is bad is the way she makes me grovel for it. She knows I’m coming up here, so she makes me grovel.”
He looked over at the bar, the ice bucket, the tongs. “You shouldn’t be begging around like that. You shouldn’t be working here at all.”
“I should be in Ramat Gan, shopping for a new Mercedes. Is that what your wife drives?”
He nodded absently or dismissively and walked toward the window. Beneath them was the Mediterranean, Hayarkon Promenade, the beach with its spatter of orange umbrellas, green umbrellas, swimmers standing in the shallows. Everything was ordinary — the sun had come back out. He went to the bar and made them both a drink.
“I drove into town and all the sudden it was very cloudy,” he said. “Like an eclipse, that was how cloudy it was. Everyone looking up. The whole way down here, I’m worrying how I would get in the hotel without everyone seeing, all the cameras lately, but everyone was just watching the sky. There weren’t any cameras anyway. It was just luck — the clouds, no cameras. My whole life I said that people who believed in luck, they lose, period. Fate, luck, whatever. I guess you can’t really get away from it.”
She was taking off her shoes. He watched, sipping his drink. She knew he was watching. She looked up at him, bent forward, her hair falling in her eyes.
“Where will you go if they make you leave?” she said.
“What makes you think I’ll have to leave?”
“Fate, luck. Those are dangerous words. Maybe you should go back to Poland, that would give them a surprise.”
“You should watch your mouth.”
“Watch my mouth.”
“Whatever comes into your head, you just say it. Maybe that’s why you’re still serving cocktails at a hotel.”
His luggage arrived, five identical changes of clothes. He was tipping the bellman when she put on the bracelet he’d brought her. She looked at it in the mirror, a line bracelet of white gold and small diamonds. Her drink sat untouched on the nightstand. He watched her look at the bracelet and he knew she was already thinking about where to sell it.
Tel Aviv — the sun reflected by water, the coolness between you and it when you looked out the window. The run-down buildings, concrete and stripped paint, the fish lunch in Jaffa, crumbling by the sea.
She had grown up partly in Foehrenwald, a DP camp not far from Munich. Before that, ten months in Bergen-Belsen. When she and her mother came to Israel, her mother changed her name from Tsilya to Gila. It meant “happiness.” He looked at the flatness of her stomach, her breasts, the faint shadows along her rib cage. Sometimes it was beyond him, an effort of patience, but now he relaxed, slow, cognizant, closing his eyes. The sound of her name and the sight of her body as he let his eyes come open again.
Gangster, racketeer, mobster — she could not get the words to adhere to the physical person. Not that she disbelieved the stories, but the stories’ language glared, whereas the truth of him resided in understatement. The gray trousers and the pressed shirt, white linen or pale blue linen. The leather shoes and the blue blazer and the Herald Tribune. Everything important was invisible, maybe glimpsed for just an instant when he turned to her in a certain way and his eyes accused her of looking too closely.
Albert Anastasia had been shot ten times, one of the shots blowing open his skull. Ben “Bugsy” Siegel sprawled in death as if napping on the sofa, his jacket lapel turned up toward his neck, as if he had sought warmth against the onslaught, blood gushing from his eye. Both of them killers before being killed. Both of them Meyer’s partners or vassals or something. She wondered how much of a killer you had to be for others to do your killing for you, to be that separate from the particulars, if that was the truth about him.
A proliferation of rumors, he would say, rumors and lies. He had come to Israel seeking a reprieve from all that — the FBI tail, the false indictments, the subpoenas, the attorney’s fees. In a lifetime of scrutiny, he had never been convicted of a serious crime. That was why he had come here, because they were supposed to accept even someone like him. As a Jew, even he had the right of return, the birthright of Israeli citizenship.
They drove the hour from Tel Aviv barely talking, the journalist watching the road, sleeves rolled back on his tanned arms. His name was Uri Dan; he was a military correspondent, a sympathetic ear, according to Lansky’s lawyer, Yoram Alroy. Dan had long black hair, a Swiss watch, a chalk-striped shirt half unbuttoned in the heat. An ability to tolerate silence, the first sign of poise.
They parked near the InterContinental Hotel amid the tour buses and stood for a few minutes by the rail with the crowd. Below them, the Mount of Olives was a huge lunar space of white stone, white sand, dark gray cedar trees, the cemetery descending like a dusty quarry cut in steps. The old graves looked like part of the hillside, eternal, sloping down in endless terraces toward the Valley of Jehoshaphat, where the dead would rise. Above it glowed the Old City of Jerusalem — the gold Dome of the Rock, the crenellated wall, the remnants of David’s ancient kingdom, covered over now by the Arab district of Silwan, run-down, cubist, hung with laundry.
Dan squinted down at the cemetery. “It’s unfortunate, the neglect,” he said, raising a flat hand at the panorama. “There’s never enough money to restore it, and once you restore some of it, the boys come down from East Jerusalem and smash it to bits again.”
“Arabs,” Lansky said.
“Yes, of course, Arabs.”
A photographer said hello in English and took their photograph.
“You don’t mind?” Dan said, turning his head.
Lansky bowed and lit a cigarette. He shook out the lit match, then slid the book back inside the lower pocket of his blazer, pushing it down behind the flap with two fingers. “I’m not crazy about it,” he said. “I’m not really crazy about any of this.”
He had explained himself to Dan back in Tel Aviv, how he hoped Dan might write a more balanced account of who he was and why he was here, something to counter the tabloids. His grandparents were buried in Jerusalem — when life had become impossible in Grodno, his grandparents had come here to Jerusalem, while he and his family had gone to New York. He had not been able to find their graves before. Maybe Dan could help him — maybe that was a way they could begin the conversation.
They started down the steep hill, the scenery blinding. They passed the Church of the Ascension, Christian tour groups in the Garden of Gethsemane. The olive trees with their scarred trunks looked like enormous hunks of driftwood. Benjamin Suchowljansky, plot 15, column B, grave 80. His grandfather Benjamin, whom he had last seen sixty years ago, when the languages he spoke were Polish and Yiddish and he was nine years old.
Dogs wandered among the rocks, the broken gates, the weeds. A decrepit rabbi had led them to the grave, where he bent down and cleaned the dirty inscription with his coat sleeve. Lansky pushed his sunglasses back over his head and wiped his eyes. He looked out across the valley without seeing anything but the brightness. He saw his grandfather in a full-length coat, beard, fur-trimmed hat. The dim shul with its broken Torah scrolls decaying on the shelves. The smell of the spice box, the moldy smell of men among books, the yahrtzeit candle in its glass. In Tel Aviv, you never thought about these things, you lived in 1972. He saw himself at twelve, smashing a plate in someone’s face — whores on Madison Street, shtarkes and pimps. New York faces crammed beneath the awnings, wagons and pushcarts and rain.