Death Beam, page 26
Then Arik had received the message from Washington.
Arik remembered vividly the first time that Max Zimmer had visited Israel, and they had stood together watching an exchange of gunfire between the Syrians and the youthful Israeli army across the Golan Heights.
“Do you recall,” Max had asked, peering about through those thick, ugly glasses, “that passage in Herzl’s diaries where he describes his first visit to the Holy Land? He was standing with his .guide when he saw a group of horsemen riding fast across the desert in his direction. Thinking they were Bedouin, Herzl wanted to flee, but his guide told him to stay. The riders were Jews. Herzl, astonished, said that he had never thought to see Jews on horseback. That is the marvel of Israel.” He gestured toward a pair of young men reloading a mortar. “A nation of Jews on horseback.”
Max had been a unique friend, to Arik and to Israel. For many years before he was purged from the Agency, he had personally taken charge of the Israeli Account: the exchange of sensitive information with the Mossad. It was Arik who had gone to Max, back in the fifties, bearing the text of Khrushchev’s secret speech denouncing Stalin—an acquisition that was later regarded as one of the Agency’s greatest coups. It was Max who had come to Arik when a Soviet defector brought news of a mole inside the Israeli administration, and Arik had moved with ruthless expedition to deal with the traitor. Both men believed in the essential truth of the saying from the Torah: “He who would kill you, get up early and kill him first.’’ In that understanding, Arik had brought Max priceless intelligence from inside the darkest recesses of the Soviet Union, and Max had helped to forewarn the Israelis of the plans of their Arab enemies.
That very special relationship had never been quite so intimate since Max had been purged from the counterintelligence staff. Since then, Arik had watched his old friend being smeared, harassed, and driven to grpund. What satisfaction Krylov, at Moscow Center, must have derived from the humiliation of the American who had been his foremost antagonist! Krylov’s fingerprints were all over the disinformation exercise that had been mounted against Max Zimmer before his death. Arik knew the devious workings of the Russian spy master’s mind. When a genuine Soviet defector fled to the West, Krylov exercised himself to sow doubt about the defector’s bona fides and deflect his information so that it would be useless to those who gave him sanctuary. It was characteristic of Krylov to attempt not one but several overlapping deception operations. So after Ushinsky had crossed sides to the Americans, Krylov had tried to convince the Agency that he was a fake, hoping that the defector’s revelations would not be believed. But at the same time, recognizing that an investigation might begin that could result in the exposure of a Soviet agent at Langley, Krylov had mounted a parallel operation to frame Max Zimmer.
When Arik narrowed his eyes, his whole appearance changed. The heavy, hooded lids gave him the look of a goshawk. You could see that this man who at first appeared in the guise of a world-weary philosopher was also eminently capable of killing. Arik narrowed his eyes now, as he thought of how Krylov had even dared to use Max’s Israeli connections to discredit him.
Few Americans were capable of following the convoluted mental processes of a man like Krylov, who was the product of a wholly alien tradition. It required more than training and experience. It required the intuitive power to feel into the mind of an enemy, even across a vast cultural divide. Arik and most of the men and women who worked for him had cultivated that power to a remarkable degree. Binyamin, the young agent who had been shot in the streets of Damascus, had been capable not merely of passing himself off as a Palestinian terrorist or a Syrian officer or an agent of the KGB, but of thinking like one. Within the Agency, Max Zimmer was one of the few men known to Arik who had had the faculty of psychic self-transposition that the Israeli spymaster believed to be the key to perfecting the art of human intelligence. Now that extraordinary American was dead.
Arik’s eyes narrowed still further.
Dick Hammond was asking to meet someone. “I need to talk to Judah Klugmann,” he said. “The man who told the American media that Max was a mole.”
Arik studied the big, open-faced American now draining his cup of sweet Turkish coffee. He knew that Hammond was a friend. Just how much of a friend he had discovered from Moshe after their agents had blown up the latest consignment of nuclear equipment destined for Iraq. Arik believed that friendship must be tested. But once proved, he returned it with a fierce loyalty.
