“Don’t knock it. It’s fascinating work. Just last week, a puppet theater group from Haifa was stranded in the Buenos Aires airport.” He squints at something in the rearview mirror. “Apparently, they had visa 21-A, and what they needed was 22-A. You can’t imagine the drama.”
I find myself studying his face and accent, or lack of accent, digging for something even remotely Israeli about him.
“Redwing, Minnesota,” he says.
“What?”
“The question you want to ask. Where I’m from.” He sighs, just a little, like someone tired of having to explain. “When the other kids were playing cops and robbers, I was playing Mossad and Nazis-hiding-in-South-America.”
“Many Nazis left these days?”
“Sometimes people call, telling us they saw Mengele getting a haircut.”
“And what do you tell them?”
“That Mengele died in 1979, but we’ll check it out anyway.” Rearview mirror again, looking for dangers only people like him can see. “Mostly what I do these days is run our local assets.”
Assets. Curious word choice. Through the driver’s side window, I see the cranes in the shipyard swinging cargo containers through the air, lit from beneath by sodium lamps. “So I’m an asset now?” I say.
“Better an asset than a liability,” he says. “What did you think you were doing in the desert for six months?”
“I never agreed to be anyone’s anything.”
He looks at me from the corners of his eyes. “You’re doing a good job. Keeping up with your training. Strong morale.”
How would he know? “Glad you approve,” I say.
“Most people we relocate, they just have to tell someone about their old life. A friend, a lover. But not you. That shows strength.”
Something there in the phrasing—a lover. “You’ve been talking to someone about me,” I say.
“We keep track of our friends,” he says.
“Who?” I say. “My instructor? Zvi?”
He ignores the question and keeps driving. But the answer is obvious. If they’re concerned about me talking, they wouldn’t go to Zvi, who’s just a teacher, someone I happen to see a few times a week. Which means Brent is referring to someone else, the one person who’d know both about my training and my ability to keep my mouth shut.
An electrical pulse dances across the skin of my neck. Without meaning to, I say his name out loud: “Marco.”
“Marco?” Brent says, eyebrow arched, the name new to him. It confirms everything.
I pinch my eyes closed and grip the handle on the door. “Before or after?” I say.
“Before or after what?”
“Before I started sleeping with him or after?”
“After,” he says, looking at me with something like remorse on his face. “If it matters, we approached him—not the other way around. And he never accepted any payment.”
“Then why?”
“Love of Israel,” Brent says with a shrug. “Funny, isn’t it? Loving a thing that can’t love you back.”
I bring my hands to my temples, the rage deafening, not in some metaphorical sense but in an actual roar. Static and rushing water. Furious electrons firing until the lights of the dashboard, of the streetlamps, of the traffic, bend and sway. I did love Marco back, or tried to, or wanted to. Next time I see him, I’ll twist his head off in my hands.
“Hey,” Brent says. “Hey, listen. It’s nothing personal.”
“Personal is exactly what it is.”
We exit the Rambla and make a sharp left onto an industrial road between the power plant and a row of white fuel-storage containers. There’s a car parked alongside the road, headlights off, the silhouettes of two people visible through the rear window.
Brent pulls up behind the other vehicle, shuts off the engine. “In a few minutes,” he says, “none of that will seem like such a big deal.”
* * *
The lights of Montevideo seem faint and distant from across the bay, and the sound of the traffic on the Rambla is only a quiet shush. A man in a leather jacket and dark jeans climbs out of the driver’s seat. He’s fit and good-looking, and he motions for me to turn around. He does a quick but very thorough frisk, unconcerned about my modesty. When it’s done, he taps on the roof of the car, and the passenger door opens.
She is, I guess, in her late forties, pale skin, with silver streaks running through otherwise blond hair. She wears a rumpled business suit, like she’d slept in it on the flight over, and carries a manila envelope in her hand.
