Читать книгу Isra-Isle - Nava Semel - Страница 11

WITHOUT A trace.

Every missing person notice ends with this succinct phrase that is part desperation, part acceptance of an extraordinary event.

Like an actor in rehearsals, Simon T. Lenox recites the inevitable next line: “As if he was swallowed up by the earth.” His face adopts an expression his ex-wives all perceived as a highly effective weapon because it perfectly disguised his intentions.

The earth only swallows up dead people, Lenox scribbles in his notepad, but man swallows up himself. He rips the page out and shoots it into the wastepaper basket. He will have to tell the commissioner to give the case to someone else. He has no intention of wearing himself out on a wild-goose chase for some Israeli gone missing in America. Not at his age. Not in his position.

Still holding the pad, he can’t help catching the missing man’s photograph out of the corner of his eye. He instantly imprints the Israeli’s image in his memory—an aptitude he was born with, or perhaps acquired during his many years of hunting people down. The man’s eyes are narrowed; he looks startled by the sudden camera flash. His hair is neatly trimmed except for a few stray locks that might have grown back too quickly. He has a square, rigid chin and sunken cheeks. He gives off a faint whiff of defiance. A man of Lenox’s own age, more or less, looking formal. No special markings.

When Lenox holds the page up, he notices a stain above the NYPD commissioner’s handwriting: “Urgent! Special request from State Dept.”

If only he could shred the piece of paper into tiny scraps, including the trite phrase “without a trace.” How futile to search for people the earth has swallowed up, leaving nothing behind for their loved ones except the uncertainty of their death. He’s not going to bear this weight on his shoulders. The home-grown cases are bad enough—now he’s supposed to worry about the Israelis, too? Fuck the Israelis.

HIS PROTESTS are met with indifference in the commissioner’s office. Simon T. Lenox pounds his fist on the desk hard enough to make his notepad jump. His colleagues peer out from behind their partitions. There’s nothing new about a confrontation between Lenox and the commissioner, but such violent outbursts are rare. Some colleagues have been recommending early retirement, and there is persistent gossip about the celebrated investigator who has lost his magic touch.

What is so special about this Israeli man that makes the United States government want to find him? Has he committed a crime?

The commissioner shakes his head.

Then why is he wanted? Is he going to be extradited to Israel?

No.

Perhaps he is privy to top secrets that can’t be allowed out? Or is he working for a hostile entity?

The commissioner doesn’t bother to reply.

Might the Israeli be an embarrassment to his country, or a threat to US security? Because if all he is liable to do is hurt himself, then that is none of their fucking business.

Once the shouting stops, the commissioner makes sure the door is closed.

It’s a delicate matter, Lenox. I need an expert on this case. We have our reasons.

But Simon T. Lenox does not walk into the flattery trap, or the duty one: You can send someone else. And anyway, an Israeli is a case for Immigration.

The commissioner insists: We’re just following orders from above. We’ve annexed you to the Secret Service. They have all the materials on Israel. And if you crack this case . . .

Then what? Israel will give me a medal? Thanks, but no thanks. Who needs honors from a foreign country?

Forced to accept the commissioner’s decision, Simon T. Lenox is swiftly vacated from his office and resettled in another office on the eighty-fourth floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center—stuck in a place where he doesn’t belong, struggling to tamp down his anger. He has better conditions here, ample space—an office designed to win him over, furnished with an executive leather chair and a state-of-the-art laptop. But all these props serve only to underscore how foreign he is in this new domain. Where are the incoming and outgoing mail trays? Where is the picture on the wall commemorating the much-publicized arrest of a suspect who was caught only because Lenox recognized her perfume? And what about the framed letters of appreciation, and his target-practice outfit, and his tailored suit on a hanger for when he is unexpectedly summoned to testify in court?

Who wants an obscure case and someone watching over your shoulder?

Simon T. Lenox stares at the partitions. Outside, the windows are drizzling: 43,600 tearful glass eyes. Inside, the phones are ringing. Crimes and misdemeanors occur constantly. In recent years he has lost something of the hunger, the joy of the hunt. Even when he solves a case, he does not feel the elation anymore. Back in the day, he used to finish off two bottles of Jack Daniels to celebrate a closed case.

At his age. In his position. He’s seen it all and heard it all. Nothing can surprise him. Not even foreigners who go missing in a country that isn’t theirs.

Without a trace. A phrase meticulously designed to mask the grief. As it should.

The place may be foreign, but the notepad is familiar. Simon T. Lenox pulls himself together and starts to write:

To: Brig. Gen. Yoav Rosen-Vardi, Israel Police Attaché to the United States, Washington, DC

I was requested by my supervisors to investigate, on behalf of the State of Israel, the disappearance of Mr. Liam Emanuel, and have happily accepted the assignment.

Incidentally, does the subject not have a middle name, as is usually the custom with us?

I hope to be able to locate the subject. I am honored to serve a true friend of the United States.

Yours sincerely,

Simon T. Lenox, Chief Inspector

Senior Investigator, Missing Persons

Annexed to the Secret Service

PS Kindly forward the affidavits you collected in Israel, as well as any relevant materials I may require during my investigation.

THE LAST person who saw him was the flight attendant on the red-eye from Tel-Aviv to JFK. She remembered the subject only because he shut himself in the bathroom for an unreasonably long time. She was about to break in, but then he suddenly emerged, seeming calm, and asked her whether she knew Yuri Gagarin. The flight attendant assumed he was suffering from some kind of mental disturbance. She’d once caught a couple going at it in the bathroom, and another time there was a man who had a stroke on a flight.

Transatlantic sex. Simon T. Lenox leans back in his executive leather chair and holds his notepad to his chest. This case might turn out to be more interesting than he’d expected.

Opening scene in a play: A man bursts out of a tiny cabin and fishes out from some hidden level of consciousness the name of the first man who broke through the gravity barrier. Did the Russian cosmonaut suffer from space sickness? That is what the missing man asked the flight attendant. Or was he troubled, during that single orbit around Earth, by his bladder? He was finally free, the son of a bitch—Columbus of the cosmos. That was what he said to her.

She was convinced he had lost his mind. Would you like a valium? she asked, and picked up the internal phone to the cockpit.

The passenger said: What a shit job, babysitting three hundred people on a jumbo jet who’ll do anything to hide their terror of death.

Ever since that day, every time she demonstrates the emergency procedures before takeoff, the flight attendant remembers that passenger. She straps on the inflatable life jacket, pulls down the oxygen mask with the dangling tubes, and his defiant face jumps up at her. Unshaven. Fresh stubble. She remembers the stubble clearly.

Did the passenger appear frightened? Might he have gone into the bathroom to cry?

No. Flight attendants are adept at spotting tears. There are people who lose their equilibrium when the rug of solid ground is pulled out from under them, she told the investigator in Israel. Simon T. Lenox presumes something of that shock, the shock of the earth falling away, afflicted her as well.

The subject pointed at the darkness swaddling the plane and asked: How do pilots learn how to control their bladder?

The flight attendant thought he was joking.

What made her ask if he was going on a secret mission?

The subject kept on about Yuri Gagarin. What had the Russian cosmonaut taken with him on Vostok 1? he wanted to know. He had the placid voice of a curious boy holding back his teacher after class. The choice of objects, he continued, must have been made with the clear knowledge that if he never came back, neither would they.

The flight attendant lost her patience and instructed the passenger to return to his seat immediately and fasten his seatbelt.

Yuri Gagarin? Who the hell is that, anyway? Lenox has trouble deciphering whether she had spat out that question at the bothersome passenger, or at the investigator. He sighs, suddenly aware of his age, albeit not of his position.

In the end he crashed. Three years after the daring spaceflight, the cosmonaut met his death in a foolish jet accident. This fact was not recorded in the affidavit from Israel, but Lenox scribbles it in his notepad as a footnote.

A possible destination for the subject: Houston, Texas: the NASA Space Center.

Only then does he allow himself to relax into the soft leather chair.

THE NYPD website lists dozens of missing people. Simon T. Lenox knows each of them by name, as well as their families, acquaintances, and enemies.

If he himself were to suddenly disappear, who would notify the authorities?

Such contemplations are best quashed early on. Self-pity is a luxury, and personal involvement only sabotages an investigation. He will do what is required, no more. He doesn’t owe the Israelis anything. He doesn’t even know any Israelis, except the ones he sees on television. CNN. Breaking news! They occupied us! We occupied them! They killed us, they’re killing us, they’ll kill us! He has no interest in the endless Middle Eastern blood cycle. Troubling the whole world with their problems for over a century already. Whenever Israel’s name comes up, he quickly flicks over to the nature channel. A river beaver building a dam. The white-tailed deer’s mating habits. Those are the only scenes that can lull him to sleep.

Yet here he is, with a missing Israeli.

Israelis are a type of Jews, aren’t they? What kind of Jews are they?

The FBI’s central computing system aggregates data about missing people from all law-enforcement authorities. Innocent and less-innocent people who walked out one fine day from their homes and never returned. Lenox, unwillingly, has become an expert—a dubious title, since he has failed to get most of his subjects home in time, or in one piece.

Since the last time he logged into the site, three bodies have been found, among them that of a six-year-old girl who was murdered with her mother by the mother’s boyfriend, in a motel near Albany. He killed them both with an axe. A particularly horrific case, if there is even any reasonable way to rank such horrors. Lenox remembers being notified about the disappearance of the woman and her child, who’d gone to spend the afternoon in the park. He remembers trying to get the neighbor woman to talk on the phone, but all she could do was shriek at him. The girl and her mother had no one else in the world.

