by Tommy Tenney
Through his binoculars, the limousine prepared to turn onto Ramban Street. A disguised Red Cross van awaited them, parked innocuously along a busy sidewalk but loaded with fourteen thousand pounds of ammonium nitrate and a recipient cell phone whose ringer was wired to complete an electrical circuit. A tiny spark would trigger an explosion even the infidel Americans’ armored plating would not withstand.
His thumb minutely began a downward plunge as he saw the tires begin their swerve, and the oddly out-of-place Cadillac began to turn—and Hadassah called out to her driver, “Bernard, I’m so sorry, but could we go straight instead, please? I’d like to drive past the Great Synagogue. Just a small detour. It would mean so much to me. . . . ”
Bernard took a deep breath, gritted his teeth, and gave a light warning honk to the motorcycle escorts, whom he knew would soon despise him. Then he muttered a warning into his radio headpiece, corrected the wheel, and began to abort his turn. He did so broadly, giving the inside motorcycle room to not only heed his verbal warning but compensate for the change in direction and avoid being clipped.
The escort expertly evaded the limousine’s front bumper with an abrupt turn of his front wheel—almost jack-knifing on the wet pavement, the kind of impulsive maneuver a new rider might make under less challenging circumstances.
Back on the nearby rooftop veranda, the spotter’s mouth fell open, his hand still tight upon his cell phone digit. He tried to calculate whether there was still time, whether the turning vehicle was still within range of his blast perimeter. But he hesitated, and within a second and a half, it was too late. The limousine had vanished into the distance of King George Street.
He swore softly and threw down the binoculars with a loud clatter. For the second time, the target had escaped by mere feet. His brief moment in the spotlight had been delayed—not denied, mind you—for he would still make certain that her assassination would be recorded to his credit.
Chapter Eleven
A quarter-mile away, Hadassah Kesselman finally ended her Shiva mourning period—eight days later than mandated by Jewish tradition.
She glanced up at the Great Synagogue passing her window, whispered a strangled good-bye to her Poppa, then buried her face in her hands, sobbing more loudly than she had in years—perhaps her whole life. She wept for her vanished family, her heritage now consigned to the realm of memory and written word. Most of all, she wept for her own ruptured connection to the world. With the rain falling, it seemed that the whole world was weeping with her.
She could not stop her tears for two miles, while her motorcade traced a detour back to Ramban Street and proceeded toward the Valley of the Cross. By the time they passed the southern end of the templelike Knesset building and turned onto Kaplan Street, home to the Prime Minister’s office, she had regained control of her breathing and was holding up a mirrored compact to repair her smudged makeup. How ironic, she thought, looking at her face. All these drivers’ efforts to keep me dry and perfect, yet here I am, still managing to look like I just ran through the rain. . . .
The emotional eruption left her heaving and weak, yet it also served a helpful purpose—it seemed to have swept away the depression, at least for a time, and left a whole new inner weather pattern in its place. She felt the limo nose down into the office building’s parking garage, took a deep breath, and knew she was ready.
Darkness returned around her; ahead was only motorcycle brake lights and the tug of sharp turns upon her torso. Finally, they stopped. She didn’t wait: she flung open her door, muttered “Thank you, guys” to the escorts, and walked into the brightly lit elevator entrance with the stride of one who would not be deterred.
Her personal security guard missed the elevator door and, with a disgusted sigh, turned for the stairs with a grim assessment of her destination etched upon his face.
Strangely, once the elevator door opened to the fifth floor, Hadassah hardly needed to remember her way. It seemed that a shock wave preceded her, parting the hallway’s knots of bureaucrats and loiterers and forging a path of swerving feet and shocked faces for her to follow. She feigned a taciturn expression and steered straight ahead, noting nothing and acknowledging no one. Part of her felt guilty, for the eyes seeking hers bore mostly sympathy and affection. But she simply could not afford to make eye contact and risk losing her delicate composure. She attempted to keep her face from conveying anything worse than conviction, and walked on.
