Embedded in the blackened acoustic tile was a small white object the size of a large kernel of corn. Something metallic was apparently part of its composition, for it gleamed as it reflected the flame.
Benni looked back at Arthur with widened eyes. He had already judged the distance and knew he could not reach it. He hunted in his coat pocket, took out his house keys, and slipped a small penknife from the ring. Arthur palmed it with the dexterity of a pickpocket, but he still had to wait.
The diversion came within a minute. Suddenly the elevator doors opened and a blinding flash made the investigators throw their arms up defensively.
“Jesus Christ—what the fuck!” someone shouted.
“Daily News,” said a singsong female voice from inside the elevator. “Smile, everybody!”
“Block the camera, for Christ’s sake,” O’Donovan said. He was not yelling. He had seen it happen too many times. And the uniformed cop had already thrown his girth across the open elevator doors.
Roselli reached up and popped the ragged tooth from the foam core. Baum was already holding out a handkerchief, and he moved it quickly, caught the object, and slipped it into his coat.
“Your men let me up here!” the woman was squealing.
“And my men will let you out,” O’Donovan replied as he returned to his work.
“We have freedom of the press in this country,” she shouted as the big cop hammered on the elevator buttons and the doors closed.
“You are free to leave,” O’Donovan mumbled.
“Fucking vultures,” someone growled.
Roselli nodded at Baum. Then he put his fingers on Benni’s arm and pushed him a little in O’Donovan’s direction, like a father coaxing a shy toddler at a birthday party. He winked at Baum and walked back into the consulate.
O’Donovan was rising from the sneaker, taking off his gloves.
“Let’s call the M.E. back over for this, Jerry,” he said to one of his detectives. “Might tell us more about the concussion.”
“Where’s the phone?” the detective called Jerry asked.
“Go on inside,” Benni offered. “To the right, on any desk in the passport section.”
“Thanks.” The detective was buzzed in.
“Mr. O’Donovan,” Benni said as he approached the young man.
“Mike,” the detective corrected.
“Mike, then.” Benni gave the cop his best fatherly smile. “Tell me, were there any other victims? Wounds, and so forth?”
“There was a Russian family.” He was still eyeing Baum with cautious detachment. “Sustained some ear damage.”
“That is all?”
“They were inside the consulate,” said O’Donovan. He picked up his suit coat from a plastic ground sheet, rolled down his shirtsleeves, and buttoned them. “I think some of your people suffered shock trauma, but nothing serious.” The small emphasis on the word “your” made Benni realize that this would not be an easy friendship to cement.
Baum backed up a bit, looking at the floor and speaking as he moved, so O’Donovan was forced to follow him as he maneuvered into his jacket.
“I wonder,” said Benni, when they were removed from the rest of the group, “if you could spare half an hour for me?”
O’Donovan looked at Baum’s face as he pulled his tie out from inside his shirt. The Israeli’s tone was not obsequious; it was more like a suggestion to share information. He had seen how quickly the man outmaneuvered Buchanan, and the SAC was mean-spirited, but he was no idiot.
“What’s on your mind, Colonel?”
“Benni, if you please. Do you have a car?”
“Outside.”
“Good,” said Baum. “Give me a lift, and I will offer you a small present.”
O’Donovan examined Baum for another moment. No good detective rejected an informant, no matter how duplicitous the source might seem to be.
“And it’s not even Christmas,” he murmured as he turned to his colleagues. “Frank, when the medical examiner gets here, try to wrap this up. Two uniforms should be here round the clock. I’ll be back anyway in half an hour.”
The task force members watched O’Donovan as he swept a hand toward the elevator. “After you, Colonel.”
“It’s Benni,” Baum insisted as he hit the button.
“Yeah,” said the detective, as if an alchemist were offering him bullion at a discount. He took off his booties, recovered Baum’s from him, and dropped them into the Crime Scene bag.
O’Donovan did not care much for this whole scenario. He had been to the Middle East. Not enough time had passed, and there was no one and nothing from that part of the world that he had liked or cared to remember.
As the elevator doors began to close, O’Donovan looked across the gloomy tunnel of the antechamber, through the mangled window frame of the security booth, and into the brighter daylight of the consulate.
He saw Arthur Roselli’s silhouette facing him from the other side of the blown-out cubicle. The shadowy figure offered a weary salute.
O’Donovan shot him the finger.
Chapter 4: Columbia University
The face that filled the eyepiece of Mussa Hawatmeh’s powerful Steiner monocular caused him to draw an inadvertent breath, for he had not expected to find a thing of such beauty connected to the lumbering target of his assignment. He focused on the features of the young woman, assessing from her expression that the exchange taking place at two hundred meters’ range was not the chance encounter of two strangers, yet he was unsure if the rush of his pulse came from the discovery of a tactical advantage or the simple response to a stunning female. And of course there was no way for Mussa to know that the face delivering his momentary pleasure caused its owner such regular discomfort.
In fact, Ruth Baum was the sort of young woman who sometimes wished that all of humanity were blind.