Now Lenox wonders who attended the double funeral.

The hardest moment is facing the person who comes to notify the police about a disappearance. Although it is a fairly consistent scenario, variations on the same scenes and events, Lenox has still not managed to build up adequate barriers between himself and the grief. At first they shut themselves up at home and wait for news of any sort, even the news of death. Then come the phone calls in the middle of the night, when Lenox pretends to be encouraging, murmuring hollow clichés pulled from his reservoir. And of course the despair, a companion that grows more and more constant as time goes by. Even when the notifiers stop visiting the police station hoping for information, Simon T. Lenox can’t stop seeing their eyes. They are nailed to his consciousness, as though he holds the key to these people’s happiness or calamity. When he tries to fall asleep, he is pierced by that gnawing longing in the loved ones’ pupils. He will be spared of all that with this case, thank God, because the State of Israel has no eyes.

Most of the missing people eventually turn out to be dead, as Lenox informs the department rookies year after year. He warns them to prepare for the moment of identification by arming themselves with any defense mechanisms they can muster to prevent the outbursts of pain and compassion. Above all he loathes the “floaters,” the ones spat out by the ocean and the rivers, whose faces have been washed clear of any human expression. The first time he had to identify a floater, he puked his guts out. He’s built up immunity since them, although the thought of the Israeli’s face sends shockwaves through his body nonetheless.

This is his twenty-eighth missing person. Why does he count them, categorize them, and shuffle them?

His first Israeli. He was preceded by the Irishman who jumped off Mount Rushmore, the seventy-year-old Greek who left his wife, children, and grandchildren and ran off to Reno where he married a seventeen-year-old waitress, and the New Zealander who just forgot to call home. Who came first? Lenox can’t remember.

And the Israeli?

Without a trace.

THIS ISN’T my Israeli.

It’s not anyone’s Israeli.

Simon T. Lenox wakes up in the middle of the night. If he dreamed, the dreams are gone. He stands over the toilet but the urine takes its time. The pressure cuts through his groin. Like a tomahawk strike.

Fuck the Israeli.

THE SALESWOMAN at the Duty Free shop in Ben-Gurion Airport also recognized the missing man. Her affidavit was taken in her native Russian.

A tiresome business, the medley of foreign languages in the Middle East. Lenox is planning to ask for overtime because of this case. Had he been present at the interrogations, he would have monitored the witnesses’ body language, all the hidden signals that reveal what they themselves do not even know is important information.

Did the subject bother the saleswoman about Yuri Gagarin, too? Lenox skims the affidavit wearily, disappointed to find no mention of the Russian cosmonaut. But since the encounter preceded the incident with the flight attendant, it is possible that it was the saleswoman’s Russian accent that jogged the subject’s memory with Vostok 1.

What language did they talk in?

Hebrew.

Lenox is impressed by the young Russian woman’s quick mastery of a new language.

She is a “New Olah”—the Hebrew term is noted in the margin. Lenox will have to find out what that means. Why not just “immigrant”?

A deceptive language, Hebrew.

Moving on.

The subject purchased a pair of sneakers at the Duty Free, and made a point of confirming that they were waterproof. The soles would have to withstand a slippery surface, he explained to the saleswoman. But the sneakers weren’t the reason Valentina remembered him. The pair he chose was simple and unembellished, although she tried to talk him into getting a newer model, with air cushions.

Valentina. The name flashes through Lenox’s mind—distant thunder—and he circles it.

The subject told her that if she had immigrated to Israel thirty years ago, they would have made her change her name to Vardina or Adina.

Why? Lenox wonders. The Israeli investigator had not bothered to explain.

It was the boarding pass that made the subject stick in Valentina’s memory. He was clutching it the whole time, and inadvertently tore the stub off.

A façade of serenity, Lenox notes, and looks at the photograph again.

The man paid in cash, dollars. He put the new sneakers on at the store and left his old pair by the checkout counter. When the final boarding call for flight 001 to New York came over the speakers, Valentina found the boarding pass stub sticking out of one of the customer’s old shoes. At first she thought it was a note, and she had a moment of doubt: opening strangers’ letters was a rude invasion of privacy, and she was a well-bred young woman from Saint Petersburg.

Did you abandon your post? asked the Israeli interrogator.

Simon T. Lenox hopes Valentina wasn’t fired.

She ran to Gate 3 and found her customer holding up the line with a long trail of grumbling passengers behind him. She was so excited that she had trouble explaining to the flight attendant what had happened. All that came out of her mouth was Russian. The flight attendant was furious. At first she refused to match the two parts of the pass, but finally she inserted the stub in the machine and scolded the passenger.

Did the man thank Valentina? Without her, after all, he would not have been able to get on his flight. Or perhaps he had changed his mind? Was this a desperate attempt to sabotage his own disappearance?

In the document faxed from Israel, the silences are not recorded. Lenox is convinced that Valentina paused for several seconds before answering. Either way, the text is blurred and he cannot decipher her reply.

OLD-FASHIONED SNEAKERS. It’s doubtful that is what Yuri Gagarin would have chosen to take on Vostok 1 for his voyage beyond gravity.

Sipping his third Jack Daniels later that night, from a bottle whose label reads, “Every day we make it, we’ll make it the best we can,” Lenox scans his apartment and cannot find a single object so precious that he would be unwilling to part with it. Even his notepad is replaceable. What’s already written is less important than what has yet to be written.

The glass in his hand is cool. A cheap tumbler—he bought three of them at the drugstore across the street after his third wife left with the entire contents of the apartment.

If he were going on a voyage beyond gravity, all he’d take would be a bottle of Jack, so he could have a few sips while he watched the bluish-green ball from above. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to piss on everyone.

The pain in his groin again.

Israel is so small that you can barely see it from outer space.

Fuck Israel.

Irritating raindrops tap on the window, but even the drizzle doesn’t open up his bladder.

HE NEVER files his notepads. He promised the commissioner that on the day he retired he would box them up in sequential order and deposit them at the archive. Behind his back people make fun of his techniques. He always starts by collecting testimonies in reverse chronological order—going back in time—and then he examines each one discretely, as if they did not form a series of events in one person’s life. Simon T. Lenox believes that every human encounter is an autonomous event, a closed circuit, which can only be assigned meaning when it is over, in the light of previous events.

The theory of traces.

There are those who believe he inherited the approach from his Native American forefathers, but Lenox dismisses this idea out of hand. His wife—the second one, if he recalls correctly—claimed he was the reincarnation of a coyote: he could smell blood. But she said that during a vicious fight, shortly before hurling every glass in the kitchen at him.

This won’t be a complicated case. The sloppy Israeli will leave plenty of tracks. After all, he left his old shoes at the Duty Free, and even forgot his boarding pass stub. He’ll be easy to find.

Or his remains will.

Everything points to a spontaneous, unplanned decision. A rebellious kid playing hooky.

This is the first conclusion Lenox presents to the commissioner, and he doesn’t bother trying to disguise his smugness.

LENOX IS under pressure. Nothing is spoken outright, but he picks up whispers from behind closed doors. Someone from the Israeli Embassy in DC calls to find out if there’s any progress on the case. They don’t want anyone talking, otherwise the subject will find out they’re tailing him. And as soon as the press smells any blood . . .

Impatient fucking Israelis. Convinced they have the whole world eating out of their hand. If their missing man is in danger, why don’t they say so clearly and name their suspects? Keeping their dirty little secrets to themselves.

But the commissioner is on edge. He is also being pressured to report up the chain of command. Hit the road, Lenox. Don’t bury yourself in paperwork. Fill in the details as you go along.

But Lenox has yet to read the Israeli’s résumé, a series of dry data he intentionally leaves for last, burying the subject’s official curriculum vitae at the bottom of the pile. When he entered the US, he wrote “business trip” on his arrival form. His handwriting is clear and his English seems fluent. No signs of anxiety. The immigration authorities report that his passport is valid. Everything seems to be in order. And yet . . . Doesn’t a man have the right to shake his life off? Like a dog getting rid of a tick?

Perhaps the Israeli was in debt. Statements from three Israeli banks attest that he had emptied his accounts out, one after the other, shortly before the flight. He mailed his life insurance policy to a post office box in Jerusalem. There is not a casino in the world that will not roll out the red carpet for him.

Lenox makes a note: “Possible destination: Las Vegas.” He looks at the window. The rain on the eighty-fourth floor of the North Tower is puny, or perhaps the drops have not gained enough velocity at this height. The window-cleaning machine is operating. The windows are smaller than the standard size, to prevent the tower from becoming a heat trap. Despite the downpour, the cleaner has not deactivated the washer.

Idiot, Lenox thinks. It’s pointless. Perhaps the window washer also keeps a precious object with him as a memento? If he ever gave any thought to the abyss gaping below him, he’d quit immediately.

Idiot. Or a hopeless optimist.

Lenox devotes another second of thought to the cleaner and plunges into the next document.

WHAT CAME before what came before? Some people in the department dispute the unique investigation method Lenox has developed. “Shuffling the deck,” they call it. Why not go about things sequentially? Examine the testimonies chronologically until you get to the intersection at which things went either this way or that? But Simon T. Lenox prefers to chronicle events before they occur. To him, going backwards is the most logical direction. Putting toe to heel is not a regression, because it allows him to uncover the clues from which the future actions of the subject will derive. In previous cases Lenox has been able to predict the subjects’ destinations fairly accurately, and then he can lie in wait for his prey a step or two ahead—this on the basis of a cluster of clues gathered retroactively. It’s not prognostication. It’s not exactly science. Just a simple human talent that he has refined over time.

