He arranges a deal — his letters and papers, worth more when he’s dead, sold through someone who could get their full worth, someone from his old neighborhood. Proceeds will go to the useless son. The son has no idea about any of this. Any number of scenarios after that. Maybe Bellen’s broker/collaborator is so disgusted by the idea of Bellen contemplating all this that he kills Bellen himself, just because he can. Maybe that was somehow implied in their conversation all along. Maybe Bellen killed himself. Maybe they drove him to Beit Sahour and let him blow his own brains out behind a construction site. Maybe they let him do it in Tel Aviv. The people I’m talking about can arrange these things anywhere. They hate the Arabs but they also work with the Arabs. Was it Bellen’s inspiration or theirs to dump the body in Beit Sahour?
I realized that after almost three years I no longer believed in these theories of the crime. They spoke to me now more of the theory’s probable creator, Oded Voss, than of the mystery itself. I thought of what Rachel had said, that Eliav had inherited only a small amount of money. I thought of Eliav’s nightmare. “I was in the room where it happened,” Eliav would say. I thought of my waking dream the day before of those boys with their rifles marching Bellen across the rocky field.
I went to Tel Aviv that Monday, still not having managed to talk to Voss since my arrival. We’d been playing phone tag, perhaps half deliberately, and so when I got to Tel Aviv I went by myself to Bellen’s childhood neighborhood, Hatikvah, and to the steakhouse on Etzel Street that Voss had taken me to the last time we’d been together. I had forgotten how small the restaurant was, how brightly lit. There on the side wall were those signed and framed photographs of Israeli athletes and politicians and movie stars, along with a picture of the former owner, Yehezkel Aslan, one of the gangsters who appears in Kid Bethlehem. I chose a table behind the only other customers, a pair of Mizrahi men seated before a spread of a dozen salads in tiny dishes, pita bread, kebabs. One was on his cell phone, the other talked to the waitress while he fingered a large stack of shekel notes beside two other stacks in rubber bands. I realize how unreal that sounds, how like a movie, but it’s the paradox of places like the steakhouse that they don’t seem quite real, even when you’re there. Bellen’s picture was not on the wall — it hadn’t been there before either, but the absence struck me this time as deliberate, ghostly. Perhaps I was wrong about Voss’s theory. Perhaps outside the restaurant, somewhere in Hatikvah, Bellen’s killers really were still at large.
I went for a walk after lunch through the outdoor market, a place oddly reminiscent of a large train station, with its rows of prefabricated stalls, roofed by large white plastic panels like the ones at the restaurant at which I’d had lunch with Rachel. People browsed through bins of multicolored candies, dried fruits, nuts, spices, olive oil, the women dragging behind them those graceless wheeled carts made of plaid vinyl, the men carrying their purchases in pale orange plastic bags. Shoes, key chains, wallets, kitchenware, plungers. The drama of buying and selling, a thousand actors playing themselves with a slightly heightened vigor amid the dry goods and the bins laden with produce. Not ghostly Me’a Shearim but strident Tel Aviv. Not the pious in their ghetto but ordinary people focused on the simple comings and goings of daily life. I walked all the way back to my hotel through the parts of the city that Eliav would have known, endless stretches of shabby little shops, noise, buildings the color of wet cement, traffic, smog. In Levinsky Park, crowds of African men loitered or waited for day work, refugees from war and genocide in Eritrea and South Sudan, their belongings in shopping carts or just piled beside a tree — foam pads, carpets, blankets. Homeless people without status in a country frightened by their arrival. Not far from where they gathered was the bus station, where Eliav had bought drugs in his twenties and early thirties and perhaps again that November. It was a few blocks down from the no-man’s-land on either side of Highway 20, a place of vacant lots full of dust and weeds and the abandoned shell of what might once have been a municipal garage, now covered in graffiti. The wasteland around that highway reminded me of Bellen’s conjuration of Eliav in the midst of one of his relapses. He remembers something about a sign that says PAZ — blue letters on a yellow ground, PAZ — but what he no longer knows is if this sign was a part of his friend’s directions or whether its vivid colors and letters have only made it seem that it was part of those directions. I took a photograph of the abandoned garagelike structure — it didn’t have a sign that said PAZ but the graffiti on it called out to me for reasons I could only guess at in that moment. I learned later that the graffiti was a religious invocation. It was the name of a revered Hasidic rabbi, Nachman of Breslov, who among other things wrote mystical tales that influenced Kafka.
That afternoon, I went back to my hotel near the beach. I sat at the bar off the sunlit lobby and looked at the picture on my cell phone of Gila and me, more and more perturbed by the expressionless look on my face, the quality of numb detachment, even immateriality. I remembered that lunch we’d had, the sense I’d gotten then that Gila, in her illness and isolation, somehow thought of us as kindred spirits. I felt that kinship myself now, sitting at the hotel bar, imagining Gila as a waitress thirty years ago, keeping her back straight as she bent down with a balanced tray of drinks. I suppose the kinship I really felt was not so much with Gila as with her absence, or with whatever faint traces I imagined still remained of her in Tel Aviv. I had learned from the manager at the Dan Hotel that a Gila Konig had been an employee there from 1969 to 1977. No one who worked there now of course had ever met her. I couldn’t find any information about what she’d done between 1977 and 1980, the year she finally came to New York. It occurred to me that I was probably the last person in Israel who still knew her name.
When I finished my drink, I walked up Frishman Street, past Ben Yehuda, Dizengoff, the sudden open spaces of what is now called Rabin Square — pigeons and litter, discount stores fronted by cafés with white tables. I had been walking all day and I kept walking now, into a neighborhood of modern apartment buildings, flowering trees, benches in the shade, the streets named for artists and musicians. At 4 Be’eri Street, I found the building — the ordinary building that Lansky’s biographer Robert Lacey describes as a “run-down concrete box on stilts that was similar to thousands of others in the suburbs of Tel Aviv.” Through the window of one of the apartments I could see simple birch furniture, a lamp on the ceiling in the reds and blacks of a Calder mobile. There was no one else out on the street and so I came closer, following the sidewalk to a pair of clipped hedges that led to the entryway. Nine buzzers on a metal doorjamb. The kind of building that in my childhood in New York would have contained the office of a podiatrist or an orthodontist. I looked through the glass door and saw the dim foyer with its low ceiling, the beige linoleum on the walls and floor — looking through that glass was like looking at a photograph from 1972, a black-and-white photograph of a crime scene. Almost as much as I remember her, I remember the odd, spartan asylum of that empty apartment, the way we spread our coats like blankets on the floor and laughed a little as we knelt, kissing, then stopped laughing.