The Nylon Hand of God

by Steven Hartov

  “Making friends all over the place, huh, Benni?” Arthur Roselli laughed as Baum walked up to him, and they clasped each other’s shoulders with grips like sumo wrestlers.

  Baum stepped back and shook his head. “When I saw you, Arthur, I was sure I was going to blow the whole thing.”

  “You handled it like Solomon, you old renegade,” said Roselli. “That asshole didn’t know what hit him.”

  “If I am a renegade,” Baum warned as he wagged a finger, “then you are sounding like a traitor.”

  “He’s not from my group!” Roselli mimicked Jack Buchanan’s growl, and the two old friends laughed again.

  Arthur Roselli had, for three years, been the Central Intelligence Agency’s chief of station at the American consulate in Jerusalem. He and Baum had first been introduced at one of those diplomatic cocktail parties that resemble Halloween, where all the intelligence officers are pretending to be something else. Sometime later, Roselli had approached Baum one to one, seeking his aid in an extremely delicate issue. The CIA suspected that an American immigrant serving in the Israel Defense Forces was passing information on U.S. weapons systems to a Romanian intelligence agent. The soldier was caught by Baum and turned, and thereafter Roselli became Baum’s “playback feed,” distorting the intelligence that continued to be purchased by Bucharest.

  It was not long afterward that Baum found himself in Roselli’s shoes, asking the CIA man for help with Operation Flute and the quest for Amar Kamil. Without Roselli’s aid, Benni and Eytan Eckstein might well have wound up as corporals in the reserves, checking women’s pocketbooks for explosives outside Cinematheque.

  Eventually, Roselli had been recalled to Virginia and promoted to head the Agency’s counterterror program. The two had remained in touch, primarily through secure communications links. But during the Gulf War, when the Scuds began to fall in Israel, Roselli’s first phone call upon detection of an Iraqi launch by CIA satellites was always to wake the Baum household so they could don their gas masks.

  “How did you know I was coming?” Benni asked with pleasure.

  “I didn’t at first,” said Roselli. “I was going to send one of my men up here, but then Uri Badash called me.”

  “Hunh. I will have to give that Shabaknik a lecture about security,” Baum said facetiously. “He thinks he is my social secretary.”

  “And thanks for making me that fucking Buchanan’s employee,” said Roselli. “But I won’t be able to hang around.”

  “You’re welcome.” Baum grinned. “I also have only three days. But your FBI compatriot will be happy to replace you with one of his own. We will feed him what we want and send you the real Mac . . . MacDon . . . How is it?”

  “McCoy. And that’s exactly what Buchanan intends to do to you, big shot.”

  “We will see.” Baum’s eyes crinkled.

  Roselli suddenly grew solemn. “Hey, I’m sorry about your casualties, Benni.”

  “Our casualties, Arthur. The girl was an American.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Moshiko was a soldier. He was aware of the risks.”

  “Badash tells me you knew the kid.”

  “Know,” Benni corrected. “I just came from the hospital. Went there straight from Kennedy.” He lit two cigarettes and handed one to Roselli.

  “Ahh, a taste of the old country.” Roselli dragged on the Israeli brand. “Is he going to make it?”

  Benni was silent. He was seeing Ben-Czecho’s broken and bandaged form lying in the NYU intensive care unit. Drugs dripped into his arms, and monitors blipped like faint signals from a lost spacecraft. The boy’s eyes were wrapped in gauze. He had been trached in the throat on the floor of the consulate, the hole sutured now, and he was breathing on his own, but he could only utter the occasional hoarse whisper from dry lips.

  Benni had taken a piece of ice from an aluminum pan and gently moved it over Moshiko’s mouth. Then he spoke to him, and the tremendous effort to smile that screwed up Moshiko’s burned face had brought a glisten to Benni’s eyes.

  “Ani kahn. I am here,” Benni repeated a few times. When Moshiko reached up and tried to clutch him with his right hand, Benni avoided the bandaged stump and gripped his forearm. Except for professional secrets, the two men had never held much back from each other, and Benni was not going to allow some strange doctor to perform his fatherly duties.