How unfortunate that his methods are not widely adopted—going backwards while facing forwards. The only steps Lenox seems unable to predict are his own. When he tries to chart the various branches of his life, whether by following the conventional theory of traces or using his own variation, he cannot reconstruct what came before what came before.

Sometimes he thinks his third wife left him before his second one did.

IN THE middle of the night, Simon T. Lenox sits up in bed and looks at the numbers glowing on the clock. Sleep has left him, and he lies there gazing at a drizzling Manhattan—Eighty-Seventh Street and Third Avenue—and thinks about suitcases. He pads over to the bathroom and squeezes a few drops out into the toilet.

If his wife had seen him remember to lift the seat and put it down again, she might not have left. Was that the second one or the third one? They all used to complain.

He pours the remaining Jack Daniels into the toilet, hoping the stream will awaken his bladder.

VALENTINA.

With his boxers still halfway down his legs, Simon T. Lenox bounds out of the bathroom to his computer. It’s getting light. Downstairs they’re collecting the trash. Black plastic bags piled outside the main doors.

Like bodies. That’s what one of his wives used to say. The one who got up early.

Soft pecking sounds emerge from his computer as it connects to the network. Sometimes he feels as though he himself is a search engine.

Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova. A Russian cosmonaut aboard Vostok 6. The first woman in space. How many times did she orbit Earth?

Lenox thinks he’s starting to get the Israeli mindset. He goes back into the bathroom and purposely dribbles on the toilet seat.

THE MISSING man had something else to say to the flight attendant when he came out of the bathroom: he complained about the faucets.

It’s a crazy system. Either your hands freeze or they get scalded, and you waste a lot of time trying to reach a lukewarm compromise. Not only that, but passengers are requested to wipe away the grayish residue in the bottom of the miniature sink, “In consideration of your fellow passengers.”

Simon T. Lenox highlights that paragraph in the affidavit with bright yellow.

A LUGGAGE carousel slowly revolves in his mind. He peers into his bedroom closet and takes out a small suitcase, then tosses in a pair of socks and a shaving razor. None of his wives were very good at packing. He would always find something missing and have to stop in some godforsaken town to buy underwear or a toothbrush.

The suitcase gapes at the foot of the bed like a mouth with its false teeth removed, and he kicks it shut and shoves it into the dusty darkness under the bed. He’s not going to set off without finding out his destination.

Not at his age. Not in his position.

Outside, in the rain, he realizes he’s forgotten an umbrella.

THE COMPLAINTS from Israel soon land on the commissioner’s desk: Why is your detective wasting our time with trivialities? What difference does it make which kind of suitcase the man used? What matters is what was inside it!

Lenox yells at the commissioner: What is up with these Israelis always being in a hurry? Why are they demanding results before they’ve even lifted a finger? They’re asking us to guarantee that some crazy theory they’ve concocted will turn out to be true. They should be grateful we’re helping them at all and shut up. We’re doing their dirty work and they sit there in their bloody Middle East and have the gall to complain.

The commissioner cuts him off. Listen to me carefully, Lenox. This is a mutual obligation, at least as long as our interests are aligned. And you’re the one who should be thanking me, because I’m the dam holding back the pressure from upstairs. A Republican congressman from Indiana has already intervened. What’s going on with your Israeli, Lenox? What is he up to? Where is he headed?

When Lenox demands once again to know why he is being asked to turn over every stone for this Israeli, the commissioner blurts: Maybe they count them over in Israel, like a herd of buffalo.

HE CAREFULLY copies the inventory faxed by the Israelis into his notepad:

One faded brown leather suitcase full of old records. One zipper torn, the other rusted. The strap used to tie it is on the bathroom floor.

One gray Samsonite. The inner pocket contains an old Hebrew-English pocket dictionary. One wheel broken. A ten-year warranty affixed to the side.

One gym bag with a Los Angeles Olympics logo. In the side pocket is a ticket for the javelin throw finals.

One empty cosmetics case.

One military duffle bag. At the bottom, two cheap towels and a pair of khaki underwear.

One red suitcase with every zipper torn. Inside are gas masks, twenty rolls of adhesive tape, and a package of rubber gloves in various sizes.

SIMON T. Lenox sends an urgent fax to the Israeli Embassy. When no reply is forthcoming, he sends another. That evening he is informed about the emergency kit that every Israeli citizen has been required to possess since the Gulf War. Every so often the kits are “refreshed.” They must be joking, Lenox remarks to the commissioner. But the Israelis didn’t trust their authorities, so they added a few of their own items to the official survival kit: a rag soaked in bleach and baking soda, rubber gloves, and muck boots. If the Iraqis invade, they’ll assume the Israelis are busy washing dishes and cleaning bathrooms.

At first the police thought the house had been burgled because there was such a mess. Closet doors and drawers were open, the floor was strewn with belongings, the toilet was clogged and dirty water had flooded the bathroom. But there was a row of suitcases and bags lined up underneath the opening to the boydem. Another unfamiliar term in this document stamped “State of Israel.” Lenox circles it and scribbles a question mark. Then he says it out loud to make sure he hasn’t missed something in the pronunciation. Could they have meant Boy Damn? But what would that mean?

He’ll end up having to go see Jackie Brendel, the woman known in the Secret Service as “the Jewish Question.” But he’s worried he might hurt her feelings and get a complaint filed against him. That’s all he needs, just before early retirement.

My luggage inheritance, said the son who was brought in from Jerusalem by the police to identify the apartment contents.

So the missing man has a son.

But he wasn’t the one who notified the police about the disappearance.

AT EVERY stage of the investigation, Simon T. Lenox calls up images and attempts to construct a scaffolding of the missing person’s drama.

The Israeli stands in his bedroom with its entire contents scattered around him, and looks at the containers in which his life has been repeatedly packed and unpacked. In his mind’s eye Lenox sees the Israeli untie the suitcase strap, kneel down, and rummage through the collection of LPs he couldn’t bring himself to throw out. The White Album, Dark Side of the Moon. The mementos he chose to take with him might shed some light on his mood before disappearing. And how fortunate that vinyl is back in fashion—Lenox will advise the Israeli to sell the collection for a handsome profit.

He must have an interest in sports, since he traveled to the Olympics. But why did he choose a marginal sport like the javelin throw?

Lenox goes back to the photograph. The Israeli’s shoulders are hunched; he does not look particularly athletic. Lenox envisions a javelin floating through the air toward the rainy horizon.

Gravity. An important detail—or perhaps a dead end.

WHAT DOES he have so far?

Yuri Gagarin. A one-way plane ticket. A torn stub. Sneakers. Nonskid soles. Valentina. A pair of faucets in an airplane bathroom. The Vostok spacecraft. Gas masks. A javelin.

There is also a large backpack, the kind favored by serious hikers. That is the item missing from the luggage inheritance, according to the son.

Lenox does not have any children.

HE GATHERS the traces carefully, like precious relics. As the assembly floats around his mind, he has trouble separating the shards of information and ranking them by importance. He has learned to wait patiently for the collision that will direct him to the start of the route, with the understanding that even the slightest random detour could throw him off course.

Don’t give up, Simon T. Some clarity has to emerge from all this. When archeologists gently blow the dirt off their findings, they take into account that the wind might scatter a few blinding particles into their eyes.

Lenox contacts the sneaker manufacturer and asks for samples of nonskid soles. He wastes an hour on futile lines of questioning until he finally identifies the right model.

Sir, why are you so insistent on finding an outdated pair? This model was discontinued long ago. But Simon T. Lenox does not give in, going from one store to another until he can top his stack of documents with an imprint of the sole.

The eighty-forth floor of the North Tower is empty. Everyone has gone home, except the officer on duty. Lenox sips mineral water from a bottle he found in the hallway and scolds himself for being too cowardly to smuggle a bottle of Jack Daniels into the office.

The Israeli has not checked in to any hotel in New York, nor has anyone matching his description rented a vehicle in the last few days. Lenox marks the items still needing clarification, and uncomfortably shifts the papers around, right to left, right to left. The pen hovers, and his hand is tempted to write his name backwards, the way it would be written in Hebrew. His letters come out crooked, clumsy, like a child learning to write.

What made those people in the Middle East choose right-to-left for their alphabet? What kind of Jews are these Israelis?

Jackie Brendel will know, but who wants to get mixed up with the Jewish Question?

He packs up the documents and puts his raincoat on. At the liquor store near the subway he buys a fresh supply of Jack Daniels. His hands fondle the bottles and the papers.

His bladder has calmed down. For now.

EVERY DETECTIVE insists that there is a tendril binding all the clues together, and even if it is merely the product of their contemplations, they spread out the net and do anything they can to declare that they have fished out a meaning.

But Lenox believes that the clues he gathers enable him to track the human mind while it is still bubbling, zigzagging among the fragments of its past and future acts. Lenox walks softly through the thicket, stealthily approaching the unknown land, an estate anyone can claim. He patiently awaits the right explanation, the one and only possibility—yet he does not reject all the others.

HE FALLS asleep at the kitchen table, covered with a mound of clues.

Someone is throwing water in your face, Simon T. It’s washing away the traces. How will you find the way to the island, White Raven?

When Lenox wakes himself, he finds his clothes drenched. For a moment he thinks he has wet himself like a baby, but it’s only sweat.

He plunges onto his bed, his whole body aching from the javelins.

VISIONS.

His grandmother claimed they were flashes of the past or the future, encoded messages sent by the spirits. Unexpected images that come in dreams or hallucinations, during sickness or intoxication.

