“Then let them stop killing the one. Let them stay on their sides of the borders and I will stay home and sit on my hands.”
Ben-Gurion talks to the General as an uncle might. He has always kept the General under his wing. “Do you understand what you start? You shame them in front of their people, and in the eyes of the world. They shoot a farmer off his plow, and then it’s you running riot, invading. Then come the reports with my breakfast. ‘He’s burned down a police station.’ ‘He’s slaughtered a whole unit on patrol.’ It’s too much!” The old man pulls with hopelessness at his crazy tufts of hair. “You cannot level a village with the people still inside.”
Dayan finally speaks, to warn him. “Continue on, and the region will spin out of control.”
“Perfect,” the General says. “Spread the word. Tell the Arabs, if they lose control so will your general. Tell them, I can’t be contained. No one, surely, wants that.”
Peres clears his throat. He says what the General imagines he must already have been contemplating. “It’s not only our enemies. It could come from an ally. From the Americans or the British. There is a lot at stake, and any of them may find a way to put you out of commission for good.”
The General laughs at this, a deep, satisfied laugh.
“Tell them I can’t be killed. Not ever. Tell them all, ‘He is more golem than man. The General cannot be stopped when he is out avenging Jews.’”
Peres, in his fancy French suit, twists uncomfortably in his chair.
The General leans his elbows on the table and points at Dayan.
“You, more than anyone, know it’s true. You’ve witnessed too much to say different. How many times on the battlefield has that one good eye of yours seen me not die? You tell them,” he says. When Dayan doesn’t, the General says it himself. “I sit here, still breathing, only because Death cannot get a good hold.”
The General straightens up in his seat, letting the challenge stand. He waits for an answer, sitting there in his white civilian shirt, open too far at the chest, his sleeves rolled up on his powerful arms.
They can see for themselves the scars and lesions and burns. They know from that first war alone, the cicatrix beneath his clothes cut wider and worse.
It was more than a miracle that he survived Latrun.
They consider him, because the General makes them. And they understand that maybe what the General says is true.
2002, Berlin
The spread Joshua is renting is more impressive than Farid imagined. He’d have been proud to live in the gatehouse, let alone in the giant edifice that sat across a statuary-strewn football pitch of a lawn. Weathered green bronzes have been placed all along the way to the front door, and through that massive door is a marble entryway with sculptures of its own.
It’s a shockingly fancy abode. But Farid absorbs almost none of it as Joshua leads him right on through to a giant sunroom that juts out the back of the house, sticking deep into the yard like a thumb.
The room is all white, and what isn’t white is window looking out onto the water. There are white couches and a white ottoman. There’s a white table and chairs, carved with curling leaves and vines.
A telescope mounted on a tripod stands by the wall of windows, and Joshua motions for Farid to look through it, which he does, focusing on the yacht club on the far shore.
Farid straightens up, and the two men stare out the windows with nothing but lake unfurled before them.
“Sit,” Joshua says, insisting his guest face the water and continue enjoying the view. The instant they settle at the table, a tall German appears, offering Farid a deferent smile. He wears a starched and stiff-looking shirt beneath a red silk vest. He waits patiently to be nodded into the conversation.
“Can I get you anything?” he says, in careful English. “Coffee? Pastries?”
“A coffee and zwei Eier im Glas,” Joshua says, ordering first. He makes an apologetic face for Farid, not because of his manners but because of his ordering. “That’s about all the German I’ve got.”
Farid asks for the same, and, as the man in the vest recedes, Joshua calls after him, telling him just to bring it all, the pastries and cheeses and mueslis and brown breads. “On second thought, put on a show!” he says. He does not make his apologetic face a second time. He says to Farid, “If we’re eating, let’s eat.”
“Why not,” Farid says. And, feeling it must be acknowledged, he adds, “This is very grand.”
“It’s too much house for me. But it’s good for business. It looks like success.”
“Isn’t it success?”
“The accountant is the only one who can tell you that. Everything else is nonsense. Personally, I’ve never quite understood why a van Gogh in the boardroom of some Japanese automaker impresses anyone. It has nothing to do with how many cars they put on the road.”
“I think you probably do understand,” Farid says, raising a grandeur-indicating eyebrow. “I think you know just what message this house sends, or you’d save yourself a lot of money and stay at a hotel with clean sheets and Eurosport on the TV.”
“I don’t pick. I have a full-time fixer. She has a budget for such things, which she spends down to the last penny, because she knows if she doesn’t I’ll just give her less of a budget to work with the next place we set up shop.”
“You need fish to catch fish. And money to draw money.”
“Do you think?”
“My whole life here is built on the idea that looking a part will often see that you get it.”
“What if this were a business meeting?” Joshua says. “Wouldn’t you assume that the cost of heating this place in the winter and keeping it cool in the summer, that the number of people who must break their backs to keep the lawn green and the marble slippery, means I must lack some sense of scale?”
“Do you want me to agree, or to tell you, again, that I think success breeds success? To me, this house makes you seem smart for finding your way into it.”
“I just think the hunger for this kind of excess is what makes the bubbles grow and then pop.”
“I wish I’d met you earlier,” Farid says. “I could have used that advice before the tech stocks crashed.”
“You took a big hit?”
“Growing up poor, I promised never to complain when blessed with so much privilege, even when times are tight.”
“I’m sure you’ll make it back. Once you know how to make a fortune, it’s much easier to do it the second, the third, the fourth time,” Joshua says, and laughs with something like glee. “At least that’s what I’ve been telling myself. Because it’s about fifty-fifty that I’ll be rebuilding from nothing by this quarter’s end. I’m at that giddy spot,” he says, “where I’m kind of relishing watching the whole empire burn down. I’ve got so much tied up in so many ventures, it’s almost thrilling to wait and see which failure will drag me past the point of no return.”