  “Moshiko, listen to me,” he said gently as he bent toward the ravaged face. “You are not going to use this hand again, my son. Not ever. It is gone. But I think you knew that, didn’t you?”

  Moshiko’s arm went limp, and Benni laid it at his side. Certainly the shock of amputation had been surging through Moshiko’s medicinal barriers for hours, telling him by way of pain what no bold mouth had yet dared utter. He nodded twice to Benni, a quiver dimpling his chin.

  “And no crying.” Benni squeezed the young man’s shoulder gently. “The salt will make it harder on your eyes. And you are going to see again.” Moshiko’s face turned toward Benni’s voice. “Yes, you will. The doctor swore to me.” He did not think it necessary to say now that it would be through one eye only. “Oh, and Uri Badash sent a message. He says you’ll just have to learn to shoot lefty and gives you thirty days to get back to work.”

  For the first time since the explosion, Moshiko’s brain offered him an image to replace the ghoulish grimace of his attacker, and he smiled a real smile. It must have pained him awfully, for the skin over his cheeks was still oozing through scales of fresh scab, but he managed it. He lifted his left hand and raised a thumb.

  “Good.” Benni touched the top of Moshiko’s head, the black hair still caked with dried blood. “I have to get over to the consulate, but I’ll be back. Is there anything you want to tell me? Anything you saw that I should know?”

  Moshiko lay still for a moment. Then he moved his lips, and a sibilant whisper emerged.

  Benni bent over and placed one of his large ears above Moshiko’s mouth. “Again.”

  Moshiko repeated himself, and Benni straightened up, a frown creasing his forehead. Now he was whispering.

  “Did you say Allahu Akbar?”

  Moshiko managed another nod.

  “He said it to you?”

  Moshiko lifted his left hand and mimed a writing implement.

  “He wrote it down?”

  Moshiko wagged a finger.

  “It was already written?”

  Moshiko formed the “okay” sign with his fingers.

  “He gave it to you.” Benni imagined the transaction at the security drawer. “It was a note.”

  Moshiko raised his thumb.

  “Mitzooyan. Excellent,” said Benni. “Where is it?”

  The young man waved his hand. The note was gone, burned, dissipated by the blast.

  “Of course.” Benni patted him on a bare shoulder. “Rest now. You are brilliant. I’d kiss you, but I think I’ll leave that up to this gorgeous young thing.”

  He looked up and smiled at Kathleen, who was sitting in a vinyl armchair on the other side of the bed. Only immediate family members were allowed in the ICU, but she had claimed that she was Moshiko’s sole relation. She did not understand the Hebrew exchange between her lover and this burly man who looked like a villain from a James Bond movie, but she had watched the way he touched Moshiko. Like a father. And when he smiled at her, she smiled back….

  “Yes, he’s going to make it,” Benni said now to Roselli. “There was a girl there with him. Very beautiful. He will be all right. I could tell by looking at her.”

  “Good,” Roselli said, but he was wondering if he himself would want to survive such a maiming.

  Benni stubbed out his cigarette in a soot-caked ashtray. “We should go.” He made an effort to smile. “Before people start to talk.”

  “Wait a minute, Baum. You haven’t solved this thing yet.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A theory,” Roselli pressed. “Baum without a theory is like flapjacks without syr
up. What’s your assessment?”

  Benni shrugged. “You know me, Arthur. Slow-witted.”

  “Yeah,” Roselli scoffed. “Right.”

  Baum had known that Arthur would want to engage in speculations about the bombing, and he wanted to avoid such a discussion. He could not share details of the upcoming prisoner exchange, and therefore denying that Hizbollah had a hand would seem unreasonable. Given Moshiko’s story about the note, it seemed unreasonable to him.

  “Well,” Benni said, “it could have been any number of groups.”

  “Oh, come on. You feed ‘Suicide Bomber’ into our system, and the only thing you get is ‘Moslem Fundamentalist’ flashing at you like a runway beacon.”

  “Perhaps.” Benni demurred.

  “You had the same thing in Argentina last year,” Roselli prodded, as if he had to remind Baum of recent history. “Although if I remember right, you guys tried to flush some German girl from the bushes.”

