The Nylon Hand of God

by Steven Hartov

  No one spoke until the man had removed the plates and deposited three cappuccinos.

  “Prost.” Martina raised her cup and sipped as her companions echoed the toast. Her smile smoothed the troubled waters, and she carried on with the wedding analogy. “So, as we have discussed, this affair is a lavish one. I will need to place deposits. Flowers alone are a fortune these days.”

  A half-million dollars will buy a lot of flowers, Omar thought with some cynicism as he toed the briefcase. “The funds are here,” he said. “However, as we also agreed, the bank would like to have some short details of the expenses and festivities.”

  Martina reached down for her purse, and Mussa watched her hands. He had known her for ten years, but he still could not anticipate her actions. She might have made some silent calculation, could well surprise and shock him, as she often did.

  She came up with a folded piece of paper, very small and flimsy, and handed the slip to Omar. He carefully unfolded it, peered down for a moment, then removed his glasses and held one lens like a magnifying glass.

  The little page was filled with typed English words, the list long, detailed, and precise, as he would expect of a German “consultant.” He did not react to the equipment: M-16 rifles of such and such capacities, uniforms of particular grades, components for electronic devices he would never fathom. There were four vehicles that were fairly common and the listing of an aircraft lease, multiplied by hours. He took note of the flat rentals in Helsinki and the prices of French passports on the black market.

  But all of that was overshadowed by the lone descriptive sentence at the bottom of the page. He squinted hard and moved the paper closer to his face, and when he raised his head, his eyes were wide and emphasized his silence.

  “Is it all very clear?” Martina asked as he stared at her.

  Omar nodded once.

  “Will you remember it?”

  “I am not likely to forget,” he whispered.

  Martina reached once more for her handbag.

  Y’allah, mâ baka fiyi, Mussa thought as he squirmed. I can no longer stand it. I’ll piss in my pants.

  Martina plucked a filtered Kent from her purse and lit it with a gold electronic lighter.

  “So unhealthy, my dear,” Omar warned, though he was pondering dangers far greater than smoking.

  “I’m trying to quit.” She lifted the glass ashtray from the table’s center and drew it near, sheltering it with a cupped hand. Then she recovered the paper from Omar, dropped it into the receptacle, and touched the cigarette to its skin. The flash paper flared for a millisecond, leaving only a tiny pile of ash. The ignition must have burned her fingers, but she did not flinch.

  “Perhaps I should not have been so confident.” Omar looked at the ashtray as if it were a wrecked luxury car he had driven too fast. “I may not recall all the pricing details.”

  “No matter,” said Martina as she stubbed out her prop. “They fluctuate like the stock market. And besides, as we agreed, whatever balance remains is reserved for my estate. As I told you, I have personal matters that will require attention in the event this bride meets a sad fate. Which is a possibility, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Regretfully, I would.” He seemed to have lost interest in the charm of Martina’s company, and as he gathered his coat over his shoulders, he gestured at the briefcase that would remain. “That should suffice you quite nicely. And please, do contact me when this phase of the project is complete.”

  “There will be no need. You will read about it in the newspapers.”

  Omar regarded her for another moment. “Go with God,” he wished.

  “If She wills it.” Martina smiled.

  The old man made a sound in his throat, raised himself upon his stick, and walked quickly from the restaurant.

  Mussa reached for the briefcase and passed it to Martina’s side. She was reminded briefly of Von Stauffenberg’s attempt to kill Adolf Hitler, and she glanced quickly inside to make sure that it contained only envelopes of cash.

  “Los” she said to him, having witnessed his discomfort, and he shot from the table and headed for the rest rooms.

  She settled back and sipped the cappuccino, listening to the soft, accordionlike notes of the bandoneon, exhuming melancholy thoughts of her own losses. . . .

