She pounded her fist on the table, put her hands on her temples, and rocked.
Shmeltzer considered what to say and decided to say nothing.
"Such pain, it's not right, after what he'd been through. Then I saw the blood, from all ends-he was urinating it and coughing it up and spitting it. The life was flowing out of him." She unwrapped the paper towel, looked at it, and put it on the coffee table. "That's what happens to people-that's what happens to Jews. You live a good life, work hard; then you fall apart- everything comes out of you. We had no kids. I'm glad they're not here to see it."
"You're right," said Shmeltzer. "You're hundred percent right."
She stared at him, saw that he was serious, and started to cry again, pulling at her hair. Then she looked at him again, shook a fist.
"What the hell do you know! What am I doing talking to you!"
"Gveret-"
She shook her head no, got up from the couch, stood and took a step forward, catching her foot on a leg of the coffee table and reeling.
Shmeltzer moved quickly, catching her before she fell. He put his arms under her armpits and kept her upright. She reacted to the support by punching at him and cursing him, spraying him with saliva, then going all loose and limp, letting her arms fall to her sides. He felt her pressed against him, her soft bulk astonishingly light, like meringue. She buried her face in his shirtfront and cursed God.
They stood that way for a while, the woman sobbing in anticipation of widowhood. Shmeltzer holding her. Confused.
The gag cards on the wall of Fink's Bar were tacky, decided Wilbur. The kind of thing you'd see in a hick-town tavern, back in the States. Combine that with enough Wild Turkey and you could forget where you were. For a moment.
He picked up The Jerusalem Post, read the piece again, and took a sip of bourbon. Another scoop heard from.
He'd been on his vacation-ten days of R and R in Athens-when the murders story broke. The international Trib hadn't carried it-the first he'd heard of it was a page-two item in the Post he'd picked up on the plane back to Ben Gurion.
Like most foreign correspondents, he spoke no Hebrew or Arabic and depended upon native journalists for his information-the Post for the Jewish angle, the English edition of Al Fajr for the Arab side. Both were highly partisan, but that was okay; it spiced up his pieces. Anyway, it was either that or bird-dog the government spokesmen, and Israeli mouthpieces were cagey, paranoiac, always grooming themselves for victim status. Always worried someone was out to get them, invoking military censorship when they didn't want to deal with something.
The vacation had been a good one. He'd met up with an Italian photojournalist named Gina, a skinny, bleached-blond free-lance with an appetite for sauteed calamari and cocaine; they'd met on the beach, traded meaningful looks, puffed-up bios, and shared a line from a vial that she carried in her beach bag. She had a room in his hotel, checked out of it, and moved in with him, living off his expense account for a week and a half of fun and games, then woke him up early one morning with a blow-job and breakfast, left him eating dry toast as she tossed him a ciao and was out the door, back to Rome. Wild girl, not pretty, but adventurous. He hoped she hadn't given him a dose of anything.
He took another swallow of Turkey, motioned for a refill. Two murders-potential start of a serial. It just might play back home, the kind of thing the wire services sometimes went for. No doubt the Times men-New York and L.A.-had gotten hold of it, but they usually stayed away from crime stories, milked the political stuff, which was always in heavy supply. So maybe there was still something to work with.
Being out of the country when it broke bothered the Jimmy Olsen part of him, but after six months in Israel he'd needed the time off. The country was hyperkinetic; the pace could drive you crazy.
Stuff never stopped coming at you, but most of it was noise. Grabowsky had loved it-he was a certified information junkie, firing off pieces right and left, breaking productivity records before he'd ventured too far into the Bekaa and gotten his arm blown off. The day after he'd been certified a cripple, the wire service had called Wilbur in from Rio. Farewell to a beautiful assignment. A little boring-how much could you write about favelitos, generals, and sambas, and Mardi Gras was a once-a-year thing-but my, my, what a culture, white sand, all those women sashaying topless along Ipanema, caramel asses hanging out of G-string bikini bottoms.
After three fat years under the Brazilian sun, Manhattan seemed poisonous, unhealthily clamorous, a headache machine. Welcome home, Mark. Home. Backslapping and speeches from the boys in the New York office, kudos to old Grabowsky, drink to the one-armed Hemingway (could he, Wilbur wondered, learn to type with that prosthesis?), and keep the fire burning in the Holy Land, Mark. Rah, rah.
Not his style. He'd laid his Front Page fantasies to rest a long time ago, wanted to take things easy, enjoy life. The wrong man for the Israel bureau.
The pace.
A story that was milkable for a week anywhere else faded in a day here, crowded out by something new before the ink was dry. Crazy coalition government, had to be at least twenty political-parties-he was a long way from knowing all of them-constantly taking shots at one another, clawing for little smidgens of power. Knesset meetings turned invariably to shouting matches; last week there had been a fist fight. They couldn't talk softly; a real Brooklyn deli scene-the constant charges and countercharges of corruption, virtually all of it noise. The Arabs were no better, always whining, buttonholing him, wanting to see their names in print. Cries of oppression from guys driving Mercedes and living off the U.N. dole.
Everyone had an axe to grind; in the six months he'd been there, a week hadn't gone by without some kind of major political demonstration. Usually there were two or three. And the strikes-the doctors, the nurses, the postal workers. Last month the taxi drivers had decided they wanted more money from the Transportation Ministry, blocked the main thoroughfares of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv with their cabs, burned an old jalopy in the middle of King George Street, the tires stinking to high heaven. Wilbur had been forced to leave his car at home and walk everywhere, which inflamed his corns and heightened his antipathy toward the country, the obstreperousness-the Jewishness of it.
He finished his drink, put the glass down on the bar, and looked around. Six tables, five empty. Two guys in a corner: Margalit from Davar, Aronoff from Yediot Aharonot-he hadn't gotten close to either of them. If they'd noticed him come in, they didn't show it, eating peanuts, drinking ginger ale, and talking in low voices.
Ginger ale. Another problem. Newshounds who didn't take their drinking seriously. No one did. The country had no drinking age-a ten-year-old could waltz into a grocery and buy hundred-proof-and yet, no one went for it. A kind of snobbery, as far as he was concerned. As if they considered sobriety some sort of religious virtue, regarded booze as a goy weakness.