Perhaps that was the old woman’s way of justifying Lenox’s weakness for Jack Daniels. When he once shared a vision with her, she was ecstatic. First she celebrated the fact that her grandson, the man who had left the reservation without looking back and studied in the finest white institutes of education, was still graced with hidden powers. She viewed this as decisive proof that the river of time cannot sweep away ancient gifts.

But the visions contradict Lenox’s perception of himself as a rational, measured, reasoned man. At first he thought he might have “Korsakoff’s syndrome,” which makes people confabulate to compensate for their memory loss. Then he concluded it was a by-product of his overworked brain.

Is the event that occurred the complete opposite of the event that did not occur?

That’s a crock of shit, said the old woman.

As a last resort, he tried to explain to his grandmother how computer games work, but she dismissed him with a wave of the hand.

The earth is the same earth, White Raven; it is only the people who are different. Or at least they appear to be. And when the presence of prior incarnations is denied . . .

She sounded like a New Age preacher.

And don’t use my Indian name, he told her. Definitely not in public. They’ll come looking for my feathers and tomahawk.

JACKIE BRENDEL is reticent when people ask about her religion. It underscores the fact that she is the only Jew on the eighty-fourth floor of the North Tower. Lenox understands her. He also gets angry when his investigative talents are attributed to the heritage passed down from his forefathers.

The Jewish Question works as an accountant for the Secret Service. A busy bee, she sits hunched over her desk for long hours, surrounded by numbers and only rarely taking breaks. Her hair is dyed auburn. She has twice been named Most Valuable Employee.

Hey, Lenox, have you heard the latest one?

Lenox smiles.

What’s an anti-Semite?

Someone who hates Jews just a little more than necessary.

And what’s an Israeli?

Someone you can hate a little more than a Jew.

Lenox laughs. Of course he does.

Except for the occasional hello, they have never spoken. He ran into her twice at the coffee station where she was pouring muddy liquid out of the carafe very slowly, as if calculating how much she could take before being obliged to make a fresh pot for the other employees.

Lenox tries to catch her in the hallways, but she always slips away. Finally, he sends her an e-mail:

Dear Ms. Brendel,

I have willingly accepted a request from the State of Israel to help locate an Israeli citizen who entered the US legally and has not been seen since.

I would be very grateful if you would be kind enough to answer a few of my questions related to your people.

Yours sincerely,

Chief Inspector Simon T. Lenox

Senior Investigator, Missing Persons,

New York Police Department

Annexed to the Secret Service

From Lenox’s notepad:

After condensing the clues, what is left?

A Russian female cosmonaut. Duty Free. Night flight. Military duffle bag. Khaki underwear. Boydem Dark Side of the Moon. Hiking backpack. Javelin.

EVERY TIME he writes down a group of clues, the javelin annoyingly reappears.

IN THE second stage of his investigation, Lenox always experiences distress at the prospect of invading a stranger’s private domain, probing the miniscule habits and daily routines of a man he has no intimate connection with. Only later does he become aware of the percolating pleasure, the joy of voyeurism. To cleanse his conscience, Lenox pretends the subject is a fictional character whom he will never encounter face to face. But for some reason, this case does not surrender to the familiar pattern. No distress. No conscience. Not even any pleasure.

Lenox is suspended in a physical state somewhere between gas and liquid, while his feelers work hard to capture the true nature of the man he is looking for—the bone marrow that quivers inside the rigid formal uniform worn by a person when he goes out into the world. His offenses, the ways he repays those who mistreat him and sometimes spurns those who favor him. The strategies he employs to climb up the ladder. The fine threads of deceit, the fawning before supervisors, the deposit of resentments that amass into an impenetrable stratum.

Lenox is a lightening rod for weaknesses.

The nose pickers, the ball scratchers, the zit poppers, the hair pullers, the nail biters. The ones who hit, the ones who ogle at young girls, the child rapists, the incestuous. He has exposed them all during his career. A river of Jack Daniels has flowed through the NYPD hallways.

Does the Israeli remember to put up the seat when he pees?

Lenox writes the question in his notepad.

JACKIE BRENDEL does not write back. Lenox stands at his computer angrily and types:

Dear Ms. Brendel,

In using the term “your people,” I had no intention of casting doubts, heaven forbid, on your absolute loyalty to our country.

Yours,

S. T. L.

Simon T. Lenox has always been able to figure out the reason for a person going missing early on in his investigation. The spectrum of human motives is fairly limited: jealousy, narrow-mindedness, revenge, fear. None of these fit this case.

Assuming the Israelis are not keeping some essential piece of information from him, the subject has no enemies, no debts, no criminal involvement; he is not a foreign agent, not under the influence of medications, not depressed, and not suicidal.

Not, not, not.

But there must be something that he is.

The questions melt in Lenox’s boiling brain. He can barely observe his own condition.

Perhaps, unwittingly, Lenox is not conducting a search but a hunt. His request to publish the missing man’s picture in the press and put him on the front page of the missing persons’ site was met with firm refusal from the commissioner. As was the suggestion to offer a monetary reward for information. If only he knew why this Israeli was not being treated like other missing persons.

They look out at him from the website, rows and rows of faces. An innocent web surfer would think he’d come across a family photo album. Their digital eyes flicker on the screen. No desperation or pleading. Those are reserved for the circle of loved ones waiting in torment. Lenox does not bother to ask for updates anymore.

Which of these people will never be found?

IF THERE is a son—that must mean there was a wife.

A wife, however, is no guarantee of sons.

Lenox’s second wife told him: You don’t deserve it. His third wife blamed his faulty sperm. And the first wife? What, if anything, did she say?

Dear Inspector Lenox,

I have never been to Israel, and not all citizens of the state are Jewish.

Respectfully,

Jacqueline Winona Brendel

Chief Accountant, Secret Service

ALTHOUGH HE could easily look online, Simon T. Lenox chooses to open up an atlas he finds in the Secret Service storeroom, where they pile up the books no one uses anymore.

The atlas is dusty. Hasn’t been opened for years. Outdated geographical boundaries stretch over the pages’ inner hinge, which is as loose as the perforation on a boarding pass. Lenox’s forefathers used to winter in one area and relocate in summer. Yet they viewed themselves not as nomads, but as dwellers of everyland.

Israel fits under his pinky finger. He swipes at the image as though it were a spill and instinctively licks his finger, expecting to taste blood.

His fingers start to walk. He surrounds the sea, passes wearily over Europe, plods through Asia, crosses the Bering Strait with two fingers, and goes down from Canada to the US border.

On a whim, he calls an outdoor gear store and gives them a description of the Israeli.

The young woman laughs: Have you lost your mind? Do you have any idea how many nature buffs we get in here?

Lenox insists. He can fax a photograph over—maybe someone will remember.

He hears her mutter: Some asshole is posing as a cop. She hangs up.

Simon T. Lenox’s fingers are still on the map. America is between his thumb and his pinky, and the continent sprawls beyond his hand.

The fax chatters and spits out another affidavit. Lenox reaches for it with one hand while his pinky finger remains in the atlas, blindly probing for the estimated location of Israel.

I HAVEN’T seen Dad since my grandfather’s funeral.

That is what the missing man’s son said.

And it hasn’t occurred to the fucking Israelis to tell him this until now?! What were they thinking? Are they trying to manipulate an American detective the way they maneuver the whole world? Lenox refuses to be their pawn. He’ll close the case and be done with it. They can go find their lost son themselves.

He hurls the atlas onto the windowsill. The drops outside tremble from the impact, but quickly resume their course.

Fuck you, Isra—

HE SIPS his Jack Daniels and slowly calms down.

Orphanhood.

The javelin that slowly slices, scalping away the last remaining trace of childhood.

Here is a logical explanation: the Israeli is removing his grieving self from his familiar environment. He is going far away, somewhere where he will not be consoled, where no one will sympathize and pat his shoulder and utter clichés about having to be strong and how the show must go on.

Lenox’s grandmother said: The dead are always following you. Indians are excellent trackers in their next lives, too.

He corrected her: in their deaths.

He had cultivated his characteristic expression when he was a child, and it really was a very effective way to disguise intent. Lenox even insulted his grandmother under the guise of politeness. Folklore is a business for old ladies on the reservation, not for a citizen of the New World. We’ve crossed into the next millennium, and despite all the fanciful prophecies of doom, the world continues to suffer the usual calamities. The same endless bickering. Always us against them. Yawn.

And the world record goes to the Israelis. Addicted to their tedious quarrel. They and their neighbors were offered a chance to put down their weapons, but they missed it.

Fuck them all.

Before the police arrived, the missing man’s son assumed his father had shut himself away in his home for the duration of the bereavement period. The discovery that he had left the country without observing the custom of shiva horrified him. He found it hard to believe that his father could trample Jewish tradition so crudely. He accused the police detective of provocation, and the poor man had to swear on his children’s lives that the father had really left Israel the night after the funeral. The son made a point of noting how sacred he himself held the customs, and talked emotionally of how he had gathered his friends from the yeshiva in Jerusalem to say prayers for his late grandfather’s soul.

If a person dies without leaving enough relatives, the newly religious grandson explained to the secular investigators, people could be paid to say Kaddish over him.

Lenox scatters question marks over the document: shiva, Kaddish—terms vaguely familiar to any New Yorker, but what is their significance for members of the map-stain nation?

The son had called his father a few times after the funeral, but naïvely assumed he had disconnected his phone for the mourning period. As a rule, they did not speak often. Ever since he became a ba’al teshuva.

The Israelis haven’t bothered to explain this term either, and Lennox circles it.

He’s given up on Jackie Brendel. What is that Jewish woman afraid of? That he’ll plunder her precious faith? Why would anyone want to join up with the Jews anyway? Chosen people my ass.

