by Nathan Ronen
Since then, they had been crowned as the ultimate power couple, with a singular status in Israel’s political realm. But currently, this did not particularly help him. He needed a dramatic show that would negate the whirlwind of investigations and rumors regarding corruption at the top. He needed some striking event that would distract the media from him and from the constant digging into suspicions of personal corruption. He knew the year to come would be the crucial one in their history. Even if he wanted to throw his hands in the air in surrender, she wouldn’t allow him to do so. But he knew that he would never give in, would always hope for a miracle. He was used to being the underdog and in the minority, with his back to the wall.
During the long years in which he had rooted himself in political ground, Tzur had cleverly transformed into a well-oiled, skilled, and highly efficient political machine. Anyone who displayed any tentative signs, or independence, or put his status at risk was immediately and ruthlessly kicked out, a step justified with various excuses. His only problem was that he hadn’t managed to change his lifestyle and habits, or stay away from the dangerous twilight zone in which it was easy to lose control and cross the line. As the years went by, the royal couple’s appetite only increased, their behavior gradually seeping into the forbidden zone. And so they came to be surrounded by an efficient apparatus of ‘friends’ intended to satisfy the duo’s increasing hunger for gifts of various kinds; for first class; for lovely, expensive objects and various forms of pampering, and for a gaudy, ostentatious lifestyle, always at other people’s expense.
As someone who had spent many years as a politician on the back bench, he knew that “for by wise counsel thou shalt make thy war.”20 He knew that during this period, the Israeli public needed a leader with a sure hand, a leader who would know how to sell both his own image and theirs. His years as a member of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee had given him good fluency in American English, and the American advisors with whom he surrounded himself had taught him that in order to rule the people, you needed to control the depths of their primeval mind, their survival instincts. This was particularly true when dealing with a nation that had experienced the trauma of the Holocaust and was frightened of financial hunger. The desire of this small nation, persecuted throughout history, to be loved and accepted among the family of nations played right into his hands. This was precisely what he delivered. He knew that what they wanted was to hear their leader speak good English, in a low baritone voice and with a Boston accent he had acquired during many hours of rehearsal with an American diction coach.
His emotions were in turmoil. He wanted to go to the election not as a candidate who had been appointed as a replacement to the late prime minister, who had perished in a plane crash, but as a candidate worthy of being prime minister in his own right. He yearned for an election in which he would win by a landslide. For two years now, he had been working quietly behind the scenes with party heads and influencers in various sectors, weaving together a new coalition. He made multiple promises to appoint people as ministers or Knesset members, ambassadors or chairpersons of the board of directors of major state-owned enterprises. He surrounded himself with low-IQ sycophants who highlighted his leadership qualities by comparison. Relying on the page of targeted messages conveyed to them by his bureau, they would challenge the voters with the question, “Who could replace Ehud Tzur?”
Two major mistakes compromised his conduct thus far. The first was the fact that he had bet against the incumbent Democratic American president as he campaigned for his second term, putting all his chips on the Republican candidate. This angered the president, who decided to punish Israel and approved a major weapons deal with the Saudis, totaling 35 billion dollars, while ignoring Congress’s decree of maintaining Israel’s superiority in the arms race.
His second mistake was the police investigation initiated against him following the gatekeepers’ demands. They pointed out violations of the Election Act due to funds received from donors and passed on to various right-wing organizations. His supporters had managed to conceal the deposition of the Mossad’s director, pilot Izzo Galili, from the public with strict gag orders. He was mainly angered by the fact that the person privy to most of his secrets, his office manager Geula Mordoch, had threatened him the moment she found out he was about to get rid of her in favor of someone prettier and younger. The fact that she was pregnant did not allow him to fire her under the rules pertaining to government employees, and so he remained stuck with her, like a bone thoroughly lodged in his throat.
