The Betrayers Read online

  —My oldest, Svetlana said, indicating the photo. Now in Simferopol. Her husband prefers to be unemployed there.

  —He also attends the synagogue? Kotler asked playfully.

  —It’s not for him, Svetlana curtly replied.

  —And your other daughter?

  —She is at the university in Kharkov. She studies economics. A brilliant girl, but this summer she is working in a hairdresser’s, Svetlana said and shrugged ruefully.

  The corridor came to an end and they faced a door. A small window along the right side of the corridor admitted light. The left side of the corridor opened out to a vestibule. Three steps down was another door, which led to the scraggly yard.

  —A private entrance, Svetlana said. You would have a key.

  She then unlocked the door to the guest quarters and ushered them into a room of some twenty square meters, hardly extravagant, but tidy and bright. It had everything one expected from such a room: a desk, two chairs, a dresser with a small television upon it, and a double bed with the pillows and blue coverlet precisely arranged. The floor was composed of square white tiles; the walls were also painted white. Above the desk hung a rectangular gilt-framed mirror, and above the bed an amateur watercolor of a seascape, with wheeling gulls and little sailboat. Between the desk and the dresser was the door to the celebrated toilet. Svetlana stood behind them as Kotler and Leora peered inside. They saw a light blue commode with its water tank, a sink of the same color, and the raised platform of the shower protected by a translucent plastic curtain. Like the rest of the quarters, the space was cramped but everything looked clean and in good repair.

  —Towels are here, Svetlana said.

  Folded over a rod that was screwed to the back of the door were two thin, stiff cotton waffle-print towels, not large enough to wrap around a grown person’s waist—masterworks of Soviet fabrication.

  With the tour concluded, they returned to the bedroom and inhabited a brief silence. Svetlana looked from Kotler to Leora and then said, So.

  —We’ll need a few minutes to discuss, Kotler said.

  —Very well, Svetlana said.

  Her eyes then ranged about the room and momentarily came to rest on the bed. She turned and regarded them both as though trying to communicate something wordlessly. A thing too embarrassing to say out loud.

  —And if there are other things you need for the room …

  Kotler took this as an allusion to the ambiguity of his and Leora’s relations. In other words, the discreet offer of a foiding cot.

  —Thank you, he said.

  Svetlana withdrew to the main house, doing a poor job of concealing her resentments: a resentment that they had not immediately agreed to take the room and a resentment that anticipated their inevitable refusal.

  Once she had gone, Kotler sat on the bed, bouncing gently to test the firmness of the mattress.

  —This is not a good idea, Baruch. It’s not worth it.

  —What about your sympathies?

  —I don’t need to prove my sympathies, and neither do you.

  —But that’s the problem with sympathies, Kotler said with a smile. One keeps needing to prove them.

  —Baruch, to stay here is to ask for trouble. And the whole point of coming here was to evade trouble.

  —The point. But not the whole point.

  —You know what I mean.

  —From that woman, we have nothing to fear.

  —And from her husband?

  —A Kazakh Jew in a Crimean town?

  —A Russian Jew. If there is a Russian Jew in the world who doesn’t know who you are, I haven’t met him.

  —Come, sit by me, Leora.

  Kotler patted the spot beside him on the bed. Reluctantly, she did as he asked. Kotler reached for her hands and laid them on his thigh. The gesture was paternal and reassuring, but also undeniably more. Through the fabric of his trousers, Kotler felt the warm, birdlike weight of her hands. They sat quietly together and allowed the moment to take its effect. Slowly, as if submitting to fatigue, Leora rested her head on Kotler’s shoulder.

  —There, my bunny, Kotler said.

  What a picture they made, he thought. This voluptuous, serious, dark-haired girl with her head on the shoulder of a potbellied little man still wearing his sunglasses and Borsalino hat. Fodder for comedy. And yet, the girl’s fingers slipping between the man’s thighs dispelled comedy. In its place, the leap of animal desire.