At that very moment, a note is slipped under the door. Simon T. Lenox is in no rush to pick it up, feeling tired and troubled by his bladder.

Dear Inspector Lenox,

All Jews are responsible for one another.

Yours,

Jackie Winona Brendel

He sits there pondering, rolling the bottle between his hands without taking a drink.

Does this mean they have some sort of fraternity? Or has Israel become a closed enclave where no stranger can set foot? What is it about this map-stain nation that has it ruffling feathers all over the world for more than half a century? Other states barely get a mention on the evening news, even when they are the sites of massacres. Maybe the Jews themselves are not yet accustomed to having their own sovereign entity, and they’re still trying to lodge it in the world’s consciousness.

Lenox puts off a trip to the bathroom. His bladder is ringing false alarms anyway.

THE SON felt that his father wanted to be left alone at the cemetery, and he recalled watching him hunch over the grave, his pants cuffs getting dirty.

There is nothing odd about that. Every person has his or her own way of saying good-bye.

The missing man placed small stones on the dry clods of earth while his son stood nearby, hidden from view, watching as his father demonstratively removed his yarmulke and put it in his pocket. The last of the mourners had left and the son lingered, swallowed his pride, and approached his father. He wanted to get through to him.

Dad, he who does not obey the ancient laws will be punished.

Stop reciting slogans, son, the man replied. Look at us. I’m the older one—running ahead, and you, the younger one—you’re going in the opposite direction.

Unable to avoid a graveside argument, the son declared that the Jewish faith was eternal and had no backwards or forwards.

Something seems to be clearing in Lenox’s mind.

The father said: I feel sorry for you, my child.

Child. As if he had not been through his own journey of learning.

The missing man dug through his pockets. For a moment the son hoped his father had changed his mind and was looking for his yarmulke, but instead he pulled out a crumpled piece of rolled-up paper and said: This is our property. Granddad left us an inheritance.

When he held out the paper, the son turned his back. Now he regrets that, he told the investigator. At the time he thought it was blasphemous to speak of an inheritance at the newly dug grave. Desecration of the dead.

He could still hear the echo of the body sliding into the grave.

Lenox reads this over and over again, to make sure there is no mistake. The body—into the grave? But where was the coffin?

Dear Ms. Brendel,

Why not, “All humans are responsible for one another”?

Yours,

S. T. L.

LENOX THINKS back to the only Jewish funeral he ever attended, at the elegant funeral home on the Upper West Side. The commissioner himself eulogized the deceased—a senior fraud investigator who died of a heart attack in the middle of the second act at a Broadway show. He enumerated the man’s virtues in great detail, elevating his stature to sublime levels, while the mourners shifted uncomfortably in their seats facing the coffin.

Lenox represented the unit. Wearing his smart suit, the one that always hangs in his room for court appearances, he placed a wreath of red carnations, ordered specially, on the dais. He noticed the dissonance immediately, and later learned that Jews do not bring flowers to a funeral. He felt misled. To relieve the boredom of the eulogies, he stared at the coffin and considered its composition: restrained elegance, no superfluous copper or velvet adornments. Fine oak. The decay would take years.

He was relieved to find the coffin closed. He would not have to stand over the dead man’s face, and his breath and droplets of saliva would not descend with the coffin into the earth as a promissory note, a reminder that Lenox too would one day arrive in that same nameless no-place. He wondered for a moment whether the Jew was wearing his finest suit and a pair of shoes cobbled especially, as was the Italian custom.

A sealed coffin. How convenient.

Lenox, accustomed to seeing butchered bodies, prefers not to look at natural death straight on. He didn’t even go to his grandmother’s funeral.

He doesn’t remember who instructed him to press the widow’s hand and murmur, “You should have no more sorrow.” A ludicrous phrase. After all, if there is one thing in the world that is not only probable but certain, it is sorrow.

Jews haggle with the future, using idioms passed down from generation to generation like whispered spells that have lost all power, although they refuse to admit it.

As ordered by the commissioner, Lenox accompanied the convoy to the Jewish cemetery in Queens. The coffin was gently lowered into the grave without a sound. The dead man vanished with no exposed face frozen in death, no expression of relief or torment, no outline of the body that once was. No unnecessary sounds that keep echoing out.

But in Israel they put the dead person straight into the earth, like a burden to be gotten rid of.

YOU WILL have sorrow and your children will have sorrow and your children’s children will have sorrow.

Lenox, though, being childless, will be spared the sorrow.

There will be no one to have sorrow after him.

Perhaps that would be his consolation, were he to allow himself to wallow in self-pity. It’s a good thing he is not one of those naïve people who beg for life to stop moving after they are gone. The way he sees it, any remnants of grief are tossed into the grave, with or without a coffin, and that’s that. As though they never existed. As far as Lenox is concerned, it would be best to have no mourning at all.

Reconstructing that Jewish funeral, he suddenly recalls Jackie Brendel’s presence at the Queens cemetery, like a detail swallowed up in the investigation that now suddenly emerges, surrounded with a soft halo. He remembers her standing outside the circle.

Which of his wives did she remind him of . . .

When Lenox starts pacing, with his notepad between his teeth, his colleagues beyond the partitions always know he’s reaching the critical stage of an investigation.

PROFILE OF an Israeli. Intermediary Report:

Frenetic. Control freak. Delusions of invincibility. What happened will not happen again. Charges ahead.

How come these Israelis never get tired? Or perhaps in this case the tables have turned, and it is the javelin that is launching the thrower.

Simon T. Lenox waits for a signal, like a buffalo who senses a hunter closing in on him, weapon aimed, yet still the beast does not move.

He murmurs the missing man’s name for the first time: Liam Emanuel. It sounds foreign. And yet . . .

WHY THE javelin throw? A sport so devoid of glory. Lenox pounces at the computer and sucks out data. The challenge is to throw the javelin in mid-sprint, since even the slightest deceleration will slow the spear’s velocity and result in a huge waste of effort.

If only he knew what the destination was. Deep down, he admires Liam Emanuel for pushing his own limits, as though he has trained for this race his whole life. From whom was the Israeli expecting applause?

Lenox paces up and down the hallways, reading and rereading the printout, tempted to put his own body to the test, even if his colleagues scoff at his clumsy movements.

His body is ungainly. His belly folds over his belt, and the flesh on his arms is flabby. It’s a pity he never joined the cult of physical fitness worshippers. If he tries to throw a javelin he might end up hitting someone behind him.

A legal throw must be over the shoulder or the upper arm, he reads out loud. The thrower may not turn his or her back on the direction of the throw, and in order for the throw to count, the javelin’s tip must penetrate the ground and leave a mark.

He is suddenly visited by an image: A blazing javelin soars toward the window, aiming its fiery tip right at him.

In his new office, Simon T. Lenox flinches and almost falls, then bursts into laughter that makes the windows shudder. Hallucinations! How he mocked his grandmother for them. Once he told her she had a Jewish disease—and he didn’t want to catch it.

Jackie Brendel is stingy with her information. Keeping her cards close to her chest. Maybe that is the common thread linking the Jewish source with its Mediterranean offshoots.

Still, there is something charming about this woman, though he has never been willing to admit it before.

LENOX SPENDS the day studying the marginal sport.

In the “American grip,” the javelin is held diagonally along the crease of the palm, with the pinky finger and thumb wrapped around the top and bottom, and the three remaining fingers gripping the cord.

Complicated? No more than a manual for a DVD player or a newfangled washing machine, which manages to obfuscate even the simplest tasks.

Is there an “Israeli grip”? He has already learned that the Israelis never settle for what already exists, always feeling the need to reinvent the wheel.

The person who notified the police of Liam Emanuel’s disappearance was his ex-wife, who had not loosened her grip even after they were formally separated. Here is the key to the mystery: she probably wanted to make sure she wouldn’t be left out of the inheritance, that her former partner wouldn’t make off with a treasure. Greed—the most common motive for all crimes and misdemeanors. Why would he have thought the map-stain nation’s members were any different?

Intermediary Conclusion: Liam Emanuel turned his apartment upside down because he was looking for his father’s will.

Before he shuts down the computer, Lenox writes:

Dear Ms. Brendel,

Do you know what a boydem is?

He does not sign the message.

He’s not sure if the pressure in his groin is from his bladder or his erection.

PROFILE OF an Investigator. Final Conclusion:

Frenetic. Control freak. Delusions of invincibility. Charges ahead.

Just like the Israelis—a patently discomforting comparison.

He has to close this case, soon.

Lenox paces back and forth, biting his notepad. Behind his back they always gossip: it’s his Indian blood. They never say it out in the open, not wanting to be suspected of racism. For a moment, Lenox allows himself to take pleasure in the sweet pressure in his loins.

TAKING ADVANTAGE of Lenox’s trip to the coffee station, Jackie Brendel slips another note under his door. Her handwriting is less neat this time, and the letters wander onto the margins. She does not bother with polite openings.

A Jew is buried in a coffin in the Diaspora, but in Israel only the shrouds separate him from the earth.

There is no sign-off either.

How can she respond to a question he has not asked, and yet not answer the question he did ask?

AT THE end of the son’s affidavit there is something else. He quoted the last words Liam Emanuel told him at the cemetery. They were standing some distance apart. The son had started walking out on a different path than the one he entered on, since a person must not enter and leave a cemetery the same way. Liam Emanuel, scorning such superstition, demonstratively turned to leave the same way he came in. He shoved the crumpled paper into his pocket with his earth-stained hand.

And then he said something to his son.

A meaningless mumble, the Israeli investigator determined.

If only this were a different case . . .

