Tanner's Virgin by Lawrence Block Page B

going,” I finished.
    I didn’t want to close the account. I withdrew three thousand dollars in American funds, leaving so little that the bank obviously was only continuing to serve me out of a sense of noblesse oblige. I changed someof the dollars into Swiss francs and some into British pounds, and on a hunch I bought a couple hundred dollars’ worth of gold from a wholesale jeweler on the Hirschengraben.
    I killed time at a movie. I had already entered the theater before finding out that the film was one of those I had seen at Portsmouth, the Great Train Robbery thing, with all of the voices dubbed in German. The ending remained the same. Goddamned Scotland Yard caught the lot of them.
    I took a taxi to the airport. I couldn’t go home and I couldn’t go back to England. I couldn’t go to Kabul because the spies would tear me apart. I couldn’t go to India or Pakistan because it would cost too much. I had only three thousand dollars and that would be barely enough to buy Phaedra’s freedom. I couldn’t go to Iran because the only direct flights went through either Athens or Istanbul, and I couldn’t go to Athens or Istanbul for political reasons. I probably could have gone to Baghdad, but I wasn’t sure how seriously the Iraqis took my involvement with the Kurdish rebels. I probably could have gone to Amman, unless the Jordanians knew me as a member of the Stern Gang.
    I felt like Philip Nolan, the man without a country. I felt like a displaced person, a refugee, homeless, unwanted—
    So where I went was Tel Aviv.

Chapter 7
    T ourists entering Israel had their passports checked at length. Their luggage, too, received careful scrutiny. I had no way of knowing whether this was a matter of routine or if the inspectors had been tipped off to some special circumstances, but it was obvious in any event that M. Paul Mornay’s Belgian passport would not get me into the Promised Land.
    So Paul Mornay left the tourist line and joined another line composed of those planning to immigrate permanently to Israel, and in this line his passport did not receive a second glance. In Hebrew I told the attendant I was fulfilling my lifelong dream of returning to the homeland of my people. In Hebrew he told me that I would indeed be welcome. “You already speak the language,” he said. “That will be of great value to you. And it encourages us to welcome newcomers from Europe. The country is drowning in a sea of Sephardim. And a sea of paper—consider the cursed forms we must fill out! But I shall gladly help you.”
    He gladly helped me, and in short order M. Paul Mornay had filed his preliminary applications for Israeli citizenship, stating that he was a Jew and had a Jewish mother, this last being Israel’s sine qua non ofHebritude. “So you see that we are stricter than Hitler,” the immigration officer joked. “With just one Jewish grandparent one could be admitted to Auschwitz, but one must have a Jewish mother to enter Israel.”
    I’ve no idea whether the real Paul Mornay, aliveh sholem, had a Jewish mother. Neither of my own parents were Jewish, although I do remember dimly that a sister of my father’s had married a man named Moritz Steinhardt, at which point the rest of the family ceased speaking with her. I have never been wholly certain whether she was ostracized because her husband was Jewish or German.
    But as I filled out the immigration forms I felt a sudden bond of kinship with Minna’s little friend Miguel. He stayed home on Jewish holidays, and I was a member of the Stern Gang and a citizen-to-be of Eretz Yisroel. As the rye bread advertisements put it, you don’t have to be Jewish.
    Â 
    I stood at the window of Gershon’s apartment and looked out at downtown Tel Aviv. “Many Americans compare our city to San Francisco,” Gershon said, “but I have never been there. Do you notice the