The Theatre - Kellerman, Jonathan

Were the two of them childless? Maybe that was why she looked so unhappy.

She'd gone into the kitchen and was drying dishes. He followed her in.

"What did you mean by 'never'?"

She turned around and faced him. She inhaled and her bosom heaved impressively. She noticed Shmeltzer looking at her and covered her chest with her dish towel.

What an interview, thought Shmeltzer. Very professional.

"My husband is in the hospital. I just got back from there. He's got cancer all over him-in the stomach and the liver and pancreas. The doctors say he's going to die soon. Weeks, not months."

"I'm sorry." What an inane thing to say. He'd hated it when others head said it to him. "How long has he been ill?"

"For a week," she snapped. "Does that give him a good enough alibi?"

"Gveret Schlesinger-"

"He told me the police suspected him-some Yemenite accused him of being a murderer. A few days later he had cancer!"

"No one accused him of anything, gveret. He's a material witness, that's all."

Eva Schlesinger looked at him and threw her dish down on the floor. She watched it shatter, then burst into tears, knelt, and started to pick up the pieces.

"Careful," said Shmeltzer, getting down beside her. "That's sharp-you'll cut your hands."

"I hope so!" she said and began grabbing at the shards quickly, automatically, like someone batch-sorting vegetables. Shmeltzer saw pinpoints of blood freckle her fingers, pulled her hands away, and brought her to her feet. He steered her to the sink, turned on the tap, and put the wounded fingers under the water. After a few seconds most of the bleeding stopped; only a few red bubbles persisted. Small cuts, nothing serious.

"Here," he said, tearing a piece of paper towel from a wall-mounted roll. "Squeeze this."

She nodded, complied, started crying again. He guided her into the living room, sat her down on the couch.

"Something to drink?" he said.

"No, thank you, I'm fine," she whispered between sobs, then realized what she'd said and started laughing. An unhealthy laugh. Hysterical.

Shmeltzer didn't know what to do, so he let her go on for a while, watching her alternate between tears and laughter, then finally growing silent and covering her face with her hands. She started to mutter, "Yaakov, Yaakov."

He waited, looked at the blood-speckled paper towel wrapped around her fingers, the view of the desert from the living room window. A good view, rocky crags and pinhole caves, but architecturally ths French Hill complex made no sense-towers on top of a mountain. Some developer bastard fucking up the skyline

"He had pain for years," said Eva Schlesinger. To Shmeltzer it sounded as if she were accusing him, blaming him for the pain. "He was always hungry-he ate like a wild animal, a human garbage disposal, but was never satisfied. Can you imagine what that felt like? They told him it was in his head."

"Doctors," commiserated Schmeltzer. "Most of them are jerks. How's your hand?"

She ignored the question, leaned her uninjured hand on the coffee table, and tossed out words like machine-gun bullets: "He tried to tell them, the fools, but they wouldn't listen. Instead they told him he was nuts, said he should see a psychiatrist-head doctors, they're the biggest nuts of all, right? What did he need them for? His stomach hurt, not his head. It's not normal to have pain like that. It doesn't make sense, does it?"

"Not at all-"

"All they want is to keep you waiting for hours, then pat you on the head and tell you it's your fault-as if he wanted the pain!" She stopped, pointed a finger at Shmeltzer. "He was no murderer!"

Shmeltzer saw the fire in her eyes. The bosom, moving as if imbued with a life of its own.

"Of course he wasn't-"

"Don't give me your double talk, Inspector! The police thought he was a murderer-they blamed him for the Arab girl. They killed him, put the cancer in him. Right after the Yemenite accused him, the pain started to get worse! What do you think of that? Nothing helped it-even food made it worse! He refused to go back and see more doctors. He was gritting his teeth and suffering in silence-the man's a rock, a shtarker. What he's been through in his life, I won't tell you-he could take the pain of ten men. But this was worse. At night he'd crawl out of bed-he had an iron constitution, could take anything, and this pain made him crawl! He'd crawl out and walk around the apartment groaning. It would wake me up and I'd go out and find him, crawling. Like an insect. If I went to him he screamed to me, told me to leave him alone-what could I do?"

She pounded her fist on the table, put her hands on her temples, and rocked.

Shmeltzer considered what to say and decided to say nothing.

"Such pain, it's not right, after what he'd been through. Then I saw the blood, from all ends-he was urinating it and coughing it up and spitting it. The life was flowing out of him." She unwrapped the paper towel, looked at it, and put it on the coffee table. "That's what happens to people-that's what happens to Jews. You live a good life, work hard; then you fall apart- everything comes out of you. We had no kids. I'm glad they're not here to see it."

"You're right," said Shmeltzer. "You're hundred percent right."

She stared at him, saw that he was serious, and started to cry again, pulling at her hair. Then she looked at him again, shook a fist.

"What the hell do you know! What am I doing talking to you!"

"Gveret-"

She shook her head no, got up from the couch, stood and took a step forward, catching her foot on a leg of the coffee table and reeling.

Shmeltzer moved quickly, catching her before she fell. He put his arms under her armpits and kept her upright. She reacted to the support by punching at him and cursing him, spraying him with saliva, then going all loose and limp, letting her arms fall to her sides. He felt her pressed against him, her soft bulk astonishingly light, like meringue. She buried her face in his shirtfront and cursed God.

