“Davis!” Binder shouted breathlessly, stunned by the heavy Israeli’s speed. “You and Mancuso, the other flank!” Davis and Mancuso instantly sprang away in the opposite direction, as Griffin’s cab turned into the street and raced after them. Ruth was alone. She looked around for a moment, hearing the approaching sirens, seeing the rectangles of light popping up in the neighboring buildings. She took off after Benni.
Martina did not hesitate. She had walked the route before, and now she merely had to run it. The gap between the rear of the Edelweiss and the mirroring brownstone on Ninetieth Street was too wide to leap, but just one building to the east, the void closed to less than ten feet. She ran along the hard-packed snow and hurdled the dividing wall onto the next roof.
Halfway across that expanse, she slowed, hearing the pounding of the policeman’s feet behind her, his shout stolen by the wind as she curved to the left, picked up speed, and launched herself from the eave, arching up like a long-jumper as the black alley flashed below. Her feet cleared the lip of the far roof and she executed a perfect parachute-landing fall in the snow, onto a calf, thigh, hip, rolling as her clamped ankles followed over. She stayed down, drew her pistol again, waited until she heard the quickening pace of the policeman’s feet as he prepared to mimic her leap, then stood full up and pointed the P-38 across the gap. His mouth opened wide and his arms flailed and he slid down onto his back in a spray of white cloud. She did not need to fire. She had killed his momentum.
Zigzagging now in the event that he would try for a shot across the gorge, she sprinted over the roof of 210 East Ninetieth and skidded to a stop at the ledge. She stuck her head out over the five-story drop, looking west, then east. Nothing yet. But they would come.
She holstered the pistol, clutched the ice-glazed iron ladder, and swung over, locking the vertical spars between her insteps and sliding down to the first fire escape platform. Then she ran to its iron staircase, gripped those banisters, lifted her feet, and schussed down it, sailor style. In ten seconds she was hanging from the lip of the final platform, ignoring the pain in her torn palms as she dropped ten feet to the sidewalk.
Baum rounded the corner from the avenue with Binder at his heels and Ruth a close third. But Martina had far less of an expanse to cross.
The slim skyscraper of Ruppert Towers stood just across the street, set back thirty meters from the sidewalk. A driveway curved toward the bright glass lobby, the asphalt bordered on the right by a chest-high brick wall. An expansive private park led away from the top of the wall, with twisting brick paths and the bare trees of a small urban forest.
Yet she waited on the south side of the street, her left hand stinging on the snowy trunk of a car, crouching enough to obstruct their aim, but not so much that they might lose her. The trio thundering down the street from her left curved in her direction. From the right, a pair of men came steadily up the hill, their arms pumping with exertion, followed by a yellow taxi.
Her breath was coming hard now, less from the strain of flight and more from her fury. In my mother’s house, she nearly cried aloud. My mother’s house! She fought the urge to just step into the street and open fire.Wait, she commanded herself. Wait. They had to close the range.
Baum was four car lengths away and the men to the right not much farther when Martina moved, driving everything into her legs as she raced across the street, grimacing with pleasure as she heard a cry of frustration from behind and above, the cop who had chased her pounding on a fire escape as he watched. Her slamming sneakers and the grinding of her leather drowned out the shouts of her pursuers, and with one hand on the driveway wall she was up and over, head down and flying through the park.
Benni still led the pack, as Jerry Binder tried to match the colonel step for step. Ruth was not far behind, unsure of why she also ran, an actor in her own nightmare, which had suddenly spun to life before her eyes. Davis and Mancuso passed her now, closing on Binder and Baum with their revolvers held high like Olympic torches.
Benni reached the wall, slammed his palms down, launched himself up, and rolled onto his side, the momentum carrying him back up on his feet. Binder finally passed him, having taken the height in one tremendous leap, and the two men hurtled after the receding silhouette in the park, their breaths coming like locomotive plumes, their middle-aged hearts warning them that it would have to end soon.