There were so many women on this earth who tried every morning to live up to a magazine-cover ideal, spending hours before mirrors, applying subtle hues of makeup to emphasize hollows that should exist and did not, to raise the planes of faces too flat. To strengthen lips too thin, eyes too small, throats born sagging, chins left wanting.
But Ruth had fallen into that other category, the one she should have thanked the heavens for instead of cursing them regularly. She decried the envy of her friends, responding to their compliments with such dismissals that they soon learned to still remarks about her looks, and she so distrusted male attention that only those brave souls who could weather ego batterings were left alive on her social battlefield.
If beauty was truly in the eyes of the beholder, then Ruth labored counter to the efforts that might please those who beheld her. And still she was unsuccessful.
She was of medium height and weight, yet her proportions added illusionary inches to her proud posture. Her feet were small, her legs slim and rising to a youthful waist and stomach. Her hands were strong and unmanicured, her breasts just a bit too full for her own sense of economy, and her skin a pale amber, permanently tanned where years of desert exposure would remain a lifetime tattoo.
Ruth tried to calculate a narrow range of fashion, loose-fitting jeans and jackets to camouflage all lines that curved away from straight and narrow planes. Her bulky sweaters in the winter and T-shirts nearly to her knees in summer did much to keep her secret safe, but there was nothing she could do about her face.
Her auburn hair fell well past her shoulders, a curtain that often drifted in her way. She would tuck the strands behind an ear, and then the high plane of her forehead and her emphatic eyebrows offered up her intelligence. Her large azure eyes above high cheekbones were nearly always clear, despite the late nights spent hovering over texts, and her slim nose sloped up immeasurably just before the tip, a remnant, she supposed, of some distant Christian German ancestry. Her lips were just too full, a wide bow that annoyed her, their only grace being that they were perfect for the flute she used as therapy when life became too burdensome for her to c
oncentrate on studies.
The expression she cultivated appeared to be a grim assessment of everyone’s intelligence. Yet Ruth Baum’s greatest problem when it came to suppressing her own beauty was that she loved to laugh, and her wide bright smile foiled her entirely.
Ruth’s years in America had not much altered her view of the world or stilled the tensions that were birthrights of Israeli citizens. To most Israelis, America was a place where one could shed the choking memories of battle, the probabilities of death from any hostile border. Since the ill-conceived war in Lebanon of 1982, the desire to make yeridah—literally “going down” from the State of Israel—no longer bore the stigma that once caused emigrants to make the move in secret. Israelis had been leaving the country in record numbers, their motivation clear: escape.
Ruth’s reasons for resettling in New York were similar, yet after struggling through the better part of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’ master’s-doctorate training program in research psychology, she had been brought to the realization that her own “escape” was a very private one. It was also clear that no degree of professional success or creature comforts would ever free her from the bonds of her past.
She had come here to study, hoping in the process to leave her darker self behind. But by now she had accepted one of her professors’ simplistic description of the human mental condition: The airlines may lose all your luggage, but your emotional baggage is always carry-on.
Still, although the daily drudgery of study had become oppressive, she enjoyed the life at Morningside Campus. The lawns and hedges of the spacious courtyards were English in their manicured geometry, the stone and brick and marble architecture Washingtonian in its elegance, and somehow an invisible academic moat discouraged the violent forms of human life that lived outside. It was like a retreat, and while Ruth was anxious to receive her degrees, she was not looking forward to being thrown from the nest.
There were many international students at Columbia, yet few of them had ever served as officers in wartime armies, none of them as military intelligence analysts attached directly to the offices of a chief of staff. No other woman had ever worn the rank of captain while monitoring the progress of a commando raiding party as she huddled with a team of sweating colonels in a subterranean operations room. Ruth rarely expounded on her experiences, but word got around, and the beauty she denied was cloaked in an additional air of mystery.
She knew that her tendency to seek anonymity was the inheritance of her father’s professional habits and would not necessarily benefit her academic progress. She was not effusive, but she also was not shy, and coming from a society where everything was open to debate and everyone’s expertise a target for challenge, she bridled at the “professor as God” mentality of the American system. She had to teach herself a degree of tact that she certainly had not learned from her parents.
For the most part, however, she could not remain inconspicuous, for many of her instructors were heterosexual men. At first it was her eyes, and then the soft and throaty Israeli-accented English that drew their curious necks from the collars of their cardigans.
She tried not to take advantage of her congenital trousseau, but after her first year of struggle she decided that any benefit accrued from her professors’ unrequited feelings was beyond her control. She had committed only one sexual error, having slept with an associate professor, and though she quickly lost interest in his nervous performance, she had to stretch it out until semester break. She sometimes remembered now, with a smile, how during that autumn term she had claimed menstrual afflictions of impossible duration. She got her A and ended the liaison, and now she kept her distance from them all.
Not that every member of the faculty found her fetching. On American campuses, Israel was no longer viewed as the David of the Middle East, and she was occasionally taken to task for simply hailing from a “fascist Sparta.” One Russian-born instructor had made the mistake of equating her opinions on a matter of schematic psychology with her origins in an oppressive, siege-mentality society.