“Of course you can talk to Klugmann,” Arik said. “If you need to. But I’m sure you’d rather talk to Rael.”
“To Rael?” Hammond could hardly believe his ears. He saw Rael Halevi as vividly for a moment as if she were standing in front of him, her hands outstretched, her long black hair borne aloft by the wind as it had been that day years before when they had stood together at Masada, on the spot where the zealots had fought and died. He had loved Rael Halevi once. Perhaps she had been moved by an answering
love. But Rael was not only a spectacularly, unjustly beautiful woman. She was one of the most professional operatives in the Israeli secret service.
“Go to Rael,” Arik was saying. “Judah Klugmann is her father.”
Hammond now experienced a real sense of shock. “How is it possible?” he questioned. “She never told me—”
“There may be many things Rael never told you. There are things Rael does not share. Not even with me.” Arik contemplated the American’s reactions, following Hammond’s facial expressions with his hooded eyes. And it crossed Hammond’s mind that perhaps Arik had loved Rael too.
“Go to her, Dick,” Arik repeated. “She’s in Jerusalem. Moshe will take you.”
Hammond had calls to make from the embassy in the morning, so they left around 11:00 and arrived in Jerusalem shortly before lunch. They pulled over to a roadside stall en route and Dick Hammond watched Moshe and their driver wolfing down their falafel with a mounting sensation of queasiness.
“You’re not hungry, Dick?”
“Not just yet. I’ll stick to a beer. Thanks all the same.”
In the car, Hammond went on thinking about the guarded conversation he had had with Charles Canning. The Agency already seemed determined to sweep Max’s death under the rug. Les Winter was happy to accept the suicide theory. That figured, since the most probable reason Max would take his own life was that he was harboring a guilty secret. But Canning seemed convinced Max had been murdered. If so, Hammond asked himself, then who was the hit man? He recalled the Palestinian terrorist that the defector, Ushinsky, had talked about.
“Moshe,” Hammond said to his friend, “do you remember anything about a Palestinian called Sammy Hamad? We put in a request for a trace to your service a few weeks ago. I gather you were able to oblige on some of the background, but had no information on his current whereabouts.”
“Hamad is a common name,” said Moshe Stem. “But we
have information on one terrorist who may be your man. We captured a prisoner who was trained by the Soviets at the Sanprobal school in the Crimea a few years back. He mentioned that several of his classmates were singled out for special training in clandestine warfare. One of them was called Hamad. We believe he was recruited as an executive agent for the Soviets, reserved for special operations under direct control from Moscow. The same man was active in Central America a couple of years ago, helping to organize the guerrillas down there. Which means he must be able to pass himself off as a Latin. We also have him identified as one of the instructors at the Lahej camp in South Yemen before the attack on the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979. You’ll remember that some of the ringleaders of that Saudi uprising got their military training at Lahej, under the supervision of the Soviets and East Germans. So Sammy Hamad, if that is his real name, seems to be a very well-traveled young man.”
‘‘Ushinsky said that Sammy Hamad was a key figure in a plan for major sabotage in the United States.”
“Why not?” Moshe was weaving his mobile hands. “It makes perfect sense. He’s a Palestinian. If he gets caught out, the Soviets can easily disown him. Your President has declared himself to be a friend of Israel, so any action orchestrated by a Palestinian against the United States can easily be explained away in terms of wounded Arab nationalism.”
Moshe Stem must have guessed what was on Hammond’s mind, because he added, “Max Zimmer was a good friend of Israel too.”
Moshe led the way to a modest office in an anonymous building near the Plaza Hotel. He opened the door without knocking, and was greeted familiarly by a man who was running a tape through a telex machine.
Moshe headed straight for the glass door at the end of the corridor and flung it open.
“Enter,” he invited Hammond.
“My God!” Hammond exclaimed, frozen in the doorway. “What’s happened?”