Through the black tree trunks they could see a high metallic fence at the border of the park. It curved to the left, where in the distance it was bolted to the side of Ruppert Towers. To the right, it led back to Ninetieth Street. Beyond the fence there was nothing but black air, as the built-up park dropped off into a canyon of open lot. Binder had a flash of hope, that Martina Klump had erred. She would be trapped. But Benni was no fool for optimism.
Martina’s sprinting figure reached the fence, yet she did not hesitate. She leapt up on the chain link like a spider, pulled herself onto its horizontal spar, stood up to full height with her arms spread like a swan diver, and jumped. There was a resounding clang as her body impacted with a towering light pole six feet from the fence, and she corkscrewed down and away.
Binder slammed against the chain links, knowing he had nothing left with which to emulate the woman’s feat, and he rattled the metal with his big hands and roared, “Motherfuckingsonuvabitch!”
Benni joined the big American, looked down, then slumped onto his back in the fresh coverlet of snow, trying to breathe. . . .
Twenty feet below, Martina’s black soles touched the deep lane that forked to a parking lot beneath the towers and also out the other side onto Ninety-first Street. She was already running again, keeping close to the building as she stretched out into a rapid lope.
The escape route had worked, but her satisfaction was spoiled by those other emotions that twisted her face into a mask of rage.
“You want to play family games, Benni?” she whispered as she ran off into the night. “Two can play.”
Chapter 9: The Lexington Avenue Grill
Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin Baum looked down at his hands. They rested at the edge of the small dining table, turned upward for his inspection, the hair-matted backs lying listlessly against the white tablecloth. They were slabby things, the digits wide and stubby like cheap cigars, the palms lined like a dry riverbed. A flat gold wedding band was locked behind a bulky knuckle of the fourth finger on the left, and only surgery of flesh or metal could free it now.
Baum wondered how his long-dead parents could have ever dreamed such hands might fly across the delicate teeth of a piano, or how the women he had known had allowed these hooves to fumble over their breasts. These hands that were so comfortable gripping pistols, tweaking radio dials, jabbing at trembling subordinates,snatching at the collars of the accused. A hundred different currencies had been dealt from them like blackjack cards, some lives clasped protectively by them forever, while others were allowed to slip between the fingers with no more ceremony than a quick dust-off on trouser seams.
Like the hands of a renowned character actor, they belonged to one man while gesticulating for so many others. They were the hands of a pudgy toddler called Bibi, and those of a boisterous bull called Benni. They were the hands of Hans-Dieter Schmidt, Hugo Klein, George Harrington, and those of Antoine Arbre, Maxwell Pine, and Nigel Trunk. Some of these personas were deceased now, some temporarily retired, yet all of their identities survived in ledger-sized safe boxes, and every act they had committed—murders, flashes of heroics, deceptions, and seductions—was etched into history just as if all six had been full flesh and blood, wandering a course from birth to death.
But they all shared this same pair of ugly hands, and as Benni stared past the fleshy blades that would have been the envy of a tae kwon do master, he was truly stunned. On the table lay a large white plate, with a lovely slice of steak streaming juices around a hill of mashed potatoes. A crisscross of baby asparagus completed the gourmet-magazine layout, and all of it untouched.
For the
first time since he could remember, Benni had lost something that not one of his personas had ever neglected, despite pressures, dangers, or even incapacitating illness.
He had lost his appetite.
A dinner knife and fork lay bracketing the meal, and Benni slowly gripped the handles, raising them erect. Yet his culinary weapons refused to do battle, and he sat there looking like a prisoner protesting in the mess hall of a penitentiary.
He raised his eyes and looked across the narrow dining room, the water glasses shimmering from a rushing subway, the businessmen aglow with a day’s worth of takeovers, puts, and calls. A long oval bar of blood-red teak lay as sentry to the Grill, a hundred wine and beer glasses racked above it like stalactites. There was no dividing wall between the restaurant and the lobby of the Loews Summit Hotel, and he watched as a pair of tired El Al pilots, peaked caps pushed back on their gray heads, hauled their crew cases toward the reception desk. The Loews had replaced the Lexington as the Israeli government’s unofficial New York hostelry. It was newly renovated, metallic and spotless. Benni missed the Lexington.
