Gabriel Allon: The Black Widow Part 11

"What letters?"

"The letters you took from my bedroom."

"I didn't take anything from you."

"Who did?"

"Let's go," was all the woman said.

Descending the stairs, suitcase in one hand, purse in the other, Natalie noticed that the woman walked with a slight limp. Her car was parked in Ibn Ezra Street, directly in front of Natalie's. She drove calmly but very fast, down the Judean Hills toward Tel Aviv, then northward up the Coastal Plain along Highway 6. For a time they listened to the news on the radio, but it was all stabbings and death and predictions of a coming apocalyptic war between Jews and Muslims over the Temple Mount. The woman rebuffed all questions and attempts at conversation, leaving Natalie to stare out her window at the minarets rising above the West Bank towns just beyond the Separation Barrier. They were so close she imagined she could touch them. The proximity of the villages to such a vital road had left her dubious about the prospects of a two-state solution. French and Swiss villages existed side by side along a largely invisible border, but Switzerland did not wish to wipe France from the map. Nor did the Swiss beseech their sons to shed the blood of French infidels.

Gradually, the Coastal Plain fell away and the highway tilted toward the bluffs of Mount Carmel and the green-and-tan patchwork of the Galilee. They were headed vaguely toward Nazareth, but a few miles before reaching the city the woman turned onto a smaller road and followed it past the sporting fields of a school until a security barrier, metal and spiked, blocked their path. Automatically, the gate slid away, and they proceeded along a gently curving street lined with trees. Natalie had been expecting a secret installation of some sort. Instead, she found herself in a quiet little town. Its layout was circular. Bungalows fronted the road, and behind the bungalows, like the folds of a hand fan, lay pastures and cultivated cropland.

"Where are we?"

"Nahalal," replied the woman. "It's a moshav. Do you know this term? Moshav?"

"I'm an immigrant," answered Natalie coolly, "not an idiot. A moshav is a cooperative community of individual farms, which is different from a kibbutz."

"Very good."

"It's true, isn't it?"

"What's that?"

"You really do think we're idiots. You ask us to make aliyah and then you treat us as though we're not quite a member of the club. Why is that?"

"It's not such an easy life in Israel. We're innately mistrustful of people who choose to live here. Some of us had no choice. Some of us had nowhere else to go."

"And this makes you superior?"

"No. It makes me something of a cynic." The woman drove slowly past the shaded bungalows. "Not bad, eh?"

"No," said Natalie, "not bad at all."

"Nahalal is the oldest moshav in Israel. When the first Jews arrived here in 1921, this was marshland infested with Anopheles mosquitoes." She paused. "Do you know this type? The Anopheles spreads malaria."

"I'm a doctor," said Natalie wearily.

The woman appeared altogether unimpressed. "They drained the swamps and turned this place into productive farmland." She shook her head. "We think our lives are so difficult, but they came here with nothing and actually built a country."

"I suppose they didn't notice that," said Natalie, nodding toward the Arab village perched atop a hillock overlooking the valley.

The woman gave her a despairing sidelong glance. "You don't really believe all that drivel, do you?"

"What drivel is that?"

"That we stole their land."

"How would you describe it?"

"This land was purchased by the Jewish National Fund. No one stole anything. But if you're ashamed of our history, perhaps you should have stayed in France."

"That's no longer an option."

"You're from Ma.r.s.eilles, yes?"

"Yes."

"An interesting place, Ma.r.s.eilles. A bit seedy but nice."

"You've been?"

"Once," said the woman. "I was sent there to kill a terrorist."

She turned into the drive of a modern bungalow. On the covered veranda, his face obscured by shadow, stood a man clad in faded blue jeans and a leather jacket. The woman slid the car into park and switched off the engine.

"I envy you, Natalie. I'd give anything to be in your place right now, but I can't. I haven't your gifts."

"I'm only a doctor. How can I possibly help you?"

"I'll let him explain," the woman said with a glance toward the man on the porch.

"Who is he?"

The woman smiled and opened her door. "Don't worry about your bag. Someone will see to it."

The first thing Natalie noticed after stepping from the car was the smell-the smell of rich earth and newly mown gra.s.s, the smell of blossom and pollen, the smell of animals and fresh dung. Her clothing, she thought suddenly, was wholly unsuited for such a place, especially her flat shoes, which were little more than ballet slippers. She was annoyed with the woman for having failed to tell her that their destination was a farm in the Jezreel Valley. Then, as they crossed the thick green lawn, Natalie again noticed the limp, and all sins were forgiven. The man on the veranda had yet to move. Despite the shadows, Natalie knew he was watching her with the intensity of a portrait artist studying his subject. At last, he came slowly down the three steps that led from the veranda to the lawn, moving from the shadow to the bright sunlight. "Natalie," he said, extending his hand. "I hope the drive wasn't too difficult. Welcome to Nahalal."