Rael was stretched out full-length on the floor. Her skirt, bunched up around her waist, revealed a long expanse of her temptingly rounded thighs. Her face was pillowed on her left arm.
“Is she ... is she ...?’’ Hammond stammered, unsure if she had fainted. Or if something worse had happened.
His answer came in laughter, from Moshe, standing behind him, and from Rael, as she picked herself off the floor and rushed to fling her arms around him.
“I was sleeping,” she told him, still grinning broadly. “I always try to take a catnap around noon. I arrived at the office at four this morning.”
Hammond studied her. He saw that her body had ripened in the years since they had been lovers. “You’re more beautiful every time I see you,” he said, meaning it.
When they were all sitting down on the simple wooden chairs in the room, Hammond said, “You know why I’ve come.”
“I know. You want to ask about my father.”
“I never realized—”
“There was no reason why you should have known Judah Klugmann was my father,” she anticipated his thought. “He was never a father to me. He left my mother before I had learned to talk.” She spoke of Klugmann with indifference rather than bitterness.
“This newspaper story about how he was a double agent—”
“Is partly true. My father believed in Moscow all his life. He was run via East Berlin. We never talked about that either. My father and the chief of the East German service came from the same family in Stuttgart. It means that Misha and I are cousins too. But I’ve never met Misha.” She glanced at Moshe Stem, who nodded. “The story about Max Zimmer was a lie,” she went on. “My father was ordered to say that. Misha told him to do it. Misha and Krylov wanted to frame Max. My father was never told why.”
“You sound very sure of your facts,” Hammond observed.
“I talked to my father after the newspaper story appeared,” she explained. “Arik asked me to do it. I hadn’t seen my father in ten years or more. He’s a very old man, Dick. Much older than his years. Old and weak. He confessed everything. And you know why he confessed?”
“Because his daughter was asking the questions,” Hammond suggested.
“That wasn’t the main factor. Misha ordered him to tell lies that hurt Israel, and its friends. My father wasn’t prepared for that. He finally had to choose between being a Communist and being a Jew. He’s finished now. He won’t do any more harm. He wants to bury himself on a kibbutz for however„ much time he has left. You can tell that to the Agency. Moshe can confirm it.” Moshe Stem nodded again.
20
MIAMI BEACH, October 14
Sally Sherwin curled her toes and dropped the back of the lounge chair to stretch out full-length beside the pool. The late sunlight sprinkled through the vines that half-covered the sloping glass roof above her head and fell across the paving slabs like wheat sheaves. She needed the moment of stillness, the private space in which to start piecing things together again. “We cannot look squarely at either death or the sun,” she had read somewhere. She was trying to look squarely at Max’s death. The sudden shock of it made her feel, more than ever, that she was right to try to create a normal, happy environment for herself and Jimmy, right to have gone through the divorce, right not to put herself absolutely at any man’s disposal—least of all a man from the secret world that had swallowed up Max. Everything was so provisional; you had to enjoy and fulfill yourself in whatever time was given.
The sunlight was cut off as if a curtain had been drawn. Sally shivered at the thought of what might be awaiting her in New York after the funeral. She had left on a day of torrential rain, under the lash of the winds that had built up to gale force in the steep canyons between the Manhattan skyscrapers,
shredding umbrellas and driving pedestrians into sodden huddles in doorways.
She thought about Dick Hammond, and how difficult it was for him to understand what she needed. The shadow that fell between them was not just the shadow of the Agency. It was that there was a point beyond which she could not, or would not, give herself to a man. As a mother, an artist, and a professional woman, she was obliged to defend her private space, the space from which Dick was excluded.
Sally jumped up with a start as cold water splashed over her stomach and thighs.
“Hey, cut that out!” she yelled.
Jimmy giggled. His nose, just visible over the edge of the pool, disappeared as he kicked off again and swam toward the far side with short but determined strokes. The boy had already outgrown the water wings she still made him wear. That was one of her ex-husband’s contributions to Jimmy’s education. Charles’s idea of teaching his son how to swim had been crude but effective; he had thrown him into the deep end and told him to get on with it.
