“And then there’s my law practice,” Tamara said with mock pride. “I have an assistant and two clients.”
That afternoon Peter and Diana unpacked their bags. As they tried a siesta, Peter shifted and sighed, turned and moaned.
“What is it?” Diana said. “What’s on your mind?”
“Oh, nothing.”
“Come on, tell me,” Diana said, sitting up against the wall. “I can’t sleep either, I’m too excited. There’s so much going on in our lives right now.”
“Well, if you must know, it’s Arie. He’s hardly seen us in three years, but he didn’t ask one question about America. Not one. It’s all about him. Always was, always will be.”
“Oh, don’t be silly. Tamara must have told him everything. He was just happy to see us, and he’s proud of what he’s done. He has a right to be. Let’s talk about something else. You still don’t know what the Office wants?”
“I have another meeting tonight. With Rafi Eitan. One bit of good news though. The promotion comes with a pay raise. Five percent for the job and five percent for my academic grade. Ten percent.”
“Oh good,” Diana giggled, and pulled him close. “We’ll be able to afford a bigger flat. Maybe as big as this bedroom. Come on, don’t look so glum. Laugh.” She tickled him under the arms and opened his trousers to tickle his tummy. She kissed him too, and took his hand and placed it inside her T-shirt, and rubbed her big belly against him.
“We can’t,” Peter said. “Look at you, you’re about to burst. I’ll crush the baby.”
“Oh, Peter dear, use your imagination.” She crouched and wagged her tail.
PETER
TEL AVIV, ISRAEL
August 1962
Later that afternoon Yaacov drove Arie and Peter to their different meetings in town. It was a mostly silent ride, each lost in his thoughts. Arie was guarded about who he was seeing, and what time he’d be home. And Peter was just as guarded, saying only he had to meet his boss at the office.
Peter’s first meeting turned out to be not with Eitan but with Amnon Sela, his nemesis, the European Section Chief. Sela couldn’t have been more cordial though, congratulating Peter on his degree, inquiring about America, Diana, the twins, making Peter wonder what the catch was: Keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer? Sela made two coffees and put out a saucer of cookies while filling in the background, starting with Cairo’s Revolution Day shocker.
“Egypt’s new rockets put the fear of God into our leaders. Complete surprise. Where were we? Don’t ask. It’s the Nazis back up to their usual tricks. Harel wants them stopped once and for all, and at last Ben-Gurion is on board. It’s going to get rough. Why are you smiling?”
“Just that I guessed it.”
“The lovey-dovey approach with Germany didn’t work, Adenauer refused to rein in the German scientists in Egypt. So we have the green light to get rid of them. No German scientists, no Egyptian rockets. Not to mince words, we are going to speak the only language that works with those murdering scum Nazis, their own language—threats and elimination. Yitzhak Shamir’s crew in Paris are experts at that. With some help, of course. Not from you though.”
He paused, to let it all sink in, waiting for the obvious response from Peter.
“So where do I fit in?”
“Good question. Come with me. Rafi is waiting for you.”
* * *
When Peter returned to the villa, it was dark. He tiptoed in and found Diana fast asleep, lying on her side with his pillow supporting her belly. He sighed as he gazed at her. It isn’t fair, he thought, on her or the boys. But how could he say no? Rafi Eitan had anticipated every reaction and objection so that he was helpless, like a fly in a spider’s web. It was good to be on his side though. Rafi and Harel were the best, and they had chosen him to work with them on this crazy coup. A career person would do well to hitch himself to their wagon. Really, how could he say no?
But would Diana see it that way?’
He had to leave in two days.
He lay on his back in the dark, savoring a slight sea breeze from the open window, trying to make sense of the story Eitan had told. It beggared belief. The bottom line was that Adolf Hitler’s top Gestapo commando, an SS-Colonel, the toughest, most feared fighter of the Nazi Special Forces, had been recruited by Mossad. He was the first port of refuge for Nazis on the run in Europe, he protected them, and now he was an Israeli agent. What a breakthrough! And Isser Harel and Rafi Eitan wanted him, Peter Nesher, to run him. And to make sure he wasn’t a double agent. Because if he was for real, the Nazi scientists, if they could be made to fear for their lives, would fly to the colonel like bees to honey. Or like dogs to shit. And we can pick them off one by one.