“If I’d wanted to argue politics, Professor,” Ruth had responded, “I would have gone to the School of International and Public Affairs.”
The tactic earned her back slaps after class. Having revealed his prejudice, the pompous man could not possibly give her a lesser grade just because she was Israeli.
Socially, Ruth was well ensconced. After a few false starts born of petty jealousies, she had won the respect of those fellow students who had also survived the program. She retained just a few friends who served as confidants, while making herself available to the numerous classmates who, for some reason, sought her counsel on issues personal and professional. Perhaps it was the depth of her eyes, the suggestion that her experience far exceeded her time on earth. But what endeared her most was her availability as the target of a gibe. She enjoyed a sarcastic tease, and she could take it just as well as give it.
Just after the first lecture of a new professor, her friends would gather round and imbue her with manipulative traits she did not have.
“So how’re you going to play this one, Ruth?” This was usually Paul Desmond, a Cornell graduate who spent a lot of time wishing he were at Harvard. “Cold bitch? Warm and shy?”
“Dominatrix,” Ruth would answer simply, as the small group walked from Schermerhorn over to Uris Hall for coffee.
“Whips and leather?” Lisa Borowitz was Ruth’s roommate in the two-bedroom they rented together on West 112th Street.
“He’d have cardiac arrest,” a woman named Kit commented on the elderly professor. Kit was a transfer from Georgetown, tall, blond, leggy, and cynical.
“Mental torture, then,” Ruth decided.
“Yeah, you’re good at that.” Paul waved and split off, heading for the gym to squeeze in a workout.
“He loves you,” Lisa said to Ruth as they watched Paul depart.
“Sheh hazion omed, hasechel yored,” Ruth muttered in Hebrew.
“Which means?”
“As the cock rises, so the intellect declines,” Ruth offered with a demure smile.
Kit laughed. “You’re such a delicate flower.”
Ruth had no interest in Paul Desmond, nor in most of her other male classmates. She found it difficult to relate to the average American male, for she came from a place where by the age of twenty-one most young men had shouldered terrible responsibilities, made life-and-death decisions for themselves and others under their command. American college men still retained the high school immaturities that Israeli boys shed within their first weeks in the army.
Still, she did not reject all advances out of hand, and when occasionally she found herself attracted to both the mind and the body of an American, she expressed her desires unabashedly. Ruth enjoyed sex, and coupled with the lack of frequency with which she partook of it, her desire could reach a fever pitch.
Unfortunately for Ruth, most of the relationships did not endure for more than a few weeks, as her partners became demanding of time she did not have. Postgraduate work at Columbia was extremely expensive, and she had to work.
Foreign students in the United States were granted limited work visas, but Israelis abroad could find employment in their own government facilities without restrictions. And so she shuttled back and forth from the Mishlachat Habitachon, the Israeli Defense Mission in midtown, which was primarily responsible for purchasing American-made supplies with the millions provided in grants and loans from the U.S. government. Ruth served as assistant to a retired IDF general, who was kind enough to allow her to steal whole blocks of time to keep up with her studies. He was also sharp enough to realize, after his first and only gaffe, that Ruth did not want to be reminded that being the daughter of Benjamin Baum offered her any advantage.
In addition to this, she discovered that her talents in English brought further financial benefits. Other foreign students employed her to “edit” their papers (penning the original works could result in her expulsion); some o
f them were quite wealthy, and no one squabbled over her prices. She was often amused when a cousin to the Crown Prince of Oman would hand her five hundred dollars as a tip for editing a paper that took her barely an hour to bring to top form.
And still there were times when the financial burden nearly broke her will, and she came very close to calling her parents in Jerusalem and asking for a loan. But the idea that her father might answer and she would have to ask him for help stilled her hand. Instead, she reluctantly fished a credit card from her wallet, took a cash advance, and paid for the next round of academic credits at exorbitant interest rates.
Ruth no longer felt that resorting to such measures was the knee-jerk, regressive behavior of an angry child. If her years studying human psychology had taught her anything, it was that resentment for parental misbehavior had to be explored, understood, and vented. She and her father had hardly communicated at all since her coming to America, yet she understood her own feelings now and she hoped someday to have the opportunity to face him as an adult and “dirty the air.”
She realized now that her years of resentment had not begun to foment until she herself was an intelligence officer. It was then, sometimes standing watches that saw days pass into nights in The Hole, far below General Headquarters, that she saw the depths of her own childhood deprivations. She watched as field rank officers embraced their work with near erotic fervor, ignoring phone calls from their wives, missing children’s birthdays, and to Ruth it was like suddenly being introduced to her father’s mistress, a hag called “duty,” who had stolen her childhood.
And for what? Had Israel found a minute’s peace for all his absences? Had his explanations that he was “fighting” for her security dulled the pains of his inattentions? Had his professional successes, so secret that he would not share them, been worth her scorching feelings of unworthiness? It was during those long hours of fluorescent days that never ended, before computer screens of blinking coded traffic, listening to the urgent radio contacts of agents in the field, that it suddenly struck Ruth in the heart like a Jerusalem December wind. She looked around at the intense expressions of these men and finally saw her father for what he was.
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