“Mommy,” the child called out, “when is Uncle Max coming back?”
“He’s not coming back, darling.”
“Where’s he gone?”
“He’s gone to heaven, sweetheart.” How did you convey the absoluteness of death to a five-year-old?
“Is heaven a long way?” Jimmy asked.
“Yes. It’s a long way.”
Phyllis popped her head out the back door. “I’m just going down to the supermarket,” Sally’s mother said. “Is there anything you need?”
“No, Mother. Thank you.”
“Can I have some animal crackers, Grannie?” Jimmy called out.
“Okay,” Phyllis said indulgently. “Sally, will you do something for me? Will you give Christophe ten dollars when he’s finished out back?’ ’
Christophe was an elderly Haitian refugee—one of those who were streaming into Miami at the rate of seven hundred or so every week—whom Phyllis had taken under her wing. She gave him odd jobs to do around the house, communicat-
ing with him, it seemed, by some form of telepathy. The neighbors were scared of the new immigrants, blaming them for the rising crime wave in southern Florida. Phyllis maintained that now that the immigrants were here it was no use bewailing the fact that they had been allowed to come; the community had to absorb them. She had nothing but scorn for nervous friends who talked about moving out into the white fortress suburbs in Broward County.
When Phyllis had gone, Sally got up and walked to the door of the greenhouse. Phyllis’s latest protege was wearing only a ragged pair of gray pants, suspended by a bit of rope, and a straw hat as he hacked about in the garden with a machete. The blade flashed, the man bent forward, and then he straightened up, with a large clump of greenery in his hand.
That doesn’t look like a weed, Sally thought.
She opened the door, to see clearly. There was no doubt about it. The Haitian was chopping down her mother’s prize gardenias.
“Stop!” she yelled at him.
Christophe turned to her with a gap-toothed grin.
“Christophe, on ne doit pas couper les fleurs.” Sally switched into uncertain French, remembering that the Haitian did not speak English.
Christophe appeared not to understand. He doffed his straw hat with a flourish.
“Bon jou’, Maman,” he said in his patois. And returned to assaulting the gardenias.
“Arrêtez ça!” Sally screamed. She leaped forward and grabbed Christophe’s hands, physically arresting the fall of the machete on the last of her mother’s flowers.
The Haitian looked at her as if she were crazy.
“Moi pr’aller,” he said in a tone of wounded reproach, and shambled off around the side of the house.
“Jimmy,” Sally called. “Come out here and help Mommy.” Together they picked up the sorry heap of savaged gardenias and ferried the debris to the trashcan. It was just as well, Sally thought, that Phyllis had gone out and did not have to witness the price of her philanthropy firsthand.
“Where’s heaven, Mommy?” Jimmy asked as she crammed
the last of the greenery into the bin, keeping aside the prettiest of the flowers to put in vases inside the house.
“Up there,” she said helplessly, gesturing toward the western sky, where the sun had sunk behind some tall apartment blocks on the other side of the water.
The boy’s question, the dead flowers, the approach of nightfall filled her with unutterable sadness.
“Why are you crying, Mommy?” The child was standing next to her, peering up into her eyes.
“I’m not crying.”
“Poor, poor Mommy.” Jimmy was hugging her legs, pressing his head against her lower thigh. “Don’t be sad. I’m going to marry you.”
She picked him up and cuddled him. The boy’s expressions were pure Charles: the smile that dimpled his chin, the black scowl, the look of dogged, unyielding determination that now molded the round face under the shaggy mop of hair.
“I’m hungry,” the boy said as she carried him back into the house.
“Okay. Go watch television for a little while, and I’ll fix us some hamburgers. Then it’s time for bed.”
“Can I go swimming again?”
“It’s too late for swimming. Look: the sun’s going down.” There was a long orange glow in the western sky.
