Dinner at the Centre of the Earth

by Nathan Englander

  “You’ll end up in prison, one way or the other,” is what his mother said, ignoring him. “I figure this at least puts you on the right side of the door. This way, at least you’ll be able to come home on the weekends.”

  “It’s Israel. We let the murderers come home on weekends. You could kill a dozen people and they’d let you out to dance at your kid’s wedding. No sale.”

  “This is a special job,” she said. “Top secret. You’ll be a shushuist. You’ll have a fancy résumé for the rest of your life. And the prime minister is asking. The General—it comes from him.”

  “The General is asking? For me?”

  “For you alone. So you can imagine it must be a real emergency if he wants me to turn to you. It’s something he can’t go outside the circle for—and I really shouldn’t even be talking about it on the phone.”

  “If anyone’s tapping your phone, it’s him or his fascists.”

  “Or the Russians,” she said. “Or the Americans or French or your beloved Brits. Anyway, it doesn’t matter even if they are listening. I haven’t said anything wrong. Nothing at all.”

  “You’re doing it again,” he said. “You’re talking for the transcripts. I hate when you fake talk for whatever country’s spooks are eavesdropping.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Sorry,” she said. “I know I do that. I have a very strange job.”

  “You do.”

  “And now I have a strange job for my son. It will pay nice. And it can’t be hard.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because the General thinks you’re an idiot. He smiles when I tell stories about you, but I can tell, he thinks you’re a fool. If it were complicated he wouldn’t trust you. It’s that you’re loyal and can keep your mouth shut, is what he’s after.”

  “Nobody keeps a secret better.”

  “Also, he doesn’t think you’ll ever find a girlfriend to whisper it to, even if you wanted.”

  “He said that, or you’re saying?”

  “Who is ‘he’? ‘He’ we’re already done with. Don’t ever, after this, even think his name in relation to the work.”

  “Okay.”

  “Promise me not even to think it, yes?”

  “I’m really hanging up now.”

  “Do! It doesn’t matter. You wouldn’t win.”

  “What?”

  “If you were on the show, you’d lose. That’s why people watch. On the couch, at home with a beer resting on their bellies, everyone knows all the answers. It’s different under scrutiny. You don’t have what it takes to handle the pressure.”

  “I do.”

  “Then prove it. It can’t be long, this job. A couple of days, maybe a few weeks, at most—and he promises to keep you on the books for a year. No harder than babysitting a sleeping child. Soon as they figure out what to do with their problem, you can go back to watching TV. If you ever do wake up and want to build a future in this country, if you ever want to move out of your mother’s apartment, a nice vague entry on the résumé, and the government payslips to go with it, it will make their minds run wild. You can go to high-tech after this. They’ll think you were a top assassin, or a frogman. They’ll think you’re a hero even if all the General is asking is for you to keep a chair warm. And remember, it’s not the General asking. Don’t even think about him ever again once I hang up this phone—you already promised! Let me hear you say it!”

  “I promise.”

  “What do you promise?”

  “I don’t even remember. That’s how forgotten it is.”

  “Good,” she said.

  “Good,” he said. “Tell them to call.”

  “I already did. Now go watch your show.”

  2002, Paris

  He really shouldn’t touch that newspaper, and really shouldn’t be in this restaurant again, and definitely should have stayed on his side of the river, keeping to the relative safety of the Left Bank near his home.

  In his sorry state, Z has come to the conclusion that he should never have passed any of the battery of psychological exams, that it was odd that he’d been recruited in the first place and ridiculous to have put him in the field. He still likes to believe that there’s always wisdom shoring up the Institute and its secret systems, and imagines his handlers knew his weaknesses at the start but found there was an upside worth the risk.

  Now they’re facing the reality of their poor decision and will have to neutralize Z at great expense.

  His garroting, or poisoning, or drowning in the Seine, would, in the annals of Israeli espionage, be the same as brushing a little Tipp-Ex onto a form. He is a human typo soon to be whited-out from his line.