An hour and a quarter after leaving Jerusalem, the convoy reached the outskirts of the town of Caesarea. It was a city of nouveau-riche wealthy residents who had built their sprawling estates not far from the ruins of the ancient city of King Herod the Great. Herod, a king of Edomite origin, had built a port city in the year 13 BC and named it after Emperor Augustus. It had served as Rome’s administrative center in the Roman province of Judea since the province was first established.
“You have reached your destination!” the vehicle’s GPS software declared, as the convoy finally reached Pomelo Street in the “Caesarea by the Sea” neighborhood.
Members of the VIP Security Unit had already set up a blue tent by the parking lot, into which the prime minister’s limo glided. Yamam21 sharpshooters were visible on the villa’s roof, and its entire surroundings had been declared a ‘sterile,’ closed-off area.
The host, a Russian oligarch named Boris Kagan, was standing at taut attention, as appropriate for someone welcoming the prime minister of Israel to his home. He was a tanned, tall man, obese and balding. He was wearing a white linen suit, a blue dress shirt, and a red tie. Next to him, all excited, stood his fourth wife, Maya Sando. She was twenty-seven years old, a former beauty queen and Moldavian supermodel. She displayed a constant artificial smile that exposed two rows of bright white teeth. Maya was clad in a tight leather suit that highlighted the curves of her willowy frame. In her high heels she looked very tall. Her smile and the way she carried herself qualified her for the status of being a citizen of Eden.
“Nice to meet you, your excellency. Ehud Tzur,” the prime minister extended his hand to Boris.
“Come. I show you my home.” Boris hugged Tzur’s slender shoulder, walking him toward a four-seat golf cart parked nearby. The prime minister’s wife was ushered by the hostess to a round of introductions to the many guests.
Anyone who happened upon the massive house on Pomelo Street in Caesarea and managed to peek in through the solemn-faced Russian bodyguards, securing the site with ferocious guard dogs, might think they had accidentally stumbled upon one of the mansions from the TV show “Downton Abbey.”
Through aggressive outlays, Boris Kagan’s real estate campaign had allowed him to purchase seven adjacent villas spread over an area of about four acres and demolish them completely. The stretch that had housed them was converted into a residential area of about 64,600 square feet, including a monstrous three-level house supported by Carrara marble columns with gold embellishments. The house also contained a roomy spa with treatment rooms, a Turkish bath, a Finnish sauna, a well-equipped screening room in the basement, a stylish bar recreating a pub in Dublin, a covered pool, a gigantic outdoor pool with an adjacent movie screen emerging from a hole in the ground, and silent internal elevators from a subterranean parking garage. The garage boasted the finest vehicles in the world. A private system of generators, ensuring the complex’s electricity supply in emergencies, had been constructed underground.
Tzur and Boris got into the golf cart while the prime minister’s security detail rushed after them on foot. The oligarch steered the vehicle toward an artificial hill located in the middle of the complex. A reconstructed ancient square with Roman columns had been built at its center. Several groves of fruit trees stretched out beside it, along with tennis courts and golf links separating the estate from the sea.
“You probably aski
ng how much my house cost, right?” Boris asked in broken Hebrew, quickly answering, “Total price of project estimated at more than a hundred million dollars, which makes it the most expensive house in our country, maybe the entire Middle East. They tell me home of king of Saudi Arabia is more expensive,” Boris said, cracking himself up. He looked curiously at Tzur, trying to assess the extent to which he had impressed him.
Tzur did not react. He had already seen larger estates in his life, in Palm Beach and in Turkey, more gaudy ones in the Persian Gulf countries, and more ostentatious ones in the Nation of Brunei.
“What do you say, beautiful, huh?” Boris looked at Ehud Tzur in self-admiration, pointing at the adjacent beach and the ancient Roman aqueduct structure standing there. It served as handsome scenery for the bay of blue water and the private beach Boris had built for himself without proper authorization.
“That’s my yacht,” he pointed at a large white yacht that was moored in the middle of the bay.