He perspired at the thought. Because if he wasn’t for real, the commando colonel could probably kill him with one hand.
A car drove up, its door clicked shut. Peter jumped to the window and saw Arie in a pool of light checking his watch. His own showed three thirty. Up to his usual tricks, then.
Peter tiptoed down to meet his brother and found him in the kitchen, pouring a beer.
Arie looked up with a start, almost spilling his drink. “Oh! You’ll give me a heart attack, creeping up like that.”
“You thought I was Tamara?”
“She’s asleep. I hope. One for you?” Arie said, holding out the bottle.
“Sure.” Peter filled his glass and gestured with it to the table. “Sit? Talk?”
Arie shrugged. He’d rather sleep, but all right.
Peter walked to the staircase door and closed it. “Don’t want to wake anyone,” he said.
“What makes me think I’m about to get a lecture,” Arie said.
“Why, is there a reason?”
“From you, always. Or have you changed?” He stood at the window, looking into the night. “How about going outside, it’s warm tonight and there’s a nice breeze.”
The brothers refilled their glasses and strolled to the end of the garden. It merged with the public footpath, which led past ferns and rocks to the cliff itself. There they stood as close to the edge as they dared. Below them was a hundred-foot drop onto the rocks and sandy beach of Herzliya, with the dark sea glimmering in the moonlight. They looked up at the galaxies, the fluffy streak of the Milky Way. The calm and the silence were so complete they could almost touch them.
Arie joined Peter on a flat rock they used as a bench. The only sounds were the rippling waves, collapsing onto the sand as they always had and would. Approaching the horizon, the moon was ready to bow out.
There was no lecture. Instead, Peter took Arie’s hand in his and held it, possibly for the first time in their adult lives. He stretched his legs, put one foot over the other. The moment stretched into a minute, of contemplation, their thoughts turning inward. Until Peter turned to Arie. They’d never really talked about their parents or their sisters. It was too painful, too mysterious, too hard. A story with a pleasant enough beginning, no middle, and a horrific end. “In the camps,” Peter asked at last, “did you ever look up at the sky like this?”
Arie withdrew his hand. “Don’t ruin the moment.”
After a few seconds Peter said, “Arie, it’s 1962, it’s been over seventeen years.”
The waves lapped and the silence grew. Finally, Arie said, “Peter, it’s never over.”
There was so much more Peter wanted to ask. Arie had never said a word, not even about his last moments with Mama and Pappi, Renata and Ruth.
Peter had also wanted to tell Arie that he was leaving in two days, to thank him for looking after his family, to ask him to take care of Diana and the new baby. Again he would miss the birth of his child. He wanted to …
But Arie stood and walked away, calling over his shoulder, “Come on. It’s late.”
* * *
At eight o’clock Peter walked the two sets of twins to school, sinking into sand where the sidewalk ran out, telling them not to throw stones, and warning Ezra and Noah t
hat when they came home he would not be there. “Back in a few weeks,” he said, knowing it could well be much longer.
At the corner, Ezra said, “That’s it, Dad, don’t come closer.” In case he didn’t get the message, Noah said, “Say good-bye here.” Peter laughed. He remembered, with a pang of conscience, how his parents had embarrassed him in front of his friends. Not that he had many in Germany, he was the only Jew in his class. He’d have died if his parents had come to the school gate.
“It’s fine,” he said. “I’ll see you to the gate.”
“No,” they both yelled in terror.
“Just kidding. Here, give me a hug. Two hugs and I’ll bring presents.” Even that wasn’t enough. They pressed their bodies against his in puny imitations of an embrace and ran off with Carmel and Daniel, shouting, “see you when you get back, Dad.”
He took his time walking back to his brother’s home. It was another sunny day with a deep blue sky, a blessed day. He felt satisfaction course through his veins and a glow in his cheeks. I know why I feel so good, he thought. I’m going away with two children and when I come home, I’ll have three. In just a few weeks. He felt a surge of gratitude to Diana, of love, of completeness. He was lucky to have her, to have the boys, to be home, to have it all. Yes, he had made the right decision to stay in Israel.
