Damascus Gate (6 page)

M
ISTER STANLEY'S
was behind the Hotel Best, on the second floor of a concrete building with tinny metal facings and opaque glass windows that presented an art deco curve to the street. It was very late when she finally arrived, a little after three on a weekday morning. The cab driver who brought her from the bus station told her he was from Bukhara. He spoke good English and wanted to know about Los Angeles. L.A. was not a place well known to Sonia. He shook off her questions about Bukhara and the Jewish drummers native to it.

The street on which Mister Stanley's stood was two blocks long. It was the second street from the beach, lined with the back doors and service entrances of oceanfront hotels and postcard shops and snack bars, all shuttered and dark.

A mist of small rain dampened the empty, littered street, and getting out of the cab, Sonia shivered in its unfamiliar salt chill. She had become a Jerusalemite, accustomed to the dry hills. For the trip to Tel Aviv she was wearing her bohemian Smithie getup: a denim skirt, sandals, a black top with her turquoise necklace, an expensive black leather jacket. Crossing the street, she heard laughter from the shadows, low laughter of indeterminate gender.

It was not a meeting she looked forward to. But Stanley settled nothing over the telephone and made it a point of honor to be incommunicado during daylight hours.

The metal grille at the street door was down and she had to rattle it for some time before anyone came to answer. Then an unshaven young man who looked as though he had been asleep appeared and stood looking at her blankly through the grille. Addressing him in her fractured Hebrew, she understood that he was a Palestinian. After a moment, he lifted the grille without a word and stepped aside to let her pass.

A rap tape went on suddenly. Climbing the stairs, she saw the spastic flashes of a strobe light playing on the well of darkness at the top. There she found an open doorway to the black and blue dance floor. In the middle of it was Mister Stanley himself, etherealized by the flashing light, performing some kind of Siberian cake walk to Lock N Lode's projectile recitation and grinning at her.

"Yo, Sonia! Com-rade! Dar-ling."

Two more young Arabs were sitting on the floor against the wall, watching Stanley perform. They looked agreeably awestruck, like a couple of shoeshine boys in a Fred Astaire movie digging Mister Fred. Sonia raised a hand to shield her eyes from the glare of the strobe. "Someday," she told Stanley, "I'm gonna have a seizure up here."

He came over to kiss her, shaking his head in comic confusion at the coarse poetry on his sound system.

"Listen! What means, Sonia? Whatsitsay?"

There were do-it-yourself prison tattoos on his wrists and the backs of his hands. Links, nets and webs gauged in the mottled, freckling skin. She had to wonder what the officials of ingathering had made of him at Lod. Must have worn his mittens on the flight from Moscow, she thought. He had been rejected for military service because of the tattoos.

"Sonia? Now? Just then. What he's saying?"

"'Be chillin', muvvafucka, take off my rhyme,'" Sonia reported. "Something along those lines."

Stanley repeated it with a good accent. "What means?"

"A death threat." She had to raise her voice to be heard. "To anyone who steals his rhyme." She shrugged impatiently.

"Aw
riiight,
" said Mister Stanley. "Chillin' muvvafucka!" He spread his arms out, winglike and loose-wristed, to dance a few steps more. "Whatsmatter? You don't like it?"

"Sure," she said. "I like it fine. Could you chill that light," she added, "because I think it's giving me epilepsy, know what I'm saying?"

He kissed her indulgently and gave a command in Arabic. When the sound and light were stopped, a tall, dark, strikingly attractive young woman appeared on the dark dance floor, caught by a standing spot overhead. Stanley conducted everyone to a table. One of the two young Arabs brought them a tray with a bottle of Perrier, a bottle of Stolichnaya, and dishes of cucumber slices, olives, Arab bread and what appeared to be caviar.

The woman's name was Maria Clara. When Sonia tried her in Spanish, she replied in a rather genteel accent that she came from Colombia, from Antioqhia province, not far from Medellin. Her features were patrician and tragic. Sonia assumed that she played a role in Stanley's dealings with the Colombian cocaine trade.

"You should hear Sonia perform," Stanley said in English to Maria Clara. "Breathtaking. Soon we make a record."