The tour ended and they returned to the house. Numerous guests were huddling around the refreshment tables scattered around the large garden. Waiters in spotless uniforms circled among the guests carrying trays, while a string trio played classical music in the background.
Boris and Tzur slipped into the house through a private door and went down to the basement, which was comprised of a private screening room for thirty people and a fully equipped Irish pub. The design, the scenery, and the ambiance were all perfect. Boris enjoyed watching Ehud Tzur’s surprised face.
“I have thirty different kinds of single malt whiskey here and three different beers on tap,” Boris boasted. “Maybe I treat you to very expensive vodka?” He offered Tzur a vodka bottle that looked like an especially large perfume spritzer.
“I’m sorry, I don’t like vodka; I prefer whiskey.” The prime minister’s eyes appreciatively surveyed the selection of Scottish, Irish, and Japanese whiskey, as well as American bourbon, which were arranged by categories: single malt, blended, or smoky.
“You don’t know what you’re missing,” the oligarch said. “It’s not a pretty perfume bottle, it’s vodka distilled with gems, from the Blackwood Distillery in Scotland. Price of bottle begins at $7,000 per bottle.”
Tzur was not impressed. He had gotten tired of Boris’s incessant need to wow him. He wanted to get back to the party itself, where he had seen a wealthy bunch of one-percenters who had banished disease, poverty, untanned faces, aging and physical labor. There were some interesting industrialist types, bankers, tycoons, diplomats, and a few unfamiliar, intriguing characters who were huddling with young starlets.
“May I pour this for you?” the barman asked. He took the frozen bottle from Boris, producing a pair of chilled crystal tumblers from the freezer.
“No, thanks. I still prefer a good whiskey,” Tzur insisted, pointing at a bottle of Japanese Yamazaki whiskey.
“Give him from the private collection. Special deluxe bottles,” Boris commanded.
“Excuse me, Boris. The truth is that I’m not in an especially sociable mood tonight. I apologize, but I feel that I can be honest with you,” Tzur said, playing the fake honesty card that always proved effective with his supporters. “If our wives weren’t friends, I’m not sure I would have made it today. I’ve got so many things on my mind and so many people annoying me.” The prime minister flashed a wide grin, which, from afar, might have mistakenly been taken to project warmth. From up close, he conveyed only the narcissism of a seasoned politician, as the oligarch’s predatory instincts immediately perceived.
Boris surveyed him suspiciously. His eyes assumed the gaze of a cobra just prior to striking.
“Oh, well, life in Israel is not a dick,” he said, bursting out in laughter. “Life here is always hard!” He assessed the effect of this joke on Tzur, immediately adding, “That is a Russian proverb, and I’m hoping my Hebrew didn’t ruin its flavor.”
Tzur did not laugh. He raised his whiskey glass and declared, “Kanpai!”22
“Na zdrowie.”23 Boris saluted him with the frozen vodka.
Ehud Tzur sipped the whiskey in pleasure, his eyes seeking a cabinet for Cohiba cigars.
“A fine cigar always goes well with the whiskey,” he said.
“I’m sorry, I don’t smoke and can’t stand the smell of cigars,” Boris said, solving his dilemma.
“I’m not big expert on your politics,” Boris continued. “It looks like one big mess to me, all the elections and your democracy. I think in Israel there is too much democracy. You have Arab Knesset members who badmouth the country in the Knesset. With us, in Russia, it would not fly. They would just disappear.” Boris poured himself a third shot of Diva vodka.
Tzur sighed. “You understand, I’ve been prime minister almost two years! My ministers don’t want to go to election, because they know that if the election takes place, I no longer have a duty of loyalty toward them, since the person who chose them for office was the previous prime minister. We had a kind of unspoken agreement that they would stay in office and support me in the government vote after the hundred days in which I was only the interim prime minister came to an end, and in return, I let them stay on. There was never a whole lot of love there. They never forgave me for the fact that I was one of them, a junior minister on the outskirts, and rose to the top only because of an erroneous legal consideration by the previous prime minister. He appointed me as deputy prime minister because he owed it to me as compensation for the role of minister of finance that he promised me and ended up giving to someone else. The legal implication of his mistake resulted in my appointment as acting prime minister after his death.”