“Thanks for coming,” she says in English, the Israeli accent present but not thick. “How are you holding up, Judita?”
“Who are you?”
“I’m called Dorit,” she says, then motions for me to follow her toward a concrete jogging path that runs along the shore of the bay. “I was at your apartment this afternoon. Had a talk with your father about the situation, yours and his.”
“What about it?”
“There’s been—I’m sorry, Judita. Things have escalated.”
I exhale sharply through my nose. “Just spit it out, whatever it is.”
We turn down the path, the waves lapping at the shore only a meter away, leaving behind crescents of dirty foam.
“Your father planning on any trips? Hong Kong, say? Moscow?”
Is he going to be another Snowden, she means. Running to the press, spilling secrets. I think of the doomsday device, loaded and ready to fire, waiting for me to pull the trigger. “He wouldn’t do that unless he had no other choice.”
“The Americans are convinced it’s coming,” she says. “They’ve whipped themselves into a frenzy.”
“We’ve always known that,” I say. “That’s why we’re here.”
“Except now they’ve decided to do something about it.” Dorit’s hands flutter through the pockets of her suit jacket like she’s looking for a pack of cigarettes that isn’t there, the habit of someone who quit but just now wishes she hadn’t. “There’s a list the Americans keep. A ‘kill list,’ they call it. No trial. No arrest.”
“For terrorists,” I say.
“Or anyone else they don’t want appearing in open court.” She breathes in deeply and rubs her hands together. “Last week, they added your father to it.”
A wave lands against the rocks and, as it recedes, seems to take all the sound in the world with it. I wander away from Dorit to the edge of the path and sit, my mind struggling to decipher the words she just said. The sounds were clear enough, but the concepts they refer to seem somehow jumbled, mismatched.
The color of the sky is France. Love weighs fourteen inches. Your father is on the kill list.
She’s standing behind me, arms crossed over her chest. “It isn’t a rumor, it isn’t speculation—I want you to know that. We have a copy of the document, with the president’s signature.”
“The president?”
“It’s an executive order. The president is the only one with that kind of power.”
It’s impossible, what she’s saying. Has to be. “You’re a lying sack of shit.”
Dorit sits down beside me. “You’re right,” she says, and opens the envelope. “Just not tonight.”
The paper she hands me is waxy and curls in my hands, but the image on it is sharp enough: a photo of a piece of paper on a desk, the name of William Bloom and the signature of the president clear as can be.
I stare at it a long moment. “How did he react?” I whisper. “When you told him, what did he do?”
Dorit looks out at the water. “He took it well. Well enough. He got up. Pulled the curtain back. Opened the window.”
I close my eyes. The man who hasn’t had more than ten minutes of sunshine on his skin in the last year is suddenly pulling back curtains and opening windows.
“There’s a reason I’m telling you separately,” Dorit says. “You need to know that this isn’t a death sentence, not necessarily.”
“A death sentence is literally
what it is,” I say, squeezing the paper in my hands until it tears.
She takes it back from me, puts it in the envelope. “We have no reason to suspect the Americans know where you are. And this is about your father. Not you.”
I look at her. “I’m just collateral damage.”
“That’s how they’ll see it, yes.” The wind picks up, blows her hair across her face. She pulls it back into place. “Question is, what will you do about it?”
“What can I do?” I ask.
Dorit rises to her feet again, crosses her arms over her chest. “I have to go now, Judita,” she says.
“Wait,” I say. “Tell me what to do.”
“Not my job to say. You’ll have to ask your handler.” She looks at the water again, squints her eyes, as if thinking. “Maybe you—do nothing. Maybe living here as Judita is the safest you’ll ever be.”
* * *
I watch her scramble back over the rocks to her car, leaving me there, alone on the shore. She climbs into the passenger seat, and a moment later, she’s gone. Brent—handler Brent—approaches the way Dorit left, stepping carefully over the stones to the path, not in any kind of hurry.