  And once again she saw her parents whirling through a crowd of dancers in fine black suits and scarlet gowns, arching against each other, with proud, exaggerated postures, in the clinches of the tangos born in brothels of the Orilla. She saw again their happy smiles and felt the ruffles of her own party dresses, the sense that in this magic land called Buenos Aires nothing could encroach upon the triangle of love that was her family. There had been no hint of danger then, even though she was aware that her parents and their friends lived in Argentina as members of a society removed, like royal dukes and duchesses cast adrift from their own fatherland.

  Her father offered her no more than adoration, a love and sense of confident security equal to that lavished on her mother. He was a man respected for his scientific brilliance, often whispered to in German consultation by men who sought his wisdom, expressed their fears as times changed after someone named Perón had gone, and were comforted by Doktor Otto Klump’s reassurances that their world would be unaltered.

  He was a calm and ordered man; not arrogant, but stubborn, yes. And even when Martina began to miss the dwindling parties, and the “discussions” started up between him and Katharina, he refused to move from their home in Vicente López or seek anonymity in some slum like San Fernando, where houses were no more than stucco huts on lawns of rocky mud.

  Martina carried on, singing German nursery rhymes at home and chattering her perfect Spanish in the school she skipped to every morning.

  And then her world turned inside out. A day in May 1960. A day to be remembered, when suddenly her father’s courage cracked. The telephone calls began, the whispers in the dark of late-night visitors, men who had seemed so erect and powerful, their faces now pale and creased with worry. A tragedy had befallen one of their circle, and he was gone somewhere, taken by some vengeful force, and Martina hid behind her door, confused. And very soon their friends fled, parents with whom her parents had danced, children who had ridden ponies on her birthday. She heard her mother’s hissed insistence, her pleading of names such as Paraguay and Brazil. Yet her father would not run again, he said.

  And then his work at the laboratory was gone, and with it all her mother’s smiles. And finally her father’s confidence ended with a pistol shot. The very weapon that lay nestled in her handbag . . .

  She no longer felt the fury, and her sadness very, very rarely brought on tears. Yet she wondered once again at what might have been, who she would have become instead, had he lived.

  She realized that Mussa had resumed his seat, his face now turned to her expectantly.

  “Sprich du. Bitte.” She offered him the opportunity to speak his piece.

  “It is far too dangerous, Leila,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “Please, don’t mock me.”

  Martina dropped her facetious expression, crossed one knee, and folded her hands over it. All ears.

  “Yes, it is,” Mussa continued. “And you know it too. Once again, I object to the entire plan. We will all simply be killed, without hope of success.” There was a thin film of sweat on his upper lip, and he wiped it quickly with a napkin.

  “Without risk, there is no reward,” said Martina.

  “That is a meaningless slogan.” He pressed on, angry now at being patronized. “And another thing. Bringing your mother into this, in any way, defies all rational security procedures.”

  “Your German is really improving.”

  “As my brother’s brother”—Mussa gripped the table and raised his voice—“I must state my complete opposition to this.”

  Martina was unmoved by Mussa’s plea. They had had this argument before, but she knew exactly how to defuse him.


  “And as your brother’s brother,” she said quietly, “you are obliged to support me in my life’s endeavors. At least, that is, according to the Koran. So if you are truly a servant of Allah . . .”

  She left the conclusion hanging as Mussa sat back in his chair, looked at the ceiling, and muttered something under his breath.

  “Ach. Trottel!” Martina spat, but she was already past this victory of wills and looking at the entrance to the dining room, where a young man was striding toward their table. He was short and wore a leather motorcycle jacket, his body girded with a messenger’s pouch, and he carried a helmet under one arm. He was smiling stupidly.

  “Masalkhair,” the young man said brightly in Arabic as he plopped clumsily into a chair.

  “Guten Abend,” Martina replied slowly in German. “Why don’t we just put up a shingle here that says, ‘Yadd Allah—Open Nine to Five’?”

  The young man blushed for his indiscretion.

  “I told you, Iyad, to meet us later. At the flat.”

  “But I thought you might want to see these now.” He rubbed his helmet-matted hair. “I’ve been out there all day, and they just came out of the one-hour.”

