Traitor Read online

  They spoke about her interest in film, her love for American movies from the 1970s. She was the first woman, he thought, who had spoken to him with such enthusiasm about the Godfather movies, about the grandiose splendor of breathtaking mob hits to the sound of celestial music, about the deep-seated oath hidden in the Mafiosi’s battle cry of “going to the mattresses.” With their conversation moving along with such ease and amiability in his conformist, bureaucratic office, he wondered why they had never before discussed such things so freely and directly. Why hadn’t the long evenings and nights they spent together—waiting, waiting, pressing ahead patiently and persistently with their mission—led to the same kind of straightforward and simple relationship, a relationship like the one that appeared to be evolving during the course of their conversation about, yes, about all things that weren’t work and missions and the Mossad? It was the first time that this young woman, a spectacular oyster in his eyes, had allowed him a glimpse through a small opening in her shell. After all, he had never been able to even guess what she was thinking or feeling at any given moment. Perhaps he hadn’t tried. He had always focused on her calculated and efficient ability to get things done, which so impressed him. For the first time perhaps, in the small lounge area of his office, of all places, she suddenly appeared to him as a woman with depth and softness, with youthful enthusiasm and charm.

  Ya’ara did indeed go on unpaid leave, a leave of absence that had already been extended every year for the past three years. They hadn’t kept in touch, and only on very rare occasions would he hear someone mention her name, or say something about her in passing. Someone once said, “She’s happy. I saw her a few days ago; there’s a light in her eyes.” And now, on the phone, when he said, “Ya’ara? Hi, it’s Michael Turgeman from the office,” he knew she had recognized his voice even before he said his name, and hers rang with a musical chime he had never heard before. He didn’t have to explain. When he said he needed to see her in an hour’s time, she knew right away that he was talking about work and that it was urgent.

  He’s cute, she thought, when he suggested they meet at Café Bueno, near the moshav where she lived. She put on her favorite leather jacket, a biker’s jacket, and, collecting her keys on the way, said to Hagai: “I’m going out, darling. Yes, I remember, we’re at your parents this evening. I’ll be back in time.”

  15

  Seeing him approach from afar, she thought, oh my, he’s even thinner than he used to be, and his hair is grayer, yet he still carries himself as if he’s the master of his domain. Yes, she said to herself, without doubt, Michael Turgeman is someone who occupies a place in this world. When she stood up to greet him with a smile, he thought, oh my, she’s looking very beautiful these days. And he saw shards of light in her blue-gray eyes.

  They reached out to shake hands, and then Michael said, “Really? Come on,” and tugged her toward him and they embraced. She smelled wonderful, as always; this time, however, despite the January cold and the wind coming off the sea, her fragrance was tinged with passionate shades of spring. He looks like a spy in that long coat, she smilingly thought, and then corrected herself—because one thing she already knew, someone had spoken and she had listened—he looks like a retired spy.

  A double espresso for him, a mint tea for her. Michael told her about the new office he was opening and his plans to focus on human rights cases, as soon as he got himself organized and caught up on twenty-five years of legal material. She told him about her final project at the School of Film and Television, about the short film she had already shot and was now in the editing stage of. Two people, she said, a woman and a man, who meet up again after several years and find themselves together in a shuttered apartment in a residential tower in Netanya, and the woman says to the man: It’s very simple, you’ve been in love with me now for a very long time, you’ve loved me since way back when. They remain in the apartment for an entire week without ever going out, living on coffee and dates they find in one of the large apartment’s sterile cupboards, going from room to room and from bed to bed, with the shutters opening gradually all the while to allow light and the smell of the sea inside. Michael recalled their conversation about the bold cinema of the 1970s, about raging bulls and bikers tearing down dirt roads, easy riders. But he didn’t say a word about The Godfather. We all choose our own individual paths, he thought.

  He told her about his meeting with Aharon Levin, and said: “I need you on the team. Three months. We’ll finish things up and move on. We’ll go back to our lives. We’ll get started on Sunday. I need you, Ya’ara, what do you say?”

  “Don’t turn on your charming face. It doesn’t work on me and you don’t need it anyway. Hagai’s gonna kill me; but if the request comes from Aharon, I’m in.”

