By the time I finished my beer, more patrons had left the bar. Almost half of the tables were now vacant, and the dance floor was deserted. Akiva went to the dance floor, turned off the music, and returned to the bar. He let out a theatrical sigh of relief and smiled at me. "Each night, after listening to the music for hours, I find that I am starved for silence."
He dialed again, and this time it was picked up. He got a silly-looking smile on his face and said, "Hello, Sima," and asked her how she was doing.
He told her that I was looking for Miryam Cohen and that he thought she might agree to meet with me. She apparently asked about me, because he started describing me to her. My height, the width of my shoulders, my facial features, my hair. It felt odd to be described that way, and I asked myself what good this information could do to her. When he was done, he listened for a moment, then hung up. He took a pen out of his pants pocket, scrawled something on a scrap of paper, handed it over, and said to me, "Here is her address. Sima says you should come tomorrow at five. She is busy tonight."
12
I rose the next day and had breakfast at Greta's Café. I read a couple of newspapers, learned that the world was a dangerous place and that Israel's economy was still in the doldrums. I half-listened to an impassioned argument between two other patrons, one of whom was a communist who believed that Stalin was the greatest man who ever lived, the other a former officer in the Polish Army who fought the Russians in 1920 and thought the mustached tyrant of Moscow was the devil incarnate. I played a quick game of chess with myself and chatted with Greta at the bar. She said I looked tired. I said I didn't feel it. No more than usual.
Before noon I left Greta's and wandered over to a small cobbler's shop on Shefer Street. The potbellied man who ran the store knew I wasn't there to get my shoes fixed. He disappeared into a back room and came back with a cone-shaped paper-wrapped package as long and wide as my forearm. The scent of sausage, paprika, black pepper, and garlic wafted through the paper. The smell made my mouth water. Meat was strictly rationed, and I had no idea where he got his supply. His wife did the seasoning herself, and they probably made more money by selling sausage on the black market than he did by fixing shoes and selling laces and polish.
He handed me the roll of sausage, and I handed him a banknote. The money went straight into his pocket. I asked for a bag and he gave me one. I put the sausage in it and walked out. I went back to my apartment and ate two pieces of bread with thick slices of sausage. The rest I put in my icebox.
After I'd eaten, I stripped to my shorts and lay in my bed. I had a Western paperback with a promising cover of two gunmen in leather chaps and wide-brimmed cowboy hats, facing each other across a dusty street. I started reading and by page five felt my eyes grow heavy like paperweights. I closed my eyes, thinking to let them rest for a few minutes, and woke up three and a half hours later, with the book resting open in the shape of an army tent on the sheet beside me.
I took a shower, ate some more bread, emptied my can of coffee beans into a glass, filled it with hot water, and drank the combination, black and bitter. Then I headed out.
Sima Vaaknin lived on the second floor of a white Bauhaus building on a quiet, tree-lined street in the north of Tel Aviv, as far as one could get from the club where Maryam Jamalka was arrested. It was not the sort of place one imagined a prostitute would live. But then Akiva had said that Sima Vaaknin was different.
At five on the dot, I knocked on the door, and it was whisked open as if she had been waiting just on the other side. The woman who stood in the opening could have been sixteen or seventeen years old.
For a moment I was unable to utter a word. I could well understand why Lydia would be jealous of Sima Vaaknin. She had a natural beauty and appeal I had only rarely encountered. Men would want to have her, and women would want to have what she had. She was five foot five, and every line of her body soared and sank where it should have. She was wearing a calf-length bright-yellow dress of some thin material through which the dark skin of her thighs and belly could be intimated. The cloth was thicker around the breasts and hips and groin, but that concealment only added to her appeal. A red sash belted the dress at her waist, accentuating its narrowness and the fullness of her breasts and hips. Below the hem of the dress, her feet were bare, her ankles thin and delicate. Above the neckline, the skin was flawless and the color of caramel. Her collarbones were shapely, her neck long and taut, her shoulders nicely rounded.
The grin she offered me dominated her face. Her teeth sparkled between thick and shapely unlipsticked lips that were a reddish pink, and in both cheeks deep dimples appeared. Her eyes were large and wide-set. Their color was a dark-brown like moist and fertile farmland. Her hair was black and brilliant and thick. It hung around her face and shoulders like a burst of ink. It was the sort of hair to run your hand through, to stroke gently, and, at certain moments, to grip hard in your hand.
I could tell by the widening of her smile that she was aware of my reaction to her appearance and was enjoying my discomfort.
I asked if she was Sima Vaaknin.
"Who else? Haven't you come here specifically to meet me?" she said, her voice high-pitched and playful.
She turned and walked deeper into the apartment, leaving the door open for me. I entered, closing the door behind me, following the sway of her hips as she made her way down the short hall to the living room. She had the lazy, flowing movement of a satisfied cat. With a gesture of her hand, she wordlessly offered me the choice of a sofa and two armchairs.
I took one of the chairs. She remained standing, now looking down at me from beneath her long curling eyelashes.
"I have wine and coffee and tea and water. What would you like?"
I told her water would be fine. She went and fetched it. The glass was cold, filled with ice. As she handed it to me, I could smell the scent of jasmine and cinnamon on her skin. I emptied the glass. The water felt fantastic. She took the used glass from me. She had brought nothing for herself.
She sat on the sofa, bending her feet under her.
"So you're Adam," she said.
"Yes. Adam Lapid."
"You're almost exactly like Akiva described you. But your eyes are a lighter green, and your hair a darker brown. He also didn't mention that troubled expression you wear."
"I look troubled?"
"There's a line between your eyebrows that looks as permanent as a scar. That's all right, though. It suits you. And I sort of like scars."
"Are you always this direct?"
She nodded. "Especially with men."
She smiled, one hand flattening the fabric of her dress along her thigh with a long, smooth motion. Then she tilted her head slightly backward and raised both hands, pushing her hair back past her ears. The movement made her dress stretch taut across her chest, and I could clearly make out the outline of her breasts. Then she lowered her hands back to her thighs, letting her hair fall back to where it had been, and the fabric of her dress loosened, better hiding what lay beneath. As far as I could see, her hair had not needed adjustment, and her dress had not required smoothing. I got the sense that nothing Sima Vaaknin did, not a single movement of her limbs or a curl of her lips or her intonation, was without purpose. It was all designed to draw and shift my eyes and attention from one body part to the next. Teasing my eyes with her legs, then her breasts, then her neck, then her face, then her mouth, and back to her legs again. And, unlike Lydia's crude maneuvers, Sima Vaaknin did not appear to be trying too hard. In fact, she did not look like she was making any effort whatsoever. Her enticing movements were as natural as breathing and walking.