Goodbye Paris, Shalom Tel Aviv: A Novel by Marco Koskas

Author:Marco Koskas [Koskas, Marco]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-02-03T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 17

Elias answers the police summons without a lawyer to try to play down the situation, and he goes there by bus. Two hours on the road separate Tel Aviv from Netivot, that little town in the Negev a little over three miles from Gaza, and even if it isn’t at the end of the world, when you want to go there, it takes all day. Despite the quantities of missiles it received from Hamas, Netivot has remained a place both calm and strange, where you sometimes meet transsexuals who’ve had very successful surgery. There Elias knows a certain Levana, a good-looking blonde with the voice of an ogre, very nice and ultrafeminine, who doesn’t always make you pay for a blow job. A real subject for an Israeli film, that Levana: born in a man’s body, but also into an ultraorthodox family who called it the work of the devil when she decided to change sex. Levana became a woman nonetheless. Her seven brothers accepted it, since she supports them financially while they twiddle their thumbs pretending to study the Torah.

As he doesn’t want his absence to make waves at H24, Elias calls in sick, except that he’s obliged to admit to Olga that he’s going to the cops in Netivot. She frowns, quick to sense something wrong.

“Why the cops?” she asks first. “It’s a terrorist attack, not a crime.”

“The Shabak reclassified the attack as a criminal case.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Oh, no reason, just didn’t want to worry you.”

“Eli darling, trust me, please,” she says, putting her arms around him. “Tell me what really happened. You can’t leave me out of this. I’m your woman.”

“Don’t forget, they wanted to slit my throat.”

“But you say yourself the Shabak doesn’t think it’s a terrorist attack.”

“So what?” Elias replies. “It’s still attempted murder, right?”

“Yes, but why? Why did these guys want to kill you?”

“To steal the car, that’s all. Why complicate things?”

Another source of unease is growing between them—the bracelet he wanted to give her when she returned from Gérardmer. Olga doesn’t dare ask for it, of course. She’s too sensitive for that. But still . . .

Why doesn’t he give it to her again? Well, so as not to admit it’s precisely because of that damn piece of jewelry that it all happened. Elias is more or less convinced it brought him bad luck. Ill-gotten gain, an unlucky object, a jinx, whatever, he has to give it away, sell it back, or fence it, anything except give it to Olga again. He loves her so much! If she left him again, this time he’d really commit suicide.

“Do you know the two individuals who tried to assassinate you?” the Netivot policeman asks him directly.

“Never saw ’em before,” Elias answers.

“They’re saying they know you.”

“From where?”

“They say you sold them a car and you returned to take it back in the middle of the night.”

“What car?”

“The four-wheel drive you had when you got to the artificial dune.”

“Baloney. That car is still at H24.”

“You’re

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