  I’m no fool, Michael thought, and Ya’ara knows so, too. When she said, “If the request comes from Aharon,” she was actually telling him, “I’m not doing it for you or because you want me. Your request is up against all the other things I’m doing right now and it may not win out. But if it’s Aharon . . .”

  And a few seconds later, as if she had read his mind, Ya’ara added, “So how do I address you from now on? Sir? Or can I still call you Michael?” And Michael’s heart filled to the brim with warmth, and he said to himself, I’ve made the right choice. She was one of a kind, this young woman, you offer her adventure and danger and she doesn’t even think of saying no. She was up for it from the get-go, the scent of war in her nostrils and eager to play a part. As if she had never really left.

  With the details already settled, they continued to talk, and Ya’ara ordered another tea. She told him about her studies and how she had met Hagai and the house they were renting on the moshav, not far from here—but you already know that. And she was still on her endless leave of absence, but she thought it really was time to decide now, and it was pretty clear to her that she wanted out, that this long holiday was going to turn into a permanent break. She was not going to go back now to a life of endless traveling, and there was Hagai, and Hollywood awaited her, too. There it was, a hint of her charming smile, she was already trying to decide which evening gown she would wear when she’s called up to accept the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, and her smile was now a glowing one, the smile of someone who was busy making student films but dreamed of international acclaim. “Do you know that that smile, that’s something new, you never used to smile like that,” Michael said to her. “Yes, I’m not really the same person you once knew,” she responded.

  16

  The avenue of casuarina trees loomed against the backdrop of the darkening sky. Dabs of purple and gold appeared on the edges of the heavy clouds. It never fails to surprise me how quickly evening falls here, Michael thought to himself, and not for the first time. He turned off to the moshav, the wheels of his Audi skidding over the dirt and stones that filled the numerous potholes along the rough road. Solitary heavy drops of rain fell on the windshield, and he imagined them falling softly on the fertile earth around him, too, giving rise to the smell of winter in the countryside.

  Amir was waiting for him just outside the door, shielded by the pergola that hung over the porch at the entrance to his home. A smile, a manly embrace, accompanied by firm slaps on the shoulder, twice, three times. Michael took a step back and said, “So this is what a student looks like, does it? You do look a little too smart!”

  Amir smiled sheepishly, his light-skinned face turning a little red. “Just so you know, it’s not so easy for someone my age,” he said. “I’m not like all you Ashkenazim, who went to study straight after the army, with your parents paying for everything, including a students’ apartment in Talbieh. I had to provide for my parents, too. My father, God rest his soul, was still recovering from the work accident and my mother was still taking care of my two younger brothers.”

  “I know, I know; have you forgotten who I am? What’s up with you?” Michael responded, wondering how with the name Turgeman, he could still be seen as “all yo
u Ashkenazim.” The two of them, he and Amir, were still standing on the porch, water dripping down around them and the fragrance of mandarins filling the darkness. “And for the record,” he continued, “note that I worked all through university. Doing whatever came my way. I worked my ass off. That’s why you do it when you’re young, not when you’re already a middle-aged old man, like some of us here.”

  “Come, come inside. Smadar and the children are already at her parents’; I told her I’d join them a little later because my commander’s coming to check up on me before the Shabbat comes in. Something to drink? We’ll make some nice tea, and we have marzipan cookies baked by Smadar’s mother.”

  The aroma of strong sweet tea. And like the tea, the marzipan cookies also reminded him of the sweet and heart-warming foods his mother used to make. He looked Amir in the eyes and got straight to the point. “Listen. I need you. Yes. Like when we were in Marseille that time. A special task assigned to Aharon Levin directly by the president himself. No one is in on it aside from us, from the team we are currently putting together. Ya’ara Stein is already in. Do you remember her? And I’m also bringing in Aslan, the guy who was a part of the security team, and someone else, a young woman you don’t know, Adi, who’ll be our intelligence officer. I haven’t spoken to her yet, but you can take my word for it. She’s on the team, too. That’s everyone. An elite squad.” He told Amir the little he knew, and he could see that Amir already felt offended, angry, and personally hurt by the betrayal of that long-ago young upstart, who was now at the very least a senior director-general or high-ranking commander in one of the security establishments. Amir wasn’t one to outwardly display emotion, and his face remained calm now, too, aside from a resoluteness of sorts that clouded his blue eyes. But Michael had known him for years and had been with him in more than enough complex situations to know that Amir always took things to heart, and that he made no distinction between the personal and the public, which were essentially one and the same for him. If this traitor was screwing the state, then he was also fucking him, Amir, personally, and there were many things Amir could take, but not something like that.

