Cut Throat Dog by Joshua Sobol, Dalya Bilu

pierces him with a sharp look—one of those precise looks which always ended in a body lying at the side of the road, or sitting at the wheel of a car with a hole between the eyes—and asks in an amused tone of voice:
    What’s the matter with you, Shakespeare? Everyone’s waiting for you.
    For Yadanuga he’s Shakespeare, just as for him Yad-anuga is Yadanuga, and not Yudaleh Nugilevski, who to his widowed mother is still her good little boy Yudinka, who leaves a soccer game in the middle if she calls him, and comes running to ask her what she wants him to do. And in high school he was the tough daring athlete Roofy, who even then excelled at walking on the parapets of high roofs and acrobatic riding on the Matchless Motorcycle his uncle Yehiel Nugilevsky-Nagil brought back from the army. And in the assassination squad, where they served together, he was discovered to possess a delicate hand, capable of skewering a lizard on the branch of a jacaranda tree with a commando knife at a distance of eight meters, and therefore he was Yadanuga in the team of the ‘Cunning Cooks’, of which only the two of them hadsurvived, and Hanina uses this ineffable name only when no strange ear is in the vicinity, and Yehuda Nugilevski too calls him Shakespeare only under the same conditions. In the presence of the other employees of the advertising agency Yadanuga becomes Mackie, and Shakespeare becomes Hanina.
    Yadanuga, says Shakespeare, and then he says again: Yadanuga …
    And since at least three seconds, if not four, of silence pass between ‘Yadanuga’ and ‘Yadanuga’, the latter responds with a short ‘What’, leaving all options open, and Shakespeare repeats once more:
    Yadanuga.… I didn’t sleep all night. And he immediately corrects himself: Maybe I slept for two hours.
    What’s up? asks Yadanuga, who reads his friend like an old book full of pencil lines. Don’t tell me you’re still stuck with Adonis’s ghost.
    It’s much more complicated than you think, says Shakespeare.
    I thought you came back because you’d recovered from that illusion at last.
    It’s not an illusion, says Shakespeare.
    Listen, says Yadanuga, after you called from New York and told me you were on his tracks, I spoke to Tzibeleh. He got into the archives and went over the report by the Belgian pathologist, who by the way died a couple of years ago—
    I know the de Odecker document off by heart, says Shakespeare, and it’s no longer relevant.
    The de Odecker document isn’t relevant?!
    Look, says Shakespeare, even if this guy isn’t Adonis, although I think he is, I’ve gotten somebody else involved, someone who has nothing to do with the affair, and this person’s life will be in danger as long as Tony is free.
    Tony? says Yadanuga in surprise. But he wasn’t called Tony. He was called Tino.
    Yes, confirms Shakespeare, his official name was Tino the Syrian.
    He wasn’t actually a Syrian, Yadanuga tries to clarify something forgotten to himself. He was some kind of English-Spaniard or German-Italian wasn’t he?
    He was a Belorussian of English-German descent, Shakespeare corrects him.
    Right, right! Yadanuga’s memory grows clearer, like a distant dream whose details suddenly, at the magic touch of a word, or a sound, or a picture, begin to emerge from the mists. His name wasn’t Tino at all!
    No, that was his alias in their network, Shakespeare fills in another detail.
    Right, his name was Anatol! Yadanuga eagerly adds another details to the mosaic emerging from under the sands of oblivion.
    Anatol? Shakespeare introduces a doubt into Yadanuga’s heart, without offering an alternative.
    Just a minute, just a minute, not Anatol, Yadanuga corrects himself, Anthony.… Anton!
    Do you remember his face? asks Shakespeare. Could you draw his face for me without the beard?
    How can I draw his face for you without the beard? protests Yadanuga. All they gave us then was a blurred photograph … you could hardly see anything. That’s