They woke at six-thirty, sweaty and grungy. Terry turned on the shower (it wasn’t much of a shower but it was wet) and put Liz into it first, then dried her off and while she dressed herself he rinsed off the travel grime, shampooing his red hair twice and lathering quickly with the hard hotel soap as the water temperature dropped precariously fast. Wrapped in a towel he stepped back in the room to find his daughter singing to Shmulik, whom she held cradled in small arms.
He started to speak but she put a finger to her lips.
“Quiet. Daddy. Shmulik’s tired from the long trip and he’s afraid because it’s a different bed and I’m singing him to sleep.” So he followed orders and watched silent as Liz, who’d put her T-shirt on inside out, rocked the steady teddy, three days younger than she was, and sang an incredible melange of English and Hebrew nonsense syllables as the creature stared up at her lovingly with button eyes.
She was a bright child. Precocious, Terry thought proudly; always the coquette. Her habit (just like her mother) was to stand, legs slightly apart, feet planted firmly, hands on her hips, and, well, command. She’d spoken words at nine months, sentences at sixteen, and after having lived in Israel more than half her life she could make do in Hebrew almost as well as either of her parents, learning the language by osmosis from Orli, the Yemenite maid who came daily to clean and watch her while Terry and Maggie pursued their writing chores. Bright, hell, she was a pistol. Take Shmulik the bear. Originally his name had been Bar-Bar, which was short for bear-bear. But seven or eight months after they’d arrived in Israel Liz announced that the teddy had been rechristened.
“Shmulik,” she said, oozing the syllables. “Shmu-u-u-ulik.” And Shmulik he’d been ever since.
They’d come to Israel three years before, moving from Rome in the fall of 1974. The nomadic, vaguely newlywed American Family Robinson on a Great New Adventure. Maggie was the one with the job: an associate producer for a U.S. television network whose news panjandrums decided to expand Middle East coverage by opening a minibureau in Jerusalem.
Terry, who made his living freelance writing and occasionally editing English-language texts, had lived overseas for two decades, a confirmed bachelor well into his late thirties, until he’d met the beautiful, auburn-haired Maggie Ross on a blind date in Rome, wooed her for sixteen months with flowers, white Italian truffles, and weekends in Tuscany, and finally — finally — convinced her, twelve years his junior and ambitious as hell, that marriage to a struggling journalist entering early middle age was the fate to which she’d been doomed.
Eleven months after they set up housekeeping in a small but comfortable house with a huge garden in Jerusalem’s German Colony, Maggie’s network got a new vice president for news and a new set of budget priorities, which did not include a Jerusalem minibureau. So, twenty-six weeks’ severance pay in their pockets, the network American Express card cut in two and express-mailed to New York, they were suddenly on their own in the Promised Land, evicted from the expense-account Eden of network news. They thought about going back to Rome, but they’d rented out the five-room flat Terry owned in Parioli — a four-year lease to an American diplomatic couple. Besides, they rationalized, Rome was expensive, while the house in Jerusalem cost a mere $350 a month and Israel’s living costs were lower than anywhere in Western Europe except Portugal. The country was beautiful, the people were friendly. Moving would be a hassle. They decided to stay on, as long as they could make ends meet.
Maggie, a natural scrambler, got work as a freelance producer whenever Barbara Walters or Walter Cronkite or some other network luminary came to town and needed extra hands. She also pitched article ideas about many of the Israeli political contacts she’d made to every American magazine she could think of — and a few paid off. The Woman’s Day profile of Dayan was her first big-time assignment and she fretted over each comma and semicolon.
If the magazine bought and published it, it would be a breakthrough — not to mention the $3,500 fee, enough to keep them going for four months if they were cautious about how they spent it.
There was other money, of course. The net income from Terry’s apartment was a thousand a month. His freelance articles brought in four to six thousand a year. A one-day-a-week editing stint at the Jerusalem Post’s International Edition was good for another fifteen hundred per annum. And if things got really rough there was the account in Switzerland, a numbered account containing just under five hundred and fifty thousand U.S. dollars in Swiss francs, Terry Robinson’s accumulated pay as an NOC — Non-Official-Cover — contract agent for the Central Intelligence Agency, for which he’d worked on and off since graduating from Brown University twenty-three years before.
He wasn’t one of those gun-toting cowboys of suspense fiction. Not his style, although he’d qualified with a handgun during a training session back in the States a decade earlier. Nor was he an expert on ciphers and satellite transmissions.
Terence Robinson was an information gatherer, an evaluator, a shrewd judge of others. He was adept at recruiting and setting up networks of agents, running them, and protecting his people. His cover was perfect: as a freelance journalist, a writer of ephemeral articles on travel (and, very occasionally, Euro-politics), he got to see a lot of things and meet a lot of people.
Much of the information he gleaned he passed on to Langley through a series of case officers. In Italy he spent his time writing about tourism, even publishing a paperback on Tuscany. He wrote occasionally about the labor movement for the Wall Street Journal and a somewhat overdramatic, he thought at the time, piece on the rise of domestic Italian terror for Playboy. But for the most part, Terry Robinson stayed clear of controversial themes. They were dangerous because they pegged you one way or another, and his entire existence depended on his not being pegged as anything but a nondescript freelancer, a generic American expatriate.
Maggie knew what he did of course.
Johnny T, Terry’s case officer when he’d gotten married, had encouraged him to tell Maggie the truth.
“There are secrets and there are secrets,” Johnny had said, long fingers drumming idly on a Formica table at a nondescript trattoria just off the crowded Piazza Farnese. “If Maggie doesn’t know, it could be worse for you in the long run.” Besides. Johnny’d explained, the Agency was leery of agents who couldn’t share one of the most basic facets of their existence with their wives.
So, shortly after their marriage he’d taken Maggie to San Gimignano for the weekend on the pretext of researching a piece on some of the small wineries in the area. They stayed at a simple hotel in Pancole, a few kilometers outside the town, and over wine, crusty peasant bruschetta, salad made of wild greens, and thick grilled veal chops, he quietly explained to his bride just what he did for a living.
“You’re kidding,” she said, her hand clapped to her mouth. When he didn’t smile, she dropped her hand and said, genuinely shocked, “You’re not.”
And then, perceptive reporter that she was, she cut to the heart of the matter: “Why, Terry?”
He played with his wineglass. “Because there are bad guy’s out here, and the only way to keep them from winning is to do everything you can to be one of the good guys.”
She frowned. “Everything you can?”
“All I can — the best I can.”
She shook her head. “But history—”
“Nobody really understands history. Not really. Not all the way.”