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through the crowds outside the Damascus Gate.
     
     
     
    Haifa
     
    The old Fiat wound its way up the slopes of Mount Carmel, past the Arab-style brownstones and apartment buildings, leaving the teeming streets of the waterfront far behind. Asher parked the Fiat outside a pension house almost hidden from the road behind a tall stand of pines. He went inside.
    The owner, Levitski, took him up to a room on the second floor. Netanel sat in a chair by the window, staring at the port through the mist of rain. The wind rattled the window in its frame, moaning around the eaves.
    “ Shalom .” Asher held out his hand. “My name’s Asher Ben-Zion. I am with the Haganah.”
    Netanel looked up at his visitor, but if he recognized him from the previous night he gave no sign of it. “ Shalom .”
    Asher sat in the chair next to him. There were dark shadows under his eyes. “Forgive my appearance. I have not been to bed for nearly forty-eight hours. There has been a lot to arrange.”
    Netanel nodded, but said nothing.
    “What is your name?”
    “Rosenberg. Netanel Rosenberg.”
    “Do you remember what happened last night, Rosenberg?”
    “I remember I got very wet.”
    “There are at least half a dozen who owe you their lives.” He studied this Rosenberg more closely. A scar on the right side of his face had healed badly and pulled the lid half closed over the eye. His lip had once been badly tom in two places and now pulled down the corners of his mouth in a permanent sneer. More like the face of a villain than a hero, Asher thought.
    How old was he? There was white in his close-cropped hair, and his face was lined. Perhaps forty.
    Levitski had provided him with fresh clothes, but the shirt was too small for him and the shirtsleeve did not conceal the blue tattoo on his forearm. His hands were never still, Asher noticed. But the most unsettling thing about this man was his eyes. They were lifeless, like the fish heads down at the market at the waterfront. “You are a brave man,” Asher said.
    “Is that what you think?”
    Asher shook his head. “Well, it’s what I thought at first.”
    “And now?”
    “Now I wonder if you weren’t almost hoping you would drown.”
    Netanel shrugged. “How many did you save last night?”
    “Of the five hundred and forty-six people on board we estimate that just over three hundred made it to the shore. The rest either drowned or were arrested this morning by the British.”
    “You managed to hide the rest?”
    Asher shook his head. “Unfortunately not. The British may have picked up perhaps as many as a hundred, from the village or at roadblocks. The rest are scattered all over the northern coast, here in Haifa, in Acre, or on kibbutzim away from the coast. There are eight of your comrades in this pension alone.”
    “So. Only two hundred?”
    Asher bristled at the implied criticism. “In the circumstances, it was more than anyone could have hoped for. It is two hundred more Jews in Palestine who otherwise would be rotting away in DP camps in Europe. Europe doesn’t want any more Jewish refugees. We do.”
    “You really think the British will give us our own Jewish state here?”
    “I don’t think that’s what they want to do. We will have to persuade them.”
    “You will use force against them?”
    “We’ll employ whatever means necessary. This land was promised to us by God in the time of the Pharaohs and by Balfour in 1917. Imagine that! We have the word of both Jehovah and the British! Palestine is our twice-promised land.”
    “Then why do they want to stop us coming now? They fired on us last night. I saw two men lying on the deck with British bullets in them. I thought they were on our side. I thought it was just the Germans who wanted to kill us!”
    “They don’t hate us. It’s not personal, it’s just politics.”
    “Everything is just politics. Hitler and Streicher were just politics. Gassing children is just politics.”
    Asher shrugged. “The British