Sobbing, she left the room.
Libris Café, Yavne Street, Tel Aviv, 1230h
Catriel Levine, chief patent attorney for the Technion University, sat down at a table on the pavement and ordered tea. Even in the black suit she wore, the heat did not touch her. Catriel could not remember being warm: her bones always felt cold inside, and today her thin skin bristled easily in the drafts from the sea. She checked her silvery GeM. The job would be done soon, and then she could leave for the airport.
A circle of young men stood nearby, Orthodox Jews, the threads of the tallit hanging from their white shirts, arguing playfully about something: a point of Talmud, or maybe a bus schedule. She looked at their straight, thin backs and the coils of youthful beard and wondered again at the gulf between herself and the life of the street looping around her.
That life, which she had never wanted but still watched from a distance, was now closed to her firmly and finally. What she had done about her uncle had been necessary, although no court would ever see it that way. In Tanakh, a woman named Yael lured the destroyer of Israel into her tent and hammered an iron spike through his head while he slept. Was what she had done so different? Wasn’t the Temple of God worth it? Why did she not feel the triumph of Yael? Why did she feel instead like King David after he contrived the death of Uriah—a calm despair at what she had done? And now she was about to add to the pain.
She stirred the tea and drank, longing for its warmth. This café was a refuge, an old bookstore with a tea bar, the kind of place where time meant little and there were books instead of blazing, blaring screens. A book lay open in front of her, one of those Russian novels that her uncle was always encouraging her to read. But today she hadn’t read a word.
She needed to harden herself. The events of the next hour would all take place out of her sight, but she would be there anyway—and in her mind she would be there from now on. This task, although unforeseen, was necessary too. Tempelman had brought it on himself. He was a sly, distasteful character with no family. He would not be missed—indeed, the world would be better without him. Still, she hoped she would not be able to visualize it, or at worst that one day other visions would crowd it out. It would be soon. Already the picture the police had given her of her uncle’s death was beginning to fade.
He had not suffered, they said. A bullet to the head, apparently—they had been vague about it. Quick and final. That night in her bathroom she had looked at herself in the mirror and, for an instant, saw a thing, not a person—a murderer. But then reason flowed over the impression. Emanuel Shor, the uncle she had loved all her life, a traitor. Not only that—he had tried to enlist her as well. For a long time, he said, his eye had been on her as his “disciple.” When she began to understand his meaning, it immobilized her heart; her kindly uncle changed into a creature with hair over his eyes and lips, with a chemical odor and an expertise in deceit. He was just another treacherous man after all.
And men did not have hearts. Certainly not her father, Nathan Levinsky—nor her Uncle Emmanuel, contrary to what she had always believed. Even Jules Halevy, their closest friend, a blustering doctrinaire who couldn’t distinguish between talk and action. She had been vague with him about the money and the Texan, and he had gone around with an inflated head ever since, delighting in the secret as if it had been his idea. And then one of the partners at Cohen Brothers had liked her—a tall, physically beautiful man named Ivan. For him, she had felt nothing but contempt. Ivan used the law miraculously, like an alchemist who could charm gold out of bare rock. He enriched himself almost effortlessly, and his methods were very useful in achieving her agreement with the Americans. But she could visualize herself manipulated by such a man and grew sick at the thought. When he looked at her, his eyes narrated the complex and tedious dance he would lead her through to its inevitable endpoint.
No, no one would best her. She would not be stopped—certainly not by a smarmy little blackmailing policeman like Shimon Tempelman.
Yet, as Talmud says, in the death of one man, all humankind dies.
Never mind. She would fly to Dallas, secure from this minor threat. Unpleasant, but necessary.
The Arab wasn’t troubled; in fact, he seemed unsurprised, even serene about it, as if he had known it was coming. Strange how much she could tell about him, even though he had never shown his face to her. She had not even tried to figure out how he managed to leave his little signals unnoticed, how she would find a crumpled envelope or a sweet wrapper near her place at the café and suddenly see a pattern in it. She knew she had passed him on the street more than once, but did not know him from any other unshaven Palestinian sulking his way to work. All that she really wanted to know was that he guaranteed results—with finality.
She remembered when she put out feelers for such a person and was surprised at how quickly she found him. Once or twice she had the vague impression that he had been looking for her, not the other way round. He wanted to be known only as “the Arab,” as if there were only one Arab in the world. He had persuaded her, although she had not thought she needed persuading, that violence was as neutral a thing as diplomacy—as useful for good ends as for evil ones. And, he insisted, he served only good ends.
They had first met at dusk on a bench in the terrace park overlooking the Baha’i monument in Haifa. She never saw his face, only his reflection in a darkened street lamp. He did not like electronic communication, he said; it was not ephemeral enough for him. There would be no phone calls, no messaging—only talks, in the shadows. He told her to watch for small wads of paper, which she should then destroy. Would there be a code of some kind, she asked? He laughed quietly and said she would understand.
And she did. Walking in the park as instructed on the afternoon of New Year, she found a rutted, crinkly note on that same bench. Unfolding it, she recognized the Hebrew word for “finished” in the creases of the paper. She would not forget the view of Haifa from that bench that afternoon. A hazy, hot October day, the park filled with picnickers, and her heart frozen.
There was more. Where to find the object, how to pay him, how to contact him again if she needed him. He was like an accommodating auto repairman, and the fees were reasonable.
The aftermath was as she had predicted. She had iced herself against the police and remained quiet, even in the face of the reptilian little man from Shin Bet who appeared to know what she was thinking. Far worse was the agony of her father. The only way to deal with her own heart was by candid refutation. Not murder but pre-emption; not a breaking of law but a carrying out of law. Her father would understand if only he were able to bear understanding.
Then Tempelman had come along with his sneering inferences. Again, she was surprised at the Arab’s promptness answering her call—it was a little chilling. A paper napkin carelessly folded under a cup of hot tea. Only two questions: Who, by When. No Why. Again, a few whispers on a warm evening in the park. Closure guaranteed.
This item of business concluded, she would be able to board the plane leaving nothing pending. First to Paris, then the long flight to Texas. There would at last be the kind of power only unlimited money can buy. Catriel felt around in her bag and was reassured at the touch of the small GeM-like device she carried. Soon the world would be flooded with such devices, and soon after that the Temple would begin to rise on the holy mount. For this, she reasoned against reason, her uncle needed to die.
She looked at her little silver GeM clock and realized that it was past time. A signal would be waiting for her in the lavatory at Cohen Brothers. She had felt it unnecessary, but the man had insisted. He always closed his accounts, he said. Catriel paid for the tea, returned the book, and walked down this street of cafés and legal offices toward her chambers. People were scarce on the pavement because of the heat. It was mid-afternoon, but the city seemed ghostly, almost deserted. It was the High Holy Days.
Cohen Brothers—New York, London, Tel Aviv. She paused and touched the brass plate in the lobby of the high-rise—surprising herself, as she had never felt anything for the firm. Still, she would not be coming back. She had left a message for her father and for the Halevys; she would not miss the jowly old men, and she didn’t believe they would miss