A flash of desert umber caught his eye, and he looked up at the silent screen of a giant TV, another CNN report on the stranded UN nuclear inspection teams in Iraq. No other diners appeared interested in this now passé drama. When the stock ticker loped across the screen, then they would look up.
Benni surrendered, laying the utensils back down. He raised a finger, and in a moment a sprightly blond waitress in a buttoned vest and tight white collar appeared.
“Can I help you, sir?”
He tried to smile. “May I get a drink, please?”
“Perrier?”
“Beck’s.”
“Certainly.”
He reached down absentmindedly into the pocket of his car coat, coming up with a pack of cigarettes. He frowned at the red-and-white box of Marlboros, remembering that his Israeli stash was exhausted. He lit up, murmured, “Out of Time,” and sneered at his own pun.
The call from Itzik Ben-Zion had woken him long before dawn. It was not the timing that disturbed him, for his profession precluded any notion of undisturbed sleep. Rather, it was Itzik’s tone, and his message.
“That’s enough, Baum,” the general growled without greeting. “Back here tomorrow.”
“This is just getting hot, Itzik,” Benni attempted without real hope. “Some very interesting developments.”
“Have you seen your daughter?”
“Yes.”
“And Ben-Czecho?”
“Once. I’ll see him again today.”
“Good. A team is coming in to replace you.”
“You know, Itzik—”
“And of course I don’t have to remind you of the priority mission. Back here tomorrow. That’s an order.” Click.
It did not really matter. There was no way for Benni to explain to his commander why the bombing had taken on such significance. In order to do so, he would have to unravel a decade’s worth of knotted lies, and even then the general would have correctly emphasized the “priority.”
The waitress set a fluted glass on the cloth and quickly filled it from a tall green Beck’s. Benni watched her hands, thinking how the Germans stretched out beer pouring like extended foreplay, the Americans got it quickly over with, and Israelis always slugged it from the bottle.
“Is your dish all right?” she asked with some concern.
“The dish is fine,” said Benni. “And I am sure the food will be also.” He winked at her, and she waved a hand and left. He returned to a comfortable frown.
His final visit with Moshiko had not uplifted him. The boy was fully aware of his injuries now, the drug intake only a skein of comfort over the throb of violent amputation and the horror of a lost eye. The jokes about Moshe Dayan’s unhampered sexual and political achievements fell flat.
Ben-Czecho had been moved into a private room and was up on his feet. Yet now that his survival was assured, the impact of his maiming was not a future for which he gave thanks.
Within a week, he would be shipped back to Israel for rehabilitation at Tel Hashomer. Benni promised to put in a call to his old friend Naftali Rossman, the war-crippled head of that hospital unit, who had worked wonders with thousands of Israel’s young casualties. He also assured the boy, without mentioning Martina Klump, that the investigation was progressing nicely. And he tried to assuage Moshiko’s vengeful comments with the reminder that his attacker had already served his sentence, having blown himself to bits.
Moshiko merely grunted in response to these attempts. The ever-present Kathleen, her youth and beauty looking drawn and fatigued, sat thumbing through the Israeli tourist brochures that some well-meaning soul had brought her from the consulate. The images of a foreign land and culture assured her only that she would never see her wounded warrior again, and she watched him pace before the window, his hand fidgeting behind his hospital robe, his eye staring out at the snow, their love stretching thinner across a cavern of unshared experiences. . . .
Benni took a long drag from the Marlboro, parted his teeth, and a thick ribbon of smoke leapt into his nose like a genie returning to his lamp. A woman across the room glared at him, yet he was sitting in the proper section, and he held her righteous gaze and sipped from his beer until she turned away in disgust.
Perhaps the alcohol would return his stomach to its natural ravenous state. This hollow lack of desire was an odd sensation, yet he was well aware of its cause. He was abandoning an operation, an act equivalent to an obstetrician taking a dinner break in the midst of a breech birth. It was an anomaly, a crime against his own nature.