  “But,” Amir hesitated, “my studies . . .”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll wrap this thing up within three months at most. You’ll write up the makeup exams. You’ll take another semester. We can discuss it after we catch this son of a bitch, and the office will approve whatever you need. Trust me. I’m looking out for you. I’ll do the degree with you if you like. But I have to have you with us now. You’re responsible for all the logistics and everything else that only you can do. Watching our backs. Making sure everything is functioning properly, working smoothly and quickly, as it should. When the moment of truth arrives, I want you at my side. I don’t want anyone else in your stead. Deal, Amir?”

  “I said to you already back then, at the airport in Marseille, that I’ll do anything you ask of me. Always. I don’t say such things lightly and I don’t say them to just anyone. I mean what I say. If not, I keep quiet, you know that. So if you’re here to ask something of me, it’s clearly something serious and I’m in. I’m just going to have to smooth things over with Smadar. She’s grown accustomed to having me at home by now.”

  “Believe me, she’ll thank me. She’s used to being on her own, you’re probably driving her crazy already. Besides, you know what kind of a girl she is. Charming, charming. Don’t buy a lottery ticket, bro, you used up all your luck when you found her. Tell her I was sorry she wasn’t home when I came by.”

  17

  “Tell me something,” Michael panted, “do you think you could run a little slower perhaps?”

  “If I were to slow down anymore, man, I’d be dead.” Aslan laughed, but came to a halt nevertheless, to allow Michael to catch his breath a little. The sea’s high waves were washing up over the beach, leaving just a narrow strip of soft wet sand on which to run.

  “This was a particularly bad idea, meeting you here,” Michael grumbled. “It’s six-thirty in the morning, freezing cold, and we’re alone on the beach. Aliens could abduct us in their spaceship and no one would even know.

  “In short,” he continued after his breathing eased off a little, a sharp pain still piercing his side and dark waves still threatening to wash over both of them, “in short, I need you. Like in the good old days. Like in the cold of Warsaw and Berlin. This time it looks like we’re gonna be freezing our butts off in Russia, if we do actually manage to get on the trail of this son of a bitch. I need you for three months straight, without any kayaking down the Amazon or climbing volcanoes in the Philippines in the middle.”

  Aslan smiled. He lived his life in keeping with a single guiding principle—a lot, of everything, for as long as possible. After serving in the Shin Bet’s and Mossad’s special ops units for thirty years, he decided upon retirement to make a point of traveling for six months out of every year. At the age of fifty-three, he was still lean and muscular, in excellent physical condition for his age, his hair gray and his skin tanned. And when he smiled, a set of remarkably white teeth lit up his face. Michael knew that Aslan didn’t need much for his subsistence, and that every shekel that he didn’t spend on the day-to-day bare essentials was put aside to pay for top-quality travel gear, first-class local guides, and air tickets to the farthest edges of the globe. Aslan, for his part, liked working with Michael and appreciated the serious and thorough manner in which he operated. He had once told one of the case officers that he could spot the tenacity and iron will lurking behind their commander’s amiable façade. Truth be told, they shared that same tenacity. Aslan had accompanied him for years to meetings with agents of all kinds, some of them scumbags, some profoundly psychologically scarred, some tough, unpredictable, and thus dangerous. Aslan made sure that the agents turned up to the meetings clean, unaccompanied, and with no one following them. He sat in on the meetings himself when the need arose, and always as Michael’s “personal secretary”—a personal secretary who didn’t say a word and simply sat there with watchful eyes, bulging muscles, and the unmistakable hint of a weapon under his jacket. Over the years, with Michael no longer simply handling the agents himself but overseeing complex operations involving large numbers of people, Aslan learned to appreciate his calm and authoritative conduct, his composure, the trust he placed in his people, and the freedom he allowed them. He saw how Michael managed to get people to display qualities that even they didn’t believe they possessed. They were more alike than met the eye. So how could he say no to him?