  —Leora, I agree this isn’t the rational thing. The rational thing would be to stay with the other woman.

  —The peasant.

  —The hardy, noble peasant. Who doesn’t care for Jews and doesn’t read the international press.

  —It isn’t too late.

  —Call it curiosity. Call it instinct. And I am a man who has followed his instincts.

  —I thought it was principles.

  —In my experience, they’re one and the same.

  Leora straightened up and looked at him.

  —You know my position. What more can I say?

  —If you trust me in large matters, trust me in small.

  —Baruch, it isn’t trust, it’s agreement. Usually, I agree with you. I agree with you like with no one else.

  —Well, then this time will be an exception. Or more precisely, an evolution. Between two people, trust is more important than agreement. I am asking for your trust. Do you trust me on this?

  —I disagree with you, Baruch, but I will not fight with you about it.

  —Good. That is the definition of trust.

  They found Svetlana in the kitchen, rinsing beet greens in the sink.

  —So you have decided? Svetlana asked, not bothering to extract her hands from the sink.

  —We will take the room, Kotler said.

  —Is that so? Svetlana said, warming not at all.

  —We will pay in cash for the week in advance. If that suits you.

  —Yes, Svetlana said evenly, that suits me.

  THREE

  As the sun started its slow midsummer descent, they settled into their room. Svetlana had provided them with keys to the front and back doors and then done them the favor of graciously disappearing. For a moment—after they had finished arranging their belongings in the drawers and cabinets, and after they had stowed their empty suitcases in a corner—Kotler and Leora regarded each other with a mixture of wryness, giddiness, and apprehension. They had stolen away to hotel rooms before, but, except for one instance, never for more than an afternoon or an evening. Six months earlier, on a diplomatic visit to Helsinki, Leora had prevailed upon Kotler to let her stay the night in his bed. But there, she had had her own room a few doors away. Here, for the first time, they had created the semblance of a shared home. Their clothes resided in the same dresser, the same drawers. In the bathroom, huddled together in the shallow cabinet, were their vitamins, pills, creams, and toothbrushes. They were now publicly what they had been privately—which meant they were now altogether something else. Leora still had her apartment in Jerusalem, but as for himself, Kotler thought, this room arguably represented his only home. As matters stood, he had no other.

  Liberated from past constraints, free to indulge themselves as they wished—as they had declared they would if only given the chance—neither of them could quell the feelings of restlessness and anxiety. Kotler had been on the run for nearly two days. He’d packed his little suitcase and slipped out of his house before dawn on Friday, hiding out first in his office and later in Leora’s apartment. And for much of the day now he and Leora had been traveling, beginning with the surreptitious early-morning flight from Tel Aviv to Kiev, another from Kiev to Simferopol, the bus from there to Yalta, and then the imbroglio with the hotel. All this time they’d barely had a chance to catch their breath and apprise themselves of what was happening in the world. In Kiev, during their layover, they had briefly been able to access the Internet, but it had still been too soon for there to have been any reaction or commentary. Leora had also phoned her f
ather and had the pained, unpleasant conversation. Kotler stood beside her, close enough to overhear part of what her father said and to feel the blot of disapproval. She was her parents’ only child, very much her father’s daughter, and had lived her life to merit his good opinion. A decade younger than Kotler, Leora’s parents had also been Zionists and refuseniks. When their application to emigrate was denied, they’d been trapped in Russia for the final eight years of Soviet rule, though, unlike Kotler, they had been spared the adventure of the Gulag. Yitzhak and Adina Rosenberg—good, intellectual, fair-minded people. Kotler came to know them in Israel at the periodic gatherings of former refuseniks. It was at one of these gatherings that Yitzhak introduced Kotler to his young daughter, a top student at Hebrew University with an interest in politics. When Kotler later hired Leora for his staff, her parents were exceedingly grateful. That was four years ago. Each of those years, they sent a fruit basket to Kotler’s house for Rosh Hashanah. Rosh Hashanah was again approaching, but Kotler supposed there would be no fruit basket this year.

