I kick off my sandals, feel the sand between my toes as we stroll. “So you’re the thief.”
“I am simply pulling together data, same as I used to for Mossad. If I have to tell a story or rearrange things to get what I want, it’s what I do. Stealing, I don’t know. I think you must want the thing before you can steal it.”
“You’re as delusional as he is. If you take something that’s not yours, it’s stealing. You just give him the out if you’re caught, he can shrug, What? Who is she?
I touch her arm, slow us down. She is a brisk walker.
“What?” she says, then turns away, utterly still for the first time since we met. The chatty one in her skirts, glasses without frames. This woman who’s maybe romanced members of Parliament and worked her way into corporations with ten levels of security. She raises her head slightly, eyes reflecting moonlight like a raccoon’s. “In Mossad I learned to be more cunning than anyone at the table, to think out of the box. We were bold, risky, we had no choice. We created systems that could detect a heartbeat ten feet outside of a tank, all kinds of surveillance devices tapping into databases, and still we killed so many wrong people. Where do you put that? There’s no place for it. But money, it makes more sense. People think—”
“Stop it with the ‘people think,’ okay, I’m not interested in your little philosophies.”
“Then what interests you? From what I can tell, nothing.”
“That’s not true, you have no idea.” I hear my voice crack, blood coursing under my skin, Gila steady as a news-caster. She is so much like my father: clever, manipulative, “audacious,” everything I’m not. I work this through in less than thirty seconds, while she’s not-looking, trust me, I know not-looking, and then I’m babbling about the sea, the stars, how different this country is from the one I’d traversed with Marc, and somehow we’re conversing again, bumping into each other slightly as we walk. Desire always gets me by the throat first. Then elsewhere. The various twitches and puls But the throat...
She walks a step in front and takes my arm. “Shhhh.”
“I—”
Regah, regah! Do not speak a word, don’t move!” She sits me down, then disappears into the sand, up over the board-walk. Left in shadows, I wish I were armed with something other than a BlackBerry. Fear and desire share a path to the heart. I count backwards until she appears, stuffing a shiny object inside her shirt — definitely not a BlackBerry. “It’s nothing, just him.”
“Who?”
“He often has me followed.”
I realize she’s talking about my father. “Sounds like you two have a great relationship.”
“Come, we’ll take you to the hotel. I must go to him.”
Five. Old habits die hard
At the Sheraton, she drops me without a word, and I know my father’s on to me. I twist open a midget bottle of Scotch and suck it down in one sip, lying back on the lonely comforter. Hotel beds make me want to come, but this time it’s more. Gila Zyskun is not like any of my father’s lovers, though she asked about them. At first they liked to care for me, be my best friend. Some insisted we “go shopping,” a ridiculous activity. Gila laughed, she hated shopping too. The few he married stopped trying. A hand on my arm, she understands, her father had been a notorious philanderer, a general, and that’s all we need, so different from those who’d endlessly probe, How did it feel? in the name of love. Like my father, I have failed every relationship in my life, but Gila doesn’t care, says we’re more alike than different. I come so fast it’s clear: I don’t trust me either.
Four. An unbelievable story
The three of us have lunch at an upscale Russian restaurant in Herzliya. This is diamond money, my father says, tapping his thin, manicured finger on the crisp white linen. Marc had the same fingers, long and elegant, a few neat black hairs above each knuckle as if they’d been perfectly embroidered. You wouldn’t think such pretty hands capable of such mischief.
My father divulges the plan over bowls of creamy pink borscht, blinis, caviar — comfort food, he says. On Sundays, as a boy, his father took him to visit Russian relatives in Brighton Beach and on the way home they ate lunch. He misses New York but won’t endure a trial. “I’ll die first,” he says, and he’s not joking. Gila says he carries vials of hemlock, at any moment ready to cut out on his own.
The plan is simple. I am to take a jump drive to Paris and deliver it to an associate, who’ll move the contents accordingly. Simple until I know how I’m carrying — “It’s small and thin,” my father says. “Undetectable as a tampon. And there’s something else you should know.”
“Don’t bother her with that,” Gila says, worried, I think. Spying has taught her to be stoic, controlled.
“She has to know, everyone’s on edge. The police are being extra-vigilant.”
“It’ll just make her nervous.”
He glowers at Gila, then me, knows something’s up, maybe? Her concern warms me, then nurtures paranoia: What if this conversation is staged? “Look, Jen, there was trouble here recently. Something like twenty companies were busted for spying on each other... It’s an unbelievable story. One day out of the blue, this mystery writer calls the police and says parts of his unpublished novel are appearing all over the Internet and they trace it to a virus planted on his computer—”
“No, not a virus,” Gila interrupts. “It was a Trojan horse, you know that.”
“Same thing.”
“No, it is not the same, the Trojan is much smarter, you have to invite it in. Tell the story right or don’t tell it. Already, you leave out that he was writing with his wife, they were a team, but the son-in-law was related to the wife.”
“He was after the husband, trying to humiliate him.”
Voices raised, the vein under my father’s left eye pulsing, Gila’s long neck coiled, they argue back and forth about who did what and when, a slick coat of oil congealing over the untouched blinis. The gist: Upset over his breakup with their daughter, the former son-in-law hacked into the mystery-writing couple’s computer with spying software, mining whatever he could and releasing it on the Internet, at times altered to sully the man’s reputation. He’d also sold his Trojan to a number of private detectives who used it to spy for their corporate clients.
“They were very sloppy,” Gila says.
“Israel has one of the most competitive business climates in the world,” my fathers says.
“They left a trail longer than a rocketship to the moon.”
“Without that writer — writers,” he winks at Gila, “they would have been fine, which is the takeaway here: Don’t mess with the family.”
“What’s on the drive?” I jump in, speaking loudly, as much to topple their excitement, the current between them, as to figure out what I’m in for. They angle toward me, my father no doubt wondering how much to divulge, whether it’ll make a difference. Everything I own, he says. No need to elaborate, it can’t be legal, and though my father’s gall shouldn’t stun me, throughout my life I’ve been his foil, I am slightly taken aback that he’d sacrifice me for his crumbling empire.
Gila excuses herself to go to the restroom, silencing my father and me as we stare, traces of her lingering, the after-glow. He sighs, “Did she tell you she worked for Mossad?”
I nod.
“She’s come up with things you wouldn’t believe if you saw them in a James Bond movie. Can’t imagine what I’d do without her. She’s amazing.”
“Oh, I know.”