City of Secrets by Stewart O’Nan Page A

ordering the hostages to lie down on the ground. Hands on your head, he’d said, as if it came naturally. As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he knew where they’d come from.He barked it, more threat than command. The familiar intonation shocked him, like a pet phrase of his mother’s bubbling up, and behind the machine gun, as now, in bed, remembering, Brand cringed. Coincidence or not, it seemed wrong that at his most heroic he sounded exactly like Nosey.

6
    H e thought they’d proved themselves with the train job, yet for weeks Asher had nothing for them. Radio silence, Radio Cairo. Winter was over, the desert beginning to bloom. The cemetery smelled of jasmine and lavender. Brand put away his sweater and left his window open all day. Instead of going out on missions, he drove the Peugeot and listened to the news as other cells attacked the power station and the central prison and, one night when he was only a few streets over so that he ended up getting stuck at a roadblock, the Palestine Broadcasting Service on Queen Melisande’s Way, taking heavy casualties. He was at once enraged at the waste and jealous of their daring.
    Having survived everything that had gone wrong on the train job and come away with the loot, he now saw it as a great success. He’d forgotten how he felt hearing the plane thatmight have been a Spitfire (it wasn’t), and watching Lipschitz clutch his neck and pitch forward as if he’d been killed (he hadn’t). He knew nothing of the PBS operation except rumors passed around the queue, but with the pride of the newly triumphant he was certain they could have done better.
    Eva had a new lunchtime client at the King David. He was a minister of business affairs, a Jew, and married, an easy mark. A strange case, Eva said. Very carefully he hung up his tie and jacket and slacks, fit his socks and sock garters into his shoes and shut the closet door, as if to protect them, yet the entire time he wore his undershirt and shorts. Lately she had a habit of denigrating her clients—out of loyalty, Brand supposed. He wished she wouldn’t say anything. He already pictured too much.
    Waiting for her, he noted the comings and goings of the Secretariat. The hotel had three restaurants and two bars, and lunch was a busy time. The clerks and stenographers and switchboard operators brought their own, filling the wicker chairs on the rear terrace and the benches of the rose garden, eating sandwiches and leftovers off their laps, but the main dining room and the grill room and the Arab Lounge were elaborately decorated stages where power brokers from Tripoli to Teheran met on neutral ground to finalize deals over pink gins and bloody filets. Brand knew them by their cars. Here, among the high command’s armored Humbers and the tycoons’ sleek limousines, the blonde’s Daimler wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. The drive was lined with majestic prewar Bugattis and brand-new Rolls bought with oil money. He’d seen Montgomery’s former second in command and King Faisal of Iraq walking hand inhand like lovers, heads bowed, discussing the business of empire, and Clark Gable stopping on his way to India, and the great Heifetz, come to play a benefit for the Jewish National Fund. Once, as Brand was reading the
Post,
the high commissioner had crossed not three feet in front of his bumper. Like the waiters and cigarette girls at the Kilimanjaro, the doormen and valets all knew Eva, and soon the Peugeot. All they had to do was fill the trunk with TNT, set a timer and slip out the back.
    There were targets everywhere, yawning opportunities. The military courts, the YMCA, the train station. Instead, he gave his unsuspecting fares the tour of the seven gates and pointed them toward the orange juice stand owned by Scheib’s cousin.
    With their share of the money, he and Eva could have gone anywhere and started over.
    â€œI had to fight to get here,” she