Stanley's offer was an agreeable fantasy based on his periodic attempts to muscle in on some local record distributorship. Back on the Arbat he had bootlegged American R & B records, and now, as the proprietor of Mister Stanley's, he felt himself an impresario. Stanley and his ambitions had become a troubling constant in Sonia's life. She had not sung in public for twelve years before meeting him. One night the previous spring, she spent an evening in Tel Aviv with an old pal from Friends school and they had gone to Mister Stanley's to try the jazz. The jazz had been sort of east of the Vistula, but Sonia and her friend, a junior officer at the Ankara embassy, were both visibly African American and for this reason had been given the big hello. Stanley had regarded them as an authenticating presence, or at least as atmosphere.

She had been drunk and merry that night. She had been prevailed upon to sing a few Gershwin songs. "Our Love Is Here to Stay." "How Long Has This Been Going On?" It had been a rush. And after that, Stanley had always wanted her there. Stanley had also always wanted her as a mistress—less in his bed, she suspected, than on his arm. As an authenticating presence, or at least as atmosphere.

She had a generous glass of Stoli and a slice of Arab bread and caviar. It improved her mood.

"Really good, Stanley. Appreciate it."

In reply, Stanley presented a vision of himself as stricken Pierrot. He clasped his tattooed hands across his chest and turned the corners of his mouth down. "Sonia," he said plaintively, "I miss you. Why you don't come around more?"

His eyes were bright blue and the skin under them was dark, so that he seemed to be always watching in shadow.

"I want to come back," she said. "I was hoping you could give me a gig."

"But of course," he said happily, and took her hand. "Start anytime. Start tonight. This young woman is a wonderful singer," Stanley told his guest. "Great voice. Makes you shiver."

Maria Clara nodded in somber approval.

"So I'm free next week," Sonia said, wanting to give herself a few days to work up to it. "When do you want me?"

"The night you can start, you should start. Next weekend?"

"All right," she said. "I'd like that. Same deal as before?"

The deal she had had before entailed Stanley paying her five thousand dollars American for seven nights, two performances a night. When he had first proposed the sum, she had thought he was joking. But he had not been; he commanded large sums and he genuinely liked her singing. The amount made it worthwhile to cope with him, at least for a few weeks.

"Same deal," Stanley said.

In addition to large sums of money, he dispensed drugs with vast prodigality, and coping with him meant not accepting any. Sonia's reading was that he would expect nothing beyond minstrelsy for the agreed-upon salary. For free dope, there might be certain expectations, carnal and otherwise. He knew she had worked for the International Children's Foundation in the Strip, that she had UN documents and access to the UN's vehicles.

"You have a place to stay in Tel Aviv? We can fix it for you."

"I have a place lined up," she told him. It was not exactly true. She knew a pension near the beach that was owned by two old Berlin Spartacists, acquaintances of her parents.

"Maybe you'll be going to Gaza soon?" Stanley asked. "In one of their little white cars?"

She knew he moved drugs there. He claimed to have contacts in the army and in the civil administration, as well as among the local
shebab.
The blue and white UN vans that shuttled between the Hill of Evil Counsel and the Occupied Territories exercised a practical fascination for him.

"I don't think so, Stanley. I think I've worn out my welcome there."

"Well," he said, "if you do, we might work something out. I got friends there." It was as explicit as he had ever gotten. He reached out and took her hand. "Wait, Sonia. One moment. I have something for you."

"It's all right, Stan," she said. "I have to go."

In fact there was nothing but the empty street outside, no buses or
sheruts
for Jerusalem until five or so. He disappeared into a back room, leaving her dithering in Maria Clara's company.

"You're beautiful," said the cool, sad Colombian. She had the gravity of a tango artist. "You mustn't go so soon."

"Well," said Sonia, "thank you."

"You remind me of Cuba. You look like a Cuban. And when you speak, you sound Cuban."

"I'm flattered," Sonia said. "But I'm too clumsy to be Cuban."

Sonia was more or less used to Stanley, but Maria Clara gave her sudden stark chills.

"You know what?" Stanley asked. "We got call from your old boyfriend. The clarinet."

"Ray Melker? How's he doing?" She was about to ask whether he was off drugs, but that might be an awkward question in present company.

"He's in Safed. He gives tours. Now he wants to work. Come down and blow for us."