They stood that way for a while, the woman sobbing in anticipation of widowhood. Shmeltzer holding her. Confused.

The gag cards on the wall of Fink's Bar were tacky, decided Wilbur. The kind of thing you'd see in a hick-town tavern, back in the States. Combine that with enough Wild Turkey and you could forget where you were. For a moment.

He picked up The Jerusalem Post, read the piece again, and took a sip of bourbon. Another scoop heard from.

He'd been on his vacation-ten days of R and R in Athens-when the murders story broke. The international Trib hadn't carried it-the first he'd heard of it was a page-two item in the Post he'd picked up on the plane back to Ben Gurion.

Like most foreign correspondents, he spoke no Hebrew or Arabic and depended upon native journalists for his information-the Post for the Jewish angle, the English edition of Al Fajr for the Arab side. Both were highly partisan, but that was okay; it spiced up his pieces. Anyway, it was either that or bird-dog the government spokesmen, and Israeli mouthpieces were cagey, paranoiac, always grooming themselves for victim status. Always worried someone was out to get them, invoking military censorship when they didn't want to deal with something.

The vacation had been a good one. He'd met up with an Italian photojournalist named Gina, a skinny, bleached-blond free-lance with an appetite for sauteed calamari and cocaine; they'd met on the beach, traded meaningful looks, puffed-up bios, and shared a line from a vial that she carried in her beach bag. She had a room in his hotel, checked out of it, and moved in with him, living off his expense account for a week and a half of fun and games, then woke him up early one morning with a blow-job and breakfast, left him eating dry toast as she tossed him a ciao and was out the door, back to Rome. Wild girl, not pretty, but adventurous. He hoped she hadn't given him a dose of anything.

He took another swallow of Turkey, motioned for a refill. Two murders-potential start of a serial. It just might play back home, the kind of thing the wire services sometimes went for. No doubt the Times men-New York and L.A.-had gotten hold of it, but they usually stayed away from crime stories, milked the political stuff, which was always in heavy supply. So maybe there was still something to work with.

Being out of the country when it broke bothered the Jimmy Olsen part of him, but after six months in Israel he'd needed the time off. The country was hyperkinetic; the pace could drive you crazy.

Stuff never stopped coming at you, but most of it was noise. Grabowsky had loved it-he was a certified information junkie, firing off pieces right and left, breaking productivity records before he'd ventured too far into the Bekaa and gotten his arm blown off. The day after he'd been certified a cripple, the wire service had called Wilbur in from Rio. Farewell to a beautiful assignment. A little boring-how much could you write about favelitos, generals, and sambas, and Mardi Gras was a once-a-year thing-but my, my, what a culture, white sand, all those women sashaying topless along Ipanema, caramel asses hanging out of G-string bikini bottoms.

After three fat years under the Brazilian sun, Manhattan seemed poisonous, unhealthily clamorous, a headache machine. Welcome home, Mark. Home. Backslapping and speeches from the boys in the New York office, kudos to old Grabowsky, drink to the one-armed Hemingway (could he, Wilbur wondered, learn to type with that prosthesis?), and keep the fire burning in the Holy Land, Mark. Rah, rah.

Not his style. He'd laid his Front Page fantasies to rest a long time ago, wanted to take things easy, enjoy life. The wrong man for the Israel bureau.

The pace.

A story that was milkable for a week anywhere else faded in a day here, crowded out by something new before the ink was dry. Crazy coalition government, had to be at least twenty political-parties-he was a long way from knowing all of them-constantly taking shots at one another, clawing for little smidgens of power. Knesset meetings turned invariably to shouting matches; last week there had been a fist fight. They couldn't talk softly; a real Brooklyn deli scene-the constant charges and countercharges of corruption, virtually all of it noise. The Arabs were no better, always whining, buttonholing him, wanting to see their names in print. Cries of oppression from guys driving Mercedes and living off the U.N. dole.

Everyone had an axe to grind; in the six months he'd been there, a week hadn't gone by without some kind of major political demonstration. Usually there were two or three. And the strikes-the doctors, the nurses, the postal workers. Last month the taxi drivers had decided they wanted more money from the Transportation Ministry, blocked the main thoroughfares of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv with their cabs, burned an old jalopy in the middle of King George Street, the tires stinking to high heaven. Wilbur had been forced to leave his car at home and walk everywhere, which inflamed his corns and heightened his antipathy toward the country, the obstreperousness-the Jewishness of it.

He finished his drink, put the glass down on the bar, and looked around. Six tables, five empty. Two guys in a corner: Margalit from Davar, Aronoff from Yediot Aharonot-he hadn't gotten close to either of them. If they'd noticed him come in, they didn't show it, eating peanuts, drinking ginger ale, and talking in low voices.

Ginger ale. Another problem. Newshounds who didn't take their drinking seriously. No one did. The country had no drinking age-a ten-year-old could waltz into a grocery and buy hundred-proof-and yet, no one went for it. A kind of snobbery, as far as he was concerned. As if they considered sobriety some sort of religious virtue, regarded booze as a goy weakness.