THERE’S NOWHERE to go from here. He’ll have to call it quits. Even though the commissioner has finally eased up on him, and the Israelis in DC have stopped breathing down his neck too.

A miserable case. Who cares about a piece of real estate that some old Jewish guy once bought as an investment and left to his Israeli descendants? Is that all there is? Some drama!

Not at his age. Not in his position. He will not babysit a petty Israeli who won’t share his property with the other heirs. What sort of treasure are we talking about, anyway? Probably some moldy dump in Brooklyn or Queens. Big fucking deal. A real find. Liam Emanuel is holed up there, sitting on his Israeli ass downing Jack Daniels and laughing at everyone. You gotta admire the Israelis—wrapping the whole world around their little finger. The ex-wife managed to keep two governments—including one superpower—on their toes just so she could sink her teeth into a juicy piece of the pie. Inheritance squabble. That’s the whole story.

Lenox leans over the fax machine and feeds in his intermediary report. At least he’ll be spared having to identify the body.

Attn: Brig. Gen. Yoav Rosen-Vardi, Israel Police Attaché to the United States, Washington, DC

Re: Israeli Missing Person

Dear Sir,

Following a vigorous investigation into your case, I have found no evidence that the Israeli citizen Liam Emanuel is involved in any act of a criminal nature, or has fallen victim to a hostile plot. The earth has not swallowed him up. It would be more accurate to say that he is the one who has swallowed the earth.

I must therefore conclude that there is no justification for further involvement of US law authorities. Your missing person wishes to enjoy the fruits of an investment in an American asset. I advise notifying any of his relatives who may still be concerned about his well-being that the evidence points to a person who acted lucidly, and, if I may be permitted, out of sound financial considerations. Your man is not mixed up in anything un-kosher.

Kosher. Finally a Jewish word. Lenox has such fun typing it.

IN THE dimness that is never completely dark, Lenox places his report on the commissioner’s desk. Manhattan glows outside the windows. An arrowlike city shining bright. For Lenox, it is an unimpeachable place, although he has always been reluctant to award it the overwrought title of “home.” His eyes have stopped taking in its beauty. He has grown accustomed to it, as one does to a pair of tattered slippers. An island bought for twenty-four dollars from Indians. His naïve forefathers. He wouldn’t have walked into that trap.

He gives his tower’s southern twin a farewell glance. A French tightrope walker once tiptoed over a cable strung between the two towers. Twelve mountain climbers have scaled their walls. Three parachuted down safely, and George Willig was arrested and fined one cent for each of the hundred floors he climbed.

Lenox permits himself a moment of sentimentality at the sight of this urban evergreen forest in its seductive packaging. The spirits of hunters and herds of buffalo and coyotes, assuming they exist, are now roaming the mazes erected by white people in an island of rock. The Israeli, who is not his at all, was not swallowed up by the earth; he probably wanted to be buried in a coffin rather than thrown straight into a grave.

A barbaric custom. There’s no understanding them. Israelis, Jews, same thing. As far as Lenox is concerned, the affair is over.

The Israeli’s photograph, still perched on the stack of paperwork, reflects the Manhattan glow. His narrowed eyes seem to be winking.

Bye-bye, you Israeli fucker.

A QUICK nod at the night watchman, and Lenox is out on Fulton Street, corner of Greenwich. Flooded with relief, he skips the subway station and decides to walk uptown.

Pain in the ass of a nation. With their ancient death cults. After all, the solution to the mystery is always less complicated than one thinks. You have to look at the first circle of acquaintances, because the harasser is almost always someone who knew the victim. But Lenox hasn’t exposed a perpetrator in this case—only the missing man’s well-wishers who were suffocating him under the pretext of concern.

Digging through his coat pocket for his jangling bunch of keys, he finds a note from Jackie Brendel. When did she sneak that in? He angrily unfolds the paper and reads under the light that glows from the Towers.

A boydem, the Jewish woman wrote, is a hidden opening. A place of shelter inside a house. A Yiddish term that made its way into Hebrew.

The letters start to bleed in the rain and Lenox has to huddle close to the building to read the rest of the note.

At times of trouble, one can seek refuge there.

WHAT IS she talking about? Refuge from what? There was no apparent threat.

Lenox himself is starting to toy with the idea of disappearing. When you disappear, no one has any idea what you’re doing, and you are free to navigate beyond the awareness of those who would encircle you. What is there to bind Lenox to his present existence except the shackles of habit? His time card, a handful of friends as worn out as he is, and the occasional fuck. The familiar stomping grounds of life. Even his youthful yearning to bring about revolution is no more than a feeble flicker when he awakes, and it quickly fades into daily routine. How tempting to just cut away. To run and throw the javelin at the same time. On the empty streets of Lower Manhattan, Simon T. Lenox practices. He doesn’t get very far from the Twin Towers before he starts panting. He tries to gain momentum, reciting the rules:

The javelin must be gripped above the ear, higher than the head, with the tip aimed forwards and tilted down. The most common mistake is to swerve before letting go, which makes the javelin miss its target.

Who would eventually notify the authorities of his disappearance?

Who gives a fuck.

The advantage of not having an inner circle is the freedom to act without guilt. He mustn’t become a cliché. If there’s one thing Lenox has learned from the Israeli, it is that.

The end of this case also means no more dealings with Jackie Brendel and her impenetrable gibberish. Why does he feel as if the Jewish woman is rebuking him? He did everything by the book, he wasn’t sloppy, and he reached his conclusions honestly and unbiasedly. The Israeli is alive and well, either here or somewhere else. Let’s respect his choice and leave him alone.

Lenox holds the note out and lets the rain soak it. Jackie Brendel’s words melt away. He balls up the soggy mess and launches it overhand at the Hudson, without knowing whether or not it hits the target. The dark waters lap at Manhattan. According to the official definition, it isn’t even a river, because it is deeper than the body of water into which it flows.

THE RUN did him well. Lenox can’t resist calling the commissioner at home to announce that he’s cracked the case. Beneath the façade of praise, the commissioner is clearly annoyed, perhaps by the invasion of his privacy. The conversation does not go as planned. Lenox is left with a bad taste in his mouth. Maybe Jackie Brendel is meddling behind the scenes, trying to get ahead at his expense. Even if there are still a few unanswered questions, the final conclusion is unaltered. The Israeli has come to no harm, and if he alienated his relatives and left home slamming the door behind him, that is no business for the authorities.

Jack Daniels is an excellent cure for doubt, but the shops are closed. Maybe he did not study all the data properly and unwittingly went off track. Perhaps he should have, from the start, sailed backwards along all the branches of the winding generational path, and kept rowing towards what came before what came before. Liam Emanuel and his son. And the late grandfather. He had died of natural causes and been given a proper funeral. Why should Lenox be expected to go back to the intersection at which the Jews and the Israelis parted ways?

Lenox’s grandmother had a long-standing allegation: Your father’s bones were never removed from the ground for a final burial, as is the tribal custom. She attributed the failure of Lenox’s three marriages to his having prevented his father’s entry into the eternal hunting ground.

Out of respect for the old lady, Lenox made do with gentle mockery: American—that’s what he was. If he were to yield to superstition, he would be undermining the ideal of one nation. He sounded like a politician on the stump. Still, he asked her not to downplay his accomplishments: a satisfactory albeit not glowing career, imminent retirement with a comfortable pension. He had achieved all this through his own hard work, without any special favors or affirmative action.

It’s just old age that attacks them and makes them slaves to nostalgia. His grandmother never got used to life outside the reservation. She demanded that he find shamans for her, even in Manhattan, and wasted her money on witch doctors who promised to help her communicate with the spirits. Toward the end, she was so disoriented that she stopped speaking English and mumbled in an indecipherable language. Yet still she demanded—though it wasn’t clear from whom—reparation.

Lenox’s Indian grandmother and the missing man’s Jewish grandfather. That could have been quite a shidduch.

Shidduch. Another Jewish word.

Matchmaking for the dead—a flourishing industry. A genetic admixture that could spur the spirits of the races, or the nations, or whatever they are.

All people are responsible for one another. The only phrase that will survive this case for him. That’s what he should have written on his application for the police academy when asked why he wanted a law enforcement career.

Lenox tries to hail a cab, but because of the rain they all pass by without stopping. Having no choice, he makes his way on foot, his muscles weary from running. From time to time he stops to wipe the rain off his face.

ARE YOU the officer, Mister?

Yes.

Did you call yesterday? Looking for someone?

Lenox rattles the cell phone to get better reception, and identifies himself in his most authoritative voice.

Your guy was just here. I think. I’m almost sure.

Where?

In our store. Outdoor gear. He talked with the sales girl.

Are you certain?

He had an accent. You thought he was an Arab, right Keisha?

A female giggle is heard in the background.

Where did he say he was going, Keisha? You helped him. Tell the cop, Keisha. Hey, Mister, is there a reward?

The young woman in the background tries to backtrack. She’s not even sure it was the right guy. She didn’t want to get the cops involved. Why go looking for trouble? But the chance of a reward . . . Maybe the grateful family would contribute a few bucks?

They giggle again. Lenox suspects they’re playing him. The caller does not answer his detailed questions about an athletic build or stubble. He only insists that the man was Israeli, in contrast to Keisha’s opinion. The two argue but eventually reach an agreement: You can smell Israelis a mile away. They always drive you crazy, turning the merchandise over and over without ever buying anything. Except this guy did, and he paid cash.

What did my Israeli buy? Lenox asks.

Only tomorrow morning will he consider the fact that he has appropriated the Israeli. At this moment he is simply aware of the tension building in his muscles as he awaits the answer.