When he reached home Diana was lying in a deck chair facing the sea, her legs in the lap of Tamara, who was stroking and kneading her feet. Her oily toes glistened in the sun. The friends looked up at him, and smiled in a dreamy way. The scene looked comfortable, reassuring, safe.
Diana’s hands rested on her belly and her eyes fluttered shut. “I feel sleepy,” she whispered.
As Peter gazed at her, with a pensive smile, Tamara said, “Don’t worry, Peter. She’s in good hands.”
PETER
MUNICH, GERMANY
September 1962
Otto Skorzeny had Willi Stinglwagner hooting with laughter. “I’ve recruited a few people in my time,” he boomed in his cavernous voice, “but nothing like this. It was so bad it had to be on purpose. It was either incredibly clever or incredibly stupid.”
“Well, it worked,” Peter, alias Willi, said, “so please give us the benefit of the doubt.”
The scar-faced Gestapo hatchet man turned out to be an excellent raconteur with a taste for the best cognac, which he drank prodigiously.
Fittingly, he said, he was in a bar when Mossad initiated the double honey trap. “They wanted a foursome!” he roared.
On a need-to-know basis Peter had not been told how Mossad recruited Skorzeny, whose account now seemed fanciful to him, but he had to admit it was a hilarious story.
A young German couple had just been robbed of all their papers and money and ended up in a bar in Madrid, where Skorzeny was having a drink with his much younger wife, Ilse von Finckenstein, the niece of Hitler’s finance minister. After a few drinks she invited the distraught but charming couple to spend the night at her home. There they had a few more drinks and a lot of laughs, but just when things were getting hot and heavy, Skorzeny pulled out a gun, saying calmly, “I know who you are, and I know why you’re here. You are Mossad, and you’ve come to kill me.”
At this point Peter was laughing so hard he couldn’t hold his glass anymore. “You’re making it up,” he gasped.
“I swear it on the Führer’s life.”
“He’s already dead. Isn’t he?”
“If I told you I’d have to kill you,” Skorzeny said. “But let me go on. So the man said, ‘You’re half right. We’re from Mossad, but if we’d come to kill you, you’d have been dead weeks ago.’”
“Probably true,” Peter said.
“Yes. Either that, or they would have been dead.” Skorzeny raised an eyebrow, and his glass. “Prost.”
“Cheers.”
Peter was learning what an entertaining dinner companion and host Skorzeny was, but he was still the Nazi who crash-landed a glider on an Italian mountaintop to rescue the former dictator Benito Mussolini; who led his special forces behind American lines, dressed in American uniforms, harassing and killing Allied troops. He may be charming, but he was also six foot four of muscle; he would be a formidable opponent. Peter’s conclusion was that if Rafi Eitan was wrong about him he, Peter Nesher, expectant father, was a dead man.
He’d soon find out. The next day one of the German scientists in Egypt who wanted Skorzeny’s protection would arrive in Munich—Heinz Krug, who ran an Egyptian front company that shipped vital parts to the scientists. He was near the top of Mossad’s hit list. It was a perfect setup. With one proviso.
Was Skorzeny for real? Would he really kill his own people? Why would he? What was his reason for turning? Money? He was already a rich man with an import-export business in Madrid that was his cover to help fleeing Nazis. All of a sudden he loved the Jews after helping kill tens of thousands in Hungary? Not a chance. Yet Rafi Eitan, of all people, trusted him, for now at least.
Eitan wanted Krug killed as a warning to the rest of the scientists that they faced the same fate if they didn’t leave Egypt immediately.
They were already scared to death. Mossad had mailed them letter bombs and sent threatening letters to their wives and children. The Germans had hired bodyguards in Cairo and traveled in packs; the luster of high wages and high living was dimming. But still they toiled in Factory 333, developing ballistic missiles to attack the Jewish state. So Mossad decided to turn the screws.
