The One From the Other Read Online Free PDF

that the British have ordered the dissolution of the committee and the arrest of its members. Apparently the assistant district commissioner of Galilee was murdered in Nazareth a few days ago. Haj Amin is now in hiding, in Jerusalem’s old city, but he’s going to try to slip out and meet us in Cairo. So, as you can see, there’s just Polkes to worry about here in Jaffa.”
    “Remind me never to play cards with you, Eichmann,” I said. “Or, if I do, to make sure you take off your coat and roll up your sleeves.”
    “Just tell Fievel Polkes to come to Cairo. He’ll understand. But don’t, for Christ’s sake, mention the Grand Mufti.”
    “The Grand Mufti?”
    “Haj Amin,” said Eichmann. “He’s the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. He’s the highest official of religious law in Palestine. The British appointed him in 1921. Which makes him the most powerful Arab in the country. He’s also a rabid anti-Semite who makes the Führer seem like a Jew lover. Haj Amin has declared jihad on the Jews. Which is why the Haganah and the Irgun would like to see him dead. And which is why it’s best Fievel Polkes doesn’t know we’re planning to see him. He’ll suspect it’s happening, of course. But that’s his problem.”
    “I just hope it doesn’t become mine,” I said.
     
     
    The day after Eichmann and Hagen left on the boat for Alexandria, Fievel Polkes turned up at the Jerusalem Hotel looking for them. Polkes was a chain-smoking Polish Jew in his mid-thirties. He wore a crumpled, tropical-weight suit and a straw hat. He needed a shave, but not as badly as the chain-smoking Russian Jew accompanying him. He was in his mid-forties, with a couple of boulders for shoulders and a weathered sort of face like something carved on a flying buttress. His name was Eliahu Golomb. Their jackets were buttoned, although it was, as usual, a baking-hot day. When a man keeps his jacket buttoned on a hot day, it usually means one thing. After I had explained the situation, Golomb swore in Russian, and in an effort to smooth things over—these men were terrorists, after all—I pointed at the bar and offered to buy them a drink.
    “All right,” said Polkes, who spoke good German. “But not in here. Let’s go somewhere else. I have a car outside.”
    I almost said no. It was one thing to drink with them in the hotel bar. It seemed quite another thing to go somewhere in a car with men whose buttoned-up jackets told me they were armed, and probably dangerous. Seeing my hesitation, Polkes added, “You’ll be safe enough, my friend. It’s the British we’re fighting, not the Germans.”
    We went outside and climbed inside a two-tone Riley saloon. Golomb drove slowly away from the hotel, like a man who didn’t want to attract attention to himself. We went north and east, through a German colony of smart white villas known as Little Valhalla, and then left across the railway line, onto Hashachar Herzl. Left again onto Lilien Blum, and then we stopped at a bar next to a cinema. We were, said Polkes, in the center of the garden suburb of Tel Aviv. The air smelled of orange blossoms and the sea. Everything looked neater and cleaner than Jaffa. More European, anyway. And I remarked upon it.
    “Naturally you feel at home here,” said Polkes. “Only Jews live here. If it was up to the Arabs, this whole country would be little better than a pissing place.”
    We went into a glass-fronted café with Hebrew words painted on the window. It was called Kapulski’s. The radio was playing what I would have described as Jewish music. A dwarfish woman was mopping the checkered floor. On the wall was a picture of a wild-haired old man wearing an open-necked shirt who looked like Einstein, but without the soup-straining mustache. I had no idea who he was. Beside this picture was one of a man who looked like Marx. I recognized this man as Theodor Herzl only because Eichmann had a picture of him in what he called his Jew file. The barman’s eyes