The Death of Moishe-Ganef
William Heinemann, 1986
Paperback – Black Swan, 1987

London, March 1984:

1.
They told me Moishe-Ganef was dead. They even showed me the body. There it was, sprawled on the single bed of a London hotel, making a fearful mess of the covers. The head was staved in by a massive blow, delivered to the left temple. It was a hideous sight, but there was little doubt, this man did look like Moishe-Ganef. There was a mole on his chin that had been there since childhood, and even a trace of that gargoyle grin he had adopted in army days. On the other hand, the light was bad, it may well not have been MoisheGanef at all, for all I knew, but a double, skin grafted with care by whoever you fancy, in Oshkosh, Nebraska or Irkutsk. These are strange times. We had come a long way from the streets of Jerusalem, the old carefree days of callow mischief in a country basking in its dream. The brave new world in its ancient setting. Hear O Israel, and the whole kitbag.

" Well?" said the tiddly little crumb who had brought me to this pass, all panic and eyebrow quiver.

" Well what?" I asked. At least one joy in the misery, to watch his tiddly eyebrows quiver.

" Is it him? Can you make an identification?"

" It's a good likeness," I said. "He used to look like himself fairly often, before he began playing secret agent."

" But you're not certain?" He was obviously presenting his best sotto voce, to avoid raising the alarm. If you sneak a reluctant witness into a hotel room at midnight, to view a corpse, you would tend to be hot on discretion.

" I am certain about the Lord Blessed Be He," I said, "but about nothing else."

A bold manifesto, given the state both of my psyche and of the Israeli nation. Pulverised by war, ineptitude and its own shattered self-image, serious doubts might be raised by the most faithful as to whether there is a Guiding Hand. Nor was the twittering pilchard playing his torch by my side much of an advertisement for the Chosen People.

" Why me?" I whispered, caught in the conspiratorial mode. "Why haven't you summoned the good old British bobbies? They have the best Scotland Yard outside Scotland. I know, I have watched them on TV for years. The Sweeney," I listed them, "CI5, The Professionals. Z Cars. Shoestring. You miss all these things, being posted here. In Israel you are fed them nightly."

" Please be serious, for God's sake," he pleaded, "we have a dead man in this room."

Are not our policemen brilliant? This one was typical home grown. Most probably Military Police at eighteen, Investigation Branch, a natural Arabic speaker. Assigned to hide in dustbins, outside Arab high schools, or the editorial offices of Al-Fajr. Shown some aptitude perhaps for foreign languages, demobilised into the Security Services. The spook type, too runtish, or so he seemed, to be your garrotte and karate hit man. Spends his free time, no doubt, in one of those Israeli shebeens in North London, haunts for spooks, burglars and heroin smugglers, the soured cream of our human export. Tiddly Crumb, I read you loud and clear, but how did you get pinned on my backside?

I was on holiday of course, taking a well-earned breather from the embattled Homeland, but someone must have been keeping tabs. It would be no problem, but why the bother? I am no longer a player in the National games. In the scramble for Causes, I am non-aligned. I have resigned from the club. Jews, Arabs, Palestinians, moderates, zealots, let them all kill each other. The only organisation I am a member of is the Jerusalem Cinematheque. I ply my trade as a TV critic, with an occasional humoresque for good measure. Fat old ladies doing Jane Fonda's workout on the beach, that is about my forte. I live in the Holy Land because I can afford the rent. Don't come the stiff-necked patriot with me. And if you insist, motherfucker, then I tell you I have paid my dues. 'Sixty-seven, 'sixty-nine, 'seventy-three, the litany of wars, cataclysms and disasters, it makes you ill just to conjure the numbers.

Nevertheless, the ghosts of the past crept after me, knocking on my poor English hosts' door: Camden Town, urb of Albion, twenty-three fifteen hours, Saturday. The rigours of the Sabbath over, James Cagney commencing on Channel Four. The prospect of bliss. But no. Thunk thunk thunk, the old-fashioned door knocker. The Crumb, enter frame bottom, with "Embassy", "Security" and "Property of the State of Israel" written all over his repugnant dial.

" Yosef Dekel?" he had said, in our ancestral Hebrew language, "I apologise for bothering you, but we need your help on a very urgent matter."

The royal We, forsooth! "I am sorry," I quoth, "but I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue. And anyway, the Children of Israel have already been saved, I have been constantly told, from bondage."