There was little comfort in the reasoning that the bombing was a sidebar. Yes, he had come here to comfort Moshiko and for a rapprochement with Ruth, but as was frequently the case in his fluid world, the rules had changed midgame. That challenging unpredictability was the factor that had drawn him to this profession, yet here he was, retreating from the field, walking off the playing pitch.
Another churning pain smoldered somewhere below his esophagus, but it was not the pricking of a ballooned ego, for Benni had never regarded himself as a one-man show. At this stage he would have hunkered down, set up a field command post, and called in his specialists. These pangs of guilt issued from the duality he felt toward Martina Klump.
Her involvement in the bombing made no operational sense. And it does not have to, he told himself as he swirled the liquid at the bottom of his glass. The act could certainly stand alone, a work of violent sculpture in the vast gallery of Middle Eastern politics. Yet as Ruth had said, without a claim of credit it was meaningless. Without the artist’s name inscribed, the piece would have no value.
The timing of the attack, on the verge of the watershed prisoner exchange, might just be tziroof mikrim—combined occurrences, the Hebrew nod to acts of fate. Yet like all good rabbis and intelligence professionals, Benni denied the existence of coincidence.
“Ach, Martina.” His lips moved slightly as he set the empty glass on the table, realized the Marlboro had burned down to his fingers, and lit up a fresh one with the stub. “If only I could talk to you.”
He understood her thirst to wreak vengeance upon him, for in her place the same wretched fire would burn in his heart. But what would make her think that a bombing in New York would sting him in Jerusalem? There was no way she could have had a schedule of the consular routines and dispatched a human grenade to maim Moshiko, even if Benni’s connection to the boy was known to her. And if by some frightening penetration of Israeli networks that information was in fact available, such a flimsy strike at Benni was foreign to her courage.
If only he could have explained to her, apologized. Just a few short minutes, and he knew he could convince her that Bruchsal had been a horrible mistake. His word, despite what she might think, was not given lightly. There had been no reason to deceive her into believing that her escape route was secure, while arranging for a marksman to take her down. An appeal from his government,
and she could have been simply locked away for life. A quiet conference with Bernard Lokojewski, and she could have tragically “committed suicide” in her cell.
Her bitterness was comprehensible, even her embrace of the Lebanese terrorists and acts of murder against Israeli troops. He had the power to suppress her crimes and grant absolution, but first she had to listen to him. He felt like the parent of a child who had joined a radical cult, and short of snatching her away to a rehabilitation camp, there was no way to deprogram her.
The Tango file. He cursed it now, the thick sheaf of reports, transmissions, commentaries, double encoded and as indecipherable as the Dead Sea Scrolls to anyone but himself. It lay there in his Jerusalem safe like a mummy wrapped in rotting swathes of lies. How he wished now that he had shared it, even with Itzik Ben-Zion, for he carried the shame of its responsibility alone. And also in that airless tomb lay that other file, Moonlight, the details of the prisoner exchange rushing onward to fruition, threatened by dangers that he sensed yet could not pinpoint.
The image came to him, and he slumped back in his chair and dropped the cigarette onto a butter dish. A tango in the moonlight. They were intertwined somehow, Martina and the exchange, and they flashed by, twirling in embrace, just like the essence of that torrid dance, breast-to-breast, clutching and then stamping apart, caressing while their hands concealed stilettos.
But what connection? How? If only Eytan Eckstein were with him now, together they could reason it out. How often had they managed it, in so many foreign capitals and slums, inhaling clouds of cigarette smoke and carafes of coffee as they tunneled through the night until a mental labyrinth surrendered? He tried to conjure his partner’s voice from half a world away.
“Nu, so Martina ran the bomber,” said Eckstein inside Benni’s head.
“Who says?” Baum countered silently.
“We’ll take it as a given.”
“Why?”
“Stop resisting, Benni.”
The Nylon Hand of God Page 22