The Outcast Hours Read online

  From the corner of her eye she could see the dead blackberry bushes which looked like they had been painted with ink, the tracery of the path.

  “Buddy, you need to drive us back,” she said.

  There had been no wind outside, but now the wind began to blow, rattling the dead trees. The owl which was flying near them must have settled upon one of the trees because she caught a flicker of motion, but she did not look to confirm it.

  She didn’t look at the house, either, with its boarded windows and its yellow door. It was there. She could feel it. The house, the door, the night outside, the icy cold, and the both of them tucked like snails in a shell. She could feel it and she could feel the deadness of the soil upon which they stood and the half-moon, perfectly ordinary.

  But not for all the gold in the world would she have stepped outside the car in that moment. Because the night was yawning.

  That’s how Grandma put it to her, “the night was yawning,” the time she told her and her brother about the house where the show took place, and how she’d come there, and the radio played Santo and Johnny while Grandma waited in the car.

  “Dude,” she said grabbing his chin with one hand and turning it so he would look at her.

  His eyes were open wide. He looked young. She thought he wasn’t late twenties, but much closer to her age. It didn’t matter. Didn’t matter if he was 70 or 20, he needed to drive them away.

  “Dude, drive. Now,” she ordered him, her voice firm.

  She thought she was going to have to punch him, but the guy snapped out of it. He turned on the car and they drove. She saw a shifting silhouette in the rear-view mirror, but didn’t pay attention to it, her gaze fixing back on him.

  “You alright?” she asked him.

  “I’m… yeah,” he said.

  He looked pale, beads of sweat on his forehead.

  Tourists, she thought. Idiots.

  She turned on the heat and the car warmed up quick. The guy was still holding real tight to the wheel, and if you looked close you’d notice his eyes were very bright. Like he wanted to cry and couldn’t.

  Fools, all of them. Looking for experiences.

  “I’m gonna play a song, alright?” she said.

  She took off the headphones and pressed play, and the old music swept around them. That slow steel guitar, chirping high, moaning of a lost love. No lyrics, but a love song. Ain’t no need for words all the time.

  He relaxed his hands. The girl lit a cigarette and placed it on his lips, and he didn’t complain none about it, he took a drag, and then she took one.

  Now she looked in the rear-view mirror, a hand tangling with one of the chains around her neck. Behind them there were pines, a narrow road, the night with pin-prickles of stars. Nothing else.

  The diner was open late. They parked, and were greeted by its welcoming glow. The light, like the music that had played in the car, was soothing. The girl opened the door and stepped out. He did too, although more slowly.

  “Here’s your other half,” he said as they both stood in front of the car.

  “Thanks.”

  He had put on the camel coat and placed his hands in his pockets. She noticed he’d gotten the coat dirty, it had stains on it, as if he’d dragged the hem through the mud or dirt.

  “I didn’t think… the show, I didn’t think…” he said, trailing off.

  “Nobody does,” she said.

  “What now?” he asked.

  “Get some rest. You have a long drive back home tomorrow,” she said.

  “I feel like I have to tell someone,” he said.

  “Not me.”

  “But—”

  The girl took out her pack of cigarettes. She had two left. She handed both to him. He grabbed the crumpled box and looked at it in astonishment, as if he didn’t know what it was. He nodded, slowly.

  No need for words. Words didn’t do.

  She bid him goodbye with a quick wave of the hand and crossed the street, heading to the bar. She was going to buy everyone a round.

  Bag Man

  Lavie Tidhar

  1

  “How come you never got married, Max?”

  He was sitting on the edge of the bed putting on his socks and shoes. Marina reclined on the mattress. The street light outside the window cast her face in a yellow glow.

  “Who says I didn’t?”

  He pulled up his trousers and buckled his belt and smoothed the crease in his trousers and put on his gun. He had one strapped to his leg and another under the coat and he also had a knife, just in case. The briefcase was on the floor beside the bed.

  “I never figured you for the marrying kind.”