When he reaches me, his hands are in the pockets of his pants, giving him a dopey, aw-shucks quality, completely at odds with what I need him to be. He pulls a flask out of a jacket pocket and hands it to me. “Go ahead,” he says. “You could use it.”
It’s warm from being close to his body, and the liquor inside tastes like scorched wood. I take one long swallow, then a second one. Brent takes it back, saying, “Easy.”
I grimace at the taste left in my throat. “So you’re my handler,” I manage.
He sits beside me, takes a sip from the flask. “Looks that way.”
“Now what?” I say, waiting for wisdom as he scratches his chin thoughtfully. “How do we handle this?”
“Option one, ignore it. Live your life here. See what happens.” He studies the flask in his hands, then puts it back in his pocket. “The Americans, they get worked up sometimes, but then someone retires, someone gets replaced, priorities shift.”
“And option two?”
“Option two is you do what we trained you to do.” He swivels his head to look at me. His eyes are cold now, and the flirty smirk is gone. “Viktor Zoric, remember him?”
“Of course.”
“The CIA approached his son, Lovrenc. Went to visit him on his yacht when it was docked in Crete. We have photos, no audio.” Brent says this without sympathy, just debriefing his asset. “The thinking in Tel Aviv is that the CIA wants to hit the reset button on American-Zoric relations. They started by giving him a job.”
“What kind of job?”
“Washington can’t very well use a drone in Uruguay, can they?” He rubs harshly on his scalp. “Or rather, they haven’t yet.”
Assassinate us, he means, or at least my father. The old-fashioned way: a guy in latex gloves carrying a pistol with no serial number. The idea of it is offensive. Better a billion-dollar flying robot than a moron in a leather jacket and track pants whose only value in this world is not asking questions when he’s given an order.
“So the CIA kills Viktor Zoric,” I say. “Now they’re working with his son. How does that make sense?”
Brent gives a resigned scoff. “Welcome to my fucked-up world,” he says. “Our fucked-up world.”
And somehow this is my option two. It’s clear enough what he’s getting at, but I look at him in disbelief anyway. “So I’m supposed to—do what you trained me to do.”
“I hear you’re good with a knife.” He fiddles with his watch as if he has someplace to be. “This Lovrenc Zoric is a danger to Israeli interests and a danger to you. I’d say the solution is obvious. Only I didn’t say that.”
“Kill him, you’re saying.”
A slow, exaggerated shake of his head. “I very much did not say that. Such a request would be illegal.”
His not saying it, I realize, is the point. It’s why he’s here with me, the asset. Things, events, coincidences crystallize suddenly in my mind, the paths between them becoming discernible. The camp in its unknown location, the instructors with their unmarked uniforms and whittled-down accents—all designed for deniability. Even my handler, Brent—the only evidence I have of his existence is a cheap business card.
Brent rises, then tousles my hair like he’s my father. “Getting late,” he says. “And you’ve got work to do.”
Seven
The living room window is still open when Brent drops me off, and for the first time since we’ve lived here, the apartment smells of something other than fear. Somewhere, my dad found a clean T-shirt, not too badly wrinkled, and is wearing a different pair of pants, the cuffs fraying where they drag on the floor but otherwise not too bad.
I see the smile beneath the beard. “There you are,” he says. “I was getting worried.”
“I got a ride. Someone dropped me off,” I say.
“I saw through the window,” my dad says. “Brent Simanski. Nice guy, I thought.”
I realize we’re speaking in English at a normal volume. “Nice enough,” I say, and set down my backpack. “I didn’t bring anything home. Sorry.”
“That’s all right, kiddo,” he says. “I picked up some empanadas and blueberries at the market. There was a cat sleeping next to the cash register, lazy little thing.”
He left the apartment. Actually left the apartment. I approach cautiously, this version of him very different from the version I left behind this morning. “What are you doing?” I say quietly.