Arik remembered vividly the first time that Max Zimmer had visited Israel, and they had stood together watching an exchange of gunfire between the Syrians and the youthful Israeli army across the Golan Heights.
“Do you recall,” Max had asked, peering about through those thick, ugly glasses, “that passage in Herzl’s diaries where he describes his first visit to the Holy Land? He was standing with his .guide when he saw a group of horsemen riding fast across the desert in his direction. Thinking they were Bedouin, Herzl wanted to flee, but his guide told him to stay. The riders were Jews. Herzl, astonished, said that he had never thought to see Jews on horseback. That is the marvel of Israel.” He gestured toward a pair of young men reloading a mortar. “A nation of Jews on horseback.”
Max had been a unique friend, to Arik and to Israel. For many years before he was purged from the Agency, he had personally taken charge of the Israeli Account: the exchange of sensitive information with the Mossad. It was Arik who had gone to Max, back in the fifties, bearing the text of Khrushchev’s secret speech denouncing Stalin—an acquisition that was later regarded as one of the Agency’s greatest coups. It was Max who had come to Arik when a Soviet defector brought news of a mole inside the Israeli administration, and Arik had moved with ruthless expedition to deal with the traitor. Both men believed in the essential truth of the saying from the Torah: “He who would kill you, get up early and kill him first.’’ In that understanding, Arik had brought Max priceless intelligence from inside the darkest recesses of the Soviet Union, and Max had helped to forewarn the Israelis of the plans of their Arab enemies.
That very special relationship had never been quite so intimate since Max had been purged from the counterintelligence staff. Since then, Arik had watched his old friend being smeared, harassed, and driven to grpund. What satisfaction Krylov, at Moscow Center, must have derived from the humiliation of the American who had been his foremost antagonist! Krylov’s fingerprints were all over the disinformation exercise that had been mounted against Max Zimmer before his death. Arik knew the devious workings of the Russian spy master’s mind. When a genuine Soviet defector fled to the West, Krylov exercised himself to sow doubt about the defector’s bona fides and deflect his information so that it would be useless to those who gave him sanctuary. It was characteristic of Krylov to attempt not one but several overlapping deception operations. So after Ushinsky had crossed sides to the Americans, Krylov had tried to convince the Agency that he was a fake, hoping that the defector’s revelations would not be believed. But at the same time, recognizing that an investigation might begin that could result in the exposure of a Soviet agent at Langley, Krylov had mounted a parallel operation to frame Max Zimmer.
When Arik narrowed his eyes, his whole appearance changed. The heavy, hooded lids gave him the look of a goshawk. You could see that this man who at first appeared in the guise of a world-weary philosopher was also eminently capable of killing. Arik narrowed his eyes now, as he thought of how Krylov had even dared to use Max’s Israeli connections to discredit him.
Few Americans were capable of following the convoluted mental processes of a man like Krylov, who was the product of a wholly alien tradition. It required more than training and experience. It required the intuitive power to feel into the mind of an enemy, even across a vast cultural divide. Arik and most of the men and women who worked for him had cultivated that power to a remarkable degree. Binyamin, the young agent who had been shot in the streets of Damascus, had been capable not merely of passing himself off as a Palestinian terrorist or a Syrian officer or an agent of the KGB, but of thinking like one. Within the Agency, Max Zimmer was one of the few men known to Arik who had had the faculty of psychic self-transposition that the Israeli spymaster believed to be the key to perfecting the art of human intelligence. Now that extraordinary American was dead.
Arik’s eyes narrowed still further.
Dick Hammond was asking to meet someone. “I need to talk to Judah Klugmann,” he said. “The man who told the American media that Max was a mole.”
Arik studied the big, open-faced American now draining his cup of sweet Turkish coffee. He knew that Hammond was a friend. Just how much of a friend he had discovered from Moshe after their agents had blown up the latest consignment of nuclear equipment destined for Iraq. Arik believed that friendship must be tested. But once proved, he returned it with a fierce loyalty.
