by Allan Topol
Furious, David wheeled around and stormed out.
“I’ll see you again next week,” Victor called after him.
* * *
His presentation went poorly at Renault. Still shaken by the morning’s events with Victor, and operating without any sleep, he stumbled through his answers to complex questions. Twice his French wholly deserted him, and he had to retreat to English phrases.
By rights, he should never have been invited back. At the end, when he was asked if he could return in a week, he shuddered. Victor and his undisclosed client were powerful people. The tentacles of their influence reached well within one of the giant corporations of France.
From Renault, he took a cab back to the Hotel Gironde to pick up the pictures developed from the film in Gina’s camera. They were the most beautiful photographs of a night sky that he had ever seen... a full moon and scores of stars against the cloudless sky. She could easily have taken them in Israel on her recent visit, or in Nice, for that matter. At first he was disappointed they didn’t tell him anything about her, but then he began to believe that they confirmed her identity as Gina Martin, the owner of two boutiques in Nice, rather than as an international terrorist.
When he returned to the Bristol, he hoped to find her still there so he could apologize, but there wasn’t a trace of Gina in his room. Even her scent had been eradicated by the cleaning of the chambermaids. He called telephone information in Nice, but was told there wasn’t a listing for Gina Martin, and he had never bothered to ask the names of her boutiques. He rationalized that plenty of single women have unlisted telephone numbers.
Weary, he slept until it was time to meet Daphna for dinner.
Anxious to know whether she was in fact being followed, as Victor had said, he insisted on meeting her in her apartment, where she greeted him with a warm hug. “I’m so glad you came to Paris, David.”
She pointed at his Russian chess set prominently displayed on a coffee table in the living room. “How about a game after dinner?” she said.
As they walked slowly to her favorite bistro in her Left Bank neighborhood, he stopped in various shop windows and asked her about varied merchandise. That gave him a chance to evaluate the surveillance. Victor’s people had both a woman on foot and a man in a car, he concluded. They made no effort to conceal themselves. Victor wanted him to know they were being tailed. David was relieved that Daphna had no idea they were being followed. For now, he didn’t want to alarm her.
As he helped her off with her coat in the restaurant, he thought of something Victor had said this morning. She was a good-looking young woman. Growing up on the kibbutz, coupled with three years in the Israeli air force, had left her toned and conditioned. The summer after her first year at Hebrew University, they had jogged together five mornings a week on the road outside the kibbutz. He remembered what a struggle it had been for him to keep up with his bum leg. In Paris, she still stuck with a regular workout program.
Over moules et frites with a bottle of Sancerre, she said to him, “I’m sorry for being such a whine last week at home. It was a depressing time for me.”
He was relieved. It sounded as if she was finally coming to grips with Yael’s death. “I’m glad you came back for the memorial service. Something like that makes it easier to move toward closure.”
“I’ll never have closure. She was in the prime of her life. You know that as well as I do. She was wonderful, but in some ways she must have been a tough woman to live with day and night.” She smiled. “Sometimes I had all I could do dealing with her from the sanctuary of the children’s dorm. She was so demanding. You know.”
“She was very proud of you. She wanted the best for you always. She was devastated with anguish when she heard that your helicopter had been shot down—until she knew...”
Daphna’s whole body tensed. She pulled back away from him. “Please, David, I didn’t want to talk about that.”
“I’m sorry. On a happier note, when you won the poetry contest at Hebrew University, she not only made an announcement to the whole kibbutz at Friday night dinner, but she read your poem.”
“Yeah, I heard. I loved her for that. And a week later she asked me if I was going to do something more practical with my life than write poetry.”
There was no bitterness in her voice. That had all passed with her mother’s death.
She played with fried potato, pondering whether she should say what she was thinking. He kept still, letting her decide. Finally she said, “I’m very glad she met you. I could hardly believe the changes in her. She softened. She came alive. They were good years for her, but initially I resented you.”
“I could tell that.”
She could see the hurt on his face, and she was sorry for what she had said. “Well it wasn’t your fault. I wanted my real father, and I didn’t want a substitute. Once I gave you a chance, though, I liked you as a person and not just for what you did for her. Then after she died, you were there for me, which I needed because that’s a real weakness of the kibbutz. You have the whole community, but you have no one. You know what I mean?”
He nodded. “So where do you go from here?”
She sipped some wine. “Well, funny you should ask. Since I’ve gotten back here, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about things, and...”
She paused.
He held his breath.
“I have to get into something more pragmatic and worldly. I’m going to take a journalism course here in the spring. Then, next year maybe I’ll go to an American university to get some training in journalism. After that, I’ll come back to Israel. If I can get a job writing for one of the papers, helping people understand what’s happening all around us in this crazy world, I’ll make a difference. The country and the kibbutz are my family. I realize that now.”
She sounded so earnest and sincere, the way only young people can, David thought. That boy Kourosh was probably like that, too. David wasn’t a religious man, but he said a small silent prayer that Daphna wouldn’t end up like Kourosh.
After dinner, they went back to her apartment and played chess. Thinking about the danger he had created for her, he couldn’t concentrate.