His temples were the color of ash, his eyes were an unnerving shade of green. Something about the handsome face was familiar. Then all at once Natalie realized where she had seen it before. She released his hand and took a step back.

"You're-"

"Yes, I'm him. And I'm obviously very much alive, which means you are in possession of an important state secret."

"Your obituary in Haaretz was quite moving."

"I thought so, too. But you mustn't believe everything you read in the newspapers. You're about to find out that about seventy percent of history is cla.s.sified. And difficult things are almost always accomplished entirely in secret." His smile faded, the green eyes scanned her face. "I hear you had a long night."

"We've been having a lot them lately."

"The doctors in Paris and Amsterdam had long nights recently, too." He tilted his head to one side. "I a.s.sume you followed the news of the bombing in the Marais quite carefully."

"Why would you a.s.sume that?"

"Because you're French."

"I'm Israeli now."

"But you retained your French pa.s.sport after you made aliyah."

His question sounded like an accusation. She didn't respond.

"Don't worry, Natalie, I'm not being judgmental. In times like these, it's best to have a lifeboat." He placed a hand to his chin. "Did you?" he asked suddenly.

"Did I what?"

"Follow the news from Paris?"

"I admired Madame Weinberg a great deal. In fact, I actually met her once when she came to Ma.r.s.eilles."

"Then you and I have something in common. I admired Hannah a great deal as well, and it was my pleasure to consider her a friend. She was very generous to our service. She helped us when we needed it, and a grave threat to our security was eliminated."

"Is that why she's dead?"

"Hannah Weinberg is dead," he said pointedly, "because of a man who calls himself Saladin." He removed his hand from his chin and leveled his gaze. "You are now a member of a very small club, Natalie. Not even the American CIA knows about this man. But we're getting ahead of ourselves." He smiled again and took her by the arm. "Come. We'll have some food. We'll get to know each other better."

He led her across the veranda and into a shaded garden, where a round table set for four people had been laid with a traditional Israeli lunch of salads and Middle Eastern dips. At one of the places sat a large, morose-looking man with closely cropped gray hair and small rimless spectacles. Natalie recognized him at once. She had seen him on television rus.h.i.+ng into the prime minister's office in times of crisis.

"Natalie," said Uzi Navot, rising slowly to his feet. "So good of you to accept our invitation. I'm sorry about showing up on your doorstep unannounced like that, but that's how we've always done things, and I believe the old ways are the best."

A few paces from the garden stood a large barn of corrugated metal, and next to the barn were pens filled with cattle and horses. A pie slice of row crops stretched toward Mount Tabor, which rose like a nipple from the tabletop flatlands of the valley.

"This farm belongs to a friend of our service," explained the one who was supposed to be dead, the one named Gabriel Allon. "I was born right over there"-he pointed toward a cl.u.s.ter of distant buildings to the right of Mount Tabor-"in Ramat David. It was established a few years after Nahalal. Many of the people who lived there were refugees from Germany."

"Like your mother and father."

"You obviously read my obituary quite carefully."

"It was fascinating. But very sad." She turned away and stared out at the land. "Why am I here?"

"First, we have lunch. Then we talk."

"And if I want to leave?"

"You leave."

"And if I stay?"

"I can promise you only one thing, Natalie. Your life will never be the same."

"And if the roles were reversed? What would you do?"

"I'd probably tell you to find someone else."

"Well," she said. "How can I possibly turn down an offer like that? Shall we eat? I'm absolutely famished."

18.

NAHALAL, ISRAEL.

THEY HAD PLUCKED HER FROM the overt world without a ripple and smuggled her to their pastoral secret citadel. Now came the hard bit-the vetting, the probing, the inquisition. The goal of this unpleasant exercise was to determine whether Dr. Natalie Mizrahi, formerly of Ma.r.s.eilles, lately of Rehavia in West Jerusalem, was temperamentally, intellectually, and politically suited for the job they had in mind. Unfortunately, thought Gabriel, it was a job no woman of sound mind would ever want.

Recruitments, said the great Ari Shamron, are like seductions. And most seductions, even those conducted by trained intelligence officers, involve a mutual unburdening of the soul. Usually, the recruiter cloaks himself in a cover ident.i.ty, an invented persona that he wears like a suit and tie and changes at a whim. But on this occasion, in the valley of his childhood, the soul that Gabriel opened to Natalie Mizrahi was his own.