“Of course you can talk to Klugmann,” Arik said. “If you need to. But I’m sure you’d rather talk to Rael.”
“To Rael?” Hammond could hardly believe his ears. He saw Rael Halevi as vividly for a moment as if she were standing in front of him, her hands outstretched, her long black hair borne aloft by the wind as it had been that day years before when they had stood together at Masada, on the spot where the zealots had fought and died. He had loved Rael Halevi once. Perhaps she had been moved by an answering
love. But Rael was not only a spectacularly, unjustly beautiful woman. She was one of the most professional operatives in the Israeli secret service.
“Go to Rael,” Arik was saying. “Judah Klugmann is her father.”
Hammond now experienced a real sense of shock. “How is it possible?” he questioned. “She never told me—”
“There may be many things Rael never told you. There are things Rael does not share. Not even with me.” Arik contemplated the American’s reactions, following Hammond’s facial expressions with his hooded eyes. And it crossed Hammond’s mind that perhaps Arik had loved Rael too.
“Go to her, Dick,” Arik repeated. “She’s in Jerusalem. Moshe will take you.”
Hammond had calls to make from the embassy in the morning, so they left around 11:00 and arrived in Jerusalem shortly before lunch. They pulled over to a roadside stall en route and Dick Hammond watched Moshe and their driver wolfing down their falafel with a mounting sensation of queasiness.
“You’re not hungry, Dick?”
“Not just yet. I’ll stick to a beer. Thanks all the same.”
In the car, Hammond went on thinking about the guarded conversation he had had with Charles Canning. The Agency already seemed determined to sweep Max’s death under the rug. Les Winter was happy to accept the suicide theory. That figured, since the most probable reason Max would take his own life was that he was harboring a guilty secret. But Canning seemed convinced Max had been murdered. If so, Hammond asked himself, then who was the hit man? He recalled the Palestinian terrorist that the defector, Ushinsky, had talked about.
“Moshe,” Hammond said to his friend, “do you remember anything about a Palestinian called Sammy Hamad? We put in a request for a trace to your service a few weeks ago. I gather you were able to oblige on some of the background, but had no information on his current whereabouts.”
“Hamad is a common name,” said Moshe Stem. “But we
have information on one terrorist who may be your man. We captured a prisoner who was trained by the Soviets at the Sanprobal school in the Crimea a few years back. He mentioned that several of his classmates were singled out for special training in clandestine warfare. One of them was called Hamad. We believe he was recruited as an executive agent for the Soviets, reserved for special operations under direct control from Moscow. The same man was active in Central America a couple of years ago, helping to organize the guerrillas down there. Which means he must be able to pass himself off as a Latin. We also have him identified as one of the instructors at the Lahej camp in South Yemen before the attack on the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979. You’ll remember that some of the ringleaders of that Saudi uprising got their military training at Lahej, under the supervision of the Soviets and East Germans. So Sammy Hamad, if that is his real name, seems to be a very well-traveled young man.”
‘‘Ushinsky said that Sammy Hamad was a key figure in a plan for major sabotage in the United States.”
“Why not?” Moshe was weaving his mobile hands. “It makes perfect sense. He’s a Palestinian. If he gets caught out, the Soviets can easily disown him. Your President has declared himself to be a friend of Israel, so any action orchestrated by a Palestinian against the United States can easily be explained away in terms of wounded Arab nationalism.”
Moshe Stem must have guessed what was on Hammond’s mind, because he added, “Max Zimmer was a good friend of Israel too.”
Moshe led the way to a modest office in an anonymous building near the Plaza Hotel. He opened the door without knocking, and was greeted familiarly by a man who was running a tape through a telex machine.
Moshe headed straight for the glass door at the end of the corridor and flung it open.
“Enter,” he invited Hammond.
“My God!” Hammond exclaimed, frozen in the doorway. “What’s happened?”