“Checkmate,” she gleefully called at the end. “You’re slipping, David. You never even saw that one coming.”
Chapter 8
Sagit was furious at herself. How could I have been so stupid? she wondered, as she finished describing to Moshe, the director of the Mossad, what had happened in Paris. The air in his office, where the two of them were closeted, was thick with tension and heavy with cigarette smoke.
“What the hell were you thinking?” he demanded to know.
“My plan was to spend the night with him, get up early and stick with him the next day as much as possible. I figured we’d spend a second night together, and I could find out what he had done and search his things to see if he brought back anything from a meeting. Instead, he totally outmaneuvered me, leaving me in bed like a rank amateur.”
“It was an absurd idea from the beginning. I can’t believe that I approved it and let you use yourself that way.”
She bristled. It infuriated her when Moshe later second-guessed decisions they had made together.
“C’mon, Moshe,” she said, “you can’t play results. It’s a tough business. Nobody does it right all the time. Not us. Not the CIA. Nobody.”
“We used to be different than everybody else. Better than they were.”
Moshe had held his job as director of the Mossad for twenty-two years. As the mastermind behind the daring Israeli raid at Entebbe, he had led the agency in its glory years when the Mossad was the envy of every other intelligence agency in the world. But nothing lasted forever. In recent years he had been presiding over the agency’s most demoralizing period, when self-confidence was giving way to self-doubt, and public praise was turning to criticism.
“Maybe we were, and maybe it was only an illusion because our enemies were so incompetent.”
&n
bsp; “Well, now they’ve gotten better. We can’t afford any mistakes—like the one you just made in Paris.”
Slowly and deliberately she reached up to the lapel of her suit jacket, unsnapped her ID badge and tossed it on Moshe’s desk. “Don’t even think of trying to talk me out of resigning,” she said firmly. “I never dreamt that he would try to drug me, but there’s no justification for dropping my guard like that.”
Moshe stared at her badge resting on his desk. He was angry at himself and angry at her. But resign? He had no intention of letting her resign. He brightened up. “It’s called post-coital satisfaction.”
She blushed. “Thank you, Moshe.” She paused and shook her head grimly. “But the bottom line is that I lost him in Paris. I couldn’t follow him to whatever meeting he had, and I didn’t get a damn bit of information.”
Moshe snuffed out his cigarette, lifted the pack from his desk, took another one out and lit it up. When he returned the pack to the desk, she followed suit.
“I thought you quit smoking.”
“Not anymore.”
Deep in thought, with a cigarette dangling from his lips, he got up from his desk and walked over to the large floor-to-ceiling windows. Through tired gray eyes, above sacks of flesh, he gazed out at the Knesset and West Jerusalem beyond, remembering it had all been open fields not so long ago.
As Sagit waited for him to continue, she looked up at the wall behind his desk. He’d framed a large blown-up picture of an American black bear that she had taken last year in Yosemite Park, when Moshe had sent her to the United States to develop a working relationship with Margaret Joyner, the new head of the CIA. Sagit had decided that the bear was the perfect symbol for Moshe. On the one hand, the animal was perceived as soft and cuddly—witness all of the children’s teddy bears—and it was generally a peaceful animal. Likewise, Moshe, called Motti in his youth, now with a thick mop of uncombed gray hair and a round cherubic face, wearing a rumpled suit, could pass for the prototype of a gentle grandfatherly figure. On the other hand, bears were short-tempered and got angry quickly. They were fierce, tough, no-holds-barred fighters, who attacked anything that threatened them or their cubs. So, too, Moshe could explode in anger when anyone endangered the people of Israel or when Mossad agents failed to perform up to his high expectations.
“Okay, let’s take it one step at a time,” he said slowly, in a kindly voice. “I can appreciate your need for self-flagellation, but we all make mistakes. Agencies like ours capitalize on the mistakes people make, but we’re human as well. So let’s talk about what we lost in this fuck-up of yours. No pun intended. We lost the opportunity to find out what he was doing in Paris. Correct?”
She nodded.
“But you didn’t compromise any of our information. Did you?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Does he know you are Mossad?”
“I don’t think so. I imagine he searched my suitcase and handbag, but I was very careful in what I took, just in case he got access to them.”
“So it wasn’t such a disaster. Whatever happened is over and forgotten. It doesn’t leave this room and you and I never mention it again.”
She glanced at the photograph on the wall again. This black bear had one other facet to its character. If you were one of his favorites, as she had always been since he had recruited her twenty-two years ago, he was willing to forgive mistakes. If she hadn’t been, he would have kept her badge and tossed her out of the office, just as he had fired Yosef for arresting David Ben Aaron without any evidence and setting off a political maelstrom.
She still couldn’t believe that she had dropped her guard so totally that David was able to drug her. Moshe could say they were all human, but it was a terrible blunder. What made her feel even worse was that she knew why she had been lulled into abandoning all of her experience and training as an agent. She had enjoyed the sex with David so much.
“I don’t deserve that much of a break, Moshe,” she protested.