But he just shrugs and smiles. “Normal stuff,” he says. “Buying food. Getting some air. There’s a little café down the street with excellent coffee, excellent coffee. But you probably knew that.”
“Keep your voice low,” I hiss. “The neighbors.”
“Fuck the neighbors,” he says.
“Dad…”
“Fuck the neighbors,” he repeats, and drops himself to the couch, legs crossed, ankle to knee, arm stretched across the back of the cushion. “Sit,” he says.
“In a minute.” I step into the little kitchen, pour some of last night’s wine into a coffee cup, and drink it. Then I refill the cup and step back out again.
“The order—the kill list—it’s real,” he says casually. “They showed it to me, Dorit and Brent.”
I take the chair opposite him. “How did this happen? Not why, but how—the actual mechanism.”
“The Gang of Four decides.” He reaches for my mug of wine, takes a sip, and smacks his lips. “It’s shit, you know. This wine. Absolute garbage.”
“It’s whatever’s left over,” I say. “The Gang of Four, who are they?”
“The committee who decides. Someone from the CIA, Department of Defense, Justice Department, White House. Bureaucrats. Cheap suits, fabulous pensions. They get together every so often to review the candidates.” He clasps his hands over his heart, makes a wide-eyed expression of stagey drama. “It’s an honor just to be nominated.”
He’s someone new now, and I am, too. What, exactly, is my job here? Supportive fellow adult or terrified daughter? “They can’t just kill an American citizen,” I say. “There’s this thing called the Constitution.”
He gives me a look, head tilted, lips pursed. Dad’s disappointment face. “One time in Moscow, you were reading the newspaper. There was an article about someone called Abdullah Sabbagh. Remember?”
I fight through the alcohol—the wine and whatever Brent fed me—and try. When I close my eyes, it comes back to me. Sitting cross-legged on the parquet floor of our apartment, reading the International Herald Tribune by the steel-gray light of a Moscow afternoon sky. My dad was wearing a blue gingham apron as he tried to make cookies, his contribution to someone’s retirement party. I alternated between reading and poking fun at him for the apron.
“I remember,” I say. “He was—sixteen. Born in Kansas or someplace. Killed by a CIA drone in Yemen.”
“He was the son of a terrorist,” my dad says. “What else?”
“He was killed two weeks after his father.”
“And what did the White House say?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know.”
“They said he was a twenty-two-year-old Al Qaeda soldier, until a reporter went digging.”
I look down, remembering all of it now. It had pissed me off and broken something inside me.
“You asked me,” he whispers, like the memory shouldn’t be said too loudly, “how the American government could kill a sixteen-year-old kid.”
“I said, ‘The good guys don’t do that kind of thing.’”
He nods. “And what did I say back?”
I lean forward, staring into the wine inside the cracked cup. “You said, ‘You’re right. Good guys don’t.’”
* * *
I try eating one of the empanadas, but it’s cold and tasteless and I give up after two bites. Maybe it’s a bad one, or maybe that’s how everything will taste from now on.
For only a moment do I consider telling him the other half of the conversation I’d had with Brent. My dad was furious about the training in Orphan Camp; he called it exploitation and all the other things it was. To tell him I was now being manipulated into assassinating the man trying to assassinate him would be met with fury. He’d head to the American embassy and surrender himself rather than let me fall into the bottomless clandestine void. The bottomless clandestine void that we both just learned has a bottom after all.
I run my finger over the cracked plywood of the coffee table. “That woman, Dorit. She said this might be the safest place we can be.”
“That’s true,” my dad says. “It’ll take them a long time to find us here.”
“How long is a long time?”
He extends his hands, palms up. “Months.”
Months. So, not never. Not even years. The reason for my father’s fatalism—and that’s what this is, the open window, his good cheer and sudden appetite—is clear to me. All those things you hear about the stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression—he seems to have flown through them in hours and arrived blissfully at the last, final, terminal stage, acceptance.
The Greed Page 5