Rael was stretched out full-length on the floor. Her skirt, bunched up around her waist, revealed a long expanse of her temptingly rounded thighs. Her face was pillowed on her left arm.
“Is she ... is she ...?’’ Hammond stammered, unsure if she had fainted. Or if something worse had happened.
His answer came in laughter, from Moshe, standing behind him, and from Rael, as she picked herself off the floor and rushed to fling her arms around him.
“I was sleeping,” she told him, still grinning broadly. “I always try to take a catnap around noon. I arrived at the office at four this morning.”
Hammond studied her. He saw that her body had ripened in the years since they had been lovers. “You’re more beautiful every time I see you,” he said, meaning it.
When they were all sitting down on the simple wooden chairs in the room, Hammond said, “You know why I’ve come.”
“I know. You want to ask about my father.”
“I never realized—”
“There was no reason why you should have known Judah Klugmann was my father,” she anticipated his thought. “He was never a father to me. He left my mother before I had learned to talk.” She spoke of Klugmann with indifference rather than bitterness.
“This newspaper story about how he was a double agent—”
“Is partly true. My father believed in Moscow all his life. He was run via East Berlin. We never talked about that either. My father and the chief of the East German service came from the same family in Stuttgart. It means that Misha and I are cousins too. But I’ve never met Misha.” She glanced at Moshe Stem, who nodded. “The story about Max Zimmer was a lie,” she went on. “My father was ordered to say that. Misha told him to do it. Misha and Krylov wanted to frame Max. My father was never told why.”
“You sound very sure of your facts,” Hammond observed.
“I talked to my father after the newspaper story appeared,” she explained. “Arik asked me to do it. I hadn’t seen my father in ten years or more. He’s a very old man, Dick. Much older than his years. Old and weak. He confessed everything. And you know why he confessed?”
“Because his daughter was asking the questions,” Hammond suggested.
“That wasn’t the main factor. Misha ordered him to tell lies that hurt Israel, and its friends. My father wasn’t prepared for that. He finally had to choose between being a Communist and being a Jew. He’s finished now. He won’t do any more harm. He wants to bury himself on a kibbutz for however„ much time he has left. You can tell that to the Agency. Moshe can confirm it.” Moshe Stem nodded again.
20
MIAMI BEACH, October 14
Sally Sherwin curled her toes and dropped the back of the lounge chair to stretch out full-length beside the pool. The late sunlight sprinkled through the vines that half-covered the sloping glass roof above her head and fell across the paving slabs like wheat sheaves. She needed the moment of stillness, the private space in which to start piecing things together again. “We cannot look squarely at either death or the sun,” she had read somewhere. She was trying to look squarely at Max’s death. The sudden shock of it made her feel, more than ever, that she was right to try to create a normal, happy environment for herself and Jimmy, right to have gone through the divorce, right not to put herself absolutely at any man’s disposal—least of all a man from the secret world that had swallowed up Max. Everything was so provisional; you had to enjoy and fulfill yourself in whatever time was given.
The sunlight was cut off as if a curtain had been drawn. Sally shivered at the thought of what might be awaiting her in New York after the funeral. She had left on a day of torrential rain, under the lash of the winds that had built up to gale force in the steep canyons between the Manhattan skyscrapers,
shredding umbrellas and driving pedestrians into sodden huddles in doorways.
She thought about Dick Hammond, and how difficult it was for him to understand what she needed. The shadow that fell between them was not just the shadow of the Agency. It was that there was a point beyond which she could not, or would not, give herself to a man. As a mother, an artist, and a professional woman, she was obliged to defend her private space, the space from which Dick was excluded.
Sally jumped up with a start as cold water splashed over her stomach and thighs.
“Hey, cut that out!” she yelled.
Jimmy giggled. His nose, just visible over the edge of the pool, disappeared as he kicked off again and swam toward the far side with short but determined strokes. The boy had already outgrown the water wings she still made him wear. That was one of her ex-husband’s contributions to Jimmy’s education. Charles’s idea of teaching his son how to swim had been crude but effective; he had thrown him into the deep end and told him to get on with it.
