43

IN THE OFFICES OF Isracorp, now descended from the thirty-second floor of the Isracorp Tower to the fourth because electricity is not available to run the elevators, two men sit together watching the proceedings of the UN General Assembly on a jury-rigged electronic connection, one of the few means of contact with the outside world. They watch in silence as the picture dims, then goes dark, followed by the office lights. Electricity must be saved. Tel Aviv’s power station is now burning little more than coal dust. Tomorrow even that will be gone.

Misha relights his cigar. “I’m not going anywhere. You?”

“Wait until you’re so hungry you’ll eat your shoes,” Yigal says. The gangster removes the stylish moccasin on his right foot, and with a theatrical flourish inhales its aroma. “Italian cuisine,” he sighs. “My favorite.”

“We’ve given up. You heard it. Done. Take us away. The end.”

“There are worse things.”

“Like what?”

“Like this being my last Cohiba Esplendido.” Abruptly Misha changes his tone, his voice dropping an octave. “Yigal, no one will have us.”

“Probably not.”

“We shouldn’t have fallen back.”

“Still, we destroyed four hundred Iranian cans,” Yigal says. “Eight hundred more came the next day. We fell back. We didn’t advance. I’ve never not advanced. Not in Russia, where they called me filthy yid. Not here, where they called me filthy Russian. In a tank, not ever. How could it happen?”

“Too many Muslims. Too few Jews.”

“Too few? Close to six million are now in Tel Aviv, more shipped in like livestock every day. Quite a few Jews, Yigal.”

“Armed with what, Misha? Anger? Desire? Teeth?”

“They don’t want us to fight, our new leaders. They want to be taken in and fed, like dogs in the street.”

“No tanks, no planes, no ammo, no fuel. I run a global business—well, I ran a global business. You know how? With a weapon called money. Without this weapon, for investment, research, trade, leverage, I couldn’t have run a falafel stand. The Americans have declared themselves neutral. Ipso facto, we have no weapons.”

“But you didn’t start with weapons. I didn’t either. We acquired them.”

“Over time. Of which we have none. Look out these windows. People sitting like statues in the street, moving only to find shade. For water they’re already drinking from the Yarkon, a river so poisonous you could die from falling into it. It’s over.”

Misha goes to the window, coated with the desert dust that swirls in from as far away as Saudi Arabia. The huge sheet of polarized glass has not been cleaned since the invasion. “Yigal,” he says, looking out. “I’m not the one who can do it. I’m a good criminal, very organized, good contacts, not stupid. But I don’t have your experience. You run the biggest company in Israel—”

“What I run is an office building with really nice furniture. Everything else is gone. Factories, banks, telecoms, software. Finita la comedia.”

The gangster turns so that in Yigal’s view he is now little more than a silhouette against the sun. “You through feeling sorry for yourself?”

“I thought I’d give it a bit longer.”

“Fuck, we don’t have any longer. Yigal, nobody will follow me. They will follow you.”