"Better grab him, Stan. He's a baby Sidney Bechet. He'll be famous someday." She was wondering what it would be like to see Raziel again. Temptations.

Stanley agreed. "You want work, I tell him, you got it."

She left without calling a taxi and walked around the hotel to Hayarkon Street and followed the patterned pavement south along the beach. The turbulent light of day was gathering on the ocean horizon, a mass of twisted clouds and pale gray light. The cold colors of sea and sky confused her sense of place.

A mile or so down the seafront, she encountered a troop of elderly men in bathing suits hurrying toward the ocean. They called to her, thrusting out their hoary hairy chests, puffing themselves up in macho array. One man waved a bottle of Israeli vodka. She stopped and watched them jog together toward the water's edge for their morning constitutional, outlined against the sunrise.

Sonia had a weakness for the old-timers. She had once spent an evening in a bar on Trumpeldor Street where they went in for old Zionist war songs, the "Internationale," Piaf and Polish waltzes; it had reminded her of her parents' world. One bounded by hope. She had begun to think of hope as belonging to the past.

There was a free taxi parked along Herbert Samuel Street, so she took it to the bus station. She caught the first morning bus, filled with civil servants on their way to work. As it climbed into the red and brown Judean Hills, she felt a sense of relief like homecoming.

Who knew, she had to wonder, which was the real world? The plastic town on the make, a city ironically like any other, or the city on the hill where she had settled. In any case, she knew where she belonged.

O
NE EVENING
Lucas had a meeting with a man who called himself Basil Thomas, who claimed to be a former officer of the KGB. He worked in Israel as a kind of journalist's runner, occasionally doing pieces himself under a variety of names, in several languages, but generally providing leads and guidance to other freelancers. Lucas owed his acquaintance with Thomas to a Polish journalist named Janusz Zimmer, who knew everyone and had been everywhere and worked thousands of sources worldwide. The appointment with Basil Thomas took place at Fink's. They shared a table in the tiny space, and Thomas, wearing an outsized leather overcoat despite the mild weather, drank Scotch as quickly as the Hungarian waiter could bring it to them.

The waiter was one of the things Lucas liked best about Fink's. He seemed to have stepped whole out of a wartime Warner Bros. movie and closely resembled at least three of Warners' Mitteleuropean bit players of the period. In the course of being served by him, Lucas had rejoiced in being addressed in a dazzling variety of honorifics: Mister, Monsieur, Mein Herr, Gospodin and Effendi.

What Lucas liked least about Fink's was the extremely close quarters its size compelled. He had found, however, that the place tended to expand or contract according to one's mood and in proportion to the amount of liquor consumed.

Basil Thomas, whistle wetted, was explaining his unparalleled access to the most secret archives of Soviet Intelligence.

"When I say anything you want, I mean anything you want. Hiss. The Rosenbergs. Did they or didn't they, know what I mean?" A salesman, he seemed to hint at some delicious unspeakable aspect of the case.

Yet Basil was a disappointment to Lucas. In setting up the interview, he had imagined a man possessed of some totalitarian chic.

"You have files on Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs?"

"Not only that. I got files on what's
desinformatsiya,
what's not. I got the Masaryk story. The Slansky story. The story on Noel Field. I got Raoul Wallenberg. I got Whittaker Chambers. I got the basis of your next book."

"So was Hiss really a spy?" Lucas asked.

"Excuse me," said Basil gaily. "This is all scheduled information." Lucas imagined he had picked up the quaint postcolonial term in the course of his travels. "This is the stuff of legend. The story of the century."

Glancing down at his guest's ruddy, hugely knuckled hands, Lucas found it possible to imagine him busting heads in some flaking Balkan capital. An earthy, smiley torturer. On the other hand, he might be nothing more than an amiable trickster.

"Janusz says you know where the bodies are buried," Lucas told Thomas. "That's his phrase."

"Janusz," Basil Thomas repeated wearily, "Janusz, Janusz. Between us," he told Lucas confidentially, "sometimes I think Janusz is a charlatan. I have doubts about Janusz."

"The century's over," Lucas said after a moment. He had gotten drunk through no fault of his own, trying to pace the man, and he was being intentionally unkind. "People may not care about all that."