  “You’ll get a medal,” Martina sneered, but she put out an open palm.

  Iyad fished into his canvas bag and came up with two packets of color prints. Soon after Martina had heard the news of the bombing at the Israeli Consulate, she had sent her men into midtown to observe discreetly the unfolding of events on Second Avenue. She had ordered photographs of all the arrivals and departures at the site, for she sensed that the incident might somehow impede her own activities. She did not have great faith in Iyad’s streetcraft, but he was a good photographer, and the swarming of press outside the consulate would provide ample cover.

  She sat back from the table and placed the photographs on her lap, then slowly shuffled the images that showed the passage of the day as morning winter light faded on wet faces into shadows of the evening. The pictures were close and very clear; policemen with their bored expressions, the placards of some Jewish protest group, the Israeli consul general flanked by young men looking tense and sleepless, the New York City police commissioner speaking into a microphone that had a large NEWS 4 banded to its collar.

  And then she stopped. Her back slowly came erect, as if something with many legs were crawling up her spine.

  She stared at the print for a very long time, so long, in fact, that Mussa and Iyad stirred in their chairs, yet they did not dare to speak. She looked at the picture, then at the one before it and the one after it, but she returned to it and held it fast while her heart rate slowly, very slowly, returned to something like a normal rhythm.

  There was no mistaking him. He should have worn a hat. She had not seen him for a very long time, but the face of Major Benjamin Baum—perhaps a Colonel now—was not one that she would soon forget. It would make perfect sense for him to participate in such an investigation, yet the coincidence set up a shrill vibration in her body, the antithesis of reuniting love. This was certainly a reconvening she had always hoped for, but on her own terms. He might be here to view events unrelated to her in any way, but Martina knew that where she was concerned, Benni Baum, or Hans-Dieter Schmidt, or whatever he was calling himself now, was a very dangerous man.

  “Markierstift.” She held out a hand to Iyad, while her eyes remained fixed to the photo, and he handed her a red china marker of the type used on contact prints. She slowly circled the bald head, thoughtful frown, and bulky shoulders. Then she leaned toward Mussa and placed the picture in his hand.

  “Track him,” she whispered, and she held his gaze until he felt the burn.

  “And don’t lose him.”

  Chapter 3: New York

  “Tell me something, Bar-El. Is this a goddamn language problem?”

  The sounds of screaming sirens had long since receded from the barricaded portico of 800 Second Avenue. Yet inside the blackened antechamber of the Israeli Consulate, it seemed that a quick call for an ambulance might soon be in order, as Jack Buchanan’s tirade threatened to turn physical.

  Buchanan was the Special Agent in Charge of the New York FBI field office, and his mispronunciation of the Israeli chief of security’s name was blatantly intentional. He said “Barrel,” when even the most jingoistic Texan would have easily grasped that it was like a cattle brand: BAR-L.

  “Is that what this is, Bar-El? A language problem?”

  Hanan Bar-El stared back, affecting a dumb look that invited Buchanan to make a fool of himself. The two men were separated by no great distance, as there was barely enough breathing space for all the investigators there to stake a claim of jurisdiction. The atmosphere was thick with burned synthetics and the anticipation that ripens the air before a cell block riot, and Buchanan’s voice was threatening to bring down a ceiling already precarious with structural damage.

  The floor, walls, and dropped acoustic tiles of the antechamber were charred to the color of barbecue coal. The carpet looked as if it had been mowed with a laser blade, and wherever the inferno of detonating Semtex had encountered synthetic resins, the substances had drooped into puddles of their former selves, so the remaining chair parts and poster frames had taken on the qualities of Daliesque dreamscapes. The combined effect was like the inside of an oven where a large birthday cake had been left on High while its amnesiac baker set out for vacation.