Finally the path ended before a twin set of dark oaken doors. Despite their thickness, she could still hear a wave of male voices arguing in Hebrew from inside. She understood, for she knew the sight well—the entrance into the Israeli Cabinet Chamber. A simple façade well known to any informed Jew, laden with history and a fractious heritage of debate and even occasional shouting and shoving.
She did not pause. With a forbidden thrill cascading across her back through her insides, she reached out her right hand and pushed straight through. A Shin Beth guard standing at post recognized her and, in a nod to protocol, began to step forward and hesitantly intervene; but she gave him her most imperious stare and inwardly defied him to stop her. She stepped forward and walked right up to the edge of the parquet floor.
Her husband’s face was the first to enter her field of sight. He was in midsentence, gesturing indistinctly into midair, but his words failed and his eyes locked on hers. On every side of him sat bodies and faces well known to every Israeli with a television. The members of the Israeli Cabinet. Those with their backs to her swiveled abruptly backward, anticipating trouble. Within two seconds, every wide-eyed stare in the room was fixed most resolutely upon her.
“Jacob,” she said, in her most wifely, intimate tone, ignoring the assembled group. “I must speak with you.”
“Hadassah.” He spoke the word more as a declaration than a greeting. “I am so glad to see you. I am so sorry to say this”—and then his features regained their solemn, official demeanor. He swept the air with a grand, apologetic gesture—“but I cannot talk with you until dinner tonight. I am so sorry, but I’m sure you realize these are critical times—”
“They certainly are, my dear. That’s why I need to talk to you so urgently. . . . I need a favor.”
“Hadassah, I literally have the chairman of the Palestinian Authority waiting on the phone.” His eyes begged for her cooperation and understanding, but his tone was firm.
“Who better to wait on me than him.” She did not try to conceal the bite in her voice.
Jacob couldn’t help but chuckle at that fierce rejoinder. Even the cabinet would have to admit that it was true—having suffered the loss she had, no Israeli expected her to grant the political mouthpiece of her father’s murderers any measure of respect.
“Mr. Prime Minister,” offered his chief deputy in a rising, tentative voice, “I’m sure Chairman Abboud would be willing to postpone for a half hour, given the circumstances.”
She stood perfectly still, not moving a muscle, and watched her husband’s eyes dart about in furious rumination—calculating the consequences. Finally, his eyes met hers again and narrowed, trying to gauge the determination in her face.
A split second of deep connection passed between them.
And she smiled.
Perhaps the smile was only a knee-jerk reaction to the errant memory that had just wandered into her mind—Esther entering unannounced before the King! At least she did not face the prospect of execution for daring to enter. . . .
Only he recognized it as brave and forced. But it did not matter to him. It was the first semblance of joy he had seen her display in weeks. The very effort of forming it opened her face, lightened her eyes, and filled him with an immediate surge of hope.
Before she knew it, he was nodding almost despite himself, as though his assent to her request was a reflex.
“All right.” He spoke without breaking eye contact with her. “Convey my deepest apologies to the chairman, and tell him that my wife and I will harbor endless gratitude for
his forbearance in a personal emergency. No, not emergency—”
“Lunch. It’s called lunch,” she announced.
A sympathetic chuckle swept through the cabinet members.
“All right,” Jacob said, finally glancing about with a sheepish grin. “Let’s call it a personal matter. That will have to do.”
“The Ramallah headquarters have cable,” muttered Moshe, the Defense Minister.
Hadassah hesitated, trying to grasp the man’s meaning, then regretted having understood. Your wife’s predicament is a matter of national media, he had meant. Even in the West Bank, they know what is at hand . . . .
Jacob stood, the decision clear in his face. “We’ll adjourn until one-thirty, my friends. Thank you all.”
And the Israeli Cabinet filed past her, each one fixing her with a moment’s somber and sympathetic nod.
Finally, they were alone. He reached out his hand, inviting her to sit, yet uncomfortable with treating her like just another caller. Especially in this room. He stifled a chuckle, for without meaning to—yet with incredible portent—she had chosen the chair with a nameplate bearing the title Secretary of Defense.
