After his arrest Herschel Kol found himself in a shuttered room with a mattress on the floor and a guard always at the locked door. Different guards brought him his meals and escorted him to the outhouse in the back yard of the house he was held in. He couldn’t be sure of his whereabouts, but from the glimpse of an open field beyond the yard’s fence and the scent of citrus in the air, Herschel guessed that he was somewhere in northern Tel Aviv, a rural part of the city known for its orange groves.
His guards were Jews, which could only mean that he was a prisoner of Haganah and that this was one of their safe houses. Two guards came for him late one night. Waking him up, they dragged him from his mattress and downstairs to the basement.
He steeled himself for the worst. The fact that he was a prisoner of Jews did not mean that he would be gently treated, and a Jewish hand holding a club would not make the blow any less painful. He was determined not to talk. The fact that his captors were Jews only deepened his resolve. No quarrel was as bitter as a family quarrel.
The basement was well lit and very clean, with whitewashed cinder-block walls. Herschel allowed himself a spark of hope when he saw that there was no interrogation equipment there. The only furnishings were a plain wooden table and two chairs.
“Sit,” one of the guards ordered in Hebrew. He sat under his escort’s eyes, his back to the stairs, and waited. He rested his hands on the table and found that it was wobbly. He idly shook it a few times.
He heard the steps creaking as somebody came down. He did not turn around, but kept wobbling the table. His jailbird habits had come right back to him, he realized. Prisoners usually turned childish, and here he was.
“You two can go,” the newcomer told the guards in Hebrew.
A sabra, Herschel thought, listening to the accent.
The guards left. Herschel glanced up at the man taking the chair across the table. The newcomer was heavy-set with broad shoulders and close-cropped thinning hair. He had high cheekbones that lent an almost Oriental cast to his features and a parrot’s beak of a nose. He wore a black patch over his left eye.
“Herschel,” the man said brightly, “I apologize for how you’ve been treated. I’ve been very busy, else I would have gotten to you before now. I say, it has been a long time, yes?”
Herschel rubbed his sleepy eyes. “Do I know you?”
“We were quite good boyhood friends, but my family moved from Degania in 1922. I’m Moshe Dayan.”
Dayan! Herschel was only ten at the time, but he well remembered his old friendship.
“Moshe, of course I remember you now,” Herschel said truthfully, thinking fast. “For old time’s sake, can you get me out of here?”
Dayan laughed. “You’re certainly an Irgunist, I see. There’s nothing you won’t exploit.”
“You have no reason to act superior,” Herschel said harshly. “Not when Haganah seems to be arm in arm with the CID. The British arrested me, and yet here I am in one of your safehouses. Tell me, do you really think it prudent to let the CID know your hideouts?”
“They don’t know where our hideouts are, Herschel. This place and others like it are being used specifically for this operation. The British have no idea where Haganah goes to ground.”
“You going to let me go or not?”
Dayan nodded. “You are free to go,” he began, but when Herschel stood up, he added, “after you hear me out.”
“Either I’m free or I’m not.”
“Please don’t make me summon the guards.”
Herschel shrugged and sat back down.
Dayan’s one eye sparkled with amusement. He looks more like a parrot than I first thought, Herschel mused, watching the way Dayan cocked and turned his head to focus upon him.
Kol indicated the eyepatch. “What happened?”
“In ’39, when the political winds changed and the British began to worry about the Axis influence on the Arabs, they decided to prove how evenhanded they were by arresting some Haganah men. I got five years. In ’41 they let me out the same as you, because I volunteered for a commando mission. We were in Syria and I was looking through a pair of binoculars.” He shrugged. “Some sniper got in a lucky shot and my eye was gone.”
“You made out better than Raziel at any rate,” Herschel said. “What is it you want to talk to me about? Make it quick, please. I’d like to get out of here.”
“And you will, Herschel, that I promise. Whether you agree to what I ask or not, you’ll be free to go. We need your help, my old friend.”
Herschel began to laugh. “Haganah—Ben-Gurion— needs my help? What for, Moshe? You’ve got the British, yes? They will hand Haganah a little piece of Palestine because you have behaved and asked politely. So why should you need the help of a—what have you called us?—a maniac, a gangster, a terrorist?”
“The British will give us nothing. They will not make good on any promises. We all know that.”
“We do?”
“The British have told us what is expedient. Once the war is over they refuse to antagonize the Arabs and risk driving them into the Russian fold.”