  To get to the heart of Yalta, he and Leora didn’t bother to ask Svetlana for directions but left through the back door, scattering fowl. Kotler led them toward the coast. He flattered himself by thinking that he was navigating from childhood memory, that his sense of the place inhered in him from all those years ago. Closer to the truth was that the town was not very large and sloped downward toward the sea. A few stops on a minibus soon returned them to the tourist center, depositing them near Lenin Square, where, framed heroically by the Crimean Mountains, the bronze Bolshevik still stood on his pedestal looking intently out to sea—and peripherally at a McDonald’s. In time, Kotler thought, the good citizens of Yalta might resolve, if not to add a pile of bones at his feet, then at least to replace him.

  Without too much trouble, Kotler and Leora located an Internet café, dark as a grotto and occupied mostly by teenage boys wearing headphones and hollering to one another as they shot at Chechens or the Taliban on their computer screens. Kotler had once caught Benzion playing a similar game. A sensitive, studious boy, he was then a student at the yeshiva. Seeing his father’s reaction, he’d said shamefacedly, The guys were playing it. Now, stationed near Hebron, he was no longer playing.

  They found two available terminals next to each other at the back of the café and began with the Israeli press. It didn’t take them long to find what they were looking for. The lead stories in both Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post featured the same photograph of the two of them in the Tel Aviv airport. The photograph captured them as they presented their documents at the ticket counter. It had been taken from a distance, furtively, by another traveler, Kotler presumed, as the professionals never suffered from such scruples. Still, there could be no mistaking their identities, particularly his—though he supposed Leora had now attained a level of notoriety to match his own. Haaretz also provided a companion photo of his wife shopping for Shabbat at a market near their Jerusalem home. In the photo, Miriam looked every bit the aggrieved, steadfast spouse, the victim of her husband’s treachery. For the article, she said only that she refused to discuss “a private family matter.” Kotler could imagine the scene at the market, the pestering, beseeching journalists. But with Miriam they stood no chance. At this thought Kotler permitted himself a fond smile. Miriam was a rock. In her time she had undergone a harsh apprenticeship and was as canny about the press as any image consultant. The reporters could flatter themselves that they had caught her in an unguarded moment, but Kotler would have been surprised—and, frankly, disappointed—if Miriam hadn’t orchestrated the whole thing, down to the potato in her hand when they took her picture.

  In both newspapers, “the scandale Kotler” shared the front page with news of the Knesset’s vote in favor of the withdrawal from the settlement bloc. It had gone as predicted, with the prime minister’s coalition eking out a narrow majority. Kotler, not wanting to be on record as merely abstaining, had cast his vote the previous day, shortly before his ignominious escape. The Haaretz article listed his name among the notable opponents, prominent among the defectors from the prime minister’s cabinet. Then there were the obligatory quotes from the various factions. The same choir singing the same song. The prime minister cited defensible borders and the welfare of the Israeli state. The chief of staff spoke of the army’s inviolable discipline. The Left rejoiced. The Right seethed. The Americans applauded. The settlers pledged bloody insurrection. And the Palestinians complained.

  The din would continue until the operation was executed. What happened then, nobody knew. Nothing good, was Kotler’s opinion. The only question was just how bad.

  He felt Leora’s hand on his arm. On her computer screen was displayed a column from an Israeli Russian newspaper. There again was the same grainy photograph from the airport.

  —At least here someone bothered to add one plus one, Leora said.

