“No. He just thinks it might well have been.”

“What do you intend to do about it?”

“Nothing now except poke around a little more down there. If he’s alive and in the country, you can count on us to get him. Just give us time.”

“And the old man?”

“Forget it, Srulik. I tell you, that whole desert down there is swarming with freaks. This whole country, in fact. How the hell would anyone know? This Yotam is slightly spaced-out himself. A year ago he told me he’d seen a lion in Gravel Gulch. And he’s into ghosts and Ouija boards too. For my money, Srulik, we’ve got the highest percentage of nuts of any country on earth. Take care. And not a word to his parents about this.”

After Chupka had departed, Srulik went to sit alone for a while in his office. It was hot and the mosquitoes were out in full force. If there really is a Higher Being, he mused, whether God or Whatever, I personally beg to differ with Him, or that Being, on several issues, some of them quite fundamental He could have done everything in a far better way. But what I most dislike about Him, if I may say so, is His cheap, vulgar sense of humor. What He finds amusing is unbearably painful to us. If He gets such pleasure from our suffering, then He and I are in deep disagreement. It’s almost eight o’clock and the general meeting’s at nine. I’d better start going over the agenda right now.

On the fourth of May, at two in the morning, in the ruins of Sheikh Dahr, Chupka’s men caught the murderer who had broken out of the prison not far from Kibbutz Granot some four months before. They found him sleeping like a baby in the sheikh’s abandoned house, tied his hands behind his back with his shirt, and marched him off to the Afula police station. There, after vigorous questioning, Captain Bechor was finally satisfied that this client had never encountered Yonatan Lifshitz. All this time he had been living off the land, poaching chickens, stealing oranges from the citrus groves, drinking water from irrigation pipes. From time to time, too, he confessed, he was supplied with fresh clothes, matches, and even a bottle of arak by Bolognesi, who had come to know him in prison many years before. If you’d like, said Bechor, we can give that crackpot the third degree as well. No, thank you, said Srulik. Don’t bother. Bolognesi is harmless. Leave him alone.