  On the far side, the consulate’s steel entrance door was discolored yet intact, a counterpoint to the gaping hole immediately to its left, where Moshiko’s bulletproof window had thundered through his security booth like a flying house in a tornado. The steel window frame was twisted, the shorn ends of telecom wires gleaming in the glare of Crime Scene spotlights like the orthodontic braces of a screaming teenager.

  Buchanan and his minions outnumbered their Israeli counterparts. He stood in the center of the chamber, six foot one, his short brown hair going gray, his hazel eyes set close together in a slabby Celtic face. The veins in his neck bulged above a starched white shirt, regimental tie, banker-gray suit, and cream raincoat. The SAC’s anger was a tool he utilized each workday, but in recent months he had discovered the emotion greeting him at dawn. His fiftieth birthday was approaching, and there was nothing he could do to outwit the calendar. Add to that this dispute over territory he considered his turf, a splash of racial hatred, and he was ready to blow.

  “Do I have to get a translator up here?”

  The American men and women constituting his task force winced with the FBI chief’s outburst. You could certainly take the Israelis to task for many things: arrogance, lack of manners, their dismissal of all opinions not their own. But suggesting that they lacked intelligence or linguistic talent was bound to put you on the losing side of an argument.

  “Only if you wish to add insult to injury,” Bar-El replied evenly.

  He stood defiantly before the shattered booth. It was cold in the room, yet he remained jacketless, his gray shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows, his fingers smeared with soot. Knuckles on hips, he had the air of a combat officer who had lost a man, blamed himself, and knew that the battle was far from over.

  He was flanked on both sides by his security team, large GSS men emulating their boss’s attitude. They, too, had shed the blazers that concealed their sidearms, their pistols and spare magazines now in plain sight. Given the circumstances—and being Israelis—no man’s raised voice was likely to impress them. So as Jack Buchanan ranted, they looked decidedly bored.

  “All right. I’ll say it real slow. This is New York City, in the State of New York, in the United States of America. This is not fucking Tel Aviv.” Buchanan shrugged off his raincoat, while Bar-El’s men instinctively watched his hands. “There has been a crime committed here. A crime of local and national importance, which makes this both a local and a federal issue.” At this point he waved his badge. “And as I am the senior agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for this district, I have complete jurisdiction o
ver this crime scene. Is that clear?”

  The GSS man to Bar-El’s right raised his palms to applaud. Hanan’s own hand flicked out and preempted the gaffe.

  “What is clear to me, sir,” said Bar-El in a measured tone, “is that you are standing on property which falls under the category of diplomatic integrity.” His smooth English seemed to enrage Buchanan further.

  “That is your territory.” Buchanan shot a long arm toward the blackened steel door. “This”—he pointed at the floor—“is New York State.” He took a moment to turn slowly, looking into the faces of four men and women wearing blue parkas stamped with ATF, three uniformed NYPD cops, three more NYPD detectives, two Crime Scene men carrying armloads of gear, and four more FBI field agents. None of them dared defy his authority in what was clearly escalating into a dangerous confrontation, but their faces showed uncomfortable queries of “What next?”

  “Now,” Buchanan pronounced as he again faced Bar-El. “I will give you all one minute to clear this area, return inside your facility, and allow my people to continue their work. One minute. And then I will place all of you under arrest.”

  “Sh’enasseh,” one of Bar-El’s men uttered clearly in Hebrew. He locked his thumbs into his belt, his right hand favoring the Browning High-Power he used for close protection details. This time Bar-El made no move to quiet his man.

  “What the hell did he say?” Buchanan demanded.

  “He said”—Bar-El translated—“‘Go for it.’ ”

  Buchanan’s jaw dropped; he was a man unused to having his gauntlet picked up. Thirty years of political infighting had given him a well-oiled tactical brain, and he realized that his own self-assurance had just resulted in the calling of his own bluff, leaving no option but to carry out the threat. What would the Director say? Friend to the President, jet-setting sophisticate, a former judge, who wore out his tuxedos at cocktail parties hosted by friendly embassies in Washington. It would not please the boss, heaping scandal on disaster.