  Marina had been a working girl in the past but now she ran a flower shop and she and Max had an understanding. And he didn’t normally say any damn thing, so why was he being chatty tonight? He thought of Sylvie in Marseilles and the boy, who might even have grown-up children of his own by now. It had been nearly forty years since he’d gone and left them. When he came to Israel he joined the army, full of enthusiasm, a patriotism he’d never quite lost. Never quite lost the accent, either.

  These days he barely remembered what she had looked like, even her smell. He wondered vaguely if she was still alive. But he’d done what was best.

  “It wouldn’t be fair,” he said. “Considering.”

  You can’t lose what you never had, he thought. Put on his wristwatch. Sat down again and ran his hand along Marina’s smooth leg, fondly. “I have to go,” he said.

  “You always have to go,” she said.

  Max shrugged. Picked up the briefcase and went to the door. “A man’s got to work,” he said.

  “And you’re more honest than most,” she said, and laughed, showing small white teeth. “What’s in the case, Max? Guns? Money? Pills?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. He really didn’t, and he didn’t care. “I just know where to pick it up and where to drop it off.”

  Truth was Benny was keeping him mostly on ice after that job in the Negev went bad. A Bedouin clan had been muscling in on some of Benny’s southern territory and he’d sent Max to take care of things, and Max did, he’d left two bodies behind him in Rahat but they caught up with him as he was driving back along the lonely desert road and they filled his rented car with bullets. He was lucky to still be alive, he’d run into one of the dry wadis, and before they could come after him a border police patrol showed up and the Bedouins made themselves scarce. But it had been close and he wasn’t getting any younger, sixty was coming up on him like a brick wall.

  He tried to remember what it felt like, the pursuit and running through the dry riverbed, thinking they were coming behind with their AKs. For a moment it felt like being a kid again, playing cowboys and Indians. It should have been horrifying: instead it was a rush.

  He smiled at Marina as he left. Went down the stairs with the briefcase in his hand. A kiddie job. He hummed a song, something even older than himself. Opened the door to the street and stepped outside still humming.

  2

  “On the ground, motherfucker,” Pinky said. Pinky was hopped up on speed and he felt like he was flying. He perched on the seat of his bicycle and aimed the gun at the old man with the briefcase.

  There were four of them on bicycles, all training guns on the old dude. They’d waited outside in the shadows until the light came on in the upstairs apartment where that old Russian whore lived. It was so easy it was laughable. He wanted to laugh. His teeth were chattering from the speed and he couldn’t make them stop. “Hand over the briefcase, slowly.”

  The old man didn’t put up a fight. He looked very calm, which annoyed Pinky. Pinky was seventeen and he didn’t like old people, with the exception of his grandmother, who let him stay with her and sometimes cooked him roast chicken with paprika in the oven, which he loved, but who most of the time just sat by the window with a sad, resigned look on her face.

  Apart from old people, Pinky didn’t like African refugees, Fi
lipino workers, Russian immigrants, beggars, teachers, fat people, stuck-up girls who wouldn’t talk to him, Arabs (obviously), Orthodox Jews (obviously), social workers and, of course, the police.

  He hefted the briefcase in his hand wondering what was in it. It felt light but not too light. He grinned like a maniac and his teeth chattered. “That’s it,” he said. “Stay on the ground, old man.”

  The old man didn’t say anything, just lay there, looking up at Pinky like he was memorising his face.

  “Did I say you can look at me!” Pinky screamed. The window overhead opened and the Russian whore stuck her ugly face out and Pinky raised the gun and she quickly withdrew.

  “Come on, Pinky, let’s go,” Bilbo said. They called him Bilbo because he was small and hairy. It was either that or, sometimes, Toilet Brush.

  “Shut up!” Pinky said. “I said no names!”

  “Sorry, Pinky. I mean—”

  “You want me to shoot you myself?” Pinky waved the gun at Bilbo.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Bilbo said. His real name was Chaim, which was even worse than Toilet Brush, or at least that’s what Pinky always figured.