  “That was just a decoy.” Benni waved an arm and started again for the door.

  “Wait a minute.” Roselli reached out and pulled at Baum’s coat. “I’ve got a present for you.”

  Benni turned to look at his old friend as the conviction that indeed it might be time to retire washed over him. It was a sensation of weariness, as if he was losing the ability to dissemble, as if Arthur was pulling on the cloak of deception that he had always worn so comfortably.

  “It’s not a Zippo with your name on it.” Arthur smiled. “It’s a tooth.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “A tooth, Baum.” Roselli opened his mouth and tapped one of his large white incisors with a fingernail. “Buchanan’s people are out there trying to bag everything, but it’s stuck in the ceiling right outside the entrance door.”

  Benni’s eyes narrowed as he understood the significance of such a find, and he knew that Roselli was of the same mind.

  AMAN’s research department was the best in the Middle East, retaining Israeli experts in every professional field that might prove useful in intelligence operations. Some years back, an American officer had been taken hostage in Lebanon, and as a crude demonstration of sincerity, the kidnappers had mailed a severed finger to the American embassy in Tel Aviv. Even before taking a print off the digit, Roselli had brought it to Baum.

  AMAN had summoned the “Hand Man,” an elderly doctor who had survived his years at Auschwitz by developing an unusual expertise that amused the SS. He could be shown a man’s palm and tell you if it belonged to a coal miner, a crematorium cleaner, or a camp guard. Since the war years, he had extended his repertoire.

  “This is not the finger of an American officer,” the old survivor had pronounced. “It is the second digit, right hand, of a Lebanese farmer. You see? It even has a ridged callus from a scythe handle. Cedar wood, of course . . .”

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t got a Tooth Man too,” Roselli demanded.

  “We do, at that,” Benni confessed, “although I think he uses an autoanalyzer and a microscope.”

  “Right. And that tooth can buy you a lot of leverage.”

  “Perhaps.” In fact, Benni knew that with a list of the compounds used to fill the tooth, he could have the general location of the dentist who did the work, and therefore the origin of the bomber, determined within one hour.

  “Your perhapses are getting too coy for me, Benni.” Roselli slapped his friend on the back. “Let’s move.”

  They walked back out into the waiting area, where the wind from the shattered windows was pushing some torn propaganda booklets around the reading tables and overturned chairs. Hanan Bar-El was helping two of his men seal up the holes with black plastic garbage bags and masking tape. He spotted Baum and Roselli and walked over.

  “You two know each other?” he asked bluntly.

  “Eyes of a cop,” Roselli commented to Benni as he jerked a thumb at Bar-El. He stuck out a hand and introduced himself.

  “You nearly saved my ass,” said Bar-El.

  “Bullshit,” Roselli sniffed. “I just don’t like gunfire in close quarters.” He cocked his jaw toward the blown-out booth. “So what’s your first instinct on this thing?”

  Benni tried to deflect the speculations. “It is probably a bit early to round up the usual suspects.” He kept the conversation in English, even though Roselli’s Hebrew was quite functional. “Right, Hanan?”

  Bar-El ignored Baum’s reticence. “Hizbollah. I still think they did us in Argentina, we didn’t fuck them enough for it, and now they’re getting cocky.”

  “What about this Jew-against-Jew thing that’s in all the papers?” Roselli wondered.

  “Oh, come on, Arthur,” Baum scoffed. “Three years in Jerusalem, you ought to know us better.”

  “You lived in Jerusalem?” Bar-El raised his eyebrows.

  “He was studying at yeshiva,” Benni said with a straight face.

  “I know it sounds insane,” Roselli admitted. “But keep it on the list for now.”

  “At the very bottom,” said Bar-El. “What do you think, Benni?”

  Baum was forcing himself to ponder the possibility that Hizbollah, or some offshoot thereof, was trying to scuttle their own prisoner exchange. But for the sake of Captain Dan Sard, he wanted to reason their participation out of it. “I think that I had better look before I leap.”

  A woman crossed through the passport section and approached the three men. She was small, in her mid-thirties, with jet-black hair pulled into a tight ponytail, dark eyes, and no makeup. She spoke to Bar-El in Hebrew.