A map and a raincoat, says Keisha. Jesus, I was so sure he was an Arab.

The line goes dead.

LET GO, Simon T. Let the man wallow in his anonymity. His reconstructed, recycled life is not your own life returned to you. The Israeli is merely movement in space, something that passed over your head and vanished. Let go, Simon T. Do not give in to the romantic notions about the traces a man leaves behind merely by being present. You are only the audience in this race, and you didn’t even pay a dime to watch it.

The Israeli case is closed, just as it was before you crudely stepped into it. After all, you can’t expect thanks from Liam Emanuel, and don’t be tempted to believe you are his savior, from others or from himself. The sense of intimacy between you and him is inevitable, and all too familiar from other cases. You already know it’s a false intimacy. If you met him face to face, you would be complete strangers to one another. He would scoff, and rightly so: What do we have to do with each other?

And let’s say he was from a different nation—would you dare trespass his borders for your own needs, like you’re doing now? French, for example. Or Hungarian. Is it only because he is Jewish, or Israeli, that his borders are a free-for-all? And is the solid evidence of him being alive not enough to halt your voyeuristic desires? Or maybe that’s a side effect of the bladder problems.

Let go, Simon T. Give this man a final burial, as is the tribal custom.

Your bones mean nothing to him either. It’s best to stick with mutual ignorance.

Boydem. Boydem. Boydem.

A foreign word taps to the beat of the raindrops. The sky is pierced with holes. It’s a pity Lenox didn’t become a doctor, like his grandmother wanted him to. Then he could have diagnosed an enlarged prostate and recommended emergency surgery.

As a child on the reservation, the old lady told him an ancient Indian version of the creation myth, whereby the Raven pissed out the world.

A boydem inheritance. A road map. A raincoat. A patrimony.

This is our pastpresent, the missing man murmured on his father’s grave as he clutched the property title. And Lenox, an experienced detective, had walked into the trap and accepted the Israeli investigator’s opinion that it was just a meaningless mumble.

Or maybe he said presentpast . . . How had that detail escaped him?

Lenox walks out in front of a taxi and waves his arms dramatically. He tells the driver to hurry to the outdoor gear store. When they arrive, he hands over a fifty-dollar bill and rushes to the glass door. The store is closed, but he spots employees inside, locking up the cash registers and arranging merchandise in piles. Lenox holds his badge up to the glass and bangs.

When he is let inside, he finds Keisha standing meekly behind a stack of discounted sleeping bags. She is no longer giggling. She just keeps saying, “I dunno,” and glaring at the young man who made the stupid mistake of calling the police.

Lenox adopts a friendly demeanor and tries to get them to talk.

Sneakers?

They don’t remember.

Backpack?

Maybe.

Stubble?

Shrug.

Finally Keisha mutters: Poor guy forgot to take his change. I ran after him. Didn’t want him saying I was a cheat.

She got so wet. It was stupid. Chasing after a stranger in the rain to give him back three miserable bucks. She caught up with him just as he was starting his car. Dumbass. He could have put on the raincoat he just bought. She’d tried to sell him an umbrella. But he’d said: I don’t mind getting wet in the waterfall. Thundering water, that’s all it is.

His car was parked just outside the store, further proof that he wasn’t from around here, because every local knows that’s a gamble. They’ll slap you with an $85 fine and another $125 for towing. They get away with murder.

Such profligate use of the word, Lenox thinks. That is something only people who don’t have to spend their lives looking at butchered bodies can afford to say.

The car model—do you remember by any chance, Keisha?

With that tone, biting yet gentle, he had won over three women.

Off-road, Keisha says. Four by four. Jeep Cherokee. Olive green. Her favorite color.

The customer had a foreign accent. When she found him outside, he told her to keep the change.

She answered: And you keep dry.

The stranger smiled at her. The jeep door was wide open and the seat was soaked from the rain.

Then he added: Everything that could have happened has already happened.

An illogical sentence. Certainly not the usual way of hitting on a woman.

Picking up a spark in Keisha’s eyes, Lenox becomes aware of a twinge in his lower body. Was this young black girl tempted to leave it all behind for the promise of an olive green Cherokee?

After me, the flood.

Who said that? Lenox asks.

Keisha recoils. Lost her confidence all of a sudden. Maybe she got confused and it was actually Before me, the flood.

Who said that? Lenox insists.

I don’t know. It’s an expression, isn’t it?

She looks in vain for support from the young man, who has joined them, but he is impatient, rushing her to close up the store. She ignores him and turns her dark, warm doe’s eyes back to Lenox.

Is this guy important to you, Officer?

Lenox nods his head involuntarily. His muscles tense up again. Keisha’s giggle is back too. Nervous, yet full of charm.

You and him look alike. You related?

The young man turns off the lights in the store, and the three of them feel their way out in the dark, past the blinking alarm light.

IN HIS mind Lenox sets up a matchmaking business. An old dead Jewish Israeli and an old dead Native American wade through the mist, and Lenox records their negotiations in his notepad.

The Raven is the Creator, says the dead Indian woman. He is the one who pissed out the world.

And why should he create a world? asks the dead Jewish man to get the conversation going.

Out of boredom, the dead woman answers. His wife was badgering him—she was sick of living in the void.

The Great Spirit, the one responsible for the match, follows the disputation closely from up high.

LENOX’S GRANDMOTHER always insisted that when he was a child, she told him all the ancient secrets. He remembers nothing. Murder stories were far more interesting to him than native folklore.

She lay on her deathbed in a Jewish nursing home in Riverdale, in the Bronx. A lone Indian among Jews. He got her a room there through his connections with the commissioner. If you have to die, then do it in good company. Jews die gracefully. They leave the world without protest. Whereas Israelis—judging by this missing-person case—go out kicking and screaming, hoping their departure will arouse waves of remorse.

Bullshit! There should be equal law for Israelis. Lenox is unwilling to attribute any special virtues to them, in life or in death. Were he the celestial matchmaker, he would advise the deceased couple to find some common interests. They could rattle their bones, gossip about who has been taken out of his grave, who’s coming up soon, and who’s going down. For his grandmother, a final burial is the only way to get to the eternal hunting ground. But on this point, the match is doomed. The dead Jewish man will be horrified by the desecration of graves.

Lenox’s grandmother did not give an inch even when she was fading into complete delirium. Drugged up and dying, she still would not let go. A pathetic grip. Or perhaps it was extraordinarily brave?

Right before the end, Lenox was called to the nursing home. He stood under the Star of David engraved above the front door, clutching a few tobacco leaves in his fist. If his dying grandmother could have seen him observe the ancient Indian custom, she would have been pleased. Hearing everyone around her speak Yiddish, he wished he had tried harder to find her a more suitable place. But at least he made sure she got a room with a view of the Hudson.

He walked into her room with the nurse close behind him. His grandmother’s body was emaciated. Only her hands remained fleshy and pink like a girl’s.

Simon T., my White Raven, she murmured, looking out at the river through the window.

He gave instructions for her burial and never went back. Thirty days later he received a FedEx package from the Hebrew Home for the Aged. Inside were her false teeth. But where was her pipe? He meant to send a letter demanding a thorough search, but it slipped his mind. It was just a beat-up smoking tool.

She had also owned a faded belt, which was once embroidered with colorful beads. Lenox told them to throw it out. Later, he vaguely remembered that his grandmother had called it a “wampum belt.”

White Raven, she called him before the end.

Simon T. Lenox refuses to believe in a world excreted or a Creator unable to control his sphincters.

FULLY CLOTHED, he steps into the shower and turns on the faucet at full power. The scalding flow washes away the late-summer sediments, and Lenox allows the water to untie the knots in his muscles. He drops his clothes on the wet floor, where they block the drain, and the small cubicle starts to overflow. He thinks he might have peed, but the temperature blurs the difference between the fluids.

He doesn’t hear the phone chirping in his coat pocket. Only when he steps out of the steaming shower and enfolds himself in a fragrant towel does he see the screen: New Voicemail from Unknown Number.

INSPECTOR LENOX? It’s me, Keisha. From the outdoor gear store. I remembered something. Sorry if I’m making you crazy, ’cause this might just be nothing. Even though it’s none of my business, and I don’t even know what the guy’s called, the one who bought a ten-dollar raincoat and a map of New York. But I’m telling you, Inspector Lenox, if that asshole did something bad, then he deserves to be punished, and I don’t want him to get away, ’cause we can’t always recognize the assholes when they look like good guys. I knew this dude once with a sweet baby face, and then it turned out he was into hitting women with a baseball bat. So if this guy of yours is not what he looks like, and even if I’m wrong and he’s just your long lost brother, then I just want you to know that when I said his Cherokee was olive green, he laughed. He said he couldn’t tell ’cause he’s color-blind. That’s some kind of disease, isn’t it?

A short giggle.

Beep.

WHAT A headache.

Lenox plans to take two painkillers and dive into a white slumber, free of dreams about dead people who’ll never find their shidduch. Tomorrow he’ll take the day off. That Israeli and his olive Cherokee can end up wherever they end up. He would call Keisha back now, but his battery’s dead and he’s too exhausted to recharge it. Huddled in his towel, Lenox leans on the wall and calculates the steps required to reach the nearest Jack Daniels, when his brain picks up a buzz at the door.

Why didn’t the doorman let him know someone was coming up? Maybe it’s a neighbor.

Lenox crouches, hoping to make himself vanish. This is not the time for borrowing an egg or coffee. His fridge is empty anyway. He wraps the towel, which feels less soft now, around his waist and looks through the peephole. For one mad second he expects to see his Israeli.

