Operation Shylock: A Confession Read Online Free PDF Page B

West Bank the month before and that I’d been following in New York onthe nightly news. A curfew was in effect in East Jerusalem and tourists had been warned away particularly from the Old City because of the stone throwing there and the possibility of violent clashes escalating between the army and the Arab residents. The media had taken to describing these riots, which had become a more or less daily occurrence in the Occupied Territories, as a Palestinian uprising.
    “Why can’t you contact the Israeli police?” she asked.
    “I think the Israeli police may find themselves facing problems more pressing than mine right now. What would I tell them? Arrest him? Deport him? On what grounds? As far as I know, he hasn’t passed a phony check in my name, he hasn’t been paid for any services in my name—”
    “But he must have entered Israel with a phony passport, with
papers
in your name. That’s illegal.”
    “But do we know this? We don’t. It’s illegal but not very likely. I suspect that all he’s done in my name is to shoot his mouth off.”
    “But there
must
be legal safeguards. A person cannot simply run off to a foreign country and go around pretending to be someone he is not.”
    “Happens probably more often than you think. How about some realism? Darling, how about your taking a reasonable perspective?”
    “I don’t want anything to happen to you. That’s my reasonable perspective.”
    “What ‘happened’ to me happened to me many months ago now.”
    “Are you really up to this? I have to ask you, Philip.”
    “There’s nothing for me to be ‘up to.’ Did anything like what happened to me ever happen to me before that drug? Has anything like it happened to me since the drug? Tomorrow they’re printing a retraction. They’re faxing Helene a copy. That’s enough for now.”
    “Well, I don’t understand this calm of yours—or hers, frankly.”
    “Now the calm’s upsetting. This morning it was my chagrin.”
    “Yes, well—I don’t believe it.”
    “Well, there’s nothing I can do about that.”
    “Promise me you won’t do anything ridiculous.”
    “Such as?”
    “I don’t
know
. Trying to find this person. Trying to
fight
with this person. You have no idea whom you might be dealing with. You must not try to look for him and solve this stupid thing yourself. At least promise that you won’t do that.”
    I laughed at the very idea. “My guess,” I said, lying once again, “is that by the time I get to Jerusalem, he won’t be anywhere to be found.”
    “You won’t do it.”
    “I won’t have to. Look, see it this way, will you? I have everything on my side, he has nothing on his, absolutely nothing.”
    “But you’re wrong. You know what he has on his side? It’s clear from every word you speak. He has you.”
    ___
    After our dinner that evening I told Claire that I was going off to my study at the top of the house to sit down again with Aharon’s novels to continue making my notes for the Jerusalem conversation. But no more than five minutes had passed after I’d settled at the desk, when I heard the television set playing below and I picked up the phone and called the King David Hotel in Jerusalem and asked to be put through to 511. To disguise my voice I used a French accent, not the bedroom accent, not the farcical accent, not that French accent descended from Charles Boyer through Danny Kaye to the TV ads for table wines and traveler’s checks, but the accent of highly articulate and cosmopolitan Frenchmen like my friend the writer Philippe Sollers, no “zis,” no “zat,” all initial h ’s duly aspirated—fluent English simply tinged with the natural inflections and marked by the natural cadences of an intelligent foreigner. It’s an imitation I don’t do badly—once, on the phone, I fooled even mischievous Sollers—and the one I’d decided on even while Claire and I were arguing at the dinner table about the wisdom of my trip, even while, I must