  “Hanan, I just took a call from Tel Aviv. National Police are sending two bomb people over on the next El Al.”

  “Yoffi,” said Hanan.

  Roselli looked down at the attractive woman and extended his hand. “Art Roselli, from Washington.”

  The woman regarded his proffered hand with an amused expression, then shook it once in a strong grip. “Natalie Shapira, from Ramat Gan.”

  Roselli laughed.

  “Arthur is a friend,” said Benni to the woman. Shapira was the head of the consulate’s public relations unit that dealt with a voracious New York press. She was also one of the resident Mossad agents, a double duty that often turned her working days into twenty-hour marathons. She and Baum had encountered each other at various Israeli intelligence seminars.

  “A rare and beautiful thing, a friend,” said Natalie as she looked squarely up at the big American.

  “Natalie is chief of our Information Department,” said Bar-El.

  “And I must go inform.” She smiled and walked away without further pleasantries.

  “Pretty spook,” Art murmured to Benni.

  Baum looked at him quizzically. “What makes you say ‘spook’?”

  “You just got here, and you two know each other. But you didn’t greet each other.”

  “I am definitely losing my touch.” Baum shook his large head.

  Bar-El headed back to his office, hopeful now that the National Police chablanim would soon arrive and collect all their evidence. Then he could clean up and have the consulate back on its feet by Monday.

  Baum and Roselli walked back out through the steel entrance door. “You’re going to need an ally out here,” Roselli said, sotto voce. “I’ll point you in the right direction.”

  The ATF people had marked off the blast area, a tricolored flower of pennants. The Crime Scene men no longer wore their goggles, having placed minute explosive residue into small plastic boxes. They were now filling three large garbage bags with bits of clothing and other recognizable debris. The bags were taped and marked: Female. Male. Other.

  The EOD man from Redstone had his own bag. Benni eyed it longingly, for it would contain any wires, microchips, or detonator parts that could give the bomb designer a “signature.”

  Roselli walked Baum over to one wall, where the three NYPD detectives were squatting over an object partially covered with white plastic.

  “What you got?” Roselli asked in as harmless a
tone as he could muster.

  “Girl’s sneaker,” said a detective without looking up. He was prodding the object with a pencil eraser. “Part of her’s still in it. Wanna look?”

  “I’ll pass,” said Roselli.

  One of the men stood up, brushing off the knees of his suit trousers. He was tall and slim, yet he appeared taut beneath his white button-down and conservative paisley tie. Like a boxer, Benni decided. The man looked to be about thirty-five, with short blond hair that would have branded him a fascist in the America of the seventies but, with its finger-combed gel, was now classified as chic. He had green eyes, some red in the thick eyebrows, and a smooth Irish complexion, still pink with the cold. Benni feared that he was looking at a younger clone of Buchanan, until a wry grin appeared on the young man’s lips.

  “Quite a performance, Roselli,” the detective said. “I like the Darth Vader routine.”

  “The better to scare you with, my dear,” said Arthur as he offered his hand.

  The detective just waved back, showing his surgical glove.

  “Detective Michael O’Donovan,” Roselli announced with a flourish, “meet Benjamin Baum.”

  The young man said only, “Colonel,” as he glanced at Baum.

  “You two seem well acquainted,” Benni said in an effort to warm the atmosphere.

  O’Donovan looked at the CIA officer, then breathed something that might have been a sigh. “From days gone by,” he said quietly. Then he squatted and rejoined his fellow detectives.

  Roselli caught Baum’s attention, looked down at O’Donovan’s back, and thrust out his chin. That’s your man, he signaled. Benni mouthed sarcastically, “Thanks a lot.”

  The two walked back over to the darkened corner where the CIA agent had been standing before Baum’s arrival. For a long moment, they stood in silence.

  “Can I smoke in here?” Roselli suddenly called out to no one in particular.

  “They’re your lungs,” one of the detectives answered.

  Roselli produced a pack of Camel Lights and fished a cigarette out with his lips. As he raised his lighter, he paused and flicked his eyes at the ceiling. Benni looked up as the flame flared briefly.