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“As for your angle in this matter, that is easy, yes? You are a soldier for hire. You enjoy the challenge and the responsibility of generalship. I understand that. I do. You like to fight, and you like killing, as long as those who die aren’t your men. And, I dare say, after all these years with Shemets — and now, on your own behalf — you are long in the habit of appearing to please the Americans.

“For the Verbovers, there is great risk. Our entire community could be lost in this adventure. Wiped out in a matter of days, if your troops are ill prepared or simply, as seems not unlikely, outmanned. But if we stay here, well, then we are finished, too. Scattered to the winds. Our friends in the south have made that clear. That is the ‘stick.’ Reversion as the fire in the seat of the pants, yes? A restored Jerusalem as the bucket of ice water. Some of our younger men argue for making a stand here, daring them to dislodge us. But that is madness.

“On the other hand, if we agree, and you are successful, then we have regained a treasure of such incalculable value — I mean Zion, of course — that the mere thought of it opens a long-shuttered window in my soul. I have to shield my eyes from the brilliance.”

He raised the back of his left hand to his eyes. His thin wedding band was engulfed in his fingers like an ax head lost in the flesh of a tree. Litvak felt the pulse in his throat, a thumb plucking over and over at the lowest string of a harp. Dizziness. A sensation of ballooning in his feet and arms. It must be the heat, he thought. He took shallow timid breaths of rich burning air.

“I am dazzled by that vision,” the rebbe said. “Maybe as blinded by it, in my own way, as the evangelicals. So precious is the treasure. So incalculably sweet.”

No. It was not, or not only, the heat and ripeness of the shvitz that were making Litvak’s pulse thrum and his head spin. He felt certain of the wisdom of his gut: Shpilman was about to reject his proposal. But as that likelihood drew nearer, a new possibility began to dizzy him, to course through him. It was the thrill of a dazzling move.

“Still, it’s not enough,” the rebbe was saying. “I long for Messiah as I long for nothing else in this world.” He stood up, and his belly poured over his hips and groin like scalded milk foaming down the sides of a pot. “But I am afraid. I’m afraid of failure. I’m afraid of the potential for great loss of life among my yids and the utter destruction of everything we’ve worked for these last sixty years. There were eleven Verbovers left at the end of the war, Litvak. Eleven. I promised my wife’s father on his deathbed that I would never let such destruction befall us again.

“And, finally, truthfully, I fear this all may be a fool’s errand. There are numerous and persuasive teachings against acting in any way to hasten the coming of Messiah. Jeremiah condemns it. So do the Oaths of Solomon. Yes, of course, I want to see my yids settled in a new home with financial assurances from the U.S., offers of assistance and of access to all the unimaginably vast new markets your success in this operation would create. And I want Messiah like I want to sink, after this heat, into the cold dark waters of the mikvah in the next room. But, God should forgive me these words, I am afraid. So afraid that even the taste on my lips of Messiah is not enough. And you can tell them that down in Washington. Tell them the Verbover rebbe was afraid.” The idea of his fear seemed almost to entrance him with its novelty, like a teenager thinking of death or a whore of the chance of an immaculate love. “What?”

Litvak held up his right index finger. He had something, one more thing to offer the rebbe. One more clause for the contract. He had no idea how he would deliver it or if indeed it could be delivered. But as the rebbe prepared to turn his massive back on Jerusalem and on the complicated hugeness of the deal that Litvak had been putting together for months, he felt it well up in him like a chess brilliancy, notated with double exclamation marks. He scrambled to open his pad. He scrawled two words on the first clean leaf, but in his haste and panic, he pressed too hard and his pen ripped through the wet paper.

“What is it?” Shpilman said, “You have somethin more to offer?”

Litvak nodded, once, twice.

“Something more than Zion? Messiah? A home, fortune?”

Litvak got up and padded across the tile floor until he stood just beside the rebbe. Naked men, bearing the tales of their ruined bodies. Each of them, in his way, bereft, alone. Litvak reached out and, with the force and inspiration of that loneliness, and with the tip of his finger, inscribed two words in the vapor condensed on a white square of tile.

The rebbe read them and looked up, and they beaded over once more and were gone.

“My son,” the rebbe said.

It’s more than a game, Litvak wrote now, in the office at Peril Strait, as he and Roboy awaited the arrival of that wayward and unredeemed son. I would rather fight to take a prize however doubtful than wait to see what scraps I may be fed

“I suppose there’s a credo in there someplace,” Roboy said. “Maybe there’s hope for you yet.”

In return for providing them with manpower, a Messiah, and financing beyond their wildest dreams, the only thing that Litvak had ever asked of his partners, clients, employers, and associates in this venture was that he never be expected to believe the nonsense that they believed. Where they saw the fruit of divine wishes in a newborn red heifer, he saw the product of $1 million in taxpayer dollars spent secretly on bull semen and in vitro fertilization. In the eventual burning of this little red cow, they saw the purification of all Israel and the fulfillment of a millennia-old promise; Litvak saw, at most, a necessary move in an ancient game — the survival of the Jews.

Oh I wouldn’t go that far

There was a knock at the door, and Micky Vayner put in his head.

“I came to remind you, sir,” he said in his good American Hebrew.

Litvak stared blankly at the pink face with its peeling eyelids and baby-fat chin.

“Five minutes before twilight. You said to remind you.”

Litvak went to the window. The sky was striped in the pink, green, and luminous gray of a salmon’s hide. Sure enough, he saw a star or planet overhead. He nodded his thanks to Micky Vayner. Then he closed the box of chessmen and hooked the clasp.

“What’s at twilight?” Roboy said. He turned to Micky Vayner. “What’s today?”

Micky Vayner shrugged; as far as he knew, it was, by the lunar calendar, an ordinary day in the month of Nisan. Though, like his young comrades, he had been trained to believe in the foreordained reestablishment of the biblical kingdom of Judaea and in the destiny of Jerusalem to be the eternal capital of the Jews, he was no more strict or nice in his observance than any of the others. The young American Jews at Peril Strait observed the principal holidays, and for the most part, they kept the dietary laws. They wore the skullcap and the four-corners but kept their beards in military trim. They avoided work and training on the Sabbath, though not without exception. After forty years as a secular warrior, Litvak could stomach that much. Even in the wake of the accident, with his Sora gone, with the wind whistling through the hole she had left in Litvak’s life, with a thirst for meaning and a hunger for sense and an empty cup and a barren dish, Alter Litvak could not have taken a place among truly religious men. He never could have fallen happily, for example, among the black hats. In fact, he could not abide black hats, and since the meeting at the baths, he had kept to a minimum his contacts with the Verbovers, as they prepared in secret to be airlifted en masse to Palestine.