  “I’m with you. Tell Aharon that I’m in. But don’t forget I’m in Africa in April. My son is joining me there, and we’re going to climb Mount Kenya. You’ll find me there if you make the effort,” Aslan said with a smile, before breaking into a run and disappearing into the sea spray that rose like a mist from the incessant violent encounter between the waves and the rocks on the beach.

  18

  “It could rain at any minute now, and then we’re fucked,” Michael said to Adi, who was sitting on the bench next to him, her hair tied behind her head and one hand gently rocking the red baby carriage. “Sorry for the way I look,” he continued, gesturing at himself. “I was out running with Aslan. Do you know him? He’s joining our team. Well actually, he ran and I stumbled along behind him. It’s never good to tell lies that don’t ring true or make any sense. . . . But,” he went on without allowing Adi to get a word in, “I’ve brought along small compensation for the early morning wake-up call.” He produced a cardboard tray with two cups of coffee and a small bag of pastries on the side. “I picked them up on my way,” he explained, as if Adi suspected he had baked them himself.

  “There’s no such thing as an early morning wake-up call when you’re the mother of a five-month-old baby girl. And this team you mentioned. Ours, you said. Whose team exactly?”

  “Yes, I skipped a few steps,” Michael admitted, telling himself at the same time that he had skipped far more than he probably should have. After all, he hardly knew A
di. She had made a very good impression on him the first time they met, with a presentation of her intelligence research paper on members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. He noted her passion, enthusiasm, and her impressive ability to piece together details, to weave them into a complete picture. He was left dazzled by her proficiency when it came to managing databanks and computerized research systems. But her most important quality, as far as he was concerned, was her ability to readily and naturally say “I don’t know, here we have a gap that can only be filled with an assessment, perhaps only a guess; here we need to wait for more information to come in.”

  He couldn’t help but notice her advanced and very becoming pregnancy at that same first meeting. So that’s what they mean, apparently, when they say that pregnant women have a glow about them, he thought. She was wearing an airy, summery dress at the time, and there was something special about her that he couldn’t immediately pinpoint. Then he had it. She oozed charm. A pleasant, self-assured charm, accompanied by a certain degree of gravity. He gently inquired back then: “Your first?” And she responded with her eyes aglow, “Yes. A girl.” They met again a few times thereafter, during the presentation of various plans of action, and she never failed to impress him all over again. He visited her once in her office, which she shared with two other intelligence officers. Michael wasn’t in the habit of making personal visits, and everyone usually came to his large and impressive office, but on that occasion he wanted her to show him something on one of her computer systems, and he descended the two floors and went to her office. Her corner was meticulously neat, and pinned to the corkboard hanging behind her desk he saw a postcard displaying a painting of a beautiful woman, deep in thought, reading a letter in front of a sunlit window. It took him just a moment or two to recognize it as one of Vermeer’s paintings. Also pinned to the board were a number of poems that had been cut out from a newspaper literary supplement and a single photograph of cypress trees blackening on the backdrop of a setting sun. It’s from my kibbutz, she explained after noticing where his eyes were focused. From before we moved here, that is. Where’s here? he asked. Tel Aviv. Just near Lincoln Street, if you know the area. He subsequently retired from the Mossad and they never met up, of course, and now, on a bench in a small park in the heart of Tel Aviv, they were sitting down together again, along with her baby, who stared wide-eyed at the gloomy skies spread out above her. He glanced over at her and said: “What a lovely baby! Her name’s Tamar, right?” And she laughed and responded: “Are you kidding? Tamar’s two and half years old, meet Michal.” And, embarrassed for just a moment, he waved his hand in a gesture of forgetfulness and absentmindedness: “I’m such an idiot. Time passes so quickly, devilishly so, Tamar is a big girl already. For a moment there I was under the illusion that time had stopped. Get a grip, man,” he said to himself, and smiled at Adi, whose upper lip was already covered with the foam from the cappuccino and whose eyes now smiled a thousand times more brightly.