The next day Skorzeny met Krug at Gabelsbergerstrasse 35. Half the block was a construction site. “An attempt at humor, my friend,” Skorzeny said. “To put you at your ease. This is the site of the new Egyptian Museum.”
Krug didn’t smile. Instead his eyes darted every which way, and his lips were tight. “Relax,” Skorzeny said. “I have experience in these matters. You will not be harmed.”
“My wife got a letter just yesterday from those damn Jews. They’re going to kill me, I know it.”
“They won’t touch you, believe me.” Krug got into the Mercedes and Skorzeny pulled away from the building site. There was already a fine layer of dust on the shiny black car. “We’ll go somewhere safe to talk, a nice beer garden in the forest. There are two bodyguards in the car behind, they’ll follow us everywhere. Your worries are over. You didn’t tell anyone you’re meeting me?”
“No, of course not.”
“You’re sure? Not even your wife? Nobody knows?”
“Nobody.”
Skorzeny was a fast driver, hard to follow as he wove through the morning traffic, but in the Audi behind, Peter stayed on his tail. Next to him was Boris, a small-arms expert, who kept his eyes on the car ahead and didn’t say a word.
Boris had only one duty. In the forest, when Skorzeny took out his revolver to shoot Krug, as planned, he should discreetly cover Skorzeny. If Skorzeny even looked at Peter the wrong way, he should shoot him dead.
But they needn’t have worried. Skorzeny even had a good line, which Peter quoted in his operations report as an example of the character of the man. As the four of them walked through the trees, and Krug wondered where the beer garden was, Skorzeny said, “You know I said I won’t let the Jews hurt you?”
“Yes. I appreciate that.”
“Well, it’s true. They won’t. I will.”
He slid out his silenced pistol and shot Krug in the back of the head, which sent him crashing into a tree, leaving blood on the bark. He confirmed the kill with a bullet to the heart.
They rolled Krug into the hole waiting for him and poured acid over him. After twenty minutes they poured lime over the remains to ward off sniffing dogs and wild animals. They covered him with earth, leaves, and branches and carried a heavy log so that there would be no drag marks and laid it on top.
They were panting now; it had been hard work. Peter was bent double, hands on knees, drawing big breaths, Boris was leaning against a tree, wiping his brow with the back of his hand.
Otto Skorzeny pulled on h
is black leather gloves and stood ramrod straight. “Right,” he said. “Let’s go find that beer garden.”
A Löwenbräu with the Nazi killer was the last thing Peter wanted. He was unnerved by a spasm of hatred and distaste for the man. It was the leather gloves that had done it. He had noticed with all the Nazis he had the misfortune to work with: they all wore leather gloves. It must be some sort of last nod to their glory days. They felt no shame or sorrow. They didn’t regret what they had done; they only regretted that they had lost the war.
Still wary, Peter kept three steps behind Skorzeny as they followed the narrow track back to the cars. Now that the deed was done he wanted nothing more than to leave Germany. He didn’t have much time.
Krug would be reported as missing within hours. He needed to use that time to put as much distance as possible between himself and Otto Skorzeny.
But although the standard follow-up to an assassination was to fly straight back to Israel, Mossad was moving fast, and Peter had more work to do.
So they decided to keep him in Germany.
A decision he would regret forever.
DIANA
TEL AVIV, ISRAEL
October 1962
Doctor Max Shilanski was in a hurry to get to Haifa for Yom Kippur with his parents. But his patient had only dilated five centimeters, and he couldn’t hand her over to a colleague because they’d all left already to be at home for the holiest day of them all, the Day of Atonement.
Diana Nesher had been pushing and screaming on and off for seven hours. She was sweating, her face was scarlet, and she was yelling in English, a language Doctor Shilanski didn’t speak. But while languages differed, mothers didn’t. What else could she be yelling but “Baby, come already!”
The contraction passed with no more dilation. Diana was moaning and cursing Peter for being a man and not having to go through this agony. If men did this there would be no procreation, the species would be extinct in a generation. And good riddance, if this was what it took. And where was he, anyway? Peter, get your ass back here! “Aaaaarrrggghh!” she yelled, this time not in agony but in frustration.
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