Boris listened, but was clearly not truly grasping the intricacies of politics in a democratic country. He did, however, understand the intention behind such maneuvers.
“Fortunately for me,” Tzur added, “at the moment, there’s good financial growth, low unemployment rates, real wages that are rising and expanding buying power, surplus tax income, and a steadily decreasing government debt.”
“If everything good, what’s the problem?” Boris asked, gulping down a fourth shot of frozen vodka, which he raised in honor of Ehud Tzur, yelling, “Na zdrowie, dorogoy premier.”24
“Kanpai,” Tzur replied, raising his second glass. On an empty stomach, he felt the alcohol fumes loosening his exquisite control. Tzur found himself opening up to this repulsive wealthy man, of all people, a man he barely knew: a perfect stranger who, seemingly, had no financial agenda in Israel. The fact that he was actually providing him with a sympathetic ear made Ehud Tzur feel untypically at ease.
“There’s a thorn in my side,” he explained to the oligarch. “Other than the ministers and Knesset members who annoy me, there’s a strata of senior state employees that I didn’t appoint. They call themselves ‘the gatekeepers.’ These are retirees who once headed the army, the police, security agencies, including the former head of the Mossad. They set me up as a target of investigations and are trying to bring me down. All these investigations before the elections I’m planning are keeping me awake at night and driving me crazy!”
“So, what are friends for?” Boris asked, enfolding Ehud Tzur in a bear hug to which Tzur did not know how to react. He was not the hugging type and was also repulsed by the appallingly sweet scent of the oligarch’s aftershave.
Boris lowered his voice by an octave, leaning in. “If something like that happen to me, I would invite specialists from the old country, Russia. People who know how to do clean job, without leaving marks. There are two kinds of experts for two kinds of jobs. First thing, we have a few ‘cleaners’: experts dealing with cleaning out problems. Some Chechen comes and handles… how you call them, your ‘gatekeepers,’ and just makes them disappear, poof! Like magician. No bodies, no problems. Then he disappear like wind. Pooof! Was never here.”
The prime minister gazed at him silently. Boris switched to Engl
ish in order to explain himself.
“After him, arrives a team of the best hackers in the world, called Cozy Bear,25 who help your people build ‘new media’ infrastructure in order to manufacture supportive social media for you. These days, that’s the way to bypass the conventional media and appeal directly to public opinion through social networks. They make a big mess on the internet. Badmouth rivals and create a shady image for them, shaping public opinion for the elections,” Boris continued. “These guys have already done great work on our behalf in a few countries in Eastern Europe— Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, and even in the United States, against the Democrats. They’ve raised people who never believed it would work to power.”
Ehud Tzur assumed an expression of concern.
“Why are you worried?” Boris clapped the prime minister on the shoulder. “My wife Maya asked me to help you and I’m willing to do it as a friend.”
A chill shot down Tzur’s spine. Suddenly, it occurred to him that he was talking to a man who certainly recorded every conversation, thus exposing Tzur to blackmail.
“Let me think about it. It’s dangerous and not that simple. Over here, everything leaks like a broken slate roof.” Ehud Tzur was frightened by the oh-so-simple and effective offer that had come his way, to get rid of his enemies from within. He was mostly afraid of the possibility that such actions could be attributed directly to him, or to the security agencies subordinate to him.
“I’m a friend of President Putin,” Boris informed him. “We have democracy in Russia, too. For you, it’s prostitutka. How you say in Hebrew: whore. Everyone asks for payment. In Russia, it’s an orderly democracy. We fix everything. If you want to solve your problem, I can help you. We don’t have a Supreme Court or civil rights organizations or the New Israel Fund26 and all these leftists bullshitting about human rights, like you do.”