“Then why have you helped them?”
“Because terrorism will rob us of sympathy. Herschel, what’s happened between our organizations is ugly, I don’t deny it, but it has been necessary. If we give the world an excuse to hate Jews, they will gladly take it. It’s far more convenient for the powers that be to focus on Moyne’s assassination than on the plight of the refugees in internment camps.” Dayan frowned.
“You see, lrgun ideas are right, but the timing is all wrong. We must bide our time until the British reveal themselves as liars. Then we can begin to drive them out. Given a couple of years the British will withdraw from Palestine, confident that the Arabs will accomplish what has so far proved to be beyond Hitler’s reach. The white paper’s goal of an Arab Palestine will have been realized. Nobody will blame the British, and the world will go on merrily enjoying the region’s output of petroleum.”
“It sounds to me like Ben-Gurion owes Begin an apology.”
“What’s befallen the lrgun is its own fault,” Dayan insisted. “Begin was given every opportunity to fall into line behind the establishment. He had his chance—”
“Like I’m having mine?”
Dayan regarded him. “I told you you’d be released no matter what, and I meant it. I am offering you a chance to aid your organization by helping us. So far we’ve been able to hold our own against the Arabs, but Jewish boys repelling a Bedouin raid on an agricultural settlement is one thing; the Jewish people defending themselves against tens of thousands of British-trained soldiers of the Arab Legion is quite something else. We—Haganah, lrgun and LEHI—can train the manpower, but we don’t have the guns.”
It was all true, of course. Herschel had just spent a year at various lrgun training camps and had helped write a manual on the Bren gun, but not enough of these weapons were available. Fewer than one in ten had been issued a weapon, and most of those were revolvers.
“You said that by helping you, I can also help the lrgun. How so?”
“The three resistance organizations will all be in the same boat when the British break their word. They—we—will form the core of the army that will win the homeland. Don’t you agree?”
“I suppose,” Herschel replied, “but where do I fit in?”
“You’ve become something of a weapons-expert in the last year. You know not only how to use existing weapons but how to make rudimentary arms. Isn’t that correct?”
Herschel shrugged. “Pipe bombs, very primitive single-shot pistols, a crude mortar—I tell you, Moshe, it was more for morale than anything. You give a man a weapon—any weapon—and he doesn’t feel so powerless.”
Dayan nodded, smiling. “Yes.” His fingertips nervously tapped the tabletop. “Before I tell you what it is we want from you, I’ll tell you what we can do for you. Our relationship with the British is such that we could get you a pardon. Your record would be clean. There’d be no more threat of prison.”
“That would be very nice for me. Now suppose you tell me what it is you want.”
“We are establishing a network all across the world to search for weapons. We will import all we can. Some of our people are finding guns and others are finding the money to pay for them. The arms we acquire will be distributed equally.”
“So you want me to act as the Haganah’s arms buyer?” Herschel asked.
“As one of them, yes. As I’ve said, there will be a network and you would be a part of it.”
“Why are you doing this? For me, I mean. Here you are offering me what amounts to a full pardon to join in a cooperative effort that could proceed very well without me.”
“We have no shortage of volunteers, but not so many are technically knowledgeable. We will come across many arms brokers who want to sell us junk, so men like you, who can tell what’s good from what isn’t, are very valuable.” Dayan looked down at the table. “But it’s more than that, Herschel. You see, I remember a conversation we had when we were boys. I was bragging about being named after a hero. You shamed me by telling me about your father. ‘He’s the real hero,’ you maintained.”
“I remember that very well,” Herschel said. “I was still mourning him, I suppose.”
“I’m offering you an opportunity to be just as much of a hero as your father. He did not shirk his duty and you must not. You speak English and you have the technical expertise to do the job, and so you must do it. The old generation were giants, and now we must be giants if the dream is to endure.”
“Enough.” Herschel smiled. “I’ll do it. After all, my father did not hesitate to go to the rescue of his Moshe.”
“Good.” They shook hands, but when Dayan mentioned that Herschel should join Haganah, he refused.
“No more oaths. What use are they? Is it kiss the Bible and touch the pistol or the other way around, comrade?”
“You needn’t join if you don’t want it,” Dayan said neutrally.
“You mentioned speaking English as a qualification for the job. I take it you’re sending me to London?”
Dayan shook his head. “America.”