  “Take the case and go,” the old man said. His tone annoyed Pinky. He climbed off the bike.

  “I already did,” he said.

  “Good for you,” the old man said.

  “Fuck you!” Pinky said, and he kicked the old man viciously in the ribs. The old man grunted but didn’t say a thing.

  “Come on, man!” Rambo said. Rambo was big and stupid but he was loyal. Pinky hawked up phlegm and spat on the old man but missed him and the spit landed on the pavement near the old man’s face. Pinky got back on the bike and then, just to prove he could, he aimed the gun up at the sky and squeezed off a shot. It inadvertently hit the street light, which exploded loudly, startling all of them and scattering glass on the ground.

  “Shit!” Rambo said. Pinky’s heart was beating to a drum and bass track. They got on their bikes and pedalled away as quickly as they could, whooping into the night.

  3

  Max got up and brushed glass shards off his trousers. Marina stuck her head out of the window, and he could see her in silhouette against the light of the moon. “Get back inside,” he said, gently.

  For a moment there he thought that punk kid was going to shoot him. What a way to go, he thought. Shot by some kid on a dirty street in the old bus station area. They didn’t even pat him down for his guns.

  He didn’t really care who they were, but he wanted to know who had employed them to rob him.

  He began to walk, humming softly to himself. At this time of night the old bus station area was coming alive as its residents, mostly foreign migrant workers and refugees, returned home to their slum-like apartments. The bars and shebeens, always open, became busier. The junkies, who came from all over the city, congregated on the burnt remains of the old terminal building, and the sex shops and what was left of the brothels welcomed their furtive johns with tired indifference.

  But there was beauty here, too, Max thought, passing a stall selling flowers, roses and chrysanthemums, anemones, poppies. They scented the air, joining the smells from the nearby shawarma stand where suicide bombers twice blew themselves up, the smell of cumin and garlic and lamb fat. Two Filipino kids, up late, played football by a butcher stall, where a man in a stained apron methodically cut chops out of the carcass of a pig, using the cleaver with a proficiency Max admired.

  He wove his way deeper into the maze of narrow streets, crumbling building fronts, faded shop signs. A young white girl with needle marks on her arms tried to entice him into a dark hallway, lethargically. He waved her away. The night was still young and boys will be boys, but he had a feeling it wouldn’t be as easy as that. He reached the front of a store that said Bookshop overhead. Dusty textbooks in the window, geography books by the long-deceased Y. Paporish with maps that showed countries which no longer existed. Max let himself in.

  A bell dinged as he stepped through. The shop was dark and dusty, with books piled everywhere, paperbacks in English and French, forgotten Hebrew novels and ancient comics hung up by a string, their pages fluttering sadly like the wings of dead butterflies.

  Hanging on the wall was a detailed artist’s illustration of the imagined future of Tel Aviv’s central bus station. It showed a graceful tower rising into the sky, a sort of 1950s retrofuturistic construction decorated with spiral bridgeways and floating flower gardens, and showed happy, well-fed, well-dressed residents, the men in suits and ties and the women in floral dresses, all smiling and holding hands as they beheld this miracle of engineering.

  “Makes you cry, doesn’t it?” a voice said. Max turned and saw Mr Bentovich, the ancient proprietor, a small pale man who always seemed to Max to resemble a particularly inedible and quite likely poisonous mushroom.

  “Didn’t see you there, Bento.”

  “You’re being familiar again, Max. I don’t like people being familiar.”

  “Sorry, Mr Bentovich.”

  They shook hands. Bento’s was moist and cold. His touch made Max shudder. They stood there and admired the artist’s impression of what the future most decidedly did not look like.

  “To what do I owe the pleasure, Max? You’re not here to do me in, are you?” Bento laughed, the sound a dry cough in the dusty air of the bookshop. “Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “If anyone’s to do it, I’d rather it was you, Max.”

  “I’m flattered.”

