As though at last the cue had been uttered for which he’d been waiting, Uri entered the classroom.
“Lunch,” said Smilesburger, smiling warmly.
The dishes were crammed onto a cafeteria tray. Uri set the tray beside the TV set, and Smilesburger invited me to pull up my chair and begin to eat.
The soup wasn’t plastic, the bread was not cardboard, the potato was a potato and not a rock. Everything was what it was supposed to be. Nothing as clear as this lunch had happened to me in days.
It was only with the food passing into my gullet that I remembered I’d first seen Uri the day before. Two young men in jeans and sweatshirts who had looked to me to be produce workers had been identified by George Ziad as Israeli secret police. Uri was one of them. The other, I now realized, was the guy at the hotel who’d offered to blow me and Pipik. As for this classroom, I thought, they’d just borrowed it, maybe because they figured, not so stupidly, that it would be a particularly effective place to lock me in. They’d gone to the principal and said, “You were in the army, we know about you, we’ve read your file, you’re a patriotic guy. Get everybody the fuck out of your school after one this afternoon. This afternoon the kids are off.” And probably he never complained. In this country, the secret police get everything they want.
At the conclusion of my lunch, Smilesburger handed me, for the second time, the envelope with the million-dollar check. “You dropped this last night,” he said, “on your way back from Ramallah.”
Of the questions I asked Smilesburger that afternoon, the ones to which I could least believe I was being given a straight answer had to do with Moishe Pipik. Smilesburger claimed that they had no better idea than I did of where this double of mine had emerged from, of who he was or whom he might be working for — he certainly wasn’t working for them. “The God of Chance delivered him,” Smilesburger explained to me. “It is with intelligence agencies as it is with novelists — the God of Chance creates in us. First the fake one came along. Then the real one came along. Last the enterprising Ziad came along. From this we improvise.”
“You’re telling me that he’s nothing but a crackpot con man.”
“To you there must be more, to you this must be a singular occurrence rich with paranoidal meaning. But charlatans like him? The airlines offer them special rates. They spend their lives crisscrossing the globe. Yours took the morning flight to New York. He is back in America.”
“You made no effort to stop him.”
“To the contrary. Every effort was made to help him on his way.”
“And the woman?”
“I know nothing about the woman. After last night, I would think that you know more than anyone does. The woman, I suppose, is one of those women for whom adventure with a crook is irresistible. Phallika, the Goddess of Male Desire. Am I mistaken?”