At first he doesn’t recognize her. She stands there erect and tense, like a school girl sent to collect donations for the Salvation Army, her auburn head bowed.

A woman at the door.

A strange woman at the door.

A Jewish woman . . .

When she reaches out and raps on the door with her knuckles, Lenox finally opens it and realizes he doesn’t know what to call her.

JACKIE. JUST Jackie.

Why are you here?

To help you.

Lenox remembers his manners, but he can’t shake her hand because of the towel. Clumsily, aware of his bare private parts under the fabric, he chatters meaninglessly.

But you wrote Jacqueline on the note.

My mother adored Jackie Kennedy.

And your middle name? Winona? It doesn’t sound Jewish.

He’s rusty. Completely forgotten how to engage in flirtatious small talk.

But Jackie Brendel ignores the question and walks in.

It doesn’t occur to Lenox to ask why she has an Indian middle name.

SHE SITS down at the kitchen table and starts speaking in Yiddish.

Es hot zich oysgelozt a boydem! Nothing will come of this.

Oyf a boydem is a yarid! Much ado about nothing.

Boydem klots! They have nothing to do with each other.

Zogn boydem! A bunch of hokey.

Shlepen di ku in boydem aroyf! Treading water.

An odd language. The code of dead Jews. Moses Brendel was the one who passed down the secret Jewish language’s finer points to his daughter. The only thing to make its way into Hebrew was boydem.

And what remains of the lost Indian languages? Lenox wonders as he listens to the Jewish woman’s soft voice scattering its warmth through his empty space. She turns down the Jack Daniels, and he feels uncomfortable drinking in her presence. They are trapped in forced intimacy, separated only by the towel.

Aren’t you writing this down? Jackie asks urgently, as though offloading a burden.

A boydem is a narrow, elevated space, usually above the bathroom ceiling, where Israelis keep old items they don’t use anymore. It’s also where the hot water tank is often housed. Boydem: a wasted overhead space that gathers mildew. Boydem: an excellent hiding place.

So said Moses Brendel, from his resting place in the Hebrew Home for the Aged in Riverdale.

Why do Israelis need a boydem?

How many Israelis can fit in one boydem?

What dangers might impel an Israeli to seek refuge in a boydem?

Where could Simon T. Lenox hide in times of danger?

Boydem: a fascinating conversation topic, notes the matchmaker who watches impossible shidduchs between dead people.

Boydem: foreplay.

THAT IS what Lenox wrote in his notepad afterwards.

JACKIE BRENDEL gets rid of her remaining cargo:

In Israel, they don’t have basements or attics like they do in Europe or America. In the Middle East, there are no wide expanses to spread above houses or burrow beneath them. Moses Brendel visited Israel as a tourist only once, and his daughter has no intention of going there. She buys Israel Bonds, and that’s enough. Fifty dollars a year. It’s tax deductible, and will eventually be repaid with two-percent interest. Not a bad investment, her accountant says. Jewish. Of course he’s Jewish.

The room goes silent, and the two inhabitants consider various options for advancing the conversation. Finally Lenox gets up, remembering to tighten the towel around his dangling parts, and floats a hypothesis:

Maybe Israel is the Jews’ boydem?

The tension instantly shifts and dissipates. Jackie Brendel promises that next time she visits the nursing home, she will ask her father, a German refugee, to translate that phrase into Yiddish for her, since it is a commonly accepted wisdom that Jewish humor gets lost in any other language.

Lenox is infected by her rolling laughter, as though they are accomplices in an impending crime.

God forbid. Sex is no crime.

HE CAN’T exactly call it “lovemaking,” yet he is reluctant to dismiss it as just a fuck. At first he recognized a blend of sadness and fear, followed by mutual thirst with perfect timing. He is unable to reconstruct the precise moment at which her clothes were removed. He, on the other hand, had only to drop his towel.

Perhaps because he was surprised, Lenox had trouble restraining himself, and when she straddled him and guided him inside her, gazing into his pupils from above, the semen suddenly burst out. Without making excuses, Lenox stared at it oozing out on the two of them and then pooling into a dimple.

He forgot about the Israeli. Until morning.

He lay there facing the window, staring at the crisp dawn. Perhaps this was how Liam Emanuel saw the world: gray on gray.

Affirmative action.

HALF-ASLEEP, HE drifts away on a flood of Jack Daniels, kneeling in a canoe, wearing shoes with nonskid soles. He tries to use a pair of javelins to row to a thicket of auburn facial stubble. The sky is clear, though he wears a raincoat with holes in it. He searches for his grandmother’s lost pipe. A defaced body floats down the current. Has the disaster already occurred, or is it about to happen? Perhaps it is a cyclical calamity? He cannot find land. He drops the oars and has to row with his hands. The pain is so intense, it’s as though they have been amputated.

When he opens his eyes he does not know whether he is lying on a bed of mud or on the indentation between Jackie’s shoulder and her breast, but he knows for sure that he has had this dream once before.

DON’T GO. Stay.

She begs him to let the Israeli man grieve alone. We have to respect his choice. So he’s mistreating his son, his ex, and the whole state of Israel. Who cares? If he wanted to commit suicide, he wouldn’t have bought a map and a raincoat. Let him lick his orphaned wounds, like animals who leave the pack to focus on their pain and then return. We should admire those who are willing to look finality straight on. He’s a big boy, the Israeli. He managed to shake off the herd of comforters with their repository of clichés. Their time will come.

Lenox is almost convinced, but as she talks, Jackie is already shoving spare underwear, a pair of jeans and balled up socks into the tiny suitcase under the bed. She stands on her tiptoes to reach a sweatshirt on the top shelf. He can’t remember which of his wives bought it for him; it was a rare show of sentimentality.

She moves through his space as though she had memorized the layout while he slept.

Now she holds his toothbrush as if she’s about to toss it to him. A faint odor rises from the bed sheets. He hasn’t brushed his teeth yet, and the taste of her orifices—salty mud—comes from his palate.

When he leaves the apartment, he will wonder if he remembered to put the toilet seat down.

ON THE morning after, the partners in sex recede into their fortresses to conduct their private post-mortems. He considers the breasts that made his blood surge, the thighs that kneaded his erection. From close up, at magnifying-glass range, the flesh appeared flawless. But distance allows a sober mutual examination. Jacqueline Winona Brendel is not particularly attractive. Her youth is long gone. Her wrinkled skin seems incongruous with her revelations of passion last night. Nor did she fail to notice Lenox’s flabby waist and the mound of his belly, whose outlines she licked up and down and across. On the morning after, there is an unseen presence between them. Perhaps the Israeli is the spirit that ties them together—a matchmaker of sorts.

As Jackie picks up last night’s towel to toss it in the laundry hamper, Lenox unzips the suitcase.

If he were Liam Emanuel, he would have gone back to pick up Keisha.

Happy ending. Headlines.

But there was something else that needed to be done.

On his way out, Lenox grabs the last document from the pile—the one he always keeps for the end. Standing at the door, he reads the résumé, while Jackie peers over his shoulder.

Liam Emanuel. Born: May, 1948, Tel-Aviv. The father, Mordecai Emanuel, is a Holocaust survivor from Manheim, Germany. The mother, Tzippora, a native of Tunisia, was killed in a motor accident when Liam was a child.

1967: Enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces, served as a soldier in the Six-Day War and the War of Attrition. Reached the rank of captain. As a reserve duty soldier, took part in the Yom Kippur War, the Lebanon War, and the First Intifada.

Graduate of the Theater Department at Tel-Aviv University.

Graduate of the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s cadet course.

Political activist. Candidate in the upcoming Knesset elections.

Divorced, father of one—a son, who became religious after traveling in the Far East.

Dry facts: born, lived, will die soon.

All the rest . . .

Life in a capsule.

JACKIE BRENDEL offers an alternative résumé: The missing man is the son of immigrants. Yearns for artistic expression. Possesses diplomatic skills. Ambitious. Seeks power. These milestones, she says, cannot be inscribed on any tombstone. She hands Lenox his suitcase.

At the bottom of the résumé it says:

Special identification markers: color-blindness.

Where are you going? she asks.

Jackie is already showered, dressed, and made up. No one in the North Tower will be able to guess where and how she spent the night.

After a slight hesitation, Lenox picks up the suitcase and answers: Niagara Falls.

SHE WALKS from Eighty-Seventh Street all the way to the World Trade Center. As she steps into the elevator, sweaty, her makeup smeared, she suddenly bursts into uncontrollable laughter. She’s never heard of someone inheriting a waterfall before.

The other elevator riders shrug their shoulders and keep staring at the numbers hypnotically. When the elevator stops at her floor she is lost in thought and doesn’t get out, and when it lurches again, her blood pitches too and she has a dizzy spell. She waits for the next stop, on the eighty-sixth floor, and gets out. On a whim, she starts walking down the stairs, rolling her laughter down in the darkness.

BEFORE LEAVING, he debated whether or not to take his gun. At first he put it in his belt, then moved it to a holster on his ankle. Eventually Jackie made the decision. Without saying a word, she took the gun and propped it among his bottles of Jack Daniels.

The fear was gone, he noted. Only the sadness remained.

BY THE time he gets to his car, he is furious at the Israeli.

You piece of chicken shit! Defector. Emotionally infantile. Is that what they taught you in your celebrated army? In your Middle East bazaar politics? In the theater you so admire? You ducked behind the curtain so you wouldn’t have to face the audience spitting at you. You couldn’t leave a note on the fridge? A pithy voicemail? Sorry, I’ve gone out. I won’t be back.

Trampling on bodies, that’s what you’re doing.

That is the real résumé, summed up in three words.