“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 Adi. 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.
He told her about the affair from the beginning and about the team he was putting together. “I want you to be our intelligence officer,” he said. “I need you.”
“But I’m on maternity leave; Michal isn’t even six months old yet.”
“That’s fine. We aren’t going to employ you on a full-time basis. We’ll be working from my office, a small apartment on Nahmani Street, in fact. You can bring Michal with you. It’ll get you out of the house a little. It’ll do you good.”
“You know, Michael,” she said, “we don’t know each other well enough for you to tell me what’s good for me. And you have no idea if I want to get out of the house or not. And working with a baby on your arm isn’t much fun. I’m sure you’ve never done so.” She inadvertently reached up to her neck and delicately ran her fingers over a gold pendant that remained partially concealed under her shirt. Michael imagined she was tracing her finger along the outline of the piece of jewelry that brushed against her skin.
“Touché.” Michael smiled, and then turned serious again. “And that’s precisely why I want you. You tell me like it is straight to my face and aren’t scared of me. You’re right, I went too far. I made assumptions I shouldn’t have. I apologize. Will you forgive me?”
“There’s nothing to forgive. But you can’t speak to people like that. All I can say is that I’ll give it a try. That if it works out, great. But if it turns out to be impossible for me, you’ll have to find yourself a different intelligence officer. I’d like to catch the bastard, too, after all, so I’ll give it a go. When do we start?”