  “What do you want?” Bento said. “I’m up on my payments to Benny.” He went behind the counter and when Max looked at him he knew Bento had his hand, under the desk, on the butt of a gun.

  He shook his head, raised his hands. “I come in peace,” he said.

  “I hate this place,” Bento said. His little wizened face looked like it would cry. “I used to sell books, Max. Books!”

  “I know, Bent—Mr Bentovich. I know. How’s business, though?”

  Bento shrugged. “Alright,” he said. He pushed a hidden button on the desk and the top sprung open and he swept his hand majestically as if to say, take your pick.

  The desk was divided into compartments and in each one Max saw dried fungus, cubes of hashish, pre-rolled joints, moist cannabis sativa, pills, more pills, even more pills, and a bag of mints—“For my throat,” Bento said when he saw Max’s look.

  “Sell to kids, much?”

  “From where I’m standing,” Bento said, morosely, “everyone’s a kid, Max. Even you.”

  “I’m looking for one kid in particular,” Max said. “About seventeen, pre-army. A little shit.”

  “They’re all little shits, Max. Can I offer you anything? On the house. You need some Viagra? Cialis? Something to keep your pecker up?”

  “I need what you know, Bento,” Max said, and the friendliness was gone from his voice, and this time Bento didn’t correct him on the use of his name. “About a little shit called Pinky, who has three friends even stupider than he is.”

  “Pinky, Pinky,” the old bookseller said, “now, why would I know a Pinky?”

  “Because he was as high as a kite the last time I saw him,” Max said, “which was not that long ago, Bento. Not that long ago at all. You sell diet pills?”

  “I sell everything, Max,” Bento said, reproachfully. “You mean amphetamines?”

  “Why are you fucking with me, Bento?” Max said. “You know who I’m after. So why are we playing games? What are you after?”

  “I’ll tell you what I’m not after, Max. I’m not after any trouble.”

  “And why would there be trouble?”

  Bento just shrugged, which made Max wary.

  “Who is this kid?” he said.

  “He’s just a punk,” Bento said.

  “Who is he working for?”

  Bento laughed. “Working for?” he said. “Who’d employ a moron like that.”

  “I don’t know, Bento,” Max said, patiently. “That’s why I asked.”

  “W
hy the interest, anyway?” Bento said.

  “Do you always answer a question with a question?”

  “Do you?”

  Max sighed and pulled out his gun and put the muzzle against Bento’s forehead. Bento stood very still and his eyes were large and jumped around too much: they were the only animated feature of his face. “You dip into your own merchandise?” Max said.

  “You try being stuck in here all day dealing with scum,” Bento said. “Those kids would be the death of me one day. You know someone got done just outside my front door? The other side of the road. Eritrean or Somali, one of those guys.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Max said.

  “Wise guy,” Bento said. “Can you take the gun away, please?”

  “Since you said please,” Max said. “No. Tell me where I can find Pinky.”

  Bento’s face twisted in a sudden grimace of hatred, but whether it was of Max, of the kids, or of the circumstances that led him here, to this dismal bookshop in the modern ghetto of the old bus station of Tel Aviv, Max couldn’t say.

  “He and his little friends squat in an abandoned flat on Wolfson,” Bento said.

  “Yes?”

  Bento gave him the address. Max made the gun disappear. When Max was at the door Bento said, “Max?” and Max said, “Yes?” turning around to face him.

  “Don’t come back here,” Bento said.

  “I hope I don’t have to,” Max said, and he saw the old bookseller scowl.

  4

  He had the feeling he was being watched as he walked to the address Bento gave him. A vague sense of unease that grew with each step, but Max could see no one, could only trust his instinct, and he thought, they will come in good time. First, he had his business to take care of.

  It was a rundown building on a rundown street and it didn’t take much to break the lock on the downstairs door. The stairwell was unlit and smelled of piss and as he climbed the floors he saw four pairs of bicycles chained to the railings. He reached the third floor and an unpainted door and kicked it open and walked inside with his gun drawn.