  He stops himself from following that train of thought any further. Open worry, panicked musings, they change the facial musculature, they make him seem guiltier and more suspect and might, in a weak moment, cause him to forget himself and look nervously around. Were there someone who had not yet spotted him, hunting for such a tell, it would be a giveaway of the most obvious kind.

  He thinks it best to focus on respiration. He takes control of his breath, calming himself, inhaling and exhaling in a measured and natural way. He moves from the very-out-of-place Hebrew newspaper on the table over to the cash register, behind which—as per usual—a giant, scruffy man sits, looking like a French-Jewish Cossack.

  What is not as per usual is the waitstaff. There is a new waitress—North African, he’d say; also Jewish, he’d say, who faces away from him as she bends over the tubs of hummus and tabouleh and labneh, scooping food onto a plate. There is also a tall and muscular new waiter, who is, on this visit, the person who concerns him most.

  The moment that Z entered the restaurant, he noticed the waiter noticing him. The waiter immediately stepped out the side door, texting something curiously short into an already repocketed phone.

  From the way the waiter holds himself, Z can tell that he hates his new job, and that he is maybe an actor or a musician, and that he also appears to be gay. Or maybe he is acting gay, and acting unhappy, and acting aesthetically bent so as to camouflage himself among the legion of like-minded Huguenot waiters who want to be singers, or painters, or directors of artsy French films, all of whom can’t stand the tourists and touristy Jews they’re forced to wait on all day in the Marais. It’s their neighborhood now (gay, not Huguenot), and the sooner they close down this little living museum to the shtetl, or pack it up and move it out toward the airport and Euro Disney, the better.

  It is the perfect cover, if this waiter-that’s-not-a-waiter was expecting Z’s stomach to betray him yet again. All he’d have to do now is step back outside and press some detonation code into that same phone. The next thing you knew there’d be Turkish salad on the ceiling, and Z spread all over the Rue des Rosiers, ground up into his own personal pâté.

  Z can feel himself sweating and nearly hits the ceiling when the Cossack at the register asks him politely whether he wants takeout or to sit down.

  Z tells him in his bad French that he wants to sit. The manager points to the open table by the window, the one with the paper resting atop. Z takes a seat and, considering the newspaper curiously, as if he’s never seen a Hebrew daily before, picks it up and drops it onto the chair opposite, leaving it hidden from view.

  Who brought it? Who carried it here, an edition two days old?

  Then he remembers a story they all used to laugh about during his training. A story about one of the terrorist bigwigs whom Israel had tried and failed to assassinate—though not by much. The target had been successfully poisoned, but after weeks laid up in a Damascus hospital, he didn’t succumb.

  All the victim knew about his own near-killing, the only thing his doctors could tell him for sure, was that the toxin hadn’t been ingested by mouth but introduced through his skin. He also knew that Israel was surely and actively still trying to see him dead.

  What Israel knew was pretty much everything. Where he was at any given moment, whom he met with, and half the things
he said. They knew it all, including the protective measures the man now took. Like some poor King Midas, afraid to make gold, this man had ceased to touch anything whose point of origin was unclear. When he got a letter, his most trusted aide stood in the other room and read it through the door. Food was carefully sourced, prepared on premises, and tasted in advance. Toiletries were replenished from a different pharmacy, in a different part of the city, each time. As with the food and the letters, this loyal aide would then run his boss’s Right Guard up and down his own patriotic armpit and floss with the first minty meter of any new wheel. This same secretary also traveled to a new newsstand each and every day for a fresh copy of the paper. Then he’d turn the pages for him, as his fearless leader read.

  Recalling this, Z uses his foot to push that chair and that poison paper farther away, feeling his throat go dry. He looks at his fingertips where they touched the newsprint. As the waitress approaches, Z holds them up to the window, looking for residue in the light.