" We know your politics," he said, still in the Windsor idiom, "and this is not a recruiting drive. It is a personal matter. You had a close friend, I believe, one Moshe Sherman? He is the cause of my visit."

Oi. Spare us this. Not Moishe-Ganef - Moishe-Thief! The chicken risen from its own ashes. A Pandora's box I prefer to keep sealed, locking away private memories along with the public detritus of our popular nightmares: victory orations, funeral dirges, the salute of rifles over coffins, the PLO, UAR, WIZO, Messrs Peres, Begin, Sharon, Levy, the scandalous boredom of our national television, the defence tax, the Peace For Galilee tax, the shame of winning the Eurovision song contest ... Each one of us an Atlas, carrying the world, without benefit of foreskin even. One more feather, the last straw of Moishe-Ganef, could tip the whole shebang over. From his first day at kindergarten, the man had been nothing but trouble. Now he lay in a Russell Square hotel room, with his head like a squashed watermelon, if it was he, that is, in the waving circle of The Crumb's pocket torch.

" We will leave now," said The Crumb, consulting his luminous watch. It was waterproof too, I'll bet, in case he might be detailed to shadow an Enemy of the State from the bed of the Serpentine. He ushered me out, carefully, noiselessly unlocking, locking the hotel-room door, drawing me to the fire escape. Three cats, who thought they had a clear night lined up with the house garbage, protested, but I shushed them, with the born expertise of any tenant of a Jerusalem dwelling. "Take me home, James," I said, sitting back in his Fiat, as he tried to gun the motor quietly. "Or are there any more bodies on view tonight?" I saw him taking me on a grand tour of friends' carcasses, and even, for good measure, relations. You thought London was your bolthole, Joe Dekel. Take a peek into your personal catacomb. For a gross moment I saw my Anat's face, contorted in death, perhaps strangled, her raven hair spattered with congealed blood and mud. Imagination has always been my curse. My shield from conformity, yes, but also my daily, nightly terror. I was coming to believe I had really seen Moishe, j ust a moment ago, smashed, like a cast-off marrow. One has seen The Dead in their natural habitat: deserts, rocks, disembowelled sandbags. But in the Edenvale Bed and Breakfast in Russell Square? Everything should have its limit.

" If you bear with me," said The Crumb - he had dropped his imitation of Prince Charles with nasal catarrh - "there is one more visit. My superior here. He is also someone you know, but very much alive, thank God."

Do not take the Lord's name in vain, I thought at him, before we know with whom we are dealing. There were a dozen questions I could have thrown at this lackey, this shitty errand boy of an even shittier system I try to excrete every morning, but alas, excrement is within you, you manufacture more, constantly: the Enemy Within. Get behind me, Satan ... My mind merged with the shrill grind of the Fiat.

He took me to a private address, in a mansion block in a crescent behind Lancaster Gate. The kind of posh area, close by Hyde Park, where Saudis and other Gulf Arabs congregate, prostrating themselves on the green. No wonder Arabs often look so dour and woebegone, if they hate the desert so. A queer area for an Israeli to settle, unless he is on masquerade...

The name on the bell The Crumb pressed was Bronson. I was now taking care to notice such things. I had told my English hosts to contact a journalist we knew, if I did not return by morning. In every Israeli Jew lurks a certified paranoid. In most, he has leapt on to the surface. To The Crumb I had merely said: "If I am not back by five a.m., Yassir Arafat will be informed." He grunted. He must have read my file, but refused to appreciate my oeuvre.

The night's shocks were obviously not yet over. This "Bronson", opening his door cautiously as we climbed the stairway up to the third floor, was indeed familiar. Baruch BenTovim, alias Guttenson, alias Gingi Tussik-Punim: "Ginger Arse-Face", as we had called him in the army, because he was both freckled and covered with acne. Now he still resembled a snowman with German measles, but he was balding, too, which shows you what happens if you follow a career in Intelligence to its pay-off. He and Moishe had served with me in the Israel Defence Forces, a period of one's life some dote on, but not I. More worms escaping from the can. Amnesia, where is thy sting?

Tonight was not going to be among the top ten of my life, not even the top twenty. The ginger simpleton sprang forward and purloined my hand before I had the chance to hide it. His grip was strong. I could see him working out with a Bullworker at dawn, freckled pectorals flexed in the bathroom mirror.

