There's no love lost between Nathan and Ben Levi. The rebel and the truth-seeker in Nathan despise his own facility at speechwriting, his way with smooth words to disguise murky maneuvers. Ben Levi is well aware of Nathan's feelings but cunningly parades the disabled veteran as a tribute to patriotic heroism and a foil to his own charisma. We learn that Ben Levi has an estranged son, Gabriel, a noted archeologist and political liberal. The occasion of the assassination attempt was a public reconciliation between father and son, a photo-opportunity handshake only just forestalled by the shot that struck Nathan.
Twist follows upon twist, death upon death.
The genre itself requires that a detective alternate between the inspired and the obtuse, and Nathan carries this to mesmerizing extremes, by turns a pitiful figure, stumbling around and unable to perceive the obvious, and then, by virtue of his aural and olfactory acuity, an Israeli Holmes. Bukiet's busy plot is satisfying in its ingenuity, and it covers a multitude of Israeli angles in this political polyhedron of a country. Yet it is Nathan himself who is the triumph of the book, and whose riches both as a character and as a guide to Jewry and to Israel exceed the melodramatic genre in which Bukiet has confined him. Nathan has recruited the gay dive's owner, Ezekiel, to help him drag some truth out of one of Ben Levi's vilest aides. Drag is the word.