  What brings Z to this restaurant for the fifteenth time in the fifteen days since his plan’s implosion (through explosion) and the betrayal of all he held dear is his weak stomach. It isn’t weak in the traditional sense. For the sensitivity is in spirit, not digestion.

  Under unbearable pressure, plotting an escape from his self-inflicted bind, Z found he desperately needed to eat the comfort foods that calm him and remind him, from the inside out, of his real and true self. When expecting one’s own unexpected demise, isn’t it fair to keep taking a favorite last meal, until it proves to be just that?

  So Z further risks his already-imperiled life, unnecessarily exposing himself daily for a plate of hummus and a little chopped liver, for some smoky eggplant salad, a kibbeh, and a fat square of salty feta. He will—marrying together the two halves of his self—have a warm pita and a basket of rye bread, which is exactly what he orders from the waitress who is busy writing it all down in her pad. Taking her in, he acknowledges that—along with food—he has another kind of terrible weakness. It is that he also falls easily, and hopelessly, in love.

  She is beautiful, dark skinned, and dark eyebrowed, and has above her perfect lips the tiniest black down of hair, the faintest of mustaches, that makes him think she is the most perfect woman he has ever seen. After he’s done mangling the French language in his attempt to order, she shakes her head and addresses him in English. His heart melts again.

  “My French is almost as bad as yours,” she says, with a barely perceptible accent that leaves him melted into a puddle. “This will be better for us both.”

  And so he ventures it. “Italian?” he says.

  “Roman,” she says, wiping down his table with a rag and then lining up his silverware with a neurotic flair. When she reaches to straighten the other chair, she picks up and holds out the paper.

  “Not mine,” he says.

  “Do you want it?”

  “I’m staying away from the news these days. In any language.”

  “Well, my Hebrew is even worse than my French,” she says, and puts the paper back where she found it.

  “You’re an Italian Jew?” Z is openly enamored.

  “I am,” she says. “And you’re an American?”

  “Sometimes, yes.”

  “And Jewish?”

  “It depends who’s asking.”

  He crosses the river back to Rue Domat, his alley of a street and one of the quietest in the heart of Paris. A place easy to slip into and out of, a street with access to egress (by foot, taxi, bus, Metro, RER, even by boat), and so sleepy and odd a stretch as to make any aberration stand out. It was the perfect place for an operative maintaining a low profile, and living under a simple cover, to set up shop.

  Before things turned sour, it had made Z feel safe when keeping an eye out for enemies from the other side. It served the same purpose now while on the lookout, with much greater angst, for those from his own.

  Swiping his fob below the keypad, Z hears the click of the lock and slips through the gate to the building’s archway. He nods at the woman sweeping in the courtyard and disappears into the entrance on the left, taking the stairs two at a time to his second-floor flat.

  He makes all the checks of his training, and all the checks he’s amassed from experience, and a mix of those one somehow absorbs and conflates from a lifetime of American movies and TV. Inside his apartment, he peers out the back window that looks from his bedroom onto the courtyard. He finds himself staring down at the top of the caretaker’s headscarf as she sweeps her way toward the rear arch. He then runs to the front window to peer down both ends of the street. No cars, no bikes, nothing but the man who sits on his red suitcase, begging, at the point where the block elbows with Rue des Anglais.

  Z has dropped two euros into the man’s cup every morning he’s been in town from the day he moved in and occasionally asks a question and hands the man a twenty-euro bill. He has been grooming him for the day he might need to know something good.

  Satisfied nothing is amiss, Z strips down to his skivvies and gets in bed to lie on his back and stare up at the ancient rough-hewn beams of his ceiling, looking for patterns where there are no patterns, losing himself in the gnarls that interrupt the grain.

  It’s his main form of entertainment since being viciously awoken to the consequences of what he’d done, for Israel, for Palestine, and, most urgently, for himself. He now sees his actions as a crime of political passion, undertaken in a desperate, last-ditch fugue state and driven by his good-hearted intent to do what’s right.