How appropriate, he told himself with just the faintest hint of a grin as she stood behind the chair.
Finally Jacob rediscovered his wits and walked around to give her a soft kiss on the cheek. His hand grazed her forearm in an additional gesture of intimacy.
“Honey,” he whispered, and both of them knew this tone of voice had never been used in that room before. “A surprise, of course, but I’m so glad to see you. Up. And about.”
“Me too.” She smiled at her own ambiguity. “Glad to see me ‘up and about,’ I mean. You have no trouble getting around.”
“I’ll call for lunch.” He pulled out the chair for her, then went to the phone.
She had chosen to sit across from him—for despite their very personal relationship, she most definitely had a petition to bring.
He finished muttering the lunch order, hung up, sat down and faced her with a blank expression.
“So. Did you come here with a specific goal in mind? That is, beyond making a grand entrance and spooking my entire cabinet?”
She recoiled slightly at the directness of his words, and so did he. Clearly, he had not intended to start by chastising her. But a sentence that had begun as humor had somehow escalated.
She decided to respond in kind. Not mean, but not wilting, either.
“Yes, I had a goal. I came here to see if I had a marriage. Or just an official, state-approved bedroom partner.”
He closed his eyes briefly and breathed out in frustration. “Please, Hadassah. I’m about to reinitiate peace talks that could affect the future of this country. And quite possibly the geopolitical balance of the entire world. Can I be forgiven for needing to focus?”
“I need you, Jacob.”
She said it in a low, intimate, almost pleading tone. One which no man who loved his wife could possibly rebuff.
He sighed again. “I appreciate that, honey. And that means a great deal to me. But honestly, my people—our people—need me too, right now.”
“They can wait through the most decisive thirty minutes of your marriage. As Moshe implied, everyone knows what happened. They all know I’m the national ‘basket case.’ They’ll appreciate your husbandly commitment.”
He sighed even more deeply, resolutely. Accepting her terms.
“What is it, Hadassah?”
She shook her head. “I want to talk to you. You’re the only one left in the world I can have a heartfelt conversation with—do you know that? I used to have Poppa. Now it’s you, or no one.”
“How about G-d?” His eyes gazed at her from atop his steepled fingers. He had voiced the question softly, for he knew he was more religious than she.
“Please. You know what I’m talking about. G-d and I aren’t exactly on speaking terms right now.”
“Maybe you should work on that.” But his voice held no rebuke. “Maybe. But in the meantime, I don’t want my emotional survival treated like some cabinet agenda item. I need to talk to you, not mark off a checklist.”
He laughed out loud. “For such a vulnerable person, you’re very much in my face right now, you know that?”
She laughed, too. It had struck her also that her pose of abject weakness was starting to wear thin. She had, in fact, come with a clear goal in mind. But she also knew that she would require several long minutes of thawing to coax it out.
Chapter Twelve
Her face sobered quickly.
“When we met,” she said, “I had a life. A career, a trajectory, that was about as stratospheric as yours. At least, it seemed that way to me. For a while.”
He nodded, his face softening at the memory of it. “No, you weren’t fooling yourself. It seemed that way to me, too. In fact, I was intimidated by you. At first.”
“So what happened?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Life. Political destiny.” He paused and looked down at his folded hands. “I know I have failed to make you feel a part of my career the way I wanted to.”
“No, that’s not it. But you can’t let yourself off that easy.”
She spread her hands out flat on the table and stared at them as though they contained some exotic secret.
“I’ve lost my life, Jacob.” She looked into his face a moment. “I’ve lost my meaning, my momentum, my reason for living. I don’t know where it went. I mean, I didn’t lose it like you misplace a wallet. And I can’t really see why my father’s death would have suddenly destroyed it. All I know is, I can’t seem to grasp ahold of it anymore.”
“What can I do?”