“You’re right. You don’t. But forget about yourself for a minute. Think about me. I’m pragmatic. It’s already September. The Knesset Committee on National Security has given me one month to find out what’s behind the Dental Affair, and I can’t blame them. There’s a dangerous conspiracy that involves David Ben Aaron. We’ve to got to find out what’s going on. Changing players at this point in the game isn’t such a good idea even if it would assuage your guilt.”
“But...”
“Forget it, unless of course you don’t think you can emotionally handle the job after what happened in Paris.”
“No, I can do it,” she replied in a determined voice. “It was a temporary lapse on my part. He means nothing to me.”
“Good. Then let’s move on.” Moshe puffed deeply on the cigarette and blew a smoke ring into the air. “Where is he now—our Russian kibbutznik who’s obviously at home in Paris?”
“He flew into Ben Gurion from Paris this afternoon on El Al 009. I was in the tower with binoculars watching him walk off the plane, a little past two o’clock. I had Customs do a thorough search on him and his bags. Even looking for false bottoms. Nothing turned up.”
“And after that?”
“At my request, Gideon Marcos, the chief of security at the kibbutz, met him in front of the terminal, and they went straight back to the kibbutz with two of our surveillance teams trailing them. So as of an hour ago, David Ben Aaron, or whoever he is, was back at Bet Mordechai. We have one surveillance team on the road, just outside the gates of the kibbutz, if he tries to leave, and another about a kilometer away at a key intersection. All agents have his picture. I also took the precaution of placing his name and passport number on the L list at all points of embarkation. He won’t be able to leave the country again without your approval.”
Moshe nodded his head. “You’ve obviously recovered from your lapse in Paris. What’s your next step, Sagit?”
“I called the people at Ulpan Ha’emek, where he first went to live when he arrived in Israel from Russia, on the chance that they took dental Xrays as part of his overall physical.”
“And?” he asked impatiently.
“They have a set that someone from the Ulpan’s driving to Jerusalem right now. As soon as they get here, I want to take them to Professor Barach at Hebrew University Dental School.”
“What are you looking for?”
She had a look of determination in her eyes. She was now hell bent on getting revenge for the humiliation David had inflicted on her. “I don’t know. I don’t have much else to go on. Just that somebody went to a lot of trouble to get his Xrays in Haifa.”
“What about fingerprints?”
“When I woke up at the Bristol, I became professional again. I did my best to recreate his end of the telephone conversation, and I placed a couple of items in a clear plastic bag I obtained from a chambermaid, for prints.”
“What did he leave behind?” She looked embarrassed. “Well?”
Sagit reached into her purse and pulled out a plastic bag containing a half-empty bottle of chloral and the wrappers from three condoms. As she handed it to Moshe, her face grew beet red. “If you ask me whether it was really three times, I’ll kill you, Moshe.”
He smiled at her and shook his head. “Kinahora,” he exclaimed.
“What the hell’s that mean?”
“It’s Yiddish for ‘you must have had a really good time.’”
“I swear I’ll kill you, Moshe, if you ever mention this again.”
“At least you should call it a vacation day when you submit your time records.” Amused at his own joke, he began to laugh. “I assume you won’t tell our fingerprint people how you got these items.”
“They don’t need to know.”
He rubbed his tired eyes. “Did you just tell me that the next morning you made a transcription from a recollection of his part of the phone conversation?”
She reached into her purse and pulled out a folded sheet of Bristol stationery. �
�I have it right here.”
“Read it to me.”
Sagit opened up the page and began reading, a Hebrew translation because Moshe didn’t understand French. Still, she tried to imitate David’s inflection.
“You have the wrong room. You’re mistaken. There’s no one here by that name. I suggest you call back…What is your name? I’ll give it to the hotel operator. Maybe you can leave a message…And if I’m not there?”
Moshe leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes tightly to concentrate. “Read it again,” he said.
When she was finished, Moshe asked, “When he first got the call, what was his reaction? Was he surprised, or was he expecting it?”
“Clearly surprised. I was watching him. He was trying to conceal his reaction, but he couldn’t.”
“That’s significant.”
“What’s it tell you?”
“The caller identified him with a name other than David Ben Aaron. If it was just a code name, he shouldn’t have been surprised. But if it was a name he had used at another time in his life and thought he had gotten away from.”
She interrupted. “That’s how he reacted.”
“The rest of the conversation tells me somebody set an unanticipated meeting for him, later that night or the next morning, which is why he had to get rid of you.”
She nodded her approval.
Moshe shifted gears. “How are you coming on the preparation of David Ben Aaron’s bio—the bio Yosef didn’t have the sense to develop before he arrested the man?”
She had this memorized and she responded in quick staccato-like bursts, “David Ben Aaron came to Israel about four and a half years ago. The immigration forms he completed show the following: Born as Anatola Ginzburg in Moscow in 1958. Parents were both sent to the gulag, when he was very young. Both died there. Raised in Moscow by a grandfather, Ginzburg, on the father’s side. Married and divorced in Russia. No children. Wife’s name unknown. Probably not Jewish. Educated in computers. Last employment in Moscow at Novosti Chemical Company as a computer programmer. Port of embarkation: Odessa.”