" Joe Dekel!" he exclaimed with that kibbutz bonhomie he had laid over his citified background. It used to be de rigueur for social climbing, but in the Begin Age it has become a nono. The Nationalists hate the kibbutz marginally less than the Fatah, and on a par with the Gulag Archipelago. The Gingi must have done something useful for his new masters, though, to rate the cushy London station. "How have you been? We haven't met for agesl I'm so sorry it's under these circumstances."

" You've grown fat," I told him. He should not think the Bullworker absolved him from the perils of smugness. "Do you think so?" he sounded surprised. "I thought that department was adequate. But of course it's been a long time. You look A-OK. The grey in your hair suits you. I see you're no longer with the Faithful."

" You are mistaken." He was referring to the absence of my little knitted hattie, the skullcap of the religious stalwart. I am damned if I am going to call it a "yarmulka". I was not going to explain to the likes of him why I wear it at home but whip it off when abroad. At home at least they know my face and my views, and the chauvinists give me a wide berth. Abroad I loathe people assuming by the hattie that I am a nationalistic zealot. Jews who come up to me in the street and say: "Don't be downhearted. I think your Menahem Begin is wonderful." What can I say? You are not in luck, Reb Yid, I am Israel's only religious anarchist... "It must have blown off on the way," I said, just to annoy the Gingi. "The police will pick it up and know everything."

He sighed, his eyes saying Joe, Joe, when will you ever be serious. He had by now ushered us into a sparsely furnished living room, with bare walls, a sofabed, two straight-backed chairs, a plush grey carpet and a low table with a brass Arab tray and coffeepot upon it. Urging me to the sofa by his side, The Crumb dutifully perched on a high chair, the Gingi poured coffee into three small white cups. '
" This ii a sad business, isn't it? I am really sorry we dragged you into this, but there is a reason. Of course, you could have refused."

Schmuck, you know me for a curious bastard. And you know Moishe was a childhood friend, despite all that passed later. Don't give me this hint, hint, nudge, you are still one of us at heart. "You are not going to leave him lying there, I suppose," I said, "for the beasts of the field."

He glanced at his watch. "The police should be finding him about now," he said, "I shall be informed in the morning." He sipped, closing his eyes at the marvel of his own brew. It was nothing to write home about. "The fact is," he said, "we have not seen Moishe for going on three years. We meaning The Intelligence Family as a whole. It was a great surprise to us to find he'd been seen in London. Frankly we were keeping an eye. And now this. We had to make a quick decision. Check connections, given his recent history. You understand, of course." "No."

" Running a quick check," he continued blithely, "lo and behold, who do we find slumming in London but Joe Dekel, companion of our Moishe's misspent youth, partner of his masturbation contests. Of course, I said to myself, it's probably a coincidence. Annual Joe Dekel holiday time. You fly off every year when your army reserve duty's due. It's a familiar scene. They tend to shuffle you to the back of the pack and the Nation is spared another embarrassment."

" I would go to jail as a war resister," I explained, "but the food is better over here."

" Had he been in touch with you?" he asked directly, peeping over the rim of the coffee cup.

" Moishe? He has been crossed off my social list. I merely followed his seamier exploits in the Police News."

" He was going to sue the State, you know, for wrongful arrest. He wrote a whole epic for the Ombudsman. Then, pfatt, he goes right off the map again, disappearing into thin air. The Director General was most upset. This was in November 'eighty. Since then not a whiff, till London, three days ago. And before we can make contact - this."

" He always was an unreasonable chap," I agreed. "Now I've brought you in on a hunch." He leaned forward. "All right, I know you hate our guts these days, but this could be beyond politics. When you pass through The Family, you become a relation, even if you come to hate the parents. Blood is blood. Even you can't deny that, skullcap or no skullcap."

" It's two in the morning, Gingi," I said, "what the fuck do you want of me? Why all this identification charade? Do you know your own man or don't you?"

" Of course," he said, "there are dental records, which are supposed to be infallible. And fingerprints. But these are hitech days. Do you remember the Oswald hooh-hah? They exhumed the body and pronounced the teeth kosher. But were they fooled none the less? We have sawbones who can give you the face of a monkey, or change you into Sophia Loren. There have been cases of double-bluff: a face redone as itself, with minute flaws. I can tell you, it's a minefield out there.”

" So, remove the body and examine it."

" Not everything in life is simple. Intelligence is not what it used to be. There are constraints, rules of engagement. I am a small cog in the wheel. He was never close to me as he was to you. I want a friend's hunch, an instinct. Was it Moishe Sherman lying in that hotel room? What do you truly think, Joe?"

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