  The first thing he did in the aftermath was go around the flat unplugging telephone and TV and radio. The same went for the cable box and the outmoded Minitel that was already there when he’d moved in. He popped the battery from the alarm clock for no good reason, and, citing personal, murderous precedent, he removed the battery from his cell phone, along with the SIM.

  He arrived at his office the next day, sweaty and uncontrollably nervous. He took a nightmarish meeting with his boss and handler and, sensing his paranoia was no longer paranoid, Z stashed his laptop in a drawer of his desk, its new permanent home.

  With that, there was nothing in the house that could send or receive a signal, so staring at the ceiling is all he has. That, and a single French novel that he can’t read, left on the nightstand when he’d rented the flat.

  As he concentrates on the beams, trying to empty his mind, his thoughts veer to the severity of the situation in which he’s entangled. By now, headquarters in Tel Aviv, and various bureaus around the world, have tallied a good part of the damage that he’s done, combing through the files he’s dumped, the operations he’s blown.

  All those angry katsas assigned to the French desk must be falling all over themselves for the chance to torture Z, to find out what he’s shared and whom he has betrayed, to hang him up by his toes, waiting for the secrets to fall out of his pockets like loose change, and then to wring out of him the reasoning behind his unhinged, treasonous exploits.

  There’s really no need to beat it out of him (at least from his perspective). Z would flip on his own. “I was trying to avoid a calamity on Israeli soil,” he’d say. “It was the ticking bomb that justifies so much of the misery we unleash.” Of course, this would not satisfy, as his bomb has blown. So he might also explain that he was trying to even the score. Unfortunately, the score he was trying to even out was the Palestinians’. He was trying to make amends for his sins. He knows that second part wouldn’t go over. Recompense for one’s enemies, well, that wasn’t the point of spy craft at all.

  Anyway, his abduction, transfer, and torture in Israel is the last of the options he thinks they’ll choose. Z figures what they’re really fighting over is the pleasure of being the one whom Z would see coming, of getting to witness the very real dread he would feel as he recognized the person sent to murder him with great brutality, or maybe just to render him useless—lobotomizing him with an ice pick or awl and leaving him to be discovered, a trickle of blood ru
nning from a nostril, his eyes differently lit, as he roamed vacant around Parc des Buttes Chaumont.

  What scares him more than facing that moment of knowing are all the operatives skulking about that he wouldn’t see at all. The cloaked killers. And, supporting them, the army of sayanim, the sympathetic-to-the-cause Parisians, who play their scaled-down roles. The locals ready to lend a spare room, or leave the keys to a car, the volunteers who, when tapped, are happy to act as another pair of eyes. Wherever he goes, every extra step in that city, he is exposing himself to these unidentifiable strangers who are surely already on the lookout for Z.

  Failing to picture any viable solution, any permutation of a future that includes rescue or escape, he becomes so upset that he fetches a bottle of cheap supermarket champagne from the kitchen and, standing by the front window in his underwear and keeping watch on Rue Domat, he pours himself glass after glass, throwing them back until he’s done.

  Trying to take advantage of even a quick alcohol-fueled, nightmare-sodden sleep, Z crawls back in bed. He still can’t stop the terror tapes from spinning and only calms himself by picturing that blessedly callipygous waitress bending over the hummus, scooping a heaping plate.

  He had loved her, even before she turned around and approached his table. He had loved her coloring, and her eyes, and her big behind, and again that faint mustache that she didn’t care to wax off.

  Z flips over on the bed and buries his face in a pillow. He imagines an impossible new life, the pair of them forgetting everything that came before, and together looking only toward a bright new after. He’d recover all the money he’d stashed away for just such an emergency, maybe moving with the waitress to some flat up a hundred flights of stairs. Z can see her in their living room, the skylight open, the rain blowing in. Eyes closed, straining his mind, Z can see it, and Z can hear it. There is the waitress, her belly pregnant, her little chest turned huge. Then comes the sound of their fat, smelly pug, asleep on the couch at her side, and snarfling through its flattened nose.