“You can listen,” she replied hastily, emphatically. “A few years from now, you’ll be out of office and living the comfortable, respected life of a national statesman. You’ll have media appearances, speeches in faraway countries, books to write, protégés to counsel. And me, I’ll just be one of the well-dressed ladies-who-lunch, shopping in the boutiques, with no children”—she rushed over the words—“whose greatest achievement is what she used to be—First Lady.”
She stared at him for a sign of affirmation and received none.
“What happened to the young woman you met, who wanted to write the definitive history of the Holocaust, who wanted to be the best mother who ever lived, who wanted to run for the Knesset?”
He bent forward to rub his forehead, obviously realizing she intended to wait for his reply. His politician’s mind quickly strung together her demands—to be young, to write, to be a mother, to be a politician in her own right. With an ability honed by years of negotiating, he mentally zeroed in on what might be the true source of her frustration.
He again ran his hand over his face, then stared at her as though he was seeing her for the first time. He briefly wondered if the small bit of shrapnel that had pierced her womb had also blown apart his marriage. The physical wound was healing quickly enough—yet the question of children festered, unanswered.
“What does Hadassah tell you about this?” he finally replied.
She frowned, misunderstanding. “Me?”
“No. The ancient one. The Hadassah who wrote in your family’s journals.”
Her eyes flashed with quick anger. “What about her?”
“G-d had a plan for her.”
“Yes. She was one in a million. What I wonder, when I read those journals, is what about the young concubine to whom she wrote the letters? Leah? She’s my ancestor, remember. Not Esther. What about her? Is it possible that her only reason for being on earth was to pass on that journal? Was that it? To spend years in some royal harem being essentially raped once every few months, year after year? Is that what a loving G-d had in mind for her life?”
“I don’t know.” Jacob shook his head slowly, wishing he had not brought up the subject.
“No. We don’t. But here’s what I came to ask you. See, I didn’t want you to just listen. I have a reques
t. Not from my husband, but from my Prime Minister. I need a favor.”
“Name it.”
“I’m a scholar. An investigator, at least in an academic sense. Let me help find out who came after you. The one who killed my Poppa.”
“You don’t think it’s the usual suspects? Hamas, Hezbollah, Fatah . . .”
“No, honey. Jacob. I don’t.” She smiled wryly at the inadvertent endearment.
“Why not?”
“First of all, because if it had been, they’d be stumbling all over themselves to claim responsibility. And in over two weeks, there’s been complete silence. Second, because I know you would have told me if the intelligence had come back with anything. And third . . .”
“Yes? Third?”
“Because of Poppa’s last words.” She automatically lowered her voice. “He wanted me to hear him so badly, he just refused to die until he’d gotten the words out. He said, ‘She did not perish. You must find her.’”
“Why didn’t you tell me this? I didn’t know he said anything!”
“Because I haven’t been sure if it meant anything. But I’ve been thinking about it for the last two weeks, and now I’m convinced. Besides, I think you and your people haven’t the first clue why that man attacked. And I think my father knew. Something.”
For the first time all day, Prime Minister ben Yuda looked shocked. He stared ahead into space, searching for an answer in the thin air.
“Do you have an answer for me?” she asked.
Rather than speaking, he reached over to a dark green folder among the papers to his left. He pressed down on its surface and slid the cardboard toward her.
She made no move to open it.
“What does it say?” she asked.
“This top-secret report concludes that the bombing was not carried out by any known Palestinian group. And that it was probably not even directed at me. Who it was actually directed at may never be known, although the investigation continues. The document was presented to me twenty minutes before you arrived.”
They both exhaled and let a long, tense pause flow between them. “Hadassah, I suppose it makes sense for you to spend some time researching this. You might even be entitled. I’ll open some doors for you, quietly. Try to improve your access to people and documents. But I have to warn you. First, you have to be careful. No playing secret agent. And second, this cannot come out. If the world discovered that the Israeli First Lady was conducting some kind of ad hoc personal investigation, I and my intelligence cadres would be humiliated. Do you understand? With the very first media report of this, it’s over. Nonnegotiable.”