“Mommy,” the child called out, “when is Uncle Max coming back?”
“He’s not coming back, darling.”
“Where’s he gone?”
“He’s gone to heaven, sweetheart.” How did you convey the absoluteness of death to a five-year-old?
“Is heaven a long way?” Jimmy asked.
“Yes. It’s a long way.”
Phyllis popped her head out the back door. “I’m just going down to the supermarket,” Sally’s mother said. “Is there anything you need?”
“No, Mother. Thank you.”
“Can I have some animal crackers, Grannie?” Jimmy called out.
“Okay,” Phyllis said indulgently. “Sally, will you do something for me? Will you give Christophe ten dollars when he’s finished out back?’ ’
Christophe was an elderly Haitian refugee—one of those who were streaming into Miami at the rate of seven hundred or so every week—whom Phyllis had taken under her wing. She gave him odd jobs to do around the house, communicat-
ing with him, it seemed, by some form of telepathy. The neighbors were scared of the new immigrants, blaming them for the rising crime wave in southern Florida. Phyllis maintained that now that the immigrants were here it was no use bewailing the fact that they had been allowed to come; the community had to absorb them. She had nothing but scorn for nervous friends who talked about moving out into the white fortress suburbs in Broward County.
When Phyllis had gone, Sally got up and walked to the door of the greenhouse. Phyllis’s latest protege was wearing only a ragged pair of gray pants, suspended by a bit of rope, and a straw hat as he hacked about in the garden with a machete. The blade flashed, the man bent forward, and then he straightened up, with a large clump of greenery in his hand.
That doesn’t look like a weed, Sally thought.
She opened the door, to see clearly. There was no doubt about it. The Haitian was chopping down her mother’s prize gardenias.
“Stop!” she yelled at him.
Christophe turned to her with a gap-toothed grin.
“Christophe, on ne doit pas couper les fleurs.” Sally switched into uncertain French, remembering that the Haitian did not speak English.
Christophe appeared not to understand. He doffed his straw hat with a flourish.
“Bon jou’, Maman,” he said in his patois. And returned to assaulting the gardenias.
“Arrêtez ça!” Sally screamed. She leaped forward and grabbed Christophe’s hands, physically arresting the fall of the machete on the last of her mother’s flowers.
The Haitian looked at her as if she were crazy.
“Moi pr’aller,” he said in a tone of wounded reproach, and shambled off around the side of the house.
“Jimmy,” Sally called. “Come out here and help Mommy.” Together they picked up the sorry heap of savaged gardenias and ferried the debris to the trashcan. It was just as well, Sally thought, that Phyllis had gone out and did not have to witness the price of her philanthropy firsthand.
“Where’s heaven, Mommy?” Jimmy asked as she crammed
the last of the greenery into the bin, keeping aside the prettiest of the flowers to put in vases inside the house.
“Up there,” she said helplessly, gesturing toward the western sky, where the sun had sunk behind some tall apartment blocks on the other side of the water.
The boy’s question, the dead flowers, the approach of nightfall filled her with unutterable sadness.
“Why are you crying, Mommy?” The child was standing next to her, peering up into her eyes.
“I’m not crying.”
“Poor, poor Mommy.” Jimmy was hugging her legs, pressing his head against her lower thigh. “Don’t be sad. I’m going to marry you.”
She picked him up and cuddled him. The boy’s expressions were pure Charles: the smile that dimpled his chin, the black scowl, the look of dogged, unyielding determination that now molded the round face under the shaggy mop of hair.
“I’m hungry,” the boy said as she carried him back into the house.
“Okay. Go watch television for a little while, and I’ll fix us some hamburgers. Then it’s time for bed.”
“Can I go swimming again?”
“It’s too late for swimming. Look: the sun’s going down.” There was a long orange glow in the western sky.