"For the record," he began after settling Natalie in her seat at the luncheon table, "the name you read in the newspapers after my alleged death is my real name. It is not a pseudonym or a work name, it is the name I was given at birth. Regrettably, many of the other details of my life were correct as well. I was a member of the unit that avenged the murder of our people in Munich. I killed the PLO's second-in-command in Tunis. My son was killed in a bombing in Vienna. My wife was gravely wounded." He did not mention the fact that he had remarried or that he was a father again. His commitment to truthfulness went only so far.

And, yes, he continued, pointing across the flat green-and-tan valley toward Mount Tabor, he was born in the agricultural settlement of Ramat David, a few years after the founding of the State of Israel. His mother arrived there in 1948 after staggering half-dead out of Auschwitz. She met a man from Munich, a writer, an intellectual, who had escaped to Palestine before the war. In Germany his name had been Greenberg, but in Israel he had taken the Hebrew name Allon. After marrying, they vowed to have six children, one for each million murdered, but one child was all her womb could bear. She named the child Gabriel, the messenger of G.o.d, the defender of Israel, the interpreter of Daniel's visions. And then she promptly turned her back on him.

The housing estates and settlements of early Israel were places of grief where the dead walked among the living, and the living did their best to find their way in an alien land. In the little breezeblock home where the Allons lived, candles burned next to photographs of loved ones lost to the fires of the Shoah. They had no other gravestone. They were smoke on the wind, ashes in a river.

The Allons did not particularly like Hebrew, so at home they spoke only German. Gabriel's father spoke with a Bavarian accent; his mother, with the distinct accent of a Berliner. She was p.r.o.ne to melancholia and mood swings, and nightmares disturbed her sleep. She rarely laughed or smiled, she could not show pleasure at festive occasions, she did not like rich food or drink. She wore long sleeves always, even in the furnace heat of summer, and placed a fresh bandage each morning over the numbers tattooed on her left forearm. She referred to them as her mark of Jewish weakness, her emblem of Jewish shame. As a child, Gabriel learned to be quiet around her, lest he awaken the demons. Only once did he dare to ask her about the war. After giving him a hurried, evasive account of her time at Auschwitz, she fell into a deep depression and was bedridden for many days. Never again was the war or the Holocaust spoken of in the Allon household. Gabriel turned inward, solitary. When he was not painting, he took long runs along the irrigation ditches of the valley. He became a natural keeper of secrets, a perfect spy.

"I wish my story was unique, Natalie, but it is not. Uzi's family was from Vienna. They are all gone. Dina's ancestors were from the Ukraine. They were murdered at Babi Yar. Her father was like my mother, the only survivor, the last child. When he arrived in Israel he took the name Sarid, which means remnant. And when his last child was born, his sixth, he named her Dina."

"Avenged."

Gabriel nodded.

"Until now," said Natalie, glancing at Dina across the table, "I was unaware she had a name."

"Sometimes our Dina reminds me of my mother, which is why I love her. You see, Natalie, Dina is grieving, too. And she is very serious about her work. We all are. We see it as our solemn duty to make certain it never happens again." He smiled in an attempt to lift the veil of death that had fallen over the luncheon table. "Forgive me, Natalie, but I'm afraid this valley has stirred many old memories. I hope your childhood wasn't as difficult as mine."

It was an invitation to share something of herself, an intimacy, some well of hidden pain. She did not accept it.

"Congratulations, Natalie. You just pa.s.sed an important test. Never reveal anything about yourself to three intelligence officers unless one of them is holding a gun to your head."

"Are you?"

"Heavens, no. Besides, we already know a great deal about you. We know, for example, that your family was from Algeria. They fled in 1962 after the war had ended. Not that they had a choice. The new regime declared that only Muslims could be citizens of Algeria." He paused, then asked, "Can you imagine if we had done the same thing? What would they say about us then?"

Again, Natalie reserved judgment.

"More than a hundred thousand Jews were essentially driven into exile. Some came to Israel. The rest, like your family, chose France. They settled in Ma.r.s.eilles, where you were born in 1984. Your grandparents and parents all spoke the Algerian dialect of Arabic as well as French, and as a child you learned to speak Arabic, too." He looked across the valley toward the village perched atop the hillock. "This is another thing you and I have in common. I, too, learned to speak a bit of Arabic as a child. It was the only way I could communicate with our neighbors from the tribe of Ismael."

For many years, he continued, life was good for the Mizrahi clan and the rest of France's Jews. Shamed by the Holocaust, the French kept their traditional anti-Semitism in check. But then the demographics of the country began to change. France's Muslim population exploded in size, far eclipsing the small, vulnerable Jewish community, and the oldest hatred returned with a vengeance.