  That someone was Chava Margolis, his old friend turned foe, once the mother superior of the Moscow Zionists, the strict, ascetic Krupskaya of their movement. As one of the witnesses against him in his Jerusalem trial, she had later wished to undo him, but here she was saying what any reasonable person should have said: That it was cynical and vindictive of the prime minister to destroy a man’s family simply because that man wouldn’t bend to his political will. That such an act tarnished the prime minister far more than it did Kotler, particularly as, in the end, it achieved no political goal. And that even people like herself, who had long since grown disenchanted with Kotler, should, instead of gloating over his humiliation, take a moment to reflect upon the reptilian soul of the man who was leading their country. She then added, as professional journalistic practice demanded, that her accusations against the prime minister were speculative, given that no evidence had yet been found to connect him to the incriminating photographs that had been leaked, anonymously, to the press. But she felt that only a child of extraordinary naïveté would believe that the prime minister wasn’t involved. And she hadn’t met any such children in the entire state of Israel.

  Kotler knew that no evidence would ever be found. The prime minister was many things, but he was no amateur. Kotler doubted the press would ever even trace the man who had contacted him. Kotler had known more than his share of security agents and spies, and, as in any walk of life, there were the addle and the adept. But the man he had met, who had introduced himself as Amnon, was a seasoned operator.

  Two days earlier, this Amnon had called Kotler on his private cell phone, thus bypassing his staff. How he got the number, Amnon didn’t bother to explain. He asked that Kotler meet him that evening in the park behind the Israel Museum to discuss a matter of great consequence not only to the state but also to Kotler’s personal life. He instructed Kotler to come alone.

  —You should not fear, the man said. There is no threat to your physical safety.

  The threat, Kotler was made to understand, was of a different nature.

  He rather suspected what the matter was about. For weeks he had criticized the prime minister’s decision to unilaterally withdraw from the settlement bloc. At first Kotler had done so strictly in camera. They were mostly allies of political expediency, he and the prime minister. Kotler had pledged the eight mandates his Russian immigrant party had won in the previous election to allow the prime minister to patch together his ruling coalition. For this, he had received his ministerial portfolio and, presumably, the stature and influence that went with it. He also had the residual respect afforded to an old Zionist hero, although politics, that indiscriminate blade, eventually cut everyone down to size. So when the prime minister ignored his objections, Kotler voiced his opposition first in the Knesset and then on the op-ed page of the New York Times, where he vowed to resign from the cabinet if the prime minister pursued his plan. After that, the usual pressures were brought to bear. His office was inundated with angry phone calls and letters. The prime minister sent his lackeys, first with carrots, then with sticks. All of this was in keeping with what p
assed for normal political discourse in Israel—at the best of times, no place for gentle souls. But involving a man like Amnon exceeded all bounds.

  Still, Kotler agreed, unflinchingly, to the meeting. Not out of curiosity or apprehension, but because he had learned that there was only one way to deal with people like Amnon. You had to stand before them and look them in the eye. Otherwise they started thinking that they could exert power over you.

  Kotler went to meet Amnon at eight in the evening, at the very onset of dusk. The trees cast long crisp shadows. A smattering of people filtered through the park—ordinary Jerusalemites glad for a respite from the summer heat, as well as the day’s last visitors to the museum. Kotler walked along the footpath, drawing only the occasional glance. His manner betrayed no distress. He, in fact, felt none. He felt, if anything, a familiar sense of contentment. A purposefulness. Fifteen minutes earlier, he had gotten up from his dinner table, kissed his wife and daughter, and calmly walked out the door.

  At the appointed place, Kotler saw a burly man in his late forties. His hair was shaved down to dark stubble, sunglasses perched atop his head. He wore a yellow short-sleeved polo shirt whose fabric was stretched by his broad shoulders and thick arms. To complete the image, with his blue jeans he sported a pair of modern athletic sandals, a kind meant for hiking. He looked like certain other sabras of his generation who cultivated the air of retired colonels and regarded the world with the relaxed leer of the habituated military man. In his left hand, held leisurely against his thigh, he had a letter-size manila envelope. As Kotler approached, the man smiled exuberantly and extended his right hand like an old schoolmate or favored cousin. Kotler played along and allowed the man to shepherd him to a vacant bench under a gnarled carob tree.