Free City of Secrets by Stewart O’Nan Page B

is.”
    â€œâ€˜Honestly.’”
    Her face changed. She pointed to the door. “Get out. Now.”
    All weekend he stayed away from her place, working late and eating at the Alaska. In Riga the trials had wrapped, the five men responsible for the massacre hanged, the rest of the city tacitly exonerated—just as he expected, meager consolation. His old life was over, his new one a shambles and a sham. To celebrate, he paced his flat with a glass of Johnnie Walker, bumping his nose against the cold window, leaving a greasy smudge. The humming, stumbling melancholy of solitary drunks. Why was Katya dead and Eva alive? She probably didn’t even miss him. She’d probably already hired another driver. The station was so close, he heard the last train from Jaffa laboring up the final grade of Mount Zion, and then his fellow cabbies shuttling passengers into the city, making money. In the crypt his pistols waited, newly oiled. Child of the Great War, survivor of the last, his entire life he’d never pointed a gun at another man, only had them pointed at him. Innocent Brand, the pigeon of history. It was a miracle he’d lived this long.
    â€œGoddamn, yes,” he said to his reflection, and was surprised to find his glass empty.
    He woke in his clothes, sour-mouthed. At the garage Pincus brought him coffee, hovering like a mother. Greta set him up with an older American couple going to Bethlehem for their anniversary. With everyone on his side, how could he fail?
    He wasn’t so much afraid as annoyed at the prospect of the mission, as if it were a checkpoint blocking the route to his newlife. He could see the reasons for it, and generally agreed with them, but as the workweek kicked in, he began hoping it would rain on Friday, making the desert impassable for anything but a jeep. Even that would only postpone it.
    Tuesday Asher called a meeting for the following evening at the high school. If stopped, they were an amateur drama club working with Eva. Brand thought the idea would please her. Out of habit he swung by to give her a ride, taking the shortcut through the flower market to her gate. The lamp wasn’t lit, but when he knocked, there was no answer.
    She’d taken the bus. She wanted him to be shocked, and while he was, mildly, he was also flattered that as she schemed, she was thinking of him. Yellin apologized for missing the last meeting but didn’t mention the dentist. On a chalkboard Asher ran through the plan, which seemed to Brand both overly complicated and too simple. Asher would meet them with the second car at a kibbutz a few miles from the chosen spot. Brand, Fein and Yellin would watch the hostages while Asher and Lipschitz blew the safe. The car could hold only five of them, so Eva would monitor the escape route from the kibbutz and handle communications. The whole operation was wishful, based on the guards trading the payroll for the hostages. If they refused, would Asher really kill them? From experience Brand was leery of anything with too many moving parts. At least Eva would be safe.
    Afterward, she refused a ride home, then, in the parking lot, when it began to rain, changed her mind. She sat in back and spoke only to Fein and Lipschitz, letting Brand know it wasn’t a victory. Brand, used to losing, knew it was.
    He expected they would make up before the operation. Eventually she’d forgive him, he’d apologize, and they’d go on in their normal, tortured way—or that was how it had worked with Katya. He believed this until two o’clock Thursday afternoon, sitting at the Lions’ Gate. Mad as it sounded, in twenty-four hours, inevitable as the sun rising, he would be in the Valley of Ayalon, aiming a gun at a train. Rather than spur him to go see her, the idea made him colder. At this moment, if that was all she cared for him, the hell with her. She should have told him about Gideon in the first place. And yet that night,